Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor. She’s been anthologised in many Year's Best series by editors such as Ellen Datlow and Paula Guran. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. A collection of some of her work, "All the Fabulous Beasts" (from Undertow Publications ) was a Locus Award Finalist and won both a Shirley Jackson and a British Fantasy Award. “Ormshadow” (from Tor ) is her first novella.
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Henry Ellard, aged eighteen, can’t believe that he’s just witnessed three people die, only hours ago.
One of them was Rebecca Saunders. The Firebrand. How he loved to watch her as flames danced across her outstretched hands.
Henry strikes the pink head of a match against the side of the matchbox. There’s the flare and the familiar smell as sulfur and phosphorus combine. He passes a finger through the flame.
Bearable, he thinks.
Henry tries to hold his finger in the flame but fails. He throws the match into the ashtray and watches it burn to a shrivelled stick, his scorched finger in his mouth.
Three deaths. What combination of murder, suicide, and accident has he seen?
The first time he saw Rebecca was as he wandered through the crowd. She stood, her sequinned costume winking in the sunlight, handing out flyers. A remarkable woman, able to withstand flames and who looked right at him and smiled as though he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. She reached out and touched the livid purple birthmark that covers the left side of his face with a fingertip.
Equally remarkable is that she’s died in a pyre that’s consumed both her and Leo Saunders. Henry could hear the man roaring from the heart of the inferno. The thing Henry doesn’t understand is that Rebecca didn’t scream. Not even once.
“Henry?”
He looks up to see a waitress standing over him. Her gaze flicks from his eyes to his birthmark. “I’m Katherine. From your history class.”
“Oh, hi.” He’s chosen this café to avoid such encounters.
“I work here,” she adds, as if an explanation is required.
Henry tips his face away from her to hide the unsightly port wine stain. The gesture makes him look reticent at best, dismissive at worst, but it’s instinctive.
“What are you having?”
“Black coffee, please.”
Katherine hesitates, as though she has more to say. He wants her to leave him alone. It’s too complex, trying to work out whether her friendliness is genuine, mockery, or from pity when his mind is so full of the recently deceased Rebecca, Leo, and Christos Saunders. He lights another match and stares at the flame until Katherine walks away.
###
Henry Ellard, at sixty-four, feels indignant that he’s had to start afresh. His new house has no claim to his history. It’s not where he embarked on or ended family life. It’s not where he and Katherine raised their child or where Henry had a heart attack, pain crushing him to the floor.
The house does have charm though. It’s at the end of a lane, single storied, with a veranda that wraps around the whole building. There’s a galley kitchen and two bedrooms, although the spare one’s never used. The lounge window overlooks the woods. The trees are company. The room’s unfit for entertaining as he’s made it his sanctuary. One wall’s covered with shelves laden with box files. The desk that was built for two dominates the room. Henry used to sit opposite Katherine, then his wife, as they marked student papers late into the night.
A single poster, an original, acts as the room’s sole decoration.
Something new and unique comes to Paradise. The Firebrand! The world’s only burning girl!
Rebecca Saunders has been rendered half woman, half phoenix in the illustration. Her costume’s pinched at the waist and her sloping tail is red and gold. She smiles, despite being on fire.
Henry always keeps his own personal copy of his book to hand. The Firebrand: Death in Paradise by Henry Ellard. His ex-wife once threw it at him during a fight.
“Your responsibility’s to us, not the past,” Katherine had shouted.
She was across the room upending files of photos, programs, and transcribed interviews. He lunged after her, trying to protect his archive of lost lives.
Henry’s book is stuffed with original snapshots, letters, and his own handwritten notes. He flicks through until he finds his favorite photo, pressed like a leaf between the pages. A cropped version’s reprinted within the book, but the original is of the whole Saunders’ inner circle, dressed for dinner.
