Concerning the Circus

   The air grew thick with the threat of rain. Still in the distance, but present nonetheless. Out in the field by Drywood Creek the carnival was a dark and silent creature, abandoned and slumbering beneath a moon moving in and out from clouds. Hoell stayed in the shadows, warily treading the perimeter of packed dust and sporadic gravel. Grey rain would later turn the field into a mess of pale clay mud, and then the carnival would be gone, but for now Hoell silently walked in the long shadows of mechanical giants, evil silhouette of midway booths, silent terrors advertised by weathered cutouts.
   The carnival spun out like a wheel, a spiral, turning slowly from the center, the Midway. Hoell kept moving in clockwise, watching a shifting moon alter the landscape. Rounding the front of an old flatbed pick-up he thought he saw one shadow melt away from the rest, but rather than recede with the moon's tide glide toward a tent rippling gently in the quiet breeze. The air picked up the must of the river, sharp fuel and animal spore, and the hint of decay lurking just on the end. They were still following him.
   He ducked around the creaking pendulum of a Ferris Wheel car, skeleton shifting faintly the metal gates, getting an empty animal pen between them. He thought he had dodged sight, but slipped around a hulking truck still reeking of diesel to get some distance.
   The moon vanished, obscuring the attraction in front of him, housed in a trailer with sides like a Murphy Bed. In the darkness a shadow moved beyond the Ferris Wheel. Hoell took his chances and slipped inside.

Concerning the Street Car

A flurry of cars rocked over the trestle, showering a curtain of coquelicot sparks and sibilant murmurs. Hoell stayed toward the center of the street, watchful eye on the flickering barrel fires. A bearded man coughed into gloved hands but ignored him. The one-eared dog at his feet looked at Hoell briefly, then lost interest. In a moment Hoell was mounting the saturnine stone steps up the embankment toward the parallel of Second Street, elevated train lumbering noisily past. In a brief flash of its light Hoell thought he saw something else beneath the trestle, an impression more than an image, a figure cut from the darkness of the night. The dog uttered a low growl. The man coughed again, almost apologetically. Hoell kept walking.

Concerning the Houngan

   The Houngan was tall, razor thin, skin the color of creamy coffee. Dirty braids drifted rhythmically across his face. His face was devoid of eyebrows, but marked with the ambiguous blue of ancient, faded tattoos. He was draped in the chair like dry cleaning, like an aquarium skeleton collapsed against his treasure chest. Timelessness, the musty air of centuries, hung about him, mingling with strange herbal and sweat notes.
   Hoell suddenly remembered the cigar, fished it from his jacket and held it out. Languidly the Houngan took it, lit it with an unseen flame and pulled a smoke. He exhaled with eyes to the heavens, a connoisseur waiting for the last moment to dispense an opinion. At last he spoke. "The winds are changing, Jazz Man. They are blowing from the south. From the past."
   Hoell nodded solemnly.
   "But they will not stay. They are here only to move out again. He seeks what is his, what holds him to this earth he created for himself."
   The cigar, which with Savannah smelled like a wet newspaper, filled the air with a sweet musty smell, a faint hint of anisette there and gone.
   "Whitechapel wants it too," Hoell put in. "He wants to give it himself."
   "Whitechapel thinks he can change the winds of his own fate. He thinks he can walk the same path as He." The Houngan flipped a tuft of ash to the floor. "He is wrong," he said matter-of-fact. "The time for bargaining has passed. Only the just shall survive."
   Hoell's hands found an unheard Jelly Roll Morton in the air, tapped it out like Morse Code. "What would you have me do?"
   The Houngan looked at him with scrutinizing black eyes. He reached into his jacket and pulled forth a card, flipped it around with a flourish and revealed the face to Hoell. A crude icon of a chess rook, the card obviously upside down. "You must go to Him. Bring what He desires. Out of the chaos of the storm the moon will shine."
   Hoell looked down at the object in his hand, trying to make up his mind. He sighed, and moved his shoulders back resolutely. "I don't know that I've a choice," he said, and slid the tin box into his coat. He tipped his hat to the Houngan and left the room.

