Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (13 page)

“Huh,” I said even more
stupidly.

He merely blinked, one slow
blink. His eyes hadn’t done the little flinch and dart away like
most of the others did. It was as if he was looking past my face
into some hidden part of my soul. That messed me up worse than any
flinch had ever done. I dropped my head, shaking my hair over my
face. “What are you?” I asked.

“I am Wraeththu.”

That was the first time I heard
that name but it gave me the shivers as if I’d heard that word
before. Strange and not strange. His voice was extraordinary: soft,
modulated, like singing, rather than speaking; the timbre neither
male nor female, but some kind of fluted mix of both as if
manipulated by a synthesizer. It was a bedroom kind of voice that
people would pay to hear, hypnotizing and erotic.

“That’s your name?” I
asked.

“No, my race. You are human
scum; I am Wraeththu, the chosen ones.”

Now that pissed me off. “Hey,
butt-hole, not an attitude you should cop, sitting there in a cage
with a bunch of human
scum
all around, who’d just as soon
use you for target practice as look at you.”

He raised his chin. “They won’t
use me for target practice.”

“Confident of that, huh?”

“No, just practical. If they’d
wanted to kill me, they’d have done it already. I’m to be a
spectacle. A freak. They’ll come to gawk.”

“What’s to gawk at? You look
just like us, no different from any kid down the block. Just
uglier.” Not true in any stretch of the imagination, but my mean
streak was asserting itself. He merely smiled in a superior manner
that made me want to punch out his pretty face. Sliding his hand
down his belly, he stopped at his crotch, patted it. “You think
we’re the same, do you?”

I shivered with some kind of
primal intuition, while at the same time I was wondering what the
hell he was talking about. Half-man, half-woman, the ad had said.
So I asked him, “What do you mean?”

He laughed, then stood in a
fluid motion, body long and lean, walked over to the cage bars, and
pressed his face against them. My heart was in my throat. He said,
“Wouldn’t you like to find out?”

“I don’t want to find out
anything,” I said, standing to face him. “I came to spit at
you.”

“You came to see the freak, a
real freak, not just some accident of nature. You pitiful beings
don’t even know that when you look at me you’re looking at your
death. But on some level you
do
know it. That’s why you’re
afraid, why you want to stare. Your kind isn’t long for this world
now. Change is coming.”

Now I could feel anger surging
through me. “They’ll break you!” I hissed. “They’ll spit on you and
starve you and beat you until you wish you were dead. And I’ll be
there to laugh.”

“Why all this hatred?”

“Because of this!” Roughly, I
pulled my hair back and turned my face to the side so he could get
the full effect. “Your kind did that. You destroyed my family and
threw me into a fire. Left me to die.”

He leaned forward to look,
seemingly puzzled, rather than repulsed. “Impossible. We haven’t
moved this far out – yet.”

“I’m from Carmine City,” I
said.

That caused him to start and
look at me, even more intently. “It can’t be,” he said. “Although,
you do look like him. My head hurts. You should come back later.”
Slowly he dropped back down to his cross-legged position, pressing
fingers to his temples. His eyes fluttered shut and began jerking
around under the lids as if he was dreaming. I could feel the
humming inside my skin again. The tingling ache that I often felt
in the burned side of my face increased. I waited, anger rising,
but he appeared to have gone into a trance. Banging on the bars, I
shouted, “Wraeththu, Wraeththu scum!” No response. I picked up a
pipe lying on the stage and lobbed it at the bars. It bounced off
with a heavy metallic clang.

Pavel stuck his head in the
door flap on the other side of the tent and yelled, “What the hell
are you doing in here? I told you to stay out!”

Next thing I knew, he’d given
me the bum’s rush out the door and I was laid out flat on my belly,
spitting straw. Renny and Sparks, now in full make-up, pointed at
me, miming laughter. I felt ashamed, and skulked back to the
trailer to shroud my anger in smoke and poisonous dreams. For the
next six hours, I hid in my room, indulging my demons.

My act was always the same. The
talker, Stubs Wheaton, stood outside the tent and called to the
crowds in his whiskey-smooth voice: “Ladies and gents, come in and
see the strange and rare oddities of the human condition. Yes, here
they are, and you can thank your lucky stars, they ain’t you. Come
in and see Esmeralda, the bearded woman, hairy as a werewolf. Flat
Stanley, the thinnest man alive. Delilah, the contortionist. She
can put her legs behind her head and kiss her own ass. Sorry folks,
this ain’t a family show. And Janus, the boy with two faces.
Beautiful as a god on one side, hideous as a devil on the other...”
And so it went.

