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The night-lit town beckoned Rusty Everett down its streets and alleyways – the streets were hushed but blinking with light, and when he leapt once again into Dimension EV4920’s version of himself, he could see them outside his little shabby apartment’s window. The apartment was withered and unkempt, and the clothes he’d hung in on his outside windowsill flapped in the late-autumn wind.
The toilet bowl faced a small, chipped-porcelain sink and a tarnish-edged mirror hanging on the wall behind it. In the mirror Rusty could see the bedpost, the pale-blue wall behind it with its ugly patches where the water leaked in and the wallpaper had begun to peel. The only spot of meager color in the room hung above that bedpost: a diploma marking Eric D. Everett’s graduation from Brandon Medical School, and a red-cross medical certificate for the five years he’d worked in medical residency.
He grabbed a coat from the hook by the front door, and left with the apartment’s key fitted nearly in his pocket. The streets of Chester’s Mill – darker, blunter, the houses morphed into flat-looking little dirty-brick buildings boarded up with wooden planks – met him at the door with a gust of howling wind.
Rusty followed the road-signs, at first, but gave up when he recognized none of them. The number of passers-by on the streets was sparse, and most of them hurried by with their heads down, faces obscured by hoods or scarves. The sidewalk was blunt and dull, dark in its old pebbled paths, and the gutters ran with filth and scattered bits of white. He turned his collar up to avoid being recognized, though he didn’t think it was likely. Around the corner of the sign-post that said Barrymore Lane, a beggar whom he did not recognize sat on the stone steps playing on the guitar, and singing.
He’d planned merely for a walk around the neighborhood, but in his sudden curiosity, he continued ahead. That was until he saw the tents, sprawled out in the distance. They were glowing. In fact, blinking on the road, they were the brightest things he’d seen in town tonight, like big goblets or lanterns.
The tents were striped, bright crimson and white shining with a coating of gold, reminding him of the polka-dot hairbands Jannie had worn for years and refused to take off. Because they’re pretty, Daddy, she said, with insistent wide eyes, but back then she was four and had a slight lisp, and she’d said purty.
So purrrty.
He began to walk, onto the grass, where footsteps of trainers and combat-boots had churned out a muddy pathway.
Near the entrance, there were brief silhouettes creeping into the tent through a flap. A young man stood before it, on the side of the path. He looked ill-tempered and wore a checkered-red jacket made of thin fabric and a shirt beneath. Thin, for a cold night.
“Mister? Mister! Hey!”
Rusty hadn’t quite realized he was doing so until he was there. In fact, he hadn’t quite realized what he was doing at all until he felt his own footsteps on the grassy path, and squelch quietly in the patches of mud.
Right before him was the biggest tent, which stood tall and pointed and impatient, the pattern of red and white were like long strips of icing lathered across a stout, radiant cake. Light seeped through the striped fabric as if through thin lantern paper, tinting the grass and the faces that surrounded in its rosy-gold glow.
As if from a distance, he heard his own voice.
“How much?”
“Ten,” the boy said. “Same as every night.”
For one moment disappointment – rueful disappointment – danced around Rusty’s heart. But thrusting his fingers through his pockets, he’d discovered that he had a couple of coins clinking in his pockets. Old, gold-tinted coins that seemed somewhat old-fashioned, embedded with George Washington’s patient wise visage. He counted them on his palm, slowly, feeling lightheaded, feeling half-breathless with sudden amusement.
Because why on earth was he doing this?
Transfixed, he thought, that was the word.
He felt transfixed.
He handed the money out. The boy at the door took it and jammed it, tinkling, into his pouch.
“Show’s already on,” he said. “Halfway through.”
The interlude came in a sudden whinnying of horses, and some of the men inside grumbled, murmurs of gruff voice echoing through the tarp. The whinnying sent a shiver right down Rusty’s back. He heard the sound of laughter and jostling murmurs from not so far away. He heard music, too: a blaring rag-time tune sang away, pipes and strings and piano keys in its sound.
