The Hangman's Revolution (3 page)

The director’s hands are red!
Chevie saw. Red with Jax blood.

“Farley the tattooist!” he roared.

Roared? Really?
said blasphemous Chevie.
That’s more like a bleat.

“Shut up!” said real-world Chevie. “Just shut up.”

Gunn fixed her with his blazing eyes. “Shut up? You would…Do you know who I am?”

“Hobbit!” shouted Chevie. “Hobbit…Hobbit…HOBBIT!”

The Thundercats moved, each grabbing one of Chevie’s shoulders.

I have so had enough of these guys,
thought Traitor Chevie, the silent killer, the betrayer.

If the Thundercats had been expecting resistance, they would have fared better; but Cadet Chevron Savano had only proven to be a middling combatant at best. And, in any event, the particular moves she used now had never been taught in the academy.

Chevie took Witmeyer first, spinning under the Thundercat’s outstretched arm and jabbing her kidney with four straight fingers. Continuing the pirouette, Chevie bent Vallicose’s knee with a powerful kick, then turned back to Witmeyer, who seemed bemused to be in intense pain. Chevie grabbed the warrior nun’s splashback visor and yanked it downward until their faces were level.

“Hi,” said Chevie, in a tone that was somehow more shocking than the assault, then she punched Witmeyer in the nose. Chevie could never put the Thundercat down with force alone, but pain was distracting Witmeyer, which gave Chevie a chance to snag her weapon and cover Vallicose as the warrior nun reached for the buzz baton on her hip.

“Leave it, Miley,” Chevie ordered, flicking off the pistol’s safety. Then she nodded to Vallicose. “You too, Gaga.”

Inside, Cadet Chevie was wailing in terror.

What?

Did the Traitor teach me to fight?

How else could I have attacked Thundercats?

The Traitor has damned me to hell.

Miley?

Gaga?

Of course the
most
dangerous person in the room had been forgotten, as her brain erroneously assigned him the role of
least
dangerous person in the room. This had been the secret of his success in France. Director Gunn scrabbled onto the desk, hefted his tablet computer, and bashed Chevie across the skull.

Cadet Savano toppled in angular sections, and as unconsciousness drew its slow curtains across her senses, the last thing she heard was Gunn’s sarcastic voice.

“My most feared Thundercats laid low by a helpless girl. Perhaps you two are not as formidable as you think, eh, Moley and Googoo?”

Ha,
thought Traitor Chevie.
Moley and Googoo? Hobbit be stoopid.

Then both Chevies were lost in the dark.

A guy walks into a bar and says to the barman: “Gimme one whiskey for myself and ten billion for all my possible alternate selves.”

—Professor Charles Smart

O
RIENT
T
HEATRE
,
H
OLBORN
,
L
ONDON
,
1899

N
ow our story migrates, following the curve of Professor Smart’s wormhole, emerging in the Victorian Era, where three million souls fuss and sprawl on the banks of the Thames, Fleet, and Lea. Where the sky is black with Machine Age pollution that would choke a Pompeii donkey. Where life is cheap and death is gratis. And if this prose seems overly soused in bleakness, let me remind you that we have not even touched on the great slums, where rendered fat is considered a culinary delicacy and the chief distraction for the legions of red-knuckled, soot-faced orphans is a brisk game of rat-hunt.

But we will not tarry in these quagmires of deprivation, for our tale entices us elsewhere. We follow the riffle of crow tail feathers across the patchwork rooftops of Soho and Mayfair toward Holborn, dipping through the majestic spans of its viaduct and hovering above a chalked sidewalk that proclaims in footstep-smudged capital letters that the grand reopening of the Orient Theatre takes place on this very day. In truth, the phrase
grand reopening
seems a trifle hyperbolic given the dilapidated state of the building beyond, but exaggerated claims are the essence of theater, are they not? The public demands embellishment. Superlatives only, if you please. Sopranos are
incomparable
. Comic turns are invariably
sidesplitting
(only clowns can offer mutilation as an endorsement), and magicians are occasionally
magnificent
, often
incredible
, and without exception
great.

The Orient Theatre’s resident illusionist would consider himself currently
great
, though in truth he is often
astonishing
and on occasion even
amazing
. Indeed, he once idly toyed with the professional moniker the Astonishing Amazini before settling on the more modest title: the Great Savano.

Perhaps the name bongs a gong?

The Great Savano, known as Riley to his handful of friends, lay napping on that afternoon in the steel bathtub that had served as his bed for the past weeks. About six months ago he had inherited the Orient Theatre and the various caches of gold sovereigns that were hidden around or buried under the building. It may seem a lavish bequest for a mere magician’s assistant, but the boy had earned it a hundred times over in his fourteen years. Each gas jet in the footlights had cost him a punch around the earhole; every seat represented a night spent shivering in a locked cellar. For the curtains he had paid with ingots of servitude, while the proscenium arch had been bought with the hours he had spent suspended on a painter’s scaffold, squinting as he traced the curls of its scrolls with a gilt-dipped brush. He had, essentially, signed the theater’s papers with his own blood, while his sweat and tears had served as payment for the main stash of glittering sovereigns beneath the conductor’s podium.

