The Palace of Laughter

by Jon Berkeley

  “I could fly over, since there’s no one in sight,” said Little. “But my wings wouldn’t carry you. Besides, why do we need to cross the moat when we want to get inside the hill, and not back on the Stinkers’ side?”

  “Because we can’t get to the door from here,” said Miles. “The ledge doesn’t go around far enough.” He watched the small black shapes of a number of bats darting about in erratic circles against the sky, feeding on the insects swarming around the trees that fringed the clown’s giant ear. Some of the bats seemed to be flying in and out of the ear itself. “It must be where they roost,” he thought. There seemed to be more of them coming out than going in. A sudden thought struck him, and he sat up. “On the other hand,” he said, “maybe we should have a word in this clown’s ear.”

  Little looked up at the ear for a minute. “It’s a long way up,” she said.

  “It is, but it might be a way in. If it is, it will be better than trying to get through the doors unnoticed.”

  He stood up and examined the sheer wall of rock in front of him. The rock was relatively smooth, but here and there were small cracks and fissures, and in places tufts of heather grew from them, as though the clown were not very good at shaving. Little took a careful look around, then she removed her jacket and shirt, and tied them by their sleeves around her waist. She still wore the sparkly circus costume underneath. “You never know when it might come in handy, my dear,” Lady Partridge had said.

  “I’ll fly up ahead of you and find the best way to climb,” said Little.

  Miles looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Someone might see you.” His eyes scanned the sagging stalls and the boarded buildings of the old fun park, but it seemed that the Stinkers had vanished into thin air. “I can’t see anyone,” he said at length, “but you’d better be careful.”

  Little nodded. She gave her shoulders a little shake, and her wings unfolded with a flutter. They were a beautiful pearly pink in the sunset, and to his surprise Miles felt his heart leap at the sight of them. He had not seen her fly since that night in the circus, and he watched with fascination, and a little envy, as she lifted from the ledge like thistledown and rose above his head. It must have felt good to be flying once again, and she let out a musical laugh as she soared up toward the giant ear, scanning the rock for a path that Miles could take.

  Miles sighed, and began to climb. “Come on, slowcloud,” said Little, swooping back down toward him. “Go to the right here—there’s a place for your feet, and those plants just above you will hold your weight.” He grabbed the tuft of heather and hauled himself up. There were not many toeholds, and for some time he inched his way up the rock with his clawed fingers and the tips of his boots. The moat was a long way below him now, but as he neared the top of the clown’s fat cheek, it began to slope inward a little more. He could see the huge earlobe almost level with him, and he edged slowly to his right until he could reach it. As he scrambled into the ear’s hollow one of his bootlaces snapped and the boot made a break for freedom, bouncing off the stone cheek as it tumbled downward, and finally kicking off a sharp point of rock and splashing into the dark waters of the moat below.

  Miles sat in the huge ear, which was smooth and hollow and comfortable, waiting for his breath to return. He unlaced his other boot with his bleeding fingers, and tossed it after its twin. He was about level with the hub of the big wheel. A small knot of figures was inching up one of the spokes. It looked like two of the Stinkers, carrying Henry between them as they climbed. They were too far away for him to see clearly, and with their backs turned, it was not likely they would see Little. He called to her urgently nonetheless, and she fluttered down beside him and tucked her wings away.

  “That was good,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to climb.”

  Miles shrugged casually, “It wasn’t that difficult,” he lied.

  He stood up and looked into the dark cave of the ear. The ceiling of the cave was alive with bats, crawling over one another and squeaking like pram wheels. Miles clicked his tongue to listen to the echo. It sounded like the cave went back a long way. He took a few steps into the darkness, the smooth stone cold under his bare feet. His outstretched hands touched nothing.

  “I don’t suppose you can see in the dark as well?” he said over his shoulder to Little.

  “Not very well. I once got lost in a stormcloud, and everyone laughed at me for days.” She followed a few paces and bumped into Miles’s back.

