The Night of The Tiger
STEPHEN KING
From
Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1978
I first saw Mr. Legere when the circus swung through Steubenville, but I'd only been with the show for two weeks; he might have been making his irregular visits indefinitely. No one much wanted to talk about Mr. Legere, not even that last night when it seemed that the world was coming to an end -- the night that Mr. Indrasil disappeared. But if I'm going to tell it to you from the beginning, I should start
by saying that I'm Eddie Johnston, and I was born and raised in Sauk City. Went to school there, had my first girl there, and worked in Mr. Lillie's five-and-dime there for a while after I graduated from high school. That was a few years back... more than I like to count, sometimes. Not that Sauk City's such a bad
place; hot, lazy summer nights sitting on the front porch is all right for some folks, but it just seemed to itch me, like sitting in the same chair too long. So I quit the five-and-dime and joined Farnum & Williams' All-American 3-Ring Circus and Side Show. I did it in a moment of giddiness when the calliope music kind of fogged my judgment, I guess.
So I became a roustabout, helping put up tents and take them down, spreading sawdust, cleaning cages, and sometimes selling cotton candy when the regular salesman had to go away and bark for Chips Baily, who had malaria and sometimes had to go someplace far away, and holler. Mostly things that kids do for free passes -- things I used to do when I was a kid. But times change. They don't seem to come around like they used to.
We swung through Illinois and Indiana that hot summer, and the crowds were good and everyone was happy. Everyone except Mr. Indrasil. Mr. Indrasil was never happy. He was the lion tamer, and he looked like old pictures I've seen of Rudolph Valentine. He was tall, with handsome, arrogant features and a shock of wild black hair. And strange, mad eyes -- the maddest eyes I've ever seen. He was silent most of the time; two syllables from Mr. Indrasil was a sermon. All the circus people kept a mental as well as a physical distance, because his rages were legend. There was a whispered
story about coffee spilled on his hands after a particularly difficult performance and a murder that was almost done to a young roustabout before Mr. Indrasil could be hauled off him. I don't know about that. I do know that I grew to fear him worse than I had cold-eyed Mr. Edmont, my high school principal, Mr. Lillie, or even my father, who was capable of cold dressing-downs that would leave the recipient quivering with shame and dismay. When I cleaned the big cats' cages, they were always spotless. The memory of the few times I had the vituperative wrath of Mr. Indrasil called down on me still have the power to turn my knees watery in retrospect. Mostly it was his eyes - large and dark and totally blank. The eyes, and the feeling that a man capable of controlling seven watchful cats in a small cage must be part savage himself. And the only two things he was afraid of were Mr. Legere and the circus's one tiger, a huge beast called Green Terror. As I said, I first saw Mr. Legere in Steubenville, and he was staring into Green Terror's cage as if the tiger knew all the secrets of life and death. He was lean, dark, quiet. His deep, recessed eyes held an expression of pain and brooding violence in their green-flecked depths, and his hands were always crossed behind his back as he
stared moodily in at the tiger.
Green Terror was a beast to be stared at. He was a huge, beautiful specimen with a flawless striped coat, emerald eyes, and heavy fangs like ivory spikes. His roars usually filled the circus grounds - fierce, angry, and utterly savage. He seemed to scream defiance and frustration at the whole world.
