Then the painted red curtain came down, and the crowd began to disperse, talking excitedly and repeating favorite lines to one another.
“Did you enjoy it?” Malingo asked Candy.
“In a weird way, yes. It’s nice to hear that laughter. It—”
She stopped for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” said Malingo.
“I thought I heard somebody calling out my name.”
“Here? No, I—”
“There! Somebody is calling my name.” She looked over the crowd, puzzled.
“Maybe one of the actors,” Malingo said. Looking back toward the stage. “Perhaps you were recognized?”
“No. It wasn’t one of the actors,” Candy replied.
“Who then?”
“Him.”
She pointed across the rows of benches toward a solitary figure who was standing close to the flap of the tent. The man was instantly recognizable, even though they were just catching glimpses of him through the departing crowd. The colorless skin, the deep-set eyes, the designs on his cheeks. There was no mistaking him.
It was Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man.
Chapter 9
Again, the Criss-Cross Man
“HOW DID YOU FIND us?” Candy asked.
Otto Houlihan smiled that joyless smile of his. “I followed the trail of stinking smatterlings,” he said. “It wasn’t hard to figure out where you’d gone. You’re not all that clever, whatever you might think.”
“But how—”
“—did I know you were making a getaway on a little fishing boat?”
“Kud told him,” Malingo said.
“Good guess, geshrat,” Otto replied. He didn’t look at Malingo. He concentrated his chilly gaze on Candy. “My, but you’ve become so much more famous since last we met.” He glanced toward the stage. “Apparently your life is now the stuff of bad comedy. Imagine that.”
“Why don’t you give up the chase?” Candy replied. “We’re never going to let you take us. You know that.”
“If I had my way,” Houlihan replied, raising his hands as he started to approach her, “you would be buried right here. But Carrion wants you alive. And so alive I must take you.”
If any of the departing audience had heard this, they decided to ignore it. Now everyone had departed. The Criss-Cross Man didn’t bother to look around at the empty auditorium. He had all his attention focused on Candy.
“Run . . .” Malingo murmured to her.
Candy shook her head and stood her ground. She wasn’t going to let Houlihan think that she was afraid. She refused to give him the satisfaction.
“Please, lady,” Malingo said. “Don’t let him—”
“Ah!” said a ripe, rounded voice from the direction of the stage. “Fans!”
With a little growl of frustration, Houlihan dropped his hands, still a stride or two away from Candy. The man who had just played Jaspar Codswoddle had appeared from backstage. He was nowhere near as fat or as tall as the character he had just portrayed. The illusion had been created with a false stomach, a false bottom and leg extensions, some of which he was still wearing. In fact he was a diminutive man, and beneath his makeup—most of which he’d wiped off—he was bright green. The robes he’d thrown on offstage were more theatrical than anything he’d worn during the play. Behind him came his entourage of two: a highly muscled woman in a florid dress and what looked like a five-foot ape in a coat and carpet slippers.
“Who wants an autograph then?” the little green actor said. “I’m Legitimate Eddie, in case you didn’t recognize me. I know, I know, it was an uncanny transformation! Oh, and this young lady behind me is Betty Thunder.” The woman curtsied inelegantly. “Perhaps you’d like an autograph from Betty? Or from my playwright, Clyde?” The ape also bowed deeply. Candy glanced around at Houlihan. He had retreated a step or two. Obviously he didn’t like the idea of doing anything violent in front of these three witnesses. Especially when one of them—Betty Thunder—looked as though she could break his nose with one punch.
“I’d love an autograph,” Candy said. “You were wonderful.”
“You thought so?” Legitimate Eddie replied. “Won-derful?”
“Really.”
“You’re too kind,” he protested with a sly smile of satisfaction. “One does one’s best.” He quickly produced a pen from behind the rolls of his stomach fat.
“You have something for me to sign?” he said.
Candy pulled up the sleeve of her jacket. “Here!” she said, proffering her bare forearm.
“Are you sure?”
