LITMIR.BIZ

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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 cramped quarters—I noticed that the fur on the goat head’s side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didn’t self-groom.

      “Here, kitty, kitty!” Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beast’s tail hissed at her.

      “He’s not a kitty, Shell,” Brandon said. “He’s a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.”

      “He’s not a he.” I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. “Her name is Cleo. She’s eighty-six years old, as of last spring,” I said, still reading from the plaque. “Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today.” I stepped back for a better look. “Poor thing. By the time she dies, she’ll have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.”

      Rick rolled his eyes. “They’re animals, Delilah. They don’t even know where they are.”

      “We’re all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you don’t know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. She’s your elder.”

      Rick laughed as if I’d made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cage’s bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.

      I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.

      Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didn’t let go even after I’d regained my balance, my heart still racing.

      “Don’t touch the exhibits,” a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzger’s logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. “Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.”

      “I tripped.” In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.

      “Cleo’s in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh,” Rick said. “What’s she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?”

      The man tugged the bill of his red cap down, shading more of his strong features. “Only a fool believes his eyes over all other senses.”

      Shelley laughed out loud while Rick fumed, and when I turned back for another glimpse of the large man in the red hat, he was gone.

      Shelley and I dragged the guys toward the next cage: Panthera leo aeetus. Commonly known as a griffin.

      Rick and Brandon were fascinated by the griffins, both perched on dead tree branches bolted to the ends of their massive aviary on wheels. They had the hindquarters of a lion and the majestic head, wings, and front claws of an eagle.

      An eagle on the physical scale of a lion.

      I’d seen them on television and studied them in school, but I’d had no appreciation for their size until I stood in front of them. They must have weighed at least five hundred pounds each.

      Brandon shouted at one, unrebuked by another large, gruff handler, and was rewarded when the griffin suddenly threw his enormous wings out and flapped, as if he’d dive at us. We all gasped and backpedaled. The griffin pulled his dive up short at the last second, and I noticed that a patch on his right wing, along the top ridge, was bare of feathers at exactly the spot his wing would have hit the bars, if he hadn’t stopped.

      The griffin made a horrible avian screech and I covered both my ears, but when he settled on a branch closer to us, still riled up from being teased, I realized that his sharp eagle’s beak and incredible wingspan were far less intimidating than his feet, a lethal cross between a lion’s claws and a bird’s talons.

      They were huge. And sharp. I noticed a dried chunk of raw meat wedged between his first and second digits.

      My heart ached for him. The griffin was obviously meant to soar the skies and stalk the plains in wide-open freedom. None of which he would get in the menagerie. Yes, griffins could be dangerous, but so could bears and sharks and alligators, yet we didn’t round them all up and throw them into cages.

      After the griffins came the phoenix. Shelley was disappointed when it refused to burst into flames, then rise from its own ashes for her personal amusement, even though the signs wired to its cage said the poor thing wasn’t due for a “rebirth” for nearly another month. I thought it was beautiful, even without the flames. The phoenix had a long graceful swan-like neck with plumage in vibrant graduating shades of red, yellow, and orange. Its broad sweeping tail would have made any peacock jealous.

      After the bestiary, we skipped the “Natural Oddities” section, which promised us trolls, ogres, goblins, and other assorted humanoid creatures of legend. Brandon led the way toward the “Human Hybrids” section, where the sign at the entrance promised us “bizarre and fascinating combinations of man and beast.”

      “Come forward, come forward!” the uniformed man at the tent entrance called, waving us closer with both white-gloved hands. “Metzger’s guarantees you’ve never seen a spectacle like this, no matter what other shows you’ve attended. No one else on earth has such an extensive collection of grotesque mergers of human and animal flesh as you’ll find in this very tent. Wolf and man, horse and man, fish and man, bird and woman...” He winked at Rick. “We’ve got it all! And don’t forget to take a peek at our world-famous

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