Sideshow Passage of the Day

G. S. Carnivals

G. S. Carnivals

Our Temporary Supervisor
"Stan Carlisle stood well back from the entrance of the canvas enclosure, under the blaze of a naked light bulb, and watched the geek.

This geek was a thin man who wore a suit of long underwear dyed chocolate brown. The wig was black and looked like a mop, and the brown greasepaint on the emaciated face was streaked and smeared with the heat and rubbed off around the mouth.

At present the geek was leaning against the wall of the pen, while around him a few - pathetically few - snakes lay in loose coils, feeling the hot summer night and sullenly uneasy in the glare. One slim little king snake was trying to climb up the wall of the enclosure and was falling back.

Stan liked snakes; the disgust he felt was for them, at their having to be penned up with such a specimen of man. Outside the talker was working up to his climax. Stan turned his neat blond head toward the entrance.

' ...where did he come from? God only knows. He was found on an uninhabited island five hundred miles off the coast of Florida. My friends, in this enclosure you will see one of the unexplained mysteries of the universe. Is he man or is he beast? You will see him living in his natural habitat among the most venomous rep-tiles that the world provides. Why, he fondles those serpents as a mother would fondle her babies. He neither eats nor drinks but lives entirely on the atmosphere. And we're going to feed him one more time! There will be a slight additional charge for this attraction but it's not a dollar, it's not a quarter - it's a cold, thin dime, ten pennies, two nickels, the tenth part of a dollar. Hurry, hurry, hurry!'"
William Lindsay Gresham - Nightmare Alley
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"The carnival had come to town like an October wind, like a dark bat flying over the cold lake, bones rattling in the night, mourning, sighing, whispering up the tents in the dark rain. It stayed on for a month by the gray, restless lake of October, in the black weather and increasing storms and leaden skies.

During the third week, at twilight on a Thursday, the two small boys walked along the lake shore in the cold wind.

'Aw, I don't believe you,' said Peter.

'Come on, and I'll show you,' said Hank.

They left wads of spit behind them all along the moist brown sand of the crashing shore. They ran to the lonely carnival grounds. It had been raining. The carnival lay by the sounding lake with nobody buying tickets from the flaky black booths, nobody hoping to get the salted hams from the whining roulette wheels, and none of the thin-fat freaks on the big platforms. The midway was silent; all the gray tents hissing on the wind like gigantic prehistoric wings. At eight o'clock perhaps, ghastly lights would flash on, voices would shout, music would go out over the lake. Now there was only a blind hunchback sitting on a black booth, feeling of the cracked china cup from which he was drinking some perfumed brew.

'There,' said Hank, pointing.

The black Ferris wheel rose like an immense light-bulbed constellation against the cloudy sky, silent.

'I still don't believe what you said about it,' said Peter.

'You wait, I saw it happen. I don't know how, but it did. You know how carnivals are: all funny. Okay; this one's even funnier.'

Peter let himself be led to the high green hiding place of a tree.

Suddenly, Hank stiffened. 'Hist! There's Mr. Cooger, the carnival man, now!' Hidden, they watched.

Mr. Cooger, a man of some thirty-five years, dressed in sharp bright clothes, a lapel carnation, hair greased with oil, drifted under the tree, a brown derby hat on his head. He had arrived in town three weeks before, shaking his brown derby hat at people on the street from inside his shiny red Ford, tooting the horn.

Now Mr. Cooger nodded at the little blind hunchback, spoke a word. The hunchback blindly, fumbling, locked Mr. Cooger into a black seat and sent him whirling up into the ominous twilight sky. Machinery hummed.

'See!' whispered Hank. 'The Ferris wheel's going the wrong way. Backwards instead of forwards!'

'So what?' said Peter.

'Watch!'

The black Ferris wheel whirled twenty-five times around. Then the blind hunchback put out his pale hands and halted the machinery. The Ferris wheel stopped, gently swaying, at a certain black seat.

