Rob Thurman - Madhouse

"Yeah, you know people," I commented sourly, remembering another of his informants, Abbagor, who'd tried to kill us … twice. "Too many goddamn people."

Wahanket, though, turned out to not be nearly as bad as Abbagor. Equally as freaky, but nowhere near as homicidal. And he lived in the museum we'd left only hours ago, which made him more likely than anyone to know about Sawney and his Great Escape.

The Eight-sixth Street station was starting to seem awfully familiar. After exiting and walking over to Fifth Avenue, we were back where we'd started. The Met was packed when we walked in. There were drifting couples, hordes of tourists from every country imaginable, people wandering alone, and a school group of screaming rug rats from hell. They must've left their indoor voices on the bus; even the empty suits of armor looked pained as they thundered by. We kept moving past them as Goodfellow murmured something about the lost art of child sacrifices. In one wing, he stopped before a bust with blind marble eyes and the sneer of white stone lips. "Caligula, you dumb son of a bitch." He shook his head. "I told him horses weren't the monogamous kind, but did he listen? No, not for a second. Insanity, tyranny, and one screwed-up love life, that was Little Boots for you." He sighed, "Threw some great parties, though."

Shrugging off the nostalgia, he led us to a corridor off the exhibit hall, and that in turn led to another corridor and a locked door marked authorized personnel only. Niko offered, "I'm sure Sangrida Odinsdóttir would be able to provide us with a key."

"Please. You insult me." Robin slid a bright green glance back over his shoulder as he slipped a kit of small metal tools from his pocket. "Not that that can't be arousing in certain situations."

Niko had left the restaurant knife behind and wasn't practicing with any of his at the moment, but the shimmer of metal was embodied in the minute rise of his eyebrows all the same. "No fun," Robin muttered and got back to the job at hand. "An entire absence of revelry whatsoever."

Within seconds we were on stairs and heading downward into the gloom. The steps ended in a rabbit warren of storerooms. "Wahanket or Hank as I like to call him used to be up top, mixing and mingling, so to speak, but eventually he was shuffled off down here with the other passé exhibits. I think he much prefers it here. Dark, cramped, musty…much more like home."

"Where the hell was home?" I turned sideways to move between a row of crates. "A gopher hole?"

"Not quite." Robin had produced a small flashlight and switched it on. Either the overheads didn't work or his friend wasn't into a lot of light. We moved along and entered an open area encircled by a Stonehenge of piled crates. There weren't any signs of habitation, but that's where he stopped, voice echoing in the empty area, "Hank? You up for a visit?" he called cheerfully.

There was a long stretch of silence, and then a sibilant hiss, dry as dust and abrading as sand, came out of the darkness. "A long time, Peter Pan. It has been a long time, long time."

"Get the guy a VCR and some Disney movies and this is the thanks I receive," Goodfellow grunted. "I've brought friends, Hank. Let's reduce my emasculation in front of them and call me Pan, shall we?"

A brown figure materialized out of the dark into the dim white light of the flashlight. He seemed to be made entirely of sticklike bones and resin-hardened bandages. A gaping pit of a nose and empty eye sockets were all that could be seen of his face. He looked like the title villain from every bad mummy movie I'd watched when I was a little kid, come to life. But he wasn't slow like they were. He wasn't slow at all. He slipped in and out of the thick shadows, scorpion-quick and snake-silent. It was the cowboy hat, though, that was the crowning touch. I wondered if Sangrida knew about her squatter. Or knew that he was raiding the…

"The lost and found, eh, Hank?" Robin settled on a crate and tilted his head. "It's a good look for you. Very rugged."

Covetous fingers of nut-brown bone touched the brim of the cowboy hat. "It is a crown for a king." There was a gaping grin of blackened stubs that revealed a leathery curl of tongue and the taut ligaments of a disintegrating jaw.

The thing was it should have been funny, a mummy called Hank wearing a cowboy hat, but we were looking at what was basically a corpse made of jerky. Not beef, mind you, but human jerky. Not funny. You could've dressed him in drag and it still wouldn't have been funny. Like roadkill dressed in a tutu. It was spooky and more than a little repulsive.

"The closest you got to a king in ye olden dynasties was stealing their dusty mummified genitals to make your potions," the puck scoffed before promptly contradicting himself. He was never one to let logic interfere with a good insult. "Niko, Cal, this is Hank…Wahanket. He's a scholar, like they used to make them in the day when knowledge translated to power. He was the high priest of some cranky Egyptian god or another. He was also the teacher of a minor pharaoh or two. Or five or six. Maybe even ten or twelve. Only Hank knows for sure how many dynasties he pulled the strings on, and he's not telling." He clucked his tongue reprovingly at the stinginess of it. "I don't believe he was ever human, although he's not telling that either. But he's the only walking, talking mummy I've come across in my lifetime. The human ones just tend to lie there like a bad date."

Wahanket's jaw snapped shut rigidly and a yellow glow roiled to life in the hollow eye sockets of the brittle skull. It wasn't a sunny light—more like the luminescence of a creeping cave creature. Dim, flickering, and cold. I could hear a buzz vibrating his throat—it could've been the rattle of petrified vocal cords or a plague of enraged locusts swarming from within the hollow cavity of his chest. I didn't have the slightest urge to know which.

"What have you brought me, Pan?" came the displeased rasp. "Where are your offerings? Lest I find you most unworthy, lay them before me."

"Offerings, eh? Once again, I steer the subject back to dusty, unused genitals." Goodfellow's heel kicked the crate and the beam of his flashlight danced over my face mockingly.

"Shut the fuck up, Loman," I snapped. I'd used the name for him from the beginning. Although Goodfellow was a much better salesman than Willy Loman had ever been, it was a good name for him…mostly because it pissed him off. Much, say, as he was pissing me off now.

"We are here for a reason," Niko reminded us both, his patience a little less than it had been in the restaurant. "And I'm sure that Wahanket has better things to do than entertain us. So let us move things along. Now."

"Fine, fine. I would think regular vampire nookie would mellow you out, but apparently not," Robin mumbled as he doffed the strap of his shoulder and dug the "offering" out of its black leather case. It was a laptop, the very latest with all the bells, whistles, and technophile crap that you could possibly want. That's what Wahanket was, the puck had said, a technophile of the highest order. If it was bright, shiny, and it plugged in, then he wanted it, and thanks to the seekers of his info, had it. "The latest and the greatest, O Son of the Sun. Its RAM is as plentiful as the waters of the Nile," he promised, flashing that blinding salesman smile. Pure shark. No bark, all bite.

Greedy claws snatched it up and began to examine it. "Ahhh, how can one worship gold and jewels when the knowledge within this makes you unto a god?"

"Yeah, that's great," I said dismissively. "Enjoy. So, what do you know about Sawney Beane? Ate a lot of people, was supposed to be dead. He was upstairs, now he's not. What's going on?"

"Sawney Beane." The seething eye sockets looked up from the computer. "Six hundred and eighty-seven humans consumed. For a Redcap, mildly impressive. But reconstituting from bone and ash…ah. That is quite impressive indeed. Pity there were no security guards between him and the way out or it could have been six hundred and eighty-nine. Crawling back from one's molecular shore must create a prodigious appetite." The fragments of teeth clicked together. "Unbelievably prodigious."