Sally took a deep breath and steadied herself on the porch railing. Behind them, Alphonse gripped a misbehaving patron by the collar of his jacket. The Italian pulled him close and whispered something into his ear, nearly biting it. Flip watched the exchange, and understood for certain that those hands knew murder.
Back down on the street, a drunken man howled at the sky and flapped his arms like a bird.
“You never did tell me about those things,” Sally said. “Those strange things that you took care of.”
Flip looked over at Sally to say she ought to know better.
“My babies really going to be safe?” Sally pressed, watching the flapping man.
“Yes,” Flip said quietly. “They are. At least from-”
“How do you know for sure?” Sally pushed.
“Because they’re not what he was after,” Flip said. “Who he was after.”
Sally looked down at her shoes.
“Why won’t you ever talk about it?” she whispered. “Why won’t you just tell me straight what happened? Just tell me you found him and killed him? I know you’ve done it, Flip. Can’t you just say it? I’d feel a whole lot better if you did.”
Flip said nothing. Stared at the flapping drunk.
“I mean . . . I can guess,” Sally said. “I’m not stupid. I can guess just from what they printed in the Defender, scant though it was.”
Flip stayed silent.
“How long have we known each other?” she entreated, cooing almost sensually. “Do an old friend this single kindness? Why, Joe Flippity?”
“Because the story doesn’t end with him,” Flip replied. “Because it’s bigger than one man. I won’t lie to you, Sally.”
“Then just tell me you done him,” Sally pressed coyly. “That’s all I want. Nod once if it’s yes.”
She smiled. Flip looked at her for a very long time.
“You really want to know what happened?” Flip asked.
Sally did not have to speak.
“Fine,” Flip said. “Then I’m going to tell you something I never told nobody. Are you ready? Are you listening carefully? Nash was after Tark. All that time, he wanted Tark and his brother. To kill them both at the same time. He thought Tark had stolen magic power from some beast that lives out in the lake—an invisible giant with triangle eyes. Its power came up through magic ramp. I don’t fully understand that part.”
Sally opened her mouth to ask about ten questions, but Flip kept going.
“The night after I did it—yes Sally, after I put three bullets into Nash—I went directly to see Tark. I planned to catch him after hours in his caravan, but they were doing a double midnight show and it ran into the early morning. I found Singer outside the tent and talked to him while I waited. Singer said Tark had a new trick that was knocking ’em dead. Said I really ought to see it. He let me in for free, and I sat in the back. Pretty soon, Tark came on. He began with tricks I’d seen before. Manipulations with cards. Pulling a rabbit from a hat. All that bit.”
Flip swallowed hard. He slowly brought his gaze up from the drunk flapping in the street to the sky above the buildings. There, he let his eyes linger.
“But . . . the act was building to something, Sally. It had this feeling about it, that it was leading someplace. At first, I thought I could guess to what.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sally said. “To that trick where he transports himself across the tent. Like always.”
Flip nodded, still looking up at the sky.
“That’s what I thought too. But when it came time, he did something new. He brought a long mirror out onto the stage. Big as a chalkboard in a schoolhouse. First, he held it to the side where the audience couldn’t see. Then he tilts it and we can see his reflection. And already, I know where this is going. I watch him do a pantomime dance with the reflection of himself. He touches his toes. Tips his hat. Does a flexing routine with his fingers. The reflection matches it all perfectly. Then he turns to the audience and smiles. But the reflection doesn’t turn. It keeps looking out. The audience gasps. You can practically hear the air being sucked out of the tent. It only lasts a second. Then the people applaud like you wouldn’t believe. They go crazy. And the reflection steps through the mirror.”
“So?” Sally said. “He and Ike learned a new trick. What about it?”
“Yes,” Flip said distantly, looking at the night sky above the rooftops. “But see, then an assistant pulled another long, high mirror out onto the stage. It was the same as the first—like a school chalkboard on wheels. And the two Tarks, they took turns playing with their reflections. They did more routines together. Held hands and passed objects back and forth. Then they turned to face the audience. . . and once again, the reflections didn’t. You could have heard a pin drop, Sally. A woman in the front row actually fainted. Then people went crazy all over again—clapping, hooting, cheering to beat the band. It was a standing ovation. The two reflections stepped out of the mirror, and they all stood on the stage together. All four, hand in hand. All absolutely identical. Then they took a bow.”
The expression on Flip’s face showed he was deeply troubled by what he had just described. That there was a bewildering terror to it.
Sally, in contrast, clucked as though Flip were a child who had worked himself into a tizzy over nothing.
“That could have been done a thousand different ways, and you know it,” she told him. “With makeup or costumes. Or maybe the Tarks are identical quadruplets. Ike had gone down to Indiana to stay with family, right? Maybe he brought two more up with him. Did you ever think of that?”
