7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (21)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (21)
Most people who came to see the Monster Circus knew Wonderstein's face.
His photograph had been in every newspaper and magazine, and Maya's painted signboard hung by the entrance like a barn door. They couldn't have missed it.
Blond hair, blue eyes, and chiseled features.
Tall and well-built.
An amiable smile.
Photography in this era was too blurry to capture more than a vague impression of a person's looks. Portraits were routinely falsified to the point of fraud and couldn't be trusted.
Yet everyone who actually laid eyes on him agreed the rumors weren't exaggerated. Even those who sneered at his station had to concede that much.
So anyone who'd walked in expecting a gorgeous young gentleman found the clown's entrance a shock. Members of other troupes who'd met him before felt the same.
They'd defended him at the trial, sure, but that didn't mean they regarded him as a proper colleague.
Monster circuses were despised in the industry.
Dragging pitiful creatures on stage to put on a show already looked bad enough. Add in the business about bewitching women with shady sorcery, the way a snake-oil peddler might, and the man himself seemed all the more contemptible.
They'd come to today's performance purely to gather material to mock and gossip about.
A monster circus—how original.
They'd just trot out a few unusual-looking specimens and call it a day.
Whatever they put on stage, we mustn't act the least bit impressed.
Which was why it was so hard to believe he had "shocked" them at all.
They'd assumed he'd appear with an immaculate face, bestowing easy smiles. They never expected him to look as though he'd been dipped in high-concentration industrial waste and dragged back out.
But the makeup alone wouldn't have rattled them this much.
He'd also delivered a performance that truly embodied the character he was playing.
The character was so overpowering that the first monster, the "Plague-stricken Mummy," left the stage with barely a ripple in the audience's memory.
"Shall we introduce the second monster, then?"
His style of presentation, his appearance aside, had nothing unusual about it.
He greeted them plainly, cracked ordinary jokes, introduced his troupe members in an ordinary way.
Yet every line he spoke, every gesture he made, carried something that made the skin crawl.
Small wonder. He was imitating the motions and dialogue of the "Black Magician Wonderstein" straight from the game.
The uncannily off-kilter way he held the audience's gaze, the laugh that missed its mark by a beat, the movements that needled the viewer's nerves—
All the devices that had signaled he wasn't human, the ones that made you viscerally uncomfortable, reproduced the same effect here.
The Smiling Man giggled, holding a hand halfway to his mouth in a grotesque pose.
"Ha-ha-ha! Gentlemen, you'd best steel yourselves. This lady has somewhat particular tastes. Allow me to introduce her—the troupe's sole female monster, the Spider Woman!"
Shhhk-shhhk.
Something scuttled overhead.
The moment people looked up, every light went out.
Violet flames flickered. Through them, a silhouette with far too many limbs unveiled itself.
—What a bounty of delicious-looking men. Oh, but of course, I don't dislike women either. Uhu-hu, a little crunch in one's diet now and then.
Yurakne's voice dripped with a sensuality utterly at odds with her usual scatterbrained demeanor.
The practice sessions under Ella's direction had paid off.
A dim glow illuminated the ceiling.
People took in the hall's transformation, wrought in mere seconds, and screamed.
"Wh-what is that?"
"C-cobwebs...?"
"Ugh, I hate this stuff..."
White threads tangled into intricate patterns, stretched across the ceiling's steel framework.
Viscous slime slid along the strands in lazy streaks.
Here and there, cocoons the size of men dangled from the webbing.
The cocoons shuddered as if something inside was thrashing.
"I-it's really moving...!"
"Don't worry. Th-they're obviously props."
"R-right. Or illusions."
No sooner had a spectator voiced that thought than one of the cocoons split open with a wet rip, spilling its contents onto the floor—a sticky green ichor veined with red.
Everyone who entered the Monster Circus had signed the "Wet Seat" clause.
That sort of thing was common in circuses that pulled the audience into the show or treated the seating area as an extension of the stage. It meant, in short, you accepted that your clothes might get dirty.
Uniquely, the Monster Circus's clause also encompassed "moisture caused by the audience." It was a playful way of saying you'd better brace yourself—you might be scared enough to wet yourself.
But signed waiver or not, nobody was willing to sit there and let some unidentifiable fluid splash all over them.
People near the front wore expressions of pure disgust as they pulled back.
Soon, though, they had cause to worry about their own "caused moisture" as well.
Something writhed inside the slime that now pooled across the stage.
"Aaagh!"
"O-over there!"
"A person—it's a person!"
A skeleton, its skin all but melted away, crawled from the cocoon's remnants on its hands and knees. Patches of half-dissolved flesh still clung to the bone.
It groaned and stretched a hand toward the audience.
"P-please... help me... This—this isn't a show... That troupe leader is a real demon..."
Just then, the threads suspended from the ceiling trembled.
People who looked up screamed.
The Spider Woman revealed herself. Her makeup evoked a genuine spider—sickly luminescent cosmetics that suited the image of a seductive demon down to the last detail.
She crawled through the intricate web on two legs and six arms, moving like a real spider using all eight limbs.
Watching her navigate the threads, Wonderstein felt a private rush of relief.
Most of the webbing stretching across the ceiling wasn't real.
In so short a time, they could never have covered the entire ceiling with actual silk.
Much of it was an illusion Maya had conjured, with real ropes concealed at intervals for the tightrope work.
