The Magpye: Circus (13 page)

Marv opened his eyes.

It was daytime, the sun sitting
round and fat behind hazy white clouds. The sky was blue,
incredibly blue, and around him the circus buzzed with activity.
People laughed, cheered. There were whoops as the bangs and fizzes
of fireworks echoed overhead and somewhere an elephant trumpeted
loudly.

"We never had an elephant,"
said Marv. His voice sounded wrong, like a tape being played too
slowly. "What is this place?"

A crowd of people passed him,
their faces blurry, rubbed out by an invisible eraser. Marissa was
behind them, dancing slowly, wheeling around so that her yellow
summer dress flared out. She had that dress as a little girl, Marv
remembered it.

"These are my memories of the
circus," she said. "My happy memories, that is."

"It wasn't like this," replied
Marv. "It was never like this. How did we even get here?"

Marissa smiled, and the sun
seemed to beam a little brighter.

"Silly Daddy," she said.
"Haven't you figured it out yet?"

Marv turned away. Beyond the
fringes of the circus there was nothing. No road, no city. Just
grass, unbelievably green and verdant, stretching all the way to
the sky. It was a perfect place. He wished he could remember the
circus, and Marissa, this way.

"Memories," he said, his voice
cracking. "Just like the others, right? That's all you are?"

Marissa hooked her arm in her
father's. He rested against her, his breathing becoming ragged as
he held back his tears.

"No, Daddy, not
just
memories.
Feelings, too."

She rested her head on his
shoulder, wrapped one of her thin arms around his shoulder. Marv
thought about how ethereal she had always been, a waif-like thing
of light and magic. She wasn't for this world, with all its dirt
and grime and horror and hate. She was for a place like this, where
there was only laughter.

"And love," she said,
completing his thoughts.

He turned, taking her in his
arms, letting his tears roll freely down his cheeks as he held her
gently. Around them, the circus had stopped moving, and there was
only peace and the warmth of the unreal sun.

"I'm so sorry, baby. I never
wanted you to get hurt."

"I know, Daddy."

"That bitch," he sobbed. "She
told me she'd saved you. How couldn't I see it?"

"Because you didn't want to see
it," Marissa said calmly. She stroked his wiry hair, resting his
head on her shoulder. "The best tricks are the ones you don't see
coming, right? Didn't you wonder where all your magic had
gone?"

"I used to tell you that
you
were my magic,
remember?"

They laughed together, the kind
of laughter that cut through tears only to leave more tears pouring
in their wake. Happiness had always been the vanguard of sorrow in
Marv's life.

"This the part where I have to
let you go, isn't it?" he asked, the sentence punctuated by
sobs.

"Not yet Daddy. First we have
to help Able. I loved him too, remember?"

The Ink slithered slowly away
from Grace Faraway.

Oozing along the grooves
between the floor tiles, slipping down through cracks and seeping
through any which way that it could, it made its slow but
inexorable progress through the old mill.

Behind it, abandoned by the
Ink, Grace's corpse desiccated and began to crumble inwards like a
dead wasp's nest. Her shattered skull collapsed down into her face,
leaving just the mask of her final scream, face down on the dusty
floor. The Ink could have saved her, of course. It had stitched her
body back together from worse injuries than this and had
rejuvenated her so many times, consuming younger, fresher bodies to
keep her ageing and ailing flesh firm and strong. Oh yes, The Ink
*could* have saved her.

But The Ink was bored with
Grace Faraway, and a boring story was not worthy of The Ink.

It had been born on a cave
wall, millennia ago, when a monkey had first decided to keep a
record of what it had seen that day. While the monkey slept, The
Ink had slithered off the wall and down into the monkey's fur.
Poisoned by The Ink, the monkey grew hairless and began to walk
only on its hind legs. Driven on by The Ink, it begat more in its
own unnatural state and The Ink was there to daub itself on the
face of the first of them that looked another in the eye and killed
its brother.

That
had been a
story.

