Hang Wire (33 page)

It is night. The darkness feels alive too, like the circus. There is no wind but it feels like the air is moving, something breathing in and out, in and out. There is pressure on his eardrums that follows the same rhythm. Like a heartbeat. The heartbeat of a sleeping monster.

There is someone standing behind him. He can sense his presence, although the person makes no sound. Highwire’s augmented senses are clouded by the sounds of the carnival and the weird pressure of the atmosphere, but he can feel the man there.

Highwire stands, turns, expecting there to be no one there once again. But this time there is. The man behind him is not alone. He smiles, his white eye shining with the lights of the carnival. Standing next to him is a woman, her naked body caked in black burned dirt, ash drifting off her like smoke.

He knows who she is. Her name is Alison. She is connected to him – to the body he wears, the man with the brown jacket, the man from the apartment, the man with the bruise healing above his eye.

But this
isn’t
her. It looks like her, is perfect in every detail, but it is not alive, not like the woman called Alison is alive. It is a copy, made from earth and pulled from the hot ground. A tool, a golem, nothing more.

Highwire listens for the voice in his head, but it is silent.

The carnival machines twitch and clank as Highwire steps toward the pair. Behind them stands the Ferris wheel, the largest part of the mechanical carnival. The wheel rotates this way and that, this way and that, a few degrees in each direction, no more.

The man with the shining white eye smiles. He wears a stovepipe hat. His black suit is old. The fingers of one hand he keeps in the fob pocket on the front of his waistcoat.

Highwire glances over his shoulder. The wooden soldiers have moved again, now arranged in a rank, their rifles raised and aimed. Behind, two soldiers in different uniforms – the officers – are at the carousel, frozen in conversation with the carved monkey perched atop the pipe organ.

The carnival twitches and turns, the organ wails, the lights flash, but the golem and the man in black do not move.

Highwire is fast, he knows this. Faster than the wooden soldiers, he thinks, although he doesn’t know how fast they really are with his back turned. The carnival can move, the machines creaking and clanking as they do, but they are large and heavy, animated by a stellar force centered in the monkey. Highwire can sense anger and rage, but while the machines
can
move they are not
built
to move.

The Ferris wheel stands above them all, slowly turning. It is high, thirty feet at least, a collection of pipes, struts and bare framework – not as elegant as the rest of the nineteenth century machines, more functional, but still vintage, still beautiful. From the top you could see the whole city, shining in the night.

From the top, Highwire could
jump
. Behind the wheel is a wall of trucks and trailers. Beyond that, the west side of the circus, the open fields of Golden Gate Park. Beyond that, the city. Escape would be easy. If he could move fast enough.

“You can’t leave, friend,” says the man with the white eye. “You were brought here. Brought to me.”

He takes his fingers from his pocket. Between them he holds a large coin, gold, heavy. The heartbeat sound in Highwire’s head gets stronger for a moment, and it feels like the ground beneath him is vibrating. Above all of this, the coin appears to crackle like electricity, although it is merely a gold coin being held between the fingers of the man with the white eye.

“You followed the light, didn’t you?” the man asks. “You followed it like I followed it.”

Highwire says nothing. The golem next to the man tilts its head, looking at Highwire. It is smiling, its eyes are wide and bright against its black-caked face.

“I’ve followed it a long time,” said the man. “It told me how to build the machines. Told me what it needed to grow and to spread. And then when others came and interfered, breaking the machine up, it showed me where the pieces were hidden. It shone a light for me, a light I followed, across the country, searching. And then when the machine was complete, it shone the light here. There’s something it wants here. Something deep underground. There’s something down there, friend. A power, sleeping since the planet was made by the hand of God himself.”

The man stops. He looks excited. He looks like he wants Highwire to tell him that he was right.

Highwire says nothing. Then he pushes off with his right foot against the soft dirt. He leaps over the man, over the golem, hits the dirt behind them, and sprints for the Ferris wheel.

