The Resurrectionist

LIMBO COMICS: ISSUE # 2: “A Treacherous Passage”

The crossing to Gehenna was, at times, perilous, and at other times, monotonous. The seas were often stormy and nauseating, and the ship was always cold. The freaks dressed in layers of costumes and passed the time imagining the riches and the fame that they would claim in the new world. Durga braided Antoinette’s sparse strands of hair. Marcel and Vasco played poker for matchsticks. Milena and Nadja occasionally tried to cadge drinks from the surly crew in the boiler room. And Chick scribbled in his diary, last year’s Christmas gift from Kitty.

Mostly he recorded and analyzed his visions, the messages he received during his seizures. He had them, on average, every third day throughout the voyage. All of them involved the doctor, Fliess, and his enormous laboratory castle, the Black Iron Clinic. All of them relayed in the voice of the Limbo, which had come to mean, in Chick’s mind and heart, the voice of his long-lost father. Calling out to him. Guiding him in fits and starts. Leading the son to communion and healing.

Kitty sat watch during the seizures, holding her love, cradling him as best she could, stroking the feathers of his cheek, kissing the feathers on his forehead with her seasick lips.

The Touya was a tramp steamer that managed fourteen knots on a good day and boasted a skeleton crew of fifty men, all of whom had more than a passing acquaintance with the darker side of human nature, and none of whom lost any love on the freaks. The Captain of The Touya, a hatchet-face bear of a man named Karl Gunter, communicated with the freaks through Bruno, the strongman, who conveyed the skipper’s insistence that the freaks confine themselves to the ship’s hold for the duration of the passage. Here they lodged among the freight — thousands of sealed drums filled with expensive fertilizer made exclusively from the excrement of Royal Bergauer Stallions. Twice a day, Bruno brought down a crate of food, mostly overripe oranges and tins of salted pork. The conditions were stark and filthy, but these were circus folk, after all, well used to improvisation and the uncertainties of nomadic life.

It took weeks to reach Gehenna and toward the tail end of the trip they caught the last slap of a nor’easter that snapped the freaks like marbles across the floor of the hold all night long. Jeta became hysterical and Aziz was forced to backhand her with one of his enormous paws.

Landfall came just after dawn one morning. Captain Gunter dropped anchor and summoned Bruno to his quarters for a card game and a conference over a breakfast of hardtack and Becherovka.

“My debt,” the Captain said, “is paid.”

Bruno nodded, raised his glass to the man.

“You kept your word,” Bruno agreed.

Gunter smiled, pulled out a small canvas pouch filled with snuff, and offered the strongman a pinch. The Captain’s ego was larger than his legendary belly. An autodidact, he had a well-known passion for the Bible and the Bard, and Bruno hoped that he wouldn’t have to endure a reading from the Song of Solomon.

“And what now?” Gunter asked. “What will you do?”

Seboldt waved off the snuff and tried to shrug his muscle-bound shoulders.

“We’ll look for work,” he said. “People are the same all over. Everyone wants to see the freaks.”

“So you’re staying with them, then?” said Gunter, a man not normally given to surprise.

“For a time anyway,” Bruno said.

“I could take you back home,” the Captain said. “You got them out of harm’s way. Most men would say that was enough.”

“I can’t go home,” Bruno said. “Shoshone McGee had a lot of friends.”

At this, Gunter spit out the latest sip of his drink.

“The hell he did,” the Captain said. “I knew McGee. Even his parents hated that bastard. He was a boil on the ass every day of his life.”

“The ladies liked him enough,” Bruno said, getting up from the table and moving to look out the Captain’s porthole. The small room smelled of oil and sweat and the odor combined with the low ceiling to produce in the strongman a touch of claustrophobia.

Gunter refilled Seboldt’s glass and carried it to him.

“The ladies,” he said to Bruno’s back, “feared him and loathed him. He was a bully on his best day and a rapist when he drank. And he drank whenever he was awake.”

Bruno turned around but didn’t argue.

The Captain handed him his drink and moved back to the bottle.

“The fact is, Bruno,” he said, “no one would give a goddamn that you killed the knife thrower. You did a favor for all of Bohemia. And I think you know that.”

