The Grand Tour: A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection Read online

  The Grand Tour

  A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection

  E. Catherine Tobler

  Copyright © 2020 by E. Catherine Tobler

  Introduction © 2020 by A.C. Wise

  Interior artwork © 2020 by Tressina Bowling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  “Vanishing Act” © 2005, SciFiction; “Artificial Nocturne” © 2013, Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “We, As One, Trailing Embers” © 2014, Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Liminal” © 2010, Fantasy Magazine; “Blow the Moon Out” © 2015, Giganotosaurus; “Ebb Stung by the Flow” © 2016, Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Lady Marmalade” © 2012, Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Every Season” © 2020, original to this collection; “Inland Territory, Stray Italian Greyhound” © April, 2014, Writings at the End of the World (Apokrupha)

  ISBN (TPB) 978-1-937009-81-6

  Cover art © Cyril Rolando

  Jacket design by Mikio Murakami

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC, PO Box 24323, Lexington, KY 40524

  First Edition: June, 2020

  Visit us at www.apexbookcompany.com.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Destinations

  Vanishing Act

  Artificial Nocturne

  We, As One, Trailing Embers

  Liminal

  Blow the Moon Out

  Ebb Stung by the Flow

  Lady Marmalade

  Every Season

  Inland Territory, Stray Italian Greyhound

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To anyone who ever wanted to run away.

  Introduction

  by A.C. Wise

  Have you ever wanted to run away and join the circus?

  Are you sure?

  The sound of the train chugging into town, cars packed with wonder and mystery and excitement, is also the sound of danger. That first whisper of calliope music is a promise, and also a lie. All circuses are built on illusion—a magical city springing up overnight, unfolded from train cars, poured into tents that bloom from the ground like strange flowers, and populated by familiar strangers beckoning you with reassuring smiles. But nothing in the circus is what it seems. A former nun may really be one of the fates, as old as time itself, endlessly weaving together the lives of those around her while her sisters measure and cut. A simple jar of marmalade may actually contain an entire season, a perfectly preserved memory, or the cure for a broken heart.

  Do you still want to run away and join the circus? Are you sure? Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade is not for the faint of heart, but it rewards those who are brave enough to peer into its shadows and forsake safety for the unknown. You, yes you there, you look like one of the brave ones. Step right up, and have a look inside.

  In Jackson’s Unreal Circus, E. Catherine Tobler has created a world where time is slippery, where readers may touch down in 1936 in New Orleans, only to be whisked away to Philadelphia in the 1950s, and ultimately land in the Rocky Mountains in 2001. Yet, the circus is also timeless. It is everywhere and everywhen. It is a fantastical place, and it is a deeply human one, full of universal stories threaded with longing, lost love, joy, melancholy, and the strange and unwanted searching for themselves and finding a new home.

  It is a world that is both dark and beautiful, simultaneously strange and familiar. If, like me, you grew up on Ray Bradbury, you will find echoes of his classics here, like Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes. And you will also find something that is wholly its own, one hundred percent pure Tobler. Picking up this collection, and delving into its stories, is like setting off on a journey somewhere very far away, and at the same time, it feels like coming home.

  In these pages, you will encounter a train, variable in size, containing hidden depths and hidden dimensions. You will find worlds in glass jars of all shapes and colors. Strange dogs. Dangerous men. Conjoined twins with two minds wrapped together in a single skin. You will wander through tales of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and find yourself at the intersection of all three, in a place that defies categorization. These are the delights Jackson’s Unreal Circus has in store for you. These, and many more.

  The book in your hands is a ticket. To redeem it, all you have to do is turn the page. Be warned, once you do, you will find that Jackson’s Unreal Circus is a two-sided coin where sensuality is paired with violence and pain, beauty with sorrow, the calm surface with the unseen dangers that lurks beneath. You will also enter a world that will take your breath away, prose like a siren-song that will lure you deeper within the maze of train tracks and fairways and tents until you are utterly lost and cannot emerge. Until you find you have no desire to be anywhere but where you are.

  Are you ready to run away and join the circus? Of course you are. Because you were always going to say yes to this, danger and all. The moment you heard the train chugging its way toward you, the voice of the barker drifting on the breeze, you had already agreed. The book in your hands is an invitation, one you’ve been waiting for your entire life. It’s okay to be a little scared, and to be excited too. Jackson’s Unreal Circus has room for both, it contains multitudes, including wonders crafted just for you.

  That’s the magic of stories and the circus both, they mean something different to everyone. Every performance is a little different, depending on what the audience brings and how they play their part in the show. You didn’t think you were here just to observe, did you? That’s not how this circus works. You have to prepared to give a little part of yourself away, but don’t worry, you will get so much in return.

  So, step right up, come on in. It’s time to run away with the circus of your dreams and let it run away with you. Prepare to be amazed.

