Carnival of Cryptids (Anthology to Raise Funds for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) (Kindle All-Stars Book 2)

by Bernard Schaffer

  George Penny stood motionless, waited for the pyrotechnic flames to crumple and die, then he dropped his arms and walked to a small wooden podium that was raised on a small dais at the side of the ring. When he had taken up his position the hidden speakers crackled into life once more, screeching out a recording of a quite inappropriately jaunty brass band number. Through the curtain burst a battalion of clowns, fire eaters, acrobats and tumblers, and they stomped and swooped around the cage as the anaemic music filled the air.

  George saw that the audience was barely even conscious of the performers; as clowns buffooned and men spat fire into the air and tiny women in leotards somersaulted and contorted themselves the members of the audience simply stared at the creature in the cage. And the creature stared back at them, its eyes like oil spilled on tarmac.

  The silence from the audience was absolute, and as George Penny exhorted his clowns and tumblers to clown and tumble ever more vigorously his smile grew broader and broader, for the audience still did not applaud, and George knew what this meant. When he finally held up his arms and the clowns and the tumblers froze, when the lights slipped away to leave only a single spotlight blistering down upon him, when he announced that the show had come to an end, when he stood and watched the stunned audience shuffle out through the pinned back tent flaps like humbled sinners after mass, even Horse Morrison, George Penny knew that his fortune was made.

  * * *

  After counting and re-counting the evening’s takings and writing the number – a large number, larger than he’d dared imagine – in careful script in the huge leather-bound ledger in which he triangulated his fortune, he found the uncontrollable anticipation of his future wealth to be overwhelming. That night as he lay in bed numbers spiralled like galaxies in his mind, and he found his body rigid, his limbs restless. Every time he closed his eyes the delightful enormity of his potential fortune agitated his mind so much that he found himself unable to lie still. Eventually, as the others slept, he got out of bed, left the circle of caravans and went for a walk out in the fields that nestled up around the big top.

  The air was warm and milky and the low, bloated moon hung like an infected eye as George Penny waded through rows of corn, and the stalks bent and sprang back after he’d passed with a noise like whispered secrets. Before George had reached the twisted fence that marked the boundary of this first field, however, he was stopped in his tracks by a strange noise. It was a low moaning sound, like wind easing through a crack in a mountain, and it seemed to be coming from behind the tent.

  George Penny knew before he turned back what the source of the noise would be. The performers and stage hands were bedded down in the vans at either side of the big top. There was only one thing behind the tent, and the sound came like a prophecy.

  He skirted the edge of the tent, picking his way around guy ropes slung as taut as sinews, until he reached the patch of stubbled earth where they kept the generator and stored the boxes of equipment. Tiny flies bobbed in the moonlight, and a sweet, earthy smell of diesel, straw and dung pressed in and blurred his mind like a narcotic. He stopped. There, amongst the stacks of crates, on its wooden trolley and under a dark blue tarpaulin, was the cage.

  The moaning noise started again, deep and baleful, and it reminded George of hymns sung by mourners. He paused for a moment, almost savouring the peculiar harmonic resonance of the noise, then he reached out and hauled the oilcloth cover off the cage. It hissed as it slid across the wood, and it collapsed into a stiff heap on the ground. The moaning stopped.

  Outside in the moonlight the cage seemed smaller than it had done during the show. Or perhaps it was simply that the Yeti was no longer folded into a bundle; it was on its feet, holding onto the iron bars, and George felt an unexpected pity when he saw that the creature could not straighten its legs, saw the way its shoulders pressed against the roof of the cage, the way its neck bent and its heavy domed head hung low. The more he looked at it the tinier the cage seemed, the rougher the wood, the colder the bars.

  Finally the Yeti twisted its head to look at him, slowly and without purpose, as though its actions were not its own to direct, and when its enormous eyes met George’s they conveyed a weight of emotion that the ringmaster found impossible to bear.

