Juliet popped to her feet and ran the length of the beam with the confidence of a gymnast. A good gymnast, that is, not one who slips painfully on the beam, which is exactly what happened to a mesmerized lighting technician who attempted to cut Juliet off before she could reach the screen.
Juliet winced. “Oooh. That looked sore, Arlene.” Arlene did not comment, unless turning purple and tumbling flailing into space can be counted as commentary.
Juliet knew that she shouldn’t have grinned when the technician’s fall was comically broken by a cluster of men lumbering toward her brother, but she couldn’t hold it in.
Her smile faded when she noticed the mass of bodies swarming along Butler’s frame, burying him. Another technician approached her, this one a little smarter than his predecessor; he straddled the beam with his ankles locked below him. As he inched forward, he banged a large spanner on the beam, raising concussive bongs and spark flurries.
Juliet timed the arc of his swing, then planted a foot on his head and stepped over him as though he were a rock in the middle of a stream. She did not bother to topple the man from his perch. By the time he turned around, it would be too late for him to stop her, but he should have a nice bruise on his forehead to wonder about when his senses returned.
The screen was ahead, bracketed by metal tubing, and the red eyes glared at her out of the black background, seeming to emanate pure hate.
Or maybe this guy was up late partying.
“Stop where you are, Juliet Butler!” said the voice, and to Juliet it seemed as though the tones were suddenly those of Christian Varley Penrose, her instructor at the Madame Ko Agency. The only person, besides her brother, whom she had ever considered her physical equal.
“Some students make me proud,” Christian would say in his BBC tones. “You just make me despair. What was that move?”
And Juliet would invariably answer. “It’s something I made up, master.”
“Made up? Made up? That is not good enough.”
Juliet would pout and think, It was good enough for Bruce Lee.
And now Christian Varley Penrose seemed to have a line directly into her brain.
“Stop where you are!” the voice told her. “And, having stopped, feel free to lose your balance and plummet to the earth below.”
The voice, Juliet felt, was taking hold of her determination and twisting it like a wet towel.
Don’t look. Don’t listen.
But she had looked and listened, if only for a second, and it was long enough for the insidious magic to snake a couple of tendrils into her brain. Her legs locked as though clamped with braces, and the paralysis spread upward.
“D’Arvit,” said Juliet, though she wasn’t quite sure why and, with her last spurt of self-control, pinwheeled her arms wildly, sending her entire body careening into the tubular frame supporting the screen and speakers.
The screen yielded elastically, and for a moment, the little bubble of Juliet’s mind that she still held on to believed that the screen would not break; then her elbow, which Butler had told her as a child was sharp enough to open a tin of field rations, punched through the material, sending a jagged rent running down its length.
The fairy’s red eyes rolled, and the last thing Juliet heard before her outstretched arm snagged the AV cables was an irritated snort, and then she was tumbling through a hole in the suddenly blank screen and falling toward the spasming mass of bodies below.
Juliet used the half-second before impact to curl herself into a ball.
Her very last thought before striking the crowd was: I hope zombies are soft.
They were not.
As soon as the fairy had flickered from the screen, the enthralled wrestling enthusiasts gradually regained their senses.
Geri Niebalm, a retired beauty therapist from Seattle, found that she had somehow made it all the way from the rear of the hall to the stage itself without the aid of her walking frame. What was more, she had a phantom memory of vaulting over several youngsters in her pursuit of that pretty young wrestler with the stone in her ponytail. Two months later, Geri would undergo regression therapy at her friend Dora Del Mar’s salon to bring that memory to the surface so that she could relish it at her leisure.
Stu “Cheeze” Toppin, a semiprofessional bowler from Las Vegas, woke up to find his mouth somehow stuffed with a foul-smelling nappy and the words kill bear kill written across his shirtfront in lipstick. This rather confused Stu, as his last memory was of the succulent hot dog he had been just about to bite into. Now, with the nappy aftertaste lingering on his tongue, Stu decided that he might just forget about the hot dog for the time being.
