The Dark Circus

by Ana Ballabriga

  “We mustn’t forget the distinctive sign of the devil.”

  “What are you doing?” He struggled to break free, but Hercules’s enormous paws held him in place. “What are you doing, you damn lunatics?”

  “What’s a devil without a tail?”

  Sifo stuck the glowing hot iron up the man’s ass. The horrible scream echoed off the stone walls. Salomé filled a glass with wine from the baptismal font. The stink of burned flesh made her want to retch. She fought the gag reflex and slowly poured out all her anger with the sacred potion. Steam rose as the liquid cooled the metal rod jammed up the beast’s rear. The rod fused with his flesh and formed a tail—distorted, red, and permanent.

  47

  L showed him the bullets she’d taken out of the pistol while he was sleeping. Elías fell to his knees and cried like a baby. He was destroyed, ridiculous, and incompetent. L held and rocked him for a long time.

  Then she gave him a little plastic vial of black liquid. “Take this. It’ll make you feel better.”

  The vial matched those he’d found in her uncle’s house, in the winery, and on the floor of the village church.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s W.”

  “W—for wine?”

  “Let’s say it’s like wine. With an improved formula.”

  Elías recalled the lab in the village warehouse. “Is it a drug?”

  “You might call it that.”

  Elías didn’t know what to do. He heard his mother’s insistent warnings about drugs and felt the prickly fear she’d instilled in him: “So many people have died or lost everything because of drugs.” He was just a boy when she first showed him photos of gaunt addicts, some killed by overdoses. “Don’t ever touch drugs. Don’t let them tempt you, or you’ll be hooked forever. Even a single dose can ruin your brain. Like Marifé’s son. A friend gave him a pill, and now he’s a raving schizophrenic.”

  But what did he have left to lose? He wanted to be done with it all and put an end to this hell on earth. Maybe a far worse afterlife awaited him, but he was no longer so sure about that. And maybe L was right; maybe this black potion offered solace. Maybe it could overcome his desire for death.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I always keep a few stashed in my hideouts.”

  “Hideouts?”

  “The homes of clients I trust.”

  Elías’s jaw dropped in amazement. Did this woman have no place of her own? Did she hole up in one unused lodging after another, living off absentee owners?

  He uncapped the tube and poured the contents into his mouth. It had the taste of thick, aged wine. He swallowed, and a momentary wave of nausea swept over him. He lay down.

  L took her place beside him on the bed and ran a hand over his chest. Suddenly, he began convulsing with laughter even though he was deeply unhappy. The laughter first seemed to come from someone else, but gradually he embraced the hilarity and made it his own. He felt better and better as a heavy weight lifted from him. Falling in love with his sister no longer seemed so disastrous somehow. The guilt just ebbed away.

  Incest wasn’t such a big deal, was it? It occurred in the animal world, so why should humans consider it evil? Because the Church said so?

  At that moment, all the prescriptions and warnings instilled in him since childhood vanished. Those absurd teachings about moral absolutes lost all meaning. The only reality was the present moment, where his own heart dictated moral standards. He let go of his remorse for killing his wife. It had been an accident; and besides, she’d deceived him and delivered L into Midas’s hands for torture and execution. He hadn’t meant to kill Caridad, but Caridad clearly had some idea of what she was doing to L. Her death was no tragedy.

  Furthermore, now Elías knew his attraction to L was more than mere lust. She was his sister, his elder sister. No wonder he’d fallen so desperately in love with her. She’d shown him he was living in a world of lies. She’d rescued him and freed him. He was forever in her debt.

  “Feeling better?”

  “I am. At first, I was ready to vomit, but now I feel as if someone has unlocked my chains.”

  “That’s the W,” L said. “It dissolves inhibitions and social norms, all the stuff they’ve taught you to believe. It opens your mind to a world that otherwise would be inaccessible. So now do you see why the Church was so determined to destroy my village and our winery?”

  “I think so.” Elías held his head in his hands. All the religious dogma now seemed bereft of sense. Why had he swallowed their story of an all-powerful God, an omnipotent being concerned with the welfare of His creatures?

  The truth was, never in his life had Elías seen even the slightest evidence of God’s existence or intervention against evil. Some attributed this absence to the doctrine of free will, but that was easily countered. For example, deranged murderers didn’t act of their own volition; they were victims of mental illness—and, often, childhood trauma and neglect. Weren’t they, too, victims of the evil that dominated the world? If God allowed such evil, it surely followed that no benevolent God existed. Further, God’s failure to act showed He was not all-powerful. Therefore, God could not exist—at least not as described by the scriptures of the great religions.

  “This drug is very dangerous. Once it’s widely available, that’ll be the end of the Church and most other religions as we know them.”

  Suddenly, Elías remembered the day’s big event. He grabbed the remote control from the bedside table and switched on the enormous plasma-screen television that hung like a painting on the wall. L looked confused. He flipped through the channels. Many were in languages he didn’t understand. Finally, he found a twenty-four-hour news channel in English with the story he was seeking. The pope stood at the main altar of the cathedral sanctuary with the bishop of Cartagena at his side. He held up the miraculously recovered Cross of Caravaca. The papal visit had worked a miracle. The Church had recovered a relic missing for almost a hundred years. The bishop, his father, was beaming.