The air is thick now with metallic grinding as the carnival jerks into life, every machine, ride, and attraction reacting to the movement. There are no gunshots, but Highwire glances over his shoulder and sees one of the wooden soldiers is calling to the officers while the others aim their rifles, some having dropped to one knee as they prepare to fire.

Highwire blinks. The officers are running from the carousel. The soldiers screw their eyes along their rifle sights.

Highwire blinks. Gunshots fill the air, smoke rising thick from the old fashioned rifles. The shots go wide, pinging off the Ferris wheel, sending sparks into the night. The wheel’s motor grinds, roaring like an injured beast. The carousel begins to spin, faster and faster, the moaning of the pipe organ increasing in pitch until it sounds like a siren. Underneath it all, the cacophony of the living circus, Highwire can hear a monkey laugh.

He jumps, catches a strut on one of the wheel’s spokes that holds the passenger baskets around the rim. He swings, spins around on the strut to get up speed and momentum; then he swings again to the next basket above. Highwire finds his rhythm, leaping up and up, climbing the wheel. The guns fire again, but the soldiers’ aim is poor. The bullets ricochet off the wheel, white-hot sparks flaring around him. Highwire is nearing the top of the wheel.

The wheel shakes, and shakes some more. Highwire squeezes his grip, his body bouncing against the framework. The carnival is angry and now the machine is trying to shake him off. The wheel turns, faster, but Highwire lets go of the passenger basket and catches a strut of the main superstructure. He begins to pull himself up. If he can stay in the center of the wheel’s frame, clear of the moving parts, he can get close enough to the top to swing himself over the other side, and then jump off onto the trucks.

Just a few more seconds, a few more feet. The wheel shakes and shakes. Any more and Highwire thinks it will shake itself apart.

He adjusts his grip, he counts, he jumps.

Something meets him in the air.

Something hard, cold, lit in brilliant neon strips and incandescent bulbs. It catches him, closes tightly around his legs. It pulls him back down and then swings out, and Highwire is suddenly upside down. Then it swings back, and Highwire connects with the side of the wheel. Neon tubes and bulbs shatter as his body is dragged through them, burning him, broken glass tearing into his skin.

Highwire struggles, but he is held in something huge and vice-like. He looks down, sees his legs trapped in a mangled framework. It is metal, struts and pipes, but also enameled metal sheeting, painted with stars. A fist, an arm, fashioned out of carnival parts.

The arm swings out again. Highwire sees the ground fly across his vision, the man and the golem surrounded by the wooden soldiers, the carousel spinning so fast that the animal rides around it are alive and moving, like he’s watching a zoetrope of alien creatures as they twist and turn and stamp in pain and fear.

The arm swings back. Highwire is slammed against the body of the Ferris wheel. His head hits the frame with enough force to shatter his skull, and the last thing Highwire remembers is that his name is Ted Kane.

— INTERLUDE —

MT. DIABLO, CALIFORNIA

The man walked out of the woods as slow as you like, one thumb hooked under his belt and his black jacket blowing in the evening breeze. He wasn’t smiling, not quite; the expression was rather a knowing smirk, a curl of the lip of someone stumbling upon something they were expecting to find, but perhaps not quite where they were looking. His black boots kicked up the dust at the edge of the woods before sliding silently onto the grass of the clearing, and as he walked toward the campfire, John watched, fear coursing through his body almost like a physical thing, like his heart was encased in a solid block of cold, dead metal.

“Can I help you, sir?” was all John managed. He sat in his camping chair in front of his tent, on the other side of the campfire, which crackled and sparked. It wasn’t really necessary, not on a warm Californian night like this, but he had felt the need to build it. And build it he had, and very well at that – the flames enveloped a pyramid of firewood, which stood nearly two feet high in a circle of stones John had picked up from around the edges of the campsite, within the boundary of the woods. The woods from which the stranger had come.

The man laughed, like he was surprised, and he held one hand up like he was about to swear an oath as he kept his slow pace forward. John gripped the arms of his camping chair, daring not to move just yet, but as the surprise of the man’s arrival faded he began to watch carefully, waiting for the right moment. There was a gun in the tent. The man in black looked dangerous, some kind of hobo who lived on the mountain maybe, in a crumpled suit that looked positively Victorian, like the battered stovepipe hat on his head.

