The Resurrectionist

LIMBO COMICS: ISSUE # 1: “Exile”

They came from the city of Maisel in the heart of Old Bohemia, land of pogroms and demonology. They became a family in the most binding way of all, through a shared and pitiless suffering. Make no mistake, the oldest truths are the most reliable: persecution ties a people together. To be different is to invite oppression. To wear your difference on your body, on your face, this is to invite eradication. Unless, of course, your difference is so grotesque that the crowds will pause to study, to celebrate, to marvel at your misfortune for a short time before they smite you. Then, and only then, will you have a chance to escape.

What does it mean to be a freak? For the Goldfaden Freaks it meant, for a time, a brief period in the beginning, that they were stars. They had been handpicked, assembled over years and miles by Tedeo Bluett, showman extraordinaire and inheritor of the Goldfaden Carnival, the premier — and, perhaps, the most notorious — of all the traveling circuses in all of Old Bohemia. The circus featured the standard fare of all the major bazaars — acrobats and aerialists, fortune-tellers and magicians, trained beasts and juggling clowns, games of chance and skill. So what was it that set the Goldfaden apart from the many other cavalcades of garish drama and comedy that patrolled the gypsy circuits? Its tents were no larger or more colorful than those of the Theatre Magika. Its rings of fire no hotter than those of Valli’s Cabaret. Its gorillas were no more savage than those of the Kabalist’s Revue and its human cannon was no braver than that of the Circus Herman Nevi.

No, the single feature that separated the Goldfaden from all the other touring spectacles was the infamous Freaks’ Promenade. Staged just before the finale of each evening’s show, this procession of unsightliness and deformity was unmatched in the history of sideshow lore. Truly, the Goldfaden Freaks were the stars of not just Tedeo Bluett’s circus but the entire carny world. Legendary monstrosities, they were the only freaks whose appearance in the flesh was more unsettling than even their most hyperbolic promotional posters. And because of this, Bluett saved their act for the climax of each performance and kept it short and simple.

Every night, after all the lions had been tamed and all the swords had been swallowed, after the clown king had chased his nemesis, the thief of hearts, around and into the rolling fountain, after one of the Flying Zhilinskis had dropped Little Sonya into the arms of Count Leonid and the Weatherman had been electrocuted and revived by his curvaceous assistant, and the Halloween Killer had lost his head to the Magic Guillotine, then, and only then, did Ringmaster Bluett unleash his freaks. And they marched around the perimeter of the center ring and then up, up, into the audience, right up close and personal, where the customers could see for themselves the horrible mistakes that nature makes on rare occasions.

Physically, it was not a tough gig. And this proved to be the freaks’ downfall. Because while their “act” consisted solely of a ten-minute nightly stroll of ogling and groping amid shrieks and curses, the freaks’ pay and accommodations rivaled those of the acrobats and lion tamers — a fact that triggered no end of jealousy among the rest of the Goldfaden performers. And nowhere was that jealousy more inflamed than in the spleen of Shoshone McGee, the infamous “Blade of Zürau,” a half-Cherokee, half-Irish, and fully psychotic knife thrower who functioned as the Goldfaden’s resident diva.

McGee lived in a state of perpetual crisis, a melodrama of alcoholism, amphetamine abuse, manic depression, and bad karma. He went through assistant-wives like sour candies and his colleagues agreed that he approached anything like happiness only in the midst of performance, throwing his blades at a human target. He was a tall, muscular man of dark, movie idol looks, except for an enormous protruding brow that was never quite mitigated by the black, luxuriant hair, which he wore long and swept back. His cheekbones caused marital discord in the towns through which he toured. He lived his life barefoot and bare-chested, though he favored expensive leather trousers, the tighter the better. The bulk of his salary from Bluett went to liquor, pills, and knives. But when the throwers of Old Bohemia talked shop, most agreed that McGee had the finest collection of steel in the business. He may or may not have been the most skilled bladesman on the circuit, but he was certainly the most daring. He fired his daggers while blindfolded and drunk and from distances that no Entertainers’ Guild would ever sanction.

All of this, however, is mere addendum to the central fact of the knife thrower’s existence: Shoshone McGee hated freaks.

