Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (5 page)

She only thought of herself as “Juliana” now.  Her given name was Greek, and she’d
been born in a squalid, crowded tenement in New York.  Because of her diseased nature,
she was rejected by everyone except a crazed aunt, who repeatedly bathed her with
lye and called her “daughter of Hell.”  She’d run away when she was seven years old
and spent much of her life scrounging and stealing, protected from everyone by the
demon plague within her.  Here and there, she’d left men dead in the gutter when they’d
tried assaulting her.

She was nineteen now, and she’d been with the carnival five years. 

“Right this way, right this way, come see the most jaw-dropping female on Earth, the
most diseased woman in the world!  Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, she’s not contagious...unless
you touch her!  You, sir, would you care to see this princess of pestilence unveiled,
laid bare for your education?  I thought so, sir, I can see you are man with a healthy
interest in science!”

The curtain opened.  Radu, the sideshow talker responsible for herding the customers,
led in the first group of nine or ten gawkers, the usual mix of red-faced farmers
and drooling, wide-eyed children.  Men and kids seemed most attracted to her show. 
Missouri was no different from anywhere else.

Juliana stood, still wrapped in the quilt she wore between shows, and approached the
wooden rail at the front of her stage.  Dirty upturned faces blinked at her in the
low light. 

“Juliana Blight,” Radu continued. “Bitten by a swarm of rare giant African mosquitoes,
Juliana carries all forms of disease within her flesh...from Egyptian mummy pox to
Arabian leprosy, and the mysterious Chinese worm virus...stay back from the railing,
sir, or you risk infection!”

“She don’t look too sick to me,” one man said, leaning on the railing.

“Prepare to be dazzled and horrified, sir!” the barker replied. “By the wonders of
medical science.”

Juliana shrugged off the quilt and let it fall to the stage.  Underneath, she wore
only white cotton underpants and a silk scarf, which hung loose around her neck to
conceal her breasts.  The crowd was free to inspect the rest of her body.

She held out her arms.  Dark, bloody sores ripped open along them, from her shoulders
all the way to her fingertips.  The crowd gasped and drew back—the man who’d leaned
on the rail nearly tripped over his shoes in his hurry to get away from her.  A small,
freckled boy screamed until his slightly older sister slapped and hushed him.

Juliana turned slowly, letting the crowd gasp and whisper at the sight of boils erupting
up her back, blisters blooming along her thighs and calves.  When she faced them again,
a rash of bloody abscesses, cysts, and tumors broke open in a wave from her ankles
to her hips, then across her stomach and chest.  Her face became a horror-show mask,
and her eyes darkened with diseased blood the color of bile.

As usual, the little crowd screamed and ran away through the curtain.  Radu winked
at her—he loved that “first scare” of the night, the one that was sure to draw plenty
of curious lookers with coins to spend. 

She wrapped herself in the quilt and sat down in the plain wooden chair at the back
of her stage, reading a dime novel about pirates, and Radu left to round up the next
audience.

She usually held back, but tonight she was really letting the plague out, giving them
an extra-gory display.  The others at the carnival didn’t know it yet, but this would
be her last night as the World’s Most Diseased Woman, if things turned out as she
hoped.

The next little group was ushered in, much quieter than the first, eager to see whatever
had sent the first group running in terror.

She gave them a good show.

* * *

The next day was a Sunday, and local officials had made it clear that the carnival
had to stay closed, lest it distract people from church.  Many of the carnies had
prepared for the day off with heavy  drinking the night before, so the dusty midway
was cold and silent in the morning as she left her tent and walked the dirt avenue
between the booths.  The smell of traveling carnival still hung in the air: popcorn,
fried chicken, cotton candy, horse shit from the Wild West show.

