CHAPTER 13
in which the carnival of discord opens its gates for the last time and things go terribly wrong
Cabal passed the rest of the day trying to keep his mind off a variety of things. Failure. Damnation.
Leonie Barrow.
First, he worked on his conjuring. The card vanish he’d used to dispose of the extra ticket he’d offered Frank Barrow had been technically correct but an artistic disaster. It would never do. He sat down with a deck of cards in front of a mirror and started vanishing them methodically and steadily until his pockets and sleeves bulged. Then he shook them out and started again. And again. And again. Then, for variety’s sake, he started vanishing and immediately reproducing them. The Queen of Spades flickered in and out of existence in his hand. He watched his hands closely in the reflection. He’d made a point of angling the mirror so that he could see only his hands in it. He had no desire to see his face.
When the cards started getting dog-eared and suggestively curved, like Tuscan roof tiles, he turned his attention to other objects on his desk. Pens, pencils, and a ruler mysteriously vanished and then made triumphant returns. He’d been pleased with how well he’d managed to make that woman’s confession vanish in the police station.
Thinking of it, he pulled both it and her contract from his pocket and took a moment to examine them. Nea, she was called. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever come across a Nea before. It was a pleasant name, and he let it run with abandon around his mind for a moment. Then he drew the little key from his waistcoat pocket, unlocked the desk drawer, and placed her contract beneath the others in the box. At the top, this left a single blank form. By hook or by crook, it had better be signed before midnight. He put the box away and carefully locked the drawer before returning his attention to the confession. He skimmed it and was quietly impressed at how accurate it was, given her disturbed state of mind at the time. He practised making it vanish a few more times before tearing it into ribbons and feeding them to the stove in the corner.
He leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the desk edge. Still a couple of hours before sundown. What to do? Horst had promised to finish his plans for making the carnival more acceptable to the staid people of this town, but, when he looked at them, they didn’t seem to have been touched. Cabal thought of the talk he’d had with Horst last night and felt unaccountably worried. There had been something important that obviously mattered to Horst, but Johannes had been distracted and missed it. He hoped it wasn’t too important.
He looked around the office, seeking distraction. His eye fell upon his large notebook, and he took it up. There was a piece of music that the calliope played, an odd, lurching tune that still sounded faintly familiar. Perhaps if he wrote it out he might remember where he’d heard it before. Not a man usually given to trivial pursuits, he nevertheless felt no qualms as he took up his ruler and pencil, carefully drew out staves, and started writing in notes.
Time passed in quietude broken only by the frequent crunching of the pencil sharpener. Cabal hated working with blunt instruments. Outside, the riggers followed what there were of Horst’s plans in total silence; they didn’t even need to breathe except for effect. The “House of Medical Monstrosity” had become the “Home for the Genetically Challenged,” and the tone had changed from “be horrified” to “be educated.” “The Hall of Pain: Torture Down the Centuries!” had transformed into “Man’s Inhumanity: An Exhibit of Conscience,” and “Monsters! Monsters! Monsters!” into “Unknown Nature: Cryptozoological Wonders.” Cabal himself had started to find his interest piqued by sideshows that he’d spent the last year walking past.
Cabal finished writing and looked at his work. It didn’t look familiar. Even tilting his head gently from side to side didn’t help. Then, acting on a sudden suspicion, he drew some more staves and wrote the music out again but this time in reverse. It still didn’t look familiar, but when he looked at it, it seemed far too cheerful to be a piece he’d naturally associate with this place. He whistled it experimentally. Now he was certain he’d heard it before. Outside, the sun hung just over the horizon.
* * *
Barrow sat in his garden and watched the day come to a close and wondered idly if he would ever see another. He was going to have to go to the carnival tonight and try to discover what it was that disturbed him so much about it, so wrong and corrupt. He didn’t want to. Not at all, not for a second. He just felt he ought. Furthermore, he felt that he really ought to do something about it. He wished there was somebody he could go to for help. However, he had the oddest feeling that if he suggested to anybody that the Cabal brothers — Johannes in particular — were not just proprietors of a carnival but were, in actual fact, founts of evil that must be confronted by glowing crusaders for good such as, for example, himself, then there was a fair chance he’d be relieved of his braces and laces before being brazenly patronised by a psychiatrist long before the night was out.
