Menagerie. Rachel Vincent

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “Kind of.” Shelley stuck her nose into the daisies and sniffed. “Delilah and I saw some of it when we were kids. They didn’t bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.”

      “Well, then, you’re in for a treat!” He glanced at our plastic full-pass bracelets, then waved us inside with a grand, white-gloved gesture. “Trust me, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.”

      However, that could only be partly true, no matter what they had on display behind velvet curtains and in gilded cages. Gone were the days when centaurs roamed the plains in herds, with flocks of thunderbirds beating powerful wings overhead, but we’d grown up seeing cryptids of all sizes, shapes, and colors on television and in movie theaters. They were the villains in our horror movies, most of which drew on the reaping for inspiration. They were the hidden terrorist threats in our thrillers, the bumbling bad guys in our comedies, and the subject of scientific study in nearly every documentary I’d ever seen.

      That’s where traveling creature features had the market cornered. Anyone could see a werewolf on television, but the average citizen could only see one live at the menagerie. If he or she could afford the cost of admission. And Metzger’s had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.

      Metzger’s was stunning. I couldn’t deny that, even as I stopped to scrape a thin coating of manure and sawdust from the sole of my left boot onto the grass.

      Compared to the Tilt-A-Whirl and corn-dog portion of the carnival, the menagerie was practically circus finery. The lights were brighter and the colors more vibrant. Even the boisterous organ music felt more sophisticated and dimensional. Costumed performers wandered the midway with flaming batons, balloon bouquets, and souvenir top hats, giving the menagerie the same glamorous, exotic appeal I remembered from my visit as a child. The red sequined costumes had been updated, as, presumably, had the employees wearing them, and the scents of fried dough and roasted meat still made my mouth water.

      But the guilt twisting my insides into knots couldn’t be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine I’d had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadn’t helped in the least. The small line of People First protesters shouting, “Remember the reaping!” outside the front gate had only made the whole thing worse.

      The People First activists wanted the menagerie to leave Franklin County. We had that much in common. However, they didn’t object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivity—they were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.

      What they didn’t seem to realize was that if the menagerie’s oddities escaped, we would see them coming.

      We hadn’t seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of history—so meticulously executed that we didn’t realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, we’d still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.

      Fearing locked-up cryptids that didn’t look human would do us no more good than suspecting our own neighbors and relatives of being monsters, as we’d done for decades after the reaping. But scared people can’t be reasoned with. Scared politicians can’t be talked down from their podiums. Scared nations pass reactionary laws without bothering to consider how much powder those legal snowballs will gather as they roll down Capitol Hill. Eventually, yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s normalcy.

      Reactionary legislation had spawned outfits like Metzger’s, where anything and everything not deemed to be human could be locked up and put on display with no limits, no boundaries, and no regulations except those meant to protect employees and spectators. Which made people like me—the admittedly quiet minority—profoundly uncomfortable.

      My tension headache told me I shouldn’t have accepted the tickets. My queasy stomach said I shouldn’t be celebrating my birthday at the menagerie where, as a child, I’d been shocked to see three malnourished little girls locked in an animal pen wearing no more than a few filthy scraps of material. Because when I remembered the reaping—inarguably the most profound tragedy to ever strike the U.S.—I also remembered the millions of innocent cryptids who’d been rounded up and thrown in prisons or shot on sight for resisting arrest.

      By the time I was born, several years after the reaping was discovered, the government had begun denying citizenship and legal rights to any living being only partially human, as well as to any hybrid of two or more different biological families.

      What that meant was that ligers and mules were protected by the ASPCA because they were both hybrids of two animals that share the same biological genus and family. But because the griffin is a hybrid of two different classes—Mammalia and Aves—and three different orders—Carnivora, Artiodactyla, and Squamata—it isn’t recognized as a natural animal but as a cryptid “beast.” Anything considered “unnatural” under such legislation was denied protection under U.S. law.

      That secondary national tragedy, a clean sweep of everyone not wholly human or “naturally” fauna, had been brushed under the rug, and even mentioning it made my friends and coworkers look at me as if I’d just set fire to the U.S. flag. So I’d stopped talking about it. But I hadn’t stopped feeling it.

      Yet deep down, I was dying to see the strange and amazing creatures I’d studied in school, for all the same reasons that had led me to major in crypto-biology in the first place. I wanted to see the beautiful selkie emerging from her seal-skin. The troll, so tall and thick he couldn’t stand up in most human-scale buildings. The man who could turn into a cheetah at will. The part of me that objected to the confinement and abuse of such beings was the very same part that needed to see them for myself.

      To understand.

      Metzger’s had no right to exploit the creatures in its custody, but that wouldn’t end whether I looked at them or not. And who better than I to truly appreciate, rather than taunt or mock?

      At least, that’s how I rationalized my warring desires to both condemn and experience the spectacle.

      At the center of the menagerie, towering over everything else, was the big top, an enormous red-and-white-striped circus tent with three sharp peaks that cast an ominous shadow over the fairgrounds. The entrance flaps remained tightly closed until a paying guest was admitted, making it impossible to catch even a passing glimpse of the mysteries within. Around the perimeter of the menagerie stood a series of smaller tents and attractions, and branching from those were a series of themed subsections. Everything from the posters and cages to the costumes and music was designed with a vintage feel so that it seemed as though we’d stepped back in time.

      Up first was the bestiary, where cryptid animals lounged or paced in sideshow cage wagons modeled after circus train cars from the early 1900s. They had bright, intricately carved frames and huge wooden wheels, and the beasts within were visible from both sides, through thick iron bars reinforced with sheets of modern steel mesh.

      The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.

      Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two heads—one lion, one goat—and a snake for a tail. “Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is!” she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. “So glossy!”

      But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other direction—the full length of its СКАЧАТЬ