Woman Who Loved the Moon (26 page)

“What the hell?” demanded Ricky.

“I asked Marvel if I could join the circus and he said I could!” She turned as Lynellen came up to her. “Can I wear this? He said I could ride the elephant, like you. My name’s Susie Green. I don’t—I don’t have makeup. Can I borrow yours?”

“I—sure,” said Lynellen.

“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Angelo. I’ll see you all tomorrow.” She waved and ran off. Lynellen turned to Angelo.

“Do you know that girl?”

“She came to ask me if she could join the circus, earlier tonight,” he said. “I told her what we always tell them, to ask Marvel. They never do. You know they never do.”

“Well, this one did,” said Lynellen, hands on her hips. “Marvel must be crazy! She’s a child, she can’t be more than sixteen. You have to talk to him. We’ll get arrested, or lynched!”

“Don’t be silly,” said Angelo uneasily. “He didn’t mean it.”

Tony said, from the darkness, “She thinks he does.”

“You’re the one said he knows what he’s doing!” Angelo said. Tony shrugged.

“I want you to talk to him,” said Lynellen.

“Jesus, I don’t want to talk to him. Why should I? It’s his business!” But Lynellen just looked at him. So did Ricky and Millicent. “All right. All right.” Angelo got up. “Don’t wait around for me, huh?” he said roughly. “I’ll talk to him.” He stomped away from them, annoyed that they all had been so quick to get him to speak to Marvel; why, if she wanted to say something to Marvel couldn’t Lynellen have done it herself... ?

He went to the lion’s tent. After a while four shadows came out of the big top, and drifted to the trailers. He heard the click of the doors. He did not want to talk to Marvel until Lynellen was in bed.

He knocked on the owner’s trailer door. After a moment it swung open. Marvel stood just inside the doorway. “Angelo.”

“Something on my mind,” Angelo said.

“Come in.” The ringmaster stepped back to give the strong man room. Angelo mounted the steps. The trailer was small; they crowded it. As always when they stood at arm’s length from each other, Angelo felt dwarfed by Marvel’s size. Though he was a big man, Marvel topped him, standing six-foot-eight, ebony black, supple, snaky smooth, big without bulk. It let him know how Ricky and Millicent felt. His trailer was bare, with a bed and shelves and a file cabinet. On the cabinet sat the phone and a huge fancy radio which was never played. “What is it?” The blacksnake whip stood in a corner casting a shadow across the floor.

“It’s that girl,” said Angelo.

“Yes.” The syllable meant nothing. The ringmaster’s face was unreadable, barely visible in the dim light.

“She thinks you’re going to let her join the carny, come with us to Chicago.”

“Maybe I am,” said the ringmaster.

“She’s very young. We could get into trouble.”

“My business, Angelo.”

“I think it’s our business.”

“My business,” said the black magician inexorably. “The door’s behind you.”

“Goddamn it, Marvel—” Angelo began. He reached for Marvel’s shoulder, to shake him. “Listen—” He said the next word to the floorboards.

He didn’t know how he’d got there. He could not remember being hit, but the taste of blood swelled under his tongue. He put his palms to the floor and started to rise. His muscles shook. There was no strength in them. He lay with his cheek to the floor, looking up. Marvel towered over him, whip in hand. Angelo had seen it cut. He shut his eyes.

“Poor Angelo.” The words were a resonant croon. The hand descended. The whip snake, deliberately slow, cool, light, across his back and spine. The caress turned his belly to ground- glass knots. He couldn’t move. The dark figure stepped over him, and was gone.

It seemed a long time before his body obeyed him again. He stumbled from the trailer and found his way to the animal cage. He felt violated. He knelt in the grass and was sick, rasping and retching. Then he wiped his mouth, stuck his head under the cold-water hose for a moment, and dragged himself to bed.

* * *

The next day he stayed out of Marvel’s way.

“What did he say?” demanded Lynellen in the morning.

“He said it was none of my business.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. I don’t want to talk about it, Lyn.”

