by Ed Kurtz
He shook his head and staggered back, away from the crowd and toward the open barn doors. He wanted fresh air, but he was frozen mid-step by the approach of the obsidian devil. It was prancing toward him on goat’s feet, its awful mouth hanging open and slavering freely. As it came, the creature dug its pointed claws into the flesh of its own chest and raked its trunk open. Coal-black skin fell back in two great flaps that seemed to unravel the demon—in moments something else emerged from its skin and sinew, taking up the stride without missing a step.
“Hi, Jojo,” Beth said.
She barely afforded him a glance as she floated by, her white dress sparkling like diamonds in the lantern light. She had never looked better, not even on the day of their wedding. Not their first date. Not even the very first time Jojo ever laid eyes on the freckle-faced brunette with eyes like chocolate drops and a smile that never stopped melting his heart until she stopped smiling altogether.
Beth was radiant. She was alive.
Nancy’s grimace deepened at the sight of her. Beth swept past the barn doors, paused, and turned at the waist to look back at her husband.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
Jojo curled his hands into fists and barked, “No.”
Beth’s face fell. “Oh, Jojo,” she said sorrowfully as she produced a small revolver from thin air.
Jojo whispered, “Beth.” Then she raised the gun to her temple and fired a round into her brain—a scene he’d played out in his head a million times since it happened, and here it was happening again.
Beth slumped, collapsed to the ground. No one seemed to notice. Jojo whimpered and felt his eyes burn. He wiped them dry with his hairy knuckles and stepped over his wife’s corpse, back to the middle of the makeshift dance floor. He scanned the sour faces, the slowly and clumsily moving dancers, and his eyes lit upon a pitchfork propped up against the same stack of hay bales he’d laid Theodora upon when she twisted her ankle. He retrieved it and lifted it up, snatching one of the lanterns with the tines. Jojo then took the lantern and dropped the pitchfork, and he made momentary eye contact with a pair of men who were framed in a sort of milky haze at the back of the barn. Black Harry Ashford and Barker Davis.
Jojo grinned.
“Go to hell,” he snarled.
“We never left,” the men said in unison.
“And neither have you,” Ashford added in a low, raspy voice that sounded right next to Jojo’s ear.
Jojo’s grin melted away and he hurled the lantern at them. Ashford and Davis vanished before the lantern struck the wall and exploded in a ball of fire that rained down on the hay scattered across the floor. Someone screamed and the barn doors flew shut as the flames rapidly spread, igniting every strand of hay and climbing the walls. It climbed the dancers, too—great orange and yellow bursts flared as dresses and slacks and jackets and cummerbunds went up and burned brightly, sending the two dozen phantom revellers into a shrieking panic, banging on the barn doors and knocking one another down as they burned and screamed and died.
Jojo sat down on an upended copper tub and watched the people burn. Nancy was the first to turn into a column of black and grey ash that flew apart in the air. Others followed suit: the bearded woman and Phyllis Gates and Hal White the Human Skeleton. The inferno rose and in no time at all there was no one left in the barn but Jojo; all the rest were reduced to ashes. Not even the bones were left.
The heat stung his face and the smoke stopped up his lungs, and Jojo felt himself closing off, shutting down, even as he wondered if any of this was at all real. If anything was.
And when the flames at last overtook him, Jojo remembered that he had no cigarettes left, and he chuckled, thinking about when he had them but nothing to light them with.
“What a world,” Jojo bellowed at the blaze that ate away at his suit and hair and skin. “What a goddamn circus!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The forest went on forever, or at least that was the way it certainly seemed to Theodora Cavanaugh. She figured she’d be lost if she had much of destination in mind, but she hadn’t. She had been walking for hours, well into the purple haze of dawn and past it, into the early morning sunrise that shot spears of white light through the dense, green treetops. Her shoes were abandoned ages ago, so now she walked barefoot through the twigs and dead leaves and cool, fine dirt of the forest’s floor. There were no squirrels scampering among the branches, no birds singing from high nests or in the open sky above. Theodora was completely, utterly alone. It was strange, though not a tenth as strange as everything else she’d seen and done in the last day or so. And she was cautiously prepared for more strangeness, yet.
