Freaks and Oddities

The loud whistle sounded, warning all passengers of the train’s departure. Still by the ticket booth, tapping his foot against the cobblestone setting, Castle handed his money to the keeper.

The train slowly moved forward, it’s wheels screeching against the new rail tracks.

The Keeper remained unconcerned, and took his leisurely time retrieving Castle’s ticket. Castle’s wingtips tapped faster. Nervously, he tightened his tie and straightened his vest and jacket. When the Keeper offered the ticket, Castle slapped it from his hand and ran for the locomotive. His strokes were long and slow, his haste bogged down by heaving cases and overflowing bags.

“Wait,” he yelled, tripping over loose stones. “hold the train!”

The train continued, its speed gaining and carrying weight far faster and greater than Castle could fathom. He ran, and as he ran, Castle had no doubt his books and notes were falling from his suitcase. He feared too much to look back as his hard worked thesis spread over foreign soil and stone, forever to remain unread.

Or worse, he thought, collected by dirty fingers and saved to burn for fire in the far approaching winter months, unread. He silently wished them a safe journey and the answers to curious eyes as he reached the pacing wall of windows and coal smoke.

His hands full, Castle stood helplessly in front of the train’s car, watching as it raced past him. Dull eyes watched him through grimy windows, watched as he ran for the car door and banged and pleaded. No one came for the young university student.

“Open the door, please!” He begged.

No one listened.

His audience was wary and cold, tired from travel and cursed by unfortunate circumstance. Only to add to their discomfort, a traveling party of freaks had purchased journey on the new locomotive. Their strange clothes and printed skin, odd equipment and foul language, tamed them as cultists and vile creatures, believed to serve only demons and the lords of Hell—perhaps they themselves were demons sent to spread the very ill fortune they felt. 

Every ordinary passenger avoided them, giving each width birth and piercing stares. Every ordinary passenger watched the freaks and their painted skin as it swirled like spirits, and watched as Castle ran with the train, pages fluttering behind him like feathers falling from an angel’s tearing wings. Every passenger left Castle to the whims of each other, waiting patiently for someone else to help him. 

No ordinary passenger did. 

Brushed back by the power of a passing train, Castle could have cried in bliss when the green door slid open. A brawny man held his hand out to the young scholarly student, welcoming him with flying feet and swinging luggage. 

Castle landed clumsily and with great labor, he swung back and forth on unsettled feat, the man’s grip steadying him until the door closed, safely keeping Castle from the rushing tracks. 

Castle smiled through his loud and heavy breath. “Thank you!” he said, gently clutching the arm of his generous savior. “Oh, thank you infinitely, good sir!” 

Before Castle could lift his eyes and greet his acquaintance, the arm under his clammy grip fell away. Castle found a tall, oddity of a man at his front. His white skin was marked deeply, so many inked patterns overlapped that he looked almost of a dark complexion. His ears were punctured with hollow holes—gauges, if Castle recalled properly—and silver rings. 

An oddity indeed.

“Good Samaritan, my name is Callistus Fitzroy,” Shifting his luggage, Castle freed his hand and held it out to the stranger whose presence rallied strength and sorrow. “and yours?”

The marked man looked warily down at his hand. 

From the main car, chiming from the doorway, a decidedly feminine voice panicked, “Tomas? Tomas! What on Earth are you doing in here?” 

She looked between the two, her dark glossy eyes shimmering in the morning. The light filtered thinly through the rocking windows, shining her cottened wrapped hair in a heavenly halo. 

Her panicked breath calmed with Castle’s. She smiled knowingly. “I see. Excuse him, good gentlemen. Please, be on your way, we mean no bother.”

Castle smiled up at the young woman.

“Tomas, was it? Well it is a pleasure, sir. Thank you again.” Castle readjusted the balance of his luggage, and excused himself past the young woman. 

Wandering for an open seat, Castle felt the throes of good gesture clasp his shoulders. Filled by a spell of recompense, he turned back to the young Hindu woman. “Actually, madam,” he said, meeting her dark eyes. “this man just saved me a twelve pence and a great many hours of strife, the least I could do is buy him and his company a meal. Do you mind if I do so?”

She seems stunned, pleasantly so. “Not at all. I am Maysam Anne, and my companion Tomas Korolev.” 

Castle clapped hands with Tomas, thanking him further. He could no more stop the gratitude falling from his mouth than he could stop his feet from following them to their seats. To his pleasant surprise, Tomas wordlessly took the luggage from Castle’s hands and accompanied him in baring it’s obnoxious weight. 

Castle continued to praise his thanks.

Ms. Anne had guided the boys to their seats, just as the train had finished its departure, shifting violently as it settled on the iron bars guiding its steel wheels. As they veered, they landed crudely into their seats.

