Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman Read Free Book Online Page A

“Sage Hen.”
    “The Sage Hen?” Freddy asked.
    “The Sage Hen, Your Honor,” the woman in question said, performing a curtsy.
    Not quite believing my ears about that last, I left the group to venture to the railing.
    Savage Girl was indeed below in the barn, but not at the Gospels. Instead, with one of Dr. Scott’s extinguished torches in her hand, she used the snuffed-out charcoal at the tip to draw idly on the canvas-covered walls in front of her.
    Off to the side, seated atop Savage Girl’s cage, R. T. Flenniken, watching her while trying to appear not to.
    Even in the brightness of a sunny day, the interior of the barn remained dim. But it wasn’t as dark as it had been the evening before, and I appreciated Dr. Scott’s strategy of running the Savage Girl show only as the light waned in the afternoon, or in the full darkness of evening. Murk helped along the mystery.
    Seeing the spectacle’s leading lady this morning disappointed me somewhat. She looked more simply a real girl. Petite, narrow-shouldered (I considered perhaps she had been malnourished by her years in the wilderness), thin of face, the cheekbones pronounced, the ugly mat of hair hanging limp at the back of her delicate, elongated neck.
    If anything surprised me, it was that she was entirely unconstrained. Her cage door hung open. She made odd clicking sounds as she worked at her drawing.
    I had not noticed it before, but the far wall of the barn was covered with many lines, figures and small sooty renderings, pictograms of some sort, done to the height of a person. It was impossible for me to understand their meaning. Whether Savage Girl had drawn every one or whether Dr. Scott saw this as some sort of enhancement of the dramatic effect he reached for, I could not know.
    She suddenly turned her head away from her drawing and looked up at me. The eyes that I saw the evening before as amber now appeared an ordinary hazel. Her expression contained, amid its wildness, an uncanny glint of intelligence.
    Did she recognize me? A member of her public who had now come to see her spectacle twice in a row?
    She obviously had many such adherents. I felt myself, under her stare, diminish. I wanted to turn away, but she had me fixed. She dropped her gaze before I could drop mine.
    R. T. Flenniken climbed the ladder from below and approached me. “You are Hugo, right? The son?”
    “Yes?”
    “You might want to take a try at these.” He held out the pair of claw devices that Savage Girl wielded to such great effect during the show. “Sure, put ’em on,” he said. He spoke in a wheezing stridor, passing his words through his nose.
    I expected the claw hands to be somehow fabricated out of gray-painted wood, false as the act itself, but taking them, hefting them, I realized just how lethal they were.
    A pair, identical, one for each hand, three blades on each, like triple stilettos. All six razors measured a half foot long in honed steel and were attached to a metal rig that was similar to the guard on a fencing foil. This guard had an iron peg running crosswise through the middle of it. The whole device came off as well smithed and ingenious.
    “I had ’em made up myself,” Flenniken said.
    It so happened I liked knives. I slipped my hand inside one of the vicious claws, folding my grip around the crosswise peg. Then the other.
    “We first tried giving her fangs,” the mouth breather said, “but a girl with fangs just looks silly, and besides, they wouldn’t fit right and made her gums bleed. These here were just the ticket. A man feels reborn with a set of knives on his fists.”
    Reborn, yes. Unassailable. I waved my
bayonetas
in the air and instantly gashed the back of my left hand with a blade of the right.
    “First blood,” the Toad said, smiling, and retrieved the nasty things from me.
    “You neglect the third act,” I heard Freddy saying to Dr. Scott. “Your show needs a turn.”
    “It is poor theater, you are right,” Dr. Scott said.