James stepped back from them: surveyed the place. It was a terrifying mess. Was this what the undertaker Simmons had meant when he said the circus folk wouldn’t be here for long? Had he heard tell that the North Brothers had gone and hired Pinkertons to clear out the town? James felt a little sick: if he’d been more on the ball, he might have been able to muster a warning, rather than waste these people’s time telling him tales of the Cyclops.
The lame dwarf who’d kicked his car tire hobbled past, and pausing, glared up at him.
“Ain’t you the movie pirate?” he said.
“Captain Kip Blackwell,” said James. “That’s right.”
“Well why don’t you get your fat piratey arse moving and take care of that beast? Make ’im walk the fuckin’ plank! ’Bout time someone did.”
“I’m not a real pirate.” James held up his hands. “Look,” he said. “Not even a sword.”
The dwarf bent down over one of the fallen detectives. “Well, fuck my arse, if this ain’t your lucky day.” He stood up, holding a baseball bat nearly as long as he was tall. He handed it to James. “Now you’ve got a choice — you can use this one—” the dwarf pointed to the bat “—or this one!” and James yelled as the dwarf swatted his groin.
“Ha! Unless you want to save it for the Oracle bitch, who — hey!” The dwarf yelled, as Clayton grabbed him with his good arm and lifted him off his feet.
“That’s enough,” said Clayton.
“Wotun! C’mon! Fuck you! Put me down!” The dwarf’s feet pinwheeled in the air. James raised his eyebrows.
“Wotun?”
In one motion, Clayton set the dwarf on the ground and shrugged at James. “Not much of a strongman now, I’m afraid. We’re all put in our place. By that thing.”
James hefted the baseball bat. He looked to the crack in the woods the Cyclops had left behind him. Back at Clayton O’Connor, the former Wotun the Magnificent.
Clayton took off his bowler.
“You want company?” he said.
James shook his head. “No.”
“I can tell what you mean to do,” he said. “Are you certain you dare to?”
James felt himself smile a little. “You have no idea what I mean to do,” he said, and set off toward the edge of the trees — where the Cyclops had marked his path.
As he tromped through the woods, James thought about his last day on the set. The last scene he’d shot before they let him go. Two of the Devil Pirates had tossed him into the Sarcophagus of Serpents — where Captain Kip would spend the next episode, while Princess Rebecca and the rest of the Monkey’s crew contrived his rescue and James Thorne contrived to bury his old Dad.
“Jimmy!” Alice Shaw hurried to catch up to him, as he stalked away from the plywood Sarcophagus left over from last year’s King of the Mummies serial. He sighed and stopped.
“Alice,” he said.
She stopped in front of him, set her fists on the velvet britches that were Princess Rebecca’s single nod to disguise. “I just wanted — to offer my condolences.”
“Thank you.”
“Because we can all see how torn up you are. About your father’s death.”
James frowned. “Well, it’s been a long time—”
Alice stepped closer to him, took his hands in hers as though they were sharing an intimacy. In a way, they were. “You know, Jimmy,” she said, “you should really learn how to act.”
“Alice?”
“You’d fool more people.” Alice stepped back. “Why are you even bothering to go?”
James crossed his arms. “To bury him,” he said.
“Something you wish you’d done long ago?”
He sighed. “If you like, Alice.”
She wagged a finger at him. “I know what you are, Jimmy Thorne,” she said. “The only question is: what did your horrible old father do to you to make you this way?”
James wondered if he’d ever feel the proper things about his father’s death. He felt as though he were circling those things as he walked — getting closer to the feelings of grief and loss and everything else that went with facing a father’s death.
But the fact was, he wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking about the Cyclops. And he wasn’t thinking about how he’d kill him, either.
The path led him to the bank of the creek where it twisted around a cropping of rock and tree. With a trembling, he knew where he was:
The North Brothers Lumber Company’s sawmill.
The last time he’d seen it, the mill was up and running. The whine of the saw blade would cut across the valley as teams of horses hauled giant logs up the round-stoned creek-bank to the mill’s black and hungry mouth. Inside, men would unhitch the logs and haul them further along with complicated block and tackle. Nick Thorne would be first among them, the muscles in his thick forearms dark as mahogany, straining at the weight of the spruce and pine logs cut down from the mountain slopes all around them.
Now the place was still as a tomb, its wooden walls and roof grey as stone.
James swallowed. His hand was shaking as he set the baseball bat down in the pine-needles beside him, and set out across the creek shallows. The mill’s great black doors were open. Inside was dark as the mouth of a cave.
The last time James had been inside the mill, the scent of pinesap was overpowering. Pinesap and machine oil and a bit of fear sweat.
Now, it smelled like a slaughterhouse.
At first, James was afraid the Cyclops had brought humans here — some of those folk Mr. Simmons had said had gone missing. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that wasn’t so. The smell was from something else. Animal carcasses hung from chains wrapped around the rafters. He first passed a couple of shapes like big cats, their skins torn off as they hung maw-down to the sawdust-covered ground; something that might have been a boy, but James gathered to be a monkey carcass, hanging by a single, hand-shaped foot; and, what was left of the elephant. The bloody trunk brushed James’s shoulder as he passed underneath and a cathedral of ribs hung over his head. A cloud of flies that had been feeding there followed James for just a few steps then abandoned him as he left the Cyclops’s larder, and moved into the next chamber of the mill.
James stepped around a thick post. Looked down, where the floor of the sawmill sloped from wood down to dirt. Light leaked in through the warping barn-board of the mill’s wall — reflected off a pool of oily water that had collected at its base. The Cyclops crouched by that pool — poking with an extended finger at a dark shape in the water.
The Cyclops rumbled something indecipherable, in a deep and lazy voice. Mottled sunlight from the pond flickered across the giant’s flesh.
The Cyclops stood high enough to brush rafters, while at his feet, the shape rolled and sank beneath the water.
The Cyclops’s nostrils flared and he made a bellows-like huffing sound as he sniffed. He turned to face James.
In two great steps, the Cyclops had closed the distance between them. He leaned down, so that his eye — big as James’s head — was just a few feet off.
James gasped. This close, the Cyclops’s eye was fantastical. Colours shifted across the broad surface of its iris like oil across a sunlit pool. As for the dark in its middle, that grew and shrank as the creature focussed on James—
— the darkness was hungry.
The Cyclops reached around with both hands, and tucked them under James’s arms. He lifted him like he was a small child. The Cyclops muttered ancient words as he turned James from side to side — studying him like he was a doll.
James kicked his feet back and forth in the air beneath him. He looked down: his toes were at least a dozen feet from the floor. He could barely breathe, the creature was holding him so tightly. He stared into the Cyclops’s great eye, and the Cyclops stared back.