  “Wow, they finally found it!” L sat down on the bed.

  Elías turned off the television. “I led them to it. Now the very thought makes me so ashamed.”

  “Don’t worry. They want something else, but they won’t get it.”

  “What?”

  “Fetch me the cardboard tube on the chest of drawers over there.”

  Elías brought it to her, and L slid out a rolled canvas. “Remember the paintings?”

  “Bacon’s painting! You hid it here!”

  “My people didn’t have to pay the artists.” L handed the canvas to him. “They’d all heard about W and made pilgrimages to the village to try it. The drug helped them pioneer new kinds of art that brought them international fame. Each painting was a gift made to the village, a tribute to us.”

  “Are you saying your drug inspired all avant-garde art?”

  “Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. But it certainly opened the door to radically different ways of looking at art. The fundamental change occurred simultaneously, across all different kinds of art. There has to be a reason for it. Obviously, not every avant-garde artist made the trip to our winery. But maybe we planted a tiny seed. It germinated in those geniuses and blossomed into new concepts that spread through their circles of acquaintances. It encouraged new currents in philosophical, psychological, and scientific thought.”

  “That seems awfully presumptuous.”

  “Which just shows you haven’t understood a thing I’ve said. I don’t claim W was the source of new ideas. Just the opposite; those ideas already existed. But W opened the doors to them, don’t you see? The human mind is as infinite as the world itself. But society insists we live like cattle, confined by rules and conventions. W knocks down those barriers. You can go anywhere on the mountain of life.”

  “Did Midas try the drug?”

  “Yes. And he’s desperate to get more. He thinks it’ll help him create decent art again, but he’s wrong. The W a
lready opened his mind, but it’s barren. There’s nothing left for him to find. The artists who painted our labels were geniuses before they came. The W just helped them abandon simple representation of objects and concentrate on emotional truth instead.”

  Elías was startled to find himself agreeing. “Art should stimulate—not the senses, but the emotions.”

  L unrolled the canvas on the bed for inspection.

  “This painting isn’t aesthetically beautiful. Its aim is to arouse fear, anger, or simple disgust in the viewer.”

  “I agree.”

  “But it’s just okay. It doesn’t achieve the level of true art.”

  “And what is true art for you?”

  L leaned down and pulled the belt free from his trousers. She caught Elías’s eye, turned toward the painting on the bed, and viciously whipped the canvas. The buckle lodged in the center of the image and tore through the bottle of wine.

  “What are you doing! Have you gone insane? This is a work of art!”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.” L battered the canvas with the belt. Again. And again. Elías stood frozen, unable to believe his eyes. She kept at it until the canvas was shredded, unrecognizable. “Now it’s true art.”

  Was she mocking him? “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t that outrage you? Didn’t it make you want to slap the shit out of me?”

  “Yes, it did. That painting must have been worth millions.”

  “Art shouldn’t be prized for what someone’s willing to pay for it, but for what it expresses, the way it makes you feel. Such perfection is incredibly rare in conceptual art.”

  Elías had never understood conceptual art, but suddenly he grasped exactly what she was saying. No work he’d ever studied had given him as intense an experience as this. Witnessing the destruction of such a valuable painting had been horrifying beyond belief.

  Conceptual art wasn’t a matter of creating a piece and displaying it in a museum. It conveyed its message through an intervention, a performance as English speakers put it. L had conveyed her message with absolute clarity: physical art was not sacred. She’d destroyed Bacon’s painting to teach him that. A work of conceptual art was undertaken to make the greatest possible impact on the maximum number of people. True art was not mere decoration or anecdote.

  Elías recalled reading in his art history textbook about Courbet’s 1866 painting, The Origin of the World. The close-up depiction of a woman’s genitals had caused an international uproar, and yet now it hung in the Orsay Museum as just another painting. Elías also remembered the 2014 performance of the woman artist who had entered the museum, lain on the floor before Courbet’s painting, thrown open her gown, and opened her legs wide to display her own genitals. People were scandalized. Security was called. The flustered guards dragged her off, called the police, and treated her like a criminal. Critics were very hard on her. Few understood her intention, which was simply to provoke the same intense reaction the original painting had achieved so long ago. The artist’s performance gave new life to the painting that had been confined, lifeless, in that museum.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Elías said. “No work of art has ever affected me so deeply as what you just did. I guess I’m willing to accept the contention that conceptual art is the purest state of expression.”

  “Glad to hear it. Now I need for you to get me irrefutable evidence of the relationship between our dear father the bishop and Midas.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to stage my own performance. And I promise you it won’t leave anyone unmoved.”

  48

  Elías used both his hands and his less noble parts to anoint every inch of L’s body with aloe, then he showered but didn’t shave. She’d commented that two or three days’ growth of beard was becoming on him, and he had to agree. A new look for a new perspective on life. He found short-sleeve shirts and clean jeans in the absent Scandinavian’s closet. Luckily, Holger was about his height and build. But there was no overcoat; it seemed that the Spanish chill was laughable to someone used to northern winters. So he scrubbed his trench coat with bath gel and hung it up to dry.

