Hang Wire (30 page)

“Here goes nothing,” said Bob.

A warmth spread around him, and for a moment he remembered the sea and the rolling waves on the surface, and the creatures below that made their home in his domain and who were his friends.

He remembered the islands, and the people on them. He remembered their smiles at the ocean bounty he granted them; he remembered their reverence and their ecstasy as they worshipped the god of the sea.

He remembered the joy of the departed as he guided their souls from this world to the next.

He remembered the fear of those left behind. He remembered how some believed their god was an angry but just and all-knowing lord and master, and devoted themselves to death-worship and sacrifice in his name.

He remembered being Kanaloa.

He searched. And then he found her.

Found Benny.

Bob felt the warmth spread, hotter now, and he smiled and watched the dancing colors behind his closed eyelids as the life force ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed.

And then…

Something moving
.

Bob gasped. The rolling waves of warmth that swept out from his body and into Tangun evaporated in an instant, replaced by a deep chill. A cold Bob knew well. The cold of deep,
deep
water, the cold of the void, far below the surface, the deepest place, a narrow, black wound in the side of the planet.

And something moved within it. The colors vanished from Bob’s vision, replaced with a darkness that itself, somehow, impossibly, felt cold. A darkness that moved, shapes black on black on black. Angular and geometric forms, moving mechanically, rhythmically, pulsing like a heartbeat, growling like an animal.

Something moving. Eyes in the dark. Hands reaching up through burnt earth, blackened, carbonized: golems born of the ground itself, the thing’s eyes and ears and hands, its minions crawling over the Earth. Like 1906. Like 1989.

Like today.

The visions stopped, the sounds ceased, and Bob felt himself falling. He cried out in surprise and opened his eyes just as he felt his face hit the rooftop. And then Bob felt two things he had never felt before.

Pain: cold and deep, primal, angry, electric.

Fear: black and limitless, as dark as space. There was something there, in the darkness. Something else, not sleeping beneath the city but flying, arcing through space on a trail of fire. Intelligent, shining, yet still primal, animalistic. The power Zanaar had spoken of in the warehouse.

The Cold Dark.

Bob didn’t know what it was. It had come from elsewhere, but was now in the city, its power growing. It was entangled with The Thing Beneath, the two feeding off each other, a symbiotic relationship.

Then it was gone and Bob was falling again.

Bob pushed himself up from the roof. He felt different, energized… but the fear was still there, clutching at his heart.

He closed his eyes, rolled his neck, focused on calming himself. Then he looked up. Standing before him was Tangun the Founder, his gold armor shining bright. The mask was creased with laughter.

“Tangun?”

“Dude, this is sick!” came the voice from behind the mask.

“Benny?”

“Tangun is here too,” said Benny. Bob could see Benny’s face behind the mask. She was looking around the inside of the mask, her face split into a wide grin. “Dude, seriously, this is radical. I’m like Iron Man, medieval style!”

This wasn’t right. Tangun and his host weren’t supposed to co-habit the same body.

“Kanaloa, I am healed. For this I give thanks.”

Bob blinked. It was Tangun’s voice – deeper, masculine, the voice of a commanding king.

“Ah, yeah,” said Benny. “OK, that was weird.”

It had worked then. Bob – Kanaloa – was holding Benny’s soul in place. He just hoped it would be enough to keep Tangun in the world without doing permanent damage to Benny or her soul.

Bob dragged himself to his feet. “Tangun, I’ve seen it,” he said. “The Cold Dark. We’re in trouble.”

“I too sense the danger,” said Tangun. He flexed his gauntlets and then delicately placed his hands on his hips, his mask now one of determined, directed anger. “But my question is, brother – did
it
see
you
?”

Bob stared at the golden mask of the warrior-god, and nodded. “It did,” he said.

“Then the fight is on,” said Tangun. “Our quarry moves.”

Bob looked around the rooftop, then realized Tangun wasn’t talking about anything he could actually see. The warrior-god was looking out into the city with other senses.

“Where?” asked Bob.

Tangun titled his head. “He has the woman with him still.”

“Alison?”

“She lives.”

Bob sighed in relief.

“For now,” said Tangun. “I fear she may be the killer’s final victim.”

“Final?”

The helmet tilted to the other side. “They move towards the circus. There the powers intersect.”

Bob nodded as he put the pieces together. “The Magical Zanaar. He’s from the circus – like Ted’s alter ego. Nezha had been trying to show us, all along.” He turned and jogged to the edge of the warehouse roof. The circus was in Golden Gate Park, due west.

“Wait,” said Tangun, his voice booming. Bob turned around.

“Come on,” he said.

“We must stop them before they reach the circus, to save the woman.”

Bob moved back. Tangun stood infuriatingly still. Bob tapped the back of his hand against the warrior’s breastplate, willing him to action. At the contact, Tangun jerked on his feet, and when he spoke again it was with Benny’s voice.

“Follow me,” she said, and she ran for the roof’s edge.

— XXXIV —

A voice calls his name, and Highwire opens his eyes.

It is dark. He lies, waiting, listening. The sounds are different. He tunes in, focuses his senses. Quiet streets outside, still in the city. Late. No,
early
. Very early.

In a few seconds his eyes adjust to the dark and he can see the room he is in. It is a bedroom, familiar. The blinds have been pulled down but streetlight leaks in between the horizontal slats.

Something stirs in his mind. He looks around for the person who called out to him, but the bedroom is empty and there are no sounds from beyond the door. Perhaps he imagined it.

