He dreaded the prospect.
New Haven County, CT
1
"I don't like this, George," Ginger whispered as they crept through the darkness.
"Neither do I," he said. "But hang in there. This won't take long."
She didn't understand what had come over George lately. He'd been talking about some sort of device Oz was constructing and how it was supposed to change the world or some such nonsense, and how he had to know more about it. He’d become positively obsessed with it. So when they'd pulled into Ivoryton today, George had positioned his trailer with a full view of Oz's.
Tonight he and Ginger had sat inside for hours with the lights out waiting for the big man to leave. Finally Tarantello came by and the two of them had driven off in the old Town Car. An odd pair: Oz had seemed depressed, Tarantello almost jaunty.
"What if we get caught?" She didn't want to have to take one of those walks with Tarantello.
"We won't if you just stand guard. Will you do that for me?"
"You know I will. But I'm scared."
"So am I. That's why this will be the quickest in-and-out you've ever seen."
They stopped by the front of Oz's trailer. George had a flimsy plastic ruler wrapped in his left tentacle. He slipped it between the door and the jamb and worked it up and down. A few seconds later Ginger heard the latch pop.
"Where'd you learn to do that?"
"After I lost my scholarship I spent some time on the streets of Gainesville. I got very hungry. You learn to do what you've got to do." He gestured to the shadows by the corner of the trailer. "Okay. You wait over there. I'll be right back. You know what to do?"
She nodded. She knew: Bang twice on the wall of the trailer if she spotted Oz coming. George would climb out a rear window.
With her nerves stretched as tight as the high wire, she retreated to the shadows and waited. A quiet night. All she heard were the crickets and the constant jingle from the elephants as they pulled on their chains, trying to get free.
2
Oz had left a light on, so George moved in a crouch to keep from casting a shadow on the window shades. He moved straight to the back room.
A lot of strange stuff going down lately. A new, particularly ugly freak referred to only as Wilkinson had been brought on board in California, but had remained locked up with Tarantello. Earlier today George had seen Tarantello load him into a cage in the back of a van and head out toward the woods. When he'd returned the cage was empty.
George entered the tiny room where the Device sat on its stand. It was bigger now, and again he was struck by how familiar it looked. Something from his past . . .
No time for that now. He picked a slim volume from the bookshelf by the x-ray machine, the book Oz had stopped him from examining on his previous visit, and brought it back to the lighted front room. He squatted under the lamp and opened the cover.
A journal, handwritten. On the first page:
To my son, Ozymandias
in the hope that he will
someday understand.
And forgive.
Jacob Prather
George flipped through the pages, pausing here and there when he saw "the contraption" mentioned. Apparently it was something Jacob had discovered in one of the deep shafts during his younger days as a coal miner. He found that people were fascinated by it, so he joined the old Taber & Sons circus and exhibited it as a sideshow attraction. Jacob billed it as "The Mystery Machine" but did not seem to be aware that it served any function.
The occasion of the birth of Jacob's first and only child stopped George cold.
My son, my Ozymandias, is hideously deformed. He is a monster. Martha and I have wept every night since his birth. How did this happen? What can we do for him?
George swallowed. Monster? Oz was a weird-looking duck, but compared to the freaks in his show he looked pretty damn near normal.
He read on as Jacob described his years of searching for the cause of his son's birth defects. Modern medicine offered no answers, so Jacob began looking elsewhere. But along the way he realized that his son's deformity was not an isolated phenomenon. Many people connected with Taber & Son's mud show had given birth to freakish children over the years.
That was a clue. At first Jacob was sure that the answer lay along the tour route, that a "teratogenic influence"—George didn’t know what that meant but figured it couldn’t be good—would be found at one of the show's stops, perhaps in the water supply. But wouldn't the locals there have produced an extraordinary cluster of freaks? Jacob could find no record of any such cluster.
Jacob came to the conclusion then that the key to the deformities lay within the show. His research led him to arcane sources, and in one of those sources he came across a drawing of his own "Mystery Machine."
The handwriting in the journal began to change here, becoming increasingly agitated and difficult to read. George struggled through it.
The story took a bizarre turn. Jacob's search through unorthodox sources revealed that the Device, as his curio was called, was one of the "Seven Infernals" and could provide a link to "the Otherness." Jacob did not quite understand what the Otherness was, but he learned that it existed on the far side of "the Veil" and that the Device was a gateway to the Otherness.
Apparently, Jacob noted, whoever translated the old texts had a penchant for capitalizing key words.
When the Device was intact, it maintained a pinhole breach in the Veil, allowing a tiny stream of the Otherness to leak through. According to the texts, that tiny stream had no effect on our world at large.
But Jacob was devastated by the realization that the Device had a terrible effect on unborn children. Every freakish child born by members of the Taber & Sons show—and to people along the tour route—had been exposed in utero to the Device, including his own son. It was all a matter of timing and degree. Brief exposure late in pregnancy resulted in negligible damage, while long exposure during the first few weeks or months yielded hideous deformities, some incompatible with life. Which explained his wife Martha's long series of miscarriages. But during most of her final pregnancy she had skipped the tour and stayed with her mother. As a result their son was born viable but deformed.
