The End of So Many Things
There’s much to be said about being blind in one eye, but none of what’s said is good. As children, my brothers and I played a game: one of us (usually me, because they found it amusing) would be blindfolded and have to chase the other two around a field behind our house in what I usually found to be a miserable game of torment. Each time we played, I was convinced that this time I would catch them, this time they’d make a mistake, this time one of them would be blindfolded instead of me. Isaac, my oldest brother, was particularly merciless—he would trip me or tap me on top of the head or creep up behind me and bellow in my ear, all in the name of sport. On many occasions, I cried and quit.
Now I would cry only half as much.
I did not see my family—I did not see much at all—that Christmas of 1938. Instead, I spent a number of weeks recovering in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London after the surgery that removed the devastated remains of my right eye. In that time, I was fitted with a glass eye, painted to resemble my other eye, but the doctor who tended me could not disguise his contempt for the glass eye’s manufacturer.
“That was crafted in Germany,” he said as he held up a mirror for me to look at myself. “If you don’t care to wear it, chap, no one will think lesser of you. As a Jew, I’d rather be blind in both eyes.”
I asked if he would like to recommend alternatives—he indicated that without something in the socket, the eyelid would cave in and look sunken and that the socket itself would likely shrink over time, making a later fitting more challenging and likely requiring additional surgery.
“All right,” I said. “How about a walnut?”
Blake came to see me about once a week. The first time, he was brimming with pity and apologies, assuring me that he’d find Spring Heeled Jack and get “an eye for an eye,” as it were, but by the next visit, he had shifted his focus—again, no pun intended—to a newfound interest in Chansey, the Pavilions’ resident clown and, according to his confession to Blake, the Halifax Slasher.
“Let’s say he’s the one,” he said, choosing his words carefully—I was in the middle of an eye exam and eye chart test, and he didn’t want to say too much while the nurse was present. “If he’s what he says he is, that could be a major draw. An entirely new attraction.”
“How?” I said. “It’s not like you can put it on a sign. Unless you’re thinking an arrest in the middle of his performance will make the Daily Express—and I don’t think that’s good publicity for the Pavilions.”
“I don’t care what they say about us,” he said, his roguish grin in place, “just spell our names right.”
The nurse with the eye chart smiled back at Blake, which I found oddly disheartening. I suspected I’d see her in the audience for his show one night in the spring. I had to clear my throat to get her attention back.
“A, P, E, O, R, F, D, Z,” I read.
“B, L, A, K, E,” Blake said. Of course, he wasn’t talking to me.
Whitnail came with greater frequency, which made him a steady curiosity for the medical staff, and they spread stories about him around the hospital that were reminiscent of the tales of those who’d seen cryptids. I found it entertaining, but stoic Whitnail did not.
“Have they never seen an albino before?” he said, annoyed.
I said, “No. I think that’s the whole point.”
“Abraham James, there are times when I think I should never have left ghar.” Whenever Whitnail used my middle name, I knew he was saying something of great significance to him; the word he uttered under his breath rhymed with car.
“What is that?” I asked, leaning back in my hospital chair to look up at him. “Is that where you’re from? Ghar? Where is that?”
He deliberately stepped into my newfound blind spot and made a dismissive noise.
When I was released from the hospital that March, Whitnail met me in the lobby of St. Bart’s North Wing—a chaotic hub of nurses and junior doctors and secretaries, all working against the backdrop of high ceilings and breathtaking Georgian grandeur—to escort me back to the Bòcan Pavilions. He guided me as if I were completely blind, but I appreciated the gesture, so I yielded to his control. He took all of the grand lobby in with a single bold stare.
“This is unnecessary,” he said. “Elaborate murals and portraits do not help anyone heal.”
“Would you say they were gharish?” I asked and again was ignored. Instead, he told me of the news that the Germans had violated the Munich Agreement of the previous fall and had taken over all of Czechoslovakia. I acknowledged his words, but truly, it didn’t mean much to me. The unease that most Londoners were experiencing as world events shifted like tectonic plates on the continent was far bigger than my own unease—and far less personal.
Preparations were underway for our first full summer with the London crowds; the Pavilions were a hive of activity, and we were done with hotels. When I returned to the recently assembled tent I shared with Blake, he was absent, so I took the opportunity to clean my glass walnut—in truth, the eyeball they had painted by hand for me bore such a resemblance to my other eye that I was often unnerved to hold it in my hand—and then to open my spellbook. I wondered if perhaps Arthur would know more about Whitnail’s origins.
My kelpie card, my Arthur card, was gone. It had been replaced by another kelpie, one that was accessible to me…but felt off-kilter when I called it forth. It was more horse than human, this substitute, and the caster essence it was mixed with was not my own yet still familiar. Familial. It was Blake’s essence.
I was dizzy with half-blindness and unpalatable rage. I kept jerking my head to take in my blind spot, as if Blake might sneak up on me and strip me of my initiative to explosively confront him. I paced, bumping into the furniture of our tent, and rehearsed. How dare you! You’re a failure as a mentor—see the hole in my head!—and you’re an even worse thief! Did you steal it because you knew I’d mapped your dead son and that he could tell me your secrets?
And I circled warily around the question that was blood in the water to me: Did you kill Arthur?
But when he arrived, as I burned toward detonation, Blake defused me instantly: He grinned at me, hugged me, and said, “Welcome home, lad. I see you found that I saved your spellbook in the alley that night. Unfortunately, your kelpie card shattered when you fell, so I gave you mine. I hope you like it.”
I stood silent. My fists clenched and unclenched. Finally, I said, “That’s very kind of you. But I won’t be able to use it, will I? I didn’t map it myself.”
“I know you know better than that, Abraham.” His use of my proper name stifled me that much more; had he called me Arthur, I might have been able to set my rage free. “We’re kin. You can use it.”
I wanted to demand answers, but I realized I was no longer angry enough to know the questions. I couldn’t ask about Arthur—to do so would be to accuse him of lying about my missing kelpie card or of covering up his son’s death in some manner. I no longer felt as incentivized to confront him. And then he made matters worse.
“And this is for you.” He handed me a card: Spring Heeled Jack. “I got him for you. I think you earned this one. You paid for it, and I wouldn’t let you walk away empty-handed.”
He paused, then said, “So, don’t let it blow up your head, but I suppose you should know that you have a place in my heart now. Always, even.”
Much later, I’d regret my response; I would wish I’d given more thought to it before so easily letting him off the hook. “Me, too. I’m glad you’re blood of my blood, Blake.”
***
As the Pavilions launched another season, the world around me seemed to hold its breath. The purple berets—the Caster Enigma Coalition—had temporarily retreated after their failed assassination attempt the previous fall. No doubt planning their next foolish move, Blake suggested (“their thought plickens,” he said). Without Arthur as my kelpie, I had far less incentive to continue probing what happened at The Minch when Arthur died. And London was business as usual—but most definitely not. There was palpable tension in the air as Londoners watched a storm gather strength on the Continent, some of them certain that still more diplomacy would avoid war, most of them certain that the end of the Great War of twenty years earlier had merely been a pause in hostilities. I was not immune to the societal undercurrents, of course, but as the Evening Standard said of the Bòcan Pavilions in their review, “Beyond the rattling of sabers, the show must go on!”
Blake made some inquiries about getting us booked into the Cambridge Theater, but I suspected he wasn’t sincere in his efforts. The Pavilions already had the permission of the London County Council to set up in Victoria Park, and hauling even fractional parts of our shows the 10 kilometers over to the theater would have been impractical, to say the least.
Whitnail offered an additional, ominous observation: “He would likely rather not do damage to the theater when the time comes.”
I pressed, but he would not tell me what that meant.
More than any other circumstance, though, I remember that as the summer that Chansey the clown took center stage in my awareness.
