The Magpye: Circus (24 page)

"Come on, kid, let's get you
out of here."

"Marv
…" croaked Able.
"Who's the clown?"

Mikey Bumch hadn't been with
the circus long. He was still trying to secure a decent spot in the
clown routine and still trying to get someone, anyone, to listen to
his ideas for a new act. He knew it would take time, the circus was
a close family and even after working with the other clowns day and
night for nearly three months he still felt like an outsider, but
he couldn't shake the feeling that he was destined for something
great. He'd read about other circuses, other acts, where someone
with his talents could really flourish. He just needed a start, a
chance to do more than have shredded paper thrown down his trousers
and a custard pie in his face.

Mikey Bumch was the Boy Who
Couldn't Feel Pain.

All he needed was a shot.

Mikey got shot the night circus
burned and he died alone, face down in the grass. He didn't feel
the shot, of course. He was sitting by himself, trying new
variations on his clown make-up when the shots came through the
side of the tent and split him open. He heard the sound, saw a
pattern of light suddenly appear on the tent wall, but when the
crimson blossom started to spread across his stomach he still had
no idea what was wrong. Mikey remembered lifting his shirt and
seeing the rough row of ragged holes across his soft abdomen in the
mirror, remembered watching them open like angry mouths as he stood
up and the weight of his insides pressed against the torn and
shredded muscle. He remembered trying to pinch the holes closed
with this fingers, to hold his insides in, and watching the blood
spill out over his hands but still feeling nothing of it at all.
The first thing he did feel was cold. He'd never felt hot or cold
in his whole life, but he knew somehow, on some primal level, what
this cold meant.

Mikey remembered staggering out
from his tent, his shirt bunched up around his chest, his stupid
clown's trousers snagging with each step, his innards oozing
between his fingers like mince, and coming face to face with Able.
Able, wide eyed and frantic, twisting his head this way and that
with every gunshot, flames behind him throwing up twisted
shadows.

What was it he would have said,
if he'd had another moment?

"Don't worry Able, I can't feel
a thing."

"Who are you?" asked Able, "I
don't know your voice."

"My name's Mikey Bumch," replied the clown. "We've only met
once and I was busy dying then so
…"

"The clown, the clown from my
memories of that night," said Able. "You were new, right?"

"Yeah, that's me."

"I remember," said Able. "I'm
sorry for what happened to you."

"It don't matter," said the
dead clown. "I didn't feel a thing, other than cold."

"Someone told me that you
couldn't feel pain?" asked Able.

"Actually, I can't feel
anything. It's called 'congenital analgesia'. I've had it since the
day I was born."

Mikey's memories washed over
Able, painting a new picture like a watercolour being painted over
newsprint. Able saw Mikey as a child, at first abandoned, then
pushed and pulled between foster families. Broken bones, burns,
even chewing through his own tongue more than once. Not all of the
injuries were accidents, and Able closed his mind as best he could
to the darkest memories that Bumch had to offer. Memories of
footsteps in the night, of hands on the boy who couldn't feel,
sliding under sheets, dragging him from his bed. Memories of hands
all over him in the dark. Mikey Bumch had lived his whole life
disconnected from his body in a way that made Able's condition look
like nothing at all and all anyone had ever done was treat him like
a piece of exotic meat because of it.

"No one understood," Mikey said. "They knew what the
problem was, but they didn't know what it
meant
.".

Another memory painted itself
across the last. Mikey, standing naked in front of a mirror,
carefully checking every inch of his skin for blemishes, bruises,
or cuts.

"My body," explained Mikey, "Is
like a foreign thing to me. Like sitting in a car all day every
day, only talking to people through the windows, moving around
without ever feeling the ground under your feet. I can touch, a
little, but no pain. Never, ever any pain."

"Right now," said Able, "I'd
take a little of that." He hated himself for saying it, but it was
the truth. "My father sent you, didn't he?"

Mikey's ghost laughed. It was
the strangest sound Able had ever heard in his head. Perhaps
Mikey's sense of humour was as dead as his ability to feel
pain.

