Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(105)
The sphinx glared at her the way her mother did in church, when Delilah kept clicking the ballpoint pen but couldn’t be scolded during the prayer.
The sphinx was looking at Delilah as if she wanted to say something.
Hecuba blinked, then continued pacing, but every time she turned toward the fascinated child, their gazes locked and Delilah’s curiosity was piqued again.
“Can we ask her questions?” she asked the sphinx’s handler, a large man in jeans whose thick arms were crossed over a simple red employee T-shirt. There were no top hats or sequins for handlers assigned to the most dangerous cryptids—nothing that could distract from the safety regulations.
“Questions?” The handler frowned down at her, as if he found her request very odd. “You can ask anything you want, but don’t expect an answer. She don’t talk. Even if she could, it’d probably be nonsense. Having a human head don’t mean she has a human brain.”
Delilah decided to give it a try anyway, because what other kind of brain could be inside a human head? She stepped closer to the cage, but stopped when the handler stuck one arm out to keep her at a safe distance. “Hecuba?” she said, and the sphinx stilled when she heard her name. “Do you remember Greece?”
The sphinx blinked, then narrowed her eyes at the child. A human tongue peeked from between her dry lips to wet them, and Delilah’s pulse quickened. Hecuba was going to answer. She, Delilah Marlow, was going to be the first person in history to carry on a conversation with a sphinx!
“Ha!” Someone shoved Delilah’s shoulder, and she stumbled to the left. When she turned, she found Matt Fuqua leering at her. “Did you really think it was going to answer you?” Matt and his friends laughed at Delilah while her cheeks burned.
Mrs. Essig quietly rounded up her group and announced that it was time to eat their bagged lunches.
As they headed down the midway toward the petting zoo, which boasted a picnic area and hand-washing station, the parade of performers and exhibits continued. Matt stepped into the path of an acrobat doing backflips down the sawdust-strewn path, and if Mrs. Essig hadn’t pulled him out of the way, he would have wound up tangled in a knot of bendy limbs and sequins.
Shelley whispered into Delilah’s ear that Mrs. Essig should have let him go. Death by circus acrobat would have been the most interesting thing ever to happen to him.
The petting zoo was a fenced-off area at the end of the midway. Inside, a series of small open-air pens had been arranged across from a collection of long folding picnic tables. Mrs. Essig claimed the end of one table for her six field-trip charges and shooed them toward a hand-washing station at one end of the exhibit.
Delilah dropped her lunch bag on the chair she’d claimed, then followed Shelley toward the boxy plastic sink and soap dispensers. While the boys splashed each other and used more paper towels than they actually required, Delilah and Shelley wandered slowly past the enclosures, oohing and aahing over the young beasts on display.
Instead of the usual collection of lambs, piglets, and newborn bunnies, the menagerie’s petting zoo held werewolf puppies, a centaur foal who pranced around her pen with hair the color of wheat flying out behind her, and the most adorable little bundle of white fur identified by the sign hanging from its pen as an infant yeti.
There was also a young giant—a three-foot-tall toddler wearing a folded tablecloth as a diaper. The giant’s forehead protruded grotesquely and his legs were knobby and twisted. After a second of staring at him, Delilah decided that the huge toddler was much more scared of the taunting children than they were of him.
Shelley’s favorites were the werewolf pups. The plaque hanging from their pen said that they were five years old and had been born right there in the menagerie. They had a baby sister, according to the petting zoo’s “nanny”—a woman in black overalls and a stained red apron. But the infant was still too young to be separated from her mother, so Shelley and Delilah would have to come back with their parents to see the full display at night, if they wanted a glimpse at the only baby werewolf in the menagerie.
At the last pen before the hand-washing station, Matt and his friends had gathered, wet fingers still dripping, and were shouting to be heard over one another as they stared into the pen. “What’s going on?” Shelley said, elbowing her way through the small throng of boys with Delilah at her side.
“There’s no sign, so we’re taking bets about what’s in the pen,” Matt explained. “I’ve got a homemade fudge brownie up for grabs, from my lunch, and Elías is throwing in a candy bar.”
Delilah peered into the pen and discovered the source of the mystery. Three forms sat at the back in a semicircle, facing away from the crowd. The one on the left was the smallest and the one on the right was the largest, but all three wore what seemed to be threadbare nightgowns. Without their faces visible, their species was a total mystery.
“I say they’re cyclopses,” Matt declared.
Delilah shook her head. “Cyclopses are giants.”
“Actually, there’s a pygmy species native to a small island near Greece.” Neal Grundidge pulled a used tissue from his pocket and swiped at his runny nose. “They’re people-sized.”
“They could be satyrs,” Elías said. “We can’t see their feet from here.”
“Hey!” Matt shouted, gripping the pen with both hands. “Hey, turn around! We paid for freaks, so show us some freaks!”