The Palace of Laughter (16 page)

“That you, String?” said Henry nervously.

The boy's grin widened. “You look worried, Henry,” he said. “I'm not going to eat you.”

“I was just leavin' anyway,” said Henry. He looked around him. “Where's the rest of 'em?”

“My new brothers? The slower ones is in the police cells, waitin' to be reformed. The rest of them is waitin' in ambush down by the railway yards. I told them Halfheads was plannin' a raid along the railway line, but I knew you'd more likely
come this way, 'cause I knew you'd most likely be doin' the scoutin', Henry. And being an old Gnat, I reckoned you'd probably come sneakin' up the canal. Looks like I was right too.”

“What are you doing here then?” asked Miles.

String's eyes narrowed behind their mask, and his grin faded. “I'm here to help you get where you're goin', pez. You'd have no chance of crossin' this territory without me.”

“Why would you do that?” Miles asked suspiciously.

“Firstly, 'cause I don't like you,” said String. “And if you're dim enough to want to be swallowed up by that madhouse, I'm only too pleased to help. If you do get in, you'll never come out the same.”

Miles said nothing. He had heard that phrase too many times for his liking.

“And secondly,” continued String, “when you and your little creeper is safely tucked up in the giant's mouth, me an' Henry here are going back to Halfhead territory, and with you gone I'll get my rightful place back.”

“They'll never let you back in! Halfhead's gone, he's gone,” said Henry. “'Specially since you joined up with the Stinkers. Anyway, like I said, I was just leavin'.”

String leaned over and pulled back the fence. “Off you go then, Henry. The Gnats is just returning from the bullring. I can see a swarm of 'em coming up the canal, and they don't look very happy. Mustn't have been much of a game, eh?” He let the fence swing shut, and grinned. “Look, Henry, it's me, String. We've always been mates, you and me.” He glanced at Miles. “The pez, he cheated me, and he's not one of us. Never will be.”

Henry looked away, fidgeting with a frayed bootlace. String got to his feet, and the sly grin returned to his face. “I know Jook will see sense on this, 'specially when I tell him what I've learned about the Stinkers. They're not so careful with their secrets once you pretend to join up with 'em.

“Now we'll have to move fast if you want to get over to the Palace of Laughter before sunset. That's when the doors open, and they shut again soon as all the people are inside. If you miss 'em today, you won't get another chance till tomorrow at the earliest, and they don't have a show every day, so I'm told.”

Miles stood cautiously and looked around, half expecting to find himself surrounded by Stinkers. The park seemed deserted.

“Don't trust me, eh, pez?” said String. “Very smart.
You might've made a good Halfhead, eventually. But you're not thinking it through. If I let Stinkers get you, they'll just trade you back at Pigball—after a few nights on the sky wheel—and I'd be stuck in this freaky place with these blackfaced animals for good, wouldn't I?”

He turned and trotted across the short stretch of cracked concrete to the first row of stalls with their faded canvas awnings. He turned and beckoned to them, then he ducked under the loose canvas.

“What do you think?” said Miles.

“I don't know,” said Little. “He sings out of tune.”

“What about you, Henry?” said Miles. “You know him better. Can we trust him?”

Henry looked uncomfortable. Things were simple once you followed Halfhead rules, but this was outside their scope. The rules said that once a Halfhead was out, he should never be mentioned again, but they didn't say what to do if you met an ex-Halfhead in foreign territory who had pretended to join another gang but wanted to gain back the Halfhead place that he believed he was cheated out of in the first place. Besides, he had known String for a long time, and he'd only known Miles and Little for one day. And Little was a girl, but then, he liked her. And Miles was a Pigball hero.
His head spun with all the details. He looked nervously over his shoulder, as though he expected to see Gnats swarming through the hole in the fence.

“I don't know about singin',” he said finally, “but I don't see what choice we got. He's goin' the same way I suggested anyway. I think we should go with him.”

