The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  ‘I meant out of the building. Are the stairs blocked?’

  ‘It’s a guessing game, sire. What’s your guess?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we check?’

  Kurou gave a theatrical bow in the direction of the door. ‘Be my guest, sire. Your lungs are a lot younger than mine.’

  ‘Are there any other ways out?’

  Kurou gave a creepy double wink. ‘We could dig a tunnel, couldn’t we? Alone in the dark together … cosy, yes?’

  Victor glanced up at the dim electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. There were two in the apartment, this one and another in Kurou’s filthy little kitchen. The only other light was from the fire—

  Victor sprang to his feet. ‘The chimney! It goes above ground, does it not? Otherwise we’d have choked to death by now.’

  ‘Ded Moroz in reverse,’ Kurou cackled. ‘I’m not sure I have anything in red.’

  Victor leaned close to the fire and tried to look up, but all he could see was a black-grey hole. It was impossible to tell how wide it was, or how far up it went. It was possible the floors above hadn’t blocked it, otherwise the room would be filling with smoke, but it might be a pipe no more than a few inches wide. Kurou might be able to squeeze his spindly frame up something not fit for a snake, but Victor was a little thicker around the waist.

  ‘Perhaps we should try the stairs first, see if there’s a way out. If the lower floors are intact, maybe there’s a rear access or something we can try….’

  ‘The optimism of youth,’ Kurou said, his voice taking on a musical air. ‘So delightful.’

  ‘We should try before the lights go out. I’m amazed the electricity has stayed on, but I’m sure the power will go off soon. There might be fires upstairs and everything.’

  ‘Fool.’ Kurou gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘These are my lights. They go off when I say.’ He offered no more explanation.

  ‘Shall I look then?’ Victor started to get up, but hard fingers closed over his arm and pulled him back down. He could feel bruises forming on his skin as Kurou’s face loomed close. Where the strength in Kurou’s frail arms came from, Victor didn’t know, but as he looked into Kurou’s eyes he felt all his horror come flooding back.

  ‘So keen to leave, aren’t we?’ Kurou hissed, his voice low. ‘And we’ve only just met. I would hate to wave goodbye so soon, sire.’

  Victor let out a slow breath as Kurou relaxed his grip, keeping his fingers hooked around Victor’s arm as if in warning.

  ‘I’m not trying to escape,’ he said, hoping his trembling voice was louder than his pounding heart. ‘I’m the one that came to find you, remember?’

  Kurou watched him for a few seconds, his beady eye unreadable. Then in an instant he danced over to the door, kicked back the blanket and squatted down to wipe his fingers in the dust.

  ‘Settling,’ he said. ‘Fortune follows the brave, and since you were brave enough to come here—’ he stood up and pulled the door wide, ‘—I’ll let you go first.’

  Victor got up and peered hesitantly up into the dusty gloom of the stairwell. The entire bottom floor looked undamaged, but he could only see about halfway up the stairs in the glow cast by Kurou’s apartment light.

  ‘I need my torch.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Kurou ran away into the kitchen to retrieve Victor’s torch. As he returned, Victor saw a barely perceptible flinch, one of Kurou’s hands almost dropping to the wound on his side, a rare sign that Kurou felt pain like normal people. A while earlier, as the fire died down, Kurou had donned a pair of ragged trousers, but he was still stripped to the waist, a skeleton wrapped in scar tissue. The knife wound was a deeper red gash against the blotchy red of old burns, but at some point during Kurou’s excitement it had started to bleed again. Victor couldn’t remember how many tablets he had left for Kurou. It might prove that the wound would need more. Victor decided to file the information away as a possible bargaining tool in the event that they ever managed to escape.

  Kurou tossed Victor’s torch in his general direction, cackling when Victor failed to catch it, the torch landing on the blankets at Victor’s feet. He picked it up and scowled at Kurou before he could stop himself.

