The Palace of Laughter (18 page)

Outside this strangest of hills, night had swiftly fallen. In the old broken-down stalls with their faded canvas, String was lurking in the shadows, thinking over the things he had just seen. An entrance in the clown's ear, and stranger by far, a girl with wings, who rightfully belonged to him. He would have won her if the pez hadn't cheated in the fight. He did not really want to go back to the Halfheads of course. That had just been a ruse to lure Miles into his trap, and he knew in any case that they would never have him back. But imagine what he could do if he had a scout that could fly! He could become a legend among the Stinkers, among all the gangs. Someday he would be chief Stinker himself. He thought about these things, and he looked at the darkening waters of the moat with a shiver. He steered clear of water whenever he could, and in all his twelve years he could not remember once having a bath. “You won't catch me going in
there,” he said to himself. “I'll have to try my chances at the front door tomorrow. If that fool Jook is right, they won't be coming out anytime soon.”

And so Miles and Little crept deeper into the darkness of the Palace of Laughter, while down below in the watery gloom the nail-toothed mayor of the moat took a bite out of the worn leather boot that had half buried itself in the mud, and chewed it for as long as he could. It was the worst thing he had ever tasted, and he thought with regret of the nice, wriggling white snack he dimly remembered seeing earlier, and spat out the mouthful of tough, smelly leather in disgust.

M
iles Wednesday, barefoot and bearless, stopped for a moment and listened. His eyes were smarting from the effort of staring into nothingness, and he had stubbed his toes several times. He had been imagining a faint sound for some time, and now he was sure that it was real, but it was still too far off to hear clearly. The tunnel had begun to rise steadily, and the sound seemed to cascade down toward them like waves breaking against a distant beach.

“Do you hear that?” he asked Little.

“Yes,” said Little. “It makes me shiver.” She untied her shirt and jacket from her waist and struggled
back into them in the narrow tunnel.

Miles strained his ears, but the sound was no more than a faint rushing. “Why does it make you shiver?”

“I don't know,” said Little. “There's something strange in it, but I can't hear well enough yet.”

They continued through the darkness. A draft of cold air followed them deeper into the hill, and Miles guessed that they were in some sort of air vent. At one point the tunnel became so steep that it was easier to crawl, then suddenly the ground fell away beneath them and began to descend just as steeply. They reached a point where the distant sound became noticeably clearer. It was a strange music, jangly and discordant, and it was coming from somewhere to their right.

“There's another tunnel joining this one,” said Miles. He could faintly see a circle of light. “We'll follow the music.”

“I don't like it,” said Little. “It's…back to front and inside out.”

Miles listened again. It was certainly unlike any music he had heard before. There were gongs and flutes and other sounds he couldn't name. Somewhere in the middle was a hurdy-gurdy. The notes seemed to fight with one another, and the
rhythm would now rush onward like a strong current, then catch so suddenly that you felt like you had come to a cliff with no time to stop. It made the hair stand up on Miles's scalp, yet it was also strangely funny. He shook his head as though emptying water from his ears, and entered the tunnel. “Come on,” he said. “It's only music, and music can't hurt us.”

The new tunnel was smaller than the one they had come from, and they had to crawl. There were more openings branching off now. At one point they passed over hollow-sounding wood, as though there might be a trapdoor in the tunnel floor. Now each turn they took brought a little more light, and the music grew stronger until it seemed to be drawing them toward it like an invisible rope.

Suddenly the music rose to a nerve-jangling crescendo and abruptly stopped. Miles and Little stopped too. Silence washed along the tunnel, followed by a voice that was at once familiar and different. It took Miles a moment to identify it as the smooth voice of the Great Cortado. It sounded louder and deeper than it had during his brief job interview in Cortado's trailer. It was impossible to tell how close or how far away it was. He sat back against the tunnel wall and listened. Little was still too. She seemed relieved that the music had paused.

“…your Immense Privilege to witness the most spec-tac-u-lar, the most Fan-tas-tical, the most Hil-larious Ex-travaganza of Laughter ever performed,”
the voice was booming.
“…Ladies, Gentlemen, Lords and Laddies, Sages and Peasants and Persons of Superfluous Learning, it is my Pleasure and Delight to present for you this ver-ry night the Funniest, the Wittiest, the most Side-splitting troupe of Fools, Funnymen, Boobs and Bobos, Tumblers and Tricky-Dicks that has ever been assembled in one place since Cortez presented his Hunchbacked Aztec Buffoons to Pope Clement the Seventh.”

