Mago Verde approached the gurney and bent over Maria Fortales, and underneath his green painted grin he was grinning for real. She had stopped screaming now, out of exhaustion, but she stared up at him in absolute terror, and Jemexxa could see that she was saying something to him. She couldn’t hear what it was. The crowd and the circus folk were all making far too much noise, but from the movement of her lips she was sure that it was ‘please.’
Doctor Friendly ripped off the adhesive tapes that were holding the thick gauze pad over Maria Fortales’ left shoulder. He pulled off the pad, which was caked with dried blood, exposing raw, half-healed muscle and a sawn-off stump of white humerus.
For the first time he turned around to Brother Albrecht and addressed him directly. He had a warbling, monotonous voice, almost as if he were chanting plainsong in church rather than talking.
‘This is now the most interesting part of the operation, your worship. And also, I have to admit, the most difficult. I attach the muscles and nerves of the human shoulder to the muscles and the nervous system of the snake. In this way, our dear young woman here will be able to use the snake as a substitute for her absent arm.
‘I will also connect the snake’s cloaca to the young woman’s internal organs so that it will be able to eat and sustain itself and use her digestive system to dispose of its waste.
He paused, and took off his spectacles. His eyes rolled around as if they were two planets in contra-rotating orbits. ‘These snakes are a crossbreed of both reticulated python and krait. Python for strength and size; krait for its venom, which is sixteen times more toxic than cobra venom. When she has both snakes attached in place of her arms, this young lady will be the most dangerous female that any man has ever met. They will not hurt her, of course, because they will depend on her for their very existence! But Medusa the Gorgon will be nothing compared to this charmer! Imagine the shows that you can put on, your worship! Challenge the men in your audience to make love to her, and see if they can escape with their lives!’
Mago Verde clapped again, and whooped. Unable to clap, Brother Albrecht closed his eyes and nodded his handsome head in tacit approval. The audience, both men and women, shrieked and whistled with excitement. They might have been dubious about Brother Albrecht’s freak show when they first arrived in his dream, but now they were growing ever more aroused. Xyrena could see that Brother Albrecht was aroused, too, judging by the bulge in his jerkin. He mouthed something at her, but it must have been in German, because she couldn’t even lip-read it.
Doctor Friendly replaced his spectacles, picked up another scalpel, and started to cut at the muscle of Maria Fortales’ shoulder. The pain must have been unbearable, because she found her voice and screamed even louder than before.
Xyrena turned to Jekkalon and Jemexxa and said, ‘Enough, already! I’m calling in Dom Magator. I’m not standing here watching this girl being butchered. You with me? As soon as they come busting in, Zebenjo’Yyx can zap that doctor and put him out of action. You go for Mago Verde.’
‘What about the Grand Freak?’
‘I think we should leave the Grand Freak to Dom Magator. He’s the one with the Absence Gun. One shot from that and that’ll be the finish of him. He won’t even be history.
‘John?’ she said. ‘Did you hear that? We need you in here like now.’
‘Busting in already, baby — have no fear!’
FIFTEEN
Skirmish In Hell
Soon after Xyrena and Jekkalon and Jemexxa had disappeared into the big top, every clown and circus hand and freak had crowded in through the illuminated archway to see the show, and within minutes the carnival grounds had been deserted, leaving only the animals and the quasi-animals sitting miserably in their cages.
Dom Magator and Zebenj’Yyx had cautiously climbed to their feet and looked around. ‘Clear,’ Dom Magator had decided, and behind his fearsome African mask, Zebenjo’Yyx had nodded.
They had scrambled over the ridge where they had first taken cover, and then they had dodged their way through the rain toward the big top. They had run with their shoulders hunched, like a two-man SWAT team — Zebenjo’Yyx keeping his right arm held out straight in front of him in case he needed to shoot off a sudden burst of quarrels, and Dom Magator holding up his Absence Gun, with his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
The Absence Gun looked like a Gatling machine-gun, with five rotating barrels, except that the barrels were made of pale green ceramic and the gun itself had a stock like a rifle. It worked on the principle of quantum decoherence, producing a wave function which made it a scientific impossibility that its target had ever existed. It was the third stage beyond the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat in a sealed box was both alive and dead at the same time. Anybody who was hit by an Absence Gun was neither alive nor dead, and never had been.
