The Magpye: Circus

by CW Lynch

  "I can't make any promises," he said. "I'm beaten and broken and we're at the bottom of a pit I don't know where."

  "You can heal," said Rosa. "You have to eat. That's how it works."

  "I'll be eating… you," said Able. His voice, even his own head, was weak.

  "I'm in here, with you. We'll be eating me."

  "I don't think that makes it any better," said Able.

  "Wait 'till we eat Cooper," Rosa quipped, "You'll be lucky if you're still sober at the end of it."

  Able reached down into the mass of flesh beneath him and pulled off another chunk of oozing meat. He forced it into his mouth, trying not to smell it, trying not even to taste it. It was survival, he told himself. It was necessary. He groped around, found what felt like a second body, its skin a different texture, its flesh firmer. He dug into it with his bony fingers and sharp nails, penetrating the flesh more easily than he thought possible. Another change, another adaptation, perhaps from The Magpye. Able, the dead boy, a thing with pale flesh, milk white eyes, and fingers like talons for tearing up the dead.

  He pushed another strip of meat into his mouth and felt the familiar rush of new memories. Hartley, the computer expert, came into Able's mind with his final words still on his lips. Another impressive mind, although different to Rosa's, Able reflexively held him back.

  "I'll explain it to him," said Rosa, "You do what you need to do."

  Able felt some of the familiar frothing chaos return as Rosa's mind drew away from his and submerged, along with Hartley, into the river of memory. Others rose to meet them, welcoming them to Able's dead family. Able's dead family, also known as all the people that he had failed. Also known as all the people who were dead because of Able Quirk.

  Except, of course, for one.

  "Bitch," cursed Adam King. "She's dangerous, you should never have absorbed her."

  "I owe her, she's dead because of me. Because of us, actually."

  "You can't measure yourself against the lives of normal people, Able. You're a King."

  "You're a King."

  "She will hamper you, her mind is ill adjusted for magic."

  "I'll take my chances," said Able. "She might just be able to help me think straight."

  Adam King's ghost snorted its disgust. "You've got a creature living inside you that can control the dead. I spent a lifetime preparing to harness its power and yet it still denied me. You think some cop with an OCD can help you?"

  "Maybe," said Adam. "There's so much I don't know. I thought I was just another ghost, like them, but now? I'm not just me, not just Able. And I'm not dead, not really dead, either. My body moves around, I do things. The Magpye does things too. I remember who I am now but there are still parts of me that feel more like it than me."

  "I can show you, teach you," said Adam. "Everything I learnt, all my training, is already within you. My memories are yours now, after all, but you are also my blood. You are the next of the Kings, Able."

  Able instinctively pulled back from Adam's mind as he felt his father's memories press against his, imprinting themselves on him. He saw them all, all the Kings, stretching back for generations. Each one fed on the memories of their predecessor, a line of Kings that had amassed skills and knowledge, power and wealth, and the darkest of occult power.

  But where one King ended and another began, that was something even Adam King was unsure of. Perhaps, in reality, there was only one King. The original King, the father of them all, the original King of the Dead. If that was true, Able doubted there was any space for a Quirk.

  "You won't control me." said Adam firmly. "You'll never control me again. We do this my way from now on."

  Able felt Adam bridle, but held his ground. For a moment, there was an uneasy, oppressive silence in Able's mind. He could feel the eyes of the other ghosts on him, an electric tension crackling across the surface of their mingled minds and memories.

  "Very well," acquiesced King. "I have shown you how to control them, I have shown you how to heal your undead flesh. Only the most important lesson remains, the one The Magpye wanted to teach you itself."

  "Which is?"

  "Pain," replied the ghost and, without warning, the crippling agony of Able's injuries returned.

  MARV IN THE WASTELAND

  Marv and Marissa crept across the waste ground in front of old building that concealed The Pit. The place was one of the hundred or more nondescript shells of buildings in this part of town. Monuments to the crumbling corpses of industries that had moved overseas or just ceased to exist entirely, they were arranged in block after block of giant tombstones. It was a place the city had forgotten, which made it a perfect place to put things that you wanted to disappear.