A ten-year-old boy stepped out. He walked off across the whispering carnival ground, in the shadows."
Ray Bradbury - "Black Ferris"
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"Floridly worded, the advertisement made claims even Phineas Taylor Barnum might have hedged at advancing. It alleged for the show's female personnel a pulchritude impossible to equal in any golden age of beauty or physical culture. The mind of man could not conceive of women more beautiful than were the charmers of this circus. Though the whole race of man were bred for feminine beauty as the whole race of Jersey cattle is bred for butterfat, even then lovelier women could not be produced than the ones who graced this show. ...Nay, these were the most beautiful women of the world; the whole world, not just the world of today, but the world since time began and the world as long as time shall run."
Charles G. Finney - "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
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"Beyond the quarry the dunes gave way to a small hollow, from which protruded the faded gilt roof of an old fairground booth. The striped wooden awning hung over the silent horses of the merry-go-round, frozen like magical unicorns on their spiral shafts. Next to it was another of the booths, a line of washing strung from its decorated eaves. Ransom followed one of the pathways cut through the dunes into this little dell. Here Mrs. Quilter lived out of sight of the sea and shore, visited by the quarry-workers and womenfolk of the settlement, for whom she practised her mild necromancy and fortune-telling. Although frowned upon by the Reverend Johnstone and his captains, these visits across the dunes served a useful purpose, introducing into their sterile lives, Ransom believed, those random elements, that awareness of chance and time, without which they would soon have lost all sense of identity."
J. G. Ballard - The Burning World
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"Nor were the wild animals on display at the circus any less sensational than were the girls. Not elephants or tigers or hyenas or monkeys or polar bears or hippopotami; anyone and everyone had seen such as those time after time. The sight of an African lion was as banal today as that of an airplane. But here were animals no man had ever seen before; beasts fierce beyond all dreams of ferocity; serpents cunning beyond all comprehension of guile; hybrids strange beyond all nightmares of fantasy."
Charles G. Finney - "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
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"Furthermore, the midway of the circus was replete with sideshows wherein were curious beings of the netherworld on display, macabre trophies of ancient conquests, resurrected supermen of antiquity. No glass-blowers, cigarette fiends, or frogboys, but real honest-to-goodness freaks that had been born of hysterical brains rather than diseased wombs."
Charles G. Finney - "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
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I used to work the rides at a fairground -- and never mastered the art of balancing the Ferris Wheel -- you had to remember a numerical order, if you put people in basket #1, then the next customer goes into basket #7, or else the Wheel gets out of balance and poses a danger to ye riders. My rides were always the height of danger....
 
"Likewise, the midway would house a fortuneteller. Not an ungrammatical gypsy, not a fat blonde mumbling silly things about dark men in your life, not a turbaned mystic canting of the constellations; no, this fortuneteller would not even be visible to you, much less take your hand and voice generalities concerning your life lines. Anonymous behind the veil of his mystery he would speak to you and tell you of foreordained things which would come into your life as the years unfolded. And you were warned not to enter his tent unless you truly wanted to know the truth about your future, for never under any conditions did he lie about what was going to happen; nor was it possible for you after learning your future to avert in any way its unpleasant features. He absolutely would not, however, forecast anything of an international or political nature. He was perfectly capable of so doing, of course, but the management had found that such prophecies, inasmuch as they were invariably true, had in the past been used to unfair and dishonorable advantage by unscrupulous financiers and politicians; that which had been meant for mankind had been converted to personal gain - which was not ethical."
Charles G. Finney - "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
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"And for men only there was a peepshow. It was educational rather than pornographic. It held no promise of hermaphroditic goats or randy pony stallions lusting after women. Nor any rubberstamp striptease act. But out of the erotic dramas and dreams of long-dead times had been culled a figure here, an episode there, a fugitive vision elsewhere, all of which in combination produced an effect that no ordinary man for a long series of days would forget or, for that matter, care to remember too vividly. Because of the unique character of this segment of the circus, attendance would be limited to men over twenty-one, married men preferred; and absolutely no admittance to any man under the influence of liquor."
Charles G. Finney - "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
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From the Foreword to Sideshow and Other Stories (2003), by Thomas Ligotti

“My focus, or center of interest,” he said, “has always been the wretched show business of my own life—an autobiographical wretchedness that is not even first-rate show business but more like a series of sideshows, senseless episodes without continuity or coherence except that which, by virtue of my being the ringmaster of this miserable circus of sideshows, I assign to it in the most bogus and show businesslike fashion, which of course fails to maintain any genuine effect of continuity or coherence, inevitably so. But this, I’ve found, is the very essence of show business, all of which in fact is no more than sideshow business. The unexpected mutations, the sheer baselessness of beings, the volatility of things . . . By necessity we live in a world, a sideshow world, where everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.”
 
Circus Sideshow [or Parade de Cirque] (1887-88), by Georges Seurat

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"Almost as horrible as the corpse on the ground were the men and women who clustered in a wavering, horror-struck circle beneath the tiger cage, their faces white and drawn in the diffuse illumination which streamed outward from the focused beam of the little electric torch.

They were not normal men and women. I shall never forget the awful picture they presented as they stood there, staring and gibbering and moaning in the half-light.

Freaks are seldom normal mentally. In moments of great stress and horror they never behave like ordinary men and women. As I stared about that grotesque circle, I recognized friends of long standing who had gone completely haywire.

There was Gudo, the lion-faced man, whose lips were writhing repellently beneath his distended, hairy cheeks, and whose glaring dark eyes were horribly like those of the jungle lord whose expression he aped.

There was the hunchbacked dwarf, Simon Crisp, whose face bore an expression of devilish malice impossible to convey. There was the skeleton woman, wild-eyed and teetering on the verge of hysteria, and the microcephalic idiot, Prince Charles, whose little, tapering head bobbed loathsomely up and down.

Faces bestial and hairy, wild-eyed and obscene glared at me and Gibbs as we stood looking down at poor Fred Hunter's broken body. They seemed to resent our normality, as though we had eavesdropped unbidden on a spectacle suitable to their perverse and distorted natures alone.