"No, he didn't," said the dead
clown's ghost. "It's been all I can do to stay away from him. I've
kept quiet, tried not to remember, tried to not to think. There
aren't many places to hide in your head, Able."

"Another prison... Mikey I'm sorry, I
…"

"Don't be," interrupted the
ghost. "Able, all I ever wanted to find was a family. A real
family. I thought I'd found one in the circus, and then it was
taken away. Being here, whatever this place is in your head? It's
the closest I've ever been to anyone, ever. I did find what I was
looking for, I just had to get killed to do it."

Able felt Mikey's mind pushing on the fringes of his. He'd
let Dorothy guide his hands before, let Malcolm pick up a gun, aim,
and pull the trigger. He'd let Magda walk across tightropes, had
Wally Wu fold him into impossible shapes but
this
… this was different.
This was deeper.

"You can't heal properly
because it hurts," said Mikey. "It hurts too much for your body to
do what it needs to do. But it won't hurt me. Nothing ever
has."

Able kept his mind closed, held
Mikey out for a moment longer.

"I can't
…" he said,
finding even thoughts hard to muster as another wave of pain ran
through his body. Somewhere, something popped inside him and he
felt blood, warm and new and far too thin, spilling out. "If I use
you… like …"

"You're not using me," said Mikey. "I'm using you. If you
die, then I die. If you die, we all die. You lost your family,
Able, but I found mine. They're
in here
."

For a moment, there was no
pain. There were also no voices. The other ghosts were listening,
they were always listening, but none of them spoke. Able wondered
if they knew Mikey any better now than they had done before, he had
really found in death what he had never found in life. Could The
Magpye bring peace like that, could it bring solace to the dead?
The dark creature, far below the surface of the calm waters of
memory seemed to stir uncomfortably at the idea.

Able had seen his father's memories, had seen the long
lineage of Kings who had considered themselves the masters of the
dead. He'd seen how, eating the flesh and blood of their fathers,
they had maintained a bloodline going back countless generations.
They had courted magicians, amassed occult power. Every generation
building on the memories and skills of those who had gone before,
and on the backs and bones of those they had sacrificed. The Kings
ruled. The Kings
used.

"I won't put it on you," said
Able calmly.

"You won't need to," said Mikey
Bumch. "I can take it."

And Able opened his mind.

"I won't rule the dead."

"Then serve us" said the ghosts
in unison, and Able was certain that he heard, just in that moment,
ghostly voices that were far more in number than anything he had in
his head.

Able's eyes snapped open. His
pain was gone. Underneath him he felt the cold metal floor of a van
and his nostrils filled with the smell of burning petrol. It was
dark outside, the familiar byway that led to the circus illuminated
by weak headlights.

"Where did you steal the van?"
asked Able.

Marv twisted around in his
seat. His eyes bulged as he looked at Able.

"Holy shit
…" he
whispered. "Back from the dead. Again."

Able looked down at himself.
His clothes were ruined but, underneath the rags and shreds of his
Magpye costume, there was only perfect milky white flesh. No
wounds, no bruises. No blood.

"He did it
…"
whispered Able.

"Who did?" asked Marv
suspiciously, his eyes back on the road as the creaking van whipped
around a tight bend.

"It doesn't matter," replied
Able. He tried to call Mikey's ghost forward, an instant reflex,
but another mind blocked his.

"This isn't over," said Adam
King.

"No," replied Able. "You're
damn right it isn't."

Cane woke up to find his bed
damp with blood and smeared tracks of grey-black brain matter. He
had the mother of all hangovers, and he gagged as he rolled over
into a squelching patch of something. A few nights ago, he'd woken
up in between supermodels. Now, he was waking up in a
nightmare.

He staggered across his
bedroom, dragging bedding behind him, and stumbled into the
en-suite bathroom. The harsh white light made him screw up his eyes
and he stepped blindly over to the large marble sink and its
mirror. He rolled his tongue around his dry mouth, feeling clods of
meat stuck between his teeth. His jaw ached as he gingerly rubbed a
hand across his face. He found a day's worth of stubble, maybe
more, and something sticky and dirty that stuck between his
fingers.

