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Cigarette butts, razor blades, belt buckles, boot spurs, bamboo sticks, red bricks and cut glass.  These were among the instruments of torture his father had bestowed upon him since he was a child. 

He heard the bones in his arm cracking under the weight of his father’s heel, sounding out as if a hammer to ice, creaking as the shattered fragments splintered, shifting into new, distorted positions.  Knuckles crumbling, flesh speared, the familiar crimson river flowed out to the sea around him, his hands reached out for an anchor and scraped the wall until bloodied paper daisies gathered under his fingernails.  The pale rug soaked up the liquid, thistles tangled with thorns, drawing a bud that burst into bloom before shedding its petals to dry in scattered clumps.  He closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the raft, hearing the gurgling sound of his struggled breaths, bubbles rising up from the mess of tissue and cartilage, interrupted only by the stench of singed flesh that hung in the air.  He jumped down into the inferno, the sounds of his tormentor muted under the surface, the words drowned out as he swam through its caves, his wounds healing as he passed the urchins and eels that snapped at his toes, until he came out into the sanctity of the emerald lagoon.

With each pinch, blow, cut, twist and burn he sought out that other land, the make believe asylum of his mind.  Whips transformed themselves into feathers, embers flakes of snow and cuts across his skin were tributaries on the relief map of his world.  Corridors became labyrinths and doors portals opened by unseen creatures. Harsh words softened to the whispers of garden nymphs; the harbinger of war an innocent kiss and clenched fists tumbleweed rolling across distant plains.  This fantastical fortress consumed the real world until he was exiled from his pain, his mind disconnected from his body, and he was permanently anesthetised. 

Pascual and his parents occupied a suite in the telos that they ran, providing rooms by the hour to couples in need of a nest away from the tree.  His mother, an established lady of the night, concerned herself not with his welfare, but with the adjoining brothel to which she attracted men from far and wide, so beautiful and accommodating were her girls, which she handpicked and trained in the art of lovemaking and lovepleasing herself.  Since conception, she had considered her son a burden and despised his very existence - particularly after back-alley attempts at his termination were thwarted - so the duties of motherhood were delegated to the whore-puppets that she reared and manipulated.  Empty inside, there was no life left in them to give him.  Long fallen under her wicked spell, these shells idly washed up on the shore to be plucked and briefly admired by punters before being tossed back into the inky seas. 

His education was limited to the old Sun Cash Register in the welcome parlour where he discovered arithmetic, basic terms of business, and later to read and write in chalk on the menu board words found in only a select few dictionaries at the time.  When the first days of adolescence descended upon him in a thick cloud of delirium, the ugly reality of the world once again invaded his Atlantis, seeping into his precious empire and fading it with its sun.  Queens became whores, damsels vixens and knights thieves.  All around he saw a sickness of the mind, an injustice of the people and a bloating of bellies.  His peers sought out satisfaction from his immediate surroundings as their trembling fingers ran across the thighs of the very whores he despised, aching for a release that came again and again as they were sucked into their moral vacuum.  Pascual watched on for he had no carnal desires, his manhood and his heart numb to the world. 

On a night when Bernardo Rocco was away in the neighbouring village laying his fists upon an opponent rather than his son, Pascual crept down the corridor, passing open doors, wide and brazen as the legs inside, revealing pairs of eyes that stared back at him, contorted against the grin of lips and crack of whips; eyes that screamed and eyes that wept in twisted delight.  Out into the night, they echoed the mocking contortions of the lucha libre ring, his father acting out the role of the menace, the avenged cuckold, the comic fury unleashed with stage kicks and stunt punches, the audience roaring with mirth at the pantomime theatrics of a loosely scripted feud that was, to Pascual, a sinister prelude to another, private, performance.

The mutterings of the streets told him that a carnival was in town for the night and he weaved a shadowy path through the neighbouring backyards and crooked outhouses, across the meadows towards the glowing light of the tents and cluster of gypsy caravans.  The dog day heat had wilted the leaves of the trees, browning their greens and sucking the branches dry so that they bowed along the path, crumbling into the awaiting crevasses formed in the dirt.  With empty pockets he made his way around the back, rolling himself under the wooden fence and skating the edge of the field towards the crowd.  Pulling his cap down over his face, he slipped into the hungry mob, all vying for the opportunity to satiate their morbid curiosities.  Iron men, two-headed monkeys, a ride in the electric chair and tales from the future were listed under The Realm of the Unknown.  Jugglers and frowning clowns on stilts peddled candyfloss, cigarettes and condoms.  The shouts of vendors, gongs of winners, yells of challengers, band song and bursts of neon lights were overwhelming and he ducked into the darkness and found sanctuary behind one of the tents. 

