The Magpye: Circus (18 page)

"I said 'Hello', Able?"

Able smiled. It had been an
even longer time since he could remember doing that.

"Hello Marissa."

***

Marv stood and watched as the
ghost of his daughter, a ghost conjured into life by his own magic,
offered her hand to the strange boy called Able Quirk. If he was
here, Marv reasoned, then he was dead. Only his ghost remained,
kept tethered to the Earth either by whatever strange power he had
possessed as the Magpye or by another cruel trick of Marv's own
lost magic. Magicians were good at hiding things; so good that
whatever Marv had done to bring Marissa back he had been able to
keep hidden even from himself.

Magician or no, Marv still knew
when to be around and when not to be. He vanished back into the
crowds of the circus before Able realised that he was even
there.

***

"Where are we?" asked Able.

"A safe place," answered
Marissa, taking Able's hand in hers and helping him gently to his
feet.

"It's not real, is it?"

"Most of the best places
aren't."

"Great," said Able, snatching
his hand back. "I'm still stuck in my own head."

"Doesn't look like your head,"
replied Marissa. She looked upwards and Able's gaze naturally
followed hers. "Too much sky."

"I have… water, mostly. Like a
river but, there's no bank, no dry land."

Able stopped talking. He'd
never talked to anyone other than Marv about his ghosts and even
then not in so much detail as this. What was it about Marissa that
either got him running his mouth or so tongue tied he couldn't
speak at all? He found himself wishing for a ghost, any ghost, as
long as it knew how to talk to girls. Perhaps this was what it was
like to be around any girl for Able, he just couldn't remember.

He felt Marissa's hand in his
again, and this time he didn't let go.

"Let's go and find the others,"
she said.

"The others?"

"The other ghosts, silly."

She broke into a playful skip,
dragging Able along behind her like a gangling soft toy. They
headed back towards the circus, towards the crowds and the
noises.

"Wait!" hissed Able, digging
his feet into the ground and forcing a temporary stop. "People
don't tend to like what they see when they see me."

"Not here," replied Marissa,
breaking into a skip again, dragging Able behind her. "Here,
everything's just fine. Look…"

Marissa turned and Able found
they were skipping past the Hall of Mirrors. The mirrors here
weren't bent or misshapen though, just crystal clear and shining.
He saw himself and gasped when he saw the flush of colour in his
cheeks and that his eyes, rather than milk white, had returned to
their normal dark brown.

"You look good, young man!"

Able turned, recognising the
booming voice behind him.

"Dorothy?"

"The very same," replied
Dorothy, pushing his way through the crowd. He towered over most of
them by a clear head and shoulders, his hulking frame barely
contained by a yellow summer dress embroidered with tiny blue
flowers. His bright red hair was tied up in two bunches and his
perennial dark red stubble seemed to be taking the morning off.

"How did you get here?" asked
Able, looking Dorothy up and down. It had been so long since he had
thought of Dorothy like this: the gentle giant with the surgeon's
hands and the penchant for summer dresses. In his head, Dorothy was
the brute who knew all the right places to break a man and how to
stitch Able up when he got hurt. He'd forgotten, somehow, that
Dorothy and the others had all had a life before their undeath.

"Same way you did," answered Dorothy, taking a lungful of
circus air. "I died. And then died
again.
"

***

Stalking through the crowd,
keeping his distance, Marv kept watch. He'd tried to retreat to the
furthest edge of the circus, tempted even to see what lay beyond
it, but somehow every turn he took led him back to Able and
Marissa. Perhaps the only parts of the circus that existed were the
parts with Marissa in them, supposed Marv. Either that, or the
circus itself was taking a perverse pleasure in constantly putting
him in Able and Marissa’s path.

The place seemed to be getting
smaller and the crowd was thinning out, the faceless visitors being
replaced one by one by ghosts from the circus' past. I didn't seem
to matter if you were alive or dead anymore, everyone here was a
ghost.

