“This music hurts my heads,” the knife-riddled monster groused.
“I know,” Signet said, “we go over this every time.” She stepped forward and turned a dial on the machine. It wheezed once and the music stopped, plunging the night into silence. She lovingly stroked the fire-scorched wood.
Signet then pointed up at the giant sea serpent, which floated in the sky above the brightly-lit tent. The circus’s spotlights remained lit, and they arced back and forth, adding to the surreal vision. The behemoth was almost as large as the center big top. The tattoo monster folded back on itself and then fired a blue waterspout. I cringed in anticipation, but the water dissipated before it could touch the colorful top. The world around me filled with a fine mist, and I suddenly found myself soaked.
Signet hung her head low. “Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn, damn. I’d hoped, with the power of Heather’s blood that we could overcome the protection this time.”
“Why didn’t that work?” I asked. In the distance, something howled in the night.
“This is where our fight usually ends,” Signet said, indicating the tent. “There is magic here, protecting the exterior. Ancient magic. I have been banished, so I can’t go inside. My minions can’t go inside. The outside is impenetrable, but not the interior. If we break down the tents, the spell will disperse, and we can finish this.” She pointed at the piles of dead bodies. “Some of these clowns will carry big top tickets. Find one and brandish it. It will allow you to go inside. The tickets are magical. They will promise you safe passage within the tent as long as you don’t enter one of the three rings. You need to go in there and collapse the tent. There are three poles. You must break each one in turn.”
I looked at the tent dubiously. “I take it these three poles are in the middle of the rings?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“What about the vine thing?” I asked.
“Also in the ring. The center ring.”
This setup was designed to be completed by a group of at least three crawlers, not a solo player. There was no feasible way I could do this. Not with a straight-up fight.
I pulled one of the tickets I already had from my inventory. I’d already examined it, but I looked at it again.
Big Top Ticket.
Lucky you! This ticket admits one adult into the Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus Big Top Show.
The holder of this ticket is guaranteed Safe Passage through the public areas only. Grimaldi reserves the right to rescind this safe passage guarantee to drunks and purveyors of violence.
Guaranteed good time or your money back!
Something told me I wasn’t going to be having a good time.
10
I held the circus ticket tightly in my hand as I approached the main entrance. This close to the big top tent, I could see the effects of time on the fabric and the rest of the circus. The red carpet below my feet was threadbare and stained with blood. The tent sidewalls were also stained and filled with tiny holes. Another few years, and Signet wouldn’t need a magical army to knock this place down.
“You must hurry,” Signet said. “We only have thirty minutes before the battle squad fades.”
“If I die, you need to promise to let Donut free,” I said.
“It will be done,” she said.
The entranceway was shaped like a giant clown face, and I had to walk straight into the clown’s mouth. Time had faded the clown’s pupils, making the eyes completely white. I hate clowns, I thought. I really hate clowns. Whoever invented these things needs to be punched in the face.
I had to proceed through a short, curving tunnel. Music once again rose, coming from deep within the tent. This song was faster and happier, more in the style of traditional circus music. My minimap was a sea of red dots, including one right around the corner. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, I kept thinking as I inched my way forward. I held the ticket out in front of me.
I turned the corner, and I stood face-to-face with one of the round clowns. The thing was shorter than me, but almost three times as wide. He wore a brightly colored, but filthy pink and blue gown with a dirty white ruffle around his neck. The gown cascaded over his lumpy, misshapen body. Unlike the stilt clowns, which only had shark-like mouths, this thing had a much more human face, but with pointed teeth. The white, red, and blue grease paint seemed overly thick, like the frosting on a cake. The clown’s stomach made a rumbling noise, and his entire belly shifted, like his flesh was alive.
The stilt clowns were armed with butcher knives. These guys just had long, yellowed fingernails, like the claws of a badger.
Clammy the Clown – Level 9
With a face not even a mother could love, the circus was the perfect escape for the young, portly boy who would grow to become Clammy the Clown. An expert at tumbling and with a solid work ethic, Clammy was a perfect addition to Grimaldi’s family.
Kids always love the fat clowns. They’re jolly. They’re happy. They make you laugh. The resurrected Clammy clones still exhibit all of these qualities. Except, perhaps, the making you laugh part. They sure are happy and jolly when they’re eating you, though.
The clown hissed at me, but I held up the ticket, brandishing it like a shield. The enormously fat clown leaned in and sniffed the ticket, like I was holding a treat up to a dog. He hissed again, blasting me with the stench of raw meat. But he stepped aside and allowed me to pass.
And thus I entered the main arena of Grimaldi’s big top.
As a kid, one of my earliest memories was going to the circus with my mom on my fourth birthday. She’d temporarily left my dad and run away to her parent’s’ house all the way down in the middle-of-nowhere southern Texas, dragging me along.
It was during that time she’d taken me to the circus. It hadn’t been one of the major traveling circuses, like Ringling Brothers, but a small, ghetto one. Anyone who has ever lived in the American southwest knows exactly what I’m talking about. Even little kid me had registered that this was a low-rent version of the real deal.
They’d had clowns and acrobats, plus a bunch of other weird attractions, like guys on motorcycles riding around the inside of a sphere and women juggling chainsaws. They’d also had animals. I remembered camels and dancing poodles, and a clown who walked around with a small monkey on his shoulder. They hadn’t elephants or giraffes, but the main attraction had been a crusty old tiger who’d sat in the middle of the ring while a woman in a leotard twirled fire sticks around it.
Most of these memories came back to me, years later, from photos. I’d found the shoebox with those pictures more than a decade later, hidden under my parents’ bed. This was after another birthday of mine, the one when I was left alone in the world. The box had been my mother’s. Her secret, filled to the brim with photographs and ticket stubs and a deflated balloon. The items were only of that time, the few weeks of our lives when she’d run away.
But of all my patchy, incomplete recollections of the circus, there was one characteristic of that day I will never forget.
The smell.
It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was the scent of peanuts and cotton candy and roasting corn and hay and animal musk and cheap, plastic toys all rolled into one. But it was more than that. My four-year-old mind couldn’t possibly register it at the time, but it was the scent of happiness, of joy, of being a kid, of not being afraid. Over the years I’d catch similar scents in places such as the county fair, or carnivals, or whenever I visited a place with livestock. But this was a different, oddly specific aroma that had been indelibly imprinted on me as a four-year-old, a scent I’d sometimes remember as the path I could’ve taken, the world I could’ve lived had my dad not found us and taken us back. It was a scent I’d been chasing all of my adult life.