Concerning the Diner and What Happened THERE

    The sunlight fought through the grimy diner windows, desperate to wash years of stains from the flecked counter. Insomniac truckers mingled with leftover nighthawks, a brief moment of armistice between two worlds only seen in the space of twenty minutes cities the world over. Hoell straddled the line, walked in the No Man's Land between two camps, part of neither, propelled and drawn by the pursuit of the song, like desert fathers seeking truth.
  A bit of the morning fog lingered ankle deep, a child protesting bedtime even while falling asleep. The diner in daylight offered more than invective coffee and anemic eggs; it was a space of sanctuary, a breath safe from the nightmares of the darkness. Even if they didn't sleep, Whitechapel and his ghouls vanished into some shelter from the daylight.
  The carnies slipped into the diner, stained fedora and dirty eyes staring into weak nickel coffee like reading the future in the swirling oils. With them was a woman who could only have been part of their troupe, lacking the road-worn dust and time but clearly a stranger from another land. She was Asian, probably Japanese, but hair dyed castaneous. She wore a long wool coat and a black porkpie devoid of adornment. She took a stool and drew out a cup of joe with her eyes.
  Hoell felt a chill wind settle in with them, the sort of feeling you get when you're asked to play an unlucky song and only the band knows you shouldn't play it. He tried to ignore them from his end of the bar, traced designs in the spilled sugar. The susurration of conversation had dissipated, leaving the jangle of forks on plates and the kitchen's din. The carnies were as quiet and focused a shell-shocked soldiers having seen more on this earth than they bargained for. The woman in the hat ate a slice silently but with considerably more cheer. The materteral waitress refilled Hoell's coffee.
  Gradually one of the patrons mustered the courage to speak. "You from the circus? Just set up last night?"
  The carny in the fedora nodded solemnly.
  "Y'all have that living head," the cook chimed in.
  Someone guffawed. "What's that like, pal?"
  "Sounds like a hustle."
  The woman smiled. "And led by the Jew cursed by Christ," she said, and Hoell caught the twinkle in her eye as she spooned more pie into her petite lips. He traced imaginary keys on the bar to accompany the radio. "That's what they say, anyway."
  "People say a log about your folk," the skeptic said. "Not much of it is nice."
  The woman turned inquisitive eyes as the fedora gloomed even deeper into his cup. "Takes all kinds," the woman said without interest, and reaching for the tall cruet of sugar revealed the hint of a tattoo coiling about her wrist and into her sleeve.
  The skeptic missed the temperature change. "Heard about a town in Oklahoma where the carnies were cheating folks. Then they tried to take a little girl. Town strung 'em one night in the rain. Sheriff said they were thieves, murderers and outlaws, and should twist in the wind as a warning to others."
  "Jesus, buddy," someone said.
  The woman in the porkpie nodded, spoon clanking against the inside of the cup as she stirred it. "Heard that one before. Hear a lot of things on the road. Hear a lot about Jericho, too."
  The diner fell silent again, this time slightly more strained. The woman drained her coffee, threw some bills on the counter and with the rattle of the cowbell was gone. The room remained quiet for a few gravid moments, and then someone voiced, "Jericho? Where the hell is that?"
  "It isn't," one of the carnies spoke. "It's a rumor, a legend."
  "Ten years ago, circus went through a town in north Texas," the man in the fedora said. "Rough crowd. They said someone raped one of the coochie girls. Townsfolk refused to do anything about it. Rumor holds that when the circus left, the town was empty but horses."
  No one said anything. One at a time, the two carnies stood up, paid the bill and left. Hoell waited a few minutes and followed.
  He stepped outside into the sunlight blossoming on the concrete, and the sounds of a city moving into momentum and starling frantically chirping. A brightly painted flyer on the scratched storefront glass caught his eye, announcing the circus was indeed in town, hinting at magics from the far east, human oddities and shows never before imagined by man. Mystical huckster rhetoric at its finest. He heard the scrape of a match, looked up to see the woman in the porkpie bent over a cigarette. She flicked the match into the street, drew in a deep breath, and smiled with dark glasses unmistakably at him.