The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  “You’re not making sense.” But the dread is rising now. Gordy can feel a cork, long ago inserted deep and sealed against the hazard of poison bottled within, about to be wrested out of the neck.

  “You know the trick you always used to play, back under the fountain, in the vault you made of the oubliette prisons—back when you played at being god, taking care of all the freed prisoners? The here and there trick, where there’d be multiple versions of you? You’d use it to visit us all simultaneously.”

  “I hope your plan doesn’t rest on me doing anything like that again.”

  “You’re still playing it, dummy. You never stopped.”

  He holds out empty hands. “Impossible. No ticket.”

  “You have it. You don’t need it, but you can’t not have it.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Not here. But I’ve seen; in there, you still have it.”

  “There? Where is th—”

  But then the tent fills with the scarlet tunics of cardinals. Time has run out.

  * * *

  —

  His teeth ended before the wooden stake did. In time, he realized he was merely bloodying his gums on the splinters. Goop-Goop allowed himself a count to ten, breathing heavily, in the dust, then put his hands on the post. He’d ground it down significantly; perhaps his arms could complete the job his teeth had sacrificed themselves to begin. He pulled, dimly aware of the red cloud of adjuncts and trustees gathering outside Jane’s inner tent, then entering it. The Andrews were taking no chances; they’d mustered the full force. You can’t possibly break through them, Goop-Goop told himself—there’s so many of them and there’s only one of you. You’ll need to create a distraction. Immediately, the answer came. Ah yes, Goop-Goop thought, this won’t be a problem at all; you’ve always been able to find the most useful available beasts. This is your lesson to yourself. But now this inner voice was unsteady, desperate, no longer in possession of its own convictions, nothing remaining in the words but the saying—and the striving of hands on post, hoping without expectation to hear creak and snap and splinter of wood.

  He pulled, and screamed. He screamed, and pushed. Within his cage, from beneath his tarpaulin, Wembly returned his pain, howl for howl. Scream away, friend, Goop-Goop thought. Fill yourself up with my rage. I owned this circus once. I know where to find your key.

  * * *

  —

  The dressing-room tent is crowded now with ceremonial red. Gordy still hasn’t risen, nor has Bailey—though standing is no longer a matter of choice for them. At the directive of the Andrews, they’ve been tied up, back to back.

  “Let them go,” Jane insists. “Or I’m not flying the trapeze.”

  The Andrew on his right beckons with one hand: Bring it in.

  A skinny old man is led into the room, fresh blood spilled down his nose onto his shirt. Behind him walks a young woman Gordy knows he’s seen before. “That poor man was hungry,” the young woman says, pointing back the way she’s come. “He was eating wood.”

  “I fought them as much as I could.” Sterling Shirker gasps. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was inevitable,” Jane says. She sounds like an unskilled actor, speaking memorized lines by rote. “They learned that one from Morris, too. There’s always somebody willing to pull the dirtiest trick.”

  Suddenly the old man notices Gordy; without preamble he leaps, and Gordy is hauled into his embrace. “Gordy-Gord,” Dad chokes. “All we get is moments, boy. All we get is scraps.”

  Gordy lacks the will even to answer. He can feel the shakes of his daddy sobbing, and then they pull him away. He can’t bring himself to speak. All he wants is to disappear, to not be, to un-become. If I had the ticket, he thinks, I could make us all so small they couldn’t see us anymore. If I had it, I could fade us all away and let them gnaw on each other for a change.

  Every member of this patchwork outlaw band has an overeager cardinal’s sword-point at the ready, warning against sudden movement or aggressive action, while every spare blade is directed at Finch’s neck. The Andrews return their quizzical carrion-bird gaze to Jane. It’s clear what is intended: The show must go on. There will be an Assizement, bird and spade, and also a circus; the Andrews will see to it that all is done as it must be. It’s as if Morris has crafted tiny clockworks of his own will to carry forth his edicts in his absence. If ever Morris had a Continuity, he has found it in them, the Andrews, a self-broken triumvirate.

