My Clockwork Muse (18 page)

It wasn't until some minutes later that I
contemplated the impossibility of what had just happened. I had
left Pluto just moments before in the yard. There, he was a loving
little kitty, as I had remembered him from when he had been
Virginia's beloved two-eyed cat—and as he had been just nights ago,
purring in my lap.

Then, just moments later, he was the hissing,
foul beast I had grown accustomed to since ... the incident.

That he had periodic changes of heart I could
perhaps accept. Even beasts have moods, I knew. But how, I
wondered, had he come to be inside a closed house? Some unseen
crack in the foundation? A gap in a floorboard somewhere? Cats, of
course, have the ability to slip in and out of tight spots as
adroitly as seeping water. So, intellectually, I could accept his
presence inside. That is, it was at least possible.

But that he had somehow gotten there
before
me—when I had just left him and not taken my eyes
from the cottage since—was not.

Just as I had puzzled to the point of madness
over the idea of Billy Burton in two places at once, in two states
at once—and now, I would add to the mix, of two minds at once—man—I
was left with the idea that I may have been dealing not with one
cat, but
two
, just as I was certain there were two Burton's,
albeit one a fraud.

Could one of these Plutos have been a
counterfeit? And if so, to what purpose?

I felt a chill run through me...

And a peculiar tickle on my neck.

When I reached up to scratch it, my fingers
came away bloody.

Intrigued, I stood and walked to the
bureau—from where Pluto had lunged at me—and inspected my neck in
the mirror. The glass was cloudy and warped, but I could see that
the top of my collar was soaked red from the fresh claw mark on my
neck. Looking closer, I saw that Pluto's attack might have missed
me altogether had it not been for the welt of raised flesh that
ringed the peculiar puncture wound I had noticed the other day
while shaving. Pluto's claw had apparently snagged on it, leaving a
red stripe just above my collar.

But what excited my attention more than the
seeping wound was the character of the strange puncture itself.
While the mark of Pluto's last attack was fading to invisibility
upon my cheek, the puncture on my neck, which I had discovered at
the same time, seemed not to have healed at all. In fact, if
anything, it had gotten worse. Rather than festering, the wound
seemed to be freshening. It might have been inflicted upon me
yesterday.

I wiped away the blood with a cloth and sat
down heavily on the bed, overcome by a feeling of hopelessness.
Mysterious wounds, masked swordsmen and counterfeit cats... My
troubles were multiplying. Covering my face with my hands, I leaned
back into my pillows where I soon fell into a troubled sleep.

~ * * * ~

Even in my sleep, it occurred to me that it
was a dream of my father, John Allan, that had ushered in this
whole wretched affair to begin with. I had been suffering some
torment of his when Gessler's men had wrested me from my nap. So I
wondered if my ordeal had entered some new phase when I found
myself confronting the man once again.

Our meetings were never pleasant, but this
time he wore the black mask of my 'Rue Morgue' assailant and
swatted at me with Burton's walking stick. Being unarmed, I had no
choice but to run. I was beside myself with panic, and even though
I could feel the revolver in my pocket slapping my hip, it did not
occur to me to draw it. It either was not really there, or had been
put off-limits to me for some reason known only to the mad physics
that ruled the world of my dreams. It seemed to me that the same
logic that put Burton's stick in Allan's hands should have put the
rapier in mine. But I knew from experience that the logic of my
nightmares served only to undermine my advantage, never to bolster
it.

So I ran.

Past the upended wash basin, out the door and
through the creaking gate into the churchyard, casting anxious
glances over my shoulder the entire way with that infernal stick,
wielded by my faithless father, aimed at my head, sweeping blurry
arcs before my eyes.

I was halfway to Virginia's vault before I
realized that I was no longer being chased. Breathing hard, I
stopped and looked back. The gravel path was empty. In the
moonlight, tall crooked grave markers and crumbling tombs cast
angular black shadows across the path. When I looked down, I saw
that I was dressed in my stocking feet, the dampness of the gravel
soaking through to my skin.