My son is a monster and it is all my fault! I can't tell Martha, but perhaps someday I can explain it to Ozymandias. But not before I destroy this Infernal and guarantee that it will cause no further harm.
Jacob went on to describe his unsuccessful efforts to destroy the Device. Finally he dismantled its components and spread them around the country. Ever compulsive about details, he described every hiding place.
Then he said good-bye to his son.
The rest of the pages were blank. George wondered briefly where Jacob was now, but that question was overwhelmed by childhood memories . . . the Taber & Sons circus . . . standing with his mother before the Device, coming back to it again and again, sharing her fascination with it.
He held up his tentacles and stared at them.
She must have stood before it early in her pregnancy when she was carrying him. The exposure had left him with these things in place of hands.
Then it must be true. Jacob Prather wasn't crazy.
He closed his eyes as his throat constricted. If only Mom had been fascinated with the elephants, or the clowns, his life would have been so different.
He shook it off. He'd have never met Ginger. She made up for everything.
But why was Oz reassembling the Device? How was this link to the vaguely described Otherness—whatever that was—going to change the world's perception of the children it had deformed?
George headed for the back room again. Maybe the answer waited there.
3
"Come on, George," Ginger whispered to the night.
Despite the August heat she was shivering. What was he doing in there?
And then she noticed that the jingling of the elephants' chains had stopped. Suddenly a sound behind her. A growl. She whirle
d and wanted to scream but the sound choked in her throat. She stumbled back a few steps.
Five hulking shadows, lit only by starlight, emerged from behind the trailer. The freaks known as the Beagle Boys. One of them growled again and made shooing motions. They moved closer, edging her away from the trailer.
The message was clear. Get out of here. This is Freakville.
How was she going to warn George? These . . . things were between her and the trailer now. She couldn't reach the wall to bang on it.
"I'm looking for George," she said. "You know George—Octoman? He was supposed to meet me around here." She cupped her hands around her mouth and began calling. "George! George!"
The growls were many now, and more menacing as the Beagle Boys began to encircle her. Ginger couldn't help it. They terrified her. She ran.
Back in George's trailer, she lifted a corner of a curtain and watched Oz's, waiting for a chance to return. Finally the Beagles wandered off. She opened the door, ready to dash over to warn George, but she slammed it shut again when she saw a tall ungainly figure hurrying toward the trailer.
Oz was returning.
4
A number of the older books were in foreign languages—Latin, Greek, German, and one that seemed to be in some sort of Arabic script—none of any use to George. Finally he found one in English with Mysteries of the Veil stamped on its spine. He brought it back to the front room but groaned when he opened it. It was in English, all right, but strange, old-fashioned English that was practically a foreign language.
Suddenly he heard a key in the door lock. In a panic he scrambled along the floor to the far corner of the room and rolled behind the end of the couch. He didn't look up as he heard someone enter and hurry toward the back room. It could be only one person.
From the back room he heard snatches of words and phrases in Oz's unmistakable deep voice—
"Yes! . . . I thought that's where you'd fit! . . . Ah! . . . A tragedy you can't be here to witness this, Mr. Wilkinson . . . Now let’s see what your Piece can do."
Was he talking to himself?
As George was gathering the nerve to risk sneaking out, Oz suddenly returned to the front room and went to the kitchen. George caught a glimpse of his hands; they looked . . . bloody. He rinsed them, fooled in the refrigerator for a moment, then returned to the rear.
George began to sweat. No two ways about it: Whether he stayed or made a break for it, he was going to get caught. He wondered what the price would be. A walk with Tarantello?
A silent explosion of light from the back room erased all questions.
The same kind of light he'd seen shooting from Oz's window the other night. Violet light, violent light that flowed twisting and churning from the back room, alive with shadows and erratic motion.
As the light swirled around George, a roaring grew in his brain, a call, a beckoning. Vast open vistas reaching toward strange horizons filled with mad, groping forms of twisted life flashed in his vision. He feared it even as he hungered for it.
Abandoning all caution, he struggled to rise and then forced his feet to move him across the room. The door was a vague outline ahead of him. He prayed the roaring would mask his exit. Echoing above the sound was Oz's voice, distant, deeper than ever.
"One more Piece. One more Piece and it's done!"
With the thick old book clutched tight against his chest, George slipped through the door and stumbled into the blessed darkness outside.
5
George stood outside Bramble’s stall and waited while the last stragglers were shooed from the tent. An old couple lingered, staring at his frozen posture, his body rigid as a tree trunk, tilted at a thirty-degree angle.
He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be reading the book he’d taken from Oz last night, but fate seemed to be conspiring against him. It had taken him a long time to calm down a very upset Ginger who had been sure Oz would catch George. After that he’d tried to read Mysteries of the Veil but that old English was tough sledding. He’d gotten through only a few pages before nodding off.
He’d tried again this morning and got a little further, but then it was time to get to his stall for the shows.
But just half an hour ago Oz had come by and told him he had a job for him and Bramble: another Piece.
The last Piece.
