by Egon Grimes
“You will die,” he said to the empty room. “Do you hear me, you piece of shit?”
There was no cognitive rebuttal.
—
Ivan lay on the rock hard queen-size bed in his room, several blocks from the circus. Maurice sat in the grass, his back leaned back against the Jeep’s bumper on the south end of the fairgrounds. Vadrossa watched over the grounds from the north, hiding in plain sight, sat on a bench. Alejandro the Wolf Man was in his caravan trailer.
Only an hour until show time.
28
Hundreds, if not more than one thousand, filed toward the circus’ ticket gate, taking advantage of the carnival aura, before everything got into gear officially. Quickly, the line to the Ferris wheel was long, little kids stood sticky faced eating cotton candy, watching the first set of the older kids spinning around in the teacups and the scrambler, wishing they could ride, but reserved to ride the carousel and the little train.
Alice Blackburn should have been in her little tent at the back of her trailer, but she felt she had to warn Alejandro further. The truth would set her free.
—
Combing took a while as hair covered his entire body. Alejandro finally got a mat under control on the side of his head when he heard a tinny knock at his trailer door.
“Just a second,” he said a little nervous, as he always was before show time.
Alice opened the door and stepped in.
Alejandro’s eyes popped with anticipation. “How’d you get here?” he asked.
Caught off guard, Alice tried to warm. “Alejandro, I had another dream, but I wasn’t sleeping.” Her throat closed around her words, she tried to speak, but nothing more would pass.
“I can’t believe you’re here. You’re finally here. I knew my letters would get through to you. It’s meant to be, we’re meant to be, to be together. I’m so happy.”
Confused and operating aside from herself, she said, “I’ve always loved you.” She pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it onto the floor. “My family didn’t want us together, but we’re destined.”
Alejandro’s heart danced, seeing the one and only love of his life finally come to feel how he felt.
Some years earlier, Melanie Shultz and her friends visited the Bantam Family Circus, only back then, the circus brought in good and steady crowds. It was at a stop in Toledo, Ohio. Melanie and her girlfriends—wasted on Jell-O shooters and body shots of tequila—tested how far they could go without finding each other suspicious of bisexual urges. The drunker they became the riskier their sexual tendencies swayed until sex organs no longer really mattered.
Competition commenced.
Each girl had a task, doing something nasty and the nastiest thing took the trophy. A prize Melanie mastered with ease. She won, not because of what she did, but because her friends were full of shit and chickened out. At most, a hand job to some lucky trucker. They wanted to stand back in awe. Watch a pal bite a bullet, or the tip of a cock, or the edge of a grotesque nipple.
Melanie spotted the furry man in the sideshow and knew how to conquer. It was easy. She went with him to his trailer and let him have his way. She took a quick serving and then rushed to the washroom to spill any strange dog seeds lingering inside. Alejandro didn’t know the girl’s name and did a little light reconnaissance while she was in the can of his trailer, finding her license in her wallet. A quick scribble gave him all her information. All but a phone number.
He’d asked for a number, she gave him the number to Home Base Pizza, gave him a kiss—pity—and ran to tell her friends the gory details. The next night, minutes before the show, Alejandro dialed the number, hung up after finding the number incorrect, and then dialed again. Still the pizza joint, every time the pizza joint. He must have written it down incorrectly he thought and decided the next afternoon he’d go to Melanie’s house.
He borrowed a suit from Marvin the Great, the show’s magician at the time, and went out on the town. Melanie answered the door. Whatever came beyond shock was what her expression suggested.
She was a smart girl, always good at lying. The night prior, her parents thought she was with the church group not out drunk and banging Eddie Munster. The story was that her parents didn’t approve of her seeing anybody, a lie, and that he had to leave or she’d be in big trouble.
The smile stretched across his furry face. “Like Romeo and Juliet,” he said and slunk away. For years he’d sent letters, no return address involved because he was on the constant move, but he knew one day she would find him and there she was, not a day older, standing in his trailer, her shirt already off.
