by J-F. Dubeau
“Stupid idea,” Finnegan said from his side of the wall. “Like any god’ll listen to us.”
Erica was riveted. Whether she believed him or not, Randy couldn’t tell, but considering all she’d seen so far in Saint-Ferdinand, she’d be crazy not to lend him some credence.
“Then what happened?” she asked.
“Same thing that’s happening now. Some idiot thinks he’s smarter than history, and he’s going to try to take the god for himself. It’s going to backfire like it did for Lambert.”
Finnegan nodded. “Got himself killed, that one. Not just a little killed, neither. Ripped to shreds by a god! Hell, his body’s been dead for eighteen years, but I bet ya his soul’s still being killed to this very day.”
“Tell me more. How were these Craftsmen going to kill this thing?”
“Ha!” laughed the madman in the next cell. “Never figured that out. Think we’d be spinnin’ our wheels if they had?”
“Fine, then how do they keep it locked up?” She turned to Sam. “Can’t we just go back to how it was before Edouard?”
“Wish we could, Doc, but that ain’t gonna work this time. Y’see, the only power we ever had over this god was Cicero’s Curse. The eyes, the camera, whatever form it took—so long as something was watching it, it couldn’t escape. But a curse can only last so long, and soon, Ms. Hazelwood, soon that curse’ll be broken for good.”
VENUS
THE DRIVE FELT longer than it actually was. Between the smell of cigarettes and the poor suspension on the old truck, not to mention the feeling that the ancient piece of junk would fall apart at any moment, Venus felt like time had almost stopped. In reality, it only took a little over an hour to reach the circus.
It was still early morning when they arrived at the fields behind the Peterson farm. The big top loomed ominously above the farmhouse, alternating stripes of colored canvas reduced to gray in the dawn light. As they pulled into the farm’s driveway, the whole area felt abandoned. Venus would have believed it was, too, if not for Penny’s car, which was already parked there.
“Friend of yours?” Ezekiel commented, tossing a cigarette butt out his window.
He turned the truck into an improvised parking lot, where a dozen or so other vehicles were hidden away. With little care for either the racket he was making or the comfort of his passenger, Ezekiel stopped the truck and jumped out. Venus couldn’t help but feel some degree of satisfaction as he winced in pain, putting a hand to his cracked ribs.
“Ugh,” he complained, before stretching. “You hungry? From the smell of it, they’re making breakfast already.”
“I’m fine,” she lied, ignoring her empty stomach. “Just take me to Cicero.”
“Suit yourself.”
Ezekiel waved at her to follow and walked into the forest of tents and kiosks. For a moment he resembled a fawn or satyr, beckoning her into the woods to disappear. Everything surrounding Venus felt out of place too. Not only in Saint-Ferdinand but in this day and age. She should be running away from all this, she knew. But there was an odd comfort in this old-fashioned circus.
Perhaps it was the smell of eggs and bacon that made Venus feel safe. Or maybe it was something more subtle, like the familiarity of the eye with a spiral iris, which was festooned onto everything here. Whatever it was, Venus felt more protected the deeper she walked among the attractions. The shadow of the big top enveloped her like an embrace. She knew, deep in her empty gut, that if something were to happen here, the strangers that lurked in these tents would defend her.
The scent of warm tea and alcohol filled her nostrils the moment Ezekiel pulled back the canvas. Sitting at a rickety folding desk was an old man with even older eyes. In front of him were ledgers of paper, candles, and a half-empty bottle of some amber drink. On the floor, sitting on a pile of blankets and cradling a large mug of steaming tea, was Penny. The older girl went from deeply contemplative to joyful at the sight of her friend.
“Aphrodite!” Penny smiled and rose up to embrace Venus.
“Shut up!” She smiled back.
Penny’s smile faded quickly as she tightened her grip.
“I’m so sorry . . . ,” the older girl said as she pulled away from her friend.
“Why? What happened?” Venus had been living in fear ever since she’d found the trapped god. She knew it was but a matter of time before the thin wooden door and cheap padlock were no longer enough to hide the creature within. Her eyes fell on the old man, who held a small bundle of quivering flesh in his arms. The flayed cat lifted its skinless head, calling out to its owner with a raspy mewling.