“All right,” she said. “What’s the matter, are you sick?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You’re never sick,” But she made him a cup of tea on the hot plate in the trailer, and sat with him while he drank it. It made him feel better.

When they went on that night, Sunday night, it was Susie who rode Jugger around the ring. The audience roared its pleasure at this treat. She held the clubs for Tony when he did his juggling act, and after the weight lifting, she and Tony did some acrobatics, which consisted mainly of her posing from the security of Tony’s shoulders. After the trapeze act she joined Angelo and Tony and Lynellen behind the curtain. She was bubbling. “Was I good? Was I all right?”

Lynellen said dryly, “Marvelous.”

“Ssh!” said Angelo, waiting for his signal. Marvel stood in center ring. He gestured. This was the finale, his specialty. He did it only once in every town. Angelo dimmed the lights. The crowd quieted.

One red spot shone on the tall magician. Millicent, at the calliope, coaxed from it an eerie inhuman wail. Marvel extended the blacksnake whip, drawing slow hypnotic circles with it in the dust of the ring. (Angelo fought a sudden sickness.) As if pulled by a magnet, the dust rose and wreathed the magician, obscuring him within a lurid cloud. The music stopped. And the cloud began to shape itself. It shifted and writhed. A great coiling illusion of a snake reared its hooded head to the top of the tent. Its gaze transfixed the audience. A dark tongue flickered at them. A tail like a scorpion’s arched over their heads. The snake hissed. Angelo trembled, chilled to his bones.

Then the illusion dissolved into swirling red smoke, revealing the magician standing alone in the ring. A hush measured the crowd’s awe. Then the applause began. With a slashing beckon of his whip, Marvel brought his performers into the ring.

“Ladies, gentlemen, children, roustabouts,” he bowed to the bench where the high school kids were sitting, “my deepest thanks to you all.
Marvel the Magician’s Miniature Carnival,
the finest circus of its size you’ll ever see, must leave you now. When you awake in the morning, we will be gone, a dream of straw and sawdust. But remember, as you dream tonight of the big top, that our carnival is a fleeting thing, but that ali over the world, all over the universe, the Circus lives forever!”

The people roared love at them, heating the tiny tent until Angelo, holding Lynellen on one shoulder and Susie on the other, could hardly stand it. “Down, ladies.” he muttered, Lynellen leaped down. Angelo looked up, to urge Susie to jump. The tent top had ripped somehow. He could see the stars through it. He started to speak, to say, “Look—” and a wave of heat, a dragon’s exhalation, blazed at him, followed by a freezing, bone-snapping chill. The tent was transparent. He looked at stars; they were all around him, and it was cold. Then there was nothing at all.

* * *

He awoke in a little room, a bare-walled, metal room. He was naked. He was warm. The room had no door, no windows, just a cot without blankets for him to lie on. It looked and felt like a cage. He sat up on the cot.

As if it had been activated by his shifting weight, an opening appeared in the wall. He looked through it without moving from the cot. It led into a long metal corridor. He stood up and sat down again, wondering if he could make the door close. It didn’t. Finally, he went into the corridor. The door closed behind him. He walked. The walls were cold. He was a bug scuttling inside a shiny metal box. When he got to the end of it, a second door appeared in front of him. Through it was a space, with chairs. On one of them, curled like a baby with her knees flexed, lay Lynellen. She was naked. He walked to her. Her eyes opened. She considered him.

“Angelo?”

“Yes.”

She sat up, cross-legged. Finally she reached out a hand and drew him down to sit beside her. “Did you wake up in a little room?”

“Yes. Then a door opened and I came here.”

“Me, too. I wonder if the others are here. I wonder where
here
is.” He tried to put an arm around her. “No. Don’t.” So he didn’t. They sat. A different piece of the wall opened, like a mouth, and Tony came in. He, too, was naked.

“Anybody know what the fuck is going on?” he said, with a stunning faggot swagger.

“No,” said Angelo, but it made him smile. Lynellen smiled, too.

