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The Nine Headed Fox cordially reminds you that the production of art like this story would not be legal under fascism, like that currently being instituted by the American government. During this difficult time, the foxes urge you, the readers of stories such as this, to familiarize yourself with left-wing groups in your areas and join opposition efforts.

This story was funded by the generous contributions of Dusk Noire, Reykreyth, Lorcan, Calliope Coyote, Traveling Mage, and Sophie Coyote. If you would like to feature in or fund the creation of more stories like this one, you can donate to my patreon at 9headfox.

Something Yiffy This Way Comes

By the Nine Headed Fox

On a bitterly cold and grey autumn morning, the rector died and it was the front page thing on the local newspaper. In the greasy diner on the east edge of town, right before the rundown went to empty brush, somebody had left a copy of the paper on the countertop; and everyone sitting at the countertop had read the paper, because it was there, and they were talking about it because they'd all read it; but none of them were believers, so none of them were all that cut up about it. They, like the indolently grey sky above, could muster nothing more than a gloomy demeanor and the odd soft sigh.

"You all think you'll head to the job fair?" Asked Calliope, in between bites of her hard-scrambled egg.

"Maybe." Muttered Lorcan, staring sleepily into his black coffee. "Though I don't reckon there's too much call for me." And that was true: Gwen's RX was the only place in town which had any use of a pharmacist, and Gwen liked to make sure he knew it.

"Definitely." Answered Sophie. She had already cleaned her plate and now she was chiefly occupied with the other diners–she stared at them intensely and in sequence, painting portraits of them in the palace of her mind. "Definitely, they've been cutting my hours–down at the shack?–and at this point I really just can't keep relying on them." She drummed her knuckles on the countertop.

By way of answer, Remy just nodded. He wasn't much of a talker if he didn't have to: he had the kind of shrinking, mousey way of a man always uneasy in his own skin, and doubly if anyone could see. He'd asked for eggs over easy and accepted them done well. He kept it to himself, but truthfully, he was out of work and getting desperate: when he'd seen the flier on the back page of the newspaper, it'd been a ray from Heaven.

"Well, here's hoping we get a little good news out of it." Calli said; then, yawning, she stretched her arms and stood up from the counter. "Could use a little bit of that."

"Could use a bloody miracle." Snorted Lorcan.

"Is it really that bad at the pharmacy?" Sophie, who was slight and stringy, asked every question with a worried curiosity like she was worried it'd explode.

"Whouever had the idea of selling medicine...is a fucker. Make enough of this shite to give it away fer free." He answered–even bitterer than the coffee, and that was about half as mad as he actually felt. He drained the cup in one more go and started buttoning up his coat; Sophie had never seen someone getting dressed angrily before.

"It's been nice getting to meet you all." Calliope said, in the way you do when you know you're never going to see that person again. And, indeed, had she made it out the doors that's exactly how it would have gone–but then the wind came in.

It began as a high-above airflow that stirred the trees–one shrill note from the choir of the sky, that by itself stripped the fading bronze crowns off the canopy and threw them down to the ground; then it deepened to a mighty roar that bent the trees down as supplicants before their lord. The people within the diner looked out and saw the oddments hurtling down the streets and the cans tipping over and the chromatic rivers of windborne leaves, and out in the street a man was fighting to hold his hat on his head while a woman's umbrella twisted out of her hand; then the diner door kicked open and clattered back against the wall and the timbers creaked as the napkins and the newspaper and the cook's cap all were hurled on the breeze and the people cried holy shit for sure they thought it was a tornado touched down come to drag them all straight to Hell -

Until, just as quickly as it had started, the windstorm abated, and silence regained the moment; or rather, near silence. In the moments after the commotion, as the diners regained themselves, they became aware of a most unusual din wafting in through the blown-open doors: it was a lilting, aimless melody–sung in the unmistakably shrill timbre of a circus organ, heard remote.

"Like nothing I've ever seen." Grumbled the cook, as he went to put things right. The four diners, even those who had not been ready to leave, were up from their seats–feeling, not in as many words, as though they had been ejected from the venue by no less an authority than mother nature. They left the diner in a loose grouping, intending to go no further in one another's company–but as they stepped out into the overcast morning, they one by one had their attention ensnared: at the East end of the street, where the tumbledown went to undeveloped scrubland, the soporific sunlight bore out the shape of a big top tent, which rose imperiously above the waste, garbed in deep purple walls and scintillant brass trim.

"When in blaze did that get there?" Lorcan turned his collar against the cold.

"Last night, I suppose." Calliope answered. None of the four were particular lovers of carnivals or circuses or fairgrounds; yet the big top and the tent-village surrounding commanded their attention. There was no phantasmagoria: no Ferris wheels or swinging ships or big men on stilts. It compelled quietly, by its undiminished colors and the organ's subtle lilt. It did not invite or entice or promise great things, but said rather: come and see.

"Wait, didn't there used to be like, a church out that way?" Asked Sophie–not that she'd ever been, but she'd lived here for a time, and she might've sworn that field used to hold our-lady-of-the-who-cares. But nobody answered, and she supposed in the end she'd just been turned around. They'd all wandered a little closer, without really meaning to, pursuing that deepset mammalian urge to understand. Now they were away from the diner and its parking lot, up past Jasper Sutter's house; where his old pit bull, which had never done anything but give the public grief, was holding its silence for the first time in living memory.

"I think I know that song." Squeaked Remy. He didn't, really, in the way you "know" Mary Had a Little Lamb; the song was familiar in that he'd heard the trill of minor-key organ notes, and the oom-pah of a blues dirge, and the way a song winds on to nowhere when it is meant more for the dead than for the living, and now he heard all those things together assembled in stately melancholy; and though he'd never heard it, he'd felt it before, which is what mattered. He'd felt that song, in the church bells pealing through the sunny April cold as they lowered his grandpa in the ground; he'd felt it reading a rejection note from the only place he'd ever really wanted to go. Now that yearning settled on the cockles of his heart, weight increased with every step.

"Fuck it." Lorcan exclaimed. "Got nowhere to be."

He went off ahead of the others like he had something to prove by being there first; and the others, trailing behind, ticked through every reasonable thought one by one. Hadn't Calliope been on her way to clock in? Hadn't Remy been meaning to go looking for work? Didn't something about this moment seem terribly queer to Sophie? But Reasonable Doubt put all those things to rest: No, there'd been a last minute schedule shift–she'd almost forgotten, before breakfast bucked her up. No, he'd gotten that interview from the gentleman at the place, for tomorrow; he could take today for himself. No–she'd just gotten turned around and she was being nervy about it. In loose procession they drew nearer and nearer to the carnival, across the windswept wild wheatgrass and into the big top's shadow, within eyeshot of its gilded cupula–as they drew near, the window clattered shut.

There was more to the place than just the big tent: a whole court of lesser structures attended it from all sides. There were humble caravans with lean-to awnings and open sided pavilions draped in many ribbons and camping bells wrapped in lights, and most every place had its own person. Lorcan stopped some twenty foot out, mesmerized just at first brush with them, and the others piling in behind him as well. They'd never seen such strange people, except maybe in storybooks. In a nightdark camping bell, an old woman with a mole on her cheek that looked just like a third eye sat hunched over a crystal ball full of fog; there was a strongman, covered head to toe in tiger-stripe tattoos, standing in the sunlight and flexing for nobody; and away in the distance, the light flooding from the big top's open mouth framed a tall man in a high hat whose hair was twisted out to the width of his shoulders.

"What in Hell's all this?"

"Look." Remy pointed just off the road, to a broad weatherworn sign, where faded gold lettering proclaimed this place to be R.D. HOPE'S TRAVELING CARNIVAL OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS.