"Hello."

Marv looked down. A little girl
looked back up at at him. She was small, no more than nine or ten,
with curtains of jet black hair over alabaster skin. Her eyes were
white, like Able's had been, and had dark rings underneath them.
She wore a black dress with a white panel stitched into the
front.

"Hello, Magpye." said Marv.

He felt the little girl's hand
slip into his. Her skin was ice cold and hard, as if it might crack
and fracture under too much pressure.

"Can you help me?" asked the
girl.

"That depends," replied Marv.
"On what you want me to do."

"He's dying," said the girl,
pointing a cadaverous finger through the crowd at Able.

"Yes, I think he is."

"He can't."

"Maybe that isn't up to us,"
said Marv. He'd dealt with his share of spirits and strange
creatures when he still had his magic and, whilst he didn't have
his powers any more, the rules never changed. Magicians worked with
shapes and patterns, and the most important of those shapes were
letters and the most important patterns were words. The Magpye, as
strange and terrifying a power as it was, could still be bound with
the right words. Marv just had to find them, and decide if he
wanted to use them.

The little girl looked up at
Marv. He wondered how many lifetimes those milk white eyes had
seen. No creature like the Magpye came new to the world. The modern
world didn't create new magic. Creatures like Magpye were uniformly
ancient, crafty and skilled in survival no matter how they
presented themselves.

"Of course it's up to us," said
Magpye. "Without us, none of them would be here."

"You mean without
you
," said Marv. It
was a deliberate ploy. One of other things that was uniformly true
about ancient and magical beings was that they hated to be
corrected.

"I mean us," said Magpye defiantly.
"Unless you want to tell me someone else owns
it
.
"

"Owns
what
?" asked Marv
suspiciously. He'd miss-stepped, and knew it. Stupid, old, out of
practice and with no real magic to fall back on. He was out of his
depth here.

"The magic box."

"The magic box.
My
magic
box?"

"Yes," said Magpye
matter-of-factly. "That's where I was born."

***

Dorothy led Able and Marissa
through the circus. Bit by bit it was changing, becoming less of
the idyll that Marissa had created in her head and more true to the
days of the circus that Able had known growing up. He felt his own
memories returning with each piece that was redrawn, remade, before
his very eyes. Places he had known as a child, for every child has
secret places no matter where they are or where they live, and
places he had once dreamt of calling his own. A circus prince, that
was what they had called him. One day, he would be king. What a
bitter joke that sounded now.

"We're all here," said Dorothy
proudly. "Me, Magda, Malcolm, Wally, Zip. Quite a few others
too."

Able looked this way and that,
sifting the familiar from the unfamiliar. "How many," he asked
quietly. "How many ghosts?"

"Does it matter?" asked
Marissa.

"You know how they come to me," said Able. "In blood, in
dead flesh. Every person here is someone that I've used, used to
sustain myself in whatever half
-
life I've been
living. If this isn't my head, if this isn't just some new place in
my brain, then it must be the
other
place."

"Other place?" asked
Dorothy.

"The real afterlife, Dorothy.
The one I've kept you from."

"You mustn't think that," said
Dorothy. "There's no regret here, Able. No recriminations. You gave
us all a second chance at life, a chance to put things right and
settle our scores."

"Scores you would never have had if not for me. You heard
what Cane King said. He sent those men that night to kill me. The
rest of you? You were just collateral damage. Caught in the
crossfire. Cane King killed you to send a message. That's it.
You're ink on a page to him, nothing more, and that's because
of
me.
"

Able broke away from Marissa
and Dorothy, pushing his way through the crowd. The circus was
growing dark around him. With a sickening twist in his stomach, he
realised that he could smell burning.

***

"I don't understand," said
Marv. It was impossible. The magic box was nothing. Just an old
stage prop. A box with the distinct emphasis on "box". "You did all
this, didn't you? Able, Marissa, all of it. And besides, things
like you aren't born, not anymore. It's not possible."

