by Ed Kurtz
A pair of clowns with faces like cadavers cavorted in the dew-wet grass between Jojo and the wagon, leaping like apes and swinging their arms in practiced defensive motions. Tuck Arnold slapped his own face and screamed at Jojo as he stomped the earth like he wanted to shake it apart.
In one hand he gripped a huge wrench, dripping with blood.
“You can’t have her, you rotten son of a bitch,” Tuck yelled. “I killed my wife for her! What did you ever do?”
“I guess I killed mine, too,” Jojo answered simply. Tuck looked momentarily stunned. “Get out of my way, Tuck.”
As if under a spell—which Jojo assumed he probably was—the hardware man stepped back and away. The others followed suit, all but the two remaining clowns, who danced and jumped in the stark morning light, oblivious to everything around them. As Jojo passed them on his way to the wagon, he decided that they weren’t wearing any make-up—their faces really were that white, their eyes the colour of pus. Abruptly one of them winked at him.
“Enjoy the show,” he said in a child’s voice.
Jojo gripped the splintery edge of the interlocking panel and gave it a hard yank, sliding it open. A blast of frigid air rushed out, stinging his, Charles’s, and Theodora’s faces. With it came the distinct odour of dirty animals, burnt popcorn, and shit. The interior of the wagon was completely dark and the jangly music echoed deep inside of it, deeper than the exterior of the wagon logically permitted. In the middle distance, beams of sunlight were sliced in half by the razor sharp spires of the black church at the forest’s edge.
Jojo said, “Neither of you needs to come. Ya’ll can go on back now.”
“Lead the way, boss,” Charles said.
Theodora patted Jojo gently on the back. He breathed in the cold, foul-smelling air and stepped up and into the waiting blackness.
The panel slammed shut behind them and Theodora yelped. She felt a hand at her elbow and jumped away from it, knocking against a wall and tumbling down to the floor. Someone said, “What is it?” She thought it was Charles but she wasn’t sure. The question bounced around a broad, enclosed space.
“What is it?” the voice repeated. It was Charles, after all.
“I—I fell down. Where are we? Is this the inside of the wagon?”
“Can’t be,” Jojo said from a few feet away. His feet scuffled the floor a bit and then a clunk. Theodora listened, holding her breath. “A row of seats,” he called out. “Jesus, we’re in the theatre.”
A rapid clicking sounded above, drawing all eyes to the burst of light from the tiny square in the wall there. The screen at the far end of the auditorium filled with white light and the speakers crackled all around them.
Charles said, “Look.”
On screen was a familiar room: it could have been any of the rooms in the Litchfield Valley Hotel. Small and dim, though the picture was in full colour, though every colour was brown and muted. A man and woman sat on the edge of the bed—he with his shirt off and her in her brassiere and nothing else.
“What’s this, a stag film?” Theodora asked.
Jojo turned to glance at her. “How would you know what a stag film is?”
“Heard it someplace,” she answered without answering.
He returned his attention to the screen, to the man he’d only seen alive once and the pink-faced little blonde who would probably be afraid for the rest of her life. He knew what was coming next, so he said, “Don’t watch.”
It was too late. The man arched his back and cords popped thick and dark on his neck and forehead. He screamed the scream of the dying and twisted up and off the bed, red seams forming at his shoulders and around his throat. The seams widened and dark blood sprayed from the broadening gaps as the skin pulled apart. In a matter of seconds that seemed like long, torturous minutes, Peter Chappell was dismembered and beheaded in a fountain of blood that coated the floor and the walls and the poor, shrieking girl.
Theodora screamed, too.
Charles muttered, “Sweet Jesus. Sweet, sweet Jesus.”
“I told ya’ll not to watch, for Chrissakes,” Jojo grumbled, fighting against his own trembling muscles.
