The Carnival of Lost Souls : A Handcuff Kid Novel

by Laura Quimby

  “You’ll see her,” Jack said. T-Ray had a lot to live for. More than Jack, maybe.

  “I hope you’ve got something good to trade with the Death Wranglers?” Boxer asked.

  “Oh, it’s good. Trust me,” Jack said, giving T-Ray a knowing glance. “It’s gonna work like magic.”

  “Jack, you’re on.”

  The stage lights dropped, shrouding the theater in darkness. Jack stepped onto the stage as the curtain rose. A wild sea of masked faces stared back at him. For the first time, the audience applauded when Jack was announced, and the cheers thrilled him. He started the act with some easy handcuff tricks, quick escapes, locking and unlocking the cuffs from behind his back.

  The challenge act was next—the most nerve-racking part of the show. A knot twisted in Jack’s stomach. Restlessly, he locked and unlocked a pair of handcuffs while he waited. Violet raised her pale arms up into the air, and a hush fell over the audience. Boxer stood next to Violet at the edge of the stage with his massive biceps crossed, ready to give the eagle eye to any handcuffs that the dead might bring up. This was mostly for show, since the dead rarely had their own handcuffs. To keep the show moving and to add some excitement, Jabber organized the plant, which was a pair of Jack’s cuffs that one of the dead pretended he brought to the show.

  The audience member, a skinny, rat-masked man, scurried up to the stage with a shiny pair of handcuffs and tossed them to Boxer. Jack recognized the cuffs right away. They were Bean Cobbs. Wait. Jack grabbed the handcuffs. Something was wrong. These weren’t his handcuffs. All the plants were supposed to be his handcuffs, the ones he practiced with millions of times, so there would be no mistakes. Was this Jabber’s idea of a joke? Or was he trying to set him up …

  Jack eyed the audience, searching for Jabber in the crowd, but the bright stage lights flashed him in the face like the headlights of oncoming traffic. He squinted and shielded his eyes. A bead of sweat appeared on his brow. He couldn’t get out of these cuffs. He didn’t have the key and couldn’t pick the lock in time. Time to get creative. Jack nudged Violet’s hands to put the cuffs on the largest part of his arm (that way he could slip them clean off his smaller wrists and wouldn’t have to pick the lock). This was a time when he wished that he had thick, muscular forearms like Houdini. Quickly, Jack entered his box and pulled the handcuffs over his wrists. The right cuff slipped off easily, but the left cuff was tight. It was mind over matter, or in Jack’s case, metal over wrist bone. It hurt, scraping a chunk of skin from his wrist as he wrestled the handcuff off. He tossed the unexpected cuffs out with more relief than triumph. But his challenge wasn’t over.

  Another volunteer raised a pale white hand into the air. A commotion ricocheted among the crowd like a pulse of electricity, snapping the audience suddenly to attention. After the stress of the strange cuffs, Jack had a bad feeling about where the act was headed.

  White hair appeared above the heads of the audience. Wearing a dark leather coat, the volunteer made his way to the stage. That’s when Jack recognized his weathered face and the dark blue bruises on his skin. Jabber was right. Don’t trust the dead.

  A haunting trail of whispers propelled the man up to the stage.

  “Shepard,” they all said.

  This wasn’t part of the plan, at least not Jack’s plan. With his limitless supply of custom handcuffs, Shepard was Jack’s walking nightmare. The whole thing reeked of Mussini. Jack glanced over the audience; Mussini’s hawk mask glittered in the candlelight. He raised his arms and began a hard clap. This was what Mussini lived for—the surprise, the unexpected twist. Either that or he was getting back at Jack for helping Violet stay in the show. How could Jack have been so stupid? A blind man could have seen this one coming. Jack had handcuff déjà vu. His memory flashed to Shepard’s wall of handcuffs.

  The devil’s handcuffs—they had been made just for him and ordered by Mussini. He should have known only someone as heartless and brilliant as Mussini could come up with such a stunning and tortuous pair of handcuffs. Shepard reached into his coat and pulled out the golden intertwined locking cuffs and held them high above his head for everyone to see.

  “The devil’s handcuffs, that’s what I call them.” Shepard spun them around for the dead to admire.