Through a ragged, tick-shaped tear in the tarpaulin, he peered through into a bath of saffron light and wall of gawking faces, necks craned, lips hushed.  An Arabic man dressed in long, silk robes wrapped his mouth around a flute, swaying hypnotically as the notes drifted out and took on the air with its eerie melody.  The wicker basket at his feet stirred and the curled head of a cobra danced its way heavenward, provocatively courting the shadows and moving to the beat.  When it reached the light, it revealed itself not as a fork-tongued serpent but as the hand of a woman, her painted body mimicking the skin of a snake.  She slithered out onto the ground and lay, limbs coiled around her, before drawing her legs up to rest on her shoulders, her head swooped under and she spun around on its crown.  These feats of contortion were executed with such undeniable grace and ease that, as she rippled and curled, beautiful and otherworldly, it was such a fluid motion that it was as if she did not have a spine.

The nails digging into his right arm and the hands around his throat would have prepared any other boy for the impending beating he was about to receive.  Pascual, however, was not made aware of this until the moment that he was propelled backwards from his peephole and the faces of the crowd blurred with the carousel lights as the world turned upside down and churned around as he was hurled to the ground, picked up and kicked back down, over and over, with steel toes and knuckles belonging to the notoriously cruel Menem brothers. 

The three menaces were from the neighbouring cattle ranch, each one would have balanced out a rhinoceros on a pair of scales and it was for that very reason that they had been hired to patrol the grounds.  After tossing Pascual around and proclaiming him a cripple and a beast through wobbling jaws and sprays of saliva, the gruesome trio hauled him to his knees, locked him down and branded him with a hot iron, white with heat that seared his skin and marked a cross on the lump that lived between his shoulder blades and was the topic of their torment. 

‘Enough!’  The voice was measured and commanded respect.  ‘Put that down and get out of here!’

Pascual heard a hiss as the rod was dropped into a pail of water and the brothers scarpered into the light and towards the crowd.  The man lifted him to his feet and brushed down his clothes, wiping the dust from his eyes. 

‘Damn hooligans!’ he shouted.  ‘What’s your name, boy?’

‘Pascual,’ he offered.  ‘Pascual Solari.’

‘Come with me, get you some rum.’

Pascual followed the old man who struck him as rather comical in that he was just about as wide as he was tall, bursting through the seams of his tailcoat, with a waddling gait and moustache that hung awkwardly on his face, hat askew.  What should have been an inexcusably ridiculous vision was, however, countered by the presence of unsightly scars across his face and a brutish and vulgar air.

‘Come in, boy,’ he grimaced, splashing the golden elixir into a pair of tin mugs. 

He motioned with stubby, ring-adorned fingers for Pascual to sit down on a battered armchair that was struggling to contain its innards and showing signs that, though it had been patched up over the years, the effort had now been exhausted.  Sitting on a dining chair, wooden and poorly lacquered in gold, he fixed his grey, wolf-like eyes on Pascual.

‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning back and taking a cigar from his pocket.  ‘Back there you didn’t flinch, not once.  Even your eyes were silent.  Does that not seem strange to you?’

Pascual lowered his eyes and watched as the man struck a match and wisps of grey smoke curled into the air.

‘Why is that?’ he persisted.

‘It didn’t hurt, sir,’ Pascual said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.  The church people had thought the Devil was in him when they saw him trying to walk on a leg broken in twelve places, so he was wary of making his condition public.

When the man threw his head back and roared with laughter, the lanterns that hung from the roof of the caravan rocked with him.  He stopped abruptly and eyed Pascual with suspicion.  He removed his hat to reveal a mane of flame-red hair which, with his dark, weathered skin and pale eyes, drew a striking portrait.

‘That was not bravery, that was something else.  Tell me the truth.’

‘I didn’t feel it, sir.  My body is numb.’

