Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7
After my first performance, and after the drunks disappeared into the funhouse, I was a little more apprehensive about continuing to be in the freakshow. Seeing Nikolai and Antonio pull the Bandwagon onto the train freaked me out. But before I could process anything I was interrupted by Santiago’s excited giggling as he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tightly.
“You’re going to love Europe so much, Benny!” He told me with that endless amount of happy charm he possessed. And it was like any worry I had instantly vanished whenever I saw his painted face and its contagious smile.
“How does this train even take us to Europe?” I asked him as I turned to take in the giant multicolored locomotive. I was still at a loss over how it suddenly appeared in the forest with no track or noise besides the whistle to announce its arrival.
“I honestly don’t know. We just sorta arrive at our destination after a while.” Santiago shrugged at me, clearly he hadn’t cared to have given it much thought. Before I could ask him any further questions the two of us were called over by Abigail to help the rest of the troop pack everything up. I did the best I could do with my 12-year-old strength. It was as I was loading my things from my room onto the train that I learned of our destination from Garibaldi.
“France?” I asked him. He gave me an excited nod and quickly shoved a brochure into my hand, almost knocking the shapeshifter from my shoulder. The little guy in his panic turned into a snake and quickly coiled around my neck to keep himself from falling. It got a little surprised gag from me but nothing further.
“We just have to pick up the final members of our little family and we can show you an amazing time, Benny!” he said with excitement as he quickly rushed past me to help the twins load their items onto one of the storage cars. Garibaldi walked up to the engine car and looked like he was talking to someone. I assumed it was the conductor or the train engineer. I couldn’t exactly see Garibaldi being allowed to ride a bicycle, much less a whole train.
“Oh God, did he say we’re going to France?” Nikolai asked as he sat a wooden crate down next to me. I looked up at him and nodded, showing him the brochure that Garibaldi had given me. The look his scarred and burnt face gave me sent my gaze quickly back down to the ground to avoid it. “I thought the boss had finally ditched that French freak and his stupid gremlins.” He stabbed the brochure with one of his knives and chucked it as hard as he could against a nearby tree, pinning it there.
“Do you not like him?” I asked the Russian. He looked down at me and then quickly looked around him. Once he was sure no one could overhear us he crossed his arms and let out an annoyed sigh.
“Word of advice, kid. Stay away from him. No one in the troop likes him. Not even the boss likes him that much. So you’re better off just avoiding him.” With those simple words of advice, Nikolai walked off muttering a bunch of words to himself in Russian.
As I loaded the last of my things onto the train I could tell that news of our destination had reached the rest of the members because their once cheery demeanors had all but evaporated. But despite that, we all together had taken down the circus tents and booths and had finally loaded them all onto the train. When Garibaldi called for all aboard I hesitated in climbing up the steps to board. There were still lingering doubts in my mind. The snake on my shoulder nudged me to go forward but I still stood there, frozen with indecision.
“Move twerp,” Eva told me as she shoved past me to board the train. Followed quickly after by Jasper who barely even glanced at me with his face held so high. The next person was a lot nicer since it was Abigail who offered me her hand. I looked at her and her patchy skin. Despite the fact I’d never seen someone with vitiligo before I had already gotten to know her so well that it no longer even bothered me.
“Common, Benny. Can’t keep your new family waiting,” she said with that loving smile she always had. I looked at my snake, who stared back at me with his deep red eyes. He offered me a little flick of the tongue which licked my nose and got a surprised giggle out of me. I took Abigail’s hand and followed her onboard the train.
As it turned out we all had our own private cabins so I was left with my shapeshifter and a bed along with a seat and even a bathroom. Carefully I took the shapeshifter off my shoulder and placed him on the bed while I went to use the bathroom. I took the time to get the makeup off my face and also change out of my circus clothes. I didn’t exactly know if this was allowed, but I was alone and wanted to be back in my normal clothes at least for the meantime.
With that all finished, I felt the train start moving as soon as I exited the bathroom. Wanting to see it move, I walked over to the window only to find that it was completely tinted and that I was unable to see outside of it. I suddenly figured out why Santiago didn’t know how the train moved. Plopping myself down on the bed I decided that now was as good a time as ever to discover some more things I could do with my shapeshifter friend.
