I woke up smiling and energized to the sound of loud applause. All the anxiety and fear of the previous evening had drained out of my body like it was a leaky barrel. I felt light on my feet, and my thoughts stirred forward at a steady trot, all without constantly looping back to pour over every detail of my encounter with the freak. In a word—It was amazing.
And that was probably why I could immediately tell that I was back in The Circus, specifically its biggest tent. I was sitting on top of some bleachers layed out in a circle around a central stage. Or that was what I thought at least, as in the inky darkness of the tent only the stage was well lit and visible, leaving the rest enveloped in uniform black. The sound of loud, unbroken clapping echoed from the blackness all around me.
Center stage, there stood a man in a red dress shirt, his hands clad in fingerless black gloves. When he lifted his hand into the air, the silence that followed made my ears ring more than the jubilation that came before. The Knife Thrower, I presumed.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! Behold the shocking precision of my knives! Their deadly edges flying at my beck and call!” said the Knife Thrower, “Watch as they fly and cleanly flay the flesh off of my, heh, lovely VOLUNTEER!”
Needless to say, I’ll spare you the gory details.
His hands were streaks of black and red as knives thunked into the wooden backboard the “volunteer” was strapped to. Metal screeched against metal as he packed the knives impossibly close together. Soon enough there was a perfect semicircle of knives around the volunteer’s head, but something so boring was clearly beneath The Knife Thrower. Instead, he started throwing multiple knives at a time, bouncing knife against knife, knocking them off the board only to replace them with a fresh pattern. For him, it was clearly the show that counted. And he definitely put on a performance, if this sort of sadism even deserved the name.
She screamed, she writhed, she pleaded, but she couldn’t escape, not with the way she was strapped to the target. It was a grizzly sight.
I felt… I felt… a little bit afraid, and maybe a bit shocked, but it was an incredibly dull sensation. At this point I could tell that I was in the dream by that alone, it was the same sort of headspace as the first time I had been there. I could even feel my bowtie strapped around my neck. In the dream, my sympathy for the woman was dulled below even what I usually felt for strangers.
In the end, The Knife Thrower bowed towards the void of the audience.
And just as the invisible crowd started cheering from the endless darkness, I was saved from seeing more by a gloved hand gently gliding into place in front of my eyes. My eyes drew a line from its wrist, along the arm, and up the shoulder to stare into the face of a jester, dressed in the usual costume, all in a harlequin pattern of black and red, with a large, heavy tricorn hat, its bells clinking as he angled his head. In his other hand he held a cow-bell topped staff. The face that stared back at me was paper-white, and his eyes and lips as red as blood. He sat calmly next to me, a well lit image framed by pitch black.
“I thought I would give you a closer look,” said the jester, “but then again, here I’m more than just the show, I am the very air you breathe.”
“The very air?” Literally breathing someone in was not something I wanted to be doing, just on general principle.
“Right now, you and that woman are dreaming a dream. This dream. Me. Here, I am everything,” said the jester, “but,” he added, his lips twisting into a smile as his bells jingled softly, all other sounds in the tent going silent to my ears.
“I see you need it said aloud,
what makes me different from the crowd,
my name that is, Jarqual, the mad,
but worry not, I’m not that bad.”
“In fact,” he said, returning to a normal tone of voice, “to you I am a friend.”
Jarqual. I remembered the name. He was the big boss, the circus master. And he spoke full sentences, albeit in verse. He was someone I could get answers from. Real answers.
“What—” I started to ask.
“—I’m going to give you a little riddle. It will be important for later,” interrupted Jarqual.
“There was once a baker, a cat, and a canary. The cat was a creature trying to satisfy its base desires and kept trying to eat the canary, failing every time. The canary didn’t do much of anything, and wanted even less, it might have been secretly buddhist, who knows? The baker baked bread because that was what his father taught him to do, and he didn’t think of much else. Who should envy who? Think on it while you ask your questions.”
The rapid shift in topic was a bit disorienting, more so than his brief venture into verse. At least Jarqual was cultured enough to care about poetry and philosophy—of a kind. It was not my personal field of study; I was always more of a math guy, but I knew a thought experiment when I saw one. I didn’t think philosophers spent a lot of time on envy, though, so there must have been some point he was trying to get across, but rather than ponder it now I took him up on the opportunity to ask a few questions of my own.
“What do you want from me?” I asked as my opening move.
“For you to be my new magician. The favors are merely the thinnest pretense to get you to speak with me,” countered Jarqual, giving me information that I would prefer not to be true.
I should have known that the mob would never let someone go once they had their hooks in them. And on that topic, now that I wasn’t as terrified as before I was honestly feeling a bit cheated by how he counted the favors.
“Does drinking the water count as a separate favor?”
“Sure,” replied Jarqual easily, “Call it favor one. Thought it wasn’t water. It was the liquid from the caves below us. Drinking it brings people here with more awareness than usual.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Score! Though, I’d expected him to flex his power a little more. He did run a criminal organization. I was about to ask another question, but Jarqual made a motion towards the stage, where a blob shaped thing was… undulating. It was interesting to look at, but it got boring fairly quickly. Although Jarqual was watching in rapt attention throughout, I instead used the time to think about his riddle, all the way up until the blob flowed off the stage in a continuous, pulsating stream. In the privacy of my own mind, if never again aloud, I could admit that The Freak was all sorts of creepy.
The stage having gone silent once more, Jarqual looked back at me expectantly. We continued right where we’d left off.
“So, what am I supposed to be delivering? And to whom?” It was, after all, an important point to clarify.
“Wonderful that you’ve asked. The woman who sent you to sleep is the recipient, and the parcel is death itself. Your final favor is to rob her after.”