“Murder is still murder,” Bruno said, but it came out weak. “There will be a warrant out on me.”

“There won’t be a one,” Gunter said evenly. “Teddy Bluett will find a new bladesman and life will go on.”

“Tell it your way,” Bruno said, wishing they could move on to a new subject.

“It’s my ship,” the Captain said. “I’ll always tell it my way. But this time it’s also the truth.”

“There’s nothing for me back in Bohemia,” Bruno said.

“Maybe not,” Gunter said. “Probably not. But I think you’re off to Gehenna because you want to stay,” his voice suddenly rising here, “with those pathetic vermin in the hold.”

Bruno was caught off guard.

“You’re touched,” he said to the Captain, but there was no force behind the insult.

“Careful son,” Gunter said. “You’re strong as Krok’s mule, but this morning you’re in the Captain’s quarters.”

“What are you getting at?” Bruno asked.

“I think you’re hard for those filthy monsters down below.”

Bruno spoke slowly and deliberately.

“I hate those miserable abominations. As much as you. As much as McGee.”

Gunter nodded and smiled in response.

“Son,” he said, “you might be a murderer. But you’re still a pathetic liar. And I say you’re sweet on the freaks.”

Then there was a moment of possibility in which one or the other might have thrown a punch. But both were smart men with a wealth of experience in the area of dismal consequence.

“Why don’t you just bring us into the harbor,” Bruno said, “and we’ll be out of your hair?”

Captain Gunter stared at the strongman, expressionless, then he moved back to his mess table and sat down again. He lifted his glass of spirits, brought it to his lips, and said over the rim, “Who said anything about the harbor?”

As a boy, Bruno Seboldt had survived daylong strappings from his maniac father. As a teen, he had seen trench combat in the Budwein province. As a young man, he had lived through the cholera epidemic and the Krumloff Circus fire. To say that Bruno Seboldt was a man of courage and tenacity was a more than reasonable statement. But that morning, as he heard Captain Gunter deliver those six casual words, he shuddered and was overcome with the kind of doubt that can render a man impotent for the balance of his life. And though Bruno could not have known it, down in the hold, at that exact moment, the chicken boy was starting to sweat and ache.

“I don’t understand,” Bruno finally managed to say.

“You don’t?” said Gunter, enjoying the taunting.

“You have to put in,” said Bruno. “Your hold is full of cargo.”

“So it is,” said Gunter. “Fertilizer and abominations. The shit goes down to the Port of Chaldea. That’s still a good hundred kilometers away. But I’m afraid you and the monsters are getting off here.”

Bruno squinted at him and Gunter barked out a laugh.

“I liked you, Seboldt,” the Captain said. “Truly, I considered you a friend. You could hold your liquor like a Russian and you played a fine hand of cribbage. But you’re sweet on those freaks. I’ve seen it. Don’t try to deny it. You’ve turned. You’ve gone over. And I can’t help you. I’ve got a business to run and I’ve got a reputation. If even one of my importers knew I brought those deviants to Gehenna, he’d tear up my compact. And if they knew their goods had been bunking with freaks, they’d dump all that expensive dung in the deep.”

“What are you going to do?” Bruno asked.

“You sound like a eunuch already,” Gunter said. “Good Christ, it’s an awful thing.” He shook his head and motioned to the porthole.

“We’re less than a kilometer from shore. That’s Bezalel out there. A terrible city. A place without God. Makes Maisel look like Eden. But it’s a fine spot for freaks. And their handmaids.”

“Then bring us in and we’ll be gone,” Bruno said.

“I’ve no business in Bazalel,” Gunter said. “You want to go there? Then jump in the sea and swim.”

It took Bruno a second to realize that the Captain meant his last words literally.

“You know they can’t make it,” Bruno said.

Gunter smiled as if on an indulged child.

“You had the strongest back in Bohemia,” he said. “Put it to work.”

“There are eleven of them,” Bruno said.

“Is that all?” Gunter said. “It seemed like a multitude.”

Then he called for his first mate, who was waiting outside the Captain’s door. Landau entered already smiling, as if in on the joke for a year.

“Mr. Landau,” Gunter said, “escort Mr. Seboldt topside. And have the rats brought up from the hold.”