This group portrait was taken against the backdrop of Paradise, a mile long plot of land that was part fun fair, part circus, part county show. There’s Rebecca, Christos, and their dog sitting on a picnic bench. The Russian trapeze artists, Nikolai and Lara, are standing beside them. Nikolai’s arm is around Lara’s neck, pulling her close. His lips are planted on her cheek and Henry can never decide if she looks annoyed or amused. Whether they were sister and brother, or lovers, remains a mystery. The Giant, real name Jacob Stein, has dark eyes in a long face. Nancy Fotheringale, the Wax Lady, leans on his arm. There’s Rollo the clown, face unpainted and hair slick with pomade. And Leo Saunders, of course, at the center of everything.
Henry looks at the photo, back across forty-six years and wonders if his memories have been colored by research. These people are vivid in his mind, even though he never knew them, just orbited them during his eighteenth summer, every spare penny and evening spent in Paradise. He wasn’t a freak when he walked among them. Disfigurements were a mark of pride among this wondrous clan, like the Wax Lady’s melted face or the long, cadaverous features of Jacob the Giant. If anyone did look at Henry, he fancied they might mistake him for one of these fabulous people. So fabulous that someone like Rebecca Saunders made the thing he was so ashamed of feel like an artful embellishment.
###
Henry watches the interviews he recorded when he was writing his book. Although the light falls and fades, he doesn’t turn on the lamps, just lets the glow from the screen wash the room. He can hear his twenty-nine year old self talking to Rollo, the man in the frame.
This film version of Rollo has reached that perplexing stage called middle age, yet at forty-three he shows no sign of a sedentary paunch. He lounges on the chair like it’s a throne.
“So, why clowning?” Henry asks.
He wasn’t interested in Rollo, not really. Henry just wanted to butter him up and loosen his tongue. The man was his closest link to the Saunders.
“Why not?” Rollo’s voice is neutral. Henry can see the danger in that neutrality that he wasn’t socially adept enough to pick up on back then.
“It’s not the most glamorous of acts.”
“No? Not dignified enough for someone of your intellect? A child’s diversion?” Rollo’s mouth contorts into a sneer. “Clowning is the most complex of entertainments. We have the greatest breadth of skills of any circus performer.”
Henry can see how he had been caught out, having to rack his brains to conjure up the man in full regalia, under the spotlight’s glare.
“I remember that you came into the big top standing on a zebra’s back.”
“Yes.”
“And you were locked in with the lions.”
The audience had gasped, fearful when they thought he was in danger. Then Rollo turned from bumbler to lion tamer, cracking the whip with aplomb.
“That’s right. I was an acrobat, actor, I did elephant and lion work, I was a bareback rider and a high wire walker, among other things. But clowning is more than that. It’s Greek, don’t you think?”
“Pardon?”
“Clowning. It’s comedy. It’s tragedy. It fulfils a basic human need. Did you know that priests and clowns served the same purpose in ancient Egypt?”
“No, I didn’t.” Henry’s voice is small. The clown’s no fool. Henry musters up all he knows about clown taxonomy to try and redeem himself. “You led the troupe as an auguste, not a blanc?”
Blanc, the white faced, dignified straight man of the act.
“Auguste is more interesting.” An auguste clown’s face was a riot of color that exaggerated the features. Rollo wore a matching shrunken suit that exaggerated his size. “It’s a better character. A troublemaker.”
“How did you know the Saunders?” Henry was keen to steer Rollo towards the subject.
“They took me in. His mother, Lil, did gun tricks. Leo and I grew up together. I was hanging around the Minolta State Circus after I ran away from an orphanage.”
“You ran away to join the circus.”
Listening now, Henry’s face burns at his own glib attempt to lighten the mood.
“To join the circus,” Rollo repeats, his face set hard enough to smash Henry to pieces with a look.
“You knew them well then. You were almost family.”
“They were my family,” Rollo corrects Henry, “the only family I've ever had. Lil taught us guns. Leo and I were both crack shots. Leo was sixteen when she died. I was fourteen. Christos, Leo’s brother, was only five.”
“Where was their father?”
“Tuberculosis. Giorgio died when Christos was a baby.”
