The Magpye: Circus
The Magpye: Circus
C
W Lynch
Copyright © 2013 by Christopher
William Lynch
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Smashwords
Edition, 2013
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are
either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
For my incredible wife Emily
who puts up with me, keeps me alive, and provides boundless support
for all my crazy ideas.
For my boys
William and Daniel, who can read this when they are
much older
.
And for my Mum and Dad, who are
the best.
With thanks to
Stuart Tipples: Cover Artist and
Partner in Crime
Louise Weaver: Unpaid proof
reader and Baroness of Grammar
Pete Rogers, Barry Nugent, and
Terry Copper: Fellow writers my and online support group
Lee Grice, Yossarian Nutt, Regie
Rigby, and Derek Hartley: Who all gave their names to characters in
this book without ever asking what I would do to them. Sorry
guys.
Fionna Knibbs: Who was more than
willing the join the roster of victims, but I just couldn't bring
myself to kill her. Don't worry Fi', vampires will be next.
Mike Allwood & Everyone at
SCARdiff: For giving me somewhere to launch this book, and a
deadline that therefore nearly killed me.
Harry Markos: Who believed in
The Magpye from day one.
This is the story of a
bird.
Once, a long time ago, this
bird sat on the left shoulder of death and, other than for the
reaper's steed, was Death's only companion. Together, the rider the
bird and the horse went out into the world and hunted for souls to
take to the afterlife. The reaper and his steed knew only this
duty, but the bird was prideful and greedy. It begged Death to give
it souls of its own to hold dominion over.
Death refused, but the bird
persisted, cawing in the reaper's ear incessantly. Eventually, even
Death's patience was exhausted and, in a rage, Death cast the bird
down into the shadowy space between the world of mortal men and the
afterlife. It gave the bird dominion only over those incomplete
souls could not move on to the next world and who were trapped in
limbo as ghosts, spectres, and phantoms.
The bird, for its part, was
also enraged. It grew capricious, cruel, and spiteful and hatched a
plan to swell the ranks of its own kingdom at the expense of Death
itself.
It became a spectral thing
itself and, haunting the minds of wronged men, the bird taught
mankind how to seek vengeance. It remade itself from an avatar of
death into an avatar of bloody murder and revenge and vowed to one
day become master of all of the dead.
That bird became the Magpye,
and this is its story.
INTERLOPERS
Everything in the circus was
dead except for Marv, Marissa, and maybe Magpye.
Nobody was sure about
Magpye.
Part of the problem was that
Magpye wasn't always completely Magpye. Sometimes he was Able
Quirk, and he certainly looked a lot like him. A dead him, but
still him. Other times Magpye was someone else entirely, the ghost
of some other person, or persons, speaking through Able. But
always, underneath it all, he was Magpye. Whatever the hell that
meant.
Above ground, everything had
been burnt long ago. The caravans were nothing more than rusting
skeletons, their blackened skins blistered from the heat of the
fire, ruptured, and now rusting in the merciless elements. Their
black frames looked the skeletons of elephants, great beasts come
together in their graveyard, far from the herd. Tattered tarps,
colourful shrouds for the dead circus, clung to the ruined frames
of the tents and awnings, and the ground was little more than a
black, scorched skin. Above it all towered the black bones of the
big top, casting its grim shadow across the place like a cage. When
the wind was right, you could still smell burning. If you listened
carefully, you could sometimes hear screams too. Murder hung in the
air like a fog and clung to everything, a sticky miasma that made
the flesh crawl and the heart pound.
Something bad had happened
here. The kind of bad that stained a place.
Even when the circus had been
open, before everything had burnt, there had been rumours. The
place was an old, forgotten cemetery, some said, and the ghosts of
those interred here haunted the circus and plagued its visitors.
Well, there were ghosts here, that much was certain. Magpye could
hear them. He could hear them all the time.
Below ground, in their tiny
sanctuary underneath the vast corpse of the circus, Marv and
Marissa were cooking. Pans steamed, lids rattled. Ever the showman,
ever the magician, Marv made even a simple stew cooked over a
camping stove look like a conjuring trick. Behind him, Marissa laid
the table. Impossibly, some china had survived the fire-storm that
had consumed the circus, and she placed it carefully on the
table.
The sanctuary was a small
mausoleum: an expensive tribute, Marv had suggested, to a family
long past. Despite all the ghosts that Magpye could sense, he had
no inkling of who the original denizens of this place might have
been. Unlike the ghosts of the circus, their spirits had found
peace, he suspected. Marissa had done her best to decorate the
place, papering the vaulted stone ceilings with old posters from
the circus, scrounging up what furniture she could. With the
original tenants gone, they had turned the place into a shrine to
their own lost loved ones. Salvage from the burnt out caravans was
piled everywhere, a ramshackle museum built up from the everyday
detritus of people's lives mixed with what was left of the
paraphernalia of the circus. They had used some of the larger boxes
to block up doors, limiting themselves to just a few small rooms.
Marv wanted to explore the place, but Magpye's keen sense of the
dead and their demands had bade him leave the rest of the crypt
alone. The living were the interlopers here.
Perched on the edge of an old
steam trunk, Magpye watched Marissa laying the table. The plates
were fragile, just like the girl, he thought. Survivors, but
chipped and crazed and changed by the whole thing. He was changed
too, of course, more than any of them.
"Sit down to the table, son,
you're making us all nervous," Marv said. "Or make yourself useful
and help Marissa."
