Center Stage

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Thank you all for your kind patronage to our show, it is my greatest hope that you will leave here titillated and flabbergasted, dazed, confused, vaguely vomitus, and delightfully surprised at the wonders that we have brought here to show you tonight. Unfortunately, it is my sad and solemn duty to inform you all that the Midnight’s Circus has almost drawn to its inevitable end. Pray, you may cheer and squawk as much as you like for an encore, but it would be best if you saved you exclamations for our final act of the evening. Before I may introduce tonight’s last spectacle, please do me the honor of allowing me to share a story with you all.

When I was a boy at the cusp of youth I had a fascination with strange and unusual creatures, it is partly this obsession that has led me to become your host for this evening of horror and depravity. My love of the strange in nature breached the murky depths of the ocean and crept through dark and dank jungle foliage, yet my favorite of the beasts did not stalk the Serengeti or slither along the ocean floor, but crept beneath floorboards and was the bane of my family’s pantry. The common rat, with its tiny claws and ever-growing teeth, fascinated me to no end. It was my constant obsession to catch and keep one of these creatures as a pet. Many a summer’s day was spent tinkering on the humid porch steps of my house, screwing and hammering pieces of wood and tarpaulin taken from my father’s scraps till my chubby fingers were calloused. To no avail I set them about the house and yard hoping to catch my heart’s desire. One day, however, the rats came to me.

It was twilight when I saw it. While I created another intricate contraption for their capture a rat, gaunt and gray, snuck from the shadows and climbed atop the plastic table that was my workbench. A squeak issuing from its twitching snout commanded my attention, and while my eyes nearly jumped from my head at the sound so close, my body went rigid, disbelieving that something so fascinating could be so close at hand. The rat then leapt from the table, clicked its way across the wooden floor, and with a pause to turn it head back to me, leapt through the broken screen of the porch door. My body reacted to its disappearance, exploding from the table and bursting through the door after the wondrous rodent. The rat had stopped, ten feet away, in a patch of the dusty ground that was my back yard. With my approach it once again took off at a steady saunter through the yard and into the woods bordering the property.

I was young, and despite my encyclopedic knowledge of strange creatures I did not know when a creature was strange. I kept pace with the rat, matching its crawl with my own staggering steps through the bramble. How odd it seems upon reflection that a wild animal would put up with my presence, much less allow me to trail it without putting on a bout of speed. Yet in youth the fantastic doesn’t seem so out of place, possibilities are endless to the ignorant and open minded. That is why, when it had grown quite dark in the woods and I was well beyond the call of my parents to come inside, it did not seem so strange that the rat would double back when I had lost sight of it, little paws scratching at my leg, and lead me further into the woods. The sun was gone when I stumbled through the last briar into a small clearing. Yet in my memory there was light enough, either from the moon or some other source, to see what I had been brought to.

In the center of the clearing was a monstrous tree trunk, rotted with age, yet still standing erect. The rat I had followed there kept moving, disappearing into a large hole in the side of the tree. Curious, and now incapable of finding my way back home in the dark, I strode over to the crumbling trunk and peered inside. I was greeted by a sound, hushed at first, but growing louder as I stood staring. Creaks and squeaks, nails scraping as something beautiful moved into the brighter light of the gap.

Rats, dozens of them, of all size and coloration, mouths agape and bodies distorted as they slid as one being towards me, their tails knotted together in a Celtic swirl of never ending lines. In one day I had not only found a rat, I had found a rat king! Here was something truly fascinating, truly unique, and stranger than anything I had ever seen. I wanted it to be mine, I wanted to protect and care for it, and I wanted to know more about it. And I would, over time. I spent the night there in the tree with the rat king and its swarm, stroking and fondling it. The rat king was only too happy to oblige my praises; it nuzzled my body in response to my caresses like it had known me all my life. It spoke to me in the deep crevasses of my mind, telling me about itself and the world it existed in. A world that now, as your humble ringmaster of the Midnight’s Circus, I am now as much a part of as the rat king was.

The most interesting part about the rat king to me, and the most relevant part of this story to you my gracious audience, was that rather than sign of pestilence and disease as it is in folklore, the rat king is a warning about dangers that are to come. Anyone who stops and listens to its tittering lesson would be told of disasters and plagues, terrible things which can be easily avoided should one only pay attention. And rat kings know this because they are more than a simple bundle of rodents. In the hollow of the tree the rat king whispered to me a secret. Its mind was no longer just made up of the pieces that belonged to the rats. When a rat king is formed something immortal and intangible is added, a mind without a body of its own that can only interact with the physical world by overlaying its consciousness over something else’s, some else made of many different pieces. And it told me about how even though rat kings are most common due to their natural formation, other creature’s can become kings of their kind by having something similar happen to them. That it was possible for it to enter into the consciousness of any living thing provided enough individuals were inescapably locked together. It told me, even, that should it inhabit creatures with more powerful thought processes, its own power to as an oracle would be increased.

The next day I made my way home, it was not far. It had only been made strange by the darkness. But I returned to the rat king over and over again for much of my youth, and it told me many more secrets. Through its ability was I able to start the collection of the unusual and grotesque things which you all have marveled at tonight and through its guidance was the first of many Midnight’s Circus’ performed and celebrated. But over time the rats that made up my greatest friend grew old and died, and I was left alone.

That’s when I had a thought, strange at first, but over time it grew on me. My friend was not dead, only the physical body it was made up of. What if I was to make a new body for it, would my friend return to me? And the next thought, more powerful then the last; what if I were to make it a new body, a more powerful one, made out of more intelligent creatures?

This was the inspiration for the creation of our next and final act of the evening. Made up of the bodies of 33 adults and children, legs broken then healed and knotted around each other, my friend has returned to this physical realm and to me more powerful than ever. Brought before you all for your amusement and delight, I give you, the Twisted Oracle!