Blake had replaced the hodag cryptid in his shows with Black Shuck, a big hound with red eyes that was considered to be a harbinger of death for those who saw it. I had mapped it in a graveyard in East Anglia the previous year, and it was a well-known specter in greater London. Whitnail and I were in our usual spot after I’d finished taking tickets when Blake opened his spellbook and called forth Black Shuck. It appeared beside him, four feet of jet-black fur that rippled like smoke. It snarled, showing impressive fangs, and the audience gasped appreciatively.
“The hodag was better,” I whispered to Whitnail.
“The shuck will be a better show,” he answered.
Chansey, with his shock of red hair in the center of his bald head, suddenly walked from the wings onto the stage. He bared his own fangs at the audience, matching Black Shuck’s demeanor. They were equally terrifying.
“He’s off his head,” I said. “He put the Halifax Slasher in his act?”
Whitnail said, “There is notoriety in the rumor.”
“Oh, that’s dandy, then. When I try to assassinate King Bertie, we should rename these the Abraham Pavilions. We’ll draw millions.”
“There is no need to be disrespectful. I do not believe they call him ‘Bertie’ anymore.”
Chansey pranced across the stage, grimacing at the audience in what I thought was the antithesis of a clown’s routine, before he stopped short of Black Shuck. Blake stepped into the shadows at the back of the stage, leaving clown and hound in a frozen staring match. Somewhere in the audience, I could hear a child with the hiccups—that’s how deathly quiet it was.
Black Shuck suddenly howled, and Chansey wailed in a voice so contorted and inhuman that even I was startled.
He flung himself backward, landing on his arse with his legs in the air. With a deft move, he reached out, wrapped both arms around his legs, and pulled them back behind his head. He then wriggled away, compact, walking on his arse, thock thock thock, shrieking like a man possessed. Just before he reached the stage wings, he sprung himself open like a jack-in-the-box, arms stretched above his head, and belly-flopped onto the wooden stage floor. His screeches came to an instant halt.
As he lay frozen, two stage hands stepped out to pull his body from view. Blake emerged from the shadows again and with the wave of his hand, Black Shuck disappeared again. The audience roared their approval. I was incredulous.
“So, what happens when they see him on the midway in an hour and realize he didn’t drop dead after seeing Black Shuck?”
Whitnail looked down at me as if I’d lost my mind. He raised one white eyebrow. “Do you recall that this is entertainment?”
I didn’t want to meet his eye. “Yes. In essence, yes.”
That night, when Blake returned to our tent after midnight, I was waiting up for him. As he readied himself to sleep, I asked, “So, why are you adding the Halifax Clown to your act?”
Blake waggled a finger at me. “That’s ‘the Halifax Slasher Clown.’ We stand on ceremony here. Because he’s useful. He serves a purpose, Arthur.”
I let that go. “To pretend to die because of the hound?”
“My purpose,” Blake emphasized, reminding me that he was still, essentially, an unfathomable stranger to me, kind sentiments or not. “I’d like to ensure he remains with us a bit longer, and if that means keeping him from wandering the streets of London—or Halifax—at night by giving him a role in my act, so much the better.”
“He’s a killer,” I protested. “Why would you want him here?”
“The Halifax Slasher killed no one. And I have discovered my purposes are more easily explained if I don’t explain them at all. Now. Do you ever sleep, lad?”
I considered my options for a moment, decided it wasn’t worth the bad blood that pushing would stir, and opted for a different topic. “Okay. I’ll say goodnight then. Oh, what does ghar mean?”
I caught him off guard, as I’d hoped.
He said, “It means ‘home’ in—” and then checked himself. He smiled wickedly at me. “No, no, no. I know about this game between you and Whitnail. I’m not getting involved. Ask him.”
“Not part of your purpose, eh?” I said, laughing, before turning in for the night. “I had to try.”
***
As we closed in on the end of summer, dozens of shows behind us, I started noticing Chansey, sans his face paint, in the company of Nellie, our resident “Horse Girl” whose knees bent back the wrong way such that she could gallop on all fours. When she walked upright, she looked more like a bird. But more important, I saw her walking with one arm locked up in Chansey’s. They played the carnival games together, shared popped corn, rode the big wheel and the carousel and the swing boats together. She laughed at him, not as a clown but as a witty companion. She was wearing a heart-shaped pendant these days; I’d not seen it before, but I thought I knew who gave it to her.
Since Hugh the Magnetic Man had died, I didn’t really have any friends in the Pavilions except Whitnail, and he was often as clammed up tight as a church door on Monday morning. So, I was left to speculate silently that Blake had put Nellie up to flirting with our killer clown (who hadn’t killed anyone—at least, not yet, I told myself). Another knot to tie him to the Bòcan Pavilions.
Thinking on this led me to a revelation: I was jealous. I was not necessarily attracted to Nellie specifically, but I felt a hot resentment that someone like Chansey, who was, in my view, a lunatic version of Curly from the Three Stooges, could merit the attentions of a girl. Even if Blake had encouraged her or paid her to initially engage Chansey, she certainly seemed to be enjoying it now.
“I’ll follow my secret heart,” I caught myself singing to imaginings of Nellie, thinking of the heart pendant around her neck, “till I find love.”
I lay awake some nights wondering if she truly felt anything for him.
Not that it mattered, I told myself. Not that it mattered at all.
***
It was both an exhilarating and disheartening time for me—and even a forgettable one. I was in a steady state of anxiety, which manifested itself as anger or impatience balanced against enthusiasm and overeagerness.
“You need to map something,” Blake suggested, but we’d found most of what was readily available in the London area. We went out a few times to try to find what Blake called the Thames Monster, some kind of reptilian beast in the river, but whatever it was, we didn’t come across it that fall. Oddly, it was a refreshing opportunity—it wasn’t a cryptid he had previously mapped, so it felt like it was an adventure for both of us to track it down, even if it came to naught.
“You haven’t done a snipe yet,” he said.
I said, “That’s a very good point. Oh, and I haven’t done the Cheshire Cat, Frankenstein’s Monster, or Tarzan yet, either. So, let’s do them first.”
Blake spread his hands in surrender. “Okay. So, did a snipe refuse your marriage proposal or something? Did you roll over in the night and it had snuck out on you and left a note saying—”
I popped out my glass eye and promptly put it between my lips. I had discovered this was enough to gag Blake and end any discussion I wasn’t enjoying.
“Stop!” Blake said, refusing to look. “Peace in our time! Peace in our time!”
It was his favorite expression most of that year. As we were wrapping up the previous October in preparation for our first winter in London, the prime minister of the UK, Chamberlain, came back from Munich after signing a deal that gave Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, to Adolf Hitler and Germany. He apparently stood outside 10 Downing Street and said of the Munich Agreement, “I believe it is peace for our time.”
“Chamberlain should have mapped Hitler while he was there,” Blake had said once with great contempt for both men, “though Hitler is more creep than cryptid.”
“What’s a creep?” I’d asked.
“Hitler.”
And now it was almost a year later, late August, and what had been the slow march of war in Europe was becoming more like a run. It was the news every single day. Blake had said we were going to shut down early this year because the world was changing too fast, and I was relieved to note to Whitnail, during one of the Chansey “dies” acts that Blake the Black performed five or six times a week, that there were no more purple berets in the audience. Perhaps, I suggested, the Caster Enigma Coalition had opted to live and let live.
“They are still coming,” Whitnail said, indicating a young man and woman seated at the end of the row nearest us. “They just choose not to announce themselves to Blake. For now.”
“I still don’t understand this. What is the end game here?”
Whitnail sounded surprised I would even ask when he answered, “Death, Abraham.”
I swallowed. “Whose?”
“Possibly everyone.”