The man leaned over and took the soft skin of the boy’s underarm, just above the armpit, between his thumb and forefinger and pinched, twisting it until his nails turned white, staring all the while into Pascual’s eyes.  He broke into a broad smile and released his arm, slapping his thigh and drawing the boy to him.

‘I knew as soon as I saw you,’ he chuckled.  ‘You got anything tying you down here, son?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good, we could use a talent like yours.  A opening has just come up, stuntman call it if you like - razor swallowing, fire walking, piercing, stapling - you name it, the crowd loves it.’

The position had recently become available after the previous employee, his repertoire tiring and fearing the sack, had plunged an experimental fork deep into his nasal septum, which, on extraction, had unravelled his brains out with it, twirling them around the pronged instrument as if spaghetti. 

‘No wages as such but free food and board, travel the world, not going to get a better deal than that,’ he continued.  ‘We leave tonight.’

He stretched out his hand and Pascual took it with only a whisper of hesitation.

‘Diego Alonso O’Rourke.’  He puffed.  ‘Welcome to Beelzebub’s Carnival.’

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Pascual observed his reflection in the water.  The first signs of stubble were making their way through his chin to the surface, his eyes were bloodshot and his hunch loomed over his shoulder, red and blistering.  After years of suppression, the pain of his abuse had manifested itself in the physical and he carried the weight of his disturbed subconscious in a deformed and mutating lump that grew just below the nape of his neck.  He sunk his head into the barrel, resurfacing to see the mirror replaced by muddy water.  They had travelled north through the night, along the dusty roads that wound around the mountains and rocky valleys towards the clouds.  As the group had rolled out of the fields, Pascual had held his breath until they were past the town gates, not allowing himself to sleep until they had entered into the neighbouring province and he was convinced of his anonymity. 

Half asleep, he had not yet paid attention to his surroundings and the sound of a cow mooing disturbed him from his dreamy thoughts and he spun around to see Lopez Alfaro, the resident giant.  Built of awesome proportions, they faltered only with one leg that reached no further than the knee of the other.   In order to walk, he used his foot as a hand to hold on to the trunk of a silver birch that he had fashioned into a cane.  It was a work of art, intricately hand carved with fairytales and pictures of the places in the world the giant had travelled through.  Pascual’s eyes reached his hand, clutching a milking cow, as he brought it to his lips.  The boy recoiled, open-mouthed and squinting, waiting to be rained down upon by a shower of bovine blood and bones. 

Fortunately for both cow and boy, it was not Lopez’s intention to devour the creature and instead he put its udders gently to his lips and drank from them, sucking the animal dry before replacing it carefully with his thumb and forefinger on the edge of the field under the shade of a willow tree.

‘He hates it when people stare.’

Pascual followed the husky, honeyed voice to his knees and saw that a dwarf was jumping up and down on his foot with a face of exasperation that implied that he had been doing so for some time and was somewhat bewildered by Pascual’s indifference.

‘Oh, sorry,’ he apologised.  He could not tell if the dwarf was a he with breasts or a she with a beard and thought it prudent to avoid eye contact.

The dwarf was already walking off, wagging his or her finger in the air. ‘He’s a sensitive soul but you don’t want to see him mad, oh no, I can promise you that.  Santos Poma Poma, if you need me.’

Pascual made his way towards the makeshift breakfast tent that had been hurriedly erected at the demand of a chorus of rumbling bellies.  He loaded his plate from the stacks of buttered pancakes and dipped his mug into a pan of thick, sugar-laden coffee, before retreating under a tree away from the crowd.  As he ate the food, its fuel stoking the fires of his sleepy head, he observed the assortment of weird and wonderful beings that he was now to share his life with.  Men with tails sprouting from their trousers, women with whiskers and multiple breasts, conjoined children playing an imaginary piano, an old lady with skin covered in fur and an array of confused genders.  To outsiders and patrons of the show, these people were the grotesque, the forgotten children of the devil that served to amuse for one night only but whom no one would otherwise acknowledge.  In contrast with the lives of the town he had left behind, their laughter and play struck him as anything but grotesque. 

‘So my father thinks you’re going to save the business.’ 

Her pale auburn hair was so illuminated by the low morning sun that he shielded his eyes with the back of his hand.  Her pale lips quivered with suggestion, her amber eyes smiled wickedly, her upturned palms drawing emphatic circles in the air.  

