by J. I. Radke
He was naive, and if he’d known better then, he would have fixed it fast.
There were occasional talks in his father’s den, when he really got out of line, and once he was fifteen, Cain didn’t sit on his mother’s lap when she grew wistful. He just lingered in the corner of her room, feeling the sadness on the air and not understanding what it was for. The dog’s fur was always warm and soft between his toes, and its wet nose pressed to his cheek woke him up in the mornings just before the servants entered.
AND THEN the great dazzling tapestry of his life had snagged on some evil corner of fate and begun to rapidly unravel, like candles snuffed out in the night or barrels emptied, sighing bluish gray smoke in sad little tendrils.
THE SKY was the color of old bones, gray and dingy. The rain drizzled. Cain’s breath hung in the air like clouds of life escaping with every gasp.
He touched his mother’s ruined curls, and he almost stepped on his father in the alley they called Lovers’ Lane.
They were dead.
He could count the bullet wounds, singed and bloody through their good clothes. He took his father’s rings and tripped in a dirty puddle, staining his palms and knees with gritty mud. It was cold, and he hadn’t put on gloves or a muffler. Just his double-breasted coat with the hood and his untied shoes. He hadn’t even fastened the buttons of his coat, because he’d been too scared. Too lost. Too frantic.
His voice fell in a ragged sob, but there were no tears to accompany it. No, that was just the rain, spitting down on him as if his life were as worthless as this puddle he’d fallen in. He couldn’t cry. He thought maybe he should feel the emotion tightening in his throat like it always had when he’d cried before, but everything was numb.
He walked, and he didn’t even feel the steps as he took them. He ambled through the wet shadows of Lovers’ Lane, dripping and shivering and in a daze.
“Hey—”
Cain stopped. When he blinked, a few drops of rain that had gathered on the tips of his eyelashes fell away and he looked to the corner of Lovers’ Lane. A set of dilapidated steps led up the dirty wall to a door completely boarded up, and below it was a pile of junk from every corner of life. Just garbage, a haven for street urchins and street rats alike, and beneath a crooked curtain of Bohemian fleur-de-lis and tassels that hung from the rusty landing and its laundry lines above, a man who looked like a clown smiled cordially. A graveyard clown. A resurrectionist, maybe, a body snatcher, a man of the underbelly. His hair was dark and thick, and his eyelids painted as if with kohl, though the eyes themselves were wide and full of life. His face was so pale, it was almost gray, theatrically so. The solitaire necktie at his throat was checked. Rings danced along his slender fingers. Behind him lingered a few others, and despite their abundance of black and black and more black, they looked too clean, too healthy, too well dressed and self-aware to really be ragamuffins.
“Malchik malenky,” the graveyard clown called, and wiggled his fingers invitingly.
Cain fidgeted. That wasn’t a language he knew. He stared, perplexed. Disoriented. He thought about his father, his uncle, his aunt, his teachers—telling him to always be aware and attentive, especially as a Dietrich.
“Come here,” the graveyard clown urged, smile softening. He looked so welcoming and warm. Cain inched over a few steps until the landing of the stairs and the broken balconies above sheltered him from the misting rain. “Don’t be scared,” the graveyard clown said, leaning out from the shadows of the alley, a pipe dripping above his head. Cain thought the way his hair was pinned out of his face was very handsome. Like a character from the penny-dreadful romances Maggie liked to read, a pirate or a gypsy. Behind the graveyard clown, the other few men shifted in impatience. They seemed edgy, uncomfortable. Like they wanted to get out of the rain and into a dark, dry place. Like they had no idea what to do with anyone younger than themselves and were more than content to let the graveyard clown talk to Cain. They were nobodies. He had never seen them before, not even the one who Cain had followed to Lovers’ Lane. He’d just thought he’d been following a helpful servant.
The graveyard clown smiled down at Cain where Cain stopped short before him.
“Your mamma and daddy wanted you to come with us if anything ever happened to them. They said so themselves. So you wouldn’t be alone,” the clown said.
“I’m alone,” Cain whispered as if the fact was a lesson in need of memorization, but the words were paper-thin and barely audible.