With a roll of drums, a clash of cymbals and the boom of a mighty gong that sounded more in the chest than the ears, the crazy cacophony started anew, twirling itself like a musical vine around the closing lines of the Great Cortado's introduction:
“Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, be prepared to be entertained as you have never been entertained before! Tonight the greatest comics in the Wide World will take you Beyond Laughter, and your Lives will be Transformed, FOREVER!”

The music raced and plunged like a wild thing, accompanied by squeaks and shrill whistles that seemed to be hanging on to the music by their teeth. Miles laughed at the sound, despite himself.
He began to crawl toward it, but the music seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and it was difficult to decide which route to take. The swell of laughter added itself to the sound—a great crowd of people laughing at something that was hidden from view. He had to find a vantage point from which he could see this fabulous show. He forgot his bleeding fingers and his stubbed toes, and the clammy chill of his moat-drenched clothes, his mind drawn by the hypnotic music and the waves of laughter that followed it. This, he imagined, would be more like the picture he had first had of the Palace of Laughter, and he felt an overwhelming urge to see for himself the greatest clowns on Earth. The thought of Tangerine slipped into his mind, and he brushed it aside impatiently. There was no point searching for Tangerine while the show was in full swing, he told himself, better to wait until the people had left and the place was quiet. They were nearly there now, he could tell.

“Miles!” called Little from behind. “Wait for me.” He glanced over his shoulder. Little's face looked worried and anxious. “What was the matter with her?” he thought irritably. She could find something to laugh at in a cow or a fence post, but now that they were about to witness the funniest show on Earth,
she looked as if she were lost on the way to a funeral.

“Just hurry up, will you?” he called. “You're always slowing me down.”

His voice sounded sharper than he had meant it to, but they seemed to have been crawling in circles forever, and the show was going on without him. The strange acoustics of the tunnels made the sound confusing. Sometimes it seemed as if people were choking or wailing, then he would turn a corner and it would sound like hysterical laughter again. Little was no longer complaining. She followed him silently, and when he looked back at her he could not read her expression.

The tunnel they were in began to slope downward gently. He turned a corner, and suddenly there was bright light ahead, and the sound became almost deafening. He crawled cautiously to the tunnel mouth and found himself looking out into a huge theater of some sort, hollowed out of solid rock in the center of the hill, from a vantage point high on the wall. Above him was a domed ceiling, supported by a circle of massive pillars that were carved from bottom to top with curling vines and strange animals. Just below the tunnel mouth a stone ledge, shaped like a seashell, jutted from the wall, and he dropped down onto it and lay flat on
his stomach, peering over the edge.

The roar of laughter washed over him. Some sixty feet below him he could see an enormous circus ring in the center of the floor, surrounded by banks of stone seats that were packed with people. Miles could see the crowd and the ring through a gantry of bars, pulleys and ropes, suspended from the ceiling at the level of his balcony. The gantry supported rows of spotlights, wired together with cables so frayed and tangled that they looked like the work of Fowler Pinchbucket. One spotlight hung just in front of him, and several ropes were fastened within his reach, each one bound at the end with a different-colored tape. Sandbags of various sizes dangled from the ends of some of the ropes as counterweights to the props and lights. Little dropped down softly and squeezed onto the narrow space beside him, and together they peered through the gaps in this tangle of metal and rope to get the best view of the performance.

Watching a group of people from almost directly above—through a network of bars, cables and spotlights—can make it very difficult to piece together exactly what they are doing. There appeared to be about twenty clowns on the stage at the same time. He caught a glimpse of the three small clowns with
the different-colored noses. They were trying to oil an elephant's knees with a large grease can. They kept grabbing the can from one another, and slipping and sliding on the spilled grease. The crowd sat in banked circles around the ring, mouths open and tears streaming from their red-rimmed eyes. Miles had never seen people laugh so hard. The sound of it was so infectious that he began to laugh himself.

The ring was full of chaotic movement, but from their vantage point it was almost impossible to make out what was going on. All the time the music looped and raced and clattered around the auditorium like an invisible beast running laps around the walls. The men in the audience guffawed and honked, and the ladies screeched and whinnied. The more he looked at them, the less sure he was that they were really enjoying themselves. It was hard to tell from so high up, but he thought he could see fear in their eyes.

The look of anxiety had left Little's face. She was laughing at something that he could not see. There was something unfamiliar about the sound of her laughter, but he was so distracted by the music, and the little he could see of what was happening below, that he couldn't put his finger on it. Instead he found himself laughing with her. The audience roared. Some seemed to have developed a sort of
lockjaw, their mouths fixed open so wide that they could no longer close them. One red-faced woman was cackling so hard that she toppled forward into the ring. Her husband leaned forward to look at her, but seemed unable to help. He slumped back in his seat, clutching his stomach and crying with laughter. The guffawing face of the priest behind him had turned the color of a ripe plum, and his eyes were fixed on the center of the ring as though they were glued in their sockets.