  “Put your swords down, you win,” Jane says.

  The cardinals crowd around her. They take her by the arms to compel her outward. They’ve forced Gordy and Bailey to their feet. Jane is nearly to the exit now. She digs in her heels to resist them, and, twisting suddenly, she falls from their hands and lands right on the rope-conjoined couple, knocking them all to the grass in a clutch and tangle. In the moments before they regain her to pull her up and away, she whispers: “The here-and-there trick. You never stopped playing it. You’ve been playing it ever since you opened that door. I saw you in there. You’re still there, Gordy. Behind the door. You never left.” Then they have her again, and she says, louder, so they can still hear her even as she disappears from sight and is carried away: “You still have it, back there. I saw you holding it. I saw you. You never left. I saw you…”

  Gordy disappears. It’s the second-damnedest thing. The first-damnedest thing is that, by the time he disappears, nobody takes notice. The gorilla has attacked.

  * * *

  —

  Into the dressing room bursts a howling hairy pandemonium, tearing down the privacy flap and stomping it flat. It screams, swinging long black arms scythelike in the cramped space, upsetting trustee and adjunct, knocking red-clad attackers and prisoners alike to the ground. Espying the brace of little people near its knees, it doubles-redoubles-trebles the yawp of its red-eyed rage, and, without pause or presentiment, takes the head of an Andrew into each of its purposeful paws. There is in Wembly’s simian screams the frustration of decades of captivity, of the cage, of years gone flaccid playing solitaire with a filthy deck missing the four of hearts, all now distilled and focused upon new objects of aggression and hate, focused with inerrant primordial instinct upon the smallest apes he can find. He raises them like clubs and swings them; with these tiny cudgels he demolishes furniture, wrecks mirror, dressing table, desk, lamp, and then, still howling his song of righted wrongs, still swinging bone-broken midgets like bats, bursts through the opposite canvas divider and passes out of sight. They hear him howl as he goes, and then the tumultuous ejaculations of the crowd as he lurches, presumably, into full sight of the circus beneath the lights of the three rings.

  For a moment they all abide in the silence and the detritus of the ape’s passing. Former foes lay united, dazed and wounded equals in the devastation that had come and gone. Jane scrambles back into the tent and makes her way to Finch.

  “Are you all right, baby?” She searches for a wound to tend.

  “That monster was angry.” The young woman, unhurt, confused but untroubled at this desperate pawing, says. “It hated those small men.”

  “Goooooooooop!”

  Into the space that had been a dressing room lurches a thing that had been a man: tin nails for hair, eyes a bloodshot roadmap, legs attenuating to grotesque pink flipper-flaps. Attempting to speak, it reveals a mouth bloody of gum and empty of tooth, a void lined with fresh sawdust. “Goop,” it says, searching the floor. “Goop-Goop Goop gah Goop-Goop gally gall Goop. Goop-Goopy Goop gow.” The stunned and surviving cardinals attempt to obey as best they can, while Bailey scans the tent for Gordy. Where he’d been, there remains only a tangle of ropes.

  “The gorilla must have him,” Bailey mourns. “It’ll tear him apart.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Sterling replies. “He’s elsewhere.”

  After another minute’s attempt at communication, Goop-Goop throws up its hands in frustrat
ion and commences drawing with its finger in the dust on one of the shattered mirror’s larger shards. Trustees and adjuncts, worshipful once more, crowd around to observe the creature’s efforts, the better to divine from him some sign or instruction.

  “Come on,” Bailey says, struggling out of her newly loosened bonds. “While they’re distracted.”

  Sterling demurs. “We’re going to need to stay close to Morris now, you and me. He’ll need whatever help we can give him. Donk’s coming soon.”

  “But…” Bailey points at the creature in the center of the knot of redbirds. “That’s Morris, isn’t it? He’s dangerous.”