"Earthly delights?" Scoffed Lorcan. He had to raise his voice now, over the carnival organ. It was everywhere now, a sort of cottony thick mourning tune that you couldn't keep out of your ears but couldn't get into your head–all sliding brass and warbly chimes, that degraded together into a low drone; a gently distracting attack on the senses, like sunlight one degree too warm.

"What, you spose they've got some guy playin trumpet with his arsehole?"

"Maybe." Calliope would watch anything, once. "I hope they've got something crazy back there like that, sometimes these places are really dull." She wasn't a 'thrill-seeker', she just enjoyed exciting things–sharp turns and sudden plunges, without any real danger of death. But that was the sort of thing she associated with much bigger, louder venues; here under the gloomy grey sky, surrounded by so many dignifiedly peculiar people, the very idea of a roller coaster seemed vulgar. The air in place suggested thrills of an altogether darker caliber: she pictured shrunken heads and ghosts caught on film, salt-encrusted fossils from the time before man's reckoning.

"Do you think there's a petting zoo?" Sophie said, perking up where she stood. "Because like, the coolest part of any county fair, is always the animals, but..." She thoughtfully jangled the thin metal chain that hung from her neck; it sounded like someone trying a fence. "The animals here are probably abused, if there are animals, and I'm not saying that about these people specifically, it's just that, there's really no way to carry animals on the road 24/7 and have it be good for them.

"Unless they're maybe just here from local farms..." She lost herself in thought, following her feet nowhere in specific–which is how she broke off from the others. Not that they had any particular reason to be staying together, since they'd only just met.

"You reckon we'll see that one again?" Asked Lorcan, dispassionately. Nobody answered; he realized he was alone.

"Wait-" He spoke aloud. He had to talk to himself because nobody else was around to make sense of what had just happened. He turned in place, breath quickening: every which-way he looked, the carnival extended in its daunting quietude. He hadn't realized he'd gone so deep–he thought he'd been only just at the edge of things, really only a few footsteps past the first tent. But now he was at the very foot of the Big Top.

"How'd I..." He mentally retraced his course. He'd gone past the woman with the stone eye; he remembered the tall man, and his flaming torches and his horrible smile, and–and there had been a gazebo, with a man stood in it, and the man was doing something with his chest, but Lorcan hadn't been looking, really; he'd been focused on reaching...where, exactly? He was here, but he didn't really know what had called him here. He was just off the midway, in the Big Top vomitorium, where nothing stood but striped canvas and dewy grass. This was a place between places, where nothing wanted his attention; and there was nothing to gain his attention, either. He looked one way and saw a long-winding grassy corridor, where the mist pressed in against strings of faint lights; he looked the other way and saw the same.

"Hey. You there." Another voice spoke up; Lorcan nearly screamed, as he turned around and found himself face-to-face with–of all things–a jester, just six inches away. Not a clown, but a jester, in a purple-checkered motley and a fool's flanged cap, with bells on the tips of his paws. Yes, that was right, paws–for the jester was not even human. Or–he was made up to look like he was inhuman, Lorcan corrected himself. He had a costume like he'd never seen, back home or in the states: silky white fur on the cheeks, an animalistic snout in between, blue shadow tracing the curve of his eyes. He had a baby face, but a deep crackly voice, like oil sizzling on a flatiron.

"Who...?" Asked Lorcan, as if there was anyone else. "Me?"

"Yeah, you. Wanna hear the ass trumpet?"

"...Ye wot?"

The fog was thick over the midway; a funeral pall over a static land, where the lights and music suggested motion but only stillness remained. Remy was entranced of it, for all its high strangeness: he liked it most of all in the spaces between, where the fog redoubled into opacity, and the eyes of the world were finally away from him. He finally had some time to think.

What he thought was that a carnival would be a really excellent place to go looking for a job. It was labor with a very high learning curve, with high demands and accordingly high turnover. It wouldn't pay well and it had no security but it was work that had very few barriers to entry, and even if it only took him for a season that would be better work than he had now. But more than that, that'd be a chance to get away from himself: he didn't have any roots in this town bu he had a couple anchors, and what he'd really love more than anything–what he truly wished deep in his heart–was that he could spend a little while outside of his own life; forget "Remy", local unfortunate with a debt to pay, and make of himself an unremarkable face in the crowd. In the best of all possible worlds he would have been a makeup act somewhere up in the limelight; every one of those shows had always looked terrific and he really dearly envied those people–but he was ten times too shy to be so much as a magician's assistant. He figured he'd find something that looked like a manager's office and ask for a job as a roustabout, or maybe a road agent, or push come shove he'd just carry water for elephants.

And yet.

As much as he'd tempered his ambitions, as low as he was ready to let himself sink, as utterly singular and practical his intentions–something caught his attention as only a sideshow can. It loomed from the darkness: a closed pavilion dressed in velvet and magenta, which ran for a trailer's length ahead of him. The writing on the side was degraded from the wear of many years on the open road: there was an illegible scrawl of purple, smeared by rust and rain; and beneath that, two legible ones.

WAX MUSEUM

He didn't know why a wax museum should especially attract him: he wasn't crazy about Abe Lincoln or Sherlock Holmes. And yet...it called his name. The redwood door, resplendent in the morning dew, promised a humble world unseen–a few minutes at most. Why not?

He climbed the stair to the humble, low-slung chamber; and, stepping inside, realized that the place was much larger than he'd first guessed: from the outside he'd expected something the size of an RV, but the chamber was big enough for forty people–sixty, if they crowded together. Yet all that space was for the observation of a scant few figures: the sculptures were all along one wall, and there were more empty plinths than figures. And, he realized as he silently absorbed the space, there was nobody else in the trailer–the caretaker was elsewhere, or so it appeared.

The spotty fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, blanching the carpet a sickly yellow color; threatening, always, with their pops and sputters, to twist the shadows–only to hold them evermore in that off-putting fake-morning stasis. Yet for all the stillness, he didn't feel alone: the figures were worthy of a much nicer gallery; in that ugly light he could make-believe like they were real people unstuck from history. Marcus Aurelius' cape whorled over his shoulder, frozen triumphant against a bracing wind; Harriet Tubman held her lantern aloft in one hand, furtively drawing her pistol with the other; Allen Quartermain worked the bolt on a rifle, eyes raised to the horizon after a target only he could see. Every waxwork's outfitting was immaculate, every posture a masterpiece of mise en visage, every figure so immediately recognizable as themselves, that for the first few seconds Remy didn't even realize what was wrong about them.

"Hello?" Out on the grass, Sophie was looking for someone–anyone, really, at this point. She twisted the chain around her neck, making nervous little grunts to herself just for to keep the quiet away. She hadn't meant to stay with the others, as such, but it felt a sort of indecent to be alone in a carnival ground, at such a quiet hour. What's worse, she'd gotten turned around: there were no live animals in sight, just a grid of empty game booths–bottle shoots and ring tosses, walls lined in cheap prizes, fog pressing in against them with nary a carnie out to mind them. Seeing them like that felt voyeuristic; and, contrapuntally, as though she were being watched. She'd have welcomed a barker or a siren or any kind of earcatch, to get her out from under from that winding, anxious organ melody. But it was just her and the games and the prizes- a whole leering wall of giant-sized dolls and acrylic balloons and...oversized stuffed animals.