  “Why don’t you just sit down?” he said, infuriated by the creature’s pathetic inability to stand fully and at his own pity, but as he spoke the words he realised the freight of casual cruelty that was carried within them and regretted them immediately. He looked around, saw one of the opened crates of food and pulled out a few stalks of cabbage, the first things that his fingers alighted upon.

  “There,” he said, “Sit down and eat those,” and he shoved them quickly through the bars of the cage, then he hurried away back to the safety of his tent. He didn’t wait to see whether the Yeti ate.

  * * *

  The troupe stayed in one place for only a few days, never long enough for public interest to wane, before packing the big top into a pair of huge trucks and driving until they found a new venue. They would drive until George Penny saw somewhere suitable – a park, a common, a village green – and then he would order the red and yellow canvas of the big top to be hoisted, and the tent would rise up from the countryside like a mainsail, as though the circus were an enormous galleon sailing through the fields of southern England.

  The shows maintained their popularity, and George continued to orchestrate the beautiful chaos from its centre, spouting ever more shameless hyperbole to eager audiences and painting ever more extravagant tales of the capture of the Yeti, but after that night behind the tent he discovered that when he looked at the creature in its cage and saw those resigned, defeated, human eyes looking back at him he was overcome by that same unbearable sensation of pity. He found that every time he looked at the creature huddled there in its cage knots of guilt roiled coldly in his gut, until eventually, in desperation, he sought out the troupe’s carpenter, Isaiah Cobb.

  “Do you have leather strips and some chain?” he asked.

  “What for?” said the carpenter. George Penny paused for a moment before replying.

  “I want you to make a collar and lead.”

  Isaiah Cobb was a knobbly old man who had seen enough of the world to recognise the meaning that lay behind his employer’s words, and he jerked his thumb at the Yeti’s cage in disbelief: “For that thing?”

  “I want to let it out of the cage. Just for a bit. Just while it eats.”

  “I can make a collar and lead for you, but I don’t see that any good’ll come of it. What if it ups and attacks you?”

  “It’s not violent. You’ve seen it. It’s just so it can stretch its legs.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said, and he shook his head and went off to fetch his tools.

  Later that day George Penny and the rest of the troupe watched as Isaiah Cobb, Joshua Cotton and the fire-eaters Walt Berry and Pierre Malon, their shoulders looped with ropes and chains, gingerly opened the door at the end of the Yeti’s cage and tossed a lasso of cord about the creature’s neck. They hauled on the cord, bringing the creature grovelling to the floor, but even accounting for the swiftness of the manoeuvre George was struck by the complete absence of any kind of resistance from the Yeti. Even as Isaiah Cobb fitted the thick leather collar around its neck the Yeti simply lay on the floor of the cage, and when the four men retreated, leaving the door open, it took the creature some twenty minutes before it ventured outside to test the limits of the chain that ran from the collar around its neck to a stake driven into the ground just outside the cage.

  The Yeti looked around carefully before stepping onto the grass, and the sensation underfoot seemed to delight it, for it sat down and stroked the grass fondly and at length with its leathery fingers. It was not until it was completely satisfied that it reached out and took the vegetables that George had left in a large wooden bowl just within the radius of the chain.

  George Penny watched this with relief, and as the creature
’s blunt yellow teeth worked their way through the tough cabbage stalks he felt the outermost layer of his guilt peeling away. Outside the cage the creature seemed more dignified; more at ease. Happier, certainly. In fact, seeing the Yeti outside its cage, George Penny wondered whether he might have overreacted. Of course the creature wasn’t unhappy. George smiled, and as he did so the Yeti looked up at him and George saw something glitter in its eyes that could have been gratitude, or perhaps even hope. Then for just a moment he became aware of a disquieting sensation that there was something harder and more perilous in the creature’s gaze, but the Yeti turned away, and the moment was gone.