***
The day after the Pavilions’ last open day for 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
My mam mailed me a blue card, a National Registration Identity Card, that showed I was only seventeen years old. My occupation was listed as “student.”
Keep this with you always, she wrote. Show it to anyone who asks why you aren’t in France to fight the war. If you don’t, that’s where you will be. We’ll figure out something else when you turn eighteen.
***
London at Christmastime that year was very, very different than any Christmas I’d experienced before. Store windows were still decorated, and I wandered in and out of Selfridges on Oxford Street almost every day, owing to the abundance of attractive girls and women who shopped there. I was thrilled by the ones who worked there, too. One particular day in December, the Father Christmas positioned at the store’s grand façade leaned over my shoulder from behind and said into my ear, “She’s off today, mate, but she’s working the millinery tomorrow.”
I turned to face him and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Also, what’s a millinery?”
Father Christmas chuckled, and his little round belly shook when he laughed like a bowlful of teasing. “Hats.”
“Yes.” I started to turn away but turned back. “And where are—?”
“First floor. All the hats are on pole about a meter high. You can’t miss them.”
“Okay.” I turned one more time to go and then turned to him one more time. “Happy Christmas, Saint Nick.”
“Happy Christmas, Blake the Black’s boy.” He winked at me—clearly, an attendee to the Pavilions. “Ho ho hodag.”
But for all the wreaths on light poles and garland lining windows that were filled with scenes of toy workshops and cottages deep in winter, you could feel a distinct unease. There were no festive lights on Oxford Street. This was when I was urgently handed a gas mask at the front desk of the St. Ermin’s, the hotel where Blake had stayed the previous year and where, over Christmas, he had set me up in a room as well, thanks to an especially successful summer for ticket sales to the Pavilions. (I was careful when visiting with any other employees of the Pavilions not to mention this particular perk.)
At night, the city was blacked out. Air raid sirens were tested at regular intervals, but I had no idea where I was supposed to go when that wailing started, so I usually just stayed where I was.
I showed my blue NRI card almost everywhere I went. And even then, I could feel the silent disdain from shop owners who examined it carefully, as if I might forge paperwork to avoid service. I was often tempted to do to them what I did to Blake when I wanted him to stop talking: pop out my glass eye, put it in my mouth, and then spit it out into my hand while I told them the military wouldn’t have me anyway.
As I told myself often, my mam raised me to be at the command of the crown but not as a jester.
I received a letter from her to say that she thought it would be “splendid,” a word she rarely used, if we could spend the holidays together. She said that though she knew travel was challenging, she’d like to meet at the Midland Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, the luxury hotel where she and I had dined two Christmases earlier. “Splendid” was a code word, I knew—it meant she wouldn’t be alone. Da’ would likely accompany her, or it might even mean that my oldest brother Isaac, his wife Beatrice, and their child, my other brother Elijah, or even my sister Agnes could be coming as well.
I wrote back to say of course, I’d meet her in Liverpool, and I was looking forward to seeing her. This much was true. It was the possibility of seeing my father that filled me with anxiety. His parting shot, as I’d come to define it, still hung with me: You are the least of us.
I went shopping, all the while thinking, I will show you that I am not.
***
The LMS from London to Liverpool’s Lime Street Station took just over six hours to get there, and there were no particular wartime delays, plenty of time for me to fret and work myself up into a near-panic state. I reassessed my gifts for Mam and Da’, whether he was coming or not: the latest Agatha Christie mystery (the title of which, in London, offended me such that I have not read it to this day despite being a fan of her Poirot series) for my mother and a metal Thermos one-liter flask with a screw topper for my da’. I was proud to have skipped getting one with a cork, thinking long-term for how he might use it in the fields.
I’d bought myself a gift as well: a black fabric eyepatch. They didn’t know about my accident yet, and the patch seemed less shocking than the glass eye. And if my brothers came, I was afraid they’d tease me about my glass eye.
It occurred to me on the train, however, that they were just as likely to tease me about my pirate’s eyepatch.
My panic was best quelled by two other things I’d brought with me, both for my father’s benefit: my spellbook and Whitnail.
I was honest when he asked me why I would want him to accompany me to a family event, especially a holiday one, though my honesty was brutal and curt.
“My da’ hates that I’m a caster,” I said. “I think maybe that means he hates the rest of me, too.”
I didn’t have to explain more; he even bought his own train ticket as a gift to me.
My parents were already seated by one of the marble pillars in the grand Edwardian restaurant of the Midland Adelphi when we arrived. Wait staff moved like ghosts among the tables spaced far enough apart that conversations nearby were no more than murmurs. Poinsettia centerpieces on each white tablecloth-covered table and garland and fairy lights around the doorways. My mother blended in as if she had always belonged, dressed in an elegant burgundy dress with a string of pearls that I knew were costume, given her financial conservatism. My father, on the other hand, wore a dark blue suit that was far too big for him—though it would have fit him perfectly the last time I’d seen him. He’d lost a great deal of weight. His eyes were sunken and tired. He rose to embrace me when we reached the table, a gesture that locked up my throat in grief when I felt his trembling hands hugging my back.
I was wearing an off-the-rack jacket and a tie I had borrowed from Blake, but Whitnail was dressed to the nines: a white dinner jacket and a black bowtie gave his carriage a sudden sophistication that filled me with admiration. Though he towered over them, he bowed deeply to my mother (“Angel,” he greeted her in a whisper) and shook my da’s hand with a firmness fitting Da’s unexpected frailty. I introduced them, identifying my father by his first name, but Whitnail called him Laird MacCamran the entire time.
I felt the fool for bringing my spellbook. I slipped the satchel I was carrying it in between my feet as we took our seats.
Initially, conversation lagged, awkward silences dominating the table. They asked about my eyepatch; I said it was prescribed to strengthen my other eye without telling them about Spring Heeled Jack. Whitnail had always been the type not to speak until spoken to, and he responded to the stares of other Christmas celebrants in the hall with slight nods and raised eyebrows. In one of those gaps between staccato rounds of dialogue, Da’ leaned closer to Mam and, smiling at Whitnail, tried to whisper, “He’s real, aye?”
I suppressed a groan. Mam would tell me later, when we were saying our goodbyes, that Da’s mind was, in her words, “out working in the fields while his body stayed with her in the house.”
I gave them their gifts, they gave me tartan socks that my mother had knit by hand and a torch that my da’ had bought in Edinburgh.
“For those blackout nights when ye train with for the services,” he said with a rare gruffness that had once been his norm. He then turned to Whitnail. “Ah’m sorry, pal, but we didnae ken ye were comin’. Let us settle the bill for ye.”
Mam told me my brother Isaac and his wife Beatrice and their baby Maggie were helping in my da’s oat fields. I’d not seen the baby yet, but Mam had a Kodak Brownie now and had taken pictures for me. Isaac posed like he was having his soul stolen, Beatrice looked older than her years, and Maggie looked as I have always thought babies look: like a poorly sculpted genderless doll. That first glimpse of my niece was only memorable because of the Christmas atmosphere; many years later, when she had become a fearless caster who, on another memorable Christmas, gave me my first pet, a dog, I showed that selfsame picture to her.
“I didn’t look like a real baby,” she would say, a niece after my own heart.
Mam also told me two disquieting bits of family news: She had written to my older sister Agnes in France, but she’d not heard anything back yet, not even for Christmas. But she had a ready-made answer to this.
“The war between France and Germany is likely making postal services far more difficult,” she said. “And I’m not sure where La Horgne is. I just need to have a wee bit of patience.”
More troubling was her revelation that my other brother, Elijah, had joined the British Expeditionary Force as part of the 51st Highland Infantry Division a few months earlier, and he was now with them in Aldershot in preparation for shipping out to France soon. I was taken aback because Elijah had always been light-hearted and fun loving. He’d courted a lass for a long time without it coming to much, but he was still happily practical about it all, Mam had told me. It was well-nigh impossible for me to imagine him armed with a service rifle or hunched behind a machine gun to kill other men.
