Freak Show | 𝐉𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍 𝐁𝐘𝐄𝐑𝐒

PROLOGUE

[ 00 - PROLOGUE ]

― a ghost at midnight ―

THERE WERE BODIES BENEATH HER.

Some part of her knew this - or guessed it, rather - and yet, she still set her feet on the bloodied soil every midnight. Every midnight, as if a chant had settled in the very bone of her body, she walked.

Left foot, her marrow pounded. Right foot.

Don't step on that root.

Crawl under the fence.

And the joints of her bone would yelp: Hide!

She followed the chanting with a duteous rhythm, the soles of her shoes never failing to step in the path that had been laid out for her. The path that she would know so well, if only her consciousness had been her own.

Of course, if she was the one who held the reins of her own mind, she would not have ever trailed so close to those bodies. She knew they were there. She could feel them pricking at her brain. They groaned and they begged, but every time she tried to see them, there was nothing. Their growls pleaded with her to help them(look at what we have done for that place, and look at where they have put us! LET US OUT!), but there was only a wall of dirt.

She couldn't have helped them even if she wanted. The sorcerer in her brain chanted on, and so she was made to walk atop them. She would have to do her best to ignore the howling that the bodies effused.

Her eyes soon took in the white structure that loomed before her. It appeared before her every night, always at a quarter past twelve, always reminiscent of the bodies beneath her. The absence of lucidity surrounded her with a stark landscape of nothing. Even the sky was vacant where stars normally protruded through the blackness.

She neared the white brick, eventually finding her feet at a halt, mere inches away from its doorstep. A buzzer sounded, and she stepped inside the newly opened entrance.

This, too, was dead. In her many years of living, she had never once known it to be anything other than perfectly perished. Barren of color, the paint had never once been left to peel, the floors always spotless. Even when men clothed in white had dragged those pale bodies across the linoleum and to the ground outside, the ground only remained speckled red for mere moments. Buckets of bleach and water always soaked the floors some scant moments later.

Her enchanted march continued through the hallways. She turned left and then right, and then through the same door she always walked through. If her nightly routine continued much longer, there might have been indentations where her feet always landed.

Even so, it would not last. The faculty at the laboratory would fill in the dents before dawn rose the next morning, because there always must be perfection, and a perished perfection was better than none. A perfection that had been patched up, whose blemishes had been scraped up and painted over - and buried - it was better than none.

"Seven."

There was that voice in that room. That voice that always reverberated out of always chapped lips, always at 12:25.

There should be a second voice, she thought. A second person talking, right about...

"Dr. Brenner."

Right about now.

This second voice reached her ears at a higher pitch, but nonetheless, she knew it just as well as the first. It was accompanied by cold, gloved fingers landing on her wrist, leading her to a steel-plated chair that was somehow even colder.

Here was that first voice in her ear again, repeating that same greeting: "Seven."

Her head turned to meet the owner of the voice, and once more she was met with a deadness. There were wrinkles etched in the corners of his features, and that repetitive white tone was rooted on his scalp, this time appearing as strands of hair rather than walls and floors and bodies.

"Seven," this keeper of white uttered. "You know what you must tell us?"

She inhaled. Her expanded chest held that breath there, waiting a few seconds before letting it out. The wind rushed from her mouth and into the room, and words of damnation echoed alongside it.