The Howling III (22 page)

Malcolm blanked Bateman Styles out of his mind. He got off the stool and walked forward in a half-crouch to seize the bars. He looked down into the taunting faces and summoned back a series of images. The fire. The trap. The hunters. Dr Pastory and the table. Kruger and the cattle prod. Kruger hurting Holly.

He felt it begin.

The jeers of the crowd died in their throats. For a moment there was silence in the tent. Bateman Styles, along with the paying customers, stared in awe at the boy in the cage.

“What’s happening to his eyes?” a plump girl asked her boyfriend.

“Look at his face,” somebody else said in a strangled tone.

“And his hands! My God, they’re growing!”

“The teeth! Holy shit, the teeth!”

Styles watched the contortions of the boy in the cage.

Even though he had seen the process before in reverse, he was stunned by what was happening in there. The growls that came from the boy could surely not be human.

He let the transformation continue until blackened hairy hands started to bend the inadequate cage bars. Then he caught the message flashed from the dangerous green eyes. This must go no further. Without ceremony the showman snatched the curtain back in front of the cage.

“That’s it, my friends. I think each and every one of us can agree that we got our dollar’s worth here today. Grolo the Animal Boy. There will be another show in one hour by the clock. Tell your friends. I thank you.”

The dozen people who had witnessed the performance filed out silently. Once outside, they all began to talk at once, the general topic being speculation on how it was done. They scattered excitedly over the small carnival grounds to spread the word.

*****

When he had seen the last of the customers leave, Bateman Styles hurried back through the curtain and helped Malcolm out of the cage. He was relieved to see that the boy looked normal again, if somewhat sweaty. Malcolm gave him a tired smile.

“How did I do, Bate?”

“Lad, you were sensational. We will never again have a crowd that small, or I do not know this business. How do you feel?”

“Okay. A little tired.”

“Think you can do it again in an hour?”

“Yeah. I found out there’s a kind of a trick I can use to make it easier.”

“Whatever the trick is,” said the showman, “don’t tell me. There are some things a man should not know. Go catch a nap in the trailer if you want. I’ll call you in time for the next show.”

“I think I’ll just walk around if that’s all right.”

“Sure. If you want to see any of the shows, take a ride, tell “em you’re working with me. You’re one of us now.”

*****

One of us. Beautiful words. He really wasn’t, of course, but it was as close as Malcolm had come to belonging anywhere in a long time. He strolled around the small carnival savouring the tinny music from the merry-go-round, the thumping drum from the kootch show. He inhaled with pleasure the raw smell of sawdust mingled with cooking grease and cotton candy. He gazed happily at the coloured lights strung above the walkways. When he told the other carnival people he was working with Bateman, they accepted him without question. Nobody asked what he did or where he came from. He was almost one of them.

*****

As Styles had predicted, the crowd was much larger for the second show. Many who had been at the opener came back to see it again. Jackie Moskowitz himself came in, positioning himself in the front row where he would not have to look through people’s armpits. Styles shortened his spiel this time and let the act speak for itself. Again the Animal Boy was a sensation.

When they closed out the week in Silverdale, there was no more talk of leaving Bateman Styles behind. The Animal Boy did bring in more than the kootch show and the Ring-Toss combined.

The sponsoring civic organization was so pleased with their share of the carnival’s take that they invited the Samson Supershow back to Silverdale for another stand late in the summer. Jackie Moskowitz, with holes to fill on his schedule, was only too happy to oblige.

As they travelled north with stops at Manzanar, Crestview, Mono Lake, Markleeville, Sattley, Ravendale, and a dozen other California towns nobody ever heard of, the fame of Grolo the Animal Boy spread. People were driving fifty or a hundred miles to see the amazing change of boy into beast. Bateman Styles was supremely happy. He had a real attraction again. Jackie Moskowitz was talking long-term contract.

As for Malcolm, he was as close to being content as he could remember since childhood. Sometimes he would awake in the night from a terrifying dream, then relax as he recognized the tacky trailer of Bateman Styles. There was still the nagging worry that someone would find him and take him back to answer for the business at Pastory’s clinic, but over the weeks that faded too.