WHEN THE SWABBIES came for them, the freaks went passively. Getting the fat lady and the Siamese twins up the iron ladders to the top deck was no easy task. But everything progressed peacefully until curiosity overtook one of the sailors, who tried to cop a feel on Milena, the hermaphrodite.

Milena had one method for dealing with gropers — knocking the molester to the ground and stomping repeatedly on his crotch as if trying to kill a cockroach. The man’s mates came running and a melee broke out until Landau appeared and restored order. By then, Antoinette and Jeta were hysterical and Chick was sliding rapidly into an illtimed seizure.

As the crew began to rig an iron conveyance beam off the starboard side of the ship, Captain Gunter arrived on the scene. The presence of Gunter brought a gravity to the situation that silenced even the pinhead.

The Captain was a dramatic man, given to ritual and the big gesture. So he couldn’t resist turning a childish, if murderous, stunt into high theatrics. While the crew finished securing the beam, he had Landau arrange the freaks into a semicircle on the main deck, with Bruno, the reluctant patriarch, centered among them all. The crew stood in small groups, ripe with anticipation. Several men carried wrenches or hammers. Gunter glared them into silence, then began his speech.

“I’ve spent my life at sea,” he said, “like most of the Gunter men before me. So I know how wondrous the sailor’s life can be.”

Now he began to pace, as if inspecting new recruits. He did not hide his disgust as he studied Nadja’s claws and the bones of Jeta’s face.

“But for all the beauty and the marvels, a mariner knows that the ocean can be a place of monsters. A refuge for abominations, which God, in his wisdom, banished to the cold fathoms, far from the decent company of man.”

Gunter stopped before Kitty, looked down, and shook his head as if overcome with a disappointment that rivaled his revulsion.

“The world is an imperfect place,” he continued. “And on occasion, some monsters free themselves from their briny crypt and find their way to the surface. And when this happens, it is man’s turn to do God’s work and to send the beasts back to the blackest depths.”

He turned to his men now, lifted his face to the sun and closed his eyes.

“That, gentlemen, is what we’re going to do this morning.”

The sailors began to cheer, but after a moment, Gunter raised a hand to quiet them.

“Being men of God is not an easy thing. We want to do His work and we want to do it well. So we will leave the final judgments to the One above.”

He opened the eyes, turned back to address the freaks.

“If you can swim to shore, then God be with you, and welcome to the land of Gehenna.”

A dramatic pause here, as understanding spread among most of the freaks and they began to look to one another for direction.

“And if you can’t swim,” Gunter added, as if an afterthought, “then a hell of another sort awaits you today.”

At these words, Bruno moved to grab his betrayer. But Karl Gunter was no drunken knife thrower and Mr. Landau had a pistol to the strongman’s temple before Seboldt could lay a hand on the Captain.

Gunter seemed thrilled by the attempt on his life.

“Why don’t you show your grotesque friends how this is done?” he said to Bruno.

Landau repositioned the pistol, pressing the barrel into the small of Bruno’s back and shoving him forward to the crates that were stacked into steps before the ship’s rail. Extending off the rail was the iron girder used to lower freight to the docks.

The freaks’ semicircle broke open and Bruno moved between Kitty and Chick as he approached the railing. He tried not to look at either one, but the chicken boy suddenly reached out and touched him and it felt like ice against the strongman’s skin. He glanced quickly at the feathered face and saw the beak move, and the boy, who was drooling a white bile, tried to whisper something before a crewman clubbed him to the deck. Seconds later, while falling through the skin of the water, Bruno realized that what Chick had said was, “Forgive me.”

Bruno leapt off the girder without waiting for a command or a shove. The water was frigid, but he was not worried about himself. Often, he had swum miles at a time in the River Kalda when training for a new touring season. But he didn’t imagine that any of the freaks could manage the kilometer to shore. And he was certain that some of them would sink like stones as soon as they hit the drink.

They picked Aziz first, grabbed him by his arms and placed the human torso up on the iron bar. He didn’t make a sound, but immediately began to swing himself forward, down to the end of the beam. Then he took three rocking swings, each bringing his trunk higher into the air until, on the last, he let himself fly and arced up and out and into the sky, forming his arms into a perfect V as his trajectory reversed and he began to plunge downward. He knifed into the ocean, disappeared for a few seconds, and then emerged near Bruno, who was treading water in a controlled panic.

