The Circus was normally bordered by a shimmering, multicolored expanse of solid chaos that made up most of the dream. At the moment, the shimmer had died down a bit and the view had resolved into a large field of toes. Windmills dotted the landscape at regular intervals, their fingernail-like blades spinning in the unseen wind. A weird, if passing, dream.
One of the windmills started to change, turning a slightly different hue. The color slowly got darker and darker and then swirls of other colors mixed until the windmill was no longer visible. The blot of color then started to blur and diffuse around the edges, spreading beyond what was once a sharp border. Always gaining speed and never slowing down. More and more of the landscape was contaminated. And the color came down like a tsunami, rolling down the distant hill, towards where I stood until it broke against an invisible wall, stopping five feet before my very eyes at the border of the Circus. It was always fun to watch.
Strange shapes popped out here and there within the wall of seemingly liquid color. Eyes, hands, brains, hearts, animals, plants. All these things and more floated up to the surface for a moment, before dissolving back into the greater mass. The wall of fluid was so high it was impossible to tell whether or not the ominous sky above the circus extended past them.
Frankly, I didn't dare step any closer.
“We can move through that, you know.”
The sudden words in my ear made me jump, landing ust shy of the edge.
The variegated veil split open, and a small semi-circle around me shaped to resemble my tent’s wooden flooring. But as soon as they appeared, the nominally straight boards started to bend as if severely water damaged. Uneven. Existence itself seemed to strain them.
Fucking Clown.
“We're dreams too, you know? We can impose our own selves over the chaos, though we aren’t as powerful as Jarqual.”
“Scaring me like that was a dick move, but I guess that’s good to know.”
He didn’t seem to care much at all about my admonitions—or my opinion.
“I wasn’t about to waste an opportunity to be funny. That’s the essence of being a clown, let alone the Clown. I’m just good at my job. Too bad if you can’t handle it.”
The edge of my mouth twitched into a grimace. It was an assholish thing to say, but I couldn’t say I’d expected better from him.
“It’s fine. I’ve learned not to expect any politeness on your part.”
The Clown smiled at me. With both corners of his mouth, no smirking.
“Give it a few hundred years and maybe I’ll think it will be funny to change. Humor is the violation of expectations. And at that point you might grow up a bit. Be worth being friends with.”
And if he had his makeup on hand I’m sure he’d color me surprised.
“I’d prefer to keep our relationship professional,” I commented, “but realistically I don’t think it’s possible to keep it like that for an eternity. It’s not how humans work, and I doubt it’s how whatever we are now works either.”
“There’s only so much change you can avoid when you’re human. Personally, I’m curious. What will I be like in a hundred years? Two hundred? Will I still want the same stuff? Or will I change things around. The novelty of tomorrow is something you have to appreciate if you want to be a sane immortal.”
Hearing the Clown express a sentiment that wasn’t complete garbage was a surprise in and of itself. I didn’t really see much positive in change though, I was pretty happy with myself as is.
“I think I’d prefer to stay more or less the same, except for a few superficial things.”
“Boring is as boring does. I’d tell you to suit yourself if you weren’t already dressed.”
Terrible puns aside, at least he could be civil about this.
“YO!” shouted The Knife Thrower, interrupting our surprisingly casual conversation.
“A fresh coat of blood on the old outfit, huh?” remarked The Clown
The Knife Thrower was covered in blood, from the Neck down. Every single part of him was painted over with a thick wallop of viscous red. Even the contours of his footsteps were scarlet..
“One of the dreamers was overdue for a little dose of pure terror. Had to handle it before I went on the trip. You know, to help extend our existence a little and all that claptrap. All ready to go?”
“Sure,” I said. The Clown nodded. The knife thrower shook himself like a dog, spraying blood all around. Blood didn’t stick much to us, so it worked, for the most part. The man often had bloodstains on him.
We made our way to the edge of the cliff we were standing on and descended down the thin, rocky edge. I could see the Circus from above. The strange proportions of the Circus looked more regular from such a vast distance — seemingly vast distance. The travel time between places in the dream never really lined up with what you would expect from just eyeballing the distance. Space was like that here.