She looked straight at him with such intensity that he felt as if she had seen him naked and turned away, wiping his plate on the grass.

‘What are you sitting here for?  Come on, I’ll introduce you to some people.’

She reached for his hand and he hesitated, pulling back.

‘What’s wrong?  Afraid of a few freaks?’

‘No.  I’m…I’m just not looking to make friends right now.’

‘Neither am I,’ she said, grinning.  ‘We can be enemies if you like.’

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The clown, Bladimir ‘Guffy’ Mujica, was sitting in the tent, smoking a pipe and flicking through a magazine, the cover – a rather uncompromising image of a woman and a horse - Pascual recognised from a pile that lived in the waiting room of the brothel. 

‘Ah here you are,’ came the voice of O’Rourke.  He wafted at Guffy to get out, who sloped off, head hung low, muttering under his breath about balls, chains and the price of oil.

‘Right, bring that over,’ he instructed, pointing to an old trunk that had lost its shape, patched up with off-cuts of billboards and tin cans bound with sailing rope.

Pascual slowly dragged it over to O’Rourke’s feet.  He produced a key from his pocket and opened it up to reveal an arsenal of razor blades, hammers, staplers, spikes, needles, swords, pokers, a folding bed of nails and an assortment of knives.  The stout old man rubbed his hands together in anticipation and pulled out a collection of mousetraps, a tub of maggots and an umbrella.  While Pascual passed rubber bands through his nose and practised chewing on glass and rusty blades, O’Rourke gleefully went about setting up a perilous assault course of hot coals, electrical cables and bell weights attached to surgical instruments that was to be the boy’s macabre initiation.

Several piercings, snips, scrapes, burns and the successful swallowing of an umbrella later, Pascual was subjected to the enduring curiosity of the Irishman, who relished in every new test passed, sadistically upping the degree of brutality tenfold each time and marvelling at his new apprentice who remained unaffected throughout.  When the equipment had been exhausted and they called it a day, a clapping rang out in the tent and he turned to see the amber-eyed girl perched up on the trapeze bar in the roof, her legs swinging casually beneath her. 

‘Impressive.  What are you going to call him, Papa?’

O’Rourke turned to Pascual with a look of triumph and introduced him with a theatrical bow and a wave of his hand.  ‘The Cadaver, my dear.’

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That evening, just as people had finished setting up for the night, he saw his new name written on the billboard man.  Born with pale paper-like skin that shed in sheets, the paper man could be written upon with ink or pencil or even just the indent of a well-filed fingernail.  He stood patiently still while Pascual studied the words until he made sense of at least some of them, most notably that he was about to perform the human dartboard.  Thanking the paper man, he made his way over to the main tent in search of O’Rourke.

‘I’ll paint you up after I’ve finished this foot.’

He recognised the voice that came from the shadows as that of O’Rourke’s daughter, also known as Elisa Equeze.  When he traced the silhouette he realised that she was also the contorting snakewoman he had watched the night before.  Straddled seductively across two chairs, dipping a brush into an old jam jar filled with paint, she added the finishing touches to her heel. 

‘What, you didn’t recognise me?’  She flashed him a teasing smile.

‘How do you mean, paint me?’

‘Got to draw an elaborate target on your back if you’re to convince anyone of being a dartboard.’

‘Oh,’ he shrugged, cursing his ignorance.

‘It was my idea,’ she grinned mischievously.  ‘I’ll be the one throwing the knives at you, just make sure you stand still and do as you’re told.’

Elisa had a way of extracting the inside pieces of people, the fragments of secrets and lies and the guarded memories buried under emotional rubble.  By the time she had completed the intricate red and black target on his back, Pascual had revealed to her the nature of his past in all its ugliness and the reason for his numbness, but knew nothing about the mysterious girl.  In Elisa’s presence, he had felt the foundations of his barriers shift and crumble.

As he braced himself under the bright lights of the arena, staring out into the gaggle of faces, stepping into the mouths smeared with toffee, lips sticky with lollypops and cheeks covered in candyfloss, he thought about the audience and the probability that if these people knew that his body was in fact numb, they would have undoubtedly been disappointed with the performance.  As it was, they believed his grimaces and feigned contortions of pain, spurred on by the sight of blood and a tribal drum roll.  They clapped in a delirious frenzy and went home that night to tuck their children into their beds and tell them that the shadows were friends, while they themselves slipped guns under their pillows and prayed.

