I’m writing this to tell you about the Feeders. But I don’t want to start there. I want to start somewhere nice. Before that happened. I want to start with Jimmy.
He made me feel pretty. Right from the beginning, I knew that I couldn’t help but be in love with Jimmy. Mama said not to do it, said that if I were to get involved with any of the miners it would make them think I was loose. Except “une femme de la nuit” is what she said. Even after sixteen years off the boat she couldn’t break herself of the habit of speaking French now and again.
Jimmy wasn’t dangerous. He was a nice boy. I believed it then, and I believe it now. And Pill, if it’s you reading this, honey, I want you to know that I’m going to be as honest as possible in here.
Here Pill’s heart almost broke. His hand trembled, and instead of turning the page, he very nearly shut the book. Shut it forever and let whatever was to come in the outside world come. He couldn’t read about both the terror that Jessi had to tell and how she’d once loved someone else. He thought he already knew what he’d find in these pages, but what if he didn’t? What if there were worse terrors to be uncovered? What if she also told him that she’d never really loved him? That while their marriage had been good, it had not been enough?
It was too much. He couldn’t read it. No one could be asked for that much. But he went on, let his eyes continue as he turned to the next page.
I have to be. So that you’ll understand. But you also have to know that I love you more than I’ve ever loved anybody. And if you’re reading this, it probably means that there’s a reason. If that’s the case, then you’ll need to remember how much I love you to keep going.
Remember it, Pill. I love you.
He read on.
My mother was the snake woman in the show. She hated snakes, so she refused to let me train to take her place. Instead, I had to go to school. It didn’t matter how long we stopped in a place for a show, Mama would shove me into the local school, and I’d be expected to learn. Each night, I’d have to show her my lessons. Even if I finished all the work my teachers assigned, my mother told me to go on and do the next exercises in the book.
“It’s good for you,” she said. “C’est bonne. Tu est une femme intelligente.”
“Mama, there isn’t any point,” I’d tell her. “I’m not going to need to know all this.” Even then, I’d already decided that I wanted to be an artist.
“C’est necessaire,” she’d tell me, shaking her finger at me. “C’est très nècessaire.” I kept going to the schools for her, which is how, one day, I met Jimmy.
He was too old for the schools himself, nearly twenty by the time we met, but he came each day to walk home with his little sister, a girl two grades below me. She was a sweet girl; Clara was her name, and we became friends almost immediately. Clara always wanted to know more about the circus.
“What do you do there?” she’d ask. The town couldn’t quite believe that we’d actually stopped there in the first place. Cavus had only really sprung up when the coal mining began; before that it had just been a few homesteaders’ houses, and even those kept falling empty.
“I don’t get to do much of anything except watch the others,” I told her. “Sometimes Mother will let me take the tickets, and once, when she didn’t know I was doing it, Auntie let me read fortunes with her for a night.”
“Your aunt can tell fortunes?” Clara’s eyes went as wide as dinner saucers.
“Of course she can. We all can. Gypsies are born being able to tell people’s futures,” I lied. Dear Clara didn’t know the difference, though. She’d believe anything told to her, which often got her in trouble with some of the boys.
“Do you feed the tigers?” she asked. The tigers, two ancient things that my parents hadn’t even brought over with them but bought from a traveling Indian couple, were everybody’s favorites. They were really ugly things, both of them missing most of their teeth, and neither with a mean bone in its body. There were also two lions, but nobody paid much attention to those, as they both had mange and came off looking more like house cats.
The tigers were the highlight of the circus, and after them people mostly liked to see the fat woman (my aunt Marie), her husband, Li’l Tim, a man who only came up to her waist, and then Squirrel Master Sacha. Sacha used to be the Strong Man, but when the act wasn’t doing well (there was a one-armed woman in Poughkeepsie who beat him in not one, but two arm-wrestling contests), he started to look for something new. He’d found the squirrels up in Canada, the circus wintering once in Montreal to pick up two new trapeze artists and speak a little French. The squirrels were unique because they were pure black. Sacha dressed them in gentlemen’s suits and ladies’ ball gowns and taught them to dance with one another. When he found out how much Americans enjoyed belittling negroes, he dressed two of the squirrels up to look like they were wearing blackface and taught them how to serve the others, the ladies and gentlemen whose faces he’d started to powder.
There were twenty of us when we came to Cavus. It’s hard to believe that a group of twenty can be a family, but we were. Most of us weren’t French either, not by that point, most everyone came from people my family picked up along the way. We had all kinds in our French Phantasm Circus of the Damned (always there was a hell theme, my mother painting the snakes she danced with red, like the devil), but we kept the name and perpetuated our original French heritage to set us apart from other shows. The circus was dying—we were part of its last heyday, people returning to it as the Depression raged on, but as America pulled out of it, we saw ourselves falling apart. If the fire hadn’t happened in Cavus, I don’t know that we would have been able to continue. At least the fire left us a legend. They celebrate us to this day, although it’s Sacha’s squirrels that get most of the credit. The people here think of them as survivors, like themselves.
