Journey to Psitharis

Chapter 13

            I spent three days in the confines of my rectangular cage. I danced around once an hour as promised, unless the boss came by to check my progress, which seemed to be quite often considering all of the other concerns he had in the park. I could always tell when he was out there. It was always within five minutes of a regular performance and he always wore the same cloak, hoping to fool me. I danced my heart out during those performances, remembering he had the power to get rid of me at a moment's notice, and not in a good way. Survival instinct kept me going. After all, the pain from the cattle prods was quite real. I wasn't pushing the issue where death was concerned.

When the park closed we were all released from our duties. The patrons disappeared the moment the park stopped operating. As one of the Exceptionals, I ranked higher than a normal performer and lived in special circumstances to ensure my continued success of a high-calibre artist. There were eleven of us in all: two fire eaters, the bearded lady, three contortionists, one daredevil, one opera singer, a tiny lady whose dance and look were both exotic, and another dancer like me who occupied a music box at the other end of the park. We ate dinner together, we lived in a special wing of the dorms together; we even shared five bathrooms in our special wing. The only thing we did not do was share rooms. Calperal suffered difficulty in the past with particularly jealous performers losing roommates to vicious and unexplained accidents, so he separated each of the Exceptionals into their own rooms, locking them in at night so they couldn't escape or harm the others.

This was probably a very good thing for me, because the other ballet dancer Anastasia hated me from the beginning. She would glare at me from across the table, twirling her butter knife in her hand as if she could turn the dull blade into a lethal weapon if given the opportunity. She was blonde like my sister or the Langston sisters, but she had the steeliest pair of grey eyes I had ever seen. And those eyes glaring at your from across the dinner table could scare the hell out of anyone, even in one so beautiful as Anastasia.

One of the fire breathers was very nice to me. He helped me find my way to the correct dorms on my first night as a performer. He showed me the way to the former dancer's old room when Calperal had gone mysteriously absent. Of course he did not step inside, as the rules were very plain. None of the other Exceptionals were to grace the doorway of another exceptional, especially males in the female rooms. The punishment for that was, as he informed me, "quite final."

His name was Luke. We were like old friends from the jump, settling into a nice conversation at dinner that first night. He was the one who filled me in on the hierarchy that Dream Land had become. He began his tale with a brief history of his home and childhood, and the coup that began almost from the time I had been taken away from my paradise. A few months after I stopped coming to Psitharis an army marched onto the shores of my beloved world and took over without much of a fight, as there had never been need for an army in my dream world. They overran the amusement park in the span of a day, enslaved the stronger men for soldier training or to be future workers in the new regime, guarded over the women and children in the huts they were provided and watched them like hawks. The rest of the troops proceeded to the Cerulean Palace and, though nothing was said about the fates of the occupants, most people surmised the Counsel had met a bloody end. Once the palace was secure, a great ship arrived on the shore. A luxurious, silk-lined litter containing the self-proclaimed queen and her daughter was carried by twenty men on their shoulders across the sands, through the park and up the mountain to the palace. And thus the tyranny was born.

As time moves much quicker in the world of Psitharis, each year in my world was doubled in the land I used to love so dearly. So while eight years had passed for me, sixteen years had passed in Psitharis. Pollution began to run rampant, coming from the palace and from the camps that housed all of the soldiers, so everything in the ocean died as a result. Visitors had been banned from the shoreline for fear that people would try their escape over the waters or, worse yet, prefer drowning to their new existences. The queen forbade the subjects to be happy, so the park became just another prison, another way for her to exert her inexplicable power over them. The energy that ran the park was diverted to the castle, and all the rides and attractions were eventually set up on a grid that continued operation through the blood, sweat and tears of the underground slaves. The clones were created next; one after another the hideous monsters were produced in replication machines to enforce the laws the soldiers weren't able to enforce. Too lacking in intelligence to do anything meaningful, they made perfect enforcers, dealing out brute force whether necessary or not.