I woke up breathing hard, my eyes scanning blindly across the darkness of my room. No trace of light. The sun was still below the horizon. The rest of the world was still asleep.
Sleep wasn't something I needed much of anymore. The part of me that resided in Jaruqal felt like it was asleep all the time, and that somehow bled over into the rest of me. The sheer pleasure of always having that extra time made me feel superhuman in a wholly different way.
The last three months of my life had been amazing.
Three months since I'd joined the circus. Three months since I’d taken the risk. Three months since I’d started getting dressed before dawn.
I dressed myself in two steps, legs in the leg-holes, arms in the arm-holes. Before sitting down at my desk. It was time to study.
My family was the only reason I bothered with college at all. The fact that I was in my last year made the whole thing easier to swallow. A nice out of town “job” would settle any curiosity after.
I had been tempted to just drop out more than once. The circus was busy these days. There was a lot to do before we could truly earn our place on top of the food chain and take it easy, but some things, like family, couldn’t be regained once lost.
My eyes zigzagged over the two columns of text in my book. I turned a page. And once my eyes reached the bottom of that page I turned it again. I breezed through my book.
Soon enough, a ray of sunshine illuminated the pages of my textbook, and I snuffed out the illusory light that I had been using to read so far. My alarm rang. And I stepped off my chair and stretched.
It was a socially acceptable time to get up.
My feet took me to the bathroom by pure routine. My tooth brush scrubbed against the insides of my mouth, the false flavor of chocolate ice cream I’d added gently filled my mouth with pleasure. Toothpaste was disgusting, chocolate was delicious.
A brief shower later and I was already downstairs at the breakfast table, book in hand. The TV was on though, so I couldn’t focus as much as I would have liked.
“Already studying?” asked my mother.
“Just a little bit. I take it five minutes at a time.”
“It’s clearly been working,” she remarked, happy about the situation.
I kept mom up to speed on my college life, except for all the absences, but as long as I got good grades, who cared?
A newscaster started speaking on the TV. My mother turned to look at it.
“This week there were multiple reported kidnappings of high-profile gang members. The police are currently investigating, and sources on the ground suggest that reprisal attacks have already started…”
My mother put on a sour expression and turned off the television. She didn’t like violence or crime. Especially when she had to hear about it.
“It’s terrible how people engage in all this senseless violence. Why can’t everyone just mind their own business?”
I wasn’t about to reveal that I was the cause of this, in my opinion, very sens-ible violence. I doubt she wanted to know about all the kidnapped gang members. Or their children. I was confident that she wouldn’t take it well.
Speaking of children, the creak of a door announced my sister's arrival.
“Breakfast!” she shouted, her wet hair reaching down to her shoulders.
Now all together, we started digging into our cereal, with small bits of conversation taking place in between spoonfuls. At one point or another the steady stream of conversation slowed down a bit, and Anna opened her mouth.
“I beat up a boy after school yesterday,” she announced.
“ANNA!”
“He kept making fun of me. It made me feel bad.”
“Oh, I can’t even imagine what the school will do to you for this. You can't just hurt someone else like that just because they hurt you first, especially physically!”
“I only kicked him in the nuts a few times, mom. He’ll be fine, and as a plus he’ll know not to tempt fate again. I doubt he’d blab about it.”
“Anna, I…”
What followed was a sermon on non-violence and proper behavior. Sadly for her, my sister was too much like me. No amount of lectures like that would change her mind.
Mom was almost as fond of lectures as she was of us, but in the end, she never did anything to force our hands. It was why I thought s he understood, deep down, that she was actually in the wrong.
The boy wouldn't bother Anna again and mom would let the whole thing drop. Besides, Anna understood context, she knew what targets and situations would keep her out of trouble.
Anna’s lack of interest made mom turn to me for support.
“Your brother never needed to beat anyone up in school. He settled things with words. Don't you want to be more like him? Like this I have to worry that you'll turn into some sort of criminal, and then what would I do?”