I didn’t get to do much, but I did get to draw the posters. My mother knew I was a good artist, and even though she didn’t think I could make a living at it, she encouraged me to continue drawing.
“For divertissement,” she’d say. “Les livres première and après, the drawing.”
I agreed with her, but I lived for those posters. They were all destroyed with the fire, but God, they were beautiful. My mother reimagined at her youngest (or as I hoped I’d grow to look, really) her body twisted in agony and ecstasy against the red fire of the snake’s scales, her hair falling to conceal, only barely, a nipple.
“Too much, Jessi,” she said when I showed it to her, but secretly she was pleased. I saw her stooped over the table studying it that day, when she thought no one was looking. She had a little smile on her face, and I could almost hear her thinking that she wished Papa were still alive to see it.
I drew, and it was my posters that got the Cavus folks all worked into a frenzy. We’d only stopped there on our way back east, hadn’t even planned on performing, but when the mining men saw that poster hung on the side of one of our trucks, they went about crazy trying to get us to stop and do a show. You have to understand that there were hardly any women there yet.
So we stopped. When we did a show, we did it up right, taking at least a night to set up and then running the show for three days. It was because of the care we took that customers often returned for all three nights.
Before the night we started setting up the tent; we’d been camped in Cavus for a week just resting. Mama being Mama, I was in school on the first day of our arrival, and I got to where I looked forward to the end of the day and walking with Jimmy more than any other part of it.
Clara couldn’t understand it, although she figured out my crush on her brother right away.
“But he’s just so goofy,” she’d say, grinning.
“I think he’s sweet, that’s all,” I said. Truth was, I thought Jimmy was much more than sweet. There was just something about seeing him that had me planning on ways to run away from the circus, get left behind when everybody else rolled out and then be left to the mercies of the town folk.
Which I guess I was, in the end, although not the way I’d imagined.
The first night of the show was so crowded that my mother told me there was talk amongst the circus of extending it for a fourth day. We hardly ever did that, not even in big cities.
“I think that would be just fine, Mama,” I said.
“Getting to like Cavus, ma chérie?”
“Yes,” I said, and then hung my head before she could see the whole truth.
Mama had her snake out and was oiling it. She called the snake “l’arme d’enfant,” a joke that I did not understand until much later, when she was no longer there to tell me. I laughed at it then, and I remember wishing she could see me figuring it out, that we could laugh about it together. But that just wasn’t how it was going to be.
Only Three Trees did not want to stay.
“But why not?” asked Mama, getting exasperated with him. “We’re making so much money here, Trees, and we can’t afford to turn our noses up at it. Not now.”
Mama was Three Trees’s lover. I wasn’t supposed to know this, but I did. He wouldn’t sleep in our tent. No matter what the weather, Three Trees slept outside. But there were plenty of times he visited, and most of these times Mama found an errand for me to run. Also, since I was a baby, Three Trees had been doing most of the things for me that fathers did for their girls, like teaching me how to tie my shoes and scrub down the tiger cages. So it didn’t really surprise me any when he pulled me over our second day in Cavus and told me he had to talk to me.
“Little Bear,” he said (he was always calling me that, saying I was as sluggish as one in winter), “come with me. Bring your paper and pens with you.” I followed him without question, although I remember being annoyed. The night’s show was getting ready to start in a few hours, and I wanted to find a spot near the entrance to watch for Jimmy coming in. I had it on good authority, from Clara, that he was planning on attending that night.
“My mom won’t let me go,” she’d complained to me. “But my brother promised to tell me all about it.”
So I was in a flutter, hoping to see Jimmy, and when Three Trees asked me to go with him, I don’t mind saying I didn’t want to. But you didn’t disobey Trees, and you wouldn’t want to, anyhow. He so rarely asked anything of anyone.
Trees never did tell me what tribe he was born into. Mama guessed Navajo or Hopi—somewhere from the Southwest almost surely, because Trees talked about these lands from his childhood. But he said he was no one’s man now, a lost person who wandered with us because we were as good as anyone else to wander with. He said he had a great sin for which he must pay, and that until he did he would not bring shame upon his family by naming them. Trees wouldn’t tell me what the sin was, just as he wouldn’t tell me how he intended to pay for it. I suppose there really is only one sin so great that one would count his life a shame. That’s what I thought then, anyway. I assumed Trees must have killed somebody. But Cavus has shown me that there are many other sins than this, some of them far worse than killing another person.
