The car ride never seemed to end. Victor was driving. Ashen Ellen was to his right. Jacob's body was laid out across the back seat, with a towel wrapped around him so no one saw.
"Are you ever going to talk to me?" she asked, finally deciding to break the silence.
"I'm not sure. I'm not sure what exactly I want to say to you right now."
Ellen wanted to cry, but she knew she no longer possessed that bodily function. "Victor, I'm so sorry that I tried to sell you out to Barnaby. I just… I wanted my son back."
"You were willing to throw me in prison for multiple murder accounts just so you could get Jacob back! Were you going to continue raising him on your own? Were you ever going to tell him where I was? Were you ever going to let him come visit me? Did you even for a second think any of this through?" She was silent. She let him berate her. "No, all you cared about was killing two birds with one stone. You saw the opportunity to get out of this marriage without having to spend money on a divorce or kill me. I'm out of your hair and Jacob is back in his mother's arms. Win fucking win."
"None of that matters now, Victor! Our son is dead! Or did you not realize that? Did you just forget that you carried his body out of that dungeon? Come on, Victor! You can't possibly forget that we have a son to mourn over right now!" She was turned to look at him, but he kept his eyes on the road. "We hate each other, I get it. But the one thing we have in common is that we love Jacob. And we're both feeling the same hurt right now. So can we please put our differences aside and figure out a proper burial?"
Victor sighed to show he was agreeing.
"Speaking of a proper burial," she continued. "I'm surprised you gave me such a fantastic send-off. Cremated? Ashes thrown into the ocean?" He couldn't help but laugh as she spoke. "What?"
"You dumb bitch. I threw you in the fireplace and then flushed your ashes down the toilet!" Victor was now cackling as he recalled how he took care of his wife's body.
"Somehow that doesn't surprise me." She crossed her arms and continued to stare out the window. Once Victor stopped laughing, the rest of the car ride remained silent.
Barnaby was almost halfway through the sixteenth canto of Inferno when he heard a knock on his door. Who the bloody Christ is that? The only person left on the train who cared to talk to him now was Ruuxa. But when he got up to answer the door, he unexpectedly found Julius standing on the other side.
"Jesus Christ. Where—what—where did you go? Where did you come from?"
"Alright, Cotton Eyed Joe. It's nice to see you too." Julius showed himself in and sat down on Barnaby's bed, a little too calm, cool, and collected for the ringmaster these days. "I, uh, I did something bad."
"Well I know Cassandra's dead, if that's what you mean. So what, did you kill her?"
"Wait, how do you know that?" Julius quickly turned from suave and carefree to fearful and guilty.
"Ruuxa came back to return Ellen Carson, fully alive. Apparently it's what happens when the exchange is undone or whatever. Cassandra died, so Ellen's life force jumped back into Ellen's body. Or, what remains of it, actually. You should have seen her. I managed to get a peek of her out of my window before they drove off. She's literally a sandman. It's like looking at some fucked-up stop animation in a Christmas special."
"Huh, I didn't know that would happen."
"So you admit it, then? You killed Cassandra?"
Julius' leg started to jump up and down in a nervous fit. "It wasn't my fault. She was… she was gonna out me, I couldn't let that happen!"
"Ah, so that was why you took such a liking to her. She was the best of both worlds, eh? Pretty human face, sexy animal naughty bits." Barnaby sat down and crossed his arms, squinting at Julius with a disappointed smirk on his face. "You stupid son of a bitch. Hell, what am I saying? I'm the stupid one, leaving her in your care." Julius frowned at the man with a childish look of apology. "Save it, Julius, I'm not mad at you for running off or killing our prized creation. I'm just glad to have you back. A lot's changed while you were gone, believe it or not."
"What do you mean?"
"You're all I have left, you and Ruuxa, actually. She won't leave, and I don't know why."
"You're kidding, right?" Julius was surprised to hear this news. "Where is everyone else?"
"Well… Victor bailed Athena out of jail, and the two of them hunted us down to retrieve Jacob Carson from Sanguine. Victor took Jacob's body and Sanguine. I don't know where my father is, to be honest, and I'm worried sick about him. I swear I remember hearing them tossing around the idea of giving him a taste of his own medicine while they had me tied up. Victor's probably hanging him up over his mantle whipping him to death."
"They tied you up?"
Barnaby just smiled and chuckled at his lion tamer. "Just imagine, Julius, if you were here for this. You could have saved me from those vultures that destroyed my circus. My family. My life. Victor Carson took everything from me. My mother, my father, my… Lura."
"What about Lura? She's on their side?"
