City At The End Of Time (24 page)

“A bump. It’s always been there. What about it?”

“They used to call it the Valeria,” Tiadba said. “It’s where they organized and controlled the shows. I found a way to get up there, from behind the Wall of Light. Would you like to see?”

“It’s full of dirt, right?”

“I cleaned it.”

He struggled to steady his voice and recover his attitude. “Might be interesting…but why so important?”

“The big screen is broken,” Tiadba said. “But up there is a
little
screen. Up there we can connect to a catalog of the shows they used to put on in the Diurns. I’ve watched a few. I think they tell a history. Not ours, exactly. The history of those who were here before us.”

“I still don’t know how that can help the marchers.”

“Aren’t you curious, just a little bit? To see things no other breed has seen, nor anyone else, for millions of wakes? To learn how we came to be here, and…maybe…why? We’re so ignorant,” she sighed.

“And that…”

“That’s the third thing we have in common,” Jebrassy said. “You should also know I’m impulsive. Some say I’m stupid, but I’m really just stubborn. And I care too much.”

“Four, five, and…”

“Six things we have in common?” he finished.

She drew herself up, standing just a little taller than Jebrassy, not uncommon among the ancient breed.

“If the wardens find us, or learn that we know…I think they would stop us. They would give us up to the Tall Ones. Understand?”

He nodded.

“Come with me, then. Part of the old gallery fell down a while back, right next to the proscenium.”

Jebrassy followed for about fifty yards, and then clambered after her into a darkened pit formed by the walls of a masonry chamber whose roof had collapsed. A small hatch hung open in the base of the proscenium, still partially blocked.

“Are you afraid of tight places?” Tiadba asked as she removed a few stones and bricks.

“I don’t think so,” Jebrassy said. “As long as there’s a way out.”

“Well, here’s a tunnel. It stretches behind the screen for quite a ways, and then there’s a narrow shaft going up. I think there was a lift nearby—but it’s not working. To go up there, we have to climb a tiny spiral with lots of tiny steps.”

“Show me,” Jebrassy said.

Gleeful, Tiadba took his hand and tugged him forward.

TEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 19

Seattle

Ginny had followed the music for miles and now, her long hike finished, she stared up in awe at what she had found: a wide banner painted in red and black circus letters, announcingLE BOULEVARD DU

CRIME
.

A collision of sounds filled the air—hurdy-gurdies, calliopes, electric guitars, flutes and trombones and trumpets—a screeching but melodious wreck of noise that ascended in triumph to shimmer the clouds in the starlit sky.

A wide smile crossed her flushed face.

“Hey, pretty lady!” shouted a crimson and blue clown balancing a huge nimbus of white hair. “Join the Busker Jam! Certified insane, we am! We’re better than Fair, we’re not even there!”

The clown led a toothy, grinning monkey that stalked with anxious delicacy on yard-long stilts. Busker Jam filled several long acres of grass and gravel overlooking the glinting obsidian waters of Elliot Bay, marked at the northern end by a big grain elevator, flanked on the land side by gray and brown apartment buildings and condos, and tapering at the southern end into a sculpture garden—now closed—and a lot filled with a churning puzzle of parking cars. Red and yellow tents flapped and snapped in a light breeze. Food trucks and trailers clustered near the parking lot. A veering, snaking line of performance rings of all sizes poked up between the food trailers and the grain elevator, each distinctively labeled:THÉÂTRE-LYRIQUE, CIRQUE OLYMPIQUE, FOLIES

DRAMATIQUE, FUNAMBULES, THÉÂTRE DES PYGMÉS, THÉÂTRE PATRIOTIQUE,

DÉLASSEMENTSCOMIQUES, and so on, stretching out of sight.

Ginny had never seen so many
artistes
—clowns, musicians, acrobats, magicians, and of course mimes—and she wanted to laugh and cry at once. It was so much like the girlhood she could not remember, but wanted with a desperate ache to return to.

As Jack rode along the bike path, searching for familiar faces, jauntily swinging his front tire to keep a slow balance, he spotted a practice circle, and within the circle: Flashgirl, the Blue Lizard, Joe-Jim, and other old friends warming up for a turn in the rings.

Hundreds of patrons milled about in clumps, laughing, applauding, oohing and aahing, dropping bills and change into boxes and hats. It looked like a clink-paff night for his friends and colleagues. Buskers called a good show clink-paff—the sound of coins falling into thick piles of bills. In the first ring, T-square—dressed in a flame-red leotard—arranged three firepots and a circular roller-coaster-style ramp for his unicycle. On his head he wore a bright blue T-square jutting above a huge pair of wing-tip glasses studded with rhinestones. During his act, he said not a word, simply doing acrobatics on the unicycle and riding through brilliant and startling flashes of fire from his pots. Jack knew what the marks did not: that T-square would soon set his hat on fire and require the assistance of a prestationed shill—his daughter, a savvy and quick nine-year-old who would extinguish him with a spray of foam from a chrome-plated canister.

Needing no ring, Somnambule the Sleepified worked a series of startling card tricks, then struck a frozen pose, leaning into an imaginary wind with kerchief flying and hat about to blow off his head—cradling his cheek against nested hands and snoring until the next act began.

He winked as Jack cycled past. Jack tipped a salute.

Flashgirl did not use fire, but in her yellow and orange jumpsuit, with sultry countenance and angry, superfeminist patter, everything else about her was inflammatory. Her routine consisted of juggled illusions with knives and wands, frenetic dance, and jabbing verbal assaults on male members of the audience—whose sexist attitudes she blamed for the failure of her magic. Nearly everyone laughed; she was good. Not once had Jack seen Flashgirl actually anger an audience member. Still, at forty-five, she was slowing down. He thought from the sag of her shoulders and subtle gasping as she danced that her lifelong habit of smoking might be taking a toll.