At times during that lunch, Da’ seemed the same as he ever was. But there were moments when, like the lights of Liverpool, he went into blackout mode. He stopped talking mid-sentence. He introduced himself to Whitnail again. He reminded me that I hadn’t cleaned the threshing machine properly yesterday evening, so he’d had to do it himself this morning.
The food was excellent, and my parents’ generosity greatly appreciated, but as we were wrapping up hours later, I found my thoughts too scattered and my tongue too tied to broach the subjects I’d imagined we would discuss. I’d come burning to confront my da’ about his perceptions of me, his dismissal of what I was destined to be, but that window had closed some time ago without me ever knowing it. I wanted to show Mam her old spellbook and how I’d begun to fill it, but I suddenly feared upsetting Da’ when he seemed so fragile to me. Somehow he had overlooked Whitnail’s peculiar presence, and that was enough for me. It had to be. No other choice.
When it was time to go, Whitnail retrieved my mother’s wool coat from the cloakroom and helped her into it while I buttoned up my da’s jacket for him. Though there was no snow on the ground, the skies were gray and threatening, and the temperatures were below freezing. He tilted his head and looked me in the eye as I draped his scarf—more of Mam’s handiwork—around his neck.
“You are a good boy, Abraham,” he said suddenly. His eyes clouded up. “I was wrong to drive you away.”
My lips trembled, and my teeth chattered as my own eyes watered. My mind shouted, Please let me tell him everything, tell him how it hurt, but all I could say was, “It’s okay, Da’. I’m all right.”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
Whitnail approached and extended a hand to my da’. “Goodbye, Laird MacCamran. It has been my honor to share a table with you.”
“Ah, Mr. Whitnail, I could get used to being called a lord,” Da’ said, shaking his hand.
“I’ll write and soon,” I promised Mam as we kissed our goodbyes. “I want to tell you about Jack. And I want to talk to you about Arthur. And—” I had waited far too long for this last, “—and I want to ask you about casters. I dinnae ken what it’s about anymore. We run around and map cryptids. Is that it? Is that all there is? It might just as well be football cards, if that’s it.”
“Say ‘I don’t know what it’s about,” she corrected me. We hugged. “You write, and I’ll answer. Or come home. We can talk then.”
Their train left after ours did, so they walked us to our platform. Mam waved goodbye to us as our train pulled out of Lime Street Station, and I waved back; Whitnail retreated from the window so I could cry with some private dignity. On the platform below, Da’ looked up at me, and though he didn’t wave—it wouldn’t be becoming, I knew he’d say—he touched the brim of his Homburg and half-smiled at me. Even from that distance, I could see his fingertips shake.
A few minutes later, they were lost to me, somewhere to the north behind me in the dimming light at the end of the day, preparing for a dark train ride home, their windows covered by blackout blinds so they couldn’t see the world passing by them. By the time I sat down next to Whitnail in our own dark train car, I had dried my eyes and he had removed his bowtie. I was about to thank him for coming with me, when he matter-of-factly said, “You may have a problem. I do not know for certain.”
I laughed wearily. “I have a number of them, actually. Which one are you thinking of then?”
He said, “When I helped your mother into her coat, there was a purple beret in her coat pocket.”
***
James Alexander MacCamran
February 1880 – January 1940
***
Mam’s letter arrived in February—deliberately late, I knew. The funeral was over by the time I received it. She had no means to reach my sister Agnes or my brother Elijah. Only my brother Isaac and my sister-in-law Beatrice were by Mam’s side when they buried Da’, and they had to leave midway through the service. Baby Maggie was coming down with a cold.
There were no bagpipes.
***
By March, discussions were well underway regarding whether or not the Bòcan Pavilions would operate over the summer of 1940. Air Raid Precautions were well underway, so the sirens went off regularly, but the greater concern was the IRA—two separate bombs went off in London that month. Blake seemed unconcerned.
“Next year,” he said, “we’ll play Dublin, and everybody’ll be happy.”
I hadn’t told him that Mam, his sister, might well be part of the Caster Enigma Coalition, and it was a calculation on my part. If neither of them knew they were in enemy camps—and I had to assume my mother wouldn’t have deliberately handed me over to Blake had she known he was a target of the Coalition’s wrath—then who was I to pit them against each other? Some part of me also felt I should make efforts to protect my mam from Blake’s eagerness for confrontation with the purple berets. I even went so far as to ask Whitnail to keep it to himself.
“When the time is right,” I promised him, “I’ll tell Blake.”
But as far as I was concerned, there would never be a right time.
Late March was ruddy well rotten—ice storms hit London, and the temperatures were well below freezing. St. Ermin’s turned out to be the perfect hotel to be a guest in when the storms came; not only did the electricity stay on the whole time, but there seemed to be no coal shortage for the hotel, and the two grand staircases in the lobby might as well have been revolving doors for all the foot traffic they experienced. It was on an especially bitter night—the wind brutal, the ice building up, the snow relentless, and both the skies of London and the attitudes of Londoners decidedly black—that Blake announced it was time to map the Thames Monster.
“Are you off your trolley?” I said. “It’s below zero out there.”
“And not a single trolley moving,” Blake said, and by this time, I’d seen Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, so I knew that wing-and-a-prayer grin. “I have it on good authority that the Thames is freezing over. Now’s the time when we can get out in the middle of the river to map the monster.”
The Thames hadn’t frozen like this in over a century. Blake swore it was possible. I believed him… mostly. “I think the river freezing over is a clue, my dear Watson, that we should stay inside.” Just the same, I began to pull on layers of shirts and trousers and tucked my spellbook into its satchel.
I had been cold before, and I have been colder since, but on that particular night, I imagined what those climbers had felt at the top of the Matterhorn: triumphant but frozen as stiff as the dead. Perhaps not a worthwhile trade.
In fair weather, the walk from the hotel to the river would have taken fifteen minutes or so—it wasn’t more than 800 meters. That night, however, it was a nightmarish hour.
The snow did not fall straight down—it blew sideways across our vision, blinding us both. The blackout conditions meant that streetlamps were dark and no lights shone from businesses along the way. It was like something out of Dante. I leaned in close so I could speak directly into Blake’s ear over the wind.
“It’s the second circle of the inferno,” I shouted. “The sinners of lust are ‘swept forever through the dark, stormy air by terrible winds.’”
He gestured for me to turn my head so he could put his lips against my own ear.
“Shut up,” he said.
We walked in the street—there was no traffic to speak of, and the cobblestones offered better footing—and made our way from Caxton to Broadway and then the long haul down Broadway to Petty France. We saw a few other pedestrians, though it was hard to say if they saw us or not. Everyone was keeping their heads down just trying to get where they were going. I knew we should have been able to see Westminster Abbey once we were on Petty France, but all it took was fog to hide its tower—tonight, the whole abbey had vanished.
“It’s Baltic out here,” Blake said as he dragged me to the door of St. Stephen’s Tavern. I had little doubt his intention was for us to stay long enough to warm our bones, but I was wondering how much cash I had on me and if the tavern had rooms to let. We could try again in the morning, I decided.
St. Stephen’s was dark, and the door was locked.
“Onward, Christian soldiers,” Blake said as he turned away from the entryway, “marching as to war.”
“Shut up,” I said.
By the time we’d crossed Bridge Street, again with very few motorcars and even fewer buses, and made our way down to the Victoria Embankment, I expected Blake’s common sense to take hold and send us back to the hotel for hot tea, presuming we didn’t die along the way. Instead, we descended a set of stone steps to reach the riverside walk.
