The Magpye: Circus (6 page)

The city needs the circus.
That's what they all believed. That's why they thought they were
safe, why no one ever came looking for trouble. But they were
wrong. One day, trouble did come to the circus.

It had been a night like any
other. The last of the audience had drifted away, the lights from
their cars lost in the ever present toxic glow of the distant city,
their laughter no longer echoing. Props and equipment were checked
and put away, money was counted and divided. Exhausted, the circus
folk headed to their caravans for a few precious hours of sleep
before another early start and day of preparation. Able had
finished his work and was heading back to the caravan that he
shared his with mother, hopeful for some hot food before bed, when
he heard it.

A gunshot.

Gunshots were not uncommon, of
course. Although he would never admit it, Malcolm practised from
time to time, and some of the other men hunted for rabbits and the
like. Circus life was tough life. Meat was meat, and meat was for
the pot. That's what Able's mother had said. Another memory,
another fragment. That was the curse of being the Magpye. All these
ghosts, all these memories; he could remember his mother's thoughts
on meat and a hundred other trivial things but not, for even a
moment, her face or her laugh or the feel of her hand in his as a
small boy. The dead were so much flotsam, drifting in the foam,
ruined by the river. Face down his mother's corpse rushed by,
leaving only thoughts of fire. And gunshots.

The gunshot had been unlike any
he had heard in the circus before. Too low and loud to one of
Malcolm's trick pistols, but not one of the hunters' shotguns
either. Able's body had tensed the moment he had heard it. A
gunshot, in the circus. A stranger with a gun.

He'd run towards the sound,
nimbly avoiding boxes, hopping over ropes. His mind held a perfect
map of the circus, every last inch of it. He could run through it
blind-folded. He had, from time to time. In the dead dark of the
circus he stopped, and listened to the night air. Waited. A second
gunshot came soon enough. Then another. Then another. And soon the
whole circus was full of gunshots and screaming.

He remembered Dorothy, in his
nightdress, shotgun cradled in his huge arm, calling out. Dorothy
wasn't afraid of anyone. He remembered Magda screaming, looking for
her husband, already lost. He remembered a clown, nameless to him
now, as the first person he had seen die. A clown, half in his
make-up and half out, clutching his stomach, trying to stop his
intestines from spilling out into his wide-waisted clown's
trousers. He'd fallen at Able's feet, gasped his last onto the dewy
grass. More gunshots, more screaming.

Able remembered running back
towards his own caravan, looking for his mother. This wasn't some
kids come back looking for a little trouble, or some pickpocket who
thought the circus was fair game. This was something else,
something unreal. He remembered running into Malcolm, naked except
for his boxer shorts, boots, and a cowboy hat. He was smiling. "Got
three of them kid, three of them already." He hadn't see Malcolm
again after that until he was licking his blood off the side of a
burnt out caravan, months later, hoping that Malcolm's ghost was
wearing trousers.

He remembered the shapes the
shadows made as they leapt and danced around him. He remembered the
red light of fires and the growing heat. Fires all around him,
caravan after caravan going up. An explosion, on the other side of
the big top, and cheering. They had cheered, he had remembered
that. People running everywhere, so much screaming. More
gunshots.

Able remembered his mother's
caravan and his relief that it was still standing. He remembered
his mother, silhouetted in the doorway. No face, no smile, no eyes
for him to remember, just a blurry shape yelling at him to go to
Marv's old caravan. Marv had boarded it up when he'd left, put
three padlocks on the door. Able had a way in though, a trick panel
in the floor of the caravan that Marissa had shown him when they
were just kids. Marissa said her dad had told her it was part of
some old trick, a moveable trap door. Able's mother said Marv was
the type of person who always knew where the nearest door was. Able
had never understood what she'd meant. Just another thing his
mother said that he could remember, even though he couldn't
remember her face.

Things his mother had said ...
why had only the trivial and stupid ones stuck? He remembered
arguing. Arguing in the middle of a fire-fight, that was her
alright. He remembered another voice too. He couldn't call to mind
the words that were said, just the voice. Just the voice telling
him something that gave him a sick, empty feeling in his stomach
and that made him run, made him run oh so fast. He remembered being
angry, even in the middle of the chaos and the fire. He remembered
thinking that he didn't care now if the circus burnt to ashes
because the circus was nothing. The circus was a lie. Everything
was a lie.

Able remembered reaching the
caravan, scanning around for any sign of someone watching him. He
was alone, the attention of the strangers centred somewhere on the
other side of the big top. He remembered crawling along the ground,
unhooking the latch on the secret door. He remembered climbing up
into the cool, quiet silence of Marv's old caravan. Marv had left a
lot of his magic props behind, stacked up on every available
surface. Posters were on every cabinet door, all Marv's old
glories. Memories, all stacked and stored and pasted up on the
walls. Able wished he had a place like this now, a place full of
his own memories. But now, just like then, what would he do when he
got there?

He waited, listening to the
sounds outside, trying to peek out through the boards Marv had
fixed across the windows. Through the gaps, the circus was nothing
but fire and shadows, black silhouettes against the raging flames.
They were burning everything. Why hadn't they torched this caravan
too? More gunshots outside. How long had he hidden there, whilst
his friends were murdered? How many of them died wondering why
nobody came to help? Had his mother died, wondering if her son had
made it out? She was another one of which there was no trace, her
existence wiped away so cleanly that she hadn't even left a stain
for Able to find.

He remembered the trap door
opening behind him, remembered steeling himself. This was it, this
was the moment. And after that... nothing.

A shape, a figure. Man? Woman? Able didn't know. Whispers,
anger, secrets. Then the box, Marv's magic box. Tip it over, get
inside. “
We'll
be safe, trust me, we'll be safe.”.
Had Able said that? Had he? She? Gunshots. Bullets coming through
the walls, trails of firelight behind them in the darkness of the
magician's caravan. The figure falling, the magic box toppling
down. Trapped.

