Valknut: The Binding (28 page)

Pullin’ slivers from my hide.

Petey pulled slivers from my hide.

Ain’t nobody give us an easy ride.

Jungle Jim’s voice caught and held every hobo
in the clearing. They remembered Tin Can Petey as everyone had
known him—a soft-hearted little gnome who could make a feast out of
gristle and rotting potatoes.

The night fell dark with the devil’s own
lies.

I shivered from head to toe.

Petey—he said, “Hey, what’s takin’ so
long?

We still have a ways to go.”

Petey—he said, “We got a ways to go.”

Ain’t nobody gonna tell him no.

They saw themselves in Petey, not as the
colorful characters they pretended to be or the romantic figures
the public wished them to be. They saw their lives as dirty, hard,
and as bumpy as a ride on a rattler they could never get off. And
while they mourned for Petey, they also mourned for themselves.

I jumped on down to see what’s goin’ on,

Leavin’ Petey all alone.

A mistake, a blunder, a tragedy,

I can’t never, ever atone.

Petey—I’m sorry, I can’t never atone.

Ain’t nobody shoulda left you
alone
.

Loosened by Jungle Jim’s voice, shaken by
sorrow, the last of Fenrir’s controls fell away from the hobos’
minds. Each would leave this place to live his life as he chose,
acting for good or evil according to his nature.

Then something new entered Jim’s voice—a
wavering in his otherwise perfect tenor, or perhaps a wavering that
went deeper than that.

’
Cause when I got back to that dark
boxcar,

It was silent as a stone

Petey lay still, a knife stuck in his
head,

Done and been, no more to roam.

Petey took the westbound, no more to
roam.

Ain’t nobody gonna bring him home.

The last notes dwindled away. There was no
applause. The audience didn’t move, hardly breathed. Tears ran down
even the meanest of the faces.

Jungle Jim seemed to have forgotten where he
was. He stood by the fire, head bowed, his shoulders shaking with
grief.

Waiting, watching for his chance, Fenrir
slipped into Jungle Jim’s mind and found the wall had weakened
again, as though softened by tears. He pushed against the crumbling
barrier...

...and burst into the only human mind he had
never been able to reach.

If only he had known strong emotion would
lower the barriers in Tuttle’s mind. He would have started killing
the simple man’s friends months ago. He braced himself for a
struggle, believing that Tyr would be waiting for him. Fenrir hated
him nearly as much as One-Eye, for if the great betrayal had been
One-Eye’s plan, Tyr had used their friendship to betray him.

But when he entered the hobo clown’s mind, he
found only the ordinary thoughts and memories of Jim Tuttle.

Incredulous, Fenrir ransacked Tuttle’s mind.
There had to be another entity hidden somewhere in this
confused clutter. It galled him to think that a mere human had been
responsible for hindering his machinations. Yet he found nothing.
Jungle Jim was alone in his head. Worse still, the fool was as
simple as he seemed. He had no idea what he was doing to Fenrir’s
plans.

Jungle Jim had done it all without even
trying.

It was like rending open the armor of an
enemy, one who had nicked him more than once in battle, to find
nothing but an insect inside.

Fenrir resisted the urge to tear into the
essence of Jungle Jim, to gnaw and worry at it until only shreds
remained. This human had caused him considerable irritation; he did
not want to destroy him too quickly. He would take his time and
pick through the hobo’s memories. There must be something he
valued, something Fenrir could twist, prod, destroy if need be, to
cause the suffering such impudence deserved. He had only to find
it.

And once this obstacle was removed, he would
set his final plans into motion. The end was near...the end of all.
And then, the reign of Hrodvitnir, Fenrir the Wolf, would
begin.

He surveyed the somber group of men who sat
with heads bowed as a flock before a priest. He would not work his
will on Jungle Jim while he remained in this company. There must be
no interference from his friends. Fenrir sent dark tendrils of
thought into Jungle Jim Tuttle once more.

***

Briggs surveyed the church-like stillness of
the clearing, amazed at the effect Jungle Jim’s song had worked on
this pack of bums and thugs. The song itself wasn’t so special, he
realized. It was as if emotion poured from Tuttle and flooded the
landing.

