Nightmare Carnival

HIBBLER’S MINIONS by Jeffrey Ford

It was 1933, and we wintered at the Dripping Springs west of Okmulgee. The Dust Bowl was raging, money was scarce. People didn’t buy what they didn’t need, but one thing they still needed was Wonder. The folks out on the Great Plains could always scrape together a dime or two for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors, a wandering menagerie of freaks and exotic beasts. We put on shows from Oklahoma to Ohio and back each year. Granted, the custom of carnivals was dying, and it faded another few inches with every town we rolled into. Dying wasn’t dead, though, and in those days that was something.

Ichbon was an old-timer by then, having started out with Barnum in New York City at the American Museum when still in his teens. The great showman helped set the young assistant up with connections and cash to run the Caravan of Splendors. By the time I came to the Maestro, as we were required to call Ichbon, he had seen all the wonder he could stomach, and at nights was given to drinking Old Overholt. Although he’d lost his sense of splendor, he retained his shrewdness for a dollar through those weary years and always managed to keep us in food, drink, and a little pocket money. He dressed like an admiral, complete with a cocked hat ever askew on his bald head. His trucks were dented, his trailers were splintered and rickety, his tent was threadbare, his banners were moth eaten, and his beasts were starving. A lot of us, though, in the grasp of the Maestro, had nothing but the show between us and destitution. Who would hire a man born with an extra face on the back of his head? I was Janus, the Man Who Sees Past and Future. In reality, I saw neither, and even the present was murky.

On a day in late February, Ichbon instructed the laborers, also known in their act as the Three Miserable Clowns, to erect the tent so as to check it for repairs. In a few weeks we were due to set out on that year’s journey. I was standing with him beneath the vaulted canvas, the ground still frozen beneath our feet, the sunlight showing dimly through the fabric. “What do you see in the future, Janus?” he asked me.

“Hopefully dinner,” I replied.

“I predict a banner year for the caravan,” he said.

“What makes you optimistic?”

“People are in such desperate straits, they’ll seek refuge in nostalgia.”

“Refuge we shall give them,” I said.

“Nostalgia,” said Ichbon, “is the syrup on the missing hotcakes.”

Mirchland, the dwarf, appeared then through the tent’s entrance with a stranger following. “Maestro,” he said, “this is Mr. Arvet. He’s come from all the way up by Black Mesa in the Panhandle to see you.”

I could tell the man was a farmer by his overalls and boots, and that he was beset with hard times by the look in his eyes. His face was a dry streambed of wrinkles. Ichbon took off the admiral hat and bowed low. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. He straightened and put his hand out to the man. “I am Ichbon.” The Maestro’s credo about the public was “Treat them each like visiting emissaries from a venerable land. It’s good for the cash box.” The two shook hands. I expected the fellow to ask to join the show. I’d seen it before a hundred times. But instead he said, “I have something to sell you.”

“What might that be?” asked Ichbon.

“It’s out in my truck in a crate.”

“An animal?”

“We had a black blizzard back in the fall. God’s own wrath came barreling across the dead fields a mile high, and in its clouds it bore the face of Satan. You couldn’t touch nobody in the midst of it or the electricity in the air would throw you apart. When it passed it left behind a plague of centipedes and a beast.”

“Bring your truck in under the big top,” said the Maestro, “and I’ll have the clowns unload it.”

“The big top,” I thought, looking up at the tattered canvas, and my other face laughed. I stopped laughing, though, when the Miserable Clowns, using all their strength, unloaded a long crate from the back of the truck. The sounds that issued forth from it reverberated inside the tent, reed thin but raspy, and their strangeness made my hair stand up. A moment later, a horrible stench engulfed us.

“Pungent,” said Ichbon and drew out his handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. From behind his makeshift mask, he asked Mr. Arvet, “Can you bring it out of the crate?”

“I made the box so the end slides open,” said the farmer. “Do you have a cage of some sort we can empty it into?”