Chips Baily, who had been with Farnum &Williams since Lord knew when, told me that Mr. Indrasil used to use Green Terror in his act, until one night when the tiger leaped suddenly from its perch and almost ripped his head from his shoulders before he could get out of' the cage. I noticed that Mr. Indrasil always wore, his hair long down the back of his neck. I can still remember the tableau that day in Steubenville. It was hot, sweatingly hot, and we had a shirtsleeve crowd. That was why Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil stood out. Mr. Legere, standing silently by the tiger cage, was fully dressed in a suit and vest, his face unmarked by perspiration. And Mr. Indrasil, clad in one of his
beautiful silk shirts and white whipcord breeches, was staring at them both, his face dead-white, his eyes bulging in lunatic anger, hate, and fear. He was carrying a currycomb and brush, and his hands were trembling as they clenched on them spasmodically. Suddenly he saw me, and his anger found vent. "You!" He shouted. "Johnston!" "Yes sir?" I felt a crawling in the pit of my stomach. I knew I was about to have the wrath of Indrasil vented on me, and the thought turned me weak with fear. I like to think I'm as brave as the next, and if it had been anyone else, I think I would have been fully determined to stand up for myself. But it wasn't anyone else. It was Mr. Indrasil, and his eyes were mad.
"These cages, Johnston. Are they supposed to be clean?" He pointed a finger, and I followed it. I saw four errant wisps of straw and an incriminating puddle of hose water in the far corner of one. "Y-yes, sir," I said, and what was intended to be firmness became palsied bravado.
Silence, like the electric pause before a downpour. People were beginning to look, and I was dimly aware that Mr. Legere was staring at us with his bottomless eyes.
"Yes, sir?" Mr. Indrasil thundered suddenly. "Yes, sir? Yes, sir? Don't insult my intelligence, boy! Don't you think I can see? Smell? Did you use the disinfectant?''
"I used disinfectant yes----"
"Don't answer me back!" He screeched, and then the sudden drop in his voice made my skin crawl. "Don't you dare answer me back." Everyone was staring now. I wanted to retch, to die. "Now you get the hell into that tool shed, and you get that disinfectant and swab out those cages," he whispered, measuring every word.
One hand suddenly shot out, grasping my shoulder. "And don't you ever, ever, speak back to me again."
I don't know where the words came from, but they were suddenly there, spilling off my lips. "I didn't speak back to you, Mr. Indrasil, and I don't like you saying I did. I-- resent it. Now let me go."
His face went suddenly red, then white, then almost saffron with rage. His eyes were blazing doorways to hell.
Right then I thought I was going to die.
He made an inarticulate gagging sound, and the grip on my shoulder became excruciating. His right hand went up...up...up, and then descended with unbelievable speed. If that hand had connected with my face, it would have knocked me senseless at best. At worst, it would have broken my neck. It did not connect.
Another hand materialized magically out of space, right in front of me. The two straining limbs came together with a flat Smacking sound. It was Mr. Legere. "Leave the boy alone," he said emotionlessly. Mr. Indrasil stared at him for a long second, and I think there was nothing so unpleasant in the whole business as watching the fear of Mr. Legere and the mad lust to hurt (or to kill!) mix in those terrible eyes.
Then he turned and stalked away.
I turned to look at Mr. Legere. "Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me." And it wasn't a "don't thank me," but a "don't thank me.'' Not a gesture of modesty but a literal command. In a sudden flash of intuition empathy if you will I understood exactly what he meant by that comment. I was a pawn in what must have been a long combat between the two of them. I had been captured by Mr. Legere rather than Mr. Indrasil. He had stopped the lion tamer not because he felt for me, but because it gained him an advantage, however slight, in their private war.
"What's your name?" I asked, not at all offended by what I had inferred. He had, after all, been honest with me.
"Legere," he said briefly. He turned to go.
"Are you with a circus?" I asked, not wanting to let him go so easily. "You seemed to know --- him."
A faint smile touched his thin lips, and warmth kindled in his eyes for a moment; "No. You might call me a-policeman." And before I could reply, he had disappeared into the surging throng passing by.
The next day we picked up stakes and moved on.
I saw Mr. Legere again in Danville and, two weeks later, in Chicago. In the time between I tried to avoid Mr. Indrasil as much as possible and kept the cat cages spotlessly clean. On the day before we pulled out for St. Louis, I asked Chips Baily and Sally O'Hara, the red-headed wire walker, if Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil knew each other. I was pretty sure they did, because Mr. Legere was hardly following the circus to eat our fabulous lime ice.
