Vuk paled. The same must have dawned on him. “We’ll have to get it fixed! Immediately!”

“On a Sunday?” Ivo said. “How?”

“I don’t know, but we must!”

As Vuk yanked out his cell phone and began jabbing the keypad, Ivo’s mind raced. If they could have the car towed, somehow get it repaired, they’d say nothing. As for watching the house… they’d lie… report no activity. No one was home anyway.

But they had to fix this damn car.

3

“One child,” Jack said as he handed a ten to the guy in the ticket booth.

He was a beefy type, wearing a straw boater. He looked around.

“What child?”

“Me. I’m a kid at heart.”

“Funny,” the ticket man said without a smile as he slid an adult ticket and change across the tray.

Jack entered the main tent of the Ozymandias Prather Oddity Emporium and checked out his fellow attendees: a sparse and varied crew, everything from middle-class folk who looked like they’d just come from church to Goth types in full black regalia.

At first glance the show looked pretty shabby. Everything seemed so worn, from the signs above the booths to the poles supporting the canvas. Look up and it was immediately apparent from the sunlight leaking through that the Oddity Emporium was in need of new tents. He wondered what they did when it rained. Thunderstorms were predicted for later. Jack was glad he’d be out of here long before then.

As he moved along he tried to classify the Oddity Emporium. In some ways it was a freak show, and in many ways not.

First off, Jack had never seen freaks like some of these. Sure, they had the World’s Fattest Man, a giant billed as the World’s Tallest Man, two sisters with undersized heads who sang in piercing falsetto harmony—nothing so special about them.

Then they came to the others.

By definition freaks were supposed to be strange, but these went beyond strange into the positively alien. The Alligator Boy, the Bird Man with flapping feathered wings… these “freaks” were so alien they couldn’t be real.

Like the Snake Man. Jack couldn’t see where the real him ended and the fake began.

Makeup and prosthetics, Jack told himself.

But the way he used his tail to wrap around a stuffed rabbit and squeeze it… just like a boa constrictor.

A good fake, but still a fake. Had to be… even if this was Monroe.

One aspect of the show that reinforced his feeling that these weren’t real was that there was nothing sad or pathetic about these “freaks.” No matter how bizarre their bodies, they seemed proud—almost belligerently so—of their deformities, as if the people strolling the midway were the freaks.

Jack slowed before a booth with a midget standing on a miniature throne. He had a tiny handlebar mustache and slicked-down black hair parted in the middle. A gold-lettered sign hung above him: little sir echo.

“Hi!” a little girl said.