Aziz spoke quickly to the strongman, blinking the sea out of his eyes. “I can make it,” he said. “So can Fatos, Milena, Durga, and the twins. But you have to help the rest. I’ll wait for you on the beach.”

With this he began an impressive breaststroke away from the ship, toward the rock-strewn shores of Gehenna.

Up on the deck, one of Gunter’s men was poking a hysterical Jeta down the length of the girder with a massive gaff. Bruno squinted through the sun, trying to see what was happening. The gaffer toyed with the skeleton, feigning a poke at the head and then drumming on the girder with the steel of his hook. Jeta screamed and danced as if the beam were ablaze and the crew laughed as if in the grip of a wonderful mania until, finally tiring of the routine, the crewman swung his pole up and spanked the boniest ass in all of Eastern Europe. Jeta went sailing off the girder and fell, those ridiculous arms and legs spastic all the way down. She went under the water and bobbed up once.

Bruno swam to her, dove down, and just managed to grab a twig of a wrist. He pulled her up into the air, supported her around the waist, and yelled, “Can you swim?”

The skeleton couldn’t speak. Her head was snapping back and forth on her bird’s neck. She made deep sucking noises and her eyes blinked open and closed and open again.

Bruno got up into her face and tried to speak clearly and slowly.

“I’m going to bring you into shore,” he said, “but you have to calm down or we won’t make it.”

He could see her making the effort to detach from her panic. The blinks came more slowly and her breathing became more deliberate.

“That’s right,” Bruno said, encouraging her. “That’s good. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to bring you to land.”

He kicked his legs, moved around to her backside without letting go of her, then repositioned his arm around her waist. She allowed herself some whimpering and he didn’t call her on it. He brought his mouth to her ear and asked, “Do you know how to float, Jeta?”

She could only shake her head no, and he was quick to say, “That’s all right. That’s not a problem.”

He could see her tiny ears turning blue and understood that she had no body fat to insulate her and that this meant it was possible she could go into shock before they reached the shore.

“Now, listen to me, Jeta,” Bruno said. “I’m going to put my hand on the small of your back and push you up to the surface. All right? I want you to try and lay back and let the water float you up.”

He eased her supine, positioned himself, and got a new grip on her — higher up on her chest and under her armpits. He began to swim sidestroke, pulling her along. They glided, quickly gaining some distance from the boat. Bruno’s arms and legs were enormous and Jeta weighed less than thirty kilograms. But when Gunter whistled at him from the deck, the strongman couldn’t resist turning his head to look.

And what he saw was Durga, the fat lady, being lifted over the rail by five straining crewmen. The Captain wasn’t risking the girder to this kind of girth. The crew heaved once, then twice and managed to toss the corpulent ball of flesh overboard. Durga fell like a refrigerator and hit the water in a cannonball splash that rained for long yards.

Bruno stopped swimming, pedaled his legs to tread in place and Jeta began to scream and thrash. He had to tighten his grip to keep the skeleton from going under. It was a minute before Durga surfaced, like a leviathan, spouting water and howling with the shock of the cold. But when she began swimming, she did so effortlessly, powerfully, even beautifully. She made it to the strongman in no time and they floated like happy mammals for a moment.

“You can swim,” was all Bruno could think to say, and the words came out high-pitched and delighted.

“In the water,” Durga said, “I’m petite.”

She reached out and squeezed the skeleton’s trembling shoulder.

“I’m fine, Jeta,” she said. “We’re all going to be fine.”

Then she made serious eyes at Bruno and said, “Let me have her. You’ll need to take two at a time.”

They both looked back to the ship where a defiant Nadja was trying to keep herself between Antoinette and the jabbing of the gaff. Antoinette was behind the lobster girl, still as a statue and weeping. Nadja’s best show dress had been torn half off her.

Bruno placed Jeta in Durga’s outstretched arms and began swimming frantically back toward The Touya. The lobster girl and the pinhead fell within seconds of each other. Antoinette howled the whole way down, a shriek of pure terror. Bruno got to her only seconds after she went under. He yanked her back into the air by an arm and as soon as she cleared her throat of water, the screaming began again.