I asked him to turn into various small things. From a beetle to a bunny. And he did this all with little effort on his part. This filled my mind with various ideas of what to ask him to turn into for our next performance. I quickly got some notebook paper and a pen from the art supplies that had been in my room and began to jot down ideas for him to turn into.
As I did this I received a knock at my door. Telling whoever it was to enter I was surprised to see that it was Izara who had decided to come visit me suddenly. Her single eye scanned my room before landing on me. It looked like she was hesitating whether to come in or not so I nodded at her.
“Pardon my intrusion upon your sanctuary. I bring you a charm to which it can be said will bring upon you some favor from the spirits.” She told me, opening up her clenched right hand and revealing a small necklace. Trying to decode what she’d told me in my mind I figured in some way that she was giving me a good luck charm.
“Thank you,” I told her as I sat my pen down and walked over to her to take it from her. Before I could she slowly took my hand opened it palm side up and let the necklace fall from hers into mine. It was a simple one made of string and beads with a shining emerald. “It’s really pretty,” I told her with a smile, slipping it over my head and letting it dangle down to my chest.
She bowed her head down at me slightly and backed up a bit before it seemed like she had something else she wanted to tell me. “The stone matches your eyes. Now three eyes you shall have. Be safe child, for the mantis will not hesitate to harm you when a chance to do so he has.” She bowed again before wordlessly slipping out into the hall. I stood there, my brain working overtime to try and figure out what she was trying to tell me.
I closed the door to my cabin and went back over to the bed. I sat down and stared down at the necklace, playing with the emerald stone as her warning played around in my head. This was the second time she’d mentioned a mantis. She’d mentioned it the first time she’d read my palm and now again. Was it a warning about the final freakshow member waiting for us in France? I played around with the thought in my head before a sudden squawking from my desk pulled me out of my deep thoughts.
My shapeshifter friend was a parrot, the last thing I asked him to turn into, and he pecked at my incomplete list. Smiling back at him, I let the emerald drop back down to my chest and quickly hurried over to finish brainstorming ideas for my next act. Any thoughts of mantises were quickly forgotten in the excitement over my brainstorming session.
Finding my legs growing restless, I picked up my shapeshifter friend and had him coil around my throat in his snake form. I exited my cabin and started walking in no particular direction down the train’s halls. I was planning just to stretch my legs out for a moment and there wasn’t any better way of doing this than just walking. Soon I reached the door that led to the next cart and without a second thought, I opened it and walked in. And I immediately regretted my decision when I came face to faces with Bandwagon.
It was sitting there in the dimly lit cart with its instruments still in the places where it had had them during the performance. The mass of flesh and faces writhed a little at my intrusion of its privacy. But it didn’t say anything. And I think that was scarier than if it had screamed or roared at me. Its dead silence with only the faint sounds of musical instruments terrified me and I screamed as loudly as I could, quickly shutting the door and running full sprint back into my room. The only thing that kept me from having a panic attack was my shapeshifter friend turning into a puppy and licking my face. Giggling and calming down I patted his head softly and thought that I would do everything I could to avoid Bandwagon.
I had a few more visitors over as the train continued to chug along toward our destination. Santiago was next as we both told jokes to each other and he had fun watching my friend turn into whatever small animal the clown could think of. Abigail came to join us with food from the dining cart. Garibaldi’s rule about eating together was usually not observed while traveling so we were allowed to eat in our rooms. Nikolai was my final visitor as he had grown bored in his room and decided to join me. Mostly because Santiago had refused to leave my room.
I had expected our journey to take several days if not weeks. I had always heard the horror stories of traveling across the country on a train. If we were somehow going to get to France I figured it’d take us just as long if not longer. But to my surprise just as we were all finishing the food Abigail had brought for us the train came to a sudden stop.
“Oh dear god, we’re here.” Nikolai sighed as he sat his barely eaten burger down on his plate and leaned back in my bed. I looked at everyone else and saw that they had much of the same reaction. Even Abigail who was friendly and loving to everyone I had met so far had a look of apprehension on her face.
