The swift current grabbed Straker and the hound clinging to his arm. It pulled them under, down towards the murky bottom, and out to the middle of the broad river, sweeping them downstream towards the mouth and the bay. Straker was numb from the icy water. His lungs screamed for air and blood streamed from the wounds in his arm where the hound’s jaws were locked and digging into bone.

The silver knife flashed in Straker’s free hand and found its mark. With the last of his strength, Straker plunged the knife into the hound’s muscular chest, sinking the blade into the heart, gouging and twisting to drive the life from the animal. The hound shuddered and went limp. Its limbs hung loose in the water but its jaws were locked. The dead torso began to sink and to pull Straker down with it to the murky bottom where a giant horseshoe crab burrowed deeper into the mud and muck.

Straker felt his consciousness slipping away. He struggled to free his arm from the dead weight but still it pulled him down towards the bottom. Straker hacked desperately at the dead hound’s neck, sawing with the serrated blade, trying to sever the head from the body. A cleaver would have served him better but the broad blade of the knife was razor sharp and cut the bone. Straker’s blade sliced through and he struggled towards the surface, dragging the head, as the torso drifted away downstream.

With the blade between his teeth, Straker broke the surface. Gasping for air, he holstered the knife, which had saved him again, had postponed the inevitable once again. With his legs and free arm, he struggled to swim towards the dark shore, dragging the hound’s lifeless head on his useless arm. He pulled himself up onto the broken concrete blocks that hold the shore, and lost consciousness.

A tourist looking out the window of a helicopter coming in for a landing at the 34th Street Heliport saw the bloodied body on the rocks and screamed.

* * *

Josey watched the surface of the river for any sign of his assailant or his savior, but he watched in vain. The swift current flowed past the pier and nothing broke the surface downstream. Three figures, like three shadows, stood on the wharf, trembling in the cold blast of river air. The gray moon hung low over the Jersey shore.

Madame Sonya, clutching her black cape about her, suddenly groaned and bent double. Tamara tried to help her, holding her gently,

“What is it, Grandma? Are you ill?”

Madame Sonya straightened up slowly, deathly pale and with tears in her eyes.

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “Thank you, my dear. A spirit has left this world for the next, taking a piece of my soul with him. He’s welcome to it but it’s painful for a moment when the separation occurs.”

Madame Sonya took Josey by the arm. “Come, children. There’s nothing more for us to do here. What could not be prevented has happened. We must go.”

Josey put his other arm around Tamara’s shoulder and leaned on her as he stumbled back off the pier to the bike path. They climbed the slope to the avenue and made their way back to the circus tent, to Madame Sonya’s quarters.

“Pack our things,” Madame Sonya ordered Tamara as Josey collapsed on the bed. “His, too. The crew is loading the trucks. We leave in the morning.”

Tamara, frightened, overwhelmed by the rush of violent events, went to pack.

Madame Sonya placed some incense in the burner. The acrid scent began to fill the room. She took jars of dry, pungent herbs from a cabinet and prepared a beverage in the samovar. While the tea steeped, she mashed other ingredients with a pestle and mortar, poured in a few drops of thick dark syrup, and applied the paste to Josey’s wounded leg. Then she propped him up on the pillows and brought the cup of tea to his lips. “Here, drink this. It will give you strength.”

Josey gagged on the bitter concoction. Madame Sonya fed him sip by sip and, gradually, he felt the warm liquid course through his veins. The moist compact on his leg seemed to absorb the burning pain. The aromatic beverage seemed to restore his strength. He began to feel more alert, more alive. The smell of incense seeped through his mind and lifted him from the physical plane. His thoughts raced ahead.

Tamara came back into the room. Madame Sonya spoke quietly, as if to herself,

“We’re the last three now. First the strong man, then...”

“You mean Nikko?” cried Tamara. “But maybe he...”

“I’m afraid not, my dear.”

“But how do you know?!” cried Tamara bitterly. “Maybe you’re wrong this time!”

“He was my companion for many lifetimes. I no longer sense him. His spirit has fled to a better place. His life force has been extinguished and his mortal shell destroyed by that monster.”

Tamara covered her face and wept.

“It was meant to be,” said Madame Sonya. “Nikko’s lives were rich in ways that matter. He has sacrificed himself so that Josey may live. It was his wish and his destiny to do so.”

“But why?” sobbed Tamara. “Why?”

“We are still in the time of questions. No one has answers. Those who think they do are dangerously mistaken.”

“And that murderer? That killer?”

“Yanosh?”

Madame Sonya went to the table and sat down.