Barnaby looked perplexed, never even entertaining the thought that there were sides involved in this. "I don't know, but I'm sure she's with them now. She… came to a bit of a crossroads as well. Parker Redford, your little protégé?" Julius nodded, remembering the few moments he spent with the young farm boy. "He's our notorious Birdman. He killed Jumpin' Jack and Diego. And he also happens to be Lura's son. She strangled him to put him out of his misery only for me to tell her the truth moments later."
Julius didn't exactly know what to say. "Geez, I really did miss a lot."
"So that's it. The Barnaby Traveling Circus is no more. We've got nobody. We've got a mystic shaman priestess and a lion tamer who's into bestiality. That's about it. No psychic. No acrobat. No clowns. Everyone's gone but us."
"Aw come on, Barnaby, we can still make something work. And we still have a handful of other performers left. And what about that animal hybrid you wanted to make? I didn't risk my ass stealing two animals from the Bronx Zoo for nothing!"
"No, forget that dumb idea. There's no point."
"Hey!" Julius exclaimed, getting up from the bed and standing straight. "Since when is Charles Barnaby a quitter? You would do literally anything to keep this circus alive!"
"You don't understand, Julius. It's personal now. That piece-of-shit-mayor turned my own family against me. And now he's probably torturing my father as we speak. I can't move on from this. I'm done." Barnaby covered his eyes with his hand, not wanting Julius to see the water forming in them. "Could you please excuse yourself, Julius? I really just need some time to myself." Julius remained still, not ready to give up on his pep talk. "NOW, Julius!" Finally he listened and left.
Lura woke up startled, rising up and gasping for air. It was as if she just experienced a horrific nightmare, but she didn't. In fact, she didn't even dream. She just remembered blackness while she slept. When she woke up and entered the real world, the nightmare continued.
"Are you alright, darling?" asked Athena, who was sitting at the foot of the bed waiting for Lura to wake up.
"Where am I?" Lura asked, looking around at the unfamiliar walls and photos and furniture.
"We're at the Carson residence. They're letting us stay with them for as long as we need. Neither of us have had a home outside of that train for years. It will take us a while to find places to live. I insisted that Victor and Ellen needed time to mourn in private, but they refused to kick us out. They're calling us family. Isn't that adorable?"
"How long have I been asleep?"
"Almost two days. Well, give or take. You were practically a zombie when I found you in that dungeon, with Parker's body draped over you. It was almost poetic, like Michelangelo's Pieta."
Hearing Parker's name broke her heart. Lura just put her head in her hands and waited for the tears to arrive any second.
"I'm sorry, dear. I shouldn't bring it up."
"No, no, it's fine. I have to face the truth at some point." She looked at the older woman with those accusatory eyes, and Athena knew what she was going to ask next. "Why didn't you tell me it was him? You came to me and you told me my son was alive. Why didn't you tell me it was Parker then?"
"To be quite honest, Lura, I had no idea. I just sensed David's presence around the same time Parker joined the circus. I couldn't have possibly known that they were one in the same. My powers simply don't work like that, I'm afraid."
"You tell me all the time that you're able to figure out someone's entire life story just by looking at them. You didn't see me cradling him when you looked at him? You didn't see how Sanguine abused him when you looked at him?"
Athena felt absolutely horrible, as if all of this could have been prevented if she had better clarity. "No, I swear, I didn't. Some people are able to repress certain parts of their past. Parker clearly had a very difficult one, and he most likely blocked things out, things that I wouldn't have been able to see."
"I want to see it all, Athena. I want to know the entire truth. I'm sure Barnaby was truthful in what he told me so far, but I need the whole story. From the minute he ripped David from my hands to the minute my hands took the life out of him."
Athena rubbed Lura's knee and contemplated. "Well, there is something we could try for that. I've never done it before, but there's this technique I've heard of called the ex memoria."
"What's that?"
"It allows one to fully experience another's life story. I would meditate, focusing on Parker's past. Only very talented psychics have claimed to succeed in the practice, but I could give it a try. It will enable me to relive all of Parker's life, from beginning to end, as if I were an outsider observing everything he did."
Lura scratched her arm where she felt an itch. "You up for it?"
Julius came knocking on Barnaby's office door several hours later. "Not now," Barnaby groaned, not quite ready to have his alone time end. But Julius didn't listen and he barged in anyway. "For fuck's sake, can't you leave me alone?"
"It's finished," Julius said ecstatically. Barnaby reeled back as he noticed the blood and guts all over the lion tamer's face and clothing. That, coupled with the cheerful grin on his face, made him look like he just finished a murder spree.
"What's finished?"
"The chimaera, you dumbass. Ruuxa and I, we spent all afternoon putting it together for you."