In the ages that had passed
since The Ink had oozed and dripped and leaked its way into
history. It had made empires rise and toppled regimes, painting
itself on the world. It had hidden itself in dark places and made a
masterpiece of the torture of just one life. It had explored every
facet of man's depravity in search of a story as potent and as
powerful as that first one. It might have continued that way
forever, had it not found Grace Faraway. It had found her when she
little more than a child, orphaned by a war of The Ink's devising.
The Ink had never known a creature like her, a creature of such
abject hunger and amorality. Human, but so far apart from humanity.
She seduced The Ink, in her way, and together they crafted a story
of kings and king-makers, using the power of The Ink to raise a
line that had culminated in Adam and Cane King.

And that had been her downfall. Whatever it was that Adam
King was now, it was truly
new
, and it had been
a long time since the Ink had experienced that.

The Ink found itself at a wall
and began, impossibly, to drip upwards, forming a puddle on the
ceiling that slowly began to be absorbed into the mouldy tile-work.
Above it, gunfire and screams told a small story of their own.

Murder, pain, blood, death.
Those were the very best stories, and Adam and Cane King's story
would be sure to have all of these in abundance. It was a story
surely worthy of The Ink.

"Wake up!"

Water hit Owen White's face,
pulling him back up from the cold darkness of unconsciousness. He
cursed his luck that he wasn't dead. Opening his one eye, swollen
already from the pistol whipping he had received from Taylor, Owen
White saw the smiling face of Cane King.

Owen tried to move, and found
he was tied to a chair. His ankles were bound to the legs of the
chair with what felt like rope, his arms were behind him and still
cuffed. There was a window behind King and from the light playing
across it White guessed that it looked down into the courtyard
where he and Nutt had detonated their car bomb earlier.

"Hello Detective," oozed King.
"I understand you wanted to see me?"

White tried to smile back,
feeling in his mouth a mess of blood and broken or missing teeth.
Taylor had worked him over a bit, that was clear. He was glad to
have missed it.

"I'm here to arrest you, Mr.
King, in connection with the murder of several police officers. For
starters."

Cane King laughed, a genuine, from
-
the
-
gut
laugh.

"Incredible," he chuckled as
the laughter died down. "Detective, you have got some almighty
balls, I'll give you that. Don't you think you should be begging
for your life right now?"

Owen turned his head, tried to
focus and see who else was in the room. Everything he knew about
King, Taylor, and scum bags in general was telling him that he was
dead. Maybe not in the next hour, or two, but very, very soon. The
only variable was the amount of pain they would inflict in the
meantime, and even that was a scale that started at "lots". The one
thing he might still be able to achieve was to turn Taylor and King
against each other. Having seen what Taylor could do, Owen didn't
want an animal like that loose on the streets. All White had to do
was convince King that Taylor was looking to overthrow him and he
could be assured that Taylor would be getting a body bag right next
to his own.

Owen smiled when he saw Taylor,
just to the left of the window, playing that damned stiletto of
his. He'd had time to bandage up his side, but there was still
blood seeping through onto his shirt and jacket.

Like hell that's a flesh wound,
thought White. Well done Rogers, you tagged him good after all.

"I'm not begging you for
anything, King," grunted White.

Cane King's fist hit Owen White
hard in the stomach and everything inside him moved around like
pieces in a jigsaw box. His ribs felt jumbled and loose, stabbing
his insides in places and pushing up against his skin in others. He
coughed up another mouthful of blood and realised that he was
probably bleeding internally.

"Like I said, I'm not begging
for shit," said White, spitting a glob of blood onto the floor.

Cane paced the room, rubbing
his knuckles into the palm of his other hand. Taking a deep breath
he took a run up of a few steps and punched White hard in the
stomach again. White wheezed as the air rushed out of him. Before
he could catch his breath, Cane hit him again, and again.

"You want… to kill me? You hit
like a little girl." croaked White "Your boy Taylor over there
could do… a better job. Guess that's why he wants to run… the
show."