No, this is too generous. Truth be told, McGee abhorred freaks. He despised freaks. He loathed them with an antipathy that seemed to grow with each new day. Freaks lay at the center of a furious rage that boiled, year after year, in the heart of the knife thrower. And though there were many legends regarding the source of the man’s fury, no one could say with any certainty which one was closest to the truth.

But as far as the Goldfaden Freaks were concerned, the reason for McGee’s hatred was an academic mystery. What mattered was staying away from the madman and his cutlery. And so a system of avoidance grew up organically within the troupe. The freaks’ trailers were always parked at the opposite end of the campsite from the knife thrower. They dined in separate mess tents. And Bluett slipped Glomo the clown an extra kroner and a bottle of schnapps each week just to make sure that McGee was absent from the big top when the Freaks’ Promenade occurred each night.

And yet, for all of these precautions, Shoshone McGee’s hatred only grew as the years went by. And, over time, that hatred slowly poisoned the rest of the Goldfaden troupe against what the knife thrower, in his inimitable way of turning bile into poetry, called the devil’s putrid afterbirth.

And so it was the fate of the freaks that, even within the liberal world of a circus clan, they became outcasts, exiled from the bosom, show dogs kept forever beyond the warmth of the family fire. Of course, it was natural that they would build their own fire, their own family, constructed of their ill-fitting parts and bound together by an empathy that knew no limits. That family was comprised of:

Fatos, the mule-faced boy, guileless and playful and dreamy despite his large and perpetually infected ears and the mange that spread across his cheek each spring;

Aziz, the human torso, the stoic of the family, swinging himself forward on his thickly callused knuckles, a fat lower lip tucked up over his mouth;

Nadja, the lobster girl, whose claws could clip a cigar neatly in two, who relished a good party and hinted, in the small hours of too many drunken nights, of love affairs with princes and opium;

Durga, the fat lady, a half ton of matriarchal earth goddess, who dressed in flowing silk and would listen to any problem and provide counsel and solace and Bavarian chocolate;

Jeta, the skeleton, outfitted, always, in a navy singlet, so shy that the nightly Promenade could reduce her to tears;

Milena, the hermaphrodite, proud and testy, with a wit as sharp and fine as a German scalpel;

Antoinette, the pinhead, who adored gingham dresses and piano music, and who tended to wander if not properly supervised;

Marcel and Vasco, Siamese twins who loved and squabbled by the phases of the moon and who once passed a full year without speaking to each other — though today, neither can recall the source of their argument;

Kitty, the elegant, delicate, raven-haired dwarf, with just a touch of the femme fatale, of which she was mostly unaware;

And Chick, the chicken boy, the conscience and spirit of the freak clan, with his patchy coat of feathers and the hard cartilage that formed a beak of a mouth. Chick, the boy without a past, whose mother had given him to Tedeo Bluett to raise. The chicken boy whose spirit was so pure and whose soul was so wise that his tenure in this foul world was forever problematic. With a tendency to fugues and trances, with a notion of a long-lost father, with his tender love for the dwarf, his Kitty, and a knowledge that his destiny lay beyond the borders of Old Bohemia, in the legendary country of Gehenna.

We know little about the chicken boy’s origins. And, as usually happens in the absence of fact, legend has descended to fill in the gaps. Chick himself will not dignify the legends with discussion. But late at night, walking in the woods or huddled in a trailer with his beloved Kitty, he sometimes allows himself a nip of analysis and a shooter of speculation. Tedeo Bluett has told him the same simple tale from the start.

The troupe, stranded outside of Worgl when a show had fallen through, was camped on the edge of town, on a bluff overlooking the River Kalda. It was a season of recession and grippe and people were not venturing to the theaters. Troubled by another bout of worry and insomnia, the ringmaster had taken a walk to clear his mind. He was thinking that night of getting out of the circus business altogether. Selling the Goldfaden to Herman Nevi or Kalli Kraus or one of his other competitors. Lost in thought, stumbling through the fog, a young woman’s wailing suddenly startled him. He made his way toward her cries and found himself on a slimy jetty that protruded into heaving winter waters. And at the end of the rocks, he found her.