"What? You… you did it already? Why?"
"To cheer you up! And get this, Ruuxa already had a life handy to exchange into it. This monster is alive, Barnaby. Fucking alive, I tell you!"
Barnaby was very confused, but moments later he was forced to visit the animal cages and found a horrifying creature housed in one of them. It possessed the heads of all three beasts: the wolf in the middle, and a cat on either side, with the lion on the left and the leopard on the right. The torso was lupine. The front legs belonged to the lion, the thick, muscular paws standing mightily. The leopard's hind legs were attached to the back, slim and lean and ready to pounce at a moment's notice. All three of their tails were attached to the rear, in the same order aligned with their heads.
"This is… crazy." That was all that the ringmaster could utter upon witnessing the monster in front of him.
"It's more than crazy, Mr. Barnaby," said Ruuxa, appearing almost out of nowhere. "It's a miracle, a true testament to my power over nature. You thought your little mermaid was a feat? Try the power of three ferocious beasts combined into one. I'm impressed in your selection, these three are quite the trio."
"I can't believe you did this, Ruuxa. Thank you." Barnaby shook the woman's hand eagerly. "I just don't know what we're going to do with it, seeing as there's no longer a show to present it at."
"Oh, enough, Barnaby!" shouted Julius, nudging his boss roughly. "If our run is over, then we might as well go out with a bang. Let's do one more final show, present this behemoth to the masses, make the crowd go wild. What do you say?"
Barnaby wasn't sure at first, but Julius' enthusiasm caused his lips to slowly curl into an approving smile. The two men started to laugh and cheer and high-five and chant as they realized the potential they had with this creature.
"Say, I have an idea," said Ruuxa, interrupting their little moment. "Why don't you name this thing… Marty?"
Charles quickly snapped his head. "Excuse me?"
"Well I just figured it's a fitting name, considering it's his soul."
Barnaby knew exactly what Ruuxa was saying, but he wanted her to be more explicit. She was toying with him, dangling the bait right over his head. But he wanted her to bring the bait all the way down to his face so he could attack her when she least expected it. "What do you mean?"
"Victor Carson and I had a little agreement before he left here the other night. You see, he shot your father several times, but miraculously he didn't die. I ran into Mayor Carson just before I arrived to rescue you from your duct-tape-imprisonment. We exchanged words and we made a deal. He paid me quite a sum of money to take the life out of Marty and do something with it to spite you. And I figured putting his life into a bizarre creature such as this would be a perfect way to do it!"
Barnaby was seeing red. "You bitch. You had me thinking you were on my side!" He even surprised himself when he mentioned the apparent sides.
"I have to go. I need to see a doctor about some nasal reconstruction." She stepped closer to him, no longer afraid of his power, mostly because he longer possessed any. "I'll send you the medical bills, you bastard." She spit on his shoes and stormed out, flipping him the bird as she left the circus train for good.
"Um… what the hell just happened?" asked Julius, still not fully caught up on what went down on Halloween night.
Lura dimmed the lights and sat down on the bed, watching closely as the psychic sat down on the carpet, legs crossed and hands resting on her knees. She focused all of her concentration on Parker Redford, but after about twenty minutes, it was obvious that it wasn't working.
"I'm sorry, my dear. I guess I'm not powerful enough to do it."
"What if… what if I did it with you? Like, if we held hands. You might be able to get a reading on David from my memories, or something?" Lura seemed eager and anxious to learn more about her son's past. Athena could sense how unhinged the girl was slowly becoming, but she hid her sorrow for Lura behind a smile.
"Of course, Lura, that sounds like it just might work!" She realized she was a bit too optimistic in her exaggeration, but she patted the floor in front of her to guide the woman down. Lura joined her and they grabbed one another's hands. Then they closed their eyes and concentrated. "Think only about David, Lura. I'm sure it's the last thing you want to do right now, but you need to hone in on those scarce memories that are still intact."
Before Athena finished that sentence, Lura quickly transported herself back into that funhouse mirror, when she looked at her shattered reflection and heard her baby cooing out in the distance. She recalled immediately how it all flashed before her eyes like a movie projector. Athena started to tremble as the visions emerged bright and clearly in her mind. The older woman opened her eyes and let go of Lura's hands, stunned by the overload of information she just received. "Lura, are you alright?" But Lura didn't respond. She remained seated with her eyes closed. "My gosh, I think you're doing it. You're experiencing Parker's life, aren't you?" Again, Lura didn't respond. Athena took her lack of an answer as a yes.
But Athena was wrong. Lura wasn't seeing visions of Parker's past, but rather Parker. They were surrounded by utter darkness, just the two of them, standing face to face. "Parker," she said, noticing her voice tremble and quiver in a mixture of both grief and joy.
