novelraw Chapter 59: Anger!
Chapter 59: Anger!
The circus performance was about to begin, and tickets were being sold for entry. A standard adult ticket cost 5 rupi, a child’s ticket cost 2 rupi, and a VIP ticket cost 10 rupi.
Karon bought seven VIP tickets, spending 70 rupi, as the VIP tickets did not offer a child discount.
The different colored tickets corresponded to the different sections. Upon entering, staff members would check the ticket and guide people to the correct section. The VIP section was at the very center of the front, closest to the stage.
The sections were designated, but the tickets didn’t list any specific seat numbers. Each section was filled with benches, and people could sit wherever they liked within their section.
Karon chose the third row, and sat on the far left. Eunice sat to his right, and Mina and the other three kids sat in order further to the right. Alfred took the far-right seat that was closest to the aisle.
The music was loud, and had a heavy beat. Onstage, a man in a clown costume held a microphone and kept directing people to their seats.
“Is it too noisy?” Karon asked Eunice beside him.
“No. I think it’s lively, and I’m really looking forward to it,” Eunice said with a smile. “I’ve never been anywhere so lively!”
Karon felt that what Eunice meant by “lively” was simply a bit more down-to-earth.
At last, most of the audience had settled into their seats, and the clown gave a sharp scream into the microphone, trying to grab everyone’s attention. Unfortunately, the speakers immediately blew out, causing the sound to warp into an ear-splitting burst. With the VIP seating being at the very front, and closest to the speakers, they received a direct sonic attack.
Karon took a slow breath and glanced at Eunice and the kids. They were covering their ears, but still laughing.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Carilo Circus! Our amazing program is about to begin. First up, our beautiful diva will perform the famous Roja classic, Roja Lover.”
A slightly heavyset female singer in a tight blue costume walked to center stage, a microphone in hand. As the accompaniment started, she launched into an emotional performance of Roja Lover.
It was a song written by a Swillen singer. Originally from Roja City, she had moved to Veyn with her parents at the age of three, and had later became a Veyn national. The song had won an award at some music festival in Veyn. To a traveling circus from elsewhere, it probably looked like a symbol of Roja City, though most of the locals in Roja City had barely even heard of it.
That was exactly what was proven as the song played out. The singer was skilled, but the melody and lyrics were painfully ordinary, and the audience listened with growing boredom.
Still, a show’s opening number was intended to smooth the atmosphere, easing those who had arrived early and were getting restless, while also buying a bit more time for the people still outside and making their way in. After all, people were there to watch a circus, not listen to a concert.
For Karon, the speakers, the overall atmosphere, including the frozen ground and the surrounding crowd, yanked him straight back to the atmosphere of rural funeral music troupes from his previous life.
The singer was professional. Midway through, she tried to get the crowd involved, even pointing the microphone toward them at one point, but no one knew the song; How were they supposed to sing along?
Thankfully, the song finally ended, and the singer looked just as relieved as the audience. She bowed to the audience. “Thank you, everyone!”
With that, horses immediately thundered into the ring, circling the stage at full speed. Male and female acrobats on the animals’ backs started to execute one high-difficulty move after another. Cheers erupted instantly, and the children especially let out shrieks of excitement. Only now was the circus truly beginning.
Next came the animal act. A lion, at its trainer’s command, performed a series of moves that looked thrilling.
That was when Alfred, who was seated on the far-right of the bench next to the aisle, glanced back at the entrance. He leaned closer to Lent, who was watching the show in a trance, and said in a low voice, “Lent, Uncle’s going out for a moment. Sit properly and watch over your sisters, understand?”
“Mhmm!”
Alfred glanced over at Karon, who was seated a bit far away. After a moment’s hesitation, he bent down and shifted over anyway. “Young Master, something’s going on outside. I’m going to check.”
Karon’s brows knit. “Is it serious?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll take a look.”
“Do we need to go together?” Judging from Alfred’s expression, Karon felt that things wouldn’t be simple. If there really was any sort of danger, he would take everyone home without hesitation.