Getting high as a kite before
the show made it almost bearable. I’d go to the dressing room in
the back of the tent, pin up my hair on the burned side of my face,
leaving it long and flowing over my shoulders on my good side,
strip down to a spangled loincloth, then hide in my cubicle in the
dark. When the spotlight came on, I’d step into it, presenting my
right side. Then the light would go off and I’d turn to my left
side that was burned from my hip all the way up my arm and part of
my back to my face, which had gotten the worst of it. The light
would come back on and I’d hear gasps and sometimes screams as
people filed by. Usually there was a stony silence. In case anyone
thinks this was a humiliating way to make a living, I might remind
them that I didn’t have much choice. And once I got over the shame,
I guess it was easy money. Well, I’m lying. I didn’t get over the
shame. It festered into a rage that by the time I was done for the
night, I had to go smoke myself silly to keep from hitting
someone.

But tonight, things were
different. People came by but they weren’t paying attention to me.
I could hear them talking. “Did you hear? They’ve got one of those
mutant things. Yeah, right here in the circus. I couldn’t get a
ticket until ten o’clock.” And so on. This didn’t help my mood at
all. I figured they were going to be severely disappointed when
they went into that tent and saw, not a frightening hermaphroditic
monster, but some boy in tight leather pants sitting in a cage. But
by the end of the show my curiosity was getting the best of me and
so I drew on the white mask I wore when I had to go out among
rubes, put on some clothes, and pelted over to the tent.

Standing outside listening to
people leaving, I could tell it hadn’t gone well. The buzz sounded
angry, puzzled.

“Just some loud-mouthed punk
taunting us. I’m getting my money back.”

“I don’t know. I think there’s
something to that mutant stuff. Didn’t you feel it? He gave me the
shivers, like he was speaking in my head.”

“...some kid, talking a lot
about how he was going to take over the world. Didn’t look like a
mutant to me. This is a big hoax.”

Two young women emerged
giggling. One said, “Oh Stephanie, wasn’t he gorgeous! I mean he
could have been a movie star. It was worth the money just to ogle
him. If that’s what mutants look like, sign me up.”

And so on, just as I’d figured.
I wasn’t so sure myself that he wasn’t some pretty boy that Sligo
had stuck in a cage, except that he engendered strange feelings,
which apparently others could detect as well. I remembered the
discussion between Tom and Sligo and the note of fear in Tom’s
voice.

I waited in the shadows until
they’d all left, then crept into the tent, which was dark, except
for a spotlight shining on the cage. I took off the mask in order
to see better. The mutant was hunched in one corner facing Dr.
Sligo, who stood outside the cage in his full Ringmaster’s gear,
complete with top hat. He was holding an electric cattle prod, the
kind they used to control the big cats. The mutant stared at him
with narrowed eyes. Dr. Sligo glared back and said, “A pitiful
performance. Half the crowd wants their money back. No dinner until
I see something better out of you. There’s a costume! Put it on.”
He threw some sparkly red garments through the bars.

“I can go for days without
eating,” the mutant said.

Sligo stabbed the long wand of
the cattle prod through the bars, hitting the mutant in the groin
with its pincher-like tip. With a sharp cry, the mutant dropped to
the floor hugging himself.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Sligo
hissed, giving him another shot to the back of the neck before
withdrawing the wand. The mutant convulsed and then dry retched on
the floor, which caused me to wince even though I thought I was all
for torturing him. I must be going soft.

“What do you want?” the mutant
gasped.

“They want to see a half-human
monster, so you better become one. Take off those pants and show
them what you’ve got.”

The mutant grimaced at him.
“Come in here and try getting them off me. I’ll rip you apart.”

Sligo chuckled. “How stupid do
you think I am? I’ll just throw water on you and then hit you with
this thing until you pass out.”

“And risk injuring your
investment?” the mutant sneered.

“You’re worth nothing to me
unless I can sell tickets. And I can’t sell tickets to a
performance of a mouthy kid sitting in a cage.”

