by J. Bryan
“Like the boy I told you about.” She gave a glowing smile at the thought of Seth, which did not make Jenny very happy at all. “I can see him in my future. I knew I would meet him in Paris. This is why I came to school in France.”
“What...kinds of things do you see?”
“It is more of a sensation. An aching here...” Mariella touched her chest. “Almost like being lovesick. It is ridiculous, but...do you believe in reincarnation?”
Jenny, who could remember lifetime after lifetime stretching back tens of thousands of years, shrugged. “I suppose anything is possible.”
“What if he is my soulmate?” Mariella asked. “Maybe that’s why I have such...passionate dreams about him.” The girl blushed and giggled, and Jenny resisted the urge to smack her across the face, pox and all. “I just wish I could find him. I know that when I do, my life will finally start to make sense.”
Jenny didn’t have much to say about that. They approached Place d'Italie, a ring of parks centered on a fountain. Jenny could hop onto the Metro and escape here. She wasn’t sure she was ready to hear more about Mariella’s passionate dreams of Seth.
“What about you?” Mariella asked. “What’s your secret?”
“Who says I have one?”
“You can tell me.” Mariella bumped her arm and snickered, almost as if they were friends. “You know about me. What can you do? There’s something in your touch, too, isn’t there?” She reached for Jenny’s hand again.
“Don’t.” Jenny tucked her hand in her jacket pocket.
“What happens to you when someone touches you?” Mariella asked.
“Nothing,” Jenny said. “Nothing happens to me at all.”
“Am I misunderstanding something?” Mariella frowned at her. Her full lower lip made a cute little pout when she frowned, which made Jenny want to upgrade from smacking her to scratching her. “You seemed to know me. I thought...” A sad look crept into her bright green eyes, and she looked away.
“What did you think?”
“I thought you were someone like me. How did you know so much?”
“I’m not like you,” Jenny said.
“Did you once know someone like me? Is that it?” Mariella looked hopeful. “Maybe you have seen the boy I need?”
“There is no boy.”
“I have to go,” Mariella said, checking the time on her phone. “Can we talk again? Over a nice bottle of wine, maybe? I would like to hear more of your thoughts. Although you must think I am out of my mind now.” She gave a small, awkward smile.
Jenny looked over the pretty Mediterranean girl in the pricey high-fashion clothes. Part of her already hated Mariella for her interest in Seth. Another part of her felt bad for the girl, who’d clearly stumbled through life without meeting anyone like herself, something Jenny fully understood. Now Mariella was trying to reach out to her own kind—unfortunately for her, most of their kind tended to be wicked, ruthless, and deceptive. Jenny herself had always been a powerful evil force. She was working her hardest to change that, but very few of her past-life memories gave any guidance on how to live with the pox and still be a good person.
Yet another part of Jenny recognized that the girl could be tricking her in any number of ways. Maybe she was another Ashleigh, capable of charming people while plotting to ruin them. Jenny decided to listen to that part of her, the one that said to trust no one and avoid contact with others as much as possible. It was how she’d survived her life so far.
“Do you want to give me your mobile number?” Mariella asked as Jenny approached the escalator that would take her underground to the Metro station. Mariella had a look in her eyes that bordered on desperation.
Jenny’s heart almost went out to her, but she stopped herself. The only safe choice was to run the girl off forever. Jenny glanced around to make sure no one was looking at them, and she peeled off her gloves.
“Do you know what my touch does?” Jenny asked her, stepping on the escalator. “It brings pain and death. That’s all I’ve ever been to anyone.”
Jenny held up her bare hands. For a moment, she unleashed the pox, her hands and face rippling with gory disease. A look of terror filled Mariella’s face as Jenny descended out of sight.
Jenny drew the pox back inside her and turned to face forward down the escalator. She heard the girl scream, and she smiled. Her past-life memories did provide plenty of tricks for striking fear into people. She’d always been good at that.