“Which door?” he asked. Took a step back. Nearly bumped right into the sulky young man in the checkered shirt.
“Second,” the kid said, with a boyish scowl beneath sooty eyelashes. “The one with a flap on it. Blue one. You slip in and grab a seat, buddy. You never been here before?”
The same shiver was back in Rusty’s veins, tingling… like a bell. Its tingle ran far and wild in the slow, easy pounds of his heart.
The entrance was no more than a sheet, held down by three strips of black tape, ribbons fluttering in the wind. He looked back over his shoulder, as the young man huffed and motioned for him to duck. Rusty raised one hand to lift the line of tape above him and ducked as the rough blue tarp grazed his cheek.
Inside, the world was an explosion.
Bright, dazzling-white lights shone down from the ceiling, and the pit was lit up in its glare, like the sun.
The colors jumped out like flashes of a blinking camera: there were red stripes everywhere on pale canvas, and the very air itself was spiked with dust: sawdust and floating sand-particles, fluttering golden beneath the stage-lights. The world in here smelled like stale sweat and canvas and face-paint, like strong caramel and peanuts and cheap beer, and the music hit him like a roar of heat. The music engulfed him with its drum-beat hammering, and they set his eardrums pounding, giddy, as if the ground beneath him throbbed with its earthquake.
The girl dressed in skin-tight red, right in the middle of the arena, turned a somersault and landed back onto her feet. The two other masked acrobats surrounding her repeated the movement. They winded their bodies together, in a triangle of curving arms and iron-clad backs, and the girl’s short hair fluttered as she winded her legs around her companion’s neck and dangled head-down, swinging, like a child on a monkey-bar, before coiling herself around his neck once more, hypnotic as a snake.
The mesmerizing golden warmth engulfed him like a lion’s roar. The world in here was on fire.
He was standing on a flight of wooden steps, and the spherical audience surrounding the pit reminded him of a Greek amphitheater. There was a single, darkened pathway that led from the pit and out to the open backstage area, for the performers, and all around the pit with its sandy patch was adorned with a thickly painted circumference of wine-red dye.
Rusty stumbled a step and lurched into one of the benches, earning a half-tipsy frown from a dark-lipped young woman who sat leaning against a boy’s shoulder with a bottle of booze in one hand.
Most of the front rows were empty, where he made his way down the steps and sat down on a half-rickety bench closest to the arena.
The tent was larger than he’d thought, the ceiling higher, where metal-hoops and trapezes hung in the air, graceful and eerily immobile in their wooden swings and coils of rope. He saw the bright blinding beams of light pouring down from hulky black projectors at the ceiling – saw how the top of the tent dipped and sloped into a cone-shaped steeple – and the big fat ribbons and cloths that dangled from the top.
Behind them fire exploded again, shooting up from beamers and from a flaming torch held in a masked man’s hand.
The piano was wild, and the saxophone whooped like a dying elephant.
Rusty tilted his face up, and the light showered down on his face, where a suspending, wire-thin tightrope drew briefly blotted his vision.
Behind him, the acrobats swiveled gently to the beat, bent backwards into arching bridges, rolled into slow somersaults and cartwheels, and piled themselves onto each other with undulating limbs into a contorted human pyramid.
Then the acrobats parted, like a skeleton crumbling apart, to reveal a man standing in the middle of the pit – as if he’d risen up from the floor.
The man had dark hair peaking out from his top hat, and wore a bright-red checkered matching costume, like a court jester. Rusty’s heart heaved into his throat, and the music faded in the sudden, rushing roar in his ears. In that moment there was nothing but darkness, except for the single spotlight onstage. The single spotlight onstage was Twitch.
Dougie Twitchell widened his eyes – those impish, gleaming dark eyes – and began to sing. His voice carried easily, loud and clear. When Rusty came back to himself he realized that the music really had receded, to nothing but a few softly-tinkling notes. A few notes accompanying the good-looking clown’s voice.
“Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane,” his voice sang.
“I can see the red taillights heading for Spa-ain…”
The masked man behind him blew out a puff of fiery smoke from his open mouth, framing Twitch’s face briefly in a disintegrating orb of vapor.
The gangly silhouette who looked so much like Dougie Twitchell threw one ball into the air. A red one. It soared above his head, round and bright as an apple, then came plummeting down again.
Another one. Blue, this time. Then the third. Then the fourth. He wore a bag on his hip, and with each passing second he tossed the balled-up flashes of color, and every time he caught them and tossed again. Faster, faster. A blur of red and blue and orange and purple, like turning the spokes of a wheel.
“Daniel says it’s the best place he’s eee-ver seen…”
He revolved, meeting the eyes of every audience member in turn, as he picked up speed. All the way he sang about Daniel, who was travelling tonight on a plane. The piano joined in halfway, and the guitars a beat later, in its cool, melancholic little electric tune. Sweet, ringing, wistful.
“Lord I miss Daniel…” A little grin. “Oh I miss him so much…”
He looked easy. He looked like a tall, figurine harlequin in the circus lights. He looked relaxed, and Rusty knew that look so well – Twitch with his snarky sense of humor, his lazy shamble, his streak of calmness in a hospital emergency and his boyish kind of good-natured naivety. He could remember the last time he saw Twitch doing this, too. Exactly this. It was three years ago, at Town Christmas Talent Competition… Twitch had worn a red Santa’s hat because Rose’d dared him to, and crooned along to “Moon River” while juggling half a dozen Indian clubs. He’d won first prize, beating Joe McClatchey’s Napoleon Dynamite dance. (Probably because Andrea was one of the judges, but don’t tell anyone we said that.)
Grappling the colorful plastic orbs, Twitch worked his way up to a giddy full dozen. And though Twitch could carry a tune, that much for sure, the sound of his mostly even-pitched tenor ringing across the tent was a marvel.
Because what was this? What world was this? What kind of world had he stumbled into?
“Daniel you’re a sta-ar… in the face of the sky…”
Twitch closed his eyes. He was smiling.
Oh God it looks like Daniel… must be the clouds in my eyes.
The young acrobat took a few cat-like steps forward. She put her hands on Twitch’s shoulders and heaved herself up, her legs leaping apart, slowly and languidly as if under water, as she pounced, her back arched and her arms standing up on his shoulders like iron-rods. She balanced mid-air, her legs outstretched over his head like a pair of slender red antlers, while Twitch continued his juggling, a blur of blue and purple and orange flashes. Vaguely, he heard some in the audience whoop, while others were silent, as if they had seen it. As if they had seen it all before.
Her legs swung like scissor-blades as she leapt over Twitch’s head in a heave of her arms, narrowly missing the ring of juggled plastic balls, and landed right in front of him.
The juggler slowed down, and one by one, caught every single one of the plastic balls.
The acrobat took another few steps, and held up one fisted hand. She opened it, and showed that there was the flicker of a matchstick laying on her palm.
Her eyes met Rusty Everett’s mesmerized gaze.
She lit the match, and blew it out, and the whole tent plunged into darkness.
*
The band was still bubbling the ending bars of Elton John’s “Daniel”, when the tent fell dark, and slowly they descended into silence. It was so silent, in fact, that Rusty heard the slither of shoes across the sand, and the whispers of cloth in a rustling panic.
The single spot of an orange flame emerged through the dark, like a kiss.
Drunken mutters and murmurs passed through the audience like a wave, as the darkness continued. In the darkness and the big top that smelled of canvas and sawdust, of a spine-tingling illusion of tarnished magic, the crowd sat and jostled among each other.