She had just stepped off the church porch when the woods closed in on her the night before. One second she was standing beside Jojo and the next she was alone in the wilderness. For the first stretch she’d tried to get back out again, back to Jojo. Now she figured it didn’t much matter which way she went, so long as she kept going. If she stopped, she was afraid she would never get moving again. She’d just take root in the ground and become part of the lifeless scenery. So on Theodora walked.
In the mid-afternoon, the sun grew bright and she came upon a large clearing. A few dozen people milled silently around, dismantling tents and lifting big black trunks into carriages. A dwarf and an obese woman shared a cigarette and a flask beside one of the carriages, and there was a monkey leaping around, though it went largely ignored. Theodora stopped just shy of the clearing, hidden by the trees that ringed it, and watched as a tall, bearded figure emerged from the last standing tent, a leather-bound book held tight to his chest, and vanished into the woods on the other side. Like the monkey, he too went ignored by the toiling carnival folk.
The notion to join them startled Theodora, who gripped the rough bark of tree she hid behind and imagined running away with the circus—at her age! Maybe, she thought, they could leave. Maybe there were other towns, other Litchfields, other little hells in the middle of nowhere to which she could go and live and fear and weep and love and die. . . .
From amidst the throng of sweating carnies a small, dark form burst forth—a little boy, five or six years old, pumping his little arms and legs as hard as he could in his flight for the tree line. He was covered in hair from head to toe; apart from that, he was naked. Theodora gasped, dug her nails into the bark. The boy came hurtling toward her, his feet barely touching the ground, his hairy little arms pinwheeling crazily.
The boy wept plaintively as he ran, the hair on his face hanging heavy and damp.
Theodora braced herself for the inevitable, for the men who would come after him, yelling and swearing and all but foaming at the mouth to get their wicked hands on him. . . .
But no one came. The boy made it to the trees and bounded into the shaded forest, his every step crisp and crackly as he bounced over the dead brown leaves. Theodora waited, holding her breath and quietly crying. Then at last she gave chase.
She found him shivering under a blanket of damp, mouldy leaves, hugging himself for warmth and kicking one leg. He was asleep, but still running. Her heart ached for him, but she came on slowly, cautiously. She did not want to frighten him off.
Upon touching the boy on the shoulder, he started. His eyes popped open and he yelped, scrabbling up and out of the leaves in which he’d buried himself. Theodora reached for him, said, “No, it’s all right, it’s all right.”
The boy rose to his feet, his canny eyes jetting between Theodora and the endless expanse of forest behind her. She held out her hand and smiled slightly.
“It’s all right, Jojo. I’m your friend. Really I am.”
Jojo opened his mouth as if to speak, but he said nothing. His teeth were brown. His eyes spilled fresh tears.
Theodora waggled her fingers at him.
Jojo took her hand.
They slept a short while after nightfall, Theodora leaned up
against a thick oak and Jojo nestling his head in her lap. She awoke with a snap from a vivid dream, though the details washed away in an instant. The boy was looking up at her from her lap, his eyes glinting in the moonlight.
She stretched her arms and yawned, then told Jojo to wait for her while she found a private spot to relieve herself. He looked positively terrified when she returned, as if he thought she’d abandoned him.
She swept him into a tight hug and held him that way for several minutes.
Then they walked on.
The chasm appeared in the weak, misty light at dawn. It was a good thing they hadn’t found it earlier—they might have gone right over the edge in the pitch of night.
They stood together at the edge after emerging from the trees; what remained was a ledge no more than six feet from a sheer drop to nothing at all. The boy reached for her hand, and she squeezed it in hers. They took it all in, the vast open whiteness before them, and neither of them made a single sound.