I would admit that I am not the most conventionally moral of people. Dreaming or awake, I could never find it in myself to really care about people I didn’t know, let alone people who put me in the hospital, but to put it lightly, criminals were normally people too dumb to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, or too desperate or crazy to care. Crime just didn’t provide a reward equal to the risk, especially murder. Killing people almost always just made your situation worse, and this wasn’t an exception.
“I… completely acknowledge that I can’t actually say no to you and that I have no choice in the matter, and that I owe you for helping me,” even though the doctor said I would have been fine regardless, “but is there anything else I could do? Anything at all? I don’t see how I could get away with murder,” I said, registering my plea at the altar of merciless gods.
And unlike so many others, these gods did deign to respond, in a measured and conciliatory tone at that.
“If you are to be The Magician, this will be part of your regular duties. If it eases you, this is not some uncalculated act of cruelty. The woman who sent you here, Glenda Robberts , has had physical access to the dreamlands. The other stable dreams and I have agreed to silence all those who could reveal us to the world at large.
“I don’t think it escapes you that we have great power, and thus opportunities that go beyond those of normal men. That said, we only came into being about sixty years ago. We hardly know anything about why we exist at all, yet alone about the limits of our power, so we have agreed to remain unknown to the wider world for as long as possible, to avoid… interference from other actors, such as Glenda Robberts—or national governments for that matter. People like her are normally much weaker than us, but they often possess entirely unique knowledge of the dreamlands, hence why you will divest her of any notes or other records upon her death.”
That made a lot of sense actually. And raiding someone to steal all their arcane knowledge sounded… rewarding. If I was a nightmare creature of unknown power I would probably be doing the same thing, but the problem was that I wasn’t a nightmare creature of unknown power.
“I think you understand that, sensible as that is, it doesn’t really help me if I wind up in jail, ” I said to Jarqual, who looked at me for a long moment before responding.
“The Freak can shapeshift, The Knife Thrower is superhuman, The Fortune Teller can see the future, and The Magician? He can make illusions, certainly well enough to have a rock-solid alibi. And that’s just the very start of an ever growing list. The Fortune Teller has confirmed that Glenda can see the dream even while waking, perhaps more, this gives her a sort of… forewarning of what is to come as long as it has been brewing in the dream for long enough as well as abilities that we may not know of. It is likely that she, and most certainly the police could be confused by an illusion. It would work for an alibi, I’m sure. Your newness to the dream will help shield you from her sight as well. I will leave the details to you, but as The Magician, it should be well within your power. The package contains several weapons: a bomb, a gun, a knife—poison. Things I thought you may find useful.”
I didn’t realize I was meant to be a hitman. This was not anything I planned for. Being a hitman was definitely not my first career choice. Maybe I pulled this off, got lucky, but how long could I—
“—Have you considered what’s in it for you?” asked Jaruqal, his eyebrows raised up high, as if surprised by my panicked expression. “Because you really should.”
“Not being killed?” I put forward, even though I knew it wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
“There’s more to it than that,” said Jarqual. "You can tell me your answer to my little riddle now, if you like.”
At least he was polite about ordering me around. So I did my best to answer honestly.
“I don’t think there’s anything to envy about any of them, none of them are really happy. The canary can never be happy by definition, the baker doesn’t know what he wants, and the cat can’t get what it wants. I guess you could say that they should envy the cat because he at least has a chance to get what he wants, even though he always fails.”
“And which one of those do you think you are right now?”
“Either the baker or the canary,” I responded honestly.
“So let me help you along by telling you what you want, oh Baker. All my magicians have wanted the same thing — a certain lifestyle. Access to magic, relative autonomy, money, the chance to be among the first to know what can be done within the dreamworld, and the first to benefit from it. Things I’m sure you care about,” He said, shooting a knowing look down at my magician’s costume, “And one prize above all others, the time to enjoy it all. The Circus is me, and joining it means becoming part of me—and me becoming part of you. This dream is us and we are it and as long as there are dreamers to dream us we can continue to exist here for all time. Provided we are not killed, of course.”
I don’t think I could deceive you into thinking that I wasn’t nearly hooked right then and there. Immortality, access to unknown powers with unknown limits and a million things besides? Who knew what I could achieve in ten years? And in a hundred? A thousand? How many books could I read, how much food could I eat, what things I could achieve? I'd always worried that as I got older, the world would only shrink around me, stuffing me into narrower and ever more defined boxes. One education, one career, one place to settle down in, but with infinity at my fingertips… The world could only expand for as long as it existed, each year a step in a brand new direction, free to explore the woods just off the footpath to death. And by the end? Well, I would have had enough fun for an eternity, I thought. But there was still one, just one, little, obvious blemish to this behemoth of an offer.
“... And the previous magicians were killed?” I asked, drawing the logical conclusion.
”Two were killed, one died in an accident, but I think that hardly matters, does it? Bakers can become cats in due time. And now that a little kitty knows that it can go from an empty belly to being the cat that caught the canary? It will keep trying. No matter what. ” answered Jarqual, his lips curled into a confident grin.
And boy was he right. I knew nothing about the risks, or the particulars, but for something like the offer on the table, what risk was too great? What could keep you from the great adventure, whether you succeed or fail?
“And if there were no dreamers to dream us?” I pondered aloud.
What was there to lose?
“We would end.” responded Jarqual.
Life itself? I was going to lose that anyway, and like this at least I’d gain a dream.
“Could you trap someone here, permanently? Like in a coma?” I asked, though I knew the answer..
“I keep them in cages, next to the lions, and a few others hidden all over, just to be safe,” said Jarqual, blessed with good sense.
And if something so beautiful could be a nightmare, what was to say I couldn’t be one too?