The Maestro gave orders for the clowns to bring the leopard cage, the leopard having given up the ghost through the harsh winter. The three buffoons brought the metal barred enclosure and set it down so that its opening was congruent with the sliding panel of the crate. When all was ready, Mr. Arvet went to the box and pulled up the hatch. Immediately some large tawny colored beast shot forth. It moved too quickly to see it well at first. The clowns dropped the sliding door of the metal cage and trapped it. Ichbon and I stepped closer to see.

“What in God’s dry earth?” said the Maestro.

“Me and my woman call it the Dust Demon,” said Arvet.

The Miserable Clowns backed out of the tent and fled.

The thing was as long as the leopard had been, but bulkier, more muscular, the very color of the grit that blew across the plains in those dirty days. Its body was covered with a fine, spiraled wool, and it moved on powerful legs, at the ends of which were paws with long, black, curving nails. There was no tail to speak of, just a stub, and the head was like nothing ever seen outside a nightmare. Its eyes were the tiniest black beads, and it had no ears, only holes that appeared as if they’d been drilled into either side of its skull. The mouth was wide, and there was no jaw, just a thin membrane in the shape of a giant open tulip, the whiskered edges rippling with life. The Demon grunted and then howled to discover it had not escaped. When its maw was wide, further in there could be spotted rows of sharp black teeth.

“An abomination,” I whispered from my other face, unable to help myself.

Arvet looked around as if unsure who’d spoken — he’d not seen my other me — and finally said, “Well, it is a demon.”

Ichbon shook his head. “You say this came out of a dust storm?”

“Doc Thedus, up in Black Mesa, guessed it had been hibernating under the ground for centuries, and when the topsoil blowed away, it was awoken.”

“Maybe,” said the Maestro, “maybe.” I could tell from his expression that he was seeing dollar signs. “How much do you want for it?”

“A hundred,” said the farmer.

“A hundred dollars,” said Ichbon, and put the hat he’d been holding back on his head as if to make him think clearer. “No doubt you’ve uncovered a bona fide wonder here, Mr. Arvet. I’d like to make a deal with you, but I’ve not got a hundred to spare at this moment. We’ve yet to start this year’s caravan. I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll give you seventy dollars now, and in the fall, we can meet up in Shattuck, where we put on our last show, and I’ll give you another fifty. That’s more than you’re asking. By then, we’ll be flush after our journey to the east.”

Arvet rubbed the back of his head and stared at the ground for a long time. “I suppose I could do that.”

“Good enough,” said the Maestro and shook hands with the farmer.

“What do we need to know about the Dust Demon? What does it eat? How do you care for it?”

“First off, you gotta be careful around it. The thing took down my neighbor’s wife and ate her like a ham sandwich. Luckily he realized there was money to be made from it and instead of shooting it on the spot, helped me trap it. I gotta split the profits with him seventy/thirty of a hundred dollars. I guess I’ll keep the extra twenty for myself.”

“Besides farmers’ wives, what does it eat?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he said. “We had an outbreak of jackrabbits up there and they were easy food to catch for it, so I fed it jackrabbits. It ate ’em but without any real enthusiasm. One thing’s for sure, whatever you do don’t put any water near it. Water makes it weak. My wife put a bowl of water in its cage early on like you would do for a dog, and it almost perished on the spot till we come to understand it couldn’t abide anything wet. Keep it covered in the rain.”

That night, the Maestro gathered us beneath the tent and told us his plans for the Dust Demon and how the creature would save us all. Martina, the Dog Girl, described Ichbon’s delivery as “grandiloquent,” which all but Ichbon knew meant “meandering and tedious.” The tent by then had trapped the Demon’s stench, and we breathed it while the old man carried on. Finally, Jack Sprat, the Thinnest Man Alive, said in a slightly raised voice, “It smells worse than shit in here.” From its cage behind the speaker’s podium the creature let loose a weak cry.

