Page 4 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)
Six
Visha — Blood and Bone
They brought the offender to me just after midnight.
He was dragged through the back of The Carnival like a sack of spoiled meat, arms bound in velvet rope, mouth gagged with a monogrammed handkerchief still stained with lipstick that wasn’t his wife’s.
He thought that nobody would see what he did behind the Hall of Mirrors that were hidden among illusions and shifting glass.
He thought he was invincible, but The Carnival sees everything.
They all do, eventually. I don’t bother to perform for this one, no lights, no music, no applause.
This is not theater, this is a correction.
The tent is silent except for his breathing, which is wet, erratic.
His eyes bulge behind the mask that I’ve granted him; red velvet sewn to his face, stitched with thread soaked in rosewater and rust. I hear him whimper when I approach, no fear, just entitlement.
They always believe they deserve to be spared for their sins. I kneel before him and whisper.
“Tell me what she said when you grabbed her.” I chuckle as he tries to speak through the gag, so I decide to remove it, carefully. Almost reverently.
“She screamed, sure.” He gasps, “But it’s just a show, right? That’s what you want, isn’t it? A reaction?” he stutters.
This sack of meat thinks we are the same, he thinks I’m here for the drama. How sweet. How completely fucking wrong. I make a single incision down his sternum, not deep, yet it was enough as he begins to thrash around.
“She was sixteen.” I say laced with venom dripping off each word.
“And you followed her into the dark like a man who clearly has done it before.” he begins sobbing and I smirk.
“Please, I thought…” he chokes out and I cut him off mid-sentence.
“You thought you could vanish into the fog before I found you.” I dip my fingers into the opening I made and press down ever so slowly, and he screams so beautifully.
No audience, no ghosts humming, only the sound of consequence.
I watch as life fades away as I drink in his soul.
Once it’s done I lay his body gently on the ground; I don’t bother wiping the blood from my hands.
Instead, I place them flat against the tent floor, and The Carnival drinks it like fine wine.
In the corner I hear the bone-chimes tremble, and then I feel it again.
Him. The anomaly, he has yet to step inside my tent, but I feel the shadow of his thoughts.
He just sits outside, as if waiting for something, as if he’s afraid to come close, that if he does there is no going back.
I stand and my reflection in the silver basin is off-center, tilted slightly like somebody’s watching me through the glass.
I see the roses in the corner have bloomed again, too soon, too red.
They are feeding off something that I’m not feeling, a hunger that isn’t mine, and it circles back to him.
“Who is he?” I whisper to The Carnival, I feel the wind shift, the lights buzz, the shadows ripple, yet no answer comes.
That is the part that unsettles me, The Carnival always answers…
except now. After the blood seeps into the dirt, after the silence swallows the last gasp, I sit alone in the shadowed corner of the tent, the roses pulse faintly.
Their petals trembling like a living heartbeat, and then a whisper.
So soft it could have been the wind, or the breath of a ghost.
“He’s here.”
The name is unspoken, but The Carnival knows.
I close my eyes and a memory fractures through the veil of time, a flicker of dark silk and shadowed eyes.
At that moment, I saw him. Not the broken man who stumbles through my world now, but the one he used to be, or who he might become.
He stands at the edge of the stage, lost in the flickering lights.
Our eyes meet across the chasm of silence.
He doesn’t speak, I don’t move. However the world tilts, the roses bloom out of season and The Carnival shudders.
I open my eyes, the silence is heavier now.
He has yet to come forward, but the game has now begun, and I will not be the one to lose.