“Oh God, no . . . ,” She turned back to her friend, pleading, “Why is he here? Why is Sherbet here?”
“Your mother brought him to me,” came a voice from behind Venus.
She turned to see an old woman dressed in too many robes and too much jewelry. Her skin was like sagging leather, and her eyes were like that of a husky dog, a pale, icy blue. Daniel Crowley followed her into the tent. Venus could see that something was wrong. There was too much understanding in his eyes. An unwelcome sympathy that spoke of a tragedy that mirrored her own.
Supporting herself with a cane, the old woman made her way to Venus. Stunned and perhaps a little intimidated, Venus allowed her face to be grabbed by the woman’s bony fingers. It wasn’t a gentle touch. The old lady twisted her head this way and that, appraising what she saw before letting go.
“You turned out to be a beautiful child,” she finally said, a broken smile settling onto her wrinkled features.
“What happened to my mother?” Venus asked.
The old lady crossed the room without answering. She nodded to the old man before slowly lowering herself into a chair in the corner. With much pain, she gathered the various layers of her dress and cloak onto herself, shielding her frail body from the morning’s cool humidity. After she was done, she beckoned Sherbet over. Without hesitation, the cat leaped from Cicero’s lap and transferred itself to the old woman.
“Your mother is fine. Have a seat,” the old man instructed, doing his best to sound sympathetic.
Looking back and forth between Penny and the old man, Venus did as requested. “Will someone tell me what’s wrong with my father, then?”
The old man looked drunk, or at least very much in his cups. The bottle of bourbon before him was almost empty. As Venus settled into the rickety folding chair, Cicero emptied his own glass, putting it down with a ridiculous amount of care until it stood balanced on one edge.
“Nathan . . . ,” the old woman admonished softly.
Cicero shrugged, producing a second glass from apparently nowhere and filling it halfway with the golden brown liquid. After sustaining Venus’s blistering glare for another moment, he pushed the glass in her direction.
“Your father is dead,” he said. His voice was calm, but resigned. “Drink.”
There was a moment of disbelief. Venus turned to Penny, who confirmed the bad news with a sad nod.
It hurt. For so many reasons, it hurt. Her body felt too big, too cold, like she’d suddenly become but a pinprick of a person, lost in the uncaring, infinite galaxy that was herself. This must be how Penny had felt when Dr. Hazelwood had given her the news about her mother. Or maybe it was different for everyone. Penny had given out an agonizing wail when she’d heard. Venus remained silent. Her senses and her voice felt distant, out of reach.
There was no way to know how long she sat there. Parsing the information. Cataloging her emotions. No one dared interrupt her, though from the corner of her eye, she could see Penny wanted to lend comfort. Then it happened.
In the span of a thought, the pain went away. Her mind, struggling to deal with the situation, pulled a trick she didn’t know it was capable of. Without her agreement or her prompting it, all her emotions about Paul, about her father, were suddenly packed up, indexed, and archived. More pressing issues took the place of her grief.
With a trembling hand, she reached for the gl
ass of bourbon in front of her and raised it to her lips. She grimaced as she drank some of the liquid, the smell of it reminding her of the turpentine Abraham’s father used.
“I have questions,” Venus said in a quiet but unsteady voice.
“Maybe I have answers,” Cicero responded.
“Ezekiel said I needed to talk to you. Why? Who are you?”
“My name is Nathan Joseph Cicero.” He gave a mock bow from his chair. “I am the lucky one who found the creature that I’m told now resides in your shed. I am here to set you on your destiny!”
“Did my dad know he was going to die?”
“He did,” the old woman said. “Even knowing that he would eventually perish here, he chose to build a life in Saint-Ferdinand.”
“Why?” Venus still struggled with all this talk of destiny and fate.
“Because I described to him who his daughter would be. He said meeting a person like that was well worth the sacrifice.”
Venus choked back a sob, but as quickly as the emotion had been dragged up from her mental storage, she pushed it back down.
“How do we kill that thing?” she asked.