He wasn’t as lucky with Nadja. The lobster girl fell off the far side of the conveyance beam and went under about twenty yards away. Bruno pulled Antoinette along with him but the pinhead’s thrashing slowed him. He switched his grip from arm to neck and tightened it until he choked her into silence. But in that moment of distraction he lost sight of the spot where Nadja had broken the water.

Bruno scanned the ocean and at last spotted a single claw as it bobbed up once and then slipped below the surface.

Grabbing Antoinette around the waist, the strongman swam to the claw site and dove. With his free hand, he grabbed and grabbed until he clasped a handful of the lobster girl’s hair, snatched her up by the scalp, and pulled all of them up past the surface.

Nadja broke into the air choking and heaving. Her convulsions triggered a new level of hysteria in Antoinette, which threw Bruno off balance. He began to dip to one side, immediately tried to compensate, and pitched to the other. Somewhere above him, the crew of The Touya was yelling, whistling, taunting. And then he became aware of small objects striking the water around him — banana peels, cigar stubs, and something that hit hard, maybe a rock or a bolt.

“Get on my back,” Bruno screamed at the lobster girl, trying to sling her over his shoulders and, at the same time, contain the pinhead.

He felt Nadja repositioning herself and then saw her claws jutting out below his chin. Somehow, he ignored the impulse to shake her free. He clutched Antoinette under his left arm and began to swim with his right. Keeping his head down and kicking his legs, Bruno aimed for the shore and tried not to think about what was happening up on the ship’s deck.

It seemed to take forever, but finally he could hear Durga and Aziz calling to him, cheering him on. Nadja and Antoinette stayed silent through it all, until they coasted onto the beach in a pool of foam and were scooped into Durga’s abundant arms, where they let loose all their fear and sorrow in terrible, wailing cries.

They’d come into a tiny cove, a horseshoe of sand cut out of a coastline that was mostly boulders and, further in, a plain of smaller, shinier, well-washed rocks. The human torso was in the surf up to his nipples.

“Do you need to rest?” he asked Bruno, who stood, then hunched, bracing his hands on bent knees. Water dripped steadily from his mustache.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t say a word. He turned around and dove again into the ocean.

Halfway back to the ship, he passed the twins, Vasco and Marcel. They were swimming as one body, Vasco manning the left arm and leg, Marcel, the right. Under different circumstances, it would have been something to behold. But Bruno had no time to marvel. As he glided past, Marcel said, “You must hurry,” before plunging his head back into the water, and Vasco, whose head was emerging in perfect synchronism, added, “Fatos is unconscious,” and then his head submerged and Marcel’s reappeared, saying, “and they’re about to rape Milena.”

Approaching The Touya, Bruno could see the body of Fatos hanging limp, suspended over the end of the beam. The crew had given up any pretense of ritual and the proceedings had degenerated into an unmitigated debauch. If this was God’s work, the deities of Gehenna were even more sloppy and perverse than the strongman had imagined.

Milena had been stripped naked and was bent over the railing at the waist. The angle prevented Bruno from getting the full picture, but it appeared that the hermaphrodite was being beaten with a sounding pole. The crew was into full rampage by the sound of things and the strongman began to suspect that the dwarf and the chicken boy were already at the bottom of the ocean.

He swam until he positioned himself directly beneath the hanging body of the mule. It was all he could do and it gave him time to catch his breath and rest his arms if not his legs. And though the noise of the collective sadism above was almost unbearable, the strongman’s admiration for Milena grew by the second. Bruno could see that, though s/he hadn’t yet passed out from the scourging, s/he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of even a scream, let alone a pleading. It inspired Bruno to start his own taunting and he yelled up to the sailors, “She’s got testicles you’ll never have, you arschfickers.”

And though he couldn’t have known it, Bruno’s timing was crucial. Because just at that moment, Landau, the first mate who had been wielding the sounding pole, made the decision to use it as more than a cudgel. And upon hearing the taunt from below, Landau’s associates, who had been holding Milena against the rail, released the hermaphrodite’s arms in order to spit and gesture and scream down at the strongman. And so, a moment of opportunity presented itself as the would-be rapist shortened his grip on the pole and moved closer to his victim. And all Milena needed was that moment.

