Audra clutched her doll tighter. “Zoroasters’re afraid of adults.”
“Why?” asked Jane.
“Be-because until adults see them, they stay, like, invisible.”
Alastair sat on the edge of his chair at this last remark, so prophetic. It was almost word for word what he had said of Leather Apron and the Phantom. So long as they went unseen even in plain sight, they remained powerful and capable of what seemed damn near supernatural.
“Tomorrow, will you take me to this king of yours, Audra?” said Alastair.
Secretly, Alastair believed it a wild goose chase, and he expected this would be a monumental waste of time, but it would score points with Jane and with Gabby, he supposed. At the very least, he hoped to make more recruits of the homeless children, convert them into that many more eyes and ears for the police. But they’d have to give him a great deal more than the tattered old, addle-brained, lice-infested Bloody Mary to interest him.
CHAPTER 11
The following day
Below the train viaduct at Ravenswood and Ogden, the Southside of Chicago, as far from the gaiety of the White City as one could be, a ragtag king and court looked Gabby, Jane, and Alastair up and down, some making jokes, some making threats, one lifting Gabby’s skirt with a crooked cane his scepter-and all of them painted with the dirt of Chicago back alleys. The tall, gaunt one with the wooden-crutch scepter was Robin the King, their avowed and respected leader. King Robin of Nightmare Alley, it would seem.
Robin glared at Audra while he spoke to the strangers in their midst, coolly saying, “What business ’ave you here, you pretty people?” He let Gabby’s skirt fall into place, sat on a rickety orange crate, and raised his scepter overhead.
One shorter and dirtier boy, calling himself Noel, seemed fearless. “See that green sign over there?”
“Yes,” replied Jane, following the pointed finger. “It’s a little hard to miss.”
“Angels love the color green, ’specially dark-as-grass green.”
“And why do you suppose?” she asked Noel.
“It’s the best color.”
“Shut up, all of you!” ordered Robin, oldest in the family.
“No, blue is,” countered a smaller girl. “Blue’s the color of the Lady of the Lake.”
Another said, “After night falls on the city is when the angels come out and argue the prettiest color.”
“A-a-angels come out?” asked Gabby.
“En masse.”
“To-to make war on the red armies, not to fuss over colors,” said another girl.
“Red armies?” Alastair’s tone reeked of skepticism.
“Armies of the devil Zoroaster,” explained Noel.
King Robin tempered the others like a storyteller whose audience has gotten away from him. “But sometimes the angels just come out to play.”
A half-Spanish boy named Hector parted the younger children. “Angels look down from the tallest building in the city,” he began, adding, “always with green, pink, or a golden glow, and sometimes all three colors at the same time.”
“They eat light so they can fly,” eight-year-old Marty piped in.
“The angels use the Ward’s building’s lookout tower for their headquarters?” Ransom frowned at the notion.
Noel said it was so, as if discussing the price of eggs or the weather.
“You see, there’s a whole great lotta killing going on in Chicago…just like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, you name it,” added Hector. “Lotta kids getting killed all over.”
Eleven-year-old Audra solemnly added, “The angels study their battle maps all day long in the tower before they dare go out and kill demons. Hector ought’ve told you that first.”
“I see.” Alastair had never heard of this strange mythology; apparently every street kid in his town knew it-chapter and verse.
Robin now said, “You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories. Else, you don’t stand a chance.”
Hector added, “Yeah, then’s when you disappear.”
“Gotta be on your toes at all times,” Noel said in a raspy whisper.
“You mean…or else you disappear like these kids the cops are finding dead?” Alastair asked.
“Sure…how else do you explain such things?” asked Robin.
A kid named Mickey added, “It’s the Judge of Hell and his minions against the angels. Simple as that.”
An older boy who had remained silent, sullen, wary suddenly piped up with, “Christmas night the year eighteen ninety-one, God ran away from Heaven.”
“God ran away?” Gabby asked, realizing the significance of this to the runaways. Their god was a runaway, too.
“Yeah, to escape a huge demon attack,” replied Noel. “Tell ’em Hector, Peter. Pete knows the whole story. He taught all’n us.”
Peter was the sullen one whose eyes had never left the adult strangers. He quietly muttered, “It’s a war…and the prize is Heaven.”
“A celestial war,” gasped Jane.
Peter continued. “Yeah, and it’s filled me with caution…caution of everyone-including you people.”
An excited Audra blurted out, “The demons smashed God’s palace of beautiful blue-moon marble to dust and ashes.”
“Audra! You’re gonna shut up now!” ordered Robin.
“What’re you afraid of, Robin?” asked Jane. “We’re here to help you, not harm you.”
He snorted in response. “Your damned newspapers, the Herald, the Tribune, they don’t print a word of what really matters.”
“You’re right about that,” said Alastair, thinking how little play the problem of the homeless got in the press.
“Th-they all keep it secret,” added Noel. “Tell ’em, Robin. Tell ’em!”
“Shut up, Noel!” ordered Peter, who seemed Robin’s second-in-command.
Robin stepped ever closer to Gabby, ending so close in fact that she became uncomfortable from his odors and body heat. “No one knows why God’s left us and his own angels to defend this world, but it’s what we gotta do.”
The others cheered this.
Jane Francis, as a woman, a mother, and a doctor felt stunned at these revelations, that children so young were coping not only with the streets but with a war between Heaven and Hell, and they found themselves square on the battlefield-their little souls being tugged in both directions.
Alastair’s thoughts proved similar. These homeless kids not only faced the horrors of the real world, but for some bizarre reason, they had created a mythological world of gods and demons at war over their heads, angels perched atop the Montgomery Ward Tower, riding the Ferris wheel at the fair, lighting on telegraph wires, riding atop trolleys. All this while demons emerged out of holes, sewers, broken windows, and mirrors.
“What do you make of all this?” Alastair whispered in Jane’s ear.
She whispered back, “I suspect it is how they cope.”
“With reality, you mean?”
“It allows them to understand the daily terror. If one of them disappears, he’s accepted comfort and aid from the enemy. In this case, Satan.”
Overhearing, Robin declared, “Temptations are everywhere, and so are the portals to Hell.” Using his scepter, he pointed to an abandoned train car, its doors standing open like a giant maw. “The devils sometime offer us safety, a warm place to sleep, a scrap of food, and sometimes the angels don’t have nothing to counter it with.”
“We’re not with Zoroaster,” said Jane, “I assure you.”
“Demons oft take a pleasant form.” Robin glared at Jane.
“And they’ve taken control of the sewers and Ghost Town,” blurted Noel.
“Ghost Town?” asked Gabby, who’d been absorbed, intent on every word.
“Street lingo for County Cemetery,” explained Ransom.
Something in his tone caused a scowl in Robin. The others instantly felt his displeasure, and when he turned his back on Ransom, Jane, and Gabby, stepping off, scepter in hand, the others sheepishly followed after King Robin.
“Demons feed on darkness and ignorance,” said Jane like an epitaph.