And there it was, the Thames, so wide you couldn’t hope to throw a rock across it. And yet this night, there were no steamboats or coal barges passing each other on the gray water, no brackish odor of river, no one strolling the riverwalk to take it in. The Thames was a pale field of ice, disappearing from near our feet out into darkness. I didn’t believe it was frozen all the way across, but it was certainly frozen out enough for us to venture out of sight of the shore. Snow skittered across its surface. A few buildings along our shore were violating the blackout orders, but they were so few that they were barely white smudges on a jet-black canvas. Blake tested the ice with one boot. It held.
“Now it’s going to get cold,” he shouted and preceded me out onto the ice.
I thought he was just being a cocky bastard, but he was right: Once we moved away from the shoreline and out onto the river, the buildings no longer blocked the wind. I had to hurry to keep up with him, but just the same, my feet and hands felt like hunks of ice, and I expected to fall and snap myself into frozen pebbles with every sliding step. I had lost track of how far out we’d gone when Blake stopped short and turned to hand me a length of cord. I recognized it from our rooms at the hotel—it was used to tie back the drapes. He had a dozen of them knotted end to end.
“In case I have to go swimming,” he said as he tied one end around his wrist. He then pulled out his spellbook and flipped it open. “You should get ready yourself.”
“The hotel’s going to be really mad about this,” I said, tying the other end of the cords to my own hand. “If you end up in that water, you’ll freeze to death in minutes, Blake. Maybe faster.”
“Definitely faster.” He touched a card in his book, muttered a word, and as the gate opened before us, a canoe—easily the length of three men end to end—began to take shape before him. But it wasn’t truly a boat. I could see that it had eyes, one on each side near the boat’s fore, just above gnashing wooden teeth. It glared at me and snapped as Blake reached into his book a second time and called out another creature I’d never seen, this one a brownish-red lizard about a meter long with a fiery mane atop its head. It made a noise I couldn’t hear over the wind, and the boat chomped at it as if it were bait.
I instinctively took a step back as the lizard suddenly breathed fire like a dragon in a fairy tale, flames drilling into the river’s icy surface. In less than a minute, it had melted a hole a meter across and almost two meters long; the dark waters of the Thames formed a black coffin against the ice. The boat seemed barely constrained, rocking backward and forward as if it were eager to plunge into the opening. The lizard ignored it and kept expanding the hole.
“Which circle of the inferno is that thing from?” I said.
“The Appalachian Trail,” Blake said.
When the opening was long enough, the lizard cocked its head and looked to Blake for approval. He nodded to it and touched his spellbook again. The lizard vanished. Then Blake gestured, and the boat monster launched forward and into the water with all the enthusiasm of a dog chasing a stick into the ocean.
Just as the thought occurred to me that the boat couldn’t actually go anywhere else on the frozen river, it did what boats aren’t meant to do: It sank. The waters closed over it, flooding its interior, and it disappeared as if it had never been.
“Is it supposed to do that?” I said with great alarm.
Blake ignored that. “Get your card ready. Now.”
I knelt and, using the key to my hotel room, nicked a deep groove in the ice near the edge of the hole. I jammed my card into it, hesitating with my freezing hand over it while I waited to see if the wind would try to rip it away. But it held, at least for the moment, so all I could do was hope as I slipped and slid my way around the hole to its other side. I had just pulled my spellbook from my satchel and opened it when something big broke the surface of the water.
The Thames Monster was a gigantic eel-like creature, the length of a short bus, thick like an electrical pole, with slick mottled grey and green skin. It filled the boat monster’s interior and then some, its head hanging over the aft. When the two creatures surged half out of the water together, the Thames Monster whipped its head back and forth, its lifeless saucer eyes taking in first me and then Blake. The boat bit the water’s surface in its excitement and made a wet barking noise, but the Thames Monster was dead silent.
I mapped it. My gate was bright while illuminating nothing, and in a mere moment, I had it—but by then, it had Blake.
The Thames Monster was eight meters of muscle, and it lunged at Blake at the ice’s edge, leaving the boat and the water behind as it became airborne. Blake’s concentration broke; the boat blinked out of existence. Then the Thames Monster coiled itself around him, pinning his arms to his sides. His spellbook fell to the ice as the monster twisted backward, into the water, and before I had truly grasped what I was seeing, it dove back into the river, taking Blake with it. The drape cord connecting us went taut and snapped.
Stupidly, I looked around as if I might find help in the middle of the frozen Thames in the dead of night during an ice storm under blackout conditions. I had no weapons. Diving in after them would not only fail to save Blake, it would kill me as well. I looked down, helpless, at the partial length of hotel cord and my open spellbook.
The water’s surface was still, barely rippling, even in the wind. Blake and the Thames Monster were gone.
I broke into a run.
I went down on the ice twice before I reached my card on the other side, but when I sat up on my knees and held it out in front of me, the newly formed knot on my forehead was already forgotten. I focused, and my mapped Thames Monster manifested before me. It was as terrifying as the real thing, thrashing about on the icy surface, staring unblinking at me.
Bring back the human in the water, I commanded. I could feel that minute bit of my own essence in the monster like a thread between us; my order ran the length of it. The monster’s mouth gaped open as if it were suffocating, and then it slid headfirst into the hole in the ice with muscular grace.
I waited, breathless, furiously considering my other cards. If my Thames Monster failed, I’d send Blake’s mapped kelpie after him. It was a miserable alternative.
Then, like a rocket ship in a pulp novel, one of the Thames Monsters burst up and out of the hole, driving into the sky as if it might take flight into the storm clouds above. It towered over me, Blake still wrapped in its coils. He had one arm free now, and he beat uselessly at the creature’s scaleless skin.
“Do something!” he shouted down at me.
“I am!” I shouted back. I wasn’t sure if mine had him or if the original hadn’t let go yet.
Despite his dire straits, he shook his free fist at me. “Arthur, you idiot!”
While I thoroughly resented both names, I didn’t resent them enough to abandon his rescue. Just the same, I put my hand over my Thames Monster card, and the creature suspending Blake above my head blinked out, sending Blake the Black crashing to the white ice below.
We made our way back to the St. Ermin’s with Blake leaning heavily on me, especially when maneuvering stairs or ascending a grade. We both shivered and trembled, and I frequently was forced to rub the water from my eye to keep it from freezing shut. Blake simply hung his head and let me guide us. He called forth a fire pixie of some sort to warm him on the way back; otherwise, he might not have made it. At that point, however, I didn’t think he cared either way.
As we came within sight of the hotel’s entrance, a man passed us in the cold darkness, his face buried in a scarf and behind the high collar of his thick coat. But he was hatless, noticeably not the norm, and so I could see his singular patch of red hair. He made a point of turning away, so I knew Chansey had seen us. I tried to note the receding figure to Blake, but Blake was no longer interested in anything other than a warm fire and a hot toddy.
In the lobby, a bellhop came to our aid, and together, we managed to get Blake—now a shivering and sneezing mess of hypothermia—back to his room. I sent the bellhop away and started the fire in the room’s fireplace myself. Wrapped in a blanket, Blake huddled down in a deep chair and waited for the flame. When he asked, I grinned and put his spellbook, which I had recovered on the ice, on the side table next to him.
“Ah, well. Sadly, I didn’t get to map the monster,” he said.
“Thames are the breaks,” I said gleefully; I’d been waiting for a chance to work the wordplay in since we’d made it back to St. Ermin’s.
Blake sneezed on me.
***
As it happened, Blake fell quite sick. The concierge of St. Ermin’s sent for a private physician, an older French doctor with the unfortunate last name Moreau, who came regularly to check up on Blake’s condition, though his visits were more supportive than actually useful. He declared it to be pneumonia, likely contracted from another hotel guest while Blake was vulnerable with hypothermia.
I chose to blame Chansey the clown.
He was on my mind a great deal.
