Read Online Ink by Hal Duncan - Free Book Online Page B

legend emblazoned on the cart's side announces us as something other, something different,
exotic.
    I lean over the front edge of the roof, look down at Guy.
    “Tell me we're playing here,” I say. “Before or afterward. Come on, they'd love it. We could get a bit of audience interaction going, you know? We don't have to do the usual mindfuck, just a plain old-fashioned show.”
    Guy nods at the castle looming up ahead. It rises out of a factory area, its gates sporting two Lady Liberty-size Atlases, heads bowed under globes.
    “We already have our audience, and we're booked to play tonight,” he says. ‘And I rather think we might be leaving in a hurry.”
    I humph.
    “How long's it been since we did something that we actually got applause for?”
    “I got a standing ovation in the Sheol Athenaeum,” says Jack, leaning over beside me.
    “They weren't standing,” says Guy. “They were running.”
    “They were cheering, though.”
    “I think you'll find that it's called screaming,” says Guy. “Jack, shouldn't you be practicing your lines? You too.”
    Jack rolls away in a sulk.
    “I've got them down,” I say. “I don't see why we can't just entertain people, once in a while. A little song, a little dance, a little poetry.”
    “There can be no poetry after the apocalypse,” says Don.
    “Bollocks,” says Jack. “Fuck that shit.”
    I pull Guy's new script out of the leg pocket of my combats, flip through the pages to try and find my place. Where was I? Yes.
    The Harlequin has come home.
S
oulflesh
S
teeped in an
O
rgone
M
arinade
    We hear the door clank closed behind us, turn to find it is no longer there, only a dead-end dirt path in the bushes that surround us. Clouds glow infernal orange in the sky, but the air is clear, crisp. Are we the only bitmites here? We listen for other sylphs. Hissing and tinny as a radio buried in the ground beneath our feet, we hear only a single voice.
    “You're listening to the midnight music of Radio Free Kentigern, coming out over the ether for all you lone wolfmen and preachers of the night. That's right. This is Howling Don Coyote, your one and only dog-boy with the deep and dirty that you all want dished, and I'll be taking you through from dusk till doom, yes sir, right up till those first rosy rays of the apocalypse light up the morning sky. As my dear old mother used to tell me as she tucked me in at night, my boy, the world ends tomorrow and you may die. But until it does let's kick back with a track, and this one's going out for Jack, because believe me, mis amigos, if music has charms to soothe the savage beast, there's one psycho pup out there that really needs his tummy tickled.”
    The babble is intriguing. It stirs something in us.
    Following the path out of the bushes, pushing thick, rubbery leaves aside and stepping over roots, we come out of the darkness onto damp tarmac. Under us our shadow flexes, and we kneel to touch this shape graved sharp out of the night itself with stars, tiny pinpricks of light, scattered all throughout its hollow body. No, not stars but stones, white stones embedded in the path.
    In the Hinter we did not have a shadow; it escaped from underfoot, black earth itself coming alive, refusing to be walked on. This world is strange.
    Uphill to the right, the tarmac trails up through twiggy trees like gnarled brown brooms, to the brow of a high hill, a wall topped with barbed wire. This is our path, the janitor general has told us, leading to the Circus; but something is shifting in us, we feel, underneath this newfound skin.
    Jack Carter we call our sylph, but there is something else inside this dead man walking, something brighter, something other, yes, another name.
    Jack Flash.
    We taste it sudden in the clarity of Kentigern's air. Black blood of a dead hero, angel dust of bitmites, skitters and chitters into a shape we recognize in the gravings of our chest. A schizoid epiphany made real, the stuff that dreams are made on, oh but