“We’re just lucky that Tony will set them up in their own car. We won’t have a repeat of last time when they all had to share one room,” Abigail said, still trying to remain positive despite the fact she was the only one who took any solace in that.
“Them?” I asked. “I thought it was only one person.” From what Nikolai had told me before we had departed I had thought that was the case. The three all looked at each other before turning back to me. It was obvious they didn’t want to talk about whoever was about to board the train.
That conversation was quickly derailed when Garibaldi stuck his head through my door with that ever-present smile on his face. “Benny! Come here, you have to meet the last few members of the freakshow!” he said with excitement. If he didn’t like the final members he wasn’t letting it show like the others. Handing Santiago my empty plate and taking my shapeshifter, back in his raven form, from the desk and putting him on my shoulder I followed after Garibaldi as he led me toward the door to the outside.
“Now, it’s for the best if you don’t get too close to Mathieu or his assistant.” He told me as he held the door as if about to open it. I nodded at him since I had already planned not to do so. He gave me a thumbs-up and opened the door. Outside the sun was still shining and it felt like we were still somewhere in my state. We were at a completely abandoned train station with vines and weeds growing everywhere.
“Why were we left in France, Monsieur?” A muffled French voice asked. Looking out from behind Garibaldi’s back I was met with a man a couple inches shorter than Garibaldi, with a white mask on. The mask had a painted smile on it with only a visible eyehole on the left side with a painted star over the hole. The right side had a blue-painted diamond and was completely covered.
“I didn’t feel like bringing you to America, Mathieu,” Garibaldi told him matter-of-factly, so bluntly I let out a little nose laugh from behind him. This caught Mathieu’s attention as his one eye behind the mask shone and focused on me, sending me quickly hiding behind Garibaldi.
“Who’s the runt?” he asked, still trying to get a good look at me. Garibaldi sidestepped to reveal me to Mathieu and I was suddenly left without protective cover from the masked Frenchman. Upon being fully revealed to Mathieu I was also shocked to discover that standing next to him was a woman. She was, scantily clothed with short shorts and a bra. She also had on a seethrough blouse which gave her a modicum of modesty, but for 12-year-old me this was still enough to send me into a blushing fit. She also had a mask on, this one painted red, the reverse of Mathieu’s mask with the eye hole on the right side and a painted red heart on the left.
“This is Benny! The latest addition to the freakshow! He’s our new animal tamer.” I gave the duo a half-hearted wave and my best attempt at a smile.
“And what exactly happened Ezikial?” Mathieu asked as he looked down at me with his singular visible eye. I looked up at Garibaldi to see if there would be any clarification about what happened to the previous animal tamer.
“Don’t worry about things that don’t concern you,” Garibaldi said with a smile and a snicker.
I couldn’t tell what kind of emotions Mathieu and the woman had behind their masks but it was when I started to let my eyes drift back down to the floor that I caught something about the woman standing next to Mathieu. And that was the fact her legs were a different color than her body was. I lifted my gaze to look at her and realized that she had a completely different lower section sewed to her top section. With a large scar with stitches going around where the two colors clashed.
“I am Mathieu. This is my assistant, Starla.” The woman slowly moved her hand up to wave at me before letting it drop back down like a dead fish. “And these are the Aces.” He told me. Which confused me since I could only see two people in front of me. That was until a little masked face popped up from behind him, almost like a mirror image of me.
The mask didn’t have any eyeholes or anything and simply had a playing card club painted on it. Before I could comprehend this another face popped up from behind Mathieu. This one with a diamond painted on it. Another popped up with a giant heart, and finally one with a spade painted on it. They all quickly rushed out from behind Mathieu and approached me. They were an entire foot shorter than me with messy brown hair and frilly and fluffy blue uniforms almost like Santiago’s clown uniform.
The one with clubs painted on his face walked up to me and stared up at me for a moment. Before I could say anything to him, he threw his arms around me and hugged me. This didn’t feel like a person was hugging me though, since I could feel nothing but a couple of rods under the frilly and poofy costume. The others all quickly approached me and waved and greeted me in wordless ways. All except the one with the heart painted on his mask. He hung back before being dragged and pulled over to me by the one with diamonds.