Sally and Chips looked at each other over their coffee cups. "No one knows much about what's between those, two," she said. "But it's been going on for a long time maybe twenty years. Ever since Mr. Indrasil came over from Ringling Brothers, and maybe before that."
Chips nodded. "This Legere guy picks up the circus almost every year when we swing through the Midwest and stays with us until we catch the train for Florida in Little Rock. Makes old Leopard Man touchy as one of his cats."
"He told me he was a police-man," I said. "What do you suppose he looks for around here? You don't suppose Mr. Indrasil--?"
Chips and Sally looked at each other strangely, and both just about broke their backs getting up. "Got to see those weights and counter weights get stored right," Sally said, and Chips muttered something not too convincing about checking on the rear axle of his U-Haul.
And that's about the way any conversation concerning Mt. Indrasil or Mr. Legere usually broke up--- hurriedly, with many hard-forced excuses.
We said farewell to Illinois and comfort at the same time. A killing hot spell came on, seemingly at the very instant we crossed the border, and it stayed with us for the next month and a half, as we moved slowly across Missouri and into Kansas. Everyone grew short of temper, including the animals. And that, of course, included the cats, which were Mr. Indrasil's responsibility. He rode the roustabouts unmercifully, and myself in particular. I grinned
and tried to bear it, even though I had my own case of prickly heat.
You just don't argue with a crazy man, and I'd pretty well decided that was what Mr. Indrasil was.
No one was getting any sleep, and that is the curse of all circus performers. Loss of sleep slows up reflexes, and slow reflexes make for danger. In Independence Sally O'Hara fell seventy-five feet into the nylon netting and fractured her shoulder. Andrea
Solienni, our bareback rider, fell off one of her horses during
rehearsal and was knocked unconscious by a flying hoof. Chips
Baily suffered silently with the fever that was always with him, his
face a waxen mask, with cold perspiration clustered at each temple.
And in many ways, Mr. Indrasil had the roughest row to hoe of all.
The cats were nervous and short-tempered, and every time he
stepped into the Demon Cat Cage, as it was billed, he took his life
in his hands. He was feeding the lions ordinate amounts of raw
meat right before he went on, something that lion tamers rarely do,
contrary to popular belief. His face grew drawn and haggard, and
his eyes were wild.
Mr. Legere was almost always there, by Green Terror's cage,
watching him. And that, of course, added to Mr. Indrasil's load.
The circus began eyeing the silk-shirted figure nervously as he
passed, and I knew they were all thinking the same thing I was:
He's going to crack wide open, and when he does ---
When he did, God alone knew what would happen.
The hot spell went on, and temperatures were climbing well into
the nineties every day. It seemed as if the rain gods were mocking
us. Every town we left would receive the showers of blessing.
Every town we entered was hot, parched, sizzling.
And one night, on the road between Kansas City and Green Bluff, I
saw something that upset me more than anything else.
It was hot -- abominably hot. It was no good even trying to sleep. I
rolled about on my cot like a man in a fever-delirium, chasing the
sandman but never quite catching him. Finally I got up, pulled on
my pants, and went outside.
We had pulled off into a small field and drawn into a circle. Myself
and two other roustabouts had unloaded the cats so they could
catch whatever breeze there might be. The cages were there now,
painted dull silver by the swollen Kansas moon, and a tall figure in
white whipcord breeches was standing by the biggest of them. Mr.
Indrasil.
He was baiting Green Terror with a long, pointed pike. The big cat
was padding silently around the cage, trying to avoid the sharp tip.
And the frightening thing was, when the staff did punch into the
tiger's flesh, it did not roar in pain and anger as it should have. It
maintained an ominous silence, more terrifying to the person who
knows cats than the loudest of roars.
It had gotten to Mr. Indrasil, too. "Quiet bastard, aren't you?" He
grunted. Powerful arms flexed, and the iron shaft slid forward.