Sophie stopped short; her heart skipped a beat. Hanging there on the prize wall of a ribbon-shrouded game booth was the most perfect thing she'd seen in living memory: a stuffed coyote as big as her torso, with rubidescent dark button-doll eyes and hackeysack paws, smile stitched on in that one-of-a-kind coyote expression: 'Okay, you caught me, and I'll probably do it again, but-' She had to take him home. She absolutely had to. She was rattling her chain like a windstorm just thinking of it; every single thought of the petting zoo was out of her mind in an instant.

"Oooh my gosh hello handsome do you have a name?" She asked her new friend, stepping up to the prize rack. She felt silly talking to him, right up until he didn't say anything back. "Your name is Scratch? Oh, that's a very pretty name, I like that.

"Will you be my friend? I don't have anyone, here in town." Some part of her thought for just a moment that what she ought to do was reach over the counter, snatch him up, and go. But he was such a fine piece of work, it'd be vulgar to just steal him–and besides, he didn't ask for much in return. The game was simple: a test-yer-might, with a mallet and a plate and big brass bell. The hammer was even set out beside the bell–a big heavy wooden mallet, with a cherry-red leather grip. She gasped.

"Oh, if I ring the bell? You'll come home with me if I ring the bell?" She took the mallet in her hand and tested its weight, eyes gleaming like wildfire. "It's a deal!"

Away from all of that, Calliope was straddling the edge of a different world. In a section of tents that tended nearer to black than purple, she had found something to hold her attention: under a pavilion, a tattooed woman was juggling knives. She wore a heavy leather mask in the likeness of a cat's face, and a long tail trailed behind her; and she moved in between throws with the sort of lethal grace that made her look as much like a weapon as the knives she was juggling.

“Wow…" Calli said, hushed in exaltation. The catwoman had inks made for motion: her bare arms bore a beguiling checkerboard design, most like the painted pelts of the noble wild lynx; and as she moved the ink seemed to ripple across her, las if she herself were covered in tiny dancers. She spun the knives up into the air, two or four at a time, and danced beneath like she'd never been cut before: up on her toes, down into a squat, spinning on her heel with one leg out; and always her hands were quicker than gravity, reaching up to pluck the things out of the air a moment before they would split her flesh. It felt wrong to call it a juggling act, same as it would feel wrong to call the Resurrection a magic trick: Calli could've sat there watching her for hours.

Then the cat woman snatched the last knife out of the air, and swaying as though drunk, turned to face Calli–bringing the blade within a hair's breadth of her, so that she gasped and nearly yelped–when she realized she hadn't been cut, she clutched her heart and shrank away, havering her relief.

“O-oh my word–how about you warn a girl, wow!"

“I'll think about it." Purred the cat woman. “But around here, everything really dangerous has a warning sign. It's not me you have to worry about."

"Well..." Calli smiled, tracing the other woman's curvature with her eyes. Attraction crackled between them. She felt her heart skip; it skipped right up onto her tongue and said some things she probably oughtn't have. "Maybe I like it when things are a little dangerous?"

The cat giggled coquettishly–she pinched two knives between her knuckles and swiped at the air. "Mee-ow. You're like a dog for it, aren't you...Well, y'all can hang around, long as you're not afraid of a little catscratch. I know what gets a girl like you wet."

"I asked if you wanted to hear the ass trumpet. That's what you was talkin about." In the mouth of the big top, the bestial jester was nose to nose with Lorcan, who himself was still taking in the full sight of him. It was a phenomenal costume, he had to give credit where it was due: the jester's three white tails fanned out behind him, lolling like candy swirls. He pointed up to his triangular ears, which protruded alongside the jester cap's horns. "I heard it all loud and clear."

"Z'at sposed to make me laugh?" Lorcan couldn't help but sneer–not imperious or cruel, but a real genuine sneer of disgust like he'd smelled rotten eggs. He hated every inch of this creature, a kneejerk kind of offense like when someone shows you their genitals. He was loud, brightly colored, instantly annoying, and smelled faintly of wild animal.

"Well..." The jester frowned, his ears pinning against his head. "Yeah, I guess."

Lorcan pursed his lips and looked away–that was quite enough eye contact for his taste. "S'not very funny."

"Izzat so." The jester's tails stopped wagging–he peeled his lips back in a snarl, revealing a lattice of canine teeth. "Well what would you know about bein funny?"

Lorcan couldn't keep his eyes off the jester's muzzle: it was a work of art, unworthy of its wearer: with rubbery jowls and a gumline so intricately marbled he could almost read the dental history. It made him feel a sort of queer, seeing the togue press up through the fangs, stalking behind them like a predator through the wood.

"A fair bit, I reckon. Long as you don't mind a certain propensity fer...what ye might call gallows humor."

"Gallows humor?" The jester mimed hanging himself–eyes bugged out, tongue lolling over his pointed teeth. "Like this?"

"More like...what do you call 6 grams of sodium thiopental in the prime minister?"

The jester stared at him blankly.

"A good start."

Now the jester frowned. "You call that a joke, funnyman? Who's ever gonna laugh at that?"

"Well nobody was laughing at you either, let's be fair." He had the kind of smug smirk that made most people want to slug him; but the jester was a professional, used to hecklers, who put his hands on his hips and affected a sort of aggrieved bravado.

"Oh yeah? Bet I can make you laugh harder than you ever have before."

"Bet you can't."

"What do you bet me?" The jester's eyes flashed, with a moonish wiliness–like the predator about to pounce. Lorcan was dead certain the man had nothing for him; but he stumbled in the speaking, over a sort of nameless trepidation–feeling in some small part of him that he mimght, some way, regret his words.

"Well–anything you like, I suppose." But he still said them–and the jester, hearing them, grinned a certain hungry way.

"It's a deal."

Remy had just finished his count of the twelve wax figures, and for sure they all had the same queer liberty taken with them: they were all animals, or more nearly animalistic–with snouts and tails and patches of fur, what you might call storybook creatures. Harriet Tubman had black cat ears; Honest Abe had a donkey snout. And the marvel of it was that up-close it made each person seem a little realer than they had been in the mind's eye; the idea he had was that they were borrowing, in some way, from the natural sciences, to become more memorable than humanity.

"Do you like them?" Someone asked, and Remy jumped half a foot in the air. The caretaker had returned unnoticed: now she stood in the doorway, a grim and wispy figure, shrouded from head to toe in grey silk veils, like a body made up for burning. Her voice was just as soft on the ear; she had a timbre made for pillow talk.

"I do. Yeah, a lot." Said Remy, quickly collecting himself. "I think he's my favorite." He nodded to the ferretlike face of Lenin, who fixed the audience with a commanding stare–holding out in one hand, and delineating with the other, an open copy of that seminal volume What is to be Done. He looked at once like a general and a poet and a fire-and-thunder minister, such caliber of man as America had seldom produced.

"The magic is in the little details." The sculptor told him; and he found his eyes drawn to the subtle dog-earing of the volume, the slight flush in his cheek, the untucked left sock–and of course, the ferret tail, which was curled to suggest both a tameless energy, and the curve of a sickle. "I do them all myself."

"So..." Remy looked her up and down. She was about his size, and he guessed she had a similarly svelte figure, but it was all obscured by the cloth; and whatever she was wearing beneath it, which broke the silhouette with odd geometries. He discerned frills around the shoulders, but below that the shroud defined very little. "Are you Mademoiselle Noire?"

"Sometimes." She answered; he could almost hear her grinning underneath the veil. "But so are we all. Who are you?"

"I'm Remy." He said, but she shook her head.

"Not your name. Who are you, in life's design? Hero, villain, victim, bystander?" She glided across the floor, as graceful in stride as she was in speech. Even with her veil she knew precisely where she was going: not towards him, but rather to one of the empty plinths.

