Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

The man put his foot on her skirt to pin her down then pushed his hood back.

  She recognized him immediately.

  “Hey, lady gorilla,” the guy who’d called her a fat, hairy queen bitch said. “Remember me?”

  Chapter Ten

  “You’re making a huge mistake,” Kitty said.

  But he still had a grip on her beard braid. He jerked it hard enough to almost wrench her jaw out of joint. She screamed, but the canvas of the tent seemed to trap the sound in. There was no guarantee anyone outside heard her.

  Someone would come. Of that, she had no doubt, even though it wasn’t helping her fear at the moment. The trouble was whether someone would come in time before certain damage was done.

  “You don’t get to talk, bitch,” the guy said. “You’ve done enough talking for one day, don’t you think? That fucking ugly mouth is getting you into all sorts of trouble.”

  “You’re going to die,” Kitty whispered. The muscles of her jaw ached from the strain, as though they would cramp at any moment and lock her mouth shut.

  “No,” the guy said. “My boy Larry’s out there to make sure the pussycat and me get our private time. And if you scream again, I’m going to break your mouth then stuff it with one of my socks. I’ve been told they don’t smell very good, and I’ve been wearing them all day. If you throw up with the gag in, you’re just going to have to swallow that shit right back down or choke on it. So this time, you’re going to do what your good friend Robert tells you. You got that, you ginger yeti?”

  “Get out now, before you do something you can’t take back,” Kitty said. He already had, but she was stalling and hoping in vain that he’d clue in before he acted upon his sociopathic tendencies. The circus did tend to attract such stand-up citizens.

  Damn it, Bell, where are you? More importantly, the clowns should have keyed in on them by now. So why weren’t they here?

  Robert backhanded her. The blow whipped her head to the side. His grip on her beard whipped it right back.

  Kitty lunged at him, blood salty on her tongue, to grab the boy by his hood and hair. She scratched at his cheeks, struggling against his foot planted on her skirt. There was a tear somewhere in her skirt, but this particular one was thick and well-constructed. It didn’t rip like the one the Ringmaster had gotten his hands on.

  Robert laughed derisively, even when she got a good gash in his forehead. “We got ourselves a live one here, Larry!” he called.

  Then he pulled a switchblade out of his hoodie pocket, opened it and brought it to her cheek, just below her eye.

  “You do that again, and I swear I’ll make you so much uglier, even your freak friends won’t be able to stand to see you. Do you believe I’ll do it?” Robert asked.

  She looked straight into his eyes, her teeth clenched and her lips thin, and nodded.

  He led her to her vanity chair by the beard and with his knife to her face.

  “You know, I was looking through all this shit,” Robert said. He dragged the upper half of her body forward as he moved his knife away but kept hold of her beard. He opened her makeup box and threw eye shadow, lipstick and mascara onto the vanity counter. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why you had it, since there’s zero help for a face and body like yours. But then I remembered you didn’t have any makeup on. It occurred to me all this isn’t for you. Good move. You may not have gotten it through your head that no one should have to see your hairy chest. You’re like a guy on the beach with moobs. But you’ve realized that when you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. See?”

  In the same hand that held the switchblade, he uncapped a dark purple lipstick and brought it near her face. Kitty wrenched away from the knife, but he yanked her back. The tip of the knife pricked into her cheek and dragged little lines into the flesh around her mouth as Robert smeared the purple lipstick over her lips. He made no effort to stay in the lines or make it clean.

  He threw the lipstick away and leaned over her shoulder from behind the chair. He gave a manic grin for the mirror. “Well, would you look at that? If we put you out on a street corner without the skirt and as far away from a streetlight as possible, you might be able to lipstick a guy for twenty bucks, as long as he’s far-sighted.”

  “I’m not even going to stop them from killing you now,” Kitty said. She couldn’t move her lips much if she didn’t want the knife digging in. Every part of her was trembling, but she barely felt her own fear or even her anger. She was perfectly numb.

  “You hear that?” Robert asked, bring his knife to her ear.