The ledge extended as far as she could see in either direction. Below, the precipitous drop fell a mile before becoming obscured in a bluish white mist. The mist stretched out beyond the chasm indefinitely.
Theodora and Jojo had reached the end of the world.
In an instant she understood everything. There was Litchfield, then the drop. Then: nothing at all. She had never been to St. Louis, and Jojo never bet on any horses at Hot Springs or anywhere else. There was only Litchfield. It wasn’t just that the magician wouldn’t let them leave—they couldn’t. There was nowhere they could possibly go.
Theodora had to laugh, and she did. For a long time. Jojo just sat down on the edge and dangled his hairy legs above the infinite void. After a while, he scooted away from it, stood up, and pointed at his stomach.
“Hungry?” she asked him, her voice raspy from the laughing. “Me too.”
Once again she took his hand. Once again they set off into the forest.
Sitting on a felled tree beside a bright green bush, they dined on handfuls of the red berries that grew there. Theodora’s lips were stained with the juices. Jojo’s fur was matted and sticky.
When he finished eating, he spoke to her for the first time.
“What am I?”
“A boy,” she answered quickly. “You’re just a boy.”
“Mr. Ashford said—”
“Forget what Ashford said,” she snapped. “You must forget about him.”
They rested, silently, and resumed their journey in the cool gloom of the evening. Theodora spent this time turning philosophical questions over in her head—does St. Louis even exist, or is there any place else at all?—but she did not give them voice. Vaguely, she knew the answers already. In a strange sort of way, she supposed she always had. She kept expecting the boy to ask her what was beyond the chasm, but she guessed he knew, too. There was nothing more. Because Ashford hadn’t made anything more.
The light that glowed in the middle distance was all that kept her going; it was very late and she wanted nothing more than to sit down and sleep and maybe never wake up again. Besides, she’d been carrying the boy for the last hour, and she was nearly certain he weighed more by the minute—he was growing, she was sure of it, and at a very rapid pace.
Since she did not know what caused the light, Theodora gently laid the boy on a soft bed of moss, out of the moon’s silvery reach, and tiptoed on ahead alone. As she drew near and the trees seemed to part for her, she sucked in a sharp breath. For there in the middle of the wilderness was a massive, shimmering movie screen.
Seated in a small, circular auditorium of chairs made from living roots was an audience of twenty or so people, their eyes collectively glued to the screen. Theodora could hardly look away herself—she was curious and afraid, and more than a little interested in the pulsing, full colour title card up there that read:
the story of litchfield
But then, the film burned up in a bubbling, black and orange mess. The screen went stark white and the audience groaned.
For her part, Theodora ducked behind a tree as she had at the devolving carnival sideshow and watched in silence. In twos and threes the audience rose, muttering and grousing, and wandered in every direction, vanishing into the inky shadows of the forest. The screen went dark. And someone touched Theodora on the shoulder, eliciting a sharp shriek.
She spun around the tree as if it was May Day and backed quickly away from Barker Davis, who stood with one arm behind his back and grinning ear to ear. He was back in old form—pressed blue suit, flouncy bowtie, his shellacked hair combed down on either side from the part in the middle. He raised the hand with which he’d touched Theodora’s shoulder and gave a playful salute.
“No show tonight,” he said softly. “It isn’t finished yet, you see.”
Theodora sneered.
“What more do you want? What more is there for you to do to us?”
Davis’ grin retracted and he regarded his hand for a brief moment before twisting it quickly at the wrist and producing a long-stemmed rose from thin air. He chuckled lightly, poked the stem between his lips, and with another flourish of his hand it became a cigar.
“And for my last trick,” he said in a sing-song way, and from the palm of his hand grew a long, thin flame from which he lit the cigar. He puffed away at it for a few seconds, the smoke trailing out of his mouth and nostrils, and then heaved a deep sigh.