S/he whirled and kicked and caught the scourger in the very groin that Bruno had just disparaged. Landau fell to the deck on his knees and before his men could react, Milena had taken the sounding pole from the first mate, thumped him just once across the face and broken his jaw, then got behind the torturer and brought the pole up to his throat to choke him. Seeing their leader in peril, the other crewmen backed off as Milena maneuvered the hostage up onto the beam and began edging backward toward Fatos.

Looking down just once, s/he spotted Bruno treading below and made the decision. S/he got a foot beneath Fatos’s chest, lifted and sent the mule plunging down to the strongman. Then s/he jumped, taking the pole and the first mate with her.

Bruno almost caught the mule. The shock of the water brought Fatos back to some semblance of consciousness and he let himself be pulled onto Seboldt’s shoulder as the others exploded the sea a few yards away.

Milena and Landau bobbed up at the same moment and immediately began to wrestle, each trying to choke and drown the other. Bruno swam to Milena’s aid, grabbed the first mate by the collar and submerged him, while Milena found and took possession of the sounding pole, then thrust it like a spear under the waves and into the opaque figure writhing below.

Minutes went by, Fatos lolling on Bruno’s shoulder, Milena and Bruno staring at each other as Landau drowned and his men screamed from the rail above. But not a single man jumped from the ship to try and save their drowning officer. Not even Captain Gunter, who stared down at Bruno with a look of hateful surprise.

The Captain turned away first, just as Landau ended his struggle and his body began to float languidly down to what Gunter had called “the briny crypt.”

When the body had vanished from sight, Bruno looked at Milena and asked, “Can you swim?”

The hermaphrodite looked toward the distant shore and said, “Some of it. Probably not all of it.”

Bruno nodded.

“Give me the pole,” he said.

Milena released it reluctantly. Bruno passed it across his chest until he reached the midpoint. Then he placed Fatos over the far end of the pole and let the mule’s face dip into the water for a second. Fatos came awake again and Bruno said, “Just hold on and keep your head up. I’ll take you in.”

Turning to Milena, he said, “Get on the other side. Give me some balance.”

Milena swam to Bruno’s left, arms draped over the pole. Up close, Bruno could see the cherry welts rising like bulbs on the hermaphrodite’s neck and shoulders. Bruno straightened himself out and began to kick his mighty legs and the trio was propelled away from the ship.

Bruno kept an eye on Fatos to make sure that the mule was staying awake, but when he spoke it was to Milena.

“You took that beating like a man.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” Milena said, but the words didn’t have the performer’s normally dry sarcasm.

They stayed quiet for a while, Bruno kicking with everything he had, until finally he had to know and he asked, “The dwarf and the chicken boy. Did they suffer in the end?”

Milena didn’t answer and Bruno was forced to imagine the worst. He kicked harder, until the hermaphrodite finally said, “They’re still up there. The Captain was saving them for last.”

It wasn’t what the strongman was expecting and he almost stopped kicking. But Fatos was passing out again, so he brought up a leg to nudge the mule awake, then focused on the last sprint to shore.

When they rolled into the beach, Antoinette and Jeta were calmer but still curled in Durga’s lap. Aziz and the twins had collected driftwood and scrub and Nadja was digging a pit for a fire.

“I told you he’d make it,” Durga said to her clan.

The twins ran to retrieve Milena and Fatos from the surf, dragging them up onto the beach and gently tending them. And though some of the clan had never before seen the hermaphrodite naked, none thought to gape.

Aziz approached Bruno and asked, “Can you go back?”—his way of asking if there were, in fact, any reason to swim out to the ship one more time.

Bruno was starting to tire. The lungs of even the strongest man in Bohemia have their breaking point. His legs were cramping and weak. And he was so chilled that his skin was entirely puckered.

He spoke softly to the human torso.

“They were alive when Milena jumped.”

“Then I won’t keep you,” Aziz said, already assuming, there at the start, that Bruno was a patriarch who would sacrifice anything for his brood.

