13. Circus Charlie (17)
13. Circus Charlie (17)
The identities of the evaluators working for the Christian Guide were kept strictly anonymous. The editorial staff who corresponded with them knew only their pen names and security numbers—nothing of their real names, ages, genders, addresses, or any other personal information. Within the editorial department, only one person knew who the evaluators truly were: the editor-in-chief.
The system was vulnerable to cronyism, but the selection process itself was transparent. A committee of randomly chosen editors rigorously vetted applicants' abilities and whittled the pool down to those fit to become full evaluators.
Editor José had been tapped for this quarter's selection committee. He was not happy about it. He had urgent business to handle in secret, business no one could know about.
That business came from someone outside the company, someone who had been giving him orders since his days as the most junior editor.
The demands were always the same: find readers who had assigned a particular score to a particular performance, and hand them over. The readers he named had nothing in common except that matching score. But once José passed their personal details along, a new commonality emerged. None of them ever sent another letter to the editorial office.
A noblewoman who had followed only Escape King Rudini's shows.
A country boy who had meticulously documented every performance near his village.
A renowned provincial writer with a taste for biting comedy.
All had drawn the editorial department's attention, their names surfacing now and then in the public columns. Then their letters stopped dead. Every time, it happened after José sold their information.
José did not want to imagine what became of them. But the news of certain gruesome murders reached his ears regardless. Each time, his conscience writhed. Yet he could not defy the old man. Defiance meant his own death.
The old man had issued new orders yesterday afternoon.
José, as usual, began rifling through the reader mail, searching for someone whose score matched the one the old man had sent. The one thing he wanted to avoid was dragging his feet so long the old man came to find him. Every direct encounter left him plagued by nightmares that robbed him of sleep for days.
The old man had a human shape, but he was not something you could call human. Even the creatures he sent as messengers made that plain. José tried hard not to think about the monstrous bird currently occupying his room.
He had figured the job would take at least two weeks. The Vegas Theater District Festival had only just ended, and readers' letters were only now trickling into the office one by one.
But luck found him where he least expected it. At the evaluator selection meeting he'd attended only under duress, he spotted a probationary evaluator who had assigned a score that matched the old man's exactly.
With full evaluators, even a match yielded nothing he could give the old man. Evaluators submitted reports from any post office with only their pen name and security number enclosed—no post office box, no reliable means of tracing them.
Security around probationary evaluators, however, was looser. Hidden from the other editors, José tracked the postmark on the probationer's parcel and dug out his post office box number.
Thanks to that, the old man's messenger was on its way back within four days of arriving, and José could sleep soundly in his own room again.
The following night, he stepped into his house and felt a presence.
A chill slithered down his spine. The sensation was alien—and familiar.
He looked toward the shadow standing in the corner by the window. A figure dyed utterly black. José was certain it was the old man.
"I—I didn't expect you to come yourself. I sent the messenger back yesterday."
José fought to keep his composure, but his voice shook anyway. His fear of the old man ran that deep.
Then he got a better look at the intruder and couldn't suppress his confusion. The person standing there was not the hunchbacked old man he knew. This was a handsome blond in his twenties, the kind even a man would admit was good-looking.
He was smiling, but the expression carried something unnatural. Before José could form any judgment, the man moved.
Wonderstein drew a blade from his back and raised a tentacle from the shadows to pin him down.
The bedroom shook once. José did not scream. Not because he was especially brave—he was simply accustomed to situations like this.
"Wh-who are you...?"
"I never imagined this method. Using the Guide to hunt for Eyes..."
Wonderstein reproached himself.
If only he had realized sooner, he could have saved hundreds of lives.
His sentimental attachment to the Christian Guide had cost him precious time in reaching the truth.
"L-look, I'm—"
José understood at once that this man was not well-disposed toward him. The hostility in the air made it plain: this man and the old man were enemies.
Wonderstein squeezed the tentacle until bone began to creak.