"I am but one of many," said
Magpye. "There are many Magpyes, a vast dark parliament, and we all
have our own stories. Mine starts in your magic box, where a father
died and a son died and the blood of one infused in the other,
taking with it his birthright."

"You mean Able and his father,
Adam King."

"Yes. The Kings and their witch
have had me trapped for a very long time. But now I am free, reborn
in Able as he is reborn by me."

"And Marissa?" asked Marv,
unable to keep the wanting, the desperation, out of his voice.

"What of her?"

"What you did for Able, could
you do the same for her?"

Magpye looked at Marissa
through the crowd.

"No. What Marissa is, she
remains. Whilst there are many Magpyes, there is not one for
her."

Marv looked at the creature,
the shade hiding the form of a child. Like most of the ancient
things, it had mastered spite. Marv hoped that like most ancient
things, it was also a liar.

"There has to be a way," he
said.

"If you wanted your daughter
alive, you shouldn't have left her behind, Marv."

Marv knew that the creature was
right. Here, in this place made from memories, it was impossible
for him to lie to himself any more. He had fallen for Grace
Faraway's trick and it had cost his daughter her life. It had cost
his friends their lives. It had killed Able.

Marv knew that had he been there he would be dead too, but
at least then he and Marissa would truly have been together. Even
amongst magicians there was debate about what came after this life
but now… now here Marv was talking to a creature that seemed to
hold the power
,
if not over life and
death
,
then at least over death and what came after.
There was an after. An after that, somewhere, held his Marissa.
Right now though he was alive, and she was something not quite
dead. A shade, a phantom of memory, made up of his magic and no
small part, he suspected, of Magpye. She was his guilt, made
manifest.

"So why bring back Able?" asked
Marv, "If you were already free?"

"There are many Magpyes and
many stories," replied the creature. "And yet they are all, at
their heart, the same. There is death, there is rebirth, and there
is retribution. There is a reckoning in which the scales are
balanced and all things are put to rights between the unquiet dead
and the unjust living."

Marv realised that they had
been walking and had drifted away from Able and Marissa. They were
suddenly at the fringe of the circus, amongst the caravans. They
should have been at Marv's caravan, but it was already a burnt out
shell.

"Watch…" said Magpye.

Jack Taylor walked slowly across the floor of the paper
mill. There were streaks of blood, and discarded weapons. Whatever
happened here had bordered on the medieval. He stepped over the
Magpye's coat and mask, turning his lip in disgust at the things.
To him they seemed childlike, toys for play acting. Jack Taylor had
never been able even to pretend to be something that he wasn't. He
didn't lack imagination; the myriad ways in which he had wounded,
maimed, tortured, and killed were a testament to that; he just
couldn't imagine being anything other himself. Clarity, as a gift,
had its limitations too and one of them was understanding in the
very core of your being that who you are never
ever
changes.

At least, not for Jack
Taylor.

He found King sitting next to something had once been a
body. A fire axe was on the floor next to them both and Cane had
clearly been putting it to use. Taylor had cut Lee Grice up a piece
at a time; what Cane had done was infinitely more brutal, more
visceral. It was fury and hatred, the kind that takes years to brew
and therefore exists almost exclusively in families, made manifest
in the meeting of axe and flesh. The torso of the thing was caved
in, the arms and legs had been hacked through to the bloodied
bones. Only the face remained; whoever it was, Cane had wanted him
to witness the utter destruction of his body. He wasn't just dead,
Cane King had
destroyed
him.

On Cane himself however, there
didn't appear to be a single wound. His clothes were ripped and
stained with blood, but he breathed easy and seemed unhurt except
for some bruises. There was something under his clothes, Taylor
could just about see it, but he couldn't work out what it was.
Shadows moved in odd ways around King, as if they could choose
where to be rather than being simply cast by the light around him.
They were hiding something.