With any luck, she’d scared Mariella all the way back to Italy.
* * *
The bed in Jenny and Seth’s apartment was a rococo-style antique with curving posters at the foot. The high headboard was carved with intricate little grapevines and cupids armed with love arrows., and the mattress was stuffed with goose down. Jenny had never slept in a more comfortable bed in her life, but lately she was having trouble sleeping at all.
She looked at Seth, who dreamed the night away beside her, his bare chest painted silver by the moonlight, a crooked, happy smile on his lips. What did he have to worry about? He didn’t know she was pregnant, or that the baby was doomed. He didn’t know that another one of their kind was trying to track him down.
She was fighting panic. Mariella claimed to see the future, and in that future, she saw herself and Seth together. Jenny wondered if it was true. How would Seth react if she told him she was pregnant, and then the pregnancy reached its inevitable, bloody end? How would he feel about her? He claimed not to care about having children, but he was still young. His mind could change, especially if he learned he’d fathered a child, and it had died.
Jenny regretted how she’d threatened Mariella, remembering from previous lives that the more she used the pox, the more likely she was to miscarry. Her moment of trying to scare the girl could have cost the baby’s life. But the baby had no future anyway, so why should she worry about that?
Her thoughts kept swirling and pounding against the inside of her skull. She could sense everything going wrong, the magic carpet tearing beneath them.
Seth’s eyes drifted open.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled.
More than I can tell you, Jenny thought.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “Bad dreams.”
“Sucks,” he said. His eyes were barely open, and his blond hair stuck out in every direction. He put an arm around her.
Jenny had been having bad dreams, too. Telling Seth about their most recent life had stirred up those memories like angry hornets, and they kept intruding on her waking thoughts as well as her dreams. Alexander had purposely tried to block her memories of her most recent lives, while restoring hundreds of others. He’d wanted the old, evil Jenny back, not the new, slightly-less-evil version she’d become as she spent her recent lifetimes with the healer, Seth, instead of the dead-raiser, Alexander.
“There’s more I didn’t tell you about our last life,” Jenny said. “The more I tell you, the more I remember.”
“I thought we ran off with the circus and lived happily ever after.”
“If ‘happily ever after’ lasts only a few weeks.”
“It’s over now. Long time ago.” He turned away from her, leaving Jenny to stare up at the ceiling. She couldn’t stop thinking about that life, which wasn’t surprising, considering the specific things she was dealing with in the present. It seemed immediate to her, as if none of the problems from their previous life had been resolved, and they were all waiting to come back and haunt her.
Jenny closed her eyes, but she couldn’t sleep.
Chapter Eleven
Juliana stripped away her robe for the eight men who’d crowded into the back of the sideshow tent, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey from paper cups. They shouted and whistled as she bared herself—all of them except one. He stood watchfully in the back corner, his fedora pulled low, arms folded. He wore a suit instead of the frayed overalls and work shirts of the other men, and he wasn’t drinking.
Juliana did not try to make her show allur
ing—the carnival had a special “model show” tent for that, where men could leer through a thin, gauzy curtain at women wearing little or no clothing. Still, on occasion, there would be a man who came back to her show day after day until the carnival left town, eyes hungry to see Juliana’s pale, exposed body turn rotten with disease.
She did her best to avoid those men, who sometimes waited around outside the tent wanting to talk to her. She did not want to talk to them. This man was most likely one of those. He’d now come to see her three days in a row, ever since the carnival had arrived at the busy fairgrounds in Anderson County, South Carolina.
She gave the man no special notice at all as she slowly turned, letting the weeping, pus-dripping sores bloom slowly all over her. The drunken men shouted and jostled each other, impressed by the apparent circus trick.
The man in the corner didn’t join in the drunken laughter and applause. He had a shaggy beard and sharp eyes, and the squarish bearing of a police officer, which troubled her. Carnies always had to watch out for cops and usually had to pay “patch money” under the table to avoid being harassed. It wasn’t normal for local cops to hit up individual performers for bribes, but anything was possible.
