“Come in,” Bell said. He twirled his crystal ball on one finger as though it didn’t cost hundreds of dollars. Then he rested it back on its pedestal next to the runner as Valorie entered.
Charles had to work to get up from so low to the ground.
“And here I thought Maya’d be sitting on his lap when I came in,” Valorie said.
“I’d wanted such a tableau for you, my dear,” Bell replied. “Maya thought you wouldn’t appreciate the humor.”
“You have many fine qualities,” Valorie said drily. “Your humor isn’t one of them.”
“What the heck is going on?” Charles asked.
The tent flap fell and tied itself closed. Charles clutched the back of the chair, once again shaken. Valorie’s stomach sank. Bell had shown his magic. She didn’t know whether that was ever a good thing with an outsider.
Then again, his power had been revealed the moment Charles had recognized her, which wasn’t any better.
“Have a seat, sir. You can sit with me now. I needed him in my sight but out of the way of the customers. I told them he had received some bad news and was taking some time to recover. Charles was kind enough to go along with my little falsehood. Maya has occupied herself elsewhere for now, so you needn’t worry yourself that she has an eye to steal another man of yours.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Valorie replied.
“You didn’t have to,” Bell said. “She did. Please, sir, join us. We have some things to discuss. It’s why you came.”
“I didn’t come here to talk to you,” Charles said, keeping his distance.
“No, but you’ll have to speak to me because anything you discuss with her concerns me,” Bell said, unshaken and unfailingly polite.
“Because you’re the one holding her hostage. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Valorie wasn’t a contortionist, of all things, when she disappeared. And that’s what she did. She disappeared. They couldn’t ever find her, not even a body. After a year and no trace, they told me they had to move on to other cases, especially since you were young and had a reputation for being impulsive,” Charles said.
He edged toward the table, but not because Bell wanted him there. He kept coming closer to Valorie, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, not even now.
“You’ve done something to her. Torture, conditioning, threats, rape… You’ve done something to her. You’re the reason I lost her.”
“You’re not entirely wrong, sir,” Bell said.
Charles lunged at Bell.
Bell raised his hand, perhaps to make Charles freeze where he stood, maybe to do something more forceful. Valorie jumped from her chair and grabbed Charles first, holding him back by his shoulder.
“Stop,” Valorie said quietly. “Just sit down, Charles, and maybe we can start to explain.”
“We? What’s this we? Tell me it wasn’t what you wanted, Valorie. Tell me you didn’t throw in with him from the beginning. Or that you haven’t thrown in with him since, if he did take you away. Tell me.” He struggled against her, not sure which of them to go after first, his fear turning to anger.
Valorie was well-versed in that particular transformation. She saw it in the circus’ victims, yes, but she’d also experienced it in herself. Anger was her weapon as well as her shield. Charles had been a tempering influence, a pacifist to keep her tamed and give her perspective. But this wasn’t an ordinary situation, and there had been twenty years since that idealistic young man had been her fiancé. This wasn’t quite the same man. All she had to do was look at him.
To Valorie, he was the man she’d left and the man he was today. She could see them both at the same time, but she had trouble reconciling the two images, one before her and one in her mind—like watching a 3D movie without the glasses.
And she wasn’t quite the same woman either.
“I didn’t torture her to change her mind,” Bell said. “She did nothing to be brought into my circus except say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I had no desire to hurt her, but the pain caused was inevitable once I brought her in.”
“That’s so much bullshit,” Valorie said, wrestling Charles to the spindly chair next to hers. He collapsed into it, all of a sudden not strong enough to hold himself up in spite of the fight he’d had in him seconds ago.
Bell waited for her to elaborate, as though he didn’t already know what she’d meant. He’d heard these arguments before, and he still insisted on spewing this kind of crap. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he liked being called out.
“You didn’t have to do it the way you did it,” Valorie said. “You could have just made me flexible, and I would have figured it out at some yoga class or with some experimental sex position with my fucking husband—”
“Valorie!” Charles said, suddenly scandalized. But Valorie was so beyond scandal.
“You could have had my boss give me the flexibility I asked him for, either for the rest of my time at that company—which would have made my job much better—or just that day so that I could enjoy the circus like I’d wanted to. I remember that day so vividly it could have been yesterday,” Valorie said. “There were literally hundreds of ways you could have handled the wish. You took my words and twisted them because you wanted me in your circus. Nothing more, nothing less. You saw something you wanted and you took it, because you don’t know any other way. I’ve come to accept that part of you, as much as a person can, but don’t pretend you’re just a victim of circumstance like the rest of us.”
She sat down at the conclusion of her rant, unafraid of any repercussions. She didn’t know why he bothered to lie like this. Was it delusion, or was it his usual inability to understand himself as humans saw him, distanced as he was from being human? His mask was just another lie, but the question had always been whether he understood how much that mask was a lie or whether he’d fooled himself from all the times he’d looked into the mirror.
“I don’t understand,” Charles said. “Did he force you into this or didn’t he?”
