by C M Muller
He turned the bottle over. A single purple gem winked from its cracked lip and dotted the wormy board at his foot. He chuckled grimly. “Water, water, everywhere…”
The bottle slipped from Father’s hand to the floor. The smoked glass spun on its edge and fell, tumbled over and over across the thrumming boards in the faint glow of the kerosene lamp, a steady beat rumbling in my chest like the approach of summer thunder.
One of the painted tears on Father’s face came to life and cut a gray trail down his cheek. “That is what it is to be clown,” he whispered.
Mother laughed and crushed the spider in her hand.
The bottle has never stopped moving. It is still rolling towards me, beating its snare, rising to its crescendo. Waiting for me to fall.
But Father was wrong. I know that now.
He has to be wrong.
His name is Boggs but he doesn’t know it. “Boggs” is the name I have given him. We have never spoken. He appears to be around ten years old.
Boggs is the filthiest person I’ve encountered in the cratered streets of the old city. He wears his coat of grime proudly, like a family crest, and yet the child underneath it all is beautiful, a little prince dug up from years of enchanted slumber in the peat bogs of a land that still believes in fairy tales.
And so: Boggs.
It was the morning after a performance that I first noticed him following me. He had cleared away two round spots of caked dirt from his eyes and one from across his mouth to replicate a pale grin. The skin beneath shone white, clown color. The red handkerchief that covered his unwashed head would snap in the air anytime he raced to a hiding place when he thought that I might be looking, which was often. The game grew into ritual and after awhile I stopped reaching for the moplah hidden in the folds of my coat. There were always worse shadows to have.
I never see Boggs during the performances but I know he is there all the same, hanging from half-rotted beams like a limber alley cat, far away from the darkness whispering sweetness to him below, watching me watch for him.
During the day when the streets are free of Fever Men, I journey into the city to forage for food and stage crafts. Sometimes I can spot Boggs trying to grab his shadow and stretch it across a brick wall when he thinks that I’m not looking. Once I watched him from a hotel balcony as he danced and tumbled down a rancid alleyway so filled with polished bones that it resembled the gleaming horde of a cannibal emperor. Boggs laughed and laughed to himself the entire time.
His path is clear.
When I sleep, I dream, and when I dream, I remember how the end began.
It begins with the maestro dangling me high above the roaring earth from puppet strings sewn through my flesh. The quenching Fire breathes new red life into the world below even as it devours it. Monoliths tear their way into heaven with charred, broken fingers; floating tatters of skin crinkle and evaporate like a rain of shimmering confetti; steel streets quake with the death-rattles of a generation.
I watch as doctors and terrorists and newly-anointed mothers march through the ceremonial blaze hand-in-hand as if in mutual understanding, as if shackled to each other by their own guilt.
As if all of this is their fault. And perhaps it is.
Their screams are never as loud as the flames. They register only as a soft hum trilling through the veinwork of my strings: distant; faceless; always inside of me.
I look up to the maestro and ask: Why this? Why me?
He never answers, just glares down from on high with his flickering glass eyes, the golden tombstones of his mouth spread wide. All I can hear is the muttered creaking of the strings.
A scorching wind stirs and sweeps across the faces of the crooked things that are rising up from the settled dust. They clench their claws experimentally, tasting the electric air, shedding embers from their barren skulls like a crumbling afterbirth. Together they stand regarding the blasted remnants of our faith with ash-flaked eyes.
Boggs is in the center of their ring, waving his red handkerchief to me, his soft hair buffeted by the wind. I go to move but the strings hold me like a web, send violin shrieks of pain through my blood. I struggle wildly, blinded by grinding marrow and cartilage, broken prayers bleeding from my mouth.
Why him?
The maestro is silent. I reach down and shout my prince’s name across the end of the world.
Boggs doesn’t hear me, only stares up with the pale skin of his smile. The handkerchief is caught in a current of wind and spins up towards my outstretched hand. I make a grab for it but at the last second the cloth dances from my reach. The crooked things start to close around Boggs like the eye of a hangman’s rope. As the circle tightens, the fiery priests turn their patient gaze upon me.
My strings hum with the sound of their laughter.
A furnace blast of night air blows through a vent in the theater’s wall, snuffing out my dreams. I rise on cold, tingling legs, check the reinforced door of my shuttered annex at the back of the theater for signs of intrusion. The latches and padlocks are undisturbed, but sleep will be irretrievable now.
I gaze across the landscape of old circus posters that cover the walls, the paper as crinkled and browned as the leaves that fill my casket-bed, the child-wonders and Continental mystics and hardy daredevils all posing and preening with the fierce desperation of the dying and the forgotten.
Tonight will be a night for walking, a night for reminding. The moplah disappears within Father’s coat and I am out in the city’s veins once more.
Up above, pregnant thunderheads rumble with promise for the fresh bounty of acid rain they will deliver to the scarred dogs lapping at the overturned fire hydrant. Solid clouds of smoke boil from broken windows and canvas huts, the acrid stink of burning hair laced with the carnal musk of boiling fat. A sundried old man chained to a stoop recites poetry in a foreign tongue swollen with fever. He’s being kept there either for safekeeping or as sacrifice. His sad, hoarse music offers no clues.
