David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“‘He has seen the Trojan women and sung duets with Sirens and walked the sea bottom at the heel of Poseidon,’ Twillicker would bellow. ‘He has fought Ulysses, battled Odysseus, and shook a fist at great Jove himself! Ladies and gentlemen — I give you — ’

“And their breath would suck in, as the bright red curtains drew from the front of a tall, steel-barred cage.

“‘ —I give you Polyphemus! Son of the Sea God Poseidon! ’

“And the curtain would open, and the men would gasp, and the children scream — and the women, some of them, would faint dead away at the sight of the naked giant Polyphemus. His lips would pull back from a shark’s-row of teeth, and his great arms would rise to rattle the bars of his bolted-together cage — and he’d take a taste of them with that eye of his.

“And then, as fast as it’d risen, the red curtain would fall back in place, and the next crowd would come through. By the time the circus was ready to pull up, all the crowds were filled with familiar faces. They all felt the same draw Twillicker had felt that first night. By the time the circus left a town, the coffers were filled to overflowing with fresh torrents of silver.

“The Cyclops became a part of the circus like he’d always been there. The cat wranglers and elephant handlers and the roustabouts had all worked out a drill for moving him, from his cage to the railcar and back again — figured out how to feed him without getting too close to those giant hands, those lethal jaws — and devised a way to wrap the ropes and chains around his wrists and ankles and middle, so he couldn’t squirm much. Charlie Baine looked at his books, and understood that for all the food he was buying for his Cyclops, profits were still higher than they’d ever been. As for the freaks, now relegated to second-class oddities in the shadow of Polyphemus? They rattled the change in their pockets and shrugged. Even Wotun couldn’t complain much, about being upstaged by the Greek giant. It was as good as pitching the tent next to the Grand Canyon. Folks’d pay to watch your show, just because it was on their way to the view.

“And the view,” said Clayton, “doesn’t ask for a cut of the nut.”

“But the Cyclops wasn’t just a view,” said James. “The Cyclops felt differently.”

Clayton winked at him. “No fooling you, sir. ’Tis true. The Cyclops felt differently . And why wouldn’t he? For we kept him like an animal, although he was a thinking beast. He stood in his cage, listening to Twillicker holler his spiel, enduring the stares of the glassy-eyed rubes. Submitted to the will of his wranglers. And always he watched. With that great eye he has. He watched and he paid attention. Listened to what Twillicker said, and made out the words. Listened to the rubes muttering amongst themselves. Heard the wranglers and the freaks and the clowns chatter on. Two weeks and a day before the tragedy here—” he gestured behind him to the camp “—he spoke.”

Clarissa the Oracle stood, her eyelids trembling in a sideshow trance. “ I am Polyphemus ,” she said in a deepened voice. “ Son of the Sea God Poseidon .”

“Dear Clarissa started talking then, too. She’d given up the trapeze, and been fooling with tea leaves and Tarot cards instead. We thought she might open a fortune-telling booth. When the words started to come — the poetry — it dawned on us all that little Clarissa should start calling herself the Oracle.”

“From the Greek stories,” said Clarissa.

“It was a theme,” said Clayton. “The Cyclops didn’t speak much. But the words he did speak commanded respect. He seemed to speak the things in a man’s soul. The things that did not wish speaking. Perhaps — perhaps he did what Twillicker’s Texan host said he did: drank in the souls of men and women through his great eye, and spat up truth. For is it not true that the Cyclops were the sons of Gods?”

“The sea god Poseidon,” said James dryly.

“You mock,” said Clayton. “But you shouldn’t, because you’ve seen him.”

James couldn’t argue with that.

“The talk continued off and on,” said Clayton. “Sometimes it would be just a few words a day. Words we could understand. Words in strange tongues. All mixed up. It was a kind of parroting. After a time, the talk became incessant. He talked as the wranglers tore down his cage, roped his wrists and led him to his rail car. It went on even after he was chained in, we all boarded, and the train was underway. Talked and talked and talked through the night, louder even than the engine whistle sometimes — softer than a whisper in your ear at others. Far into the next night, and into the mountains — the giant’s voice lived in our skulls. That can be the only thing that drove Twillicker to do what he finally did.”

James shivered as the wind shifted over the circus shanty town. In the distance, he heard a rumbling sound of car engines. “And what,” he said, goose flesh rising on his arms, “did Mister Twillicker finally do?”

“Unbound him,” said Clayton. “They found Twillicker’s body near to the Cyclops’s car after the wreck. The giant killed him, we can only think — after Twillicker clicked the locks with the key we found on ’im. Perhaps the Cyclops told him something he could not ignore. Or perhaps—”

“—perhaps the temptation to take a look was too strong to resist,” said James quietly.

“Split up the middle was he, into Twillickers two,” said Clarissa helpfully. “One good, one wicked — and—”

She stopped. Rubbed her arms. Looked back to the road.

“What’s wrong, deary?” said Clayton.

“Wicked,” she said, very quietly, as the first black-draped truck crested the hill and stopped, to let its load of bat-bearing men out to the circus’s hobo town.

“We should run.”

“ You are all trespassing. By the authority of the Chamblay Sheriff ’s Office and the owners of the North Brothers Lumber Company — on whose property you are squatting — I’m placing all of you under arrest .”

The speaker was a thick-set man with short bristly white hair and thick brown sideburns who stood on the hood of the second truck in. He wore a suit jacket and black wool pants, tucked into rubber boots that came up near his knee. He held a long double-barrelled shotgun propped against his hip. Maybe two dozen men carrying baseball bats and wearing dark suit jackets surrounded him.

“ Don’t make trouble for yourselves. ” The man lowered the megaphone and motioned down the slope with the barrel of his shotgun. His men started to move.

James was already ankle deep in the river. Clayton and Clarissa, and a crowd of others with the circus were with him.

“Who the hell is that?”

“Pinkertons,” said Clayton, huffing as he sloshed. “That one was here day before yesterday. There was trouble with a couple of the roustabouts.”

Pinkertons. James shuddered. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard of the detective agency; when he was a boy, a gang of Pinkerton men ran herd on the men who worked the lumber mill. His father’s most prominent scar, a puckered pink thing that extended along his forehead up past his hairline, dated back to the first time Pinkertons came to Chamblay.

Dating to a night…

When the bedsprings screamed, and…

…Jimmy tasted the sawdust in his mouth…

There was no doubt about it. James’s feelings about Pinkertons were… complicated.

The Pinkerton men moved through the camp like armed locusts. They knocked down tents and sent pots of hot water flying and splashing into cook-fires. Three of them descended on a dark-chinned roustabout and pummelled him to the ground. Two were studying James’s coupe, parked a dozen yards up-slope. Another two chased down a pair of dwarfs straggling behind the exodus to the creek, while five more waded into the waters after the fleeing mass of circus folk. At the top of the slope, their captain stuck a cigarette in his mouth as he watched it all unfold.