She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years, he told Chick. She was hysterical and distraught and, beyond this, Bluett would say, somehow he knew that she was the saddest creature he had ever encountered. This is a bold statement for a circus man to make and it is the one part of the story that Chick has never doubted. The girl was dressed—hidden was the word that Bluett used most often — in the kind of flowing, hooded cape that had been fashionable many years previously. Beneath the cape, she wore a serving girl’s frock, the tattered uniform of someone’s maid. A washerwoman-in-training, was Tedeo’s initial guess, but when he saw her face peek out from the hood, he knew he was wrong. No, even in this hysterical state, with her hair tangled and matted by the spray, this one was a beauty of rare breeding and grace.

Her crying ceased when she saw Bluett approaching on the jetty. But she was silenced for only a moment.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she screamed over the wind.

And Bluett knew that she meant to throw herself into the chop.

He halted and held a hand up, both to reassure the girl that he understood and to block the water blowing into his eyes.

The girl looked from the ringmaster to the river, as if suddenly unsure of her next move. And that was when Bluett saw she was holding a package, something the size of a bread loaf, wrapped in a rapidly decomposing newspaper — what he would later discover to be a medical tabloid known as The Journal of Physical Abnormality.

“Please,” he yelled over the screeching winds, “let me help you.”

With this, the girl threw back her hood. And even in the darkness, Tedeo Bluett could see that she had eyes as striking as the emperor’s emeralds.

“You want to help me?” she asked, her contempt cutting through the gale. “Get him to Gehenna.” And with that, she tossed the bread loaf at the ringmaster and threw herself off the rocks.

Instinct born of a lifetime in the circus caused Bluett to go down on one knee and catch, perfectly, the tossed burden that he understood, at once, to be something other than a loaf of bread, something alive and moving and making sounds of its own. Torn, he ran to the jetty’s end before allowing himself to inspect the creature in his arms. His eyes swept the water but there was no sign of the jumper. He called out to her but knew, as he called, that it was futile.

Then he peeled back the news wrap and took his first look at the child inside.

“I have lived a life in show business,” he would tell Chick over the years that followed that night. “I have trafficked all my days in spectacle. I come from a people who have made their living mining the most curious parts of this astounding world. But in all my time, in all my travels, I had never seen anything like you.”

IT WAS THIS very chicken boy, born into tragedy and mystery, who drew the bulk of the “normal” performers’ wrath. Too innocent and pure-hearted for his own good, Chick had become the crowd’s favorite absurdity, a creature whose deformity could not camouflage his deep sense of compassion and truth. That Chick was a religious seeker, given, rumor said, to prophetic dreams, made him only more suspect and, ultimately, despised by the rest of the Goldfaden troupe.

During the final tour with the Bluett show, the freaks’ popularity peaked. It was in the city of Smetano that the problem came to a head. The audience had been impatient all week and even the master showmen had trouble commanding full attention. During Magda Zhilinski’s neck twist there had been catcalls, genuine boos and hisses, though Magda had performed perfectly. When Grendal Romain attempted to put his horses through the synchronized folk dance, the music could not be heard above the crowd’s impatient grumbling. But the last straw was heaved on during Shoshone McGee’s knife-throwing exhibition, when someone yelled, “Bring on the freaks!” and the crowd cheered at an inopportune moment — causing McGee to nick, for the first time, his latest wife’s inner thigh.

At this, McGee’s long-seething rage boiled over into murderous rebellion and the Goldfaden troupe revolted en masse. They issued Bluett an ultimatum: Choose the freaks or choose the rest. One or the other. To share a stage with these blunders of God was one thing. To be upstaged by them was something else entirely. Something evil and unnatural and, finally, intolerable.

That Bluett was not a stupid man goes without saying. He had the savvy of a fifth-generation showman. True, the freaks were his finale, the most popular attraction of the whole circus. But their act consisted of nothing more than a ten-minute parade. And you cannot book a tent with ten minutes of deformity. As a climax, the freaks were gold. As a beginning and an end and everything in between, they were death.