If he could just, somehow, dive backward on the chair, roll around, reach the gun and–

“Oh, now, I’m disappointed, friend,” said the man. He stopped by the edge of the fire and put his hands on his hips. John shuddered as he saw the man had one gray eye, pale as newsprint. He wore a waistcoat under the black jacket but John didn’t notice the color. What he did notice was the shining silver something on the man’s hip, revealed as his hand brushed the edge of the jacket aside, quite deliberately. A gun, in a holster. “I come here in peace,” the man said, “and you’re already thinking of how you can get one-up on the situation.” He shook his head and tutted.

John licked his lips, his eyes on the holster. “What are you, some kinda cowboy?”

Even as the words escaped his throat, John regretted it. Now was not the time to be a smartass, even if it was just the nerves talking.

“You might be closer to the truth than you realize, friend,” said the man. He let the edge of the jacket fall back and then he sat on ground on the other side of the fire, folding his legs beneath him to sit cross-legged in a way that John – at least twenty years the man’s senior – thought he could remember being able to do a good long while ago, back when his hair was longer, the hem of his trousers wider.

John released his grip on the arm of the camping chair, which creaked in response. The other man raised an eyebrow and the knowing smile came back.

“You’re going to ask, friend,” said the man, “what I want. And at the very least to that question I can offer you God’s honest truth.”

John frowned at the man’s archaic speech. The man’s accent was rich, treacle-dipped, from somewhere in the Deep South, each word drawn out and savored like the first bite of a fine meal.

“The ranger said there was nobody else camping up here,” said John. “Said I was alone on the mountain. Not much call for camping on a Wednesday, I guess.”

The other man’s knowing smile returned and he tilted his head as the fire cracked, the sound as loud as a gunshot in the night. He lifted the hat from his head and placed it on the ground next to him.

“What makes you think you aren’t alone, friend?”

Psycho. The man was a fucking psycho, John thought, and this was it, the end. The weirdo obviously watched the gate down the mountain road, watched the comings and goings, and when he knew he had the park to himself he could come out and gut the lone camper he’d been stalking all afternoon. John shivered, closed his eyes.

“Oh, don’t be like that, friend,” said the man. John opened his eyes and the other man was looking at him, that pale gray eye practically shining in the firelight that bathed him in a moving yellow light. “I said I came in peace, and on that subject not a lie would pass my lips.”

They sat in silence for a minute or two. John wondered if maybe he could kick the fire over fast enough, then get to his car, a piece of shit Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, faux wood paneling and everything, that waited under the trees on the other side of his tent. Maybe he could. If the keys weren’t in the tent behind him.

John thought a moment. “Did you walk up here?” he asked. He’d arrived just before five, pulling into the park gate just as the ranger was driving back down the road to lock up. The ranger had let John in, pointed him in the direction of the best camping spot on this side of the mountain. Then, as John coaxed the Oldsmobile up the gravel incline, he’d closed and locked the park gates.

John hadn’t heard anything man-made all afternoon, not even the jet that had flown high above, its vapor trail catching fire in the setting sun as John had started to gather rocks for the campfire. The main road was a long way down the hill. If the stranger had walked up from the gate it would have been a heck of a hike. But if he was a hobo who lived on the mountain, why hadn’t the ranger said anything? The mountain was large but surely the parks service knew who should be there and who shouldn’t.

“My friend,” said the man, holding his hands out and closing his eyes, like a patient man instructing a slow student, “you are not asking the right questions.”

“You’re not from around here, are you? What is that, Kentucky? Alabama maybe?”

At this the man’s eyes flicked open and the smile returned. He dropped his hands, and his white teeth glowed orange in the firelight.

“Now, isn’t that the thing,” he said. “I’ve traveled far and wide over this here continent, and sometimes beyond, but nobody has ever asked where it is I call my home. I knew I was right to find you, friend.” He looked up into the cloudless sky, black and salt-scattered with the light of distant suns. “The stars are shining for me today.”