He let the graveyard clown scoop him up into his arms even though it seemed outrageous to be carried when he was fifteen. The graveyard clown and his friends wore a little bit of red with all that black, and Cain knew those weren’t his family colors, but all the colors seemed to be running together into a mess of dirty gray and too, too bright whites.
“We’ll take care of you, I promise, miliya.” The clown man held him on one hip, and Cain stared over his shoulder at the others. They didn’t look like people his parents would have liked. They had the feel about them that the Dietrich protective services did—good at lying and good at fighting. Rough and tumble but somehow refined. One of them winked at him. Cain heard hidden holsters creaking as the graveyard clown turned and ducked under the Bohemian curtain, and, cradled in the clown’s arms with his nose pressed into his neck, Cain went with them out of the alley and left his parents’ bodies in the puddles of Lovers’ Lane for the undertaker to pick up.
IN A dusty corner of the rooms below St. Mikael’s-on-Windsor, there were secrets—better than drugs hidden in figurines of the Virgin, better than the church’s hidden tithe, better than the whispered sins collected by the latticework of the confessionals for all time.
The graveyard clown and the others took him to an apartment on Flynn Street. They sat in a dirty kitchen drinking coffee together and discussing their own business, taking turns checking on the malchik malenky whom they’d left in the narrow salon to read the moldy children’s books they’d offered and eat the stew and bread they’d given.
They waited until dark, changed Cain’s clothes, paused to marvel over his colorless eyes, then gave him a scratchy coat and a cap to wear as they made their way to Windsor Avenue, Ruslaniv territory, where St. Mikael’s sat on its treasure trove of secrets.
There was a hidden door in the sanctuary, and beyond it a dark unknown hall where the next concealed entrance was a trapdoor in the floor.
The graveyard clown had held Cain’s hand as they made their way through the secret corridors and down below the church, where the air was colder and danker, and the meager candlelight danced on the walls with their peeling red paper. It was like the dungeons of lore, or the gateway to hell everyone talked about. And Cain clung to the clown as the first real fear began to set in.
It was sharp and cold, but not yet eloquent of witless panic. My parents are dead, he kept thinking. Why did they give me to these people? was the thought thereafter. Then the panic set in. The panic was numb and mindless. Logic was not his anymore, just the fear and the distrust. He was not stupid with youth; he was the heir of the Dietrichs. Instinct hissed this was not right—these people had never spoken to his parents before in their lives. And yet rational thought threatened to destroy him, and a plan of escape was a rational thought.
They emerged from the secret hallway into an underground haven, and the graveyard clown crouched down to eye level with Cain and gave him a reassuring wink.
“Oberon’s already getting attached,” one of the others had said, and Cain had tried to shrink away, eyes wide and utterly dumb with the choking veil of confusion.
His parents were dead. They’d been left in Lovers’ Lane, full of holes. There had been a hellish fray on the streets, and with the most elite Dietrichs out, distracted by such, Ruslanivs had broken into the manor. And someone had killed his dog. And the halls had been in chaos. And someone had found him hiding, and they’d said, “Follow me, love,” and Cain had followed. Stupidly, he’d followed. He’d run through the s
treets, hadn’t even tied his damn shoes, and there he’d found his parents, and then—why, why, why, why—
“Oberon, like the king of the fairies?” Cain asked, looking around. The dungeon-like stairs had led them down into what seemed an underground mansion, complete with ornamented ceilings, and giltwood furniture of crushed velvet, lovely paintings and gold-faced urns. Hallways branched off in every direction. A detailed crucifix sat above a bowl of holy water and rose petals. The air was still chilly.
Murmurs rippled through the others. The graveyard clown, Oberon, had tugged Cain by the collar over to big doors on the right. The two brass knockers there had vicious-looking lion faces, snarling and pierced by large rings. Oberon knocked with them, thrice.
It was Father Kelvin’s office, and he was jubilant as Oberon led Cain into the room.
He rambled about something or another—a blessing, a score, a perfect scheme, and Q’s genius, but who Q was, Cain didn’t know. All he’d thought in the daze was that something was just off with the Father.
“Strip,” Father Kelvin thundered, eyes wide and glittering as if he’d just told the best joke in the world, and his accent was harsh and Eastern.
