“Embrace it,” Webster continued. “This is your death.”
“No,” I cried. “It is not my death, and these are not my gods.”
I removed from my pocket the bundled-up form of my stole and displayed it to him.
“Check your pockets, Mr. Webster. I think you’ll find you’re missing something.”
And as realization dawned, Webster was surrounded by what appeared to be five or six columns of swirling grains. I saw him try to break through, but the intensity of their movement increased, blinding him and forcing him back. And then, of a sudden, they disappeared and all was still. Webster’s thin form was left standing alone in the dying light from the burning oil. All movement had ceased on the beach. He raised his head uncertainly to me and reached out a hand. Instinctively, I stretched out my own hand to him in return. Whatever he had tried to do to me, I could not leave him in peril.
Our fingers were almost touching when a shape appeared close by Webster’s feet. I saw an oval of sand rise up with two holes about midway down its form, like the sunken sockets of eyes. The bridge of a ruined nose stretched between them, framed on either side by a pair of jagged cheekbones. And then, around Webster’s feet, a maw opened: I saw lips, and a brief glimpse of what might have been some kind of tongue, all carved from black sand. Webster looked down and started to scream, but the thing began to suck him down. He struck at the shape, his fingers clawing as he attempted to arrest his descent, but soon he was submerged to his chest, then his neck. His mouth opened wide once more, but any further sound he made was silenced by the grains that stilled his tongue as his head disappeared beneath the sand.
And then the face collapsed, leaving only a shallow depression where the hole had swallowed the life of a man.
There is no salvation without sacrifice. God Himself sent His only Son to prove the truth of that lesson, but there are others who have learned it in their own way. An archaeological dig at the site of the stone altar revealed a mass of bones, dating from before the time of Christ to the foundation of the village, an appeasement to whatever strange gods these people worshipped.
The chapel at Black Sands once more lies empty, and the village has a new leader. A German bomb landed on the beach in 1941, but it failed to explode. Instead, it sank into the sands, and attempts to recover it proved fruitless. If a bomb could sink into those sands, the argument went, then why not a person? So barbed wire has since been erected around the beach, and warning signs have been posted advising people to stay away.
Webster was wrong: the old gods will not so easily be forgotten. Sometimes the wind blows along this desolate stretch of coastline and causes shapes to rise up from the beach, phantasms of sand that hold their form for just an instant too long before falling in small heaps to the ground. It may take years, even decades, to complete the process, but they will succeed.
For slowly, and surely, they are obscuring the warning signs.
Some Children Wander by Mistake
The circus seldom came to the towns in the north. They were too scattered, their populations too poor to justify the expense of transporting animals, sideshows, and people down neglected roads in order to play to sparsely filled seats for a week. The bright colors of the circus vehicles looked out of place when reflected in the rain-filled potholes of such places, and the big top itself seemed to lose some of its power and vibrancy when set against gray storm clouds and relentless drizzle.
Occasionally, some forgotten television star would pass through for a week of pantomime, or a one-hit wonder from the seventies might attempt to rustle up a weekend crowd in one of the grim, boxlike clubs that squatted in the larger suburbs, but the circus was a rare visitor. William could not recall a circus ever coming to his town, not in the whole ten years of his life, although his parents sometimes spoke of one that had played early in the year of his birth. In fact, his mother said that she had felt William kick in her womb as soon as the lights went down and the first of the clowns appeared, as though he were somehow aware of the events taking place outside his red world. Since then, no great tent had occupied the big field out by the forest. No lions had passed through here, and no elephants had trumpeted. There had been no trapeze artists, no ringmasters.
No clowns.
William had few friends. There was something about him that alienated his peers: an eagerness to please, perhaps, that was the flip side of something darker and more troubling. He spent much of his spare time alone, while school was a tightrope walk between a desire to be noticed and a profound wish to avoid the bullying that came with such attention. Small and weak, William was no match for his tormentors, and had developed strategies to keep them at bay. Mostly, he tried to make them laugh.
Mostly, he failed.
There were few bright spots to life in that place, so it was with surprise and delight that William watched the first of the posters appear in shop windows and upon lampposts, adding a splash of color to the dull streets. They were orange and yellow and green and blue, and at the center of each poster was the figure of a ringmaster, dressed in red with a great top hat upon his head and mustaches that curled up at the ends like snail shells. Surrounding him were animals-lions and tigers and bears, oh my-and stilt walkers, and women in spangled costumes soaring gracefully through the air. Clowns occupied the corners, with big round noses and painted-on smiles. Sideshows and rides were promised, and feats never before witnessed in a big top. “From Europe,” announced the posters, “For One Night Only: Circus Caliban!” The performance would take place on, of all dates, December 9, the date of William’s tenth birthday.
It took William only minutes to track down the circus folk responsible for distributing the posters. He found them on a side street, using a stepladder to put up the advertisements for their great show. A cold north wind threatened to make off with a dwarf in a yellow suit who teetered at the top of the ladder as he tried to staple a pair of posters together around a lamppost, while a strongman in a vinyl cape and a thin man in a red coat held the ladder steady. William sat on his bicycle, watching them silently, until the man in the red coat turned to look at him and William saw those great curly mustaches above a pair of bright pink lips.
The ringmaster smiled.
“You like the circus?” he said. His accent was funny. Like became lak, and circus became sow-coos. His voice was very deep.
William nodded, awestruck.
“You don’t speak?” said the ringmaster.
William found his voice.
“I like the circus. At least, I think I do. I’ve never been.”
The ringmaster staggered back in mock surprise, releasing his hold upon the ladder. The dwarf at the top stumbled a little, and only the actions of the bald strongman prevented the ladder from coming down, dwarf and all.
“You have never been to the circus?” said the ringmaster. “Well, you must come. You simply must come.”
And from the pocket of his bright red coat he produced a trio of tickets and handed them to William.
“For you,” he said. “For you, and your mother, and your father. One night only. Circus Caliban.”
William took the tickets and held them tightly in his fist, unsure of the safest place in which to put them.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said the ringmaster.
“Will there be clowns?” asked William. “There are clowns on the posters, but I just wanted to be sure.”
The strongman stared at him silently, and the dwarf on the ladder grinned.
“There are always clowns,” said the ringmaster, and William thought that his breath smelled very sweet, like bull’s-eyes and gumdrops and jelly babies all mixed together. “It would not be a circus without clowns.”