3

"One child," Jack said as he handed a ten to the guy in the ticket booth.

He was a beefy type, wearing a straw boater. He looked around.

"What child?"

"Me. I'm a kid at heart."

"Funny," the ticket man said without a smile as he slid an adult ticket and change across the tray.

Jack entered the main tent of the Ozymandias Prather Oddity Emporium and checked out his fellow attendees: a sparse and varied crew, everything from middle-class folk who looked like they'd just come from church to Goth types in full black regalia.

At first glance the show looked pretty shabby. Everything seemed so worn, from the signs above the booths to the poles supporting the canvas. Look up and it was immediately apparent from the sunlight leaking through that the Oddity Emporium was in need of new tents. He wondered what they did when it rained. Thunderstorms were predicted for later. Jack was glad he'd be out of here long before then.

As he moved along he tried to classify the Oddity Emporium. In some ways it was a freak show, and in many ways not.

First off, Jack had never seen freaks like some of these. Sure, they had the World's Fattest Man, a giant billed as the World's Tallest Man, two sisters with undersized heads who sang in piercing falsetto harmony—nothing so special about them.

Then they came to the others.

By definition freaks were supposed to be strange, but these went beyond strange into the positively alien. The Alligator Boy, the Bird Man with flapping feathered wings… these "freaks" were so alien they couldn't be real.

Like the Snake Man. Jack couldn't see where the real him ended and the fake began.

Makeup and prosthetics, Jack told himself.

But the way he used his tail to wrap around a stuffed rabbit and squeeze it… just like a boa constrictor.

A good fake, but still a fake. Had to be… even if this was Monroe.

One aspect of the show that reinforced his feeling that these weren't real was that there was nothing sad or pathetic about these "freaks." No matter how bizarre their bodies, they seemed proud—almost belligerently so—of their deformities, as if the people strolling the midway were the freaks.

Jack slowed before a booth with a midget standing on a miniature throne. He had a tiny handlebar mustache and slicked-down black hair parted in the middle. A gold-lettered sign hung above him: little sir echo.

"Hi!" a little girl said.

"Hi, yourself," the little man replied in a note-perfect imitation of the child's voice.

"Hey, Mom!" she cried. "He sounds just like me!"

"Hey, Mom!" Little Sir Echo said. "Come on over and listen to this guy!"

Jack noticed a tension in the mother's smile and thought he knew why. The mimicked voice was too much like her child's—pitch and timbre, all perfect down to the subtlest nuance. If Jack had been facing away, he wouldn't have had the slightest doubt that the little girl had spoken. Amazing, but creepy too.

"You're very good," Mom said.

"I'm not very good," he replied in a perfect imitation of the woman's voice. "I'm the best. And your voice is as beautiful as you are."

Mom flushed. "Why, thank you."

The midget turned to Jack, still speaking in the woman's voice: "And you, sir—Mr. Strong Silent Type. Care to say anything?"

"Yoo doorty rat!" Jack said in his best imitation of a bad comic imitating James Cagney. "Yoo killed my brutha!"

The woman burst out laughing. She didn't say so, but she had to think it was awful… because it was.

"A W. C. Fields fan!" the little man cried with a mischievous wink. "I have an old recording of one of his stage acts! Want to hear?"

Without waiting for a reply, Sir Echo began to mimic the record, and a chill ran through Jack as he realized that the little man was faithfully reproducing not only the voice but the pops and cracks of the scratched vinyl as well.

"Marvelous, my good man!" Jack said in a W. C. Fields imitation as bad as his Cagney. "Marvelous."

He moved off, wondering why he'd been afraid to let the midget hear his natural voice. Some prerational corner of his brain had shied away from it. Probably the same part that made jungle tribefolk shun a camera for fear it would steal their souls.

As he passed a booth with a green-skinned fellow billed as "The Man from Mars," he glanced up and stopped cold.

Dead ahead, a banner hung over the midway. Faded yellow letters spelled out sharkman. But it was the crude drawing that had captured his attention.

Damn if it didn't resemble a rakosh.

After what he'd seen here already, he wouldn't be half surprised if it were.

Not that one of Kusum's rakoshi had a single chance in hell of being alive. They'd all died last summer between Governors Island and the Battery. He'd seen to that. Crisped them all in the hold of the ship that housed them. One of them did make it to shore, the one he'd dubbed Scar-lip, but it had swum back out into the burning water and had never returned.

The rakoshi were dead, all of them. The species was extinct.

But something here might resemble a rakosh, and if so, he was extra glad he hadn't brought Vicky along. Kusum Bahkti, the madman who'd controlled a nest of them, had vowed to wipe out the Westphalen bloodline; Vicky, as the last surviving Westphalen, had been his final target. His rakoshi emissaries had been relentless in their pursuit.

Passing a stall containing a woman with a third eye in the center of her forehead that supposedly "Sees ALL!" Jack came to an old circus cart with iron bars on its open side, one of the old cages-on-wheels once used to transport and display lions and tigers and such. The sign above it read: the amazing sharkman! Jack noticed people leaning across the rope border; they'd peer into the cage, then back off with uneasy shrugs.

This deserved a look.

Jack pushed to the front and squinted into the dimly lit cage. Something there, slumped in the left rear corner, head down, chin on chest, immobile. Something huge, a seven-footer at least. Dark-skinned, manlike, and yet… undeniably alien.

Jack felt the skin along the back of his neck tighten as ripples of warning shot down his spine. He knew that shape. But that was all it was. A shape. So immobile. It had to be a dummy of some sort or a guy in a costume. A helluva good costume.

But it couldn't be the real thing. Couldn't be…

Jack ducked under the rope and took a few tentative steps closer to the cage, sniffing the air. One of the things he remembered about the rakoshi was their reek, like rotting meat. He caught a trace of it here, but that could have been from spilled garbage. Nothing like the breath-clogging stench he remembered.

He moved close enough to touch the bars but didn't. The thing was a damn good dummy. He could almost swear it was breathing.

Jack whistled and said, "Hey, you in there!"

The thing didn't budge, so he rapped on one of the iron bars.

"Hey—!"

Suddenly it moved, the eyes snapping open as the head came up, deep yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the shadows.

Imagine the offspring from mating a giant hairless gorilla with a mako shark. Cobalt skin, hugely muscled, no neck worth mentioning, no external ears, narrow slits for a nose.

Spikelike talons, curved for tearing, emerged from the tips of the three huge fingers on each hand as the yellow eyes fixed on Jack. The lower half of its huge sharklike head seemed to split as the jaw opened to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. It uncoiled its legs and slithered across the metal flooring toward the front of the cage.

Along with instinctive revulsion, memories surged back: the cargo hold full of their dark shapes and glowing eyes, the unearthly chant, the disappearances, the deaths…

Jack backed up a step. Two. Behind him he heard the crowd oooh! and aaah! as it pressed forward for a better look. He took still another step back until he could feel their excited breath on his neck. These people didn't know what one of these things could do, didn't know their power, their near-indestructibility. Otherwise they'd be running the other way.