Juliana finished her show, and Radu ushered the men out. She sighed and let her aching legs rest a moment, then changed into a light dress made of cheap, lumpy cotton, and she tied her hair back with a scarf. She slipped out through the back of the tent and circled around behind game booths, emerging far down the midway, in case her obsessed fan in the fedora was looking for her.
She emerged from behind the Wheel of Chance and hurried across the midway, which grew dark as each booth shut down for the night, like clusters of stars vanishing from the sky. The stragglers wandered toward the gates. Only the grab joints remained open, selling off the last of their hot dogs and fried dough to the departing visitors.
She nodded at One-Eyed Filip, the middle-aged man who ran the haunted house. He claimed to have lost his eye in the war, but Juliana had heard it was actually from a knife fight in Budapest. He played it up as the host of the haunted house, rubbing black makeup around the hollow eye to make it seem even larger and darker.
He smiled, showing several missing teeth, and waved her into the haunted house through the tall front door, painted to look like an arched medieval gate surrounded by lurid green skulls.
She walked quickly through the dark, twisting corridor, ignoring the sounds of chains and screams. Little windows on either side of the hallway offered views into different “scary” rooms: a mortuary where a bloody arm reached out of a casket, a dungeon where skeletons and one very decayed body hung on the walls, a red-lit “Hell room” with devil mannequins around a tinfoil fire. In that room, other clumps of tinfoil glittered in “fireplaces” around the wall, which was decorated to look like a volcanic cave. Horned red bats with pointy wings flapped up and down near the ceiling, and the wires that held them up were almost impossible to see.
She looked in through another window at a “mad scientist’s” laboratory, decorated with jars full of disgusting items like fetal pigs, giant spiders, and a small monkey, all preserved in formaldehyde. A body lay under a sheet on the lab table. It slowly sat up, moaning with the agony of the undead, and the sheet tumbled down to reveal Sebastian, his face painted green, bolts glued to his neck. He rose stiffly from the table, holding his giant green hands out in front of him.
“Argh! Beware Frankenstein’s monster!” he groaned at her, waving the big green hands in her direction.
“The monster doesn’t talk,” she reminded him.
“Argh...argh!” He staggered toward her and reached out his oversized, overstuffed green gloves to grab her through the window. “The monster is hungry!”
“The monster doesn’t eat girls, either.” She stepped back along the hall, out of his reach.
“Argh!” The big green hands retracted into the window. She waited for him to come out. And waited. He’d been working the haunted house for a couple of weeks, on top of general work as a roustabout. It had been his idea to add the movie monster Frankenstein to the exhibit of gross jars.
“Sebastian?” she asked. The haunted house had gone quiet, including the hidden phonographs. Filip was shutting down for the night, like everyone else, which meant the last paying customer was gone.
She heard footsteps, but they were from the wrong direction, back toward the front door.
“Filip?” she asked. “Is that you?”
Nobody answered. The footsteps came closer, approaching through the dim, twisting hallway.
She thought of the large man with the fedora and the wild beard. If he’d seen her, he might have followed her inside, slipping past Filip while he was busy closing up shop, or maybe knifing Filip to get him out of the way. He seemed like the kind of man who wouldn’t think twice about killing someone.
She returned to the window and looked into the laboratory, but Sebastian was gone. A pickled pig fetus stared back at her from its jar.
“Sebastian?” she whispered as loud as she dared, and then someone grabbed her from behind and hauled her back off her feet. She could feel the brushy beard against the back of her neck. He smelled like mothballs.
She screamed as she twisted herself back and forth, trying to wriggle and kick her way free, but his arms were strong and clutched her tight.
“Unhand me!” she shouted, letting the pox boil up to her skin. She clawed her nails across his leathery face and ripped out a fistful of his beard, but he only laughed.
