Effigy (34 page)

The unseen hand held the ringmaster steady on one leg while supporting the other behind him like a rigid tail. From there it helped him safely to the ground, scooping him up the moment his toes met dirt to vault time and again over the pretty grey. Bendy marvelled at the man, but kept a portion of his admiration for the mount. Through everything, Belle held her canter, reliable as the sun.

Pitch dropped back into the saddle and, as though the great hand were twisting him like a cork stopper, began turning circles on his seat, his heels just clearing the tips of Belle’s ears. He rode facing her tail for a time, then slipped down her inward flank and hung there Comanche-style, hidden from view. When next he stood on the grey mare’s back, the hand flung him heels over head in a series of backward somersaults. Women screamed. For a finale, the invisible fingers guided him headfirst through a maze
of hoops held aloft by his brother the clown—the last of them dancing with flames.

Pitch knew enough to end the show on a high note, standing firm on Belle’s rosin-coated back with his arms open wide and his big mouth shut. The audience roared for him as he rode his final circuit, forgetting for the moment the lack of tumblers and scantily clad girls, the sad menagerie. They were still applauding full bore as he rode behind the straw blind and out the tent’s back flap.

Bendy slipped out in time to watch him pull up short before the mountain lion’s cage. The storm had scudded on, leaving the world sodden, the firmament clear. Belle stood steady, blowing hard. Pitch slid to terra firma, becoming a trembling, sweat-drenched thing. His bare soles sank in the mud. He’d removed his tailcoat before the ride, performing in waistcoat and trousers—the golden plush gone dark in cat-whisker patterns about his crotch, sagging half moons beneath his arms.

The cageboy approached and caught hold of Belle’s reins, handing over the ugly top hat as though in trade. Pitch returned it to his head without a word. Belle knew the drill. She followed Stanley along the train of cages to its end, disappearing after him into the stable he’d knocked together out of clapboard and sailcloth the night before.

Pitch flipped a tin feed pail and lowered himself to sit. “Fetch me my coat.” He pointed to where the garment hung from the latch of the lioness’s cage. A deeper, dirtier shade than the animal on the far side of the bars, the coat was damp with rain, ripe with Pitch’s stink. Bendy held his breath and plucked it down, delivered it to the ringmaster’s lap.

Pitch cradled the tailcoat loosely, one hand rifling its folds. Retrieving pipe and pouch, he stuffed the bowl, struck a match
and sucked up a mouthful of fruity smoke. He didn’t offer Bendy a pull—nor did he offer comment on the boy’s debut. Hunched on his pail, he sucked and sighed as though he was alone.

“Mind if I get a little practice in later?” Bendy said finally. “Riding, I mean.”

Pitch glanced up, smoke driven from his lips in a grey rush. “Thought you said you could ride.”

“I can.” Bendy toed a shallow puddle. “I want to get the feel of the ring.”

Pitch let his gaze slip, the strain of keeping it tilted too great. “Not on Belle.”

“No, sir. I thought I’d try the gelding.”

The ringmaster eased himself up from the pail. “Come back when the crowd’s cleared,” he said around the pipe’s stem. Turning side-on to the space between two cages, he sidled through the gap and was gone.

Bendy had intended only a short stroll—just long enough to let the last of the gawkers vacate the tent and its charred surrounds—but he found his limbs craved the plain swing of the human gait. He followed Second to where Montgomery angled off, and turned right on California, headed for the docks. Every dull heave of dune, every scrubby front garden, every salt-rotten whiff soothed his senses. At the foot of Central Wharf he found himself reluctant to turn back.

The grounds were lifeless by the time he returned. A lantern had been left hissing at the mouth of the corridor that ran between the tent’s back wall and the train of cages—a beacon to those who belonged, a deterrent to those who would do mischief under cover of dark. Realizing he was one of the former, Bendy felt himself smile. He lifted down the lantern and entered the
makeshift arcade. Above him, a strip of night. To his right, a pale expanse of canvas, to his left, the hunkering train. The cages were blind and silent now, their bars fitted over with panels of painted wood. Each bore an illustration, an ill-conceived rendering of whatever lay breathing within. Bendy paused before each crude portrait, holding the lantern close.