The winding path eventually came to a halt in an opening in the sheer rock of the cliff-face, the mouth of a cave.
The opening was pitch black, and yet I could somehow still see shapes moving in the cave. Blacker than black smudges that danced as if projected on the empty darkness of the hole. The entrance itself was more of a rough triangle, rather than the more oval shape popular in maps.
It had creeped me out the first time I’d seen it. I’d been given a tour by the Fortune Teller. Sure, the decor was spooky but when you came in you could tell that the cave was just a cave. The only spooky things in there were the ones we’d put there in the first place.
The cave was the main access point to the tunnels. Unlike the walking giant that was Zacharia, most people weren’t capable of traversing the chaos between two stable dreams safely. That was why they had built tunnels. The tunnels stretched between the two domains of Jarqual and Djibrak with many other exploratory, but ultimately fruitless passages branching from both sides. They had been dug by the freak, and this far down they were mostly stable from the chaos above. This let them serve as the only reasonably safe path in the entire dreamlands.
“Did either of you bring any torches?”
“Fuck,” replied the Clown.
I simply waved my hand. Let there be light.
The inside of the cave was now as bright as the outside.
“Nice trick,” admired the Knife Thrower. The Clown only nodded and went in.
My powers were easier to work with here, within the dream. Things that weren’t acceptable on earth worked here. Maybe because I was actually a magician here there was less of a need to pretend? How well you fit a role definitely affected what you could do, but it wasn’t exactly a hard science yet, despite ongoing efforts.
The cave was annoying to walk in, but we made do regardless, even though there was plenty of stalagmite dodging involved.
Like in most caves, a lot of liquid dripped from the ceiling. A few buckets had been placed here and there to collect it. They were all almost full of the same liquid that the Freak had initially given me to help me get to The Circus. We kept a stock on hand to feed to the dreamers if it looked like they were going to wake up. Speaking of which…
A man was chained to the wall about half way down the cave. He was looking directly at us. Completely silent — totally out of it.
“One of ours?” I asked aloud
“I keep him here because he's afraid of the dark. Would you mind putting the light out around him?”
With a gesture of my hand the space around the man sunk into an inky blackness. Even darker than the cave had been before, so dark that it blotted out even one’s sense of touch. There was a lot of screaming.
“Nice touch,” complimented The Clown.
“Just don't mess with my dreamers when I'm not around.”
The screams got quieter as we rounded corners and crept through narrow spaces at an even pace. It was really remarkable how well several tons of rock could block out sound. My foot hit a puddle, and the wetness that crept over my shoe let me know that we'd gone all the way down.
The bottom of the cave was all one large, more or less oval chamber. There were two ways forward. First, there was an actual door right next to where we came from. It led into a storage room where we kept the bulk of items retrieved from people like Glenda. Many of them could be volatile in the right circumstances. Then, there was a literal hole in the far wall that led to the tunnels.
“You can’t reach very far, can you?” said the Clown. “I have the same problem down here.”
And he was right. While the rest of the cave was as bright as daylight the interior of the tunnel wasn’t illuminated for more than a few steps. After that there was a gradient of increasing darkness.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
“I’ll go get something for that,” and without further ado the Clown went into the storage room.
“You know, this totally proves my point,” commented the Knife Thrower.
“What point?”
“No one’s told you yet that all of this world is just the fantasy of humans? The dreamers and all the others?”
“More or less, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“You can illuminate the cave because my carefully cultivated little dreamers think that you’re all powerful, but in the chaos beyond, their opinions matter less. Opinions. This entire world runs on nothing but opinions and the rules on how to add them together. Doesn’t that terrify you, little dream?”
That was definitely something that I’d noticed from day one. It was next to impossible not to what with how blatantly — human run — the dream was, but the man was clearly trying to make some other point. The Knife Thrower liked to talk, so I guessed we would be playing this game until the Clown returned.
The Knife thrower had an ego a mile wide. So whatever he thought was important here was probably some sort of self-aggrandizing bullshit.
“So he who controls opinion, you, is the one with all the power? Is that what you were getting at?”
The Knife Thrower smiled.
