It Never Ends
Tales from the Kichirou Show - Chapter Seventeen
Welcome to the Kichirou Show! Where the lights are bright, and the popcorn flows freely. Join us as we travel the country and entertain the masses, reminding patrons of a bygone era with carnival games, circus acts, and the controversial sideshow.
If there is something you fear, you can run away here.
Mitch Lorrins runs to the Kichirou Show to escape murder allegations. Suz joins the show in search of a fugitive. Agi the dragon flees an intergalactic cartel, and Lucky barrels through reality in the hopes of preventing the apocalypse.
But pack up and leave, and you’ll surely bleed…
Not everyone will be able to get what they want, and no one will escape.
Tales from the Kichirou Show is a serialized volume of interconnected short stories that gradually come together to weave a larger tapestry. If you’re new, then start here:
Chapter Seventeen
The first time Lucky attempted to kick Suz out of the Kichirou Show didn’t go how he planned.
The show was at one of the fairground sites, and he found Suz outside enjoying the weather. Seated in front of her was Christopher. It looked like she was trying to style his hair without irritating his sensitive scalp.
“I have psoriasis,” he overheard Christopher tell her. “It gets scaly, red, and itchy. The underside of the clown wigs have started to irritate my skin.”
“That’s too bad about the wig. Clown makeup looks even creepier without it.”
“You think I won’t scare so many kids if I have crazy hair?”
“Well…” Suz said uncertainly.
Their discussion ended when the two caught sight of Lucky coming toward them. Christopher smiled brightly. “Hey, Lucky. How’s it going?”
“I need to talk to Suz,” he began without preamble. “Alone.”
Christopher’s smile faltered. “Oh. Okay.”
Lucky didn’t allow himself to feel guilty as he watched the tall clown dejectedly amble away. Suz folded her arms and pinned Lucky with a look of disapproval.
“That was rude.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Of course he will, but that’s no excuse to hurt his feelings.”
Exasperated, Lucky huffed. “I’m not here to talk about Christopher!”
The woman clamped her mouth shut and folded her arms. “All right,” she replied brusquely. “What do you want to talk about?”
His hand twitched toward the waistband of his jeans where the detective’s stolen gun was hidden. Laszlo had shown him how to make a holster out of every-day items which was mostly invisible if he wore baggy shirts that hung loosely around his waist. Instead of drawing the gun, Lucky clenched his fists.
“I want you to leave the show.”
Surprised, she did nothing for a moment except blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me,” he said in a stern voice. “You need to leave Kichirou.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because otherwise you’ll ruin everything. You’ll ruin the show, your investigation, and the entire freaking world! I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re doing it in the worst way possible.”
She frowned. “Investigation?”
“Agh!” Lucky dragged his fingers roughly down his face. “I know, okay? I know you’re a detective, and I know why you’re here. And if you don’t do what I—”
His threat was cut off when Suz swiftly grabbed his arms. Her grip was rock solid and slightly painful. Usually, intimidating him on a physical level was Desmond’s shtick.
“Shut your mouth, and listen to me very carefully.” Suz lowered her voice and stared hard at him. “If you try to blow my cover, I will make your life hell. I don’t care that you’re only eight years old—in fact, that could work in my favor. And I don’t care that you’re allegedly psychic. If you think you can push me around or bully me into submission, you’re wrong.”
She squeezed his triceps until her fingernails pinched him.
“Do we understand each other?”
Lucky wasted no time nodding his head.
Suz smiled sweetly, as if the whole encounter had been nothing but friendly. “Good! I’ll see you later tonight.”
She released him and gently soothed the crescent-shaped bruises forming on his arms. Then she left Lucky alone, feeling a little bit scared of Suz Nielson.
Eventually, Lucky realized that Suz couldn’t be forced to leave. What he did successfully do once was prevent her from joining Kichirou in the first place. It wasn’t difficult to keep both Moon and Regina distracted on the day that Suz arrived. Especially when he got a little help from Atlas, who always enjoyed aggravating the creative director. It was just as easy to convince Desmond to turn Suz away.
The next issue to tackle was Agi the dragon. It was tougher to prevent him from joining Kichirou since Regina was the one who paved the way for his entrance, but Lucky refused to panic. After all, he could live out countless iterations of the same two years. He literally had all the time in the world for trial and error. That was what he thought anyway, until something … odd happened. Variations of old events took place all the time, but it was very rare that brand-new events occurred for Lucky anymore.