  Boxer glanced at Jack and shrugged his shoulders. There was no way Jack could turn down the challenge, and Mussini knew it. Tonight, Jack was being given a taste of how Mussini operated. If Jack beat the cuffs, the crowd would celebrate his victory; if Jack failed, the crowd would be in awe of Shepard’s evil cuffs. Both ways, Mussini’s show won.

  The crowd buzzed with excitement, greedily gawking at the devil’s cuffs. Jack nodded to Boxer, who took the handcuffs from Shepard and inspected them. His mind raced. He needed to come up with a way out of this mess and fast. Jack turned and addressed the audience.

  “I’ll accept this challenge, but only if Mr. Shepard can first prove to me that the handcuffs work. He must open and close them right now.”

  “You have my word, that should be enough,” Shepard said, dripping mock sincerity, which caused the audience to reel with laughter, suspecting what Shepard’s word was worth. No more than the word of any of the dead, Jack thought bitterly.

  “No offense, sir, but I’d like to see you unlock the cuffs with my own eyes.”

  “Very well. I’ll prove it to you.” Shepard pulled the golden key from his pocket. It sparkled as a spotlight caught it. Nice touch, Jack thought. Shepard was milking this for all it was worth. He opened and closed the lock to the devil’s handcuffs, making it look easy, like a baby could break out of them. Jack watched as Shepard returned the key to his left-hand breast pocket. Now he had no choice but to accept the challenge and take his chances.

  Violet held up the handcuffs, and T-Ray snared the drum in the background. She closed them deliberately around Jack’s wrists, not too tightly, though it hardly mattered. Instantly the cuffs tightened of their own accord, strangling his wrists as if they had a score to settle. Violet pulled back the curtain to the box, Jack entered, and the music began to play. Jack took one last look at Shepard and the audience, and ducked his head inside the box so that he could concentrate. Crammed inside the box, Jack struggled with the handcuffs; none of his keys worked on the lock, and he couldn’t figure out the internal formula of the lock system. Shepard was right about the lock, for it twisted and turned inside as if somehow anticipating every move Jack made to pry it open. It was obvious the cuffs were smarter than he was.

  Lock-picking was like navigating a maze. Jack closed his eyes, pictured the cool metal surface of the lock inside his mind, and the box disappeared. He was in the woods at night, and all the sounds around him were wild and alive. He entered a labyrinth with metal walls. He tried to follow the formula of the grooves, each twist and turn, the empty spaces in between, but every time he thought he had the lock figured out, it moved, snakelike, refusing to be undone. He didn’t know what to do.

  Jack remembered what Shepard told him in the shop—that every lock had a vulnerability, like a secret door built in by the locksmith. If there was a weakness to the devil’s handcuffs, it wasn’t in the design. Then it hit him. The weakness was not the handcuffs—the weakness was the man who made them. Shepard was the key.

  Jack had been inside the box for many minutes before he whispered for Violet. She poked her head in the box, bringing a cool breeze with her.

  “Violet, I can’t get them open.” Jack held out his wrists, battered and cut from the vicious metal handcuffs.

  “What do you want me to do?” Violet’s brow wrinkled. “Should I get Boxer? Maybe he can break them open?”

  “No, no. You have to get the key.” Panic raised Jack’s voice. He was drenched in sweat and his legs were starting to cramp from standing in the small space.

  Violet’s eyes flashed. “The key?” she asked. She didn’t like how the trick had turned.

  “Yes, get it from Shepard. It’s in his left-hand breast pocket.” Jack shifte
d his weight, trying to get more comfortable in the tight space. That made the box sway, causing gasps from the audience. Violet steadied the box and waved to the crowd before turning back to Jack.

  “How do you expect me to get inside of a man’s pocket? You do realize that Shepard is wearing the coat with the key, right?”

  “Use your girl powers,” Jack blurted out as the cuffs twisted tightly around his wrists.

  Violet pulled back in the small space. “My what?”

  “Just smile at him. Chat him up, be really nice and then pick his pocket.”

  “Jack, are you suggesting I steal it? Which, I must say, is not an entirely unacceptable option, but …”

  “Please, Violet, you’re my only hope.” Jack sighed.

  “I’ll try, but I’m not going to do anything disgusting to get that key, so if he tries any funny business, I’m going to get Boxer to wring his skinny neck.”

  “It wouldn’t be Shepard’s first time.”

