“Get Skyy,” she said.
The door closed and both the man and the dwarves hurried out of the tent through a flap a few yards away. They were heading back out towards the Midway. As soon as they were gone, Talman ran to the back of the trailer, and sat against its walls, arms hugging his legs close to his body. How long could he stay here?
“She wants you,” the barker said, and a chill spiked through Skyy’s belly. The time was here. Taking a deep breath and blinking back a tear, she hurried after him and Wen and Wong to her mother’s trailer.
Inside, Reind stood against one wall as Erin mopped Yvette’s brow with a rag. The others were there too, Felina, Yvonne, Andrese, Helena. Nobody said a word as she entered, and she went straight to the head of the bed. Erin stepped away and Skyy knelt in her place, immediately feeling the awful pain of her mother through the strange sight of her third eye. All pain was bad, but this pain felt truly…wrong. Terminal.
“Mama,” she whispered. The older woman smiled weakly and nodded.
There was a thud from the far corner of the trailer and Andrese turned his blonde head to look out the back window.
“Someone’s outside,” he announced. His brunette side never stopped staring at Yvette.
“Who?” Skyy asked.
“Kid. Big hair and tattoos. He’s leaning against the wall over here.”
“I’ll shag him,” Reind said, and moved to the door.
Skyy watched him leave, but then called him back just as the door was closing.
“Reind,” she said. “Don’t send him away. Bring him in here.”
“Trust me,” Skyy said. It felt right.
The door closed and she looked at her mother’s white face. Despite the shaking, wracking pain, Yvette’s eyes met hers with a strange calmness, searching her daughter’s soul.
“I’m not ready,” Skyy whispered.
Yvette met her gaze and hissed. “Ready,” she said. “You must. You’ll find help.”
The trailer door opened, and Reind pushed a struggling Talman into the room.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” the boy protested.
“Shhhh,” Skyy said, looking his way. Talman was instantly silent.
Talman saw the room was filled with freaks. A two-headed guy. A girl with too many arms. Dwarves. Skyy and her three eyes. But the strangest, he thought, was on the bed, where a half naked woman lay gasping and shaking with an exposed and ridiculous number of breasts. He suddenly knew why the Freak Show tent had been empty in the middle of the day. They were all here.
“Is she having a baby?” he asked, noting the bulge of her belly and the cribs and jars.
“Several,” the girl with four arms answered.
At that, the woman on the bed suddenly cried out loud, a hideous, toe-curling scream that seemed to cut off as quickly as it began. She rose from the pillow, and then fell back to the bed, and Talman saw the woman at the foot of the bed reach forward, and rescue a red, wriggling thing from between the woman’s legs.
“It’s a boy,” Erin said and handed the child to Andrese who immediately began wiping it clean.
“It has three heads!” Andrese announced. “And it’s still living!”
And then Yvette screeched again, and another bloody bundle fell into Erin’s hands. This one made no noise. Erin shook her head and handed the stillborn child to one of the dwarves.
“Too many testicles,” Wen said, and sponged the baby off before placing it in a jar to be worked on later.
Again Yvette cried out with heartstopping volume, and then instantly stopped as deformed child after deformed child was delivered, eight in all.
Talman watched it all silently, keeping to the wall and out of the way as each of the family took a child, dead or alive and cleaned it, readying it for life…or display. A girlchild had eight nipples, just like its mother. A boy had a tail growing from the end of its spine.
The one that chilled him the most though was the child without any sex at all. It was a stillborn, and was smooth between its legs. In the center of its chest was a second mouth. Both of its mouths were wide open, and Talman imagined it inside Yvette, soundlessly screaming in stereo as it expired.
At last, with a final expulsion of dark blood and what Talman guessed were the slick organs of “afterbirth,” Yvette slumped to the bed, and cried no more.
“Benjamin,” Skyy suddenly called, and the door burst open instantly. The ringmaster entered, and rushed to Yvette’s side.
“I think it’s over,” Skyy whispered, and drew back as the man buried his mustache in the crook of Yvette’s neck. The woman didn’t stir.
Skyy came to stand by Talman, cheeks glistening with the waterfall of tears from three crying eyes. After watching Benjamin cry and whisper to Yvette’s body for a few minutes, Skyy finally turned to look at Talman with a long, wet stare.
Finally, she nodded to herself and asked, “You don’t want to go home, do you?”
He shook his head.
“Would you like to travel with us for awhile?”
The faces of her sisters and brothers nearby turned towards her with frowns and one of Andrese’s mouths whispered, “What do we need him for?”
Skyy smiled. “He needs us right now.”
Talman stood up straighter, about to protest. He didn’t need anyone.
“And
I
need him,” she continued. “If mama’s passing things on to me, I need help, and you all already have work enough. And I don’t think Benjamin is going to be up to it for awhile.”
The ringmaster was now sobbing uncontrollably at the bedside.
Talman relaxed slightly.
“It’s been awhile since the circus had a tattooed man,” Skyy said thoughtfully, looking again at Talman’s garishly decorated arms. “Interested in adding to your collection?”
Talman grinned, just a little.
“Yeah,” he said, and moved with Skyy to stand at the side of Yvette’s bed. He looked around the room at this bizarre family of freaks and felt something strange inside. Something he hadn’t felt since his dad passed away.
Talman finally felt at home.
“Yeah,” he whispered again, this time to himself. In his throat he felt a lump of sorrow for the pain of his newfound family, and after a moment, a tear crossed his cheek, for the mother he would never get to know.
— | — | —
“Let me tell you something about my tattoos,” the artist said. “When I draw on you it is not just a picture; with my ink I will scratch into your soul. My art is deeper than skin.”
