Читаем Nightmare Carnival полностью

Mae drew the patchwork quilt up over her knees and watched the progression of rainbow-bright lithographs roll past: lions and tigers jumped through fiery hoops, grease-painted dogs in organza skirts and sea lions balanced balls on their noses, bosomy girls with tiny corseted waists rode atop white horses. Alastair Kleininger’s clown whiteface flashed a joey-red-lipped grin from the side of a tumbledown hayshed. She felt a pang of sadness at a poster of the circus troupe’s most treasured asset, Madelaine the Elephant, elegantly decked out in her maharaja headgear, with Mischa LeTellier the Half-Boy in the howdah on her back. Mischa had died unexpectedly of apoplexy six months back, having never reached his twentieth birthday, poor boy. There hadn’t been time to modify the poster, or more likely the Bishop didn’t like wasting money on new posters until the old ones ran out.

No one else had ever had quite the same bond with Madelaine as Mischa. The two of them had practically grown up together ever since the Bishop had bought the Asian elephant as a wild orphan, her mother shot in the jungles of Ceylon, the calf shipped over on a steamer half starved to death by the time she arrived in Boston. Barely a teenager, Mischa had signed on with the circus shortly after, and fallen in love with the baby elephant at first sight. He regularly slept in the menagerie top, the elephant’s trunk cradling his legless torso like a child holds a doll for comfort. The bull man the Bishop had hired especially to break her when she was still a calf had appealed to the circus boss to split up Mischa and Madelaine, claiming the half man got in his way, undercut his authority, interfered with her training.

But Mischa and Madelaine had been inseparable even when the little elephant quickly grew into a very large one. Mischa, with no legs, could manage Madelaine better than the bull man with an ankus, using watermelon rinds to reward her when she sat on her back legs and raised her front legs, the buoyancy of a river to teach her to spin. The legless boy had loved riding Madelaine, so the Bishop commissioned a howdah especially built to fit Mischa, intentionally undersized to make Madelaine seem even bigger than she was. The gasps of surprise and fright (and if they were lucky the occasional fainting lady) when Madelaine knelt on her front legs and lifted him with her trunk out of the howdah to the ground used to delight him. Even Madelaine looked as if she, too, enjoyed the applause, the tip of her trunk raised to her bulbous forehead in salute pulling her lips up into an open-mouthed grin. They were happy, they were making the circus money, and the Bishop was content to leave them be.

Madelaine had been the Bishop’s first, and for a time only, exotic animal, soon parlaying his dog-and-pony show into a modestly successful traveling circus, The World-Famous Bishop Brothers Traveling Carnival. If there ever had been a brother, Mae never saw him, and all those who knew the circus master simply called him the Bishop, no one sure what his real name might be. Not that many circus folks ever used real names anyway.

The Bishop grew his circus methodically, attracting enough talent like Eric and Lavinia Malcome, the fire-eater and sword-swallower act, and professional sideshow freaks like Mae and Max until he could finally get rid of the Chinaman. The Bishop had brought the opium addict back with him after the Boxer Rebellion, employing him as a circus geek who bit the heads off live chickens and rats and swallowed them to the shrieks of titillated spectators. The chickens ended up in the kitchen pots, the dead rats tossed out with the night soil.

The Bishop bought out two smaller circuses, bringing in Billy North and his Marvelous Menagerie: camels and llamas, a pair of black bears, three lions and a tigress, two wallabies that had quickly multiplied into ten, a troupe of chimpanzees that worked with the clowns, and sixteen zebras harness-trained to pull the gilded animal wagons along with his miniature ring stock ponies. The dogs, farm animals, and exotic birds Kleininger used in his clown act had their own cages, but their pet rhesus monkey lived in the animal trainer’s car with Billy and his wife.

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