"Hi… mom." She ran over to him and wrapped her arms around him, eerily similar to the way she held him after she strangled the life out of him and learned the truth about his identity. She knew this wasn't real, that this was just her imagination running wild. Parker was dead. This was just some conjured representation of him. But he felt so very real.
"I… I don't know what to say, to be honest," Lura noted as she broke away from the hug. "It's not like I expected to ever see you again."
"I'm ready to tell you anything you want. That's why we're here, isn't it?" She nodded in agreement.
"Um, okay. I guess I'll just dive right into it, then. Who knows how long this thing lasts. So… how did you manage to become the only child to escape Sanguine's lair?" Lura remembered asking Barnaby that night after sex why he had to kill a decoy baby to make her think it was David, and how he responded that David was already gone by the time their plan was in motion.
"One of Sanguine's clowns, do you remember a guy named Spunky?"
"Of course I do!" As she answered, she realized that she only knew him for a brief period of time, just when she arrived. And now that she thought about it, he left the circus right around the same time fake-David died. She just never really noticed that coincidence because she was too busy grieving the loss of the son that wasn't really dead.
"Sanguine treated the guy like shit, apparently. Spunky would always ask to help out with the abuse every time a new kid came along, but Sanguine always refused. Just around the time I was around, Spunky decided to spite Sanguine by kidnapping all of his victims, which included me and some other boy a few years older named Ben. We disappeared without a trace. No one from the circus ever managed to find us. We eventually found an abandoned farm and took refuge there, and after a while we just called it home. I didn't know any better, and I certainly don't remember what happened to me in that dungeon when I was a baby, so to Ben and I, Spunky was our dad. Then things took a turn for the worse. He started to beat us for practically no reason at all. He homeschooled us, and if we got the answer wrong we would get his belt on our bare asses fifteen times. I started to hate him. We both did."
Lura was heartbroken hearing this.
"I already told you what happened to my brother. Ben was threatening to take me away and escape his abuse, and he and Spunky got in a big fight. Spunky pushed him down the stairs, and a few hours later, Ben was dead. Like I told you before, he started to feel bad about what he did to Ben and wasn't so rough on me anymore. Because of that I started to gain a little more freedom and I started taking night classes, which he didn't approve of at all. That in turn caused him to be even rougher on me. And then I bashed his head in. A few hours later I found my self unknowingly hiding in my mother's boudoir upon the Barnaby Traveling Circus, seeking revenge on the men who brought me to live this hell of a life."
"Parker… I'm so sorry. But you have to listen to me, okay? Listen to mama." Hearing that made Parker smile. Finally he was able to match a face to the word, that word that he longed to say for his entire life. She grabbed his face and brought it right up to hers so that their foreheads touched. "Spunky and Sanguine may have hurt you in the past, but all of that was because of one man: Charles Barnaby. He took you from me. He brought you to this circus. He brought you and I both into this hell." He nodded to show he understood. "And I promise you… I promise that I will make sure he suffers an even worse hell for this. He cannot get away with killing my son. Okay?"
"I love you, mama," Parker was bawling his eyes out at this point, and the two of them embraced again, this time not over his death or their shared loss of one another, but this time, because of nothing but love and reunion.
And just like that, the vision faded. Lura opened her eyes and found herself sitting on the bedroom floor again, with Athena plopped on the mattress anxiously waiting for her return into consciousness.
"Well? How was it? Did you experience his whole life story?"
Lura got up and sat down next to her. "Oddly enough… I did. I saw my boy. And he told me what I needed to know." They smiled at each other, but Lura's smile quickly turned into a sour frown. "Ugh, is it just me, or is it really stuffy in here? You didn't pass gas, did you, Athena?"
"Heavens no! Why would you accuse me of such a thing! Old women don't fart. And even if I did, I probably wouldn't have remembered doing so!" Athena chuckled at her own joke, but when she saw Lura become physically green, she stopped. "Are you alright, Lura?"
"No, I feel like I'm going to pass out or something." She then hopped off the bed and jetted into the adjoined bathroom. Athena heard retching and cringed at the sound. She gave her a few minutes to settle down and get it all up, but then she heard a loud thud. "Lura, what's wrong, honey?" Athena waltzed over to the bathroom and gasped once she opened the door. Lura must have passed out and hit her head on the tub. She was lying on the floor with a bruise forming on her forehead. "Lura! Lura! Oh heavens no! I'll be back in one second, I'm going to get Victor! Don't move!"
Athena slapped herself on the side of the head after realizing she told an unconscious person not to move.