And so, on a cold autumn night, when a harvest moon blasted the forests with blue light and the fog rolled in cold and wet, Tedeo Bluett banished the freaks from the only home that most of them had ever known. To his credit, he paid them a month’s wages and let them keep their costumes.

The freaks were dumbfounded. By and large, these were not wily individuals. Most had been coddled throughout their lives, tended and managed by Bluett like prized sheep. They were not idiots but they were all spoiled to a greater or lesser degree and had little sense of how to take care of themselves in the wider world.

So, when Bluett abandoned them at a campsite on the edge of Village Odradek, the freaks were confused and terrified. Fat Durga went to work at once, playing the mama to her misshapen brood. She draped her gargantuan arms over several sloping shoulders and dispensed a rosy future. The freaks would stay together, she proclaimed, and remain a family. They would apply for a state license and get out on the road, on their own. This was the best thing that could have happened to them. No more suffering the pettiness of the mundane jugglers. No more living off an allowance from the ringmaster. They would form their own troupe and control their own destiny.

Jeta and Antoinette were comforted by Durga’s prophecy. And most of the others were at least calmed enough to sleep. But Chick and Kitty weren’t fooled by the big lady’s dreams of blue skies and gravy. They said nothing aloud, but they exchanged a lovers’ knowing look across the evening’s campfire. The look said: What do we know about licensing? What do we know about bookings and ticket sales? About promotion and advertising? About tent riggings? About union rules? About the twisting back roads of Old Bohemia?

The look said: What do we know about putting together an act?

Chick appreciated, even loved, Durga’s optimism and her way with a cheerful story. But what the family needed most in this instance was a new patron. Someone strong and smart who could guide them, keep the clan together and manage the business aspect of their collective life. While Durga sketched out the details of their gleaming future, Chick wracked his brain trying to think of a new and worthy patriarch. It was not an easy task — most of the circus owners in Old Bohemia made Tedeo Bluett look like a saint — and Chick fell asleep before he could conjure a candidate. And woke an hour before dawn with a hand clamped over his beak and a knife tip poking into his neck.

His eyes, wide with shock and betrayal, opened and looked out on Bruno Seboldt, the Goldfaden strongman, an authentic Hercules who had joined the troupe a year before, hiring on during a matinee in Krappl. Bruno, who could burst iron chains and heave a dozen clowns the length of the tent and lift a small horse straight over his head, was said, from the start, to be a wanted man. He had never warmed to the freaks. And now it looked like he was ready to murder at least one of them.

But after a horrible moment of mutual staring, Bruno sheathed his knife into his boot, brought a sausage of a finger to his mustache-hidden lips and made a shushing sound. Then he released Chick’s beak and motioned to the trees beyond the campfire. Chick rose silently, stepped over a sleeping Kitty and followed the strongman into the woods.

“You almost scared me to death,” Chick said to Bruno’s back.

Bruno found a stump and sat on it, which brought his head even with the still-standing Chick’s. Despite the nighttime cool, the big man wore a training shirt that exposed his enormous arms and the identical tattoos on each — pictures of Atlas hoisting the earth. Bruno kept his eyes on the ground, as if, even in the shadows, he could not bring himself to look at the chicken boy.

“If I had wanted you dead,” Bruno said, “I would be roasting you on a spit right now.”

It was always an unsettling image, no matter how often he heard it, and Chick allowed himself a shudder.

“What’s all this about?” he asked. “You’re rid of us. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Bruno shook his head.

“It’s McGee,” he said, scratching the back of his skull. “He says you’re all abominations. That if we just let you go free, you’ll only find another circus that will take you in.”

It was as if someone had read Chick’s mind, though he knew that Flora Kino, the troupe’s resident gypsy, was more grifter than psychic.

“And what business is that of yours?” Chick asked. “You don’t have to look at us anymore. You don’t have to share the tent or the trailers with us. You got what you wanted.”

Moonlight reflected off Bruno’s forehead.

“McGee says it’s too dangerous. The competition is fierce these days. We can’t afford to lose our audience to the monsters.”

Chick nodded, unable to hide from the logic. At a loss, he simply said, “And what do you think, Bruno?”

The strongman scratched at his cheek, pulled on his mustache. Finally he rose from the stump, came forward, and towered over Chick.