The bear was more grizzly than black, humped over a mess of unidentifiable gore. One foreleg twice the length of the other, snout flattened around a rat’s nest of teeth. The mountain lion was worse, stretched all out of proportion along an elephant-grey ridge, its head a fat house cat’s under coyote-sized ears.

The birds came nearer the mark, perhaps copied from the plates of a book. Inside, Bendy knew, fewer than half the wire birdcages hung. He’d learned the night before—shortly after learning he was to bunk in with Camden—that the clown routinely carried his favourites back with him to the hotel. Room number nine was already crowded by the time Bendy arrived, the birds tucked into themselves on various perches, Camden splayed like a tide-abandoned starfish across the bed. Bendy took the armchair, disturbing the fat macaw that clung to its back.

Last and perhaps strangest, the painted monkeys hung from ropy, lime-green vines. A single face repeated atop various configurations of limbs, the moony grin of an infant dosed with rum.

At the gallery’s end, a second lantern spilled light down the stable’s wall. If Stanley was within, he made no sound. Drawing open the door, Bendy held his light down by his thigh and made low, friendly noises in his throat.

Not one of them flinched. Not a rustle, not a single hoof stirring the straw. They watched him, mules and horses, motionless in their pinched stalls. For a moment he was puzzled, but then it came to him—he couldn’t spook these animals if he tried. To a
one, they’d dulled their senses to the wuffing of a bear, the shrieks of the deep jungle, even the feline musk of the ancient foe. These mules pushed through frenzied crowds as a matter of course. Belle and the brown gelding—and maybe even the old roan in her day—had learned to run rock-steady circles while no end of human nonsense took place on their backs.

Bendy lifted his lantern, fixing on the gelding’s stall. By habit, he found himself treading softly, easing back the latch, murmuring as he took down a bridle and slipped it over the long brown nose.

The horse came quietly, Bendy leading him through the back flap and round the blind, past the draped darkness of Philomena’s cage. Still no sign of the cageboy. Was it possible he’d sloped off somewhere, leaving his charges without a guard?

Bendy strode to the centre of the ring and set the lantern down on the beaten earth. He took a moment to stroke the gelding about the withers and neck, then tucked his boot into the near stirrup iron and rose.

Three trotted circuits and the brown horse broke into a canter on his own. Bendy let him have his head. Another turn of the circle and he felt himself on the brink of a gravitational trance. It shattered at the sound of her voice.

“So far, so good.”

He hauled back on the reins harder than necessary, but the gelding took it, skidding neatly to a stop. Philomena stood poised on one of the bale seats, a furred creature at the limit of the lantern’s reach. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d spend the night in her cage. But now that he thought about it, what alternative did she have? To step blithely through the front door of the Gillespie Hotel clad in nothing but her own glossy hair? Or worse, to belie her canine character by showing up there in a dress?

“Don’t quit on my account.”

She hopped lightly, gracefully to the adjacent seat, then the next, the next—a child crossing a creek on stones. Or not a child. Something fleeter, more certain of its feet. She breezed past him where he sat motionless astride his mount, bounding full circle, bale to bale. His head swivelled, eyes dogging her as they would a flash of something feral, thrill and misgiving made one. She closed in on her starting point, surpassed it and carried on, landing in moments on the bale nearest his suspended heel.

She gazed up at him, obscure in the melded shadow he and the gelding cast, wearing nothing but her own thick pelt.

“Or do,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Do quit.” Her teeth came clear in a smile. “On my account.”

He was down on his own two feet before he knew it. When he glanced about for somewhere to tether the horse, she caught hold of his hand and said, “He’ll stay put.”

She pulled him after her, not looking back. Her grip was strong, her palm hairless, smooth. Her nails were pointy. They dug in a little, quickening his pulse.

As they drew up alongside her cage, she brought her face in close. “He’s in there.”

Bendy felt something tear free inside his chest cavity and rise. “He?”

She mouthed the next word.
Stanley
. The heart in Bendy’s mouth beat hard.

“Don’t worry.” She made a bottle of her fist, tipped a thumb to her lips. “He’ll be out for hours.”

“But—” Bendy looked past her, contemplating escape.

“I don’t invite him.” She let his comprehension build for a moment before adding, “I’m inviting you.”