What a fine and mightily vexing question. Once, Remy would've had the answer ready to go–before misfortune made his future an inscrutable tangle. The rejection, then the diagnosis, and then the pink slip...giving everything its due thought, he didn't really know where he was going, or what kept him going, except maybe inertia.

"Truthfully", sighed Remy, "I wish I knew. I'm actually looking for work right now."

The madam stepped up onto the wooden dais, and took her place among the statuary–the clunk of two leather boots the only thing attesting for sure that she was a living being with weight and mass. Remy hadn't realized until that moment that he had halfway expected her to start flying around, or vanish into thin air. But she wasn't a ghost or a djinn or anything so dire: she was only a woman wrapped in a shroud.

"Well, I could use an assistant." The madam told Remy–he breathed in sharp, trying not to betray exactly how desperate he was.

"I'm debuting a new character today. I'll wear the costume this afternoon, and move it onto a figure this evening. If you'll help me with that–there's not much to it, really. I just need you to yank away the shroud, to show me off to the audience."

"Yeah..." Remy nodded–that sounded like a couple of hours of easy work, waiting around to yank the cloth off the lady; and, he supposed, getting her dressed up again afterwards for the next audience. "Yeah, I can do that. What sort of hours is that?"

"We close at seven." The woman said. "But there's more time on schedule if you want it."

"Well I'll stay as long as you want me." Remy said, breaking into a grin. It seemed like his worries were over–and though the woman's face was hidden, he was certain she was grinning too.

"It's a deal."

Sophie had the hammer in her hands and a manic fire in her heart; Scratch was calling her name from the merchandise wall. She felt out the mallet's weight and made a few test swings–and once she felt like she had the right of it, she swung it overhand right for the plate. It should've come down in a steady arc–but just as she began the downswing it lurched in her hands, as though yanked by a magnet; the swing came down off-center and crashed into the edge of the impact plate, sliding off and into the dirt. The weight made half a lurch, six inches into the air.

Sophie scrunched up her face and growled at the hammer: her first thought was that there was some kind of trick to it–a weight in the shaft, or in the head, to throw her off. She tested it again–twirled it, tossed it in her palm, tried to catch some feeling for how it might be rigged. But after half a minute she couldn't figure out the trick to it–there wasn't one little tug or twist or in all the movements she made. So far as she could tell it was an ordinary wooden mallet, not even so much as a corked handle; frowning, she chalked it up to a bad hammer swing.

She didn't notice the seam tracing its way down the back of her ears–she felt it, but didn't notice it, mistaking it for a bead of sweat. She did not see the thin white strands which wound their way out of her pores, and blossomed into needlework; her attention was all on Scratch.

She made a second swing, and this time hit the plate dead on; but she was controlling it too much, with her hands too far up the haft, so it only had enough force to send the weight halfway up the pipe–then she took a third swing, with too much power, and went over the rim of the plate and into the dirt; and as she took her fourth, the East Wind raced down over the bigtop and into the midway, blowing her hair around her face. Then her arms were too tired so her fifth swing went cadawampus midair; the hammer fell from her grasp and clanged against the plate. With every swing the stitchwork spread, like cracks in glass, across her neck and down her spine–and never once did she take it for more than an ordinary ache, even as the skin around began to darken into plush.

"You're a little underdressed, puppy." The Catwoman had taken Callie out from under the pavilion, into a place all their own: a purple-striped pup tent, with its flaps opening away from the main path. The inside was cramped and warm, with a stool and some pillows and a rack of masks and a bunch of weird shaped knives–it was half a break tent, half a supply tent.

"Come again?" Callie cocked her head: she was dressed for cold weather, showing nothing below the neck. The Catwoman playfully clicked her tongue, tapping a finger to the tip of her snout–and then to Callie's bare nose. In the rear of the tent, a coterie of animal masks hung from a crude timber stand: brass, leather, mache, fur. Now all of them were staring at her, dark eyes made cavernous in the lamplight.

"You forgot your face, puppy doggy. However am I supposed to take you anywhere when you're practically naked?" Her voice was a deep sussur that came up from the low chest–a purr in the truest sense.

Callie felt the woman's voice in her skull, tickling the inside of her ears; she could've fainted against her broad, muscular chest. The next thing she knew she was running her hands over the mask, picking out one to call her own.

“Can I have any one of these…?" She asked. Each mask was brilliant and unique, by shape or material or coloration. Together they represented a carnival in themselves: here was a white fox with shocks of blue down his ears; here a lavender bat with a rebel-pink shock of hair.

“No." Coquettishly, the Catwoman laid her fingers on Callie's shoulders–pressed her muzzle up against the human's neck, hot breath against her ear. She hitched her fingers into the other woman's jacket and roughly yanked it down to her elbows; Calliope gasped, but made no motion to stop her: though she should've been shuddering in the Autumnal chill, she felt ready to burst into flames.

“Y'all get to take the one what was made for you. The one that's calling your name."

Rationally, none of them could have been made for her. But the very moment the knife-thrower said the words, Calliope's gaze alighted on one in particular–and it compelled her. She laid both her hands on its velvet cheeks and could not take her attention away.

It was a rough canine likeness: angular, with especially pointy ears. The jaw was lined in leather and hung wide open, framing uncannily angled fangs –and behind the teeth, a mouthpiece she couldn't quite make out. The creature's forehead was crowned with a jagged pink scarification: a daggerlike sigil from no language she could name, which unaccountably called to mind the idea of sacrifice. The mask was kinky, macabre, perhaps even gruesome–she'd never go to bed with someone wearing it. But she saw it and it called her name.

“The drowning dog." The Catwoman whispered in Calliope's ear, drumming her pointed nails across her shoulders–the shivers danced all down Callie's back, made her wish she had a tail to wag. “What an exciting choice."

Calliope hung on every word–as sure as she hung on the mesmeric mask itself. When she spoke, her tongue felt heavy in her mouth, like a stranger was using her as a puppet. “What's so exciting about it…?"

"She's in a state of tension." The Catwoman cooed–now Calliope's hands were on the mask, and she was lifting it from the rack. "Hungry for something she cannot have..."

"What...what does she want?" Now she was raising it to her face.

"Put it on and find out." Now she was pressing it against her skin; the mouthpiece pressing in between her lips, hooking under her teeth like a bit. Now she felt it digging into her gums–and growing.

"You wanna couple laughs, mister comedy critic? Well, get a load'a this." In the alley by the big top, the vulpine jester presented Lorcan with a sextet of long balloons–half black, half white, in keeping with his own motley–and threaded them together, huffing and puffing into the ends of each one so that his creation took shape in leaps; until he gave one precipitously deep breath and the whole thing inflated into the distinctive likeness of a jester's cap. It was a cheap trick, that any party clown could do, and it wasn't very funny: Lorcan crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow, letting his face do all the talking.

"Oh, no no no, this just the start. See, here's the funny part." Then the clown danced the balloon-hat out to the edge of his fingers, and quick as a whip slapped it on top of Lorcan's head. It tickled staticky against his scalp but that wasn't really funny either. But then the jester pointed to the full-length funny mirror stood up alongside the big top, and looking into it Lorcan saw himself as he was: a grim, winter-dressed figure, with a physician's dead, haunted, eyes. He would concede that, in the most abstract and intellectual sense, the juxtaposition of a man like him wearing a hat like that was academically 'funny'.

"Hee hee." He deadpanned. "Hoo hoo." The fox grinned wider, and Lorcan, looking over at him, felt...something rising in his chest. A sort of energy that threatened to become a chuckle; he supposed at first just the social pressure to laugh, even at something as sad as this shite–but it was something more visceral than that; maybe just the sadness itself, doubling back again. Or maybe something altogether different, and dire. The jester's eyes flashed.