Even now, as his wiry frame folded itself into the tub, swathed with waves of his fox-fur magician’s cloak, boot heels clanging on the steel vessel, Riley paid in dark dreams for his ownership of the Orient. His old master, Albert Garrick, haunted him, dripping threats into his ear. He never showed his face, mind you; he just whispered ghastly terrorizations. How he would punish Riley, how he was not perished but merely adrift in Professor Smart’s damned tunnel, how he would haul himself from the ethereal nothingness and wreak bloody vengeance.

I have time to plan my escape, Riley, my boy. Time is all I have.

Garrick was the devil, thought Riley, as he thrashed and pulled for the surface. And the devil can never be banished so long as one soul fears him.

I fear him, Lord knows I do.

It was not the devil who awaited him in the land of queen and men; it was Bob Winkle, resplendent in his new travel suit.

Bob Winkle, the young grifter whom Riley had rescued from a life of crime in the Old Nichol and set up with a bunk in the Orient. Bob the Beak, as he was known by some, because he had shown quite a knack for winkling information from reluctant sources.

“Yer going to bash a hole in that tub with all the jiggling,” was Bob Winkle’s comment now. “Kicking like a dangler, you are.”

Riley granted himself a moment before engaging. A breath or two to exhale the shade of Garrick and anchor himself in the wide-awake world.

“You plump out that rig well, Bob,” he said at last. And it was the truth. Bob cut a fine figure in his newly delivered suit: a jacket of orange tweed with brass glinting on cuffs and waistcoat, legs stuffed into the vases of high boots.

“I resembles a circus monkey,” said Bob equably. In Bob’s opinion, a circus monkey was a few steps up the ladder from a tenement snakesman on the greasy pole to Newgate Prison.

Riley’s hands emerged from folds of fur, and he curled his fingers around the tub’s rim. “I’ve seen a monkey, Bob. Your mug ain’t half so appealing.”

A josh between young men. Nothing extraordinary on the face of it. No more out of place than a sailor in a gin joint, but for Riley casual jokiness had a newborn quality. His mind was beginning to slough off the tight membrane of Garrick’s tyranny, just as Bob had shed his scraps of mortified clothing, his archaeological layers of compacted dirt, and the unhealthy ocher hue that had pasted him since birth. In truth, with some mileage between him and the shadow of Old Nichol, Bob Winkle was flourishing. He had sprouted several inches in the half year since his salvation, and his hair had revealed itself to be wheat yellow. Riley’s old frame, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to lengthen, but at least his humor was brightening somewhat—while he was awake, at least.

Bob lent his governor a helping hand. “You don’t have to sneak a kip in the tub, boss. We has a bed, you know.”

“A specter wouldn’t fit sideways on that mattress,” said Riley. “I’ll hang on to my bath, if you don’t mind. You’re not exactly wearing a hole in it.”

Bob rapped the tub. “I ain’t a mackerel, boss. And dirt seals the pores, keeps sickness out of a body.”

“And I ain’t sneaking a kip. I was up all night rigging the theater, as you know. That was a well-earned snooze.”

There were more comfortable places to grab some sleep, Riley knew, but the FBI had stashed him in a tub when Garrick was nipping on his coattails in the future, and he had survived that day, so even though the tub itself had little to do with that undeadness, he clung to it as a symbol.

Sleep in a tub,

Dodge the nub.

The rhyme would never be immortalized in the pages of the
Strand
magazine, but it comforted him nonetheless.

Bob poked Riley’s cloak with a finger, feeling the fine chain mail hidden in the lining. “I see you’ve taken to sporting this in the tub now? Surely that ain’t in the bather’s handbook.”

Riley flexed his legs, testing the cloak’s weight. “Onstage, the chain mail can turn aside a blade if one of the tricks goes awry, but I need to wear it easy as pie, like there’s not an ounce of strain on my legs. For that casualness I got to practice, Bob. And perhaps if you practiced your card handling with the same dedication, you’d be a sight further along the road to wearing your own cloak.”

Bob changed the subject sharpish. “I ’ad a cable from my source.”

The source was an investigator friend of Bob’s who had been dispatched to Brighton to sniff out Riley’s half brother, Tom, who had last been seen in that seaside town.

Riley looked up sharply. “And?”

“Nothing much,” said Bob.
“
’E’s poking around, but no joy so far. Waste of tuppence if you ask me. I’m going there now on the afternoon train.”

“But you’ll miss the grand reopening.”