  Kurou hung back in the doorway as Victor crept up the stairs, worried that any noise might bring the building down on his head. He had reached the second landing before his torch could make out any signs of damage from above, but when he spotted the huge stone girders that had blocked the stairwell, his heart sank.

  He swung the torch through the curtains of dust, looking for a way through, but he might as well have been walled in. What few lumps of broken masonry looked small enough for him to shift could bring others tumbling down.

  There was no way through.

  He was about to head back down to tell Kurou the bad news when he heard a little cough come from beneath the rubble nearby.

  ‘She’s in there,’ he said, pointing. ‘I don’t know how far. I can’t get her to answer me, but if I point the torch through this gap I can see part of a foot poking out.’

  At Victor’s shoulder, Kurou gave a huge looping nod that utilised his whole upper body. He reminded Victor of the flamingoes he had once seen in Moscow Zoo.

  ‘A girl, you think? Tasty, yes?’

  ‘No!’ Victor actually felt the temptation to swipe Kurou around the head, but thought better of it.

  ‘Then what did you drag me up here for?’

  ‘We have to get her out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … we have to.’

  Kurou stared at Victor a moment, then gave a shrug and headed back down the stairs, doing a bizarre hop-skip-jump as he disappeared out of sight. A bang came from below as the door swung shut, and the tiny glow of light that had stretched its fingers to the edge of the stairs below was gone.

  Victor was alone with his torch and the hoarse breathing of the trapped girl.

  She was about ten feet away, lying in a crux below a V-shaped metal girder holding up a heap of broken masonry. Victor could only see part of her foot, and only guessed it was a girl from the timbre of her occasional coughs. He had called out a few questions but received no answer.

  He moved a few feet to his right, to the very edge of the stairwell, looking for some way to reach her. As he squatted down and pointed his torch between piles of bricks and rubble, fallen lintels and hunks of chewed up stone with protruding metal teeth, he tried not to think about the danger he was in. He didn’t want to think about Isabella, or the impending war, or the thousands of tons of broken rock and metal just waiting to plunge down and pop his head like a squashed lemon.

  He tried only to think about the trapped girl, and that it was his duty to try to save her, even though a large part of him wanted to be downstairs next to the warm fire. It was a simple matter of conscience.

  Part of the wall above had broken away and fallen across the stairs. Huge lumps of concrete as large as Victor’s chest were held together by metal support rods strung through them like braces correcting a giant’s teeth. They had fallen at an awkward angle, and closest to the wall there was a thirty-centimetre gap between the lowest chunk of broken masonry and the floor.

  Victor trained the torch on it and gulped. He could just about wriggle through if he got down on his belly, but he would have to go all the way in, somehow get a hold of the girl and pull her out with no way to lever himself other than by jerking his knees back and forth like a desperate swimmer in a dried out pool.

  It was as close to a suicide mission as he ever hoped to take on. If the girl was stuck she was as good as dead. Trying to pull her free might kill them both, but even if she was free beneath the rubble he might not be able to drag her back out. He would have barely a couple of centimetres each side to lever himself, and would need at least one hand free to try to push himself backwards.

  His heart was pounding harder that it had done on his first meeting with Kurou. He was no hero; this was ridiculous. He was a small town inventor without a brave bone i
n his body.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he called again, but once more received no answer except a creaking groan from somewhere high above. A flutter of dust rained down on him, and Victor stared down at his feet, too afraid to look up.

  Before he had a chance to talk himself out of it, he pulled off his coat and top layers, tossing them to the ground beside him. Then he stripped off his undershirt and wrapped it around his left forearm. Naked to the waist, the chill was punishing, but he gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it. Holding the torch in his right hand, he dropped to his knees and then his belly, sliding forward until the huge chunks of masonry were right above him. His breath came in little gasps, the terror greater than anything he had ever felt. Death, if it came now, could be brutal or merciful; he could be crushed in a moment or left to die slowly for days.