"Ghkk—!"
"From now on, I suggest you answer carefully. I will not tolerate lies."
His voice was courteous. A smile lingered on his lips. That inhuman politeness only terrified José more. He spilled everything he knew.
"Th-that's how it happened... I had no choice! If I hadn't, I would have been—"
Wonderstein did not let him ramble further. He knocked José unconscious, dumped him on the floor, and strode to his desk—to confirm the details on the probationary evaluator José had sent to Igor the day before.
If he gave chase now, he might still be able to stop him.
Wonderstein studied the torn envelope bearing the post office stamp. He stood there a long while, checking and rechecking.
His smiling lips quivered as if they might split apart. He could not believe what he was seeing.
He did not need a postal directory to trace the box number. He did not need to confront the editor-in-chief and demand the probationer's identity. The number stamped on the postmark was painfully familiar. It was the address where he occasionally sent letters asking after an old friend.
Alamo.
Igor is headed for Alamo!
Wonderstein tore bat-like wings from his back and shot into the sky. No other thought entered his head. Only Ella. Only worry for her safety flooded his mind.
***
After writing her letter to Charlie, Ella left the school and headed for the butcher's shop. She needed the butcher's signature on the envelope so she could send the letter free of charge.
Mail in the village moved through the merchants' post office boxes. Buying postage wholesale through commercial boxes cost several times less than individuals purchasing stamps one by one.
When she reached the butcher's, she greeted the two dogs stationed out front. The mother dog, once a stray, had been hanging around for months, fed on scraps of meat by the shop owner.
"These rascals. I'm the one feeding them every day, and they still follow you better than me."
The butcher grumbled as he signed the envelope she handed him. The dogs who only stared blankly at him except at mealtime would, the moment Ella arrived, thrust out their tongues and thrash their tails in joy. It stung a little, but he also found it curious.
"Ahaha, that tickles!"
"Woof! Woof-woof!"
Before handing the letter back, the owner glanced at the recipient's name.
"Sending this to Charlie?"
"Yes! He sent me a birthday present not long ago, so I wrote him back. Oh, sir—if you've got any letters to send, give them to me. I'll mail them on the way."
"Hm? You're going all the way to the station yourself?"
"Yes! I have a visitor coming this afternoon anyway. I figured I'd wait for them there."
"Ah, right. Got it."
The owner opened the mailbox set up in front of the shop and handed her the basket of letters inside.
The station was about five kilometers from the village. Moving through the desert, that meant roughly three hours round trip. For circus school kids who regularly roamed tens of kilometers on a surplus of energy, this was nothing.
Ella slung the basket onto her back and ran toward the station. The moment she vanished over the right side of the hill, a figure appeared on the left. A short, stout old man dressed entirely in black. He limped slowly down the slope.
The butcher noticed him heading straight for the shop.
"What's your business?"
The butcher swept him with a guarded look. The old man's appearance was suspicious in every particular.
Instead of answering, the old man drew a Mantula's Blade from behind his back and hurled it. It bored into the butcher's shoulder.
"Gyaaagh!"
The instant Igor made physical contact, he knew everything about his opponent's body. This one did not possess the Eye of Kirkeus.
"What, just a coincidence? No, several scores hitting the mark at once can't be coincidence. Was it someone near you who wrote them?"
Igor had intended to torture the information out of him. When the butcher lunged at him with a meat cleaver, aiming to split his skull, he reconsidered.
"You monster!"
He'd just kill him.
A second blade shot from Igor's back and bisected the butcher at the waist. Blood and entrails erupted as his upper body toppled to the ground. His lips moved a few times, his face frozen in disbelief at what had just happened to him, then he stared into nothing and went still.
The old man listened. A scream like that should have drawn attention, but no one nearby seemed to care. It was a slaughterhouse, after all—the cries of animals were constant background noise. People must have dismissed it as that.