Ichbon took Sprat’s cue and said, “In closing, I want to reiterate: the Demon will draw them, money will fill the coffers, and the Caravan of Splendors will rise from its economic hibernation to live again.” We clapped once or twice, I wouldn’t call it applause, and everyone made a beeline for the exit. Even the Maestro didn’t stick around. He walked in a stately manner followed by the Three Miserable Clowns pantomiming him in the throes of his speech. They followed him, and I followed them, back to his trailer, where I knew the Old Overholt would flow. It seemed that Maybell (the Rubber Lady) and the Falling Angel had the same notion as me. They were there, seated outside, passing the bottle with Ichbon when I arrived. A small fire burned in the center of their circle. There was an empty wooden folding chair and I joined them.

The next morning, I woke in my trailer, with a headache from the whiskey and coughing out of both sides of my head from Maybell’s harsh muggles. The only thing I could remember was the sight of Ichbon reeling drunkenly beneath the stars, going after the Three Miserable Clowns with a lion-taming whip. They were running around him, ducking and weaving, and he was snapping that thing in the air, like gunshots. They were all laughing hysterically. “Miserable bastards,” the Maestro bellowed and cracked the whip. When I left the trailer, hurrying to make it to breakfast on time, I nearly ran over Mirchland. He said, “The Maestro wants you in the tent in a hurry.”

I was hungry and the thought of facing the smell of the Dust Demon with a hangover didn’t sit well. Still, I went. When I got there, I found Ichbon standing next to the cage of the creature. His hat was off, his head was bowed.

“Yes, Maestro,” I said.

He nodded toward the cage. The beast was lying motionless. I stared for a long while, trying to notice the rise and fall of its breathing, but it was still. By that time, the flies had arrived, and although it seemed impossible the thing stunk worse.

“You see that on the floor of the cage?”

I nodded.

“That’s the future.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Considering I don’t first blow my brains out and if I had the money, I’d have that thing stuffed,” said Ichbon. “We could still make a fortune off the carcass with the right banner and bullshit in the towns, but a stitch job like that would sink us. I’m afraid we’ll just have to move ahead without it.” Never let it be said that the Maestro was a quitter. “The Dust Demon,” he said, as if picturing the creature rendered in full color bursting out of the ground toward an unsuspecting farmer’s wife. Just then, I glimpsed a black dot of an insect leap off the creature’s head and land on the back of Ichbon’s wrist. He looked down, brought his hand closer to his eyes, and squinted.

Moments passed and he continued to study it.

“What is that?” I finally asked.

“It’s a flea,” he said. “Quick, go get the professor and round up the clowns.” As I hurriedly left the tent, I saw, through the eyes in the back of my head, the Maestro cover the insect on his wrist with the opposite hand. He was smiling broadly. “When life is shit, make shit soup,” he yelled after me.

Professor Dunce was Jon Hibbler’s show name. He was the only one in the caravan older than Ichbon. Throughout his long life in the business he’d done nearly every act, once even passing as Jeez Louise, the Bearded, Tattooed, Fat Lady. He’d seen all there was to see on the road, and the Maestro kept him around as a sort of advisor. Still the creaky Hibbler had to pay his way, and so pretended for the crowds that he was an imbecile. Dressed in a graduation gown and wearing a dunce cap, the professor would sit in a chair, and Ichbon would stand next to him, calling the patrons over and beseeching, “Ladies and gentlemen, could anyone really be this stupid?” It cost three cents to ask the dunce a question, and I never ceased to wonder how many couldn’t wait to spend their pennies. Hibbler had a college degree, though, and had a rasher of high academic terminology that he would splice together to make a whirling lecture devoid of sense. The crowd loved their own love of his inanity.

The professor moved slowly, shuffling along amid the trailers in his black gown like some grim clergyman. The cold affected him greatly. He was pale as a ghost with a shock of white hair and a white beard. By the time I rounded up the clowns, Hibbler was just passing into the shade of the tent. Immediately, Ichbon ordered the clowns to go and bring back three glass jars with screw-on lids and eyebrow tweezers. Then he turned to the professor and said, “Do you remember, Jon, your act back twenty years ago, Hibbler’s Minions?”

Ichbon’s words took a moment to sink in, and then the professor smiled and said, “You mean the fleas?”

The Maestro stepped close to me and said, “This man, at one time, was the proprietor of the most renowned flea circus in the world. God, what a moneymaker it was.”

