“You’re going to have plenty of time to explain this crap.” Without waiting for a response, she walked around the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s side. Vikous seemed about to say something more, but he went to the passenger side and got in instead.
“I never liked this place,” Calliope said.
“The house?” Vikous followed her gaze, tipping his head speculatively. “Doesn’t seem too bad.”
“We used to have this apartment,” she murmured. “It was really . . .” She looked at Vikous, straightened in her seat, and started the engine. The Jeep pulled into the street and left the house behind.
Two blocks down, a young man Calliope would have recognized watched them from the confines of a reasonably new but nondescript vehicle. As they pulled away, he pulled out a cell phone and pressed a button. “Sir? It’s Hyde. She just left the residence. The guide was with her sir, yes. The one you expected.” He paused, listening. “Yes, sir. I’ll call the others.” Again, he waited. The smile below his mirrored sunglasses was broad and showed too many teeth. “Thank you, sir.”
Vikous kept his hood up as they drove through the suburban streets. The angle of the opening indicated he was watching the streets scroll by through the side window. His body, overlarge for the space it was crowded into, was tense. Calliope found herself glancing at him as she drove, waiting for him to say or do something.
“What’s going on?” she finally said.
The hood moved slightly. “Unfriendly regard,” he said in a strangely ritualistic cadence and tone. He shook himself, his shoulders shifting beneath the layers of clothing in ways that Calliope couldn’t quite explain or follow. “Someone watched us leave,” he explained in his normal, sandblasted voice.
“How do you—” She stopped herself. “Bad guys or good guys?”
“There aren’t any good guys,” Vikous said. His hood made an abortive move in her direction. “Besides us. Not involved in this business, anyway.”
“Real informative,” Calliope muttered.
“No offense, but you don’t exactly react well when I play it straight with you.” His voice was dry.
Calliope stiffened defensively. “I don’t think anyone would blame me for not immediately running to my guide for answers when he looks like a reject from Barnum and Bailey’s.”
“You don’t exactly make it easy. You’re acting like this is a”—he waved his hand, exasperated—“a dress-up party you crashed.” He paused. “I’d say you weren’t taking it seriously, except for the time you kicked me in the chest, or the time you teargassed me, or the other time when you left me in a parking lot to go deal with Gluen by yourself.”
Calliope’s jaw was tight. “I can’t help but think that all has one particular asshole in common—the one who never explains anything, just does something weird and waits to see if I freak out, like it’s a test.”
“Everything is a test,” Vikous muttered. “If you haven’t figured that out by now, I’m really not going to be able to help you. You’ll leave me in another parking lot, or smack me with your little swagger stick.” He turned in his seat as best he could, leaning back against the passenger door. “Or maybe you could get about halfway and turn around and run home,” he growled. “Again.”
Calliope yanked on the wheel of the Jeep and brought it to a screeching halt next to an open park in which the grass had gone autumn brown. Without a word, she ripped her keys out of the ignition.
“That didn’t take long,” Vikous said, his voice flat and harsh. He opened the door and swung his legs out of the vehicle. “This is a joke.”
“That’s a little ironic from someone who looks like a friggin’ clown.” Calliope’s voice rose as she spoke; she shouted the last words through a door Vikous had already closed. She sat in the silence of the cab for a few seconds, then got out, stalking around to the passenger side of the vehicle. Vikous was already ten feet away by the time she got to the sidewalk.
“I’m trying,” she shouted at his back.
Vikous stopped. His hood shifted as he looked up at the overcast sky, then he turned back, hands jammed deep in his pockets, walking stiff-legged back toward the Jeep. “You’re playing at trying.” He was nearly shouting, paying no attention to the sparse traffic on the sidewalk that first looked and then quickly looked away. His hood was still raised, but pushed back enough that she could make out his features. The snarl in his voice spread to his face, where the corners of his mouth had drawn up to reveal several uneven, yellowing teeth. Something along the line of his shoulders moved wrong.
Calliope felt a queasy surge in her stomach. “I don’t know what you mean.” She shook her head, as though to clear it. “I don’t know how you know about . . . me. And I don’t know what I’ve been thinking. I’m about to drive out of town on a weeklong road trip with a complete stranger, a homeless man who’s been stalking me for who knows how long.” She glared at the sidewalk, working her jaw. “I’m going home.”
“You’ll never be home,” Vikous said. “Not till this is over. You know there’s something out there now and you know it killed White. You won’t be able to shut down the last three days and fool yourself.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Calliope said, barely audible.
“I—” He clenched his jaw. “I know you’re too good a liar to believe your own stories, and you notice too much to pretend you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.” With one gloved hand, he reached up and yanked his hood back under the cloudy afternoon sunlight. “You want me to play it straight? Look at me.”
Calliope looked, unable to keep her eyes from dragging over his features or dismissing anything as a trick of the light in a strobe-lit bar, or the shadows of a predawn street, or the dim haze of her shaded house. Eyes the color and sheen of hard plastic buttons bored into her, completely bereft of whites, despite the fact that they were open wide and staring right at her. The green spikes of hair on his head were too regular, too solid. His white face paint didn’t flake or peel, didn’t look like paint or stain at all, and the same was true of the crimson smear that surrounded his mouth—a mouth that was too wide, that opened too far when he spoke, dropped too far open when he drank . . .
and had too, too many teeth.