Given Dr. Moreau’s nationality, I took the opportunity to ask him if he knew anything about the village of La Horgne, where my sister Agnes lived. Moreau told me he had a sister there himself, but they had not been in communication in some months—he had heard from her husband just before Christmas but nothing since.
Whitnail tended Blake most of the time, though after a week, Blake declared he didn’t need an albino wetnurse and told Whitnail he could stop coming around. This was fortuitous because I needed Whitnail to accompany me while I performed menial tasks for Blake in preparation for another season for the Pavilions come May. It was looking, however, as if the city would suspend or least heavily restrict our setup, and we most certainly would not be allowed nighttime performances due to blackout conditions. Blake instructed me to make the rounds to the various hotels to let everyone know that the future was still uncertain.
“Say it nicely,” Blake told me, “but we all might be out of work for a bit longer.”
When Whitnail and I reached a hotel called the Savanna Rooms, where he had arranged for Nu, the Pavilions’ Giraffe Girl from Burma, to stay, we learned she had not returned to her room in six or seven days. The boy in a pith helmet at the reception desk told me in a conspiratorial voice that you always had to be careful letting rooms to “those people.”
“Don’t be a bigoted imperialist,” I said.
The boy blinked. “Sorry, but how can you be an imperialist about circus people?”
Whitnail put a hand on my shoulder and steered me away as I constructed a withering response. The boy looked up, noticed the giant albino for the first time, and busied himself in a back room where I couldn’t get to him.
“It was Chansey,” I said as we left the Savanna Rooms. Whitnail had our list of hotels still to visit. “I told you, Blake and I passed him that night during the ice storms. I bet he had her prisoner under his coat.”
“We are in Soho,” Whitnail said. “Chansey is nearer to us in Westminster. Why would he come to Soho to find her, kidnap her, and bring her back to Westminster on the night of an ice storm.”
He was not asking. Just the same, I ran through a solid dozen ways and means by which it could have happened—most of them turning on Nu being in Westminster for other reasons, eliminating the necessity for Chansy to travel to Soho to find her—but Whitnail was clearly ignoring my flight of fancy now.
When we got to the Westminster Palace Hotel, a middling no-frills functional hotel just a few blocks from St. Ermin’s, I had to concede that encountering Chansey could have been pure coincidence, given our proximity to one another. But when we learned that Chansey had never checked in last winter, had never been a guest at the Westminster Palace at all, Whitnail had to concede that there could be something to my suspicions.
***
Alone in my room that night, I touched one of the cards in my spellbook and brought forth Spring Heeled Jack.
I’d not done so since Blake had given me the card, and I wasn’t sure it would work, but our familial relationship passed the test, and he appeared at my bedside, as wicked-looking as I remembered.
“Spring Heeled Jack,” I said.
“One-eyed Jack,” he said.
I ground my teeth. “I want you to find out where a clown named Chansey is hiding. I can describe him so you—”
“Hold on, Dupin,” Jack said, sitting down in a chair across from me and pointing his spring-loaded shoes at me. “Do I look like a rooftop bobby to you?”
“He is bald with—”
“No.” Jack smiled at me. “Not only won’t I do it, but I can’t. You still have a lot to learn about the world, you little coxcomb.”
I didn’t know what the word meant, but I knew the tone. Irritated, I sent Jack back to his card.
***
With the Pavilions stalled, the spring and summer weeks became a running series of wasted days and frustrating nights. Blake was even more agitated than I was by the inaction, and he often bemoaned the money he was spending keeping everyone on hiatus in hopes that the Ministry of Home Security would soften their policies.
“Maybe we’ll just go on without permission,” he muttered on more than one occasion.
The more he hung around the St. Ermin’s Hotel, the more aggravated he became. He paced the lobby, which I knew was irritating the front desk staff. I suggested once that he might resume the types of dalliances he’d pursued when I first joined the Pavilions. His confused reaction told me he didn’t know what I was talking about. I elected to avoid mentioning the hedonistic specifics.
In early May, Winston Churchill became prime minister, and Germany invaded France. The tension around London was so physical that Blake, ever the opportunist, noted that we could make a fortune just easing people’s fears for a day. Everywhere you went, the only conversations were about the war on the continent, what would happen if France lost, and what we should be doing for the Home Guard and the Air Raid Precautions. Blake volunteered for the ARP, though I didn’t think it was helping his agitation at all.
I wrote home to Mam, as I often did during the off-season and now that we were not hosting the Pavilions over the summer, and before I had heard back from her, Dr. Moreau, the French physician who had been treating Blake during his bout with pneumonia, accosted me on Caxton Street in front of the hotel.
“La Horgne, it fell to the Germans,” he said in a quiet voice.
I said, “Your sister?”
“I do not know.” He touched my sleeve with his fingertips. “I do not know about your sister, either. Je suis désolé.”
We wept together in silence.
When my mother wrote back, she said she had heard nothing from Agnes in La Horgne or my brother, somewhere unknown in France. But by then, news of the evacuation at Dunkirk had reached us in London. And though the news was terrible—a retreat from the Germans across the English Channel on any ship possible—I briefly had hope that my brother Elijah would be part of that evacuation.
A week later, I heard that the 51st Highland Infantry Division, Elijah’s division of mostly Scots, had been defeated at a French place called St. Valery-en-Caux. They were supposed to evacuate like those at Dunkirk, but the weather was too bad and the Germans were too good. Ten thousand Scots and French soldiers were taken prisoner.
I didn’t know if I should wish Elijah a prisoner or dead.
I turned eighteen with no fanfare at all that June. I only realized I was older three days after it had passed.
That July, it seemed to rain most every day; if it didn’t rain, it threatened to. It was overcast and dark even in the early afternoon, and the somber misgivings that surrounded all of us felt as if a terrible ending was coming soon. People hurried from place to place with their eyes lowered and their voices muted. Conversations were the sounds of water draining in the background, gurgles and hollow echoes. The fear you would feel crossing an unknown room in the darkness, knowing there was broken glass somewhere under your bare feet, was the fear that filled every hour.
I experienced an unexpected stab of regret and inertia thinking about my abilities as a caster. I could see what many couldn’t, could find creatures great and small that were mythical and magical, could make their essence part of my own, and yet I was helpless to so much as find my siblings. Not stop the war, not save a life on its deathbed. Just find the ones I loved. For all the magic I could access or that I might access one day, none of it could change the way the world was turning blacker and blacker.
I told Whitnail my thoughts. “I’m going to leave the Pavilions. I have to go. Agnes and Elijah are behind enemy lines now. I have to use whatever caster skills I have to see if I can find them.”
He looked down at me as we stood together on a darkening corner as automobiles and omnibuses made their ways off the streets for the night. Pedestrians hurried along past shops that were pulling their shades and blacking their windows. I expected him to say I was being a wee fool, a stupid lad whose bravery was born from a silly set of cards of imaginary beasts. I would not have disputed his words.
But Whitnail was always a surprise to me. “You,” he said, “are the best of us.”
I hugged him so fiercely I didn’t know if I could let go. I missed Da’. I missed Mam. I missed Hugh the Magnetic Man. I missed the safety of the farm.
I knew I would miss Whitnail.
***
“Churchill himself approved it,” Blake said to me, so smugly that I was sure he was lying. “I’m setting us up for a massive debut in six weeks.”
I snorted skeptically. We were sharing tea in the Caxton Grill, the restaurant for the St. Ermin’s Hotel. There was no meat that day; rationing had been underway for months, so we stuffed ourselves with wholemeal bread. “Go boil your head. You don’t know the bloody prime minister.”
Blake stopped chewing, put down his teacup, tossed his napkin on the table, and stood up. He walked a few feet from the table and pointed at one wall. “On the other side is the bar, yes? Well, care to guess who talks shop with his own in the Caxton Bar? Why, that’s right—the British bloody Bulldog. And I just walked right up to him and asked permission to hold a show under the grand tent. And he granted it.”