  Jack tried to relax while Violet disappeared from the box and into the crowd. He hated making Violet steal, but he was reaching his limit—the wringing metal cuffs and the suffocating walls of the box. The challenge closed in on him. He couldn’t let Mussini beat him, and in the dark of the box, his options were slim.

  The image of Skimmer and the shower of stolen rings that he gave his gang floated through his mind. It didn’t matter that the gold was fake; the gifts were still so valuable to the other boys. Skimmer was their hero. Using a sleight of hand, he made the impossible happen. Was that so wrong?

  Stealing isn’t a noble pursuit, at least that was what the little voice inside Jack’s head, which sounded a lot like Mildred, said. But it wasn’t as bad as some things, like hurting another person, he reasoned. At McDovall Academy there was this kid, Brian Ryan, who was super-skinny and hated everyone. The only thing he liked to do was shove kids into the brick wall behind the school. Brian was surprisingly strong for such a string bean. It became the infamous brick-wall burn, because any exposed skin got scraped against the brick. One poor guy got scraped on the tip of his nose, and Brian called him Rudolph for the whole six months that he was at McDovall. Brian ended up in juvie, and Jack wasn’t a bit sorry for him.

  Jack wasn’t exactly squeaky clean when it came to obeying the law, so he could understand how Skimmer slipped up. He stole from the school cafeteria once, though it wasn’t entirely his fault; his penny-pinching foster father only gave him exactly sixty-five cents for lunch, which was the exact price of a reduced cost lunch in the cafeteria. It was bad enough that Jack was forced into the humiliation of the poor kid’s lunch, but then to have to count out change was mortifying. And the cheapskate gave him nickels and dimes, not even quarters. The guy probably fished the loose change out from the sofa cushions.

  Anyway, Jack had already bought his lunch before noticing the cupcakes. Good cupcakes, not cheap hydrogenated oil–filled cupcakes that could withstand the next ice age, but homemade chocolate cupcakes. He had to have one, and he was sick and tired of counting out change like a street urchin. Houdini only used his sleight of hand once to steal food, potatoes from a vendor on the freezing streets, but then he was starving. Jack slipped the cupcake up his jacket sleeve when the lunch lady wasn’t looking and ate it in a beat-up stall in the boy’s bathroom. In that delicious moment, he didn’t care if it was wrong to steal.

  Mildred would say he was becoming desensitized, and that the line between right and wrong was blurred because of his circumstances. Maybe that’s where Jack was right then, squeezed in the tight space between a cupcake and a brick wall. Jack poked his head out of the top of the box, and the dead laughed and slung a few choice insults: Loser! Give up! Stupid kid! His forehead was covered in beads of sweat. From the audience’s perspective, it looked as if his head was sitting on a table. T-Ray had rejoined Jabber on the stage, and they tossed bowling pins back and forth, juggling them high into the air to entertain the crowd, while they anxiously waited for the Kid to escape the handcuffs.

  After what seemed like forever, Violet hurried backstage and whispered instructions to Boxer, who looked at her strangely and shrugged. Boxer walked out onto the stage and addressed the crowd. The audience waited eagerly, barely breathing. Boxer cleared his throat.

  “Perhaps the Kid needs a kiss for luck, from his beautiful assistant.”

  The crowd cheered. Violet strolled out onto the stage. She brushed Jack’s hair back from his forehead and bent down face-to-face. The cool tip of her nose brushed against his cheek. Their lips touched, and she pressed her lips tightly to his. Her tongue pushed open his lips. Jack’s eyes widened. He felt the key as she slipped it inside his mouth with her tongue and then quickly pulled her lips away. The taste of metal made his mouth water.

  Within moments, Jack thrust his hand through the hole in the top of the box—holding up his golden trophy. He was free from the devil’s handcuffs. The crowd roared with applause. Jack threw back the curtain of the ghost house and emerged victorious onto the stage to take his bow. The dead leaped to their feet. For all they knew, the great and dangerous Shepard had been fairly beaten. Jack had done the impossible. Mussini glared at Jack and then rose to his feet and applauded just as loudly as the rest of them. He had been beaten, too, but his star was born that night, and he knew Jack’s popularity was worth the minor loss.