Typically whenever he ran into Reggie, she ignored him unless Atlas was present to bring everyone together. So, it was strange when Lucky bumped into her one day in a hotel lobby and she grabbed his sleeve, forcing him to stop.
“Hey!” she whispered. Reggie glanced left then right to make sure no one else was listening. “How are things coming?”
Lucky cocked his head. “Huh?”
“Your plan!” she hissed. One of the musicians passing by glanced at them, so Reggie drew him out of the lobby and into the nearest corridor. “You said you had a plan to fix things and that you needed my help.”
“Fix things?” Immediately, he thought of his struggle to save the show from destruction, but Lucky couldn’t imagine he would have confided that in the youngest Morrigan. To himself, he wondered, “What could I have meant by that?”
This event was new, he realized, feeling awe and intrigue for the first time in years. Whatever Reggie was referencing hadn’t actually happened yet. At least, not for Lucky.
Exasperated, she replied, “How should I know? You’re the time traveler, not me.”
The muscles in Lucky’s face went slack from shock. “You think I’m a time traveler?”
She laughed a little. Not laughter born of disbelief, but the sort of laughter one uttered when they realized that they were involved in something completely ridiculous.
“That’s what you told me,” she said.
“And you believed me?” he asked in total bewilderment.
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Well, I did until just now.”
Quickly, he backpedaled. “No, no! I didn’t lie to you. It’s just that no one ever really listens when I try to tell them that I’m not psychic. Sorry for the confusion, but this conversation you’re remembering from your past is still in the future for me. So, at the moment, I have no idea why I told you I was a time traveler.”
“I guess I could explain it…” Reggie seemed torn as she chewed on her bottom lip. “But I don’t want to mess up the space-time continuum or whatever.”
Lucky laughed, trying to imagine what her reaction would be if she knew about all the changes he had already made to the past. “Yeah, that’s not as big of a deal as you might think.”
The past, the present, and the future were all happening simultaneously, and every single moment happened over and over again.
“It’s okay, though,” he assured her. “I’ll figure it out. This isn’t the first time I’ve been confused by something I haven’t done yet.”
Although, it had been a very long time since that had happened. He found the confusion a refreshing change of pace from his perpetual frustration.
He was about to part ways with Reggie when something else occurred to him.
“Oh! Hey, Reg.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your email password?”
Suspicious, she narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to try to stop you from doing something stupid, but I need your password.”
“Okay…” Regina cleared her throat and then mumbled so soft and fast that Lucky almost missed it. “My password is clownsrsexy843.”
He made a face. “Gross.”
She attempted to casually shrug off her discomfort. “Whatever. Everyone has a thing—but if you tell anybody, I will chain you to the sideshow where you’ll never see the sun again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The next time he found himself in the time period leading up to the acquisition of the Cosmic Egg, Lucky logged into Regina’s email account from Atlas’s phone. He found the eBay emails that detailed her purchase and forwarded them to Moon.
If anyone was capable of derailing Reggie and potentially stopping Agi from ever arriving, it was the irascible Sandford Moon.
There were some things that Lucky didn’t seem to be able to change no matter how hard he tried, and Agi’s arrival at the Kichirou Show was one of them. Even when Moon was able to successfully thwart the delivery of the Cosmic Egg, Agi still wandered the country, running and hiding from the aliens hunting him, until he found shelter at the Kichirou Show. It was maddening.
But hopefully, without Suz, he could protect the show regardless of the dragon’s presence. If only he could stop Agi from burning everything!
In a last-ditch effort to convince the dragon that he was perfectly safe here, Lucky approached him one night when he was still living in the music trailer. Tired, and not feeling very optimistic, he threw open the door.
“Hey,” he said to the dragon. “I’m Lucky. And you’re Agi.”
Agi, an indistinct shadow huddled among the music stands, sat up.
“Reggie is going to get you food.” Lucky didn’t know if that was true or if Agi was hungry, but both were good assumptions. “Hang on for a little longer, and you’ll be okay,” he assured the dragon, who looked nervous and not well rested at all.
Folding his arms, Lucky chewed on his lip while he considered something.
“Okay, I’ve never tried this, but…”
He rubbed his eyes. There was no way this would actually work. He had to give it a shot, though.
“If I ask nicely, could you not destroy the Kichirou Show?”
Agi cocked his head, confused.
Lucky shook his head and laughed. “What am I doing? I don’t even know if you can understand us yet. I’ve never been able to work out exactly when you picked up English.”