“I won’t ever wash it off!” Candy said. She caught Malingo’s eye as she spoke, and with a couple of darting looks to left and right, instructed him to look for a quick exit.
“What shall I write?” Eddie wanted to know.
“Let me see,” Candy said. “How about: To the real Qwandy Tootinfruit.”
“That’s what you want? Well, all right. To the real . . .” He had barely written two words when the significance of what he’d been asked to write struck him. He very slowly raised his head to look at Candy. “It can’t be,” he breathed softly.
Candy smiled. “It is,” she said.
From the corner of her eye, she could see Houlihan was now approaching again. He seemed to have realized something was wrong. At lightning speed, Candy snatched the pen out of the actor’s hand and then swung around behind him, putting her shoulder against his back and shoving him toward the Criss-Cross Man. The padding made him unstable. He stumbled forward and fell against Houlihan, who also lost his balance. Both men fell to the ground, with Legitimate Eddie on top.
Houlihan roared and raged—“Get off me, you fool! Let me up!”—but by the time he had got himself out from under Eddie, Malingo had already led Candy to a gap in the wall of the tent.
“You’re not going to escape me, Quackenbush!” Houlihan yelled as Candy slipped away.
“Which way?” Malingo said when they got outside.
“Where are the most people?” He pointed off to their left. “Then let’s go!” she said.
As they made their way toward the crowd, she heard Houlihan’s voice behind her and glanced over her shoulder to see him appearing from the tent, a look of insane fury on his face.
“You’re mine, girl!” he yelled. “I’ve got you this time.”
Though there were only about six strides between the pursuer and pursued, it was enough to give Candy and Malingo a head start. They plunged into the throng and were quickly hidden by the parade of people and animals.
“We should split up!” Candy said to Malingo as they took refuge behind a line of booths.
“Why?” said Malingo. “He’ll never find us in this chaos!”
“Don’t be so sure,” Candy said. “He has ways—”
As she spoke, Houlihan’s voice rose above the clamor of the celebrants. “I’m going to find you, Quackenbush!”
“We have to confuse him, Malingo,” Candy insisted. “You go that way. I’ll go this.”
“Where will we meet again?”
“At the freak show. I’ll meet you there in half an hour. Keep to the crowds, Malingo. It’ll be safer.”
“We’ll never be safe as long as that man’s on our heels,” Malingo said.
“He won’t be on our heels forever, I promise.”
“I hope you’re right. Vadu ha, lady.”
“Vadu ha,” Candy said, returning the wishes in Old Abaratian.
With that they parted. For Candy the next few minutes were a blur. She pressed through the crowds, trying all the while to get the sound of Houlihan’s voice out of her head, but hearing him every step of the way, repeating the same dreadful syllable.
“Mine! Mine! Mine!”
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of faces moved before her as she proceeded, like faces in some strange dream. Faces masked with cloth or papier-mâché or painted wood; smiling sometimes, astonished sometimes; sometimes filled with a strange unease. The
re were a few faces she recognized among the masks. The Commexo Kid appeared in a hundred different versions; so did the faces of Rojo Pixler and even Kaspar Wolfswinkel. There were others to which she could put no name that nevertheless drew her attention. A young man danced past her wearing a black mask streaming with bright red dreadlocks. Another man had a face that had erupted into bright green foliage, in which flowers like daisies bloomed; yet another was tattooed from head to foot with golden anatomy but wore on his chest a cleverly painted hole, which seemed to show her his mechanical heart.
And every now and then among these bright, strange creatures there would be a naysayer: a serpent in this Eden, preaching the Coming Apocalypse. One of them, dressed in a ratty robe that exposed his sticklike legs, even had a fake halo attached to his head and pointed at the people as they passed, saying they would all perish for their crimes, at the End of Time.
But his bitter words could not destroy the magic of this place, even now. Everywhere she looked there was beauty.