Although Trees claimed allegiance to no tribe, he often stopped at the reservations we traveled through to speak with the people. He was known by some as The Mailman. Our show traveled far and wide, and Trees carried messages between The People, between tribes and families that had been split up, between leaders and chiefs who wished to speak not through the white men’s devices. I think it was part of his penance, though he’d never said so directly. Trees also often heard his own news from the reservations, his own stories that he passed down to me as lessons, or information that he used to help the show out in small way. Like the fact that in Sarasota there was a man who would let people camp on his land for free if they joined him in evening prayers, or in Austin, where a man could trade wood like diamonds. Three Trees knew all manner of things.
When he asked me to join him that day, he was just returning from an overnight trip to see some people on a reservation up north. I assumed whatever he wanted to tell me had to do with that, and I wasn’t wrong.
We went to the outskirts of town and found a nice big rock to lean ourselves against. We had to be careful because in many places people didn’t like to see us together, him forty-five and dark, me a white schoolgirl. They thought…things about us. Things I’m sure you can guess, and so I won’t repeat them. Trees pointed to the flour sack I’d brought, motioned for me to take out my pencils and paper. I did.
“As I speak, Little Bear, I want you to draw what I tell you.”
“I can’t do that,” I interrupted him. “I can’t just draw what you’re thinking, Trees. It’s not how I work.”
He only nodded at me. Yes, I understand. Yes, you will do it, all the same. It was near to impossible to put Trees off when he wanted something. So I took my pencil in hand and waited. “I have spoken with my brothers last night, and they had a great story to share.”
I knew he was going to tell me the story without me asking, so I just waited and started to doodle with my pencil. I started drawing the grass around us, and the cliff in the distance. I put some wisps of clouds in the sky, although there weren’t any yet. The day was as clear and blue as water. Trees began his story, and I drew.
“The men, they were Crows, or that is what you, the white people, would call them. This particular tribe, or what was left of it, also felt themselves to be Keepers of something. They said that the land on which we now reside is an evil land. ‘A bad place,’ they called it, and said it was why they never lived here, why only newcomers like the farmers and miners who didn’t know better lived here, although The People tried to warn them.”
On the paper, I drew a picture of a miner. I gave him a hat and a gleam in his eye like he was looking for gold. I knew that’s why most men went anywhere, and Clara had told me the story of how Cavus got put on the map because of the gold seekers and then the few farmers and settlers coming later. Clara had also told me a fairly terrifying story about a woman here long ago who went mad. The kids at school still sing a song about her. I drew a woman in my picture. Lucy had been the name of the one in the story Clara told me. I put her way out in the distance, her face peeking over the horizon, watching the miner arrive.
“My brothers, they tell me that they have kept this land for many seasons—not always cleanly, for they are but human—they kept it as best they could. But when the miners came, they spilled blood in violence on The Bad Land and opened up the earth’s wound to feed it this blood. This was a very bad thing.”
In the ground of the picture, I drew a great gash. I could almost see it then, the earth sleeping, a darkness just beneath the ground, and on top, a place waiting to be cut back open, a scar. I drew the line until it disappeared into the cliff, right beside the figure of Lucy I’d drawn. Behind Lucy, I drew a large, black hole. I was tempted to put teeth in it, it looked so much like a mouth, but I did not.
“The People, they were able to put the evil that awakened back to sleep, but it was hard. This evil, it is like nothing The People had seen before. It walks in the skin of humans—steals the skin to wear over itself and destroys the human within it. At first, The People thought maybe it was the ghost of a shaman, a skinwalker whose magic had gone bad. But when they met the evil, when they killed it and put it back to sleep, they knew it was nothing human. It was greater, they said. The evil was a new god, one they had never seen, but not new to the world. Old to the world. Old and jealous. The god wanted to spread himself. So he left his seed under the earth, and waited for a human to let it loose and carry it on to others. The evil wanted children. It wanted us to become his children.”
“Trees,” I interrupted him. For a second, I thought he was joshing me, putting on the “Wise Old Indian” act like he did for the rubes. But I knew he wasn’t. I’d never seen him so solemn before. Usually, even during his most serious stories, there was a smile for me, a reassuring pat of his hand on my arm to let me know that everything was all right. Not now, though. Now he sat there looking off into the distance, almost like he was seeing the exact same thing that I was drawing on my page. It scared me then, but I was young. More than my fear, I thought about the show that night, and Jimmy. “Trees, I don’t want to rush you any, but I’ve got to get back to help Mama.”
He looked at me then, and what I saw scared me more than if he’d been angry. He looked at me and he looked sad. So sad, like I had no idea what was coming, or what I was asking him. No idea, but I’d find out just the same.
“Draw, Little Bear,” he told me. “I am almost done.”
What could I do? I drew. I drew something coming out of the rock, out of that dark hole beside Lucy’s head. It wasn’t anything concrete, not yet, it was just a shadow. A shadow that looked a little like a man, and in the shadow I began to draw tiny faces, faces to make out the shape of The Shadow’s arm, his leg, his hand, which was reaching toward the place in the grass where little Lucy crouched. One of the heads looked a lot like Jimmy’s, and this made me smile. Then it made me smile. Now it makes me shudder. How could I have known?