  Marissa, the new Marissa that Marv had conjured, no longer concealed her spectral nature. Ethereal, she seemed to move a step out of sequence with everything around her. Marv's magic wasn't as powerful if you looked right at it, and Marv knowing that Marissa was a ghost made her weak. Like any magic trick, it wasn't as good once you knew how it was done.

  "You're sure this is the place?" asked Marv. He already knew the answer to the question, Marv could feel his restored magic tugging him away from the place harder and harder with every step closer that he took, the reflexes of a lifetime as a habitual coward were hard to deny.

  "Able's inside," said Marissa. Her voice echoed against unseen walls; it reminded Marv of listening to an old radio, the sounds distorting and deforming from time to time. He closed his eyes for a second, tried to focus his magic, focus Marissa. It was no use. The more he thought about her, the less real she became.

  "You should go," said Marv. "I'm sorry darling, but I need to concentrate."

  There was a gust of wind as Marissa vanished, returned to whatever place it was that she went when Marv wasn't thinking about her. He wondered how long he could keep this up, if she would become weaker every time that he conjured her or whether somehow, some-way, he could make it stick. Everyone seemed to be cheating death these days.

  Marv took a deep breath and concentrated on the moment. A clear head, that was all he needed. Get Able out of here, then get them all on the road. He still had contacts and with this magic restored he was less afraid to use them. They could find a new life somewhere, for all of them.

  Staying low, Marv raced across the last of the waste ground, keeping to what little cover there was before slipping into the shadows at the side of the building. There was only one entrance that wasn't boarded up, a set of double doors with fresh tyre tracks leading up to it. The padlock on the door wasn't new, but it was expensive. It took Marv almost ten seconds to open it.

  "Beat that, Able," Marv chuckled to himself. The door opened smoothly, and Marv slipped inside.

  ***

  On the other side of the road, Jack Taylor lowered a pair of night vision googles and smiled to himself.

  He always knew The Pit was dangerous.

  PAIN AND THE PIT

  Able writhed in pain, feeling himself sink deeper into the stinking mire of oozing, sweating meat and corpses. He tore hunks of flesh from the bodies with trembling hands and forced them into his mouth, hoping that the dead flesh would heal his wounds as Adam had promised. The fresher meat filled his mouth with cold blood. He choked and gagged, but kept eating.

  He felt his lungs try to inflate. He felt broken bones regrowing, pushing past or through tissue that was in their way. He felt muscles stretching, reaching out to the lost parts of themselves to reconnect. It was a pain unlike anything he had ever experienced, the pain of a body being forced to work in a way so unnatural that it rebelled against it. Lungs burst and collapsed again and again. Broken bones regrown were brittle and shattered under the weight of flesh that had swollen into a mass of cankers and tumours.

  And all the while, consumed by his agonies, Able felt the once cool waters of memory boil around him. The ghosts, his ghosts, were reduced to a foaming and incoherent mass.

  Beneath it all the dark shadow of The Magpye lu
rked. It had kept its promise to the magician, Able was whole and restored, but The Magpye had promised nothing more beyond that. Let the child and his errant father master the pain alone. The Magpye would wait. It was very old and very good at waiting.

  "You must move your pain, Able," said Adam, "Give it to one of the ghosts. Let them suffer it in your place."

  "I… can't…" gasped Able.

  "It's simple," scoffed Adam. "Just draw one of them forward. The pain will find its own way."

  "I won't… do it…" said Able, struggling to order the words in his mind as his body convulsed and spasmed with another agonising wave of regrowth. Somewhere inside him an organ inflated and burst, sending a wave of hot fluid gushing out. Able vomited, spewing up clods of partly chewed meat.

  "You've done it before," said Adam, "Without even realising it. When I was just a mystery voice in your head, I guided your pain to a place where you couldn't find it."

  "No!" howled Able, his voice echoing around The Pit. "No!"

  "The ghosts are yours!" commanded Adam. "Pick one!"