He has been in this apartment before. This is the apartment of the man in the brown jacket, the man with brown hair and the bruise healing over his left eyebrow.

The voice again. A whisper over his shoulder, although he is still lying on the bed.

Ted. This is Ted’s apartment.
His
apartment. He is that man. He is Ted. He knows the voice was speaking to him, to Highwire, the acrobat.

He lies in the dark and waits and listens. Then he feels it.

Fire, in the sky. A bright light that shines, shines. Cold power.

And something… moving, beneath the city, channeling power, siphoning it downward. Mindless, crawling, being fed by death, by blood, by murder.

Canvas. The Big Top. The tight rope.

Yes
,
Ted
, whispers the voice in his head.
There the nexus lies.

He blinks and waits, but the voice has gone.

The
nexus.
It is at the circus, he can feel it now. The Thing Beneath sleeps under the entire city, its very being embedded in the tectonic plate. The circus, like the city, is right on top, but the circus is the channel. The circus is
feeding
it.

And…

Highwire sits up, rubs his temples. Cold power and a vision of infinite dark.

“Who are you?” he asks the empty room, but there is no reply. Was the voice even real?

He moves on the bed and his head thumps,
one-two
, in time with his heart. He looks around. He doesn’t remember getting to the apartment – to
his
apartment – but then he doesn’t remember a lot of things.

But–

–
he
knows
about the nexus. And about–

–
the Cold Dark, and the Thing Beneath. He knows he must stop it. Them.

An odd feeling swims over him. There is dizziness, and nausea. He jerks his head around, sure there is someone there at his shoulder, but the bedroom still has a single occupant.

He turns back to the door. He needs to continue the hunt. The killer must be stopped, must be–

“Too late for what?” he asks aloud. The voice is real then. It is not his voice, although he thinks now that perhaps only he can hear it. The feeling of someone by his shoulder persists.

He has a purpose. To hunt the killer. Now… what? He is too late?

He gets up and he stands in the bedroom. The apartment is still. The presence at his shoulder seems to move from one side to the other. He turns around again, knowing there is nobody there.

“But I come from the circus.”

There is no reply.

“Who are you?”

Silence. It unnerves him, so he leaves the bedroom, walks around the apartment. He remembers it now, all of it, as he sees individual items: the brown leather sofas. The coffee table. The dining table. The laptop on it.

The laptop is open, the screen bright in the dark room. There is something moving on the screen, black and spidery, flickering and flickering.

The word processor is open. There is a single line of text, in a repeated column. The page is scrolling, like the track pad is jammed. The text at the top and bottom of the page flickers as the infinite scroll zooms onward.

They are Chinese characters. Logotypes. It takes him a moment to notice this, because he can read the text without any problem.

Highwire reaches out and touches the track pad, and the scrolling stops.

Follow the power
,
Ted,
says the voice in his head. Then, as he watches, text begins to type itself on the laptop’s screen, adding new lines to the column, one word at a time.

He closes the lid of the laptop. The apartment is suddenly much darker. He leaves it, and follows the voice. He returns to the circus. To the nexus.

— XXXV —

Tangun was nearly a full block ahead, in pursuit of The Magical Zanaar. He ran through the crowds of Chinatown, pedestrians and tourists parting around him, all unaware of his presence. Bob followed. They couldn’t see him either. Exercising his powers, just enough.

Bob had already broken the rules, bringing Benny back to life, binding her soul, holding it in place to keep Tangun tethered to the world. And then there was the manipulation of gravity and of light. It was all very simple.

And wouldn’t it be so much easier just to step through into the quantum foam of the city and pick out the evil? He could pluck Zanaar and send the Cold Dark back to the stars. He could extract Nezha’s power from Ted. Destroy the thing under the city once and for all. He could stop it all, just like that. No more running, no more racing against the clock. Just one thought, and it would be done.

And then what? The possibilities were endless. Bob stopped in the middle of the street, the crowds now coursing around him like he was a boulder in a river. He grinned. He remembered what it was like, when he was Kanaloa, when the world was young, the universe a blank canvas, the very fabric of reality clay in his hands.

He could save the city, the whole world, and then… improve it. And why not? San Francisco could be rebuilt according to his design. And then he could apply the same to his home, Hawaii, and then to the rest of the world. And why stop there? Why, there was no power in the universe that could stop him. He was a god, and what was a god without worshippers? They would bow to him in fear.

Bob’s head spun, and his eyes felt hot and wet. He staggered on his feet, and shook his head.

And that was why there were rules and why there was no need for gods anymore. Absolute power corrupts, but absolute power over everything, space/time itself bending to your will – that was not corruption, that was
consumption.
One step into a darkness from which he could never return. Bob had pushed far enough already. He dared not go much farther.

Bob only hoped Tangun possessed the same self-control he did. He looked up and saw a flash of gold ahead, where the street began to climb one of San Francisco’s famous hills.

Bob followed.

He saw Zanaar, eventually. Alison too. They disappeared around the mouth of an alley. Tangun was behind them. Bob followed, miles behind. He’d spent too much time dreaming of power.

The alley was dark. The light from the lantern-shaped lamps of the main street and the hundred different neon signs in orange and red, blue and green, that lined it only spilled so far.

Bob stepped into the shadows, noticing for the first time that the street was wet beneath his bare feet. Something shone on the ground ahead. He moved closer, reached down and picked up Tangun’s warrior helmet.