I peered in the direction of Virginia's
burial vault. There I glimpsed a figure dressed in white gliding
across the path, seeming to float like a bank of mist through the
gloom. I immediately thought of Olimpia. She had moved in exactly
that same fashion and in exactly that same spot just days before,
drifting over the ground as if her toes hung suspended in the air.
I would not mistake her for a ghost this time. Still, my heart
quickened, not with fear, however, but with longing. Olimpia! I
thought to cry out to her, but my tongue was tied. I hastened to
the spot where I saw her pass.

Before I had taken two strides, a form
stepped into the path from behind the vault. I stopped dead in my
tracks. It was a woman in a white dress. I squinted at her through
the gloom, no longer certain of her identity.

"Olimpia?"

There came no reply. She moved towards me. I
shook my head to cast the vision from my eyes, for, though the
night was still, her white dress seemed to billow around her in
some preternatural breeze. Yet, she was far from gliding now. I
distinctly heard the crunch of the gravel beneath what I soon
became aware was an unusually heavy tread. She walked toward me
step by crunching step.

"Eddy..."

The voice came to me, sweet and plaintive. I
felt it more than heard it and my skin crawled, for the voice
seemed familiar to me. And not only the voice, but the form
itself.

Now I knew I was dreaming—and I wanted John
Allan back.

"Virginia?"

She presented a flawless, milky white cheek
to me. Virginia! It was! I started to run to her, but a sudden
sense of foreboding restrained me.

"Eddy..."

I realized that the dress she was wearing was
the same one in which I had buried her. Her dark hair, jet black in
the moonlight, had fallen forward, concealing half of her face. A
faint smile began to quiver upon her lips. She held out her arms to
me, and I all but collapsed into them, such was the trance I had
fallen into. This was my Virginia, after all, come back to me. My
beloved.

I could feel her fingers caress the back of
my neck and when I opened my eyes I saw that it was not just the
moonlight that had given her skin its unnatural pallor. It might
have occurred to me that she was as pale as a ghost, if part of me
did not think she was one.

"Eddy," she said again. This time I could
feel her breath in my ear—and it bore to my nostrils the stench of
the grave.

In fear, I started to draw back when a mark
on her neck caught my eye. Upon closer examination, I saw that it
was a puncture wound, the same sort of wound that existed on my own
neck. Only this one was cracked and dry, a dead hole into her
throat. I remembered that it was the mark that I had thought
nothing of in life. In death, it took on a sinister aspect.

"Virginia, what has happened to your little
neck?"

Instead of answering, she raised her face to
mine. I thought she meant to kiss me and I felt myself falling once
again. But when she turned her head, I saw that while one cheek was
flawless and fair, the other was gashed and torn. The dry flesh
hung in tatters, eaten away by decay, and foul with the corruption
of the grave.

I staggered back. But for every step I took,
she took one towards me. I soon ran out of path and stumbled
backwards into the grass. I did not want her to touch me. I knew
now that the thing that ambled towards me was not Virginia, but
some revenant occupant of the churchyard that only a trick of my
troubled soul had transformed into the image of my dead wife. In my
mind flashed visions of Burton in his fool's motley accompanied by
the faces of John Allan's household blacks from my childhood back
in Richmond with their wild-eyed tales of zombies and ghosts.

I scrambled to my feet and groped in my
pocket for my revolver.

"Eddy..."

In a panic, my fingers frantically sought out
the handle of the gun. Finding it, I drew, remembering at the last
moment that
'it's not an aimin' gun
.
'
Just draw and
fire, I told myself. My finger tensed on the trigger, but I could
not pull it. The Virginia-creature took a step towards me, and then
another. I brought the gun up and held it straight out from my
shoulder. My hand shook, but I knew I had six loaded barrels, none
of which could fail to hit a zombie-sized target from four and then
three paces despite my tremulous grip. My finger tightened and the
cluster of barrels began to rotate...

I diverted my aim at the last instant.

Bang!

God help me, I couldn't do it. The shot went
into a bush at the side of the path.

