Read The Magpye: Circus for Free Online Page B

to need a bus. And fire engines."
    Magpye snapped the phone shut
before Owen White could answer.
    "Fire engines?" spluttered
Piotr, "You crazy fuck, you can't..."
    But Magpye was already walking away, his
steel - capped boots sloshing through the pool of
gasoline. He heard Piotr floundering behind him, trying to pull
himself out of the warehouse. Magpye reached into his coat and
pulled out one of Malcolm's pistols.
    "Trick shot time," he
whispered. "Yee-ha."
    He fired over his shoulder, the
bullet ricocheting off the metal stairway and hitting the floor,
kicking up sparks and instantly igniting the gasoline. He heard
Piotr screaming, but it was immediately distant. A wave of heat hit
him.
    Fire. Fire was memories.
     

FLAME
    Memories passed through the
mind of the Magpye like corpses down a flooded river. Against the
background torrent there were occasional shapes, sometimes faces,
twisted and turned and battered in the foaming flood of random
thoughts all mixed together. Somehow, he controlled it all, made
form from the chaos. One ghost at a time, one memory at a time, he,
they, had built the creature they called Magpye. It was neither a
him, nor an it. It was a they, and each fought for its place.
    The most singular voice was
Able. He had been there first, after all, and it was his body. But
he was as much a ghost as any of them, convinced that he had died
and been reborn as this thing. Before the fire, before the circus
was put to flame and all his friends and family had been killed,
Able had never heard or seen a ghost in his life. So this new Able,
this Able that could sense the dead and make them his through their
dead flesh and old blood, this had to be a new Able. A different
Able.
    And so the memories of the old
Able were lost in the flood of ghosts that raged and foamed and
threatened to burst the banks of his very mind in their desperate
hunt for revenge on those that had wronged them. Submerged beneath
so many others, old Able hardly spoke at all.
    But fire, fire always brought
him forward. Fire was how he had "died" and how the new Able had
been born. New Able, Magpye, and the ghosts. Too many people for
one head. Too many by far.
    Able had been a quiet kid.
Devoted to his mother and to his strange non-nuclear circus family,
he'd quietly learnt the various skills and trades that were the
cornerstones of circus life. There were other kids around, but none
of them worked as hard as Able for his keep. He could rig, and was
fearless of heights, could walk into the cage of any animal without
a care, and could set up for any act in the entire show. For every
acrobat, every clown, there was a guy like Able behind the scenes
somewhere. They kept the circus running and, when they needed to,
they kept the circus safe. Able could spot a pickpocket faster than
anyone and he'd turfed out his fair share. He wasn't a tough guy,
but he didn't need to be. Everyone knew that the circus took care
of its own, especially this circus.
    Unlike other circuses, this one
didn't travel. It hadn't moved in generations, so Able had been
told. Other circuses didn't, wouldn't, come to this city, and so
this one had stayed. But for the stories that he heard of the city
and everything he read in the newspapers or heard on the old TV
that his mother kept in her caravan, the city always seemed a
faraway place. Its poison never really reached the circus and so
they existed in a sort of malignant symbiosis. The circus and city,
each the estranged twin of the other, each the other's twisted
mirror image in some ways.
    The city people came here to
escape, Able thought. Who wouldn't want to come to place where
fantasy was the norm, where magic and excitement and danger were
guaranteed, all for the reasonable price of a ticket? Who wouldn't
want to come here when the place that they came from was synonymous
with fear, and nightmares, and corruption?
    The city needs the circus.
That's what they all believed. That's why they thought they were
safe, why no