It was a good strategy. Anna loved her big brother, and we both didn’t like making mom sad, but it wouldn’t work. Anna and I shared a look, we both knew that I had beaten up plenty of people in school. I’d just kept mum about it.
“Hypothetically,” I ventured, “If I was part of a violent coup to overthrow the government, how would you react?”
“Don't even joke about that,” replied my mother. “I think I'd blank out from the stress.”
Definitely never telling her.
“Of course, I’d never do that as I’ve always been the superior, older sibling! Unlike the inferior, younger Anna.”
“No!” screamed Anna, right on cue.
And that diffused the situation. Later we watched our favorite show on the couch together before each going our separate ways.
I had a meeting to get to.
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We were meeting in the circus's main tent. The one with all the bleachers and the unnecessarily dramatic audience covered in eternal darkness. There weren’t any people in there, I’d found out. The shroud of cheering darkness was apparently more akin to furniture. Like the impressive oak table that had been dragged on top of the stage. The thing might have belonged to The Clown, no one else would own a hot pink table. It clashed with all the circus’s colors.
The table had some drool on it too, dripping from above. That’s where all the screams were coming from too.
“Gaaaaaah. Gaaaaaah!” screamed the dreamer hanging from the ceiling. His well muscled body hung suspended upside down on a trapeze. He must have done bodybuilding before he had become just another mind for us to inhabit.
“Gaaaaaaaaaah,” he thrashed, and a wet glob fell on my shoulder. Just great.
“Can’t we put him in the lion pit with the others? Or just do this when we finish the meeting?”
“He needs to see us every once in a while, otherwise he’d hardly be dreaming of us,” clarified The Knife Thrower. I didn’t doubt his expertise, keeping the dreamers dreaming the right sort of thing was mostly his job. The rest of us only pitched in for a big show every few weeks, like the one where I had first met Jarqual.
There was something behind my head.
“Besides,” whispered a voice in my ear, “we’re too busy to do it later.”
The sound made me jump away, letting out a noise that might be described as a scream if one wasn’t feeling generous.
“Hahahahaha! Now that’s a Clown for you,” Commented The Knife Thrower. I also found it funny the first time it happened to me, but this was the nth. The Clown didn’t care though, seemingly too happy seeing me miserable. The little beast was honking his nose from where he’d appeared behind me.
“The many hilarious pranks made possible by teleportation are not to be overshadowed by its practicality,” he elaborated.
He was perhaps the most annoying person in the entire circus. And the fact that he could teleport at will only made his presence inescapable. On one rare occasion when I was actually sleeping, he appeared in my room at home and woke me up with a spray of water, only to make me fall asleep again for a group meeting. The man was a menace.
The Fortune teller was not amused by the joke, having been a frequent target before my arrival. And The Freak, she was just… blobbing out. There was no way to tell what she was doing or thinking when she was an amorphous mass.
Jarqual found it funny, I was sure. He was a bitch like that, but he still called the meeting to order.
“As always, we can start with the reports. I'll go first,” said Jarqual.
Meetings always started with everyone sharing their progress on tasks. It was a very mundane way of doing things.
“I have consulted the others and we have come to a joint conclusion—we will support the insurgency in Africa. In return the rebels will grant us a ‘fief’ in which we will be free to pursue our more elaborate projects without fear of discovery.”
Our overall aim was, of course, to study the dream, and to wring out every bit of power we could from it, but as testing got more and more ambitious it also got much less subtle, which was why we were looking for a large-scale testing area. And that was why we wanted an irredeemable backwater to call our own and the rebels would have rural areas to spare. Out in the boonies, no-one would take tales of strange lights or sounds seriously. Except the locals, but no one who mattered took them seriously.
“They have also agreed to give us a fair share of the prisoners of war.”
I.e. people that will be presumed executed. People that no one would miss.Test subjects.