King glanced at Taylor. White
saw it, and knew instantly that his suspicions were correct. King
was afraid of Taylor. Not a lot, not enough to ignore how useful
the psychopath could be to him, but enough to believe White's
accusation. White suspected that the spot at King's right hand had
once belonged to Mick Garrity until King had realised that Taylor
had none of Garrity's limitations. It had been Taylor who had
killed and gutted Lee Grice, White was sure of it, and even Cane
King had to be afraid of a man who could do that.

"Is that the best you can do?"
asked King. "Try to turn us against each other? You're not in one
of your interrogations now, Detective. You want to play good-cop
bad-cop with me? It would help if all the other cops weren't
fucking dead!"

"Suit yourself," replied White.
"Just remember it was me who told you to watch your back when
there's a knife in it."

King's fist again, this time
landing in the side of White's jaw, loosening teeth and sending a
mouthful of blood across the room.

"Let me tell
you
what's going to
happen, OK?" he shouted. "When you go back to them, you go back
broken - do you hear me? You go back limping and beaten and pissing
your pants every time someone slams a door near you. You're going
to be so fucking terrified that you're going to sleep with the
lights on from now until the day you die. And everyone will know,
EVERYONE WILL KNOW, that I did it to you. And the best bit? Not one
of them will do a god-damned thing about it."

King punched White again,
straight into his shattered eye socket. White screamed despite
himself, the pain almost unbearable. His chair toppled backwards,
leaving him on his back like a stranded turtle. King's boot slammed
into his side, again and again, turning White's ribs into broken
glass inside him. White tried to turn, to position one of his arms
to block some of the kicks, but he was tied too tight. All he could
do was soak up the punishment and hope the shadows around the
corners of his vision soon drowned him in sweet
unconsciousness.

King stopped for a second to
catch his breath.

"Nice… speech…" White
wheezed.

King squatted down over him,
his face so close that White could feel droplets of sweat dropping
off King down onto him.

"Keep it up," King growled.
"Because I can. When I'm done with you tonight I've got a doctor
who's going to patch you up. I'll come back tomorrow and start
again. I'll break you, it's just a matter of time. All this talk of
a vigilante, some kind of fucking ghost? It was all bullshit,
wasn't it? Just a fucking cop in a Halloween mask."

Owen White's one good eye was
full of blood, he blinked to try and bring Cane King's face into
focus. If Magpye wasn't already dead, the best and only thing that
White could do for him was keep his existence a secret. If King
thought that White was the vigilante then that gave White the edge,
even if it was an edge he was going to pay for in broken bones.
White blinked again. He wanted to look King right in the eye when
he delivered that little "fuck you", but there was something
moving, something he couldn't focus on.

"What are you looking at?"
asked King.

White's eye finally focussed
and he couldn't stop himself from grinning. On Cane King's cheek
was the tiny red dot of a laser sight.

"A dead fuck, that's what I'm
looking at."

The window behind King exploded
and White was blinded by a splatter of hot blood.

Yossarian Nutt. Sniper and
all-round bad cop.

Adam King strode through the
mill. Bodies lined the corridors, the remnants of the crossfire
between the cops and the Kingsmen. Bodies, not corpses, as King
counted more than one breathing his last as he passed. So much
death, the reaper couldn't get to them all at once. Adam listened
to their ragged breaths, watched the light flicker in their eyes
like dying candles in the dark.

He felt no pity for them,
showed them no mercy. He sensed their ghosts shake loose from their
dead flesh and pass him, racing headlong into the night to scream
and scream and scream. It seemed like all the dead cried out for
vengeance on someone.

Adam let them go. His head was
already full. Able and the circus ghosts bubbled at the fringes of
his mind, their memories washing against his own like tidal foam.
He focussed his mind on keeping them out. Their time would come.
He'd seen what Able could do with their skills and talents
combined, when he became the thing that he called "Magpye". The
creature was lurking, a shadow beneath the surface of the water,
it's full and terrible power concealed for now. It was as cunning
as it was primal, but Adam was determined to bridle the beast. Able
let the creature take control; Adam would be its master.