by Jon Berkeley
“I don’t know about singin’,” he said finally, “but I don’t see what choice we got. He’s goin’ the same way I suggested anyway. I think we should go with him.”
Miles looked across at the gap in the canvas through which String had disappeared. A stiff breeze was blowing dark purple clouds across the reddening sky, and the sun was close to the horizon. “Let’s go then,” he said.
Henry laid a hand on his arm. “Wait,” he whispered. “Creeper goes first.”
Henry took off, running at a crouch. He was almost as soundless as Little. He did not make directly for the near end of the stalls, where String had disappeared, but ran swiftly along between the two rows until he had reached the third or fourth stall. Here he dropped to his knees, lifted the canvas and peered underneath. He poked his head inside, then quickly withdrew it, but not quickly enough. Several pairs of hands reached out from under the stall and grabbed the small boy. He just had time to shout “Ambush!” before a rag was stuffed into his mouth and he was dragged in under the canvas.
“Run!” said Miles. He took Little’s hand and they ran along the alley between the stalls, straight toward the Stinker ambush. There was no point in going any other way. They were too close to the Palace of Laughter to turn back now, and behind them there were only Halfheads and Gnats. Dozens of Stinkers were wriggling out from under the stalls, their eyes white in their black masks and their putrid clubs in their hands. Miles leaped high over the crawling boys. “I’ve outrun them before,” he thought, “and I can do it again.” Little hung on to his hand, and though her wings were hidden away her feet barely touched the ground.
As he ran, Miles felt a sick feeling in his stomach at the thought of leaving Henry to his fate, perched in the sky for three days and drinking rusty water. He hoped that Henry had the story wrong, or that he would somehow manage to escape, but there was no more time to think of this now. As they neared the end of the stalls, a Stinker stepped out in front of them, and in the blur of movement Miles recognized String’s sly leer. String was pointing at him with one hand, beckoning the converging Stinkers with the other. “That’s him,” he shouted. “He’s the one that brought the cops on us! I seen him—”
But that was as much as he got to say. Miles had pulled the bone from his belt, and was holding it out in front of him as he ran full tilt toward String. “Here’s your bone back,” he said, as it dawned on String’s face that he had no intention of stopping. The gnarled end of the bone met its original owner square in the chest, and with a gasp of shock the winded boy went down, and Miles and Little leaped over him without breaking their stride.
The big wheel loomed directly over them now. They ran past its gigantic metal feet, fixed to the ground with bolts the size of a man’s head. A swarm of painted boys clambered down the wheel with the practice of spiders in a web and dropped to the ground. The Palace of Laughter towered ahead of them, even bigger than Miles had imagined. For the first time he could see it clearly, and it was by far the strangest of all the strange things he had seen since the night the Circus Oscuro arrived in Larde.
Imagine an enormous clown, as tall as a mountain, wading through solid earth up to his chin. If you can picture such a thing at all, you may have some idea what the Palace of Laughter looked like. It was a large, domed hill, carved into the shape of a giant clown’s head. His great stone eyes bulged from their sockets and his blue-lipped mouth was frozen in a huge laugh. Set into the open mouth was a pair of huge wooden doors. The crown of the hill was bald and smooth, with a fringe of cedar trees sprouting like fuzzy green hair above the enormous carved ears. Around the hill lay a moat of greenish water, crossed by a drawbridge that looked like a huge wooden tongue.
They ran toward this strange hill, the boy and the angel, with no idea of how they would get in, indeed with no thought in their heads but to escape the top-knotted, club-wielding army that was hot on their heels. Just before the drawbridge stood an abandoned ticket booth. Miles headed for it instinctively, though it was hard to imagine what protection the dilapidated hut with its glassless windows could offer them.
As they reached the booth and began to scramble through the window, the sound of a great gong rang out from somewhere inside the hill. The enormous wooden doors swung inward, and a moment later a troupe of tumblers and stilt walkers emerged onto the drawbridge, blowing whistles and tooting horns. There were three tiny men in top hats, with whitened faces and each wearing a different-colored nose. They cartwheeled across the wooden tongue of the drawbridge without losing their hats, followed by two men on stilts so tall that they had to duck to avoid the stone teeth as they left the giant mouth. After them came a number of other clowns, some banging drums and others waving firecrackers on sticks above their heads, and the whole motley procession marched along the cracked concrete path, past the booth in which Miles and Little crouched, toward the wrought-iron gates of the park entrance.
Miles peered back the way they had come, through a crack in the boards. The Stinkers had melted away at the approach of the crowd. It was as though the park, which a moment ago had been swarming with angry boys, was empty but for Miles and Little, and the strange parade that passed before them on its way to the gates of the fun park.
When they reached the gates the stilt walkers unlocked them and swung them open, and a crowd of people surged in from the street outside, led by none other than Baumella the giantess herself. The clowns and stilt walkers turned and fell in on either side, playing their chaotic music and cartwheeling along beside the people, who shuffled toward the great clown’s head as though they had just had a long journey and an uncomfortable night, which indeed they had.