Magpye cocked his head to one
side, an affectation that let Marv and Marissa know that he was no
longer listening to them, but to one of the many voices that only
he could hear. Dead voices, never quiet. "Sorry," he mumbled,
hopping down from his perch.
"That's OK," said Marissa,
unsure whether the apology had been for her or not. "Everything's
ready. Why don't you sit down and we can get started?"
Magpye shot Marv a look. "I
can't..."
"Try," said Marv, pouring
steaming stew from the pan into the waiting bowls. "Just...
try."
And so the three of them sat
and stared at their plates of stew. Marv, the once great circus
conjurer, and Marissa his daughter and former assistant. Magpye
knew them both, but couldn't be sure if the memories were his or if
they belonged to one of his ghosts, to the one of the voices in his
head.
He felt Marissa’s hand on his.
It was warm, far warmer than his own cold and cadaverous flesh.
"You used to love this stew,"
she said earnestly. "You've got to eat something, keep your
strength up."
Magpye pushed the bowl away
angrily, spilling some of the steaming stew onto the old wooden
table.
"I can't," he said flatly, his
temper immediately subsiding. "I can't eat this."
He stalked away from the table,
damning the voices in his head for their sudden
silence
as Marissa began to
sob behind him.
***
Sitting in his lair, Magpye
listened to the girl's sobs fade away, and to the muffled sounds of
Marv's calm, deep voice. He was a hypnotist, amongst his other
conjuring skills, and Magpye wondered if Marv had ever considered
reaching into Marissa’s mind and turning off the things that
plagued her. The voices said no, but Magpye still wondered.
The "lair", as Magpye had come
to term it, was the smallest of their rooms. Marv's old trick
cabinet stood against one wall, co-opted by Magpye for his own
storage. A bed of sorts, cobbled together from part of one of the
old caravans, lay awkwardly to one side. A jagged shard of warped
glass was propped up in one corner, a poor substitute for a decent
mirror. Magpye liked to look at himself, he said, to see if he
could see any trace of them, the voices in his head, behind his
eyes or on his face. Marv said that Magpye had once stared into the
mirror for almost two days. All he ever saw was his own warped
reflection, of course. The dead were far too cunning to be caught
in mirrors.
A soft tap on the door and the
creak of hinges announced Marv's arrival.
"I'm sorry," said Magpye
instantly, "I shouldn't have..."
"It's fine," Marv interrupted,
dragging an old crate away from the wall to make an impromptu seat
for himself. "But you can't hide what you are from her forever you
know."
Magpye looked down at the
floor. "And what is that, exactly?"
"You're a young man with some
incredible gifts, Quirk."
"Don't call me that!" snapped
Magpye. The bed creaked under his weight as he shifted himself back
and forwards. Marv knew the movement and understood the inner
torment that it signified. He couldn't imagine what it was to have
so many voices in your head, especially when they were
screaming.
Marv sighed and rubbed at his
face. "You can't afford to forget who you really are, son."
"Who I really am is why all of
my friends and all of my family are dead, Marv. Who I really am is
why we live in a tomb underneath what used to be our home, why we
have to scavenge in the wreckage of our lives, of their lives, for
the things we need. Being Able Quirk is why all of this
happened."
Magpye stood up and stalked
across to the trick cabinet. Yanking the doors open, he revealed
the contents - a small arsenal of throwing knives, a long handled
axe, a belt hung with loops of trapeze wire, and his great coat.
Stitched with a series secret pouches and pockets, even Marv didn't
know the full extent of the coat's contents. Hanging from the top
of the cabinet, was the mask. In a cabinet full of weaponry, it was
the mask that frightened Marv most of all.
"You're going out?" he asked,
warily.
Magpye pulled on the great
coat. Inside, Marv could see holsters swinging.
"And you've got yourself some
guns, I see."
"Malcolm put me on to them. He
kept them in a secret compartment in the floor of his caravan."
"Malcolm..." said Marv wistfully. Malcolm had been the
circus' sharpshooter. British by birth, he dressed as a cowboy and
affected a Texan drawl as part of his act. He'd been great, in his
day, but he'd never told anyone the secret of where he'd learnt to
shoot. Marv had always suspected that he was more than just a
sharpshooter or a trick shot. For one thing, he'd never come across
a trick shot
who knew how to
shoot a man in the gut
so
that it took him a whole day to bleed out.
Magpye unhooked the long
handled axe and slung it over his back on a leather strap.
"I'm not going to try and stop
you," said Marv.
"I know."
"But you can't do this forever.
Eventually, you're going to have to stop hiding and remember who
you are, underneath all of this."
"Doing this," said Magpye,
unhooking the mask, "Is the only thing that makes any of this make
sense."
Marv stood, placing his arms on
Magpye's shoulders. He could feel hard plates stitched underneath
the cloth. "I used to feel that way, you know I did. They were my
family too."
"You left."
"And I came back."
"When they were dead. When it
was too late to help anybody."
Marv found he
couldn't see Magpye's
eyes any more. The pale, milky orbs were almost devoid of
colour, another of the mysterious changes that had come over the
boy Marv had once known as Able Quirk, but it was more than that.
He didn't see the dead, or hear them like Magpye did, but that
didn't mean that he didn't remember them. The circus had been his
home too, once. Marv, the great magician, the master escape artist.
He'd pulled his greatest ever escape without even knowing it,
leaving the circus just a few weeks before it was burnt to the
ground, the entire crew murdered.