‘Once again, your naivety about your own people shocks me, Miss Selmerey.’
He places the bag and pack in the centre of the table.
‘This will provide us with a means,’ he continues, his eyes never leaving the pack as he speaks, ‘to ensure our return.’
‘Our?’
‘Naturally: or are you really saying you’re not intending to help me bring Lorn back from the Carnival Diabolus?’
As we’ve talked, we’ve naturally ignored the silken bag lying on the table. When we look back towards it, it has changed: it’s collapsed, empty. The pack of cards that had been inside the bag has vanished.
Far from being dismayed, the Senator elatedly reaches for the empty bag. Unstringing it once more, he tips it over an outstretched palm.
What look like a few small, dark seeds spill out into his hand.
The Senator grins wryly when he sees my bewildered expression.
‘Surely,’ he says, ‘you’ve heard of Jack and the Beanstalk?’
*
Chapter 22
‘They’re seeds?’
‘Pips, to be exact. Seven pomegranate pips, to be even more precise.’
Holding his palm at an angle above the open bag, he slowly and carefully tips the pips back into the bag, until only one remains in the crease of his hand.
With a quick jerk of the hand holding the bag, his fingers grasping the drawstring as he does so, he pulls it reasonably tightly closed.
‘Amongst the seeds found within a pomegranate, one of them is a duplicate of one found in paradise.’
His palm flat once more, he holds out his hand towards me, as if offering me the pip.
The pip’s no longer dark: it glows a ruby red, like a small sliver of crystal. Or as if surrounded once again by blood-red juice.
It begins to spread, as if it were now a bleeding cut to his hand. As if a nail had been hammered into his palm.
The lifeline running across his palm quickens, quivers, as if actually alive; a thread of life rising up from his skin, as snaking mists rise from ground warmed by the morning sun.
Like a snake, a recently awakened serpent, the wraith-like line at first writhes languidly above his palm; then it abruptly shoots forward, like it’s striking out, a strike of lightning coursing through the air.
It crackles as it rips through the booth, sighs as it exits through the darkness off to one side of the newly formed doorway.
‘That’s what we follow,’ the Senator announces triumphantly, reaching out with the hand holding the bag to take my own hand.
He strides towards the darkened area alongside the door, his palm still held out flat before him, the streaking thread seemingly being gradually absorbed or devoured by his hand as he moves forwards.
I go with him, too dazed and bewildered to protest.
As we step into the darkness, it’s like stepping into a glowing light.
*
The glow comes from the incredible brightness of a multitude of surrounding lights.
The darkness lying beyond and all around them provides the sharp contrast that makes them seem all the brighter, all the more alluring and fantastical.
All the colours imaginable, they sparkle as if illuminated gems: rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethyst, amber. Mainly suspended, often in long rows, they could have been the burning stars of an endless universe.
There’s also the familiar sound of throbbing generators, the smells of oil, of ground-in horse droppings. There’s laughter, merriment, the raucous cries of drunks. A wailing, too: the odd cry of agony, of distress. Gasps that could be amazement or moans of disappointment, of anguish. Shrieks of those being thrilled, of those filled with fear.
The weaving, snapping thread connected to the Senator’s hand entrancingly ripples through this universe, leading us deeper into this mix of light and dark, of excited yells and sounds of pain.
The lights swirl through the darkness, as suns and planets whirl through space, solar systems in miniature that spin ever faster as they draw ever closer together, whirlpools of accumulating light.
They explode, as if suffering from an overload, darken, shrink, sucking in evermore of the surrounding darkness. Darkness which slithers, coagulates, hardens, becomes form, material – man.
Suddenly, the warping, wafting thread of life has vanished, as if broken, snapped.
And all about us is the chaos of unending carnival: the Carnival Diabolus.
*
Chapter 23
The carnival extends endlessly in all ways around us. Above. Below.
No matter which way you look, which way you head, you’re seeing, you’re striding into, a carnival of booths, bars, rides, entertainers, shows, and bawdy, flimsily dressed burlesque.
The crowds are exhilarated, enthusiastic for everything that’s happening about them; whether it’s being invited to take part in a show, an act, a ride, a challenge for a prize, a gamble, a drink, a liaison, an encounter.
It’s all so familiar. Yet also so at odds with the joy I’ve always associated with the carnival.
Blackness swirls about everything, everyone, as if it’s smoke, or oil, swirling and expanding in water.
Some of the grins on faces are pained, forced, as if elicited through an effort to please on their part, or by an accuser or torturer, insistent that they play the part of enjoying themselves. Others, however, are wild, animalistic in their sense of freedom; the freedom to do everything they could have ever wished for in their wildest, most bestial imaginations.
There’s no reason to hold back here. No reason not to take part in the very sheerest excess of behaviour, the lowering of morals, the shrugging off of civilisation, of humanity.
There are no shells here to either constrain or contain people.
No shell of society. No rules. No regulations. No restrictions.
No shell of body. For the bodies I think I see are only made up of the surrounding darkness, darkness that whips and snaps through them.