  There were a series of muffled shouts on the other side of her closed but unlatched tent flap. She thought she recognized one of them.

  “Victor!” she called, but Robert lowered his knife to her throat.

  “Uh-uh, lady gorilla. We’re not done,” he said. He trailed the tip of the double-sided knife down the cord of her neck to her cleavage. “You know, I think these tits need to go. It’s a travesty for hair to be all over tits like these. I mean, can you imagine sucking on one and getting hair between your teeth, like going down on an untrimmed hooker?”

  “You’re just jealous you never had a pair like these yourself,” Kitty snapped. He was going to try and kill her anyway. He was going to fail. That gave a woman certain confidence she wouldn’t usually have in the face of a criminal lunatic.

  “Oh, I got a brass pair, bet your hairy ass,” Robert hissed, bringing the knife back to her face.

  She couldn’t help the cry when Robert pushed the knife deeper against her cheekbone, nearly hitting the bone.

  “You humiliated me, cunt,” Robert said. “Now, I’m not going to kill you for that, but I am going to make sure that your perverted majesty is just as humiliated as I was every day for the rest of your life—even more than you are now, because you don’t have the sense to get it. No one’s going to save you, and everyone is going to see you for exactly what you are. More importantly, you are.”

  He reached for a glass foundation container and threw it at the mirror, which shattered into a spider web pattern. Her reflection and his became jagged, broken.

  “You ain’t no princess or queen. You’re a disgusting freak and a fucking monster, and it’s time to realize your place isn’t in my face, making people laugh at me,” Robert said.

  “You seem to do just fine at that all by yourself,” Kitty said, wincing more. This time the knife reached bone. Blood caught in her facial hair and dripped down onto her chest.

  “Bitch really doesn’t know when to stop talking, does she?” Robert said.

  He whirled her off the chair and onto the rugs just as Victor and Larry fell through the loose flap into her tent. Victor was choking Larry, but when he saw Kitty and the state of her face, he struggled to his feet just in time for Larry to grab his ankle. Victor faceplanted, his forehead striking the edge of her vanity.

  His stone flesh kept it from being a fatal wound, but it didn’t stop the blow and the fall from stunning him.

  “Get him out of here!” Robert yelled at his friend.

  “It’s like the dude’s really made of stone,” Larry said. His face was a special blend of swollen and multi-colored. “I can’t get at him long enough to keep him down.”

  “You can shoot the fucker for all I care. I’m not done,” Robert snapped.

  “Whatever. You owe me what’s left after this,” Larry said. He pulled a gun out of the waistband of his pants then grabbed Victor’s ankle and grunted as he dragged him toward the door again.

  “Just do your job, asshole,” Robert said.

  He punched Kitty when she tried to knock his knife arm away—after all, her face was already gouged, what difference did it make if it was scratched again an inch or two to the side?—and she hit the carpet face first. She tried to kick her legs, but they caught in her skirts when he tugged on those as well.

  She froze when she heard the gunshot.

  “I can’t even get it up for you,” he muttered as he climbed over h
er. “Damn hair’s everywhere. Makes me want to retch. But we’ll have some fun. I guarantee you that. There are so many other ways.”

  “Get off me, you impotent bastard,” she said through clenched teeth, wriggling against him. “You’re only digging your grave deeper.”

  He smirked, tracing over her smeared lipstick with the edge of his knife. “I should definitely do the tongue first. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”

  Kitty was pretty sure what got them into this mess was a mixture of poor nurturing and nature gone bad, but she didn’t want to make his access to her tongue easier. A whimper escaped her lips.

  She was on her stomach, covered by a maniac with a knife to her mouth, and there was nothing she could do.

  After a sharp, violent snap, Robert suddenly screamed, the sound high-pitched and deafening.

  Another snap.

  Robert wasn’t on her anymore.

  Kitty scrambled away toward her bed and wiped her mouth of the lipstick and some of the blood with her blanket before turning around.