He went to shut the door. It was late at night, and despite the fact that duration of night and day didn’t play by the rules for him, Lucky’s circadian rhythm sometimes did align with the setting of the sun; Agi wasn’t the only one who needed his beauty sleep. But Lucky couldn’t just leave things like this. He paused before the door latched.
“I know this doesn’t make much sense to you right now, but I need you to hear me out. This place, Kichirou … it isn’t such a bad place to be. You might feel trapped here sometimes, but … Don’t destroy it. Please.”
He heard the dragon huff and shuffle his feet.
Lucky dropped his arms to his sides. “Well, that’s it, I guess. Good night, Agi.”
Lucky did his best, and yet the show still burned.
That was fine, he told himself as he watched flames lick at the tents and ashes and embers shoot into the sky. As long as Suz wasn’t here to dismantle everything from the inside, then Kichirou could survive.
Several yards away, he saw Reggie march up to the Magician.
“Hey!” she shouted at the masked man. Slowly, he turned away from the fire. “How can you just stand there? Don’t you see what’s happening?”
The Magician said nothing. This was all looking very familiar.
“If you won’t try to fix this … then let me.” She held out her hand. “Give me what you promised would be mine.”
When the Magician made no move to accept her proposal, Reggie got in his face. They would have been breathing each other’s air, if the Magician’s body wasn’t dead as a doornail.
“What’s the matter with you?! Do you want all of this to be destroyed?”
Lucky knew what would happen next, and things wouldn’t end well if she went down that path. “Regina, wait!”
He sprinted toward the pair, but instead of catching her attention, it was the Magician who looked at Lucky.
Seizing the opportunity, Reggie shoved the man. Taken by surprise, the Magician stumbled and fell to the pavement, giving her the opportunity to bend over him and rip the mask off. Lucky had seen the dead face of Mitch Lorrins a few times, but the sight never failed to make his skin crawl.
“If you won’t give me the show,” she said through clenched teeth, “then maybe I should take it.”
“Reggie!”
Lucky jumped on her, grappling with the arm that held the Magician’s mask. She switched hands, holding the white mask out of his reach, before placing the mask over her face.
He held his breath and watched in horror as Mitch Lorrins rapidly decayed. In a matter of seconds, the fugitive was nothing more than a pile of dusty bones and clothes. Regina doubled over, coughing and wheezing. The realization of her grave mistake dawned on her as she clawed at her face, trying and failing to take the mask off. Lucky grabbed the edge of the mask to help, but it seared his skin. With a hiss, he snatched his hands back.
Gasping, Reggie fell to her knees. Not knowing any other way to remove the mask from her face, Lucky was forced to watch her suffocate.
It felt like his breath was stolen when she finally slumped over. Her body dropped to the pavement, motionless. The Magician was dead, and now so was Regina Morrigan. Unless someone put the gloves and the hat onto her body to complete the ensemble, then the Magician would be no more.
A low, echoey howl rose from somewhere on the fairgrounds and seeped into the night, tainting the air. The awful noise filled Lucky with an acute sense of dread. It made him feel like the end of the world was near…
He tried to grab the Magician’s belongings—he would put them on Reggie’s body himself if he had to—but time shifted. The future, the past, and the present danced around each other with no rhythm. No sense of chronological order. Lucky’s fingers closed around air as the Magician’s effects were lost in the flow of time. Beneath that strange river ran a current of reality that was being eroded faster and faster.
He turned and ran. Lucky bolted without thinking about his destination and ended up near the fortune teller’s tent, which was once again on fire. Bracing himself against the heat, he ducked inside the tent, only for the flames and smoke to vanish a second later. The tent was intact and undamaged. Lucky heard the sounds of revelry outside. He poked his head through the flaps and saw a show in progress. Quickly, he flipped the sign by his tent to say Closed and then retreated back inside. Shaking, he sat in his chair and stared into the crystal ball. He needed a minute or two alone to collect his composure.
Sometime later, he heard familiar footsteps, and then Atlas stepped into the tent.
“Lucky? You okay, buddy?”
He gazed up at the man. The image of Atlas blurred through a sheen of unshed tears. His voice broke when he spoke.
“Something bad is going to happen.” The tears overflowed, rolling down his cheeks. “It always does, and I can never stop it.”
Confused and probably worried, Atlas frowned at him. “Something bad? Lucky, what are you talking about?”
He shook his head. “I can’t do this, Atlas!” he choked out. “You never should have trusted me!”
