The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Five gals on either side, one in the middle. Ones on either side did their Little Egypt harem dance, the classic shake and grind, in outfits that flashed their hips, thighs, the fake jewels in their belly-cups, ’fore popping their front-closed brassieres apart to let their boobies sway free. One in the middle, though, whoever she might be that week — she was the real deal, the star attraction. The one who risked the full blow-off and lifted her split skirt high, let the rubes gape at the hidden-most part of herself while up above the Mask of Fear nodded and grinned, all pallid skin and bruisy eyes and dead snake hair hung in clusters like poison vine, adding a very particular sting indeed to her all-too-naked tail.

“I don’t suppose you even know what this is,” Miz Forza said to me, the first night I turned up shivering at their campfire with my hand half-out, half-not, just in case they took a notion to whip me for it. She had it hung up on a stand, like for wigs, and was stroking it all over with some foul-smelling stuff meant to keep it supple; the other gals all just sort of looked ’round it, shoving Miz Farwander’s stew inside as fast as it’d go, like they was trying to forget how one of ’em would have to stick her head inside ’fore the next work-a-day was done.

What the Mask was made of I didn’t know then, and didn’t want to — but I sure did want me some of what else they had. So I squinted hard, then back up at the caravan’s walls, which were covered in similar figures, their paint weather-worn yet still somehow bright, like fever.

“Looks like the Medusa, to me,” I said, finally. “That old hag-lady with hissers for locks, who could turn men t’stone with one look-over. Some Greek fella cut her head off for her, hung it on his shield, an’ used it to get him a princess t’marry. And then a horse with wings come out her neck, if I don’t misremember.”

The Mizes exchanged a glance at that, near to surprised as I’d ever seen ’em come. From the start, they read like sisters to me, though their names was different: Miz Forza was the smaller, dressed like a fortune-teller in a hundred trailing skirts and scarves, all a-riot with colour; Miz Farwander was tall as some men and tougher than most, never wore nothing more elaborate than a pair of bib overalls and a greasy pair of cowboy boots, with her hair crammed down inside an old newsboy’s cap so tight she might as well be bald. Come to think, they neither of ’em liked to show their hair none — Miz Forza’s was wrapped like rest of her in a scarf the colour of money, wound ’round with a string of old pewter coins. And she wore gloves, too, right up to her elbows, while Miz Farwander’s hands were covered so deep in grime and such it was like they’d been dyed — black and grey, with no easy way to tell their fronts from their backs, except by what she was doing at the time.

And: “That’s good,” she said, approvingly, and grinned at me wide, so’s I could see her teeth were all capped and shod in metal from east to west — metal of every sort: Silver, tin, steel, bronze, and even a hint or two of gold. “Ain’t it, sister? Most don’t know the old tales, not anymore.”

Miz Forza nodded back. “That’s right, that’s right; they do not, sad to say.” To me: “And who was it taught you the right way of things, dear? Your mother, maybe? Grandmother?”

“That’d be my Ma. She loved all that old stuff.”

“But you don’t have no true Greek in you, do you, even so? Not by the shape of your face, or the colour of your eyes. ”

I blushed a bit at that, though I tried not to, for I’d been twitted over these things often enough, in previous days.

“Don’t rightly know,” I said, shortly. “Don’t rightly care too much, either. not ’less it’ll get me a job, or some of that stew you’re ladlin’ out there. ’Cause if it will—”

Miz Farwander laughed. “If it will, then you’re Greek through and through, ain’t you — both sides for a hundred generations, all the way back to Deucalion’s mother’s bones? Aw, you don’t have to answer, child; I can see you need feedin’, sure as sin. And the storm-bringer Himself knows we got enough to go ’round.”

Miz Forza cast eyes at her, sidelong, as though to warn her not to speak so free. But Miz Farwander just shrugged, so she turned back to me instead, asking—

“And what might your name be, gal? If you don’t mind me askin’.”

“Persia,” I said. “Persia Leitner.”

