great iron crane swooped down on Reg and crushed the juice from his limbs.
Yes indeed, Carrie-Anne Valentine had a gift. But no matter what folk’d said in chapel, there weren’t no spells or hocus-pocus. If there hadda been, I might’a known how to ease her now and bring back the sun.
Somehow the girl managed to steer us home. As the motor cut, I scooped Wesley up into my arms and put a shoulder to the door. The wind was awful strong now and battering at the long-dead prairie. Birds tried to fly ahead of it; the pull of that great black mouth was too strong. I hadn’t got the wings to take flight, but Boar House would do for me and mine like a wall of stone.
“Gotta get inside now, Miss Carrie-Anne.”
The girl, though, was rooted, hand on the open driver door, her stare taking in the empty porch.
“Why haven’t they surfaced by now? The danger’s passed. They should be surfaced.”
The words seemed to bite into her flesh, and she was gone suddenly, striding out towards the field.
“Miss Carrie-Anne! Miss Carrie-Anne!”
The dust was too thick to see past my own hand. A mighty cold swept in. Wesley was a tugging piglet at my neck and shivering so. With backwards glances, I fought my way up the steps to the porch, burst in past the gauze, got a grip on the front door and shut the howling out.
It was the blinding mercury where the sun’s glow hit the nosecone which drew Ben Richards to gather up a few of Bromide’s best men and take them out into the field. For the breadth of an afternoon, the men toiled against the welts of the dust dunes. Long into the amber eye of the evening, they worked to expose the Burrower’s cockpit. It took the quarry worker, Samuel O’Ryan, twenty minutes more to put a crack in the toughened glass hub.
When they’d laid the bodies of Virgil Roberts and Jos Splitz on the ground, those men found space in their lives to stand and stare a moment, and wonder who else among them would have travelled far below the ground in that steaming dragon. Some wondered if the two dead had indeed tunnelled in search of life-giving water. A few feared a modicum of truth in Dixon’s tale of draining the land. One wondered if the field of bore holes had contributed to the death of Oklahoma’s farming land, its seas of dust. Ben Richard, whose face was etched with the rawness of the storm like a charcoal map. Across the field and the churned garden, he saw Miss Splitz’s housemaid and her boy stood still as waxworks at the carnival and just watching.
He strode on over.
Shreds of Indian Blanket flowers carpeted the porch steps, which creaked a little as he climbed as if weary.
“Julie Sanders?”
Keeping her hand on her boy’s shoulder, the negress turned her face towards him. She was a living well of emotion. Fear and loss flowed and ebbed across her face.
She struggled to keep the boy back but he broke away.
“Yu need take these back, Sir?” The kid held out a palm with five small pebbles in it. “Miss Splitz. She found them underground.”
Ben squinted down. “Nah, boy. Keep ‘em.”
He dipped his head and peered over at the housemaid.
“Ain’t no sign of Carrie-Anne, but we’ll keep on looking.”
“I reckon she’s gone, Mister Richards. Back to the dirt from which she came.”
“Well, we can hope she didn’t suffer.” Ben tucked back the bob of pain in his throat. “Meantime, my daddy says how’s about you and Wesley settle yourselves with us for a while. You can always come right on back at the first sign of Carrie-Anne.”
The housemaid tucked her son back in under her arm. “Yes, Sir. We’ll pack a few things and say our farewell to Boar House. But first, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just watch a while longer.”
“‘Course, Julie. Take your time.”
The Preacher’s boy strode off down the porch steps and through the tangled remains of the garden. Dust lay over everything as if the garden and house had been asleep for a thousand years. There was no bird song, no evening insect chorus. Only the distant voices of the men and the emptiness of the clean-swept plains.
Author’s Acknowledgements
For every circus there must exist a ringmaster, someone to shape the weird and colourful chaos of acts into a plausible show. For me, that person is my husband, Del Lakin-Smith. Words of thanks can never begin to repay his unconditional love and support. Oh no, for that Jack Daniels is required!
A special mention must also go to our very own wolf girl, Scarlet. Thank you for staying untamed and reminding me that imagination should not be subject to rules or caged – a message my mother, Carolyne Lakin, would surely have approved of.
Another force of nature is my publisher, editor and very dear friend, Ian Whates. With Ian at the helm, Newcon Press has taken genre publishing to new and glittering heights and I am delighted to be on board.
I must also pay tribute to geologist, mechanic, self-survival expert and all round good guy, Marc Williams, whose studio reengineering helped root Cyber Circus in reality.
Talking of the real world, I am indebted to a spectacular troupe of writer colleagues and friends: Sam Moffat, Paul Skevington, Helen Sansum, Cath Hancox, Donna Scott, Neil Bond, Natalie Wooding, Alex and Emma Davis, Brian Marshall, Mark Dakin, and Ian Watson. Likewise, thank you to Tamsin Baxter and the rest of the clan – Nick Lakin, Dave Lakin, Grace Lakin, Jasmine Lakin, Carl Baxter and Nyall Baxter - for your care, concern, bolstering, and always being there.
A final circuit of the ring in honour of my father, Nev Lakin, to whom this book is dedicated. Thank you for nurturing my appreciation of the natural world and for teaching me how barren life would be if it all turned to dust.
About Kim
I still live in the family home I was born in. Ivy House has always been one of those piles of bricks and mortar with its own personality. As a child, I was terrified of its numerous dark corners, creaking floorboards, rattling pipes, spiders the size of dinner plates (only a small exaggeration) and lights that flickered. Without realising it, I was busy building my first stories of monsters out to get me, ghostly apparitions and other bloody ghouls. As a partially deaf child, I found my imagination more of a curse than a blessing and spent many a sleepless night peering out from under the bedcovers.
My fascination with the shadow world extended to my love of theatre and dance. Following in the footsteps of my grandmother, Doreen Roberts, a former ballerina, I filled my spare time with dance lessons. When not en pointe, I was at the Burton School of Speech and Drama taking part in lessons, productions, competitions and exams. Real school was somewhere I couldn’t get out of quick enough, but on stage I felt free.
True freedom came when, at age 16, my hearing magically resolved itself. At the same time, I found a new place to dance – the nightclub. It’s fair to say I went off the rails for a good while, and I’m not sure I ever got back on.
1990 was marred by the Gulf War and lousy fashion. Having failed my A levels in spectacular fashion, I travelled to Accra, Ghana, and took up a post as a teacher’s assistant at the Ghana International School. My visit was not the romantic gap year presented in glossy brochures. Alongside the beauty of the country and its people, I was introduced to the harsher side of life, to poverty, self-survival and racism.
On my return, I decided to make the most of the opportunities I had been blessed with. I signed up at Stafford Collage for two years and did a 360 on my previous A’level results. Having studied English Literature, Theatre Studies and Stage Design, I found a new passion in the form of playwriting. In 1993 I enrolled at the University of Glamorgan on their Combined Studies course. Why ‘Combined Studies’ sounded better to me than ‘Humanities’ is lost to history. I do know that my time at Glamorgan was transformative work-wise and on a
