Metropolis Read Free

“The freaks and the fauna, boy. That’s what keeps them coming,” Barnum had said the one time he’d met the man, to impress him with the importance of his job; but that wasn’t why the stableman now chose to run into the flames. He loved the animals, and he had a humble favorite in a four-horned goat who was kept in a horse stall at the far end of the barn. It couldn’t even see over its door. In the end, it was mostly the thought of that goat being smoked alive that overruled his impulse toward self-preservation.
    In stocking feet but otherwise fully dressed against the bitter night, the stableman was up and running at last. Or up and crawling. At first he clutched his bedding and boots to his chest as he crouched and leapt, groped and ducked, stayed close to the ground where the air could still be breathed; but everywhere he stepped, everything he touched was searing hot, and at some point he stopped and swathed his head in the blanket, jammed his feet into his boots and draped the rest around his shoulders for protection from flying embers as he crept forward toward the stalls. Not a heroic costume or posture for an opening scene, but that was the best he could do.
    What he saw from under his improvised turban just might have been Hell after all. The fire had licked its chops and slurped up everything familiar, everything he had. The room he’d just left, though nothing but a cold closet off the tack room, was his only place in the world. It had suited him to live there, adjacent to all those animal souls, normally taciturn, howling now like the dead they were soon to join. In addition to the circus creatures, Barnum’s stable had a row of stalls for hackney horses. They pulled the roving wagons for the circus when it went out on the road, and when there was no road show they stayed home and plied the carriage trade, which, of course, ran all night.
    But where were all the hack drivers now, he wondered. There were always a few of them hanging around, setting out late or returning early. Had they all succumbed? Had they noticed the fire early on and fled? And if so, why hadn’t they thought to free the horses at least, or to rouse him, to save him? They’d never hesitated to wake him in the past when there was trouble to attend to, whether fighting dogs, drunken midgets or ailing beasts.
    The air was choked with burning particles and eerie sounds, and the maze of hallways, pens and stalls confounded him, though normally he knew every turn in the dark, every beast by name and temperament, every horse by whether it liked to be scratched between or behind the ears. From where he stood, he could see the far wall glow and billow orange and black, swaying like a cobra, dancing before it strikes.
The python!
he thought. It would soon be baked behind its terrarium glass. But even if he were able to free it, where would it have to go after that but slithering off to a different death among the embers?
    Just then, he heard a distant bellow, and he recognized the voice of Sedric, the rather mangy dancing bear. The stableman’s urge to save the bear was checked by the recollection of the shackles, padlocks and iron bars Barnum used to prevent the theft and exaggerate the danger of his more grandiose or dangerous beasts. The panther, the gibbons, the elephants—all the carnivores and imports, in fact—were beyond his aid. He had no keys. Why should Barnum trust a nobody like him with keys?
    The horses were screaming and the fire was all around, so that it seemed to be the flames that spoke in equine voices. Then a thunderclap of collapsing wood preceded the onrush of hooves; bared square teeth flattened him against the doorjamb. A roan hack caromed down the corridor, away from the fire and the door. He knew her—Alice, she pulled a fruit cart in the city, the monkey wagon on tour—and she reminded him of the one thing he could do: He marched into the heat, to the horse stalls. First came the show horses, six of them plus