Cane opened his eyes and looked
at himself in the mirror. The lower half of his face was caked with
dried blood. It stained his teeth a filthy brown and flaked away as
he worked his aching jaw back and forth. Underneath it, of course,
was The Ink.

Ochre black against Cane's
tanned skin it moved slowly, languidly, like an eel gliding through
water. No shapes, no patterns, just simple broad and somehow
muscular strokes.

Cane sensed that The Ink was
sated, for now.

Shedding the soiled sheets and
bedding, Cane stepped into the shower. Twisting the controls on the
wall, he let the hot water cascade down and wash the blood and
brain from his face, hands, forearms, and chest. He picked the
strands of stringy flesh from between his teeth and flicked them
onto the floor of the shower, the small pool of water around his
feet running red.

Opening the door, he caught
sight of himself in the mirror again. The Ink traced its way across
every inch of him, moving faster now than before. It explored,
running along the edges of muscles, following the tracks of
arteries and veins. He let it paint its sigils and symbols on his
skin, feeling its power.

He felt like a new man.

Grabbing a thick towel from a
hook on the wall, he dried himself off crossing back across the
bedroom. Discarded on the floor, he found Patrick Keane's head.
Smashed open at the top, the contents had been scooped out and
consumed in last night's feeding frenzy. Brutalised, Keane's face
clung onto his skull by only a few tendons and strands of muscle,
looking more like a mask on a dummy than a dead man's face.

Cane kicked the head under the
bed, laughing to himself.

What a thing it was, after so
many years, to finally have the arcane power that was his by right.
After years of envy, living in Adam's shadow, and the denial that
had followed after his murder. Dragging the Kings into the 21st
century? Cane laughed at his own stupidity. If this was the power
that the magical legacy of the Kings had to offer, then it was time
to return them to the dark ages. Gleefully, Cane sought out the
other heads, tossing them in the air or kicking them across the
floor. Everything they had known, all their secrets, were now in
his head.

Or, they should have been.

Cane found himself staring into
the empty eye sockets of Victor Chase's skull, the second most
feared man in the city reduced to a bowl of bone and left-over
meat. There had been such secrets behind those eyes, in the swirls
and whorls and lobes of Chase's brain. Cane shook his head, trying
to recall everything that he had learnt, to bring the memories back
into sharp focus, but it was no use.

Like his own memories of the
night before, Chase's were becoming blurred and fogged, slipping
from his mind as easily as the blood and brain had washed from his
body.

Cane dropped Victor Chase's
skull and rushed back to the bathroom, fixing himself in the
mirror. He watched The Ink intently, looking for some sign. He
closed his eyes, tried to focus. Finally The Ink spoke to him.

Cane slammed his fist into the
mirror, shattering the glass.

"I understand," he said
quietly, the hot pain in his fist already being soothed by The
Ink.

"Problem, Boss?"

Cane King's eyes snapped open as he spun around to face
Jack Taylor. It only took him a second to return a smile to his
face. Jack Taylor didn't scare him anymore. Taylor
should
have been scared of him, but whatever else Jack Taylor
was, he never seemed to be afraid. Maybe it was another benefit of
his so-called clarity, thought Cane.

"No problem, Jack. No problem
at all. Just working out a little frustration."

"Looks like you had a party in
here last night," said Taylor.

"You know how it is," replied
Cane, knowing that Jack didn't have the faintest clue. At least, he
hoped he didn't. This was Jack Taylor after all; killing people and
eating their brains might just be what he did for fun. "Do you have
any news for me?"

"Not really, boss," lied
Taylor. "Pretty quiet night. A little fallout from the gangs, but
they'll drop into line. You're still the King, and every one of
those guys had it coming one way or another." Taylor wasn't about
to tell Cane about The Pit or what he'd seen there. Like any good
shark, he could sense blood in the water and, right now, Cane King
was bleeding out without even knowing it. Taylor didn't need his
much vaunted clarity to see that killing the four biggest bosses in
the city had more than destabilised things, it had lit a short fuse
under the whole city.