Alfred glanced around. “Young Master, there are many people here, so it’s safe. I’ll go alone.”
“Alright.”
Alfred left through the nearest exit. Most of the people were inside watching the show, only the Chasset vendors and their customers were still scattered about outside of the largest tent. There were not many people.
Alfred walked straight over to a small Chasset tent.
He picked up the flap to see a Chasset-dressed man lying on the ground. A woman was prying at a lockbox with all her might, cursing as she worked. “He died quick enough, but where the hell did he hide the key to his stash?”
The tent’s other occupant was an old man wearing a battered leather jacket who was sitting on a small stool. In his hand he held a small knife. He brought its blade to a metal ring on his ring finger, tapping the two again and again to produce a crisp, brittle sound.
When Alfred entered, the old man opened his eyelids just slightly. That one mere glance instantly placed immense pressure on Alfred. At that moment, he understood that this old man was a being he absolutely could not go against.
Almost instinctively, he found himself comparing the old man to Sir Tiz. Alfred’s gut told him that Sir Tiz was likely stronger. This intuition was not because Tiz gave off a greater sense of pressure, but because he didn’t.
Tiz had once given Alfred the faint illusion that, if he tried hard enough, he might barely be able to fight him to a draw. In retrospect, Alfred understood that it was that feeling itself that was the most terrifying part.
Rasma tossed the dagger to the ground in front of Alfred. “Dig out one of your eyes for me. Be careful; no scratches.”
Alfred’s peripheral vision flicked to the woman still prying at the lock.
The old man’s mouth curled into a smile as he raised his hand. “Order—Cage.”
In an instant, a black frame took form around Alfred, completely sealing him inside. It blocked every trace of his Succubus Eye’s power.
Rasma was the High Priest of the Church of Order, one of the most powerful figures outside of the Temple. When word had spread that he was heading for Swillen, the regional administrators had been thrown into a panic. When meeting him in person, they had needed to bow respectfully and address him as Lord Rasma.
Alfred might not need to care about an ordinary local Inquisitor, but this man was on a level far, far above that. To a certain extent, he was the Church of Order’s public face in the secular world.
It was at this moment that Alfred, who had been about to give in to despair, suddenly let out a quiet breath and brought his hands together. “Praise Order.”
A credential floated out from his pocket.
Rasma’s gaze tightened. He opened his hand, and the credential drifted down into his grasp. The issuing office was the Church of Order, Swillen Region, Roja City Inquisitorial Division.
To Rasma, that information itself wasn’t worth much, but what did catch his attention was the name attached after all of that: Tiz Immers.
Rasma flicked his hand, dissipating the cage. Alfred settled back onto the ground and said respectfully, “My lord.”
“You’re one of Tiz’s people?”
“Inquisitor Tiz is my direct superior.”
“Ha...” Rasma sighed, making no effort to hide it. He then bluntly stated, “I really like your eyes. I was planning to just take one. You’re demonkin, while I’m law enforcement.”
Alfred said nothing.
“But since you’re also a part of the Church of Order, it’d be awkward to just rob you. I could trade for it instead. I’m confident I can offer a price that would tempt you enough that you would voluntarily give me one eye in exchange.”
Alfred remained silent.
“But since you’re Tiz’s subordinate, I can’t do anything.”
Inside, Alfred shouted, Praise Tiz!
Rasma rubbed his forehead and continued, “There was a time when I thought I wasn’t inferior to Tiz, at least not by much. But later...”
Same here.
Rasma pointed to the corpse on the ground. “He insulted the Church of Order.”
“Yes. I’ll handle it.” It was convenient that Karon had driven the hearse today.
“Mm.” Rasma stood and left the tent. The moment he stepped out, the lock the woman had been prying at finally popped open with a loud crack.
“Hah...” Rasma looked over at the circus’s large tent. Since Tiz’s people were already present, he didn’t need to interfere. He had come to suppress the emotional turbulence that rose up in him whenever he was in Roja, but instead, he had ended up back at his starting point.