Green Terror flinched, and his eyes rolled horribly. But he did not
make a sound. "Yowl!" Mr. Indrasil hissed. "Go ahead and yowl,
you monster Yowl!" And he drove his spear deep into the tiger's
flank.
Then I saw something odd. It seemed that a shadow moved in the
darkness under one of the far wagons, and the moonlight seemed to
glint on staring eyes -- green eyes.
A cool wind passed silently through the clearing, lifting dust and
rumpling my hair.
Mr. Indrasil looked up, and there was a queer listening expression
on his face. Suddenly he dropped the bar, turned, and strode back
to his trailer.
I stared again at the far wagon, but the shadow was gone. Green
Tiger stood motionlessly at the bars of his cage, staring at Mr.
Indrasil's trailer. And the thought came to me that it hated Mr.
Indrasil not because he was cruel or vicious, for the tiger respects
these qualities in its own animalistic way, but rather because he
was a deviate from even the tiger's savage norm. He was a rogue.
That's the only way I can put it. Mr. Indrasil was not only a human
tiger, but a rogue tiger as well.
The thought jelled inside me, disquieting and a little scary. I went
back inside, but still I could not sleep.
The heat went on.
Every day we fried, every night we tossed and turned, sweating
and sleepless. Everyone was painted red with sunburn, and there
were fistfights over trifling affairs. Everyone was reaching the
point of explosion.
Mr. Legere remained with us, a silent watcher, emotionless on the
surface, but, I sensed, with deep-running currents of - what? Hate?
Fear? Vengeance? I could not place it. But he was potentially
dangerous, I was sure of that. Perhaps more so than Mr. Indrasil
was, if anyone ever lit his particular fuse.
He was at the circus at every performance, always dressed in his
nattily creased brown suit, despite the killing temperatures. He
stood silently by Green Terror's cage, seeming to commune deeply
with the tiger, who was always quiet when he was around.
From Kansas to Oklahoma, with no letup in the temperature. A day
without a heat prostration case was a rare day indeed. Crowds were
beginning to drop off; who wanted to sit under a stifling canvas
tent when there was an air-conditioned movie just around the
block?
We were all as jumpy as cats, to coin a particularly applicable
phrase. And as we set down stakes in Wildwood Green, Oklahoma,
I think we all knew a climax of some sort was close at hand. And
most of us knew it would involve Mr. Indrasil. A bizarre
occurrence had taken place just prior to our first Wildwood
performance. Mr. Indrasil had been in the Demon Cat Cage,
putting the ill-tempered lions through their paces. One of them
missed its balance on its pedestal, tottered and almost regained it.
Then, at that precise moment, Green Terror let out a terrible, ear-
splitting roar.
The lion fell, landed heavily, and suddenly launched itself with
rifle-bullet accuracy at Mr. Indrasil. With a frightened curse, he
heaved his chair at the cat's feet, tangling up the driving legs. He
darted out just as the lion smashed against the bars.
As he shakily collected himself preparatory to re-entering the cage,
Green Terror let out another roar -- but this one monstrously like a
huge, disdainful chuckle.
Mr. Indrasil stared at the beast, white-faced, then turned and
walked away. He did not come out of his trailer all afternoon.
That afternoon wore on interminably. But as the temperature
climbed, we all began looking hopefully toward the west, where
huge banks of thunderclouds were forming.
"Rain, maybe," I told Chips, stopping by his barking platform in
front of the sideshow.
But he didn't respond to my hopeful grin. "Don't like it," he said.
"No wind. Too hot. Hail or tornadoes." His face grew grim. "It
ain't no picnic, ridin' out a tornado with a pack of crazy-wild
animals all over the place, Eddie. I've thanked God mor'n once
when we've gone through the tornado belt that we don't have no
elephants.
"Yeah" he added gloomily, "you better hope them clouds stay right
on the horizon."