Bramble’s birth certificate said he was John Henry Kobayashi, but he was Bramble to the troupe, and The Astounding Tree Man to the public. He’d wanted to bill himself as Kobayashi - the Living Bonsai, but Oz had vetoed that, stating none of the yokels they attracted would know a bonsai from a barbell. Bramble’s act, if it could be called that, was to sink his feet into a basin of moss-covered dirt and strike a pose.
People would stop and stare at what looked like a man-shaped tree that somebody had dressed in a loincloth. Yeah, yeah, so someone got hold of an old tree and carved a head at the top of its trunk. Big deal.
And that was exactly what Bramble looked like. His skin was bark rough and deadwood gray; his arms and legs bent at strange angles; his fingers were too long, too twisted, and too many; his hair stood thick and stiff and kinky, all tangled into, well, a bramble. His features were vaguely Asian—his father had been Japanese, his mother Irish—but his most striking peculiarity were the twigs—or "branchlets," as he called them—that sprouted at odd intervals from his limbs and torso.
So he’d hold his pose, statue still, and let people stop, stare, and move on. When he tired of that pose, he’d assume another. Those present for the realignment invariably yelped in surprise and wonder. The commotion would attract others and soon a crowd would gather, watching, waiting, to be rewarded by . . .
Nothing.
Bramble would wait until they’d dispersed before moving again, causing another outcry, followed by another destined-to-be-disappointed group.
For the moment he held still until the old couple was scooted out, then he straightened and rolled his shoulders.
"That was the shakan shape," he said as he extricated his feet from the dirt. For a guy who stood a good six feet, his voice was unexpectedly high-pitched. "It looks simpler than the moyogi, but it’s more difficult to maintain. The kengai, of course, is the toughest. I’ll let you know next time I assume kengai. You can come see."
"That’d be great," George said. He hadn’t the vaguest idea what Bramble was talking about.
"But you didn’t come here to learn bonsai culture, I assume."
"Oz wants to see us."
"That so?" His branchlets twitched as he frowned and narrowed his already narrow eyes. "I fear I know what this is about." He looked at George. "A Piece?"
George nodded. "That’s what he says."
Oz had given him no information beyond the fact that he wanted George in on the retrieval. George wanted no part but Oz was insisting. He had the option of refusing, but that might get him kicked off the tour. Not many more stops left, but the big carrot of his end-of-tour bonus awaited back in Florida. The bonus was designed to keep folks from blowing the show early. And it worked. Just as it was working on George. He needed that money.
All George could hope for was that this trip would be less nerve-wracking than the last.
Bramble pulled an extra-large yellow dashiki over his head. The branchlets raised tennis-ball bumps beneath the fabric, lumps that wriggled and twitched.
"Lead on, Macduff."
George figured it would be kind of show-offy to tell him that Macbeth really said, "Lay on, Macduff," so he . . . led on.
They walked through the deserted top, out the backdoor and wound through the starlit backyard. George waved to those he knew. Most waved or called back, but ignored Bramble. George’s trapeze act allowed him to straddle the two worlds of performer and freak; Bramble was pure freak.
When they reached Oz’s trailer they found him waiting in the doorway.
"Ah, John Henry," he said, smiling as he stepped off the steps. "Glad you could come." He jerked a thumb toward the woods. "Let’s g
o where we’ll have a little more privacy, shall we? You too, George. No need to look so glum."
Did it show so much? He wanted to get back to that book.
They walked to the edge of the clearing and stood in a close circle.
"There’s a man in a nearby town, a collector of antiquities—mostly religious items—who will not part with the Piece he holds. His name is Charles Eldridge and I’ve visited him a number of times, most recently last night. I have offered him a good price, but he will not budge. I have explained that it does not belong to him but to us, yet he does not care. He harbors some sort of delusion that I am the devil, or some such nonsense."
"Perhaps he is right," Bramble said.
Oz frowned. "This is not a joking matter, John Henry."
Bramble’s lipless mouth twisted. "Perhaps not. And perhaps I wouldn’t be making jokes if I—if we knew what all this Piece business is about, if you weren’t so damn secretive about what you’re going to do with these things once you have them all." He held up his seven-fingered right hand. "And don’t tell us about justice and acceptance and that crap. Those are just words. I want to know what’s going on here."
Me too, thought George, but said nothing. Instead he watched Bramble’s branchlets rising and falling—flexing and stretching?—under the dashiki.
Oz said, "And you shall—once I have all the Pieces."
"Why not now?"
"Because I don’t want to get hopes up. If I don’t collect all the Pieces—all of them—any promises I make will be empty. And we’ve all had enough disappointment in our lives."
George couldn’t argue with that.
"You said this was the last Piece."
Oz nodded. "And that makes the success of this little sortie an absolute necessity."
"You’re expecting trouble?" Bramble said.
"I sense something in Eldridge," Oz said. "I saw something in his eyes. He has a reason beyond mere acquisitiveness for holding onto that Piece. He’s more than a collector, he’s an adventurer as well, a student of the arcane who I believe is quite mad. I also believe he knows more than he’s letting on . . . maybe something he shouldn’t. Or perhaps it’s just his madness."