“It was a good act,” said the professor.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“I couldn’t get the fleas. You have to be able to loop a very thin gold wire around them to get them to perform. Cat and dog fleas are too small, but human fleas—Pulex irritans—were large enough. I’d harness them to miniature chariots and have them walk a tightrope, carrying a little umbrella. At the end, I’d shoot one out of a cannon and catch it in midair. It’s the cleanliness of the modern world that’s put them in decline. You can’t find them anymore.”

The Maestro said, “I hope you still have some of that gold wire,” uncapped his hand from off his wrist, and brought it up for the professor to see more clearly. “Look at the size of that thing.”

Hibbler nodded, slowly at first, but then with more determination. “I could work with that flea,” he said. “It would be easy.”

“I’ll have the clowns collect as many as they can from the carcass of this worthless pile before I have it burned.”

There came a day in early spring when the caravan finally lurched forward toward the rising sun. To be moving, to be caught up in a day’s work, I found preferable to the purgatory of wintering. After the Dust Demon had been burned down to its bones and Ichbon had retrieved the skull and claws, the aroma lingered in camp till the day we departed. Despite the dust storms, everyone breathed easier on the plains out of reach of the tentacles of that stench.

I brushed up on my act, which beside cheap tricks like inhaling a cigarette with one mouth and expelling the smoke out the other, took the form of an argument with myself. The Maestro always warned me, “Don’t leave the audience for too long with your other face. It’s too strange, too hungry. When it licks its lips, the customers walk away.” I’d only viewed my other face once, in a room of mirrors, but the sight of me struck me unconscious on the spot. I was left with amnesia of the incident, unable to picture me. Whenever I tried, the hair would rise on the backs of my arms and the saliva would leave my mouth. I rewrote the script of the argument so that my other face had half as much dialogue. It meant fewer times I would have to turn completely around to answer myself, and that was fine with me as the act was exhausting.

The Maestro was right: the crowds that March were so dejected, they pretended we were good. By the time we made it to Muskogee, Professor Dunce had shed his graduation gown for a tuxedo and top hat and been reborn as Hibbler, Master of Minions. He sat with me and the Maestro and Maybell one evening. We passed the smoke and the bottle and he explained, “These are no ordinary fleas. They’re disproportionately large with enormous heads. I can see their eyes watching for my commands. Under the jeweler’s loupe I have discovered they don’t have insect limbs, insignificant sticks, but muscular arms and legs with feet and hand-like grippers.”

“But will they perform?” asked Ichbon, taking a toke.

“I daresay they’re smarter than dogs,” said Hibbler. “I don’t even have to bind them and they willingly perform the feats I require.”

“They feed on your blood?” asked the Rubber Lady.

“They don’t touch me. When I doze off at night, they leave the trailer and go hunting. I think they must be into the animals, but I knew it was right to let them find their own diet. How much could they take? There are only six of them.”

“The peacock is looking a little peaked,” said Ichbon.

“When we open in Muskogee and you see the act and the money it brings, you won’t care if they’re feasting on your balls, Maestro.”

“There’s a lady present,” said the face at the back of my head.

I saw the first show of the new flea circus, and Hibbler’s Minions was the hit the old man had promised. Every night after the first, it was packed for his performance in the back left corner of the tent. The crowd could readily see the fleas and were astonished at what they’d been trained to do. Incredible lifting, pulling, acrobatics, tightrope walking, leaping, and all without a harness, all initiated by voice command from Hibbler. Laid out on a board was a three-ring circus, and in each ring a different flea performed a different feat. One lifted a silver cigarette lighter over its head, the next juggled caraway seeds, the third tumbled and leaped high into the air. Above them one crossed on a high wire. All six of them enacted a chariot race with two tiny chariots going around the circumference of the center ring. Word spread far and wide about the minions. And when their act drew to a close the damn things would line up in a row and bow to applause.

Hibbler was back in old form and there was actually a spring in his step. He’d become the star attraction of the Caravan and was relishing it. “I rule them with an iron fist,” he told me. “They know they’d better listen.” But he dismissed me when I mentioned the fact that both the peacock and Brutus, the orangutan, had recently passed on. Both animals were withered and lethargic in their final days.