It wasn’t Melanie of course, it was Alice and for reasons she couldn’t fathom, she was taking her clothes off and approaching her long-time friend. She attempted to fight. It was as if someone had hands on her brain and she was nothing but a fully functional marionette. A meat sack.
“I knew you’d come back,” Alejandro said, quickly dropping his pants and tossing aside his shirt.
Alice approached. No we can’t. This is wrong. She began running her hands through the thick black hair on his chest. It was soft. She’d imagined coarse bristles. She stood in dark brown panties, a pair she reserved for heavy periods, and an aged white bra.
Alejandro began running his finger over the edge of imaginary lace, frilly lingerie. His fingers brushed between Alice’s legs, the fur on his fingers grazing her thighs as he entered. Alice’s body tightened. She wanted nothing about what was happening but couldn’t scream, couldn’t fight, couldn’t even muster a peep in anguish.
It wasn’t natural, not at all. This had to be a dream and she was stuck. Nightmare fucking, she let go and watched the world move.
The Wolf Man’s finger worked at her hole, she could feel it more than she did in the earlier dreams, feel his fingers working, feel her body ready for him, the fur of his hands offering rug burn against her tender flesh. He swung her around and she fell back onto the bed.
They locked eyes and Alejandro inched toward the woman on his bed, licking blood and juices from his fingers. Pink saliva dripped from the hair on his chin like an excited animal. Alice watched, there was nothing else to do. Alejandro entered and began to pump.
He leaned forward and began to kiss his Melanie, slobbering a wet mess all over Alice’s face. Just a dream. Her arms pushed Alejandro’s head downward toward the source of all the moisture. His tongue flickered and splashed against the sticky liquid. He drank it in, choking a little on the quantity of fluid, he saw, felt, and tasted.
Dry and confused, Alice marvelled at this impossibly real dream that she understood at a level that made her notions unreliable. Why didn’t she wake up? Is this a dream?
29
Ivan left the motel, unaware of where he headed. He went along, knowing if he fought, his head would pound and he’d keep on moving to wherever he had to go.
When he awoke from a nap, it struck him that this had begun with the tongue. Was it even a regular request? Really, how had he discovered the request?
“Fuck,” he whispered, blinking at the dim streets leading up to some very bright lights alongside some very dark spaces. After a few turns away from the main drag, he saw the fairgrounds ahead, heard the happy laughter, and grew worried. Just before he reached the lip of the grounds, his body veered off the path toward a large, grimy dumpster. He tossed back the sticky lid and jumped in, finding a giant duffle bag. It was heavy. He could tell by the way his body struggled and his fingers ached under the pressure. The bag dropped gently from the dumpster’s edge and he climbed out, taking far less concern with his body than with the bag.
The bag’s straps hoisted over his shoulder, he made for the fairgrounds. People came and went in groups, he could feel their pulls on him. Everyone sized him, even the children. They wanted him, they saw him…they saw something, anyway.
The scene was about to go very bad. There were too many innocent people and he wasn’t really a bad man. Reasonable and realistic.
A man catcalled him.
A woman turned her head and touched the V of her shirt where the buttons held fast against the curve of her breasts. He was something else to everyone that passed. A group: mother, father, daughter, simultaneously he was a rugged lumberjack woman, mannish but with woman parts, a beautiful feminine man from that TV show about the superhero FBI agents, and a cartoon dinosaur. As he passed all the new people, he became a different tangle of secret desires. Those eyes weighed on him like the heft of the duffle bag weighed on him.
The sun descended, and once reaching the perimeter on the east side, hanging in a shadowy field, Ivan’s fingers unzipped the bag. He placed tiny little green pieces of plastic into the grass every few feet. For each deployed, a silver plate compressed. This intrigued Ivan, but was still a mystery. He worked his way back around the way he came and placed one hundred little somethings?
