The Magpye: Circus Read online

  "Nothing," said Garrity. "Nothing to lose."

  IN THE PIT

  Able woke up. Not Magpye, but Able. Able in his entirety.

  He woke up and tried to scream.

  He tried to scream and he tried to scream, but there was no noise. There was no noise because there was no air and there was no air because, as he gingerly brought a hand down from his crushed throat to his torso, he touched what he instinctively knew was the dead and flaccid tissue of a lung, punctured and useless, exposed to the precious air. He thought his stomach would have turned but his stomach, he quickly discovered, was not a stomach any more. Just a mass of pulpy gore, chopped and chopped and chopped until there was nothing left that resembled an organ of any sort anymore.

  His shaking hands explored further, nervously fingering along a fragment of exposed rib before becoming entangled with a loop of dislodged intestine. The pit was dark around him, the only light a dirty disc of moonlight above him, the opening of the pit, which seemed further away than the moon itself. He was glad of the darkness as he pulled his fingers free from the mess of flesh and closed his eyes.

  "He's opened you up."

  Dorothy's voice. Concern, anger, fear. Able, conversely, felt nothing. He didn't have time right now to wonder why.

  "Able, you should be dead."

  "I get that a lot."

  Able reached out and found the wall behind him. He realised his legs were bent at an impossible angle underneath him.

  "Dorothy?"

  "They dropped you a long way, kid. I think your neck is broken, back and pelvis too probably."

  "I'm paralysed," replied Able glibly. "I can't feel anything."

  It was Magpye who spoke next, an old and cruel voice that smiled in Able's head like a shark with a knife in its teeth.

  "You will," it said. "You'll feel it all. You can thank your friend Marv for that."

  "Marv? Why?" asked Able. Along with the memories of his past life, whole and intact, he remembered as well what it was to have a creature living inside his head. The ghosts were one thing, with his memories restored his dead friends held little fear for him, but the creature was something else. The creature was the thing that really haunted him. He willed himself to show no fear, wondering if you could lie to something that lived inside your head. He knew he could lie to himself, he hoped that would be enough.

  "Why?" taunted the creature. "Because your friend Marv wanted you to be in the driving seat when we got back here. Your memories intact and you in control, that's what he said. Well, here you are. I just hope you know what to do. I hope you know how to mend your dead flesh. I hope you know how to put a bridle on your pain and make it silent. And I hope you know how to stop the ghosts of every other dead thing in this pit creeping into your head and making it their home."

  "Every other dead thing?"

  "Cane King had his little dog drag your bones here, to his charnel pit. It's where he keeps the things he's killed, his own private tally or murder and death. His father used it before him, his grandfather before that. They're all in here, every one. It goes down a long way, Able. A long way."

  Able's hand crept tentatively past his leg, felt the soft, strange something underneath him. He felt flesh, a fragment of bone, and blood. Blood, the vessel of the ghosts, their transport from wherever they were to the inside of Able's head. Blood. It only took one drop, and he was steeped in it. Steeped in blood, dead, and sinking.

  "I'm going to bring your pain back now, Able," said Magpye. "I've fixed your throat enough for you to scream. Let me know when you're ready for me to take over again."

  The pain hit in an instant. At first, it was so impossibly vast that Able couldn't comprehend it. It felt like someone else's pain, seen and felt sympathetically, but still remote, still distant. In the darkness, it felt like his body went on forever and the pain in some parts of it was so very far away. It wasn't until the second wave, as his mind grew accustomed to the amount of pain and began somehow to process it, that he realised how very small and broken he was. No human mind had a concept for this much pain or being alive having been so utterly and completely butchered. It was what unconsciousness was for, but Able knew that Magpye would not allow that. The creature would keep him suspended here in this state of agony and terror until he begged it for its help.

  But it wasn't the only person, Able wagered, who knew the dark things that the Magpye claimed to know. There was someone else who had at least claimed to know this power, to call it his own. Someone who had studied a lifetime to wield it.

  And so Able did cry out in pain and desperation, but it was not the Magpye's name that he called.

  The word that Able Quirk screamed was "Dad".

  RAINING

  Marv woke up face down in the rain, the wet and gritty earth of the circus in his mouth. It still tasted of burning, even after all this time.

  He struggled to his feet, mud sucking at his hands, elbows, knees, and feet. His first thoughts were of Marissa, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  "Please," he whispered to himself, staggering in the direction of the hidden entrance to the underground mausoleum. "Please let her have made it back…"

  His clothes were soaked through; the rain stung his eyes as he fumbled with the hidden catch that opened the concealed door. He tried to imagine her opening the door from the other side, imagined the light and warmth from their makeshift stove welcoming him. He held the image in his head, tried to make it real. He ignored his senses, magical and mundane, when they told him those things weren't there, that they weren't going to happen. Marv had always thought that Magpye was the only one who could hear the ghosts of the circus, but the place felt strangely empty around him now. He couldn't shift the feeling that, around him, that emptiness was mocking him. Laughing at him through the rain.