He was so adamant that I almost believed him. But still. “Why would Churchill be hanging around some hotel bar? It’s daft, isn’t it?”
Blake sat down across from me again, Errol Flynn, and folded his napkin like a gentleman. “Because he’s working with MI6, and they’re working out of St. Ermin’s. They even call it the ‘spy hotel.’ He’s here all the time. So, there you go.”
I stared at him, knocked for six but slowly coming to accept that he was telling the truth.
“Six weeks,” he said, back to the bread. “We need another tent, twice as big as the one we’ve always used. We need the laborers, but don’t reach out to any of the barkers or the vendors or the performers. If this goes well, we’ll sort them out after.”
I became more ecstatic, the more he spoke. I didn’t tell him that I planned to go to France as soon as I had the money, so when he told me he’d pay me handsomely for this first performance of the year, I nodded eagerly.
It simply didn’t cross my mind that yes, he had met Churchill, but the prime minister had told him no, absolutely not. Nor did I conceive then that Blake’s man-about-town ways—which he began again the night after our discussion and continued throughout August—had never been about streetwalkers or gambling or alcohol. His wanderings through hamlets and villages and towns and cities had been to put the word out everywhere he could: Blake the Black is performing again. Do you hear, Caster Enigma Coalition?
Come and get me.
They were coming again, and Blake was sending them free tickets.
***
It was a cool Saturday afternoon the day of the final show for the Bòcan Pavilions. It was drizzling when the people began to show up around 4:00 for the 4:30 performance. I didn’t see a single purple beret among the ticketholders, which I found reassuring.
The tent we had procured was massive and had taken a full day to erect. We had set up in Victoria Park, where a civil defense group trained while we drove stakes and raised the canvas walls and wired the ceiling. No one said anything to us as we strung the lights and brought in the generators—proof that if you look like you belong, people will assume you do.
I’d not seen Blake most of the day, but as I was taking tickets, I assumed he was nearby, waiting to take the stage. So, when Whitnail approached me at the grand tent’s entrance, the look on his face told me something terrible had happened. A wave of dizziness and nausea made my one eye lose its focus; the steel-grey day went blurry on me as Whitnail leaned forward to breathe into my ear from behind.
“I do not find Blake backstage,” he said, “and I do not know anyone else to tell. I do not know what we are to do.”
My mouth was dry. “What is it?”
He told me.
He pointed to the back of the grand tent where we parked the lorries to load and unload them. I held onto his arm to stay upright for a moment, ignoring the impatience of the people waiting to have their tickets torn so they could enter the tent. When I was sure I wasn’t going to faint, I asked him to take over for me, and I rushed the length of the grand tent and into the shadows of our makeshift car park.
In the fifth lorry, Whitnail had said.
We’d done a slapdash job of painting over the old logo on the roller-shutter rear door—the words “J. Samuel & Son” were barely discernible beneath a bold circus orange. It was already cracked open, so I climbed up, my heart hurting in my throat, and threw the door up.
There was blood, just a little. There were deep but thin angry red marks around her throat where she had been strangled. And there was Nellie, the Horse Girl.
I knew I didn’t need to, but I put my hand on her chest to see if I could feel her heart beating. I didn’t—but she was still warm to the touch. Her eyes were open in surprise. I realized her heart was not just stopped, but it was missing: the heart pendant she had worn around her neck was missing.
I came to my feet, spinning, as Chansey climbed up into the cavernous back of the lorry with me. His eyes were feral, his fang-filled grin maniacal and eager. He had blood on his lips—I didn’t know whose it was. He reached up and pulled the door down behind him. As the light ran away, I could see he had painted his face, and he had a brass ring around his neck that I’d not seen on him before—but that I had seen around the throat of Nu, the Giraffe Girl, who had vanished months earlier. I assumed he had Nellie’s heart pendant on him as well. In the complete blackness, I heard Chansey’s feet shuffle as if he were pawing the floor like a bull preparing to charge.
“Bye bye, boy,” he whispered. His words echoed off the metal sides of the lorry. “I’ll keep that eyepatch. I’ll see death just the way you will.”
He made a thumping sound, as if he’d fallen, and I smothered a cry of surprise in my throat. I fumbled for my satchel.
A thunder of motion rushed toward me in the dark with a surreal thock thock thock noise that I had heard before.
I needed both hands, so I had to let him come. I knew where he was—he was low, walking on his arse, his feet behind his ears to kick at me while his white gloves locked around my wrists and pulled my face down to his so he could bury his sharpened teeth into my throat or my cheek or my only eye. I tried to remember which card she was as I desperately slammed my hand down between the pages of my spellbook and called her name.
“WHAT?” she raged as she appeared in an unnatural light between me and the clown just feet in front of me, his legs and arms stretched out toward me like a mutated spider. His eyes were black in Bloody Mary’s aura.
“Kill him,” I said aloud.
“WHEEEEE!” Mary shrieked and lunged at Chansey.
He was far faster than I would have ever given him credit for. He unfolded himself like a department store shirt being shaken out, and he did a backflip on his hands to put him at the lorry’s door. As he wrenched it open, Mary hurtled into him. Her fingernails whirled, slashing like fistfuls of razors, and thin lines appeared in Chansey’s red clown vest. A brighter red began to bubble out of those tracks as Chansey fell out of the lorry and onto the ground outside. Nearby, someone outside cried out. Chansey fled out of my sight.
I put my hand over Bloody Mary’s card, and she was gone again, though not before glaring at me with unmitigated scorn. I stumbled to the edge of the lorry and leaned out, expecting Chansey might be waiting to ambush me, but he had vanished as thoroughly as Mary.
I stood for a moment, my chin touching my chest, my breath ragged. Then I turned, knelt, and closed Nellie the Horse Girl’s eyes so she wouldn’t have to see this terrible, untrustworthy world anymore.
***
There was no line at the grand tent’s entrance now. Whitnail was still standing there, though, waiting for me to return. I leaned into him, and he propped me up.
“You look like an albino, too,” he said. “Maybe we are kin.”
“It was Chansey,” I said. “He got away. When the show’s done, we have to find him.”
Whitnail held the tent flap open for me, and we went inside for Blake the Black’s last performance.
***
The audience was still. An occasional cough, but no one spoke, and in a tent with over 400 people, it was unnerving. I searched the faces but did not see anyone familiar—yet I understood, after only a minute, that there were no children here.
“Are these them?” I asked Whitnail. We had taken our normal positions by the canvas wall nearest the entrance.
“Yes.”
I looked at the empty stage where Blake would soon stand to face the ones he’d been eager to confront. The red velvet curtains were already standing wide open. I said, “When they kill him, will you take me to France?”
“Yes.”
Blake clearly had no expectations of an introduction that night. Whitnail remained rooted where he was as Blake the Black, to the silent refusal of no applause, stepped out onto the stage beneath the trio of lanterns the stagehands had raised to create his spotlight. He was dressed in his tuxedo and vest, but the flourish was absent. His hair was unkempt, the fake whiteness of his teeth missing. He did carry his spellbook, however, and it was already turned open to whatever page he sought.
He said nothing to the audience, and they said nothing to him.
“Is my mother here?” I whispered to Whitnail.
“I did not see her,” he answered, which was no answer at all.
Blake put his hand on his spellbook, and when he did, the audience moved as one. In a halted militaristic gesture, every person before the stage donned a purple beret. The movement was so smooth, I was reminded of the newsreels I’d seen in the picture houses of German soldiers, marching in unison, each step lifted high and in sync with every other soldier’s step. I caught my groan.
I could not take my eyes off of them as I said to Whitnail, “Do they have weapons?”