He thought about what he’d said to Leonie. He was scared for her, more so than ever before in his life. He was scared for himself, too. It’s only fear, he thought, and that can’t hurt me. Some bugger with a hatchet, now, that’s worth worrying about. He tried to imagine Cabal bearing down on him with an axe, a knife, a crowbar, and he smiled. The ice-cool Mr. Cabal behaving like a thug — now, that was funny. Then he remembered the dead look in Cabal’s eyes when he’d seen Leonie, and suddenly it wasn’t funny at all. Across the fields, the sound of the carnival’s calliope floated to him, the notes ugly and mocking. Barrow realised that the music had started the instant that the sun had gone down. That didn’t surprise him at all.
* * *
Cabal ignored the calliope and continued to whistle the reversed music. Damnation, what was it?
“I’m glad you think so,” said Horst from behind him.
Cabal turned, the whistle dying on his lips. “What do you mean?”
“You, whistling ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ You have a perverse sense of humour.” Horst pulled on his coat and top hat. “If you’ll forgive me, I don’t like the atmosphere in here very much.” The door opened and shut, and Johannes Cabal was alone once more, in all senses of the word.
Cabal looked at the staves with disbelief. He leaned forward over the notebook and rested his fingertip on the first note. “Hap-py days are here a-gain,” he sang quietly as his finger tapped from note to note. Yes, Horst was quite right. In abrupt disgust, he tore the pages out and threw them in the wastepaper basket. “Very funny. Most amusing.” He pulled on his coat and hat and went to find Horst. Somewhere, somebody laughed.
Horst was walking in long-legged strides between the stands, stalls, and sideshows, pointedly ignoring the riggers that approached him asking for clarifications of his half-written plans. Johannes Cabal had no trouble finding him; he just followed the trail of disgruntled men with wilting bits of paper in their hands. He caught up with Horst by the Mysteries of Egypt, where Cleopatra had managed to buttonhole him. As Cabal approached, he could hear her haranguing Horst.
“Woss all this, then? Eh?” she squalled, waving a sheet of paper under Horst’s nose.
“It’s your revised script,” said Horst with uncharacteristic irritation. “Learn it. Now.”
“Woss wrong wiv me ol’ script, eh?” She changed gear and her voice became mellifluous, sensuous. “I” — she breathed the word — “am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, mistress” — this with a significant look — “of the Nile. Come with me and discover the pleasures … and the terrors of the ancient world.” She went from smoky seductress to Billingsgate fishwife in much less than a second. “There! W’a were wrong wiv that, eh? I mean, that were the dog’s bollocks, that were. Now you’ve given me this crap!” She waved the sheet in his face. “Woss all this shite ’baht dynasties an’ stuff? People dun wonna know ’baht that! They wanna ’ear ’baht shaggin’ an’ murder an’ people ’avin’ their brains fished aht their noses an’ stuff!”
Horst was never impolite to
ladies. Unfortunately for Cleopatra, she wasn’t only definitely not a lady, she wasn’t even technically human.
“Shut up,” said Horst in a cold hiss. He sounded a lot like his brother. “Just shut up. Come midnight, you’re dust and ashes, just like everybody else in this travelling nightmare, so I really don’t care what you think. You learn the script I’ve given you and you deliver it properly. If I come around this show later and find you delivering the old one, or deliberately making a bad job of the new one, you’re not even going to make it to midnight. Do you understand me?”
Cleopatra blinked. “All right,” she said in a very small voice.
“Horst,” called Cabal as he approached, “Horst, what has got into you?” Cleopatra looked fearfully at the pair of them. “You are dismissed,” said Cabal, and she ran off into the sideshow like a frightened kohl-smirched bunny.
“What has got into me?” Horst looked at the dark sky. When he looked back down, his expression was one of purest animosity. “Where do I begin?”