Bruno nodded, spat into the foam at his feet, turned and began to trudge back into the sea. He chose a simple stroke and maintained a consistent speed. He tried not to think of all the hours he had spent playing cribbage with Karl Gunter in the basement recreation room of the Jungborn Gymnasium in Maisel. He tried not to think of the sound that Shoshone McGee’s neck had made when he twisted it and all those tiny bones had cracked like knuckles. He tried not to wonder what was compelling him to risk his life for the sake of some hideous abominations. And he tried very hard not to think about what was transpiring aboard The Touya at this moment.

AND WHAT WAS transpiring was a kind of sadism that, with the death of First Mate Landau, had escalated from dangerous hazing into an orgy of brutality and humiliation.

The chicken boy, fully in the grip of the Limbo now, had been trussed at the feet and hoisted to hang upside down from a cargo boom suspended off the mizzenmast. There he hovered, a feathered and twitching piñata, assaulted by both his visions and the group of crewmen who took turns batting his body with clubs and shovels and mop handles.

Inside the Limbo, the illusions had never been so vivid before. It was like watching a film at the Kierling Theater back in Maisel, but better, sharper, more colorful. More real, like a play, a tragedy in which the chicken boy was the main character. He was running from Dr. Fliess with the rest of the freak clan. He was running through a desert, the sand burning his feet. And then the desert became a swamp, a dank, fetid marsh that gave birth to enormous flies. The flies bit at his face and tried to hide in his feathers. And then the swamp became a beach, where terrible waves broke over massive boulders, this romantic nightmare taking place under the shadow of a looming black castle where the doctor and his creatures lived and worked.

Chick cried out with the terror of the hallucination, but his cries were no distraction for the crew of The Touya, half of whom had pinned the dwarf, Chick’s Kitty, to a bulkhead, a chain wrapped around her neck like an iron snake.

Captain Gunter had only a tentative control over his men, mad as they were with lust and hate. And, of course, the Captain himself was fighting a siege of powerful and complex urges. Landau’s attempted rape of the bi-genitaled creature revolted him, but the first mate’s murder by the hermaphrodite enraged him. In the beginning, he had wanted nothing more than to frighten and humiliate the abominations and then be rid of them forever. But, as the Captain should have known from all his reading, such plans have a way of not only unraveling, but of coming back to ravage the planner.

Gunter had lost an efficient, if depraved, first officer. Now he wanted only to dispose of the last two monsters and get the ship to the Port of Chaldea. The men, however, had other ideas. And to oppose them, while they were in this agitated state, was to invite mutiny and, perhaps, even his own dispatch off the conveyance beam.

So he decided to allow one last ritual of exorcism, one final venting of the crew’s fear and discomfort, before tossing the chicken boy and the dwarf into the blue. But when he came upon a sailor — Hoess Wirth, by name — standing over the chained dwarf with his pants around his ankles, he couldn’t help but forbid the congress, saying, “Son, would you know an animal in this way?”

Possibly Wirth was ashamed of his answer because his johnson immediately went flaccid. Enraged by this, he looked at the Captain and said, “Anything wrong with this, sir?” and began to urinate upon the helpless Kitty.

The Captain allowed for the lesser of two evils, but when one of the crewmen who’d been waiting on the sidelines for his turn yelled, “I’ve got a better idea,” Gunter was truly frightened.

The sailor ran to the hold, calling for his mates along the way. They disappeared for a time, made abundant noise down below, and reappeared, each carrying a full drum of the Bergauer fertilizer, which they at once began to open, prying off welded lids with fire axes and shovels, and dumping the excrement in a growing mountain all over the Captain’s once-gleaming deck.

“The skipper says they’re animals,” said Wirth, the urinator, taking the late Landau’s position as leader and spokesman. “And animals love to rout in their own shit.”

Cheers went up and crewmen began to pull down the still-quaking Chick, while others hauled Kitty up off the bulkhead. They threw the freaks like sandbags into the mountain of feces and then began to cover the misshapen bodies with shovels full of night soil until there was no part of the deformities remaining to be seen.

Completely encased in the world’s most costly dung, Kitty found it difficult to breathe. She tried to work her hands up to cover her face, forced herself to keep her breakfast down in her stomach where it belonged. But before she could stop herself, she found her brain rejecting any chance at hope and began thinking, This is how it ends, smothered in a casket made of horseshit.

