“So, what is your job, exactly?”
“In the menagerie we all have many duties. But in general, I oversee the handlers and make sure the livestock is clean and healthy enough for work—both manual labor and exhibition. You are a special assignment. We need to uncover your species and draw it out for the public to see.”
“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”
Gallagher shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll have to hurt you.”
His pragmatic address of my biggest fear surprised me. He wasn’t making a threat; he was making a prediction. But I couldn’t take it seriously. Everything that had happened to me since I’d first entered the hybrid tent had hurt in one way or another.
“And why is that?”
“Because I believe you truly don’t know how to become the beast we all saw yesterday, and hurting you won’t change that.” His delivery was so sensible. He’d ruled out abuse because the time and energy spent causing me pain wouldn’t be worth expending if it wasn’t justified by the desired result.
I couldn’t decide whether that made him more or less preferable to Ruyle, who was clearly willing to hurt me just for sport. Or pleasure.
“So, if torture’s off the table, what’s the plan?”
Gallagher scruffed his red baseball cap back and forth over his dark close-cropped hair. “If we can figure out what you are, we’ll know how to trigger your transformation.” He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “We really need to get started.”
“Repeating the word we isn’t going to make me feel like I’m part of some team effort, and neither will playing good cop to Ruyle’s bad cop. I’m not going to develop Stockholm syndrome or fall for reverse psychology.” I scooted to the back of my cage and sat with my knees tucked up to my chest, my dress pulled down as much as possible to keep me covered. “I’m not going to help you turn me into an exhibit.”
Gallagher pulled a chair from beneath one of the tables at the back of the tent and sank into it in front of my cage. The metal groaned beneath his bulk. “If you don’t cooperate for me, the old man will assign you to someone else—probably Ruyle or Clyde—and your new handler will likely take his title a lot more literally than I do.”
I shrugged, as if that prospect didn’t completely terrify me. All I had left was free will. If I let them take that, I would truly have nothing.
“And if that doesn’t work, the old man will sell you.”
“To Vandekamp. I heard.” I spread my arms, taking in the entire carnival full of atrocities. “How much worse could his menagerie possibly be?”
Some new bit of understanding settled behind his gray eyes. “Vandekamp doesn’t run a menagerie. He keeps a private collection, and everything in it is for rent.” Gallagher leaned closer to the cage, and something in his voice—something bleak and raw—kept me from looking away. “The man deals in exotic fetishes, Delilah. Vandekamp will break you, or he will let someone else pay for the privilege,” he said, and every piercing word deepened the gash in my soul. “If you don’t know how to access your inner monster, you’ll have no hope of defending yourself.”
I took deep, slow breaths to calm my roiling stomach. “Are you trying to scare me?”
Gallagher stood and threaded his fingers through the wire mesh between us. His grim stare captured mine. “I’m trying to convince you to unlock your arsenal. Why would you damn yourself to the role of victim when you could be scary enough that even if you do spend the rest of your life in a cage, no one would ever fuck with you?” His grip rattled the steel mesh and his gaze intensified. “I can see the destructive potential in you, Delilah. You’re dangerous, and you could unleash that to your own benefit. Let me help you learn how.”
You’re dangerous. His words echoed in my head, and they made sense. They felt good.
Too good.
I hadn’t yet found his weakness, but he’d found mine.
“Smart,” I whispered, without breaking his gaze. “Trying to manipulate me into cooperating so I can protect myself.” As if that were working for any of the other “dangerous” exhibits.
Gallagher let go of the cage. “You’re going to believe whatever you want.”
“Yeah. I am.” Finally, he seemed to understand the inalienable certainty that had kept me running on no sleep, under threat of starvation, abuse, and exploitation. “That’s one liberty you and this circus of inequity can’t take from me.” The anger slowly smoldering in my chest flared into true flames. “I can believe whatever I want, and unless you muzzle me, I can say whatever I want, and even if you cut out my tongue, I’ll write whatever I want on the floor of my cage, in my own blood.” I rose onto my knees and gripped the side of my cage. I was high on the truth, and on my own embattled nerve.