Cabal’s mind worked quickly to isolate an event that might have caused such a rapid deterioration in relations. “This is about that woman last night, isn’t it? The one with the child?”
“Yes, this is about the woman last night. The one with the child. What did you do to her? What dirty little stunt did you pull?”
“I granted her wish. That’s all.”
“And she signed over her soul for it.”
“No. She didn’t. She signed over her soul so that I’d take the wish away again. She wanted the child dead, Horst. She’s no angel.”
Horst waved his finger in Cabal’s face. “No, she didn’t want her baby dead. For crying out loud, Johannes, she just wanted a little help. Couldn’t you see that? Couldn’t you see that she just wanted a little help? She needed a babysitter, not a plan for murder.”
“I. Don’t. Care. What. She. Needed,” said Cabal, feeling his temper stirring. “She was prepared to sign for what she got. That’s all that matters.”
“‘That’s all that matters’? That is not all that matters, by a very long chalk. She’s a person, a human being, a living woman. Not just another name on one of your forms. You’ve ruined her life, you know that? She knows what’s waiting for her now, hanging over her.”
“I didn’t hear you make this kind of fuss over any — ”
“Pay attention, Johannes! The difference is that she hadn’t done anything wrong until you railroaded her into it. You! You’ve finally become what you were always meant to be.”
Cabal’s sixth sense belatedly started tingling. He had the faint impression that somebody was making a fool of him, had been making a fool of him for the last year, somebody who smelled quite strongly of brimstone. “What do you mean?” he asked cautiously.
“You are such a fool,” said Horst. “That’s what this whole exercise has really been about. I thought you’d have worked it out a long, long time ago. Old Hob down below isn’t interested in a pile of souls that he would have got anyway. He wanted to push you into taking one. Corrupting one. That business with Billy Butler was to make you desperate, make you forget that somewhere inside” — Horst’s voice cracked slightly — “there’s a good man. My little brother, Johannes. That’s all gone now. You’re not trying to beat the devil anymore. You’re doing his work for him. You’re not my brother anymore. I can’t… I won’t help you anymore.” Horst turned and started to walk away.
“Horst?” Cabal’s voice was small, disbelieving. Horst braced himself against sentiment, kept walking. “Horst, I need you. I can’t do this alone. I’m so close. Horst!” His brother’s stride never faltered. Johannes Cabal’s temper was a volatile quantity at the best of times, and he could feel it riding in his gullet now. This time, however, it was different.
There was something else there, a blossoming flower of easy violence that flooded up through his chest and found expression on his tongue, a faint taste of aniseed. “You will help me, Horst,” he said, his voice stronger, “or you’ll stay the way you are now, forever.”
Horst stopped. He stood still a long moment and then turned. “What,” he said quietly, “did you just say?”
You have power over him, thought Cabal, although part of him wondered if somebody else was doing his thinking for him. He can’t talk to you like that. “I said, you’ll do what you’re told or you can stay a parasite for the rest of time.”
Horst took a moment to consider his words. He walked right up to his brother until they were nose to nose and said, “Go fuck yourself, Johannes.” There was a sudden breeze as air rushed into the space that used to be full of Horst. Cabal looked around, blinking. He was quite alone.
Who needs him? said a small voice in his heart. You’re the man with the plan. Get to it. One last soul needed. Horst was just holding you back with all his stupid little scruples. Now you don’t have to pussyfoot around looking for somebody who wants to give their soul away. Now you can find a likely candidate and take it.