He looked up at the stars, feeling faintly hollow, and shook his head as he walked away. “Sigh. This whole day was wasted.”
***
Inside the main circus tent, the show continued.
Next, it was a live magic act. The magician was a man with delicate features who moved with deliberately feminine mannerisms. A closer look revealed that he was the same person who had worn the clown costume at the beginning of the show, though makeup was now gone.
The act was called Underwater Survival. A tall glass tank that was filled to the brim had been pushed onto the stage. When the host announced the act’s name, Karon felt a flicker of surprise. Normally, shouldn’t it be called Underwater Escape?
The classic routine was for the performer to be bound and put inside of the tank to struggle, searching for the release before finally forcing the lid open to gasp for air. Sometimes, the knot-tying would be done by a random audience member chosen on the spot. That was escape, but survival sounded more like living underwater.
“Welcome our performer, Miss Mandira!” The magician gestured backstage. A young woman in a dress walked out, waving at the audience as she approached the magician. Her smile was restrained and unnatural, even stiffer than Mina’s had been earlier in the day when Karon had told her to sit beside Eunice.
Karon’s brows drew together. On some sort of instinctive level, this performer, Mandira, made him uncomfortable.
It wasn’t related to her looks, but was something else.
As a member of the Immers household, Karon had spent the last few months helping the family business. Transporting corpses had become routine for him, and he had gotten so used to driving the hearse that it almost felt like an RV.
The young woman who had stepped onto the stage gave him a certain sense of familiarity; her smile, the texture of her skin, the look in her eyes.
If the young woman were not moving, Karon would have assumed her to be a corpse on a table, waiting to be sent on its final journey.
Her expression was exactly identical to one he had seen that night in the basement workshop. That one had belonged to a “guest” Aunt Mary had introduced whose wife had asked for him to be shown at his memorial with a gentle smile. Aunt Mary had stapled the skin of the man’s face into place to create a “refined smile.”
It was the same as Mandira’s smile onstage right now.
“Next, we’ll invite a lucky audience member to help tie the ropes!”
The magician walked to the edge of the stage and started scanning the crowd. Because Karon was in the VIP section that was closest to the stage, the odds of him being chosen were high.
Instead, the magician chose Eunice. He pointed at her and spoke into the microphone, “This beautiful lady, could I invite you to come up and help us complete this great magic performance?”
Eunice waved her hand, refusing.
“Don’t be shy. Please come up quickly. We’re all waiting for you.”
Eunice glanced at Karon, as if seeking his opinion, only to see that his expression had turned incredibly serious. She looked back at the magician and refused again with a polite smile and a shake of her head.
“Is the gentleman beside you your husband? Oh, in that case, may I invite your husband to help us instead?”
Karon’s gaze remained fixed on Mandira. She was maintaining the same smile, but she turned with the magician’s movements, adding small flourishes of movement, and even leaning against the tank while striking dance poses to accentuate her silhouette. Flashes of skin flickered into sight from beneath her skirt. This kind of roadside circus didn’t only target children, which was why sexualized teasing was normal.
“Sir, sir?” The magician called to Karon again.
Suddenly, Karon heard a young woman’s voice. “I’m cold... I’m so cold... I’m really so cold...”
It was faint, yet even in the noisy tent it sounded impossibly clear. At the same time, a chill swept through Karon’s hands and feet, so intense that he shivered.
When the magician failed to get Karon’s attention, he picked a different man seated from the front row instead. The middle-aged man immediately agreed to participate and climbed over the short barrier to get onto the stage.
“Sir, please come over here,” the magician said, guiding the man. “Miss Mandira, come welcome our guest performer.”
Mandira walked up to the man. They hugged, and during the embrace, the man deliberately shoved both of his hands inside of Mandira’s skirt, groping and kneading. Many of the male audience members let out exaggerated shrieks, followed by a string of whistles.
