Читать книгу Menagerie - Rachel Vincent - Страница 12

Delilah

On the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up to find that Brandon had left four glossy red tickets on my nightstand. They were made from nice card stock—definitely keepsake quality—covered in glittering, scrolling black script. My hand shook as I picked them up. I knew what they were before I even read the print.

Admission For One

To Metzger’s Menagerie

The Largest Traveling Zoo

In The Northern Hemisphere

I left the tickets in the glove box during my shift at the bank, where I spent most of the day trying to tune out the excited chatter of my fellow tellers. About half of my coworkers also had tickets. The other half couldn’t afford to go.

Nothing pays very well in small-town Oklahoma, and usually that’s okay, because there isn’t much to do in the land of red earth anyway, until you get up to the capital or out toward Tulsa. Hell, you can’t even get full-strength beer with your dinner unless you pay for an import.

But the menagerie hadn’t been within driving distance of Franklin County in nearly fifteen years, and it might never come back. Everyone who could borrow money or call in a debt would be there to see the spectacle.

Including me.

Brandon had spent a fortune on the tickets, and it didn’t really matter that I would rather drive to the city and spend my birthday at the ballet, or a concert, or even a baseball game. As my mother had told me all my life, the true gift was in the intent, and my boyfriend had meant well.

He always meant well.

That evening, Brandon took my hand as we wandered down the fairground midway behind my best friend, Shelley Wells, and her boyfriend, Rick. Barkers cried out from both sides of the path, challenging us to pin the tail on the centaur, or knock down pop-up silhouettes of satyrs with a rubber-tipped archery set, or shoot the shell bras off mermaid figurines with water guns. Calliope music played at a volume only small children and the near-deaf could actually enjoy.

The noise scattered my thoughts and scraped my nerves raw. We hadn’t even gotten to the menagerie section of the carnival yet and I was ready to go home.

“Hey, Lilah, did you see they have a minotaur?” Shelley pointed to a twenties-style poster tacked up next to a spinning ride advertised as “guaranteed to make you hurl.”

“They didn’t have him when we were kids.”

I nodded, and she turned to walk backward, facing me while she shouted above the jostling, buzzing crowd. “You see a minotaur in school?”

“No. They’re pretty rare.” We’d seen very few live cryptids in class, and minotaurs were among the least likely to ever be studied by undergrads. They bred slowly in captivity and gave birth to only one offspring at a time. Most experts believed they’d be extinct within a century—a tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.

“You shouldn’t have quit.” Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Rick’s arm, then called to me over her shoulder. “You would’ve been a great crypto-vet.”

“I didn’t quit. I just didn’t go to grad school.” For a while, though, that had been the plan. I’d finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before I’d realized that the only jobs legally available in the U.S. for crypto-vets would have required me to lock up my patients. Even the ones with human faces.

Those jobs were at places like Metzger’s Menagerie.

Or worse: research labs, in which scientists tested everything from cosmetics to biological weapons on creatures protected by neither human law nor ASPCA regulations.

Disillusioned by those prospects, I’d moved back home to Franklin, where the median income was less than two-thirds that of the national average and my best guess on the median vocabulary looked even less promising.

A jewel glittering among small-town clods of red clay, Brandon was a newly minted pharmacist with a future in the family business. He read books and spoke in complete sentences. We’d been together since the month I’d come home from college, and—poor gift-giving skills aside—he was a very nice guy. And he truly loved me.

The only part of me that had been relieved to find such a morally ambiguous birthday present on my nightstand was the part that had half expected an engagement ring.

I wanted to be more than a small-town bank teller married to a small-town pharmacist. But I had no idea what “more” might look like, and the certainty that I’d know it when I saw it had faded with each day spent in Franklin. All I ever saw was Brandon, and all he seemed to want to see was me.

And a traveling zoo full of bizarre beasts.

The actual menagerie was behind a second gate at the end of the sawdust-strewn midway, a design no doubt intended to pull people past countless opportunities to spend money on their way to the main attraction—the only part of the carnival not offered on a yearly basis by the county fair.

Brandon and I caught up with Shelley and Rick at the menagerie gate, where another line had formed. I recognized several of the people in the crowd as account holders from the bank, but without my name tag—Hello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?—they didn’t seem to recognize me. The family in front of us had three small children, each clamoring to touch the shifter kittens and phoenix chicks in the petting zoo. At the gate, the parents were reminded that certain areas of the exhibit, namely the succubus tent, would be off-limits to anyone under eighteen.

Rick snickered like an overgrown twelve-year-old and Shelley elbowed him. I thanked the universe for my mature, stable, predictable boyfriend, then realized that I’d just found three different ways to call Brandon boring.

When we got to the front of the line, an elderly man in a red sequined vest and a black top hat took one look at Shelley, then bowed low and pulled a bouquet of real daisies from his sleeve. He presented them to her with a flourish from one knee, heedless of his cracking joints.

Delighted, Shelley returned his bow with a curtsy, spreading the hem of an imaginary skirt, and even I couldn’t resist a smile. Then she and Rick helped the poor old man to his feet.

The ticket taker resettled his hat on his head. “First time at the menagerie?”