“My Apsáalooke brothers, they told me this story because they believe that although they are here now to protect the land from this Evil God, they won’t always be. Their numbers grow small, their blood weakened. Even now many of their children turn against the old ways, refuse to believe the stories of their elders. They told me because they had a vision. Their shaman, a man old enough to have seen the last awakening, he had a vision, Little Bear, and you were in it.”
I stopped filling in the detail on the tiny Jimmy face I’d been working on. I felt a coolness brush across my brow as sweat popped out there. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it one bit. I tried to laugh it off, but Trees gave me that look again, that sad, sad stare.
“That’s stupid,” I told him. “What did he do, exactly? He came up to you and said: ‘I had a dream, Trees, and this girl named Jessi was in it, she and this bad man that tried to eat her up?’ ” I laughed again and bent my head back over my drawing so that Trees couldn’t see how scared I really was.
“No, Little Bear, that is not what he said.” I felt Trees’s hand on me, and I leaned into it, grateful for the comfort of his touch. I turned to smile at his face, tell him that well, then, he’d got it wrong. No need to worry about it, but probably we should be getting back to the show. Probably I should be getting back to Jimmy.
But Trees wasn’t done. He squeezed my arm and looked me right in the eyes. “The shaman told them that in his vision he saw a great army of these Children of the Bad Seed. ‘Feeders,’ he called them, because they were fed upon by The Evil and then fed for The Evil. The Feeders steal our bodies and use the evil that is already in us to be born. They feed not just on flesh but on the evil within us. They grow strong with it. This shaman, in his vision, saw a great army of Feeders, and in this army there was only one warrior standing against them and the world. Only one. A girl. Young and with the face of a white child but the spirit of The People. She fought against the army, though their number was many.”
“So what?” I said. I was shivering now, and I’m sure Trees could feel me, shaking in his grasp. “That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t mean anything at all!” I’m ashamed to say that I was shouting at him. I’d never raised my voice to Trees before, never for anything, but I did so then. I felt a tear on my cheek. I’d started to cry without even knowing it.
“The shaman named the girl,” Trees continued. “He called her ‘She who Fights with the Spirit of the Bear.’ ”
Then Trees pulled me to him, and I cried until all the tears were gone. He held me, and I held him, and I thank God that no men came by then to misinterpret the desperation with which we clung to each other.
I don’t know how to tell you what happened the final night of our show except to say that it was unexpected, despite Trees’s warning. We’d stayed on for an extra night, ignoring the protest of a few of the folks, including Trees, and we had a full house. By this time, I’d not only seen Jimmy at the last two shows, I’d also managed to sneak a kiss with him. Despite Trees’s dire prophecy, I couldn’t have been happier. I won’t say that I disbelieved what he said, because I didn’t. Trees never lied. He probably believed what the men on the reservation told him. Of course he did, or he wouldn’t have told me. So I didn’t disbelieve him either, I just thought he’d gotten it wrong somehow. Misinterpreted it.
By the night of the last show, the encore, the sickness was already among us. According to the men Trees talked to, in order for whatever evil is tucked beneath Cavus to be set loose again, the earth must be opened and blood must be spilled in violence. I don’t know what the blood was, but I do know that with the coal miners beginning their digging, it must have been only a matter of time. A drunken fight, a man hitting another out of frustration over a slow load, a lip split with the back of an angry hand…who can say. I don’t know how it happened, or who the first Feeder was, the first to open the earth and swallow the poison, but I do know that by the day of the show he’d infected many others, most of them miners, but not all. Dear God, not all.
The night of our last show, I saw many things that I did not understand at the time. I’m not sure that I understand them even now, but I’ll tell them to you. By writing them down perhaps I can make some sense of them.
The first thing I saw that was wrong, really wrong, came with Clara. She didn’t show up for school the second day after Trees talked to me. But I saw her on the school ground, just the same. She was on the playground while I was still inside the classroom. I always sat by the windows in school if I could, and I’d managed to procure a window seat in Cavus. I was looking out the window, and a shape caught my eye, something darting across the grass and over behind the merry-go-round.
When I looked closer, I saw that it was Clara. Only not Clara as I knew her. She wore no clothes, despite the crisp weather, and she ran with an unnatural speed. I raised my hand to excuse myself for the outhouse, and went to find her.
You see, Pill, I thought she was sick. It was not often that I made friends on our stops. More often than not I was the child to be mocked at others’ leisure, the child to be shunned or, in the best-case scenario, ignored. And why not? Why not vent your frustrations on someone who will be here one day and gone the next? It does no more harm to call the wind names.
But Clara had been different. She’d been my friend. And so when I saw her running about the playground in distress, I went to find her. I caught sight of her as soon as I stepped outside. She was crouched out of view from the windows of the school, hunched over the sandbox behind the storage shed. It was where some of the older kids went to exchange notes, hold hands, or even sometimes smoke. Now, though, there was no one there but Clara.