"What's so funn-fnrrk." An explosive wind tore up Lorcan's esophagus and came out of him as an ugly snort. His barb died in his mouth; his heart skipped. The sound had passed through his vocal chords, out of his mouth, and was uncannily like his voice; but that had not been his laughter. It had come up from deep inside him autonomically, no more mirthful than a hiccup. "...Fox was that?"

"What'd you say?" Chortled the jester, whose voice had heightened to a cruel, mocking tone; and when Lorcan tried to speak, a peal of rough, misshapen laughter escaped him–coughs that sounded like chuckling. Eyes watering, he grabbed the hat by its tips and yanked–a jag of blistering red pain ripped down his scalp. The hat was stuck to him–

"What–haha–did you hoo hoo hoo do to me hehehe-"

"Nothing more than what you asked for." The Jester crooned; Lorcan threw a punch at him, which he easily evaded. "Something to make you laugh. I win. And what I get in return, is 'anything I'd like'..."

The second punch met skin–the jester plucked it out of the air in his open palm, threading his fingers with Lorcan's; and the young pharmacist could only watch, transfixed, as his hands begin to darken with a steady growth of fur.

"So you're joining the show~!"

"I'm part of the act..." Remy muttered again–a mantra for the moment. He was marching up and down the length of the trailer, except for when he pressed his face up against the glass looking for a customer. And always he was reminding himself that he was part of the act, and had better look part of the act; though in truth he felt scrawny, scruffy, manifestly unfit to walk among the wax figures, much less present them. He'd have liked some kind of dress blue or a coat or at least a smart looking sweater but he was just his same old raggedy self–an ordinary man from Dirt, Nowhere. But he supposed that was the magic of a carnival, that even an unremarkable schlub could be rubbing shoulders with Napoleon Bunny-parte. Which, he abruptly realized, he literally was.

He didn't remember getting up on the plinth. But he was standing on the hardwood dais in between Napoleon and Barkus Aurelius. He wondered briefly how he'd–but it wasn't really important. What was important was getting bodies in the trailer and so far there wasn't even a body in the midway. He stepped out onto the grass and cupped his ears, hoping for any snatch of conversation or children's laughter or anything but that infernal organ.

Someone was laughing, at least–one lonely voice near the big top was in a proper manic cackle. And further down the midway he heard the telltale DOONG of someone testing their strength. So he supposed that the people must be here, whever they were; and all he had to do was wait. Even if, in the waiting, he grew ever more uncomfortable with his position.

When he reentered the trailer the tips of his ears brushed against the doorframe. Startled, he ducked–thinking, for one flash of an instant, in the irrational confabulatory way of the ambiently fearful, that someone had been clinging to the ceiling waiting to attack him. Of course, no such thing had happened; it was absurd on its face, really laughable. He supposed he had to admit that some part of him was spooked; maybe it was being with all these lifelike figurines, without any warm bodies, or maybe something was wrong about...his ears! His ears were wrong! Gasping, he clapped his hands to his head, and felt–

Two perfectly round ordinary human ears, as most men have, which did not have tips and were manifestly capable of grazing the doorframe. His heart skipped that beat for nothing, and he felt like a right fool for it. He knew what it was: he'd imagined he had pointy ears like the animal-people in the museum, which he supposed was a testament to their craftsmanship; but more than anything it meant he needed another cup of coffee.

"Hey, Miss Noire? It's–it's still pretty quiet, so I'm going to nip back down to the diner and get another cuppa joe, alright? I'll be back in five minutes."

Mademoiselle Noire said nothing: she remained statuesque under her shroud–which, he supposed, in the rough and unmannerly language of carnival folk, meant 'fine; she did not object'. He ducked out under the doorframe and into the misty morning, realizing only once he'd set foot on the soil again just how much the trailer had really given him the creeps. He'd have to get used to it, his fortunes being what they were; but he'd take better work as soon as it came along.

And he must have been lost in that line of thinking, because when he looked up after some half a minutes' walk he realized he'd gotten completely turned around: he didn't know which way lead back to the diner, or indeed back to the museum: all he could measure for sure was his proximity to the big top.

"Well, where'd I..." He turned a circle. The place had a winding, irregular setup, where the tents cut into the walkways at odd angles; so that you never walked in a straight line for longer than a hundred feet, and anywhere you stood you saw a junction or a tent that looked a lot like one you'd seen already–he stood in front of an empty yellow duckshoot booth, walked eighty feet, turned left, and saw another empty yellow duckshoot booth. The place was setup to make you go mad.

But he was closer now to the big top than he'd ever been before: he looked up its length and couldn't see the spire. Here the organ was louder than it had ever been, its high haunting tones so real that now he felt each one in his bones. It was a hungry, thalassic sound, that lensed every moment through an undertow of reverence for the carnival. In his sleepy imagination, the big top seemed as a fae cathedral risen from the deep–and felt that to be near it was to be touched by the magic of carnival, changed forever in some lesser or greater way. He didn't hear Lorcan until he was almost on top of him.

He came stumbling out from between a gap in two attractions, with the crazy gait of a manic drunk, and nearly crashed into Remy; he threw his hands onto Remy's shoulders -

"He-he-he-help~!" He cackled, eyes twinkling, face twisted into a wide open-mouthed grin; his lips were startlingly red, twin rails of cherry cut across his pale face. "Help me!"

Remy twisted away from him, crying out in surprise, and then in confusion. Lorcan was dressed like a jester now, for some reason–or maybe a bit more like a doctor. He wore plain green scrubs with a checker-motley coat, and a yoyo-stethoscope around his neck. For a tense moment the two locked yes–scratching the base of his neck, Remy ventured:

"Do you...work here?"

He clutched the lapel of his motley coat and held it up in his fists, cackling his only answer. "Look what they're dooo-hoo-hoo-hee-hiing to me-hee-heeee!"

Remy looked him up and down–no bruises, no open wounds, barely any color on him except for the flush in his cheeks and his scraggly orange hair. "They...got you wearin a silly outfit?"

"Is that your idea of a joke?!" Rage flashed in Lorcan's eyes; he parted his lips in a snarl, and a row of jagged canine teeth.

"What's your problem, man?" Remy stepped back, elbows up, ready for Lorcan to swing on him. "You're the one dressed like like a–a bicycle deck got a medical license!"

Instead the jester doubled over laughing, clutching his burning belly, tears of mirth welling in his eyes, shoulders shaking till they were sore. There wasn't one whit of reason to it; no jokes, no card tricks, no funny balloon shapes. As the moments went on, his senseless high laughter the only sound, Remy became more and more disgusted–the act sucked, and for his money the costume was dumb. He made to leave.

"Ple-he-heeease!" Lorcan wailed, falling knees-first into the dewy grass, his entire frame convulsing with spasms of wild laughter. His heart was ablaze with an impotent fury, a desperate wish to cry out for help, to rip off the outfit that had become enshrined on his flesh, but all he could do was gekker, even while the burning-hot pain encircled his tailbone. "I can feel the tai...aah...aahahaha~!"

And at that moment, finally, a flourish: a plume of color erupted from the seat of his pants, a flamboyant red scarf cut in the image of a fox's tail: a half decent magic trick. Or maybe–Remy realized as it began wagging back and forth–it was a pretty decent magic trick. Or actually–Remy realized as Lorcan lifted his mangy half-furred face and flashed his wide canine teeth, unthinking bloodlust abundant in his feral yellow eyes–something was horribly wrong.

