Sturgeon, Theodore - The Dreaming Jewels

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The Dreaming Jewels (v2.0)
Theodore Sturgeon, 1950
A jewel-eyed jack-in-the-box holds a mysterious key to the future of a young boy
who runs away from home and hides away in a traveling freak show.
1
They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the
high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the
street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years.
In a way it was a pity. He was a nice kid, a nice-looking kid too, though not
particularly outstanding. There were other kids, and teachers, who liked him a little
bit, and some who disliked him a little bit; but everyone jumped on him when it got
around. His name was Horty -- Horton, that is -- Bluett. Naturally he caught blazes
when he got home.
He opened the door as quietly as he could, but they heard him, and hauled him
front and center into the living room where he stood flushing, with his head down,
one sock around his ankle, and his arms full of books and a catcher's mitt. He was a
good catcher, for an eight-year-old. He said, "I was -- "
"We know," said Armand Bluett. Armand was a bony individual with a small
mustache and cold wet eyes. He clapped his hands to his forehead and then threw
up his arms. "My God, boy, what in Heaven's name made you do a filthy thing like
that?" Armand Bluett was not a religious man, but he always talked like that when
he clapped his hands to his head, which he did quite often.
Horty did not answer. Mrs. Bluett, whose name was Tonta, sighed and asked for a
highball. She did not smoke, and needed a substitute for the smoker's thoughtful
match-lit pause when she was at a loss for words. She was so seldom at a loss for
words that a fifth of rye lasted her six weeks. She and Armand were not Horton's
parents. Horton's parents were upstairs, but the Bluetts did not know it. Horton was
allowed to call Armand and Tonta by their first names.
"Might I ask," said Armand icily, "how long you have had this nauseating habit? Or
was it an experiment?"
Horty knew they weren't going to make it easy on him. There was the same
puckered expression on Armand's face as when he tasted wine and found it
unexpectedly good.
"I don't do it much," Horty said, and waited.
"May the Lord have mercy on us for our generosity in taking in this little swine,"
said Armand, clapping his hands to his head again. Horty let his breath out. Now that
was over with. Armand said it every time he was angry. He marched out to mix
Tonta a highball.
"Why did you do it, Horty?" Tonta's voice was more gentle only because her vocal
cords were more gently shaped than her husband's. Her face showed the same
implacable cold.
"Well, I -- just felt like it, I guess." Horty put his books and catcher's mitt down on
the footstool.
Tonta turned her face away from him and made an unspellable, retching syllable.
Armand strode back in, bearing a tinkling glass.
"Never heard anything like it in my life," he said scornfully. "I suppose it's all over
the school?"
"I guess so."
"The children? The teachers too, no doubt. But of course. Anyone say anything to
you?"
"Just Dr. Pell." He was the principal. "He said -- said they could ... "
"Speak up!"
Horty had been through it once. Why, why go through it all again? "He said the
school could get along without f-filthy savages."
"I can understand how he felt," Tonta put in, smugly.
"And what about the other kids? They say anything?"
"Hecky brought me some worms. And Jimmy called me Sticky-tongue." And Kay
Hallowell had laughed, but he didn't mention that.
"Sticky-tongue. Not bad, that, for a kid. Ant-eater." Again the hand clapped
against the brow. "My God, what am I going to do if Mr. Anderson greets me with 'Hi
Sticky-tongue!' Monday morning? This will be all over town, sure as God made little
apples." He fixed Horty with the sharp wet points of his gaze. "And do you plan to
take up bug-eating as a profession?"
"They weren't bugs," Horty said diffidently and with accuracy. "They were ants.
The little brown kind."
Tonta choked on her highball. "Spare us the details."
"My God," Armand said again, "what'll he grow up as?" He mentioned two
possibilities. Horty understood one of them. The other made even the knowledgeable
Tonta jump. "Get out of here."
Horty went to the stairs while Armand thumped down exasperatedly beside Tonta.
"I've had mine," he said. "I'm full up to here. That brat's been the symbol of failure
to me ever since I laid eyes on his dirty face. This place isn't big enough -- Horton!"
"Huh."
"Come back here and take your garbage with you. I don't want to be reminded
that you're in the house."
Horty came back slowly, staying out of Armand Bluett's reach, picked up his books
and the catcher's mitt, dropped a pencil-box -- at which Armand my-Godded again --
picked it up, almost dropped the mitt, and finally fled up the stairs.
