Valknut: The Binding (29 page)

Soo leaned over the fire to pour herself some
coffee. Then the scene shimmered, like he was seeing it through
yellow heat waves over hot pavement. He felt a stirring in his
brain and Soo started to change. Her hair shrank and darkened to
short brown curls. Her hat disappeared. Her legs and arms
shortened, too, and got thicker. She lifted her head from her
coffee and looked straight at him as if she could see him there, in
the dark. He gasped and staggered back.

It wasn’t Soo sitting there. It was Sharon,
his wife, plump as ever, especially the parts she sat on. Her
cheery face looked like he remembered, only she didn’t look so
cheerful now. She stared at him funny, like she was scared of him.
Scared and disgusted. And her eyes were yellow.

Then all of a sudden he was inside his little
three-bedroom house a few blocks north of the tracks. He wandered
room to room, just like he had five years ago when he had come home
to find it empty. There was the flattened carpet and clean patches
in the peeling wallpaper that told him where the furniture had
been. There was the melted spot on the kitchen counter where Sharon
had set a hot frying pan. There were the girls’ empty closets,
somehow smaller without the rock collections and dress-up clothes
and toys to fill them up. Everything, just like he remembered
it.

Only this time, the house wasn’t quite empty.
Sharon was still in it.

“You can’t support us any more,” she said.
“You’re nothing but a dummy.” She had never said these things to
him before she left, but the words were there now. And her eyes
said even more.
I can’t stand to let those clumsy, stupid hands
touch me.

Feelings stirred through him. Bad feelings
that made him heat up all over. He fought them, afraid of what they
might make him do. A sob shook his body and this time he couldn’t
swallow it back down.

It isn’t real. That’s Soo, there, not my
wife, and this isn’t my house. These feelings aren’t real, neither.
Someone’s messing with me.

He stared at his hands, which had clenched
into fists all by themselves. He had to get away. Still sobbing, he
lurched away from the jungle. The feelings faded as he left the
firelight behind. A few more steps, and he couldn’t remember
anymore why he was running. He just knew he couldn’t stay
there.

The wind picked up again, blowing right
through his worn suit coat. If he couldn’t stay with Soo, he’d need
some other shelter. The festival had all sorts of hideaways a guy
could tuck himself into for the night. Jim tried to figure what
place might be best, but his thoughts felt thicker than usual. He
shrugged and started off for the tent village.

Halfway there, the sheet of cardboard dragged
past him, flapping and turning like a living thing. It seemed to
know where it was going. Cardboard was a blanket, or a mattress, or
a lean-to against the wind and rain. He pounced at it, missed, and
gave chase. The cardboard flew in a burst of wind, scooting past
the food vendors’ deserted stands. It came to rest in the
festival’s carnival, pinned against Ashley’s favorite kiddie ride,
a train that looked like a big snake chasing its own tail on an
oval track. Thinking of Ashley, his throat tightened and he thought
he might cry again. He had nothing left but her and the other
children who knew him as Jungle Jim, the hobo clown.

Jim hurried to the cardboard. He couldn’t let
it get away again. He was too tired to run after it any more. The
wind tried to take it from him, but he grabbed it and held on
tight. Air puffed from his lungs like a train whistle and his legs
felt wobbly. If he didn’t find a place to jungle up soon, he might
just go to sleep right where he stood.

He looked at the kiddie ride. In the day, the
train would race up and down and around its track with a load of
squealing kids. Ashley always rode up front with her white-blond
hair streaking behind her like a comet tail. The ride was quiet
now. It would make him a fine house, and the cardboard would be his
roof.

He climbed to the pavement inside the oval
ride and wedged the cardboard between a heavy control box on the
ground and the underside of the track. Taking one last look around,
he crawled inside his new lean-to and fell asleep before he knew he
was lying down.

***

Lennie hadn’t played inside a cardboard box
since she was eight years old, when her father had brought home a
new washing machine. Her mother had exclaimed over the shiny, white
washer, but Lennie was far more interested in its packaging. That
box had housed her own private world for months, until the cat
turned it into his back-up litter box.

