Monstrous Affections (32 page)

“From the Greek stories,” said Clarissa.

“It was a theme,” said Clayton. “The Cyclops didn’t speak much.
But the words he did speak commanded respect. He seemed to speak
the things in a man’s soul. The things that did not wish speaking.
Perhaps — perhaps he did what Twillicker’s Texan host said he did:
drank in the souls of men and women through his great eye, and
spat up truth. For is it not true that the Cyclops were the sons of
Gods?”

“The sea god Poseidon,” said James dryly.

“You mock,” said Clayton. “But you shouldn’t, because you’ve
seen him.”

James couldn’t argue with that.

“The talk continued off and on,” said Clayton. “Sometimes it
would be just a few words a day. Words we could understand. Words
in strange tongues. All mixed up. It was a kind of parroting. After
a time, the talk became incessant. He talked as the wranglers tore
down his cage, roped his wrists and led him to his rail car. It went
on even after he was chained in, we all boarded, and the train was
underway. Talked and talked and talked through the night, louder
even than the engine whistle sometimes — softer than a whisper in
your ear at others. Far into the next night, and into the mountains —
the giant’s voice lived in our skulls. That can be the only thing that
drove Twillicker to do what he finally did.”

James shivered as the wind shifted over the circus shanty town.
In the distance, he heard a rumbling sound of car engines. “And
what,” he said, goose flesh rising on his arms, “did Mister Twillicker
finally do?”

“Unbound him,” said Clayton. “They found Twillicker’s body
near to the Cyclops’s car after the wreck. The giant killed him, we
can only think — after Twillicker clicked the locks with the key we
found on ’im. Perhaps the Cyclops told him something he could not
ignore. Or perhaps — ”

“ — perhaps the temptation to take a look was too strong to
resist,” said James quietly.

“Split up the middle was he, into Twillickers two,” said Clarissa
helpfully. “One good, one wicked — and — ”

She stopped. Rubbed her arms. Looked back to the road.

“What’s wrong, deary?” said Clayton.

“Wicked,” she said, very quietly, as the first black-draped truck
crested the hill and stopped, to let its load of bat-bearing men out to
the circus’s hobo town.

“We should run.”

“
You are all trespassing. By the authority of the Chamblay Sheriff ’s Office
and the owners of the North Brothers Lumber Company — on whose
property you are squatting — I’m placing all of you under arrest
.”

The speaker was a thick-set man with short bristly white hair and
thick brown sideburns who stood on the hood of the second truck
in. He wore a suit jacket and black wool pants, tucked into rubber
boots that came up near his knee. He held a long double-barrelled
shotgun propped against his hip. Maybe two dozen men carrying
baseball bats and wearing dark suit jackets surrounded him.

“
Don’t make trouble for yourselves.
” The man lowered the
megaphone and motioned down the slope with the barrel of his
shotgun. His men started to move.

James was already ankle deep in the river. Clayton and Clarissa,
and a crowd of others with the circus were with him.

“Who the hell is that?”

“Pinkertons,” said Clayton, huffing as he sloshed. “That one was
here day before yesterday. There was trouble with a couple of the
roustabouts.”

Pinkertons. James shuddered. This wasn’t the first time he’d
heard of the detective agency; when he was a boy, a gang of Pinkerton
men ran herd on the men who worked the lumber mill. His father’s
most prominent scar, a puckered pink thing that extended along his
forehead up past his hairline, dated back to the first time Pinkertons
came to Chamblay.

Dating to a night . . .

When the bedsprings screamed, and . . .

. . . Jimmy tasted the sawdust in his mouth . . .

There was no doubt about it. James’s feelings about Pinkertons
were . . . complicated.

The Pinkerton men moved through the camp like armed locusts.
They knocked down tents and sent pots of hot water flying and
splashing into cook-fires. Three of them descended on a dark-chinned roustabout and pummelled him to the ground. Two were
studying James’s coupe, parked a dozen yards up-slope. Another
two chased down a pair of dwarfs straggling behind the exodus to
the creek, while five more waded into the waters after the fleeing
mass of circus folk. At the top of the slope, their captain stuck a
cigarette in his mouth as he watched it all unfold.

