Angels of Music (33 page)

‘Dance, girl,’ whispered Malita in her ears. ‘If you disappoint, they’ll go after your family.’

Malita shoved Kate at Morpho.

She slammed against his chest and he grabbed her hair, which hurt enough to get her attention.

The herky-jerky music continued, with pauses Offenbach hadn’t written, as she was rattled around the stage. She struggled, but Morpho was strong and had done this before. He let her go and slapped her face hard, snapping her head around – a few more like that, and her neck would break.

She aimed a kick at his shin. Make use of the damned boots!

Deftly, he got out of her way and she fell over. Sliding on the still-wet oilskin, she got a sandpapery burn on her bare thigh. He jammed a boot in her ribs and she rolled over, trying to ignore the burst of pain.

At this rate, her debut would be over in no time at all.

Morpho took her arms and hauled her up again, lifting her off her feet and over his head, then wheeling her around in the air. She was dizzy. Flashes went off in her eyes.

Up in the flies, she saw Sultan the Gorilla, rifle-barrel moving as he kept his bead drawn on her…

…and, above him, a black shape, descending silently on the ape sniper. A dangling loop of cord hooked around Sultan’s throat. The Punjab lasso!

She had only a glimpse, but it was enough. She had not been abandoned. A Phantom watched over her…

…though she couldn’t help wishing Erik had got his act together a little earlier.

Now, she had to get through this
pas de deux
without being killed.

Morpho held her by an arm and an ankle and spun like a top. Her hair came loose and flapped like a flag in the wind. A panorama rushed past, faster and faster.

The Red Circle. The orchestra. The prop table. The stagehands. Guignol, chained. The black chasm of the auditorium. The painted pastoral scene, streaked with blood. The waiting victims.

She tried to look up.

Morpho let go and she slid across the stage, scraping her side raw, ripping her costume. Her shawl came loose and she skidded to a stop.

A breathing moment.

Above on a wildly swinging gangway, unnoticed by everyone else, a slender, cloaked, white-masked figure exchanged
savate
kicks with Sultan the Gorilla. Erik had entered the field.

Morpho mockingly beckoned to Kate.

At this point in the dance, the
apache
girl usually crawled on hands and knees back to her pimp to take more medicine. The little fool would try to stick him with her garter-knife but he’d bend her wrist back contemptuously until she dropped it.

Kate pulled the toy stiletto from her boot-top. It had an edge but no point. Could she jam its spring?

No time.

Malita kicked her rump and propelled her towards Morpho.

Mortain laughed and applauded. A particular aficionado of this act, it seemed. His blonde was watching again, almost lulled.

If she tried to stab Morpho in the chest, the blade would do no harm.

Determined not to die on her knees, she stood and countered his come-hither gesture with one of her own, summoning him to a fight.

He brought out his own knife. A blade sprang from its handle. Not a prop.

She flicked a glance upwards. Erik’s lasso was tight around the gorilla’s neck. She didn’t dare look too long, for fear of drawing attention to the show above the stage.

Morpho puffed smoke and danced towards her.

She slashed at his face, catching his cheek with the knife-edge. Used to scythe rather than stab, the blade didn’t retract. She barely scratched him, but a runnel of blood dripped from his face. He gulped and swallowed his dog-end. Coughing and choking, he thumped his own chest.

Now, she got a good strong kick to his shins.

More applause.

‘I love it when they fight back,’ said Mortain, loosening his sash. ‘
Encore, encore
!’

Morpho, unhappy with the way this was going, came at her like a wrestler, arms out. If he caught her now, he’d break her spine over his knee.

Sultan’s rifle fell from above and slammed butt-first into Morpho’s head. His skull audibly cracked and his one eye went red then dull. He collapsed like a sack of bricks. The gun discharged as it hit the floor. Malita yelped, shot in the ankle. The ditchwater Duchess grabbed her by the hair and hauled her into the wings. Her screams grew higher in pitch.

At this point, the orphans – very sensibly – ran off. Slipping between stagehands’ legs, they zigzagged to avoid capture. Henriette and Louise barrelled through the blindfolded orchestra. The musicians made a racket as they missed their places, then stopped playing and tumbled into each other. In the kerfuffle, the children disappeared backstage.

