Peculiar Tales Read Online Free Page A

Maybe, with both of us having a little time on our hands, I might be able to get a story out of him. It’d sure beat going back uptown and squeezing out six column inches about dalmatian puppies. I figured any carny ought to have plenty of good stories, even if that notion is in fact contrary to my actual experience. Every carny I’d ever talked to turned out to have a life no more interesting than the average bobby soxer down at the five and dime. Still, hope springs eternal—especially with the dalmatian puppy story facing me—so I strolled over, tipped my hat onto the back of my head, hooked my thumb at the banner behind the fellow and said, “That sure looks like something you got there, mister.”
    He’d looked up as I approached and smiled. A handsome fellow and youngish—looked like a college boy, which I figured he probably was, working for the summer. Athletic-looking, too, but not big—not a football player or anything like that. I figured him for the rowing team. It’d go with those Frank Merriwell good looks he had. He was probably a real sheik with the ladies.
    “Sure is,” he replied. “Wanta see ‘im? Only cost you a dime.”
    I told him, sure, I wanted to see the Man-Made Freak, who wouldn’t? He hopped down beside me with a kind of lazy grace and dusted off the seat of his trousers. A boxer, maybe, I thought, or a track and field man.
    “Haven’t had many folks out this early,” he continued. “Most of the shows aren’t even set up yet. Everyone’s sleepin’ in or havin’ a late breakfast. Thursday’s are always pretty dead. Things don’t pick up much until after dark.”
    “Yeah, I noticed there’s not much action around here.”
    “Nope. Dead as a doornail.”
    He turned toward me as we reached the flap that covered the entrance. He looked expectant so I fished out a dime and handed it over. He flipped it, caught it and stuck it into a pocket without a word.
    He held the canvas flap aside and I went in. It was dark inside and much too warm. I had expected the smell of rotten straw and mildew and urine, and there was that but there was something else, too. Something like old meat and stale vomit. As my eyes adjusted I saw a low platform in the back of the tent with a tall folding screen set up on it. Standing next to it, the handsome young talker was reciting his spiel.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with all the practiced indifference of a phonograph, “boys and girls. You are about to witness one of the greatest, most awe-inspiring, most bone-chilling wonders of this or any other world! The awful fruit of science gone wrong, the original, the one and only... Frankenstein! ” And with that he pulled the screen aside.
    Well, what he revealed sure lived up to the advertising, which surprised the hell out of me, I got to admit. In fact, I was not a little sorry that it did because it was no doubt the most awful thing I’d ever seen and being a correspondent during the recent unpleasantness in Europe I’d seen some pretty godawful stuff.
    It had been sitting on a wooden chair and when the screen was pulled away, it stood up— slowly and painfully, which only made it seem worse. I keep saying It , but I didn’t know what else to call it at the time. It must’ve been well over six feet tall, maybe six and half, but standing there on the raised platform it was hard to tell. As for what it looked like . . . you ever see that Hollywood version of The Picture of Dorian Gray ? The one with the painting that Chicago artist did, Ivan Albright, if I got his name right? The one that made Dorian Gray look like he was made of rotting cottage cheese and earthworms? Well, this thing was something like that. A pair of fishy eyes stared gelatinously from the moldy face and a livery tongue lolled over the pendulous blue-grey lips, like a huge, glistening slug crawling over the toppled gravestones of the creature’s crumbling, mossy teeth. It was more than obvious now where the odd smell