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Over the following weeks the group continued their northerly route, sleeping on the road, travelling days and working nights.  Though he still maintained a quiet distance, the community had opened up to him.  He had proved himself to be a useful addition to the family, taking on small but valuable chores and they welcomed the enthusiasm with which he fixed the latrines, cleaned the jar with the soothsayer’s eyes, found scrap metal for the strongman to chew on and rigged up all manner of tents.  His act was incorporated into other shows and O’Rourke developed some fresh pieces, even rigging up an electric chair in a tank of water and a Russian roulette nail gun.  He found it comforting to be a cog in the machine along with the others, no one ever complained or raised their voices, things just ticked along under the watchful eye of the flame-haired boss and, at last, amongst these freaks, things were almost normal. 

He had begun to admire O’Rourke as a performer.  He was a lion tamer and to see him at work with Anastacia was a humbling sight.  O’Rourke controlled the lioness with subtle, graceful movements, a slight of hand, a tap on his hat, a raised eyebrow.  He was something of an enigma in the lion taming industry and his ability to subdue even the fiercest of creatures was known and feared far and wide.  She never, even when provoked, fought back or swiped her tail aggressively, even though she had the strength to knock him dead with one paw.  There was a resolution in her eyes that Pascual recognised in himself.

Elisa became evermore bewitching to Pascual and when they were not together she danced around his thoughts.  At first he had been wary of her confidence and beauty and shied away from her attention, but she had enticed him, cajoling him into contortion, tightrope walking, and other, less reputable pursuits such as stealing grain and siphoning petrol from trucks.  Just a few years his senior, she impressed him effortlessly with her trickery and hunting skills, wading out with him to the rivers and lakes they camped beside to spear trout and snapper to cook up on the fire.  Though his heart had grown cold since he closed the door on his feelings, it was thawing and shifting towards desire.

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When they pitched up at a dusty village nestled in the mountains, white-washed houses and fields littered with cacti, the spare bed in his caravan became the temporary home of a couple who had joined the carnival in return for passage to their hometown on the coast. 

Hugo Palmieri and Manuela Portela were siblings by birth, lovers by marriage.  They shared the same mother but it was their fathers and a twist of fate that had set them apart.  He was dark skinned and graced with a youthful complexion; she was porcelain white and her face wrinkled and ancient.  Neither of them ever spoke a word out loud to one another, communicating instead through telepathy.  Occasionally, the mischievous duo would use thought alone to send objects flying across the room, swap salt for sugar or turn the pages of a book in order to get a rise out of the other and this was guaranteed to have the pair rolling around the floor with tears of laughter.  This also extended to commanding brooms, mops and dusters to carry out the household chores, which relieved Pascual of such tasks and ensured that the caravan was always spotless.

Manuela held the keys to doors of other worlds, lives and dimensions inhabited by souls and beings that endowed her with their knowledge, though her psychic amnesia had begun to hinder her powers.  She could hear the dreams and thoughts of those around her and know how they would be answered.  Sometimes, at night, when Pascual was sleeping, she would go into his nightmares, hold him by his hand and lead him from the darkness to other places that reached far beyond his tortured subconscious and in that time reduced his lump considerably.  Hugo read the futures of others from his own palm, the lines of which were constantly in flux according to the universe.  As he watched the trails twist and turn and chase one another across his skin, his lambent eyes would turn a milky white and light up with the excitement of a child as he darted about the room scribbling down the paths that lives known and unknown to him would follow.  Despite his apparent youth he was, as Manuela, of considerable age and his gifts were weakening also.  The lines had begun to merge with fresh wrinkles and sunspots so that an element of guesswork had come into play and he often had to rely on Manuela and Pascual to interpret them for him.  Still, they had a zest and humour for life that Pascual found infectious and he would often stay up all night listening to their tales of past civilisations and distant lands.  He told them his hopes and fears and, without divulging his future, they comforted and inspired him to take hold of his life and taught him ways in which to strengthen his mind and develop a psychic awareness that might protect him in the world.