“This globe has been in our family for generations. It is one of a kind and has... unique properties. It came into our possession in 1450 from the hands of a Druid priest whose body was disgorged from a bog in the Carpathian forests after heavy rains. The Druid had apparently sunk in the bog clutching the globe and still held it in his hands. It’s not glass, as you might think, but a large polished jewel, Beryl, a clear Emerald.”

Madame Sonya removed the silken cloth and gazed into the globe that rested on the marble hand. The acrid fragrance from the incense burner filled the room. Her eyes bored into the globe, searching, but the milky cloud within expanded and congealed, rendering the sphere opaque. Madame Sonya looked up,

“I cannot see him. My vision of this sequence is clouded or perhaps blocked. A fog has descended on the labyrinth of possible events. The thread is knotted and tangled. I don’t sense him. There is no focus of darkness,” she said shaking her head.

When morning came, Madame Sonya carefully packed the globe and marble hand into a bowling bag she used to transport the large sphere. She gathered her incense burner, her mortar and pestle; she took the jars of herbs from the shelf and placed them all carefully into a traveling case.

They came out onto Damrosch Park into the crisp bright winter morning and walked to the curb where the line of buses was standing. The city was waking up and coming to life. Crowds of boisterous teenagers, laughing and teasing each other, gabbing on cell phones, pushing and shoving, were swarming across 62nd Street towards La Guardia and Martin Luther King high schools. Commuters were streaming down into the subway station to catch the downtown trains to work. Deliverymen were unloading boxes from the backs of trucks and vans. The storefronts on Broadway were raising their gates and opening up for early shoppers. The restaurant day staffs were unlocking the doors to prep for the lunch rush. Big rigs and morning traffic were moving at a good pace down 9th Avenue. Broadway was stop and go, as always. Gray, brown, white — a flock of pigeons, startled by a car horn, swooped from their perch on a ledge and wheeled down into the canyon between two rows of buildings. A helicopter flew over the park heading northeast towards the airport. The city had opened its eyes, stretched, and was getting down to the day’s work.

Madame Sonya led Tamara and Josey to the curb on 62nd St. The driver put their suitcases under the bus and they boarded, with Madame Sonya clutching her bowling bag with its precious contents. The rest of the circus troupe came across the plaza in twos and threes and boarded the buses. The four coaches, one by one, pulled away from the curb and turned up Amsterdam Avenue heading towards the West Side Highway.

* * *

Straker woke up in a hospital bed.

“Good morning, Yanosh. How are you feeling?”

Professor von Holzing was sitting at Straker’s bedside.

“Like hell.”

“Well, you’re still alive by some miracle.”

Straker tried to sit up. He could not move his arm and saw that it was tightly bandaged and immobilized. The events on the pier and the struggle in the river began to come back to him.

“I found this,” said von Holzing, taking Straker’s silver Colt from his side pocket and laying in on the night table. “You’ve re-injured your arm, Yanosh.”

Straker groaned. “I almost had him.”

“Yes, he was within grasp. But he’s disappeared and the circus has left town.”

“We’ve got to stop them.”

“First you must rest, Yanosh. It’s not clear when you will regain your strength and the use of your arm.”

“You’d be surprised, professor. We... I heal quickly.”

“Splendid!” said von Holzing. “Once you’re ready to move, I have something to show you — a little surprise for our abnormal adversaries.”

A nurse came into the room to check Straker’s blood pressure and vital signs. Straker fell back to the pillow with a groan and closed his eyes. The nurse motioned for von Holzing to leave, whispering, “Let him sleep.”

* * *

The caravan of buses crossed the Hudson on the great span of the George Washington Bridge. Josey gazed through the window down at the glittering waters far below. The towers and needle-nosed spires of the metropolitan skyline crowded down the eastern bank of the river, across the island, and stretched away to Brooklyn. Josey caught a glimpse of the mouth of the river opening into the bay as the bus reached the level summit of the sheer cliffs of the Palisades and rolled into Jersey.

Weaving through traffic, the driver negotiated the lane changes and cloverleaves, and picked up Route 80. They continued west, away from the city, across the Jersey plains and, two hours later, passed through the Delaware Water Gap into the old, low rolling snow-covered mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

Josey sat with Tamara, his forehead against the cool glass of the window, his eyes closed. Madame Sonya sat across the aisle with the carnival barker, the bowling bag in her lap. As the miles rolled by, putting more and more distance between them and the city, Josey began to relax. The threat he had felt ever-present, since the day he and Tricia and Sam had first gone to the circus and visited the fortune teller, seemed finally to be subsiding for the first time.