"The sins of the stepfathers," said Armand, "are visited on the stepfathers, even
unto the thirty-fourth irritation. What have I done to deserve this?"
Tonta swirled her drink, keeping her eyes on it and her lips pursed appreciatively
as she did so. There had been a time when she disagreed with Armand. Later, there
was a time when she disagreed and said nothing. All that had been too wearing. Now
she kept an appreciative exterior and let it soak in as deeply as it would. Life was so
much less trouble that way.
Once in his room, Horty sank down on the edge of the bed with his arms still full
of his books. He did not close the door because there was none, due to Armand's
conviction that privacy was harmful for youngsters. He did not turn on the light
because he knew everything in the room, knew it with his eyes closed. There was
little enough. Bed, dresser, closet with a cracked cheval glass. A child's desk,
practically a toy, that he had long outgrown. In the closet were three oiled-silk
dress-covers stuffed full of Tonta's unused clothes, which left almost no space for
his.
His ...
None of this was really his. If there had been a smaller room, he would have been
shoved into it. There were two guest bedrooms on this floor, and another above, and
they almost never had guests. The clothes he wore weren't his; they were
concessions to something Armand called "my position in this town" rags would have
done if it weren't for that.
He rose, the act making him conscious of the clutter he still clutched in his arms.
He put it down on the bed. The mitt was his, though. He'd bought it for seventy-five
cents from the Salvation Army store. He got the money by hanging around
Dempledorff's market and carrying packages for people, a dime a trip. He had
thought Armand would be pleased; he was always talking about resourcefulness and
earning ability. But he had forbidden Horty ever to do that again. "My God! People
will think we are paupers!" So the mitt was all he had to show for the episode.
All he had in the world -- except, of course, Junky.
He looked, through the half-open closet door, at the top shelf and its clutter of
Christmas-tree lights (the Christmas tree was outside the house, where the
neighbors could see -- never inside), old ribbons, a lampshade, and -- Junky.
He pulled the oversized chair away from the undersized desk and carried it -- if he
had dragged it, Armand would have been up the stairs two at a time to see what he
was up to, and if it was fun, would have forbidden it -- and set it down carefully in
the closet doorway. Standing on it, he felt behind the leftovers on the shelf until he
found the hard square bulk of Junky. He drew it out, a cube of wood, gaudily painted
and badly chipped, and carried it to the desk.
Junky was the kind of toy so well-known, so well-worn, that it was not necessary
to see it frequently, or touch it often, to know that it was there. Horty was a
foundling -- found in a park one late fall evening, with only a receiving blanket
tucked about him. He had acquired Junky while he was at the Home, and when he
had been chosen by Armand as an adoptee (during Armand's campaign for City
Counsellor, which he lost, but which he thought would be helped along if it were
known he had adopted a "poor little homeless waif") Junky was part of the bargain.
Horty put Junky softly on the desk and touched a worn stud at the side. Violently
at first, then with rusted-spring hesitancy, and at last defiantly, Junky emerged, a
jack-in-the-box, a refugee from a more gentle generation. He was a Punch, with a
chipped hooked nose which all but met his upturned, pointed chin. In the gulch
between these stretched a knowing smile.
But all Junky's personality -- and all his value to Horty -- was in his eyes. They
seemed to have been cut, or molded, blunt-faceted, from some leaded glass which
gave them a strange, complex glitter, even in the dimmest room. Time and again
Horty had been certain that those eyes had a radiance of their own, though he could
never quite be sure.
He murmured, "Hi, Junky."
The jack-in-the-box nodded with dignity, and Horty reached and caught its
smooth chin. "Junky, let's get away from here. Nobody wants us. Maybe we wouldn't
get anything to eat, and maybe we'd be cold, but gee ... Think of it, Junky. Not being
scared when we hear his key in the lock, and never sitting at dinner while he asks
questions until we have to lie, and -- and all like that." He did not have to explain
himself to Junky.
He let the chin go, and the grinning head bobbed up and down, and then nodded
slowly, thoughtfully.
"They shouldn't 'a been like that about the ants," Horty confided. "I didn't drag
nobuddy to see. Went off by myself. But that stinky Hecky, he's been watching me.
An' then he sneaked off and got Mr. Carter. That was no way to do, now was it,
Junky?" He tapped the head on the side of its hooked nose, and it shook its head
agreeably. "I hate a sneak."
"You mean me, no doubt," said Armand Bluett from the doorway.