The view of the room fell away as the picture shifted, through the door and down the hallway, at the end of which was an open door. The room beyond the door was identical in every respect to the blood-soaked one before, except for everything being in reverse. Sitting with her long, stockinged legs crossed in a chair by the window, the nurse adeptly threaded a needle in and out along the seam of a little cloth doll. Her bright red lips were moving rapidly, her voice a low drone. What she said could not be heard above the whimpering coming from the bed. There, a girl thrashed like a freshly-hooked fish, her arms and legs bound with torn up bedsheets. She was nude, her skin nearly as white as the clowns’. When the girl jerked her head to reveal her face, Theodora cried, “Margie!”
The nurse continued her inaudible muttering as she completed her stitching. She tied off the thread at the crook of the doll’s neck and bit off the excess with her teeth. Pleased with her handiwork, the nurse smiled, showing lipsticked teeth. She then drove the point of the needle into the doll’s left thigh and Margie screamed with agony. Thrashing more wildly now, a dark indent formed in the girl’s thigh to correspond with that of the doll’s. The skin snapped and blood boiled out. The nurse stood, leaving the needle stuck in the doll, and walked on her toes to the side of the bed.
“Poor baby,” she taunted. “Does it hurt?”
“Please,” Margie’s agonized voice echoed from every speaker in the theatre. “Please stop.”
The nurse puckered her full lips and shook her head, playing the part of the concerned medical assistant to the hilt. She gently set the doll down on the nightstand beside the bed and leaned over Margie, taking the girl’s chin in her hand and bending over until their faces were only inches apart.
“Please,” Margie moaned.
The nurse flicked out her tongue and ran it up the length of Margie’s face, lapping up the girl’s tears. Margie squeezed her eyes shut and tried to turn her head away from the nurse, but the woman held on tight, even as she moved her face down the length of the girl’s body.
“Oh, God,” Theodora groaned, looking away.
As the nurse fell upon the leaking wound in Margie’s thigh she grunted with pleasure, sucking at the thick pulses of blood.
“Is it real?” Theodora asked, her face buried in her hands. “Is she there? Is she really there?”
“That’s crazy,” Charles said. “She was just way out at the church.”
“So were we,” Jojo reminded him.
“What about the sheriff, then?”
“I don’t know, but we’d best get to the hotel.”
“Isn’t that just what she wants?” Theodora asked. “That, that awful woman?”
“Probably, yes. But I’m going.”
Jojo stormed the auditorium doors and smashed against them. He might as well have thrown himself at a wall for all the good it did—they were locked up tight.
“Damnit!” he growled.
“They just want to torture us,” Theodora said. “They want us to watch that girl die.”
Jojo pounded on the doors and shouldered them with all his weight. They did not budge.
Charles wandered away from them, watching the screen as the camera backed out of the room and zipped down the hall, backwards down the stairs and into the lobby where it stopped. A man in a crumpled grey hat sauntered up to the cigarette machine and pushed a coin into the slot. Charles’ bellhop cap remained where he’d left it on the floor. It looked for all intents and purposes like the most regular night in the world at the Litchfield Valley.
“Couldn’t be,” Charles whispered, scratching his chin.
“Maybe if we both hit them at the same time,” Theodora suggested behind him.
Charles flipped around and hollered, “Hey, forget that. I know the way out.”
“What?” Theodora said, puzzled.
“Where?” Jojo asked.
“Right there,” Charles said, pointing at the screen. “All I need’s a knife.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ernie Rich never saw them take her; he merely looked into the backseat of his automobile and Margie Shannon was gone. He would have naturally assumed that she’d run into the house—she lived there, after all—except for the high-pitched scream that echoed in the distance, as though a giant bird had plucked her up in its talons and taken her to the clouds.