In the presence of gruesome death all that was sinister and abnormal in them surged shockingly to the surface. Some were obviously not to be trusted alone with that poor, broken thing on the ground. They would have lifted and examined it, have pawed it gloatingly, eliminating all clues."
Frank Belknap Long - "Carnival of Crawling Doom"
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"Naturally he didn't have nerve enough to ask Magda to go through the funhouse with him. With incredible nerve and to everyone's surprise he invited Magda, quietly and politely, to go through the funhouse with him. 'I warn you, I've never been through it before,' he added, laughing easily; 'but I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a funhouse; that is, a place of amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too badly frightened in it, the owner'd go out of business. There'd even be lawsuits. No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters.'"
John Barth - "Lost in the Funhouse"
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From “The Next Sideshow” (1981), by Ramsey Campbell

Underfoot the path felt less like concrete than mud. Had the gardeners been moving earth, or had he missed his way? He stumbled onward, blinking; rain poured down his forehead into his eyes. Was that a shelter ahead, among the streaming trees? But there was no such building on his route home. Then he heard rain scuttling on metal. The dark shape was a caravan.

There were several, huddled like beasts beneath the trees. Raindrops traced veins through the dirt on their dim windows. Had the caravans any right to be there? They were robbing him of shelter. As he trudged past they rattled like maracas.

One pair of curtains was untidily parted. Beneath it, light slumped on the drowned twitching grass, and illuminated a section of a notice. Gray made out a few words: MAZE, FREAK SHOW, WELCOME. The letters squirmed under trickles of rain. Had the notice been laid there for passersby to read? It looked more as though it had fallen into the mud.

If the sideshows were open, perhaps he should take refuge there—but he’d never seen a freak show, and didn’t intend to start now. He knew deformity existed; that was no reason to become involved in its exploitation.

As he picked his way along the squelching path, he started. Why? It had only been a glimpse of a face peering between curtains. He hadn’t had time to distinguish it properly. It must have been his thoughts of freaks that had made the impression seem so unnatural.

The curtains had drooped shut now. Next to their caravan stood a low construction without wheels. Was it the freak show? No, he could just make out the sign that dangled slightly askew in the entrance: MIRROR MAZE.

The entrance was unlit. Within it, to the left, the cramped barred aperture of the paybox yawned, a cowl full of darkness. Sagging tendrils of his hair trained rain down his neck; his clothes and his eyebrows were sodden. He heard a new onslaught of rain rushing across the lake. Shivering, he dodged into the entrance.

Beside him a voice said, “Nowhere to go?”
 
There is nothing as silent as a sideshow at closing. The last of the hooting throngs, the laughing woman and crying babes, are gone. The group of children who suffer from physical ailments, their lame bodies twisted, their limbs so unruly, have limped away. I remember the child, his frame so twisted, who has such trouble holding onto his horse, and as my foot stays on the peddle that moves the carousel I tremble with fear that he will fall from his puppet-horse. But his smile! His wide and laughing mouth! I watch as the horses slow and stop, as the child's special friend helps his bent and twisted form down to the metal floor. I watch as he is placed into the cart in which, unable to walk, he is pulled by his fellows. I wave to him as he holds his spasmodic hand toward the horses and myself.

The lights of the wheel die out, and the distant coaster stops its mechanical roar. I unfasten the straps and roll down the flaps of tarp that shield my beasts at nightfall. I stand on the footrest of the horse on which the crippled child had smiled and unleash the final tarp, and I sit on that horse in the eerie darkness, surrounded by the frozen silhouettes of horses, these bestial mannequins. I sit, dreaming, while other operators have gone away to turn in their ticket boxes. There is a rustling outside the tarp, and as I return to wakefulness I see the form that slides beneath the heavy faded oilskin. A shaft of moonlight sneaks through the top of my ride, at the tarpaulin's small opening above me. It shines on the shape that creeps nearer, on the pale flesh that so resembles the substance of the tarp that encloses me within this place of shadow. It limps, this shape, to one particular horse, the one that has lost a foot, and which we are too poor to repair. It snuggles into the painted saddle and raises its monstrous hand unto the peek-a-boo moon. A noise comes from somewhere within the ride's mechanics -- an eerie musical sound that is unearthly; and as I cling to the frozen mane of my trembling horse, the ride begins to move.

The squat thing turns to look at me with jesting yellow eyes. It's wide mouth curls in bestial mirth as it points its talons particularly to me and waves.
 
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"He wonders: will he become a regular person? Something has gone wrong; his vaccination didn't take; at the Boy-Scout initiation campfire he only pretended to be deeply moved, as he pretends to this hour that it is not so bad after all in the funhouse, and that he has a little limp. How long will it last? He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he's only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this fellow's way, complicate that's, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was.

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator - though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed."
John Barth - "Lost in the Funhouse"
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Thomas Couture (1815-1879)
Pierrot on Trial
Oil on canvas, c.1863
12 5/8 x 15 inches (32.2 x 38.1 cm)
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
 
Pierrot_the_Politician.jpg


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Thomas Couture (1815-1879)
Pierrot the Politician
Oil on canvas, c.1857
46 3/4 x 61 inches (119 x 155 cm)
Wallace Collection, London
 
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