This box didn’t seem nearly as large as the
one she remembered and the air had the same stifling paper-and-glue
odor that had driven her out of her cardboard forts as a child. But
it was the best shelter she could get for less than fifty cents.
And at least it was clean.

As painful as that pressure in her head had
become during the poetry session, the sudden release was almost as
bad. The landing emptied of hobos while she sat in an incoherent
daze. Junkyard had to prod her into moving. He’d left her at the
festival’s jungle before going to look for Jim. Too Long Soo took
one look at Lennie’s dull eyes and led her to the nearest empty
box.

“Crawl in, girlie. Yer lookin’ more tired
than a hound dog after a night of coon huntin’.”

But now Lennie felt fine, though exhausted
and plagued by a small, completely ordinary headache. She should be
out with Junkyard, looking for Jim. But she had no idea where to
look. Most likely, she would just get lost.

Soo’s voice penetrated the thin cardboard
walls as she argued with Bones O’Riley over the ingredients for
tomorrow’s stew. Bones claimed that the carrots were “so limp
they’d have to soak in Viagra for a week to stiffen up.” Soo
countered that the carrots were fresh bought, that he was being
“more ornery than a pit bull with mange,” and that she was getting
tired of Viagra jokes. The conversation seemed almost ordinary
after the bizarre events of the last thirty hours.

Lennie squirmed uncomfortably and poked at
the pile of newspapers that served as her pillow. She tried to
relax, but it was no use. Tired as she was, her mind wouldn’t slow
down. Too much had happened, this day. She sighed and switched on
the flashlight Soo had given her.

If not for the tattoo, she might believe that
she had taken a nosedive into schizophrenia somewhere between Ames
and Minneapolis. From the moment she had awakened in the boxcar,
she had been sensing things that weren’t there and had been
assaulted by beings she couldn’t see. Her body seemed to have
developed a power she couldn’t understand. Most distressing, no one
around her ever seemed to notice anything unusual.

She pointed the flashlight upward and stared
at the circle of light on the cardboard ceiling. There had to be a
connection between Ramblin’ Red, the tattoo, and the mental
attacks, if only she could see the pattern.

The pressure she had sensed at the poetry
session had to be related as well. She tried to pinpoint when she
had first felt it, but it seemed like it had been there at a low,
ear-popping level all day. She had only noticed it after the
readings were well under way. During Jungle Jim’s song, it expanded
like a constipation of the mind, blocking her ability to think or
see. And then, magically, it was gone. Why?

Abruptly, she knew with awful clarity the
focal point of the attack.

She should get up, find Junkyard, tell
him...tell him what? 
Something is after Jungle Jim—I could
tell by the way my headache went away when Jim disappeared.

Yeah, right.

Still, she should try. Junkyard had said
something about checking Bill’s house. Soo might know where that
was.

But Soo seemed very far away. In fact, even
sitting up seemed like far too much work. She yawned. Her concern
for Jungle Jim faded into an almost drunken lethargy. Alarm
trembled in the back of her mind. 
This isn’t
right.
 She struggled against the unnatural pull of sleep.
But her eyes closed anyway. The flashlight slipped from her relaxed
fingers and rolled across the floor. Its light cast shadows of
nothing in the corners of the box.

***

The carnival sprawled across the pavement
like the skeleton of an abandoned alien city, the wind whispering
through its rusting metal bones. From one extremity came the
frantic, lonely flap of a loose awning. From the other came the
jingle of chains on the swing carousel. At its heart, there was a
muttering, a shallow cough, and then the gentle seesawing of Jim
Tuttle’s snores.

The moon had gone out behind charcoal clouds.
Layers of shadow blanketed the carnival. In the lee of a cotton
candy stand, the deepest shadow of all swelled and split in
amoeboid separation. The blacker portion drifted to the oval of
Ashley Sutter’s favorite ride, roiling with Fenrir’s rage.

Here was Jormungand, Fenrir’s own brother,
rendered in rusting metal and peeling paint. The colossus of the
deep, reduced to a two-dollar ride in a traveling carnival. The
yellow in Fenrir’s eyes flared, threatening to pierce his cloak of
shadow. These humans made mockery of his brother for the
entertainment of their children. They would soon learn what a child
of Loki could do.