A tiny cry suddenly rings out, chills the stifling air. I glance towards the face of the moon, noxious through its haze of smog, and see the ragged outline of an airborne beast snapping its wings towards the sky. A small body hangs by its foot from one of the creature’s barbed talons. Two stoop-shouldered tramps, man and woman, stand in the distance huddled together, watching the scene by the meager light of the smoldering pit at their feet. Chances say the stolen baby is theirs.
The man and woman observe the sight with the same helpless wonder as they would a shooting star. The figures in the sky are soon gone. The childless parents quickly stomp the faint embers into the ground and stumble away, perhaps back to their own nests to feast and rest from all the night’s trials.
I walk on.
At the end of the street a car rocks steadily against a toppled lamp-post like a restless scarab, its fogged glass smudged with ominous runes. I pull on the rusted handle of the back door and the whole frame clatters into the gutter. A woman lies sprawled across slashed fabric, her skin already a pallid shade. The Fever Man has the fingers of his claws spread wide, their eager, gasping mouths breathing in the woman’s misty essence as it pours out through the orifices of her skull.
The Fever Man snaps his face up, cutting off the life-flow streaming from his victim. He glowers from his perch, hissing quietly from the gas mask respirators of his jaws as I slowly remove the moplah from my coat. At the ringing glint of the blade, the Fever Man leaps forward from the car, claws eager for my skin.
His head makes it out of the door. I heave out the rest and toss it into the street.
I lean into the car. The woman is still alive. Her eyes flutter open and register me, widening in recognition, or fear. I smile and give her a soft, comforting laugh. A faint moan creeps out from her cracked lips. I shake my head and whisper to her.
“No. No, it’s okay.” I laugh again, to prove it. “It’s all right. I’m here now.”
The woman continues to moan. I
can feel the sound inside of me, rising, rising. I crawl across the seat and nestle against her side. I hold my hands up.
“Look at me!” I tell her. “Nothing to be afraid of. See? Nothing to be afraid of!”
She writhes away from me but her flesh is beginning to ossify now, crumbling from all the life the Fever Man has drunk from her. She falls back in the seat, shaking as her ribcage caves in with an audible snap. I pull her up and look into her clouding eyes.
“Don’t you see? I’m the clown.” I choke on the second laugh as it hardens in my throat, dig my fingers deep to keep my hold on her. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Not with me. Please. Don’t be afraid. I can help you. I’m the clown. Please. Please. Please.”
Several moments pass before I open my eyes again. When I do, the woman in my arms is gone. A cloud of cremated ash blows through the car’s open portal, and I am alone once more.
Drying my eyes, I walk back out into the street, gaze up into a sky robbed of its wishes. I swallow and a compulsive shiver worms its way up my spine. The medicine has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I turn to go and stop as a yellow face resolves itself from the shadows of the doorway to an old apartment block across the square. A thrill of violence grips my nerves, my rage coating my skin in a cold sweat. I raise the moplah’s gory blade and consider going in to do my work, to set it all right again. I draw the weapon to my side and take a tentative step across the street. Like a candle sparked to life, a second pair of eyes light up in the doorway.
And another. Another.
Soon a mass of eyes stare back at me from the apartment block, glimmering their challenge. I stand in the street and regard the lone, decapitated body resting against the car. When I look back to the doorway, the Fever Men have already disappeared.
When I was a boy and Father was the clown, part of his act was to take a bouquet of giant roses and cut one of the buds off to stick into his lapel. Every time he did this two more rosebuds would grow in its place, so he’d cut them off and stick them into another spot on his coat, the coat I wear now. This game would keep going until the front of Father’s coat was nothing but a curling wave of red. He would stagger comically from the weight and then fall onto his back, the bouquet sticking straight up from his chest in a mock-funeral pose, the sawdust of the midway exhaling and settling back over his still, still face. Father would be dead, and the roses would just keep growing. The crowd would scream with laughter.
It was a funny joke.
Ever since the Fire came the sun only burns. It bakes the fears inside our heads until we see only the fog of nightmares clouding our skulls.
I walk along the bank of a dried riverbed with only my heated thoughts to keep me company. The fog makes it easier to ignore the confusion of bleached limbs and drained torsos that broil from their towering mound in the dead river’s throat. They are the bodies of the old and the lost, survivors who tired of surviving and came down here to die. Glassgreen blowflies drone merrily over the sun-withered scraps, happy to play their part in the broken drama.
I leave the fetid riverbank and re-enter the city through the shade of an overpass clogged with fossilized trucks. A sudden movement catches my eye and I turn just in time to see a shadow fleeing across one of the stone columns.
Impossible, I think. The sun is still out.
A piece of thick white construction paper flutters gently at the base of the column. I run over and snatch it up, unfold the intricate schoolyard design. A huge heart beams up at me from the page, scratches of red overlapping the magic marker outline. The fog in my skull begins to lift. I remember now how the top of the shadow’s head appeared to wave as it ran to its hiding place once it had been spotted. I hadn’t recognized it at first. It seems that Boggs can grow his shadow as tall as me now.