“With this.” Penny reached down to where she had been sitting. She unwrapped a bundled towel and carefully pulled out the kitchen knife she had used to stab the god.
“That didn’t do much good last time.”
“It’s different now,” Cicero said. “Imbued.”
“What does that mean?” demanded Venus.
“Before your friend plunged the blade through the god’s body, this was just an ordinary kitchen knife. But, as with all things, contact with the divine changed it. Nothing and no one can be in the presence of a god and remain the same. That knife, your shed . . . you.”
Venus felt a wave of self-consciousness wash over her. She’d never admitted to anyone how close she had been to the god in her shed. Even her best friend, who had soaked her hands in the creature’s cold blood, wasn’t aware of the depth of contact between Venus and the beast that had killed Gabrielle LaForest.
“Is that how Dr. McKenzie was able to do . . . what he did?” Penny asked, still haunted by her out-of-body experience.
“No.” The old ringmaster scratched the side of his face thoughtfully, deciding how to handle the question. “During his travels, Randy’s father had collected a rather long list of . . . tricks I guess is the best word for them. The list is not a spell book. There’s no magic in what Randy’s been doing. Just a series of ways to con the universe into doing certain preestablished things. Things that have been woven into the fabric of reality since the very beginning.”
“Like a back door in a piece of software . . . ,” said Venus. “So, what now? We just take this knife, go back to my place, and stab the thing? Again?”
Cicero took a sip of his drink. A thoughtful smile hung on his face as his ancient eyes looked into the distance, or maybe the past.
“Oh, I’m afraid not. Today isn’t about heroics. Today is about tragedy. By the time we get to the creature’s jail, it will have broken free. And there’s no need to go after it, because it will be coming to us.”
WILLIAM
WILLIAM HADN’T STOPPED drinking. Sitting behind the wheel of his Lexus, he’d hoped that with enough booze, somehow the world would change. That perhaps he could, through sheer intoxication, turn back the hands of time a few weeks.
A month ago he had been sober. His wife had been a world-class homemaker instead of a carrion-feeding harpy, and his sweet, innocent Audrey had been the bright sunlight of his days.
William had considered driving to the drugstore. He had the keys in his pockets and could get his hands on whatever he wanted there. Carl, the pharmacist who worked for him, often talked about which drugs did what, idly discussing which ones had the most interesting and unusual side effects. A Valium and Percocet cocktail would make for an easy enough exit, especially with the alcohol already in his system.
In the end, however, his car brought him to the Crowley house. It was a large, luxurious domicile. On the side of the house, Bergeron could see a trailer with a decent-sized boat on top, waiting for a sunny day to go fishing.
All of it, William knew, Crowley owed to him. The inspector was good at his job, but life wasn’t a meritocracy. The man had gotten the job because William, a powerful and influential man, wanted him to have it.
Crowley, Peterson, and McKenzie had shown up one evening, not long after Audrey’s eventful birth. They made wild claims about how they could help his daughter, heal her weak heart, each offering a more outlandish option than the last. William hadn’t believed a word of it. Not until they’d shown him what they could do. Peterson had carefully pulled out a painting of a blue jay so convincing, the bird actually moved and chirped on the canvas.
It was Randy’s trick that had really sold him, though. The doctor had with him a white lab rat inside a crude iron cage. Without taking the animal out, Randy reached in and snapped the poor creature’s neck. When William was convinced of the rat’s demise, the doctor had proceeded to insert a series of dull black metal needles into its body. Without ceremony or fanfare, the rodent had reanimated, despite its still-severed spine.
These were “cheap parlor tricks” the three of them had claimed, compared to what was actually possible. All they needed was to get their hands on a god. So, with William Bergeron’s support, they had rebuilt the Sandmen.
Today Randy McKenzie was rotting in jail, accused of murder; Harry Peterson was dying up in Sherbrooke Hospital; and Crowley, after years of promises, was about to lose everything he’d worked toward over the last decade. And William and his wife had lost their precious daughter anyway.
Consumed by his thoughts, William didn’t notice the large SUV that made its way up the road until it was about to turn into the driveway. He hadn’t intended on confronting the inspector. In fact, he didn’t really know why he was here in the first place, but seeing an exhausted Crowley get out of his car and stroll purposefully toward him fired up something in William’s soul.