“Kind of.” Shelley stuck her nose into the daisies and sniffed. “Delilah and I saw some of it when we were kids. They didn’t bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.”

“Well, then, you’re in for a treat!” He glanced at our plastic full-pass bracelets, then waved us inside with a grand, white-gloved gesture. “Trust me, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.”

However, that could only be partly true, no matter what they had on display behind velvet curtains and in gilded cages. Gone were the days when centaurs roamed the plains in herds, with flocks of thunderbirds beating powerful wings overhead, but we’d grown up seeing cryptids of all sizes, shapes, and colors on television and in movie theaters. They were the villains in our horror movies, most of which drew on the reaping for inspiration. They were the hidden terrorist threats in our thrillers, the bumbling bad guys in our comedies, and the subject of scientific study in nearly every documentary I’d ever seen.

That’s where traveling creature features had the market cornered. Anyone could see a werewolf on television, but the average citizen could only see one live at the menagerie. If he or she could afford the cost of admission. And Metzger’s had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.

Metzger’s was stunning. I couldn’t deny that, even as I stopped to scrape a thin coating of manure and sawdust from the sole of my left boot onto the grass.

Compared to the Tilt-A-Whirl and corn-dog portion of the carnival, the menagerie was practically circus finery. The lights were brighter and the colors more vibrant. Even the boisterous organ music felt more sophisticated and dimensional. Costumed performers wandered the midway with flaming batons, balloon bouquets, and souvenir top hats, giving the menagerie the same glamorous, exotic appeal I remembered from my visit as a child. The red sequined costumes had been updated, as, presumably, had the employees wearing them, and the scents of fried dough and roasted meat still made my mouth water.

But the guilt twisting my insides into knots couldn’t be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine I’d had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadn’t helped in the least. The small line of People First protesters shouting, “Remember the reaping!” outside the front gate had only made the whole thing worse.

The People First activists wanted the menagerie to leave Franklin County. We had that much in common. However, they didn’t object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivity—they were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.

What they didn’t seem to realize was that if the menagerie’s oddities escaped, we would see them coming.

We hadn’t seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of history—so meticulously executed that we didn’t realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, we’d still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.

Fearing locked-up cryptids that didn’t look human would do us no more good than suspecting our own neighbors and relatives of being monsters, as we’d done for decades after the reaping. But scared people can’t be reasoned with. Scared politicians can’t be talked down from their podiums. Scared nations pass reactionary laws without bothering to consider how much powder those legal snowballs will gather as they roll down Capitol Hill. Eventually, yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s normalcy.

Reactionary legislation had spawned outfits like Metzger’s, where anything and everything not deemed to be human could be locked up and put on display with no limits, no boundaries, and no regulations except those meant to protect employees and spectators. Which made people like me—the admittedly quiet minority—profoundly uncomfortable.

My tension headache told me I shouldn’t have accepted the tickets. My queasy stomach said I shouldn’t be celebrating my birthday at the menagerie where, as a child, I’d been shocked to see three malnourished little girls locked in an animal pen wearing no more than a few filthy scraps of material. Because when I remembered the reaping—inarguably the most profound tragedy to ever strike the U.S.—I also remembered the millions of innocent cryptids who’d been rounded up and thrown in prisons or shot on sight for resisting arrest.

By the time I was born, several years after the reaping was discovered, the government had begun denying citizenship and legal rights to any living being only partially human, as well as to any hybrid of two or more different biological families.

What that meant was that ligers and mules were protected by the ASPCA because they were both hybrids of two animals that share the same biological genus and family. But because the griffin is a hybrid of two different classes—Mammalia and Aves—and three different orders—Carnivora, Artiodactyla, and Squamata—it isn’t recognized as a natural animal but as a cryptid “beast.” Anything considered “unnatural” under such legislation was denied protection under U.S. law.

That secondary national tragedy, a clean sweep of everyone not wholly human or “naturally” fauna, had been brushed under the rug, and even mentioning it made my friends and coworkers look at me as if I’d just set fire to the U.S. flag. So I’d stopped talking about it. But I hadn’t stopped feeling it.

Yet deep down, I was dying to see the strange and amazing creatures I’d studied in school, for all the same reasons that had led me to major in crypto-biology in the first place. I wanted to see the beautiful selkie emerging from her seal-skin. The troll, so tall and thick he couldn’t stand up in most human-scale buildings. The man who could turn into a cheetah at will. The part of me that objected to the confinement and abuse of such beings was the very same part that needed to see them for myself.

To understand.

Metzger’s had no right to exploit the creatures in its custody, but that wouldn’t end whether I looked at them or not. And who better than I to truly appreciate, rather than taunt or mock?

At least, that’s how I rationalized my warring desires to both condemn and experience the spectacle.

At the center of the menagerie, towering over everything else, was the big top, an enormous red-and-white-striped circus tent with three sharp peaks that cast an ominous shadow over the fairgrounds. The entrance flaps remained tightly closed until a paying guest was admitted, making it impossible to catch even a passing glimpse of the mysteries within. Around the perimeter of the menagerie stood a series of smaller tents and attractions, and branching from those were a series of themed subsections. Everything from the posters and cages to the costumes and music was designed with a vintage feel so that it seemed as though we’d stepped back in time.

