James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

Could he bear to do the same with the thing’s head — yank it loose and hide it somewhere? Perhaps shove the top of the piano aside and toss it in? He forced himself to look at it, to imagine clamping the tongs against the ivory cheekbones and twisting the head until it snapped. The thought paralyzed him, but he had to do it. He steeled himself. He couldn’t be stared at any longer. He stepped toward it, reaching out with the tongs, slowly drawing the jaws apart. He daren’t get the tongs in the thing’s mouth; it would snap the steel rods like twigs.

The tongs inched closer. Kraken shook so that the loose rivet about which the tongs swiveled rattled like a locust. He gasped for breath. The horrible eye sockets seemed to stare through him — through his forehead beaded with cold sweat, a great salty drop of which rolled into his right eye, nearly blinding him. The tongs settled in against the cheekbones, and, with a thrum of settling bones, the thing on the table gave a quick lurch, as if shaking off the rubber clamp.

Kraken hooted in fear, dropped the tongs onto the top of the slab, and trod backwards toward his corner, slamming into the game bird’s table with his right foot. The spindly table leg buckled, and the skeletal bird rolled from the plate in a little cascade of peas and fell to the floor. Kraken watched it in horror, half expecting the thin gray bones of the wings to vibrate and the bird to sail off like a great moth toward the flame of the gaslamp. The tongs banged down on the floor beside it.

This wouldn’t do. He couldn’t abide the idea of the bird out of sight on the floor behind the table. He must know its movements, if there were any. If it flew out of nowhere at him, he’d simply drop dead. He bent suddenly, summoning his strength. He grasped the tongs, plucked the bird from the floor, and tossed it, tongs and all, into a coal bucket on the hearth next to the piano. The bird whumped into the bucket in a cloud of coal dust; the tongs banged against the wall and dropped onto the hearth tiles. Kraken whirled around at the sound of a sudden scuffling behind him, expecting to find himself confronted by the handless skeleton. But there it sat, unmoving. The scuffling issued from beyond the wall across the room. Something pawed at the wall, trying to get in at him. Kraken slumped backward toward his stool in the corner.

A panel in the oak wainscot slid abruptly open, and beyond it, tugging weirdly at a pair of shoes, was a bent Willis Pule. He backed into the room, grunting with effort, and Dr. Narbondo appeared behind him, holding up the opposite end of a corpse. Pule dropped it as soon as it was entirely past the wall, as if he were immensely tired. Narbondo kicked the corner of the panel, and it slid shut, cutting off the entrance to what looked to Kraken to be a dark, low hallway. Kraken shrank into his corner, wondering in horror at this new act of villainy, half relieved, however, that it wasn’t him that was being dragged down tunnels.

The panel had just slid shut when there came a fearful pounding at the conventional door. Pule swung it open, and there stood Shiloh the messiah with a look on his face that seemed to imply that he would brook no nonsense, that he’d come for his mother and there would be hell to pay, perhaps literally, if he wasn’t satisfied. Narbondo scowled back at him. “Where is Nell Owlesby?” he asked suddenly.

“She’s safe — safer by far with my flock than with you.”

“Half your flock is my flock,” said Narbondo, “and they’d as soon eat her as give her a tract. Get her.

“Quite impossible, I assure you.” Shiloh stepped in and closed the door, frowning at the littered room and at Bill Kraken, who, it seemed, was at least as offensive to him as was the corpse on the floor. “I’ll keep my end of the bargain. You don’t need the woman for that. I know where the box is hidden, and have these ten years. If you do as I say, you’ll know too. It’s as simple as that. But you needn’t worry about the woman. She’s worth nothing to you beyond that single bit of knowledge. And that, as we both know, is worth an enormous amount, isn’t it?”

The old man slouched on a stool, obviously enjoying the advantage he held over Narbondo. He removed a snuffbox from his pocket, pinched out a frightful quantity, and inhaled hugely, surrounding his head in a momentary brown cloud. He sneezed voluminously six times in rapid, deflating succession until he was reduced to a bent, wheezing ruin, his face a mask of mixed pain and satisfaction. Dr. Narbondo shook his head in disgust. Shiloh groped for his pocket, replacing the snuffbox, and wiped his eyes with the hem of his robe. His wrinkled forehead alternately relaxed and contracted like an irritated slug, as if he were experiencing after tremors of his recent snuff-inspired earthquake.

He pulled himself erect and looked straightaway at the Keeble box atop the aquarium; then, before Narbondo could stop him, he stepped across and picked it up. “Very nice article, this.”

The hunchback jerked toward him, snatching the box away. The old man put on a theatrically offended face and then looked in mock surprise at his empty hands. Narbondo scowled and set the box gingerly atop the piano.

The heap of bones and winding sheet on the slab seemed to slump just a bit in response to the box having been moved, and the wisp of settling debris struck the grin from Shiloh’s face. He seemed to recall suddenly that it was his mother that lay before him. Narbondo wheeled his misting device past on a tea cart, brushing the old man out of the way. Then he hauled out of a cupboard a low gurney. He and Pule tugged the fresh cadaver onto the gurney and cranked it up level with the slab. From a wooden trough beneath the jar of yellow fluid he pulled a dripping, desultory carp, alive but sluggish, and slapped it onto the gurney beside the corpse. He worked quickly and deftly, but with a contracted brow and sweat-beaded forehead, as if he knew precisely what he was about and knew equally well that what he was about was not at all a simple business.

Pule stood silently by, spurred now and then to grudging action when Narbondo snarled out orders, then falling into inactivity, either out of a lack of comprehension or a general unwillingness to be ordered about. The old man twittered near the window like a bird — the approaching experiment having eliminated any veneer of detached coolness. He gasped suddenly and clutched his breast. “Where,” he cried, pointing. “Her hands…where are her hands? I swear to heaven, Narbondo, if you’ve made a hash of this, if you’ve…”

“Shut up, old man!” cried Narbondo, clipping him off in midsentence. “Where are Lady Southcote’s beautiful hands?” he asked Pule. Pule stared at him, then looked around, bending to peer under the slab. Kraken quaked in silence on his stool.

“You foul…!” cried the evangelist, unable to think of a word sufficiently foul to express his indignity. “I’ll…”he began again, but this time a wild clattering arose from the direction of the hearth, and a chunk of coal the size of a walnut popped out of the coal bucket onto the floor.

“A rat,” whispered Narbondo, reaching for the poker at the far side of the hearth and raising it over his head.

“Damn me!” shouted the old man, enraged that Narbondo had abandoned his mother to chase a rat. Narbondo hunched toward the coal bucket, a finger to his lips. A wild rattling issued from it. Coal dust rose in a cloud. The bucket tipped over with a clang, cascading a little delta of clinkers onto the hearth, atop which rode the blackened remains of the pea hen, its broken wings working furiously, its head swiveling from side to side. And, as if in accompaniment, the piano erupted into discordant play, as if someone were beating randomly on the concealed keys. Kraken crossed himself. Shiloh threw open the window over the courtyard and perched one foot onto the sill, ready to leap. Narbondo swung the poker wildly at the hopping pea hen, slamming it into the piano leg. The bird rose into the air, a thin whistling sound chirping from its stretched throat where ragged, charred skin still clung in patches. The box atop the piano danced in tune to the wild playing, and the pea hen shot off like a stone out of a sling, straight into the wall above the aquarium, smearing coal dust and grease onto the yellowed plaster, then dropping with a splash into the water, sinking slowly to the gravel and staring out at them mournfully before collapsing onto its side.