Maysam, accustomed to such scrutiny, averted her gaze and pitied the poor Mr. Callistus Fitzroy, who had unknowingly subjected himself to dark glances and cruel, fire like rumors. 

Every ordinary passenger stared as a respectable English man sat and indulged his curiosity with the Freaks from the circus, their witchy vision woman smiling and talking with him like an old friend. 

Maysam enjoyed his presence, she greeted and conversed with Castle in polite conversation, though her words remained quiet and cautious. It was the way she gently flicked her wrist as she spoke, and the slow flutter of her lashes, that Castle watched as she was painted in an image of peaceful serenity. 

Time moved past them as quickly as the passing scenery beyond the rattling train windows. Castle, true to his word, bought the two freaks—though he would never call them such—a meal, and after many moments of his endless questions, Maysam could no longer hold her own question beneath her painted lips.

“My dear, Mr. Callistus Fitzroy,” she started, placing her cooled tea down on the shivering table they shared. “does it not bother you? The scornful looks you receive as you converse with us?”

Castle smiled, looking around. “Oh,” he exclaimed, tapping his mouth with the bleached cloth of his napkin. “I hadn’t noticed. Why, does it bother you?”

She shook her head.

“Then there is your answer, madam. If it should not bother you, then why would it ever bother me?” 

Castle plainly continued his questions, and as the train continued on its journey his inquiries delved deeper into personal and philosophical debates. He touched upon every topic he could think of: politics, ethics, histories and literature. He asked them feverently of their lives and the paths they took that lead them on their present journey. He asked where they were going and where they had been; regrets and pleasures, stories and tales.

He was a curious boy, Tomas observed, a man ever quiet and silent with his intake of knowledge. 

As they neared the endless bottom of his well of topics, Maysam, Tomas, and Castle fell into a friendly silence for the remainder of their travels. 

Each eager to busy themself with their own work, Castle observed as Maysam Anne practiced and shuffled her tarot, and Tomas Korolev as he drew a match alight and watched as it moved, alive in its consumption of the small wood before falling into darkness on Tomas’s black fingers. 

Maysam could foretell the future, read it in the cards, but she politely refused to read for Castle. “It is one thing to read and soften the fates of strangers, but to meddle in a friend's life—I made a vow to never do such a thing.” She would tell him with the gentle voice, the underlying laugh of a mother’s amused chidings.

Castle, dissuaded by the seer, took to digging through his belongings. He would need to calculate the cost of his loss from the station platform—and whether he has the money or time to replace it. He was eager to find what he thought lost and left behind, and despite all convictions otherwise, he continued to believe it was contained deep within his belongings. The feather weight of his coin purse and the force he tempted to reckon through his written word begged it to be so.

“Oh blessed be!” Castle exclaimed, pulling a pampered and crumpled pamphlet from his bag. “I’ve not lost it!”

“Not lost what?” Tomas asked.

“The way to change the world.” 

Before his company could question him or the paper grasped between his fingers, the train fell into a slow, pacing rhythm. The world around them—once a blur of movement viewed through the eyes of a people moving too quickly for time—came into a subtle focus. Mountains stretched beyond the small and run-down train station, dirt roads and paths leading to an adventure far more interesting than either Tomas or Maysam could experience within the circus. The world awaited smart, clumsy, geniusly folly Castle, while his two companions would fall and crumble beneath the sands of hate and contempt. 

“Well,” Castle said, his toothy smile larger than Maysam had seen it yet. “this is my stop. It was a pleasure, truly. Thank you, Tomas Korolev, Maysam Anne, for the company and for the train.”

Without a word, the gawkish Castle Fitzroy lifted his luggage and departed the train. He never looked back, never said goodbye, but when he landed on the platform and walked quickly up the waiting dirt road, he turned back. Through the windows, every ordinary passenger forgotten from their minds, Maysam and Tomas could see the young Mr. Fitzroy turn, smile, and wave. 

As the train moved to continue its travel, Maysam and Tomas watched as Castle waved. 

Shaking her head, Maysam laughed, “And people find us odd!”

“Maysam, look. He left it on his seat. I wonder if he knows?” Tomas picked up the thesis. He looked back to where Castle had stood. He moved to hold up the paper and encourage the student back, but when his eyes found the distant marks of his weighted feet in the mud, he saw the student no more. “He’s gone.”

“He’ll figure it out eventually.” 

From that day forward, the circus freaks never forgot the young English student. In fact, Callistus Fitzroy was never seen again, not by the freaks and not by the university. On late, somber nights, with their bellies warmed by alcohol, they wondered if he lived at all. Had he died in that mountain pass, or had they dreamt him? Only the thesis, they had; and they kept it until the day they’d succumb to death.