Horty didn't move, and for a long instant his heart didn't either. He half crouched,
half cowered behind the desk, not turning toward the doorway.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothin'."
Armand belted him across the cheek and ear. Horty whimpered, once, and bit his
lip. Armand said, "Don't lie. You are obviously doing something. You were talking to
yourself, a sure sign of a degenerating mind. What's this -- oh. Oh yes, the baby toy
that came with you. Your estate. It's as repulsive as you are." He took it from the
desk, dropped it on the floor, wiped his hand on the side of his trousers, and
carefully stepped on Junky's head.
Horty shrieked as if it were his own head which was being crushed, and leapt at
Armand. So unexpected was the attack that the man was bowled right off his feet.
He fell heavily and painfully against the bedpost, grabbed at it and missed, and went
to the floor. He sat there for a moment grunting and blinking, and then his little eyes
narrowed and fixed themselves on the trembling Horty. "Mmm -- hm!" said Armand
in a tone of great satisfaction, and rose. "You should be exterminated." He grasped
the slack of Horty's shirt and struck him. As he spoke, he hit the boy's face, back and
forth, back and forth, by way of punctuation. "Homicidal, that's what you are. I was
going to. Send you away. To a school. But it isn't safe. The police will. Take care of
you. They have a place. For juvenile delinquents. Filthy little. Pervert."
He rushed the sodden child across the room and jammed him into the closet.
"This will keep you safe until the police get here," he panted, and slammed the door.
The hinge side of it caught three fingers of Horty's left hand.
At the boy's shriek of very real agony Armand snapped the door open again. "No
use in your yelling. You -- My God! What a mess. Now I suppose I'll have to get a
doctor. There's no end -- absolutely no end to the trouble you cause. Tonta!" He ran
out and down the stairs. "Tonta!"
"Yes, Peaches."
"That young devil stuck his hand in the door. Did it on purpose, to excite
sympathy. Bleeding like a stuck pig. You know what he did? He struck me. He
attacked me, Tonta! It's not safe to have him in the house!"
"You poor darling! Did he hurt you?"
"A wonder he didn't kill me. I'm going to call the police."
"I'd better go up while you're phoning," said Tonta. She wet her lips.
But when she reached the room, Horty was gone. There was a lot of excitement
for a while after that. At first Armand wanted to get his hands on Horty for his own
purposes, and then he began to be afraid of what people might say if the boy gave
his own garbled version of the incident. Then a day went by, and a week, and a
month, and it was safe to look to heaven and say mysteriously, "He's in safe hands
now, the poor little tyke," and people could answer, "I understand ... " Everyone
knew he was not Armand's child, anyway.
But Armand Bluett tucked one idea snugly away in the corner of his mind. That
was to look out, in the future, for any young man with three fingers missing from his
left hand.
2
The Hallowells lived at the edge of town, in a house that had only one thing wrong
with it; it was at the intersection where the State Highway angled into the end of
Main Street, so that the traffic roared night and day past both the front and back
gates.
The Hallowell's taffy-headed daughter, Kay, was as full of social consciousness as
only a seven-year old can be. She had been asked to empty the trash, and as usual
she opened the back gate a crack and peeped out at the highway, to see if anyone
she knew would catch her at the menial task.
"Horty!"
He shrank into the fog-swirled shadows of the traffic-light standard.
"Horton Bluett, I see you."
"Kay ... " He came to her, staying close to the fence. "Listen, don't tell nobody
you saw me, huh?"
"But wh -- oh. You're running away!" she blurted, noticing the parcel tucked under
his arm. "Horty -- are you sick?" He was white, strained. "Did you hurt your hand?"
"Some." He held his left wrist with his right hand, tightly. His left hand was
wrapped in two or three handkerchiefs. "They was going to get the police. I got out
the window onto the shed roof and hid there all afternoon. They was lookin' all over
the street and everywhere. You won't tell?"
"I won't tell. What's in the package?"
"Nothin'."
If she had demanded it, grabbed at it, he would probably never have seen her
again. Instead she said, "Please, Horty."
"You can look." Without releasing his wrist, he turned so she could pull the
package out from under his arm. She opened it -- it was a paper bag -- and took out
the hideous broken face of Junky. Junky's eyes glittered at her, and she squeaked.
"What is it?"
"It's Junky. I had him since before I was born. Armand, he stepped on it."
"Is that why you're running away?"
"Kay! What are you doing out there?"