Half-moons?
Boomerangs of sorts.
And then it finally hit him.
Mines.
By the time he’d spread his plastic death around the north, east, and west sides he headed for the south. The bag was light by comparison and his body took far less care with it as he walked.
Brilliant light blasted from poles overhead and the only safe area was the southern exit. The first mine went off and Ivan dropped the bag to his side. His hand dug in. An enormous automatic rifle strapped over his shoulder, a ridiculously long banana clip jutting out from the bottom. After the initial blast, people stopped dead, at first, uncertain, but the second blast caused official panic. Explosions blew left and right. Ivan saw people coming toward him, feeling their pulls as they drew closer and he began to cut them down. Children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, teenagers, no one was safe from the shots. The clips didn’t last long, but there were a dozen in the bag by a glance.
—
Maurice heard the shots and went running, passing a wall of mirrors that fattened him then slimmed him, the base a large cartoon elephant. The elephant. Everyone saw Ivan as exactly as they wanted to, so did Maurice.
Maurice saw Ivan as Ivan, because he sought Ivan. Although revenge is a powerful motivator, survival can be stronger. He ducked behind a trailer and watched the madman gun down innocents. He pulled out his gun and aimed carefully. If he missed, he’d be plus a few orifices.
Maurice aimed. He squeezed, but as he did the man stepped forward, seeming to know, know of the spiralling lead flying through the scream-ridden air. A girl popped out of the trailer that Maurice hid behind, grabbed a pair of pruning shears, and jumped back in the trailer.
It was a long enough distraction for Maurice to lose sight of Ivan.
—
Down to his last clip, Ivan ran, moving anyone who contested his path.
30
Alice walked toward Alejandro. Wake up! Wake up! she shouted inside.
“What were those bangs out there?” Alejandro asked, too happy to care.
“Children with firecrackers, right under some old ladies. They got a little excited. I want to see you naked,” she said as she approached and lifted the shears.
“You’ve seen me… Oh! Without hair?”
Wake up, goddamn it!
Alice nodded and all of a sudden, the dream became all too real to her. She could feel the air, hot and thick, the well-penetrated flesh between her legs, the blood and cum drying on her thighs, but most of all, her arms moving with the shears, all too lifelike.
“I’ll start with your back and then move to your chest and head. And then we will make love, naked. Don’t you want to make love more?”
Alejandro’s grin stretched a million miles and he sat up straight, back to Alice. Without ceremony, she jabbed hard into the uppermost region of his spine. There was a tight, gristly snap. His body fell limp. His eyes scanned slowly and then closed. She stabbed into the back of the skull and… she fought the sight to go elsewhere, memories, dreams, thoughts.
No, please, she begged as the world flashed back.
She saw the mess, the tragedy. She felt the hot liquid on her flesh.
The night air was heavy and in the trailer, heavier, she crunched and carved, hands on remote pilot, until the brain hung. One final snip. The brain was free and she held it like a prized collectable.
The trailer door swung open and an ugly old man entered, taking the brain from Alice’s grasp. She didn’t fight it. The man was out of the trailer before she could really understand his presence. Her arms fell and her vocal folds worked with her. She screamed. She was in a pool of blood. The blood spilled relentlessly from the open skull. She straightened and took a frantic barefoot step, slipping. It didn’t stop her and she was out the door, screaming, “Help me! Please, help me!” naked and drenched in blood, looking like Carrie White, without the powers.
—
The streetlights dimmed and the voices quieted. Maurice had lost the shooter—the freak who stole his daughter’s tongue. He moved back to the scene, look for clues. A corpse-ridden ghost town. Cops and firefighters filtered in slowly, but had to be wary of mines in the grass. Maurice knew where the man had gone and followed the path. All over, the dead and the nearly dead slumped in the grass with dismay plastered on their faces, their crimson, sticky masks pained and surprised.
