“That’s enough, asshole.”

Bondy looked at him wide-eyed, his forehead wrinkling up to where his hairline should have been. Probably no one had talked to him that way in a long, long time.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody you want to know right now. Maybe you should call it a night.”

Bondy took a swing at Jack’s face. He telegraphed it by baring his teeth. Jack raised the rod between his face and the fist. Bondy screamed as his knuckles smashed against the iron, then did a knock-kneed walk in a circle with the hand jammed between his thighs, groaning in pain.

Suddenly a pair of arms wrapped around Jack’s torso, trapping him in a fleshy vise.

“I got him, Bondy!” Hank’s voice shouted from behind Jack’s left ear. “I got him!”

Twenty feet away, Bondy stopped his dance, looked up, and grinned. As he charged, Jack rammed his head backward, smashing the back of his skull into Hank’s nose. Abruptly he was free. He still held the iron bar, so he angled the blunt end toward the charging Bondy and drove it hard into his solar plexus. The air whooshed out of him and he dropped to his knees with a groan, his face gray-green. Even his scalp looked sick.

Jack glanced up and saw Scar-lip crouched at the front of the cage, gripping the bars, its yellow gaze flicking between him and the groaning Bondy but lingering on Jack, as if trying to comprehend what he was doing, and why. Tiny rivulets of dark blood trailed down its skin.

Jack whirled the pike 180 degrees and pressed the point against Bondy’s chest.

“What kind of noise am I going to hear when I poke you with this end?”

Behind him Hank’s voice, very nasal now, started shouting.

“Hey, Rube! Hey, Rube!”

As Jack was trying to figure out just what that meant, he gave the kneeling Bondy a poke with the pointed end—not enough to break the skin but enough to scare him. He howled and fell back on the sawdust, screaming.

“Don’t! Don’t!”

Meanwhile, Hank had kept up his “Hey, Rube!” shouts. As Jack turned to shut him up, he found out what it meant.

The tent was filling with carny folk. Lots of them, all running his way. In seconds he was surrounded. The workers he could handle, but the others, the performers, gathered in a crowd like this, in the murky light, in various states of dress, were unsettling. The Snake Man, the Alligator Boy, the Bird Man, the green Man from Mars, and others were all still in costume—at least Jack hoped they were costumes—and none of them looked too friendly.

Hank was holding his bloody nose, wagging his finger at Jack. “Now you’re gonna get it! Now you’re gonna get it!”

Bondy seemed to have a sudden infusion of courage. He hauled himself to his feet and started toward Jack with a raised fist.

“You goddamn son of a—”

Jack rapped the iron bar across the side of his bald head, staggering him. With an angry murmur, the circle of carny folk abruptly tightened.