"Coming, Mother! Horty, I got to go. Horty, are you coming back?"
"Not ever."
"Gee ... that mister Bluett, he's so mean ... "
"Kay Hallowell! Come in this instant. It's raining!"
"Yes, Mother! Horty, I wannit to tell you. I shouldn'ta laughed at you today. Hecky
brought you the worms, and I thought it was a joke, thass all. I didn't know you
really did eat ants. Gee ... I et some shoe-polish once. That's nothin'."
Horty held out his elbow and she carefully put the package under it. He said, as if
he had just thought of it -- and indeed he had -- "I will come back, Kay. Someday."
"Kay!"
" 'Bye, Horty." And she was gone, a flash of taffy hair, yellow dress, a bit of lace,
changed before his eyes to a closed gate in a board fence and the sound of dwindling
quick footsteps.
Horton Bluett stood in the dark drizzle, cold, but with heat in his ruined hand and
another heat in his throat. This he swallowed, with difficulty, and, looking up, saw
the broad inviting tailgate of a truck which was stopped for the traffic light. He ran to
it, tossed his small bundle on it, and squirmed up, clawing with his right hand, trying
to keep his left out of trouble. The truck lurched forward; Horty scrabbled wildly to
stay on. The package with Junky in it began to slide back toward him, past him; he
caught at it, losing his own grip, and began to slip.
Suddenly there was a blur of movement from inside the truck, and a flare of
terrible pain as his smashed hand was caught in a powerful grip. He came very close
to fainting; when he could see again he was lying on his back on the jolting floor of
the truck, holding his wrist again, expressing his anguish in squeezed-out tears and
little, difficult grunts.
"Gee, kid, you don't care how long you live, do you?" It was a fat boy, apparently
his own age, bending over him, his bowed head resting on three chins. "What's the
matter with your hand?"
Horty said nothing. He was quite beyond speech for the moment. The fat boy,
with surprising gentleness, pressed Horty's good hand away from the handkerchiefs
and began laying back the cloth. When he got to the inner layer, he saw the blood by
the wash of light from a street-light they passed, and he said "Man."
When they stopped for another traffic signal at a lighted intersection, he looked
carefully and said, "Oh, man," with all the emphasis inside him somewhere, and his
eyes contracted into two pitying little knots of wrinkles. Horty knew the fat boy was
sorry for him, and only then did he begin to cry openly. He wished he could stop, but
he couldn't, and didn't while the boy bound up his hand again and for quite a while
afterward.
The fat boy sat back on a roll of new canvas to wait for Horty to calm down. Once
Horty subsided a little and the boy winked at him, and Horty, profoundly susceptible
to the least kindness, began to wail again. The boy picked up the paper bag, looked
into it, grunted, closed it carefully and put it out of the way on the canvas. Then to
Horty's astonishment, he removed from his inside coat pocket a large silver cigar
case, the kind with five metal cylinders built together, took out a cigar, put it all in
his mouth and turned it to wet it down, and lit up, surrounding himself with sweet-
acrid blue smoke. He did not try to talk, and after a while Horty must have dozed off,
because he opened his eyes to find the fat boy's jacket folded as a pillow under his
head, and he could not remember its being put there. It was dark then; he sat up,
and immediately the fat boy's voice came from the blackness.
"Take it easy, kid." A small pudgy hand steadied Horty's back. "How do you feel?"
Horty tried to talk, choked, swallowed and tried again. "All right, I guess. Hungry
... gee! We're out in the country!"
He became conscious of the fat boy squatting beside him. The hand left his back;
in a moment the flame of a match startled him, and for an etched moment the boy's
face floated before him in the wavering light, moonlike, with delicate pink lips acrawl
on the black cigar. Then with a practiced flick of his fingers, he sent the match and
its brilliance flying out into the night. "Smoke?"
"I never did smoke," said Horty. "Some corn-silk, once." He looked admiringly at
the red jewel at the end of the cigar. "You smoke a lot, huh."
"Stunts m'growth," said the other, and burst into a peal of shrill laughter. "How's
the hand?"
"It hurts some. Not so bad."
"You got a lot of grit, kid. I'd be screamin' for morphine if I was you. What
happened to it?"
Horty told him. The story came out in snatches, out of sequence, but the fat boy
got it all. He questioned briefly, and to the point, and did not comment at all. The
conversation died after he had asked as many questions as he apparently wanted to,
and for a while Horty thought the other had dozed off. The cigar dimmed and
dimmed, occasionally sputtering around the edges, once in a while brightening in a
wavery fashion as vagrant air touched it from the back of the truck.