  A few feet ahead of him, he heard another little cough.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he whispered, inching himself forward, digging his soles against the rough concrete of the stairs to push himself forward. He didn’t dare lean on any of the rubble around him for leverage out of the fear it would come crashing down.

  It had looked to be about ten feet from outside, but now he was pushing himself forward it seemed so much further. Little shards of rock cut into his naked belly as he moved forward, but the little stabs of pain they caused were almost a relief compared to the endless press of the concrete, which was as cold as a block of ice.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered, counting the pressure of his feet as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. One step, two, three, four—

  And then his fingers touched something that wasn’t freezing cold or hard like stone or steel.

  The sole of a boot.

  He tried to give it a little shake, but it was difficult to move his hands enough with his arms fully outstretched. Instead, he inched himself further forward until his hand could reach up as far as the girl’s knee.

  He could see her better now, a pair of woollen trousers under a heavy jacket, her face hidden by a hood that was still pulled up. She was lying on her front, her face turned to the left, away from him.

  It appeared she had been remarkably lucky. From Victor’s angle it looked like she wasn’t trapped, which meant if he could just get a good grip on her he might be able to pull her free. If she was injured he couldn’t tell; her thick jacket would have soaked up the blood from any flesh wound, but none of her limbs looked bent out of shape. It was possible she was just concussed.

  Moving one inch at a time, Victor pushed the sleeve of his shirt under her leg and pulled it back over the top. Trying to find the pressure to tie it tight enough took a few minutes, and he couldn’t reach her other leg as he had hoped. He didn’t know how well he could move her by pulling on just one limb, but it would have to be enough.

  With the knot tied as tightly as he could manage, he started to inch his way backwards, pushing with his hands and elbows.

  His rescue mission was going well until his shirt went taut. He gave it another tug and the girl’s leg moved a few inches towards him, but the rest of her body stayed put. He tried to back away again, but to achieve the pressure he needed to drag her body he would have to use parts of the fallen masonry for leverage.

  He was so scared he could barely even breathe. The torch had begun to flicker, the batteries running low. He had perhaps a couple of minutes before he was plunged into darkness, and then he might not even get out, let alone the girl. He had to move, and he had to move now.

  He gave the fallen lintel nearest to his leg a tentative kick. It felt stable enough, but if he leaned his knee into it would it stay where it had fallen, or would it shift just enough to cause something heavy above him to come crashing down?

  The torch gave another flicker and for a second everything when black. Victor tapped it against the ground and it came back on, but the warning was enough. Ignoring the danger, he dug his knee into the fallen rock and pulled backwards.

  The girl shifted a few inches. She gave another little cough, this time accompanied by a groan.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re safe,’ he hissed at her, digging his knee in again and hauling her back another couple of inches. A gentle breeze ghosted over his ankle, and he realised his feet had found the exit. A little more and he’d be able to sit up and pull her out. They were so close—

  Something rumbled far above him, and a sudden pattering of falling debris fell like rain around them. Victor froze as little chunks of rock bounced down around him, some striking him on the bare skin as they ricocheted off fallen masonry into his cubby hole. One struck the casing of the torch with a hard crack.

  Victor gritted his teeth and began to worm his way backwards as fast as he could. The deadweight of the girl’s body barely seemed to move as he wriggled back and forth, his body aching from both the chaff and the cold of the floor.

  ‘Where am I…?’ came a weak voice.

  ‘Hang on!’ Victor called out. ‘Don’t struggle!’

  ‘Where? What’s going on?’

  Victor had almost freed his legs when the girl came to her senses and began to struggle. One foot kicked out and struck a large fallen rock that bounced down just inches from Victor’s face.

  ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘Stop struggling or it’ll collapse.’

  ‘Who’s there?’ the girl called, and he thought he recognised her voice from somewhere but couldn’t quite place it.

  ‘Victor. My name’s Victor Mishin.’