Over by the trees, An-Gryferai took a short run and launched herself into the air, her wings softly thundering. She quickly gained altitude, and flew up high over the top of the tent. Then she started to wheel around the four black pennants which were flapping wetly from its flagpoles. She was buffeted by the wind and the rain, and blinded by fitful flashes of lightning, but she managed to keep steadily circling, waiting for Dom Magator to give her the word to attack.
For the past ten minutes, Dom Magator and Zebenjo’Yyx had listened closely to everything that had been happening to Xyrena and Jekkalon and Jemexxa, so that when they pushed their way in through the main entrance and marched side by side into the auditorium, they had a good idea what would confront them. Even so, as they reached the stage, crowded with clowns and freaks and fire breathers, and with Brother Albrecht sitting in his black contraption in the center, Zebenjo’- Yyx said, ‘Jesus Ker-ist! This ain’t no circus! This is hell on wheels!’
All around them the audience were baying with bloodlust, both men and women. They sounded like a pack of hounds, more than three hundred of them, closing in for the kill. Many of them standing on their seats so that they could get a better view of Maria Fortales as Doctor Friendly prepared to suture the snakes on to the stumps of her shoulders. One woman had lifted her nightdress at the front and was gnawing at the hem in excitement.
Trumpets were blaring, drums were rattling, and the clowns and freaks were stamping their feet on the stage, so that the noise was overwhelming.
‘Zebenjo’Yyx, sic that bastard in the white coat!’ Dom Magator ordered. ‘Jekkalon — Jemexxa — hit that fricking clown! The green one!’
Brother Albrecht caught sight of them. ‘Who are these?’ he shouted, and he was so angry that flecks of spit flew from his lips. ‘Wer traut such, meinen Albtraum einzutragen? Who dares to enter my nightmare?’
But without any hesitation, Zebenjo’Yyx raised his right hand again. Lincoln couldn’t consciously understand how he knew how to fire his arrows, but for some reason he did. Not only that, he did it with speed and casual expertise, as if he had let them off hundreds and hundreds of times before. He raised his right arm and pointed it directly at Doctor Friendly. Then he closed his fingers, and squeezed his fist tight, striking Doctor Friendly with six arrows. There was a sharp rattling sound as the arrows flew out of the release mechanisms on his forearm. Doctor Friendly was thrown backward by the impact and hit his head against the front wheel of Brother Albrecht’s contraption. The two circus hands who had been holding the snake down ducked sideways for cover, but Zebenjo’Yyx raised his left arm and shot both of them, two arrows in the chest and one between the eyes for each of them. The snake twisted and rolled off the gurney and dropped with a thump on to the stage. Before it could slither out of sight, Zebenjo’Yyx shot it with seven arrows, all the way along the length of its body. The final arrow nailed its jaws to the floor.
Mago Verde, however, didn’t wait. He struggled through the crowd of performers to the far side of the stage, and leaped off, forcing his way between members of the audience up the right-hand aisle. Brown Jenkin whirled around and saw him, and shouted
out ‘Attente moi! Mago Verde! Shit-merde you bastard! Wait for me!’ He immediately jumped after him and struggled up the aisle close behind him, snatching at his coat and screaming at him. ‘Attente moi! Attente moi! Wait! They will schneiden me if they catch me! You know that!’
But as Mago Verde tried to escape, Jekkalon pushed his way to the rear of the stage, where two vertical ladders ran up to a trapeze platform. He scaled one of the ladders so quickly that he looked like a human spider. He paused for only a split second, balancing on his toes. Then he swung from one trapeze to another, double-flipping and triple-flipping, flying over the audience toward the rear of the auditorium. The audience looked up in amazement, and immediately hushed.
Jekkalon reached the last trapeze platform well before Mago Verde had managed to fight his way up the aisle to the back of the big top. ‘OK, Jemexxa!’ he called out. ‘Give me some of that sweet, sweet voltage!’