“That’s enough you four. You can interact with him later, get on the train now.” Mathieu ordered them. They all quickly nodded and rushed onto the train, jumping, cartwheeling, and crawling into the train as quickly as they could. The one with Spades on his mask stayed for a moment and quickly handed me something before following after his fellow aces.
“You get the entire fourth car to yourselves. I expect not to have a repeat of the Denmark fiasco.” Garibaldi told Mathieu as his assistant wordlessly walked past him and got onto the train. The masked man stared at the ringleader before giving a slight nod, and walked onto the train, leaning on his cane a bit as he walked past me. “You can go back to your room now Benny. You’ve officially met everyone in the Freakshow!” Garibaldi told me excitedly. I nodded at him and gave him a faint smile. “We’ll be on the train for a bit longer until we reach our destination in France. So go ahead and go back to your room,” he told me, to which I nodded and left him. On my way back to my room I looked down at the item that Spades had given me. A bottlecap with a smiley face on it, and that got a genuine smile from me.
Returning to my room and finding it empty I let my shapeshifter friend sit on the bed while I sat down at the desk and pulled out some paper. While their leader and assistant had weirded me out to no end, the Aces had put a smile on my face and had gotten some real laughs out of me. So I sat down and drew each of them from my memory and decided to give it to them. I looked over to see if the shapeshifter wanted to come with me, but his eyes were closed at that moment and he looked like he was sleeping. Not wanting to wake him up I elected to go myself.
Walking out into the hallway of the train, I started making my way toward the fourth train car. It was when I was almost there that the warnings from Nikolai started floating around in my head. But I wasn’t exactly going to deal with Mathieu. I was only going to deal with the Aces, and I was only dropping off a drawing, so in my mind, it would be all right. Arriving on the fourth train car, I looked around to see which of the rooms the Aces were cooped up in.
Knocking on the first door I didn’t receive an answer. And thinking that they really couldn’t talk, to begin with, I decided to see if the door was open. It slid open and I peeked into the room. I let out a surprised yelp when I saw Starla sitting motionless in the center of the room. I was about to apologize for intruding on her but she slowly lifted a finger to her painted lips in a shushing motion. I nodded quickly and showed her the drawing I had made. She stared at it for a moment before slowly moving her shushing finger towards me. I thought she was pointing at me for a moment before I looked behind me and noticed that there was a door behind me. I mouthed a thank you to her and slowly closed the door.
Knocking on the door I waited for a moment. This time the door opened up and Clubs was there to greet me. Standing on top of Hearts so he could reach the doorknob to greet me. The Aces all waved hello to me and Clubs hopped down off of Hearts as I handed them the drawing I had made of all of them. Diamonds was positively ecstatic at receiving this since he was jumping up and down for joy.
“I hope you guys like it,” I told them with a giggle as I watched them all pass the drawing between themselves. They all nodded together and waved goodbye to me as I closed their door behind me and left. With my mission completed, I started making my way back to my room. As I opened the door connecting the fourth car and fifth I ran into Mathieu. He was in the process of putting his mask on and I had arrived just in time for him to put it back on.
“You saw me, didn’t you?” he asked me, his muffled voice sounded livid at me. I backed up quickly as he let the door close behind him and followed after me as I backed up in fear of him. My chest tightened as I was suddenly and painfully reminded of the fear that my father gave me whenever he was going to harm me.
“N-no! I didn’t see anything!” I told him as I tripped on my feet and tumbled down to the floor with a thud. Already I was instinctively holding my arms up to protect my face. Mathieu lifted his cane and smacked the head of it against his gloved hand.
“You lying little shit,” he hissed at me as he lifted the cane over his head. I was more than sure I was going to meet a violent and painful end on this train in the middle of nowhere. I had escaped an abusive household just to have met the same fate I would’ve most likely had if I had stayed home.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Garibaldi’s voice suddenly broke through the haze of complete fear that had enveloped me. Lowering my arms from my face I was met with Garibaldi gripping Mathieu’s cane tightly and preventing the masked Frenchman from bringing it down on me. It was the most angry I had ever seen Garibaldi up to that point. The anger in those multicolored eyes was enough to send a shiver down my soul.