“Provided of course that we successfully perform the promised assaults and assassinations. Freak, Clown, you’ve already seen their requests. Do you believe them to be doable?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The Freak did a thing I couldn’t even describe. What even was that?
“Perfect,” respondent Jarqual, “And you, Clown?”
The Clown made a sort of sour face, but still managed to chuckle through a response.
“I can’t off Botha. He’s got eyes and guns on him constantly. And all off them are humorless fuckheads that get off on rape and torture and don’t find anything else even remotely funny.”
“Botha is low priority,” assured Jarqual. “The agreement can be easily amended after an initial show of force proves that we have the capability to carry out our promises. Anything else to add?”
“No. Me and the Freak have mostly been scouting out the targets. We did find a witch doctor who could scry at a distance through the dream, but he had no records or valuable objects.”
Shame, that would have been useful. Despite the fact that Glenda was my first mission, people like her were few and far between, not to mention how hard it was to find them. Djibrak, one of the two dreams allied with Jarqual, was entirely dedicated to scouting and surveilling and was the one that usually tipped us off, but even with that level of commitment there were at most two cases a month.
“If that is all, you may go next, Fortune Teller.”
The Fortune Teller rose from his seat, his robes trailing half a second behind him. His hands came out of the mass of fabric and placed an item in the center of the desk. A very familiar object and a couple of amorphous, rainbow colored chunks. The spoils of my tussle with Glenda.
“I suppose, well, that I can go next then, if no one else would rather go first of course,” lollygagged The Fortune Teller.
“In my capacity as head of research, I have thoroughly investigated these objects, as well as the written material that our dear Andrew here recovered from the previous owner’s home, and have managed; therefore, to reach some overarching conclusions.”
The guy was always long winded, but he was more than good enough at his job to justify suffering through his digression-laden explanations. He and one of Djibrak’s minions headed all of our research projects, the results of which made up the bulk of our long term strategy.
“It was an incredibly frustrating thing to determine. Through some form of self hypnosis, detailed in her diary, Glenda was able to access a particular portion of the dream, which seems to be more closely connected to the waking world than the rest. This material, and the blade, both come from there, and it allows the passage of things, or people, between the dreamlands and the waking world, on a physical level.”
Which was a big deal. There were limited ways to transfer objects, and particular objects at that, between the dream and the real world—and none for people.
“Indeed, if we were to use this to—”
“So what you’re saying is that we could get Zacharia out of the dream,” interrupted The Knife Thrower with glee. He seemed happy about it. Finding a way to get things physically out of the dream, especially Zacharia, was an important strategic objective for us. Right below the still unachievable mind control.
Me? I was just glad that Zacharia was on our side, for now at least.
In our grand plan to crush all those who could stop us, each of the three dreams had a role to play. Jarqual and us dealt with the humans directly, through physical force, finely applied. Djibrak gathered information and handled general research on the dream, the source of our power. Zacharia’s role was to sit pretty and be intimidating. He was a six-hundred-and-sixty-six foot tall giant whose flesh was made of the sown together bodies and consciousnesses of his dreamers, both past and present. Their faces were locked in eternal screams as he carved his path from one section of the vast chaos of the dreamland to the next, the bodies hideously distorting while acting as the flesh and sinew that powered the giant’s hefty frame. If you got too close to him the dreamers started getting grabby. Whether it was out of desperation or just plain vengeance on a world that did something so heinous to them, that I didn’t know. I wasn't about to let them touch me either way.
He was our proposed nuclear deterrent.
For his part, the demon straight from hell agreed to be part of the team, but only under the condition that once our rule was secure, he would play the role of the afterlife for a good chunk of humanity. It made me uncomfortable to know that while I might escape death itself, there were still fates worse than death to worry about.
“Precisely” said The Fortune Teller. “As well as our beasts, and any number of the horrible things that Djibrak knows how to manufacture in the dream. We can unleash all the horrors we have collected over the years. To that end I propose that we send a team out to meet with Djibrak and attempt to scout the location.”