Miles looked across at the gap in the canvas through which String had disappeared. A stiff breeze was blowing dark purple clouds across the reddening sky, and the sun was close to the horizon. “Let's go then,” he said.

Henry laid a hand on his arm. “Wait,” he whispered. “Creeper goes first.”

Henry took off, running at a crouch. He was almost as soundless as Little. He did not make directly for the near end of the stalls, where String had disappeared, but ran swiftly along between the two rows until he had reached the third or fourth stall. Here he dropped to his knees, lifted the canvas and peered underneath. He poked his head inside, then quickly withdrew it, but not quickly enough. Several pairs of hands reached out from under the stall and grabbed the small boy. He just had time to shout “Ambush!” before a rag was stuffed into his mouth and he was dragged in under the canvas.

“Run!” said Miles. He took Little's hand and they ran along the alley between the stalls, straight toward the Stinker ambush. There was no point in going any other way. They were too close to the Palace of Laughter to turn back now, and behind them there were only Halfheads and Gnats. Dozens of Stinkers were wriggling out from under the stalls, their eyes white in their black masks and their putrid clubs in their hands. Miles leaped high over the crawling boys. “I've outrun them before,” he thought, “and I can do it again.” Little hung on to his hand, and though her wings were hidden away her feet barely touched the ground.

As he ran, Miles felt a sick feeling in his stomach at the thought of leaving Henry to his fate, perched in the sky for three days and drinking rusty water. He hoped that Henry had the story wrong, or that he would somehow manage to escape, but there was no more time to think of this now. As they neared the end of the stalls, a Stinker stepped out in front of them, and in the blur of movement Miles recognized String's sly leer. String was pointing at him with one hand, beckoning the converging Stinkers with the other. “That's him,” he shouted. “He's the one that brought the cops on us! I seen him—”

But that was as much as he got to say. Miles had
pulled the bone from his belt, and was holding it out in front of him as he ran full tilt toward String. “Here's your bone back,” he said, as it dawned on String's face that he had no intention of stopping. The gnarled end of the bone met its original owner square in the chest, and with a gasp of shock the winded boy went down, and Miles and Little leaped over him without breaking their stride.

The big wheel loomed directly over them now. They ran past its gigantic metal feet, fixed to the ground with bolts the size of a man's head. A swarm of painted boys clambered down the wheel with the practice of spiders in a web and dropped to the ground. The Palace of Laughter towered ahead of them, even bigger than Miles had imagined. For the first time he could see it clearly, and it was by far the strangest of all the strange things he had seen since the night the Circus Oscuro arrived in Larde.

Imagine an enormous clown, as tall as a mountain, wading through solid earth up to his chin. If you can picture such a thing at all, you may have some idea what the Palace of Laughter looked like. It was a large, domed hill, carved into the shape of a giant clown's head. His great stone eyes bulged from their sockets and his blue-lipped mouth was frozen in a huge laugh. Set into the open mouth was a pair of huge wooden
doors. The crown of the hill was bald and smooth, with a fringe of cedar trees sprouting like fuzzy green hair above the enormous carved ears. Around the hill lay a moat of greenish water, crossed by a drawbridge that looked like a huge wooden tongue.

They ran toward this strange hill, the boy and the angel, with no idea of how they would get in, indeed with no thought in their heads but to escape the top-knotted, club-wielding army that was hot on their heels. Just before the drawbridge stood an abandoned ticket booth. Miles headed for it instinctively, though it was hard to imagine what protection the dilapidated hut with its glassless windows could offer them.

As they reached the booth and began to scramble through the window, the sound of a great gong rang out from somewhere inside the hill. The enormous wooden doors swung inward, and a moment later a troupe of tumblers and stilt walkers emerged onto the drawbridge, blowing whistles and tooting horns. There were three tiny men in top hats, with whitened faces and each wearing a different-colored nose. They cartwheeled across the wooden tongue of the drawbridge without losing their hats, followed by two men on stilts so tall that they had to duck to avoid the stone teeth as they left the
giant mouth. After them came a number of other clowns, some banging drums and others waving firecrackers on sticks above their heads, and the whole motley procession marched along the cracked concrete path, past the booth in which Miles and Little crouched, toward the wrought-iron gates of the park entrance.