“Unhand me?” He laughed harder, releasing her as he doubled over. “That’s what you said! ‘Unhand me!’ Yes, right away, Your Majesty! I shall unhand thou!”
Juliana scowled. She’d known it was Sebastian the instant she’d heard his voice. He’d changed into a hairy werewolf mask, which she’d mistaken for a beard. She grabbed the mask off his head.
“Yow! You pulled my hair.” He clapped an oversized hand to his head and looked pained. He still wore his green Frankenstein makeup, complete with fake stitches on his forehead.
“I think you will survive the injury,” she said.
“Oh, sure. I can already feel the hairs growing back.”
“Braggart.” She looked around and saw that he’d pulled her back through a hidden door into the room with the devils and bats. “You’ve dragged me into Hell. What do you intend to do here?”
“We’ll punish your sins.” He pulled off the big green Frankenstein gloves and walked towards the biggest fireplace in the cave.
“I avoid sinning,” she told him.
“Up the chimney you go. Victims first.” He gestured inside the fake fire.
She leaned her head inside and looked up. The inner structure of the haunted house was bare here, the wooden beams and columns roped together where the different chunks of the house had been assembled after they were unloaded from the train. Exposed wooden rungs formed a ladder to the roof.
“We’re climbing up?” she asked.
“Yes, Your Majesty, now that I’ve unhanded you, you may climb.”
“You first.” Juliana smiled. She watched him climb up through the dark space, then opened a trap door at the top, revealing a square of starry sky.
“Come on up,” he called down to her. “The roof ghosts are in a friendly mood tonight.”
“So long as the roof ghosts don’t mind.” Juliana climbed up after him.
They stood on a narrow wooden platform behind the plywood dormer windows, painted to look like cracked shingles and boards. The roof ghosts were just balls of rag cloth mounted on sticks, with sheets tied over them to flap and billow in the wind. From here, she could see the darkened midway spread out below.
“This carnival has everything backwards,” he told her. “They put the freaky girls in the model show, and the pretty girls in the freak show. It makes no sense.”
“You’re dangerously close to being charming.”
“I know. There’s always danger in the air when I’m aro
und.”
“Are you going to kiss me or not?”
“That’s an easy choice.” He drew her close and gave her a long kiss, while her hands clasped behind his neck. The feeling of his body pressed against her made her shiver. Since joining the carnival, he’d slept in a cot in the crowded roustabout tent, but she was often tempted to invite him back to her personal tent instead. Tonight, she was in a very tempted sort of mood.
After a few minutes, she pulled back and smiled up at him. Her cheeks felt like they were caked in mud, and when she touched them, her fingers came away green.
“You got Frankenstein makeup all over me!” she said.
“Now you look like the Bride of Frankenstein.”
“Frankenstein doesn’t have a bride.”
“Poor Frankenstein. One of my favorite picture shows.”
“I would love to see a picture show with you.” She rose on her tiptoes to bring her face closer. He kissed her again, but this time one of his hands slipped down her back to caress her bottom through her dress. She let out a delighted, surprised squeal into his mouth and pressed herself against his broad chest. Her body was flushed and heated. She tried to work up the nerve to whisper a suggestion in his ear, that they should both go to her tent.
Bright yellow light flooded the space behind her closed eyelids. She opened her eyes, blinking at the flashlight pointed at them from the ground below. They’d been caught, and anyone left on the midway could see them now, embracing, green Frankenstein paint smeared on her face.
“What are you kids doing up there?” Filip shouted.
“Ah...” Sebastian replied.
“Get down here! There’s someone needs to talk to you. I’ll unlock the front door.” The flashlight swooped down to the entrance of the haunted house.
A minute later, the two of them emerged from the front door, looking sheepish. Filip shook his head at the sight of them.
“This man needs a word,” Filip told them. He pointed his copper flashlight at a large man standing beside him, who had a thick beard and wore a suit and fedora.
