Unknowing

The carnival never leaves town. Every night harlequins dance across the shadowed streets and into nondescript houses in search of their next captive audience. Behind the walls of mirth are seven secret sentences which weave words of pure, unbridled hate into a creed of brutality. At the gate stand seven brothers, bound by blood to their grotesque work masquerading as the spreading of joy to the town’s children. Seven carnival tents stand arranged in a circle, forming a spellbound ring in which happiness is slain for sport. Every night, no different from the other; every scream, no different from the previous; every show of force, no different from the next.

Shrill sounds, what passes for music, fill the air about this circus of bereavement. Tones of pain reverberate around every street corner, gracing tonnes of concrete with their misery. Black, white, and red jesters jig a hellish jig to the beat of insane drums, to the piping of blasphemous flutes, to the breaking of bones. Water dies, unknowing; the ultimate practical joke. Corpses surround the orchestra. The orchestra surround corpses. Gods scream; their screams goad the orchestra to continue. Their daemonic symphony rehashes the world around them into a bleak facsimile of their barbaric image.

The ground collapses and buildings crumble into dust and are replaced with buildings yet grander. Towers, citadels, fraying at the ends, coerce dilapidated spires into the shape of a tarmac tunnel, under which men are given the robes of the uninitiated. The green nemesis moon stares down as the uninitiated are given trial after grim trial. A lone automobile stands in the middle of their circle, windowless in a sea of shattered glass. The seven brothers, brooding in the light of the moon, stand as overseers to this grim spectacle, reciting their seven secrets to their faceless initiates’ diabolical masquerade. The town, a graveyard, night after night. The sun rises in apprehension, doomed to repeat this unapologetic cycle; and the carnival never leaves town.