A swarm of miniature blue monkeys the size of hummingbirds fluttered up in her face and clambered into the sky, up invisible ropes disappearing in a cloud of violet smoke. A dozen balloons floated past her, pursued by a quiverful of needles, which caught up with their quarry and pierced them, liberating a lilting chorus of voices. A fish of elephantine proportions, with bulging eyes that looked like twin moons, floated past, trailing a scent of old smoke.
In this confusion of wonders Candy had long ago lost all sense of direction, of course. So it came as a total surprise when she turned the corner and found herself in the very backwater that they’d first come down with the zethek in his cage. Straight ahead of her lay the freak show, its brightly colored banners depicting the cast of monsters to be found inside.
She glanced back down the alleyway, just in time to see Houlihan come into view. Hoping to avoid his eye, she shrank back into the shadows, and for a moment she thought she was going to be lucky.
But then, just as he was about to disappear into the crowd again, he seemed to sniff her, and with a chilling certainty he turned his head in her direction and peered down the darkened alleyway. There was no more shadow for Candy to shrink into. She could only hold her breath and wait.
Narrowing his eyes as though trying to pierce the shadows, the Criss-Cross Man began to push his way through the crowd toward the alleyway. The smallest of smiles had appeared on his face. He knew where she was.
Candy had no choice. Clearly he’d seen her. She had to retreat. And there was only one place to go: into the freak show.
She broke out of the shadows and started to run. She didn’t bother to look over her shoulder. She could hear how close Houlihan was now: the sound of his feet sticking and unsticking on the garbage-strewn ground, the raw rasp of his breath.
She parted the canvas curtains and flung herself through them into the backstage area of the freak show. The smell that met her was almost overpowering: the mingled stench of rotting hay and some sickly sweet perfume that had perhaps been splashed around to cover up the other smells. There were three large cages close by, the largest containing a thing that looked like a pony-sized slug. It let out a pitiful mewling at the sight of Candy, and it pushed its eyes between the bars of its cage on fleshy horns. They scrutinized Candy for a long moment. Then the thing spoke, its voice soft and well-educated.
“Please let me out of here,” it said.
The creature had no sooner uttered these words than they were echoed from the other two cages (one of which contained what looked like a four-hundred-pound porcupine-woman; the other, one of the creatures Candy had seen advertised on the billboards outside the show: a hybrid boy, with scaly flesh and a pointed tail). The same cry, or a rough variation of the same, escaped them both: “Let us out!”
It was now rising from other directions too. Some of the voices were high-pitched squeals, some low rumbling, some just scrawls of sound.
And then, just as she thought the cacophony could not get any louder, she heard Houlihan out in the alleyway, whistling for her like a man who’d lost his pooch in the crowd.
Quietly cursing him, she backed away. Any minute, she guessed, the Criss-Cross Man was going to step into view. The sooner she was out of here the better. . . .
Meanwhile there was a roll of drums from the show itself, followed by an announcement delivered by a woman’s voice, which managed to be both coarse and pompous.
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Scattamun’s Emporium of the Malformed. You are guests in the largest collection of freaks, grotesques, inverts, miscreations, mutants, monsters, tetragogs and fiends in the Abarat; plus, of course, the one and only Eye in a Box! Be prepared to be appalled at the horrors Creation has made in the name of Life; at the Horrors that Evolution in all its Cruelty has brought forth! They were made for our amusement! Feel free to mock them! Spit at them! Poke them a little if you dare! And be grateful you are not in their shoes!”
“Please—” the giant slug mewled. “Let me out.”
After hearing Mrs. Scattamun’s horrendous speech, Candy had no doubt of what she should do. She pulled open the bolts on the creature’s cage. The slug leaned its weight against the door, which swung open with an ill-oiled creak. Meanwhile Candy moved on to liberate the porcupine-woman, followed by the hybrid boy. None of them lingered. The very moment the bolts were drawn they were out, hollering and howling with joy at their liberation.
The freaks nearby heard this joyous din, of course, and started to raise a chorus of their own. Soon the whole wooden platform upon which the freak show stood was shaking with their demands of freedom. Candy might have gone to find them and set them free, but at that moment the curtains were pulled apart, and Otto Houlihan came through, gloating.