  “I believe you,” he laughed. He wondered how they could make a light. The wick of his brass lighter would be soaked with moat water. “We’ll just have to go slowly. It can’t be dark everywhere in this hill.”

  They moved cautiously onward through the pitch darkness, Miles in front with his hands out, and Little hanging on to the tail of his jacket—possibly the only two people in history ever to have been swallowed by an ear.

  Outside this strangest of hills, night had swiftly fallen. In the old broken-down stalls with their faded canvas, String was lurking in the shadows, thinking over the things he had just seen. An entrance in the clown’s ear, and stranger by far, a girl with wings, who rightfully belonged to him. He would have won her if the pez hadn’t cheated in the fight. He did not really want to go back to the Halfheads of course. That had just been a ruse to lure Miles into his trap, and he knew in any case that they would never have him back. But imagine what he could do if he had a scout that could fly! He could become a legend among the Stinkers, among all the gangs. Someday he would be chief Stinker himself. He thought about these things, and he looked at the darkening waters of the moat with a shiver. He steered clear of water whenever he could, and in all his twelve years he could not remember once having a bath. “You won’t catch me going in there,” he said to himself. “I’ll have to try my chances at the front door tomorrow. If that fool Jook is right, they won’t be coming out anytime soon.”

  And so Miles and Little crept deeper into the darkness of the Palace of Laughter, while down below in the watery gloom the nail-toothed mayor of the moat took a bite out of the worn leather boot that had half buried itself in the mud, and chewed it for as long as he could. It was the worst thing he had ever tasted, and he thought with regret of the nice, wriggling white snack he dimly remembered seeing earlier, and spat out the mouthful of tough, smelly leather in disgust.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BACK TO FRONT AND INSIDE OUT

  Miles Wednesday, barefoot and bearless, stopped for a moment and listened. His eyes were smarting from the effort of staring into nothingness, and he had stubbed his toes several times. He had been imagining a faint sound for some time, and now he was sure that it was real, but it was still too far off to hear clearly. The tunnel had begun to rise steadily, and the sound seemed to cascade down toward them like waves breaking against a distant beach.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked Little.

  “Yes,” said Little. “It makes me shiver.” She untied her shirt and jacket from her waist and struggled back into them in the narrow tunnel.

  Miles strained his ears, but the sound was no more than a faint rushing. “Why does it make you shiver?”

  “I don’t know,” said Little. “There’s something strange in it, but I can’t hear well enough yet.”

  They continued through the darkness. A draft of cold air followed them deeper into the hill, and Miles guessed that they were in some sort of air vent. At one point the tunnel became so steep that it was easier to crawl, then suddenly the ground fell away beneath them and began to descend just as steeply. They reached a point where the distant sound became noticeably clearer. It was a strange music, jangly and discordant, and it was coming from somewhere to their right.

  “There’s another tunnel joining this one,” said Miles. He could faintly see a circle of light. “We’ll follow the music.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Little. “It’s…back to front and inside out.”

  Miles listened again. It was certainly unl
ike any music he had heard before. There were gongs and flutes and other sounds he couldn’t name. Somewhere in the middle was a hurdy-gurdy. The notes seemed to fight with one another, and the rhythm would now rush onward like a strong current, then catch so suddenly that you felt like you had come to a cliff with no time to stop. It made the hair stand up on Miles’s scalp, yet it was also strangely funny. He shook his head as though emptying water from his ears, and entered the tunnel. “Come on,” he said. “It’s only music, and music can’t hurt us.”

  The new tunnel was smaller than the one they had come from, and they had to crawl. There were more openings branching off now. At one point they passed over hollow-sounding wood, as though there might be a trapdoor in the tunnel floor. Now each turn they took brought a little more light, and the music grew stronger until it seemed to be drawing them toward it like an invisible rope.