“Honey, it ain’t Chicago,” she said. Then she began to cry. Her whole body shook. “I don’t like it,” she sobbed. “I want to go home!” She stopped crying abruptly when Susie came into the room, crying even harder. She ran to the girl. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said. “Look, we’re together. Ricky and Milly will be here, they’ll show up any minute, you’ll see. Nothing can be so bad if we’re all together.” Angelo felt a spasm of jealousy as she hugged and patted the frightened kid.

“If I don’t get some attention,” he said. “Tony and I will start holding each other.”

“She needs it more than you do!” snapped Lynellen.

Angelo saw the look in Tony’s eye, and was sorry. When Millicent and Ricky did walk in, he turned to them, Ricky was subdued. Milly wouldn’t look at them. She curled on a chair, just like Lynellen had been when Angelo found her.

“What’s the matter with her?” Angelo asked Ricky.

Ricky said, “She’s naked.”

“We’re all naked.”

“Yeah. But she’s a naked dwarf. That’s ugly. I don’t care, but she does.”

The door opened again.

What came in was—nothing. Before the door closed Angelo glimpsed a scattering of ice-white stars in a black sky, But there was something strange in the room now. It showed as a blurring of light and a twisting of dimension, a discontinuity that crawled up the wall and halfway over the ceiling. You couldn’t look at it, but you couldn’t see through it, Angelo tried and his eyes filled with tears. Lynellen, scared and angry, said, “Damn you, be one thing or another!”

A familiar deep voice said, “What I really am you would not want to see.”

Ricky jumped. “Marvel?”

Silence. Within the blur of light Angelo saw a dark shadow thicken, until the ringmaster stood before them, uncertain like a picture out of focus, carrying the blacksnake whip, dressed in his tails and top hat. Lynellen said “What—who are you? Where are we?”

“You are on—
gabble
.” The word came out nonsense to their ears. “I am the ringmaster.”

“What have you done with Lila and Jugger?” Angelo demanded. “What happened to the circus, the tent, the people—”

The form within the blur faced him. “They did not come with us,” Marvel said. The whip in his hand undulated rhythmically. like some monstrous tail. “We left them.”

Lynellen’s voice rose, “Where are we?”

One whole side of a wall, like a picture screen rolling up after a movie, slid out of sight. Behind it, going on and on into infinity, were only stars. Even Milly lifted her head and uncurled her stumpy body to look. Susie giggled. The sound was shocking in the alien place. “He turned the tent into a spaceship and poof!” she said, and shook, weeping without sound, her fists like claw on the smooth, cool fabric of the chair.

Angelo said, “You’re a thing from the stars. From another planet? You brought us here. Why? For what?” He had a horrifying vision of them all captive in their little boxes, being observed through cosmic keyholes. Or were they just going to be strapped to tables and dissected?

The Marvel-form dissolved into a shimmer of light, as if the being had become tired or bored with maintaining it. “You will be in the circus,” it said. The wall of stars vanished.

They looked through a window at a strange and yet familiar place. There was a suggestion of a tent. Within it, inside a hundred rings, creatures of all sizes and shapes and colors cavorted. There was music, and the sound of hissing in the wind. The scene was bright and far away, like a painting come to life.

Millicent said, “I see people in there.”

“Where?”

The scene swooped at them. They hovered like birds over one ring. In it were six people, three men, three women, doing a high-wire act in silver spangles and long rainbow plumes. They were good.

“But where’s the audience?” Ricky said. They looked at the shimmer in the air.

“Maybe they’re invisible, like him,” said Millicent. Angelo didn’t think he was invisible. Behind the shapeless glow he sensed a truer shape, coiling and uncoiling against the metal wall.

“You brought us here to be in a circus?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“A circus in the stars. We’re not that good. You know that. Why didn’t you steal the Flying Wallendas?”

“You are a much more interesting act,” Marvel said, “by
our
standards.”

Tony stood up, hands on hips. “Man, you are crazy,” he said. “I don’t perform for some gook I can’t even
see.
You just pick us up and take us home.” Lynellen nodded.