And then she felt herself being lifted. Felt herself being moved roughly through the air. And then she was dropping, rapidly, that plunging sensation erupting in her stomach and her temples.

She hit the water hard and the outer layer of filth was instantly washed away. The falling feeling was replaced by a sense of drifting, an almost peaceful languidness. She began to dig with her hands, used them like claws, tearing away the pasty crap above her eyes, shaking her head to dislodge the turban of scheisse.

Her mouth and nose sealed, she floated downward for a while, though her sense of time had been obliterated by trauma. She came to a stop suddenly and lay a second before the panic ignited. And then she was flailing. Her body was writhing, twisting, shaking, her arms and legs trying to thrash and kick. She opened her eyes, could see almost nothing, a pale shaft of light corrupted by free-floating clods and particles swirling away from her frantic dance.

And then even the light was gone. And she felt herself grabbed anew, manhandled and lifted up again. Felt other hands, bigger hands, wiping at her head, her face. She turned and saw the strongman, cheeks puffed out with captive air. Bruno knocked away the last of the clinging dung from Kitty’s face, pulled her into his arms and began to ascend.

They broke into the air, both of them gagging. Bruno seemed unsteady, his eyes overlarge and bulging a bit.

“Can you tread?” he asked and when Kitty nodded, he released her at once, took a huge breath and dove out of sight.

Kitty knew she was close to shock but she pedaled her feet and scrubbed at her face and neck with salt water and scratched with fingernails. From the deck of The Touya, crewmen threw shitballs, but managed only to pock the water around her. They yelled vengeful obscenities, but Kitty couldn’t hear them anymore.

Bruno was gone for what seemed like hours, maybe days. Kitty was woozy. She had to remind herself to work her legs and feet. Her head lolled and bobbed and she thought she heard Ringmaster Bluett calling her to perform.

When Bruno finally popped up again, he was alone. He heaved several times, got hit in the back of the head with a ball of shit, and said, “I can’t find him.”

Kitty moved her arms, propelled herself into the strongman’s chest, then, without a word, she put a hand on the top of Bruno’s skull and used the last of her strength to press down on that massive, shitstained cranium.

Bruno stared at her and after a moment, said, “Once more. That’s all I can do.”

Kitty just stared back as Bruno filled his lungs and pitched himself down once again.

This time, he seemed to be gone weeks, perhaps months. But this time, when he broke the surface, he had the chicken boy in his arms. Chick was unconscious but not quaking — the seizure had ended. His feathers, even wet, were black and tarry with horse manure.

Bruno didn’t speak. He turned his back to Kitty, who took a moment to understand that she was to climb on and wrap her tiny arms around the strongman’s neck. When she had positioned herself, Bruno shifted Chick to keep the boy’s face in the air, then began swimming.

The last thing they heard from The Touya was a single curse—Miss-geburten—in the horrible new voice of Captain Gunter.

IT WAS A LONG, painful trek into shore, and several times Bruno thought his absurd trio would go under. But the waves and the currents were with them, and when Bruno washed into Gehenna for the last time, the others were waiting. The clan was whole and again united.

Somehow, Aziz had managed to start a fire. Fatos was awake and lying next to the flames. Milena was still naked but the sarcasm had returned, fully intact.

“Smells,” s/he said, “like we’re home.”

Durga took Kitty off of Bruno’s back and proceeded at once to wash the dwarf in the surf. But it was Bruno himself, the new patriarch, who insisted on tending to Chick. Years later, the twins would say that this was the moment when the bond between the strongman and the chicken boy was first forged.

Bruno laid Chick on the beach, cradled Chick’s head with his massive hands, put an ear to the boy’s chest to confirm the heartbeat, and put mouth to beak to assist the struggling lungs. In seconds, the chicken boy heaved the last of the Limbo bile and a gallon of seawater into Bruno’s lap. And then he awoke, looked up into Bruno’s face, and said, “I knew you would save us.”

Upon hearing Chick’s voice, Kitty broke away from Durga and ran to her love. There were tears of both rage and joy then, from every eye in the troupe.

Sometime later, they all fell asleep and dreamed, restlessly, through the remainder of that day, huddled together near the warmth of the fire, like infant creatures in a cold and fearful new world.