Still, buskers worked sick or well—he hoped she was just fighting a cold. Jack knew where to find the performers’ zone, at the end of a short path winding up to the small changing trailer, marked off by stakes and ribbon. The moon-shadow of the huge grain elevator dominated this end of the park, and here, half in lunar shade, Joe-Jim squatted on a big white bucket, eating fruit salad from a plastic tray. He spotted Jack, and for a moment gave him a blank look.
He doesn’t remember.

Then something seemed to connect—to click in his head—and Joe-Jim waved his fork. “Brother Jack, back on track!” he called, spraying bits of orange.

“Whom do I address tonight?” Jack asked, shaking hands busker-style, with a sharp clap of palms and a hook-and-wriggle of three fingers.

“Tonight we are Jim. Joe’s on vacation in Chicago. Be back in a week. Calls me every day to check in.”

Joe-Jim’s routine was to perform acrobatics with an invisible partner—mime in the middle of the air, to all purposes, and at his best, he astonished. He was only a few years older than Jack but looked older, and also looked as if he had not been eating well. His eyes were haunted, his high cheeks were dark yellow, and both cheeks and chin bristled with two days’ growth of beard. One of his wrists had been tightly secured with a dirty Ace bandage. A lateral cut, Jack guessed—not a serious attempt.

“Why aren’t you jamming?” Joe-Jim asked. He insisted on being called by both names, whoever was actually present. Few in any audience could know that whichever character, Joe or Jim, performed on any given day, was half of a genuine split personality.

“Rats went on strike,” Jack said.

“Feeling our age, the rats and I,” Joe-Jim said. “Not good times, Jack.” The perennial pessimist, Joe-Jim pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one into his palm. “Keeps the demons at bay,” he said, and lit up with a squint.

“About those demons,” Jack said. “Seen any lately?”

“No more than usual.” Joe-Jim pulled up another bucket, inviting Jack to sit. The acrobat-mime had suffered through a lot—muggings, broken love, weeks and months in and out of institutions. Jack suspected he had at most a year or two before the streets and poverty—and the demons—snatched what was left of his health. Busking was a hard life.

“Do you ever run around empty?” Jack asked. “Moments when both Joe and Jim have left the building?”

Joe-Jim blew out a coil of smoke. “I couldn’t do my act with
two
invisible guys. Why?”

“Just asking,” Jack said.

“No, but it bugs me when we fight. I can’t get the invisible guy to do his part.” He smiled slyly. “You’re about to say, I’ve adapted rather well.”

“You’ve adapted rather well.”

“
I
certainly think so. I could never work in a cubicle, with my mates wondering who would show up day to day.” He dropped his cigarette half smoked on the grass and ground it down with his slipper heel. His features grew stiff. “Heads up. Here comes the shadow that walks like a man.”

A tall, emaciated anatomy wearing a top hat and formal attire—the suit split equally black and white top to bottom, the back adorned with a metallic blue skeleton—sauntered toward them, his gait that of a zombie Fred Astaire. His face was white and his eyes were ringed with black, and he radiated a deadly gloom.

He ignored Joe-Jim but homed in on Jack with hungry precision.

“Back off, Sepulcher,” Jack said, rising with fists clenched.

Joe-Jim looked away and inward.

Sepulcher pinned Jack with his sharp, deep eyes—famished, but not for food. “How’s your father, Jeremy?” he asked, his voice as resonant and lost as a bull in a cave.

“Still dead,” Jack said. He had changed his name years ago—everyone knew that.

“I’d forgotten,” Sepulcher said. “Always good to forget unpleasantness. Then—I saw you, and it all came back.”

Sepulcher never seemed to attract much of an audience or make much money. Some on the circuit had speculated he was a rich eccentric with a really bad act, which consisted of standing still for hours on a street corner, his eyes following people as they walked past—and occasionally letting loose with a whistled dirge.

Some buskers—the worst of a generally good lot—were actively creepy. Sepulcher’s real name was Nathan Silverstein.

“I worked with your father, Jack,” he said. That was a fact. Silverstein and Jack’s father had worked as a comedy team fifteen years ago.

“I remember,” Jack said. He turned to say good-bye to Joe-Jim, but Sepulcher grabbed his shoulder in a vise of sharp, bony fingers.

“I didn’t want to come here,” Sepulcher growled. He sucked in his cheeks and dropped his thin white-lined brows. “These people
hate
me.”

“I wonder why,” Jack said.

“But you, young son of an old friend,
you
have something I need.”

Jack looked down. “Let me go, or I’ll break your arm.”

Sepulcher let go, but his white-daubed digits flexed. The index and thumb made a space, three inches.

“This big. Dark, pitted, shiny. Burned by time. A crooked black rock with a red eye.
They
want me to find it.”

Jack stared the man down, his teeth grinding.

“To pay a debt,” Sepulcher added. “You have it, I know you do.”

Jack shook his head. “Haven’t seen it, Nathan,” he said. And that was true, in a way. His father and Silverstein had split up after a few months, despite drawing decent crowds in small comedy theaters across the Midwest. Sepulcher had been different back then, but Jack never liked him.

“That rock…” Sepulcher seemed unable to finish his thought. Jack knew he needed to leave, or there might be a ruckus—so he said goodbye to Joe-Jim, then, giving Sepulcher a wide berth, walked quickly to his bike.

Sepulcher stared after him with forlorn conviction—Jack could actually feel the man’s eyes like little needles in his neck. “That was
my
rock, Jack! Your father stole it from me! My life has been a misery ever since!”