HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre (3 page)

This time MaryBeth kept walking, her head high, he
r mind shut against the warning.

She exited the tent and hurried to find her father where she had left him on the midway looking for her while she had sneaked into the sideshow.

#

It was only days later the circus freak
’
s prediction came true. Her father
braced her with questions she tried to answer, but he kept interrupting her excuses, accusing her of wrongdoing. He said, "I knew something was wrong, MaryBeth. You're the only one I confided in about my terminal condition. You knew I hadn't long to live.
You hated your brother and sister, didn't you? Didn't you! If your mother were alive, she would die of horror at what you've become."

MaryBeth ran to her room, weeping crocodile tears. Once behind her door she began to plot.

#

It was hours later, night eng
ulfing the quiet mansion in shadow, when MaryBeth crept down the stairs to make sure her father was asleep in bed. It was true, she decided, what the sideshow monster had told her about the future. Her father's suspicions were at their highest peak ever a
n
d even if it meant his fortune would have to be left to charity, he was sure to bring her to justice for her crimes. That was the kind of father fate had saddled her with in this dreary, horrible life. Not only was she the youngest child, she was indisput
a
bly the ugliest. Not only had her siblings been brilliant, they had also been beautiful. She hated them with a passion from early childhood and that passion burned bright as a dying star. If she had it all to do over again, she would still find a way to m
u
rder them.

She left the stairs and tiptoed into her father's library. She went to the secret panel and the safe there. She would have to take as much cash as he had stashed and disappear before the exhumation. For although he hadn't threatened it, she knew
he would come around with the idea it had to be done, if only to satisfy his suspicions. She would have to start a new life before he went that far. She cursed her father, cursed her destiny. Why couldn't anything ever go her way? Her father was dying. H
e
r siblings were dead. She was all the family left to take over and run her father's multimillion dollar businesses. Why had life sabotaged her this way, ruining every plan she made?

As she was fiddling with the flashlight and reaching for the combination
lock, she felt a sudden, sharp pain in her left scapula that caused her to almost pass out. She swayed on her feet, dropped the flashlight, and held onto the wood panel door to keep from fainting outright. Oh God, she thought, what's happening? Am I havin
g
a heart attack?

She bit down on her lower lip. As the pain passed, she stumbled in the dark to chase the flashlight that had rolled a few feet away. When she bent to retrieve it, another sharp pain brought her to her knees. She reached for her shoulder an
d pressed down, trying to bar the pain. She gasped. She felt an ominous knot and, in the darkness, her eyes grew wide in fear. She got hold of the flashlight, twisted her head and aimed the bright white beam on her shoulder. She pushed back the collar of
h
er blouse. She saw it now. The knot was no knot at all. It was a tiny...

…
head
.

She clenched shut her eyes, then opened them again, hoping to find it gone.
No
, she thought,
no-no-no-no.
A cold shot of adrenalin forged through her body like a ship steaming
full throttle across a placid ocean. Her vision was clear, her mind blankly open in fascination. There was no hair on the tiny head, just a skull covered with her taut skin. The miniature face was misshaped, the nose flattened to one side, the lips hangin
g
open on raw gums, the little eyes closed against the world. Even as she stared, dumbfounded, the head grew, stretching against the skin and muscles of her body, inching forth into the world. She saw the beginning of a neck, the tendons tightly coiled, st
r
etching, arching.

Hello, MaryBeth. Can we be friends?

The shock of the new voice inside her head traveled through her body, shaking her to her very depths. She dropped the flashlight and screamed.

#

Enveloped in a giant black hoodie, the skinny blond girl crept around the tents of the sideshow. She could hear the announcer inside introducing the acts.

She passed by the carnival barker counting his proceeds from the crowd inside, and turned the corner
of the tent. High overhead a full moon rode a gray cloudless sky, tracking her with shadow. Beneath her feet the gravel wheezed as she stepped forward. The scent of donuts fried in pots of hot grease made her stomach turn. She found the flap and pushed in
s
ide, shutting out the noise and babble of the midway.

The hall was dark. She made her way by putting both hands on the canvas and following it until her fingers touched cold glass.

"Are you there?" she whispered.

Light suddenly flooded the small enclosure
behind the glass and the smiling two-headed man stood there as if he had been waiting ever since she had left days before.

"Hello, there, we're glad you've come."

"Shut up," she said. "Talk to me, dead head."

Hello, MaryBeth. I knew you'd be back.

She thr
ew back the great black hood of her jacket and slipped it off her shoulders to let it fall to the sawdust floor. "Look at me." She glowered in fury. "Look what you've done."

Next to MaryBeth's normal head sat a second one just the same size, the eyelids cl
osed with eyeballs rolling, the mouth agape and dripping saliva onto her shirt.

Oh, how beautiful you are!

"Devil! Demon! Warlock! You put a curse on me. You've disfigured me!"

I did no such thing. That's your evil, MaryBeth. That's your heart and your sou
l. That's your twin self, the one that has wanted to come out all of your young life-- and now it has. It was fueled by your mean spirit. It was born of your heartless ambition. I suppose it speaks to you, does it not? And is it wise, MaryBeth? We know it
isn't really beautiful, not like your brother and sister were before a train dismembered one and a deadly mushroom poisoned the other. But, tell me, is it all you could ever want in a sibling?