“He forced me in,” Valorie replied. She set a hand on Charles’ shoulder again so he wouldn’t jerk right out of the chair again. “But after a while, he didn’t force me to stay.”
“They have a name for that,” Charles said.
“They can shove a summer sausage up their rectum. They didn’t have to go through what I had to go through or what any of us go through,” Valorie said. “If there’s a phrase that they might use, it only makes them feel better about themselves. I eventually decided to stay. It wasn’t to make him happy. It was because I was happy with where I was, and going back would have caused more problems than it would have solved.”
“What are you talking about? You would have been home,” Charles began.
“Look at me!” Valorie shouted. She stood up and spread her arms. “It wasn’t a trick of the light, Charles. It’s not a really good makeup artist. A woman can look ten years younger to strangers or acquaintances, maybe, but to my family? The friends who knew me well? And now…I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. How can I turn up looking twenty years younger without someone wondering who I sacrificed my firstborn to?”
Charles flicked his gaze from Bell—who sat with his legs crossed and his hands clasped on his thigh as though bored at a business meeting—to Valorie. He squinted through his glasses. It wasn’t his prescription that failed him. Even so, he removed his glasses and cleaned them on the edge of his jacket. Then he slipped them into the inside pocket.
He took her hand.
What he could deny with his own eyes, he couldn’t deny to the touch. She could see signs of age in his hands, the more prominent veins, the way the fine geometric lines of his skin had become more pronounced, the gathering of flesh around the knuckles of each finger, the quality of his nails.
He traversed his thumb over the back of her hand, testing the texture, the undeniable smoothness, although the skin of her palms was tougher than it used to be, just as her body was a little sleeker. Thes
e were changes that were beneficial for her new profession, changes Bell had encouraged in her body.
Charles studied her nails as though they held the answer to immortality. Sure, she had the answer to that one. Make a wish in front of a jinni who happened to grant wishes and hope that he or she liked the idea of having the person around for a while.
Charles slowly drew her back down to her chair. He was tentative, unfamiliar with such familiarity after so long. Valorie tried not to shiver when he tucked the loose part of her hair behind her ears to get a better look at her face. He brushed the pad of a one finger over the paint, but he didn’t smear it once he determined it wasn’t intrinsic. Same with the rhinestones she’d attached near her eye makeup. He leaned close to see past the paint and color. With the brushes of his fingers and palms, Valorie had a simultaneous fear and longing that he would kiss her.
But that was unfair. To him. To her. To his wife.
It wasn’t unfair to Bell. If it got him jealous, tough shit. This was his bed. He had to lie in it.
“How is this possible?” he asked, his breath warm on her lips.
“Magic,” Valorie said.
“No, seriously.”
“I wasn’t being flippant, Charles. It’s magic.”
He jerked his hands away as though her skin burned him.
“The exact thing I said to my boss before I got pulled into this place was, ‘I wish you’d give me a little more flexibility on this.’ That was the wording that Bell needed,” Valorie said.
“What does the wording— You said ‘wish’. You mean the wording of the wish? You can’t be serious, Valorie. Stop fooling.”
“Do I look like I’m fooling?” Valorie said. “Scratch that. Do I sound like I’m fooling?”
“No,” Charles said. “But you also sound like when you’re telling a good lie. I could never tell.”
“You could always tell. I just had stories that seemed like they should be lies,” Valorie replied.
“So you’re…you’re not lying now,” Charles said slowly.
“No.”
“It’s magic.”
“Yes,” she said.
He processed that, his expression blank but his eyes bright. Then he turned toward Bell, more cautious than before. Trying to attack Bell had been uncharacteristic. This was the Charles she knew better. “It’s you. You’re the one with magic. And you forced her in here with magic—with her wish. So you’re what, some kind of genie?”
“Yes,” Bell replied. No adornments. No obfuscation. No lies. No more hiding.
“You expect me to believe that?” Charles said.
“I have no interest in convincing you of anything. The only way to know for sure is to wish and see if it comes true,” Bell replied.
“No,” Valorie interjected quickly. Was he trying to torture her now that she was thinking of leaving? Was that what this had been about the whole time? “No. We don’t use the ‘wish’ word unless we mean it, and even then we shouldn’t most of the time. Don’t let him rope you into his games.”
She glared at Bell. His demeanor remained unchanged. He really was infuriating sometimes, but he wasn’t usually this infuriating with her, which made the conversation even more frustrating.
“I never said he should,” Bell responded. “I merely said it would be the only way he could know for sure. People rarely believe in magic until it happens to them, especially in a place like this.”
“I can’t tell whether y’all are bats crazy, pulling my leg or telling the truth,” Charles said. He leaned down to bury his head in his hands and rub them against his face. “I’m not sure which one I want to be true. I’m leaning toward crazy, because crazy can be fixed.”
“Sorry. It’s true. I wished for more flexibility. That’s what I got. And Arcanium got a spanking new contortionist to add to Oddity Row and the evening set list. I was a prisoner then. Yes, Charles, I was kidnapped. I was held captive. I couldn’t have contacted you if I tried, and I did try to run away—several times. There are things that happen to us when we try—”
“What? Do you get flogged or something?” Charles said.
