The Magpye: Circus (23 page)

Without warning, they snapped
back to the present.

"I understand," she said.

"You
… understand?"
replied Able. He felt breathless, nauseous, his own mind stretching
to catch up with Rosa's.

"Your name is Able Quirk. This
body is Able Quirk's. You are the illegitimate son of Adam King.
Cane King killed your mother, your father, and tried to kill you.
You survived. We all survive in you. We are ghosts, or perhaps
memories. There is something else, a 'thing', that gives you this
ability. It is hiding from me."

"The Magpye is hiding from
you?" asked Able incredulously.

"It has secrets," replied Rosa
in a matter-of-fact tone. "It knows me now. And so it knows I have
a habit of rooting out secrets."

"You're not like the others," said Able. "All of your
memories are so
… clear.
Organised."

"I have perfect eidetic
memory," replied Rosa. "And now, so do you. If you need it."

"Need it?"

"I'm dead because I went
looking for revenge for a friend of mine. That's on me. I can use
this afterlife, or whatever it is, to analyse the mistakes I made
or I can get that revenge once and for all."

Able felt himself relax for the
first time since Rosa Blind's mind had become a part of his.

"I can't make any promises," he
said. "I'm beaten and broken and we're at the bottom of a pit I
don't know where."

"You can heal," said Rosa. "You
have to eat. That's how it works."

"I'll be eating
…
you," said Able. His voice, even his own head, was weak.

"I'm in here, with you.
We'll
be eating
me."

"I don't think that makes it
any better," said Able.

"Wait 'till we eat Cooper,"
Rosa quipped, "You'll be lucky if you're still sober at the end of
it."

Able reached down into the mass
of flesh beneath him and pulled off another chunk of oozing meat.
He forced it into his mouth, trying not to smell it, trying not
even to taste it. It was survival, he told himself. It was
necessary. He groped around, found what felt like a second body,
its skin a different texture, its flesh firmer. He dug into it with
his bony fingers and sharp nails, penetrating the flesh more easily
than he thought possible. Another change, another adaptation,
perhaps from The Magpye. Able, the dead boy, a thing with pale
flesh, milk white eyes, and fingers like talons for tearing up the
dead.

He pushed another strip of meat
into his mouth and felt the familiar rush of new memories. Hartley,
the computer expert, came into Able's mind with his final words
still on his lips. Another impressive mind, although different to
Rosa's, Able reflexively held him back.

"I'll explain it to him," said
Rosa, "You do what you need to do."

Able felt some of the familiar
frothing chaos return as Rosa's mind drew away from his and
submerged, along with Hartley, into the river of memory. Others
rose to meet them, welcoming them to Able's dead family. Able's
dead family, also known as all the people that he had failed. Also
known as all the people who were dead because of Able Quirk.

Except, of course, for one.

"Bitch," cursed Adam King.
"She's dangerous, you should never have absorbed her."

"I owe her, she's dead because of me. Because of
us
, actually."

"You can't measure yourself
against the lives of normal people, Able. You're a King."

"
You're
a King."

"She will hamper you, her mind
is ill adjusted for magic."

"I'll take my chances," said
Able. "She might just be able to help me think straight."

Adam King's ghost snorted its
disgust. "You've got a creature living inside you that can control
the dead. I spent a lifetime preparing to harness its power and yet
it still denied me. You think some cop with an OCD can help
you?"

"
Maybe," said Adam.
"There's so much I don't know. I thought I was just another ghost,
like them, but now? I'm not just me, not just Able. And I'm not
dead, not really dead, either. My body moves around, I do things.
The Magpye does things too. I remember who I am now but there are
still parts of me that feel more like
it
than
me
."

"I can show you, teach you," said Adam. "Everything I
learnt, all my training, is already within you. My memories are
yours now, after all, but you are also my blood. You
are
the next of the Kings, Able."