He was right.

It happened in mid-July. The Samson Supershow was playing a small town outside Red Bluff. Two men from Los Angeles paid their dollars and walked into the show, and Malcolm’s life was about to be changed forever. By mid-July, with the Samson show playing a town called Castle Rock, Malcolm had relaxed enough to laugh out loud, something he had not done since his days with Jones. He felt sometimes that his life here was too good to last.

He was right.

“What am I doing here?” Louis Zeno complained. “What’s the name of this town again?”

“Castle Rock,” said Ted Vector. He was a bony, loose-jointed man with quick eyes. He wore a bag of camera equipment slung over a shoulder.

“Castle Rock,” Zeno repeated. “That’s not a town, that’s a dance craze from the thirties.”

“Don’t be so negative. Once you see what I’ve got for us here you will forever remember Castle Rock as our Eldorado.”

Zeno came to a stop on the sawdust midway and stared at his companion. “Tell me something, what made you think of me, anyway?”

“Actually, it was Ed Endicott who suggested you.”

“The editor of National Expo?”

“Do you know another Ed Endicott? He said he liked the way you were handling that werewolf business down in Pinyon until you got yourself in trouble.”

“Yeah, trouble. I could have got mysef eaten,” Louis Zeno muttered.

“So when I told him what I had here, he said you’d be the perfect one to write it.”

“Wonderful. Now I’m the National Expo’s werewolf man.”

“You would rather be the two-headed-calf man?”

“Okay, okay.” They walked on a short distance in silence.

Then Zeno said, “You really think this Animal Boy is legitimate?”

“What the hell, he’s close enough. They’re talking about him all over the state. Ed Endicott was convinced enough to give me an advance, and you know the Expo don’t throw money around.”

Zeno sighed. “Let’s get on with it then. This better not turn out to be some turkey in a rubber mask.”

*****

Grolo the Animal Boy had his own sign outside the tent now. Two garish paintings flanked the platform where Bateman Styles was delivering the pitch. One showed a figure with the body of a boy and the head of some nightmare animal with huge tusks leering out from between two trees. The other had the Animal Boy carrying off a terrified, near-naked woman in the tradition of 1940s horror movies.

Zeno stared up at the pictures. “For this you had me drive up from LA?”

“Lighten up, pal. You can’t spend your life writing about Burt Reynolds and Bianca Jagger,” Vector told him. “Anyway, it’s what’s inside that counts.”

The photographer stopped to click off several pictures of the front of the tent, then they joined the large crowd listening to Bateman Styles.

“… It is my duty to warn you, friends,” Styles was saying, “to stay well away from the front of the stage. Grolo is inside a sturdy cage of tempered steel, but his full strength when the rage is upon him has yet to be tested. Therefore, for your own safety, please stand clear. Every one will be able to see everything that happens.”

He paused and made a mental count of the spectators. “Now let us go in for the first show of the evening. For those of you who cannot fit inside the tent this time, your tickets will entitle you to first admittance at the next show one hour from now by the clock.”

The showman stood next to the girl selling tickets and smiled contentedly. When he spotted Ted Vector’s camera bag he leaned down from the platform.

“Sorry, sir, no pictures.”

Vector looked up in innocent surprise. “What?” Then he smiled and tapped the camera bag as though he had just remembered he was wearing it. “Oh, this? I don’t plan to take any pictures inside. I’m a tourist, you know. Never go anywhere without my camera.”

“Well, as long as you leave it in the bag… ” Styles said doubtfully.

“Absolutely,” said the photographer. He and Louis Zeno paid their money and filed into the tent with the rest of the crowd.

The people were packed shoulder to shoulder in the tent. There was no air circulating except that which flowed in through the entrance. The combined body heat was oppressive.

Zeno tucked himself in behind Vector and followed the photographer as he pushed his way to a position near the front. He mopped perspiration from his neck with a handkerchief and stared gloomily at the moth-eaten velvet curtain.