“Well, yes, but that’s not the only thing keeping us here. It’s physically painful for us to leave when we’re being kept,” Valorie said. “I went through that enough before I gave up. I probably went through it more than a normal person would.”
“Y-you do that to them? Whip them? Cause them pain?”
“My rules are few but very clear, my punishments effective. As a result, I rarely have to punish,” Bell said.
“That’s…that’s…”
“I know what you think it is,” Bell replied. “What you think is irrelevant. My enforcer is happy, and my people who test their boundaries learn what lines they cannot cross—for the safety of the circus as well as themselves. And it is my circus. My people.”
“They don’t belong to you,” Charles said.
“And yet they are mine.”
“It’s not important,” Valorie said, before Charles could get into a full-on slavery rant that Bell probably deserved. It wasn’t the same. This wasn’t a man enslaving another man. That damn mild-mannered alter ego fooled people every time.
“What do you mean ‘it’s not important’?” Charles snapped.
“Can you stop him from doing it? No. Are you going to remember this conversation in thirty minutes? Who the fuck knows?” Valorie said. “You’re here because you recognized me when you weren’t supposed to ever see me again. And because you saw me, you recognized there were serious questions that needed to be answered. You have those answers. It’s up to you to accept them. Now what?” She directed that last question to Bell. This was his court in the end, for good or ill.
“Now, I must silence him,” Bell said. “I’m sorry, Valorie, but I cannot let him leave without some kind of assurance he will not sound the alarm on Arcanium.”
“Sorry, my ass. Even if you didn’t see him coming the first time, which I doubt, you definitely saw him coming the second time, and you could have changed my appearance or something to make me seem different enough. You’ve done it before.”
“Wait, when you say ‘silence’ me, what exactly does that mean?” Charles asked, holding up his hand to interrupt Valorie and Bell’s side of the conversation.
“It entails a number of possibilities,” Bell replied.
“You are not killing him to punish me,” Valorie said. “You’re not going to do that to me, not after everything I’ve done for you, Bell. Not after what we had. You are not going to kill him because of your fucking mistake or something that you wanted to happen.”
Charles stood up and backed away from the table, but there was nowhere to go. There were shelves of fortune teller trinkets, the armchair, rugs and pelts on the ground and a latched tent flap. Above, there was nothing to weaponize but beads, feathers and scarves. He could try to crawl under the tent canvas, but it was well staked and taut. Bell could stop him if he wanted to, or the clowns could be waiting for him, patrolling the exterior of the tent. All Bell had to do was say the word.
“If you were going to kill me, why didn’t you do it earlier?” Charles asked.
“Because he wanted to see your reaction when you were told the truth,” Valorie said.
“And this is the man you’ve thrown your lot in with?” Charles asked, gesturing emphatically at Bell as though he were the devil himself.
“He has his bad qualities,” Valorie said.
When dealing with an outsider, it seemed a weak justification. But Charles hadn’t been here for all these years. It took time and a treasure map to find the good, but once people did, it was no wonder many of them stayed in the sanctuary Arcanium could provide. She didn’t know how she could explain that to Charles.
She could try. “You’ve got to understand, Charles, he’s not human. Once that sinks in and you stop expecting him to be human, he starts making more sense.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Charles argued. “Eve
n the angels are subject to His will.”
“Because the angels have no will,” Bell said. “Your religious arguments amuse me. You think you can argue theology with someone who was there at the beginning of creation, before any of the creatures of the earth crawled from the dust?”
“Then you know right from wrong, and you know what you’re doing is wrong,” Charles insisted.
“I know my place in this universe, sir, better than you know your own,” Bell said. “Perhaps you should consider this before accusing me of stepping out of my place. If I wanted to kill you, I’d be well within my boundaries. The laws of your people are not my laws, man. Not even the laws of your reality are mine. Remember that. But I don’t have to kill you for your silence. Your former fiancée said that I could wipe your memory. The risk in that is that you could always come back and rediscover Valorie, and this entire headache would occur once more.”
“It’s your headache, Bell. I have zero sympathy,” Valorie said. She crossed her arms over her chest to conceal how her abdomen had decided to twist itself into knots without her. “I gave you the simpler option. You chose complicated. Congratulations.”
“But then I would have never found you,” Charles said. “I would have never known what happened to you. You still would have been missing. Do you know what that did to me?”
“Yeah, I noticed how choked up you still are about it when we met while you were with your lovely family,” Valorie said.
“What was I supposed to do? Wait forever?” Charles asked, holding his hands out in supplication. “Janice is a good woman, and I love my kids.”
“No, I didn’t want you to wait. I wanted you to never find me…ever.”
“I didn’t know if you were flaky, in danger, in a desperate situation or whether you were dead,” Charles said.
“How’s knowing working for you? Because it sucks over here, Charles.”
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