by Ed Kurtz
“So savage it cannot even speak, ladies and gentleman,” Barker Davis hollered. “His mother mauled by a pack of hounds when she was pregnant, and when time came to deliver the child into the world—this abomination was the horrifying result.”
A different lie than the first, Jojo realized. The story changed all the time. He thought he could remember one about a flying saucer depositing him in a cornfield, abandoning him there. A sad, motherless boy with a shame-inducing cutaneous disorder made for a terrible tale at a circus sideshow, even if it was the truth. The barker could always come up with a better one.
And this one had his audience by their throats. Davis thrilled them with one fabrication after another, each one more improbable than the last, while his sneering abettors jabbed at Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy with their poles and spit in his dark, matted hair.
Then Barker Davis swept his arm over the crowd in a wide arc and they were gone. His stooges remained, but he called them off, shouting, “Enough!”
Gradually the walls came back, and then the rest of the office with them. Even so, Jojo could still smell the rich odours of the travelling sideshow, the menagerie of human oddities to which he belonged. A fraction of it was real: he had soiled himself.
“I’m a showman,” Davis said as he had before, this time with evident derision. “I can’t help myself.”
Jojo croaked, afraid to hear himself bark again. But his voice came back to him.
“Wha—what did you do to me?”
“It’s your nightmare, Mr. House Dick,” the showman answered. “You tell me.”
“Poison,” Jojo weakly posited.
“No, Mr. Walker. Magic.”
“Magic . . .”
“The best and strongest. Why, if you think that was good, you should see what they’re seeing in there.” He pointed at the door, but Jojo knew he meant the auditorium. The special midnight show.
“Theodora,” he rasped. “Georgia.”
“So many nice ladyfriends for the Wild Man of Kostroma. I would never have guessed.”
“Mr. Davis,” the man in the tweed jacket interrupted. “The show—it’s nearly over.”
“You’re quite right, Abner. And tomorrow is Friday, after all. Best night at the pictures, Friday—but I suppose you already knew that, Jojo Walker.”
“You . . .” he wheezed, short of breath. “Leave them alone.”
“Good night, Jojo Walker,” Davis said, strolling past the prone form on the floor as though he was no more than a kink in the carpet. “We show business people work late, and there’s much to do.”
He handed his cane to Abner and reached for the door.
“You know, perhaps I might leave you with some Fletcher, as you so seem to enjoy him—
“With as little feeling as I turn off a slave that is unfit to do me service, or a horse . . . or dog . . . that have out-lived their use, I shake thee off, to make thy peace with Heaven.
“Take him home, Ab.”
The man called Abner in the checked tweed jacket removed a black leather sap from his coat pocket and lunged for Jojo. There was a burst of lightning and his head exploded.
After that, nothing.
Theodora crossed her legs and looked occasionally at the blonde woman Jojo couldn’t keep his eyes off of. She didn’t recognize her, but this was hardly surprising—though she had spent her entire life in Litchfield, her social experience had always been severely limited by the men who ruled over her life. First her father, and then his replacement in Russ. It was astonishing, now that she thought about it for the first time. It was such a small town, and yet she barely knew anyone in it. Even the people she did know she didn’t know.
Her breath hitched in her throat and she realized that she’d been glaring at the back of the woman’s head for quite a while. Quickly she averted her eyes, repositioning them on the big, empty screen ahead of her. The picture was about to begin, and she needed everything in her power to focus on that rather than the consuming sense of loneliness that washed over her.
A tear spilled out of her right eye and she moved swiftly to wipe it away. She didn’t need to. The lights were dimming down.
The Midnight Show
Chapter Eleven
Georgia May Bagby went rigid in her seat and shrieked.
It commenced with a soft sepia image of a tall, slender man in top hat and tails, his beard waxed to an impish point and his long fingers dancing menacingly over a table in the middle of a stage. From this the picture cut to a flickering title card that introduced him:
“black” harry ashford
magician—illusionist—entertainer
master of mystery
Back on the stage, Ashford gazed intently at the table as a thin mist formed at its centre and rolled out in all directions. There was no sound and no music, only the hypnotic clicking of the projector above. From amidst the thickening vapour a reptilian column rose up and struck out—a viper. In a single deft motion, Ashford snatched the snake in one hand, just below the head, and began to stuff the entire length of the hissing creature into his fist with his other hand. In a matter of seconds, the viper was completely subsumed by the magician’s hand, and when he uncurled his fist and spread out his fingers, the beast was gone. A sly, lupine grin spread across Ashford’s gaunt, pallid face and the picture snapped to another title card.
ashford learnt his unfathomable dark arts
from an indian fakir—
qalander al’hazrad!
Now, stock footage, or so it seemed. Somewhere in the East—India, Georgia assumed—on a crowded market street hedged in on both sides by leaning shanties. In the middle of the street the multitude gave a wide berth to the half-naked man sitting cross-legged on a bed of nails. The man’s head lolled from side to side, his simple white turban undisturbed by the motion. Apart from the turban, he wore nothing but a tattered loincloth; the remainder of his dusty, wrinkled flesh was exposed, and much of it pressed down against the sharp points of the nails beneath him.
qalander al’hazrad—
feared and respected by his own people—
privy to secrets no man should know!