But they didn't. They moved slowly toward us, cyclopean pillars in
the sky, purple at the bases and awesome blue-black through the
cumulonimbus. All air movement ceased, and the heat lay on us
like a woolen winding-shroud. Every now and again, thunder
would clear its throat further west.
About four, Mr. Farnum himself, ringmaster and half-owner of the
circus, appeared and told us there would be no evening
performance; just batten down and find a convenient hole to crawl
into in case of trouble. There had been corkscrew funnels spotted
in several places between Wildwood and Oklahoma City, some
within forty miles of us.
There was only a small crowd when the announcement came,
apathetically wandering through the sideshow exhibits or ogling
the animals. But Mr. Legere had not been present all day; the only
person at Green Terror's cage was a sweaty high-school boy with
clutch of books. When Mr. Farnum announced the U.S. Weather
Bureau tornado warning that had been issued, he hurried quickly
away.
I and the other two roustabouts spent the rest of the-afternoon
working our tails off, securing tents, loading animals back into
their wagons, and making generally sure that everything was nailed
down.
Finally only the cat cages were left, and there was a special
arrangement for those. Each cage had a special mesh "breezeway"
accordioned up against it, which, when extended completely,
connected with the Demon Cat Cage. When the smaller cages had
to be moved, the felines could be herded into the big cage while
they were loaded up. The big cage itself rolled on gigantic casters
and could be muscled around to a position where each cat could be
let back into its original cage. It sounds complicated, and it was,
but it was just the only way.
We did the lions first, then Ebony Velvet, the docile black panther
that had set the circus back almost one season's receipts. It was a
tricky business coaxing them up and then back through the
breezeways, but all of us preferred it to calling Mr. Indrasil to
help.
By the time we were ready for Green Terror, twilight had come ---
a queer, yellow twilight that hung humidly around us. The sky
above had taken on a flat, shiny aspect that I had never seen and
which I didn't like in the least.
"Better hurry," Mr. Farnum said, as we laboriously trundled the
Demon Cat Cage back to where we could hook it to the back of
Green Terror's show cage. "Barometer's falling off fast." He shook
his head worriedly. "Looks bad, boys. Bad.'' He hurried on, still
shaking his head.
We got Green Terror's breezeway hooked up and opened the back
of his cage. "In you go," I said encouragingly.
Green Terror looked at me menacingly and didn't move.
Thunder rumbled again, louder, closer, sharper. The sky had gone
jaundice, the ugliest color I have ever seen. Wind-devils began to
pick jerkily at our clothes and whirl away the flattened candy
wrappers and cotton-candy cones that littered the area.
"Come on, come on," I urged and poked him easily with the blunt-
tipped rods we were given to herd them with.
Green Terror roared ear-splittingly, and one paw lashed out with
blinding speed. The hardwood pole was jerked from my hands and
splintered as if it had been a greenwood twig. The tiger was on his
feet now, and there was murder in his eyes.
"Look," I said shakily. "One of you will have to go get Mr.
Indrasil, that's all. We can't wait around."
As if to punctuate my words, thunder cracked louder, the clapping
of mammoth hands.
Kelly Nixon and Mike McGregor flipped for it; I was excluded
because of my previous run-in with Mr. Indrasil. Kelly drew the
task, threw us a wordless glance that said he would prefer facing
the storm and then started off.
He was gone almost ten minutes. The wind was picking up
velocity now, and twilight was darkening into a weird six o'clock
night. I was scared, and am not afraid to admit it. That rushing,
featureless sky, the deserted circus grounds, the sharp, tugging
wind-vortices all that makes a memory that will stay with me
always, undimmed.
And Green Terror would not budge into his breezeway.
Kelly Nixon came rushing back, his eyes wide. "I pounded on his
door for 'most five minutes!" He gasped. "Couldn't raise him!"