To her left, Calliope heard a gasp. She turned, confronted with the terrified face of a young boy clinging to his mother’s side. The pair had been walking down the street but the boy was now hauling frantically backward on his mother’s arm, his eyes locked on Vikous.
“Darien, stop it, quit acting so—” she managed a smile toward Vikous. “I’m sorry, he doesn’t mean to; he’s always been afraid of clowns.”
Vikous smiled and Calliope couldn’t help but see, now, that it went too far around his face, but the woman was struggling with her son and didn’t notice. “It’s all right, ma’am. They scare me, too.” He turned to a bench facing the park and scooped up a discarded newspaper. Using it as a shield for his other hand, he made a gesture and a rose pivoted out of thin air and into his outstretched hand as he pulled the paper away.
The woman jumped, startled as she turned to find the flower in her face. “Oh! My . . . thank you.” She hesitated a moment in reaching for the flower, then accepted it. “Thank you,” she repeated, then turned to her son. “See? He’s just a nice magician clown.” The boy shook his head, his eyes still locked on Vikous, and shook free of his mother’s grasp, running into the park.
At least I can see the whites of the kid’s eyes, Calliope thought.
Clearly mortified, the woman called after her son. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed to Vikous and hurried off into the park. Vikous watched her go.
“Maybe we should get back in the car now.” He pulled his hood up.
“We’re not done yet,” Calliope said. Her eyes followed the woman as she approached her son, who had barricaded himself inside a jungle gym. “But yeah . . . let’s go. I’ll drive, you talk.” She turned and walked around the back of their vehicle.
A
nearly invisible smile played around Vikous’s mouth. “Works for me,” he murmured, his voice almost too low to carry. He rolled the newspaper into a tube, tapped it again with his hand, and climbed back into the Jeep.
“Before we get into this,” Vikous said, rubbing at his eyes, “understand that there’s only so much I’m going to talk about right now. There’s too much to explain all at once, even just about the parts that have to do with you. Even if there weren’t, there’s parts that won’t make any sense to you now and I’m not wasting my time on them.” He took a deep breath. “Plus, there are rules about this sort of thing. Okay?”
“Sure, I guess.” She glanced over at him. “Start out easy. What are you, exactly?”
He exhaled into something like a laugh. “I can’t really say.”
Calliope’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, son of a—”
“Now wait.” Vikous raised a gloved hand. “Explaining why I said that will tell you some things, so let’s not go back to kicking me out of the car just yet.” Calliope’s face remained tense, but he continued: “The only real rule we’ve learned is to keep our heads down. All of us.”
“All of you . . . what?”
He glanced in the side passenger mirror as they pulled onto the highway. “Well, rule out aliens and all that garbage. What I’m talking about are the sorts of things you heard about when you were a kid or when you read old stories. You know dragons and boogeymen, right?” Calliope nodded, her expression still set and cautious. Vikous nodded in turn. “Okay, which one of those can you describe?”
Calliope’s brow creased. “Dragons, I guess. Boogeymen are just . . . scary; they don’t look like anything.”
“Which is why they’re still scaring the crap out of little kids, but you don’t have dragons burning towns down.” He gestured out the window with the rolled-up newspaper. “You look out there and you see cars and trucks and highways; there’s nothing magical in this world anymore—that’s the nature of the people who control it.” He looked at Calliope, then back to the window. “The things that don’t match, the things that stand out”—he made a gesture with his hand—“they go away.”
“They die out.”
“Didn’t say that.” Vikous turned his attention to his own gloved hand. “This has been going on a long time. As a general rule most of the things we’re talking about aren’t very stupid; even trolls and goblins can learn to hide, but it’s harder for them because most people would see a goblin and say ‘oh dear, that’s a goblin.’ Being easily recognizable doesn’t help when you’re trying to keep your head down.”
“So ‘go away’ means hide.”
“Usually.” He gestured, his eyes still following his hand. “For some of them, a long time ago, going away meant literally going someplace that’s . . . Else. They had the trick of how to do it, the rest didn’t, and now they’re gone. They don’t come back, ever, so none of the rest of us really know anything about it.” He dropped his hand in his lap. “Mostly though, yeah, they hide.” He looked up. “Some of them have names, and some of them never did: any things that could pass among people without getting noticed pretty much did exactly that.”
Calliope raised an eyebrow. “So . . . every hobo clown touring around the country is a . . . whatever you are, hiding in plain sight? That’s—”
“Whoa. No.” Vikous frowned. “I don’t think any of us—well, most of us—have ever been that numerous. In my case, what you’re thinking of is a culture that built up, was built up a long time ago, on purpose, as camouflage. We passed ourselves off as entertainers and spawned imitators that we could then be mistaken for. I don’t know what to tell you I am because we’re always something else; fitting into the gaps has been our nature for so long we don’t even exist as ourselves anymore. Even those who know about us call us by different names.” His gaze returned to the highway. “It’s a good trick, but compared to some folks I’m an amateur. There are things that can live in cracks and shadows, feeding on the prickles on your neck that you get when you walk back to your car at night.”