On reaching the ocean, he went with them to their village and it was with much sadness that they parted ways.  They begged him to stay and live with them in their lemon grove on the cliff but by this point he was truly in love and they understood that he would have to follow that path himself.  Before they left, they gave him two pieces of advice - both characteristically cryptic - and promised that they would see him again one day.

‘Who is the beauty and who is the beast?’ said Hugo

‘When the vine grows tight, careful of the bite,’ whispered Manuela.

As he ran back to the camp he played the words over in his mind but, unable to decipher them and with thoughts of a more interesting nature occupying his imagination, he let them fall to the ground, buried under the dust of his feet.  As he came around the cliff edge, he was met with the sea and was humbled by its scale.  He had never set eyes upon the ocean before, knowing it only from postcards and his dreams, but he felt a sense of belonging that tugged at his heart.  The sun was low on the horizon and had turned the water a deep purple, with orange waves breaking on the shore below.  The tents were already scattered across the beach and as the sun dipped its head beneath the water, the coloured lights lit up and announced the night’s adventures. 

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After the performance was over he went looking for Elisa.  He was going to tell her that he loved her, that she had contorted his quiet heart and made it scream with desire.  She was nowhere to be found in the tents or caravans and he wandered down to the shore, calling out for her, desperate for those honeyed eyes and blazing locks.  Then he heard her and a chill ran down his spine. 

In the dark waters, a few metres out to sea, her pale arms were illuminated by the moonlight, splashing in the inky sea.  Her shouts were muffled as she slipped beneath the waves, but he followed his name, swimming awkwardly, dragged down by his clothes.  When he reached her, she clung onto him with such force that she pulled him down with her before he could catch a breath and water flooded into his lungs.

When they resurfaced, a mess of limbs and sea spray, he realised with relief, then confusion, and finally anger, that she was laughing.

‘Why are you laughing!’ he choked.

‘The look on your face!’

‘I thought you were drowning!’

‘You rescued me,’ she purred.  ‘Well, well.  You really must love me.’

She pulled him to her and kissed him with a hunger and urgency that made him sure that she understood his love.  The nerves that danced on her lips stretched out their arms and took the hands of his in theirs, drawing him inside her and he plunged down into the chasm, swallowed by her heart.  Every inch of his skin woke up from its deep sleep.  The nerves that lay dormant came alive to her touch as she wrapped her legs around his and he cast off the shackles of fear and gave himself over to her, swimming into her sea, filling his lungs, deeper and deeper until he could swim no more and they washed up on the shore.

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When Elisa woke in the morning and saw in his eyes that he loved her with all his heart, that he had opened up the doors that he had for so long kept locked and let her in, she knew that it was time for the fun to start. 

The truth about Elisa Equeze was that she had been born with a black heart.  She was the little girl that cut the heads off her dolls because they were prettier than she was, plucked the wings off of insects so they could no longer fly, smashed eggs out of nests and poured salt on slugs until they bubbled and burst, torturing the world in miniature around her.  As she grew up, wings became the malleable dreams of people, eggs their hope and salt the cruelty that she scattered on their lives.  This was the point she had been working towards.  Numb, he had been no use to her, but now that he could feel again, she would be free to pull off his wings and poke out his eyes. 

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Pascual woke up a second time to an empty bed, rocking back and forth, and he realised that they were already on the road and heading south again.  The sea breeze had gone and the stifling heat invaded his nostrils.  Out of the window he could see the plumes of dust gathering from the tracks of the wheels and the cacti waving at him as they followed the desert route.  He pushed his head outside and felt the grit and warm air battering his face, the sun scorching his skin.  He wanted to touch everything, to pour his surroundings over his body and feel with her all that existed in the world.  His mind wandered over the night before and his heart pushed against his chest, his insides churning over and his skin dampened with sweat.  These sensations were once harbingers of fear and pain but now signalled his love for Elisa and the feeling world around him that he now so desired to inhabit.

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As they rolled into the village, past terracotta houses faded by the sun, bumping awkwardly across the cracked earth, a cripple waved to him.  As his cane danced in the air, Pascual was reminded of his own disfigured body.  He felt the swollen growth on his back and could feel its burden weighing down upon him and as he watched the vultures circling up ahead he wished that they would devour it. 