Upon cutting back to the fakir, the screen was suddenly taken up by the startling image of the man convulsing on the nails, his limbs flailing against the sharp, ripping points. The crowd backed away even as the camera closed in on the spasming man. The nails shredded his skin wherever they touched it, and though none of them came near his chest, the flesh there seared and came apart in a confluence of deep, bleeding lines. The lines, drawn by some invisible blade, formed a puzzling symbol when completed:
That was when Georgia screamed, though she did not fully understand why. Naturally, the gruesome spectacle of the fakir in his aggrieved state was enough to unsettle any observer, but for some reason it was the symbol itself that struck her as particularly horrifying. She knew she had never seen it before. She had no idea what it signified. But for every second the sigil remained on screen, Georgia’s scream became louder and her fear more pronounced.
Chapter Twelve
But of course there was no sigil, no fakir, no market street somewhere in India. There was only Black Harry Ashford, alone in the mist, his sunken eyes almost transcending the divide between cinema and audience member in a very real way that made Theodora shift uncomfortably in her seat. She presumed that anyone, from any seat in the house, could have gotten the impression that magician was staring directly at them, not unlike some of those eerie portraitures old people sometimes hung in their stairwells. Yet somehow Theodora figured anyone would be wrong, that though it might have seemed as though Ashford’s eyes were trained on them, it was her he was truly staring down. And though the idea was as terrifying as it was fantastic, she could not look away—
—not even when Jojo Walker’s blonde friend let loose a shriek that would normally have made Theodora leap out of her skin.
>
“Shhh,” said the magician, his voice echoing from the speakers positioned all around the auditorium. “Pay her no mind, Theodora. She does not like what she sees. Do you like what you see?”
A small, girlish smile turned up the corners of her mouth as her eyes widened to saucers and spilled over with warm, happy tears. For she most assuredly did like what she saw.
For here was daddy on a cool autumn morning, the square necktie he only wore on weekends dangling over his trim torso in the years before alcoholism and self-neglect caused him to balloon like a human zeppelin. He crouched to hold hands with a beaming child on a glossy gymnasium floor, a small girl in a white dress whose face belied the greatest happiness a child can know. That’s me, Theodora thought. Look how happy I am. I’m so happy.
A knowing smile sliced across daddy’s square, crew-cut head as he looked down at his darling daughter, showing her off to all the men in basketball jerseys who called him Coach and respected him like soldiers respected a four-star general. Then one of them, a hatchet-faced young man who held the ball between two gigantic hands, suggested they all call her Lil’ Coach from then on, and they did. When Coach ain’t around, maybe you can fill in for him. I bet we’d be some team under you, Lil’ Coach.
Daddy laughs (though it is a laugh without sound), lets go of the small girl’s hand so he can hold his stomach and rock his shoulders. Everyone is happy. The little girl is the centre of the world at that moment. No one even notices the tired-looking woman in the stands, her head canted to one side and the needlework on lap untouched.
A title card burst onto the screen, washing the moment away.
1912!
before the world knows global warfare!
simpler times! happier times!
A close-up on a slightly older girl’s drawn face, her mouth quivering and eyes dead. Some years later, she realized.
but you knew better—
—didn’t you, theodora?
“Yes,” she agreed aloud.
She knew much better, and the next scene—so nightmarishly familiar—did nothing more than prove her awful knowledge of that fact. The tired woman with her left eye swollen almost completely shut. The cowering fear, the misery hanging thick in the house like a fog. Midnight visits, daddy’s breath hot and pregnant with drink and desire. Then:
saint louis!
bustling city of miracles and sights un-dreamed of!
Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages, a multitude of people numbering a hundred Litchfields, a thousand. She knew it well in memory and in too many dreams, this intimidating, threatening, wildly inviting metropolis to which she was spirited away, all those years ago. It was in St. Louis that she convalesced in that dirty little home for unwed mothers on the east side of town, it was here that they took her unholy progeny from her womb and spirited it away so fast she’d never even known its sex. The riverfront, the warehouses, the seedy wharf culture to which she ran with hopes and terror of never being herself again.
“Oh, but daddy found you, did he not, little Theodora?” said the devilish magician, Black Harry Ashford. “Look.”
In one hand Ashford held a fan of cards, stark black on both sides. With the other he pointed a long-nailed index finger at the screen descending behind him at the back of the stage. A flicker of light and the film began: the film-within-the film.
The young woman, her face a ghostly parody of pancake make-up and dark, black eyes, made a wide O of her mouth and pressed the back of her hand to her brow—the over-emotive performance of a Louise Brooks or a Theda Bara, though it was herself performing for the sorcerer’s audience. It was Theodora On The Wharf.
Her fright came at the slavering, hunched form of daddy, his hands stretched out like vulture’s claws, come to make a dishonest, ruined woman of her. Though of course it was much too late for that. She had only one option left to her now, with daddy on one side of her and the roiling Mississippi on the other. A tad dramatic, perhaps—but upon directing her enormous black eyes at the dark water she could have sworn the river opened up as though it had a mouth, inviting—no, demanding—that she come inside.
