Three

The big top reared over the rest of the circus like a mountain. He hadn't registered, really, how absolutely immense it was.

And, on the inside, it was as grand as its size indicated. The tent itself seemed to be a simple covering for what was an actual building underneath. It was an old-fashioned opera house. Baroque architecture spiraled away overhead, dark oak gleamed in the light from the oil lamps, and dust-covered portraits of what must have been great actors and actresses lined the walls.

The crowd was filtering further inside, and splitting up to take their seats. Some went up the great oak staircases to reach the higher tiers that must have lain beyond the doors. Others went straight through the ones on the ground floor, or set off into the hallways to find doors further down. The theater beyond must have taken up most of the building, judging by how far apart the doors were set.

He waited for several minutes until the last few stragglers had made their way out of sight, then crept in. Now, thick carpeting thumped under his boots instead of grass and dirt. The tattered clothes he wore shed pine needles and mud with every step, leaving a trail of filth behind him as he lurched forward.

"We have a brilliant show for you all tonight, folks!"

The announcer's voice boomed out from inside the theater. For a moment, he stopped and stared around, listening to the echoes. Then something caught his eye.

There was a small window set into the wall on his left, just next to a door. The door didn't lead to the theater, and the room beyond was dark, but that wasn't what he was looking for.

Reflected on the glass, he could see himself.

"-Miz Willow on the organ, and, of course, Pennywise leading the clowns-"

The announcer's voice was as sharp and brilliant as a knife edge. He paid no attention to it. The glass held his focus.

He lurched forward.

"-but before we get started, let's get a big hand for the stage boys-"

A twisted, misshapen body, as if a normal man had been taken in two giant fists and stretched until he was almost half again as tall and a third as wide, but the process had been uneven and all the limbs were mismatched...

"-and Mister Erstly over here leading the band-"

 A pair of splintered wooden hands, tipped by dark slivers that looked sharp enough to cut, more claws than fingers, clutching at a torn and mud-stained coat that somehow managed to be too long and didn't do anything to conceal the misshapen body or tattered clothes beneath it...

"-and, of course, we'd like to thank you, the audience, for taking the time to come out and see us here at Land's End! Give yourselves a hand-"

And, at the top, a leering jack-o'-lantern. Its eyes were nothing more than triangles, its mouth - his mouth - carved in a jagged, pointed grin.

A scarecrow stared at him from his reflection.

The announcer's voice seemed to fade away as he watched himself. Thoughts wrestled one another in his head. He knew that he should be feeling something akin to revulsion or confusion, but the - he looked right, somehow. He still had the feeling that it wasn't normal for him, but it did feel... right.

There was another brief reflection of something in the ruins of his mind. It might have been satisfaction, though he didn't know why.

He knew that he should be feeling something else, but all there was at the moment was a twinge of worry that his appearance might make anyone hesitant to talk to him. And he needed people to talk to him. Because, under the dull half-interest of seeing himself, he felt the endless, gaping want. It had awoken in him when he had found himself in the forest and realized that his mind was gone. It would stay with him, he knew, until it was satisfied.

He wanted to know.

Distantly, he became aware that there was music playing from the theater. It was quick and cheerful, the calliope's tune picked up by an entire orchestra.

As he turned and walked carefully towards the doors to the theater, he wondered idly how much of the show he had missed. He vaguely remembered hearing a few more words from the announcer, but as for what they had been, he had no idea.

He pushed the door open just far enough to peer through the crack.

The theater was a huge, cavernous, circular expanse lit only by the lights of more brass flowers set along the aisles. Seats lined the walls in tiers, rising upward for at least four stories. He couldn't have even begun to guess at the total size of the area, or the number of people currently filling its seats. They stretched up towards the top of the theater, where everything was lost in blackness. There were no lights up there.

But there were lights on the stage, and that was what drew his attention. The stage in the center of the theater was a raised dais that occupied the entire central area of the massive room, and it was illuminated by massive floodlights suspended from the scenery above. There must have been someone up there in the darkness, he realized; even as he watched, the lights moved to focus on the acts taking place below.

It was faintly disappointing, he realized, that they seemed to be ordinary circus acts. There was a lion tamer to one side, and a trio of performing elephants, and a clown car speeding its way through everything. The crowd cheered and waved as the different performers came and went, and the announcer stood on a small platform in the very center and waved his white-gloved hands as he called out each one.

For a while, those gloves held all of his attention. The ringmaster wasn't so much a man, it seemed, as a force of nature, all gleaming grin and booming voice, sparkling red satin and waving white-gloved hands. He was more fascinating than the acts he seemingly controlled -

And then he noticed the other one.

The ringmaster stood above the other acts, calling out to them and telling them when they were done or when they were to begin. He seemed apart from them, somehow. But he wasn't the only one. There was another figure, down among the acts, that moved as separately as he did.

It was a woman in whiteface. She had brilliantly red hair, but wore it in a severe bun that was barely visible under her derby hat. The hat she wore, and the accompanying suit, was brown. It wasn't black, or a particularly rich oak. It was just brown, and sharply cut so as to make it professional rather than revealing. It was boring. If it weren't for the whiteface, and the red nose, she wouldn't have looked out of place in a courtroom. Or at a funeral.

And she moved through the other actors as if they hardly existed. She didn't seem to do anything in particular. She simply wandered from ring to ring, occasionally looking up at the crowd. Her eyes, he saw, were as sharp as the rest of her. Even from this distance, he could tell that.

The other clowns wore brightly-colored, purposefully ill-fitting clothing, and ran about throwing pies at one another or getting into staged, cartoonish fist-fights. Even the other actors would sometimes join in and throw something at a clown. But no one threw anything at the woman in whiteface.

Penelope C. Wise.

Something about her features caused another flash of recognition in his mind. Again, he felt as if he were struggling with himself. He wanted to talk to her, badly, but... something stopped him, something in the broken glass.

He settled for watching.

The circus acts went on for a long time. He wasn't sure how long he had been standing behind the doors when the ringmaster finally called for the audience members to quiet themselves, but he knew it had been a long time.

The actors had all begun to file off the stage, save for the ringmaster and the woman in whiteface. She stood beside the ringmaster's little raised dais, her arms folded behind her back, and surveyed the audience imperiously.

"All right, ladies and gents, that was a show and a half, wasn't it?" The announcer raised one hand and flashed that brilliant grin at the watchers. There was a cheer. When it had finished, the ringmaster continued, "Well, it's not over just yet, folks! I know you all came out here to Land's End to see the absolute greatest show on Earth, and we don't aim to disappoint! We've got something for you here tonight that I know for a fact you've never, ever seen before!"

The orchestra started playing again. This time, the tones were sombre and dark, and hung in the air like fog. The lights overhead dimmed and focused, not on the ringmaster, but on a small circle of stage just in front of his dais. As he watched, the floor there seemed to pull away, revealing darkness beneath.

Something started to come into view. It was a cage, he realized, made out of ancient-looking wood and rusted iron. As the platform that it sat upon came into view from under the trap door, he saw the thing inside.

-a hunched humanoid figure, skin off-white and clammy, as long and thin as he was but with a head that was little more than a skull, eyes like black pits and long needle-like fangs stained red. The hands were bony and the fingers too long, too impossibly long, edged like razors and coming to sharp points-

The ringmaster was talking again, over the murmur of the audience, but he wasn't listening. Something was flashing in his mind again, shining off one of the fragments of memory, and it screamed its words at him as he stared at the thing in the cage.

The Rake.