Concerning the Trunk

    The Alligator Crawled over Center Street, skulking from the doors of one club to confront the battle drums and bagpipe trumpets of another. Blues fell like warm rain over South Avenue, steaming on the street, foaming with the alcohol, and drifting with cigarette trails over the Arrowhead Hotel. Less than a block away and marooned by the neon parallel of the district, the hotel occupied a neglected patch of heaving concrete street and alley, in earlier, better days a glamorous lodging now become derelict, graveyard tenement.
  Hoell could hear the jazz clubs like music from the next room, lingering as echoing ghosts in the cracks of dirty brick. There was no lock on the outer door; he let himself in, quietly ascending stairwells dark, wet and crowded with refuse to the fourth floor. The life and light of 42nd and South was just a glimmer of a memory here, replaced by a colicky baby's screams, raised voices of domestic arguments, and the nightly news turned up loud to drown the presence of reality.
   One room, 409, stood by itself at the end of a hall. It had been rented time interminable, but no one living there could remember the last time it saw traffic. Hoell paused before the door a moment, then unlocked it.
   The room was small, and long abandoned. Black mildewed walls peeling paper, bending like lily petals to the detritus and rotted carpet on the floor. A window was broken as by a baseball, letting in the weather and songbirds, the view of a dangerous fire-escape, and the thin refrain of Drunken Barrelhouse Blues. The furniture was the skeleton of a bed frame and a high-back chair, upholstery scavenged for nest lining spilling among the leaves and paper of dime novel pages carpeting the floor.
   Hoell shut the door behind him, moved to a small incision of a closet, where the winds of ages had blown drifts into the back wall. He nudged aside a pile of moldered blankets and the nest of a small animal with his foot, cleared a space in the carpet and newspaper remains to the floorboards while bugs scurried from the way. He pried loose a section of floor, revealing a bootleg space concealing a battered, rusted army trunk. Hoell hauled it to the floor, wrestled Savannah's key in the lock, releasing it with a crash that echoed in the room.
   Wading through a maelstrom of ancient clothing, yellow and brittle newsprint, photographs of long forgotten soldiers. Trinkets, memorandum, charms, and ark of lives unremembered. He brushed these to the side with reverent hands, digging until his fingers touched a blackened tin box the size of a book. He paused, fingers resting on the sides, as though willing himself to pull it out. Then he lifted it suddenly, like jerking a bandage, and closed the trunk. He set the tin on the chest and opened it.
   Midnight blue velvet, blotched and slightly moth-nibbled, folded like ripples of a dark ocean. Hoell pulled them back slowly, as though afraid of what was beneath. It was wasted effort. Nestled within, with a thin patina of dust, was a short handled straight razor, sizable nick missing from the blade. The metal was pitted, wood worn smooth and glossy. It was impossible to guess when it had last been used. Not in Hoell's lifetime. But nestled within the worn velvet guard was a small, sinister dollop, uneven and mottled.
   Hoell exhaled a deep breath, closed the tin, and turned to find the Houngan in the high-back chair.

Concerning the Ghost Boy

    He didn't get very far before the Ghost Boy found him. The old town was deserted by all but the occasional roaming cat, still, cold and stretched taut as though waiting for something to break. The dismal strains of someone turning Bye Bye Blackbird into a lament slunk along the stairwells with the sickly, rhythmic streetlamps, born out of the night. And then, suddenly he was there, materializing from the shadows. Hoell almost screamed. Keyes reached the palm out again. Hoell flinched, then swung.
  The right cross flew just shy of Keyes' face, the ghost bot languidly rolling his face from it. An arm shot out, grey fingers curling around Hoell's throat. Hoell struck to the stomach, felt his fist connect with all the response of punching a pillow. He tried to pull the arm off, Keyes' hand trying to rifle in his coat, Hoell trying to reach the revolver in his pocket even as purple swam in his vision. Then the pressure released and Hoell tumbled to the street. He heard the guttural roar of a bear, scrambled to his feet to see Savannah, face sclerotic with rage, gripping Keyes in a massive bear-hug. The ghost boy squealed like a wounded rabbit, thrashed impotently.
  "Go!" Savannah shouted. Hoell turned and fled, leaving falsetto shrieks bouncing off the empty canyon walls in pursuit.



. . . . to be continued. . . . .