“Alright, sir, please help us tie the rope around her hands,” the magician said.
The middle-aged man started tying. He had no technique, and just looped and knotted the ropes.
“Great! The ropes are tied, and our performer, Miss Mandira, will now enter the tank. Everyone, give her a round of applause!” With her hands bound, Miss Mandira climbed the ladder. Before entering the water, she turned to face the audience and bowed to them. That perfect, standard smile remained on her face, practically unchanging.
“Count down with me!” The magician bounced and hopped about the stage, leading the entire crowd. “Three!
“Two!
“One!”
Mandira leapt into the tank.
“WOOOOO!!!” The whole audience roared, yet Karon sucked in a sharp breath. He felt as if he was the one who had just jumped the water.
“Karon, what’s wrong? Are you not feeling well?” Eunice asked, concerned.
“No, I’m fine. I’m fine,” Karon said, forcing himself back into his seat.
Onstage, the magician locked the tank lid with a heavy padlock. Through the glass, the audience could watch as Mandira sank beneath the surface.
Her skirt drifted upward, exposing long, pale legs, presenting an image that drew an immediate reaction from the crowd. She waved at them through the water, interacting just as she had before, and the flawless smile on her face never changed.
“Now we’ll perform some other acts first.” The magician pulled out a deck of cards and began doing basic, tedious card tricks. The audience had seen such things a hundred times before, yet while they normally would have been bored, no one booed.
That was because almost nobody was watching what the magician was doing. Even if he had just sat there eating a bowl of pasta, no one would have yelled that his performance was bad or demanded refunds. Everyone’s attention was on the tank.
How long would Mandira stay in there? How long could she hold her breath?
“I’m cold... I’m so cold... really so cold...” The voice returned inside Karon’s mind. It made him think of the time he had stood on the first floor of the Immers’ home and heard Mr. Mossan crying in the basement.
Miss Mandira was a corpse.
When Karon’s gaze shifted back to the tank, Mandira turned to face his seat.
“So cold... so cold... They kept dunking me into the water... again and again... again and again... so cold...”
Who are you? Karon tried to ask in his mind.
“They call me... Mandira...”
Who are they?
“The ringmaster... the magician... the owner who bought me from my parents... the one who drowned me... the ones who kept soaking me... again and again...”
Karon’s brows tightened. Instinctively, he wanted to pull away from the grotesque “conversation,” because he could already feel it, a fierce, tangled emotional infection that was spreading through him at terrifying speed: confusion, bewilderment, resentment, and a hatred so intense that it felt like it could drip.
Karon had always been sensitive to emotions, and he didn’t want to be influenced by someone else’s feelings. He shut his eyes, giving himself a mental cue, as though hanging up a call.
However, when he opened them back up, his vision had become violently distorted. He was looking through water and through glass. Everything on the other side looked warped and exaggerated.
Even so, he saw familiar figures.
The children, Lent, Sara, Clarice, Mina, and Eunice. He even saw himself sitting beside Eunice.
Karon pressed both hands to the glass. A suffocating pressure overcame him that was impossible to describe. Even worse was the sense of despair that no matter how he suffocated, he would never die.
That was because he was already dead. He couldn’t die again.
It was a psychological torture beyond human comprehension, like being cast into hell on earth.
All the while, the audience wildly cheered at Mandira’s movements. From their perspective, she was still showing the same refined smile, and the way she slapped the glass looked like she was playful interacting with them.
Karon blinked hard, again and again. He had to get out. If he didn’t, he would go mad. He would absolutely go mad.
Finally, with another blink, Karon’s body jolted, and his vision snapped back to his body in his seat.
“Karon? Are you sure you’re okay? I called for you just now and you didn’t respond at all.” Eunice sounded anxious.
Karon pulled her into his arms, burying his face against her body. His hand slipped straight under her clothes, pressing against the warmth of her skin.
He was moving by almost pure instinct, like someone who was about to freeze to death clinging to any source of heat, even if doing so meant throwing themselves into a fire. At such a moment, the brain was no longer able to think.