The midway looked sad by day.  No colored lights, no steam-powered calliope music
from the carousel.  The morning sun washed out the giant paintings of clowns, gorillas,
and dragons—instead of weaving a fantasy world, they simply looked like drab, flat
cartoons, painted onto wooden booths with all the games, toys, and other flash packed
away inside.  Without the mystery of the night beyond the lights of the midway, even
the Ferris wheel looked small and pathetic. Spooky Manor, the haunted house, just
looked silly, with its yarn spiderwebs and the skeleton peeping out the front window,
though it could look convincingly scary at night with the proper lighting and sound
effects.

Most of the carnival was devoted to crafting illusion, making a pretend world of color
and magic to open up wallets and purses.  Even the rides were meant to inspire a false
feeling of danger, the games rigged to conjure a false sense that the mark might win
big.

Juliana wasn’t a trick or a scam.  Everyone in the carnival assumed she was, of course,
that she’d mastered a kind of theatrical illusion using some combination of makeup
and lighting. Probably most or all of the customers believed that, too, once they
had time to think it over and wrap the memory into a familiar packaging.  They might
even tell each other how obvious the fakery had been, later, when they were well away
from the sideshow tent.

Juliana walked off the fairgrounds and followed the dirt road into town, which wasn’t
much more than two strips of brick and wood buildings, a well, and a corral.  The
largest building was the train depot.

She drew odd looks and whispers from the crowd of townspeople gathered in the street. 
She’d dressed as plainly as she could, in her brown dress with a few flower designs
sewn here and there, a scarf to help shield her head from human contact, a white straw
hat for the hot sunlight.  Of course, she had to wear the black gloves unrolled all
the way along her forearms, something very out of place in the Missouri summer.  Everyone
knew she wasn’t local, and so they would correctly assume she was with the carnival
camped outside town.

Along the street were multiple wagons with people piling in, ready to ride to the
next town, just as she’d hoped.  A man in a tie, possibly the town preacher, was yelling
at them not to go, telling them they’d be damned, that they should instead attend
a proper church, such as his own, for example. 

Juliana approached a woman sitting in the back of the wagon with three small children,
one of whom was a boy, five or six years old, with a badly shriveled leg.  It looked
like polio.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Juliana whispered to the woman, who wore a dress that had once
been fine but was now patched many times over. “Is this wagon going to the revival?”

“We are,” the woman said. “You must be from the circus.”

“Yes ma’am,” Juliana said, trying to sound a little Southern. “Might I ride with you? 
I could pay you a penny or two for it.”

“Not on the Lord’s day, you don’t!” the woman snapped.  She might have been in her
late twenties or early thirties, but her sun-wrinkled skin made it hard to tell. 
She turned toward the bearded man in the big brown hat who sat on the driver’s bench,
holding the reins of the two horses. “Henry, we can take this circus girl to see the
preachers, can’t we?”

“Don’t see why not.” Henry puffed his pipe, not even looking back at his new passenger.

“Let me help you up.” The woman reached down a hand.

“No!” Juliana jumped back, not wanting to infect her with the demon plague. “I can
manage, thank you.”

She climbed up into the straw-littered wagon and sank into a back corner, as far from
the family as possible.  She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them.

The three children stared at her.  The crippled boy seemed the youngest, but his brother
and sister couldn’t have been older than nine or ten years.

“Are you in the circus?” asked the boy with the bad leg.

“Yes,” she told him.

“Are you a clown?” the older boy asked.

“Or an acrobat?” the girl asked, hopping to her filthy bare feet. “I can do flips. 
Want to see?”

“I’ll burn your hide if you step down from this wagon, Izzy May!” the woman snapped.
“Sit back like you were.”

Izzy May quickly sat down beside her brothers, next to a trunk roped into place. 
The mother sat on another large trunk.  It looked like they planned to be away from
home overnight.

“I’m nothing special,” Juliana said. “I work a sugar shack.”

“What does that mean?” the girl asked.

“I make cotton candy,” she told them, and the kids looked very impressed.

“Do you have some?” asked the boy with the bad leg.

“Sorry, I don’t,” she said, and the kids immediately lost interest.  Juliana turned
to their mother. “The next town isn’t a very long way, is it?  You’re returning tonight,
aren’t you?”

