[CONTENT WARNING – GORE, VIOLENCE]
On this night of carnage, Le Cirque des Fréres Thibault had lost all but two of its Ensemble des Monstres. Among them:
Raymundo Elastico, the double-jointed man. Strangled with his own right arm.
Thumbelina, world’s tiniest woman. Bound in a firecracker vest and tossed into the elephant pen.
Gerhard the Gourmand. All 643 pounds of him, force-fed porridge until he choked, then liver extracted to make foie gras.
Marguerite had dispatched them all—each murder more depraved, more grisly than the last, while her conjoined sister, Sophie, wept, forced to witness each horror.
***
“Unhand me!” Marguerite screamed, straining against Sophie’s grip to force the cut-throat razor through Barbara the Bearded Lady’s throat.
“Sister, please!” Sophie pleaded, strength fading as the blade sliced through whiskers, searching for skin. “We must escape—or they’ll hang us both!”
“What a sight that would be!” Marguerite said facetiously, in a voice like tearing fabric. “A two-for-the-price-of-one bargain for the hangman!”
***
That morning, Sophie had begun to notice terrifying changes in her sister: random screeching in unintelligible languages; a sulphuric stench; random jerking and spasming that made their shared torso tremble. Though they once moved, spoke—even thought—as one person, a schism had appeared. It was as if they had become strangers. Or was it an intruder, worming into Marguerite’s mind—and her half of the body—probing relentlessly into Sophie’s, attempting to commandeer their entire being?
Their life of equilibrium had unravelled, and by the time Sophie realised, Raymundo’s corpse lay at their feet, a tangle of rubbery limbs.
From that moment, she’d fought relentlessly, but now, her strength—and her will—had begun to wane with the setting of the night’s full moon.
***
Madame Claudette, the circus’s fortune teller, had warned the Thibault brothers not to set up here, in the grounds of the abandoned asylum. “Evil lurks here,” she screeched, terrified. “Killers and madmen buried in unhallowed ground!”
So, perhaps, when Savo the Strongman had been driving in pegs to set up their tents and inadvertently collapsed the ground beneath—revealing a shallow grave and a chained-up skeleton—he should not have simply filled it in and carried on. And the sisters certainly should not have chosen this very location to unfurl their bedroll.
***
Marguerite cackled wickedly as she finally broke Sophie’s grip. Blood gushed, soaking Barbara’s whiskers and bathing her nightgown in crimson.
Defeated, Sophie sobbed, her arm falling limply to her side. Her sister, her body, her entire being, and the only friends—only family—she’d ever had, were irretrievably lost to an unknown, unspeakable evil.
The deed done, Marguerite twisted her head at an impossible angle. Wild eyes—with no recognition of the life they’d shared-–burned into Sophie’s cheek, accentuated by unsteady, fetid breath.
“I’ve grown weary of sharing this body with you, sister.” Marguerite growled. “Tired of being a two-headed freak. It’s time for us to part.”
The razor flashed. A head fell. And for the first time in their 26 years, Marguerite and Sophie, the celebrated Siamese Twins, went their separate ways.