Geek Syndicate
wind was right, you could still smell burning. If you listened carefully, you could sometimes hear screams too. Murder hung in the air like a fog and clung to everything, a sticky
miasma that made the flesh crawl and the heart pound.
Something bad had happened here. The kind of bad that stained a place.
Even when the circus had been open, before everything had burnt, there had been rumours. The place was an old, forgotten cemetery, some said, and the ghosts of those interred here haunted the circus and plagued its visitors. Well, there were ghosts here, that
much was certain. Magpye could hear them. He could hear them all the time.
Below ground, in their tiny sanctuary underneath the vast corpse of the circus, Marv and
Marissa were cooking. Pans steamed, lids rattled. Ever the showman, ever the magician,
Marv made even a simple stew cooked over a camping stove look like a conjuring trick.
Behind him, Marissa laid the table. Impossibly, some china had survived the fire-storm
that had consumed the circus, and she placed it carefully on the table.
The sanctuary was a small mausoleum: an expensive tribute, Marv had suggested, to a
family long past. Despite all the ghosts that Magpye could sense, he had no inkling of
who the original denizens of this place might have been. Unlike the ghosts of the circus,
their spirits had found peace, he suspected. Marissa had done her best to decorate the
place, papering the vaulted stone ceilings with old posters from the circus, scrounging up
what furniture she could. With the original tenants gone, they had turned the place into a
shrine to their own lost loved ones. Salvage from the burnt out caravans was piled everywhere, a ramshackle museum built up from the everyday detritus of people’s lives mixed
with what was left of the paraphernalia of the circus. They had used some of the larger
boxes to block up doors, limiting themselves to just a few small rooms. Marv wanted to
explore the place, but Magpye’s keen sense of the dead and their demands had bade him
leave the rest of the crypt alone. The living were the interlopers here.
Perched on the edge of an old steam trunk, Magpye watched Marissa laying the table. The
plates were fragile, just like the girl, he thought. Survivors, but chipped and crazed and
changed by the whole thing. He was changed too, of course, more than any of them.
“Sit down to the table, son, you’re making us all nervous,” Marv said. “Or make yourself
useful and help Marissa.”
Magpye cocked his head to one side, an affectation that let Marv and Marissa know that
he was no longer listening to them, but to one of the many voices that only he could hear.
Dead voices, never quiet. “Sorry,” he mumbled, hopping down from his perch.
“That’s OK,” said Marissa, unsure whether the apology had been for her or not. “Everything’s ready. Why don’t you sit down and we can get started?”
Magpye shot Marv a look. “I can’t...”
“Try,” said Marv, pouring steaming stew from the pan into the waiting bowls. “Just... try.”
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