Page 2 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Four

Visha — The Curtain Never Falls

The curtain parts like a wound splitting open, the smoke curls from the floor, thick and sweet with rot.

My heels click against the stage, blades disguised as ballet slippers, sharpened from months of rage.

A soft murmur of hush sounds roll through the crowd.

They never know if this is theater or a warning.

That’s the fun of what I have made. Blood is beautiful when it lands on silk.

I glide across the stage, with weapons laced into my pointe shoes, each step a whisper of metal against the wood.

The music swells around me, not from a speaker but from the mouths of the damned.

They hum like little cicadas; discordant, and hungry, my little audience, my ghosts.

They never leave, they can’t. They are mine to keep.

A man begins to scream from the front row, yet he is not part of the act.

He stumbled towards the stage, sweat slicking his brow, drunk on whatever nightmare drug we laced into his ticket.

The crowd thinks it’s all an illusion, that I am simply a magician, a trickster, a dancer who has the utmost perfect balance and sharp blades.

My balance is my rage, and my blades are real.

He rushes towards the stage, frothing at the mouth over his wife.

How she disrespected him and how nobody puts the baby in a cage.

He must think this is a show where he is the star now. How cute this little idiot is.

I leap into a jeté and into a death spin, my heel catching the beautiful arc of his throat mid-sentence; it slices open with a hiss.

He begins to gurgle, stumbling as he stares at me like I’m a god, or a monster.

It’s the same thing in my eyes. As he drops to his knees, blood blooming beneath him like a rose; dark, petaled and perfect.

Applause erupts almost thunderously from the crowd.

Eternal love, and I bow as The Carnival feeds.

Later that evening I wash in a basin filled with wine and salt.

It does scald the skin, and that’s the point.

I must stay clean, even if nothing in me is.

The tent smells like my childhood, dusty, silk, perfume that I haven’t worn since before I had my name carved into the bone.

I ignore the scent, yet something else is gnawing at me.

A presence, something new. Not a predator, or even prey, something… watching me. Someone…

I turn sharply to catch whatever might be there, yet nobody is.

Only the tent flaps rustling, but I feel him.

I think The Carnival does too. It reacts to his presence, the lights begin to flicker, the bone-chimes hiss.

The roses that I brought in from the stage have begun to bloom again.

I plucked them all last night, one by one, they should not be blooming.

They only ever bloom when I feel something, and I don’t feel anything anymore.

I simply can’t. That was the deal I made, wasn’t it?

I snap the rose in my hand, thorns piercing my palm, the petals are wet with blood that isn’t mine. He is here, and The Carnival knows it.