Creation began on 11-30-19

Creation ended on 09-29-21

Thir13en Ghosts

There's no Need to feel this Pain: The Great Child's Voice and the Dire Mother's Growth

Profile Eight and Profile Nine: The Great Child's Voice and the Dire Mother's Growth

The result of her rape by the Tall Man, Margaret, a new unwed mother, stared down at her newborn son, Harold. The other carnival freaks were, to her horror, pleased with a new freak show in their traveling circus. If Margaret wasn't a mere three-feet in height, she would've left the circus to pursue a new life for herself and her son. But she could barely move her legs at the moment; her unplanned and undesired pregnancy and eventual birth of her son had complications that left her bedridden and temporarily paralyzed at the waist down.

Margaret Shelburne? She heard a voice in her head, making her take her eyes off her newborn and looking around her tent that she lived in while traveling with the circus, but she saw nobody around. I'm right in front of you, Margaret.

She looked ahead of herself and saw a strange man that looked like a young boy of dark skin and a dark disposition that he'd been forced to carry all his life.

"Who are you?" She asked him, holding onto her child protectively.

"I'm somebody who's concerned about your future," he answered cryptically. "I became aware of your situation and came here to offer you a solution to your past and present troubles."

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is… I can give you and your son a life outside of the circus, a life where you will be accepted instead of laughed at. You will have what you desire…and what you need the most. I saw a good future for you…and in it, you were no longer the height that you are now; you grew to be five-feet tall, a commonly-good height for few people, and your son was happy with you."

"How do I know you're not here to condemn me just because I'm small?" Margaret questioned; ever since she was raped and impregnated, she had been judgmental of everyone around her, concerned for her safety.

"I shall show you your future…that I'm trying to save you from," he answered her, raising his right hand…and made her world grow darker than his eyes were.

She saw her son grow to be as massive as her rapist, the Tall Man, was, and how their lives in the freak show circus were miserable beyond any doubt. Her dear Harold, as a result of her spoiling him for all his life, was confined to diapers and a bib, incapable of even basic speech, communicating only like a baby would at ages of infancy. In one vision, the dark man showed her how the other carnival freaks kidnapped her as a prank upon her and Harold, who had decimated the carnival in search of her, only to become unstable upon finding her dead of suffocation in a sack the other freaks put her in to keep her in. What terrified her the most was what her Harold did in retaliation: He grabbed an ax and went on a vengeance-driven murder spree against the other sideshow freaks and put their heads on display for the paying customers that came to see them. And in the final vision, most likely what was life after death, was of eternal agony because a man, who was just as cruel as the carnival owner, Jimbo, was, had her and Harold locked up inside a strange chamber and condemned to a life of further agony until God-knew-when whatever else happened.

"Oh, God!" She gasped, being returned to the tent in front of the man that claimed to want to help her.

"Do you believe me now?" He asked her.

"I…I was kidnapped and put in a sack," she told him, holding her son tightly-yet-lovingly, "and Harold killed the carnival members after I died…and that man…locked up with these other people like his own freakshow."

"Cyrus, and he doesn't exist yet. That was a future that can only happen so long as you two stay in this traveling circus and you spoil your son. I know that you love him with all your heart, but the love you do shower him with…will become bad over time. I have seen people with so much love for their children go to extremes for them when something goes wrong, but half the time, that love is born from desperation…and other times, it's due to never having been loved properly by the people that were supposed to love them. I'm willing to show you how to live a better life…but only if you're willing to leave this place…and live."

Margaret looked at him…and then at her son as he slept peacefully. The sight of themselves in the future was horrifying to her. She didn't want that to happen. Any of it.

"Where can I go?" She asked him. "I can't go back to my mother's…and we can't stay here. Where is there a place for us to belong?"

"There is a place to belong," he told her, offering her his right hand. "There's a place for you both to belong."

She reached out to take his hand, fearful…but more so over the fact that she now knew that if she stayed here, worse would befall herself and Harold.

-x-

Epilogue

Jimbo never saw or heard from Margaret after that day, and the Tall Man later died from food poisoning a month. In fact, nobody had seen or heard from Margaret, who should've been impossible to overlook because she stood only three feet in height, or saw her son. If they had, they would've known that a stranger of the dark that brought the light had visited her the last time anyone in the circus ever bothered to look, and he came with a gift of a new life for her and Harold. And what a life it was as the years passed.

"Harold," Margaret called out to her son one day, living in a nice house in a small town, standing at five feet tall, an acceptable height that was viewed as normal for most people.

"Yes, mother?" A young boy of seven years asked as he was playing with a small ball with some other boys.

"It's lunch time."

"Okay, I'm coming."

It had been seven years for Margaret since she met Brother Correction, and he took her a different point in time to free her and Harold from their original fate; by displacing them in a different time and altering her growth to an average height, and then helping her receive a better education for a decent living, Margaret was able to raise Harold to be a better person. She could put her past in the circus behind herself and move forward for her son. As a teller at a small bank, she had a nice job that she could be proud of during the weekdays and one of those everyday faces that could be seen elsewhere during the weekends because there was always someone taking pictures of the picture like a paparazzi, only looking for common faces because celebrities were not entirely worth photographing all the time.

Harold would never end up the way he did in the previous time because of this shift in fate; his mother never spoiled him, he knew more words than a child his age should know, and his interests included the childish things like bugs, small animals, planes and dragons. His mother would often tell him the story of how he was a baby when she met the stranger that gave her a better life for both of them, but not always elaborating on what she meant by that, just wanting to protect him from that darker side of the truth.

"He was this Good Samaritan fellow that offered help when nearly no one else would've out of kindness and humility," Margaret would say to her son. "These days, people like that…are invaluable and rare to encounter. I hope that you meet someone like him some day in the future when you need help with something."

All Margaret could hope for as the next few years came and went…was that she would get to see Harold become a better man than what his father could've been…and still be capable of affection like he was now.

Just walking down the street in the town, seen but not really seen by the people, Brother Correction, eating a pastry made by an amateur baker trying to make his mark in the world of his neighborhood…sighed at how good it tasted. He knew Margaret and Harold would be alright now. It wasn't a premonition like every other time he allowed himself to gaze into one's future, but a feeling. Just a feeling. It put a smile on his face to know that they'd be able to do fine in this life he gave them that wiped their previous slate clean of their dark fate.

If only every mother and child's fate could be the same, he thought.

A/N: Took forever to return to, and took forever to locate after a long time and everything else in between. I hope this chapter soothes people until the next one can be worked on. I like the film, despite its fearsome interpretation of the spirits, but why does there have to be only one ghost in the Black Zodiac that is of a different color from the rest of them?