Read Online Tell My Sorrows to the Stones by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online Page A

to know it. But even Tiny and Oscar were above him. If the troupe had been a wolf pack, Benny would have been on his back, baring his throat for everyone who came along. And why?
    It was all about the laughs.
    Laughter and his status in the circus, nearly always the only two things he thought about, were foremost on his mind as he followed Zerbo, Oscar, Tiny, Clancy the Cop, and the rest of them into clown alley. Tiny bumped Oscar, then clapped him on the back—they’d successfully completed the Hotshots gag after having totally bungled it the night before. On a façade so rickety even old-time Hollywood stuntmen would’ve shied away from it, three-hundred-pound Tiny dressed in drag and pretended to be a mother trapped with her infant on the third story of a burning building. The fire effects were minimal—gas jets, a low flame, a lot of orange lighting, the whole thing designed by a guy who’d helped put together the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular at Disney World, before he’d been fired for drinking on the job—but it looked great, as long as Tiny didn’t set his wig on fire.
    Oscar, in character as a clown firefighter, pushed a barrel of water back and forth across the ring, exhorting Tiny to throw him the infant and then jump into the water. The culmination of the whole thing was that Tiny’s aim would be off, forcing Oscar to step into the water barrel in order to catch the baby—only a doll, of course. At the moment he caught it, the trap door would give way beneath the ring, dropping Oscar and the baby and the water through and giving the audience the impression that the baby had been heavy enough to drive him into the ground. It was a pain in the ass to set up the gag, but when it went off, the surprise always led to real laughs, especially when Tiny theatrically threw up his hands, mopped his sweating face with his wig, took a deep breath, and blew out the fire around the windows like candles on a birthday cake. The lights would go dark. Cue the applause.
    Thursday night, Tiny had stumbled, throwing off his timing. The doll—to the eyes of the crowd, an infant—had tumbled down to splat in the middle of the ring while Oscar stood watching like a fool, until the trapdoor gave way and shot him down into the space beneath. The audience had to know the baby wasn’t real, but they’d screamed all the same.
    Timing was everything, Benny always said.
    How Tiny and Oscar could screw up the gag so badly and still be above him in the pecking order, he would never understand.
    In clown alley that Friday night, he washed off his makeup without a word to any of the others. Most of the time he shot the breeze with them and tried to ignore the fact that, four years since he’d joined up, they still treated him like a mascot, but not tonight. The cold cream took off most of the makeup and then he splashed a little water on his face and dragged on a pair of stained blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt—it had been strangely cool the past few nights, uncommon for July in western Massachusetts.
    As he left the others behind and went out to wander the grounds and clear his head, he ran into the lovely blonde contortionist, Lorna Seger. There were tears in her eyes and she gave him a helpless, hopeless glance that made him think maybe she wanted to talk about her breakup with the stunt rider, Domingo.
    “Hey,” he said, shaken from the reverie of his self-pity by her sadness. “You okay?”
    Lorna smiled and wiped at her eyes. “Could be worse, I guess,” she said. “I could be a clown.”
    Benny flinched. Lorna chuckled softly to let him know it had been a joke. He hoped Domingo ran her down on his motorcycle.
    “You’re such a bitch,” he said.
    Lorna rolled her eyes. “Why is it clowns never have a sense of humour?”
    He walked on, fuming, wanting to scream, wanting to get the hell away from the circus but crippled by the knowledge that—like everyone else who performed under the tent—he had nowhere else