As he dashed past this version of Atlas, Lucky wished that his Atlas had sent someone else to save the Kichirou Show.
Lucky found that if he wasn’t careful, Suz would find a way into the show. He hadn’t thought about her for months, but when he ended up in Atlas’s barber chair again, there was Suz. She and Regina sat next to each other while Atlas draped a Fourth of July plastic tablecloth over his shoulders. Suz stared hard at him as Atlas began to snip off locks of Lucky’s dark hair.
“So, Suz,” Atlas said while he worked, “what did you do before you came here?”
Reggie leaned closer to the woman and waggled her eyebrows. “Yes, do tell!”
As soon as Suz opened her mouth, Lucky cut her off.
“She was a high school social studies teacher,” he said blandly. He was so sick of this conversation.
Surprised, the detective blinked at him. Lucky averted his eyes. Last time he was in this position, he believed Suz was the root of all evil. That she was the one who started the dominos toppling. But he had gone through a whole cycle of this chaos without her presence, and it hadn’t made a difference. It all went down almost the same way it always did with Reggie and the Magician duking it out.
Thinking of Reggie, he looked to where she sat. Their eyes met, and before he could look away, he was struck by a revelation.
Reggie was there the last time the show crumbled, which occurred even though Suz was nowhere near Kichirou.
It wasn’t Suz’s fault.
Was it ever her fault? Of course, she was responsible for the scandal that she brought upon the show, but was that really enough to end Kichirou? Lucky thought back to his lessons with older Atlas, back when he was still preparing for this mission. Despite the fact that Suz had lit the proverbial fire under Kichirou’s ass, the woman had stayed with the ex-employees and performers until her untimely death—and those ex-employees and performers had accepted her. Almost like they didn’t blame Suz the way Lucky had been blaming her for years.
But Reggie … She never left the show, not even when Kichirou was nothing but a memory. That was why Lucky didn’t meet her until he traveled back in time.
He didn’t have first-hand knowledge about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the show’s demise; the time loop he was in didn’t extend that far. However, he did know Reggie’s personality. If Kichirou was in the middle of a crisis, Regina Morrigan would fight to be the one in charge, even if the ensuing drama was detrimental to the show. She wouldn’t be able to stand someone like Moon taking the seat of power that she believed was rightfully hers. He had already seen that she would act impulsively if her position in the show was seriously threatened.
She stabbed Desmond, someone who loved her. And she stole the Magician’s mask, outright defying someone she feared.
Suz and Agi weren’t the ones who needed to be stopped. It was Reggie.
The youngest Morrigan winced and brought a hand to her face to gently massage a spot over her right eye.
Stopping Reggie from doing anything was like trying to hold back a strong wind with nothing but his bare hands. Lucky didn’t want to end up like Desmond, bleeding out in an alley, nor did he want to stand between Reggie and the Magician. He brainstormed ways to talk sense into the youngest Morrigan. The trouble was that logic had almost nothing to do with her problematic behavior. Her actions toward Desmond and the Magician were based in reactive emotion. Lucky could only imagine if he attempted to use logic against Reggie in a situation that she deemed ill-suited for logical thought. Although he wasn’t a real psychic, he didn’t foresee that scenario ending well for him.
At first, Lucky dropped hints, cryptically mentioning to Reggie that she should consider talking to someone about any problems she might have. Perhaps she could take lessons in anger management or learn how to be less of a control freak. That was about as effective as he expected. She brushed aside his concerns. The thing was, Reggie didn’t seem like an angry person or a control freak on the surface. It was widely agreed that Moon was the one with the short fuse and the one who needed to have his hands in every part of the show.
No matter what Lucky said to her, she never changed. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that the time for talking was over. Now, he needed to take action.
Day by day, the weight of Suz’s stolen gun became a heavier secret to carry. And every day, he made excuses not to do what seemed to be the only option left. What was the point in putting off the inevitable? He could say that he wasn’t ready to take drastic measures, but the truth was, Lucky would never be ready; he was only sixteen years old! But if he couldn’t save the show, then he would have gone through the strain of time jumping for nothing.
He would have given up his childhood in vain.
Feeling sick to his stomach, Lucky called Atlas into the fortune teller’s tent one evening before the night’s show had opened to the public.
“What’s up, buddy?” Atlas smiled at Lucky, so trusting of the boy that he had taken care of for longer than he knew. Lucky swallowed hard. In order to do as Atlas had instructed, to save the Kichirou Show, he would have to betray Atlas’s trust.