“No,” Cain had argued.
“Strip,” Father Kelvin repeated. “Even you have to be deemed healthy and fit for my circus, little prince.”
Cain broke off and tried to run then, as suddenly as a lock might snap to the right key. But they’d caught him before he’d even made it to the stairs—strong hands, that horrible language he knew but didn’t know—and he’d tried to bite them and kick them, but that was the best he’d managed, reduced to animal instincts.
Then the graveyard clown, the king of the fairies, had whispered, “I’m really very sorry, miliya,” and clamped a cloth soaked in chloroform over his mouth.
Out went the lights under St. Mikael’s.
IT SEEMED forever he was dreaming.
The dreams hadn’t made any sense at all. They weren’t familiar to him. Sometimes he wondered if they were even his dreams at all. Colors and shapes swam in and out of his vision. People spoke. He stared at a wall. Someone played music—Schubert, on the violin, and Chopin on the pianoforte, and a scratchy paraffin wax cylinder of some warbling old opera or another. Put a sock in it, for Christ’s sake!
He was awake, and then he wasn’t, and he couldn’t keep his eyes open long enough to see who came and went, bringing him dinner and pulling out that terrible bronze syringe with the angel faces at the knuckle holes. Apparently he was still alive, but he couldn’t remember taking nourishment, or wandering around the room they kept him in, or talking to those who claimed he had, but finally the nightmarish fog lifted and Cain sat cross-legged, hands shaking over his dinner, staring across the ugly little bed at his captor. Oberon.
“You’re drugging me,” Cain mumbled matter-of-factly, eyes wide and cold with hate. Or at least, they’d felt so. But perhaps he’d still looked utterly out of it, barely fifteen and held hostage under the influence. He understood in a grave and detached way that he could not feel anything with urgency like he had the last time he’d been aware of himself. Because they’d been drugging him.
Oberon stood at the foot of the bed, hands in the pockets of his pinstriped waistcoat. His eyes were dark and inhospitable, a stark contrast to the kind smile he’d offered in Lovers’ Lane. He shrugged limply.
“Morphine,” he confirmed the accusation. “Tears of the poppy, put right in the veins.”
“How long?” Cain croaked.
“A week and a half,” Oberon replied. “Your house has all but announced you dead too, malysh. And that’s all the good you are to them, anyway, no matter how much you fight us, because now you belong to Father Kelvin. Kelvin bought you fair and square.”
All but dead. Belong to Father Kelvin. Kelvin bought you.
Cain realized then that his father’s rings were missing. He didn’t know where they were. It was the last detail to pierce the fog that made it clear to him his parents were dead, he was alone, and the world as he’d known it was simply no more.
It had all just ground to a vicious halt and left him reeling and dizzy and broken, abandoned by miracles.
Oberon led him to a magnificent washroom, in the style of a Roman bath for one. Cain bathed. Under the bandages, he found on his arms bruises and dried blood, and it made him ill to think they’d been using that ugly needle on him, nursing his stupor with the tears of the poppy. Oberon gave him a Turkish cigarette, in fine paper with gold arabesques and with a little silver filter that felt nice on his dry lips. The smoking woke him up a little more as the morphine dreams continued to fade away.
Oberon showed him to another room, deeper in the maze of underground halls, if they were still under St. Mikael’s at all. The lodgings were eight to a room, assuming by the count of beds.
“This is your room now,” Oberon said, with a cordial smile. Either the graveyard clown was mad, or defeated by the sheer madness of it all. “You get the last bed on the left.”
“I’m not here because my parents set it up,” Cain finally choked out, which he already knew, but it was like he needed Oberon’s confirmation to fully grasp this sudden hell. Bleak acceptance was hard to swallow. He wondered where the other occupants of the shared room were—who they were, what they were.
Oberon offered a bitter shrug.
“No,” he said, without even sugarcoating it. “Rabota.”
MALCHIK MALENKY meant “little boy.” Cain learned that one fast, just like miliya meant “darling” and malysh meant “baby.”
Rabota meant “work.”
FATHER KELVIN’S circus was a brothel.
