The Magus swiveled in his recliner. As he turned to face Crecca, his wide smile, half white bone and half stainless steel, curdled the carny master’s blood.
“I want this to be a very special performance,” the Magus told him. “I want the entire crowd on its feet, cheering at the moment the lights go out and the music swells.”
Crecca knew the Magus could see in the dark. He had had some kind of microminiature infrared sensors built into his steel eyes. So as not to miss a thing. Even the Magnificent Crecca, a born chiller, a leader of other chillers, a man who had personally opened the nozzles on the poison-gas canisters more than once, couldn’t stand to watch the final agonies of so many. The times he had been forced to remain in the viewing box, to stand beside the laughing thing in the recliner, to wear a pair of predark, Soviet night-vision goggles, he had shut his eyes tight against the horror. Because of the goggles’ lenses, the Magus couldn’t see his lack of enthusiasm.
The carny master had often wondered about the source of the Magus’s horrendous appetites, which were as much a mystery as everything else about him. Did they spring from his being able to move back and forth through time? A consequence of some expanded, vengeful-godlike perspective he had acquired? Or were they the result of a progressive dementia brought on by the physical changes of decades of such travel? And then again, Crecca knew, it was possible that they had nothing whatsoever to do with time jumping. But rather, with the replacement of his various human parts with gear boxes and servo mechanisms. It was possible that as the Magus became less human physically, he became less human spiritually.
That the creature demanded the carny audience always received a rocking good show before they were chilled was a case in point.
Crecca knew there was no strategic need for this deception, this extra effort on the part of his crew. As soon as all the residents were seated, the tent entrance could have been sealed and the gas released. No pain, no strain. But because the Magus understood, and it seemed to the carny master, even fed off the dark, dark energy of human despair, he insisted that the exits remain open, even though the rousties not involved in the show were already systematically looting the ville; he insisted that the crowd be lifted up to the heights of joy before being dropped into the abyss.
Only at the grand finale, when the floodlights in the tent suddenly went out, when the canisters were opened, when the center ring performers made their hasty exits; only when Mozart’s Requiem began to boom at deafening volume from dozens of surrounding speakers, would the stunned audience realize it was all a trap.
And that there was no way out.
With glee, the Magus rubbed his palms together, his steel fingers clicking like castanets. “Oh, this is going to be good,” he said. “This is going to be very good.”
Chapter Twelve
Leeloo Bunny looked up at Dean, who sat close beside her, cross-legged on the ground. As the carny folk rushed around making last minute checks of their equipment, the boy seemed to be scanning everything and everyone with those intense eyes of his. She sensed a coiled tightness in him that she didn’t really understand and couldn’t put a name to. His mood under the circumstances seemed strange to her, though. For sure, it wasn’t the same wild excitement she felt in the big tent with the big show about to begin.
Dean caught her staring at him, and smiled.
Oh, my, she thought as her heart melted into a small, throbbing puddle in the center of her chest.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.
Leeloo felt a twinge of confusion. Since when was there any question that things were going to be fine?
Then the recorded overture started up. Through surround speakers, “Tah-Rah-Rah-Boom-Ti-Ay” blared forth. No one in the audience knew the long history of the song, nor did anyone recognize this particular version as belonging to the Grateful Dead.
The red-haired carny master jumped over the low bumper of the center ring and into the spotlight. Behind him trailed a naked baby stickie on a long chrome chain fastened to a choke collar.