All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (44 page)

My eyes darted left
and right, watching, and it seemed every time I looked right, I saw
movement in my peripheral vision to the left. When I looked left,
movement on my right. Nothing jumped me, and by the time I made it
to the end of the canvas alley, all the muscles in my body felt like
some demonic boy scout had removed them, used them to practice for
his knot-tying badge, then replaced them.

The straw-strewn
ground continued a couple of yards beyond the end of the tents,
carrying on into blackness. And I don’t mean it was dark:
there was nothing. Like the artist drawing the scene ran out of ink
or time and left the rest of the page a colorless blank. I crept to
the edge and considered extending a toe out into the dark like a
swimmer testing the temperature of the ocean, but decided against
it. At the beach, you could pull your toe out if it was too cold—I
wasn’t so sure I could retrieve my toe if the void wasn’t
to my liking.

I stutter-stepped
my way crab-wise along the edge, ducking under ropes disappearing
into the dark which remained taut despite ending. When I reached the
front corner, I peered around while trying to keep the majority of
myself hidden behind the canvas pavilion. A broad, brightly lit
avenue stretched between the tents on one side and the edge of a
forest of trees taller than any I’d ever seen on the other.
Cages lined the boulevard at regular intervals, exactly the type of
enclosures you’d expect to see at a traveling zoo: gray metal
bars ran vertically between wood fascias painted in one-time bright
reds and golds now faded to dull pink and yellow.

The nearest cage
held an animal I’d have to compare to an elephant, only
bigger. It looked sort of like an elephant—wrinkled gray skin,
stump-like legs, a writhing trunk—but the similarities weren’t
as similar as they appeared at first glance. The wrinkled skin
looked wet, slimy, the way a snake’s looked. The six thick,
stumpy legs each ended with a huge hand like the foot of an
orangutan. The writhing trunk protruded off the beast’s
forehead, three tiny, bloodshot eyes winking at me beneath it. It
also had tusks: two great, curved, black tusks set atop its head.

It appeared to
ponder me, then circled away, its attention drawn somewhere else. As
its other end faced me, it lifted its tail, loosened a sphincter
large enough to swallow a compact car, and proved beyond doubt this
beast created the mound of dung I nearly landed in. I turned my head
away in disgust.

Imagine cleaning
that off the bottom of your shoe.

†‡†

The scene on the
tapestry neither moved nor changed. The embroidered rendition of the
mythological Icarus hung suspended in the blue sky, the wings
strapped to him with a leather harness falling to pieces as the
warmth of the sun melted the feathers composing them.

Trevor stared,
waiting for the man to fall to his death or the scene to shift
again, but neither happened. The man floated in endless free fall,
head thrown back, his face hidden from Trevor, but he knew it was
his father’s face. He hugged his knees tighter to his chest,
chewed on the inside edge of his bottom lip. What happened if the
fall ended?

Is this
happening? Can I save him?

Time the teen no
longer felt capable of measuring passed and the man continued his
fall. Trevor stared and, after a while, didn’t know why he
did, couldn’t remember why he found it important. His vision
blurred, his eyes hurt, and he forgot who was falling. Forgot why he
was in the room, where the room was.

When the woman
interrupted his stare, he no longer recognized the word she spoke.

“
Trevor?”

He re-aimed his
head toward her with great effort, as though a sand bag sat atop his
shoulders rather than his head. He gazed at her blond hair, golden
eyes, and recognition flickered somewhere at the back of his mind
before the urge to return his gaze to the tapestry snuffed it out.

She put her arms
around him, pressed herself against him, and her touch ran a shock
through his shoulders, into his chest—a huge, living joy
buzzer pressed uncomfortably to his entire body. When she released
him and held him by the shoulders at arms’ length, the
vibration subsided to a tolerable level and he began to breathe
again.

“
Are
you alright?”

The words made
their way into his ears where he heard them but didn’t
comprehend. He stared back at her, his eyes open so long by then he
no longer felt able to blink for fear his eyelids would be sandpaper
scraping across his corneas.

The woman said
something else he didn’t understand and stood. His eyes didn’t
move, only stared at the same level, stared at her midsection now.
Dirt streaked her shirt, and blood. A missing button left a gap in
her blouse and he saw the pale flesh of her belly.

“
Trevor.”

The word again. It
echoed in his head, bounced around his brain looking for a place to
take hold long enough for him to recognize it. It circled like a
marble dropped into a sink and quickly met the same fate: it
disappeared. He swiveled his heavy head and caught another glimpse
of the tapestry before the woman pulled him to his feet, jerking his
gaze away. The falling man had landed, but not in a pile of broken
bones and twisted limbs. Instead of a shattered body lying on the
ground, he saw the man standing, a cage at his back.

And then the woman
put her arm around him again, the sensation of her touch pulsing his
teeth like he’d bitten down on a chunk of aluminum foil, and
pulled him away.

†‡†

Poe guided Trevor
away from the chair and toward the door on the far side of the room,
each step a struggle to keep him headed in the right direction as he
sought to look over his shoulder at the wall hanging.

“
Come
on,” she coaxed. “We have to get out of here.”