It was a perfect prison with no windows and seemingly no chance of escape.
In structure, it was genius. In morals, it was diabolical. Some worked the rooms hidden below St. Mikael’s, auctioned off for a night or reserved for a short while between highest-paying clients. Others were rented for parties where they danced. Others yet took part in what had garnered the name circus for Father Kelvin’s evil little business in the first place, a touring performance for clients and prospective clients who came through, wanting sights New London couldn’t offer on the street level. It was a colorful exploitation of the dead-eyed and broken souls Father Kelvin kept as his own.
If Oberon had never let him wake from that trancelike limbo of morphine dreams, resentful and hardening deep inside, Cain wouldn’t have cared. The world wasn’t much different thereafter, anyway.
It was hazy, like the fog of early morning when a boy couldn’t keep his eyes open, or the peak of a fever when the body was so cold but the sweat didn’t help. Times, events, faces, and names blurred dizzily together, bled together, ran together. In the dark and chilly labyrinth of rooms, all framed up in artifice as they were, points of reference began to merge, as did the days and the nights, until it was all one big swirl of slaughtered hope.
Cain made friends with the other boys in his room. They ranged in age and price, of course. They called each other “Brother,” in a secret and confidential way, and Cain had stared at them all the first night and wondered if he’d be there long enough to be called “Brother” too.
He learned their names, because they talked to him even when he’d refused to talk back, convinced for some reason that if he stayed remote and aloof, somehow he might be saved.
There’d been Larke, and Jasper, and Mordecai, who had all been working the streets of New London in various shadowy ways before they’d stumbled upon Father Kelvin’s circus and decided it was better than sleeping in the gutter another night. There’d been Garrett, who had fallen into Father Kelvin’s grasp after being ousted from one of the Queen’s many orphanariums. There was Andrej, who had once run with gypsies and sometimes resurrectionists, and who’d been stolen away from the hanging block of Yekaterinburg by Q and Oberon years before. And then there’d been Emil, whose parents knew he was there and took a quarter of the profit he earned, which was all Father Kelvin would allow
them.
That was the saddest to Cain. First he figured, well, that wasn’t fair at all, that none of them got paid for the work they did. But Andrej explained Father Kelvin assumed it was reimbursement for “room and board,” and Cain was struck by a void-like gloom, a sorrow for Emil. Cain was like most of the others, there only because fate had discarded them. But to be there because your family had signed you up for it? That was heartbreaking, in a cold and distant way.
Cain wished he could pity Emil, but he couldn’t stop pitying himself long enough.
Without his father’s rings, in this cold, dark underground place of moldering velvet and damp candlewicks, whispering footsteps and creaking beds, where the air was thick with secrets surely he was not Cain Dietrich anymore.
You’re as good as dead, Oberon, the eerie graveyard clown, had told him.
After all, Father Kelvin didn’t refer to him by name. He called him “The Little Prince.”
NOBODY HAD ever really told Cain what he’d be doing for Father Kelvin, but he made inferences.
He started out working the rooms under St. Mikael’s. One of Father Kelvin’s men snapped, “Stop snarling like that, we know you’re not dumb,” and threw him into a festooned room.
It seemed all rational thought had dissolved into the thunderous bass chord of his panicked heart, but it was rather nice to be alone again for a short while, feeling the smooth marble floor underfoot and running his fingers over the vanity table, the clean mirror. He stooped over to smell the flowers at the bedside, and he took a moment to lay curled up on the maroon divan, pressing his nose to the cool gold frame.
He’d known what he was waiting for. And when the man was let in by another one of Kelvin’s agents, there was a soft, genteel light in his deep-set eyes and his suit was of fine broadcloth. Wasn’t it amazing how one’s appearance and demeanor could tell the story of one’s life? Lamplight glinted off the man’s pocket watch. Cain stood in the shadows behind the draped bed and stared at him in bleak distaste, wondering just how much the gentleman had paid for a virgin with noble blood. Unless Kelvin’s men had spun some other wild furtive lie about Cain, and in that case, what did the man think of him? Could he tell he was a noble son plucked from grace or did he just look like another one of the dark-eyed and underfed fallen of the rooms beneath St. Mikael’s?