Jemexxa, who was still on the stage, lifted her right hand, with its shiny reflective palm. Jekkalon did the same. Mago Verde seemed to guess what was likely to happen, because he started to struggle back down the aisle again, and then he ducked his head down and hunched his way along a row of seats, trying to use members of the audience to shield himself. Brown Jenkin kept close behind him, still screaming and chattering.
Jekkalon swung from one trapeze to another, until he was dangling right over Mago’s Verde head. He held out the palm of his hand and aimed it at Mago Verde, and told Jemexxa, ‘Now!’
An intense flash of lightning jumped out of Jemexxa’s hand and struck Jekkalon’s with an ear-splitting bang. At the very last second Mago Verde grabbed Brown Jenkin under the arms and heaved him up in front of him. Brown Jenkin didn’t even have time to shout out before his head exploded. Brains and bone shrapnel were sprayed all over the audience who were standing around him, and a cloud of brown smoke rolled up into the air, mostly from his scorched tweed coat.
Mago Verde slung Brown Jenkin’s body aside and vaulted over the next row of seats, and then the next. Jekkalon swung after him, from one trapeze the next, but Mago Verde managed to keep dragging members of the audience in front of him, one bewildered dreamer after the other, so that Jekkalon didn’t dare to take a shot. If he killed any of the real people who had been drawn by Brother Albrecht into this dream, he couldn’t be sure what would happen to them in real life.
Mago Verde rolled over the last tier of seats and disappeared. Jekkalon swung after him on his trapeze, spinning in a wide circle, but he couldn’t see him anywhere.
‘You nailed him yet?’ asked Dom Magator. He was panting hard.
‘Not yet. I lost him. He probably escaped out back, where we snuck in. Do you want us to go after him?’
But Dom Magator said, ‘Forget him for now. We got ourselves a whole lot of trouble on the stage.’
Jekkalon twisted around on his trapeze and saw that the clowns and the freaks and the circus hands were gathering protectively around the black contraption in which Brother Albrecht was sitting. But they were not just shielding their lord and master from Jebenzo’Yyx and Dom Magator. They were tearing open their shirts and their blouses and their silky clown costumes and baring their chests, as if they were inviting the Night Warriors to kill them.
Even Brother Albrecht’s entourage of naked tattooed men and women were clustered around him, too, their arms held wide open, making no attempt to protect themselves. Xyrena thought that it looked like a nightmare production of Hair.
‘You will leave my dream now!’ Brother Albrecht shouted at the Night Warriors, and he was incandescent with anger. ‘You will leave my dream now, all of you, whoever you are, and you will never return!’
Dom Magator climbed up the steps on to the stage. A white-faced clown came waddling toward him, as if to intercept him, but Dom Magator waved his Absence Gun at him, and said, ‘You want to cease to exist? You’re going the right way about it,’ and the clown gave him a horrified grin and waddled away. Dom Magator approached Brother Albrecht.
‘Sorry, pal,’ he told him. ‘Me and my friends can’t leave just yet. We came here to bring this whole disgusting charade to a well-deserved conclusion and we won’t be saying our goodbyes until we’ve done it. Now, if this collection of oddities and short asses know what’s good for them, they will elect to stand peacefully aside and let us get on with the business in hand.’
He lifted his Absence Gun, double-cocked it, and leveled it at the clowns and the freaks who had gathered themselves between him and Brother Albrecht. He saw a pretty little pale-faced girl standing directly in front of the Grand Freak. She had straggly brown hair and a long floral dress with a lacy collar. She gave him a hesitant smile, but when he looked down at her feet he realized why she probably wasn’t afraid to die. She had the black-and-tan paws of a German Shepherd, instead of feet.
He thought that he would probably be doing all of these people a big favor, canceling out their existence as if they had never been born. But he knew that it wasn’t his call.
Xyrena stepped up beside Dom Magator, and said to Brother Albrecht, ‘Don’t you have a conscience, Mister Grand Freak? You’re responsible for all of these people. You wouldn’t want to see them hurt.’