Still more surprising was the effect the song
had on Briggs, and he hadn’t really known Peter Olson. He hoped no
one would think anything but rain had dampened his cheeks. Not that
anyone was looking at him. Even the two thugs seemed to have
forgotten him.

If there had been any doubt before, Briggs
was now certain Jim Tuttle had nothing to do with Peter Olson’s
murder. But he may have witnessed something, and that could
endanger his life. Briggs wasn’t about to lose sight of him until
he got him safely into protective custody. He edged forward,
careful to avoid eye contact with the two thugs.

Tuttle seemed to have forgotten where he was.
He held himself stiffly and stared over the audience’s heads. The
other hobos began to stir, blinking and looking around as if the
air had suddenly cleared. Briggs got the sense that the poetry
reading was over. No one cared to follow Tuttle’s song with some
trite poem about the joys of the iron road. One by one, they
climbed to their feet, obscuring Briggs’s view of Tuttle.

Afterwards, as he tried to piece the events
together, Briggs was never certain what happened next. He had begun
to push his way through the crowd, determined not to lose Tuttle.
But instead of forcing his way directly to the oil-drum fire where
he had last glimpsed Tuttle, he had somehow ended up at the back of
the crowd.

He couldn’t guess how that had happened. The
memory was gone.

He caught a last glimpse of Tuttle, the
firelight flickering over his still face, and then Briggs stumbled
over someone’s foot and hit the concrete on his hands and knees.
The foot he tripped over belonged to the jean-jacked man he had
recognized earlier.

The man met Briggs’s eyes with a gaze haunted
by a private pain. With an almost audible click, his features slid
into place in Briggs’s memory. Shorten the hair, shave the
sideburns and—that’s right—put him in a uniform. This was Austin
Harding’s brother.

***

The throbbing behind Lennie’s eyes had eased
during Jungle Jim’s song, but now it was back, worse than ever. It
was as though the boathouse landing was perched on a geyser, and
she was the only one who could sense the pressure building. She
wondered dimly if this was how people with precognition felt when
they chose not to take a flight that ended in crash, or stayed home
from the maiden voyage of the 
Titanic
. If only it would
be so easy for her to avoid disaster.

She pressed cold fingers to her eyes and
huddled against her bent legs, trying to remember what it was like
to be warm. Something scuffled nearby, followed by the painfully
familiar sound of a body hitting the broken pavement hard. She
raised her head to look and winced as the small light of the fire
amplified the throbbing. The man with the FRC Police jacket was on
his hands and knees, staring into Junkyard’s face. He looked both
incredulous and incredibly annoyed.

“What the hell are you doing here,
Harding?”

Junkyard’s mouth twisted bitterly and he
looked away without answering.

“Harding? Is that your real name?” Lennie
couldn’t help asking, though her head hurt worse when she spoke.
This was the first solid fact she had learned about him.

He hesitated, looking ready to deny it. Then
he shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Douglas Harding.”

He pushed himself off the cardboard and
picked up his duffle bag. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Detective
Briggeman...”

“Not so fast.” Briggeman stood quickly and
brushed the dirt off his hands. Junkyard tried to push past, but
Briggeman stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Junkyard
stiffened, and Lennie thought he might take a swing at the
detective. Great. Maybe when they take you to jail, they can drop
me off at the hospital before my eyeballs explode.

Briggeman let his hand drop, but stayed in
Junkyard’s path. “Easy, Harding. I just want a few answers.
Starting with 
Are you trying to get yourself bloody
killed
?”

Junkyard grunted impatiently, straining to
see past Briggeman. Worry creased his forehead. “Love to tell you
all about it, but I need to catch my friend before he wanders off.
It’s not safe for him out here.”

Jungle Jim! Lennie had completely forgotten
about him. She looked toward the fire. Hobos were milling around
it, saying their goodbyes before they—how did they put it? She
fought to focus, but her brain had turned to slag. Before jungling
up. That was it. Hobos jungled up for the night. Good idea. She let
her head drop to her knees and stopped fighting the pain.