This was how Able Quirk died
and Magpye was born.

Cane King threw the phone
across his office and watched it smash against the far wall.

"Problem, Mr. King?" asked
Taylor, filling the silence whilst his boss calmed and restored the
polished veneer that so few saw crack, let alone fall away
completely. King ran a hand through his blonde hair, took another
deep breath.

"That was Victor Chase," King
eventually replied, his voice full of venom, sinuously twisting the
mob boss' name. "He says I owe him a warehouse. And some kids."

"I'll make some calls," replied
Taylor, reaching for his mobile phone. "Make sure the story gets
lost."

"I don't care about the media,
I
am
the
media," spat King. "Killing the story there doesn't end it,
not something as big as this. Vic Chase has got a big mouth, he'll
tell the other bosses. Cops will tell other cops. He burnt it to
the ground, Jack. People are going to notice and maybe people are
going to start to think that you can go up against me and get away
with it after all, that maybe they should pull on a mask and burn
something of mine down. It starts on the streets, Jack, not in the
papers."

"So, what about your plan?"

King sighed. "Exactly. My plan.
It's time to move that up a gear, don't you think?"

King strode out of the office, leaving Taylor behind. He
stalked down the corridor. The King family mansion had been
completely redecorated and remodelled to his exacting
specifications. Every heirloom and antique had been packaged,
indexed, and shipped to storage. Every portrait and photograph too.
There was nothing in the building, save the bricks and mortar, more
than a year old. It was a statement in modernity, homage to
progress. The King mansion had been dragged
,
kicking and
screaming
,
into the now. Except that the past
was still out there, hammering at the doors, clawing at the
windows. The past wouldn't leave Cane King alone.

King rapped hard on the door of
one of the many guest suites and waited.

"In my own damn house..." he
muttered, waiting impatiently to be admitted. Finally, with a soft
click, the door opened. Cane took a breath. Calling in the
specialist was one thing. Meeting her face to face, that was the
final threshold. Once he crossed it, he knew he could not return,
not entirely. She would have her price.

"Come in, Cane."

Cane pushed the door and walked
in, stopping short when he saw the corpses on the floor. Emaciated,
desiccated, they gave off no odour, their grey skin like paper over
their still bones. They looked impossibly ancient, little more than
husks, empty cocoons long abandoned by any life. They were dressed
smartly, and Cane knew that he recognised at least one of the
suits.

"My apologies for the mess, Mr.
Taylor was good enough to send me some of your men. They have left
me feeling quite invigorated."

Grace Faraway was standing in
front of a full length mirror, admiring her naked body. Her dark
skin was covered in tattoos, a trace work of strange symbols that
seemed to shift whenever Cane looked at them, as if they held
secrets they guarded jealously from him. Shorter than Cane, Grace's
lithe figure was somehow otherworldy, its proportions all slightly
off. She should have been beautiful, alluring, but there was an
inherent wrongness to her that Cane couldn't ignore. She turned to
face him, her nakedness masked by a swirling of tattoos.

"Put something on, witch," said
Cane flatly "And you owe me three men."

Cane had seen magic before. His father had been able to do
things, strange and magical things, and had told Cane stories about
his grandfather and his great
-
grandfather and the
things they had been able to do too. As a child, Cane had assumed
they were just parlour tricks and stories to send him off to sleep.
He hadn't believed it.

As he'd grown older though, the evidence was harder to
ignore. The King family were steeped in magic, in the occult, and
most of all in the dead. His father held s
é
ances,
entertained mystics and psychics of all flavours and denominations.
Cane had quickly learnt that these were no garden-variety
charlatans either. They were the real thing; powerful and terrible
and haunted by knowledge that was beyond other men. Some nights,
the house echoed to their screams. The King family were steeped in
magic and in the occult indeed, but most of all it was steeped in
the dead. In the mansion, there were endless rooms given over to
the dead. Kept as shrines, their former occupants' belongings were
left in place as if they might return at any moment. In every
hallway and on every staircase there were portraits, one King after
another, a bloodline that seemed almost endless, stretching away
from Cane into the dark past. He hated it. He felt belittled by it,
as if his every achievement was being measured against those of his
forebears, dead judges casting their verdict on him. That was why,
the first chance he had, he'd expunged every trace of them from the
house.

Grace, however, had been harder
to get rid of. She was family.

"A girl has to eat," Grace
replied, affecting a coy tone of voice as she shrugged on a gown.
"Your food here is so... flat. Lifeless."

She stalked across the room,
stepping over the desiccated corpses daintily, and sprawled onto
the bed.

"I don't have time for games,"
Cane said firmly. "You might have seduced my grandfather with these
games, but they won't work on me. I called you here to fix a
problem, nothing else."

Grace smiled. It was a
barracuda's smile, all sharp teeth and cunning. "And what makes you
think that it's my kind of problem?"

"Because the guy's a freaking ghost," said Cane scornfully,
hating the words even as they came from his mouth. "Because he does
things that no
-
one should be able
to do. And... because of Adam."

Grace laughed. Cane tried to
ignore that the mirrors in the room glazed with ice as she did so,
or that the hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck were
standing on end. Some part of him, some very old part of his brain
that understood what a predator was, the part that woke up in the
middle of the night sometimes, was telling him to run.

"Ah yes, your brother. Your
poor, dead, brother. Well, you're not the first King to think that
he could solve all of his problems by killing their brothers and
sisters."

"I don't want a history
lesson," said King.

Grace sat up on the bed. "But
that's what this is all about Cane, that's what you have to grasp.
This is bigger than you and Adam. What's happening here started
generations ago. You're just the next in line."