  Suddenly the music rose to a nerve-jangling crescendo and abruptly stopped. Miles and Little stopped too. Silence washed along the tunnel, followed by a voice that was at once familiar and different. It took Miles a moment to identify it as the smooth voice of the Great Cortado. It sounded louder and deeper than it had during his brief job interview in Cortado’s trailer. It was impossible to tell how close or how far away it was. He sat back against the tunnel wall and listened. Little was still too. She seemed relieved that the music had paused.

  “…your Immense Privilege to witness the most spec-tac-u-lar, the most Fan-tas-tical, the most Hil-larious Ex-travaganza of Laughter ever performed,” the voice was booming. “…Ladies, Gentlemen, Lords and Laddies, Sages and Peasants and Persons of Superfluous Learning, it is my Pleasure and Delight to present for you this ver-ry night the Funniest, the Wittiest, the most Side-splitting troupe of Fools, Funnymen, Boobs and Bobos, Tumblers and Tricky-Dicks that has ever been assembled in one place since Cortez presented his Hunchbacked Aztec Buffoons to Pope Clement the Seventh.”

  With a roll of drums, a clash of cymbals and the boom of a mighty gong that sounded more in the chest than the ears, the crazy cacophony started anew, twirling itself like a musical vine around the closing lines of the Great Cortado’s introduction: “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, be prepared to be entertained as you have never been entertained before! Tonight the greatest comics in the Wide World will take you Beyond Laughter, and your Lives will be Transformed, FOREVER!”

  The music raced and plunged like a wild thing, accompanied by squeaks and shrill whistles that seemed to be hanging on to the music by their teeth. Miles laughed at the sound, despite himself. He began to crawl toward it, but the music seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and it was difficult to decide which route to take. The swell of laughter added itself to the sound—a great crowd of people laughing at something that was hidden from view. He had to find a vantage point from which he could see this fabulous show. He forgot his bleeding fingers and his stubbed toes, and the clammy chill of his moat-drenched clothes, his mind drawn by the hypnotic music and the waves of laughter that followed it. This, he imagined, would be more like the picture he had first had of the Palace of Laughter, and he felt an overwhelming urge to see for himself the greatest clowns on Earth. The thought of Tangerine slipped into his mind, and he brushed it aside impatiently. There was no point searching for Tangerine while the show was in full swing, he told himself, better to wait until the people had left and the place was quiet. They were nearly there now, he could tell.

  “Miles!” called Little from behind. “Wait for me.” He glanced over his shoulder. Little’s face looked worried and anxious. “What was the matter with her?” he thought irritably. She could find something to laugh at in a cow or a fence post, but now that they were about to witness the funniest show on Earth, she looked as if she were lost on the way to a funeral.

  “Just hurry up, will you?” he called. “You’re always slowing me down.”

  His voice sounded sharper than he had meant it to, but they seemed to have been crawling in circles forever, and the show was going on without him. The strange acoustics of the tunnels made the sound confusing. Sometimes it seemed as if people were choking or wailing, then he would turn a corner and it would sound like hysterical laughter again. Little was no longer complaining. She followed him silently, and when he looked back at her he could not read her expression.

  The tunnel they were in began to slope downward gently. He turned a corner, and suddenly there was bright light ahead, and the sound became almost deafening. He crawled cautiously to the tunnel mouth and found himself looking out into a huge theater of some sort, hollowed out of solid rock in the center of the hill, from a vantage point high on the wall. Above him was a domed ceiling, supported by a circle of massive pillars that were carved from bottom to top with curling vines and strange animals. Just below the tunnel mouth a stone ledge, shaped like a seashell, jutted from the wall, and he dropped down onto it and lay flat on his stomach, peering over the edge.

  The roar of laughter washed over him. Some sixty feet below him he could see an enormous circus ring in the center of the floor, surrounded by banks of stone seats that were packed with people. Miles could see the crowd and the ring through a gantry of bars, pulleys and ropes, suspended from the ceiling at the level of his balcony. The gantry supported rows of spotlights, wired together with cables so frayed and tangled that they looked like the work of Fowler Pinchbucket. One spotlight hung just in front of him, and several ropes were fastened within his reach, each one bound at the end with a different-colored tape. Sandbags of various sizes dangled from the ends of some of the ropes as counterweights to the props and lights. Little dropped down softly and squeezed onto the narrow space beside him, and together they peered through the gaps in this tangle of metal and rope to get the best view of the performance.