Kate wished them luck and hoped they’d make a better choice for their next circus.

Now,
everyone
looked up. Kate smelled paraffin.

M. Erik had returned to his shadows.

Sultan was lowered slowly, in lurches, on a rope looped around his ankle. He twisted in the air, human hands stuck out of hampering hairy arms. He shook his head, as if trying to get his mask off. He yowled, throwing his voice – his cries seemed to come from all over the auditorium. Drops of liquid spattered on the oilcloth. The gorilla was soaked in paraffin.

‘What is this?’ cried Pradier.

‘It’s Poe,’ squawked Guignol. ‘The tale of “Hop-Frog”!’

Once, Erik had appeared at a masked ball as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. Like Guignol, who’d written Dr Tarr and Professor Fether into his show, the Director of the Opera Ghost Agency was an admirer of the gloomy, sickly American poet. Kate preferred Walt Whitman, herself.

She remembered the story of ‘Hop-Frog’. The abused jester tricks the cruel king and his toadying courtiers into disguising themselves as orangutans with flammable pitch and flax, and then touches a torch to them.

A ribbon of flame ran down the rope and caught the fur of the paraffin-sodden gorilla man. With a
whump
, Sultan was enveloped in fire. Burning fur stank. A screech sounded, and was cut off as the ape-man sucked fire into his lungs. He kicked and struggled, swinging like a pendulum…

…then the rope burned through. Sultan fell, cracking boards. The props-master had the presence of mind to throw a bucket of water on the dead man. The fire hissed out. Smoke and steam rose. Pradier, an idiot, chittered in delight, taking this for part of the show.

Du Roy stood. He appeared calm, yet a vein throbbed in his forehead.

He looked around for the phantom who had wrecked the performance, then turned – suspicion pricked – to the veiled woman at his side. Kate wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten not to trust Clara Watson.

Du Roy drew a small pistol from inside his jacket. A ladies’ model. He jammed it up under the scarlet widow’s chin and ripped off her veil.

The Master of the Red Circle beheld a face he didn’t know.

Yuki shrugged out of the hooded cloak. She wore her kimono.

She even carried her parasol.

‘Surprise,’ gloated Guignol.

The select audience shrank away from Yuki. Gripped by a premonition.

‘Find the lady,’ said Guignol.

Mortain’s doxy pulled off her stiff yellow wig and shook out red hair.

So, Yuki was Clara and Clara was the blonde.

Only Kate was who she said she was – even in this
apache
outfit.

‘Whoever you are,’ said Du Roy, ‘you’ll die now…’

Du Roy stood back and straightened his arm, steadying his gun. The barrel was an inch from Yuki’s nose.

Faster than the eye could register, Yuki unsheathed a sword from her parasol and made a forceful, yet elegant, pass.

Du Roy looked at a red line around his wrist. His brows knit as he tried to pull the trigger. Wires were cut and the impulse from his brain couldn’t reach his fingers. Puzzled, airily irritated, he didn’t yet feel the pain.

His hand slid off his wrist and thumped on the floor, letting go of the gun.

Blood gouted like a fountain, which Yuki side-stepped.

‘Musicians,’ said Guignol, sharply. ‘Selection Thirteen,
andante
.’

The ensemble took heed, adjusted their blindfolds and assumed their playing positions, instruments ready.

They launched into Guignol’s idea of an appropriate tune. ‘Three Little Maids from School’ by Gilbert and Sullivan, from
The Mikado
.

Yuki set about her precise, bloody work – more surgery than butchery.

Among the Red Circle, she lashed out. She held her sword hilt up and struck down, adopting a series of poses, face impassive, ignoring the gouts of gore. She was not hobbled by her dress which, Kate only now realised, was slit to the waist to allow for ease of movement. Her habitual tiny Japanese steps were misdirection.

Screams. Intestines uncoiled. Limbs and heads flew.

The Red Circle got their fill of horrors now.

Three little maids from school are we,

Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,

Filled to the brim with girlish glee,

Three little maids from school!

Père de Kern tried to flee, but his imps gripped his train and he was tugged back onto the killing floor. Yuki laid open his spine. He bucked like a cut-open caterpillar.

Everything is a source of fun…

Mortain lost his innards. Pradier lost his head.

Nobody’s safe for we care for none!