Fenrir climbed to the center of the ride and
stood over Jungle Jim’s little shanty. The hobo moaned within, his
mind a playground where Fenrir toyed with his dreams.

It was not enough to merely kill him, though
that would be easy enough to do. Fenrir would tear out Jungle Jim’s
soul, soil it beyond redemption, and feed it back to the simple man
in tortured pieces. He might not kill him at all.

He began his work delicately, peeling back
the first onionskin layer of Jungle Jim’s mind. His manipulations
were subtle at first. Fenrir would not underestimate the clown in
his eagerness for revenge.

Jungle Jim was dreaming the memory of a cool
fall afternoon shortly before the accident that had changed him.
His thoughts were clear, as though his brain had never been
damaged.

Sharon had brought Jessie and Alexandra to
see him at work. He sat on the open tailgate of a pick-up parked in
front of the roundhouse. His wife stood next to him and a child
perched on each of his knees. They watched a diesel unit ease
forward. Jim was supposed to check the air brakes on the unit
before it went out again. The power of the train’s massive engine
vibrated through them and hot air blew dirt in their faces.

“A tornado in a can,” he said, and the girls
flung their arms around him in delighted fear. He laughed, holding
their warm bodies close, and looked at his wife to share the
joke.

Instead of laughing with him, as she had all
those years ago, Sharon stiffened, her mouth tight and
disapproving. Her eyes glowed yellow.

Jungle Jim thrashed in his sleep, knocking
the cardboard aside. Fenrir leaned close, his lips twisted
somewhere between a snarl and a grin. He opened a memory of another
place and time, and began again.

Jessie, Jungle Jim’s little darling, the
younger of his two children, had fallen off her tricycle. She sat
on the roadside, the skirt of her dress torn and bunched around her
thighs. Blood streamed from scrapes at her elbow and both knees,
but Jim knew her tears were those of frustration rather than pain.
She was his tough girl, his adventurer. He lifted her into his lap,
the peach fuzz of her leg hairs soft against his calloused hand.
“There, now. Don’t cry—you didn’t hurt your trike a bit.”

She laughed through her tears and kissed his
cheek. Then her mother burst from the house. Instead of bringing
bandages, the way he thought he remembered, she snatched Jessie out
of his arms.

“I saw it,” she screeched. “I saw it all
through the window. You just stay away from my daughter—don’t you
ever touch her again!”

She snarled at him, and her teeth had
lengthened, each ending in a sharp point. Jungle Jim started,
almost waking up, but Fenrir pressed him back.

“Not yet—there is more,” he murmured, his
voice a low growl.

Jim dreamed on.

He was giving the girls a bubble bath. Both
girls had sculpted their hair in Dairy Queen curls. He chuckled and
filled his hands with colored bath foam, dotting each girl’s nose
in purple. He rubbed the foam on Alexandra’s back, over the
washboard of small muscles and ribs. The soap felt slick on her
smooth skin.

“Stop that!”

Startled, Jim fell back from the tub. Sharon
stood in the bathroom door, her face distorted in outrage.

“You pervert!” She crossed the bathroom in
two strides and swung her open hand at his face. The fingers ended
in hard, sharp nails, more dog-like than human. They laid his cheek
open with four long gashes. “If you ever come near my babies again,
I’ll kill you!”

He gaped at her. Why had she struck him? He
was only giving the girls a bath. Then he looked down at himself
and saw that he was naked. Smears of purple foam streaked his
body.

No, it didn’t happen like that—it never
happened like that!

But he was caught in the dream, his crazed
wife standing over him, blood dripping from impossible claws. He
fought the false memory, fought to awaken, but the dream wouldn’t
let him go.

Sharon is doing this to me.

He didn’t know where the thought had come
from, but he was certain it was true. And now she threatened to
keep him away from their children. He kicked out at her, driving
her back. Then he was on his feet and charging her, hands
outstretched, and he could hear the girls screaming behind him, the
fear in their voices, see the hatred in Sharon’s eyes, and he knew
that this wasn’t real, that he would never strike his wife or hurt
his children in any way. Someone was doing this to him.