Robin Jarvis-Jax 02 Freax And Rejex (23 page)

Beside him Rupesh opened his eyes and grinned. “I am Rufus!” he declared, elated. “I am a Two of Clubs also, and you – you are my brother!”

“Blessed be!” Tommy cried.

“Blessed be!” six other young voices repeated around them.

T
HE THREE BLACK
Face Dames awoke and immediately rushed from the stage. The Ismus was lying face down on the ground. The scars on his back were no longer burning, but were charred and scabbed and black. The bodyguards lifted him gently and his eyes flickered open.

“Never let me do that again,” he said, exhausted but with a wry twist to his mouth.

They carried their Lord to Jangler’s cabin and laid him on the bed, on his stomach.

All across the camp, people were reviving and staggering to their feet. Marcus picked himself up, clutching the back of his head. His vision was bleary and he gazed around at the others.

Charm was swaying unsteadily, rubbing her forehead. Alasdair was doubled over, trying not to heave. Lee’s eyes were closed and he took deep gulping breaths. Jody was making sure Christina was all right and Jim was staring at his trembling hands. Spencer’s face was ashen. Maggie was still on the ground, too weak to rise.

“We blacked out!” she exclaimed, staring at the mass of people slowly recovering in the compound. “Every last one of us. That’s damn freaky!”

“Did I imagine it?” Spencer muttered. “Or did that man fly over our heads – on fire?”

“What were in the drinks this time?” Alasdair asked.

“It really happened,” Jody told them angrily. “It did! Don’t pretend it didn’t!”

“That’s crazy!” Marcus snapped. “Just crazy!”

“Eww! Ewww!” Charm squealed when she discovered the blood in her hair and down her neck. “What’s goin’ on?”

They touched the backs of their heads then looked at the blood on their
fingers. Most of them shuddered in shock and revulsion. Eight of them laughed.

Shaken and pale, Jangler dusted himself down and retrieved his clipboard. That made him feel better. Clambering on to the stage, he called for quiet and viewed the children sternly.

“Which of you have awakened to your true lives?” he demanded in a businesslike tone. “Who now can be accounted amongst the blessed?”

Tommy and Rupesh jumped up and down eagerly. Six more children did the same.

“Patrick Hunter, Daniel Foster, Beth McCormack, Oliver Gaskin, Diane Haywood, Mason Stuart,” Jangler said, jotting down their names. “Only eight of you? Most disappointing. So much effort for so very little. What a senseless risk.”

The eight new converts to the world of
Dancing Jax
were led away from the others by the Harlequin Priests, who took them to a sunny and peaceful corner of the camp, away from the stumbling confusion of the crowd. It was there that Kate Kryzewski interviewed them and got the “afters” her report desperately needed safely in the can.

“Wait!” Charm called to Jangler. “That’s not it, is it? Nofink happened to me. Why didn’t I wake up in the castle? I can’t remember nofink. How come?”

The old man regarded her through his spectacles.

“You may well ask, young woman,” he said tersely. “I don’t know why you and the rest are not deemed fit to join us at Court, but there you are. Now I suggest you enjoy what remains of the festivities today. Tomorrow’s an early start; the transport will be here first thing.”

He made some ticks on his clipboard then walked off the stage.

“Oi!” Charm cried out. “This ain’t the end, is it? It can’t be! That ain’t fair! All I got were this bleedin’ headache. There’s no one more wanting to go there than me! Please, gimme more time, another go! I’ll do whatever!”

But Jangler wasn’t listening. He headed for his cabin and entered with a respectful bowing of the head.

“My Lord?” he addressed the figure lying on his bed. “It is done.”

“How many?”

“Only eight, I fear.”

The Ismus reared his head. “Is that all?” he growled.

“Young people are so very stubborn,” Jangler said apologetically. “And this group appear more so than most. But I shall whip that out of them, you’ll see. And at least, this way, enough remain to power the bridging devices.”

The Ismus rested his head on the pillow. “Yes,” he sighed. “That is certainly important; until more centres are established in other countries, the transfers must continue here.”

Jangler nodded then wondered why the Holy Enchanter was laughing softly.

“My Lord?” he asked.

“The manifestation of the Castle Creeper is nearly wholly complete now,” the Ismus said. “Even as I battled Haxxentrot, I felt that trespass more sharply than ever.”