“Some years ago,” he said, his eyes on the burning ember at the tip of his smoke, “I saw a picture called Battle of the Sexes. Now this was a silent picture, must have been around, oh, 1914 or so. Not terribly memorable, apart from the fact that Griffith—he was the director, you understand—made the same picture again years later, around ’28. Now why do you suppose Mr. Griffith did that?”
Theodora remained silent, watching the magician with weary eyes.
“We-ell,” he drawled, taking another long puff from the cigar, “for one thing, this new version had sound—Movietone sound-on-film, they called it. Quite an innovation, it was. Had a little song in it and everything. ‘Just a Sweetheart.’ I still remember the words.
“I loved the pictures back then. Still do. A whole different sort of magic there. Illusion and trickery the likes of which crummy sideshows never reached. Never, Theodora. Not even . . . well, I digress.
“Things change, my dear. We learn from our imperfections, our mistakes. And, if we’ve got the mettle, we can always try again, can’t we? Say, I think I’ve got an awful lot of mettle, don’t you?”
His grin widened again, smoke seeping out of it. Theodora took another few steps back.
“I liked that second version much better, myself. An improvement on every count. And I think I shall like the second Litchfield much, much better, too.”
“There’s nothing left,” she stammered, ashamed of the hitch in her voice. “No one.”
“That’s not true. I have you, Miss Cavanaugh. And the dog boy, of course.”
With that, Davis turned on his heel and called into the darkness: “Come on, little one. Come into the light. I won’t hurt you.”
“Stay where you are, Jojo!” Theodora shouted. “He’s a monster!”
Davis laughed. “I’m the monster? Have you seen the little beast? Sakes alive. . . .”
“He’s just a boy!”
“And I’m just an entertainer, my dear.”
Momentarily the boy emerged from the shadows, rubbing his tired eyes with his fists. He looked from one adult to the other, his face slack and expression puzzled.
“Hello there, Jojo,” Davis cooed, bending over. “How would you like a proper place to live? A real house with a real bed in it?”
Theodora said: “We burned them all.”
“No, not all. And you will rebuild. If people do anything at all, they destroy and rebuild. Destroy and rebuild. A new life, a new chance. A new Litc
hfield.”
“A new lie,” she put in.
Barker Davis whipped around and hissed at her, his eyes yellow and bright.
“It’s all you’ve got!” he screeched.
Theodora jumped backwards and collided with a tree. She stumbled and fell over, then quickly scrambled away from Davis. But before he could return his attention to the boy, Jojo leapt into the air and fixed himself to Davis’ back, scraping claws at the man’s face and sinking his half-rotted teeth into the flesh of the neck. Davis screamed and slapped at the hairy child, but Jojo held on, scratching and biting, biting and scratching.
“Jojo!” Theodora yelled. “Jojo, no!”
“I won’t let you,” the boy bellowed, his voice breaking. Deepening. “You took everything from me. Everything.”
Before her petrified eyes Jojo was growing into a man, even as he dug in with nails and teeth and shredded Barker Davis’ face and throat. Blood flowed freely from his cheeks and open neck. It was jet black.
Before long, Jojo’s feet touched the ground; he was as tall as Davis now, if not an inch taller. He seized Davis by the shoulders and spun him round. Smoke roiled up from the leaves at their feet—the cigar had dropped into the detritus and ignited it. Neither man noticed, for one was in a savage frenzy and the other was in the process of being torn apart. Theodora cried as she watched.
“Beth!” Jojo screamed. “Sarah! My job! My friends! My whole goddamn life! You took it all!”
Davis opened his mouth to answer, but only wet, black bubbles passed his lips. Jojo howled madly, a wolf’s howl, and brought his foaming jaws down upon the middle of Davis’ face. He clamped down, growling as he wrenched his head from side to side, and tore away the man’s nose and upper lip. Theodora yelped with fright.
Jojo chewed the skin and cartilage before spitting the whole gummy mess right back in Davis’ annihilated face.
