Alex Grecian - Devil's Workshop

“It’s really nobody,” the man said. “I thought he was somebody, but I was mistaken. But now I don’t know what to do with you, Walter Day. I think I’ll keep you for a time. Perhaps I’ll feed you to my fly.”

“Listen-”

“Yes?”

“By order of the Queen, I’m placing you under arrest. Surrender now, while you can, and I’ll see that you’re treated well.”

The man took a step back. Day heard his shoes scuffing on the stones. Then he began to laugh. Day felt himself slipping away. When the man stopped laughing, he sniffed and Day heard him blow his nose.

“Thank you for that,” the man said. “I needed a good hearty chuckle. You know, I quite like you, Walter Day.”

The man’s voice had lost its mocking tone. He sounded sincere. And surprised.

“I really really do,” he said. “You’re so marvelously uncomplicated.”

“Let us go free,” Day said.

A hand clamped against the fabric of the hood over his mouth and Day smelled something sharp and acrid, a chemical seeping into the hood.

“Shh,” the voice said. “No more talking. I still have work to do, and I’m suddenly peckish. Why don’t you take a nap?”

As if the man had given him a hypnotic command, Day felt the floor open up under him and he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Eunice Pye stood just inside the doorway and squinted into the gloom of the Michaels’ house. She listened very hard, harder than she had ever listened before, but heard nothing, no movement, no voice or rustle of paper or cloth anywhere in the house. And so she crept cautiously into the hall, past the coatrack and the little pile of mail on the floor. She left the front door open behind her and sunlight bounced off its painted red exterior, now angled into the hall, and shone deep orange against the wall next to her.

She moved her feet forward, one at a time, barely lifting them from the smooth uneven floorboards. She held her best garden hoe out in front of her with both hands. She knew there was little she could do with it to threaten anyone or protect herself, but it made her feel better and safer to hold it.

The stairway was in front of her, along the right-hand wall. She stopped and looked up. There was a red runner that swam up the middle of the stairs, and she wondered briefly at the extravagance of it. She had a small rug made of rags and cast-off remnants next to her bed that Giles had given her on some long-ago Christmas Eve. She could not even imagine how much such a long strip of carpet must have cost. She blinked and held still and remembered why she was there in that house, and then she took a deep breath and moved forward.

Nothing stirred in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and so she turned her attention to the parlor door, which was now near to her left elbow. That door was standing open, and she could see a giant table painted black just inside the room. She moved two steps sideways and she was standing in the doorway with the table to her right. There were chairs around the table, four of them, but the chairs were empty. There was a bookcase against the wall directly ahead of her, behind the table and next to the fireplace. It held a collection of knickknacks and small painted family portraits and perhaps a dozen books of the kind sold by door-to-door salesmen to the lady of the house. Among the portraits she spotted two or three framed photographs of stiffly posed people in their Sunday finest. She wondered if Mrs Michael would ever be coming back to that house. She wondered if Mrs Michael was dead, perhaps buried in the back garden. But no, that was silly. Eunice had seen Mrs Michael leave the house with three big trunks and ride away in a four-wheeler while Mr Michael was at work.

Eunice finally turned her head and looked at the two objects nailed to the mantelpiece over the hearth. She stared at them for a long time, hoping that they would turn into things one might normally see on a mantel, things that were not tongues. But they didn’t change.

She tore her gaze away from the tongues and saw Mr Michael sitting in a straight-backed padded chair next to the fireplace. He was tied there with mailing twine, and he was watching her. He held perfectly still and his eyes were open, and for just a moment she wondered if he was dead, but then she saw that his chest was rising and falling rhythmically. His hair was tousled and his eyes were red and his mouth was puffy and crusted with blood, much the way the mouth of the bald prisoner had been when she had seen him in the street.

She took a quick glance around the rest of the room, then laid down her hoe and rushed to his side. He turned his head to watch her as she approached, but didn’t make any other movement. She hunched over his wrists where they were bound to the chair and her gnarled fingers worried at the knots, which had been pulled tight and small like hard little seeds. She shook her head and whispered to Mr Michael.

“Rheumatism,” she said. “Can’t move my fingers so well as I might have done once upon a time. But don’t you worry. You sit tight and I’ll be right back.”

She scurried away back to the hall and clucked her tongue at herself. She murmured under her breath. “Of course he’s going to sit tight, you silly old woman. Man can’t move if he wants to.”

She glanced up the stairs again as she passed them and went along the hallway to the kitchen. She tried to move quickly, but she didn’t want to be surprised by anything, so she stopped at the kitchen doorway and entered slowly, checking both corners by the door before she went all the way inside. Nobody was waiting for her there, but the back door was standing open. She went to it and looked around the empty garden before exploring the kitchen. It wouldn’t do to have someone walk in while she was distracted.

There was a knife block on the counter and the biggest knife was missing. There was a butt of ham and some bread crumbs on the butcher block. A honeybee sat on the ham. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and it buzzed around her head.

“Go on, little bee,” she said. “You don’t eat ham and I know you’re not gonna sting me.”

It lost interest in her and zee ’d across the kitchen and zigzagged out through the open door. She selected the smallest knife from the block and ran her thumb along its blade to see if it was sharp. She nodded to herself and crept back down the hallway to the parlor, checked it carefully for new people, and then hurried over to the chair where Mr Michael sat in enforced patience, waiting for her.

The knife was very sharp indeed and made short work of the mailing twine. She rubbed Mr Michael’s wrists to get the blood moving in them again.

“Can you stand?”

Mr Michael nodded, but didn’t speak. Eunice looked at his mouth and then looked at the horrible tongues hanging above the hearth, and she blinked back tears at the thought of what the poor man must have endured.

She patted him on his arm and helped pull him up. He clutched the back of the chair and leaned hard against it, and they waited for the feeling to come back to his legs. When he could walk, she led him out of the parlor and turned right and guided him down his own hall to the door, which was still standing open. She was so anxious to leave that house that she practically pulled him out into the sunlight. He stood blinking in the tiny front garden while she pulled the door closed behind them. She didn’t hear it latch, but she turned and took Mr Michael by the arm and led him into her house and put on a kettle for tea. While she waited for the water to heat, she went and got a roll of gauze bandages, a little bottle of iodine, and the pint of rye that Giles had always kept in the back of the cupboard. Then she broke open her jar of pin money that she had saved from sewing work. She would need pennies to pay the neighborhood boys.