Come to daddy.
Swim into the pitch.
And though so clear a memory should not have surprised her, Theodora started in her seat when the tragic heroine on the screen in the screen made for the edge of the wharf and launched her frail body toward the yawning mouth of the river.
And, if only she hadn’t been wearing so loose and flouncy a dress as was given to her at that filthy home, the huge wharf rat would never have been able to reach out with his great, apelike arm and snatch her back to safety.
Safety. She snorted.
Saved from the belly of the whale to be returned to the dragon’s lair. Probably, Theodora thought, Louise Brooks or Theda Bara would have been rescued before it was too late. But it was too late for this suffering heroine before the picture ever started. The screen went grey and the magician frowned, clown-like. He removed his hat and pressed a hand to his chest, mournful and full of mock grief. When, a second later, a fluffy white rabbit poked its head out from inside the hat, Ashford could not contain his mirth. From sad clown to happy, he shook with laughter and dumped the rabbit into a small cage on the stage floor. A feminine arm crooked in from off-screen, passing a white tablecloth to him. This he accepted without acknowledging the assistant, and he spread it out with a showman’s aplomb before draping it over the cage.
With a theatrical wave of a black wand, the magician worked his magic. He paused, pondering what he might have done, and then tossed the wand to the back of the stage and whisked the cloth away from the cage.
There was no more rabbit, naturally. In its place, a small, terrified boy—naked apart from the thick brown hair that covered every inch of his shivering, waifish body. The hair beneath his eyes was matted and wet with tears. Ashford spread his hands out and bowed to the audience, his face a ghoulish mask of wicked delight. The wolf-boy shrank into a corner of the cage and hugged his furry knees. Theodora’s heart ached for him.
Ashford’s mouth moved, his lips stretching comically to over-pronounce silent words. The next title card translated:
this abomination cannot help you
The magician smirked knowingly in the next scene, stepping back from a frame filled with his leering face to reveal the bright, dusty view of the circus unfolding behind him. Jerkily, the camera moved in a shaky arc to take in the carnies setting up the tents, the menagerie of exotic animals being led into the Big Top, the ashen-faced clowns practicing their juggling routines. And then: daddy, his countenance slack and without expression, holding a large placard upon which the traveling camera stopped to focus.
barker davis presents:
the devil’s business
A grotesque caricature of a simpering demon appeared in a bottom corner of the placard, approving of the title while keeping its dismal, soulless eyes directed forward, into the camera lens and through it, at Theodora.
Daddy turned the placard around, where a different demon leered and grinned at the list of players—
lil’ coach—ol’ anne the negro nanny
& jo-jo the hideous wolf boy of kostroma
Daddy let the placard droop in one hand and walked backwards until he vanished into the Big Top. A small crowd was forming: men in straw hats and women in thick, hot dresses and a mass of children leaping at their heels. Amidst the mob came a man in both “drag” and blackface; a great, fat man with floppy breasts sewn into his dress and his face done up with burnt cork after the manner of a minstrel singer. This ridiculous pickaninny Theodora understood to be “ol’ Anne, the Negro nanny.” Gripping Anne’s hand was a small, wild-eyed girl with brown curls and a smear of caramelized sugar across one cheek, the remains of some infrequent confection.
She was Lil’ Coach, Theodora herself.
Anne dragged the girl through the crowd, parting the milling peo
ple like a bulldozer and stopping when they came to a smaller tent on the outer fringe of the circus proper. An ornate, hand-painted sign hung from wire above the half-open tent flaps: human oddities.
The drag Anne made a broad circle of her mouth, framed in white greasepaint, and wagged a finger at the child.
“laws, no! dat dere ain’t no place for a chile!”
(Theodora shifted in her seat, frowning. She had no recollection of her childhood nanny speaking or behaving in the exaggerated manner of the performer playing her part on screen.)
The child pouted and kicked up a tiny cloud of dust. Anne scowled at the kid and planted her huge hands on her broad hips. From the tent came a dwarf in a jester’s costume, smoking a cigarette and regarding Anne and Lil’ Coach warily. The dwarf was followed by a squat man with a pockmarked face that was stretched to form a rictus grin. He wore a striped band skimmer on his round head and tucked his thumbs into his suspenders while he bent back, bouncing on his heels as he spoke to the nanny and little girl.
“madam—this show is for all ages,
races, creeds and people of any faith.
come inside and see what wonders lie within!”
The nanny shook her head zealously, her great, cork-blacked jowls shaking like a bloodhound’s. As she did so, the child tugged at her nanny’s skirts and pleaded with huge, glossy eyes. For his part, the barker grasped his sides and quaked with laughter. Neither the nanny nor the child could determine the source of his merriment—and for that matter, Theodora couldn’t, either.
There came more jabbering from the barker and more head shaking from Anne to match, none of which was translated to title cards, but whatever spiel the experienced barker gave was successful in the end—the nanny relented and followed the man into the tent.