“Do you really believe that fleas could drain an orangutan of its life? Please, Janus.”

“There are only six,” I admitted.

“There were only six,” he said. “Now there are ten. But still, ten fleas?”

I lost my skepticism for a while in the success of the show. All the acts were doing well, what with the crowd Hibbler drew. Instead of being pleased with the money that flowed in, though, the Maestro seemed anxious. Sometimes he didn’t even wait for nightfall to start on the Old Overholt. “A tenuous thing, a flea,” he was overheard to say. When the Falling Angel asked him what he meant, Ichbon whispered, “It’s not the fleas I’m worried about in that act.” Then the anteater was taken by an acute malaise and in a matter of a week, became depleted and died. It was noted that the creature’s eyes were missing at the discovery of its death. With this my skepticism returned, and I feared the minions were behind it. Mirchland had the same idea, and we discussed it one night, standing under a full moon behind the mess wagon when neither of us could sleep for the phantom itching brought on by our knowledge of what was happening to the menagerie.

“All that’s left is the albino skunk,” he said. “Then what?”

By the next morning, the albino skunk had also gone the way of all splendors, and the Caravan was for the first time since its inception without a menagerie of any sort, save fleas. The burial of the poor creature was pathetic. Everyone was there but no one had anything to say. Finally, Ichbon took his hat off, cleared his throat, and spoke. “I, for one, have no regrets seeing this overgrown rat pass on. It bit me once. In fact, I celebrate the passing of the entire menagerie. Good riddance to the damn beasts. The whole thing was a crime I’ll now wash my hands of.” When he was finished, the fleas dragged a dandelion onto the grave. Hibbler said, “Now say your prayers.” I swear I saw them kneel all in a row and bow their heads. Mirchland looked up at me from the other side of the grave and carefully nodded. Beside me, I noticed the Falling Angel was looking pale, his once-skintight lavender outfit now sagging with wrinkles.

Performers on the circuit agreed, the Falling Angel, Walter Hupsh, had an act so simple it was beautiful. He took a ladder to a platform at the peak of the big top, twenty feet in the air. Then he bent cautiously forward, grimaced, and fell. He was tall and lanky and not well built for it, plummeting like a bird forgetting its gift. Granted, there were two old mattresses buried in the packed dirt beneath the ladder where he hit. They were covered over with sawdust, and the public never knew. But still, with each performance there was an impact. Hupsh was head rattled from a life of falling, that we knew, but a strange lethargy overtook him as we left Tulsa for Wichita. His trips up the ladder had become pathetic, his flights, as he called them, tragic. Mirchland and I kept tabs on him.

One afternoon, out of design, I sat next to him at lunch. “You look tired, Walter,” I said. “Not been sleeping well?”

“I think I busted my ribs,” he said, and a little drool of oatmeal issued from the corner of his lips. “And I got the itches something fierce. I wake up with the itches.”

“Are you being bitten by a bug, maybe?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said and went back to his oatmeal.

In the days that followed, Walter came to rival Jack Sprat for most emaciated, and Sprat challenged the Falling Angel to a duel for sole ownership of the title. Cooler heads prevailed. The Maestro took me aside and said, “The falling guy looks like shit. Reminds me of the peacock.”

I told him what I thought was going on and that Mirchland was onto it too. “Those fleas, whatever they are, drained the life out of all of the animals and now have turned to human blood.”

“You mean Hupsh?” he said.

“Of course,” I answered. “Look at him.”

Just then the man was practicing his act. We looked over toward the center of the tent. The Angel took the ladder as if he were gravity itself. I could feel the weight of each labored step, but up he went, a trooper. Ichbon smoked a cigarette in the time it took him to reach the platform. Once there, he inched out to the edge. He stumbled, grasped at his throat, and groaned pitifully in the descent. He hit with a rattle. The Maestro and I ran to him. There was nothing left but a flesh bag of broken bones covered in sawdust.