We looked at each other, at a loss. Green Terror was a big
investment for the circus. He couldn't just be left in the open. I
turned bewilderedly, looking for Chips, Mr. Farnum, or anybody
who could tell me what to do. But everyone was gone. The tiger
was our responsibility. I considered trying to load the cage bodily
into the trailer, but I wasn't going to get my fingers in that cage.
"Well, we've just got to go and get him," I said. "The three of us.
Come on." And we ran toward Mr. Indrasil's trailer through the
gloom of coming night.
We pounded on his door until he must have thought all the demons
of hell were after him. Thankfully, it finally jerked open. Mr.
Indrasil swayed and stared down at us, his mad eyes rimmed and
oversheened with drink. He smelled like a distillery.
"Damn you, leave me alone," he snarled.
"Mr. Indrasil --" I had to shout over the rising whine of the wind. It
was like no storm I had ever heard of or read about, out there. It
was like the end of the world .
"You," he gritted softly. He reached down and gathered my shirt
up in a knot. "I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget."
He glared at Kelly and Mike, cowering back in the moving storm
shadows. "Get out!"
They ran. I didn't blame them; I've told you -- Mr. Indrasil was
crazy. And not just ordinary crazy -- he was like a crazy animal,
like one of his own cats gone bad.
"All right," he muttered, staring down at me, his eyes like
hurricane lamps. "No juju to protect you now. No grisgris." His
lips twitched in a wild, horrible smile. "He isn't here now, is he?
We're two of a kind, him and me. Maybe the only two left. My
nemesis -- and I'm his." He was rambling, and I didn't try to stop
him. At least his mind was off me.
"Turned that cat against me, back in '58. Always had the power
more'n me. Fool could make a million -- the two of us could make
a million if he wasn't so damned high and mighty...what's that?"
It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-splittingly.
"Haven't you got that damned tiger in?" He screamed, almost
falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.
"He won't go!" I found myself yelling back. "You've got to --"
But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of
his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom.
With something between a sob and a curse, Mr. Indrasil strode past
me, face mottled with anger and fear.
I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of
me realized I was about to see the last act played out.
Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil's trailer, the power of the
wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was
an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule before that thundering,
cosmic force.
And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror's cage.
It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing
inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently,
their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky
above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned
souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.
"It's time, Jason," Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the
clearing by the wind.
Mr. Indrasil's wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar
across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing.
I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It
gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.
And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was
unhooking Green Terror's breezeway -- and the back of the cage
was open!
I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.
The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr.
Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down
at the tiger.
And Green Terror stopped.
He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and
then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a
terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh
of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were
evenly matched.
I think, in the end, it was Green Terror's own will -- his hate of Mr.
Indrasil -- that tipped the scales.
The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And.
something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to
be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt
lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool
around his collar.
Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously,
Green Terror leaped.
I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on
my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I
caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone
funnel, and then the darkness descended.
When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the
all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had
been beaten with padded Indian clubs.
Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes
were open and grinned relievedly. "Didn't know as you were ever
gonna wake up. How you feel?"
"Dislocated," I said. "What happened? How'd I get here?"
"We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil's trailer. The tornado
almost carried you away for a souvenir, m'boy."
At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came
flooding back. "Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?"
His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an
evasive answer.
"Straight talk," I said, struggling up on one elbow. "I have to know,
Chips. I have to."
Something in my face must have decided him. "Okay. But this isn't
exactly what we told the cops -- in fact we hardly told the cops any
of it. No sense havin' people think we're crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil's
gone. I didn't even know that Legere guy was around."
"And Green Tiger?"
Chips' eyes were unreadable again. "He and the other tiger fought
to death."
"Other tiger? There's no other ---"
"Yeah, but they found two of 'em, lying in each other's blood. Hell
of a mess. Ripped each other's throats out."
"What -- where --"
"Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler
that way." And before I could say another word, he was gone.
And that's the end of my story -- except for two little items. The
words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: "When a
man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts
determine the mold!"
The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me
later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me
was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.