  * * *

  As the weeks passed George Penny grew more and more fond of the Yeti. He was delighted by the creature’s ability to generate wealth, but in addition to this – though he would never admit it – he found the creature’s quiet dignity to be extremely relaxing, almost meditative, and if the morning was fine then he would pass it sat on a chair set just outside the outer reaches of the Yeti’s chain, reading a book. He wanted to sit next to the beast, to stroke the hair on its back, perhaps, but although it had exhibited not the slightest sign of aggression George reluctantly acceded to Isaiah Cobb’s advice to keep at a safe distance and he remained beyond the limit of the chain’s radius.

  When no-one else was in earshot he spoke to the creature, relaying news and anecdotes about the people attached to the big top as though the creature were an attentive nephew eager for tales of the exotic. In his quieter and more reflective moments he’d tell the beast about his wife Ruth.

  “She never believed me when I said we’d be rich,” he’d say, as the Yeti chewed on its vegetables, “She always told me I was daydreaming, that I should concentrate on getting myself a steady job. But I told her that I had plans, that I could make a fortune, and so I was out all hours of the day and night, buying here, selling there, chasing deals that no-one else wanted or trusted, some of them clean, some of them not so clean. But never anything big. When she had our son, little Jacob, she thought it would force me to settle down, but she didn’t realise that it would only drive me harder. How could I let my son grow up poor? I went abroad, to Paris and Berlin and Belgrade and Istanbul, I roamed around the world looking for opportunities. I bought and sold textiles, exotic animals, precious metals, ancient artefacts, I bought ships and trucks to carry my goods and then I sold them again when the businesses dried up, and it wasn’t until I reached Calcutta that I heard from Ruth. There was a letter waiting for me at the consulate. It said ... well, she told me that she didn’t care about the money, that she just wanted us to be a family. I was touched, of course I was, but I hadn’t made any money and I couldn’t go back empty-handed. But that was when I met the man who told me about you, and you changed everything. You’re my fortune. You’re the ticket that’ll finally take me home.”

  The shows continued with enormous success, drawing crowds from all around every time they moored the big top to a new field or green. There were some objections, naturally enough – a professor of zoology came to see George Penny after the show one night to tell him that the Yeti was ‘clearly a type of orang-utan, or a bipedal ape of some kind, in any case, and certainly not of the genus homo’, and in the midst of one show a young Jesuit minister took exception to Penny’s characterisation of the Yeti as man’s nearest cousin, and had to be forcibly removed by two of the clowns – but by and large the shows were popular, and George Penny began to accumulate no little amount of money.

  As the weeks stretched into months, however, the Yeti began to exhibit signs of distress. If it was not lying listlessly in the corner of its cage then it was rubbing its back against the bars to the point that it wore away the hair, leaving bare patches of sickly pale skin. It left its cage only reluctantly, and it chewed on its food mechanically, as though through habit rather than hunger. Its breathing was shallow and its eyes, once deep with what George Penny had interpreted as a primitive wisdom, seemed dull.

  George Penny saw this change in the creature and became quite distraught. He saw himself as an astute businessman, and the animal was the one investment of his life that looked like paying out, but the facsimile of humanity contained within those thick, expressive lips, the delightfully nimble fingers, and, more than anything else, the peculiarly sapient eyes set an unexpected note of empathy ringing somewhere deep within him.

  “Exercise is what it needs,” said Joshua Cotton, nodding to himself as he stood with George Penny in front of the cage, “My uncle’s horse went like this after it broke its leg and had to be confined to the stables. We’ve got imaginations, but an animal’s mind is only as big as the world it can see. Stands to reason.”

  George Penny frowned, pursed his lips and tapped a finger absently against his chin.

  “The show can’t very well go on if the star turn isn’t able to perform,” he said.

