by Tim Meyer
A week later, a man and his six-year old son were fishing down by a river near Slidell, Louisiana, when the dead body of Ted Wood washed up on an adjacent bank. He had a knife lodged in his back, with the initials D.W. carved into the handle.
These sort of incidents happened frequently since Arthur's father passed away. Arthur equated the years when his father was alive to be like Heaven. The carnival was profitable. They put on quality shows and people came in droves to see them. Things felt safe, secure. When Donald Wilko took over, everything went to Hell. Shows ran, whether Donald was in shape to perform or not. They made piss for money. The audience was thin, when there was one. Donald would drop the same old line “the times are changing,” and mutter nonsense about people being more interested in moving picture shows than they were about seeing live entertainment, but Arthur knew that was total horse manure. People still believed in live entertainment, and he became hellbent to prove The Great Donald Wilco wrong.
That was when Arthur was eighteen, and a year later nothing much had changed. A few more of the group's talented performers, folks who had been around since Arthur's father ran things “dropped out” for one reason or another. Andrew Burkits (the One-Armed Wonder!) who'd been in the business since he was six-years old, suddenly quit because his mother back home in Arkansas had suddenly become very ill and needed his attention. Arthur knew that Andrew was not from Arkansas, but from Georgia. He knew this because Andrew frequently wrote his mother in Georgia, and often had Arthur read over his letters, to proofread them. Arthur was much better at writing than Andrew, or so Andrew used to tell him.
Everybody knew what Uncle Donald had been doing. It was no secret. The problem was no one had the gonads to stand up to him, not even Arthur. The last person who tried to stand up to Donald was a man named Evan Urie, the guy who cleaned horseshit out of the trailers. Evan approached Donald late one night, near a large body of water. With the moral support of many other performers, Evan schemed to kill him, cut his throat and toss him in the lake like some common thug. Arthur had been left out of the attempted coup. The group decided it was best not to tell him, but when it happened, when the time came to appoint a new leader, it had been agreed upon that Arthur would become the new face of the Great Denlax Carnival. Unfortunately, those plans were squashed when it was Donald who returned from their midnight palaver rather than Evan. One of the conspirators—Judy Willow—went out to look for Evan the following morning, only finding his hand lying in the dirt near the body of water Evan said he was going to leave Donald in. Just a hand. The rest of Evan would not be discovered because an alligator came along hours before Judy did, and devoured Evan's body quite easily.
Judy Willow died later that week, her naked body found by hunters deep within a Kentucky forest.
Arthur Denlax prayed that things would get better and people would stop dying and leaving him.
He never thought much of God, for He was never much a big deal to those who called the road home. But he wanted answers; he wanted things to go back to normal; he wanted justice for those taken from him.
Luckily for him, a man named Quincy Black, would be along to help him with all of those things.
2
It was Arthur Denlax's nineteen and a half birthday when he woke up one morning to the smell of something burning. It smelled like meat, sausages perhaps. It was too early for any of the other performers to be up and about, most of them slept until the mid-afternoon. Arthur sat up from his makeshift bed comprised of mostly hay, and glanced over at last night's lover; the girl with webbed feet and hands (THE HUMAN FROG! a big poster exclaimed). Some found it repulsive, but Arthur found he was attracted to things that most people were disgusted by.
He moved away from his hay-filled mattress, toward the smell of smoked sausage. He crossed the campgrounds and walked over the unconscious body of Donald Wilko. Had he the stones to do it, he could've easily cut the bastard's throat out. Arthur could have gotten his blade deep within the sinister man's flesh and halfway across his neck before the son of a bitch even knew what was happening. Instead of doing that, Arthur moved in dream-like fashion toward the savory smell of delicious meats. His feet moved with little effort. Before he knew it, the campsite was far behind him, and he was walking down a small hill, toward a much smaller campsite where a single man was sitting down holding a string of sausages over an open fire. He wore a brimmed hat, slightly cocked to the side, a red feather sticking out of the black band wrapped around it. Long black hair flowed from underneath it, past his shoulders. He wore a white shirt with buttons, and green suspenders to hold up his trousers. He smiled and gave a subtle wave as Arthur approached his quaint assembly.
“Good morning, fellow traveler,” the mysterious man welcomed him. “Beautiful, isn't it?”
“Very much so,” Arthur agreed. “What brings you all the way out here?” Arthur surveyed the man's carriage, which had been pulled by two mares. The horses grazed yonder their meeting place.
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” the man responded. “I'm a traveling salesman. Much of my time is spent on the road.”
“Traveling salesman, huh? Wouldn't your business be better off in a shop in some town or city? I mean, aren't the days of a traveling salesman numbered?”
“I guess I could say the same of a traveling carnival,” the man said. He lit his pipe and withdrew smoke from it. “Tell me, Arthur, are you happy?”
Arthur took a step back, as if the man had meant to harm him. “How do you know my name?” he asked, somewhat frightful.