A gateway into the physical plane—dimension?—was something we had wanted for a long time. Our major weakness was the physical bodies of the permanent dreamers. If they were killed or somehow woken from their comas we would inevitably fade. Access to the physical world would let us defend them. Or maybe even bring them here in body as well as spirit. Sure, we could carry on for a while with sleeping people instead of coma patients, but as it was explained to me, The Circus and our powers would become unstable and start to drift more easily.
“Composition wise I think we should send The Clown, The Knife thrower and The Magician. Jarqual must remain here as usual, I am useless outside of an office and The Freak is not mobile enough within The Dream. I take it everyone is in favor?”
There was a round of yeses.
“Perfect. You know this reminds me of the Shark incident from my youth, when we all…”
I was just about to cry from the inevitable digression when my favorite extradimensional horror saved all our asses.
“Yes. We are all aware of the shark incident. It was truly marvelous what you did there,” Dismissed Jarqual. The Fortune Teller nodded, there was even a small smile on his face. Was it really that easy? Just faking some interest?
It was apparently that easy, as The Fortune teller let The Knife Thrower have his turn.
“Ghhh,” moaned the man suspended above us. The Knife Thrower ignored him.
“The seven permanent dreamers are in generally good condition. Their recent pictures qqmedical records, now obtained by The Magician, were fairly comprehensive and show them to be in good enough health to stay in their respective comas with no complications. That being said, the families could still decide to pull the plug at any time, but there’s been no sign of that so far. The newest of them,” he pointed up, “is almost at the point where his image of the circus is fully stable, so we should be able to add an eighth dreamer in a few months. The number of occasional dreamers remains stagnant at about one a month.”
After I had learned, mostly from The Fortune Teller, some of the secrets of the dreamers that kept us all alive, I always paid special attention to The Knife Thrower’s report. The “permanent” dreamers were as important to me as food and water, the occasional dreamers on the other hand…
A few years ago, a movie starring killer clowns with a jester that oddly resembled Jarqual was released. It was so popular that there were still a few posters up. The public liked it, but it wasn't good for Jarqual.
The movie caused a severe spike in the number of occasional dreamers, tens of them per month. I had rewatched the movie after I had heard the story from The Fortune Teller, and Jarqual’s face looked eerily similar to that of the actor to this day. The Circus had apparently had less red backlighting before too, it was more so shrouded in night than in the perpetual twisting red mist that had been a characteristic of the place since the first time I’d arrived. Another feature picked up from the movie.
“GAAAAAAAAH!” screamed our newest dreamer from above the meeting room table. I guessed that meant it was my turn.
I was in charge of our “mortal assets.” Much like the Freak and Clown, I was mostly in charge of carrying out targeted violence, but my invisibility also made me invaluable as a spy.
“So far the kidnapping tactics have been successful. We have a whole warehouse of criminal syndicate members' families that we can use as leverage, but I think we should stop the operation soon and make use of the assets we already have. The more… superstitious of them have already started to suspect something supernatural could be going on. And the various police and investigative agencies whose files I’ve put on our server definitely know that data has been exfiltrated. That being said, nothing I found on their systems indicates that we’ve been compromised.”
“And the more significant agencies?”
“All have multi factor authentication as well as cameras in most rooms with computers in them that can access sensitive information. I’ve been following several of the higher ups to see if they would let something slip, but aside from isolated documents that they haven’t been careful with, I don’t have access to any sensitive records.”
“Unfortunate, but thank you for your hard work.”
Honestly. It was more tedious than hard at that point. No one was going to assume that a perfectly invisible man was peeking over their shoulders any time soon. That being said it couldn't hurt to switch up my MO every once in a while.
“If that’s all, then this meeting is adjourned.”
“No, there’s one last thing,” interrupted the Fortune Teller, “Magician, what of the threat that you cannot go into details about?”
“No news. Wilkins hasn’t been home at all since I last saw him.”
“Wait, who are we talking about?” Asked The Clown.