A scream filled the air, a mad feline howl. A
black cat dashed out from beneath the shrub into which I had fired
and disappeared into the night.

Startled, I watched it dart away. And when I
looked back I found Virginia's decay-ravaged face moving close to
mine, and I knew she didn't mean to kiss me this time.

I couldn't say how long I slept. But when my
eyes snapped open, I was happy beyond measure to find myself in my
own bed. From the quality of the light, I could tell that it was
early morning. I flung my covers aside and my happiness vanished at
once.

Swinging my feet free of the blankets, I
could see that I was still dressed in my clothes from the previous
night. To my horror, I found that my socks were soaked through to
the soles of my feet. The knees of my trousers were shiny and slick
with mud and clinging to the fibers were rancid flecks of—of what I
could not say. Worse still, I saw that my door was slightly ajar
and lying in the crack, half in and half out of the room, was the
form of an obviously dead animal. A black cat.

Pluto!

Even with his eyes closed, I could see that
it was poor Pluto. I immediately felt a wave of guilt surge through
me. Surely I had managed to kill the creature in my sleep,
as—judging from the condition of my feet—I had obviously been
walking about and God knew what else. I stooped and picked him up
from the floor. His body was still supple and I held him at arm's
length, shaking him gently and speaking his name. But this cat was
beyond revival.

It was only a short moment before I found the
cause of his death, a small bullet hole in his flank. My "dream"
came flooding back to me. I could hear the bang of the pistol when
I had fired into the bush, followed by the scream of the cat. I had
shot him.

But which Pluto? The one that constantly
tried to kill me or the one that purred on my lap?

I was convinced that this was the latter.
Pathetically, he had come to me to seek comfort in his final
moments, unaware that it was a bullet from my gun that had finished
him.

I crossed the room and laid him on the table.
I decided to check to make sure this was indeed Pluto, so I thumbed
back his eyelids and was not surprised to find one dead yellow eye
and one empty black socket. I noticed some object glimmering there.
Looking closer, I saw entangled in the fur around Pluto's missing
eye—protruding from the hole, in fact—a small metal object.
Inspecting it closely, I found it to be a tiny spring, such as you
might find in a pocket watch. It was clotted with dried gore. The
little spring must have gotten lodged in Pluto's former eye
somehow. During some thrashing of his death throes, I supposed.

Then I parted the fur around his bullet
wound. I found it peculiar that the wound itself was dry. More
peculiar still, the fur was also dry and not matted or sticky with
blood as I would have expected.

Inside the hole, a glint of something caught
my eye, probably the bullet. I plunged my fingers into the wound,
the edges of which expanded elastically as I delved deeply under
Pluto's dead skin. Expecting to find slimy bits of tissue and
tendon enveloping the lead slug, my fingers instead found a piece
of thin metal. I grasped it and pulled. Something snapped lightly
and I drew the object out of the hole, tilting it one way and then
the other until it came free of the wound.

It was a gear, a finely-tooled cogged
wheel.

Curious.

Unlike the little spring, I saw no
possibility of the gear finding its way inside Pluto by natural
means. Perhaps he had swallowed it. With a rising sense of
apprehension, I went back to the wound and fished around inside
again, producing this time a short length of brass tubing. As I
held it to my eye, I saw that a drop of some kind of translucent
red liquid spilled from its hollow end.

My breathing came fast and heavy now.
Prodding inside the creature once again with my finger, I felt
nothing but oily gears, springs and tubes. Hooking a tangled mass
of the stuff with my knuckle, I yanked out a brass and copper snarl
of cat gut, realizing then to my horror that this was not a cat at
all—clearly not a biological entity of any sort—but some kind of
clockwork mechanism.

I looked around frantically for a knife,
meaning to cut the thing open, when my eye fell upon a little
wooden box I had never seen before. What it was and how it came to
be on the table in my bedroom, I did not know. I could see about
its base smudges of caked soil such as I had found on my trousers
and, as I reached out to grasp it, I was filled with a sense of
foreboding.