For the first time the girl revealed true emotion. She began t
o cry tears round and clear as thumb-nail diamonds. They rolled unchecked down her thin haggard cheeks. "What am I to do? What's going to happen to me?"

"Welcome!" cried the smiling man, his grin as wide as the new moon.

Yes, welcome, MaryBeth. Welcome to
the sideshow. We can always use another freak exhibit. Maybe you can have a glass booth right next to us. Won't that be cozy?

The girl leaned against the glass, defeated, and rested her forehead there. The second head, pulled forward, pressed against the g
lass as well. This new monstrosity said in a cheerful, knowing voice,
I love the carnival. We can have our own quarters. We can talk to the normal looking freaks when they come by to gawk at us. We can plumb their souls and rend the darkness, spilling thei
r secrets, all the dirty little secrets.

The smiling man looked at the two heads pressed against his glass and clapped his hands in the kind of glee usually only gifted to little children or the senile elderly. "Are you going to stay? Do you want to stay?
We would love you to stay!"

"Shut up." MaryBeth wiped her sniffling nose and raised both heads so she could look beyond the glass at her future. "Just shut up, you babbling moron."

The smiling head bobbed and beamed with goodwill, delighted with the girl a
nd her sharp wit. He just loved his fellow freaks in the sideshow.

And so do I,
his brother said.
And so do I
.
The more the merrier. There's never enough good freaks for the clientele. MaryBeth will be brilliant.

MaryBeth pulled back her shoulders and trie
d to raise her head high. "I hope you live long and die in torture."

How odd you say that, MaryBeth. I wish the very same for you.

The smiling man smiled like a goon, the world spun on its axis, the stars burned and blinked, the moon rode high, and the car
nival played on.

THE END

A RIP IN TIME

by

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

Cover art copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

Angie hung onto the black iron bars in the window of the Bakerwane
Asylum watching the street. She recognized the devil man the minute he hit town, mainly by his distinctive, eccentric steed. It was a fake palomino, all dolled up with copper plates covering its muscular hips, ropes of silver Mexican coins threaded throug
h
its mane, and a horse-like face with wide square teeth showing bone white in the unrelenting South Dakota sunlight. The horse trotted down the dusty street with a clank and a jingling of bells attached to its long tail, throwing shards of light before it.
It was Dane all right, though she called him the devil man. Dane Whitehall, county sheriff, the man she would kill if she got the chance. It had been Dane, six months earlier, who had testified before the court that she was practicing Magick. He had witn
e
ssed it he said, insuring she
’
d be locked away for the public good.

She wouldn
’
t know Magick if it stomped on her foot and called her Baby. What she did know was the little mechanical box she had hidden under her thin cotton mattress was as malevolent and
destructive as a gear-studded hangman
’
s noose the town of Hot Spring, South Dakota used on murderers. If she could master the secret of the box
’
s inner works, if she could speak to the gears that drove it, she might be able to use it against the devil man,
but there would be no Magick involved.

“
You!”
she shouted out between the bars, pressing her face against the iron and frowning for all she was worth.

Dane
’
s head snapped around and he reached to push back his leather hat to see who had called. When his g
aze fell on the window and her face pressed there, he quickly glanced away, keeping his face forward.

“
You, I said! Don
’
t ignore me, I won
’
t be ignored. Did you catch your man? No? What kind of sheriff are you, anyway?”
He had left town to chase a robber,
but came back empty handed. All he knew how to catch were innocent women living on their own.

The steed carried him past her and down to the livery four blocks distant. She tried, but she couldn
’
t mash her face into the bars enough to see him. She stepped
back from the window, feeling exhausted and alone. How had it come to this? She had been the best Rough Rider the Barbary Express had ever employed. She could handle her nickel-plated .45 revolver like nobody
’
s business and many a bandit had found that ou
t
to his grief. She rode alone, needing no partner or escort, and she made her deliveries on time to far flung outposts where the steam rail couldn't go.

Then she
’
d taken a tumble near Hot Spring, the cinches on her saddle breaking on one side, sending her
sprawling down the banks of the river gulch just outside of town. She always checked the saddle, and she knew the cinches were worn, but she thought they
’
d last until she reached town. The fall had broken her right leg in two places, sending her to the h
a
rp specialist who discovered his instrument was useless to mend her. They had called in the surgeon. More like a scalpel hound dog was what he was, not even a real doctor. He cut and ripped and tore and left her maimed, that
’
s what he
’
d done. In recompens
e
he
’
d given her the box, hoping to keep her quiet. The box, he said, was pretty, but to be truthful it had a little problem. “
It may be haunted,”
he
’
d said. “
It came from an Indian out near Deadwood, paid his bill with it when I was practicing there, but
e
ver since I
’
ve had it the blame thing keeps beeping and ticking like a clock. One time I think it spoke, but I
’
d had a few whiskeys, so don
’
t take that as gospel.”