Jenny Plague-Bringer(32)
Jenny had been having bad dreams, too. Telling Seth about their most recent life had stirred up those memories like angry hornets, and they kept intruding on her waking thoughts as well as her dreams. Alexander had purposely tried to block her memories of her most recent lives, while restoring hundreds of others. He’d wanted the old, evil Jenny back, not the new, slightly-less-evil version she’d become as she spent her recent lifetimes with the healer, Seth, instead of the dead-raiser, Alexander.
“There’s more I didn’t tell you about our last life,” Jenny said. “The more I tell you, the more I remember.”
“I thought we ran off with the circus and lived happily ever after.”
“If ‘happily ever after’ lasts only a few weeks.”
“It’s over now. Long time ago.” He turned away from her, leaving Jenny to stare up at the ceiling. She couldn’t stop thinking about that life, which wasn’t surprising, considering the specific things she was dealing with in the present. It seemed immediate to her, as if none of the problems from their previous life had been resolved, and they were all waiting to come back and haunt her.
Jenny closed her eyes, but she couldn’t sleep.
Chapter Eleven
Juliana stripped away her robe for the eight men who’d crowded into the back of the sideshow tent, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey from paper cups. They shouted and whistled as she bared herself—all of them except one. He stood watchfully in the back corner, his fedora pulled low, arms folded. He wore a suit instead of the frayed overalls and work shirts of the other men, and he wasn’t drinking.
Juliana did not try to make her show alluring—the carnival had a special “model show” tent for that, where men could leer through a thin, gauzy curtain at women wearing little or no clothing. Still, on occasion, there would be a man who came back to her show day after day until the carnival left town, eyes hungry to see Juliana’s pale, exposed body turn rotten with disease.
She did her best to avoid those men, who sometimes waited around outside the tent wanting to talk to her. She did not want to talk to them. This man was most likely one of those. He’d now come to see her three days in a row, ever since the carnival had arrived at the busy fairgrounds in Anderson County, South Carolina.
She gave the man no special notice at all as she slowly turned, letting the weeping, pus-dripping sores bloom slowly all over her. The drunken men shouted and jostled each other, impressed by the apparent circus trick.
The man in the corner didn’t join in the drunken laughter and applause. He had a shaggy beard and sharp eyes, and the squarish bearing of a police officer, which troubled her. Carnies always had to watch out for cops and usually had to pay “patch money” under the table to avoid being harassed. It wasn’t normal for local cops to hit up individual performers for bribes, but anything was possible.
Juliana finished her show, and Radu ushered the men out. She sighed and let her aching legs rest a moment, then changed into a light dress made of cheap, lumpy cotton, and she tied her hair back with a scarf. She slipped out through the back of the tent and circled around behind game booths, emerging far down the midway, in case her obsessed fan in the fedora was looking for her.
She emerged from behind the Wheel of Chance and hurried across the midway, which grew dark as each booth shut down for the night, like clusters of stars vanishing from the sky. The stragglers wandered toward the gates. Only the grab joints remained open, selling off the last of their hot dogs and fried dough to the departing visitors.
She nodded at One-Eyed Filip, the middle-aged man who ran the haunted house. He claimed to have lost his eye in the war, but Juliana had heard it was actually from a knife fight in Budapest. He played it up as the host of the haunted house, rubbing black makeup around the hollow eye to make it seem even larger and darker.
He smiled, showing several missing teeth, and waved her into the haunted house through the tall front door, painted to look like an arched medieval gate surrounded by lurid green skulls.
She walked quickly through the dark, twisting corridor, ignoring the sounds of chains and screams. Little windows on either side of the hallway offered views into different “scary” rooms: a mortuary where a bloody arm reached out of a casket, a dungeon where skeletons and one very decayed body hung on the walls, a red-lit “Hell room” with devil mannequins around a tinfoil fire. In that room, other clumps of tinfoil glittered in “fireplaces” around the wall, which was decorated to look like a volcanic cave. Horned red bats with pointy wings flapped up and down near the ceiling, and the wires that held them up were almost impossible to see.