Eunice froze, but when she saw Karon’s pale face, she didn’t push him away. She used her bag to block others from seeing his hand, shielding his actions from any nearby eyes that might notice. She wrapped her other arm around his neck, pressing her cheek to his.
To outsiders, it looked like nothing more than an affectionate couple sitting close together.
“Hah... hah... hah...” Karon panted, unable to stop himself.
He could hear the young woman’s voice, he could feel her emotions, and he could even see through her point of view.
He had interacted with corpses several times before, but never like this, never with such overpowering immersion. Was it because Mandira was a corpse that could still move? Was she somehow different from the corpses he had awakened before, the ones who had been lying on gurneys or in coffins?
Gradually, Karon’s breathing steadied. Eunice kept patting his back gently. She could feel that the man in her arms had been overtaken by some sort of loss of control.
All along, the crowd’s excitement rose higher and higher. Mandira had been underwater for far too long, to the point that the magician had already finished performing several other tricks, all of them long, dull, and very basic.
Still in the tank, Mandira leaned back, floating as her long skirt rose to almost completely cover her face. The audience began to wonder if something had happened, if she had drowned.
Mina, Lent, and the others were already covering their eyes, too scared to keep watching.
“Alright! Now we have reached the moment we witness a miracle!” The magician finally threw his damned deck of cards to the ground and strode over to the tank. He spun on one foot for effect, climbed the ladder, showed the key to the audience, and then shook it dramatically while opening the lock as slowly as possible.
Halfway through, he pretended that the key didn’t work and dropped it to the ground. He climbed down to pick it up, then climbed back up again, adding one “accident” to another to the point that the crowd was scared into swearing and shouting.
No matter what, the atmosphere was perfect.
At long last, he unlocked the tank and lifted the lid.
Mandira instantly broke through the surface. She raised both arms in a classic dancer’s pose, like a ballerina born of water.
“WOOOOO!!!”
“Amazing, amazing!!!”
“That scared me to death, it really did!”
The cheers exploded, pushing the entire tent to its peak. Mina, Sara, and Clarice were clapping hard even while crying. They had genuinely been terrified for the performer’s safety.
It was at that moment that Karon, still in Eunice’s arms, turned to look at the stage. A deep, cold light flowed through his eyes. His lips moved, forming a soundless phrase: Go... Die.
Mandira, still holding her dance pose as she basked in the audience’s praise, suddenly reached up and wrapped her arms around the magician, who was standing on the ladder beside the tank, tipping his hat to the audience.
There was a huge splash, and the magician fell into the water.
Mandira flared her long skirt again, this time completely covering the magician’s face. She then pushed herself down on top of him, pinning him in place. The magician’s hands clawed wildly at the performer’s body, more frantically and crudely than the middle-aged audience member had done earlier.
From the audience’s perspective, this looked like the next act. The magician and the performer were staging a passionate scene inside the tank.
“WOOOOO!!!”
“Brilliant, brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!”
“This ticket was worth it, absolutely worth it!”
“Beautiful, so beautiful!”
No one cared how long the performer and the magician remained locked together in the water. However long it lasted, it would be fine, right? She had already stayed underwater for so long earlier and nothing at all had happened to her.
The crowd only cheered and shouted, reveling in the hormones the last act had stirred up, already deciding that as soon as the show ended, they would go outside and crawl into a Chasset young woman’s tent to vent properly.
Inside the tank, the magician’s hands finally stopped struggling. Beneath the skirt that hid his face, his face was forever frozen in an expression of terror. Mandira still clung to him, showing no sign of ever letting go.
In the audience, Karon finally realized just how wrong his behavior had been. He sat up straight.
“Do you feel better now, Karon?” Eunice didn’t question his earlier actions, and only showed concern for his wellbeing.
Karon nodded and whispered to her, “Thank you.”
At the same time, right at Karon’s ear, a young woman’s trembling voice was heard, long and relieved, “Thank you...”