Frost poured the broth from a steaming pan into a large cup and sat it in front of Bill, who had taken a seat at the dining table. He brought plates to the table, then the bread and cheese. He poured Bill and himself a glass of milk.
“Eat, boy, eat,” Frost said.
Bill ate. He tried to go about it nicely, but he was too starved. His lips were so swollen from the mosquito bites he found it was difficult to stick the food into his mouth, so he drank all the soup and ate a little of the cheese and bread. Frost gave him more soup. Bill soaked the bread and cheese in it and slurped it down noisily and drank another glass of milk.
Frost said, “I have some clothes you can wear. I’m a little heftier than you, but they should fit you all right. Loose is the fashion, they say.”
“Thanks,” Bill said. He studied the man carefully as he sipped his second glass of milk. He seemed genuinely kind and gentle. One of those souls you read about or see in movies, but seldom encounter. A true Good Samaritan. Bill thought this could really work out. The blonde was right. Frost was a prime sucker. Bill began to figure the angles, but soon gave it up. After all he had been through, angles were a little hard to come by.
“What you got here?” Bill asked.
“How’s that?”
“This a freak show?”
“Why yes.”
“I seen that dog fella. What exactly happened to him?”
“Conrad. Why, nothing happened to him, son. He was born that way. His parents abandoned him and he was raised in an orphanage and finally he ended up with me. My right-hand man, actually.”
“He ain’t really part dog, is he?”
“Oh, goodness no. His show name is Rex the Wonder Dog. A bit of his humor, you see. But certainly not. He’s as human as you or me.”
“I wonder, a guy like that, he ever get any pussy?”
Frost moved his mouth about for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know as I can say… He likes the bearded lady, but
… Well, I just don’t know… Had enough?”
“You got any more?”
“Sure do.” Frost poured Bill another cup of soup and sat down again. “You… go to high school?”
“Yeah. I didn’t do so good, though. I think they passed me to get rid of me.”
“What’s your line of work?”
“Haven’t really got one right now.”
“Hard to get a job?”
“I guess.”
“You know, you could be at the right place.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, I think I should be straight with you, Bill. This is, as you said, a freak show, and you have… some peculiarities.”
“Peculiarities?”
Frost reached across the table and touched a hand to Bill’s face.
Bill reached up and touched himself. His face was strange to his fingers. He went down the hall, found the bathroom, went in there, and turned on the light and looked in the mirror.
A monster was looking back.
Nine
At first he thought perhaps he had been snake-bitten, but it made no sense. He felt okay except for being wasted, and if he had been bitten he felt he’d have known it.
Bill leaned closer to the mirror. His eyelids were huge, and his nose was knotted up, along with his forehead, which had a series of angry red welts across it like a bridge built of heated stone. Every inch of flesh on his cheeks was bloated and inflamed and itched. His lips were blowed up like inner tubes. They had rolled back on one side of his mouth to reveal his teeth.
Mosquito bites, only much worse than he had assumed. He had lain down amongst thousands of mosquitoes, and while he slept, they’d had their way with him. His face had hurt bad for a while, but now the real hurt was past and there was only the swelling and the itching, a bit of heat behind the skin. He thought he must be allergic to them.
That’s what the dog-man had been talking about. One of us. One of us. He’d assumed Bill was a freak.
Wow, thought Bill, I’m disguised.
When Bill returned to the table, Frost said, “I must ask. How did you arrive here?”
“I was hitchhiking. The driver had a little accident. I banged my head, and when I awoke, well, here I was.”
“Was the driver hurt?”
“I can’t say. He was gone. I guess he put me out beside the road. I wandered in the woods after that.”
Frost thought about that for a while. Bill couldn’t tell if he was convinced by the story or not. Frost changed tactics, asked, “Your face, that isn’t how you were born, is it?”
“Mosquitoes.”
“What?”
“My face is swollen, that’s all. Mosquito bites.”
Frost let out with a whoop. “I’ll be darned. Fooled even me. I’ve seen many a freak, and you fooled even me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe in the daylight I would have known. I thought it was some kind of industrial accident. An explosion of some kind. Mosquitoes. Now that’s the ticket. I’ve never known anyone to be bitten that bad before.”
Bill smiled, and he knew a smile on his face must look strange and hideous. Then he quit smiling. He said: “I suppose it’ll go away. Probably I’m allergic.”
“Well, now, mosquito bites. I reckon it will. I suppose.”
“But you’re not certain?”
“It’s hard to be certain of anything,” Frost said.
“How do you… Why do you hang around all these freaks? Doesn’t it… depress you?”
Frost smiled. “Freaks are only mistakes of nature, but they have hearts and minds like everyone else. Some, like the pinheads and the balloon heads, do not have good minds, but they have feelings just the same. Suppose your face stayed that way?”
“I’d have an operation. I’d kill myself. I wouldn’t live like this.”
“Oh, you might. Freaks live among freaks here. We accept one another.”
“But you’re not a freak.”
Frost smiled. “No?”
Frost stood and unbuttoned his shirt and pointed to his chest. On his left breast was a tiny gray hand, the wrist growing from the location of his heart, or at least the location one imagined for the heart. The hand poked into the air with slightly bent fingertips; the hand looked like a crustacean or prehistoric spider that had been partially boiled. The gray flesh was lined with dark, thin veins that throbbed with blood.
“There was a whole child here once,” Frost said, tapping the hand. “We were both living, but I was freed of him and he was… destroyed. I know no other way to say it. This is all that remains. This hand. The wrist is connected to vital organs. They could not cut him all the way clear. The hand is a part of me. It beats with my pulse, with my blood. It is me, and him.”
“Good God!”
“That’s not all.” Frost unbuttoned his pants and lowered them and scooped at his underwear and peeled them down over his ample right hip and showed a massive red scar that ran all the way up his right side. “And here