“Oh, when you're on the road as much as I am, you pick up on a few things.” The man looked as if he remembered something. “How rude of me. I never introduced myself. My name is Quincy Black, seller of all sorts of magical items. You must be interested in something I have, oh yes, I think you will be. But first...” He pulled the sausages away from the flames, and swung the long string of meat toward Arthur . “Won't you try some of my sausage?”
3
Arthur politely declined the man's offer. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry. Quite the contrary—he was indeed famished. It had been a good long while since he had something that provided nourishment such as cooked sausage. Loafs of bread and trapped rainfall water were just not filling him up. He kicked himself all the way back to his trailer for not taking just one measly sausage. He imagined what it would have tasted like, and his mouth filled with water. The man had been a little strange, yes. His queer antics made Arthur doubt whether the sausage would have satisfied him at all, that maybe the sausage was nothing more than poison. In any case, Arthur put the peculiar wanderer in the back of his mind, for when he returned to the campgrounds, something was missing.
The rest of the crew.
The spot where Donald Wilko lay waiting for someone to come along and end his life was now vacant. Arthur called out various names, but no one answered. He checked the trailers, places he knew where the performers liked to sleep and take naps, only to find them as empty as the rest of the campgrounds. Even the mobile stable where they kept the horses were unoccupied. Sylvester, the crowd-pleasing monkey, was missing from his cage. The cage had still been locked. The trickster monkey had not escaped; he vanished into thin air, along with everyone else.
Arthur, confused and slightly scared, walked to the middle of the campground, close to where he saw Donald Wilko passed out on the grass not more than an hour ago. He screamed. He yelled the names of his friends; his companions; his cohorts; people who had comforted him when his father died and left him all alone. No one answered, for they had all left him too, just like his mother had on the day he was born, just as his father had twelve years later. He screamed the names of his mother and father, and still no one replied. After, he simply screamed.
Finally, someone answered.
“No one is here, Arthur,” a voice said. “Except for you, and I.”
Arthur turned and saw the traveling salesman standing on the outskirts of the camp ground. His attire had chang
ed since their last encounter. He was no longer wearing a fedora, instead his long dark hair flowed unrestrained. His shirt had been white—now black and a black leather jacket over it. A crow perched on his shoulder, and Quincy was feeding it little bits of sausage out of his hand. The bird pecked carefully, unwilling to risk tearing into the man's skin. “And my little friend here.”
“Who are you?” Arthur snapped. “Where did my friends go? What is happening here?” Struggling for breath and on the verge of soiling himself, Arthur darted his eyes spastically.
“Relax, kiddo. I'm not here to hurt you. I'm only here to help.”
Arthur stepped away from the man garbed in black, just as he advanced forward. Arthur had heard words like that before, from the mouth of Donald Wilko.
“What is happening here?” Arthur repeated.
“This?” Quincy Black asked, looking around the world, which was surely his doing. “Think of this as a dream. You've had dreams before?” Arthur nodded, cautiously. “Good. Well, this is no different, I assure you. This dream is my creation. I've brought you here.”
“Why?” Arthur asked.
“Because. I want to make a deal with you, Arthur. I want to help you take back what is rightfully yours.” Quincy Black smiled. “I want to give you back your father's legacy.”
4
“Ten years,” Quincy Black said to him. “This will be all of yours for ten years. On your twenty-ninth and a half birthday, I will come claim what is rightfully mine.”
“And what's that?” Arthur asked.
“Think of me, as a ringleader. And I too, have a very big carnival to run. I need people, Arthur, people like you, who are going to take part in it. I need performers Arthur, and I have chosen you to play a very big part in my show!” Black laughed maniacally. “Doesn't that sound fun?”
“I guess,” a very young, very naïve Arthur Denlax said. “So what do I have to do?”
“After your ten years is up? Ah, not much. Just train in the ways of the Elduronds, learn their magic in hopes of assembling an army large enough to take over the entire universe!” Quincy smiled again. “Not much at all, my dear boy, not much at all.”
Arthur stared at him, blankly. “I... I don't understand.”
“And the beauty of it is, you don't need to!” Quincy shouted. “Just know, that I will give you what that sad sack of shit, Donald Wilko, will never be able to give you. Understand?”
Arthur remained still.
“This is what your parents would have wanted.”
“I want to live here longer than ten years. I want to... live forever.”
“And you will! My dear boy, my dearest Arthur, you will. Just—not in this world. And trust me, in ten years, no one in this world will even give a monkey's tit about a traveling carnival. You'll fail in this world. But the world where you're going! Oh, man! Do they love carnivals! You can perform forever there! You can be the star, and everyone will love you! They'll adore you! Think of the women... they'll line up around the block just to have you touch them. Trust me! It'll be everything you ever wanted and more...” Quincy Black approached him, and this time, Arthur did not retreat. “Your parents, will be very proud of you, Arthur. They will look down at you from Heaven and smile.”