“Hello, Jessi,” she said, without ever looking up at me. I thought then that she must simply have heard me approach, but now I think not. Now I think she was waiting for me.
“Clara, what’s wrong?” She looked up at me, and I saw that her face was streaked with mud, as if she’d been eating the stuff. Indeed, she looked as though it was very possible. She was playing in it, and the stuff caked her arms all the way up to her elbows. It had been Clara’s only fault since I’d known her, a propensity for dirtiness, to play as roughly and rowdily as the little boys and to let no mud puddle or dirtied fence stand in her way. Now, though, she’d taken it to an entirely other level. Her naked body boasted streaks of mud and cuts across it.
“Oh, Clara!” I said, kneeling beside her. “What’s happened to you?” I must confess that a dark thought crossed my mind, a thought that it was not her but someone else who had removed her clothes.
“Nothing, Jessi dear,” she said. She held her hand out toward me, and in it was a clump of mud. “Have a bite,” she said, and I thought she was joking, and so I made as if to take it, only as I bent closer, I saw that there was something in it. A piece of white, like a bone. I got closer still, and saw that it was a tooth! And as I was leaning over it Clara brought the mud up with force, slamming it into my face and rubbing it against my lips with a strength I would never have imagined she possessed. I pulled away, wiping the filth from my lips, careful not to let it into my mouth. If Clara was someone who did not mind dirt, I was the opposite, clean almost to obsession, and it was this compulsion, I know now, that saved me. If I’d gotten even a speck of the blood that I have no doubt accompanied the tooth into my mouth, I’d have been infected.
Instead, I managed to back away from Clara and wipe my mouth clean. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
“I’m trying to feed you,” she said. “You looked hungry.” Then she ran away, a crazy shutterbug run on all fours across the grass.
When I went back inside, I tried to tell my teacher what had happened, but she wouldn’t believe me. She thought I was making it all up to get attention. Mostly, she didn’t trust me or my family. She thought that the circus was “a moral sinkhole,” and only agreed to educate me out of pity. Mostly, I didn’t care. But when she wouldn’t believe me about Clara, I’d had it.
“Maybe you should take a look under your dress the next time you go to the lavatory,” I yelled at her, which was a big surprise to the whole class, as I’d gotten a reputation as “the quiet girl.” “That way,” I said, “you can figure out where all the bullshit is really coming from.”
Why am I telling you all this, Pill? Why? Reliving pointless conversations, pointless battles with my teacher, telling you that they thought of me as quiet? Why should you care? You know me better than anyone has ever known me. You don’t need me to tell you any of this, and my relationship with Mrs. MacIntire has nothing to do with what happened later. I’m stalling, Pill. Pure and simple, I’m stalling. I don’t want to go on.
But I must. If this was to ever happen again, you’d need to know. You’d have to stop it, Pill. You have to stop it.
The changes in Cavus must have occurred slowly, over the space of a few weeks, if I had to guess. They were already well under way by the time our little show pulled into town. However, the thing with this sickness is that it is hard to detect. I’d guess that there were already half a dozen or so infected members by the time we arrived in town. It’s hard to tell, but as far as I understand the infection, it spreads from person to person at different rates. Once someone is infected, the disease lingers, it grows. The person begins to have desires. Not unnatural desires because whatever demon it is who has implanted itself in the host person feeds on the desires that already exist within that person. This demon, the Feeder, it loves our sin, dearest. Loves it and needs it. Which is how, in the end, we were able to beat it. Or at least put it back to bed.
I went to the show that night only caring about Jimmy. I saw him, all right, but oh my God, I saw so much more. It started with Mama’s act.
“You said you were done with the snakes,” I told her. “You said you were too old.” I’d walked into our wagon to find her near to naked, with her snake and snake oil both out on the table.
“Nobody spoke to you, ma petite choux,” she said. “And you know you really shouldn’t speak until spoken to.”
The reprimand was made to sound like a jest, but I could hear the sincerity behind it. She’d been infected already, you see, although I wouldn’t know it until that night. I don’t know when or how it had happened to her, but it must have been almost as soon as we arrived. I guess I will never know. It may have been one of the miners who did it or one of the townspeople that He turned earlier. Maybe it was even Clara. Who can say?
The show that night was sold out, word about out stellar performances traveling fast. That, and The Feeder had decided our show would be the perfect place for him to play a game with the town of Cavus. My mother was the first one on the stage that night, her newly resurrected act deemed best placed at the beginning of the show, so that if something went wrong it might be smoothed over with later, better-prepared acts. Everyone in the tent anxiously awaited the first performer. When Mama took the stage, the crowd went wild. I hid in the back, where I had a good look not at the stage, but at the third row, five seats in. It was where Jimmy sat. I watched him even as my mother’s music started.
