small bun, done up with a pottery tie. She wore makeup, expertly applied to give an impression of severity that a professional dominatrix might have envied. Her lips were tight together, and she glared at the world through a pair of definite black-rimmed spectacles-they punctuated her face much too definitely to ever be mere glasses.
“So,” she said, as if she were pronouncing a death sentence, “we’re going to the theater, then.”
“Well, yes and no,” said Jonathan. “I mean, yes, we are still going out, but we’re not going to be able to see The Romans in Britain.”
“Good,” said Miss Finch. “In poor taste anyway. Why anyone would have thought that nonsense would make a musical I do not know.”
“So we’re going to a circus,” said Jane, reassuringly. “And then we’re going to eat sushi.”
Miss Finch’s lips tightened. “I do not approve of circuses,” she said.
“There aren’t any animals in this circus,” said Jane.
“Good,” said Miss Finch, and she sniffed. I was beginning to understand why Jane and Jonathan had wanted me along.
The rain was pattering down as we left the house, and the street was dark. We squeezed ourselves into the sports car and headed out into London. Miss Finch and I were in the backseat of the car, pressed uncomfortably close together.
Jane told Miss Finch that I was a writer, and told me that Miss Finch was a biologist.
“Biogeologist actually,” Miss Finch corrected her. “Were you serious about eating sushi, Jonathan?”
“Er, yes. Why? Don’t you like sushi?”
“Oh, I’ll eat my food cooked,” she said, and began to list for us all the various flukes, worms, and parasites that lurk in the flesh of fish and which are only killed by cooking. She told us of their life cycles while the rain pelted down, slicking night-time London into garish neon colors. Jane shot me a sympathetic glance from the passenger seat, then she and Jonathan went back to scrutinizing a handwritten set of directions to wherever we were going. We crossed the Thames at London Bridge while Miss Finch lectured us about blindness, madness, and liver failure; and she was just elaborating on the symptoms of elephantiasis as proudly as if she had invented them herself when we pulled up in a small back street in the neighborhood of Southwark Cathedral.
“So where’s the circus?” I asked.
“Somewhere around here,” said Jonathan. “They contacted us about being on the Christmas special. I tried to pay for tonight’s show, but they insisted on comping us in.”
“I’m sure it will be fun,” said Jane, hopefully.
Miss Finch sniffed.
A fat, bald man, dressed as a monk, ran down the pavement toward us. “There you are!” he said. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for you. You’re late. It’ll be starting in a moment.” He turned around and scampered back the way he had come, and we followed him. The rain splashed on his bald head and ran down his face, turning his Fester Addams makeup into streaks of white and brown. He pushed open a door in the side of a wall.
“In here.”
We went in. There were about fifty people in there already, dripping and steaming, while a tall woman in bad vampire makeup holding a flashlight walked around checking tickets, tearing off stubs, selling tickets to anyone who didn’t have one. A small, stocky woman immediately in front of us shook the rain from her umbrella and glowered about her fiercely. “This’d better be gud,” she told the young man with her-her son, I suppose. She paid for tickets for both of them.
The vampire woman reached us, recognized Jonathan and said, “Is this your party? Four people? Yes? You’re on the guest list,” which provoked another suspicious stare from the stocky woman.
A recording of a clock ticking began to play. A clock struck twelve (it was barely eight by my watch), and the wooden double doors at the far end of the room creaked open. “Enter…of your own free will!” boomed a voice, and it laughed maniacally. We walked through the door into darkness.
It smelled of wet bricks and of decay. I knew then where we were: there are networks of old cellars that run beneath some of the overground train tracks-vast, empty, linked rooms of various sizes and shapes. Some of them are used for storage by wine merchants and used-car sellers; some are squatted in, until the lack of light and facilities drives the squatters back into the daylight; most of them stand empty, waiting for the inevitable arrival of the wrecking ball and the open air and the time when all their secrets and mysteries will be no more.
A train rattled by above us.
We shuffled forward, led by Uncle Fester and the vampire woman, into a sort of a holding pen where we stood and waited.
“I hope we’re going to be able to sit down after this,” said Miss Finch.
When we were all settled the flashlights went out, and the spotlights went on.
The people came out. Some of them rode motorbikes and dune buggies. They ran and they laughed and they swung and they cackled. Whoever had dressed them had been reading too many comics, I thought, or watched Mad Max too many times. There were punks and nuns and vampires and monsters and strippers and the living dead.
They danced and capered around us while the ringmaster-identifiable by his top hat-sang Alice Cooper’s song “Welcome to My Nightmare,” and sang it very badly.
“I know Alice Cooper,” I muttered to myself, misquoting something half-remembered, “and you, sir, are no Alice Cooper.”
“It’s pretty naff,” agreed Jonathan.
Jane shushed us. As the last notes faded away the ringmaster was left alone in the spotlight. He walked around our enclosure while he talked.
“Welcome, welcome, one and all, to the Theater of Night’s Dreaming,” he said.
“Fan of yours,” whispered Jonathan.
“I think it’s a Rocky Horror Show line,” I whispered back.
“Tonight you will all be witnesses to monsters undreamed-of, freaks and creatures of the night, to displays of ability to make you shriek with fear-and laugh with joy. We shall travel,” he told us, “from room to room-and in each of these subterranean caverns another nightmare, another delight, another display of wonder awaits you! Please-for your own safety-I must reiterate this!-Do not leave the spectating area marked out for you in each room-on pain of doom, bodily injury, and the loss of your immortal soul! Also, I must stress that the use of flash photography or of any recording devices is utterly forbidden.”
And with that, several young women holding pencil flashlights led us into the next room.
“No seats then,” said Miss Finch, unimpressed.
The First Room
In the first room a smiling blonde woman wearing a spangled bikini, with needle tracks down her arms, was chained by a hunchback and Uncle Fester to a large wheel.
The wheel spun slowly around, and a fat man in a red cardinal’s costume threw knives at the woman, outlining her body. Then the hunchback blindfolded the cardinal, who threw the last three knives straight and true to outline the woman’s head. He removed his blindfold. The woman was untied and lifted down from the wheel. They took a bow. We clapped.
Then the cardinal took a trick knife from his belt and pretended to cut the woman’s throat with it. Blood spilled down from the knife blade. A few members of the audience gasped, and one excitable girl gave a small scream, while her friends giggled.
The cardinal and the spangled woman took their final bow. The lights went down. We followed the flashlights down a brick-lined corridor.
The Second Room
The smell of damp was worse in here; it smelled like a cellar, musty and forgotten. I could hear somewhere the drip of rain. The ringmaster introduced the Creature-“Stitched together in the laboratories of the night, the Creature is capable of astonishing feats of strength.” The Frankenstein’s monster makeup was less than convincing, but the Creature lifted a stone block with fat Uncle Fester sitting on it, and he held back the dune buggy (driven by the vampire woman) at full throttle. For his piece de resistance he blew up a hot-water bottle, then popped it.
“Roll on the sushi,” I muttered to Jonathan.
