Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

Sometimes Jamie thought back to life before Uncle Don had come and introduced him and Scott to The Circus of the Mind. After all, it hadn’t been that long ago. But the days added up into weeks and then months, and now it was as if a single, long road had smashed through all his other memories and all that was left were shabby theatres and circus tents, hotels, motels, trailers and camper vans. Hours spent on the dusty highways criss-crossing Nevada, always on the move, often in the middle of the night, chasing the next dollar, wherever it might be.

He wondered how he had managed to survive the last few years without going mad. But he knew the answer. It was stretched out on the bed in front of him. Scott had been the one constant in his life, his only true friend and protector. They had always been together. They always would be. After all, it was only when the adults had tried to separate them that The Accident had happened – the beginning of this whole bad dream in which they were now trapped. Jamie examined his brother. Scott seemed to have fallen asleep. His bare chest was rising and falling slowly and there was a sheen of sweat on his skin. Jamie thought back to what Scott had told him, that night in the big tent where they were performing – just outside Las Vegas. It had been the end of the first week. The first public showing of the telepathic twins.

“Don’t worry, Jamie. We’re going to come though this. Five more years and we’ll be sixteen. They can’t keep us then. They can’t make us do anything we don’t want to.”

“What will we do?”

“We’ll find something. Maybe we’ll go to California. We can go to Los Angeles.”

“We could work in TV.”

“No. They’d turn us into freaks.” Scott smiled. “Maybe we could set up some sort of business… you and me.”

“At least we’d know what the competition was thinking.”

“That’s right.” Scott warmed to the subject. “We could be like Bill Gates. Make millions of dollars and then retire. You wait and see. Once we’re sixteen, we’ll be unstoppable.”

They still had two more years. But Jamie was aware of a growing anxiety. It seemed to him that with every day that passed, the dream was fading. Scott was becoming more silent, more remote. He could lie still for hours at a time, not quite asleep but not awake either. It was as if something was slowly being drained out of him and Jamie was afraid. Scott was the strong one. Scott knew what to do. Jamie could go on performing. He could put up with Uncle Don and the casual brutality of his life. There was just one thing that scared him.

He knew he couldn’t do it on his own.

At the far end of the corridor, in a corner office with views in two directions, Don White was sitting behind a desk that he couldn’t possibly hope to reach. His stomach was too large. He was an immensely fat man with flesh that seemed to fold over itself as if searching for somewhere else to go. It was ice cold in the room – this was the one place in the theatre where the air-conditioning worked – but there were wet patches on the front of his shirt and under his armpits. Don sweated all the time. For a man his size, even walking ten paces was an effort – he looked permanently exhausted. There were dark rings under his eyes and he had lips like a fish, always gulping for air. He was eating a hamburger. Tomato ketchup was dribbling between his fingers, dripping down onto the surface of the desk.

There were two men sitting opposite him, waiting for him to finish. If they were disgusted by the spectacle in front of them, they didn’t show it. One was bald. The other had dark hair. They were both wearing suits. They both waited silently while Don finished his meal, licked his fingers, then wiped them on his trousers.

“So what did you think?” he demanded at last.

“The boys are very impressive,” the bald man – Colton Banes – replied.

“I told you. They can really do it. There’s no trick. It gives you the creeps, if you ask me. But it’s like they can get inside each other’s head.” Don reached out for a half-smoked cigar and lit it. The bitter smell of old tobacco rose into the air. “The other acts in the show… they’re nothing. But those kids are special.”

“I’d be interested to know how they first came to your attention.”

“I’ll tell you. I picked them up three years ago. They were about eleven then. Nobody has any idea where they came from. They were dumped when they were just a few months old. They were picked up by the child protection people some place near Lake Tahoe. No mum. No dad. Probably got Indian blood in them… you know, Native American. Paiute or Washoe or something. Anyway, they were fostered a few times but it never worked out for long. I’m not surprised. Would you want to have someone hanging around with you who could see into your mind?”

“They read other people’s minds as well as each other’s?”

“They can do it. Sure. But they pretend they can’t and I can’t make them. I mean… all right, on the stage. Party tricks. But never outside. Never in real life.” Don sucked on his cigar, then blew out smoke. “So they get bounced around a bit and they finally end up with my wife’s sister and her husband in Carson City. But that didn’t work out too well, I can tell you.”

“What happened?”

“They were there for about a year and then Ed – he was the husband – did himself in… committed suicide. Maybe it was something to do with the kids. I don’t know. They were on their way out anyway. He’d had enough of them.” He leant forward conspiratorially. “Ed always said there was something weird about them. Like, if you belted one, the other would feel the pain. Can you believe that? You whack Scott and it’s little Jamie who gets the bruise on his face. One of them always knew what was happening to the other one, even when they were miles apart. Ed couldn’t live with it. He used to say it was like being in an episode of The X-Files. So he was going to get rid of them, and the next thing I know, he’s dead, my wife’s sister is freaking out and nobody wants the boys.”

A lump of ash fell off the end of the cigar. It landed on Don’s sleeve but he didn’t notice.

“That was when I decided to take them in,” he went on. “I was running this show. At the time it was called Don White’s World of Illusion. But when I saw the boys, when I realized what they could do, I changed all that. I called it The Circus of the Mind and put them in as the final act. The strange thing is, everyone thinks there must be some trick. Hidden signals and codes – that sort of thing. It isn’t just the audience. Even the other performers don’t know how the boys do it. Isn’t that funny? Marcie and me, we think that’s hysterical.”

Banes had introduced the other man as Kyle Hovey. Now Hovey spoke for the first time. “Why haven’t you put them on television?” he asked. “You could have made more money that way.”

“Yeah. I thought about that. Marcie and me talked about it. But they get too well known, someone’s going to take them away.” He hesitated, not sure how much he should tell the two men. “You know how it is,” he went on. “We only got them in the first place because the foster care system is so overstretched. Too many files, not enough case workers. That’s what Marcie says. Right now it seems like everyone’s forgotten about them… and maybe it’s best to keep it that way.” He examined the cigar for a moment, gazing into the burning ash. “Anyway, it’s like I told you, they won’t do it. It was hard enough getting them to perform on the stage. I took a belt to them. Then I starved them. I told them, If you don’t work, you don’t eat. And even then they still refused.”

“So what did you do?” Banes asked.