“You want a sex show, Sligo? I
didn’t know you were such a complete pervert,” the mutant said.
“You know there isn’t much to see, unless I’m aroused, and I’d need
another har to achieve that.”

What the hell was he saying? My
curiosity had become overwhelming.

“Use your hand, you freak,”
Sligo said. “It’s no matter to me how you display yourself.”

“I refuse to debase myself for
you, human scum! You can kiss my hot little harish ass.” The mutant
lunged forward, reaching through the bars towards Sligo’s
throat.

Sligo thrust the prod at him.
The mutant grabbed the end of it and then screamed. It was like
something out of a Frankenstein movie. The air around him crackled
with blue lightning and his white hair seemed to stand up with
static, writhing almost as if alive. I smelled roasting flesh, and
suddenly, I couldn’t stand it. I stepped forward into the lights
and yelled, “Stop! Stop it now!”

Sligo jerked the prod away and
then threw it to the ground as if it had burned him too. The mutant
boy staggered back, sank down to the floor, and stared at his
reddened hands. Sligo was shaking and pale even under his white
make-up. “Crazy sonovabitch,” he muttered. Slowly, he bent, put a
hand on the stage, sat for a moment as if collecting himself, then
hopped down. He found a discarded cup full of ice and slid it
across the stage so that it smacked up against the bars. “Put some
of this on those hands,” he said. The Wraeththu grabbed the cup,
spilled some ice into his hand, and immediately popped it into his
mouth. He crouched back onto his heels, and began slowly rocking,
mumbling something.

Sligo glared at me. “What the
fuck are you doing here?”

“My job, Dr. Sligo. You told me
to watch him between shows.”

“So I did. Earn your pay now.
Run and get some burn ointment and bandages. Hurry up. We’ve got
another show in an hour.”

The Wraeththu looked up. “Bring
some water too. Please. My tongue feels like a balloon.”

On my way out, I noticed that
there was already a crowd lined up outside the tent. Stubs the
talker was really promoting the shit out of this mutant thing. I
honestly didn’t know what was going to happen. I went to the supply
tent and got the first-aid, then stopped by concessions and picked
up some water bottles, a cup of ice, and a hot dog, because I
didn’t know if he would be hungry. I slipped back in through the
exit door.

Dr. Sligo and the mutant seemed
to have reached some sort of truce. Sligo had left, taking the prod
with him, and the Wraeththu had shed his leather pants and put on
the costume Sligo had tossed at him, a sparkly red halter top that
looked like it belonged to Sheena, one of the equestriennes who was
very flat-chested, and a long sheer red scarf tied over the hips.
Underneath the scarf, the mutant wore tight spandex briefs that
revealed a masculine bulge between his legs. That at least seemed
normal. Or was it? The shape didn’t quite look right. But oh, what
lovely, long legs he had! The costume definitely made him look more
feminine and made me somewhat queasy. What was he? Or she? He was
sitting cross-legged in the cage, leaning his elbows on his
knees.

“Here.” I crouched down and
handed him the water and food.

Stone-faced, he unscrewed the
top of the water bottle and chugged it down. Then he stuffed the
hot dog in his mouth. It was gone in three bites.

“You must have been hungry,” I
said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get you some more,
later.”

“I’d be grateful,” he said. “I
haven’t eaten in three days.”

I couldn’t help it; I was
beginning to feel sorry for the bastard. “What the hell is going
on? Sligo wouldn’t even treat a dog this way.”

“I’m worse than a dog,” he
replied, wiping his mouth. “I’m the next stage in human evolution
and it scares the shit out of the likes of you, doesn’t it?” The
lights above his cage reflected in his eyes like melted stars.

“If you keep talking like that,
this crowd is going to lynch you and I wouldn’t stop ‘em,” I
replied.

“Then why did you speak up for
me, earlier?”

“I couldn’t stand to see any
creature get burned like that. Empathy, I s’pose. Even
you
could probably imagine why. Here hold out your hands.”

Obligingly, he stuck his hands
through the bars. They were fine hands, long, slender fingers. The
palms looked red with some bubbled blisters and two little
blackened spots on his right hand. It could have been worse. I
cupped the back of his hand in my palm preparing to put some
ointment on it and got a sudden tingle all through my body as if my
flesh was singing. I jerked away from him. “What the fuck are you
doing to me?”