“Dear Clarissa started talking then, too. She’d given up the trapeze, and been fooling with tea leaves and Tarot cards instead. We thought she might open a fortune-telling booth. When the words started to come — the poetry — it dawned on us all that little Clarissa should start calling herself the Oracle.”
“From the Greek stories,” said Clarissa.
“It was a theme,” said Clayton. “The Cyclops didn’t speak much. But the words he did speak commanded respect. He seemed to speak the things in a man’s soul. The things that did not wish speaking. Perhaps — perhaps he did what Twillicker’s Texan host said he did: drank in the souls of men and women through his great eye, and spat up truth. For is it not true that the Cyclops were the sons of Gods?”
“The sea god Poseidon,” said James dryly.
“You mock,” said Clayton. “But you shouldn’t, because you’ve seen him.”
James couldn’t argue with that.
“The talk continued off and on,” said Clayton. “Sometimes it would be just a few words a day. Words we could understand. Words in strange tongues. All mixed up. It was a kind of parroting. After a time, the talk became incessant. He talked as the wranglers tore down his cage, roped his wrists and led him to his rail car. It went on even after he was chained in, we all boarded, and the train was underway. Talked and talked and talked through the night, louder even than the engine whistle sometimes — softer than a whisper in your ear at others. Far into the next night, and into the mountains — the giant’s voice lived in our skulls. That can be the only thing that drove Twillicker to do what he finally did.”
James shivered as the wind shifted over the circus shanty town. In the distance, he heard a rumbling sound of car engines. “And what,” he said, goose flesh rising on his arms, “did Mister Twillicker finally do?”
“Unbound him,” said Clayton. “They found Twillicker’s body near to the Cyclops’s car after the wreck. The giant killed him, we can only think — after Twillicker clicked the locks with the key we found on ’im. Perhaps the Cyclops told him something he could not ignore. Or perhaps—”
“—perhaps the temptation to take a look was too strong to resist,” said James quietly.
“Split up the middle was he, into Twillickers two,” said Clarissa helpfully. “One good, one wicked — and—”
She stopped. Rubbed her arms. Looked back to the road.
“What’s wrong, deary?” said Clayton.
“Wicked,” she said, very quietly, as the first black-draped truck crested the hill and stopped, to let its load of bat-bearing men out to the circus’s hobo town.
“We should run.”
“You are all trespassing. By the authority of the Chamblay Sheriff ’s Office and the owners of the North Brothers Lumber Company — on whose property you are squatting — I’m placing all of you under arrest.”
The speaker was a thick-set man with short bristly white hair and thick brown sideburns who stood on the hood of the second truck in. He wore a suit jacket and black wool pants, tucked into rubber boots that came up near his knee. He held a long double-barrelled shotgun propped against his hip. Maybe two dozen men carrying baseball bats and wearing dark suit jackets surrounded him.
“Don’t make trouble for yourselves.” The man lowered the megaphone and motioned down the slope with the barrel of his shotgun. His men started to move.
James was already ankle deep in the river. Clayton and Clarissa, and a crowd of others with the circus were with him.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Pinkertons,” said Clayton, huffing as he sloshed. “That one was here day before yesterday. There was trouble with a couple of the roustabouts.”
Pinkertons. James shuddered. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard of the detective agency; when he was a boy, a gang of Pinkerton men ran herd on the men who worked the lumber mill. His father’s most prominent scar, a puckered pink thing that extended along his forehead up past his hairline, dated back to the first time Pinkertons came to Chamblay.
Dating to a night…
When the bedsprings screamed, and…
…Jimmy tasted the sawdust in his mouth…
There was no doubt about it. James’s feelings about Pinkertons were… complicated.
The Pinkerton men moved through the camp like armed locusts. They knocked down tents and sent pots of hot water flying and splashing into cook-fires. Three of them descended on a dark-chinned roustabout and pummelled him to the ground. Two were studying James’s coupe, parked a dozen yards up-slope. Another two chased down a pair of dwarfs straggling behind the exodus to the creek, while five more waded into the waters after the fleeing mass of circus folk. At the top of the slope, their captain stuck a cigarette in his mouth as he watched it all unfold.
“Get away from my car!” shouted James.
“Christ,” said Clayton, a dozen steps ahead by now. “Hurry, boy. He’ll crack your skull! Run!”
James was about to turn and do just that, when the shadow passed briefly over their head.
The Pinkerton captain looked up. He dropped his cigarette, still unlit. The boulder crashed down in the middle of his truck — sending glass and metal flying through the air. The Pinkerton men who were following them turned and gaped at the sight.
Clarissa screamed then.
“Oh, Lord!” shouted Clayton, pointing at the opposite bank. James looked, and froze, creek water lapping icily at his ankles.
The Cyclops stood there, a bronzed giant in the sunlight. He raised an arm to shield himself against the flames, then waded into the creek and bent down and reached into the water.
James stood transfixed as the Cyclops’s muscles strained to yank a huge, river-rounded rock from the creek bed. Lids the size of window covers crinkled over his single eye and his sharp teeth bared in the sunlight as he hefted the rock to shoulder height. James swallowed and gasped as the beast straightened, the muscles rippled down his abdomen.
“What’re you staring at? Come on, boy!” Clayton yanked James’s arm and hauled him stumbling downstream. Behind them, there was a gout of water high as a geyser as the rock crashed in the path of the five detectives who’d followed them. James ran, as best he could, through the fast-moving shallows of the Chamblay Creek. He didn’t look back when the terrifying roar sounded out across the valley; kept moving when he heard the two gunshots, and the screaming. He finally stopped with the rest of them, when they reached a small rapids in the creek.
Clayton helped Clarissa onto a low, spray-soaked shelf of rock that split the creek. James hauled himself up, and for the first time looked back.
The circus camp was blocked now by a low rise of trees. A black plume of smoke rose above them and into the sky. There was another scream — distant and strangled — and then Clarissa pointed and cried out: “Look!”
A man was flying — his legs and arms wheeling as if for purchase on the air. He must have been a hundred feet up, before he started falling again. There came another roar. Clarissa covered her ears. Clayton shut his eyes against the tears. The others who were lucky enough to make it to the creek cowered in terror.
And as for James—
James Thorne found his hand creeping to the belt of his trousers. He pulled it away, and ran it through his hair.
“My God,” he said unconvincingly. “The horror.”
The camp was ruined when they returned, and the Cyclops was gone. But he’d left his mark. People were down everywhere: strong men and acrobats and clowns and roustabouts, and the hard men from the Pinkertons. Some must have been dead, because it smelled like barbecue. The beast had marked his exit with a gateway of smashed and broken trees. Clayton bent down onto his knees and clenched his good fist. Clarissa knelt beside him. The two of them wept softly.