‘I have seen them hurt!’ they heard Brother Albrecht shout back to them, although he was barely visible behind the jostling crowd of freaks. ‘I hurt them myself, and often! And mutilated them! It’s all part of the show! All human life is pain and suffering and disappointment, no matter what lies God tells you! Pain and suffering and disappointment are the price we have to pay for being born!’
Dom Magator aimed his Absence Gun and tried to get a fix on Brother Albrecht’s head, but the freaks kept moving and nodding and leaning at different angles so that he found it impossible.
‘What you are trying to do is fruitless!’ Brother Albrecht added. ‘Now I want all of you to leave my dream and never come back! You will see it again, soon enough, when I bring it to the waking world! You will hear our music and see our black flags waving, and you will know that we have come to preach the truth about God, and the fallacy of human charity, and the pleasures of endless agony!’
‘Not a fricking chance,’ said Dom Magator. He nearly caught Brother Albrecht in his cross hairs, but the pale little girl moved her head into his line of fire, still smiling at him.
‘Man, I think you should go for a shot whatever,’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘How many of these freaks are goin’ to survive, when this circus breaks up? Most of them, they’re only dream people anyhow. You can’t hurt nobody who’s only a dream!’
But at that moment Brother Albrecht shouted out, ‘Flammen! Flammen! Geben Sie mir Feuer!’
‘What?’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘What in hell’s name he talkin’ about?’
They soon found out. The fire breather came stalking toward them, stiff-legged, his face still smudged with soot from his last display, like a marionette which has just been snatched out of a bonfire. His cheeks were swollen, his eyes were watering, and Dom Magator suddenly realized that he had a mouthful of lamp oil.
‘Hit the deck!’ he shouted, and at that instant, with a soft roar, a huge ball of orange fire enveloped the Night Warriors, so that their armor and their costumes were set ablaze. Xyrena was the most vulnerable: she wore only a crown instead of a helmet, but Dom Magator spun himself around as the flames rolled toward them and shielded her face with his upraised hand. All the same, Xyrena yelped as the fire singed her hair.
Zebenjo’Yyx blew out the flames on his forearms, and then twisted around and around, furiously trying to see where the fire breather had disappeared to. ‘You all right, Xyrena?’ he asked. ‘You not burned or nothin’? Everybody else OK?’
Jekkalon had swung back from the rear of the big top now, and he landed on the stage next to Jemexxa. Small flames were still flickering on her legs but he quickly smacked them out.
Dom Magator looked back toward Brother Albrecht’s contraption, to see if he could manage to get a clear shot this time.
For a fleeting second he saw Brother Albrecht’s face, in profile, and Brother Albrecht looked angrier than ever. All this tussling was holding up his eighth sacrifice, after all — and not only that, Zebenjo’Yyx had killed his surgeon and one of his snakes. Dom Magator saw him sharply in his sights, and was just about to fire when an elderly woman with blood-red eyes deliberately blocked his line of sight. She had an expression on her face that explicitly challenged him, ‘Go ahead, if you dare — kill me! There’s nothing I’d like better!’
Zebenjo’Yyx came up to join him, still stiffly sticking out his right arm, ready to fire. ‘Where’s that fire-eatin’ mother? He almost choked me.’
Before Dom Magator could answer him, there was another soft roar, from the other direction this time, and for a second time the Night Warriors were enveloped in a huge ball of flame. Zebenjo’Yyx fired off five or six arrows, two of which were blazing, but the fire breather was far too quick for them, and pushed his way back into the crowd. Dom Magator checked his infrared sensors to see where he might have gone, but for the few vital seconds in which he might have located him the ambient heat was far too high, and all he could see was dancing black ghosts, like a Balinese shadow-theater.
‘Nobody hurt?’ he asked.
In the confusion the clowns and the freaks and the children had all started to drag Brother Albrecht’s contraption back toward the rear of the stage.
‘I still say take the goddamned shot!’ shouted Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘Back in Hamtramck, you wanted to waste somebody, you just cruised by and you sprayed the whole street, no matter who was standin’ there! Sometimes it’s the only way, man, believe me!’
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