“H-he…saw my face,” Mathieu mumbled as he let go of his cane and allowed Antonio to take it from him. Standing up quickly I rushed over to him and wrapped my arms around him, burying my face into his stomach before I broke down and started crying into his fancy red ringleader suit. This was the first time in my life anyone had stopped physical harm from coming to me, and it was something I was eternally grateful for at the time.
“Remember, Mathieu,” The way Garibaldi said the Frenchman’s name made it seem like it was an insult. “You’re only still here because I enjoy your act. I can barely tolerate you. And if you so much as harm Benny or any other member of the troop, I’ll lose any reason of keeping you around. Is that understood?” he asked of Mathieu. I pulled my face away from Garibaldi and looked up at him. Through my tear-filled eyes, I could’ve sworn that I saw the scar across his face split open. But upon wiping my eyes I saw that there wasn’t anything there.
Mathieu wordlessly nodded at Garibaldi and the ringmaster led me back to my room, where my shapeshifter friend was waiting there for me. He flapped over to me and landed on my head as I continued to wipe my eyes from the tears that were still leaking from my eyes. I expected a lecture from Antonio, but instead, he removed his hat and ran his hand through his white long hair.
“Good thing I got to you in time. I’m sorry if he ruined your day, Benny,” he said with a sigh as he tussled my hair and offered me one of those rare genuine smiles that he possessed. I sniffled as I finally managed to stop the tears from flowing and shook my head at him.
“No, it’s okay. Are we going to get to perform? I-I have a lot of cool ideas for animals.” I told him with a smile and one final wiping of my eyes and nose. He looked back at me with an excited smile and got right back up on his feet with the same cheery attitude he always had.
“I can’t wait to see it! We should be arriving at our next destination soon. All we’ll have to do is pitch up our tents and we’ll be all sent! Keep thinking up some ideas in the meantime! I can’t wait to see them!” he said with giddy excitement as he hopped and skipped his way out of my room. The whole interaction got a good laugh out of me and I sat down on the bed with my raven friend still perched protectively on my head. I looked down at the good luck charm that Izara had given me and smiled. Maybe it had brought me good luck after all.
I took the opportunity to try and take a nap until we reached our destination.
The train finally stopped after another half an hour and we all disembarked and began to unload the train once again. Even though it felt like we had only just packed everything up, I didn’t complain much at all. The shapeshifter took the form of a snake again and hung around my neck while I helped unload the crates.
As I helped open some of them and handed out a few items needed to raise the big top I snuck a glance over toward the fourth car and watched as Mathieu exited followed quickly after by the Aces and Starla. The Aces did all the unloading which brought a smile to my face as I watched all of them give their boxes to Hearts as the big tower of boxes soon came to be even taller than he was. And yet the little guy effortlessly waddled along with this giant load of boxes and followed after his similarly dressed friends as they led him to the location to drop them off.
As I watched them with amusement I wasn’t paying attention to where I was sticking my hand into. I hadn’t realized that the open box was Nikolai’s. And the Russian had a habit of leaving stray knives everywhere. As I stuck my hand into the box without looking, one of these blades sliced open my palm. I pulled my hand out with a loud shout and quickly held it out in front of me. The gash was large and blood began to flow out of it quickly.
“This is why we shouldn’t bring kids on the circus.” Eva’s cold uncaring voice surprised me. I quickly looked over to her as she gracefully descended the train to stare at me. I held my hand and squeezed it to try and stop the bleeding, wincing, and whimpering in pain as the German acrobat circled me like some predator playing with its prey. “You must learn to heal your own wounds. Take care of that yourself. No one here is going to help you but yourself.” She told me. Her cold uncaring words hurt me almost as badly as the knife had.
“Leave him alone, Eva!” Santiago shouted at her as he waddled over as quickly as he could with his pigeon-toed feet. Quickly he kneeled next to me and took my hand to look at it. “He’s only 12-years-old. Could you stitch up your wounds at 12?” the clown asked her. This was the first time I’d ever seen him be serious. Judging by Eva’s reaction I guessed that she in fact couldn’t stitch her wounds at 12. She tsked in frustration and started walking off in the direction of the rapidly being built tent. Jasper emerged soon after and called out to her to wait for him.