The sun shone bright over the hills, but the air was colder than ever. The sheriff blew a puff of warm mist and rubbed his arms with his hands. The circus wagon rested quietly on the grass, still as a coffin. He’d watched as the three went into it, then nothing. The clowns vanished and the remaining people—Tuck Arnold, Betty Overturf, and Lana Ashe—simply wandered away, their heads bowed and eyed hooded. Rich called out to them, singling Tuck out particularly, ordering him to stop. He had questions, but all three of them behaved as if they hadn’t heard him. They staggered on, headed vaguely in the direction of town. Rich let them go.
Rubbing his temples with circular motions, Ernie Rich considered his options. He was the last of the law in Litchfield, which had gone from a force of two men to just him overnight. As far as he knew, his deputy remained where Rich cut him down, dead on the carpet. He thought about Jojo, about how much he trusted the man he was forced to shit-can a year earlier. He’d always liked Jojo, and never considered his former deputy’s dalliance with the coloured maid to be any of his business, but there were elections to think of. In a small town with only two cops, he couldn’t brook one of them being at the centre of such an outlandish scandal. It was a matter of the circumstances undoing them both, or just the one of them. Rich opted to save his own skin.
Now he felt like the entire world depended on Jojo Walker.
At the present, however, Sheriff Rich was on his own and damned curious about the freshly abandoned circus wagon into which Jojo and company went and from which no one had yet emerged. He drew his service revolver and steeled his nerves and walked determinedly over the cool, wet grass to the interlocking panels with their ornate, gilded patterns.
“Jojo? What’s going on in there?”
The jarring music was gone with the departure of the wagon’s attendants, so Rich pressed his ear to the panel in an effort to hear what was happening inside. He heard nothing, but smelled sweet wood smoke. Deciding that the wagon was aflame, he hurried away from it to a vantage point that revealed the wagon to be in fine condition. But the pastor’s house was engulfed.
“Sweet Jesus,” Rich mumbled.
Flames the colour of autumn leaves danced in the windows, which presently exploded from the intense heat. The kitchen and living room were wholly consumed by the fire, and the porch was going up fast. Rich stood stock still and watched dumbly, his revolver dangling at the end of his arm, completely powerless to act. There was no way he could enter the house without passing out from the smoke and perishing in flames. Whoever was in there was a goner, and he knew it.
As the fire roared to greater intensity, Rich scampered away from it. He scanned his immediate environs and discovered to his bewilderment that the wagon had vanished and the old clapboard church was back where it was supposed to be. If the magician’s influence had left this place, he realized, then the fire was quite real. And that meant that the Reverend Jim Shannon was probably dead.
He kicked up a clod of earth and cursed under his breath.
In lieu of a knife, which no one had, Theodora offered a nail file. Charles stabbed the screen with it, six inches above his head, and dragged the file down to the stage to create a jagged, six foot tear. Light spilled out of the crevice. Jojo said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Footsteps scuffed against tiles on the other side, their heels clacking loudly. Jojo grabbed one side of the gash in the screen and ripped it wide open to reveal the hotel lobby where an inebriated guest was staggering toward the staircase. He whistled and shook his head.
“If I don’t ever see another trick like this again that’ll be just fine by me,” he said.
Charles looked to Theodora and shrugged.
She said, “Don’t even think about saying ‘ladies first.’ It’s your damn hole—you go through it.”
Charles smiled and peered into the lobby. The drunk was gone, though he had begun to sing from somewhere on the second floor. Charles spotted his cap on the floor and snorted. He stepped through.
Theodora half expected something terrible to happen, for a bright light to flash and burn Charles up like a piece of tissue paper. Instead, he simply entered the lobby as though walking through any ordinary door. Jojo went next. The men stood side by side and looked back through the gash at her. She shrugged, let loose a small, nervous laugh. Then she too went impossibly from the Palace’s auditorium to the hotel lobby.
“Them trolleys in St. Louie got nothing on that,” Charles observed.
“Is this really the hotel, though?” Theodora wondered aloud. “I mean, how can we know for certain where we really are?”
“I don’t reckon we can,” Jojo said. “But that’s not going to stop me from doing what I can for that girl.”