  “He’s even more dangerous if Donk gets him again,” Sterling whispers. “Even one more time. Jane told you, I expect. We got to stick to him like butter on rice, keep him from going even one more toe over the line.” Any question of escape has, in any event, become moot; the trustees have recovered well enough to secure their prisoners. Somebody produces a notepad and a pencil for the gooping thing; it now furiously scribbles its directives.

  “But…Morris is insane,” Bailey protests. “He thinks it all came from him. That all of us sprang from his mind. He thinks he created everything.”

  “That’s the problem,” Sterling says. “Didn’t Jane tell you? That’s the exact problem. He isn’t Morris, not really. And he did create everything. He did.”

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps it would be helpful if I explain what the Gordys saw.

  Gordy stood on an endless beach. Behind him, the door: same as it ever was.

  Gordy stood in the tiny room. In many ways the only chamber onto which this door has ever opened. Four square gray walls. Nothing to report.

  Gordy stood in the room where two identical men contend. Did I see this before, he wonders? Was this here last time? Did I force myself to forget? Did I simply fail to turn and see it? He watches their struggle unfold, watches the sea rise into a wave as the loser makes one last desperate act.

  Oh, God, Gordy thinks. I think that I know what I haven’t known yet.

  Gordy stood on the endless beach, clutching a shining green ticket in his hand. The wave no closer now than ever before. Thrumming throughout his being, he heard the Voice:

  —I desire mercy, not sacrifice

  –Damn you. Do your own dirty work, why don’t you? Damn you for giving me this thing.

  —Who told you I gave it to you?

  –I…

  —He has called it. It is Time.

  * * *

  —

  Suddenly, immediately, at a speed immeasurable, the wave lurches forward. It will arrive in minutes or seconds. Possibly it has arrived already to devastate all he calls his own.

  Gordy has the ticket in his hand. He leaps for the door.

  Story is entirely subject to authors.

  But authors are entirely subject to readers.

  And readers are subject to infinite change.

  —Unknown

  At night, he finds beauty in the metropolis.

  Downriver a prison lurks, one of thousands across the planet, teeming with degraded men and women. Most of them, the Coyote knows, are guilty and deserving of their state. Still, the day will come when those walls can be destroyed. No good comes of those places. The Coyote hangs in the sky, listening to the city wail and murmur and thrum.—You’ll do more than free their bodies from the degradation of cruelty; you’ll free their minds. An untended river cuts an unruly path, but it can be channeled. So, too, with the mind. Your control over your super-telepathy power is crude, but you’ll learn the mastery of it. When the time is right, you’ll open their minds and punish their bad impulses until their rivers run straight. Each man and woman will become as precise as architecture. In time, the people will obey because they won’t remember any other state but obedience, but first, they will obey because you will teach them this new truth: The only other option is to burn. Now they’re ruled by fear, but you’ll harness their fear, use it, turn it to better ends. Soon their fear will set them free.

  But now the hour has come, and there is a daily promise to be kept. There is one who requires a more attentive justice, whose worst impulses require a slower extermination. Today you’ll take his skin, and replace it with something new and inappropriate. This will seem to him a punishment, but the day will come when you have taken every original portion of him, when you will begin to replace even the replacements, exchanging them again with something yet worse, and then he will long for the return of the older, lesser torment. Over the years you will make an example of him to pierce the dullest awareness—the suffering due to any who ever again dare cause the suffering of another being.

  Over the city rolls a reverberating cannonade of exploding air, a flash like lightning, and then the Coyote is gone, flying toward Pigeon Forge.

  * * *

  —

  Three spotlights light the three rings. Somewhere in the dark beyond, the crowd knows, the tumblers and clowns wait to entertain; to leap and fall and catch, to thrill them to breathlessness and draw them to their feet. The tapestry is hung from the tent roof, and on the other side, the entertainers await their cues. Somewhere there, behind the tapestry, readying themselves, backstage, are the…Here the line of thought fades into imprecision and distraction. Something’s happening back there, though—something exciting and preparatory.