  Destinations

  Vanishing Act

  1947, Roswell, New Mexico

  Artificial Nocturne

  1936, New Orleans, Louisiana

  We, as One, Trailing Embers

  1911, Coney Island, New York

  Liminal

  1880, silver rush Colorado

  Blow the Moon Out

  1957, Philadelphia

  Ebb Stung By the Flow

  1940, the Trans-Siberian Railway

  Lady Marmalade

  1946, your hometown

  Every Season

  2001, the foothills of the Rocky Mountains

  Inland Territory, Stray Italian Greyhound

  The end of the world

  Vanishing Act

  1947, Roswell, New Mexico

  Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade picked her up a day outside Denver. Jackson wouldn’t stop for a cow on the tracks, but he stopped for this little thing, with her pale hair and paler eyes. Brought the entire train to a stop to scoop her from the tracks with his long arms.

  She huddled against his chest, her small body nearly folded in on itself, and we all watched, in confusion and fascination both. The long hem of her dirty shift caught the cow catcher and the remains of said beast.

  She was none of my concern, but Jackson placed her in my car and made her just that. He lay her down in the corner, in my favorite chair, my only chair. She looked all the more pale against the blue and gold stripes. Their brilliance had long since faded, but looked new against her washed out skin. Her bare fe
et were crusted with dirt and muck and I didn’t look much beyond that.

  I was working with the quarters when she began to wail, rolling them across my fingers before trying to turn them into nickels. The steam whistle crowed as we crossed the state line, Colorado into New Mexico, and she came alive as though submerged in hot water.

  The quarters tumbled off my fingers, onto the floor where they lay as she shrieked, curled her hands over her ears, and moaned. Her face was creased with pain; for a moment, she looked like she’d been raked with hot metal, so did these creases mark her pale skin.

  After listening to her, I wanted to do the same; curl into a ball and moan. Instead, I went to her. Crouched before the chair and tried to get her to lower her hands.

  First thing I noticed was that her hands didn’t feel like hands. She was soft, as though her bones hadn’t yet firmed up. A baby in the guise of a ten year old. Second thing I noticed was the way she went quiet when I touched her.

  I thought she would twist away, scream, holler, anything but what she did, which was melt into me, against my chest. Her soft hand curled its way into my shirtfront, her thumb working over the nearest dirty button.

  “Stop that.”

  Tried to push her out of my arms, I did, but she wouldn’t go. She took to purring like a cat, like the big lions Jackson kept caged in the car behind mine. To keep me in line, he said, but I could make them vanish with a thought. Still, I didn’t like the idea of where they might end up, so I left them alone, and they did the same for me.

  The girl’s purring took up residence inside my head, worked some kind of magic and made me tumble toward the mattress Opal had snickered at, but had still come to. And where did that memory come from, I wondered as I drowned inside that rumbling sound. I was lost inside it as though it was a maze. Couldn’t find my way out, so I just gave in and eventually it bled into a familiar dark quiet I recognized as sleep.

  Woke to the train slowing again and I wondered if Jackson was stopping for another sprite on the tracks. Stars painted the sky overhead and the air smelled like manure. We’d reached our destination then.

  I untangled myself from the boneless girl. She lay as though dead and I moved away as quick as I could. Before she could latch on again. Before she thought to hold me and purr and make me a lost thing.

  The air outside was cool, smelled like snow would be on the ground come morning. I pulled my coat around me, rubbed my hands together, and approached the first of the weird sisters as they emerged from their own car. I offered up one hand; Gemma took it, but Sombra’s hand was just as quickly there. It seemed one hand around mine, though I knew there to be two.

  The sisters were two halves of the same thing, one light and one dark. Where one was concave, the other was convex. Where one was sharp rocks, the other was smooth water. Sombra’s hair was the night sky while Gemma’s was the stars. And sometimes, they were exactly backwards from that.

  Why, I wondered, couldn’t Jackson have placed the little girl in with them? They were women, they’d had children, countless children, or so they said. I’d had plenty of women, but no children. Never would. Didn’t need or want them. Would be all too easy to wish them gone and have them vanish.

  Sombra and Gemma moved like fog across the ground. Their feet never touched the ground as they drifted away. They wouldn’t help with the unloading; they never did and no one ever expected they would. They floated into the night and dissolved into fireflies against the blackness as they swept and blessed the campsite.

  Five long and pale fingers wrapped around my half-warmed hand and I started at the touch. Looked down and found the little girl clutching me, her fingers warmed, water barely contained by skin. She looked up at me and her mouth curled in a crescent moon smile.

  I could see now that her pale hair was drawn into dreadlocks. Messy on the ends like they hadn’t been tended in a few years. Her mouth was as pale as her skin; her smile slipped away, but her grip tightened and she looked around, as if to ask where and why we were.

  “Performin’ here,” I said and tried to loose my hand from hers, but she was having none of it. I walked and she fell into easy step beside me, though her little legs shouldn’t have been able to keep up.