The thought of Tricia pained him. He missed her. He had not forgotten her but she seemed a vague image from an old life that was gone now like a dream, replaced by the waking nightmare of Straker and the professor. Tamara sat beside him. Did he have to choose? He could not sort out his feelings but he knew one thing: he wanted to see Tricia again.

“I wonder what happened to Nikko?” the carnival barker said aloud to no one in particular.

“His wandering spirit seeks rest,” said Madame Sonya quietly.

“Well, I still hope he shows up. He’s the star. Nobody works the trapeze like he does. He can’t just walk away. We need him. The public expects to see him.”

“When good and evil clash at the twilight boundary of darkness and light, some disappear into the vortex, never to return. Let those rest whose mortal shells have fallen away but whose souls wing their way now through the levels. It’s the other one, the one who may yet reappear, the hunter who stalks and kills, who most concerns us now.”

The barker stared and shook his head. “You’re taking that fortune telling business just a little bit too seriously if you ask me, Sonya.”

The barker settled back into his chair and stared out the window. Madame Sonya closed her eyes. Josey felt her weariness, her resignation, her fading hope, and, was it fear?

Snow began to fall. The bus was having trouble negotiating the uphill portions of the rolling highway. The engine began to cough puffs of blue smoke out the tailpipe. As it labored to climb the slopes, the bus slowed down and sputtered, falling farther and farther behind the other buses in the caravan.

The driver made a call and then turned off the highway at the next exit, somewhere in the mountains west of Stroudsburg. They sputtered down the exit ramp and took the local service road a few miles, into a little valley between rows of green hills with thick woods on both sides and not a soul in sight. They pulled finally into a little rest area with a gas station and a motel nestled at the foot of a wooded mountain. Everyone got off the bus to stretch while the driver and the garage mechanic opened up the hood and took a look at the engine.

An old handyman groundskeeper was brushing snow from the walkway to the motel office. The man was in overalls, lightly dressed for the cold season, pushing a broom through the light snow on the walk. He was small, with long gray hair tied in a ponytail. Despite his age, he looked vigorous and handled the push broom with a lively motion. Josey saw that two sparrows were perched on the man’s shoulder, chirping and twittering. The man spoke to the birds as he worked, pausing at times to listen to them chirp in reply, as if they were chatting about the weather or discussing the latest news.

When the motel manager saw the bus and the crowd of people standing in the parking lot, he came out of the office and started down the fresh cleared path. The office door slammed shut and the startled sparrows took flight. In a rush as he strode down the path, the manager pushed the groundskeeper roughly aside. The groundskeeper dropped his broom but did not lose his footing. He gave way to the manager’s shove without resistance and spun gracefully in place.

“Get out of the way, you old fool! And hurry it up! Can’t you move any faster? Why is this taking all day? I’m not paying you to lean on a broom.”

The manager hurried down the path to the parking lot without waiting for a reply.

The handyman was unruffled. He waved his arm in an arc and the broom seemed to leap from the ground of its own accord and find his hand. The two sparrows fluttered back and landed again on the handyman’s shoulder. They continued their conversation as if it had never been interrupted and the groundskeeper resumed brushing the snow from the walk.

In the parking lot, the bus driver climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned the key while the mechanic and the barker watched the engine under the open hood. The motor turned over but did not start. After a couple of tries, they began to smell gas fumes as the carburetor flooded and the mechanic waved the driver to stop.

After a brief conference with the mechanic and the motel manager the barker walked over to where Madame Sonya, Tamara and Josey stood with the others,

“We’re stuck. We have to wait while they order a part from Scranton. They can get it delivered by tomorrow morning and the repair work takes only an hour. We should be on our way by lunchtime.”

“We’re stranded?”

“Oh great!”

“We’re stuck in this dump?”

Members of the troupe muttered among themselves but nothing could be done. The barker and the manager walked up the path past the old handyman and went into the office to check the group into the motel.

Josey followed. As he approached, the handyman, with his back turned and without a glance in Josey’s direction, stopped brushing the path and stood humbly aside with his head bowed. Josey paused and looked closely at the old man. His hands, firmly gripping the broom handle, were big veined, sinewy and strong. Josey looked into the groundskeeper’s face. A smile played on the old man’s lips. His eyes were completely opaque as if covered by cataracts.

“I’m Josey.”

The groundskeeper bowed at the waist.

“I hope we’re not in your way, trampling on the path while you’re trying to clear it.”

The groundskeeper bowed again.

“Not too talkative,” Josey thought to himself. He turned and climbed the steps to the motel office.

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2008 by Bill Bowler