Right now it felt like the needles were penetrating his soul.
You never got used to the needle.
Talman grit his teeth and closed his eyes. It was always difficult, but today it seemed worse than ever. Normally, after the first sting of the needle a warm fuzzy glow spread out across his body from the start of the tattoo. He would close his eyes and the world would become a haze of pain and blood. As the artist worked, he could feel the image growing across his skin, spreading out from its center to embrace him, to own him. He was the artist’s canvas, as the needles wove their ink indelibly into his skin. As he grew used to the pain, his mind slipped away. At first he was anchored by the fire in his flesh, but after a while, Talman could see beyond the tiny rooms with their tawdry pictures and dark stained floors.
Every town was the same. Every town had a tattoo parlor that blared its trade in neon screams and called to young and old to decorate the skeins of their lives in garish ink.
There was almost always a girl at the counter with dark hair and painted eyes and arms that spoke of storybook nightmares and whimsical dreams. Sometimes, Talman stared deep into their ocher eyes and marveled at the emptiness there. But mostly, he bypassed the girls and moved straight to the artist and asked if he or she could do something special.
The artists were often cast from a similar mold as well. They wore shirts with sleeves ripped out in order to display both their skills and demons in Technicolor flexing. Sometimes their heads were shaved and sometimes their skulls bore the imprint of another’s needle—at least Talman hoped it was another’s. He couldn’t fathom how somebody could stitch a picture into his own scalp, though he had met artists who claimed to have done every one of their tattoos, from the snakes around their thighs to the dragons on their backs, using their own hands and a mirror. He couldn’t imagine. Even after three dozen designs carved in his skin, Talman still squinted back tears and struggled to slip away from the moment of inking.
He would think about the circus, and Skyy. He would think about the children, and pray that they were all right. Ever since the death of Yvette, the circus’ eight-breasted woman, he and Skyy had acted as surrogate parents to Yvette’s babies, Skyy’s siblings. He worried most about Sal, the three-headed hermaphrodite. How could the child ever survive with so many choices to make?
But today he felt far from Sal and the circus and Skyy. He had stalked away from the circus grounds early in the morning, as Skyy still breathed softly in sleep. He’d been awake most of the night again, haunted by the feeling that something wasn’t right. The ache in his heart had grown with each passing day for weeks. He couldn’t put his finger on the reason, but Talman was troubled. Skyy sensed it, he knew. Each night she tried to lull him to sleep with kisses and caresses, but Talman only rolled away. He wasn’t happy anymore, and there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it.
So this morning, he’d done what he always did when he felt lost. He’d taken a long walk that led straight to a tattoo parlor. A place where he could mask pain with art. But with the art, came the agony of the needle. And the needle was doing its work now.
The pain was all-encompassing; it was all he could focus on. It was all that there was. He could feel the artist’s needles dipping deeper and deeper into his flesh, injecting their bloody ink closer and closer to his core.
He had covered his body in the past with pictures of snakes, fairies, skulls, dragons and all manner of mythical, colorful creatures. The children loved him to bend and flex and reveal the mysteries beneath his shirt. And when he bared his leg they’d shriek in fear of its wickedly snarling black demon of death. He had thought that the ancient serpent that coiled from his left thigh up around his belly button was the most painful tattoo he could experience. But this latest tattoo struck straight to the heart.
And that was the artist’s intention.
Talman could feel the pound in his chest drumming faster and faster as the needles penetrated the flesh just above its cage of bones. This was a new magic; the artist had promised that this tattoo was not of some fictional beast or some mythical god. When Talman had entered the tiny tattoo shop in Parkville, Illinois he had stood alone for many minutes staring at the colorful walls. The pictures here were not the normal sort of tattoo artist showings. Oh, there were the grinning skulls and the burlesque tarts and the snarling dragons and more, but somehow these tattoos, these pictures, seemed more real, more intricate than any he had seen before. Perhaps it was because of the shop’s darkness, for there was no girl waiting at the counter to tease and encourage. And Talman saw no artist waiting at the back room. He had been ready to leave, turning towards the door when a voice called out, “Can I help you?”
Talman turned to see an old man with white hair shuffling from a back hall. The man was polishing something with white cloth.
“Maybe,” Talman said. “I’m looking for something special, something really unique. I’m the “tattooed man” for a circus, so I can’t get away with the usual blue and red dragons. When our barker introduces me, he tells everyone that my body will ‘inspire, and amuse, and frighten.’ Is there someone here who has the skill to help me? To give me something truly different?”
The old man slipped the white cloth in his pocket, perched a thin pair of glasses on his nose, looked him over a moment, and then nodded. “I may be able to help you.”
The man’s hand tremored as he held it out to shake, and Talman raised an eyebrow.
“You can draw well?” he asked.
“I don’t just draw on your skin,” the old man grinned. “I draw on your soul.”
“I ain’t got no soul,” Talman shook his head and blurted. “I’ve just got skin. And I need to use it well. You can’t be the tattooed man of the circus if you don’t have some real art on your parts.”
He waved a hand around the shop. “Are these pictures of your work?”
“Pictures only tell a part of the story,” the old tattoo artist said, but he rose and walked stiffly to retrieve a black binder tucked beneath a white formica counter.
“The real story is in here,” the artist nodded, tapping a gnarled finger to his equally weathered forehead. “And here,” he repeated, tapping his chest.
Talman took the binder and paged past its cover, instantly sighing in awe of the intricate twinings, lifelike portraits and bleeds of patterned color displayed on arms and legs and necks via 4x6” photos there.
The old man nodded. “My work is never simple,” he said, “and its life stretches beyond its canvas. Sit with me and talk awhile and let’s consider the manner of your tattoo.”