“We must discover the identity of that person with all speed!”

“There may be a way of deducing that more quickly than you think, dear Lockpick,” the Ismus told him. He reached out his hand, which, up till then, had been clenched in a fist, and opened it. A pair of earphones fell out.

“From Mooncaster,” he said. “The Creeper was careless and left those behind. Organise a rigorous search and see which of those remaining aberrants is missing such a pair.”

Jangler rubbed his hands together and chuckled.

“At once!” he promised. He pulled the door open, but was startled to find a burly man in a tight costume of caramel-coloured leather blocking the way. Jangler took a nervous but irritated step back.

“Haw haw haw!” the Jockey sniggered, tiptoeing inside. “What a game you have played this day, Most Holy One. How you set every head to thunder and thump as if the very castle walls were tumbling down about our ears. I was having such a merry time with a serving maid before you did
that! How unthinkably boorish of you to spoil the Jockey’s sport.”

“Why are you here today?” the Ismus asked suspiciously “I did not request or desire it.”

The Jockey looked surprised. “I would be failing my obligations if I were not close by, to sprinkle your hours with discord and levity in equal measure,” he replied. “Besides, it was the height of bad manners on your part not to invite me to this pet project of yours. You know how I hate being left out of things – however squalid. Naughty of you!”

Jangler tried to get past him, but the Jockey caught his hands and danced him around the room.

“Your feet are so leaden!” he mocked. “Do you wear iron socks?”

The old man wrenched himself free and pushed the Jockey away. He had no time for his nonsense.

“Let me be about my Lord’s business!” he demanded.

“Oh, take your grisly visage away,” the Jockey dismissed him. “’Tis true – your scowls turn milk to cheese in the udder. But first I want you to see the gift I’ve brought our dear Ismus, to cheer him and his poor, crispy back.”

Chortling, he reached into his pocket.

“I’ve just skipped through each one of these beastly shacks,” he bragged. “And weaved in and out of those witless children out there, dipping with such dexterous, nimble fingers and brought you these. I know they’ll amuse you – hoo hoo hoo!”

With a flourish, he presented a bundle of wires. Every pair of earphones in the camp was there. Jangler uttered a cry of frustration and the Ismus stared at them angrily, which made the Jockey titter all the more.

“You can’t have it too easy,” he snickered, wagging a stout finger at them as he swept out of the cabin. “Haw haw haw – I hampered you, I thwarted you, I spoiled it, I puzzled it. Keep the dance a-twirling, keep the pieces spinning, keep the Lord a-guessing.”

Jangler pulled at his neat little beard. “What shall I do, my Lord?” he asked.

“Send them home!” the Ismus snarled in a temper. “Send everyone home, the mummers, the choristers, the cooks, the stilt-walkers, the Jacks and Jills. Empty this camp of everyone but those children. Do it!”

Jangler hurried out and the Ismus called to his bodyguards to bring his car. “Get me away from this place!” he commanded. “I’ve other pressing matters to attend to. And see that the Jockey climbs aboard no vehicle. He may ride us at Court, but he won’t be riding with us today. Let him tittup all the way back to London in that squeaky costume.”

The Black Face Dames bowed and hastened to obey. The Ismus glared at the tangled ball of earphones in his hands and threw it against the wall.

Within an hour, the camp was deserted. Jangler had shooed everyone away. The place looked a wreck. Bunting and ribbons had come loose from the poles and were straggling over the ground and snagged on forsaken stalls. Discarded goblets, pewter plates covered in crumbs and chicken bones littered the lawn. Here and there were odd articles of clothing, a shoe, a headdress, a forgotten cloak. A desolate sense of abandonment and profound disappointment sat heavy over the place.

Jody and Maggie sat on the deserted stage, gazing at the untidy camp. They and the others were still trying to come to terms with everything they had experienced that day. It seemed so unreal, so impossible.

“So that’s that then,” Maggie muttered with a morose air of finality. “All a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it?”

The other girl pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her cardigan and nodded.

“What were it for?” she asked. “What were any of it for? I can’t get my head round it. What happened today, the way he just burst into flames and lifted up, that was mental, mad – it just can’t happen… but it did. And then the way everyone passed out – it don’t make sense, none of it.”

“It’s what the Ismus does in the book though,” Maggie said. “He flies.”