“I don’t like the lot of you,” he said. “But McGee is on his way. He plans on butchering every last one of you. And I couldn’t let that happen.”

“What will you do,” Chick asked, trying to look into the dark woods behind Bruno, “when he gets here?”

Bruno’s hands went to his hips and his head tilted just a bit toward a shoulder.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that there might be a solution to this problem.”

It was at this moment that Chick felt the first symptoms of the seizure. It came as an instantaneous wallop of déjà vu, accompanied by a cold rush of current up his spine and into his brain. He staggered, regrouped, and asked, “What do you mean?”

Maybe it was the darkness or perhaps his self-absorption in the moment, but Bruno didn’t notice the change in the chicken boy.

“I mean,” Bruno said, “what if you left?”

“Left?” repeated Chick as his stomach began to churn and his eyes to lose focus.

“Yes,” said Bruno, warming to his idea as it took on weight with his words. “What if you left the country? Got out of Bohemia? Especially you. You’re always reading those newspapers and pamphlets about Gehenna. You could go there. You could take all of them with you.”

“Go to Gehenna?” in a breathy whisper, as if voicing a dangerous heresy.

“I know a man,” said Bruno, anxious to keep talking, to continue rolling out his plan. “He used to come by the gym in Maisel. We would play cards together sometimes. He has a boat. A ship. He owes me a favor. I could get you passage. To Gehenna.”

“Why would you do this for us?” Chick asked.

And Bruno muttered, “I won’t have murder on my hands again.”

No man ever spoke with more sincerity or better intention. But the vow proved impossible. Before they could wake the rest of the freaks and decamp the area, they were ambushed by Shoshone McGee, nastily drunk and thirsty for freak blood. He came out of the tree line with a knife in each hand, raving, screaming like a demon, promising rape and dismemberment and lingering death to the filthy abominations. And then he saw Bruno Seboldt.

“Betrayer,” he screamed and charged with both knives outstretched.

For a huge man, Bruno was nimble and fast. And, of course, it helped that McGee was wretched with alcohol. Bruno sidestepped the attack, knocked the madman to the ground with a blow to the neck, came down on the knife thrower’s back as if genuflecting, and in a single, fluid motion, took McGee’s head in his bulging arms, like a soccer ball, and twisted it until the neck snapped. It happened in an instant, a child quieting a baby goose.

The sleeping freaks woke with McGee’s war cry just in time to witness the killing. Everyone remained on the ground, silent and in shock, except for Antoinette, who crawled into Durga’s arms and began to whimper.

Bruno got to his feet and heaved a sigh and said to Chick, “We don’t have much time. Help me bury him.”

But the chicken boy was in the midst of a full-blown seizure, his arms and legs twitching, his eyes rolled up past his lids, a soupy bile running from his beak. He was in the Limbo now, the place of visions, of warning and prophecy. Where the voice of the father spoke its cryptic messages of possible salvation.

On this night of expulsion and killing Chick had his first vision of Gehenna. And of his nemesis, the mad doctor called Fliess. And of the doctor’s laboratory, a clifftop castle called the Black Iron Clinic.

Chick hallucinated in the Limbo throughout that night, while Bruno Seboldt carried him like a corpse across the dark countryside and a parade of freaks followed behind them both, their last Promenade in Old Bohemia.

BY DAYLIGHT THEY made it to the docks of Studl. And by the next nightfall, they were steaming out of Fleischmann’s Harbor, bound for distant Gehenna, a land known only through legend and folktale. It was a momentous turning point for the freaks. And even the pinhead knew it.

But if there was great fear — and, certainly, there was — the escape also brought a sense of hope and possibility, a sense of new beginning. Because while the freaks had escaped their first death sentence, they had also found a new, if unlikely, patriarch.

Bruno Seboldt stood at the bow of the The Touya throughout that first night at sea, staring into the ocean as waves broke to either side of the ship. He took no food and he spoke to no one. And when Chick approached him in the morning with some of Durga’s cinnamon coffee, handed the strongman the mug and whispered, “You’re one of us now,” Bruno never responded. As if he had not heard the words.