Still, that doesn’t prevent them from enjoying the sense of body, the bodily senses of taste, touch, and being touched, an orgy of food, drink, other people.
‘Carne-vale – or “farewell flesh”, if you’d prefer it in your language.’
The Senator observes the ribald goings on with an amused smirk.
‘Diabolus – the Devil! For it’s the Devil himself who has wormed his way into these people!’
‘Is that what you think all this is? An entrapment? A Hell?’
‘People entrapped by their own fleshy desires, you mean?’ His smirk is wider than ever. ‘A last spin of the coin! Some Hell, though, don’t you think?’
Admittedly, most of those around us appear to be enjoying themselves. But doesn’t any carnival bring out that initial enjoyment? The suffering is afterwards, when you atone for your excess of pleasure with a hangover, or harsh pangs of regret or guilt.
I suspect that no one around us will be tortured by guilt. The hangover, though; that might be a different matter, judging by how rolling, stumbling drunk most of these people are.
Yet again, however, I would think that it’s highly unlikely they’re expected to suffer in this way.
‘But I saw some of the people return.’
I have to yell to be heard above the screams of joy, of terror, the laughter of those laughing at others, those less fortunate than themselves.
As they laugh, they fail to realise that they have also become the source of amusement, of entertainment, for others. For many are already freakish in their nature, sprouting here an excess of hair, there an elongated nose, even an extra pair of legs. Many are gnome-like. Even more are passable as sneering goblins.
‘Yes, they were changed,’ I admit, continuing my reply to the Senator. ‘But they still came back!’
‘Not so much changed, as rearranged.’
With a slight, amused nod of his head, he indicates a group of drunks merrily sidling off into the deeper shadows.
&n
bsp; They don’t realise, I presume, that what little remains of their flesh is already unforming, deteriorating, the darkness unhurriedly wafting its way through the warp of their being: they grow tails, hooves, paws and snouts.
Elsewhere, a gorgeously alluring woman, so aware of her beauty, is unaware that the ugliness she laughs at is seeping into her, mingling to create a creature she could only despise. A freak who, tomorrow, will be an attraction, the star of her own show, if she returns to her old world.
It’s the terrified snorting of pigs, the bleating of lambs, that wakens me to a much greater sense of familiarity than I’d felt earlier: we’re walking around a patch of the carnival that reminds me so much of my own carnival, with its positioning of booths, the nature of its rides, the tumbling and whirling of jugglers and entertainers, the slinky, elasticated bodies of girls trained since birth to wrap themselves in all manner of unusual shapes.
Yes, yes; there’s Ferendra! There, too, is Gillaresh!
Yet they’re not really here. They’re a ghostly presence. (Or is it that we’re a ghostly presence amongst them?)
They move freely about the Carnival Diabolus, unhindered in anyway by its peoples. They pass through the crowds here, just as we pass effortlessly through those attending my home carnival.
Only the booths, those occupying the very same positions within each carnival, prove to be obstacles. Booths attended by people I recognise – yes, there’s Kevarn, handing out his bottles of ElixiAir – but also by people I don’t, each moving through each other, in many cases going through remarkably similar actions, their hands touching if only they were on the same plane of existence.
In this carnival, every bottle glows, the glow of the truly magical, miraculous waters that Kevarn had managed to bring over into our world. As he touches his own bottles, draws them clear, it would be so easy, surely, for him to reach for and take another one of these miraculous bottles: is that how Mom helped him choose one, by simply making sure he was aware that it was possible?
It’s an overlapping of realities: no wonder the carnies who come here find it so impossible to return! There is no edge of darkness here, a way of simply stepping back from the darkness, heading back into the light.
That, of course, is why the Senator insisted on making sure he was armed with the pomegranate seeds.
It’s no use asking him how he knew to ask for the pips, how he knew how to ask for them. He’ll just say, as he always does, that he found the answers in the many esoteric tracts he’s waded his way through over the years.
He was sorting out the lies, sieving out the truth, he has already told me. That’s how he would know of the secret portal in the Future Fates booth.
As for all the rest of this amazing carnival – with its trapeze artists flying from one plane into another, its tightrope walkers precariously balanced on a three dimensional web of ropes, many of which curve sickeningly – are they connections to every other carnival in the country, the world? Are they all unknowingly connected by the Carnival Diabolus?
The equivalent of the more ghostly Kevarn moves easily, fluidly, around his booth, holding out the waters to the eagerly surrounding crowd; and yet, it dawns on me, he never releases the bottle. Because the bottle is empty. And then, rapidly, it fills, glows: draining the waters of life from the pressing crowd.
When he places the bottle back amongst the others, it sparkles, full of life.
The bottles the crowd drink from are those purchased from the bars. They have no need for health, or wellbeing.
They’re happy. Deliriously so.
They wither and age, yet they are thankfully unaware of this.
‘A garden of earthly delights!’ The Senator grins with a perhaps shocking sense of pleasure as he watches this. ‘Their own uncontrollable needs have become their own punishment.’
‘Where will we find Lorn?’ I ask anxiously. It’s far more chaotic here than I could have possibly imagined.