She emerged onto stage with her snake, the great pale belly of the beast intertwined with her own flesh. The snake was an albino, and that night she did not paint its scales the usual red. Its ring patterns were a bright yellow, and they draped like gold over my mother’s darker flesh. She had never danced more beautifully than she did that night. It was as if the beast and she were one. As I’ve said before, if my mother had a sin, it was vanity. Always and forever, she wanted others to be looking at her, wanted youth to remain within her. And look they did.
The audience, almost entirely men, watched her as if hypnotized, studying every move of her body, every turn of her hip. It was more than them simply wanting her, although it was clear that they did—many of their pants bulged with their own l’arme d’enfant—but it was more that they were under her spell. Whether they wanted her or not was irrelevant. They had to have her.
When she ended her act, his act began. The Feeder took the stage.
No one knew who He was at first. He took the guise of an old woman, a townswoman who stepped on trembling limbs up to the stage. She wore a long black gown and eyeglasses. She was not the kind of person to be at our show. Which is why, perhaps, when She stepped onstage no one tried to stop her. The circus people were mesmerized by her just as the men in the audience had been by my mother. Even I, smitten as I was with Jimmy in the folding chair below, felt compelled to watch the woman.
There was a power about her, and I won’t say that it felt like evil. Not then. Because that would have been too simple, wouldn’t it? Evil is never so easily recognized. It makes its face known in a manner that pleases. No, it did not feel like evil, but it was a power nonetheless. She took the stage and we watched her, even as She began to speak and the content of her words betrayed her, we sat and watched as one. The circus folks, the miners, the people of Cavus. As one we watched.
“Greetings, my dear children…” She held up her hand here, the one not on the cane, and offered us a wave and a smile. It was a silly gesture, charming, and there was a spattering of laughter. My mother stood beside her, watching, her snake still around her neck and her flesh damp with the sweat of her dance.
“I come here tonight,” the woman said. “To make you an offer.”
The crowd remained hushed, spellbound, as She continued to speak.
“You do not know me and you do not know my sister. We are nothing great.”
“I’ll say!” This from the crowd, a man’s voice.
The woman ignored him. “But we could be. I could be. I do not want you to think that I speak to you falsely, that I offer myself to you with a false promise. I do not. I will not. I am not your Jehovah, your Jesus, your Allah, nor even your Satan. Nor is my sister your Lilith, nor your Mary. We are two of many. We are those who once walked the earth with you. The difference now, however, is that my sister is still allowed from time to time to walk amongst you, while I—”
“Get on with the show!” the heckler’s voice rose again, and once again was ignored.
“—daring to love you for what you were, for what you are, your wants and needs, your feedings and beatings and glorious desires…I was damned to forever live beneath you. To never walk amongst you. To never know you as my own.”
There was a small titter from the audience, and the heckler, a foppish-looking man, certainly no miner, rose and donned his hat. As one the room turned to look at him.
“Excuse me,” he said. “But if this is your idea of a show, I’ll pass. If I wanted to hear an old woman speak, I would have stayed at home with my mother-in-law!”
Nervous laughter followed this. The woman onstage bent her head, as if wounded, and then more laughter followed from the audience. Braver this time. I looked toward Jimmy to see if he was laughing, too. He was. I laughed.
With the speed of a snake that’s striking, the man beside the heckler, clearly a coal miner, the dirt still on him from his shift, reached up, grabbed the man, and neatly snapped his neck. The miner dropped the limp body to the ground.
Nobody moved. The laughter had dried up like spit in the wind.
Onstage, the woman lifted her head, and her eyes glowed such a bright black that I could feel them penetrate even to me in my dark corner. Great convulsions began to roil beneath the woman’s wrinkled skin, convulsions that made her body seem to be alive with a festoon of insects under the flesh. Then they stopped, and the woman seemed to gather herself.
“Rudeness,” she said, “will not be tolerated.”
Silence. It was all happening so fast that no one even had the time to scream.
“Although on occasion I do enjoy your sarcasm. Really I do, but this just isn’t the place for it.” For the first time, She smiled, a wide-open smile revealing her teeth. The audience gasped. Her teeth were cracked and broken off in places, but where they remained they were as long as index fingers, and sharp, whittled at the ends like needles. Her spittle gleamed from them like venom.
“Now, then. As I was saying. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” She did a little leap on the stage, clicking her heels together as if She were twenty and a man. “I have an offer to make you. I’d like you to walk with me. To be my children, as it were. To raise the proverbial finger with me to that great asshole in the sky and his favored lily-livered offspring. Most especially to that cunt-lapper, my sister. Come be mine. Walk with me.”
The audience turned toward one another, frightened murmurings beginning as everyone began to stand and push toward the door.
But before they could escape, the massacre began.