  After the show, Jack cornered Jabber backstage. “You knew that Mussini talked to Shepard and ordered a pair of the devil’s handcuffs to be made for me. You knew that he would be here tonight. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I knew. It was my job to know. I work for Mussini. But Mussini didn’t know that I took you to the River City. I thought that if you met Shepard, he might tell you something that could help you. I hoped he might give you a clue to how the handcuffs worked.”

  Jack’s nerves were frayed after the tough show. “Why should I believe you?” His temper boiled over. “One minute you hate me, the next you try and help me. I don’t get you.” Jack shoved Jabber into a stack of crates.

  “I told you not to trust the dead.” Annoyance was thick in Jabber’s voice. “This isn’t all about you. And for the record, I am neither your friend nor your enemy.”

  “What are you then? Answer me—what are you?”

  “I’m dead! This is my world, not yours.” Jabber stormed off.

  Runt bobbed backstage and wrestled the golden handcuffs from Jack’s clenched fists. “That was one of the best acts yet! Don’t know how you’re gonna top that.”

  “Maybe I won’t have to,” Jack said. “It’s about time we got out of here. Once and for all.”

  After Jack’s run-in with the devil’s handcuffs, it was clear that devils were all around him.

  A torturous week and two new towns came and went before a chance to escape finally arrived. Jack and Boxer stood backstage waiting, anxious to get the plan under way. All week long, Mussini had been minutely inspecting the finale; no matter how hard they planned everything else, the escape hinged on the trick with T-Ray’s paper animals. Mussini’s sudden obsession with inspecting his final trick was not part of the plan.

  Jack and Boxer watched from the wings as Mussini pulled each paper animal out of T-Ray’s basket, inspecting and counting each one like a mother hen. Mussini glared. T-Ray quivered like a leaf.

  “You’d think T-Ray would be used to it by now,” Boxer said. “But Mussini never inspects his tricks this much.”

  Jack watched on pins and needles. “He’s the point man. That’s a lot of pressure. If T-Ray screws this up, we’re all dead meat.”

  “I bet Mussini knows,” Boxer said, cracking his knuckles. “I know he knows. Why else inspect the trick every night for a week?”

  “‘Cause he’s turning into a paranoid wreck like you.” Jack put his hand on Boxer’s arm. “We just need to stay cool and wait. We’ve got him right where we want him.”

  Boxer pointed at Mussini. “You mean going through T-Ray’s shirt pocket?”

  All J
ack and Boxer could do was watch, listen, and hope T-Ray didn’t snap under the pressure. To cope with the stress of living in the Forest of the Dead, he had made himself a pet, a skinny electric-green garden snake, out of paper. Its name was Linguini. When Mussini stuck his big fat hand in T-Ray’s pocket and pulled out the tiny paper snake, pinched between his fingers, it looked like T-Ray was about to have a nervous breakdown.

  “What do we have here?” Mussini asked, holding the snake up into the light.

  T-Ray’s eyes bulged; he gulped. “Please, sir. It’s just my pet, Linguini.”

  “Linguini, eh? It looks like a paper snake to me.”

  “That’s his name,” T-Ray said. “He’s a snake, not pasta. That would be pathetic if I carried around a strand of spaghetti as a pet. I just like to hold him during the show when he comes to life. Calms my nerves, that’s all.”

  Mussini rolled his eyes. “I have a strict policy about creating more animals than I need.”

  T-Ray stared up all doe-eyed at him and Mussini’s glare softened. To Jack’s surprise, he held out his hand. T-Ray gingerly took the snake out of Mussini’s fingers and slipped it back into his pocket. “But Linguini winds around my wrist during the show and then goes back to paper when it’s over. He’s no trouble, really.”

  Mussini rubbed his mustache and pointed his finger in T-Ray’s face. “Just this once, then. No more. Or I’ll put a nest of baby rattlesnakes in your hammock while you’re sleeping, got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” T-Ray said, and smiled brightly. Little did Mussini know that stuffed in T-Ray’s other pockets were a flock of pooping pigeons, a band of squealing weasels, a half-dozen goats, two dozen fruit bats, and a miniature pony. Sometimes rules weren’t meant to be broken—they were meant to be shattered with a baseball bat. Jack and the gang were getting out of the Forest of the Dead with a finale to rival anything Mussini had ever encountered. Just who was amazing now?

  But it would all be ruined if Mussini stopped to pat T-Ray down. If Jack knew one thing, it was that he needed a distraction.