Miles turned his attention back to the ring. Through a triangular gap he could just see a pale-faced clown sitting cross-legged in the sawdust in front of an enormous pie and clutching an oversized knife and fork. He had a straight back and a calm expression, and sat in the center of that whirlwind of hysteria like the eye of a storm. He was dressed in an outfit that was so white it seemed to glow, and wore a very tall chef's hat, as tall again as himself. Suddenly a ragged clown on a unicycle appeared and rode straight through the center of the pie, hotly pursued by the three tiny clowns, now dressed like undertakers in long black tailcoats and top hats, who trampled what was left of it into the ground. The chef clown leaped to his feet. A small blue bolt of lightning shot from his outstretched
finger toward the last of the tailcoated clowns. It hit his top hat fair and square, and the hat flew from his head and burst into flames. The crowd shrieked. Little gave a gasp and grabbed Miles's arm, and Miles knew at once that this must be Silverpoint.

M
iles Wednesday, bootless and buttonless, craned his neck to try and get a better look at Silverpoint. He had marched off in pursuit of the little top-hatted clowns and Miles could no longer see him. Little still held tight to his arm. She was biting her lip.

The music spiraled faster and faster, higher and higher, until it was almost a continuous shriek. In the middle of the ring, a clown dressed as a tramp jumped up from under a sheet of newspaper he had been using as a blanket. The ground beneath him began to shake. He picked up his little white dog with a comical wail and ran hotfoot for the edge of
the ring. A trapdoor burst open in a cloud of green and purple smoke, right at the spot where he had been lying a moment before. All over the ring, clowns stopped their hammering and honking and squirting and cartwheeling, and turned as one to face the opening trapdoor. From the fog of colored smoke a figure rose slowly out of the ground. Miles could just make out the outline of a man sitting on a sort of throne. The hysterical bellowing of the crowd began to subside into a babble of groans and gasps. Some had fallen silent with their mouths still stuck open. Every eye in the theater was fixed on the throne.

The throne rose on a pillar of steel. It was midnight blue, and on its high back was painted the same laughing clown's face that was on the side of the Great Cortado's wagon, the same face into which the very hill itself had been carved. Looking down on it now, Miles could see it in a different light. The wide-open mouth looked ready to devour anyone or anything that came near, and there was danger in the staring eyes. Seated beneath that manic face was the Great Cortado himself. As the throne reached its full height, he stood up (which didn't make a great deal of difference, it has to be said) and began to speak in the same deep, hypnotic
tones with which he had introduced the show. There was no “Ladies and Gentlemen” this time, no “Immense Privileges,” no flowery introduction at all. This time the Great Cortado got straight down to business.

“Now you have felt the true power of laughter,”
he said.
“Elemental laughter, that has reached deep down into the center of your being and cracked you open like a tree root cracks a rock.”
The audience stared. Their mouths hung open. Miles spotted Genghis sitting at the back, his arms folded and his mouth very definitely shut. His eyes roamed around the stupefied audience, and his face wore a smug look. Miles tried to see his pockets, as though he might catch a glimpse of Tangerine's grubby head peeping out, but it was too far, and too dark, and there were too many things in the way. As though awaking from a dream, he remembered what he was doing here, and he missed the feel of the bear in his pocket more than he could ever have imagined.

“Now you know the weakness of humanity,” the Great Cortado continued in a quieter voice. “The debilitating millstone of laughter that hangs around the neck of the human race. Neither beast nor fish nor fowl carries this flaw. It is a cruel trap
that nature has made for man alone, for it comes uninvited and saps the strength of whoever is afflicted by it. It distracts and confuses the mind and lies like a thick fog across the path of progress.”

The crowd soaked up his poisoned words like blotting paper. Their jaws were slack, their eyes were glazed, and everything the Great Cortado said went in one ear and stayed there.

“Tonight,”
he continued, his voice growing stronger,
“you have finally been set free. With the help of our unparalleled entertainment, you have emptied your souls of every last drop of useless laughter. When you leave this place you will remember nothing of what you have seen, yet so complete is our treatment that you will be cured of laughter forever!”

His voice was as smooth as polished stone and as rich as chocolate, and the audience listened without a murmur. Miles, perched in his balcony, could not help thinking that the Great Cortado's words made a certain sense. Now that the music and the performance had abruptly stopped, he could not quite remember what the point of laughter was, or why it had always seemed such a missing element in his Pinchbucket House childhood. Yet moments earlier he too had been laughing at the mere fractured
glimpses he could catch of the performance. He felt confused and a little light-headed, and he shook his head as though to clear it. He knew that there was something twisted about the Great Cortado's words as they wrapped themselves around his thoughts like a snake.