‘I had hoped,’ the senator admits, ‘that he’d be here, with you, when we came through.’
‘With me? Why would he be with me?’
He shrugs, as if he’s not quite sure himself why he had made this assumption.
‘I’d thought that, maybe, what you presumed were your talents for bringing the statues to life were really his: that he was staying around you, as a sort of guardian angel.’
‘If you thought that – then why didn’t you tell me?’ I retort angrily.
He shrugs again.
‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes unnecessarily: it was only an assumption on my part.’
‘If he had been with me, wouldn’t we have seen him when we came through to this side?’
He nods.
‘Of course; but that might be why he left – because he didn’t want you to actually see him as he might appear now.’
At the stall we’re passing, the hoopla, a man cries out with glee as he’s presented with a large, soft, orange monkey as a prize: until the prize leaps into life, swings onto his back, and whips him along through the crowds as if he were now nothing more than a convenient mount.
The other players continue with their throws of the hoops regardless, aiming to deftly land them over sticks revealed, on closer viewing, to be men and women in miniature, people who scream as they are violently struck by the badly aimed projectiles.
There are more screams from the dart and airgun booths, the cards illustrated with moving people, the metallic objects being struck by the pellets similarly partly human in form. Money being exchanged, both coins and notes, are compressed men and women, as are the cards being urgently shuffled and dealt at the gambling booths.
Shrieks of glee come from the roller-coaster, the carriages spinning in a twisting, rising and falling course that’s impossible to follow in its complexity and ingenuity. Shrieks of fright and agony, however, come from the people making up its maze of wooden framing, supporting its careering path.
In complete shock, I spin away from the horror I’m seeing, barging unintentionally into a crazed-looking woman wildly winding her way through the crowd. To stop herself from tumbling, she reaches out for me, grabs me by the arm – only to almost jerk back from me as if struck by a bolt of lightning.
She hasn’t let go of my arms however. She grips them all the tighter, even though her face is creased with fear, her eyes bulbous and white with terror.
In these eyes, as if they’re crystal balls, I see myself.
I’m riding on the back of an angel, and angel with the most beautiful, outspread wings!
‘No, no! I don’t want to know your future! I don’t wish to know anyone’s future anymore!’
The woman wails, as if pained by her insight. I sense that she is tortured by her skill: seeing everything that must pass constantly laid out before her must have its own terrors.
She lets go of my arms, weaves past me, streams through the crowd once more, trying to avoid touching anyone she has to pass.
The back of her head is also a face, one anguished and miserable. Even her torso, I notice now for the first time, is twisted around to face in a different direction to her legs.
She ambles off awkwardly, unsteadily.
But before she had let me go, I had seen my future, seen Lorn’s.
I was dragging him down.
I was too heavy.
We were falling to our deaths!
*
Chapter 24
‘Did you see–’
I whirl around, checking to see if the Senator had also witnessed how my meeting up with Lorn leads to our possible deaths.
But he isn’t there. While I’ve been distracted and held up, he’s obliviously moved on through the crowd.
I look about me urgently, hoping I can pick him out from the rest of the throng.
I can’t see him anywhere. He’s vanished.
I rush through the crowd, continuing in the direction we’d originally been heading, hoping I can catch up with him. Once again, however, I
’m disappointed – or should that be dismayed?
He has the pips. The pips that will lead us back to my own world.
I can only hope now that he soon realises I’m not with him. And comes back to look for me.
Nearby, a juggler is throwing his batons into the air. He drops one, which squeals as it crashes to the ground, revealing itself to be yet another transformed, terrified human.
And if whatever I saw in that poor woman’s eyes is true, that’s my future too.
*
I head towards the Glass Labyrinth, the maze of mirrors and glass.
That’s where Lorn used to hang out back in my world.
Of course, I’m not sure he’ll be there: even if he’s taken to hanging out in the Mirrored Hall once more, I’ve no idea how many exist within the Carnival Diabolus.
He could be in any one of them. Or none of them.
If I find Lorn, I should find the Senator too: because the Senator is also on the lookout for Lorn.
Besides, it’s really Lorn who I’ve come here looking for, isn’t it?
As I approach the hall of mirrors, people are exiting it. They’re deformed, having taken on the shapes and forms they’d seen within the contorting mirrors.
There are people wearing masks too. Joining in the gaiety of the carnival. Joining in its horror too, for on removing their masks, their faces remain just the same.
A clown darts past, weeping. Has he found too, that he can’t remove his makeup without revealing the same face beneath?
The Glass Labyrinth is even more confusing than normal. It’s also inhabited by the mirage-like glass walls, the ghostly patrons, that exist back in my world.
Lorn isn’t here, however.
He could be anywhere, of course.
Even in residence at one of the innumerable Future Fates booths. That would make sense; continuing in his same role here.
He was good at it, after all.
But then again: hadn’t I just come across a poor woman who had been punished by knowing all futures, all fates?
What’s Lorn’s skills against that?
In the darker shadows, a cavorting couple are transforming, growing fur and tails, their arms writhing oddly as they become forelegs. No one else around me seems to notice, their own grins just as wild with lust, pleasure, fear.