“If you cut off my hands, I’ll write with my feet, and if you cut off my feet, I’ll write with my nose, and if you cut that off, you may as well cut my whole head off, because no matter how you slice and dice me, you can’t control what I think, or what I feel. You can keep me locked up for the rest of my life, however brief that may be, but you can never, ever own me. So why don’t you march out there and tell Ruyle, and tell Metzger, and tell the guy who tacks up the posters, and the woman who sews the costumes, and the men who drive the big trucks that the only thing I have to say to any of you tyrannical bastards is fuck you and the circus train you rode in on. Now get the hell out of my face. I’m not going to help you.”
I sat with my back against the end of my cage, spine straight, and tucked my feet beneath me. My heart hammered so hard it was all I could hear. I’d practically dared him to throw his worst at me, and I was sure I would regret that as soon as the real pain started. But pain and regret couldn’t negate the truth, and I’d needed him to hear it as badly as I’d needed to say it.
Gallagher stared at me for a second, and I couldn’t read his expression. He took a single step back and his eyes narrowed. “You’re your own worst enemy, Delilah. When you decide to put all that passion into self-preservation, you let me know. But you better decide soon, or you’ll lose the chance.”
Then he turned and pushed his way through the tent flap, leaving me all alone with my thundering rage.
“Maggie, I need you to pull the medical records of every child born in the month of March 1980 and start making copies. The FBI is sending someone over for them this afternoon. If they’re requesting records from every hospital in the country, there’s bound to be a run on ink drums. Better stock up now.”
—Memo from the Health President and CEO of Mercy General, Oklahoma City, dated September 4, 1986
Delilah
“What is that?” I asked, eyeing several wet smudges of color smeared on a thin plastic board.
“Special effects makeup.” A short woman in jeans and a red Metzger’s shirt angled her palette so I could see the paint she was blending with a short pointed palette knife. She had spiky purple-and-blond hair, and nails with tiny saber-toothed cat skulls painted on them.
Surely she was as much a work of art as whatever she’d been painting.
One of the rougher handlers, Clyde, shoved me into a dentist-style reclining chair upholstered with as much duct tape as vinyl. My teeth clacked together when I landed and the upholstery creaked beneath me.
“Alyrose used to work in Hollywood.” He pinned me down with one thick hand on my sternum while a skinny teenager with a healed-crooked nose cuffed my wrists to the arms of the chair.
Clyde’s thumb strayed south of professional contact, and when I tried to object, he pressed harder, leaning with his weight on my chest until I couldn’t breathe. I thrashed, rattling the cuffs. My flailing foot hit the kid trying to cuff my ankles to the chair.
Clyde chuckled. “An hour in here, and no one will know what an uncooperative little freak you are.” The last cuff clicked closed around my ankle and he stepped back.
I pulled in a desperate breath. When the world rushed back into focus, I found him watching as I recovered from suffering he’d dealt out as casually as he might slap at a buzzing fly.
He was waiting for my reaction.
I shouldn’t have taken the bait, but after no sleep and virtually no food, my restraint—fragile from the start—had been compromised. “Can she disguise what a sadistic asshole you are?”
He pulled his fist back, but he didn’t look angry; he looked gleeful.
I squeezed my eyes shut, straining against my restraints. Bracing for the blow.
“Clyde!” Alyrose screeched, and I opened my eyes to find her holding him back with both hands, black paint smeared across his forearm. “I don’t have the time or the skill to disguise a broken cheekbone. Get out of here. And take Abraxas with you.”
Abraxas—the boy with the crooked nose—shuffled backward to stand near the door.
“She’s a troublemaker, Aly,” Clyde insisted through clenched teeth, glaring at me.
“So am I.” She pointed her palette knife at the exit. “Get out.”