  "No!"

  Through his pain, Able forced his father's ghost back. If torturing someone else in your place was what it was to be Magpye, or to be a King, then he would have no part of it. He owed the dead. He owed his family, his circus, and he owed the cops. There were too many dead because of him, too many lives lost. He wouldn't see their afterlives spent in agony. This was his pain, the pain owed to him from the night of fire and death at the circus, the pain owed to him by the cops who had died expecting him to be at their side. He had all of his memories from before his death, but what about everything that he had done since? There was so much blood. So many others who had met their death because of him, a dead man bringing more death, all of them dying in his place.

  The Pit was a hell on Earth, but it was a hell that Able wished for.

  The pain went on. Perhaps for just a few moments, perhaps for hours, perhaps for days. There was no time in The Pit, just the unreachable disc of grey light far above, the slow decomposition of the mound of the dead, and the endless, torturous regrowth and failure of new flesh. Able grew too exhausted to eat, but the process refused to slow down. A chain reaction of growth and death, it seemed to fuel itself, keeping him trapped and insensate. In some moments of lucidity he reminded himself that he was owed this pain, that it was his due. In others, he screamed in rage at his father's ghost or at the strange and unknown-able thing called The Magpye that were the twin reasons that he was here. He begged them both more than once for death, real death, but neither answered.

  The pain was their way of moulding him, or breaking him.

  Spare the rod, spoil the child. That was the sort of thing, Able guessed, that Adam King might have said.

  And so Able writhed and howled alone in the darkness until his voice was nothing but a hoarse whisper and he could barely muster the strength to move. Inert, his body a pulsing mass of wounds and tumours, cankers and sores, he sank slowly down into the mire of flesh. He accepted his fate. A boy who should have been dead already, dying amongst the dead, his head home to ghosts and strange memories.

  Able watched the grey disc of light grow smaller.

  His heavy eyelids were almost closed when he noticed the shadow. A shape, small but growing, eclipsing the disc. Something coming closer, calling his name, reaching out. A dark shadow. Something new, yet familiar. Something from home. A voice in the dark. A figure, no, two figures, standing over him. One in shadow, one a riotous mass of colours. One face Able knew well, another a face from only the vaguest of memories. Then hands finding him, lifting his broken body upwards. Hands, lifting him up from the grip of the dead. Hands that had lifted him up once before when he was lost. Hands that did not tremble as they touched his warped and corrupted flesh, hands that brought him gently to his feet.

  "Come on, kid, let's get you out of here."

  "Marv…" croaked Able. "Who's the clown?"

  THE BALLAD OF MIKEY BUMCH

  Mikey Bumch hadn't been with the circus long. He was still trying to secure a decent spot in the clown routine and still trying to get someone, anyone, to listen to his ideas for a new act. He knew it would take time, the circus was a close family and even after working with the other clowns day and night for nearly three months he still felt like an outsider, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was destined for something great. He'd read about other circuses, other acts, where someone with his talents could really flourish. He just needed a start, a chance to do more than have shredded paper thrown down his trousers and a custard pie in his face.

  Mikey Bumch was the Boy Who Couldn't Feel Pain.

  All he needed was a shot.

  Mikey got shot the night circus burned and he died alone, face down in the grass. He didn't feel the shot, of course. He was sitting by himself, trying new variations on his clown make-up when the shots came through the side of the tent and split him open. He heard the sound, saw a pattern of light suddenly appear on the tent wall, but when the crimson blossom started to spread across his stomach he still had no idea what was wrong. Mikey remembered lifting his shirt and seeing the rough row of ragged holes across his soft abdomen in the mirror, remembered watching them open like angry mouths as he stood up and the weight of his insides pressed against the torn and shredded muscle. He remembered trying to pinch the holes closed with this fingers, to hold his insides in, and watching the blood spill out over his hands but still feeling nothing of it at all. The first thing he did feel was cold. He'd never felt hot or cold in his whole life, but he knew somehow, on some primal level, what this cold meant.