“Many.”
Blake seemed amused by the uniformity of the Caster Enigma Coalition’s membership. That Flynn grin—I saw it one last time. He said something too soft for anyone to hear, but I knew it was a call to his card. There was a flash of light, and Black Shuck, the feral red-eyed hound of East Anglia that was said to portend death, appeared before him on the stage. It growled at the front row, but no one retreated.
In every other performance, the audience applauded. For this one, they simply waited.
Now Blake gestured to someone in the wings, beckoning them out, but no one emerged. Acting embarrassed—I knew it was an act because Blake was never embarrassed—he stomped over to stage right and dragged someone out into the spotlight. It was Chansey.
“No,” Whitnail said beside me. My eyes darted back and forth between him and the stage.
Chansey’s vest was still wet with the wounds Bloody Mary had carved into him, and it ran across the once white ropes that crisscrossed his torso. It was the same way Blake had been pinned by the Thames Monster—Chansey’s arms were bound against his side by the multiple loops of rope around his chest and his stomach.
Chansey wailed, showing his serrated teeth, and a few people in the crowd stirred uncomfortably.
“Not again,” Whitnail said.
I couldn’t breathe. “What’s going to happen, Whitnail? What’s he going to do?”
There was no time for an answer. Black Shuck, who had always simply “stared” Chansey to “death” in past acts, turned and leapt for the clown, jaws snapping as it cleared the distance between them. Chansey’s terrified scream was drowned out in a strangle as the hound’s fangs found the soft flesh at the base of his throat. As dog and man slammed down onto the wooden stage as a single pile, the audience came to life. I had expected guns—pistols, revolvers, perhaps even machine guns. Instead, the purple berets revealed their spellbooks, rapidly opening them to predetermined pages where I assume they were prepared to call forth the most savage of their mapped cryptids.
Chansey made a gurgling noise, a death rattle, and Blake was suddenly in the depths of his spellbook again. Whitnail grabbed my hand.
“We must flee,” he said. “The sacrifice is done.”
“What does that mean?” I resisted his pull—I desperately wanted to be led away to somewhere safe, but whatever battle was about to be joined, I had to be sure my mother wasn’t in it. I was dragging him with me so I could look the length of rows as the audience of casters went for their cryptid weapons. I didn’t see her, but for a moment, I locked eyes with the woman I’d see a few times before, the one I recognized from years before. She wore the same specs she’d been wearing both then and when I tried to engage her to talk on the streets of Inverness. She glared at me with unabashed hatred now.
And then she died.
A legion of greenish-purple tentacles sprang into existence before Blake, firing out into the audience like a thousand arrows released at the same moment. They grew larger as they speared casters or tangled around their heads or pulled their feet out from under them. They knotted the casters together and intertwined with each other like snakes in a basket. One pierced the woman through a lens of her specs. The point of origin for the tentacles was expanding rapidly, growing massive under Blake’s silent command, and my skull suddenly felt as if my brain were pressed against the bone. I opened my mouth to scream, but Whitnail clamped his hand over my lips and pulled me away.
“It cannot tell you from them,” he hissed in my ear. “This is as it was when he sacrificed Arthur.”
I heard Arthur’s little voice again. I was pushed. From behind. I think it was my da’.
My mind could not process what Whitnail was telling me, but as the thing Blake was calling forth exploded into the grand tent’s ceiling, I recognized the pieces I could bear to even glance at as the horror I had seen in one of Blake’s cards on the first day I’d met him, the one he’d used to convince me I wanted to become a caster. Tentacles and bat wings, scales and demonic eyes that knew every secret about every soul it devoured. Including those of the storm kelpies Blake had turned it loose on. A rank wind began to fill the air of the tent, the kind you could taste as foul and spoiled. Casters were screaming for help and falling over one another, many of them hanging dead from the end of barbed tentacles that kept expanding inside their bodies.
“We’re going to die,” I said.
Whitnail pulled me toward the tent’s entrance again. “We must flee. This is the end of many things.”
A massive explosion shook the tent, knocking people off their feet, causing the stage lights and those that ringed the tent’s walls to flicker. Blake’s horror pressed in all directions, collapsing the canvas wall behind the stage to reveal the lorries parked behind it. The roof became an umbrella for the thing that grew into the sky, its dead eyes turning to take in the world that had just become more terrible with its arrival.
I heard the whistling shrieks of the bombs as they fell and obliterated our lorries. Metal exploded in all directions, but Blake was shielded by the demonic form he had chosen to do his killing. Its shape changed in patterns my mind refused to parse as a tentacle of an unfathomable size rose above it into the sky and, like an infant grasping for a mobile in its crib, snagged a bomber of the German Luftwaffe out of the air. It detonated like a firecracker in the tentacle’s grip, which simply let go and dropped the plane on the far side of Victoria Park.
Whitnail would wait no longer. He scooped me up under one arm even as I struggled to pull my spellbook from my satchel. If she could, Bloody Mary would shred Blake if I told her to.
Another bomb exploded in the park. Trees flew into the sky and crashed down near the tent. The lights were still on, inviting targets for the attacking German aircraft. Whitnail ran into the fading sun in the west, away from the tent, away from the decimation, away from the last act of Blake the Black. I caught one final glimpse of him, my uncle, my mentor, but it was partially obscured by the monstrosity he puppet mastered. I saw his face, and the tempest of rage in his eyes told me this was the end of things, just as Whitnail had said.
We escaped to a hill just a few kilometers away, where we were up high enough to see Blake’s horror continue to grow into the evening sky. From a distance, it was still gigantic beyond understanding. I could not believe Blake was still down there, battling the casters who had come to stop him from revealing their secrets, or so he’d told me. I could not believe there was still anyone alive besides him.
The German Blitz, as it came to be called, continued into the night, and Whitnail and I kept moving, desperate for shelter but not believing any was possible. We maintained our distance from Blake’s horror, but it was less than twenty minutes after we ascended the hill that it finally disappeared. A German fighter, a Messerschmitt, dove for its target, opening fire with its guns, and whether the German pilot was a good shot or one of the surviving casters from the audience landed a death blow, Blake’s nightmarish cryptid blinked out like the vilest light ever seen on earth.
“France,” Whitnail said. Not a word about Blake, the Pavilions, the Caster Enigma Coalition. Not a word about Arthur or Chansey or Nellie the Horse Girl. Just the one word I was willing to hear at that moment. France.
The bombs kept falling, terrifying the creatures in the park, who passed us as they also fled to the west, seeking safety. Squirrels, raccoons, a host of birds, even some deer raced ahead of us. We moved through a crowd of people as well, some caught up in the flow of pilgrims fleeing the end of days, others entranced to stare east and watch it unfold.
By dawn, it had all stopped, and I’d been barely shuffling along beside Whitnail as he steered us into a calm, seemingly deserted street. He led me into the lobby of a small hotel where no one was at the front desk. He helped himself to a key and pulled me along behind him to a basement room. When we entered, I fell onto one of the beds, my heart in agony, my mind momentarily unable to cope. I felt sleep preparing to smother me into forgetfulness.
I glanced over at Whitnail to thank him for keeping me alive overnight but stopped as he whispered to a small creature on the table beside the other bed. In the very thin light of the room’s only lamp, it vaguely resembled a duck, but I knew what it was.
“What is that?” I said, unable to find a tone of rejection.
“He was running with the animals so he would not be bombed.” Whitnail smiled, and I realized I’d not seen him smile in a very long time, not since Christmas of 1937, three years earlier. It was a vital comfort in that moment; I would not dare risk it.
“We’ll take him, then,” I said and rolled over to sleep.
We left for neutral Portugal two days later, and two weeks after that, we were in occupied France—Whitnail, me, and the snipe he decided to name Arthur. I did not protest.