  Silas and Lawrence were already unloading the tents. I finally shook the girl’s hand off of mine, swung up into the car, and helped Hunter roll another of the striped cylinders to the door. We maneuvered it around, gave it a swift kick down, and the boys carried it off.

  There were twenty-four tents in all. The girl watched me the whole time, perched like an owl on the fence across from the door. Her eyes were almost blue, but as the last tent came down I decided the color was only from the nearest light. She would move away and her eyes would change, no doubt.

  “Got a name?” I asked her as I came out of the car and headed back toward mine. She watched me as I took a rumpled cigarette from my coat and placed flame against its tip. Drew deep and exhaled once before she answered.

  “You?”

  “Ladies first,” I insisted. She was tiny and odd, but a lady nonetheless. Her colorless eyes skimmed over me, then met mine again.

  “Rabi,” she said, and I choked on the smoke that rolled down my throat.

  She snatched the cigarette from my hand, tossed it to the ground, and mashed it under her pale toes. I thought I might cough up my stomach, but she brushed her fingers down my arm and I calmed. Instantly, like my mother touching me after a nightmare. I looked at her through the fall of my hair.

  “At’s my name.” My voice was hoarse. I turned and thumped the side of my car. Painted in silver by Gemma, trimmed in black by Sombra, was my name and my claim to fame. Rabi, Vanquisher and Vanisher Extraordinaire.

  The little girl’s mouth twisted and she looked around, searching for another name. Any would do, any name, any word. She looked like a snowflake standing there, eyes flitting from thing to thing, the dirty hem of her shift lifting in the cold breeze. Her skin should have been puckered from the cold, her toes burned from the cigarette, but she showed no discomfort.

  Finally, she shook her head.

  I shrugged. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t mine to name. I’d be damned if I was going to do it.

  Work continued through the night. The little girl didn’t seem to tire; she helped where she thought she could, with small things, and took to following the weird sisters when they returned. She was the reverse of a shadow, but the very shadow Sombra should have had right then; as pale as she was dark. And when it was Gemma’s turn to darken, the child could flutter in her wake.

  I hauled a rope, helped pull a tent upright. The red and white striped fabric soared against the pre-dawn sky, snapped as the ropes pulled it taut. That cloth shuddered as inner supports were placed thus and so, ribs and organs and muscles to give the beast a chance of standing.

  The marmalade stand was up before the sun, which wasn’t saying much as snow had begun to fall. Too many clouds for there to be sun. I crossed the stubble grass, drawn by the scent of Beth’s fresh rolls and marmalade. I bought a small jar of the orange and a bundle of rolls, kissed her cheek, and let her squeeze my backside before I walked back to my car.

  Found the little girl there, wrapped in the blue blanket with its purple stars. She looked like a ghost and I told her as much.

  “Not a ghost,” she said, and I saw that she had one of my books. I didn’t have many. It was the atlas she had spread in her lap, and she pointed to a small town. “We are here.”

  I nodded as I punched a hole in the bag of rolls. Drew one out, cracked open the jar of marmalade. I tore the roll open next and two fingers sufficed as knife to spread the marmalade. The girl’s attention was drawn away from the book; she watched me spread the marmalade, lift, and eat the roll. Marmalade clung to my lips; I licked them clean and she mimicked the motion.

  “Gemma says you make things vanish,” she said as I finished the roll in three more bites. The rolls were so hot, they’d steamed the bag. I took another one out and
tossed it to her. Her watery fingers caught it without hesitation. She broke it open, inhaled the fragrant steam, and stretched her hand toward the marmalade.

  Her long fingers were better suited to working as knives. She spread the marmalade smooth and even and took a cautious bite, then another, then made the roll disappear in the cavern of her mouth. With a swallow it was gone.

  “You make things vanish,” she repeated.

  And I knew she didn’t mean the roll I’d just eaten. “That’s what I do.” I nodded and tore open my second roll. She came closer and took another from the bag. She went slower with her second, as I did with mine.

  “Really vanish, not magic vanish.”

  I nodded again, and I never liked where this conversation was going. It was classic, as though she’d pressed her ear against the side of my car a few weeks ago and listened while Anne begged me to do it, to make him vanish and stop beating on her and how could I say no, why wouldn’t I do it, couldn’t I understand? She wailed—wailed like the girl did when we crossed the state line—and I knew what was coming.

  Except it didn’t. Not yet.

  We sat, in companionable calm, eating rolls and marmalade, while the snow fell silently beyond the open car door.

  Ritual and tradition play a big part in Jackson’s life and so it was on the first evening that he gathered we performers together. A meal, not lavish, but steaming and generous, had been spread atop the ancient wood table Jackson claimed to have carted from one side of Europe and back again before the war. And at this table we all took our places, under the softly flowing fabric of the big top.