“Thank you,” I whimpered as Santiago took a look at my hand. His smile returned and he gave me a little giggle.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve had to deal with Nikolai’s stray knives more than you could ever guess.” Letting my hand go, he rolled up his long sleeves and showed me the many scars across them. “I’ve had a lot of practice with this.” He assured me, as he took ahold of my hand again and produced a needle and thread from under his clown hat. In what must have been some sort of speed record, he fixed up the gash on my palm in no time at all.
“Thank you,” I repeated to him once he had thoroughly examined the wound. He nodded quickly and put his supplies back under his clown hat. He told me to tell Abigail and that she would have some disinfectant spray to make sure I didn’t get some kind of infection. He then waddled away to go and yell at Nikolai about having left a knife just out and about.
Holding my throbbing and pained hand out in front of me I started trying to find where Abigail was. But before I could do so I was quickly approached by the Aces. It seemed that they’d overheard what had happened to me and had brought me some things to cheer me up. Spades was the first, quickly handing me a chocolate bar before running away to the back of the line. Clubs and Diamonds both got me bandaids and Hearts after being shoved forward by everyone else gave me some disinfectant spray.
Thanking them all I watched as they all quickly went back to work unloading their part of the train. After a rather painful application of the disinfectant spray, I cautiously went back to unloading the crate that I had been emptying. Suddenly there was a lot of commotion coming over from the front of the train. I hurried over to join everyone else as seemingly everyone from the freakshow was gathered around.
“We didn’t pack this, did we?” Edgar asked as he scratched his head. His brother looked nervous like he always did, but now it seemed like he was even more so than usual. Before us, all was a large crate. But it didn’t look like the same as the crates we used. This one was painted completely black and had no markings at all to indicate where it had come from.
“Was it left here for us?” Jasper asked as he circled the crate. He knocked on it softly and we all stood around waiting for something to happen.
“Why’s everyone stopped working?” Garibaldi asked in confusion as he stepped down from the train engine. We all looked over at him and then parted so he could see the strange crate that had us all confused. At first, he looked just as confused as us before his face suddenly lit up in absolute excitement. “Oh, it’s finally here!” he practically screamed, shoving us all out of the way to get to it.
As he did so I finally got a view of the mystery conductor/engineer. And I instantly ran to hide behind Abigail, causing a surprised jolt out of her. Standing at the door up to the engine car was a corpse. Rotted and infested with maggots the only thing to show that he was supposed to be there was a little conductor hat placed on his skeletal head. It looked over at me and raised an arm to the hat, taking it off and tipping it to me.
I let out a blood-curdling scream when I laid eyes on the rotting corpse. I was able to keep some sort of composure around the Bandwagon, but to see a full-on human corpse was just too much for me. I fell to the floor and cried out in fear at the body. My screams were enough to pull everyone’s attention from the mystery crate over to me.
“Benny! It’s okay, sweetie.” Abigail told me as she quickly fell to her knees with me and wrapped her arms around me, shoving my face into her chest. “You don’t want to see this part.” She told me softly as a sudden noise of falling pieces and rattling objects hitting metal filled my ears.
Peeking from out behind Abigail I saw that the corpse had completely fallen apart into just a pile of bones and meat. The maggots still squirmed and writhed around in the pile, more than happy to continue their feast as they did so.
“That part doesn’t ever get any easier,” Edgar said with a slight shiver through his and Alan’s boy. Taking some deep breaths like Abigail told me to I finally started to calm down, and pull my attention away from where the walking corpse conductor had been. I pulled my attention back over to the mystery Crate, where Garibaldi who had not so much as looked in my direction after I had screamed was still jumping around the box and making strange chirping noises at it.
“Who’s it from, sir?” I asked him through teary eyes and a few hiccups. He looked over at me with wild excitement in his eyes and a violent twitch from his head.
“It’s from my best friend in the whole wide world! King Creole!” he said in giddy excitement. I scratched my head at that but everyone in the freakshow suddenly had looks of complete fear.
“Who’s that?” I asked, just as the box began to shake about and rapid knocking could be heard from inside it.