“Fine,” Peter agreed. “Let’s go in.”
They handed their tickets to the wart man and stepped inside the doorway flap of the tent. On either side were bleachers, like in the school gymnasium. Peter and Dill walked down to the front of the seats.
“Let’s sit up front,” Dill said.
“Uhhhh…let’s sit a little further up,” Peter disagreed. “Just in case.”
Dill gave a sound of disgust. “Fine.”
They tramped along the wooden seats and picked a spot halfway up. Peter scanned the place, but it looked totally different from anything he remembered in his nightmare. The dream tent had been small; this one was huge. The dream tent had straw on the floor; this one had a smooth, wooden-planked stage that stood eight inches above hard-packed dirt. Colored banners hung in the background. Lanterns had lit his nightmare, but a spotlight illuminated the stage here. Everything outside the spotlight faded into pitch-black darkness.
Behind the stage was a twenty-foot long aquarium filled with water, the kind you might see at a fancy seafood restaurant. That had been entirely missing from the dream, as had the five-foot tall glass vase that stood at the rear of the floorboards. There was a single, sturdy chair, but no desk or bottle of whisky. Nothing looked the same.
“Ladiesssss and gentlemen,” a high, reedy voice lisped over a speaker system. “Pleassse take your seatsss.”
Peter tensed at first just from the weirdness of the voice, but it wasn’t the one from his dream. The tattooed man had spoken in a deep, threatening rumble. This man, whoever he was, sounded almost whiny.
The crowd settled down and grew quiet.
“Welcome to the Hopperman Carnival Freak Sssshow, where you will ssseee many great and wondrousss thingsss from performersss who hail from around the globe. Pleassse do not feel embarrasssssed to ssstare and marvel…the men and women you will sssee tonight are here to perform for your amazement! Firsssst we begin with the massstersss of mysssticisssm, Eng and Leng, the amazing Sssiamessse Twinsss!”
From the darkness on the left of the stage, two men in black robes stepped out of a slit in the tent walls. They strode side by side into the harsh beam of the spotlight. Then Peter – and everyone else in the audience, judging by the collective gasp – realized that it was not two men walking very closely together, but one. Two heads on one normal, if somewhat wide, body.
“Holy crap,” Dill swore. “I’ve only seen that on the internet.”
The men were Asian, with thin faces and bald heads. One man had a long braid extending from the base of his skull, at the neck; he had a pleasant, vacant smile on his face. The other man had a wispy goatee and looked stern, even angry. In their hands they carried a large woven basket, which they set on the floorboards before sitting on the chair and looking up at the audience.
There was absolute silence in the theater as the stern man with the goatee spoke. “My name is Leng…”
“…and my name is Eng,” said the other man, with a smile. Both spoke in perfect, unaccented English.
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Copyright © 2009 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.
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