Nightmare Carnival

Mostly though, Chattopadhyay counted the lights after putting in his pantomime offense. Nobody was going to put a championship belt on an Indian man, even if he wore a turban, or a Native headdress, or a sequined mask, or a Roman tunic. One night, after Strangler Frankhauser mouthed off in the locker room, Chattopadhyay decided to shoot. The Strangler was a fat old man with a fused ankle and thanks to his brother the promoter held the Midwestern state title. Chattopadhyay played heel and spent most of the match sweating it out under Strangler’s armpit, then grabbed an ankle, flipped Strangler over, and hooked the leg hard with a toehold.

Strangler had two choices: listen to his ankle break, then his kneecap pop, then his groin tear; or he could just roll onto his back. The ref that night had two choices too: count to three, or blow kayfabe and let eight hundred paying customers and the WEO-TV 44 camera operators and everyone else out there in Televisionland know that professional wrestling was a work. Ah, work, just another word for bullshit.

Strangler Frankhauser rolled over. The ref counted to three. The camera operator zoomed in for a close-up. Chattopadhyay — what had been his gimmick at the time, anyway? The Savage of Borneo? Chief Pow-Wow? — held the belt high.

Back in the locker room, it took six guys to pry it out of his hands and dump Chattopadhyay, a bleeding wreck minus three teeth, out on the edge of town. Television was over for him, forever. So he signed up with Jeff Gordon’s All-Star All-Comers, and wrestled the same exact match, night after night. He let himself get soft, let himself do the dumbest spots for the dumbest rubes in ten states.

But that little boy knew how to live. He could work, he could shoot, he could hook.

And he could rip.

Ripping is hard to train. You can’t live-drill it, unless you want a crippled sparring partner. But Chattopadhyay knew how to do it.

He’d practiced it on goats, since the age of eight. Under the watchful eyes of his teachers.

He kept up the practice, even in America. He’d known a man in Pittsburgh with a small herd. That man’s name had been Kalamatas.

And now, under the college boy, with his breath fading fast, he reached up till his fingers found the collarbone. And he ripped it out of college boy’s chest.

There was a sound like a wave. Then a shotgun blast, and the smell of powder. The last thing Chattopadhyay saw that night was the sledgehammer from the high-striker coming down on him.

There’s no carny wrestling these days. And there are precious few sideshows, but there’s one nameless carnival known to travel the Pennsylvania-Ohio circuit, and it has a sideshow. Jeff Gordon’s All-Star Plights of Humanity, that’s what the sign reads. And there’s a painting of a man, green with outstretched arms that end in blobs of purple putty, on the trailer front too.

But there’s no such exhibit as that green man. The All-Star Plights of Humanity is a pure geek show — not a birth defect or a hairy doll to be seen.

Gordon’s dead and buried, and Johnny the Plant runs the geek show.

He’s got two prize geeks. One’s called Mr. Whiplash. A promising young college boy who made the near-fatal error of drinking and driving while listening to jungle music on his car’s AM radio. He sits in a stool, dribbling onto his lap, a long and very realistic- looking bone protruding from the flesh of his chest. Multiply concussed during the postmatch riot, the college boy wasn’t one anymore. College boy wasn’t much of anything, anymore. He could dress and feed himself though, so Jeff Gordon had taken him on.

The other Plight of Humanity is the Human Dent. He’s an older man, and he can even talk, though for the most part nobody can understand what he’s saying, but it sure ain’t English. Where his left temple used to be is just a huge gouge. Some say that Mr. Whiplash ran this poor man down, and that’s how they both ended up geeks, sitting on a raised platform, four feet apart, on separate stools.

And there’s even proof that the story is a true one, ladies and gentlemen. Get too close to Mr. Whiplash on his stool, reach out to touch the shank of bone to see if it’s legit, and the Human Dent will turn his head, stop his chilipepperese mumbling for once, and growl in an accent that sounds almost British.

“Hands off! He’s mine!”

AND THE CARNIVAL LEAVES TOWN by A. C. Wise

The first piece of evidence appears on Walter Eckert’s desk in a locked office to which he has the only key. It is wrapped in brown paper, neatly labeled with his name, no return address. He unwraps it with wary hands.

Cheap plywood, as if from a construction site wall, pasted with a handbill-sized poster. It could be advertising any event around town — a rock band no one has ever heard of, an avant garde art exhibition no one will ever see — but it appears to advertise nothing at all.