“That German?”

“For all’s I know.”

“Your Ma might be able to tell us.”

“Might, if she was here,” I allowed, the pain of that old wound seeping up through me once more. “But. ”

Miz Forza nodded as though she’d heard all this before, which she probably had. “And you don’t know your Pa either, I s’pose,” she suggested, without any malice.

I grit my teeth. “S’pose not,” I answered. “But I sure ain’t the only one like that, ’round these parts.”

“Oh, no, no, no. No, Persia. you surely ain’t.” A pause. “Sounds a bit like ‘lightning’, though, that name. Don’t it?”

I’d never thought so, but that smell was making my mouth water hard, so I nodded. The gals all murmured amongst ’emselves, like a flock of cooing doves. And:

“It does, yes, now you mention,” Miz Farwander told Miz Forza, musingly, as she passed the last cup they had on over — and even as I sunk my face in it, through one more glance back and forth again right overtop me, like I wasn’t even there. “It certainly does, at that.”

You’ll recall the pictures, no doubt — migrant mothers, carts jam-packed with Okies bound to pick or beg, Hoover camps in every mud-field and vacant lot. Houses buried window-deep in sand and milk-starved babies buried shameful shallow, or not even buried at all. They look like a bad dream now, or even lies, but they sure wasn’t; I saw it all. Hell, I lived it.

When the crops dried and the dust come down to scour us clear, it was like every drop of colour just went out of the world — drained slow, like a man can die from one little cut alone, he only gets caught the exact wrong way. Like we was all of us being poisoned by coal-dust, or tin, or cheap nickel coating boiled off of pot-bottoms along with our daily mush, and didn’t even know it. Oh, there was symptoms and that, which we mainly put down to hunger, a powerful thing; hunger will make your head ache and give you double vision, sure enough, under any circumstances.

But I can’t think it was hunger alone that drove my Ma stark crazy, always following things from the corners of her eyes that simply weren’t there to any other person’s reckoning — not that, nor having no money, doing things with all manner of men that weren’t none of ’em my Pa, always living hand to mouth, chased from town to town like dogs and thrown rocks at for grappling at scraps.

My Ma said my Pa was some gangster in Kansas City, and she’d had to run from him — or maybe it was her Pa she’d run from, who’d paid men to cram her in a car’s trunk and dump her far from her home, to fend off the shame of her falling to ruin. But then again, sometimes she said my Pa was a wolf, or a burst of lightning, or the wind. Said he’d come winding through sunlight-wise under her window-shade one day, and fell headlong into her lap like a shower of gold.

He made me shiver, she told me. Made me bow down, like Heaven’s king himself. Persia, don’t ever forget. he made you.

I learned to hate just about every person I saw, during those days. While my Ma grew more and more tired, more and more silent, ’til the morning came she wouldn’t say nothing at all, wouldn’t even open her eyes. Wouldn’t even call after me when I left her there by the roadside, sleeping under a tree like King Minos’ daughter after the wine-god told old Theseus he wanted her for himself, so’s he and his had better cut and run ’fore she woke up to complain about it.

I was glad she’d told me stories like that one, eventually; they gave me different ways to look at things and bright scenes to play out inside my head when I sore needed ’em — like radio-music to most, I guess, or those Motion Picture shows I never had a coin worth wasting on. Helped me make my mind up, and told me how one day I’d know I was right to do her like I did. But the further I got from her side, I found, they didn’t give me no damn comfort at all.

It was on down that same road a spell I first met with the two Mizes, though, once Momma’s face had faded into the same dust as everything else that ever fell behind me. And it was only ’cause of them yarns of hers I knew what-all tale them paintings on their caravan’s side spelled out, which (like I told you) soon proved to at least count for something, in their eyes. With that one conversation, I gained what few keys to the kingdom they ever seemed like to dole out: The knowledge while this was their show, in the end, we at least had open invitation to try and keep up with it, for exactly so long as it suited them both that we should.