•
In George's trailer, the phone rang. It rang and rang, the loudest and worst sound in the world. George cringed away from it, wanting to let it to ring out, but he knew they knew he was here. There was no choice. He lifted the receiver with a shaking hand. "Hello?"
"you. failed."
"Hey now, wait just a minute."
"tribute. insufficient."
"Look, it's not my fault. Something fishy's going on here."
"show. tomorrow."
"What?! Three days straight? You're nuts. Give it a day to rest; they ain't been paid. They ain't—"
"show. tomorrow." The line went dead. George buried his face in his hands.
•
Electric light flickered, flashed through the upper Funhouse windows. A bolt of lightning had been captured and was now being tortured to death, or so it looked to Steve and the others who walked by that evening, out on secret errands in the private network of loyalties, factions, betrayals, and paybacks among the circus's lowest rung staff.
Indeed something had been captured in that sick, sickening room. Many eyes embedded here and there in the walls, paintings, furniture, and from inside of jars, watched in mute horror. Talking to himself excitedly, just like someone pretending in his kitchen to host a cooking show while he made dinner, the Matter Manipulator lurched between jars of liquid, the electric chair, and the dials and panels of what looked like radio equipment: its purpose to find, in the etheric plane or beyond, the essence of JJ the clown.
"And with just a twist of this lever," he said, examining the panel's flickering dashes and lights, listening carefully to its beeps, "Aha! Yes, we have found the essence! ‘Tis easier on the more recently dead, still all lost in limbo seeking new homes. One year past, there is no guarantee, but tonight we have found the essence! And we have the particular frequency, the unique energy frequency derived from readings taken of the flesh. The unique energy signature, the fingerprint of the soul, my darling darlings." He snickered. "And we match that on this chair with a careful twist of this dial, til the frequency is identical, creating resonance which can
reach above, beyond the physical! And we activate the magnet trap, for when it's just close enough, just close enough . . ."
The chair spat sparks and shook JJ's carefully remade body, whose organs squeezed and clutched the fluids of life about the body, though no conscious life was yet there. It was a doll of flesh, vacant and waiting. Wet stuff flew from its lips. "And the law of attraction summons the essence home! It dons its suit once more—it has life! Breathe!" he shouted, hoarse. "Breathe again, clown; the circus calls you! She is your mother and your jail cell and your only only!"
JJ breathed. Slowly his brain switched on, and his eyes peeled open to look about the room, uncomprehending at first. As memory dawned, sadness and fear formed like a cloud above him. "Why?" he whispered. "Why did you bring me back?"
The Matter Manipulator's shoulders hunched with mirth. "Happy, where you were before? Ah, but that place can wait. What of this, the physical realm, the heaven of pleasure, the spice of pain? Yours again! Have a time to recover your wits, your . . ." his fluttering hands quested for the word ". . . your motivations. Later we shall discuss the why, the what, the who. There is a task I have for you. And there shall be rewards for compliance, the punishment for failure. Do you hear me, clown?"
"Yessir," JJ whispered.
"Tricky business afoot. I suspect, and George suspects. The clowns do ill to the show, we know not how, just hunch and guesses, fleeting thoughts. Rebellion! And the fortuneteller . . . well, we do not know, but we watch—watch her now, very close. And that is your task: watch. Learn. Report. Discover what goes on." The Matter Manipulator dropped one of the velvet bags Gonko had given him onto JJ's lap. "You remember this little vice, the joys it brings, itches scratched? More awaits you, clown, if you do this well for me. More than that: your heart's desire, the friendship of the carnival overseers. Maybe it will be JJ the Clown who leads the rest!"
The Matter Manipulator produced a glass case. Inside it was a still living head, with nails driven through every inch of flesh. The lips were stitched shut. Only the eyes were unharmed. They peered, pleading at JJ through the glass. "Shall we discuss the price of refusal, or of failure?" the Matter Manipulator said. "For now you know, even swift death is no escape, should you displease me. I call you back as I see fit. This head has been alive for a hundred years. I refresh the nails, oh, every so often."
JJ shook his head. "I'll rat them out, sir. I'll snitch."
"Good boy. Then you keep your head, and next time you rest, I shall not wake you."
***
9. ABOVE
The campsite was a bustle of activity, waking Jamie from a few hours of fitful sleep not easily come by in the clown tent. All night the weird noises and sleep-talking utterances of Doopy and Goshy had colored his dreams with sickly pink, red, and blue monsters rising from the depths of garish rainbow lakes to lunge at him with clattering teeth.
He rose and went to find Dean, who'd been helping dismantle tents and trying to act as naturally and fearlessly as he could. Jamie took him over near the gazebo, where they crouched from the carnies' sight behind a waist-high wall of hedge. Jamie said, "There's a circus down there, bigger than this one. I went through those gate things and saw it."
"Down where?" said Dean.
"I'm not sure. But it can be reached with the gates and with those elevators. The lifts can take you anywhere in the world. We'd just need to learn the number code of each location and to take one of those card gizmos they call pass-outs." Jamie related all he'd seen yesterday, including the run in with Steve and the apparent plan of Gonko's show: to starve out the show beneath and get George removed as boss.
"So how do we use this?" said Dean.
"See that's the thing. Gonko was terrified that I'd blabbed down there about what he's doing up here."
"Terrified?" Dean said skeptically.
"He expressed it with homicidal anger, but yes. So he has a weakness there, but it does us no real good. If they learn down there what he's doing, they'll punish him, maybe kill him, maybe kill us for helping him, then just put someone else in charge of the clowns. We'll be just as trapped beneath as we are up here. And having been down there, I can tell you, we're better off up here. At least we're not getting whipped all day like they are."
Dean scoffed. "Just the odd drowning up here, right?"
"You can't make Gonko mad like that. Obey him and you're fine. You shouldn't have gone up onstage."
"Wasn't me, like I told you. It has to be the face paint—it changed me. I came back to myself when it washed off."
"So here's what you do. Tell Gonko you don't want to be a clown, that you'll do some other job. Say sorry for yesterday, suck up to him, then ask if you can be a ticket collector."
"Why?"
"I just have a feeling it might be useful if you learn how those gates work."
"All right. But get me a tub of that face paint."
"Why, Dean?"
"Because I remember how I felt wearing it. Bulletproof. Hell, I even beat up a couple of those other clowns. And it felt like I could have taken on Gonko and won."
"Bad idea, Dean."
"Just telling you how it felt. Get me some of that face paint. I'll hide it until I need to use it. Okay?"
"Fine. How's Jodi?"
Dean's smile was grim. "You hear her screaming when they took the makeup off her? She freaked out, fought like a wildcat. Five of them had to hold her down. Now she's Emerald again, Queen of the Park. And I'm her Romeo, but she keeps asking what happened to my big muscles." He laughed. "This is some ride you got us on, bro."