Though Stu had no way of knowing, the nappy in question belonged to little André Price, a baby from Portland who suddenly developed a speed and grace unheard of in eight-month-old limbs. Most victims of the mesmer move in a sluggish fashion, but André skipped over the heads of mob members and executed a perfect triple somersault from the ringside commentator’s table, managing to sink his only tooth into Butler’s thumb before the bodyguard was completely submerged. André Price began speaking a few months later—unfortunately it was in a language that his parents had no way of knowing was actually Gnommish. To their relief, he quickly picked up English too, though he never forgot his strange first language and found that he could sometimes make twigs burst into flame if he thought about it hard enough. A huge cacophonous moan almost lifted the roof from the theater as thousands of people realized they were not where they were supposed to be. Though there were miraculously no fatalities, by the time the last cut had been swabbed with antiseptic, there was a final count of 348 broken bones, more than 11,000 lacerations, and 89 cases of hysteria that had to be treated with sedatives, which, luckily for the patients, were a lot cheaper in Mexico than they would have been in the U.S.
And even though this was the age of amateur video, where most of those attending the event were in possession of at least one camera, there was not a single frame of evidence to prove that the mass mesmerization had ever taken place. In fact, when police flicked through the files on the confiscated cameras and phones, they found that every single instrument had been reset to factory conditions. No photos. In time, the Cancún Event, as it came to be known, would be mentioned in the same breath as Area 51 or the Yeti Migration.
Butler did not suffer from hysteria, possibly because he did not have enough air in his lungs for screaming, but probably because he had been in tighter spots (Butler had once shared a chimney in a Hindu temple with a tiger for several hours), but he had suffered over a dozen lacerations of his own, though he did not wait around long enough to have them added to the count.
As for Juliet, she was relatively unmarked in spite of her tumble. The moment she had recovered her breath, she began rolling bodies away from the spot where she had seen her brother submerged.
“Butler!” she called. “Brother! Are you under here?”
The top of her brother’s head appeared, smooth as a lollipop. Juliet knew immediately that her brother was alive because of the vein pulsing at his temple.
There was a chubby seminaked infant wrapped around Butler’s face and chewing on his thumb. Juliet dislodged the boy gently, noticing that he seemed very sweaty for a baby.
Butler drew a deep breath. “Thank you, sister. Not only did that child bite my thumb, but it tried to get a fist up one of my nostrils.”
The baby gurgled happily, wiped its fingers in Juliet’s ponytail, then crawled across the piles of humanity toward a crying lady who was waiting with open arms.
“I know you’re supposed to like babies,” said Juliet, huffing as she grabbed a banker type by his braces and sprung him from his perch on Butler’s shoulders, “but that guy stank and he was a biter.” She took a firm grip on a middle-aged lady whose blond hair had been sprayed till it shone like a buttercup. “Come on, missus. Get off my big brother.”
“Oh,” said the lady, eyelids fluttering as she tried to make sense of everythi
ng. “I was supposed to catch the bear. Or something like that. And I had popcorn, a large popcorn that I just paid for. Who’s going to compensate me for that?”
Juliet rolled the lady across the bellies of four identically dressed cowboys who all wore floyd’s stag night T-shirts under their rhinestoned waistcoats.
“This is ridiculous,” she grunted. “I am a glamorous young lady. I can’t be dealing with all this body odor and squidginess.”
There was indeed a lot of body odor and squidginess about, much of it related to Floyd and his stag night, which smelled like it had been going on for about two weeks.
This was confirmed when the cowboy wearing a floyd badge awoke from his stupor with the words: “Dang. I stink worse than a dead skunk wearing a suit of bananer skins.”
Bananer? thought Juliet.
Butler rolled his head, clearing space to breathe.
“We’ve been set up,” he said. “Have you made any enemies down here?”
Juliet felt sudden tears plop over her bottom lids. She had been so worried. So worried. Big brothers can only be indestructible for so long.