“Help me, please,” a bloody girl said, staggering into Maurice’s view. “It’s wrong I didn’t do it, someone made me!”
He couldn’t help but act on his instinct, he ran to her. She fell into his arms, wrapping her body tightly against his.
“You have to help Alejandro,” she whimpered into Maurice’s shoulder.
He pushed her back. “Are you hurt?”
Alice looked down at her body, cloaked in blood and nude. “No, but Alejandro,” she insisted while she covered her body, “please come with me, I didn’t mean it.”
Maurice followed behind the girl as she ran. She stepped on broken glass, jumped over dead bodies and didn’t flinch at all. It was almost as if she didn’t notice the terror around her.
Into the trailer was slick business, blood dripped over the door’s lip and onto the stairs leading in. My God, Maurice thought at first sight. It’s like a movie, like one of those trashy B gore movies they play at the drive-in so girls have an excuse to bury their faces in their boyfriend’s chest. “What happened?”
“I didn’t mean it. I didn’t have any control. I was like a puppet. I would never hurt him,” she blubbered and then fell into sobs. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean it.”
“You did this?”
“I couldn’t help it. I cut out his brain. I couldn’t help it. I was possessed. I couldn’t help it and then a man came in and took the brain.”
“Someone took the brain?”
“He had control over me. I can still feel him in me.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall thin, long dark hair and his face was like a supermodel, but not gaunt, perfect. He had a big cloak draped over him,” she explained and then added, “But ugly, so ugly, it was like two men came, but not.”
The beautiful man sounded all too familiar. The man from his vision. The other thing about the ugly man meant nothing to him, but he was certain it would.
He took a brain. A tongue and a brain, but why? Who is the other man? One ugly, one beautiful, but only one man.
“What do you mean you can feel him?”
“He’s in me still.”
Outside the trailer the police knocked at the neighbor’s doors looking for survivors with answers.
“We need to get you out. They won’t buy your story and I need you,” Maurice said in a loud whisper. “Is there a trap door, or accident door, or whatever?”
Alice dropped to her knees and waded through the gore to find the little handle. She swung it open and slid out. Maurice followed.
31
For most of his young life, Newton Wallin, Newt to those who knew him, had been a quiet boy. An over achiever, always first to hand in his work and always
first to raise his hand, never did anything to disappoint his parents.
That was before puberty cut a chip from his shoulder and he discovered acting up as a way to get attention from the opposite sex. Many boys acted up. Newton took it a step further once he found a suitable playpen for his act. Online was the world, his arena of acceptance, which first showed him the light and ease of being trouble without getting into any.
Wherever he went, he did so with his fancy new iPhone 5S—not a subject was off limits. It was his job to make videos and take pictures that rubbed against the grain of the adults in his town. After a month long show of pregnancy pictures from some aunts and older cousins; baby bump at ten weeks, eleven, twelve, twelve and a quarter. He got an idea and staged his own pregnancy. The first five pictures loaded were of a Professor Chops meal for two—Professor Chops being a little Chinese place downtown. He took shots from a few angles and then one of his face. A fat blob of greasy red sauce hung from his lip. He titled the folder: Conception: Baby on the Way. He then tagged all who’d posted baby related junk in the recent months. A few hours later, he took shots of his reflection, holding his shirt above his belly, pushing out gently for the pictures, 0.01 Weeks. The third set came after another three hours, he plumped out his belly a little more and took more shots. 0.1 Weeks: Very Soon Now. One hour later, he uploaded a video. He’d sprinkled water over his face and held the camera inches away. Holding in air, his face reddened and he pushed, grunting and groaning, loud squeaky farts shot out like a machine gun, followed by a liquid splashy sound. Newt fought the laughter well. His arm shook, the camera swung around, pointing at a shit-splashed toilet.
“Please don’t judge me, but I’m not ready to be a daddy,” he said and then flushed.
A good many people didn’t see the humor. A good many more did and solidified Newt with his classmates and the camera became his thing.
