James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

The piano, meanwhile, banged away. Narbondo, emboldened by the demise of the pea hen and certain that a properly objective attitude would explain away the phenomenon of the mysterious piano, lunged at the instrument and pushed back the lid. He picked up his poker, raised it ceilingward, and peered in to find nothing but flying hammers. Squinting at Pule, who had retreated toward Kraken’s end of the room, he pulled gingerly on the key cover. It was locked. Mystified, he found the key, unlocked the cover, threw it back, and shouted in surprise at the weird scene before him the crabbed, skeletal hands of Joanna Southcote, thumping pointlessly on the keys. They flailed across the keyboard in an agitated whirl, hopping onto the floor where they twitched and danced.

“Her hands!” Shiloh shouted, repeating himself, more horrified at their spectacular reappearance than he had been at their absence.

Narbondo lunged for Kraken’s fallen tongs, grappling each hand in turn, flopping them onto the slab. The first leaped off immediately, and Narbondo was on it at once, avidly now, slamming it back beside its mate. The two, finally, lay still.

“This is an outrage!” sputtered Shiloh, his mouth working spasmodically.

“This is powerful alchemy!” whispered Narbondo, as much to himself as to anyone else, and he immediately trained his sprayer onto the corpse. She seemed to stretch. Joints crackled. Her neck swiveled and rose a half inch off her chest. “Damn!” cried Narbondo, remembering her hands. He yanked out a roll of thin, braided wire from a box on his desk and affixed her wayward hands to her wrists. Her jaws clacked as if in satisfaction. Kraken was stupefied with terror. He grabbed suddenly for the water pitcher, swallowed a great draught, choked, and collapsed onto the floor, coughing and sputtering. Pule kicked him out of a lack of anything else to do, and Kraken scuttled in behind the stool, holding it in front of him to ward off the detested Pule.

Yellow mist clouded the room, swirling round in the draft as Narbondo excised the carp gland. “Her hands!” cried Shiloh again. “You’ve got them on backwards!”

“Silence!” shouted the hunchback, beside himself with success. He capered back and forth beside the slab, dancing round the edge of the gurney, spraying mist, affixing coiled tubing into a slit cut in the trachea of the dead man that Pule and he had dragged in through the secret door. He shoved it into his lungs, crying out to Pule to hold the sprayer, to prop up Joanna Southcote, to measure out a beaker of fluids.

“Her thumbs point outward!” whined the evangelist tiresomely, obsessed with Narbondo’s mistake.

“She’s lucky to have hands at all,” responded the doctor, leaping and jigging. “I’ll put the hands of an ape on her!”

And as if in response to this last threat, the corpse of Lady Southcote loomed up out of the mist like a marionette in a fever dream, jaws clacking, wavering there atop the slab as if she were adrift on a current of air.

“Mother!” cried Shiloh, collapsing onto his knees. From his robe he produced a stoppered bottle. He twisted it open and shook it liberally at the creature which slouched down the slab toward him. He intoned a nasal prayer, crossing himself, waving and gesturing. Narbondo sprayed on, stamping at a bladder on the ground that pumped something — Lord knew what — from the lungs of the dead man into the shrouded chest cavity of Joanna Southcote. The escaping gasses whistled eerily, like wind through the gap under a door.

“Speak!” implored the evangelist.

“Whee, whee, whee!” hooted the creeping skeleton before dropping off the end of the slab in a clatter of bones.

“Christ!” shouted Narbondo, genuinely dismayed at this new turn. A loose foot slid past him, out of sight under the piano, and a leg, severed from its pelvis, wobbled storklike in the settling mist before collapsing slowly forward, bouncing just a bit when it hit the ground, then clattering into silence. Only the skull, its toothy mouth working, remained animate, chattering round and round in a tight little circle on the slab.

“Command me, Mother!” cried the evangelist, grabbing for it, then stopping suddenly in mid-grab, as if he were reconsidering his actions. “She’s a ruin!” he wept, hitting tiredly at Narbondo, who stood nearby, breathing heavily.

Shiloh looked around suddenly, wildly. “She’ll come with me!” he cried.

“Gladly,” said the doctor, pulling down one of the cast glass cubes. “This is spade work.” He turned, humped across to a closet, flung it open, grabbed a dirty spade from among a half-dozen of the things, and turned to see Kraken, eyes whirling with fear, reaching for the box atop the piano.

Narbondo swung the spade at Kraken, who fended it off with his arm, howling in pain and hopping away from the piano. The hunchback spun around, recovered, and set himself to bash Kraken once again, but his quarry had abandoned the box and bolted toward the stairs. Narbondo leaped after him, paused at the top of the dark landing, listening to Kraken pound in wild steps toward the street. He turned once again into the room, where Pule crawled on his hands and knees, scuttling into the path of the skull, which jabbered along toward the street wall. The evangelist leaped back and forth, shouting orders.

“Get out of the way!” shouted Narbondo, storming past both of them and shoveling the head into the glass jar. In a moment Joanna Southcote was captive, the gibbering evangelist snatching a broad volume from a bookshelf and slamming it atop the square mouth of the jar, fearful, perhaps, that the skull, giddy with animation, would clamber out to resume its skittering journey across the oak plank of the floor.

The old man sat wheezing, cradling the prize in his lap. He stared mournfully at the heap of disconnected bone that had, for some few moments, shown such promise. With her he could have astonished the populace of London. Converts would have flocked in. The eyes of kings and dukes would have shot open. The doors of treasuries would have swung to. And here it was, a ruin.

Then again…He peered in at the head, considering. Its mouth worked silently. Without the aid of the air-filled bladder it could say nothing. But what would it take, he wondered, to provide it with a voice, from offstage, perhaps. It seemed like a blasphemy, to trump up a voice for the holy article, but the work mustn’t languish. It must go on at any cost. She would have been the first to agree. It looked to him as if she were nodding agreement from within her box, voicing her approval.

He stood up and moved toward the door. Narbondo and Pule stood talking in low tones near the courtyard window, but on perceiving Shiloh’s intent, they stepped along after him.

“It’s useless,” said Narbondo, reaching the door ahead of the tired evangelist. “I’ve done what I could. No man alive could have done more. If I had the box, there’s no telling what sort of restoration we could accomplish. Where is it?”

The old man glared at him. “You can hardly be serious. You’ve purposely made a mess of this. Out of spite. Out of evil and nothing else. I owe you nothing at all, nothing.”

“Then you’re a dead man,” replied the doctor, drawing his pistol. “Take the head,” he snapped at Pule.

“Wait!” cried Shiloh. “This is no time for haste, my son. Perhaps we can reach an agreement — twenty-five converts, shall we say, in recompense for the damage you’ve done tonight.”

“I’ll graft her head onto a carp — or better yet, a pig — and show her in carnivals. Take the head!” He waved with the pistol at Pule.

Shiloh glared at the hunchback. “You leave me no choice,” he said.

Narbondo nodded, rolling his eyes. “That’s correct. No choice at all. Not a bit. There’s nothing I’d like more than to shoot you and turn the both of you into some sort of instructive sideshow attraction. Where is the box?”