Black touched the boy on his shoulder. A wave of comfort washed over him. Tears streaked down his cheeks. He started to cry, but managed to suppress an outburst of tears in front of this powerful stranger. “Is there really a Heaven?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. There's a Hell too. And a Limbo. There's a place where people look like giant birds, places where bunny rabbits hold conversations in English. There's places made of fire and places made of ice. There's even a place called Garmetal where people live in cities underwater. I've never been to it, but I hear it's nice. There's—” the teenager was in his arms now, and Quincy Black embraced him, smiling devilishly. “There's other worlds than this one, Arthur, and I want to show them to you.”
5
“I'll need a prick of your blood,” Quincy informed him. He pulled a needle out of his jacket pocket. Arthur offered him his finger. Quincy Black jabbed the needle into his finger, and watched as a small red bubble surfaced. “There we are.” He captured a few droplets in a small vial and told Arthur that he was going to be his greatest asset. He also told him that, “A blood pact is the most strongest pact in the entire Oververse, and shall not be broken. Understand?”
Arthur did.
“Good,” Quincy said. “Then, I'll leave you with a present. I got it from this world. It's new. I'm told it's years ahead of its time.” Black produced a camera from his burlap bag. He handed it to Arthur, who stared at it, mystified.
“A camera?” he asked. Quincy nodded. “I didn't know they made them this small.” Arthur still needed two hands to wield it.
“Careful with that thing. There's something about camera's I don't like. I can't really put my finger on it. Anyway, enjoy. Oh! I almost forgot,” he said, turning back to his carriage. He opened the door and continued talking, but Arthur could not hear him. He continued to examine the small photograph machine, something he had only heard whispers about. He'd seen one once, at the Picolo Brother's Family Circus, years earlier, while he was doing some research on how other traveling carnivals compared. It was a standing one, and the photographer had to duck under a giant cloth while snapping the picture. He had only heard rumors about hand-held devices such as this, although they were becoming a fairly popular and fairly common commodity. The world was changing awfully fast, and that's when Arthur realized that maybe Quincy Black was right. What would the world be like in ten years? What would happen to traveling circuses like the one his father had successfully created? What would happen to performers like himself, and his friends? Would they adapt? Or die with the art? These were questions he would no longer have to worry about. And for that he was thankful.
“Ah! Here it is!” Quincy Black produced a big black book from the back of his carriage. It was old and frail looking, too big to hold in his hands. It had three letters etched on the cover in gold. ELD. “This is a magical book. With this, the next ten years will be the most successful, most magical time of your life. Learn it. Do not let it go to waste.”
And with that, Arthur woke up in a bed of hay, next to a naked girl with webbed hands and feet.
6
That morning, the group discovered the dead body of Donald Wilko in the middle of the campground. Someone had sliced his stomach open during the night and removed his intestines. They were strung over a small open fire, like a long string of bloody sausage. No one admitted to committing this disturbing act, and no one seemed to mind much that it happened either. They were thankful not to be victims of a similar fate. Traveling bandits, they decided, were the ones who killed and tortured him, and no one argued or questioned this claim.
7
The group needed to elect a new ringleader. Arthur Denlax won by a landslide.
8
Two years later, the Great Denlax Carnival was on the rise. Whereas most traveling circuses and carnivals were seeing business decline, Arthur's was proving to be pretty popular. He had followed Black's instructions, reading from the Eldurond's book and performing spells during live shows, beneath the nostrils of his peers. They were blind to his new tricks, except for one individual. Frog-Girl! had caught on quickly. Over a short period of time, the two of them had become more than just midnight lovers. They had become lovers in all hours of the day.
One day, before a big show in New York, Frog-Girl, also known as Veronica Silk, approached her man and asked him why he read from the big black book every day, and sometimes spoke in a language she had never heard before.
“It's magic, baby,” Arthur told her. “Real magic.”
He never elaborated, and she never pushed the subject.
9
Five years later, the Great Denlax Carnival had peaked. They were selling out two shows a night. Money poured in. There was enough of it to go around, twice, t
hree times. Even the guy who cleaned the horseshit out of the trailers was considered to be wealthy by most middle-class standards. Things had never been better, even when Arthur's old man ran things. He knew it had to, but Arthur didn't want the ride to end. Only five more years left. Five more years before he'd be forced to give it all up. One night, after they made passionate love for the second time that evening, Arthur faced Veronica in a bed that was no longer made of hay.
“If someone came to you and said you could have anything you ever dreamed, but you could only have it for ten years—what would you do?” Arthur asked her. “Would you do it?”
She giggled. “Arthur! That's silly,” she said.
“Just answer the question,” he said, smiling, but she could tell he was serious.
“Anything I want, but only ten years to enjoy it?”
“That's right. After that, you... I don't know. Die.”
“I'd want to live longer than ten more years, Arthur.”
“Even if those ten years were perfect?”
“Wouldn't matter. I wouldn't want to die,” she said. “I want to live forever.”
Arthur couldn't fall asleep that night. In fact, Arthur didn't do much sleeping at all after that night.
10