  He asked Isaiah to make him a sturdy leather thong that could be looped through the creature’s collar, and as soon as it was ready he announced that he was taking the Yeti for a walk. At this declaration Isaiah scuttled off to his scuffed wooden box full of tools, his conkery knees clanking against one another as he went, and he hurried back carrying a length of wood with a nail embedded angrily through one of its ends. He pressed the cudgel into George’s palm with a desperate look, but when George eased the creature out of its cage and saw in it an almost zen-like placidity he handed the length of wood back to Isaiah with a beatific, self-indulgent smile. As Isaiah impotently shook his head George led the creature through the field and towards the lane that led to the village.

  The creature towered over George Penny, its monstrous arms swinging like pendulums as it walked behind him, but it seemed quite obedient and showed no sign of aggression as George led it down the track that soon became a lane that soon became the cobbled street that led to the middle of the village. The Yeti followed meekly a few steps behind him, and the lead hung slack from its neck to George’s hand.

  George had intended to take the creature for only a short walk, to test out the new lead and to ease the creature gently into its new exercise regime, and he had planned to turn around at the village and return to the circus. As he reached the first of the cottages that marked the beginning of the village proper, however, he heard the buzz of conversation and the shouts of vendors.

  “Hear that?” he said out loud, as though the Yeti were no different to a person, “That sounds to me like a market.”

  Above all other things George was an opportunist, and he recognised the serendipity that the situation presented. He tugged the Yeti through the village and into the marketplace, and as the crowds froze and fell silent at the sight of them he dragged an empty crate out from beneath a stall, put it on the floor and climbed up on it.

  “You see before you one of the wonders of the natural world,” he announced to the crowd, his chest puffed out and his arm aloft, “A remnant of a savage past that God himself neglected to lay to rest. A beast-man, a half-ape, an abomination from the frost-ravaged slopes of the world’s loneliest places. From the distant Himalayas he comes here, for you to look upon him and marvel at the brutish face, the arms that can tear a man in two, the legs that can carry that monstrous, preposterous body to the very tops of the steepest mountains ...”

  At first the villagers kept their distance, cowed by the beast’s great size, but as George continued his salesman’s pitch a confidence blossomed amongst them and, one by one, they began to approach. As George built to a crescendo scores of people crowded round, surrounding them and closing in, and in spite of its size the Yeti shrank from them. As they pressed in it looked up at George on his crate with such an expression of fear and desperation that when George noticed it his easy patter faltered and he was momentarily lost for words.

  “Come and see him tonight,” he shouted, one last desperate address, then he hopped down off the crate and shoved his way through the crowd with the Yeti following behind, like a tugboat hauling a battleship into
port. It followed easily, seemed keen to return, to get away, and when they arrived back at the big top the Yeti clambered eagerly back into its cage.

  “How was it?” asked Joshua Cotton.

  “People stared.”

  “I’m not bloody surprised.”

  “I think he enjoyed it,” George said.

  “I thought this was about giving him some exercise, not taking him off out on jollies. What next, the pub?”

  “It is about exercise. Of course it is. He needs to move around, to stretch his legs. He’s a wild animal.”

  Wild animal; the words seemed flimsy as he spoke them. He knew by now that the creature’s eyes were not the eyes of an animal. But for how long had he been referring to it as ‘he?'"

  “Just be careful.”

  “Never mind that, get hold of some more chairs,” said George, “Tonight’s going to be a sell-out.”

  * * *

  At every new venue George Penny took the Yeti out for a walk, led it through the streets at the head of a swathe of onlookers ravenous for a taste of the unknown, and the public responded accordingly. George soon found that the big top was barely able to contain the audiences that swarmed in from miles around. George’s elation poured out of him, he positively vibrated with it, but had he been of a more philosophical bent he might have reflected that everything is transient.

  It was a cool morning when everything changed, and skeins of grey cloud coursed across the sky like hungry wolves. The Yeti was outside its cage, tethered by its chain to a post that Isaiah Cobb had hammered into a grassy corner of the empty paddock where they’d strung up the big top. George was sitting on a chair nearby reading a book, in the fashion to which he had become accustomed, when he heard an unusual voice.