“That woman . . .” Theodora said, glancing apprehensively at the stairs.
“I guess she’s Davis’s right-hand gal,” Jojo said. “I think just about everyone else in his gang were probably recruited the same way they got Jake.”
“Poor Jake,” Charles said, shaking his head.
“Regular folks, more or less, and Barker Davis has a purpose for them. That nurse is different, though. I don’t think he made her what she is. I think that’s all her—cold as a snake.”
“You can see it in my eyes,” a deep, feminine voice said.
The nurse walked seductively from the cashier’s cage, her round hips swaying like a pendulum. Her bare feet barely touched the tiles as she advanced, walking diagonally until Mr. Thomas was visible behind her. He was sprawled out on the floor, his face swollen and bluish. A massive black snake had its fangs deep in Thomas’s neck, its body undulating in perpetual waves down the dying man’s torso.
The nurse smiled, flicked her tongue and hissed. Jojo started; a sharp intake of breath.
“How did you forget so much, Jojo?” she seethed. She floated toward him, kicking at the floor with her toes like a dancer. “Was it so terrible, living with our little family?”
“Who is she?” Theodora whispered.
“I—I’m not sure . . .”
“Not sure, he says. The only mother he ever had and the kid says he’s not sure. Jojo, I’m offended.”
The woman pressed her breasts against Jojo’s chest and ran her narrow fingers through the hair on his face. She closed her fist around it and ripped out a handful. Jojo snarled in pain.
“Stop it!” Theodora shouted, throwing herself at the nurse.
Unfazed, the nurse swung her arm in a wide arc and knocked Theodora to the floor as though she was swatting a gnat. Charles stared, his eyes wobbling in his skull, and tightened his grip on the shotgun which he sharply raised to take aim at the nurse. She turned her head to regard him, her expression registering mild annoyance.
“Are you going to kill me, bellboy?” she fumed. “Blow my fucking head off? Perhaps you’d like to fuck my corpse afterward, yes? I’ll bet you’ve never had a white woman before, have you? And a dead one’s just as good as anything you’re likely to get—”
“Shut up!” Charles cried, shaken. “Shut up and get away from him!”
“You can do whatever you like when a girl’s dead,” she went on, her breasts rising and falling with her building excitement. “You stick it anyplace you choose—how can she object? Why, if you can
take my head clean off, you can even fuck my neck.”
“Shut up!” he screamed, tears roiling out of his glassy eyes. “Shut up, shut up!”
Her grin broadened, showing bright, flawless teeth. She stepped lightly toward him, arching her back to push her bosom forward. Charles jerked, keeping the gun trained on her. Slowly, she raised her hand and wrapped her fingers around the barrels, stroking them gently. She then guided them down until the shotgun was directed point blank at her crotch.
“Go ahead and shoot when you need to, honey. No sense in holding back on my account.”
Charles trembled. Theodora nodded rapidly, mouthing the word, Shoot.
When the nurse swept the shotgun out of his hands, she did so without much effort. He just let it go.
She said, “There’s a good boy.”
The faint, warbling strains of “Danny Boy” echoed down the stairwell from the drunk on the second floor.
“You want to see the girl,” the nurse said to him as she let the shotgun clatter against the floor. Theodora jumped, afraid it might go off.
“Yeah,” Jojo answered.
The nurse held out her hand. “Then let’s go see her.”
Jojo eyeballed the hand for a minute, amazed at its whiteness, its lack of lines. She wiggled it, urging him to take it. He did.
She led the way, dragging Jojo behind her as she floated to the stairs. Theodora started after them, but the nurse stopped her with a sharp gesture and an icy stare.
“Not you. Just him.”
“Jojo,” Theodora said.
“It’s okay. Wait here with Charles.”
“But she’s . . .” She trailed off, uncertain of which adjective to use. Crazy? Dangerous?