Up first was the bestiary, where cryptid animals lounged or paced in sideshow cage wagons modeled after circus train cars from the early 1900s. They had bright, intricately carved frames and huge wooden wheels, and the beasts within were visible from both sides, through thick iron bars reinforced with sheets of modern steel mesh.

The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.

Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two heads—one lion, one goat—and a snake for a tail. “Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is!” she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. “So glossy!”

But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other direction—the full length of its cramped quarters—I noticed that the fur on the goat head’s side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didn’t self-groom.

“Here, kitty, kitty!” Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beast’s tail hissed at her.

“He’s not a kitty, Shell,” Brandon said. “He’s a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.”

“He’s not a he.” I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. “Her name is Cleo. She’s eighty-six years old, as of last spring,” I said, still reading from the plaque. “Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today.” I stepped back for a better look. “Poor thing. By the time she dies, she’ll have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.”

Rick rolled his eyes. “They’re animals, Delilah. They don’t even know where they are.”

“We’re all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you don’t know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. She’s your elder.”

Rick laughed as if I’d made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cage’s bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.

I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.

Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didn’t let go even after I’d regained my balance, my heart still racing.

“Don’t touch the exhibits,” a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzger’s logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. “Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.”

“I tripped.” In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.

“Cleo’s in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh,” Rick said. “What’s she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?”

The man tugged the bill of his red cap down, shading more of his strong features. “Only a fool believes his eyes over all other senses.”

Shelley laughed out loud while Rick fumed, and when I turned back for another glimpse of the large man in the red hat, he was gone.

Shelley and I dragged the guys toward the next cage: Panthera leo aeetus. Commonly known as a griffin.

Rick and Brandon were fascinated by the griffins, both perched on dead tree branches bolted to the ends of their massive aviary on wheels. They had the hindquarters of a lion and the majestic head, wings, and front claws of an eagle.

An eagle on the physical scale of a lion.

I’d seen them on television and studied them in school, but I’d had no appreciation for their size until I stood in front of them. They must have weighed at least five hundred pounds each.

Brandon shouted at one, unrebuked by another large, gruff handler, and was rewarded when the griffin suddenly threw his enormous wings out and flapped, as if he’d dive at us. We all gasped and backpedaled. The griffin pulled his dive up short at the last second, and I noticed that a patch on his right wing, along the top ridge, was bare of feathers at exactly the spot his wing would have hit the bars, if he hadn’t stopped.

The griffin made a horrible avian screech and I covered both my ears, but when he settled on a branch closer to us, still riled up from being teased, I realized that his sharp eagle’s beak and incredible wingspan were far less intimidating than his feet, a lethal cross between a lion’s claws and a bird’s talons.

They were huge. And sharp. I noticed a dried chunk of raw meat wedged between his first and second digits.

My heart ached for him. The griffin was obviously meant to soar the skies and stalk the plains in wide-open freedom. None of which he would get in the menagerie. Yes, griffins could be dangerous, but so could bears and sharks and alligators, yet we didn’t round them all up and throw them into cages.

After the griffins came the phoenix. Shelley was disappointed when it refused to burst into flames, then rise from its own ashes for her personal amusement, even though the signs wired to its cage said the poor thing wasn’t due for a “rebirth” for nearly another month. I thought it was beautiful, even without the flames. The phoenix had a long graceful swan-like neck with plumage in vibrant graduating shades of red, yellow, and orange. Its broad sweeping tail would have made any peacock jealous.

After the bestiary, we skipped the “Natural Oddities” section, which promised us trolls, ogres, goblins, and other assorted humanoid creatures of legend. Brandon led the way toward the “Human Hybrids” section, where the sign at the entrance promised us “bizarre and fascinating combinations of man and beast.”

“Come forward, come forward!” the uniformed man at the tent entrance called, waving us closer with both white-gloved hands. “Metzger’s guarantees you’ve never seen a spectacle like this, no matter what other shows you’ve attended. No one else on earth has such an extensive collection of grotesque mergers of human and animal flesh as you’ll find in this very tent. Wolf and man, horse and man, fish and man, bird and woman...” He winked at Rick. “We’ve got it all! And don’t forget to take a peek at our world-famous minotaur! You won’t find another like him anywhere else in the continental U.S.!”

“It sounds really freaky,” Shelley said.

“That it is, that it is.” The talker bowed deeply, top hat in hand. “But you’ve got these lucky gentlemen to keep you and your friend safe.” He gave the guys another faux-confidential wink, and I almost laughed out loud. Brandon got nervous when he heard coyotes howl at night.

The man in the top hat glanced at our bracelets, then held back a canvas flap with a practiced flourish.

“Seriously, what’s it like in there?” Shelley asked before Rick could push his way inside.

The carny shrugged with an evasive smile. “Some people love it. Gives others the willies. But what I can tell you is that you can’t truly know who you are in here—” he laid one gloved hand over his red sequined vest “—until you’ve been through there.” He pushed the tent flap open wider.

Brandon, Shelley, and Rick stared into the darkness.

I stepped inside.