Book Five, Chapter 134: The Barker

“It feels so silly to have to tell someone about the Barker,” Dr. Striga said. “It is quite hard to conceive of a world that does not know the Sweepstakes, but you’ll find we do dream of such a place. Perhaps our obsession with worlds like yours stems from some subconscious desire for the lives we were never allowed to live—the blissful ignorance… but to understand the Manifest Consortium, you must understand the Barker.”

We sat on the bench, and as she spoke, the cold air stopped bothering me. I felt a gravity in what she was saying even before she got to the details. I instinctively knew I was hearing something important.

She grabbed my hands.

“He appears in places you would not expect,” she said, her eyes drifting off into a memory. “Places that are not quite themselves in the moment, that do not have their usual soul—schools after hours, condemned hospitals, malls that have closed down, areas of transition. Sometimes, a place can lose its spirit for a moment and appear completely alien. Have you ever noticed the liminal spaces where a piece of your mind wakes up—a piece that senses something strange?

“My first time, it was a street in the middle of the city where I grew up, normally bustling with people day and night. It had just snowed, and I was out trekking my way to work at a diner. I was a young woman, and the gift of long life had not yet made me wealthy.

“I saw him there. No one else was around. Snow had painted the entire place white—it was an entirely new world that would only last a night. I breathed deeply lungfuls of air that belonged to another plane.”

She had told this story, before, whatever she claimed. She knew it well.

“He calls out to you,” she said, “and he speaks to you like he’s known you your entire life. And you think maybe he has? You can’t help but get close. It isn’t merely because you’ve heard rumors of his existence. My entire family legend started when my grandfather met him back in my home world. For a moment, you forget what you know about him, and you’re struck with an overwhelming curiosity. You feel you were meant to be at this place, at this time, and he’s been waiting for you here. This place and this time will never exist again. A strange realization, but it feels visceral as you walk nearer.

“He smiles warmly, the Barker, apparently not even able to feel the cold though he is dressed for a summer carnival, and he tells you the price. For me, it was all the money I had in my pockets. Not much, but still precious. They say that he will only ask a price that he knows you will eventually pay, but I’m not certain that’s true. It’s just that if you’ve seen what he offers, there’s hardly anything you wouldn’t give.”

She paused for a moment to reflect, and then I—perhaps because of my innate immaturity—felt the need to interject and ask a question.

“Did you give him your soul?” I asked. That was definitely the vibe.

“He has never asked for it,” she said, as if considering whether she would.

She let go of my hands and produced a small stack of tickets from nowhere. She was using the same trick we used to make our tropes disappear and reappear—except the tickets she brandished were not tropes at all, though the design was somewhat familiar.

She handed one of them to me. It was red with gold leaf and thick stock. I could hardly read the calligraphy, but when I made out what it said, I handed it back to her, not quite comfortable holding something I didn’t understand.

The Quiet Mend
From Lumevere Remedies – Cures for the Heart & Unruly Soul

This ticket does not erase love or loss, nor does it dull what mattered. It simply lifts the weight, eases the tightness in your chest, and lets you wake without the ache pressing in first thing. One day—sooner than you think—you’ll laugh, and it won’t feel borrowed.

No side effects. No forgetting. Just the quiet relief of moving forward.

Lumevere Remedies – Because Some Hurts Need More Than Time.

There were others. Some for little things, like a traditional feast from some culture I didn’t recognize and a pair of glasses fit to your vision needs. Some were for big things, like an apartment in a box or five years off your face wrinkles.

They were products.

Magical products, but products all the same.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “This is the Sweepstakes? I thought that was for immortality. The posters of the narrators made it seem…”

She studied my eyes. “You aren’t impressed? My rare tickets are in safekeeping. They are very valuable. They are the backbone of our commerce.”

“I’ve already had my quota for surprise today,” I said. But somewhere in the back of my mind, anger started to form as a picture of this society began to develop. “Go on with the rest of your story. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“The Barker came to my world in the late 1800s. Until then, our worlds were sisters. My grandfather won my family near immortality. That made us famous, also. We left when I was five years old. I don’t even remember my first language. After the destruction of my world, there were so few left to speak it.