Able instinctively pulled back
from Adam's mind as he felt his father's memories press against
his, imprinting themselves on him. He saw them all, all the Kings,
stretching back for generations. Each one fed on the memories of
their predecessor, a line of Kings that had amassed skills and
knowledge, power and wealth, and the darkest of occult power.

But where one King ended and
another began, that was something even Adam King was unsure of.
Perhaps, in reality, there was only one King. The original King,
the father of them all, the original King of the Dead. If that was
true, Able doubted there was any space for a Quirk.

"You won't control me." said
Adam firmly. "You'll never control me again. We do this my way from
now on."

Able felt Adam bridle, but held
his ground. For a moment, there was an uneasy, oppressive silence
in Able's mind. He could feel the eyes of the other ghosts on him,
an electric tension crackling across the surface of their mingled
minds and memories.

"Very well," acquiesced King.
"I have shown you how to control them, I have shown you how to heal
your undead flesh. Only the most important lesson remains, the one
The Magpye wanted to teach you itself."

"Which is?"

"Pain," replied the ghost and,
without warning, the crippling agony of Able's injuries
returned.

Marv and Marissa crept across
the waste ground in front of old building that concealed The Pit.
The place was one of the hundred or more nondescript shells of
buildings in this part of town. Monuments to the crumbling corpses
of industries that had moved overseas or just ceased to exist
entirely, they were arranged in block after block of giant
tombstones. It was a place the city had forgotten, which made it a
perfect place to put things that you wanted to disappear.

Marissa, the new Marissa that
Marv had conjured, no longer concealed her spectral nature.
Ethereal, she seemed to move a step out of sequence with everything
around her. Marv's magic wasn't as powerful if you looked right at
it, and Marv knowing that Marissa was a ghost made her weak. Like
any magic trick, it wasn't as good once you knew how it was
done.

"You're sure this is the
place?" asked Marv. He already knew the answer to the question,
Marv could feel his restored magic tugging him away from the place
harder and harder with every step closer that he took, the reflexes
of a lifetime as a habitual coward were hard to deny.

"Able's inside," said Marissa.
Her voice echoed against unseen walls; it reminded Marv of
listening to an old radio, the sounds distorting and deforming from
time to time. He closed his eyes for a second, tried to focus his
magic, focus Marissa. It was no use. The more he thought about her,
the less real she became.

"You should go," said Marv.
"I'm sorry darling, but I need to concentrate."

There was a gust of wind as
Marissa vanished, returned to whatever place it was that she went
when Marv wasn't thinking about her. He wondered how long he could
keep this up, if she would become weaker every time that he
conjured her or whether somehow, some-way, he could make it stick.
Everyone seemed to be cheating death these days.

Marv took a deep breath and
concentrated on the moment. A clear head, that was all he needed.
Get Able out of here, then get them all on the road. He still had
contacts and with this magic restored he was less afraid to use
them. They could find a new life somewhere, for all of them.

Staying low, Marv raced across
the last of the waste ground, keeping to what little cover there
was before slipping into the shadows at the side of the building.
There was only one entrance that wasn't boarded up, a set of double
doors with fresh tyre tracks leading up to it. The padlock on the
door wasn't new, but it was expensive. It took Marv almost ten
seconds to open it.

"Beat that, Able," Marv
chuckled to himself. The door opened smoothly, and Marv slipped
inside.

***

On the other side of the road,
Jack Taylor lowered a pair of night vision googles and smiled to
himself.

He always knew The Pit was
dangerous.

Able writhed in pain, feeling
himself sink deeper into the stinking mire of oozing, sweating meat
and corpses. He tore hunks of flesh from the bodies with trembling
hands and forced them into his mouth, hoping that the dead flesh
would heal his wounds as Adam had promised. The fresher meat filled
his mouth with cold blood. He choked and gagged, but kept
eating.

He felt his lungs try to
inflate. He felt broken bones regrowing, pushing past or through
tissue that was in their way. He felt muscles stretching, reaching
out to the lost parts of themselves to reconnect. It was a pain
unlike anything he had ever experienced, the pain of a body being
forced to work in a way so unnatural that it rebelled against it.
Lungs burst and collapsed again and again. Broken bones regrown
were brittle and shattered under the weight of flesh that had
swollen into a mass of cankers and tumours.