  Mikey remembered staggering out from his tent, his shirt bunched up around his chest, his stupid clown's trousers snagging with each step, his innards oozing between his fingers like mince, and coming face to face with Able. Able, wide eyed and frantic, twisting his head this way and that with every gunshot, flames behind him throwing up twisted shadows.

  What was it he would have said, if he'd had another moment?

  "Don't worry Able, I can't feel a thing."

  "Who are you?" asked Able, "I don't know your voice."

  "My name's Mikey Bumch," replied the clown. "We've only met once and I was busy dying then so…"

  "The clown, the clown from my memories of that night," said Able. "You were new, right?"

  "Yeah, that's me."

  "I remember," said Able. "I'm sorry for what happened to you."

  "It don't matter," said the dead clown. "I didn't feel a thing, other than cold."

  "Someone told me that you couldn't feel pain?" asked Able.

  "Actually, I can't feel anything. It's called 'congenital analgesia'. I've had it since the day I was born."

  Mikey's memories washed over Able, painting a new picture like a watercolour being painted over newsprint. Able saw Mikey as a child, at first abandoned, then pushed and pulled between foster families. Broken bones, burns, even chewing through his own tongue more than once. Not all of the injuries were accidents, and Able closed his mind as best he could to the darkest memories that Bumch had to offer. Memories of footsteps in the night, of hands on the boy who couldn't feel, sliding under sheets, dragging him from his bed. Memories of hands all over him in the dark. Mikey Bumch had lived his whole life disconnected from his body in a way that made Able's condition look like nothing at all and all anyone had ever done was treat him like a piece of exotic meat because of it.

  "No one understood," Mikey said. "They knew what the problem was, but they didn't know what it meant.".

  Another memory painted itself across the last. Mikey, standing naked in front of a mirror, carefully checking every inch of his skin for blemishes, bruises, or cuts.

  "My body," explained Mikey, "Is like a foreign thing to me. Like sitting in a car all day every day, only talking to people through the windows, moving around without ever feeling the ground under your feet. I can touch, a little, but no pain. Never, ever any pain."

  "Right now," said Able, "I'
d take a little of that." He hated himself for saying it, but it was the truth. "My father sent you, didn't he?"

  Mikey's ghost laughed. It was the strangest sound Able had ever heard in his head. Perhaps Mikey's sense of humour was as dead as his ability to feel pain.

  "No, he didn't," said the dead clown's ghost. "It's been all I can do to stay away from him. I've kept quiet, tried not to remember, tried to not to think. There aren't many places to hide in your head, Able."

  "Another prison... Mikey I'm sorry, I …"

  "Don't be," interrupted the ghost. "Able, all I ever wanted to find was a family. A real family. I thought I'd found one in the circus, and then it was taken away. Being here, whatever this place is in your head? It's the closest I've ever been to anyone, ever. I did find what I was looking for, I just had to get killed to do it."

  Able felt Mikey's mind pushing on the fringes of his. He'd let Dorothy guide his hands before, let Malcolm pick up a gun, aim, and pull the trigger. He'd let Magda walk across tightropes, had Wally Wu fold him into impossible shapes but this… this was different. This was deeper.

  "You can't heal properly because it hurts," said Mikey. "It hurts too much for your body to do what it needs to do. But it won't hurt me. Nothing ever has."

  Able kept his mind closed, held Mikey out for a moment longer.

  "I can't…" he said, finding even thoughts hard to muster as another wave of pain ran through his body. Somewhere, something popped inside him and he felt blood, warm and new and far too thin, spilling out. "If I use you… like …"

  "You're not using me," said Mikey. "I'm using you. If you die, then I die. If you die, we all die. You lost your family, Able, but I found mine. They're in here."

  For a moment, there was no pain. There were also no voices. The other ghosts were listening, they were always listening, but none of them spoke. Able wondered if they knew Mikey any better now than they had done before, he had really found in death what he had never found in life. Could The Magpye bring peace like that, could it bring solace to the dead? The dark creature, far below the surface of the calm waters of memory seemed to stir uncomfortably at the idea.