“Can … can you get Reggie to come see me?” Lucky requested hoarsely. “I have something I need to tell her.”
Intrigued, Atlas raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Be right back.”
Once Atlas was gone, Lucky walked to the trunk where all the decorations for the fortune teller’s tent were stored. He crouched behind it and waited.
Time jumped all around him. It was impossible to say how long it actually took Reggie to come to the fortune teller’s tent. From her perspective, it might have only been minutes, but for Lucky, it felt closer to an hour. An hour of watching other time periods and scenes from past shows play out while he could do nothing except hide and think. He almost talked himself out of it at one point, but then Reggie walked into the tent, and he knew that this was the moment he had been waiting for. She looked around, clearly searching for him.
“Lucky?” She lifted the bottom of the tablecloth to see if he was hiding there. “Atlas said you wanted to tell me something. Where are you?”
He gripped the gun tighter in his sweaty hand and stood up. His knees cracked loudly, and Reggie turned toward him. His heart skipped a beat; the world slowed to a crawl; time meant nothing. One moment, the gun was at Lucky’s side, and the next moment, it was pointed at her face.
A bang rocked the tent, splitting the air and ringing in Lucky’s ears. The recoil rocked him backwards. Prepared for it, he caught himself.
Blood poured from a hole just above Reggie’s right eye. Shocked, she gaped at Lucky. Another bang, and a second bullet ripped through her nose, and she fell to the ground.
Lucky dropped the weapon, clutched his stomach, and then doubled over. He retched and spat into the hard-packed dirt. He had already seen Reggie die once, but it was so much worse when her death came at his own hand. He needed to get out of here.
Flinging the tent flaps out of his way, Lucky stumbled outside. He ran straight into someone and nearly fell if not for the pair of hands that quickly grasped his arms. Trembling from head to toe, he raised his head.
Reggie looked back at him. She wore one of her sparkly, sequined dresses, and her face was painted in dramatic makeup. She was very much alive. The blood rushed from Lucky’s head so fast that, for a second, he worried he would faint. Instead, he sank to his knees.
“Hey, you all right?”
Regina crouched beside him. He felt her lay a hand on his cheek and swipe her thumb across his skin. She wrinkled her nose.
“I don’t know where Atlas got this fake blood, but it is a beast to get out of fabric. Moon will blow a gasket if this stains your costume.”
Horrified, he glanced down at his shirt. The material was sprayed with Reggie’s blood. Tears spilled from his eyes as he stared at her. She pulled her hand away from him, looking uncomfortable.
He continued staring while his brain struggled to comprehend what had happened. Just moments ago, he had killed Regina. He shot her in the face twice. Her blood was still on his clothes, on his skin. That should have been the end of his mission. Without Reggie, Kichirou would survive Agi’s fire and Suz’s scandal. He should have been able to go home now.
But where was home? If the future he came from no longer existed, then how could he go back there? It was a quandary that he had never pondered until now.
“It’s never going to end,” he realized.
There was no going home. He might have saved the show by killing Reggie, but that didn’t mean that time would stop hopping and skipping. Saving Kichirou wasn’t the one-time deal that he had always naively assumed it was.
A coldness—something like dread mixed with defeat—crept over his body. First it touched his fingers and toes, then it crawled up his spine. Lastly, the cold sank into his chest, leaving him empty inside.
Reggie leaned away from him and rubbed the back of her neck.
“Um, listen … When you’re a kid, everything feels like it’s either never going to end or like it’s impossibly far away. The good news is that, once you reach a certain age, life starts to move faster. Those things that seemed so far away arrive in no time, and those phases you thought would never end eventually do. If you’re patient, everything passes.”
“Everything passes,” he repeated. “Because life moves forward.”
Life moved forward for everyone except for Lucky. To continue saving the Kichirou Show, he would have to kill Reggie over and over and over…
Reggie offered him a strained smile. “Exactly.”
More tears wet his eyelashes. If she knew what he had just done—what he would continue to do to her—she wouldn’t be trying to console him.
“Lucky, do you want me to find Atlas for you?”
He shook his head and attempted to smile back at her. “No, I’m okay. I’m just tired. Really, really tired.”
He got to his feet and stepped around her. Lucky wasn’t going to find Atlas or going somewhere to rest. He was going to Francisco’s RV so he could wash Reggie’s blood out of his shirt.
Oh, my... became a bit nihilistic there. Poor Lucky.