I refold the paper heart and put it in a pocket deep within Father’s coat, a place where nobody but me will ever be able to find it again. Patting my chest, I drift calmly back to the theater, singing an old song I’ve forgotten the words to.
There can’t be more than four people in the crowd tonight.
They watch me perform my wonders, but there’s none of the old terror in them anymore. Their faces remain slack, neither laughing nor crying. Their eyes never once flinch, not even during the Figaro Earwig sequence. They sit hunched over on their thrones of garbage, hands upturned in lap, legs splayed in front of them. The absence of their fear brings me no comfort. They are exhausted, run to ground, too tired to notice shadows or anything else that might live in the theater.
I touch the paper heart in my pocket to remind myself, looking up to the beams dangling overhead. Not seeing, but still knowing.
I rise from the cigar box at the end of the performance and clamber back onto the stage, not even bothering to acknowledge the deserted room that awaits me.
A parched rustling resonates from the back of the theater.
Just the leaves. Then the sound comes again.
I look around, my eyes searching through the soughing light of the trashcans. The theater is empty. The crowd is gone. Nothing remains.
Nothing, except shadows.
There is a light pounding in the air now, like the first few tentative drops of rain upon metal, but the sound quickly doubles then doubles again until it is ringing from all four corners of the theater. The shapes of long-jointed fingers dance across the walls in tandem with the noise. I take an involuntary step back. From my place on the stage I stand and watch as the gathered Fever Men clap their hands together in a congratulatory rhythm of applause.
Slowly, I climb back into the box and don’t come out until the thunder has finally passed.
Everything has changed.
Nothing has changed.
We live in a world where two beliefs can call each other a lie and both be right. The crowd wonders how I can be a clown in a time like this. I wonder how they could choose to be anything else.
We conform reality to suit our survival. A person could lose their home, or the love of their life, or their right eye and continue to live by conditioning themselves into a state of acceptance. It’s what allows the crowd to believe that creatures who gorge themselves on their essence are a conquerable obstacle, that a child’s wagon in an old ice-house is actually a front row seat in a theater of magic and mystery.
But take away a person’s shadow, and you’ve just stolen a part of their soul.
They may not notice it at first, their survivalist gene rationalizing it as some trick of the light, a deterioration of the eyes. Observe that person long enough though and you will see the realization drop over them like a great black curtain, watch them stumble through the blind alleys their life has become as they try to call their shadow back to them.
It’s been two days since I’ve seen Boggs.
When I sleep, I dream, and when I dream, it is only of him.
For the last two days I’ve scoured leveled plazas and raided diners and old whorehouses overgrown with cinders, chasing visions half-seen, answering echoes long-hushed. Whether it has been day or night I do not know. I see only darkness now.
I crawl out from the hard embrace of my casket-bed and trudge into the hollow expanse of the auditorium, my eyes swimming in a burning haze, gray leaves trailing behind me like breadcrumbs. The sun is setting on the shredded horizon, the overture to another lost night.
Two wretches stand outside the theater’s warped doorway, shifting nervously on the stoop. They dip their heads in and give the stage a perfunctory look. They do not see me, or at least affect as much. The wretches start to hobble off and then quicken their limping pace as the first few manhole covers begin to lift up in the streets, the white eyes of the emerging Fever Men shining out.
I lean in the doorway and stare into my city’s decrepit heart. Every muscle seems to be shouting at me for rest, but the sound of the strings is louder. I know that he is out there. There will be no respite, not until the great question is sa
tisfied. The maestro rumbles overhead, twisting the strings in his soiled evening gloves as he tries to hold me to the course of my destiny. He tells me that my path is clear.
I turn and run the other way. The theater shrinks in the distance as I soar down the gnarled avenue, claws reaching out from below for my legs, the moplah’s curved steel burning through my clothes, searing my skin. The maestro bellows grim assurances from above in the voice of my Father but I do not hear him. I must not hear him.
The eye of the rope is closing.
My footsteps are a frantic staccato on the molten pavement, the shapes of tall thin men stretching and running across the maze of drunken roofs that curl over me in the bleak light of the moon, a host of demonic familiars. I crash through doors with a sound like cannonfire, shout into windows that throw my face back to me in funhouse contortions.
The paper heart beats its wings against my chest, so fast that I press my hand to it for fear of it breaking free and flying away. Flying away, never to return.
Boggs.
A scream rips across the air and catches in the web of my strings. I follow its magnetic vibrations until I round a corner and come to the yawning gums of an alley. A mortal stench drifts from its mouth. I unsheathe the moplah and hold it at my side, waiting for the source of the scream or its cause to make itself known.
A bloated shape flies through the air towards my face before the blade cuts it down. I pluck the limp thing from the sword’s point and feel the warm trickle of its blood run over my wrist. Shaking, I hold it up to the waxen light to discern its form. Gripped between the pale knuckles of my fist is a red handkerchief.