When Ichbon caught his breath, he turned to me and said, “Get the clowns.”

Mirchland and I were already there, sitting with Ichbon outside his trailer, passing the Old Overholt, when the Miserable Ones delivered Hibbler to our meeting. The Maestro said, “Pass the bottle to Jon,” and I did. Hibbler was in his graduation gown, which, though no longer part of his act, he still wore to bed.

“We need to talk,” said Ichbon.

“Give me a cigarette,” said Hibbler.

I handed him one and he lit it with the silver lighter lifted by the flea in his show. His hands quivered. “Talk about what?” he asked.

“Falling Angel.”

“A tragedy.”

“We think your fleas did him in,” said the Maestro.

“My fleas? You shouldn’t have said that.” Hibbler became indignant and sat up straight in his chair.

“They have to be squashed.”

The old performer shook his head. “Impossible. There are too many of them. They’re listening right now.” The professor’s bravado of recent weeks was gone, and he seemed shakier than he’d been since I’d known him. After a long draw on the bottle, he wiped his mouth, slumped forward, and gazed at the ground.

“I thought you were in charge,” said Ichbon.

“I thought I was too.”

“Let’s burn them,” said Mirchland in a whisper.

“No, you might as well set fire to yourselves and the whole damn caravan,” said the professor. “Before you could light a torch they could be all over you, sucking you drier than no-man’s-land.”

“Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait till I’m on the menu,” said Ichbon. “Call them together for a meeting and we’ll ambush them.”

“Shhh,” said Hibbler. “I told you, they can hear us.”

“Fuck the fleas!” yelled the Maestro.

Mirchland and I stood up and walked slowly away from the meeting.

Ichbon watched our dull escape. “You chickenshits,” he said.

From my back mouth, I warned him, “Caution.”

Two days later, the Maestro blew his brains out in his trailer. Jack Sprat found him, slumped back in his chair, a hole the size of a silver dollar between his eyes. There were also bullet holes in his feet, his shins, his stomach, his rear end, and his thigh. We knew he must have gone mad from the itching and tried to eradicate his persecutors with bullets. Only the Miserable Clowns dared to touch his corpse. They dragged it out to the edge of the field we were set up in, gathered brush, and made a bier. One by one, the members of the caravan came out of hiding to pay their last respects. There was less said at the event than for the burial of the albino skunk, but as his smoke rose, we watched with tears in our eyes, as much for our own fates as his. The minions made a presence, their rank and file by the hundreds kneeled and prayed. When the fire burned down, the clowns retrieved the Maestro’s blackened skull and mounted it on the bumper of the lead truck in the caravan.

Forgive me if I don’t dwell on the list of my comrades who withered and succumbed to the hunger of the minions. We left a trail of smoldering biers in our wake as we moved inexorably from town to town. By the time we hit St. Joseph, near the Kansas-Missouri border, Jack Sprat, Mr. Electric, the World’s Ugliest Man and his beautiful wife, Ronnie, the Crab Boy, Gaston, the cook, and more had weakened, shriveled, and passed on. No one dared to speak about the horror we were trapped within. To speak out moved you immediately to the top of the menu. Whispers were dangerous. Those of us remaining had to take on more jobs in order to keep the caravan rolling.

Once the itching started your hours were numbered. Most were dragged down in a state of grim and silent acceptance, but there were one or two who raged against it. The latter were far harder to witness, their antics pathetic against the inevitable. As for the performers who survived, the stress of insect servitude, the fact that they were like cattle kept for slaughter, quickly began to undermine their acts. The fortune-teller saw only one future. The knife thrower’s hands fluttered like trapped birds, and his poor assistant was numb with the fear that if the fleas didn’t kill her, he would. The Miserable Clowns lost their sense of humor. As terrible as the rest of the caravan was, at each stop the crowd still showed up to see Hibbler’s Minions. The new grand finale of the act consisted of thousands of fleas coming together to form the figure of a man tipping his flea hat to the audience.