He ran. He heard Lorcan stumbling to his feet behind him and didn't look back. Snarling, barking, an inhuman cackling laugh that rose to compete with the organ; heavy mucky footsteps, bells ringing in the offbeat. He'd gone biting mad. Remy was a buck-ten soaking wet; he'd go down in one punch but he could kite like Ben Franklin. He flew across the damp earth, while behind him Lorcan struggled to keep his jingling clodhoppers out of the muck.

"Get back he-hee-hEEE-HEEEE!" And Lorcan could only laugh, even though his feet were burning and his face felt like a punching bag. When he reached his thickening fingers up to his face, and felt the place where his whiskers were coming in, he went dead quiet. He finally got the joke.

Now Remy was away from the mad jester and away from the Big Top–though not even he could escape its distended Westerly shadow. He slowed to a walk, caught his breath, tried to make sense of what all he'd just seen. Lorcan had been with him in the diner, so why was he working here now with that crummy evil-clown gimmick? There had been such genuine hatred in his eyes; and something about his pleading had seemed so desperate, so fervent, that he wondered if–no, it didn't matter. Lorcan's story was his own; he just wanted his coffee. The whole thing was a bad circus act, _s_he told himself. He just had to keep going.

He made his way methodically forward: going away from the Big Top, in one direction, he knew he would sooner or later make his way back to town; though the tents were set up to funnel him radially, urge him back towards the center more readily than they would let him away from it. He could imagine, very easily, that it was the digestive tract of some tremendous creature, passing him like cud between its chambered stomachs.

He came to the midway; where, for a change, the road was long and open and brightly lit. It was game booths and prize booths in alternating order, spanned by gaudy cloth pennants and sizzling tesla bulbs.

From down the range, he heard a thud, a clang–a heavy hammer falling on something and scraping away from it. Remy's first thought was that something had fallen, all the more when he heard the strangled squeak of frustration that followed. Picturing someone trapped bodily under a crate of something heavy, he softly called out; and nearing the pavilion from which the sound issued, he beheld a scene as bizarre as the one he had fled.

Sophie was in the tent, but she was not as Remy had known her: she had diminished, hideously, into a thing crawled out of nightmare–at the sight of her he screamed and recoiled, but he could not tear his eyes away. She had lost a foot and a half of height, and he could only guess how much weight; but not from all of her limbs at equal clip: she was balanced precariously on one leg, with the other one so shrunken-down it hung off of her vestigially, the shoes and ants leg both slipped right off; and on it the better part of her muscles had dithered away, so now the individual strands traced ropy lines beneath the plush skin. Its definition had faded, its articulation as well: there was a thigh, an ankle, and a sackcloth nub-foot with painted-on toes–all of which ran together in one tubular mass, traced on both sides by a crisscross of white stitches.

"Oh my God..." Remy gasped, clasping his hands to his throat. She gave him no mind, even as he drew closer. She was in the throes of a wild mania, her eyes alive with a covetous fire: she only cared for the prize wall, and the tacky plush coyote that hung on the hook. But one of her hands had gone small and plush as well, and she could no longer heft the mallet: she tugged uselessly at it with her remaining flesh-and-blood hand.

"Oh my God...!"

And if she had any thought in her head but monomaniacal fixation she would have to keep it to herself: Her mouth was stitched shut, expression fixed in a nebbish grin: one that said 'Okay, you caught me, and I'll probably do it again, but-'

He wanted to reach out and touch her, to see if there was anything sensible left in her; fear held him still as a statue, hands clasped on his collar bones. His heart was pounding so hard it pulsed it in his toes and the back of his scalp, white blades of cold terror.

Sophie gave up on the hammer. She flung herself forward onto the test-your-might, her meat-and-bone hand clashing against the tin scale with a dull thung that barely moved the weight. It didn't hurt, because now most of that limb was cotton. Then her good leg gave out underneath her and she fell sideways into the grass, wiggling two useless stubby ever-more-cottony limbs. She would have giggled if she had a voice, still, because it felt just like walking on air: and even if she couldn't heft the hammer anymore, she knew she just had to keep trying–she had to bring Scratch home with her, she just had to! The grumpy twoleg kept yapping at her about something that didn't matter; she pinwheeled her hand down onto the plate, and her cottony tail FLOOFED into existence behind her. It was getting harder to move, but she kept grinning–all she needed was one good swing, one good swing...

Helpless, horrified, Remy watched Sophie pour her remaining humanity out onto the test-your-might. Her every motion was weaker than the last and he could only watch, wracked with a terror so great he felt like his head might pop–there was no mistaking this for a circus act. Now she was statue-stiff, two human eyes peering out of a plush coyote doll. He could only bear witness as the eyes turned black and thickened, like frying eggs, into stiff round buttons; and then Sophie was nothing but a cheap plush coyote lying on the ground.

He wanted with all his heart to reach down and grab the doll, try to reverse this course–but then the hooks began to stir. A horrible sound like grinding rubber filled the air, as the hooks on the wall stretched out towards her like fingers–and Remy ran for his life.

"Help!" He cried. "Help, somebody!" But his voice was swallowed up whole by the pipe organ's ever-present trill, every note mocking his struggle. He ran from the midway, eyes lingering just a moment on every prize wall and every game, for the slightest thing stretched out of place, and when he leapt from that place into the sprawling canvas labyrinth of the carnival in-between it was almost a relief. He knew something was wrong now–with this whole place, Mademoiselle Noire be damned. Forget the coffee, forget the paycheck; he was going to get into town and call–someone, with a cross or a gun or a legion of zealous men.

But presently he found himself in a strange wing of the carnival, where the tents tended nearer black than purple, and the organ seemed by some trick of acoustics more shrill and remote than it ever had before–and there were people, real people, who had flesh and blood and no stitches to be seen; but he didn't trust any of them for one tenth of a second because they worked here, they were in league with the things. He ran past them, giving each one only one leery glance and receiving each one in kind. He didn't trust the old woman with the glass eye, or the tall tattooed man, and he for sure didn't trust the woman in the cat mask wearing the belt of knives–

But he recognized Calliope's voice, coming out of the Drowning Dog.

The Drowning Dog was a woman held inside a dunk tank; she wore a black coyote mask, and a thick, many-belted straitjacket. Beneath that she was naked, pale white legs open to the Autumn cold, and the freezing water below. She was tattooed from hip to toe with twining flower vines, which fit right in with the carnival people; nobody else would realize what had happened to her. The tank was glass all the way around except for the base and a cool ten foot tall, six foot full up with water; and Calliope sat but eight inches above it, trembling with fear, as the knife-throwing catwoman twirled a blade down her knuckles.

"Ladies and gentlemen -" The Catwoman began, tossing the knife into the air; she caught it between her fingers and pointed it at Remy. "-mostly you...behold: the debut of our delightful new act."

The Drowning Dog couldn't form any words; her mouth was forced open by her muzzle. Or it had been, before the leather had grown into her gums. She could only whine and yelp, her voice leaping over the glass walls in distorted unintelligible squeals. Remy looked between the Catwoman and the Dog, and all he could imagine was the bite of knives into his skin.

"A puppy in peril, an escape artist act like no other. Can the Drowning Dog escape her straitjacket and get back up for air?

"No." She turned and whipped a heavy-bladed knife across the space into the dunk tank plunger, and with a heavy splash the Drowning Dog's stool gave way and she fell, bound, into the icy water.