“You have to know how crazy ‘monsters hide among us in plain sight’ sounds,” Calliope replied.
“You’re oversimplifying things.” Vikous looked at the newspaper in his hand. “It’s not just . . .” He unrolled the paper, flipped through to the center, then folded it back on itself twice. “Here. This.”
Calliope glanced at the paper, then back to the road, frowned, and looked again. The spot Vikous indicated with one pointing finger was a perfect square of random letters on the puzzles page. “Yeah . . . I don’t get it.”
Vikous nodded as though he’d expected her answer, then passed his hand over the page. Halfway through the movement he stopped and looked at her.
She glanced back at him. “What?”
“I’m going to do something.” His voice was quiet. “One of the weird things I do.”
Calliope pursed her lips. “Should I pull over or something?”
“Just don’t freak out and drive off into the ditch.” Vikous pointed at the page. “This is how the world works.” He shook the paper just enough to make the pages rattle. To Calliope it seemed the letters in the puzzle shifted more than the paper had, as though they’d been jostled loose. “Basically a big jumble of stuff—so much stuff that you have to really concentrate just to find the things that you’re expecting to find.” He gestured, and the letters seemed to draw back from certain combinations within their midst. Watching out of the corner of her eye, Calliope saw words like work, family, vacation, and car payments tumble together, then fall back into the mix.
“Okay.” She swallowed, working the muscles of her jaw.
Vikous didn’t notice; his black eyes were focused entirely on the page he held. “The thing is, when all you’re looking for are the words on the list—the stuff you’re expecting—you miss other things sitting right in front of you.” His hand waved, and the words on the page crawled again, cringing away from troll, witch, and monster.
“Okay.” Calliope tilted her head. “Put it that way, it makes a kind of sense; still seems like people would notice.”
“It happens. Sometimes. But there are lots of things out there that are even better at hiding than this; they write their names upside down and backwards to make them even harder to see.” He looked down at the page again. “Then there’s me.”
“Yeah?” Calliope asked. “What do you do?”
Vikous held up the paper where she could see:
C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N
C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N
C L O W N C L O W N V I K O U S C L O W N C L O W N
C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N
C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N C L O W N
She snorted a short laugh. “Nice.”
He gestured out the window. “Mostly, people don’t want to know this stuff—given any kind of explanation that doesn’t involve flying cauldrons and trolls hiding under bridges, they’ll swallow it, even if tastes funny.” He grimaced, his face twisting in ways that were difficult to watch. “The real pain is the power of belief makes it—” He shook his head. “That’s for later.”
The interior of the Jeep was silent for a time. Outside, the city slowly pulled back from the sides of the highway and slid to the rear window of the vehicle, taking the afternoon with it.
“That’s . . .” Calliope began, but shook her head. “That doesn’t really tell me anything about what happened to Josh or why we’re driving into the middle of nowhere or why you’re involved in this.”
Vikous tilted his head back, resting it on the seatback. “I’m involved in this because I said I would be, and for now you’re just going to have to take that for whatever you want because I don’t have anything else.” He looked at her for a reaction, but she gave him none, and he turned back to face the front window. “The rest is more complicated.”
Calliope gave Vikous a glance. “Try.”
&n
bsp; His expression grew resigned. “Okay . . . there are places that are easy for us to hide. Forests aren’t what they used to be, but you can still get lost in one if you try hard enough.” He paused. “Understand that I’m mostly talking about the lands I know about . . . you go into another land, there are different rules. These are the rules here, right?” Calliope nodded and Vikous continued. “So you’ve got forests and caves and sewers and dark alleys and mountain ravines and things like that, where it’s . . . where hiding is easy. Easier, anyway.” His lip curled up just a bit above a jagged eyetooth. “The home of the stupid and lazy.”
“Says the thing that survives by pretending to be a homeless clown.”
Vikous scowled. “I don’t know a lot of trolls that could stand in the middle of the sidewalk next to a city park and have a conversation with a kid’s mom while she apologizes for her kid thinking he’s scary.”
Calliope pursed her lips. “Okay, good point.”
“She took a flower from me, on top of—”
“I got it, you’re amazing. I give, please move on.”
Vikous started to say something further, but gave up. “Anyway, those are the easy places. The things you find in places like that are mostly harmless.”
“Mostly.”
He made a face. “Crossing the street is dangerous if you don’t know how to look for traffic, or if you don’t pay attention.” He glanced at her and continued. “What’s more dangerous are the things that can hide in places where the hiding is hard. They’re smarter and a lot more ruthless.” He gestured broadly out the front window of the Jeep. “We’re headed into the worst part of it.”
“We’re heading to Iowa.” Calliope’s voice was flat. “Nothing magical happens in Iowa.”
Vikous seemed to ignore her, but paced his voice carefully. “People’s disregard made it possible to slip whole sections of the land out of view, like cutting off swatches for a patchwork quilt. The Hidden Lands.” He paused. “Gluen mentioned ’em. What they left behind is what you remember: empty, boring chunks of landscape between two mountain ranges.”
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