I don’t know how many Feeders there were, but it must have been more than ten or twenty, because afterward there were so many bodies. So many. Whatever the number, there was enough. There was more than enough. They rose from the chairs in which they sat, and as one they began to kill those beside them. They were townspeople, farmers, and miners alike. Amongst them were one or two from our circus. With the speed of something not of this world, they began. In front of me, a man rose to run his knife across the throat of his partner beside him. Behind him another rose and as one they turned in a synchronized movement to grab the person between them, one taking him by his foot, the other by his head, and they pulled until he tore clean in two. All the while they were screaming. Everywhere, everyone was screaming, the killers, the hunted, the onlookers.
For the most curious thing was that, yes, there were onlookers. Not a person in the circus was touched. Not a one. We watched. At first it was only my mother and me, but then, from the back tents came the rest of us, everyone entering at a run after hearing the commotion. In half stages of dress: the twins who rode the white horses around the rink, dressed only in the top of their sequined leotards; Sacha, wearing his dress pants and a long-underwear top. They came and if any of them tried to help the audience members (they did, they were not cruel people), one of the Feeders knocked them back to the outskirts. We were meant to watch.
Within minutes it was over, every audience member in that tent dead. Except Jimmy. I looked everywhere for him, scanned the bodies, scanned those trembling along the outskirts, even scanned the Feeders—better he was alive and one of them. That’s what I thought then, anyway. He was nowhere. In a minute, I had no time to think of him anymore.
Once again, the woman on the stage spoke: “Your choice, my dears. I said I’d offer you a choice and here it is. Come with me, come live as my children, and I will not kill you. Come Become. I’ll give you an hour to decide. No more. No less. Within an hour, I’ll begin to kill the rest of the town, and those I turn will be random. I’ve asked you, as a whole, to Become one of my own because you intrigue me. I…feel something for you. Forced to wander, to entertain others by degrading yourselves, to whet the appetites of others but to quash your own desires because you are but the show. I can understand these things. Yours is the time in which I will rise to my greatness. I’m asking you to be a part of this because I know you. And I love you. Outcasts, miscreants every one, I have accepted your darkness. It is your life.”
“You’re a monster!” someone yelled from the ring around the tent’s interior. I don’t know who it was, and even to my young ears the denunciation felt weak, like a line from a play.
“You may call me what you wish,” the woman said.
“What is your real name?” It was my mother who spoke. I’d run to her side at the end of her performance, but she had pushed me away, told me to get out. I didn’t obey her, only hid there, behind a flimsy folding chair in the back. Not that there was any need to hide. The Feeders seemed to know who was and wasn’t of the circus, and had left me well alone.
The old woman turned, rising taller as She did so. Taller and taller She stood, dropping her cane and seeming to actually grow into something inhuman, the lines of her flesh wavering.
“The first sensible question any of you has asked. I am The Unnamed, He Who Was Forgotten. I am The Fallen. You have called me many things. Legion. Behemoth. Even, mistakenly, Lucifer, though as I’ve said, I am not him. It is best, perhaps, to call me something simple, yes? Something we can all remember? I best like the name given to me long ago by those who thought to keep me from harming others. They called me The Feeder. It is an apt name. It speaks of both my desire to feed you, my children, and my need—no, our need—to feed upon others.”
“What do you feed on?” asked my mother, and I saw that her flesh was still covered in bright beads of sweat from her dance, so that she shone under the tent’s dim light.
“On flesh,” The Feeder said. “For a start, but later, on something much more. On the very essence of man, something far sweeter. You, I believe, would call it a soul.”
My mother stepped backwards, and half fell to her knees. “We would never become that,” she said, unaware that she already was becoming that. Had already begun to turn.
The woman shrank back into herself, now just another human, hunched over her cane. “As I said, it is your choice. I’m offering you great power. If you don’t agree to it, then I’ll take some of you anyway and kill the rest. There is no escape, believe you me.” Then the woman threw her head back and laughed, and once again I was startled at how charming She sounded, how sweet and merry. “Better yet,” She said, facing the audience once more. “Look around you. Who says bodies can’t talk?” She descended from the stage, and the half-dozen or so of her Feeders followed close around her.
“One hour,” She said. “If you choose to join me, you will meet me in the mines then. I’ll leave a Feeder here to show you the way. If not…As I said, it’s your decision. But please don’t think to try anything. What my Feeders see, so do I see. What they feel, so do I. I am They and They are Me. One hour. Any questions you have, you may ask him.” She pushed a man covered in dirt, one of the miners, forward. Then She disappeared through the tent door, the train of her children, once humans like us, following her.
I’m growing tired, Pill, and I don’t think I can write much more of this without going crazy from the memories. Not at such detail, at any rate, so I’ll try to tell you the rest as briefly as possible. The most important thing is that you understand the nature of this creature and its offspring, and that you know what you must do.
The miner that She left with us was a jovial fellow, and more than willing to answer our questions. It was a game for him, you see, because he was The Feeder, just as the woman had said. All his children were him.