  Robert knelt, one arm held up by the Ringmaster, as though in supplication. The other was loose and bent in an impossible angle, bone tenting the hoodie sleeve. Robert blubbered like a weak coward, all the cruelty gone from his face and replaced with that of a petulant little boy in pain.

  The Ringmaster glanced over at Kitty. Without looking down at Robert, the Ringmaster squeezed his wrist hard enough for Robert to drop the knife. Then the Ringmaster wrapped his hand near Robert’s elbow and snapped that forearm as though it was balsa wood.

  Another ear-splitting scream.

  Kitty flinched, only because the scream hurt her ears.

  The Ringmaster seemed to wait for her to tell him to stop. When she didn’t, he dropped Robert’s broken arm then grabbed Robert’s shoes to pull his legs out from under him. Robert screamed again when he tried to brace himself on his broken arms, but he was unable to take any weight without straining the broken and torn flesh. The Ringmaster systematically broke both of Robert’s legs, as unaffected by Robert’s screams as if he were breaking branches for kindling.

  Except for the slight, almost gentle smile on his face when he stepped back to admire his artistry.

  “What the fuck, man? What’d you do to him?” Larry asked when Victor dragged him in with his arm around Larry’s throat. “Dude, man, you crazy! Let me go!”

  When confronted by the Ringmaster’s handiwork, Victor muttered, “My God.”

  “Not in the least,” the Ringmaster replied to Victor.

  The Ringmaster bunched Larry’s shirt in his fist, and Victor let go of him. Maybe he thought the Ringmaster wouldn’t attack Larry so violently, since he wasn’t trying to get away and wasn’t as close to killing anyone like Robert. Larry’s gun had been a useless prop against Victor, after all.

  The Ringmaster brought Larry over to Robert then kicked Robert’s side to get his attention in the midst of his wailing, sobbing and screaming.

  “Watch,” the Ringmaster said.

  Once Robert managed to look up, the Ringmaster abruptly twisted Larry’s neck. Larry crumpled to the floor.

  “Hey, whoa!” Victor shouted.

  “You’re going to wish I had done that to you,” the Ringmaster said to Robert, his voice dark velvet in its promise.

  The Ringmaster grabbed Larry by his loose neck and Robert by the hood of his jacket. He dragged both of them out of the tent, one of them screaming bloody murder and the other conspicuously silent.

  “Stop!” Victor shouted, running out and stopping in front of the Ringmaster. “What are you doing?”

  “It is my task to protect those who reside within Arcanium and dispense judgment in Bell’s absence,” the Ringmaster said, disdain unmistakable. He looked down at Victor as though he were a clump of mud on his boot. “Get out of my way.”

  “Get out of his way,” Kitty said. She used her bed to help her climb to her feet in spite of her shaky legs. Fear had finally caught up to her.

  “But we can call the police now—” Victor protested.

  “No police,” both Kitty and the Ringmaster said at the same time, the Ringmaster as he hauled his prey away from the tent.

  Victor steadied Kitty as she tried to follow the Ringmaster while her legs threatened to give out underneath her.

  “We can’t have police here,” Kitty explained. “It’s why we had to use magic to keep James from remembering you, in case he decided to bring the law into this. We have our own rules. Our own law.”

  “Our own executioner?” Victor asked.

  “More or less,” Kitty said. She pushed past him and stumbled into the darkness after the Ringmaster and the two men in his hands.

  Victor ran after her. “How is that okay?”

  “It’s for our own protection. No police. No trespassers. Appease the demons who we keep around for such purposes.” Kitty brushed absentmindedly at the blood still dripping, slow but steady, down her face from the worst knife wound.

  The Ringmaster brought the screaming Robert to the clowns’ makeshift ring in the middle of Oddity Row and dropped him in the center with his dead friend, who stared unseeing up at the night sky with eyes like those of a doll. She was vaguely aware of the sensation of Victor’s palm applying pressure to her seeping cheek, but it didn’t seem as important to her as the Ringmaster standing above the crumpled bodies.