Abruptly, and in a perfectly wide-awake voice, the fat boy asked him, "You lookin'
fer work?"
"Work? Well -- I guess maybe."
"What made you eat them ants?" came next.
"Well, I -- I don't know. I guess I just -- well, I wanted to."
"Do you do that a lot?"
"Not too much." This was a different kind of questioning than he had had from
Armand. The boy asked him about it without revulsion, without any more curiosity,
really, than he had asked him how old he was, what grade he was in.
"Can you sing?"
"Well -- I guess so. Some."
"Sing something. I mean, if you feel like it. Don't strain y'self. Uh -- know
Stardust?"
Horty looked out at the starlit highway racing away beneath the rumbling wheels,
the blaze of yellow-white which turned to dwindling red tail-light eyes as a car
whisked by on the other side of the road. The fog was gone, and a lot of the pain
was gone from his hand, and most of all he was gone from Armand and Tonta. Kay
had given him a feather-touch of kindness, and this odd boy, who talked in a way he
had never heard a boy talk before, had given him another sort of kindness. There
were the beginnings of a wonderful warm glow inside him, a feeling he had had only
once or twice before in his whole life -- the time he had won the sack-race and they
gave him a khaki handkerchief, and the time four kids had whistled to a mongrel
dog, and the dog had come straight to him, ignoring the others. He began to sing,
and because the truck rumbled so, he had to sing out to be heard; and because he
had to sing out, he leaned on the song, giving something of himself to it as a high-
steel worker gives part of his weight to the wind.
He finished. The fat boy said "Hey." The unaccented syllable was warm praise.
Without any further comment he went to the front of the truck body and thumped on
the square pane of glass there. The truck immediately slowed, pulled over and
stopped by the roadside. The fat boy went to the tailgate, sat down, and slid off to
the road.
"You stay right there," he told Horty. "I'm gonna ride up front a while. You hear
me now -- don't go 'way."
"I won't," said Horty.
"How the hell can you sing like that with your hand mashed?"
"I don't know. It doesn't hurt so much now."
"Do you eat grasshoppers too? Worms?"
"No!" cried Horty, horrified.
"Okay," said the boy. He went to the cab of the truck; the door slammed, and the
truck ground off again.
Horty worked his way carefully forward until, squatting by the front wall of the
truck-body, he could see through the square pane.
The driver was a tall man with a curious skin, lumpy and grey-green. He had a
nose like Junky's, but almost no chin, so that he looked like an aged parrot. He was
so tall that he had to curve over the wheel like a fern-frond.
Next to him were two little girls. One had a round bush of white hair -- no; it was
platinum -- and the other had two thick ropes of pigtails, bangs, and beautiful teeth.
The fat boy was next to her, talking animatedly. The driver seemed not to pay any
attention to the conversation at all.
Horty's head was not clear, but he did not feel sick either. Everything had an
exciting, dreamlike quality. He moved back in the truck body and lay down with his
head on the fat boy's jacket. Immediately he sat up, and crawled among the goods
stacked in the truck until his hand found the long roll of canvas, moved along it until
he found his paper bag. Then he lay down again, his left hand resting easily on his
stomach, his right inside the bag, with his index and little fingers resting between
Junky's nose and chin. He went to sleep.
3
When he woke again the truck had stopped, and he opened unfocussed eyes to a
writhing glare of light -- red and orange, green and blue, with an underlying sheet of
dazzling gold.
He raised his head, blinking, and resolved the lights into a massive post bearing
neon signs: ICE TWENTY FLAVORS CREAM and CABINS and BAR-EAT. The wash of
gold came from floodlights over the service area of a gas station. Three tractor-
trailer trucks were drawn up behind the fat boy's truck; one of them had its trailer
built of heavily-ribbed stainless steel and was very lovely under the lights.
"You awake, kid?"
"Uh -- Hi! Yes."
"We're going to grab a bite. Come on."
Horty rose stiffly to his knees. He said, "I haven't got any money."
"Hell with that," said the fat boy. "Come on."
He put a firm hand under Horty's armpit as he climbed down. A jukebox throbbed
behind the grinding sound of a gasoline pump, and their feet crunched pleasantly on
cinders. "What's your name?" Horty asked.
"They call me Havana," said the fat boy. "I never been there. It's the cigars."