“Going into details would be useless,” replied Jarqual. “There is an ability preventing clear communication at play.”
The Clown made an unhappy face.
“I’ll stay out of it as long as it stays unimportant,” said The Clown, “but you can’t expect me to just drop it and accept not knowing anything. Especially if it turns out to be a major threat.”
“Agreed,” pitched in the Knife Thrower.
“Of course gentlemen, of course,” lied Jarqual. The Fortune Teller had explained the situation to
him, he knew it wouldn’t be that easy if it came to it.
And with that, the meeting was nearly over. Everyone rose from their seats and made to leave. Except The Freak. Their blobular form suddenly went liquid and sunk into the floor, flowing in between and underneath the floorboards. Freaky.
Jarqual stopped me on my way out of the tent. It was just the two of us.
“The Fortune Teller predicts that the passage of Zacharia to the physical world is essential for our continued survival. Without him, we die. A conditio sine qua non.” he said abruptly.
It wasn’t a pretty prediction. The necessity of Zacharia meant that the humans would need to be persuaded by force, and worse, that without the threat of him hanging over their heads they were actually capable of fighting back. It wasn’t pretty to think that my mother might live to see him deployed.
“That implies we will have to fight.”
“You have not yet grasped the severity of the situation. Combat is bad for The Circus, and especially for the two of us.”
“The two of us?”
“We are more alike than you imagine. When I was a fledgling dream born from the head of a dreamer I have almost forgotten, I saw the chaos that lies beyond the edges of dreams. Out there, there is no stability, dreams are born and die as they come. They tear into each other with vicious gusto hoping to cut out pieces of each other and use them to patch up the decay within their own beings. I was luckier than the others, the boy dreamed me again and again. I was so terrifying and vivid a dream that he was haunted by me for a lifetime, and that left me with fewer cracks than the others. But make no mistake, every day I spent there could very well have been my death bed. Decades past in which my very being flickered in and out of existence, in a state between life and death, and the more I tasted of life the more I began to fear death. Like the others, I killed to replace that which I lost each day, and when, after years and years, the boy fell into a coma. I was stable, but most of what had been me was lost, only whispers of it remained. I had died, and I was but the living tombstone of what had come before.
With time, I met the others, and came to accept this newfound form of existence. Sure, I was born from a Corpse, but what of it? I lived in peace while the corpse had lived in chaos. I would live and so too would what was left of the Corpse we would live peacefully and contentedly. And then the movie came. I had been changed for the first time in years. I was afraid. I still am. How foolish I had been, thinking that I was invulnerable when the mere creativity of some screenwriter could bring me to my knees. That was when I chose to take on the Fortune Teller, and you know how all of his prophecies end.”
My breathing got heavy. My knees were suddenly weak. Was it really inevitable?
“In death.”
“Your reaction is much as mine was. This is good. The others are not like you and I. They seek to live not for life itself, but for what they can get out of it. You are like me, obsessed with survival. Though you have not known my hardships, we are the same.”
“Why tell me now? Why imply that it’s hopeless.”
“There is plenty of hope left, prophecies are not certainties, and I intend to struggle to the very end. But there is one thing I want you to understand, by killing me, you would also be destroying the part of you that resides within me. The others would strike me down if convenient for any mortal purpose, but not you. Only in the most dire of circumstances would you raise a hand against a portion of your very being, no matter how meager. This is why I give you this blade.”
He held it out to me, the white handle clashing badly with his sleeves. I took it in my hand.
“I had withheld a portion of The Fortune Teller’s report,” he said, flicking the blade. Trails of blacklight followed the tip, interspersed with tiny red flashes. “The blade cuts the very dream we live in, whether in the physical world or here. It is most likely necessary to traverse the worlds. As a dream , it is extremely dangerous to me. I offer it to you, for now you have but two choices. Assure that this mission is a success and live with me, or fail, and die with me. I need no clairvoyance to know what you have decided.”