Mirchland and I, cautiously passing written notes, planned our escape. We were fairly certain the fleas could not read. St. Joseph was to be the spot where we would take our leave of the caravan. The plan was to disappear with the crowd at the end of Hibbler’s act, to mingle in with them and, once to the road, try to hitch a ride or run for it. Not much of a plan, but we were desperate. The correspondence we had going was voluminous, most of it pondering the fact that the fleas obviously intended to drain all of us in the carnival before dispersing out into the general population. We never saw news of flea infestations from the towns we passed through and wondered why the minions didn’t spread out and share their horror with the rest of the world. Mirchland thought it was because they were building strength, increasing their numbers for an all-out assault on some unsuspecting hamlet in our path. I, on the other hand, thought it had to do with that part of their act where they transformed through accretion into the figure of a man. “Only together can they achieve their terrifying potential,” I wrote to the dwarf.

Just as we planned, when the evening show let out on our second night in St. Joseph, I met my friend behind the clowns’ trailer. He’d packed a small satchel he had attached to a stick and had a lantern in his hand, the wick brought down so as to only offer a mere glow. He was sitting on an overturned milk crate, his back against the trailer wheel, his feet off the ground. “Hurry,” I said to him. “Let’s go.” I was anxious to be on the move. As I stepped away from him, my other me noticed that he didn’t budge. Then I spotted his empty eye sockets, and spun around.

The fleas issued forth from the twin puckered holes where his eyes had been, two living streams of black. Single file, and if my ears did not deceive me, singing some kind of song in unison. I gagged, doubled up with fear, and fell on my knees. The fleas marched along the ground to within two feet of me, and then drew together to form the word sorry, in my very own script. Something bit my rear end, a warning that I’d not be going anywhere. To my surprise, they didn’t infest me. I supposed I was to be saved for a later meal. Returning to my trailer in a stupor, I spent the night scratching my ass, the itching from just that one bite an agony. The prospect of inevitably being overrun with them made me consider Ichbon’s method of scratching with a revolver no longer insane.

Granted, the fleas were shrewd, but the next day, after torching Mirchland’s remains, the caravan headed away from Missouri and back toward the heart of Kansas. Everyone who had been with the show for a couple of years knew this was wrong, but no one mentioned it. I surmised immediately what was going on. The Miserable Clowns, who drove the trucks that pulled the trailers, were taking us out into the plains, away from the towns and cities. To be honest, I was shocked that they’d have the foresight or concern. When the fleas got through with us, there was nothing stopping them from overrunning humanity. The plan, as I perceived it, was to strand us out in the heart of the Dust Bowl and let them eat each other after they’d devoured us. In the end, if the world was to be saved, it would be saved by miserable clowns.

For the next three days straight, the caravan rolled at top speed, at first on a road, passing small dilapidated farms and one-horse towns, and then on a packed dirt path that cut through the sandy remains of what had once been pasture. The sky was blue, but you’d hardly know it as the dust blew up around everything, choking the air and blocking the sun. Myself and I had to wear kerchiefs around our mouths and noses and something to protect the eyes from the blowing grit. I opted for goggles and my other me settled for an old wide-brimmed hat pulled low. The hours dragged tediously on as we passed through the desolation. Late on the third afternoon, when the caravan came to a halt somewhere in the far-flung dry heart of America, the clowns were informed by Hibbler that there would be no more driving. The fleas needed to perform.

The trailers were gathered into a half circle as the night came on and then lit by lanterns and torches. There was no paying public for a hundred miles in any direction. We performers were to be the audience. There wasn’t any choice. We gathered on folding chairs, forming a half circle around Hibbler and a small, makeshift stage for the fleas. The old man wore his graduation gown instead of his tuxedo and top hat. He stood before us, weaving to and fro, with an insipid smile on his face. When the crowd quieted down, he lifted the graduation robe over his head and dropped it on the ground. One more horror to add to the onslaught: a completely naked Hibbler stood before us.