Clyde pushed the door open. “I’ll be right outside.” He shoved Abraxas down the narrow porch steps, then followed him and slammed the door at his back.
“Why am I here?” I tried not to struggle against the cuffs, but just knowing I couldn’t get up made me desperate to try.
“You’re here so I can bring out your inner monster with the aid of a little cosmetic magic.” Alyrose squirted dark paste from a thin tube onto her palette. “It’s not a long-term solution, but since only a few people have actually seen your transformation, makeup should work for tonight.”
“And if I refuse?”
Her smile looked genuine. “Gallagher says you’re too smart for that.”
Interesting.
While Alyrose blended colors and mixed translucent pastes and gels, I craned my neck to see as much as I could of her narrow, cluttered camper. Garment racks lined two walls, stuffed with clothes in every imaginable color and texture. High on one wall, a shelf was lined with foam mannequin heads, each wearing a different wig in a rainbow of colors, lengths, and styles.
The mallet lump on the side of my skull throbbed when I rolled my head to the side, noticing a small cluttered folding table. Amid piles of ribbons, buttons, straight pins, hot glue sticks, cloth flowers, and lace sat an open laptop, where Alyrose had obviously been designing a new poster for the carnival.
A surgical stand stood next to my chair, its shallow stainless-steel tray full of makeup sponges and brushes laid out as precisely as any surgeon’s tools.
“You really worked in Hollywood?”
She closed a bottle of what looked like black paint. “For a little while. I only worked on one movie, though. Nightmares from Hell. Did you see it?”
I shook my head, and my hair snagged on a duct tape patch on the side of the headrest.
Alyrose shrugged and set her palette on a small table near my feet. “It went straight to DVD.”
“And now you do makeup for the menagerie?”
“Oh, hon, I do many things for Metzger’s. Money is tight and time is short, so we’re all multitaskers. I design and maintain costumes, create posters, help groom the female exhibits where needed, and maintain a running inventory of all the supplies necessary for all of that.”
“Do many of the others fake their transformations?”
She laughed. “No, I mostly cover bruises, brighten pale skin, and lighten dark circles. Sometimes I exaggerate trademark features, to make the exhibits look more exotic, but you’re the first chance I’ve had to work real magic in years. Which was Gallagher’s idea, of course.”
Eagerness emanated from her voice, and as relieved as I was to have temporarily escaped the demand to “transform,” I wasn’t thrilled to have become Alyrose’s new pet project.
She sat on a chair in front of her laptop. A few mouse strokes later, the poster she’d been working on disappeared, and a startling image replaced it. The face on-screen looked familiar, but bizarre.
My breath froze in my throat when I finally recognized the monster as myself.
My irises were gone. My eyes were a milky white, shot through with gray veins branching like tree limbs. More veins branched over the skin around my eyes, so dark they were almost black against cheeks so pale my skin might never have seen the light of day. My hair seemed to float around my head in fine tendrils, but I knew that if she’d had video instead of a still shot, those tendrils would be writhing. I’d heard about it. I’d felt it. But until that moment, I hadn’t seen it.
It didn’t seem possible. Even staring right at the evidence, I couldn’t make myself believe what I was seeing.
“Where did you get that?” My voice was a ghost, so thin it seemed to have no substance.
“YouTube. Hasn’t gotten many hits yet, so we should be able to fudge the details a little. I have solid white contacts, but I can’t draw veins on them.” She spun on her stool to face me, her gaze distant as she thought. “I’d love a few more reference images. Have they figured out what you are yet?”
“No.” And I changed my mind nearly every minute about whether or not I wanted to know.
I couldn’t turn away from the screen. I looked horrific. Monstrous. “Someone posted this online?” The magnitude of my living nightmare had just exploded.
