But Milena was already removing the lantern from a small table that sat behind the hanging man, shoving the table forward and motioning for Bruno to climb on top of it. Bruno wasn’t sure the table could support his weight, but he mounted it anyway, then proceeded to take hold of the chains that bound the prisoner.
The freaks stared while Bruno ripped the chains from the ceiling. The hanging man dropped to the ground at the chicken boy’s feet. Chick went down on one knee, lifted the man’s head in his hands. The man’s eyes fluttered, then closed, as his mouth opened and the tongue inside batted around for a moment until he swallowed and found his voice and managed to say, “I knew you would come.”
Without any difficulty, the man came up on his knees and embraced the chicken boy. Over Chick’s shoulder, he surveyed the whole clan and, in a louder voice, said, “I knew you would all come.”
And then things happened so quickly that Antoinette would not suspect the truth until hours later, when she heard the first shovels of sand being tossed atop her casket.
The hanging man transformed his embrace into something closer to a choke hold and called for his creatures, a horde of grotesque homunculi — half-naked gargoyles with red eyes and diminutive but overly muscular bodies — which emerged through the trapdoor and swarmed into the turret.
And in that instant, Chick knew that the Limbo had turned on him. And that the man they had just rescued could not be anyone but their dreaded enemy and pursuer, the demon at the heart of all of their nightmares, the mad Dr. Fliess.
Within seconds, Fliess’s creatures had filled the turret, thronged over and captured all of the freaks. Bruno threw and kicked and stomped a dozen or more of the monstrosities before Fliess called the strongman’s attention to the scalpel held at the chicken boy’s neck.
Bruno and Fliess stared at each other until the doctor said, “Surely even a strongman knows when to surrender.”
Antoinette was hysterical beneath a swarm of Fliess’s monsters, who had her pinned on the floor. One of them bent back the cone of her head, as if making ready to snap the neck. Seeing this, Bruno gave up the fight and the creatures battened onto his legs and arm. The deformed angel on the pinhead’s back moved its hands to cover her mouth and silence her.
“Very good,” Fliess said, lifting himself and Chick to standing and walking to the far side of the room to get a better look at the entire troupe.
“You are more hideous,” he said, “than even I could have imagined.” He hugged Chick more tightly, brought his mouth to the chicken boy’s ear and added, “And I have a vivid imagination.”
Behind the doctor, out the turret’s window, Milena could see a vast ocean that rolled beyond the far side of the castle. For only a moment, s/he wondered about her chances of crashing through the glass and diving to the water far below. But at the end of that moment, s/he knew the idea was simply life’s last kick in the ass. A final instance of false hope.
“It’s true,” the doctor said to the freaks, “that I will never understand fear in the manner, or to the degree, that you understand fear. And yet, it breaks my heart and it angers me that you’ve allowed fear to damn you.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Chick said, staring at the strongman.
The doctor shrugged awkwardly while maintaining his hold on the boy.
“Despite all appearances,” he said, “you’re human. And like all of us, you fear the unknown.”
“You don’t know anything about us,” Bruno said, in a voice that should have held rage but, instead, contained only the sound of terminal failure.
“That’s incorrect, Mr. Seboldt,” Fliess said. “Try to remember that nothing is as it seems. That’s the original good advice.”
Then the freaks were marched out of the turret’s proper exit and down a long series of stairs and dark landings that led, eventually, out of the front gate and down a steep and narrow stone stairwell cut into the cliff. They were brought out into a small circle of beach, a horseshoe cove of hard, brown sand. There were no hysterics when they saw the graves that had been dug during the low tide or the simple pine boxes that rested next to their tombs.
Instead, Jeta and Antoinette wept and the others tried, with varying degrees of success, to assume a stoic posture. Without any delay, the gargoyles brought the freaks, in groups of two or three, to their respective coffins. No one fought and no one tried to flee. As if they’d all come, at the same instant, to some unspoken understanding or exhaustion. As if all of their spirits were like a circuit of circus lights and each one had gone out in the line.
The box for Durga was, of course, enormous. As was the one for Marcel and Vasco. Chick found himself wondering how the homunculi would manage to lower the crates into the ground. Then, ashamed at the thought, he found himself enraged. But when he spotted Kitty’s tiny coffin, his emotions simply imploded. He collapsed against the mad Dr. Fliess in a convulsion of self-loathing and despair, crushed under the realization that he had delivered the people he loved most deeply, most truly, into oblivion. Into the hopeless and ceaseless Limbo.
With one hand, Fliess stroked the chicken boy’s feathered cheek. With the other, the doctor adjusted the blade of his scalpel against Chick’s neck and made the boy lift his head.
“I want you,” the doctor said, “to witness this.”
And so, Chick watched through tear-splintered eyes as Bruno, the strongest man in the world, climbed, of his own free will, into his casket, and lay down, without a word of objection. One by one, the other freaks followed his lead.
The freaks had fought or run all the way across Gehenna. And now, here they were, models of acceptance and docility. More than anything else, in that moment, Chick wanted one final seizure, one last chance to fade out and quake and ask the reason for this gentle capitulation.
But the seizure would not come. There was no bile in his throat. No chill telegraphing up his spine. And so he tore his eyes off his clan as they lay down one by one. And turned his head upward to Dr. Fliess and asked, “Why?”
The doctor looked down at the chicken boy hesitantly, with a gaze that even a pinhead would call loving.
“Because,” said the doctor, “I am a man of both science and compassion.”
25
It was like cream at first. White on white and thick. And there was a richness, a hard sweetness. And cold moving toward freezing. That was where Sweeney first felt himself in the new moment. The sensation of his testicles rising with the cold, withdrawing — that’s what made it real, that sense of his body, that awareness. That’s what made it something more than a dream. Gave it a solidity that made it true.
He was still inside the factory. And Buzz and the Abominations were spread out around him, still in dream. That was his first sound, their collective respiration. He opened his eyes and blinked, surveyed the room and saw that Nadia was gone. He looked down to see that his pants had been pulled up and rebelted. There was a piercing sensation, like a bee sting, in the small of his back near the base of his spine. He rubbed it and only aggravated the pain.
He got to his knees and then, with some effort, to his feet. He made his way out of the cafeteria, through the kitchen, and out the loading bay onto the concrete apron. In the moonlight, he could make out the ruins behind the Harmony but everything was out of focus. He took his hand from his back, pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed down into the circles beneath his eyes. When he looked again, his vision had cleared. In fact, everything now appeared hyperfocused, more real than real. And somewhere out among the debris of the back lot, he began to hear a noise.