Miles and Little crouched, panting, on the floor of the empty booth, listening to the approach of many feet and the babble of voices belonging to people who were more used to giving their own opinions than listening to other people’s. They seemed to have plenty of complaints to get off their chests, and the cheerful tooting and banging of the clowns was having little effect on their mood. Miles could hear snatches of their conversations as the visitors passed close to their hiding place.
“They could have laid on a coach from the hotel, instead of making us walk.”
“Hotel, you call it? I’d have swam through thin porridge in me undies to get out of that flea pit, myself.”
“Maybe you would, Thacker, but I’d still have liked to be brung on a coach.”
“Get on! You’ve been sitting on your fat behind for the best part of two days. Last thing you need is to sit down some more.”
“It’s all right for you. I’m a martyr to the gout, and me ankles is still ballooned up with sittin’ in that stuffy train.”
Whatever Thacker had to say on the topic of gout was lost in the babble of voices as the crowd flowed past. The names were unfamiliar to Miles, but the voices might just as well have belonged to the citizens of his hometown. It seemed that half the population of Iota or Shallowford or Frappe had spent two days and a night cheek by jowl, crawling through the countryside on a crowded train and shacked up in a cheap hotel on the promise of a night of laughter such as they had never seen before. It was a wonder they had not strangled one another.
“I tell you what,” said a woman’s voice, its owner tottering past on a pair of high heels that were not made for walking on cracked concrete, or for swimming in thin porridge for that matter. “This show had better be as good as it’s cracked up to be, or I’ll be wanting my money back.”
“We didn’t pay any money, dear. We won these tickets,” said her husband.
The woman snorted. “Us and half the town. It’s not a very exclusive prize, is it?”
“Well, you can’t expect it to be, if it ain’t cost nothing.”
“Didn’t cost nothing, William. You’ll never amount to nothing if you don’t learn to talk properly.”
And so it went on, a parade of grumbling people, tired from a journey that was twice as long as they had expected, and all on the promise of shining a litt
le laughter on the grayness of their lives. The drums and bugles and the sound of footsteps passed by, and Miles risked another look out the window. Baumella had reached the wooden doors, and stood to one side to usher the people in. They straggled onto the drawbridge behind her and began to crowd their way in through the doors.
Miles watched carefully the progress of the crowd. Their only chance would be to try and sneak in at the tail end, just before the doors closed again. They would have to time it just right. The lucky silver-ticket winners were ten deep on the wooden drawbridge, which was fortunately made of very stout oak planks. Many of them were fonder of beer and pastries and pies than was good for them, and had the bridge not been made of such sturdy stuff they might well have found themselves in the moat instead.
As it was, there was a good deal of elbowing and shoving, and those who had not reached their full quota of grumbling earlier were taking the opportunity to squeeze a few more complaints out while they pushed their way inside. It was a strange sight to be sure: an enormous clown’s head with green cedar hair and mossy cheeks, its vast stone eyeballs staring out over the city as a long snake of people fed itself into its cavernous mouth. They reminded Miles vaguely of a dream he had had, and not for the first time he wondered what he was doing, far from home and without his Tangerine, staring into the mouth of a nightmare with a four-hundred-year-old girl.
The music of a hurdy-gurdy spilled out from between the stone teeth, mixing with the chaotic sounds the clowns were making. Silver tickets were waved in the air, but no one seemed to be collecting them, and the crowd surged into the mysterious hill without a backward glance, until the last few stragglers were swallowed up and the mighty doors began slowly to swing shut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A MOUTHFUL OF NAILS
Baumella the giantess, straight-boned and tree-tall, began to swing the great oak doors shut after the last few people had entered the Palace of Laughter. She had spotted the two little maggots hiding in the ticket booth, yes she had, but she said nothing to anyone. She saw that one of them was the tiny girl she had looked after at the circus, and she guessed that the other might have had a hand in her disappearance. She was surprised to see them here, skulking around the Palace, and rather impressed that they had made it this far. Had they run all the way on their tiny legs? The great doors creaked as they swung closer to each other, and through the narrowing gap she could see the two little ones break cover and run for the drawbridge. They were persistent wee creatures!
She knew they could not see her in the gloom behind the doors, and she chuckled quietly. “I won’t turn you in, little maggots, but I won’t make it easy for you either,” she thought. As they reached the drawbridge, she closed the doors—kerlunk!—and smiled to herself. “Let’s see what you do now, little ones.” She turned to the tall pillars, as cool and unbending as herself, and hauling a large chair from the shadows between them, sat herself down with her back to the great wooden doors.
Miles and Little almost ran full tilt into the hobnail-studded doors. They appeared to have been closing slowly by themselves, and Miles had timed his run to get in at the last possible moment. But they had shut more quickly at the end, or he had misjudged the distance, and now it was too late. He stood with his hands flat on the doors and pushed them with all his strength, but he may as well have been pushing at solid rock. A few flakes of yellowing paint drifted down from the huge stone teeth that lined the top of the doorway. Above the teeth stretched the faded blue lip of the laughing mouth, and above the lip a nose, with its two enormous nostrils like bear caves, jutted out into the sky. Ragged clouds raced over the clown’s head, making it look as though the hill were gradually toppling forward. Miles felt dizzy. He became aware of a deep rumbling sound that seemed to be coming from inside the hill.