“Yes, luckily for us.” Alyrose rolled her chair toward me, opening an opaque plastic bottle. “We have a strict ‘no photography’ policy, but it only applies to the exhibits, and you weren’t ours yet, so...” She shrugged and squirted pale liquid onto a makeup sponge. “We’ll start with your skin tone. Gallagher promised they’ll have you dimly lit, and no one will be closer than three feet from you, so I think I can pull this off, if you cooperate. What do you say?”
I nodded, not because I had no choice, though that was basically true, but because she’d asked. Maybe treating me like a person was just her brand of manipulation, but as long as she was playing nice, I would do the same.
The alternative, I knew, would involve Clyde.
For the next hour, while she painted me to look like the monster I could hardly believe I was, I lay in Alyrose’s repurposed dental chair under bright lights, trying not to feel grateful for the air-conditioning, and the quiet, and the relative solitude, because those were not things they had any right to deny me in the first place.
When the costume mistress was done with my face, she cleaned her equipment in a bathroom I couldn’t see from the chair. I stared through an open doorway at an unmade bed and a portable television sitting on a chair. Alyrose’s camper was both home and studio. And transportation. Everything she owned fit into those three rooms.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I might have pitied her, but now her meager assets represented wealth and luxury I could never again attain.
As low as personal possessions ranked on the list of things I’d lost, I couldn’t help missing my clothes, and my shoes, and my bed.
I no longer owned anything but thoughts and memories, and with each minute that passed, I volleyed between outrage and grief over my loss.
Alyrose came back, wiping her wet hands on a clean white cloth, and made several more swipes on her computer track pad. The image of my face on her screen was replaced with an image of me from the waist up, facing away from the camera, my hands raised, as if I were reaching for something. Jack, the handler with the cattle prod, stood between me and Genni’s cage, mostly blocked from view by my body and hands.
She pressed a button on her keyboard, and the picture got bigger. Two clicks later, the screen showed only my pixelated right arm and the left side of Jack’s face, blessedly blurred beyond recognition. “I can’t get much detail from this, but it’s the best shot I could find of your hands and arms. On the bright side, no one else will have a
more accurate image to compare to the final product.”
Alyrose turned from her computer and picked up a narrow, shallow box from the table, then rolled closer to me in her chair. She opened the hinged top of the box and tilted it so I could see several long, thin, sharply pointed pieces of black plastic, textured like finely grained wood. “These are your new fingernails.”
“What are they?”
She set the box down and lifted one of the pieces into the light. “They’re resin special-effects claws from a haunted house I worked on several years ago. They may be a little big, but we can trim them to fit, and in dim lighting, they should do the trick. But once we get them on, you’re not going to be able to use your hands.”
I shrugged, which was awkward with my wrists secured to the arms of the chair. “It’s not like they let us play cards.”
Holding one of the claws and a tube of theatrical glue, Alyrose frowned down at my fingers. “If I uncuff you one wrist at a time, are you going to be a problem?”
I shook my head. I would get a chance to escape—the universe owed me that—but one uncuffed hand wasn’t going to do it.
Alyrose asked Clyde for the key to my cuffs, but he refused to hand them over on the grounds that I was dangerous and deceitful. She shut him up with the assertion that if I knew how to become a monster, her services wouldn’t be required in the first place.
Clyde uncuffed my left hand, but refused to leave the trailer while only three of my four limbs were restrained.
She scowled up at him from her stool. “Why don’t you see if Ruyle has approved her wardrobe? I can’t get her dressed without her costume.”
“I’m not leaving you alone with her.”
Alyrose’s thin paintbrush clattered onto the surgical tray. “I dress the oracles and sirens all the time with no one but Abraxas here to help, and nothing’s ever gone wrong.”
“They’re trained, and sedated, and predictable, because they know their place. This bitch is dangerous and delusional, and the old man won’t let us drug her until we know what she is. You should have seen her last night, trying to bargain with Gallagher, like this is some damn hotel and we’re the staff sent to wait on her! She wasted half her breakfast this morning because she thinks she’s too good for organ meat, and—”