2. Spider Woman Yurakne (1)
2. Spider Woman Yurakne (1)
Though airships now plied the skies, nothing yet matched the ship for moving vast quantities of goods at low cost.
Thanks to advances in steam power, even inland regions far from favorable winds saw large-scale cargo traveling along the rivers, and markets flourished around every port and ferry landing.
A market in this era was more than a place to buy and sell.
Musicians sang. Acrobats tumbled. Actors staged plays.
It was part of daily life to visit the market wondering what spectacle might be on offer today.
Axville was a modest ferry landing on the Dragonyu River.
Its hinterlands held only poor fiefdoms and small villages, so compared to other markets its wares were few and its entertainments sparse.
This time, however, a piece of genuinely interesting news had spread through the Axville area.
The Monster Circus Troupe.
The name alone sent a shiver through anyone who heard it — and word was that this eerie circus had taken up residence in Axville.
“Whoa, this ought to be good!”
“Don't kid yourself. Why would a decent circus come all the way out to Axville?”
“No, maybe this one's different. They call themselves the Monster Circus Troupe. Other places probably turned them away for being bad luck.”
“Yeah? Want to go see?”
“Let's find out what kind of horrors they've got.”
Anticipation for the Monster Circus Troupe drew a bigger crowd to Axville that weekend than usual.
Villagers with nothing to do in the off-season.
Couples out for a stroll.
Neighborhood kids skulking around hoping to sneak a peek.
Noblemen chasing the next novel thrill.
A throng of people packed the ground in front of the performance tent, all of them nursing expectations about the Monster Circus Troupe.
Ding-ding. Ding.
The market bell rang out the stroke of one o'clock.
Right on cue, the curtain at the entrance was drawn aside.
Two figures emerged from the tent.
One was a pretty girl in a long crimson tailcoat worn like a dress coat over a black skirt, and the other was a clown whose head was covered by a mask and cowl.
Disappointment rippled through the crowd as people sized them up.
“They look normal.”
“When I heard Monster Circus Troupe, I figured they'd all be freaks.”
“Probably nothing much to see inside either, right?”
Facing the dissatisfied murmuring, the girl showed no sign of fluster.
She had the composure to smile brightly and even wave at the crowd.
Her face was young, but her seasoned handling of the moment belonged to a veteran showman.
The girl waited for the noise to die down.
Once the crowd had settled enough…
Ahem.
It was only a small clearing of the throat, yet in an instant every eye fixed on her.
She did not waste the moment.
She swept off her hat, stretched her arms and legs wide, and dropped into a deep bow toward the audience.
“Hello, everyone! My name is Ella, and I'm a trainer with the Monster Circus Troupe!”
Her voice was not especially loud, but it sprang into the ear with a lively crispness.
Before an audience of hundreds, her voice carried not the faintest tremor.
Those inclined to sneer at the idea of a little girl serving as the trainer for monsters found themselves thinking, instead, that the child carried herself with remarkable confidence for her age.
“Our circus troupe travels with genuinely dangerous monsters captured from all over the world! Once inside, please follow our guidance at all times. Otherwise… the monsters just might eat you alive! Only come in if you're prepared for that!”
The content of her words was terrifying, but it refused to match the voice of a cute girl.
A few people snorted at her warning as if it were beneath notice.
“What's so impressive about their monsters?”
“Are there any monsters at all?”
“Hear, hear! What if we pay and there's nothing worth seeing?”
“Show us a monster!”
Even as the crowd clamored, Ella simply stood with her hands behind her back and beamed.
She glanced at the tall clown beside her and spoke.
“They'd like a demonstration. What do you say, Sven?”
“Kekekeh. If they're asking, we'd better give them one.”
The masked clown called Sven stepped forward.
He picked out the most swaggering, discontented-looking man in the audience.
From his clothes, the fellow looked like a dockworker.
“Hey there, you strapping gentleman!”
“You talking to me?”
The man puffed up his biceps as though he had just been challenged to a duel and spoke with a swaggering expression.
The clown cackled at the sight of him.
“No, I meant the bearded lady standing next to you. You're looking a little scrawny to me.”
“What?!”
Laughter erupted across the crowd.
Naturally, there was no lady beside the man. Only his whiskery coworker.
The man's face flushed red — and so did the face of the hirsute companion who'd been branded a bearded lady.
“Mad now? Are you mad? You're mad, right? Huh? Gonna hit me? Gonna hit? Come on? Huh? Hit me? Hit me? Hit me?”
The clown let his arms dangle and hopped around the man in circles.
The nimble footwork belonged to a trained acrobat.
The crowd whooped and clapped.
They might not have understood what was happening, but the show was plainly underway.
The dockworker, realizing this was the circus troupe's mischief, quickly swallowed his anger, though his lips still twitched. Years of hard labor on the docks had carved muscle into his back and arms, and they bunched visibly as he moved.
“This is going to hurt!”
He launched a punch at the clown prancing right in front of him.
The clown was quicker.
He twisted his chest aside to slip the punch, then shook his head in exaggerated disappointment.