  When he turned on his phone, he saw several missed calls. They were from his sister and his mother, the office, his uncle, and several other numbers he didn’t recognize. He ignored them all and went back to the bedroom. He reviewed his voice mail messages from the bug in Midas’s office. One exchange was particularly interesting.

  “We used several acids to test it and were able to isolate various ingredients in the Jumilla wine, but they’re probably not exactly what you want. The most potent ones arouse a sense of euphoria and stimulate mild hallucinations. There’s some lowering of inhibitions as well, but all of these symptoms occur just before the loss of consciousness. It doesn’t seem possible to maintain alertness after inhibitions disappear.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s impossible, you shit. I experienced it.”

  “Of course, but we can’t”—he stopped and rephrased—“rather, it will be extremely difficult without the exact formula.”

  “I have all my men out looking for the bitch. But that’s no excuse for you to slack off. I’ll be at the lab tonight to check your progress.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  The Mercedes with the GPS beacon began to move shortly after eight that evening. Elías got into his BMW and drove toward Murcia. He had nothing planned; he’d know what to do when the time came. And with all those people looking for them, time was running out. The screen showed him the Mercedes weaving though Murcia’s few remaining agricultural lands and stopping at an unmarked building.

  Elías got to the place just over half an hour later. It was a fairly large operation hidden behind a stone wall topped with razor wire. Elías peered through the bars of the gate and made out a manor house with extensive grounds where shipping containers had been offloaded.

  He took two vials of W out of his bag. L had given them to him along with a story.

  According to legend, the young god Bacchus once came across a sprig of greenery in the countryside. He felt strangely attracted to the plant, so he picked it. The day was extremely hot, and he wanted to keep it from withering, so he found a hollow bone left by some bird and pushed the sprig inside. The plant immediately began to grow. Its tendrils curled out of both ends of the bone and emerged into the burning sun. Bacchus found a bone from a lion’s skeleton and used it to shield the plant. But the vine continued to grow, and again it pushed out into the light. He found a larger bone still, that of an ass, and he inserted into it the bone of the lion that contained both the bird bone and the plant. When Bacchus arrived at his destination, he tried to remove the plant from the bones, but its roots were too firmly entwined. So Bacchus had to plant it just as it was. Eventually, heavy bunches of white grapes appeared. He harvested them, stamped them with his great feet, and extracted the juice to ferment into a nectar like that consumed by the gods on Mount Olympus. He taught men the technique and was astonished to see how the wine affected them. When they drank moderate amounts, they broke into song and danced, as merry as birds. Drinking more wine gave them the strength of lions. But if they kept drinking, they became completely irrational and acted like asses.

  “Two doses, that’s all you need,” L assured him. “It will give you the strength and speed of a lion.”

  Elías uncapped the two vials and tossed back the contents. His muscles tensed in anticipation. He popped open the fuse box of his BMW, deactivated the airbag circuit, and buckled his seatbelt again. He started the engine, stamped on the accelerator, and crashed into the gate at full speed. The furious impact caved in the hood and shattered the windshield, but the car tore the gate from its hinges and carried it well into the yard before coming to a stop. He saw two men in black running toward him. He wrenched the wheel to the right, slammed the car into reverse, and hit the gas again, throwing off the heavy gate. He tried to run down the approaching thugs, but they leaped out of the way and opened f
ire. Elías crashed the car into the house and kicked out the windshield glass. He took out his adversaries with two shots from the now-reloaded pistol, leaped out of the car, and headed for the house. A thug jumped him as soon as he plunged through the doorway. Elías’s punch smashed the man’s head against the wall and broke his skull.

  An automatic weapon opened fire. Elías rolled across the floor and into a room with a couple of box springs and mattresses. With a running jump, he smashed right through the wall and left a gaping hole. He used the same tactic twice more and crashed into a hall where two men armed with automatic weapons gaped at him in astonishment. He put a bullet into each man’s head and grabbed one of the weapons. He raced down the hall to a vast room outfitted as a lab. Five or six men in lab coats huddled on the floor. Elías jerked his chin as a signal to leave. They scrambled to get out.

  At that moment, he saw Midas aiming a pistol at him from the corner of the room. He leaped to the side just as the gun went off. Behind him, a woman in a lab coat collapsed, shot through the shoulder. Elías snatched a glass container labeled Sulfuric Acid and hurled it at the wall just above Midas. The gangster screamed, tearing at his clothes. Elías pointed the automatic pistol at him but didn’t fire, giving the man time to rip off the acid-soaked shirt.

  “I need proof of your ties with the Church and the bishop.”

  “Why are you doing this? You’re his damn protégé!”

  “I’m doing what I think is right.”

  “That bitch has her claws in you. She’s playing you. You’re totally fucked. Once this is over, she’ll ditch you like the piece of shit you are.”

  “That’s none of your business. Right now, your problem is finding some juicy evidence to make me smile.”

  “And if I refuse?”