“I ended up on a world that diverged from yours in the 1980s—that was when the Barker had found it. It was a wonderful place to grow up, a place where the Sweepstakes was still mysterious and exciting. I loved it, but eventually, those of us who lived long lives realized we had more in common with each other than we did with the people of the places where we were raised. So, we found our way to the Manifest Consortium with others like us.

“I was educated in the Consortium and decided to pursue what many thought to be a silly area of academics—the hard sciences. Why would you ever need to understand the fabric of reality when you can manipulate it so well with MBW or with tickets won or bartered? No, it seems there is a very real lack of curiosity for the pure sciences in the Manifest Consortium, and many worlds where such inquiries were valued are long gone.”

Yes, I was confident that she had given this exact speech before. Perhaps to players of games past.

“So I came to the one place where I might find like minds, even if they had been lost to time,” she continued. “I seek to understand the nature of reality and of consciousness—cures for every disease that don’t rely on luck of the draw. I want to understand what happened to my people and to perhaps get a grasp of multiversal travel down to its physical roots, not just granted through magic.”

Her cadence picked up. She spoke from her chest of her grand ambitions.

“I knew Carousel’s potential when I first stepped into this world. We found it alone, broadcasting its nightmares to an audience we knew not. Attempting, we think, the very thing it hopes to accomplish with its new Throughline.”

“To an audience…” I said, interrupting. “So you’re not the audience.”

She looked at me like I was stupid—though I was certain she didn’t mean to.

“We are part of the audience now. But asking who the audience is… You might as well ask who founded the Sweepstakes.”

“Okay,” I said, or at least tried to say. I couldn’t make my voice box work.

“I spent years trying to understand what happened to my home world,” she said, getting back to her speech. “The Consortium had no answers. MBW had no answers. But on the very first day I stepped into Carousel, a song started to play over the radio—one I had not heard in 2,000 years. It took Carousel less than a day to find my world and to mock me with it.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“I have some experience with that part,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Carousel is filled with wonder and promise. For many years, we tried to understand its aptitude with MBW. It is able to do things that should not be possible. The magic between worlds is not magic in and of itself—it is a practice designed for enforcing and balancing rule sets. And yet Carousel, which bursts forth with MBW, seems to have no need to balance things.”

It took me a moment to realize that what I heard as “imbue” was her pronouncing MBW, the Magic Between Worlds. A bit obnoxious but maybe it would grow on me.

“Well, there’s balance in its narratives, from what I can tell,” I said.

“Yes, its rules are balanced to some degree, but its power appears not to be. Did you know that in the very storyline you are running, Carousel is using real time manipulation in order to simulate make believe time manipulation rules?”

Oh, right, the storyline.

“I had some idea,” I said, though I was very disappointed to know that jumping between mass casualty events using bodily injuries to dislodge you from the time stream was not real time travel.

“How does it use time travel with such ease? Low world time travel is but multiversal travel blindfolded, but Carousel is more adept. We have been fascinated for some time. These secrets are valuable, and Carousel holds the answers,” she said.

The way she spoke about it—it was pure fascination. I didn’t feel like she was deceiving me because if she was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, she should have known better than to speak about Carousel with such a dreamy tone.

“Carousel is bloodthirsty,” I said. “It’s a torture world. A death game.”

In much the same way that she couldn’t ever imagine having to explain who the Barker was, I could hardly imagine having to explain why Carousel was a bad place.

“Every world is bloodthirsty,” she said. “You’re too young to know that.”

I wasn’t here to argue. That was pointless.

“What is Carousel trying to accomplish, and why are you helping it?” I asked.

Again, that look—as if she couldn’t believe how it wasn’t obvious. Maybe it was, but I was just too narrowly focused, too oblivious to understand.

“Carousel’s ends appear simple. Ours are more practical and honorable. When you meet the Barker the first few times, he tells you the price. But if you live long enough to see him more than that, he stops naming the price, and you have to start naming your offer.”

“Offer?” I repeated.

“And this is what we offer,” she said.