“What happened after Lilia Saunders died?”
“It was hard. As much as people tried to look out for us there’s no room for dead weight on the road. We stuck together. My real talent was for clowning. Leo did gun tricks but he wanted to build an empire, even then. He saved every penny and when he was twenty-five he mortgaged a patch of land outside the city. He named it Paradise. He asked me to go in with him at the start but I said no. Can you believe that? I told him it was too big a risk.” Rollo looks out of the window. “He was going to give me a second chance at it. He was going to make me a partner before he died. The lawyer told me afterwards. All the paperwork had been drawn up. That’s life, I suppose. You don’t get to roll the dice twice.”
When Rollo looks back at him, envy and awe shines from the man’s face. “I should’ve known if anyone could pull it off, it was Leo. He knew how to sell his vision. All those factory workers and waiters. All the soldiers and sailors on leave. If you wanted a tattoo or your palm read, or to look at dirty pictures on a peep show machine, it was all there. A Ferris wheel, side shows, and a big top.”
“And you?”
“Youngest clown ever to lead a troupe. More than that, I was Leo’s right hand.”
“What about Christos?”
“Leo had been dragging him around for years. Packed him off to college in the end.”
“They didn’t get on?”
“Growing pains, that was all. No, the real trouble started when Chris came back.”
###
Leo Saunders sees the girl first. She strolls without the urgency of someone in search of work, but it’s too early in the day for punters to visit Paradise.
She stops to watch Rollo, stripped to vest and trousers, as he limbers up. The man’s all muscle and steam. Sun glints off his shaven head. Even when he’s in his clown costume he can look threatening when he chooses to. Leo’s spent a lifetime pulling him out of scrapes and stopping him from brawling, a relationship that began when he caught Rollo stealing from his mother’s caravan. Lilia was about to give him a whipping but Leo had pleaded for the urchin and she’d said, “All right, but you’re responsible for him.”
Rollo rolls towards the girl like a bowling ball that’ll knock her down. He comes to a stop inches away from her face, looking down at her with a grin. Leo’s seen him do this before to make a pretty girl shriek.
She doesn’t seem startled, just gives Rollo a tight, polite smile as she moves away. That amuses Leo. Rollo’s not used to women walking away from him.
She could be anywhere between eighteen and twenty-five. Her dress is cheap, cherry patterned nylon, the type that can be hand washed and left to dry overnight. Ugly, sensible shoes and a cardboard suitcase.
Nothing can disguise her loveliness.
“Jack,” Leo says to his foreman, “give me a minute.”
Leo, at thirty-three, has the bearing of an older man. He’s used to being obeyed.
“Sure, boss.”
Leo starts to walk over to her. He’s glad he’s freshly shaved and smells of cologne. That his suit’s been pressed.
The girl stops Nancy Fotheringale, The Wax Lady. She’s a permanent fixture in Paradise, with her own tent. Stiff and English, she drinks her tea with her little finger stuck out, now making her living by being an exhibit because she lost her post as a governess when her condition became apparent. The girl bows her head towards the older woman where most people lean away because Nancy’s face drips with pendulous tumours. She looks like she’s melting. The girl speaks and Leo’s surprised when Nancy laughs, a rare and beautiful sound.
Nancy points towards him as he approaches.
“Hello, I’m Leo Saunders.”
“Leo,” the girl repeats.
“Short for Leonides Saunderis.” He surprises himself. He never begins a conversation with an admission of his immigrant roots.
“Leonides,” her voices softens, as if more impressed with honesty than reinvention. “It’s a regal name.”
It’s as if she’s seen his heart, his fears, his insecurities and in telling him that Leonides sounds regal, has given him back his real name.
“You’re Christos’ brother, aren’t you?”
He grins. It’s not often that he’s referred to as Christos’ brother.
“And who are you?”
“I’m Rebecca. His wife.”
*****
Excerpt from "The Firebrand", a short story from Nightmare Carnival, Ed. Ellen Datlow, Dark Horse (2014)
© Priya Sharma 2014