“It isn’t bad at all,” the man said. “Look at me. I remember everything that ever happened to me. Everything. It’s just that now I’m more. Before…” He paused, as if unsure how to put this. “Before I Became, I loved to smoke. I’d smoke and smoke and smoke cigars like a chimney, but they were killing me, don’t ya see. The doctor said my lungs were black with the smoke. But now…” He pulled a stack of rolling papers from his pocket and then a tin of tobacco, and began to roll a cigarette. “Now I’m saved. I’ll live forever, and I can smoke what I want. Drink what I want, too.”
“How did you…Become?” someone asked.
“Oh, it weren’t nothing much. You just eat a little bit of flesh. The smallest amount will do. Eventually, when you’ve Become all the way, you can feed others.” He looked up, and his eyes blazed with joy. “Don’t you see what She’s offering you? You can make others immortal. You can choose. There’s a new order coming on this earth, and He’s giving you the chance to be amongst the favored.”
“You’re asking us to eat people,” my mother said. “Worse, to consume their…their souls.”
“It’s the most delicious thing you’ll ever eat, ma’am,” the man said, pinching the end of the newly rolled cigarette closed and then clamping it between his teeth. “The most dee-licious. Guaranteed.”
He told us other things, that miner. Him. The Feeder. One and the same, I guess. I won’t go into them now, but I’ll list them for you later. The important thing is to know what we did with the information. We decided to fight. We decided to stand.
We couldn’t trust everyone. Which is not to say that they were not good people, those in my circus family. They were. But what was at stake was too much. My mother, Trees, Sacha, and I were the only ones in on the plan. It had to be that way. There was no other hope. If you had seen the slaughter in the tent, you would understand, Pill. Please don’t judge me.
We would go down into the mines; that was our decision. We’d go down as if agreeing to The Feeder’s demands. This meant that we’d have to convince the rest of the circus to go down with us, not an easy thing. But we did it. Humans can be convinced of almost anything in times of fear, and I am ashamed to say that many wanted what The Feeder offered them almost from the moment He opened his mouth. Power can be a hard thing to resist, Pill.
The others were not to know also because if they did, they might fight us. They were to go like lambs to the slaughter.
It was Sacha’s idea to use the squirrels. “If I die, my darlings will die, too. Better they die a noble death. They would want it this way.” Even as he spoke, one of the creatures ran up and down his arm and along the side of his neck, chattering to him. The squirrel wore dress pants much like Sacha’s but no shirt.
When the hour was up, we marched down into the mines, taking the bodies with us.
Down, down, down, on the backs of two show horses and on the backs of some of the men. I have never seen braver people. Down, down, down they went. I went, too, although Trees and my mother made me wait at the top. My job was to finish it all.
“It is a task worse than ours, Little Bear,” Trees told me, kissing me on the forehead before he, too, went down, down, down.
I did not cry. Not then. Not even when my mother followed Trees, when they all went underground and I saw them for the final time. Why didn’t I cry? I don’t know. I just couldn’t. If I had cried, I would have lost all of my nerve.
Within the half hour, I felt the heat from the fire they’d started. The plan was for everyone to take the communion, or begin to take it, and then Sacha would let the squirrels loose. Each squirrel would have a bottle of alcohol and a gasoline-soaked rag tied to its tail. They only needed to be lit and then they’d be running firebombs, impossible to catch in their terror, impossible to put out. The timber of the supports the miners had put in to keep their caves upright would be the first to go. Trees and Mother would make sure of it. And then they would all die. Each and every one.
And if they didn’t? I was to finish them. There was only one entrance to the mining caves, a narrow hole that had to be crawled down into with a ladder. At the top of it, I was to lay down the door and light a fire on top of it. And if they still came through? Just before he left, Trees had given me his gun. I knew how to use it, too, because he had taught me many, many moons before. As I said, Trees was as good as a father to me.
That is all I will tell you of it, for I am not proud of what I had to do to the few who tried to escape. When the fire was over, I went back to the tents, my gun in hand, and I found nothing left. Trees had set fire to them before we left so that there would be a cover for all of us to go down into the mines. Unexpectedly this fire had spread, and I found the town in a panic.
In the streets, I found Jimmy. He was covered in blood, screaming that his sister was dead. When I asked him how she’d died, he would not answer, but he took me back to his home and took care of me the best he could. Both his parents were missing in the fire, killed in the mines or in town, I never found out. Jimmy asked me no questions the first two nights. On the third night he asked me to marry him. I said yes.
And on the fourth night I shot him. I dragged his body to the back of the house and burned it. Everyone thought he’d simply died in the fires. No one but me knew. And now you. I killed him, Pill, killed him without ever really knowing if he was infected at all. But he’d been with Clara, you see, and you have to be sure, Pill. You have to kill them all. Each and every one.