Jenny Plague-Bringer(11)

As usual, the little crowd screamed and ran away through the curtain. Radu winked at her—he loved that “first scare” of the night, the one that was sure to draw plenty of curious lookers with coins to spend.

She wrapped herself in the quilt and sat down in the plain wooden chair at the back of her stage, reading a dime novel about pirates, and Radu left to round up the next audience.

She usually held back, but tonight she was really letting the plague out, giving them an extra-gory display. The others at the carnival didn’t know it yet, but this would be her last night as the World’s Most Diseased Woman, if things turned out as she hoped.

The next little group was ushered in, much quieter than the first, eager to see whatever had sent the first group running in terror.

She gave them a good show.



* * *



The next day was a Sunday, and local officials had made it clear that the carnival had to stay closed, lest it distract people from church. Many of the carnies had prepared for the day off with heavy drinking the night before, so the dusty midway was cold and silent in the morning as she left her tent and walked the dirt avenue between the booths. The smell of traveling carnival still hung in the air: popcorn, fried chicken, cotton candy, horse shit from the Wild West show.

The midway looked sad by day. No colored lights, no steam-powered calliope music from the carousel. The morning sun washed out the giant paintings of clowns, gorillas, and dragons—instead of weaving a fantasy world, they simply looked like drab, flat cartoons, painted onto wooden booths with all the games, toys, and other flash packed away inside. Without the mystery of the night beyond the lights of the midway, even the Ferris wheel looked small and pathetic. Spooky Manor, the haunted house, just looked silly, with its yarn spiderwebs and the skeleton peeping out the front window, though it could look convincingly scary at night with the proper lighting and sound effects.

Most of the carnival was devoted to crafting illusion, making a pretend world of color and magic to open up wallets and purses. Even the rides were meant to inspire a false feeling of danger, the games rigged to conjure a false sense that the mark might win big.

Juliana wasn’t a trick or a scam. Everyone in the carnival assumed she was, of course, that she’d mastered a kind of theatrical illusion using some combination of makeup and lighting. Probably most or all of the customers believed that, too, once they had time to think it over and wrap the memory into a familiar packaging. They might even tell each other how obvious the fakery had been, later, when they were well away from the sideshow tent.

Juliana walked off the fairgrounds and followed the dirt road into town, which wasn’t much more than two strips of brick and wood buildings, a well, and a corral. The largest building was the train depot.

She drew odd looks and whispers from the crowd of townspeople gathered in the street. She’d dressed as plainly as she could, in her brown dress with a few flower designs sewn here and there, a scarf to help shield her head from human contact, a white straw hat for the hot sunlight. Of course, she had to wear the black gloves unrolled all the way along her forearms, something very out of place in the Missouri summer. Everyone knew she wasn’t local, and so they would correctly assume she was with the carnival camped outside town.

Along the street were multiple wagons with people piling in, ready to ride to the next town, just as she’d hoped. A man in a tie, possibly the town preacher, was yelling at them not to go, telling them they’d be damned, that they should instead attend a proper church, such as his own, for example.

Juliana approached a woman sitting in the back of the wagon with three small children, one of whom was a boy, five or six years old, with a badly shriveled leg. It looked like polio.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Juliana whispered to the woman, who wore a dress that had once been fine but was now patched many times over. “Is this wagon going to the revival?”

“We are,” the woman said. “You must be from the circus.”

“Yes ma’am,” Juliana said, trying to sound a little Southern. “Might I ride with you? I could pay you a penny or two for it.”

“Not on the Lord’s day, you don’t!” the woman snapped. She might have been in her late twenties or early thirties, but her sun-wrinkled skin made it hard to tell. She turned toward the bearded man in the big brown hat who sat on the driver’s bench, holding the reins of the two horses. “Henry, we can take this circus girl to see the preachers, can’t we?”

“Don’t see why not.” Henry puffed his pipe, not even looking back at his new passenger.

“Let me help you up.” The woman reached down a hand.