Calliope felt the water as a rack of icy knives, cutting into her naked flesh; cold enough to sting but not to stun–she felt the individual flows in keen relief, rushing through her toes and between her cheeks, swirling in her belly button and pinching her breasts in its talons. She kicked her feet wildly, trying for a few frenzied seconds to get on her back and float all while the water frothed white around her but the canvas jacket grew heavier and heavier with every moment and soon it was a leaden weight around her and now she was sinking helplessly under the water and she tried to close her mouth or hold her breath but the muzzle held her mouth open and she took on water that rushed cold past her teeth and she tried to drink it and then to hold her throat shut and the water rushed in through her nostrils and began to force its way down her throat but she touched the tank bottom she kicked off and breached the waves, gasping desperately for air, aspirating fire in her lungs while Remy was beating helplessly against the glass and her head was swimming she saw stars winking out in front of her felt a raking cold all inside her chest and–

The box shuddered and groaned as a winch in the ceiling spun to life; and a length of thick cord, hitherto lost among the Drowning Dog's desperate attempts to stay alive, wound taut around it: it lifted her shuddering, coughing body up out of the frothy water, and as she hung in the air like so much meat she dizzily tried to plead for help but all that came out was a scratchy wet yawrp. Her voice was all twisted up, by more than just a muzzle: the water ran out of her jacket fibers in an intricately patterned delta like the afterbirth that clings to newborn pups; and where it ran, her skin deepened into sandy earthtones, and her hair quickened into strands of fur. Her body was changing, in the same perverse way as the others.

"Let–" Remy's voice cracked, under simple weight of horror; he cleared his throat. "Let her go!"

"Let it go where, little puppet?" The Catwoman purred, her tail twisting spirals behind her. "The Drowning Dog lives here. It's all an act, don't be scared. Isn't that right, puppy?"

The Drowning Dog squealed unintelligibly, writhing uselessly as the dunking board beneath it creaked into motion–its clockwork mechanisms thudded tunk-tunk-tunk inside their housing, pulling it creaked back into position by intervals of degrees, making theater of its slow re-erection. The whole ordeal of the dog's near-drowning was set to begin again, in less than two minutes.

"That's–why are you doing this?!" Remy wailed, tugging uselessly on the plunger, the only exposed part of the machine, in the hope he could yank it out of alignment. The knife-thrower watched him with amused disinterested. It was riveted steel; a pitbull couldn't have gotten the plunger out of line, much less a scrawny little man.

"Why does grass grow?" She crooned, voice dripping sultry like hot butter. She had no fear of Remy and delighted in letting him know it. "I got nothin else to do."

"Please...!" Abandoning the plunger and the half-wound diving board, he threw himself on his knees, sank in the mud, nakedly pleading, clasping his hands as a parishioner before the altar. "What do you want?"

And she said nothing–but rather, as the diving board clicked into the erect position, and the last of the water cleared from the Drowning Dog's lung, she again fingered her broad-headed knife. Tears welled in Remy's eyes.

"You don't have to -"

"Do not!" The Catwoman snapped, whipping the knife with deadly aim into the dirt right between his knees; it buried itself halfway in the muck and he screamed, falling backwards over himself, twisting one ankle and overextending the other leg. She surged down upon him, planting one three-toed paw in the grass by his head, and cinched the tip of a knife against his throat–she traced a circle above his collar bones, glaring not so much at him as through him.

"None of this will ever be my choice. Don't you dare." This close up, Remy could see through her eyeholes, to the flesh beyond–he saw staples on her brow.

Then she ripped the heavy knife from the earth and leapt back from him–with felenid grace, resuming her place in the pavilion, she hurled the knife in one smooth motion, and buried it in the wooden plunger head.

The Drowning Dog screamed as it sank into the water for a second time, the cold water meeting it like a cruel lover. It happened again just as before: the brief struggle, the sink, the inevitable aspiration and dizziness and rescue from the very edge of death: and though it knew what was to come it fought just as hard against the end, and cried just as loud. When the winch pulled its coughing cold form up again, there was a feeling of climactic release or a moment it thought it had soiled itself, until it felt its tail beginning to wag.

"I'll..." Remi looked at the knife buried in the plunger, and at the Amazonian woman going to retrieve them, who was armed and dangerous and had already taken his life in her hands–and he knew he had to run. "I'll get help!"

The Drowning Dog's pleading eyes and wet, scratchy yelps followed Remy to the end of the walk–then he turned a corner and he was alone with the organ, and the maddening quest for the exit. He tried not to imagine it going in a third time, a fourth; tried not to picture the way its body would become more and more helpless with every dunk, shedding itshumanity by the gallon, until it truly was nothing but an animal being tortured.

It turned his stomach–this place was profoundly diseased, a set of mocking horrors disguised as bacchanalia. It was a changeling-place, a mimic.

The sun was really up there now, the mist almost faded to nothing. He knew that soon there would be more people, people who could help; he knew that by now, on a weekend, he should have been hearing children's laughter and the steady whine of motors outside.

With slow horror it dawned on him that–if this was a mimic place, a fae place, a predator-place...it may have already be too late for him. It may have been too late for quite some time. Didn't these corridors curl around themselves in achingly familiar ways? Hadn't the front gate been shiny, pearly white...?

Remy's legs felt like springs, his thoughts a persistently buzzing discomfort. How many signs had there been that he hadn't noticed? How many odd things had happened and he had thought–it didn't matter. If he couldn't get to an exit he could at least get to a phone, and he knew for sure that the wax museum had that.

He hoped, in some sick way, if only for the Euclid's sake, that it would be as hard to find the wax museum as it had been to find the exit. But it wasn't–in fact, it was very easy to find, without even retracing his steps. Just by following the colors of the tents he found his way out of that dark quarter and to the trailer caravanserie–where the wax museum remained, unassuming and humble, just as he left it. It didn't take him five minutes: the place was jocular, as well as cruel.

He ascended the stairs and nervously inched open the front door, halfway expecting to see the animal people come to life and coming at him with axes and hammers. But the place remained just as it had: unnervingly fine art, but just art–except for Mademoiselle Noire herself, who continued her patient vigil under the sheet, eerily still in anticipation of her first customer. Remy was sure he'd seen a phone hung up on the wall–he hurriedly past Napoleon Bunnyparte and Barkus Aurelius and Lady Goatdiva and Lorcan the Fox Jester who grabbed Remy by the wrist and throat and twisted his arm behind his back while Remy screamed and struggled uselessly. Lorcan cackled wildly in his ear and hopped up and down, his body twisting round in a display of cartoonish ecstasy wholly at odds with hatred burning in his eyes.

"Caught you, caught you, wee silly thing!"

"Let me go -!" Remy threw a useless elbow which Lorcan caught in his fat black fox paw.

"Relax, relax! I won't hurt ye; I took the hypocritical oath." Remy frowned, realizing that was supposed to be a joke. The jester took a deep breath and, holding his overssized stethoscope up to his nose, drolly deadpanned: "Honk honk."

"I liked your old act better."

"Can it." Growled the jester; who, still holding him at disadvantage, shoved him forward. They struggled for but a moment, muscle against muscle, before Remy realized he was already overpowered–Lorcan had him in a vice. He'd have to wait for his moment to run and take it as soon as he could. In grim silence, Lorcan marched him across the length of the trailer, until they stood before Mademoiselle Noire's shrouded form. She was grim and grey and still as death.

There beneath the buzzing light, with Lorcan's breath in his ear, Remy beheld the madame with new fear and reverence. The air around her seemed terribly quiet. Her figure seemed subtly wrong.

"So, mister tour guide." Lorcan murmured, voice like a sawblade waiting for the bite. "Aren't you meant to be showing me what's under that shroud?"

Remy's throat went dry. It was too bright, it was too quiet, the world was wrong and his heart skipped in fear. It was like spitting up thumbtacks just to whisper: "I don't want to."