“Get away from my car!” shouted James.

“Christ,” said Clayton, a dozen steps ahead by now. “Hurry, boy.
He’ll crack your skull! Run!”

James was about to turn and do just that, when the shadow
passed briefly over their head.

The Pinkerton captain looked up. He dropped his cigarette, still
unlit. The boulder crashed down in the middle of his truck — sending
glass and metal flying through the air. The Pinkerton men who were
following them turned and gaped at the sight.

Clarissa screamed then.

“Oh, Lord!” shouted Clayton, pointing at the opposite bank.
James looked, and froze, creek water lapping icily at his ankles.

The Cyclops stood there, a bronzed giant in the sunlight. He
raised an arm to shield himself against the flames, then waded into
the creek and bent down and reached into the water.

James stood transfixed as the Cyclops’s muscles strained to
yank a huge, river-rounded rock from the creek bed. Lids the size
of window covers crinkled over his single eye and his sharp teeth
bared in the sunlight as he hefted the rock to shoulder height. James
swallowed and gasped as the beast straightened, the muscles rippled
down his abdomen.

“What’re you staring at? Come on, boy!” Clayton yanked James’s
arm and hauled him stumbling downstream. Behind them, there
was a gout of water high as a geyser as the rock crashed in the path of
the five detectives who’d followed them. James ran, as best he could,
through the fast-moving shallows of the Chamblay Creek. He didn’t
look back when the terrifying roar sounded out across the valley;
kept moving when he heard the two gunshots, and the screaming.
He finally stopped with the rest of them, when they reached a small
rapids in the creek.

Clayton helped Clarissa onto a low, spray-soaked shelf of rock
that split the creek. James hauled himself up, and for the first time
looked back.

The circus camp was blocked now by a low rise of trees. A black
plume of smoke rose above them and into the sky. There was another
scream — distant and strangled — and then Clarissa pointed and
cried out: “Look!”

A man was flying — his legs and arms wheeling as if for purchase
on the air. He must have been a hundred feet up, before he started
falling again. There came another roar. Clarissa covered her ears.
Clayton shut his eyes against the tears. The others who were lucky
enough to make it to the creek cowered in terror.

And as for James —

James Thorne found his hand creeping to the belt of his trousers.
He pulled it away, and ran it through his hair.

“My God,” he said unconvincingly. “The horror.”

The camp was ruined when they returned, and the Cyclops was
gone. But he’d left his mark. People were down everywhere: strong
men and acrobats and clowns and roustabouts, and the hard men
from the Pinkertons. Some must have been dead, because it smelled
like barbecue. The beast had marked his exit with a gateway of
smashed and broken trees. Clayton bent down onto his knees and
clenched his good fist. Clarissa knelt beside him. The two of them
wept softly.

James stepped back from them: surveyed the place. It was a
terrifying mess. Was this what the undertaker Simmons had meant
when he said the circus folk wouldn’t be here for long? Had he heard
tell that the North Brothers had gone and hired Pinkertons to clear
out the town? James felt a little sick: if he’d been more on the ball,
he might have been able to muster a warning, rather than waste
these people’s time telling him tales of the Cyclops.

The lame dwarf who’d kicked his car tire hobbled past, and
pausing, glared up at him.

“Ain’t you the movie pirate?” he said.

“Captain Kip Blackwell,” said James. “That’s right.”

“Well why don’t you get your fat piratey arse moving and take
care of that beast? Make ’im walk the fuckin’ plank! ’Bout time
someone did.”

“I’m not a real pirate.” James held up his hands. “Look,” he said.
“Not even a sword.”

The dwarf bent down over one of the fallen detectives. “Well, fuck
my arse, if this ain’t your lucky day.” He stood up, holding a baseball
bat nearly as long as he was tall. He handed it to James. “Now you’ve
got a choice — you can use this one — ” the dwarf pointed to the bat
“ — or this one!” and James yelled as the dwarf swatted his groin.

“Ha! Unless you want to save it for the Oracle bitch, who — hey!”
The dwarf yelled, as Clayton grabbed him with his good arm and
lifted him off his feet.

“That’s enough,” said Clayton.