  Robert’s screams were beginning to attract the attention of the ones who should have stopped him to begin with. For the clowns not to have noticed a trespasser, Robert must have gone into her tent while the circus had still been in full swing. He might have even gone in there right after she’d left with the coffee that the Ringmaster had brought her. The more she thought about it, Robert had probably expected her back sooner. Much easier to do terrible things to her to make her scream when there were other people milling about, shouting, laughing, screaming themselves, so that hers would have been indistinguishable from the rest.

  “He’s already tortured,” Victor said. “And he deserves that. But…”

  “But if we called the police, we would get embroiled in a court case that would trap Arcanium here and would put you, me and the Ringmaster on the stand. Bell would probably be able to make the case for him defending someone who needed help, but it’s very possible that the law would find the Ringmaster’s use of force excessive. None of us are worried about how he would do in jail. We’re more concerned about what he would do to other prisoners. I’m not even getting into the other kinds of bad attention Arcanium could get from us going to the police, not to mention the lies we’d have to tell,” Kitty said. “This is going to happen, Victor. This is as much Arcanium as the carousel and the Row. I’m not going to try to stop him.”

  “You don’t want to try to stop him,” Victor said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “That’s not like you, even after what he did. I’d beat him within an inch of his life, but I wouldn’t take that last inch,” Victor said.

  “That’s why neither you nor I are the Ringmaster,” Kitty said.

  Victor removed his hand from her cheek. Kitty lifted her skirt and cleaned his hand off as best as she could. The skirt was ruined anyway—that seemed to be happening a lot, so it was a good thing she had an unlimited budget for material.

  The clowns now crept over the wooden ring, stalking the squirming and unsquirming prey that the Ringmaster offered them.

  “Oh my God,” Victor muttered.

  “You don’t have to watch,” Kitty said.

  The Ringmaster turned around and rested his gaze upon her, dragging Robert with him.

  “But I’m staying,” she finished.

  “Eat the dead one first,” the Ringmaster said dispassionately, but there was a violent flicker behind his black eyes, somehow brighter and fiercer than the yellow glow of the clowns’ irises. “Let this one see what will happen to him while he still lives.”

  “You want to watch this?” Victor asked.
r />   “I don’t want to. I need to.”

  Victor clenched his jaw, but he stayed.

  The clowns opened their mouths as they surrounded the dead young man. The edges reached quite a bit farther from the lines of their lips defined by their face paint.

  “Jesus,” Victor whispered. “I knew they were scary, but…”

  The clowns knelt and dug their rows and rows of sharp teeth into the dead guy’s stomach, ripping until they reached the guts. Kitty didn’t make a habit of viewing the clowns’ eating habits, and even now she feared she might throw up from the sounds they made, but she kept her gaze fixed on the Ringmaster, who barely moved as Robert struggled to get away from him in spite of his broken limbs.

  Kitty was disquieted by the fact that, with all the noise Robert was making, more of Arcanium hadn’t come around. Usually, Arcanium preferred to keep the screaming level to a minimum in case anyone from the outside walked by for innocent reasons and heard it. That was why the clowns often went for the throat first, so that their victims could remain alive but not make a sound.

  Victor put his arm around Kitty’s waist, giving her warmth in the cool night, offering himself to her if she wanted to hide her face in his shoulder. She leaned against him, but she didn’t hide.

  Tragedy—the only woman in the clown trio, her face painted up in a horrifying tragedy mask to contrast with Comedy and Murphy—reared up. Some kind of organ hung from her mouth. She twitched like a clockwork bird of prey and stared longingly at Robert. Dead victims were no fun.

  The Ringmaster crooked a finger at Tragedy in invitation, continuing to keep his gaze on Kitty.

  No, Kitty realized—at the place where Victor held her.

  Tragedy trilled in delight and leaped over Larry’s body to Robert, turning him over from where the Ringmaster had dropped him onto his stomach. She lunged to tear out his throat.

  Robert’s scream was abruptly cut short.

  The Ringmaster stepped away from Robert, who still thrashed wildly but was no longer his concern, no longer interesting to the Ringmaster now that he couldn’t scream.