Then the music started up again. Building, building, the drumroll beginning crawl up like a giant’s rumble. The piano went from its soft moans to a half-mad, ragtime tune, a chromatic scale building up to its crescendo.
When the lights burst into existence again, Rusty Everett was already lost.
The acrobats gyrated and spun around the pit. The fire-breather, now elevated on the bare back of a sleek, brown horse, turned his flaming torch towards the sky; he had taken off his mask, revealing a face marked with intricate patterns of black paint.
The world was on fire with color, as the audience breathed, and oohed, and aahed.
Horses whinnied. One of them – a grey, bright-eyed stallion – broke into a trot and leapt over the wooden hurdle in the middle of the stage, before retreating into the shadow. The fire-breather took the flame briefly away from his mouth, and sang an eerily low note, and the whinnying horses fell still.
Rising in the middle of the room, dressed in a lavish crimson overcoat, there was another masked man. His hair was parted into a wild crown at his head, and his sleeved mended with golden threads and large, jangling buttons. Small dark beads glittered through the holes of his eyes, and he lifted the tip of his red top-hat with a lazy hand, in a gesture of salute. The ringmaster, Eric Everett thought. He held a large cane in one hand, raised like a whip.
Then, with one hand, the ringmaster took off his mask, but his face was lost in the blur of the crowd.
Lying down to the side of the pit, there was a woman with dark ginger-red hair. Her mouth was drawn into a thin, forbidding line, and her eyes dark and blank as granite. She was toying with a pocketknife in one hand, and a minute later she got up onto her knees and slammed her hand down onto the grid drawn on the sand. The blade of knife came down, and down, and down, between each of her fingers. Five times backwards and forwards, and faster each time, the silver glinting tip of blade hitting the sand with a dull thud, striking between her parted fingers with a shrill frenzy, like flying, like a running tiger.
Then, in one clean stroke, she raised her face towards the audience, and hurled the pocketknife blind over her shoulder. The three acrobats behind her ducked, falling backwards with their backs arched, as the knife struck the target-board behind her, at exactly its red-heart center.
The dancers jumped, and leapt, and hopped in precise routine, and up in the air, there were silhouettes of the trapeze artists.
The lights were spinning, slowly, almost drunkenly, a colorful filter turning their white beams into shades of shimmering blue or golden-yellow. When he squinted and looked up, Rusty thought he could see a small figure climbing perilously but nimbly up in the metal railings to the suspending spotlights, like a monkey, blurring the beams of light with a hand-held plastic filter.
He saw the trapeze artists, too. Figures with long hair nestled inside a dangling metal hoop, muscled arms bracing the wooden bar, fingers coiling over a harness.
It was then that time begin to slow, for Rusty Everett. Time began to slow and the world began to spin, slowly, so inexorably, beckoning him forward.
There were about three of trapeze artists, but there was one woman who stood out in the air, poised on the trapeze right ahead of him – just sitting with one leg coiled over the wooden trapeze, her hands braced by her side. As far as he could see, she wore no harness.
She was not looking at the audience but down, at the swirling heads and top hats in the circus arena. Her hair was long, set on fire in the overhead lights, the young pale impassionate face lit up like the moon on a starless night, long eyelashes catching in the gold and drawing across her cheeks when she blinked. She wore a thin, pink-fabric gear fitted her tightly, top to bottom, like a ballet dancer, and through the clothing her arms were thin but powerful, her limbs flexible and undulating in their carefully controlled grace, like water.
She hooked her leg tighter over the bar, and let go.
She fell backwards, and there was a moment where nothing was. A moment of free-fall, of silence in the pounds and thuds and music, when the lights hit her hair and her bare neck, casting her silhouette across the floor. She opened her eyes – dark eyes, the faintest tinge of hazel-green, he didn’t need to be close to them to know – and their eyes met, across the din, across the dancing chaos of the pit.
Her eyes were sad, resigned, the twist of her lips coy and unreadable.
The trapeze artist was Linda.