And all the while, consumed by
his agonies, Able felt the once cool waters of memory boil around
him. The ghosts, his ghosts, were reduced to a foaming and
incoherent mass.

Beneath it all the dark shadow
of The Magpye lurked. It had kept its promise to the magician, Able
was whole and restored, but The Magpye had promised nothing more
beyond that. Let the child and his errant father master the pain
alone. The Magpye would wait. It was very old and very good at
waiting.

"You must move your pain,
Able," said Adam, "Give it to one of the ghosts. Let them suffer it
in your place."

"I
… can't…" gasped
Able.

"It's simple," scoffed Adam.
"Just draw one of them forward. The pain will find its own
way."

"I won't
… do it…"
said Able, struggling to order the words in his mind as his body
convulsed and spasmed with another agonising wave of regrowth.
Somewhere inside him an organ inflated and burst, sending a wave of
hot fluid gushing out. Able vomited, spewing up clods of partly
chewed meat.

"You've done it before," said
Adam, "Without even realising it. When I was just a mystery voice
in your head, I guided your pain to a place where you couldn't find
it."

"No!" howled Able, his voice
echoing around The Pit. "No!"

"The ghosts are yours!"
commanded Adam. "Pick one!"

"No!"

Through his pain, Able forced
his father's ghost back. If torturing someone else in your place
was what it was to be Magpye, or to be a King, then he would have
no part of it. He owed the dead. He owed his family, his circus,
and he owed the cops. There were too many dead because of him, too
many lives lost. He wouldn't see their afterlives spent in agony.
This was his pain, the pain owed to him from the night of fire and
death at the circus, the pain owed to him by the cops who had died
expecting him to be at their side. He had all of his memories from
before his death, but what about everything that he had done since?
There was so much blood. So many others who had met their death
because of him, a dead man bringing more death, all of them dying
in his place.

The Pit was a hell on Earth,
but it was a hell that Able wished for.

The pain went on. Perhaps for
just a few moments, perhaps for hours, perhaps for days. There was
no time in The Pit, just the unreachable disc of grey light far
above, the slow decomposition of the mound of the dead, and the
endless, torturous regrowth and failure of new flesh. Able grew too
exhausted to eat, but the process refused to slow down. A chain
reaction of growth and death, it seemed to fuel itself, keeping him
trapped and insensate. In some moments of lucidity he reminded
himself that he was owed this pain, that it was his due. In others,
he screamed in rage at his father's ghost or at the strange and
unknown-able thing called The Magpye that were the twin reasons
that he was here. He begged them both more than once for death,
real death, but neither answered.

The pain was their way of
moulding him, or breaking him.

Spare the rod, spoil the child.
That was the sort of thing, Able guessed, that Adam King might have
said.

And so Able writhed and howled
alone in the darkness until his voice was nothing but a hoarse
whisper and he could barely muster the strength to move. Inert, his
body a pulsing mass of wounds and tumours, cankers and sores, he
sank slowly down into the mire of flesh. He accepted his fate. A
boy who should have been dead already, dying amongst the dead, his
head home to ghosts and strange memories.

Able watched the grey disc of
light grow smaller.

His heavy eyelids were almost
closed when he noticed the shadow. A shape, small but growing,
eclipsing the disc. Something coming closer, calling his name,
reaching out. A dark shadow. Something new, yet familiar. Something
from home. A voice in the dark. A figure, no, two figures, standing
over him. One in shadow, one a riotous mass of colours. One face
Able knew well, another a face from only the vaguest of memories.
Then hands finding him, lifting his broken body upwards. Hands,
lifting him up from the grip of the dead. Hands that had lifted him
up once before when he was lost. Hands that did not tremble as they
touched his warped and corrupted flesh, hands that brought him
gently to his feet.