“These can last for days,” the woman replied. “We won’t be back until the Lord sends
us.”

“I have to be back for my show tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey,” the woman replied. “If the Lord wants you back here, He will find a way.”

Juliana couldn’t argue with that.

The wagon finally started to move.  A train of half a dozen crowded wagons rolled
out of town, kicking up a cloud of brown dust from the dry dirt road.  Juliana tilted
her hat forward to keep it out of her eyes, but the rest of her was soon covered in
earth.  Her sweat under the hot sun slowly converted it to a thin sheen of mud.

During the long, slow ride, the children peppered Juliana with endless questions about
the carnival.  She described how cakes were fried and cotton candy was spun, detailed
each of the games on the midway from the ring-toss to the rifle-shoot to the test-your-strength. 
She explained that she did not have her own elephant or giraffe.  She told them about
each of the characters in the sideshow, except for the attraction behind the final
curtain, Juliana Blight.  She explained how they jumped from town to town by rail.

In time, they reached the tent of the revival, almost as big as a circus tent, pitched
on a grassy pasture by the wide, slow Mississippi River. 

People had flocked in from all around, judging by the wagons and tents jammed in on
either side of the road.  There were even a few automobiles and trucks.  The center
of the action was the single large tent, from which she could hear pained shouting,
music, and stomping.  It sounded louder than a tavern on a Saturday night.

Juliana thanked the family for the ride and quickly scurried out of the wagon.  She
didn’t want the kids following her around, asking more questions about candy, magic
tricks, and carnival games, because then she would have to make an effort not to kill
them.

She drew her arms in tight around her as she walked toward the revival tent, trying
to avoid any contact with the ever-thicker crowd, where people didn’t mind doing a
little elbowing and jostling.  She hoped her gloves, dress, and headwear were enough
to protect them from her.

The revival traveled the same general railroad circuit as the carnival, so they often
saw each other’s posters in the towns they visited, though they’d never pitched tent
in the same town at the same time.  There wouldn’t have been enough money for either
group.

Juliana had heard of miraculous healings at this particular revival.  Naturally, she’d
first assumed that the performances were trickery, either making people feel momentarily
better using dramatic stage techniques, or else the healed people were just shills
in cahoots with the preacher.

However, she’d heard repeated stories from town to town.  An old blind man who could
now see, a World War I veteran who’d regrown an ear he’d lost in combat. A woman who’d
been coughing up blood, dying of consumption and too weak to walk, who was now well
and could take care of her children and work around the farm. 

After hearing one miraculous story after another about locals in one town after another,
Juliana had begun to believe something magical might actually be happening at that
revival.  She’d become determined to visit it the next time it passed close to the
carnival.  With the carnival shut down by local authorities for Sunday worship, it
was the perfect time for Juliana to sneak off and see the revival for herself.

The front flaps of the tent wall were tied open, and nobody collected an admission
fee.  People were free to walk in and out of the tent, if the thick crowd allowed
it.

She eased her way inside.  The tent was packed full, everybody cramming in to stand
under the shade and listen to a preacher on the stage at the far end of the tent from
the entrance.  He was a white-haired, pudgy man in a gray suit, dabbing his sweaty
double chin with a handkerchief, his eyes bugging as he shouted at the audience, who
responded with shouts and cries of their own.

“The devil is not some character in a radio program or a child’s picture book!” the
preacher shouted, and a number of audience members shouted back, agreeing. “The devil
is real, brothers and sisters.  The devil walks among us, wearing masks!  He can come
in any form at all!  But when he does, you’ll know him!  You’ll know him because he
tempts you with gold!  With fornication!  With sin and worldly pleasures...but those
pleasures are false!  Yes, they are!  And those tempting, earthly pleasures will fall
away, and you’ll see they come drawing hellfire behind them!  Yes, sir!  The Lord
is great...abh ah loch tay moota howklo tarris be hock bot a mok nay hapa tah...” 
His eyes closed and he raised one shaking arm, clutching the handkerchief in his fist.