Miles peered back the way they had come, through a crack in the boards. The Stinkers had melted away at the approach of the crowd. It was as though the park, which a moment ago had been swarming with angry boys, was empty but for Miles and Little, and the strange parade that passed before them on its way to the gates of the fun park.

When they reached the gates the stilt walkers unlocked them and swung them open, and a crowd of people surged in from the street outside, led by none other than Baumella the giantess herself. The clowns and stilt walkers turned and fell in on either side, playing their chaotic music and cartwheeling along beside the people, who shuffled toward the great clown's head as though they had just had a long journey and an uncomfortable night, which indeed they had.

Miles and Little crouched, panting, on the floor of the empty booth, listening to the approach of
many feet and the babble of voices belonging to people who were more used to giving their own opinions than listening to other people's. They seemed to have plenty of complaints to get off their chests, and the cheerful tooting and banging of the clowns was having little effect on their mood. Miles could hear snatches of their conversations as the visitors passed close to their hiding place.

“They could have laid on a coach from the hotel, instead of making us walk.”

“Hotel, you call it? I'd have swam through thin porridge in me undies to get out of that flea pit, myself.”

“Maybe you would, Thacker, but I'd still have liked to be brung on a coach.”

“Get on! You've been sitting on your fat behind for the best part of two days. Last thing you need is to sit down some more.”

“It's all right for you. I'm a martyr to the gout, and me ankles is still ballooned up with sittin' in that stuffy train.”

Whatever Thacker had to say on the topic of gout was lost in the babble of voices as the crowd flowed past. The names were unfamiliar to Miles, but the voices might just as well have belonged to the citizens of his hometown. It seemed that half the
population of Iota or Shallowford or Frappe had spent two days and a night cheek by jowl, crawling through the countryside on a crowded train and shacked up in a cheap hotel on the promise of a night of laughter such as they had never seen before. It was a wonder they had not strangled one another.

“I tell you what,” said a woman's voice, its owner tottering past on a pair of high heels that were not made for walking on cracked concrete, or for swimming in thin porridge for that matter. “This show had better be as good as it's cracked up to be, or I'll be wanting my money back.”

“We didn't pay any money, dear. We won these tickets,” said her husband.

The woman snorted. “Us and half the town. It's not a very exclusive prize, is it?”

“Well, you can't expect it to be, if it ain't cost nothing.”

“
Didn't
cost nothing, William. You'll never amount to nothing if you don't learn to talk properly.”

And so it went on, a parade of grumbling people, tired from a journey that was twice as long as they had expected, and all on the promise of shining a little laughter on the grayness of their lives. The
drums and bugles and the sound of footsteps passed by, and Miles risked another look out the window. Baumella had reached the wooden doors, and stood to one side to usher the people in. They straggled onto the drawbridge behind her and began to crowd their way in through the doors.

Miles watched carefully the progress of the crowd. Their only chance would be to try and sneak in at the tail end, just before the doors closed again. They would have to time it just right. The lucky silver-ticket winners were ten deep on the wooden drawbridge, which was fortunately made of very stout oak planks. Many of them were fonder of beer and pastries and pies than was good for them, and had the bridge not been made of such sturdy stuff they might well have found themselves in the moat instead.

As it was, there was a good deal of elbowing and shoving, and those who had not reached their full quota of grumbling earlier were taking the opportunity to squeeze a few more complaints out while they pushed their way inside. It was a strange sight to be sure: an enormous clown's head with green cedar hair and mossy cheeks, its vast stone eyeballs staring out over the city as a long snake of people fed itself into its cavernous mouth. They reminded
Miles vaguely of a dream he had had, and not for the first time he wondered what he was doing, far from home and without his Tangerine, staring into the mouth of a nightmare with a four-hundred-year-old girl.