He leaned out from the balcony to see if he could spot Silverpoint. A large sandbag of yellowing canvas blocked his view. It hung from a pulley just above Miles, on the end of a rope that stretched out from the center of the gantry. He felt the weight of the sandbag as he tried to push it to one side, and this gave him an idea. He looked at the point where it appeared the far end of the rope was tied. He looked down at the Great Cortado, and he made a quick calculation. The little man seemed to be nearing the end of his speech.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,”
he was saying,
“I, the Great Cortado, have finally got laughter on the ropes. With the help of the learned Dr. Tau-Tau, I have tamed it and bottled it. If ever you find yourself with the foolish inclination to indulge in this intoxicating waste of time, you may purchase it by the bottle (ten cents from all reputable dealers), and cork it when you are done. Collect your free sample on the way out. Thank you for coming.”

Miles reached up and began to pry the taut rope over the rim of the pulley wheel. Little looked at him, and her eyes widened. “Are you sure…,” she began, but she never finished what she was about to say. The rope came free with a sound that would have to be spelled
“Thungg,”
if it could be written down at all. The bag dropped like a stone, then swung out in a long and graceful arc across the huge auditorium. The Great Cortado was still standing on his throne with his arms outstretched like a letter “Y,” and the heavy sandbag was swishing through the air, aiming straight for his head. There was no doubt about it. Little held her breath, and Miles held his. He had time to wonder, as the sandbag curved through the air in slow motion, if this was his most brilliant idea yet, or whether it was an act of foolishness that would have consequences more terrible than any he could possibly foresee.

At the very moment the Great Cortado caught sight of the approaching sandbag, the raised throne jerked into motion and began its descent back into the floor. The sandbag whistled over Cortado's head, ruffling his hair as it passed. He looked up in surprise as it swung over to the other side of the theater and up, up into the spidery gloom among the bars and wires. It reached the top of its swing
and punched the glass out of a large yellow spotlight. The yellow glass rained down in a sparkling shower. Most of it landed behind the outer row of people, but one piece fell, as though it had been given precise directions, and stuck itself into the back of Genghis's right hand, already bandaged where it had been scratched by a cat and bitten by Miles himself. Genghis jumped up with a roar. The stupefied people sitting around him did not even turn their heads.

The sight of Genghis hopping around and holding his injured hand distracted Miles for a moment, but the sandbag was on its way back to him. It curved back across the auditorium, spinning now from its impact with the spotlight, and sailing well over the head of the Great Cortado, whose throne was sinking rapidly into its trapdoor.

As it passed over the ring, the three small clowns in their top hats and tails watched it closely. Suddenly the clown with the green nose hopped up onto the shoulders of his two companions, and without a word or a signal they tossed him high in the air, as though releasing a racing pigeon. Although the circus band had fallen silent, the drummer was unable to contain himself, and began a long roll on the snare drum. Green Nose somersaulted twice and
landed on the sandbag as it flew past, grasping it with his legs and flinging his top hat into the air with a shrill blast on his whistle. The drumroll ended with a clash of cymbals. The audience stared, but did not laugh. They seemed to have forgotten how. Genghis watched from below, glaring and sucking his knuckles. The trapdoor in the floor swallowed the Great Cortado, throne and all.

So quickly did all this happen that Miles didn't know what to do. The sandbag that he had released had failed to connect with the Great Cortado's head, and now it was on its way back to him, complete with a small wiry man in a funeral suit and a green nose. If he scrambled to his feet he would be in plain view of Genghis and the other clowns. If he stayed where he was he would be a sitting duck.

“Get back from the edge,” he whispered urgently to Little, but he himself seemed to be glued to the spot. The little man was getting closer by the second. The drummer had fallen silent.

When he remembered afterward what had happened, it always seemed to Miles that this part had been a dream. As the clown on the sandbag approached the balcony, Miles could see him in sharp detail. His head was covered in black curls that shone like raven's feathers. He had wide, green-painted lips
that matched his nose, and bushy black whiskers on either side of his whitewashed face. His glinting eyes were like tiny black olives. The sandbag slowed as it drew level with the balcony, and Miles found himself inches away from the small clown, who was suspended in midair, waiting for gravity to recover its grip. Suddenly he reached out, quick as lightning, and pinched Miles's nose hard with his bony fingers. His mouth opened in a grin of little pointed teeth, and he said something that sounded like “Ommadawn!” Then before Miles could even say “Ouch” he was gone.