“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
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.
“‘That’s all that matters’? That is
“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
“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?”
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.
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 walked 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