When they finally stopped he jumped out and ran through the carriages and caravans in search of Elisa.  Another group had gone ahead to set up and the carnival was already in place, he checked the camp and the farm but she was nowhere to be found.  As he questioned the groups, he noticed a shift in the performers, they avoided eye contact and hung their heads low as if the southern heat had sucked out all their energy and wearing away at their souls. 

He found O’Rourke’s caravan empty and went to check Anastacia’s cage.  Peering through the slats in the trailer piecing together the flickering shards of light and image, he could make out the figure of the tamer hunched over the lioness.  He was about to enter when he saw the old man remove a large needle from a jar of clear liquid, tap it in the air and plunge it into her neck.  Her eyes stared straight into Pascual’s and, in that fleeting dilation before they drifted into another place, he understood that the resolution he had recognised in them before was the submissive contract with pain that he himself had signed long ago and the gates of his heart began to roll inwards. 

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The crowd was restless, gaunt and twitching, expressions austere.  Anxious mothers were checking their children - pale, sickly and feverish.  They were the shadows of people that had long ago burnt out; the life within extinguished.  Pascual was in the wings behind the curtains still waiting for Elisa when he heard O’Rourke announce his name ahead of schedule.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!  Tonight we have a special treat for you!  For just thirty of your finest gold coins, you are the privileged few that will witness such a magnificent feat of contortion and endurance before your very eyes.  For one night only!’ he chuckled, sweeping his arms dramatically, attempting to drum up the dismal crowd.

Pascual entered the ring to applause, the lights blinding and the tent airless.  He searched O’Rourke’s face and saw the cowardly and depraved man inside.

‘May I present to you, The Human Torch!’

He grabbed Pascual’s hand and held it in the air victoriously.  ‘Elisa has arranged a treat for you,’ he said from the corners of his mouth as he continued to beam at the audience.

‘Fire and serpent, the Devil’s tools!’

O’Rourke met Pascual’s questioning eyes with a defiant and violent stare that warned him off dissent.  Blowing fire and slithering her contorted frame through the crowd, Elisa appeared before him, her radiance subdued, features distorted and eyes dark and fierce.

‘Trust me,’ she said sardonically and kissed him on his cheek.

The echo of the girl he loved knelt before him and began to contort his limbs and he allowed her to do so with the blind trust of a boy infatuated.  When she tied him in a knot and doused him in kerosene, the naïve hope of cupid’s arrow spurred him on.  When she struck a match and set him alight, his innocent heart was already prepared to forgive her with the love of fools.

The flames consumed him and his body raged in agony, reunited with his old enemy.  The pain tore apart his flesh and the betrayal gnawed at his heart as the crowd cheered and clapped, mocking his despair, their rapture increasing tenfold with each struggle to break free.  As the fire licked and the smoke devoured the world around him, he saw the reflection of his torture in her eyes - fixed, cold and brimming with malice - and he knew the truth; he saw the merciless bow that had played on his now charred heartstrings.

Those cursed spheres, those callous amber pools, the whirlpool of evil that lurked within - it was all revealed to him in that moment.  The fair costume vanished and only the serpent’s acid tongue remained, Satan’s fork spearing his soul.  He recognised the satisfied sadism of the torturer mocking the tortured and he was in familiar territory.  The laughter flooded his ears and he dived into its murky waters, his twisted body sinking, drowning and strangled in a tangle of seaweed, fish snapping at his eyes, darkness washing over him until he broke free and felt the lips of a mermaid against his and air rushing into his lungs, the pressure lifting as he swam up towards the surface and found the light - that emerald lagoon that was his salvation.

Opening his eyes, he was met with the faces of the audience - still as if a photograph - staring, unmoving, at the boy that had risen from the flames, ashes at his feet, the phoenix, risen again.  O’Rourke lay on the floor, wide-eyed, pale and shaking at the sight of a death-defying Pascual in front of him.  Elisa, her hair now a silvery white, haggard and beastly, her face warped with hatred and her alabaster skin grey, looked at him with dead and defeated eyes.  Pascual stood before her, dripping wet, naked and with not a single scratch or burn on his body; then he was gone.

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The boy who had conquered death and its sister pain, ran until his legs could no longer carry him and buckled under his weight.  He fell and rose, he walked and crawled, as the moonlight mocked his broken heart and the air stifled his words and dried his stinging tears.  The sun rose and beat against his back until, his feet blistered and raw, he collapsed under the shade of a lemon tree, his arms outstretched at his sides, face skyward.