“This better be good, Ted. Remember, I could be home among the beautiful people covering some swinging Hollywood party.”

“Sure, sure, I know how you cover those parties - you open a can of beer, sit in your bathtub and fantasize. Watch now, here comes the man.”

Bateman Styles made his appearance at one end of the curtain. It was a refinement he had added since the crowds became too big for him to walk easily through from the entrance to the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the most astounding, the most amazing, the most incredible phenomenon on view in America today. In a very few minutes I am going to pull this curtain aside and reveal to you the ninth wonder of the world!”

“What happened to the eighth?” Zeno whispered to the photographer.

“Wasn’t that King Kong?”

“Of course. How could I forget?”

Styles gave the two men a stern glance and they fell silent. Then the showman went on with his pitch, the grandiloquent speech rolling smoothly off his tongue in effortless flowery sentences. After many years in the business Bateman Styles no longer had to think about what he was saying. The sentences, each with a verbal exclamation mark, formed themselves and marched out of his mouth while he thought of other things.

He wound it up, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment for which we have waited in an agony of growing suspense! I give you… Grolo the Animal Boy!”

He swept aside the curtain to reveal Malcolm seated on the stool in the confining chimpanzee cage. The boy gazed shyly out at the crowd.

By this time people knew the routine of the act from the reports of others who had seen it. They launched into the derisive hoots at Malcolm without prompting from Styles.

“That’s no animal.”

“Get off the stage, you fake.”

“He doesn’t even shave yet.”

“Course not, it’s a girl!”

“Refund… refund!”

“Booo!”

Louis Zeno took no part in the harassment of the boy in the cage. Nor did he pay any attention to Ted Vector, who was fumbling in his camera bag. Something about the boy’s luminous green eyes as they locked on his for a brief moment made the writer acutely uncomfortable.

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered to the photographer.

“Are you crazy? The show hasn’t even started. Take notes or something.”

As always, when the boy began to change the jeers of the crowd died abruptly. No matter how prepared they were for what was about to happen, the actual transformation on the small stage never failed to shock.

“Jesus,” Zeno muttered through clenched teeth.

“See? See? What did I tell you?” Ted Vector had his camera out of the bag now and was holding it down low where it would be concealed from Bateman Styles.

The writer was not listening. He was back in the cabin at the moment he entered and saw torn bits of Abe Craddock everywhere. His stomach lurched, and for a moment he thought he was going to vomit.

“I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“What do you mean? Aren’t you going to interview the pitch man or anybody?”

“Who needs interviews? I can make up the quotes like I always do. Let’s go.”

“At least let me get some shots of Grolo. Your story is worth shit without pics.”

“Well, hurry it up.”

Zeno tried not to watch what was happening in the small cage, but a terrible fascination kept pulling his eyes back. The boy’s face had sprouted a coarse black hair. His body had broadened and stretched and changed its shape with a crackling of bones. He had to bend far over as he clutched the bars to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling. The eyes glowed with deep green fire. The teeth… visions of Craddock’s savaged remains swam back up in Zeno’s mind.

Vector brought the camera up with no further attempt at concealment and began clicking pictures. The creature in the cage caught the tiny sound. The ears pricked and the great head swivelled toward the source. It gave an inhuman growl, the taloned hands gripped the bars and began to bend them apart.

“You!” Bateman Styles jumped to the centre of the stage and stabbed an accusing finger at Ted Vector. “Out! I told you no pictures!”

“Come on,” Zeno said, tugging at his friend’s arm.

“Just one more.”

Click.

The bars separated. A powerful black-haired arm reached through.

“Shit, he’s coming out!” someone yelled.

Styles’s voice rose above the others. “Get that camera out of here before you get somebody killed!”

Zeno took a firm grip on the photographer’s arm and tugged him back through the tense crowd and out of the tent.

“I got some great stuff,” he said, when they were back out on the midway.

“Yeah, you almost got us ripped apart too.”

“You convinced now?”

Zeno modulated his voice. “It’s a good trick. Looked real in the dim lights in there.”

“Bet your ass it looked real. How soon can you have the story written?”