  But… No ghosts.

  No Marissa.

  The door opened suddenly and there was only darkness and cold beyond it. What else would there be in a mausoleum?

  No ghosts.

  No Marissa.

  Marv let his legs give in and slithered down the wet stone steps that led down into their former hideaway. He lay there, half in the underworld and half not and felt the rain fall onto his face.

  He had killed her. His hubris, trying to make Adam King his creature, his hubris, letting him believe that he had hidden Able from the Kings, then his cowardice that had allowed him to leave both Able and Marissa behind whilst he saved his own skin. It had been that same cowardice that, fuelled by his magic, had brought Marissa back from dead. Not whole, of course, not intact. That was beyond his power, beyond anyone's perhaps. Even the dead creature itself, the Magpye, had not seemed able to breathe a full and whole life back into Able. No, what had come back of Marissa had been what Marv had remembered of her. He had not saved her for her own sake, he had saved her for his.

  Marv, the great escape artist, who could even find a trapdoor to slip out his own grief. That had always been the way that his magic worked. No great arcane workings, no rituals, no ceremony. It was more a reflex, an ingrained defence mechanism. Marv always got away unscathed, always had an out. The great escape artist indeed.

  And that, of course, was the answer.

  Still on the ground, the rain in his face, the unyielding stone steps in his back, Marv tentatively flexed his fingers and breathed a sigh of relief.

  It was there.

  As familiar as his own skin, he felt the magic back in his fingers. It felt as if every bone in his hands was a spring, coiled and ready to explode. Invisible sparks jumped between them, a web of potential energy.

  Magic hid, it was its nature, but there were times when it begged, yearned, cried out to be free.

  It was a whip that begged to be cracked.

  There was only one thing Marv could think of to do.

  "Marissa."

  Thunder rolled overhead like a charge of horses as lightning painted the world monochrome.

  Marv. Ever the showman.

 
THE TASTE OF MEAT

  The bottom of the pit was covered with the dead, a mound whose depth Able could only guess at. It was history, a history of lost people, a history of the dead. It was the crimes of the Kings measured in feet and inches of decaying flesh, shattered bones, and the stink of old blood and shit. Able gingerly pushed his fingers into the dead flesh of the corpse nearest to him, and pulled away a chunk of human meat. It was still moist, still rich with humours and blood.

  "Eat it," said the ghost of Adam King.

  "I can't," replied Able.

  "You've been living on scraps, on dry blood and old skin. That's why we're weak."

  Able lifted the quivering morsel awkwardly to his lips. His arm felt like it was made of too many sections, held together by straining sinuous muscle. He stopped short, his fingers at his pale lips.

  "I don't know who it is," said Able nervously. "I don't know who I'm letting in."

  He felt a ripple through the ghostly waters of his mind, the other spirits muttering and murmuring their agreement. They'd been quiet since Adam had announced himself once again and the Magpye had vanished back into whatever deep and dark place it called home. The Magpye had kept Able alive though. His injuries meant he should be dead, more than dead if such a thing as possible, and yet he clung to life. He clung to life or whatever it was that the Magpye offered. Non-life, un-death. It didn't matter. Able had been right, his father knew how to control the dark thing that lived inside of Able, and those secrets would soon belong to him.

  "You don't have to let them in," said Adam patiently. "You can control it."

  "How?"

  Without a word, Adam threw up the same walls that had once trapped Able outside of his own mind, outside of the control of his own body. Inside the walls, it felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked from a bubble around Able. There was silence, a breathless, airless silence, and a pounding pressure on the outside of the invisible sphere. Able felt he should be gasping for air, but there was nothing. Nothing but a silence in which Able's own thoughts could stretch and expand, unfettered by the clutter of minds and memories he had become used to in his own head.

  Able breathed out, a lancing pain running through both his lungs, and the pressure finally overwhelmed the bubble around his thoughts. The dead flooded back in, a racing torrent of voices and fragmented memories. He knew it, and them, well.

  "That's good," said Adam. "Now eat. The flesh does more than just pass on the ghosts, it sustains us as well. It will repair you, heal you."

  "Dead flesh, rotten meat…" mused Able, staring the gloom at the piece of human muscle in his fingers. "Carrion."

  He popped the meat into his mouth before his father could voice another word, before the ghosts could add their voices to the clamour in his head. The juices filled his mouth immediately, running over his tongue and down his throat. He felt the ragged beat of his heart quicken, then steady. This was something that he didn't need his father to teach him. This next moment was instinct, as the waters of dead memory rippled from the sudden impact of a new mind, a new soul.

  A new ghost found itself in the confines of Able Quirk's head.