"My name's Horty Bluett."
"We'll change that."
The driver and the two girls were waiting for them by the door of a diner. Horty
hardly had a chance to look at them before they all crowded through and lined up at
the counter. Horty sat between the driver and the silver-haired girl. The other one,
the one with dark ropes of braided hair took the next stool, and Havana, the fat-boy,
sat at the end.
Horty looked first at the driver -- looked, stared, and dragged his eyes away in
the same tense moment. The driver's sagging skin was indeed a grey-green, dry,
loose, leather-rough. He had pouches under his eyes, which were red and inflamed-
looking, and his underlip drooped to show long white lower incisors. The backs of his
hands showed the same loose sage-green skin, though his fingers were normal. They
were long and the nails were exquisitely manicured.
"That's Solum," said Havana, leaning forward over the counter and talking across
the two girls. "He's the Alligator-Skinned Man, an' the ugliest human in captivity." He
must have sensed Horty's thought that Solum might resent this designation, for he
added, "He's deef. He don't know what goes on."
"I'm Bunny," said the girl next to him. She was plump -- not fat like Havana, but
round -- butter-ball round, skin-tight round. Her flesh was flesh colored and blood-
colored -- all pink with no yellow about it. Her hair was as white as cotton, but
glossy, and her eyes were the extraordinary ruby of a white rabbit's. She had a little
midge of a voice and an all but ultrasonic giggle, which she used now. She stood
barely as high as his shoulder, though they sat at the same height. She was out of
proportion only in this one fact of the long torso and the short legs. "An' this is
Zena."
Horty turned his gaze full on her and gulped. She was the most beautiful little
work of art he had ever seen in his life. Her dark hair shone, and her eyes shone too,
and her head planed from temple to cheek, curved from cheek to chin, softly and
smoothly. Her skin was tanned over a deep, fresh glow like the pink shadows
between the petals of a rose. The lipstick she chose was dark, nearly a brown red;
that and the dark skin made the whites of her eyes like beacons. She wore a dress
with a wide collar that lay back on her shoulders, and a neckline that dropped almost
to her waist. That neckline told Horty for the very first time that these kids, Havana
and Bunny and Zena, weren't kids at all. Bunny was girl-curved, puppy-fat curved,
the way even a four year-old girl -- or boy -- might be. But Zena had breasts, real,
taut, firm, separate breasts. He looked at them and then at the three small faces, as
if the faces he had seen before had disappeared and were replaced by new ones.
Havana's studied, self-assured speech and his cigars were his badges of maturity,
and albino Bunny would certainly show some such emblem in a minute.
"I won't tell you his name," said Havana. "He's fixin' to get a new one, as of now.
Right, kid?"
"Well," said Horty, still struggling with the strange shifting of estimated place
these people had made within him, "Well, I guess so."
"He's cute," said Bunny. "You know that, kid?" She uttered her almost inaudible
giggle. "You're cute."
Horty found himself looking at Zena's breasts again and his cheeks flamed. "Don't
rib him," said Zena.
It was the first time she had spoken ... One of the earliest things Horty could
remember was a cattail stalk he had seen lying on the bank of a tidal creek. He was
only a toddler then, and the dark brown sausage of the cat-tail fastened to its dry
yellow stem had seemed a hard and brittle thing. He had, without picking it up, run
his fingers down its length, and the fact that it was not dried wood, but velvet, was a
thrilling shock. He had such a shock now, hearing Zena's voice for the first time.
The short-order man, a pasty-faced youth with a tired mouth and laugh-wrinkles
around his eyes and nostrils, lounged up to them. He apparently felt no surprise at
seeing the midgets or the hideous green-skinned Solum. "Hi, Havana. You folks
setting up around here?"
"Not fer six weeks or so. We're down Eltonville way. We'll milk the State Fair and
work back. Comin' in with a load o' props. Cheeseburger fer the glamorpuss there.
What's yer pleasure, ladies?"
"Scrambled on rye toast," said Bunny.
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TheDreamingJewels(v2.0)TheodoreSturgeon,1950Ajewel-eyedjack-in-the-boxholdsamysteriouskeytothefutureofayoungboywhorunsawayfromhomeandhidesawayinatravelingfreakshow.1Theycaughtthekiddoingsomethingdisgustingoutunderthebleachersatthehigh-schoolstadium,andhewassenthomefromthegrammarschoolacrossthestreet...

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