There's a whisper on the wind, one that caresses the shells of your ears and settles like lead in your gut, about the old circus stationed on the outskirts of town.

It's a dilapidated old thing by now. Has been for a long while. Bound off by construction tape that looks more like a suggestion than a believable once-upon-a-time restriction. The talk of the town when your own parents were your age, now nothing but an urban legend that defines the underbrush and idle gossip of your mysterious little town of Yellow Wood.

You can't sleep without dreams that swirl in your eyes like a Da Vinci painting long after you've awoken—dreams of flashing lights, maroon-and-cream tents and black-and-white warping tiles, of acrobats screeching on unicycles and the unmistakable presence of stale popcorn and gooey cotton candy that miraculously stays on your tongue. Cloying at the kiss of your throat like cough syrup. Every factor plagued your thoughts and halted your steps.

And it seems your time has run up. They've grown impatient with you, and they won't stand to wait any longer.

You wake up with a jolt, the gleeful, sadistic cackles of a piero rockstar, Connor Bedard- that was a new addition to the nightmares - echoing hauntingly in your ears and rattling your brain, and heart, as you shoot upright in bed.

Trying to catch your breath, you barely have a moment to do so when the blaring of your alarm rings across the room just a millisecond later. You jolt again.

And, of course, because life is clearly trying to shape your survival instincts to something beyond superhuman–BOOM!

Thunder. Sheets of rain chase seconds later. You can already see the gloom and doom peeking through the curtains of your bedroom window. Undeniably autumn.

Heart in your throat and scrubbing tears from your eyes, you sit there for a moment and attempt to collect yourself. Deep breath in... One, two, three... In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight. Rinse and repeat. Your body repeats the breathing module on autopilot and leaves your frontal lobe to do the rest, regardless of how useless it seems after so long now:

They're just nightmares...

They can't hurt you...

He's not real.

Not real, not real, not real!

A moment later, right when you believe you've got a handle on your sanity and you're all caught up with your freshly awoken jitters—ping! Text notification.

You peer down at your phone screen tucked next to your pillow as it illuminates in the dim lighting of your bedroom, still bundled up protectively in your blankets like the device might grow arms and hands and thumbs to sufficiently throttle you with, but then you get a good look at the screen.

A warmth blooms in your chest—one that's welcome. Familiar. Nearly douses out the cold drip of fear and suffocating toxins that have seemed to have amassed a semi-permanent place between your lungs like some sort of symbiote within the past several weeks.

But just as that comfort set in, it was like you saw a reflection in your phone behind you. The reflection of the Piero Rockstar of the circus... Connor Bedard.