  Beneath the tent roof, overpopulated bleachers toss and roil in a welter of anticipation, fear, and hope. Vaguely aware of the Assizement, yet at the same time purposely unaware, the crowd is already given to giddiness and a rather specific form of denial. The men, women, and children filling these rickety bleachers are all local employees of Love Forgeworks—an amalgamated corporate empire of various concerns: amusement parks, food manufacturing, military contracting, metalworking, prison management and supply—though this connection is not a thing talked about. There’s a vague understanding that the home offices of Love Forgeworks are located in Pigeon Forge, that everyone who works in any part of Pigeon Forge draws their checks from this parent company. Ask any member of this crowd, they’ll tell you: Oh, I’ve been living and working here a long time, since, since…oh, always, really. How long you’ve been here is not a thing that’s talked about. On occasion—back on the cul-de-sac, back in the apartments, back in the trailer park, back at the motel that rents by the month—the concept of the before-time will drift into the conversation, only to dissipate, unreleased, into a suddenly charged atmosphere. The past? I don’t ever think about that, what did happen before, anyway, I came here from, from…why, I swear (here a wry chuckle), I swear I’ve been here my whole life. How funny, you’d think I’d travel more, but I suppose that’s just how it goes. But it’s a good life. Food on the table. Heat in the register. Clean water in the tap. A little extra to spend on the nicer things. And the circus is coming—how exciting! Every six months a private circus, who gets that? Not everybody, I’ll tell you. We’re lucky. It’s not a bad life…

  The tickets arrive in the mail a few days before, green and green and green and green and green and green and green and green and…blue. The blue tickets are backstage passes. The blue tickets aren’t discussed. There’s a tacit and catholic lack of interest regarding the blue tickets and their recipients, and the reason, or lack of reason, for having received one. There’s a counterfeited jealousy, overenthusiastic congratulations offered the beneficiary, unacknowledged relief at having been spared receipt. Some people get blue tickets, and they get to go backstage, that’s all—how fun, how lucky, to see the circus from inside the circus! Yes, we’ll see those folks again. Lord, what a thing to say. I don’t know why I said that. They’ve been chosen for a special privilege, land’s sakes. Lord, I must be tired. More coffee?

  But today there begins to edge into the already-nervous hum a new energy, a concern, an idea of some crossbeam gone, however incrementally, out of skew on the treadle. Colonel Krane
stands center-stage, top-hatted, his tuxedo striped in vermilion and pink, but for whatever reason he isn’t bellowing the commencement into his microphone. Instead he stands, awkward in silence, looking off into the dark as if expectant for some inexplicably delayed signal. The idea grows: Something’s gone awry. The circus always begins promptly, always. Something has gone fishy backstage. Backstage—this brings to mind thoughts of the blue tickets, but those thoughts are squelched before they lead to other thoughts, which are better not to have, and best not to share.

  Just then, a roar goes up—but not from the spectators. It begins from somewhere out in the darkness, as if from an adjacent room: an animal howl, followed by angry and fearful shouts, shrieks, scuffle, tumble, clatter-bangcrash—and then Colonel Krane hops in comic terror and scampers out of the limelight. Immediately, this vacated space is filled by an immense nightmare of black hair and white fang, a naked beast with an immense pointed skull, bare chest, tiny eyes. When it screams, they can see the teeth, sharp and white. In each paw it clutches a stuffed rag doll, child-sized, dressed all in scarlet. Raising its hideous face to the heavens, it screams confusion or triumph; then, with its long arms, it swings the mannequins round once, round twice, round thrice, until the dolls’ bodies pop off of their heads and fly out, sailing into the dim hidden corners of the tent, emitting two red streamers projecting behind themselves as they fly, as if each is being propelled outward by its own crimson tail. Still howling, still clutching the doll heads, the beast rushes out of the blinding light, into the dark, unseen for a matter of seconds until it tears a hole in the tent wall, admitting a freshet of night air, and then it is gone, its protestations diminishing as it flees.