“Flattering but no. I was just trying to highlight the pointlessness of existence, in general, and especially in a world governed by opinion of all things. There are plenty of opinions that I don’t care for and I resent living by, and yet here, they have actual weight. Most people are boring idiots, so our little reality by consensus is run by boring idiot gods, but even that could change. What do you think would happen, if there were no people to dream us at all? I think we’d vanish. Dissolve into the void. What does that make of the power and control that Jarqual seeks? One little, inevitable world-ending accident and we're down for the count.”
Frankly the man made a strong point. Everything he said seemed to fit the internal logic of this place. But how were we supposed to verify it? By killing everyone on earth? For immortals, such long term questions held a lot of importance, but what could we even do against something so undefined?
“Tch, I can tell from your face that you don't get it. Not enough despair,” commented the Knife Thrower. “So let me elaborate. Here, we are unquestionably governed by opinion, but our powers work on earth too. Doesn't that tell you something? As we are dreamt by the people of earth couldn’t they too be the senseless dream of another realm. And that realm? What if it too is a dream? One extra dream in an endless tower of dreams. and if any portion of the chain were to vanish. Poof. We’d be gone, like the pointless figments of someone's recursive imagination that we are. Doesn't that scare you?”
There was only one possible response to that question.
“No.”
Wild speculation was fun and all. But there were hundreds of thousands of other doomsday propositions with about as much evidence. Maybe life was all an illusion and I’ll eventually find out I'm in hell. Maybe the world spontaneously stops existing on June 6th 2666. There was too much unproven bullshit to be scared of out there to worry about. I think I’d table this unless more evidence popped up. Like a sane person. One out of the two, three if you count Jarqual, in this Circus.
The Knife Thrower wasn't happy with my answer. In fact, his face contracted into visible disgust. The guy had been trying to get a rise out of me I guessed. He opened his mouth to speak—
“Found it!” yelled the Clown, and the conversation ended then and there.
“Took you long enough,” responded The Knife Thrower.
In his hand the Clown held what appeared to be an oil lamp, but was no doubt some sort of magic item.
“It lights up the way and stabilizes the dream when you think polite thoughts. We got it off of an etiquette instructor that was exploring the dream. Fine craftsmanship, but totally useless to me.”
I couldn't help it, I laughed. Rudeness came easier than breathing to the guy and seeing him face any consequences at all for it was refreshing.
“I’ll do it then if Clown face isn't up for it,” said the Knife Thrower. The Clown looked towards me. I wasn't exactly jumping at the bit to be a pack mule, so I just nodded.
We descended into the tunnels below The Knife Thrower took point, he was the one carrying the lantern, followed by me and then the Clown, single file. It was dark, straight and mostly flat. And very very long. There wasn’t much else to do than talk. I opened my mouth to fill the silence.
“Anyone else wondering what it would be like to have two bodies on the same plane of existence?”
“If we ‘woke up’ while on earth, would our other forms dissolve as usual? If so, could we just manifest there in the first-place?” commented The Knife Thrower, clearly still trying to push his point from earlier, for whatever reason.
“Plebs,” interjected the Clown. “Watching yourself sleep gets boring fast, you unmanifest when you wake up and no, you can’t appear directly on earth. Seeing you dream about experiencing my everyday life is nourishment for my aristocratic soul.”
Of course, I already knew that he could teleport things between dimensions since he was very fond of showing off his “hammer space” After all, that’s how we managed to smuggle small items in and out of the dream. I wasn’t aware though that he could take his whole body with him, but it was perfectly in line with his powers. Teleportation was cool as heck.
“Tch, there’s no way to manifest that you know of;” riposted the Knife Thrower.
“Always harping on about all of life being a dream, bla bla bla, I’m the Knife Thrower and I think life is just a pointless figment of someone’s imagination for me to exercise my sadistic hedonism in bla bla bla.”
The lantern went out. I guess the Knife Thrower wasn’t feeling very polite.
Woosh—Thunk!
“You’re damned lucky I’m good at catching things. That would’ve split my skull in half otherwise.”
I couldn’t see anything, but I’d heard the sound of The Clown catching the knife.*
“If stabby over there doesn’t want the lantern, you can take it, Magician.”