  Isabella had been the first of several on-off girlfriends who hadn’t found Victor’s mild manner to be a sedative in itself, but at the sound of his name his old magic worked its charm and the girl calmed down, lying still while he continued to back out.

  The rumble came from above once again just as Victor’s shoulders came free and the torch gave a final flicker and died, plunging them into darkness.

  ‘Hold on,’ Victor called, terror slipping into his voice. ‘Just a little further and we’ll be safe—’

  The girl’s boot slammed into his face. Victor groaned, his neck absorbing most of the impact. He tried to hold on to her but she kicked him again.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he gasped.

  ‘Fucking bastard.’

  The voice was definitely familiar, but so was the rising thunder from high above. Some other great death-harnessing lump of power was setting itself to fall; Victor could feel the ache in the debris around him.

  Then something closed over his feet, dragging him backwards with the strength of some terrible subterranean beast. He was still holding on to the sling around the girl’s foot he had made with his shirt, and she slid out after him.

  ‘Let me go!’ she screamed as something heavy slammed down just a few feet to Victor’s left, invisible in the dark except for the vibrations it sent running through the concrete.

  Victor could see nothing. He heard the rumbling of collapsing masonry from high above him, and wondered how many seconds he had left before his life was snuffed out. He still had one hand holding on to his shirt with the other end tied around the struggling girl’s foot. Her voice seemed so familiar.

  What had grabbed hold of him?

  ‘Looks like you found a live one, sire,’ Kurou’s voice came in his ear. ‘Time for a little grave-robbing. Yours.’

  Kurou’s fingers slipped over Victor’s feet and dragged him across the floor until he felt the first bump of the stairs under his shoulders. With each step he cried out, but Kurou didn’t slow his pace, pulling him down the stairs like a child dragging a teddy bear.

  Behind him, the girl, still pulled along behind, cried out in her own pain.

  A massive crash came from above as the pile of debris shifted and settled. Despite the bruising pain in his back from the concrete steps, he knew Kurou had saved them both.

  And then he saw something wondrous: the light through Kurou’s open doorway.

  The girl had struck her head and been knocked out again. Victor climbed gingerly to his feet and took hold
of her ankles, helping Kurou to carry her inside, where they unceremoniously dumped her on top of the pile of filthy blankets. Kurou slammed the door shut.

  ‘Well, a fine catch, sire. Albeit one I’m not certain was worth such a frightful risk.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Victor gasped, pulling his shirt back on and picking a dirty jacket from under a pile of Kurou’s blankets, the cold helping him to ignore the smell. ‘You might not be gentle about it, but you saved my life back there. Why did you come back?’

  Kurou gave a lopsided grin. ‘I was hungry, sire.’

  ‘We’re not eating her!’

  Kurou shrugged. ‘Let’s see how you feel in a few days if we’re unable to find a way out. You know her, sire?’

  The girl groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. She was wearing a heavy jacket that made him instantly jealous, having left his somewhere up the stairwell. She was young, no more than fourteen or fifteen, with blonde hair and cold blue eyes set into a delicate but beautiful face. He had seen her somewhere before, he was sure of it—

  She opened her eyes. ‘You bastard,’ she spat. ‘You murdered my brother.’

  Victor, despite being slightly overwhelmed by the intensity of her vitriol, remembered her now. She was a younger, nastier version of her sister, Isabella.

  He glanced at Kurou. ‘Patricia Mortin,’ he said.

  17

  The climb in the darkness

  Judging by the girl’s impressive display of aggression in the face of life-threatening adversity, Victor felt it best that they restrain Patricia before she properly came around. Kurou tied her hands behind her back and bound her ankles, and was going to gag her with one of his putrid blankets before Victor suggested that a piece of duct tape from a roll he had loaded on to the cart might be a less potentially lethal alternative.

  Kurou, though, once the girl was safely secured, had retreated into the background to let Victor deal with her vitriol, a smirk on his twisted face.