Assolant stood up and slid his face onto Yuki’s sword-edge. His domino mask fell apart. He detached his skull from the blade, hand pressed over the spurting slice.

Life is a joke that’s just begun!

Kate picked up Sultan’s rifle. She worked the bolt, ejected the spent cartridge, chambered another. She covered the stagehands.

Morpho and Malita were dead.

Dr Orloff watched, open-mouthed, as his patrons fell.

Three little maids from school! Three little maids from school!

Yuki didn’t waste effort. She maimed and killed as she would compose a
haiku
– in seconds, with strictly limited moves.

The orchestra finished the tune.

Yuki sheathed her blade and opened the parasol. She gave a tiny, formal curtsey.

Only now did Kate remember to be terrified.

But not incapacitated. She took a bucket of water from a stagehand and scrubbed the backs of de Kern’s imps, scraping enough paint so the children wouldn’t die of clogged pores. Whoever they were, she trusted they’d be grateful.

Assolant and Du Roy were still alive.

‘Katie dear,’ said Clara, sweetly. ‘Would you free our client?’

Catching on at once, Kate helped Guignol get loose. He got the enforced straightness out of his bones and kinked up properly.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ he swazzled.

So, Guignol had been coerced into letting the Red Circle take over his theatre. He had taken steps to break their hold over his company.

‘You’re finished, Hulot,’ spat Du Roy.

Guignol mimed a shrug.

Another mystery solved – the secret identity of Guignol. He was Jacques Hulot, once hailed as the funniest man in France, then believed a suicide. Reborn as the maestro of horrors.

‘Comedy didn’t pay,’ he explained to Kate. ‘The mob wanted gore, and gore
encore
… So I got a new act. I told truths, showed the world the way it was.’

He capered over to Du Roy.

‘But the mob are less bloodthirsty than you, you pathetic wretch. My horrors are a mirror – they do not represent the world as I wish it to be. They are a caution, not a blueprint. Only a few mistake it for one. And few of them have the want of feeling that would admit them to your circle. It takes refinement to be so dreadful. Are you satisfied now? Have you finally had your fill of blood, you monster of France?’

Du Roy let go of his seeping wrist and died.

So there were no heirs of Monsieur Hulot. Guignol, the management of the theatre, was Hulot himself, transformed … and the
Théâtre des Horreurs
was the risen spectre of the
Théâtre des Plaisantins
.

Amid all the carnage, the clown couldn’t help himself. Guignol was still funny.

The tableau at the end of his show, the waxworks of the
Légion d’Horreur
, was a specific charge, accusing the Brothers of the Red Circle. Another living signpost, marking the way for the Angels of Music. These are the guilty men, these are
your
guilty men. Come and stop them, for I – Guignol – am in their power and cannot. Kate had looked for hidden meaning, when it was obvious enough to be understood in the rear stalls.

General Assolant still stood, half his face red. His famous battles were fought and finished well before he arrived at the bloody field to supervise the executions. Now, he’d have real scars to go with his medals.

The officer who despised cowards was trembling.

‘Don’t be alarmed, General,’ said Clara. ‘You must remain alive, to tell any others… any of the Red Circle not present, any who might share its inclinations. Your run is over. The show is closed by the order of… Messieurs Guignol and Erik. You understand? Your marching orders are given. Now get out of this place before my dainty friend changes her mind and plays parasol games again.’

Assolant didn’t need to be told twice. He scarpered, the sword he hadn’t thought to draw rattling at his side.

Kate took a moment and put all her weight into slapping Clara.

The English widow licked a bead of blood from her lip and shrugged.

‘You couldn’t be told, Katie. You’re a good journalist, but no actress.’

‘Why didn’t you stop the show before it began?’ she asked, as much of Yuki as Clara. ‘Before anyone was hurt.’

‘Your friend Sultan had to be removed,’ said Clara. ‘A tricky situation.’

Kate saw the sense, but still burned. Stage Door Jeannot had paid for Erik’s tardiness.

Nini, the Aztec princess, came forward. She’d taken off her headdress.

‘My father’s letters?’

‘Will be returned to you,’ said Guignol, kissing her hand.

Satisfied, Nini left the stage.

Guignol looked at the smiling props-master, the nervous stagehands and the now-sighted orchestra.