There were audible groans from the crowd and someone in a most pitiful voice whispered, “No more.” As if those words were the cue, the old man’s entire body was covered instantly by fleas. It happened so fast, I thought it was a trick of shadows from the torchlight. But no, every inch of him, instantly. His screams were muffled by the minions filling his mouth. They remained latched to Hibbler, pulsating en masse with the rhythm of feeding. And then as quickly, they were gone. His corpse remained standing for a moment — snow white, shriveled, sucked dry — before collapsing in upon itself. We gasped and rose to our feet, standing there stunned, wondering what would come next. It took no more than a moment for us to realize — this was to be the end of the road for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors. The fleas had somehow detected the unspoken treachery against them.

They struck again, covering in an eyeblink the slouching form of Hector, the Geek, making a mummy of him in less time than it took him to bite off a chicken head. As he fell away, they settled on the juggler and his apprentice. The Three Miserable Clowns stepped forward then, brandishing jars full of gasoline. They doused the writhing, flea-draped forms, and then the most miserable of them all flicked his lit cigarette at them. The sudden explosion knocked me off my feet. The next thing I knew, I was helping me up and we were running away from the caravan into the night. Ahead, it was pitch black and behind, I saw flames engulfing the trailers, bodies strewn on the ground, and a man’s form made of fleas, tipping his hat to me and waving.

I ran at top speed like I never had nor ever would again, and when I finally stopped to catch my breath, at least a mile from the burning caravan, my other me admonished me. “Up, you laggard,” he bellowed. “They can suck you dry, but I want to live. Get moving.” I pulled myself together and took off again. I wandered over dunes and across barren fields. When the wind finally died down and the sky cleared enough to let the moonlight through, I found an abandoned house, one whole side up to the roof covered in sand. Smaller dunes surrounded the entrance. Exhausted, I pried open the door, pushing a foot of sand away. Inside, there were two rooms. One was full to the ceiling with sand. The other was clear and had a rocking chair by a window that still offered a partial view of moonlight on the waste.

The next day, I awoke in the rocker to the roar of a black blizzard moving across the prairie. The approaching sound, like a locomotive, woke me. I ran outside to see it coming in the distance. Dust two miles high, rolling toward me, a massive brown cloud one might mistake for a mountain range. I’d survived the caravan and now I was to be buried alive. I told myself I would stand my ground, but the sand that was pushed ahead of it in the wind stung me everywhere, and I thought of fleas biting me. Before I turned and ran for the house, I saw it as Arvet had described: the face of Satan coalescing in the roiling dust — horns and snake eyes and maw open, hungry as a flea. I got inside and shut the door behind me just when it hit. Huddling in the corner of the clear room, I took off my jacket and threw it over my faces. The air grew thick with dust and the noise outside was deafening.

That night, after Satan had passed, I dug out. On my march back to civilization the following morning, I came upon the carnival half-buried in sand and tumbleweeds. I saw the drained corpses of my colleagues, even those of the Three Miserable Clowns. No sign of the fleas, though, as if the dust storm had sent them back into hibernation. I broke into Hibbler’s trailer and took the cash from the cash box — considerable, given the success of the flea shows. I managed to get one of the trucks going and drove down to Liberal, Kansas, where I eventually settled. I was surprised folks there accepted me for what I was, but then my having two faces was the least of their problems in those years.

I never spoke about the fate of the caravan, yet I often pictured it out there on the plain, covered over with blowing sand. A couple years later, I was volunteering for the Red Cross in one of their makeshift hospitals, treating those laid low by the dust plague, when I came upon a female patient brought in after a blizzard, close to death’s door. It was Maybell, the Rubber Lady. She was in a bad way, wheezing up clouds of dust, her chest rattling like a hamper of broken china. She remembered, called me Janus, and smiled. In the evenings, when the ward was quiet, I sat by her bedside and we reminisced about the show and Ichbon and the appearance of the minions. She told me she’d escaped being drained because her flesh was too elastic. That got me thinking and I said to her, “That’s the one thing I always wanted to know. Why they allowed me to escape.”

“I know,” said Maybell, barely able to speak. She motioned for me to draw closer, and I leaned in. “Hibbler told me it was that face on the back of your head. They felt some kind of kinship for it.”

I wasn’t sure whether to thank her for that, but my other me did.