* * *
Frank Barrow moved with surprising stealth through the shadows behind the sideshows. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he was damn sure that it wasn’t in plain sight. He’d turned up at the turnstiles, handed over his complimentary ticket, noticed that almost everybody else in the queue had one, too, and had then entered the carnival ground with the sullen expression of somebody who expected to be entertained. He’d stood by a ginnel formed between the Parapsychological Perplex Experience (the Ghost Train) and the Sociopathic Mind (a Chamber of Horrors stuffed to the rafters with waxworks of infamous murderers)[4] and made a great show of winding his watch. The instant he wasn’t observed, he’d faded into the background. Now he shook the rust off his old shadowing skills and saw what he might see. He’d stumbled upon the Cabal brothers having some sort of argument but hadn’t been able to get close enough to find out what it had been about. An odd thing, though: there had been a point when he’d been sure that Horst was about to punch Johannes, Barrow had blinked, and Johannes had suddenly been alone. He wasn’t quite sure where Horst had got to, and, judging by the way he’d been casting about, neither had Johannes. Then Johannes Cabal had paused, and a very unpleasant smile had crept across his face, like a melanoma in time-lapse. It was another odd thing in and of itself, because Cabal had looked very different for some reason, almost like a different person. Then, full of a sense of purpose that Barrow found alarming in its suddenness, Cabal had strode off into the carnival’s main thoroughfare.
Now Barrow was moving quietly, unseen, but what he was seeing was worrying. He’d spent a lot of time in his life in places of hard, manual work and was used to their rhythms and nuances. Here there were none. He’d asked at the pub in town: what were the riggers like? The landlord had shrugged; he had no clue. None had been in. Barrow thought this was downright perverse. Unless the Cabals had manned their carnival with Quakers, Moslems, and assorted other teetotallers, then there was no obvious explanation. Unless, bizarre as it sounded, they simply didn’t drink. Following a hunch, he’d been to the grocers and asked a few questions there, too. Yes, the carnival had bought supplies, but nowhere near as much as might be expected for such a large operation. “They’re on starvation rations,” the grocer had said miserably. “They hardly bought enough to feed twenty.” Looking at a couple of the strapping men standing by a big wheel, he found the idea of anybody here starving very difficult to believe. He watched them as they smiled and waved at a crowd of teenagers going by. Then another curious thing happened.
The instant the crowd passed out of sight, the two riggers froze solid. Barrow thought that they’d seen something and shielded his eyes against the fierce, clear light of the stringed bulbs, but there was nothing to see, and after a moment he realised that was what they were looking at. There was nothing there, and nobody. Nobody to pretend for, nobody to go through the act of being real people for.
Barrow could have waited for somebody else to come by to test his hypothesis. He could even have wal
ked around and by them to see them go through their paces on his behalf. He could have, but he didn’t, and he didn’t because he’d as willingly gargle with toilet cleaner. In his extensive experience, out of harm’s way was a marvellous and worthwhile place to be, and he wanted to maintain his tenancy there as long as was humanly possible. Dancing up and down in front of a couple of enormous things with arms and legs that did a reasonable impersonation of people might be construed as provocative. “Softly, softly, catchee monkey” had been the unofficial motto of the police when he’d carried a warrant card. When the monkey looked like it would have little difficulty tearing your head off and spitting down your neck, it was particularly good advice.
Instead, he vanished back into the shadows to find more data. He couldn’t hypothesise without data. When Frank Barrow built a case, it stayed airtight at two hundred atmospheres.
There was none of the behind-scenes stuff that one might expect, he discovered as he peered through tent flaps and listened at ajar doors. Everything was as dead as dust when the townsfolk weren’t there. Nobody spoke, nobody moved (although he was sure he’d heard a mass gasp of exhaled breath when a party had left the hall of murderers in the Sociopathic Mind). Dead as dust. Cold as clay. The cogs of the idea that had started forming earlier were beginning to mesh. He didn’t like the look of the machine that they were forming at all. It seemed too fantastic, like a heart pacemaker made from balsa wood and chewing gum. He must have it wrong. He just couldn’t quite see how, though. After all, if it’s got four legs, yaps, and wants to be best pals with your shin, then it’s likely to be a dog. Barrow felt he had enough circumstantial evidence that, if he threw a rubber bone, this particular idea would bring it back for him, plus a large puddle of drool. Barrow had a bad feeling that he knew exactly what was going on.
“I know you,” said a voice quietly behind him. Barrow whirled to find Horst standing there. “You’re Frank Barrow.” Horst raised his hands in supplication. “Really, I mean you no harm.”
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