Stumbling out of his own vehicle, the drunken businessman tried to affect a confident demeanor as he weaved forward to meet the inspector. He didn’t want this any more than he’d wanted the impromptu meeting at his house the previous night. Yet here he was, and it was time the inspector knew who was really in charge.
“Will. If you’re here to apologize for your wife, you could have done that over the phone,” Crowley said.
“I’m not here to apologize for anything, Stephen. In fact, I’m here . . . ,” Why was he here? What reason could he possibly have for upsetting such a volatile man as Crowley? “I’m here to tell you that you’ve been kicked out of the Sandmen!”
“Really, now?” The inspector flashed a humorless grin. “You’re drunk. Get in my car, William. I’ll drive you home before you get hurt.”
“I’m not going anywhere. You owe us, Stephen.” William’s anger and grief were overwhelming. When Audrey had been born prematurely, with a weak and fragile heart, they knew she would always live in the shadow of her condition. They did their best to give her a normal life. With her being such an energetic child, it was easy to forget that their precious daughter was living on borrowed time. Until Erica Hazelwood had informed him that his baby was dead. He begged and pleaded to have her brought back to him, whatever it took. The only person to answer that plea had been Crowley. “You owe me!”
“Owe you? I don’t owe you a goddamned thing!” Crowley’s face was turning crimson, a sure precursor to his legendary wrath.
“You owe me my daughter!” William spat. His own face was a deep shade of purple, half-drunk, half-furious. When William had gone to identify his daughter’s body, Crowley and Dr. McKenzie had repeated their promise from eight years ago. A chance to bring Audrey back. The medical examiner claimed he knew how to anchor the child’s spirit to the world of the living. The inspector said that he could get Peterson to paint a living portrait of the girl. One more convincing, more alive
than his stupid birds. Together, with the god under their control, they would bring her back. William had clung to that promise with all his emotional might.
“Oh yeah? Well, if you want me to keep that promise, you better back the hell off!” Crowley winced as he reflexively curled his wounded hand into a fist. The pain did nothing to quell his anger. “In fact, why don’t you get your fat wife and the rest of that stupid social club you recruited to back right off with you?”
“Oh, oh, oh . . . ,” William was emboldened by the drunken realization that Crowley was injured. “I don’t think so. In fact, I think you’re off the case, ‘Inspector.’ In fact, we already found someone new to fill your position. The Sandmen don’t need you anymore.”
“Oh really? Who’s going to help you get your daughter back, then?”
“Your son!” William grinned triumphantly, expecting his opponent to be stunned into silence.
“Daniel?” Crowley was more confused than defeated. “You piece of shit! You leave my boy out of this!”
“Not Daniel. Francis.” This time, the businessman got the desired effect. Crowley stared at him, his mouth agape in shock as William continued. “Oh yes. Your prodigal son. He’s been in town a few days, and he’s chosen to help us. Consider yourself fired.”
Crowley now clenched both of his fists, ready to beat the insolent drunk into a pulp. The pain that shot through his right hand, however, nearly caused him to black out. When his vision cleared, all he could see was Bergeron’s drunk, triumphant smile on his round red face.
Without thinking, the inspector pulled out his firearm and, in a single, fluid motion, fired a warning shot a foot to the side of the fat businessman.
Or so he’d intended. His aim was off from firing with his wounded hand. The 9-mm bullet hit home, punching into William Bergeron’s right eye, tearing through his brain before exiting the back of his head and taking a sizeable chunk of his skull with it.
The fat man didn’t fly back dramatically. Instead he crumpled to the ground like a rag doll that had been dropped. Through his remaining eye, William looked up at the sky. The trees in Crowley’s yard reached to the heavens, framing a tableau of sky and stars. He couldn’t blink, he couldn’t think, he wasn’t even sure it was his eye that allowed him to see. After less than a second of lying still, he saw his daughter kneel down beside him. Her eyes had been replaced by black iron nails, and a shallow cut marred her beautiful face, but it was her. His beautiful Audrey.