"You don't want to?" Lorcan mockingly repeated. "Isn't that meant to be your whole job round here?" His voice hung in the air too long, the sounds angled in queer patchy ways like something was shearing the edges off the sound. Remy tried to twist away but the jester tightened his grip and pressed his wrist back up into the small of his back so hard he cried out.

"Y'see, I don't want to be wearing this stupid fucking outfit for the rest of my life...but that's the thing about jobs." With every word from his mouth, Noire's silence seemed louder, her stillness more intense: the struggling men passed within a finger's breadth of her but she did not move. And the silence grew around her, until it was a third presence in the space between them, lopping off the round edges of Lorcan's words so that he sounded many yards away. The Mademoiselle was a sucking, monolithic presence, gnawing on sound and motion; and drawing near, Remy felt in his soul that her plinth was an altar to which he was being lead in offering. He dug his heels against the carpet, threw his whole weight in one direction, terror welling in his spine. All for naught.

"That's enough." Snarled the jester, hooking his elbow around the crook of Remy's neck–his muscles pressed against the carotid arteries, the heartflow straight to the brain. "Do yer job or I'll wring yer little chicken neck."

Now Remy's scalp was on fire, his lungs full of lakewater, stomach pitching and threatening to flip. Body shaking with a terror deeper than words his only thought was to keep his arm pinned at his side, that he mustn't reach for the veil–but then a fel force took him, like a leash around the wrist; he could only watch, uncomprehending, as his free hand rose, from his side; and, shaking like the last leaf on a branch, reached for the shroud. He didn't know why he was doing it–he was a passenger in his own body, helpless as his fingers tightened around Noire's veil–and all at once, ripped it away.

"What...?" He curled his face in confusion. The shroud fell onto the carpet.

There was no Mademoiselle Noire beneath the shroud, nor some waxwork hitherto unseen: but a blank powder-white mannequin, like you'd see in a department store. The costumery was just as ornate as any of the others', ever bit as evocative: the regal black mourning-gown and the unicorn horn scepter, it could only be Queen Victoria. But the figure beneath was bare, unworthy of enshrinement beside the others–at least, while it was naked.

Remy's arm stopped shaking–it did not go limp, but rather held itself ordinarily; and then, under a will not his own, bent back at the elbow. Fear sweat poured off of him in rivers now. He writhed, impotently, in the giggling jester's grasp; useless in his own body as the demon arm's fingers extended, and pressed against the base of his neck. They traced a path between his collar bones caressing him like a lover.

"Please-" He whimpered, and the hand-that-had-been-his reached up one finger to shush him. He felt his jaw clamp shut, his screams all walled up in his head; now he watched as the hands began to tug at his neck skin–felt, but could not see, as they could purchase on a thin waxy membrane, that was pressed against the skin. The thumb hooked under the membrane and began to peel–and immediately his eye begin to spasm, the edge of his mouth going slack, as that whole half of his face went numb; except for at the very edges of the peel, where he felt something deeper than numbness: a sense of delineation like the bounds of his own body, the knowledge that this is where he ended.

"Oh God..."

"If it makes you feel any better", Lorcan crooned–now the peel was coming up over around the base of his neck, up across his jaw, and he felt the slackness slough out into a looseness like his face was just an old bag. "...Actually, I've got nothin fer this. Honk honk."

Twisting snout into an impish grin, he released his hold. Remy couldn't run.

He couldn't do anything, now: the tear was wrapped all athe way around his neck, an icy length where he simply stopped: he was nothing more than the face stretched over the skull and soon he wouldn't even be that: he was the membrane being peeled away, by the thing wearing his skin: it was coming up over his chin now; a longer, more powerful one emerging from beneath–he yelped one last terrified squeal that was strangled halfway to its apex, as the peel came up over his mouth, and a set of full, dark lips peered out from beneath his mouth. He was nothing more than eyes and memories now, inches from oblivion; he could only frantically look around with his increasingly lazy eyeballs. He felt the tongue that had been his perk up and lick a row of sharp vampire teeth. And then a voice, alluringly deep and husky, hauntingly almost familiar, came out of the mouth.

"The eyes are the window to the soul."

Then she peeled him up past her forehead and

Remy woke with a gasp, covered in nightmare-sweat; his hands flew up to his neck and he tried to clamp the membrane down flush only to find that his skin was as he remembered it–taut over thin wiry bones. Shock of all shocks: waiting for a customer to come by, he'd nodded off in a folding chair.

"Last time I ever fall asleep in a wax museum...!" Looking up, he saw the rich phantasmagoria of the furry waxmen, as splendid now as they had been before: there was Barkus Aurelius, there was Lady Goatdiva, there was Lorcan the fox Jester–not a monster lying in weight, just a frightful figurine, that in his dream had been crossed up from the doctor he'd briefly encountered back in the diner. And there, where in his dreams had been the shrouded Mademoiselle, there was the vixen Queen Vicky; he supposed that at some point Noire must have gotten tired of modeling the outfit and accepted the slow walk of customers, but then where had she gone? He studied the model she'd left in her place; her eyes were so terribly familiar, like–oh, it didn't matter. He rolled his knuckles and slapped as cheeks, as thankful as he'd ever been to be awake again.

From outside, noise: not tortured laughter, but real person noise: a couple chatting back and forth. He leapt up and stepped out onto the front stoop like Scrooge on Christmas morning, gripping the railing and leaning out to see them sooner as they came.

"That drowning dog is just ghastly, why would anyone ever look at that?"

"Well it was just a prop–they wouldn't ever do that to a living thing."

And the mention of the Drowning Dog stirred something in Remy's memory–he'd dreamed of the Drowning Dog, and that it had been that woman Calliope; had he seen the way to the museum and only registered it subconsciously? That was the only rational answer. But there was...the patently ridiculous idea...he hammered it down: he had money to make.

"Hey, you two!" He called, waving them down as they passed–and he was just so glad to be alive, and be himself, that he really put some pepper on the sales pitch. "Wanna see some historical icons in the flesh?"

They were two ordinary ever-blinkered elderly Americans–the sort visually frustrated with a world that is determined to leave them behind. They saw a smart-looking twentysomething advertising the world of yesteryear and they may as well have been seeing sunshine for the first time; though by now it was in fact just before noon. The two of them happily sat through Remy's improvised on-the-spot show; he had a tall tale for everyone. When the couple were gone after some ten minutes' exaggerated prattling, he quickly whipped out a notebook and scribbled down–REMY: Good with old people. Why had he done that? It didn't matter. He folded up the notebook and went back to the front door: he heard new marks coming in.

Away from him on the midway, two coyotes hung from a prize wall, both cheaply made and alike in shape, with a stitchwork and threadcount most like old socks; but one, presumed by most passers-by to be the "Girl coyote", had a flower tucked behind her ear, and wore a simple metal chain on her neck.

In the dark quarter of the carnival, the drowning dog took plunge after plunge. It fought too often and too hard to be a real person, everyone agreed: the act played out the same way every time, as it kicked its paws and whined and finally sank under its own weight. If it was a real person, wouldn't it ask for help? All it did was bark and yap. And no real animal was shaped quite like that; how would they have gotten a real coyote in a straitjacket? Wouldn't a real person give up, eventually? It didn't make sense to think it was anything other than a masterpiece-puppet; and besides...it was supposed to look, really. Someone would do something, if it was real.

In the darkness of the Big Top, where the thing showed its true shape, under the eyes of the Other Audience, Lorcan ran his tongue across his wide-stretched lips for the umpteenth time, sobs choking out of him that sounded like giggles.

During the daytime, while was the Earthly Delights was lying in wait, he was bound up in the womblike darkness. Like a toy in a box with nothing left to do but gekker.

But soon the night would come.