The lantern found its way into my hand, but there was no light to be seen. Or to see with for that matter.
hhhhhh. Hhhhhh. Strange sounds came from the tunnel in front of us. Something gave a solid thud, as if it had hit the floor.
“Polite thoughts,” the Knife Thrower reminded tersely.
Thanks for the reminder. Still dark — I guess sarcasm wasn’t good enough. The Knife Thrower has very nice gloves? The tunnel was suddenly illuminated by the pale blue light of the lantern. We all cast long shadows, and the Knife Thrower's shadow fell over three tall shapes standing before us. It made it hard to see. They were furry, human shaped… things. Their hands ended in long claws instead of fingers, clashing with their perfectly normal, if furry, feet. They had tiny protrusions all around their mouths and… no eyes. Some kind of mole people?
Thunk.
A knife was in the air before I even had time to think. Dead in the head. One mole person fell and the other two scattered, clawing through the walls like a spoon through whipped cream. The Knife Thrower had the time to hit another one in the leg.
There was a moment of silence.
“Tch, ‘more stable’ my ass. Looks like we can still get the occasional dream down here.”
“Be thankful the tunnel isn’t turning into a magma vein. It’s stable enough,” replied the Knife Thrower.
Long Claws burst out of the wall and went for the lantern. They caught me just as I flinched away, leaving long gashes in my arm. They hurt, but I wasn’t about to drop our only light source over a flesh wound. A sledgehammer came down on their exposed arm, turning the middle into such fine paste that the arm was completely severed. The echo of the hit resonated all throughout the narrow hallway.
The lantern flickered—
Good job Clown. You were great out there.
—and went back to full strength.
“Focus on keeping the light going, we’d be sitting ducks in the dark,” warned the Clown sledgehammer at the ready. I had my back sprout three extra sets of illusory arms each holding their own lantern. It was the best I could do here.
The pulped stump still stuck in the wall spurted some blood on me, staining my black clothes red. The spurt soon turned to a trickle. I’d imagine the thing had bled out, but there was really no way to be sure. What was left of the arm sticking out of the wall certainly wasn’t moving.
The third mole-creature’s arm shot out from the wall next to me, faster than its friend’s. It swiped through one of the illusory lanterns before a knife grazed its arm just as it was pulling back into the wall. How the fuck did these thing even know where the light was coming from without eyes?
It was dead silent for a while after that. Nobody moved. The fucking thing could take all the time it needed in the safety of the walls. That was when the body of the moleman that the Knife Thrower had killed was pulled into the bottom of the tunnel. Though loud at first, the sound of digging slowly faded. The thing might have made a run for it.
“It left,” commented the Clown. “Probably.”
“I guess it settled for eating what was left of its friend there,” I said, thinking of what Jarqual had told me about the cannibalistic tendencies of unstable dreams. I didn’t blame the thing, it was a matter of life and death.
“I suggest we hurry up and get out of here. This is the first time we’ve encountered dreams so far down, for all we know ‘return of the molemen’ could be debuting in theaters. There could be twenty more where that came from.”
That was an excellent point, I thought and the lantern shined a little brighter.
We advanced at a quick but cautious pace. No one talked, too busy watching the walls. By my estimate it had taken us about two hours to reach our destination.
The tunnel came to an abrupt stop, and there was only a stepladder leading up to a hatch. We climbed out one by one and came out near the edge of a truly magnificent dream.
The landscape was grassy green hills as far as the eye could see under what was a shockingly blue sky. The Circus never saw daylight. And even if it did, it would do nothing to alleviate the feeling of claustrophobia generated by the cliffs that surrounded the Circus. It even smelled better here. Like grass after the rain.
The day was nearly cloudless, only one, distant hill had a touch of shadow on it. The particular cloud that cast that shadow stood out. It stood out because there was an enormous castle on top of it — floating in the goddamn sky. The castle had walls that seemed to be made entirely of back to back towers, towers that almost seemed to be competing in terms of height, but still somehow overshadowed by the behemoth of a keep within the walls, twice as tall as the outer wall.
A keep from which a distant blur was rapidly coming towards us. Flying down to greet us.