He'd worried that a nervous Yurakne might accidentally grab a strand that didn't exist.
Thankfully, she hadn't made a single mistake, gliding across the web as if friction didn't exist.
Thwip.
A strand shot from between her palms and adhered to the ceiling.
The maneuver was highly demanding, but the Ghost's "magic lasso" they'd supplied let her wrap the ceiling's center point with ease.
She gripped the lasso line and dropped from above.
The web traced a graceful arc over the audience's heads.
Nearing the stage, she ascended until her speed bled to zero, then let go.
She landed head-down against the wall with a soft smack.
To the audience, it looked like a spider adhering to a vertical surface, though in reality she'd caught hold of a rope hidden among the webbing.
Clutching it, she scurried downward on all eight limbs—pitter-patter, pitter-patter.
The sight of a human shape crawling face-down was undiluted grotesquerie.
The crowd held its breath and tracked her next move.
She advanced on the skeletal man still writhing on the floor.
"Ugh... p-please... spare me... monster..."
"Spare me the useless prattle."
The Spider Woman seized the skeleton's limbs with the four arms mounted on her back and waist.
Then her two remaining hands clamped around his neck—and tore it apart.
Crrrack.
"Ggghhk..."
Flesh spattered outward.
The skull thumped to the floor and rolled.
The sound echoing across the silent hall was unmistakably real.
People swallowed hard.
The Spider Woman swept her gaze over the seats, licking her lips.
"Oh dear, hohoho. I've shown you something dreadfully unsightly, haven't I? A pleasure, delicious-looking humans."
A collective hiss of air—the sound of tension leaving lungs—swept the room.
"Th-this is really safe, right...?"
"Th-they said so. The monsters follow their leader's control..."
"Where did they even find such hideous things?"
Wonderstein glanced down at the decapitated skull on the floor and smiled.
The skull's jaw rattled against the boards.
It was smiling, too.
Thanks to the Spider Woman, the show's momentum surged from the start, then surged again the moment Wonderstein cloaked the dead skeleton in a human shell and raised it back to life. After that, the performance moved through the Triplets, the Cursed Fairy, and hit its peak with the entrance of the Red-Blood Ogre.
Many in the audience now understood exactly why the "Wet Seat" clause included "moisture caused by the audience."
Intermission.
Ratmen scuttled between the rows, sniffing audibly, and replaced several seat cushions.
***
Ella wasn't able to set foot outside the hotel until Monday afternoon.
To convince the doctor—who insisted she needed at least a week in bed—she'd practically turned somersaults in front of him.
"I'm telling you, I'm fine. Watch."
"Wh—! No, absolutely not! This is—!"
Her body sprang like a coiled spring and spun through the air.
She reeled off one difficult ground-acrobatics move after another.
One-armed handstand, lightning flip, back handspring...
Her body slipped into spaces that missed the furniture by a hair's breadth, each pass narrower than the last—and the doctor's shrieks grew louder in lockstep.
The hotel staff who'd been attending her watched Ella's fluid movements in a trance. The way she twisted and turned through the cramped interior, slipping exquisitely between people and furnishings, was nothing short of astonishing.
"Fine, fine."
At last, he granted her permission to go out—on the condition that she would not set foot on stage. Even as he gave it, the doctor's expression remained thoroughly displeased.
He'd agreed only as a means of stopping her from demonstrating a two-story aerial breakfall, not because he truly believed she'd recovered.
"I've made myself clear. You are not to perform."
"Yes, yes! Understood!"
Ella answered with vim.
The doctor sighed, shook his head, and left the room with the hotel staff in tow.
Once she was certain everyone had gone, Ella let out a breath—Hah—and slid down to the floor.
Cold sweat trickled down the back of her neck.
Her back was beaded with it, too.
Forcing her body to move while every muscle ached with fever had drained her in an instant.
That last stunt—lunging toward the second-floor railing to threaten an aerial breakfall—had been practically a threat directed at the doctor.
If she'd actually jumped, she would never have kept her balance. She'd have been badly hurt.
Ella peeled off her sweat-soaked pajamas and stepped into the shower.
She turned the water on and pressed her forehead against the wall.
Her body burned like a furnace.
'He really didn't heal me.'
That surprised her.
She'd been certain he would lay hands on her right away.
She didn't entertain the thought that he might actually be concerned for her well-being.
Ella knew how this worked.
His kindness only extended as far as necessity demanded.
This wasn't any ordinary day—it was the day before the preliminaries.
No matter what she said, she'd expected him to heal her.
But he hadn't.
'By now, he'll have started the final showing of the day.'
Ella pressed her back against the shower wall and sank down.
Warm water seeped into her body.
The doctor's estimate—that it would take a week to shake off the fatigue—was probably accurate.
She wanted to pass out right here and sleep.
The exertion just now had made it even harder to hold herself upright.
But she couldn't afford to.
She had to see whether the troupe was executing their practice properly, whether that man was handling the emcee role well enough.
Helping him fulfill the role of troupe leader—that was her job as Deputy Leader.
That was the contract.
Ella pushed herself back up.
The moment she shut off the water, the cold rushed in. Her body shivered uncontrollably.
She wanted nothing more than to turn the warm water back on and lie down on the tile.
Instead, she clenched her teeth and stepped out of the shower.