“There’s thunder trapped in the hill,” said Little. She pressed her ear to the doors, and Miles did the same. He could hear the sound more clearly now, a grinding of gears with a regular squeak running through it. Now the ground beneath their feet seemed to be tilting upward. For a moment he thought it was just the dizziness, then he realized what was happening.
“The drawbridge,” he shouted. They turned and began to scramble up the wooden tongue, which was rising rapidly, getting steeper by the second. The surface was worn smooth by years of shuffling feet, making it hard to get a grip. By the time they made it to the top, the drawbridge was almost upright. Miles could see that Little was trying to shake her jacket and shirt off her shoulders when the drawbridge stopped with a mighty jolt. He barely managed to keep his balance, but Little, with one wing partly freed, tumbled from the top of the wooden tongue, down into the murky green water of the moat.
Miles hung on for a few seconds, expecting to see Little’s head appear above the water. He could see a faint whiteness moving in the moat, caught in the tangled reflection of the big wheel, but she did not surface. He took a deep breath, and jumped in after her.
If you’ve ever been thrown into a river or a pool by someone bigger and meaner than you, you will know how it feels to be plunged into water against your will. There is the shock of the cold, and the muffled rumble of water in your ears, and a feeling that you should have had the right to choose for yourself when you are dunked into water and when you would rather remain on dry land.
This was exactly how Miles felt as he somersaulted slowly in the moat. His ears were filled with muffled sounds, and he could not tell which way was up. He forced his eyes to open. He was in a swaying underwater forest, and he could just make out the white of Little’s skin among the weeds. He righted himself and swam toward her. The oversized jacket that she had been trying to shrug off when she fell had wrapped itself around her at the elbows, and her left foot was tangled in the thick stems of the weeds. She stopped struggling when she saw Miles, and looked at him with wide eyes. He felt that his lungs would burst with the air he was trying to keep in, but there was no time to get to the surface to take a breath. He reached for his knife, then remembered that he had given it to the small boy at the Pigball match. He grabbed the weeds that were wrapped around Little’s ankle as near to the roots as he could, and pulled.
The roots of the weeds were tough and the stems slimy, and they seemed to wriggle out of his grasp as though they had a life of their own. He managed to uproot some of them, and grabbed at the remaining handful. He looked up at Little’s face, half afraid that he was too late. He knew that he would have to get to the surface within the next few seconds himself, or take in a lungful of murky moat water. Snowflake patterns were fizzing at the corners of his vision, and through them he could see Little, her mouth slightly open, and her stare becoming fixed. Without stopping his frantic tugging, he glanced over his shoulder in the direction of her stare, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
An ugly gray-green face was staring at him from among the weeds, a face with bulging eyes, fat lips and a miserable mouthful of sharp nails. It was an enormous pike, barely an arm’s length away. Now a pike is a fish best seen at the end of a long fishing line, or not at all, and certainly not when you are trying to unwrap river weeds from the ankle of a drowning friend and your next breath is long overdue. This particular fish was enormous, mean and constantly hungry. He had spent many years fattening himself on the other citizens of the moat, and he was not used to meeting anything in the water that he could not bite in half with ease. The struggling Little had caught his eye as a particularly tasty dinner, and he was not pleased that Miles had got in his way. The shock of seeing him made Miles lose his lungful of stale air in a rush of bubbles. “I’ve got to get to the surface now,” he thought desperately, and at that moment the stubborn weeds gave way and he grabbed a handful of Little’s shirt and kicked hard against the slimy floor of the moat, up toward the light.
Miles Wednesday, weed-wrapped and waterlogged, held on to a ledge of rock at the edge of the moat. As he choked and spat, he felt Little pull free from his grasp and hoist herself onto the rock. He was afraid
that the pike would take a chunk out of his leg, but he did not have the strength to pull himself up beside her. When he had cleared out all the moat water from his mouth and nose, he realized that Little was smiling down at him as though nothing had happened. She reached out a hand and helped him climb out of the water.
“You can’t breathe when you’re underwater, can you?” asked Little.
“Of course not!” coughed Miles. “Can you?”
“Yes, but it’s not very nice. It’s a bit like being in the middle of a cloud, but much thicker.”
“You mean I nearly drowned getting you free and you could breathe all along?”
“Yes, I could breathe. But if you hadn’t freed me from the weeds that big fish would have bitten me in half before I could find his name, and anyway I’m not sure if I could sing it underwater.”
Miles leaned back against the rock face and spat out more scummy water. Now that he had recovered he could see that they had come up on the inside bank of the moat and were leaning against the gigantic cheek of the clown-shaped hill. They were on a narrow ledge, barely wide enough to lie down on, which was exactly what he wanted to do. There was still no sign of the Stinkers.
“Do you think they’re gone?” asked Little, following his gaze.
“I can’t see them,” said Miles. “Maybe they think we drowned.” He lay back and looked up at the twilit sky. “I just need to rest for a minute, then we’ll figure out a way to get back across the moat.”