She fought to keep
her tone even, confident, though she in no way felt either. The
shack where she died, the man on the tracks, Icarus’ birth,
and now this.

“
Where
are you?” she whispered to the teen. He acted like he didn’t
hear her. “Where did you go?”

She pushed him
toward the door, wishing he’d snap out of it, silently making
deals with God in her head for him to be alright.

But He can’t
hear me down here.

Fighting to keep
her throat from closing with emotion, she reached her hand out and
twisted the ornate door knob. As her fingers grasped it, she
realized it was cast in the shape of a human head, mouth open, teeth
bared in an expression of agony. She forced herself to work the knob
instead of recoiling.

The door swung open
and she pushed Trevor through in front of her, looking back at the
tapestry which held him so enthralled as she kept herself between
him and it.

It remained blank,
a sheet of black velvet shimmering against the wall, wavering,
rippling like waves upon a lake.

She closed the
door.

Trevor pulled
himself away and moved a step sending a trill of panic through the
guardian angel. She pivoted to collect him before he got away again
and quickly saw there was no danger of that happening; they’d
emerged from the room into a cage.

The air smelled
sweetly of the fresh-cut hay lining the floor at their feet. The red
paint on the ceiling above their heads flaked, weathered wood
showing through. She peered through the bars at a forest of huge
trees, their bows shivering in an unfelt wind.

No birds sang. No
crickets chirruped.

She pivoted to peer
through the bars on the other side of the cage and saw a line of
canvas tents which looked as though they’d been in use since
long before the inside of the cage received its most recent paint
job. But her gaze held on them only briefly as the man standing near
the bars grabbed her attention.

Icarus Fell stared
at them through the rusted bars.

†‡†

I took a couple of
steps toward the elephant-thing’s cage, carefully staying out
of range of the trunk-or-whatever-it-was growing out of its
forehead. Since things aren’t always as they seem in Hell, it
might have been the thing’s dick, for all I knew.

It looked at me
again, the three beady eyes winking independently of one another.
Eyes fixed on the beast, I grapevined by the cage like in an
aerobics class so I didn’t have to turn away, and nearly
tripped over a rope running from tent-edge to wooden stake. When I
glanced away to see what booby trap almost got me, the creature made
its move.

It reared up and
stuck two of its stumpy legs between the bars, the long, ape-like
fingers flexing and unflexing, grasping for me. The black tusks
banged against the bars as it sent its trunk-thing lashing at me. I
was out of its range, but fell back a couple of steps in surprise,
heart pounding. With the elephant-thing upright, I gained
confirmation that the thing on its head was indeed a trunk and not
its trouser snake.

“
Wow.
You are a big boy, aren’t you?”

I smiled a little
and tried to return my breathing to normal as its long fingers
groped empty air six feet from me. Its waving hands and trunk wafted
air against my face and with it came the smell of its fresh load of
dung. The odor reminded me again of the giant pile at the end of my
fall.

The
pile
outside
the
cage.

If it got out
before, it could get out again.

I tittered
nervously and side-stepped away.

“
It’s
okay, boy. I won’t hurt you.”

If the thing could
understand my words, I’m sure it would have laughed. What
could a measly little thing like me do to hurt the likes of him?
Nothing. If it got free I’d be crushed, pulled to pieces and,
if Hell is as bad as it seems, raped by the ridiculous appendage
between its legs.

Time to go.

I stepped over a
rope and the creature stopped flailing its arms, the fingers
clenching into fists. I held up a hand and wiggled my own fingers at
it, waving bye-bye, and the thing took the opportunity to flick its
trunk at me. A glob of the shiny mucous-like shit covering its skin
in a sheen flew off and struck me in the cheek.

I recoiled, wiped
the substance off with the sleeve of my shirt, and gagged at the
back of my throat.

Great, hit with
elephant snot.

When I looked up at
it again after settling my epiglottis, I swear elephant-thing smiled
at me. I shot it the bird, showed it my back and walked away.

The next two cages
were smaller and empty of strange animals or straw on the floor. The
fourth cage was the smallest yet, perhaps big enough for a
medium-sized dog, but too small for the human skeleton jammed into
it, though I’d have put money it wasn’t a pile of bones
when the jamming began.

The
next cage—a little bigger than the last—housed a
golden-furred monkey with big, lovable eyes like they’d
feature in an issue of
National
Geographic
.
The sharp-looking teeth protruding from its mouth and the way it
twitched like a fish tossed on the wharf might have disqualified it
from cover model status and prompted me to make a wide berth around
it. The next cage stood empty, the one after occupied by a large
parrot with a vaguely human face. It regarded me with a perfunctory
look for about fifteen seconds, then began plunging its scimitar
beak into its side and pulling out green and red feathers by the
mouthful.

I walked past the
next few cages without looking closely at their contents, but some I
couldn’t help noticing: a horse walking on two legs; the top
half of a man using his fingernails to drag himself across the floor
of the cage toward his bottom half standing in the far corner, foot
tapping; a giraffe with the markings of a zebra and the body of a
dog; a man with no arms and no legs sat upon by a grotesquely obese
woman with stout horns atop her head, the woman rocking back and
forth, moaning with pleasure as the man shrieked.