"Hmm. Should I look for clues? If it comes to it, I could always dig through his brain, though it'd cost a fair bit of Devolut."
Igor extended search tentacles and scoured the shop. Nothing useful. Even the mailbox outside was empty.
Then he heard a group of children approaching in the distance. Swiftly, he generated thousands of blood vessels and muscle fibers, connecting them beneath the butcher's upper torso.
From the street stall out front, all you could see was a person's upper body inside the shop. That would be enough to fool them.
"Hello!"
The children called out to the butcher leaning over the shop window. The moment they looked up, they froze.
Something was wrong with him. His complexion was pallid. His eyes wouldn't focus properly. His smile twitched awkwardly, like a muscle spasm somewhere in his face. And the voice that answered them was also strange.
"Hey, kids! Hello!"
He barked the words in a flat monotone.
"What's up?"
They sensed something off, but didn't dwell on it. They were the youngest students at the circus school, not even ten years old.
"Uh, we were wondering if a package came for us."
"What kind of package?"
"We entered the Christian Guide gift corner last month."
"Has anything shown up?"
The butcher's face split into a grin so wide it threatened to tear. He leaned in close enough to cast a shadow over their faces.
"The Christian Guide, you say. Do you kids send letters there often?"
"Yes! Of course!"
"All our friends at school do."
"School? School, you say?"
The butcher's head tilted nearly ninety degrees. The children assumed he was joking and giggled.
"We're going to be acrobats someday."
"I mean, getting picked in the gift corner a lot doesn't make you a great acrobat, but..."
The butcher's smile vanished, wiped away like melting snow. He whispered at them, face blank.
"Sorry, but no package has come. If one does, I'll let you know later."
The children left the shop muttering to each other about how weird the man was acting today. The instant they were out of sight, the butcher's upper body pitched forward, tumbled out the window, and rolled across the ground.
"Hmm. A circus school, is it. Right. A lot of those sprang up after that day. This complicates things. Today's work won't be easy."
Igor was weak against acrobats. His body was built on Kirkeus's cells. An entertaining show or a clever trick could snatch his attention helplessly. From what the children said, the school had at least several dozen students. Strong as he was, if they scattered in every direction, tracking them down would be a chore.
Just then, Igor heard dogs barking nearby.
"Grrr, ruff-ruff!"
It was the mother dog and her pup that the butcher kept. They had escorted Ella over the hill and were now returning.
Igor looked at them and grinned.
If he couldn't manage alone, he simply needed to make some helping hands.
He laid a hand on the mother dog's forehead as she stood barking, shielding her pup. Like bubblegum inflating, her bones and flesh twisted grotesquely, proliferating, swelling to dozens of times her original size.
"Kweaaagh!"
The mother dog, now the size of a building, bore no trace of her former self. Her skin bulged with translucent, blood-tinged blisters. Some parts of her body were hypertrophied, muscle fibers straining to burst; elsewhere the muscle had melted away, black ichor streaming down to reveal bone.
Her upper fangs had grown so long they shattered her lower jaw. Her lolling tongue dripped venom-laced saliva.
"Kiiiing..."
The puppy, terrified by what his mother had become, whimpered but still crept toward her. He seemed to expect she would still know him.
And when their eyes met, the puppy did find something there—the look of a mother who had always worried over him.
"Woof-woof!"
He bounded toward her, barking in delight, expecting her to lick his head the way she always did. He did not read the warning in her eyes.
The mother dog snapped up her pup's head and swallowed it in a single gulp.
Crunch, crunch.
"Grrr."
Feeling her child's skull splinter inside her mouth, watching her child's body dissolve in the saliva she herself had shed, the mother dog's bulging eyes streamed with tears.
"Kah-hah-hah! Were you trying to lick your baby's head? Hm? Monsters can't do that, I'm afraid! Come now, stop crying, let's get moving! It's a big stage today! This is going to be fun!"
Igor started walking toward the old building visible on the hill at the village's center.