“There you are!” he said, advancing on Candy. “I knew you couldn’t escape me forever.”
Before he could catch hold of her, the porcupine-woman intervened, stumbling between them in her ambition to be free. In so doing she blocked the Criss-Cross Man’s path for a few vital seconds, preventing him from getting hold of Candy. She pulled aside a second rotting canvas and stepped into a much more brightly lit area. Here there were twenty cages and tableaux arranged for the viewing pleasure of the paying customers, of which there were several dozen. Everybody seemed to be having a fine time watching the Scattamuns’ poor captives as they shook their cages. The louder the freaks sobbed and complained, the more they laughed.
Candy was revolted by the whole spectacle and felt a spasm of guilt at the sight of Methis, who had been quickly elevated to the status of The Most Terrifying Freak in Captivity. He didn’t look particularly terrifying. He sat at the back of his cage with his head in his hands, his eyes downcast. A little boy with cotton candy all around his mouth was kicking the bars of Methis’ cage, trying to get a response from him. When he failed, he started to spit at the zethek.
“Did this one pay, Mrs. Scattamun?” said a tall bony man, pointing down at Candy.
Mrs. Scattamun swept on over, her gray dress raising a little cloud of dust. She had spiky painted eyelashes and cherubic lips. Her nose and cheeks bore the unmistakable bloom of a very heavy drinker.
“No, I didn’t sell a ticket to this one, Mr. Scattamun.”
“Did you not, Mrs. Scattamun?”
“I did not.”
The pair of them wore hats, which were morbid variations on the aquarium hats that were apparently such a rage in Babilonium. Instead of housing living fish, however, the Scattamuns’ hats were filled with dead, withered creatures.
“Did you come here to look at the freaks?” Mrs. Scattamun said.
“Yes . . .” Candy said.
“But you didn’t pay to look.”
“I came in here by mistake,” Candy said.
Mrs. Scattamun put out her empty palm. “Mistake or no mistake, everybody pays. That’ll be six zem.” She leaned forward and the withered thing on her head bobbed in its formaldehyde.
Before Candy could reply, ther
e was a fresh eruption of noise from the back room, and Houlihan started shouting again.
“Out of my way!” he yelled. “All of you! Out of my way before I slit your throats.”
Hearing this outburst, the audience began to beat a hasty retreat, which did not please Mrs. Scattamun.
“Mr. Scattamun,” she said. “Kindly discover what’s going on back there. And stop it! Well? Don’t just look at me!” She gave her husband a very unloving shove. “Go!”
Reluctantly Mr. Scattamun crossed to the curtain and stepped through. Two seconds later he was thrown backward through the curtain at great speed. He was followed by the man who’d pushed him: Otto Houlihan.
Mrs. Scattamun let out a shrill shriek. “Get up and get that yellow monster out of here!” she demanded. “You heard me, Mr. Scattamun.”
Obediently Mr. Scattamun got to his feet, but Houlihan kicked him in the chest and down he went again, knocking over several small cages as he did so.
“Where’s the girl?” Houlihan demanded.
Candy had taken refuge behind a cage that contained a beast three times her size, which seemed to have completely rubber limbs. It bawled like a baby. Candy told it to hush, but it responded by bawling even more loudly.
Its din drew Mrs. Scattamun’s attention to Candy.
“The girl’s back there!” she said to Houlihan. “I can see her from here! She’s hiding behind the fetteree!”
“I see her,” Otto said.
“Don’t hurt my children!” Mrs. Scattamun said. “They’re our bread and butter, they are.”
Houlihan drew a long-bladed knife out of his belt and headed toward the cage containing the bawling fetteree. Candy ducked down as low as possible and crawled behind the cages, keeping her head down so as to make as small a target as possible.
Suddenly there was a growl in the shadows, and she looked up to find herself face-to-face with a creature she knew.