“Wotun! C’mon! Fuck you! Put me down!” The dwarf’s feet
pinwheeled in the air. James raised his eyebrows.

“Wotun?”

In one motion, Clayton set the dwarf on the ground and shrugged
at James. “Not much of a strongman now, I’m afraid. We’re all put in
our place. By that thing.”

James hefted the baseball bat. He looked to the crack in the
woods the Cyclops had left behind him. Back at Clayton O’Connor,
the former Wotun the Magnificent.

Clayton took off his bowler.

“You want company?” he said.

James shook his head. “No.”

“I can tell what you mean to do,” he said. “Are you certain you
dare to?”

James felt himself smile a little. “You have no idea what I mean
to do,” he said, and set off toward the edge of the trees — where the
Cyclops had marked his path.

As he tromped through the woods, James thought about his last day
on the set. The last scene he’d shot before they let him go. Two of the
Devil Pirates had tossed him into the Sarcophagus of Serpents —
where Captain Kip would spend the next episode, while Princess
Rebecca and the rest of the
Monkey
’s crew contrived his rescue and
James Thorne contrived to bury his old Dad.

“Jimmy!” Alice Shaw hurried to catch up to him, as he stalked
away from the plywood Sarcophagus left over from last year’s
King
of the Mummies
serial. He sighed and stopped.

“Alice,” he said.

She stopped in front of him, set her fists on the velvet britches
that were Princess Rebecca’s single nod to disguise. “I just wanted —
to offer my
condolences
.”

“Thank you.”

“Because we can all see how
torn up
you are. About your father’s
death.”

James frowned. “Well, it’s been a long time — ”

Alice stepped closer to him, took his hands in hers as though they
were sharing an intimacy. In a way, they were. “You know, Jimmy,”
she said, “you should really learn how to act.”

“Alice?”

“You’d fool more people.” Alice stepped back. “Why are you even
bothering to go?”

James crossed his arms. “To bury him,” he said.

“Something you wish you’d done long ago?”

He sighed. “If you like, Alice.”

She wagged a finger at him. “I know what you are, Jimmy Thorne,”
she said. “The only question is: what did your horrible old father do
to you to make you this way?”

James wondered if he’d ever feel the proper things about his
father’s death. He felt as though he were circling those things as
he walked — getting closer to the feelings of grief and loss and
everything else that went with facing a father’s death.

But the fact was, he wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking
about the Cyclops. And he wasn’t thinking about how he’d kill him,
either.

The path led him to the bank of the creek where it twisted around
a cropping of rock and tree. With a trembling, he knew where he
was:

The North Brothers Lumber Company’s sawmill.

The last time he’d seen it, the mill was up and running. The
whine of the saw blade would cut across the valley as teams of horses
hauled giant logs up the round-stoned creek-bank to the mill’s black
and hungry mouth. Inside, men would unhitch the logs and haul
them further along with complicated block and tackle. Nick Thorne
would be first among them, the muscles in his thick forearms dark
as mahogany, straining at the weight of the spruce and pine logs cut
down from the mountain slopes all around them.

Now the place was still as a tomb, its wooden walls and roof grey
as stone.

James swallowed. His hand was shaking as he set the baseball
bat down in the pine-needles beside him, and set out across the
creek shallows. The mill’s great black doors were open. Inside was
dark as the mouth of a cave.

The last time James had been inside the mill, the scent of pinesap
was overpowering. Pinesap and machine oil and a bit of fear sweat.

Now, it smelled like a slaughterhouse.

At first, James was afraid the Cyclops had brought humans
here — some of those folk Mr. Simmons had said had gone missing.
But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that wasn’t so. The
smell was from something else. Animal carcasses hung from chains
wrapped around the rafters. He first passed a couple of shapes like
big cats, their skins torn off as they hung maw-down to the sawdust-covered ground; something that might have been a boy, but James
gathered to be a monkey carcass, hanging by a single, hand-shaped
foot; and, what was left of the elephant. The bloody trunk brushed
James’s shoulder as he passed underneath and a cathedral of ribs
hung over his head. A cloud of flies that had been feeding there
followed James for just a few steps then abandoned him as he left
the Cyclops’s larder, and moved into the next chamber of the mill.