“Is that how you jab at your wife? She satisfied with that?”
Laughter burst out again.
“Y-you…!”
His pride stung, the man swung harder.
But the second and third blows fared no better.
Each time the man threw a punch, the clown crooked his neck, twisted his waist, bent his legs — and evaded every attack.
The movements were so comical that each dodge drew fresh laughter.
Still, anything repeated too often grows stale.
The audience and the punching man alike were beginning to tire when —
— something changed.
Crack.
The man's fist landed square on the clown's face.
The clown reeled as if the blow had stunned him badly.
“Is he allowed to do that?”
“All that dancing around and he finally caught one.”
Amid the murmuring, the trainer girl fidgeted as if distressed.
“Sven, are you all right?”
“Oof, that one had some weight to it… What should I do, Deputy Leader? It hurts. My head… my head feels like it's going to… come right off!”
Plop.
“Kyaaaaah!”
“Aaaaaaaah!”
“A ghost!”
Shrieks, people collapsing where they stood, others bolting — the square in front of the performance ground dissolved into chaos in an instant.
And no wonder: the clown's head had genuinely fallen off.
The most shocked of all was the dockworker who had thrown the punch. He stumbled backward and fell on his rear at the sight of the head rolling across the ground before him.
“Uaaaah — no, a monster…!”
The man was trembling in terror, his large frame entirely at odds with his courage.
Every trace of his earlier bravado had vanished.
Then something happened that horrified him even more.
“Say there, would you mind picking up my head for me?”
The fallen head was talking!
The laborer looked mere moments from fainting dead away.
The onlookers recoiled in shock, leaping back.
There could be no doubt: the severed head was speaking!
“Doesn't seem you're in any state to help, so I suppose I'll fetch it myself. Ha-ha-ha!”
At that, the headless body began to move on its own.
Puppetry?
No. It did not look as though anyone was pulling strings. The arms and legs moved with complete naturalness.
Even if it were puppetry, a head speaking by itself defied all explanation.
“Oi, body! Over here, over here! Hurry up and fetch me!”
The body groped along the ground in search of its fallen head.
Without eyesight, it blundered straight into a post with a thud.
The act was exaggerated and absurd, yet nobody laughed.
Was it funny… or frightening?
No — it was bizarre.
“Ha-ha-ha! Not bad, that punch of yours! Knocked my head clean off!”
The clown's cheerful voice rang out.
The mood hanging over the crowd, however, was nothing but cold silence.
No one could guess the secret behind this outlandish magic trick.
The clown's body lifted the head into place.
And with what followed, the crowd learned just how perverse the Monster Circus Troupe could be.
“Whoops! Hand slipped.”
Anyone listening would have recognized it for what it was: a clumsily acted fake mistake.
The whole skull slipped free between mask and hood.
People who had braced themselves for the bloody cross-section of neck and head recoiled, sickened.
But there was no flesh, no blood inside.
Only…
“Wah-ha-ha! My apologies for showing up without so much as a lick of makeup!”
Bereft of muscle, bereft of eyeballs, the hollow bone clattered out a laugh.
……!!
A storm swept the tent in an instant.
Shock, horror, fascination — those seconds passed.
And then, once the brief commotion had settled, came delirium.
“Hey! No cutting in line!”
“I was standing here first!”
“Move it!”
“Now, now! Let’s mind our manners!”
People shoved and clamored, each desperate to be the first inside.
Having now seen a skeleton walk and talk, they had abandoned every last shred of suspicion toward the Monster Circus Troupe.
Even now, at the entrance, the Skeleton Clown juggled his own skull, holding the crowd in thrall.
“Ta-ha-ha! Me? I’m nothing next to the terrifying~ monsters in there! One tap and I’d go to pieces! Woosh, right to the ground! That’s why they keep me out here! To handle the guests!”
Sven’s patter only stoked their excitement further.
Something even more grotesque than a living skeleton?
Just what manner of monsters awaited?
“Humans! This! Way! Line! Up!”
“One! At! A! Time!”
Ratmen emerged from inside the tent to manage the crowd.
Would even the largest of them reach Ella’s waist?
These chittering rat-beastmen had been hired on as the circus’s laborers.
The lowest rung of this world’s hierarchy, they turned up wherever the work was dirty and punishing.
At last the first group of spectators was lined up and ready.
“We’ll be moving along now!”
The girl who had introduced herself as the Monster Handler led the way.
Nobody was looking down on her youth now.
Sven’s show had done its work.
And just before they crossed the threshold,
another carefully orchestrated “show” went off.
Boom!
The ground shook under an impact like a boulder crashing down.
—What the…?
—Is that cannon fire?
Before anyone could steady themselves, a roar tore through the screening curtain.
“Grrooooaarrr!”
It was the cry of an enraged beast — deeper, rougher than any animal’s. The air itself trembled. People felt a chill run down their spines and goosebumps prickle along their arms. A few lost the strength in their legs and crumpled to the ground.
The Monster Handler girl put on a grave expression and whispered toward the audience.