  Watching a group of people from almost directly above—through a network of bars, cables and spotlights—can make it very difficult to piece together exactly what they are doing. There appeared to be about twenty clowns on the stage at the same time. He caught a glimpse of the three small clowns with the different-colored noses. They were trying to oil an elephant’s knees with a large grease can. They kept grabbing the can from one another, and slipping and sliding on the spilled grease. The crowd sat in banked circles around the ring, mouths open and tears streaming from their red-rimmed eyes. Miles had never seen people laugh so hard. The sound of it was so infectious that he began to laugh himself.

  The ring was full of chaotic movement, but from their vantage point it was almost impossible to make out what was going on. All the time the music looped and raced and clattered around the auditorium like an invisible beast running laps around the walls. The men in the audience guffawed and honked, and the ladies screeched and whinnied. The more he looked at them, the less sure he was that they were really enjoying themselves. It was hard to tell from so high up, but he thought he could see fear in their eyes.

  The look of anxiety had left Little’s face. She was laughing at something that he could not see. There was something unfamiliar about the sound of her laughter, but he was so distracted by the music, and the little he could see of what was happening below, that he couldn’t put his finger on it. Instead he found himself laughing with her. The audience roared. Some seemed to have developed a sort of lockjaw, their mouths fixed open so wide that they could no longer close them. One red-faced woman was cackling so hard that she toppled forward into the ring. Her husband leaned forward to look at her, but seemed unable to help. He slumped back in his seat, clutching his stomach and crying with laughter. The guffawing face of the priest behind him had turned the color of a ripe plum, and his eyes were fixed on the center of the ring as though they were glued in their sockets.

  Miles turned his attention back to the ring. Through a triangular gap he could just see a pale-faced clown sitting cross-legged in the sawdust in front of an enormous pie and clutching an oversized knife and fork. He had a straight back and a calm expression, and sat in the center of that whirlwind of hysteri
a like the eye of a storm. He was dressed in an outfit that was so white it seemed to glow, and wore a very tall chef’s hat, as tall again as himself. Suddenly a ragged clown on a unicycle appeared and rode straight through the center of the pie, hotly pursued by the three tiny clowns, now dressed like undertakers in long black tailcoats and top hats, who trampled what was left of it into the ground. The chef clown leaped to his feet. A small blue bolt of lightning shot from his outstretched finger toward the last of the tailcoated clowns. It hit his top hat fair and square, and the hat flew from his head and burst into flames. The crowd shrieked. Little gave a gasp and grabbed Miles’s arm, and Miles knew at once that this must be Silverpoint.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TOP HAT AND SANDBAG

  Miles Wednesday, bootless and buttonless, craned his neck to try and get a better look at Silverpoint. He had marched off in pursuit of the little top-hatted clowns and Miles could no longer see him. Little still held tight to his arm. She was biting her lip.

  The music spiraled faster and faster, higher and higher, until it was almost a continuous shriek. In the middle of the ring, a clown dressed as a tramp jumped up from under a sheet of newspaper he had been using as a blanket. The ground beneath him began to shake. He picked up his little white dog with a comical wail and ran hotfoot for the edge of the ring. A trapdoor burst open in a cloud of green and purple smoke, right at the spot where he had been lying a moment before. All over the ring, clowns stopped their hammering and honking and squirting and cartwheeling, and turned as one to face the opening trapdoor. From the fog of colored smoke a figure rose slowly out of the ground. Miles could just make out the outline of a man sitting on a sort of throne. The hysterical bellowing of the crowd began to subside into a babble of groans and gasps. Some had fallen silent with their mouths still stuck open. Every eye in the theater was fixed on the throne.