The Dark Flight Down Read Free

gathering round a hard-dug hole in the frozen ground. The snow continued to fall. The funeral was about to begin.

3
    More people than Boy expected turned up for Korp’s funeral. There were many of his old friends from the theater, the musicians, the stagehands and costume girls. He gazed around at the faces of all the performers and musicians and actors who had come to pay their respects to the old director. He tried to guess who they were, and what they were, singers or jugglers, or maybe, like Valerian, there was a magician among them. No, there was no one like Valerian. There could never be a magician like Valerian. Valerian, whose magic was sometimes just stage trickery, and sometimes . . . sometimes something more.
    Boy saw a small old lady at the front of the crowd with a fluffy dog on a lead. It took him a moment to remember she was Korp’s housekeeper. She had brought Korp’s faithful dog, Lily, with her. There was Snake-girl, looking quite plain without her snake. Boy realized only now that her snake and her costume were what made her seem so mysterious and alluring. It was like a new kind of vision, seeing with eyes as keen as scalpel blades, that cut away desires and emotions and wishful thinking and left only what was fact. It hurt, sometimes, if you looked upon the wrong thing, and it could burn. Not seeing Willow among the many still arriving for Korp’s funeral, he turned his face to the sky and watched the hundreds upon thousands of huge feathery snowflakes fall into the churchyard.
    Now Boy noticed something else. People were looking at him, nudging each other and pointing at him with a nod of their heads. As he caught their eye they’d look away, and Boy soon heard enough of a whisper to know what it was. Valerian. Here was Valerian’s boy, somehow still alive despite the rumors that both he and Valerian had perished in some awful, occult cataclysm in the Yellow House on New Year’s Eve.
    “Ignore them,” Kepler said quietly.
    News traveled fast, and rumor and gossip even faster. Yes, Valerian was dead, but that was only half the story. Boy had survived, after all. The crowds stared at him. He looked thinner than ever, his pale skin ghostlike and gray, but he was nonetheless alive.
    And what would they think,
Boy thought bitterly,
if they
knew the rest of it? That Valerian was my father.
    Kepler had said so, and then denied it almost as soon as he had uttered the words.
    It seemed so unreal to Boy, the Boy who was finally seeing what was truth and what was untruth. Maybe he’d just imagined Kepler had said it. Those last few minutes before Valerian had gone had been so chaotic: the noise, the light, the wind in the Tower. Maybe he’d just wanted to hear what he thought Kepler had said, and had imagined it.
    But no. Kepler had told Valerian that he was Boy’s father. Why he had denied it as soon as Valerian was dead, Boy had no idea, but he had definitely said it. And there had been a witness too.
    At the thought of her, Boy’s eyes rose from the snow and slush around his feet, and he looked up, to find himself looking into a smiling face he had been longing to see.
    Willow.

4
    Willow stood on the far side of the grave, hidden from the waist down by the pile of earth spoil that would soon be covering Korp’s coffin. Boy made to move toward her, but there was Kepler’s hand on his shoulder immediately.
    “Have some respect, Boy.”
    Kepler nodded to where the pallbearers were making their way through the crowd.
    The ceremony began and ended and finally they shoveled some of the earth back into the hole, hiding the coffin as the City was being hidden by snow. Hiding it from sight, as if that could hide it from memory.
    Boy knew there was something wrong with what he was watching, but couldn’t place what it was. Korp’s dog, Lily, however, could. As the frozen clods of earth began to drum onto the wood of the coffin lid, the sad little mutt shivered and then began to let out a pathetic