“I went and waited by Tark’s caravan after the show,” Flip said. “He came out of the tent very late, bottle already in his hand. He looked surprised to see me. At first he was cheerful. Excited. Asked if I’d seen his new finale, like he was proud of it. I wanted to slap him across the face. I told him the things Nash had said to me. About the magic ramp along the shoreline, and a thing in the lake with triangle eyes. I asked if he remembered playing on the beach when he was a little boy, with Ike. I asked if the ramp had given him powers. Real powers. He went stone still. Then I asked if he understood that the thing he sometimes sees and talks to when he’s drunk—a great insect beast—is connected to it. I believe that’s the thing he stole from, Sally. I told Tark that whatever he took, that thing wants it back. I told Tark the thing was never going to stop. That it was going to send another Rotney Nash to prey on him. Then another. It would keep happening and happening until he was dead. His brother too.”
“And what did Tark say?” Sally asked.
“He was quiet for a long spell,” Flip told her. “Then he asked me what I thought he should do.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him he should do what Du Sable did after he was touched by the ramp. Leave town for good. Never come back to Chicago. Dis-a-fucking-pear.”
“And?” Sally asked after a moment.
“And he said he would. And you and I ain’t seen him since.”
“Yes,” Sally said, pondering. “I thought that was strange, the way he just evaporated. I figured he would have stopped by here, after it all happened. At least to drink some gin, or ask if he could see the girls, now that we weren’t working together. I always wondered why he didn’t. I figured the circus must have gone on a long tour. Then, to be honest, it kind of slipped from my mind. Last couple of years, now and then I’d meet someone who’d seen the Singling Brothers Circus. I’d ask about a magician, and they’d say there wasn’t one in the show anymore. I wondered about that. I worried Tark had died, maybe drank himself to death. Do you know what became of him? Where he is?”
Flip inclined his head and gave a little pout, like a physician about to make a ‘probably’ diagnosis.
“About a year ago I saw a newspaper from Portland, Oregon,” Flip said. “There was a piece about a travelling Negro magic act that’d come through. Said the performer did animal tricks and card tricks, but that he was best known for d
isappearing and reappearing all the way across a room. Went by the name of Cornelius Mack. Wasn’t a photo, but the way they described him, it sure did sound like Tark.”
Sally nodded thoughtfully.
Out in the street, the flapping drunk was beginning to accost passersby. In the doorway of an illegal tavern—they were all illegal now, of course—a man in a straw porkpie looked at Flip imploringly. Private drunkenness was one thing, but if you acted up in public, people were going to wonder where you had got so soused. It was not uniformed police that concerned the proprietor. It was the reformers and do-gooders who might be patrolling South State to see if that new laws were actually being enforced. And who might, depending on what they saw, insist the municipality perform a proper disinfecting of the area, as opposed to the cursory papering-over that had occurred.
Flip waved his hand to indicate that he would be on it in a moment.
“Duty calls,” he said to Sally.
“It certainly does,” she replied, glancing back to the Italian gents who lingered at her door.
Sally began to retreat inside, and Flip marched down the brothel’s front steps.
Then a voice. Her voice.
“Flip. . .”
He turned back.
“Flip. . . help me not to forget Ursula Green, all right?” she said. “I want to remember her. I want to remember all of this. I don’t ever want to forget her. Or Tark, either. Ursula used to tell me that there were many people in me. Other versions of me. And they were in other places, doing other things. . .”
Flip nodded.
“That does sound like Ursula,” he said.
“These past two, three years, I feel like I’ve stepped into a world where I’m one of those different me’s. Where I don’t exist as I once did. Like I’m a train car sent down the wrong track, and now I’m in the wrong place. But I want to stay in my place, Flip. You know? This place. And I want to remember all the things that happened. Ursula, Tark. . . you.”
“I know,” Flip told her. “Tell you what, Sally; I’ll help you. I’ll help you keep all this in your mind. We’ll both remember Ursula, all right? We’ll do it together.”
Something like relief crossed Sally’s face. She nodded down at Flip. Her eyes and her smile radiated relief.
Flip smiled too. Then he turned back around to handle the flapping drunk. He walked a few paces into the street, and began to roll up his sleeves.
Unobserved now, he relaxed . . . and his face fell.
His words to Sally had been a lie.
In truth, Flip wanted only to forget.
And on those lonely midnights when he crept back to the promontory jutting out into Lake Michigan, when he sat there alone, silently watching the swaying, sentient ramp riffle like playing cards while the full moon shone overhead, when he gazed up into the sky a thousand feet above the lake at two small, triangular pinpoints that seemed to hover there—sentient, furious, and suspended in the empty ether. . .
That was when he wanted to forget most of all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Historians will find that I have taken some liberties with particulars regarding the Bucket of Blood—as, it should be remembered, the proprietors of the Bucket themselves did, so many years ago.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New York and educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University, Scott Kenemore is the national bestselling author of Lake of Darkness, The Grand Hotel, and Zombie Ohio, as well as numerous other works of horror and satire. He lives in Evanston, IL.
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