All notion of fleeing left him. Together they passed the cloaked form of her cage, padding onward to the block of bales. She led him behind it—not, as he’d imagined, through the back flap to the rest of the world, but past it, round the far corner of the blind. There she dropped to all fours, fit her fingers around one of the bottom bales and, as though it were an oversized, golden brick, wrestled it out of the wall. In its place, the black promise of a tunnel. On her belly now, Philomena wriggled inside. In moments Bendy was faced with the twin swishing tails of her legs, the bald calluses of her upturned soles.

He followed. Never mind the risk, the solid fact of the cageboy—sunk in a stupor, but still mere yards away. The tunnel was close about Bendy’s shoulders, heady with her scent. He squirmed forward the full length of his body before the dark opened into the shape of a den. Her hand came out to meet him. He clutched it and reached for more.

DORRIE DREAMS:

Dawn, and beneath me the sage clump quivers with life. The night was chill, but perhaps the child’s fold of hillside held some of the day’s heat. Doubtful. This high up, the changing time comes early, cold rising from the earth itself.

Her thirst must be terrible—how many dry days before her flock was freed, first from their camp, then from this waking world? Hunger too. This may be what’s woken her, smoke wafting from the camp below, the smell of food being ruined over fire. Not that I’d refuse a scrap if offered. In the night my own hunger opened to swallow me whole. I can feel it in my wing tips, little flight left there, perhaps a mile or two more.

Who knows if the child can smell anything, wedged beneath that reeking bush. I have yet to catch a whiff of her—not her sweet, bruised flesh, not the deep, seeping scratches on her limbs. Not even her fear.

Dawn colours the scene below us in hopeful light, the bodies rosy now, shining with dew. The dog man’s pack is rising, having filled their bellies with the usual human mess. Why make a paste
of desiccated corn when it’s so much sweeter straight from the ear? Their meat is worse, pig that tastes as though they found it floating in the reeds of a salt marsh.

Sated, they move again among the dead.

A whisper of paws on rock, and I look down on the grizzled back and black-tipped tail of a grey fox. Tree-climber, the sinewy bridge between cat and canine, a known threat to nestlings, but nothing serious to the fully fledged. A mocking caw, perhaps even a dive at the first click of those retractable claws—only, in my torpor, I begin to mistrust my wings. Hold still, then. Dead still, until the wave of its tail is gone.

See how the humans cache their kill, how they bow and scrape, swinging their heavy tools. Soon shallow patches have been scratched, and the dragging of bodies begins. Like weasels hoarding mice, they pile dead upon dead, dusting them with not enough earth to dissuade a fox kit. Some do even less, dumping corpses in gullies and concealing them with clumps of grass.

Willing the child to stay put, I stretch my hollow wings and drop, let the slope fall away before me in an easy glide. At grass level, I wing along deep and easy, skimming low over the waving green, mounting only when I reach the trampled bed where the females fell.

She is still there, one of half a dozen left. A male with hair the colour of a yellow martin stoops to take hold of her bloated ankles. He hauls her into the scrub, covering her with several branches in waning leaf. To the last, her hair calls the eye. A black, spreading wedge, like tail feathers landing or lifting off. It points the way to the rest of her, until the male kicks dirt over it and stamps it down.

A PAIR OF SHAPES
dogs Dorrie’s waking—one curved and gliding, the other triangular, terribly still.

She’s been dozing since Bendy left. Any moment now the breakfast bell will sound, and if she fails to respond to its pealing, chances are good one of the children will be sent to knock endlessly at her door. Still she doesn’t stir. Her body floats on its fatigue, a buoyancy she’s reluctant to forsake, having experienced it only once before.

She’d been a member of the household for close to a year when Hammer announced there was to be a family outing: a picnic on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Dorrie sat with the children in the buckboard, Lal taking the reins with Sister Ruth at his side. The first and third wives rode up ahead, wedged into the buggy with the man of the house. Dorrie’s stepchildren fixed their ten eyes on the passing country while she fastened hers to the cart’s jumping floor.

Lake
seemed entirely the wrong word. Climbing down stiffly over the tailgate, Dorrie thought,
Sea
. Not that she’d ever laid eyes on one, or ever cared to. Lake, sea—whatever she called it, the great body before her was another gaping expanse to be
endured. She made herself useful, laying the first of four blankets alongside a brine-encrusted thicket, so at least there would be something at her back.