Briggeman’s voice continued above her.
“Dammit, Tuttle’s gone! How the hell did I forget
about him?”

A round of colorful epithets followed, mostly
directed at himself. His voice sounded incredulous, angry, and
anxious, all at once.

“Tuttle!” He shouted. “Hey, Tuttle! I just
wanna talk.”

Junkyard’s voice echoed him from another part
of the landing. “Jim, where are you? It’s time to go to Bill’s
house!”

Lennie tried to lift her head. She should
help look for Jim. He shouldn’t be wandering on his own. She
pressed her hands to her head, trying to keep her skull from
blowing apart. Why couldn’t anyone else feel it? Then, with the
abruptness of a popped bubble, the pressure was gone.

She gasped and sat up, shocked by the sudden
release. Briggs and Harding stood before her, facing each other,
both breathing hard. The landing had emptied of hobos. No one had
answered their calls.

Jungle Jim was gone.

Briggeman drew a breath that hissed through
clenched teeth. “Shit.”

Junkyard nodded grimly. “Yeah, no shit.”

Chapter 16

Jungle Jim Tuttle shuffled through the
deserted parking lot. The wet pavement spattered his pretty yellow
shoes with grit and mud, but he didn’t care. He had no heart for
clowning, anyway. Not tonight. His insides were too swelled up from
missing Tin Can Petey.

He had even skipped the clowning at the
poetry and had sung his song for Petey. Sung it as best he could.
And at the end, those tears kept running down his face and a voice
in his head said,
you just need to be alone, is
all
. And Jim knew it was right. Bill wanted him to stay
with him and Ashley, and that nice detective fellow wanted to talk
to him, and Junkyard hadn’t wanted him to go off alone, but it was
too hard to stay and be happy for people when he felt so sad. So he
had slipped off into the woods before anyone could make him do
anything else.

Mariucci Arena hulked to his left, looking
like a great big turtle against the night-gray sky. Jim had once
heard someone say that the world rode around on the back of a giant
turtle. Or maybe that was something he’d gotten from a book before
his accident made it hurt too much to read. He looked at the turtle
building and tried to imagine what size head might go along with
that body. For a moment, he thought he heard its thick under-shell
scraping the pavement and knew it was coming after him.

“Don’t be eatin’ me,” he yelled, shaking his
fist at the building. “I’m not a giant bug.”

But it was only the sound of wind pushing a
sheet of cardboard across the parking lot. The turtle blurred and
became just a building again, and all the streetlights wore halos.
Jim shook his head and walked on. “Now I’m seein’ things, Petey,”
he said. “The whole world looks different without you in it.”

He squeezed his eyes and hot tears rolled
out. The halos disappeared. He could see the festival’s jungle
ahead. Then his eyes filled again and he couldn’t see much of
anything. His foot caught in a pothole and he stumbled to one knee.
Sobbing, he climbed to his feet and tottered unsteadily toward the
jungle.

Why couldn’t he stop crying? Other friends
died, friends as good as ol’ Petey, and Jim never cried before. It
was the way of things, after all. Everybody dies. But this time was
different somehow. He couldn’t remember ever being this sad, except
when his wife left him after the accident, and that was different.
She took his two little baby girls—the younger one about Ashley’s
age—and went away without telling him where.

Someone moved in the festival’s jungle. A
small campfire cast a warm circle of light that made the night
around Jim seem even darker. The fire was tended by a tall, thin
person who looked like a fence post wearing a hat. It had to be Too
Long Soo. He always liked Soo. The smell of camp coffee and
mulligan stew reeled through the wet air and hooked him in. He took
a deep breath and put a jaunt in his step. Maybe he could stop
crying, now.

But all of a sudden, pictures of his lost
family came crowding back, all yellowy, like old newspaper. It felt
like someone had opened his head and dropped them in. He stopped
walking and pressed his hands to his head, wishing the pictures
away. If only he could open his skull and take them out again. A
sob built up in his chest. He squeezed his throat shut and wouldn’t
let it out.

These pictures didn’t come from him. He knew
it. So he wouldn’t let them make him sad. He would ignore them and
have some of Bones O’Riley’s stew.