“Can’t be helped, boss. You gots your budge; I’ve got mine.”

Riley nodded. Bob would flood the town with Old Nichol muck snipes. If anyone could sniff out hide or hair of a lost man, it was a hungry urchin from the tenements.

“How are the Trips? Is the show set?”

The Trips were Bob’s brothers, whom Riley had lodged with a decent widow woman who made sure they got grub and schooling. In their spare time they helped around the theater and ran errands.

“Still set, same as the last time you asked,” said Bob. “Mirrors, smoke bombs, flashers, blades, gramophone, curtains loaded. The sack is stuffed with rats, as we used to say back in the Nichol. I sent ’em out with playbills. Paper the whole town they will.”

“Excellent,” said Riley, taking the dozen or so steps to the small kitchen, where a hot roll and a mug of ale waited for him on the corner table. “I told you, Bob. I ain’t drinking no more before nightfall. Chevie would have my scalp.”

Bob shrugged, then helped himself to the ale. “Ah, yes, the Injun princess. It wouldn’t do to earn Chevron’s displeasure, ’er being in the future and all.”

Bob Winkle had taken active part in the final act of Riley’s struggle with Garrick and so was well-ish versed on the time-traveling shenanigans, though he only knew the half of it and only believed a quarter of that.

“Chevie’s gone, Riley,” said Bob, then emphasized his pronouncement with an ale belch. “Into the henceforth, or into a hole in the ground. You said it yerself, she’s likely to have earhole palpitations.”

“Smarthole mutations,” corrected Riley.

“Whichever, makes no odds. The point being that much as I would love to be reunited with Miss Chevie, seeing as she expressed a wish to walk out with me, it ain’t very likely. So live yer life according to yer own needs and not under the shadow of the future.”

This was quite the speech; Riley suspected that Bob Winkle missed Chevie almost as much as he did.

“There is nothing wrong with learning lessons, Bob, and adjusting yer behavior according-wise.”

Bob finished the beer. “Don’t I know it, boss? I ain’t attended a single rat fight since we moved here. Nor trawled the Belgravia sewers for posh drain droppings.”

“Ah, sewage-dipped posh droppings,” said Riley, deadpan. “The pearls of London town.”

Bob grinned, revealing a row of ivories that were remarkably white for a tenement graduate. “Hark at the comedian. P’raps we should give you a second spot on the playbill. How’s about Charlie Chuckles as a moniker?”

Riley returned his mate’s smile and bowed low. “Charles Chuckles, Esquire, at your service.”

They both laughed, and then Riley finished his roll, chewing slowly, enjoying the slow dissolve of fresh-baked dough, untainted by the fear of a sudden blow from Garrick.

I ain’t afraid, he thought. At this exact moment in the day, I ain’t afraid.

Riley felt as though his caged heart had been set free.

“Ahem,” said Bob. “When you has finished with the far-off looks and the simpleton smiling, we should be doing a final run-through before I skedaddles.”

Riley affected a stern gaze. “You are cognizant of the fact that I am your boss, Master Winkle?”

Bob huffed and descended the three wooden steps to the backstage area. “I ain’t even cognizant of the meaning of the word
cognizant
.” He paused at the foot of the steps. “And Bob Winkle has a rule: if he don’t understand it, then sod it.”

Not a bad rule, thought Riley; then he followed his friend into the belly of the theater.

Our
theater, he realized, and a jaunty spring introduced itself to his step. It was quite possible that Riley had never even formulated a sentence containing the word
jaunty
, not to mention contemplated becoming a living example of its definition.

Jaunty, thought Riley. Look at me, all jaunty and such. Jaunty Riley.

The stage was modest by the standards of London’s famous West End, barely fifteen feet from left to right, twenty if the wing nooks were added in; but Riley was proud of the old girl nonetheless, despite the fact that here he’d been punched, kicked, sliced, etherized, and on one occasion hung from a noose tied to a rafter.

He patted one of the proscenium arch’s pillars fondly. “That weren’t your fault, eh, girl? You were looking out for me.”

Still, the memory made Riley wince. “Tell me, Mr. Winkle, did I ever relate the story of how Garrick says to me one fine morning: ‘Riley,’ he says. ‘How’s about we re-create the hanging of Dick Turpin at York? And how’s about—
’
”

Bob groaned.
“
‘And how’s about you be Turpin?’ That worn-out tale. I heard that more times than I heard Great Tom a-bonging from St. Paul’s.”

This, Riley thought, would be the ideal time to check on Bob’s studies, while he was chock-f of his own hilariousness.

“Well then, Mr. Winkle, perhaps you would tell me something else? Seven somethings in fact.”

The cockiness gushed from Bob’s face, and had it been liquid, it would have filled his boots.

“Bob is busy,” he said. “Bob has duties.”