When the lights came on, Kathryn was struggling to keep upright while removing the noose from around her wrist.
I felt Roxanne’s arms tighten around my neck.
Evan hopped down to help her, working on undoing the knot.
One of the silent clowns jumped from the window. The other end of the rope was wound around her arm.
I hurried to close the distance, but there were no handholds in the brick. I was forced to backtrack, paying for rushing with a loss of time.
The rope went taut. It was connected to something in the clown’s room, which made the falling clown a counterweight. It went down, and Kathy’s arm was hauled up. She lost her footing, and was forced to catch at the top of a windowsill with the elbow of her free arm. When the initial momentum was gone, she dropped again, and caught herself again, legs dangling for a few seconds before she found the previous footholds once more.
She weighed more than the clown did. That meant she wasn’t pulled up endlessly. She was, however, suspended in place.
Evan continued working on the knot, and I continued heading over to her location.
A peek backward showed that the man with the ill-fitting suit was still in the window, staring.
A peek downward indicated that the clown was fumbling around its person.
Drawing a knife, it clamped the knife in its teeth. It began walking up the side of the building, reeling itself in as it went. Towards Kathryn.
Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten…
The knot came undone.
The clown fell about ten feet before its counterpart caught the rope, stalling its fall.
Faster, I thought.
We were equidistant from Kathy now, but I was burdened, and the clown acrobat had clearly done this before. Her face was determined, though her eyes were literally empty – there were only black spaces rimmed with red where the eyelids had been cut out. She had a light smile on her over-painted face.
“Roxanne, if I leave you behind,” I said, “I’ll be able-”
“No,” Kathryn said. Her voice was strained.
“You’ll-”
“My arm is dislocated,” she said. “There’s no point. There’s nothing you can do for me.”
Ah.
“Focus on Roxanne,” she said, “And when you’re done getting her to safety, go to fucking hell. Bringing us here?”
I didn’t have a response.
Hooking one arm inside a windowsill for leverage, Kathryn stuck out one foot in the direction of the taut rope. She wound the rope around her leg, and then swung it.
The clown was forced to dance to the right as her rope moved.
Kathryn did the same thing in the other direction.
The clown moved like a pendulum, back and forth. Its forward progress had slowed.
Kathryn met my eyes.
I edged downward, aiming for the rope.
If I could get between them… I did have the Hyena.
The clown danced left, then danced a bit right, and clawed her way a few feet higher up the rope, until she was fifteen feet below Kathryn.
Another dance to the left, playing along with the momentum, within two feet of me. A dance to the right-
A window shattered. A large hand seized the clown by the throat.
The rope fell loose, still swinging as the clown girl let go.
The clown’s arms went limp at her sides as the hand continued to squeeze.
The hand let go, and the clown dropped. Tumbling down much as the debris had.
I passed under Kathryn, then climbed up, to give a wide berth to the window the hand had reached from.
The lights went out, then came back on again.
Something dropped. It might have been a sink, or part of a toilet. But Evan was in flight, and gave Kathy a push. She swayed, and was forced to catch at antoher handhold with her sole good hand, in order to stop from falling. The chunk of porcelain disappeared into the void below us.
“Don’t,” Kathryn said.
“I just saved your life!”
“Save it better!” she snapped.
She was panting, and I could see the shine of sweat on her brow, despite the fact that it was cold enough for our breath to fog up.
She looked up, wary for more ‘slapstick’ falling objects, and then edged along to another spot, finding another handhold.
“Kathy,” Roxanne said.
“Get going,” Kathryn said.
“But-”
“Get going, you little idiot!”
Roxanne was the one being told to go, but I was the one doing the work.
I continued following the others.
Kathryn, in turn, followed me. With only one arm that functioned at all, she had to be doubly sure of footholds, and sometimes there was only one, one place to put her foot down while she lunged for the next surface to grab, with swaying, flickering, and misleading maps of light and shadow.
She followed the route I forged, and remained silent as I mentioned the various handholds and footholds, what was good, what to watch out for. No breath for a thank-you.
■
Rose let the book drop onto the coffee table. She stood there, staring down at it, another two books stuck under one arm.
Her expression was grim.
“What happened?” Ty asked.
“One second,” Rose said. She scrawled a symbol on the coffee table in chalk, looked around, then circled it. “Need to make sure we have privacy.”
“What’s going on?” Evan asked, flying closer.
“The benefits of doing research,” Rose commented. “I found him.”
“Him?”
“Our recent visitor,” Rose said. “Blake.”
“Oh,” Ty said. “Shit.”
“Shit indeed,” Rose said.
“He’s in the books?” Tiff asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Is he for real?” Alexis asked.
“He thinks he’s telling the truth. For the most part, he is,” Rose said.
“Then that’s… not a bad thing, right?” Tiff said, a bit of cheer in her voice.
Alexis picked up the dropped book. She turned it over, then opened it.
Evan hopped up, cocking his head as he read over Alexis’ shoulder.
“No title?” Ty asked.
“It’s not a text,” Rose said. “It’s a diary.”
“Oh. Your grandmothers.”
“There’s a lot to be said for what gets left out,” Rose said.
“Left out?” Evan asked.
“In the diary, she talks about binding the Barber. I was doing some fact checking, so I could be sure there were no surprises with the dead man’s switch, and I noticed the discrepancy.“
“What is it?” Alexis asked.
“A power the Barber has. Blake is a vestige. It’s a question of how it was made. And why. The Barber is a demon of ruin. It ruins by way of reflections.”
“Reflections?” Evan asked.
“Cut right down the middle. Or, more likely, cut out a quarter. Let them get filled in and shored up as vestiges are prone to do. One gets the friends. One gets memories of school. Another gets the ability to study. Another gets the ability to fight. Trauma to one, repressed memories to another, and all down the line. Where there’s overlap, there’s enough memories to spare, or the spirits are filling it in. Things get exaggerated in vacuum, expanding to fill the empty spaces.”