Hugo and Manuela had, of course, been waiting for him.  It had been mapped out all along but in order for him to survive, it had been necessary for him to live through it and save himself.  When he came round, he was propped up by pillows in an armchair and wrapped in blankets woven from white alpacas.  A place had been set for him since the day they parted ways, so sure were they of his return, and the table in front of him was laid with breakfast dishes of eggs, ham and fresh fruit.  While Manuela washed his feet and tended to his sores, Hugo fed him and comforted him with stories about the life that would now be his, the home in the house by the cliffs and the love and care they would give him until the end of their days.  Hugo had seen his future and it was delicious.

As they put him to bed, there was a knock at the front door.

‘That will be Hugo’s great, great aunt,’ Manuela said to Pascual.  ‘She asked to see you as soon as you were back.  She has knowledge and understanding beyond our powers.’

Manuela left and a moment later the door opened to reveal a girl of no more than seven years of age.

‘I had a falling out with a warlock,’ she said, returning Pascual’s confused expression, the voice of an old hag coming from her young lips.

Pascual stared back at her in silence.

 ‘You’re carrying the weight of the past on your shoulders and you’re not going to get far with that pain,’ she croaked.  ‘Cut if off.’

‘Cut what off?’

‘I’ve been around long enough to know a damaged soul when I see one,’ she wheezed.  ‘You defeated the evils that would have sold you to the Devil but if you want to be truly free you’re going to have to cut it off.’ 

‘What if…?’

‘Make sure you get rid of it proper though, if anyone comes near it there will be trouble,’ she cackled, ignoring his questions.  ‘Unless, of course, trouble’s what you want,’ she winked at him and disappeared.

Pascual thought over the words of the girl-woman as his eyes fell heavy once again and he drifted off into distant lands.  Somewhere deep inside him, his soul laughed.

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A few weeks later a delivery arrived for a Mister O’Rourke and Daughter, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a red silk ribbon.  Santos Poma Poma carefully waddled through the tents with the parcel and made his way to the lion trailer where his boss had taken to brooding over his finances.  Since the incident with Pascual, the news had spread that they were a satanic cult and business had suffered considerably.  No village or town would grant them passage on superstitious grounds and the whole carnival was catching dust with rats in a disused barn.

The sight of the juicy packet got the old man salivating and he snatched it from the dwarf and cut the string with his index fingernail, which was as sharp as a blade. He unwrapped the waxy butchers paper to reveal a tender cut of pork and sent immediately for Elisa to spark up the stove.  They had not had a proper meal for days and it was not long before the ravenous pair were tucking into the meat, jaws clicking and teeth gnashing. 

‘I’ve never tasted anything so delicious!’ said Elisa, dribbles of juice and marbled flesh working their way down her chin. 

O’Rourke grunted a response as he shovelled the fatty meat into his mouth.  He picked out some gristle from in between his front teeth and flicked it across the floor.  When they had finished, after they had burped and sighed, licked their lips and massaged their bloated bellies, they began to feel rather peculiar.  Elisa’s insides grumbled and her stomach contracted in spasms, she danced around the table, convulsing in violent, jerky movements.  She clutched at her throat and clasped her waist, eyes wild and skin pale, glistening with beads of sweat.  A confused mess of limbs, she began to stretch and contort, twist and bend, tying herself into knot after knot.  As her father yelled and weaved, looped and curled, the pair became so entwined that in the end they were reduced to nothing more than a human ball of string, bouncing around the caravan, skin stretched translucent to reveal their innards, a liver here, a heart there, an eyeball poked with a toe.

Anastacia, whose cage O’Rourke had forgotten to lock in his greed for the meat tainted with the afflictions of Pascual’s past, prowled around the intriguing globe, slapping it with her paw, rolling it with her jaw.  She circled and skulked, savouring the revenge and smacking her lips at the hearts that pulsed in sporadic beats, crushed and contorted, the eyes unblinking with fear and skin as thin as paper, cooking in the light that streamed through the window.  With her paw, she pushed the ball around, flicking and kicking it until it bounced around the room, floor to ceiling, gaining momentum.  When she was satisfied that the knots could never be untied and the pain would be enduring, the lioness turned her back on their miserable lives and stepped out into her freedom, head held high and followed the path north.