“It seems our troupe’s worst offender, the ‘Red-Blood Ogre,’ has caught your scent and gotten rather excited. I’d say things might be a fair bit more dangerous than usual — do you still wish to enter?”
The Red-Blood Ogre.
The name alone conjured every grotesque shape imaginable.
Everyone stood frozen, speechless. From inside, as if demanding an answer, came another series of booming thuds.
“Wh-what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Y-y-yeah! I-it’s all s-staged, s-staged…”
“They’ll have trained it. They must have.”
“Don’t say it like it’s nothing. Stories about acrobats who got their heads bitten off by lions are common enough.”
“I-I’m going in! Dammit! A man only dies once, not twice!”
The line re-formed.
They followed after Ella with slightly more hesitant steps than before.
Glancing back at them, Ella clenched a small fist.
‘Perfect. Well done, Umon.’
Inside the curtain,
a ring of booths encircled the yard.
Each booth hung with its own drape.
From the largest came that same low, rumbling growl.
People did their best to give it a wide berth.
They worried that at any moment a hairy hand might rip through the curtain and iron bars and snatch them away.
Even as everyone’s gaze kept darting toward it, Ella pretended not to notice.
Umon was the troupe’s premier box-office draw.
Naturally she had no intention of revealing him yet. You save your ace for last.
She stopped before the booth at the far left.
“Now, eyes this way, please! The first monster I’ll introduce is, for sheer danger alone, arguably the worst in this circus. More dangerous even than that Red-Blood Ogre locked up over there.”
From the direction of the cage came the rattle of chains and a low, menacing rumble, as if the creature were demanding to know who could possibly be more dangerous than he was.
—More dangerous than that thing?
—Can we still leave right now?
The audience was beginning to question whether coming in had truly been the wisest choice.
“A man carrying the most dangerous disease in the world! Behold…”
At Ella’s signal, the Ratmen drew back the curtain.
“…the Bandaged Man!”
A rectangular chamber, glass on all four sides.
Inside, a man wrapped from head to toe in bandages sat crouched on the floor.
“Wh-what is this?”
“Looks like… writing?”
The glass walls were covered in red characters — blood or paint, impossible to tell.
Those with a scholarly bent recognized them at once: the ancient imperial script.
“…As the pestilence spreads like a demon… deliver the afflicted… with holy and pure water…”
The few who murmured the sounds and meanings under their breath suddenly cried out, stunned.
“It’s scripture! Passages from the holy text!”
“The Book of Saint Victor!”
Every word on the glass was a verse from the Book of Saint Victor.
Saint Victor was the priest famed for eradicating the Black Death.
Not only had his knowledge of medicine and remedies saved countless lives, but his personal might had been such that he had even vanquished a demon known as the Plague Lord.
Whenever an epidemic swept through, it was common practice to post talismans bearing Victor’s words throughout one’s home.
And now a monster was imprisoned within a cage ringed by those very words.
What could that possibly signify?
That the Bandaged Man was afflicted with a dreadful sickness.
Ella cupped a hand beside her mouth, as though confiding a grave secret.
“The plague that annihilated a small city out in Nevada. He’s the sole survivor.”
Whatever curiosity had seized them, the crowd’s feet still edged backward.
Holy seals or not, the mere presence of plague was deeply unsettling.
The girl gave them a sly, teasing grin, then strode up to the glass without the slightest hesitation and rapped her fist against it.
“Hey, Bandaged Man! On your feet! Earn your keep!”
At her command, the man lifted his face from between his knees.
The loosely wound bandages slithered down.
The skin beneath lay exposed.
“Kyaaah!”
“Ugh, damn! I’ve lost my appetite for the week.”
“That’s revolting! Is that even a human face?”
The skin was shriveled as if badly burned, black ichor oozing down in rivulets. His eyelids had melted away, leaving his eyeballs round and fully exposed. The scalp had cracked like parched rice paddies, and the sparse remaining hair put one in mind of weeds on a wasteland.
He grinned, revealing blackish gums and worn-down teeth, and the crowd felt a bone-deep chill.
“A face straight out of a nightmare.”
“That’s not a disease — that’s a curse!”
The man pantomimed cupping a hand to his ear at their abuse.
But there was no ear to cup — only a misshapen hole, from which a centipede slowly crawled.
“Aaaagh! I can’t look anymore! Cover it up!”
“Enough! Next! Next!”
“Goddamn monster bastards!”
The curtain closed.
The spectators stood drenched in cold sweat, gulping for air, trading feverish opinions about what they had just seen.
Ella let them catch their breath.
Then, one by one, she presented the rest of the monsters.
The Spider Woman, the three-headed Triplets, the Cursed Fairy — and finally, the worst monster in the entire circus: the Red-Blood Ogre itself!
It had lasted barely twenty minutes, yet the audience spilled out of the tent drunk on dizzy exhilaration.
Only after another dozen or so rounds of audiences had been ushered through did the day’s schedule come to an end.
Plenty of latecomers were still clamoring to be let in.
The show had been a roaring success.