  "Rosa Blind?"

  "You son of a bitch," replied the dead detective. "Where the hell were you when we needed you?"

  HEAD TABLE

  Sitting up in his bed, Cane King dipped his fork daintily into the top of Sebastian Blake's severed head and pulled away a piece of his brain. Taylor had arranged the heads neatly on four individual silver platters, the tops sawed cleanly away, the ragged necks supported by spikes that stood up from the platters. Cane let Taylor watch from the shadows as he slowly consumed the brains. He had once lurked in those same shadows, the second son, watching Adam being instructed in the strange methods and rituals of the Kings. It was jealousy, Cane knew, that had led him to follow a path so divorced from the rest of his family. That same jealousy had played a part in his brother's murder, not to mention what Cane had done to their father and grandfather.

  No, Cane King knew only too well what it was to stand in those shadows and witness a power arcane, to witness it and desire it and yet know that it was beyond your grasp. Of course, the strange power of the Ink was Cane's now, but that little to diminish the memories of the hours he had spent watching and envying his brother, the precious first born son of the King line.

  The 21st century suddenly seemed a very long way away.

  Cane popped a sliver of brain matter into his mouth. The Ink rushed forward, up his neck and across his cheeks, greedy for a taste. It turned his face into a nightmarish swirl of black before retreating back to the parts of him covered by his silk robe. It whispered to him, whispered secrets and hidden truths from Sebastian Blake's decades of criminal endeavour. The old man had kept a great deal hidden from King. It did him some credit, King supposed, as he speared another quivering fork full of brain.

  This one contained flickering images of the old man's murder. There was a bedroom, not unlike Cane's but not as richly appointed nor as modern. There were crashes and bangs beyond a heavy wooden door. Then, through the door, Taylor approaching, a bloody machete in his hand. The old man raised his hands, tangled in his bed clothes. A sudden warmth, the smell of piss. Taylor standing over the bed, his eyes as dead as ever, two pools of stagnant water under glass.

  The machete. The machete. The machete.

  Cane shook his head, freeing himself from the impromptu playback. He could feel Taylor's eyes on him, those same dead eyes. They gleamed in the shadows, pulling in information like two tiny black holes. Taylor saw everything. As a lieutenant it made him invaluable, but it also made him dangerous. At least, it had, before the Ink. What was Taylor now? His guns, his knives, his quick machete. What were they to a man filled with the terrible darkness that called itself the Ink?

  Cane chuckled to himself.

  "You can go, Jack," he said commandingly. "I don't think these four are going to give me any trouble."

  "Yes, Mr. King," was Taylor's only reply as he slipped obediently through one of the doors to King's bedroom and closed it behind him with a soft click.

  Alone, King let the Ink run riot over his body. It surged to his mouth as, dropping his fork, he plunged his hands into the brain of Crow. Shovelling the oozing lobes into his mouth, he felt the Ink pulsing in his cheeks and writhing along his tongue. Crow, the pimp, and his oh-so-many girls. The Ink would have some stories to tell from him, oh yes indeed. Overwhelmed by the memories rushing into his mind, King didn't hear the sharp cracking of his jaw bone as The Ink forced his mouth wider, distending his slack jaw until his gaping maw was large enough to engulf the top of Crow's decapitated head and suck the brains directly from it.

  Gasping and heaving between mouthfuls, Cane ate and fed The Ink's diabolical hunger.

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROSA BLIND

  Everything stopped in Able's brain the moment Rosa spoke. Her mind was unlike anything he had encountered before and it forcibly applied its rigour and order to everything. There was no rushing torrent of memory here, no lost moments to surface unexpectedly. There was no mystery, nothing hidden. There was only order and control. This was the machine-mind of Rosa Blind, and it would not be subsumed into the river of dead things so easily.

  "I asked you a question," she said. Even in death, her voice was the same clipped, controlled instrument that Able remembered. She had never trusted him, never trusted his alter ego Magpye, he knew that. She had trusted Owen White, and between them both they had brought her to her untimely death. "Where the hell were you?"

  "Cane King brought someone with him. A sort of … witch, I guess. She trapped me. Trapped Magpye."

  Even though Rosa was in his head, Able wasn't ready to start trying to explain the differences between him, Able Quirk, the gestalt creature that had called itself Magpye and the other... thing, the Magpye, the creature that hid inside. He wasn't sure he even understood it himself.

  Able felt something in his gut, like dropping suddenly down a roller-co
aster, as his own memories rushed past at high speed. Rosa dragged his mind forcibly back to the paper mill, to Grace Faraway, to Adam King, and to Cane. The dizzying movement of images stopped without warning at times, zooming in on some tiny detail or other. Rosa was silent, but Able could feel her mind working, whirring, inside his own. Rosa Blind saw everything, analysed it, and refiled it before moving on.

  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.