“But that’s only a book! People, real people, can’t fly.”

“There’s nothing ‘only’ about it. You should know that by now, babes.”

Jody shook her head. If she allowed herself to believe in the smallest aspect of the world of
Dancing Jax
then that door might swing wide open and she was too afraid to let that happen. She had to keep a tight grip on what little reality she was still able to understand. Taking a sobering breath, she looked over at the chalets. Christina and most of the others were lying down inside, with pounding headaches. A bitterly unhappy, disillusioned Charm was packing her suitcases in readiness for the journey back the next morning.

“What are you going home to?” Jody asked Maggie.

“Don’t call it home no more, but then it’s not been good there since Janice the stepmother from hell moved in, back when I was twelve. Wasn’t no love lost there, manipulative cow she is – or was before all this.”

“My mum and dad were great.”

“So was my dad till she got her hooks in him. I hated the way she treated him, but he couldn’t see it, starting rows just cos she was bored, turning on the waterworks to get her way, criticising everything I ever did, like it were a competition between us for his attention.”

“She sounds… choice.”

“She was. That’s why I got so big.”

“Eh?”

“A martyr in Marigolds she was. Loved having her snotty friends round and whining to them about how hard done to she were; by me, by my dad – by not having new scatter cushions, or by whatever small thing happened to her that week. Suffering in public is what pushed Janice’s buttons. Squeezing out sympathy was an Olympic event to her and she won gold every time – the warped harpy.”

“So how did that make you big?”

“Control freak, wasn’t she? Thought she was subtle about it, but I knew what she was up to, even if Dad didn’t. Kept dropping hints; someone on the telly was a bit full in the face and wasn’t it ugly, my school uniform was looking a bit tight, leaving diet magazines around the house, disapproving
looks at the dinner table, asking when my puppy fat was going to go. She worked and worked to give me a complex. Oh, she’d have loved a stepdaughter with an eating disorder – she was salivating at the prospect of those pitying looks, being right in the centre of a tragedy like that. ‘There goes Mrs Blessing, poor woman, her girl’s anorexic you know, just skin and bone, how does she cope? Must be such a worry…’.”

Maggie stroked her stomach with a victorious smile.

“I got myself an eating disorder all right,” she snorted. “But not the one she wanted. I managed to put on sixty-five kilos in three and a bit years. And I did it just to spite her. There’s no pity to be milked having a stepdaughter who’s morbidly obese. Shame, blame and ridicule is what she got instead, cos the neighbours, my teachers, the doctors, my poor dad, all believed it was her fault. And you know, seeing her more and more mortified every day was worth every forced mouthful, every painful cramp, every jeer, every snub – even the risk of diabetes.”

Jody didn’t know what to say. Her life experience hadn’t prepared her for anything like that. She couldn’t begin to comprehend what would possess someone to do that to themselves. More than ever she realised just how lucky she had been until that book came along.

“So that’s me,” Maggie said, filling the silence. “That’s what I’ll be going back to tomorrow, though it’s all changed now obviously, but she’s still a cow, just a brainwashed one. How about you? Bristol, yeah?”

“I’ve nowhere else,” Jody answered simply.

“None of us has, babes.”

Jim Parker was standing at the top of the helter-skelter, looking out over the camp. He could see everything from up there. The late afternoon breeze ruffled through his hair and caused the cloak to flap behind him. He gazed longingly at the encircling trees and imagined himself flying over them. The Ismus had proven such a thing was possible, just as Jim knew it would be. Since coming round that afternoon, the twelve-year-old had
felt different. Over the recent months, he had developed a habit of testing himself, pinching or pricking his skin to see if the invulnerability had started to take effect. Since the black-out, his right arm had been numb. When he pushed a fork into it, he had felt nothing.

The boy didn’t hear Lee discussing the same lack of sensation with Alasdair. They concluded it was some sort of nerve damage brought on by whatever had made their heads bleed and they hoped it was temporary. Jim, however, was certain his transformation was beginning.

Jumping on to the slide, he rushed down and around the helter-skelter, cheering and jubilant.

“He’s got the right idea,” Maggie remarked, watching him come scooting off at the bottom then go running round the camp, waving his arms in the air. “We should have a last-night party, really go for it big style.”

Jody considered her a moment. “You know,” she murmured, “you’re bloody right.”