The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (11 page)

Danny Ferrick lay on his bed, staring at his ceiling with
headphones on. His MP3 player wasn't working for some reason and so he had to
resort to old CDs. He had a mix on at the moment that he'd burned himself, with
The Misfits, Primus, Taking Back Sunday . . . all kinds of stuff, including
some old school Zeppelin. If he could have gotten away with it with his mother
just down the hall he would have dug through his closet to get the small bag of
weed he'd scored the previous week and lit one up. He wasn't as into weed as a
lot of the guys he knew — he couldn't call any of them friends, really
— but the times he had smoked, it had taken away some of the weight that
he felt pressing on him all the time. Right now, he would have liked to smoke
some weed because he thought it might kill the urge to itch at his skull, just
above his temples. He tried desperately to ignore the feeling, to ignore the
way his sickly yellow skin had reddened around the hard protrusions on his
head.

Not just reddened. He was just pretending to himself, being
a pussy about it. The redness and swelling around those bumps had been just the
beginning. Now the skin had begun to split.

His heart beat wildly in his chest and, though he tried to
force himself to pay attention to the music, to listen to something, anything
else, he could not. He was terrified and excited in equal measure. What the
hell did it mean? The sky was turning red. Mosquitoes had eaten the neighbors'
cat. Those kids he'd seen throwing up maggots. And it had rained blood. Blood. He
knew it was because he had tasted it, just thrust out his tongue and let it
drizzle into his mouth.

He shuddered now, there on his bed, the back of his head
cradled upon his pillow. Why had he done that? It was disgusting. Completely.

Yet not completely. Not really. His shades were drawn but he
didn't need to be able to see out the windows to know what was happening. He
had seen enough. The world was going to Hell. Or Hell was coming to Earth. It
wasn't really a long stretch for him to begin imagining that what was going on
outside and what was happening with his own body were connected. If that was
Hell out there, then maybe Hell was coming out in him as well.

Chillax
, he told himself.
Just derail that thought
train
. But he could not.

How else to explain the way his skin continued to harden to
rough leather, or the way his fingernails had become thick and sharp. Even now
he reached up to idly scratch at the dry, cracking skin around the protuberance
at his right temple. Before he even realized he was doing it he had peeled a
strip of parchment-like skin away and his nail — his claw — had
struck something beneath that was hard and marble-smooth, like a tooth.

Danny froze.

Shit
.

It was one thing to think it. Another to discover the truth.

He sat up in bed and stripped off his headphones in the
middle of a Blink-182 tune. Danny swung his legs over the side, hitched up his
baggy black pants and went to the mirror above his dresser. There was a small
light on the bureau and he clicked it on, then plucked off the shade for better
illumination. He bent over and stared at himself in the mirror. Sure enough,
where the bump protruded from his skull above his right temple the dry skin was
gone. Beneath it, something else had been revealed. Something sharp and
enamel-hard, black as oil.

A horn.

Oh my God
, he thought. Then he gave a laugh that
sounded weak and trembly, even to him.
Maybe not my God after all.

Danny reached up to scratch away the dry skin that encased
the horn on the left side of his head and it was like tearing at a scab. It
came away with little resistance. His upper lip curled back in disgust and he
saw his teeth, which seemed longer and sharper than ever to him.

"Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck me," he snarled. "This
just so completely sucks."

In the mirror he saw motion behind him and he turned and
stared at the woman who had just stepped into his room. She had mocha skin and
long, raven-black hair, dressed like a fashion model, and wore the most playful
smile he'd ever seen.

"I don't know," she said. "I think they're
kind of cute."

Storm clouds roil above the city of New York, a
thunderstorm pregnant with the promise of heavy rain. It's All Hallow's Eve and
the year is Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-Eight. Far, far below, the city is
alive with teeming life, hidden within cars and beneath umbrellas, New Yorkers
determined to enjoy the night in spite of the storm.

Dr. Graves grits his teeth and his breath comes too fast.
His heart hammers in his chest and the torn muscles in his shoulder burn. With
one hand he grips the railing of the observation deck, the rest of him dangling
over the side, rain sluicing off his coat. The wind buffets the face of the
Empire State Building, helping him to cling there. But if it should shift
direction, Graves knows he will be dead.

Since birth he has worked to hone his body and his mind,
urged on by his widower father, who raised his son to be an example of what
their people could accomplish if only they set their minds to it. Anyone else
would have let go already. The pain that sears up each finger and along his arm
is unimaginable. But Graves refuses to let go. Too many lives are depending on
him. He's not going to give Zarin the satisfaction of taking his life.

Dr. Graves feels his fingers slipping. The rain has made
the railing even slicker. The air itself is moist and it is hard to breathe. He
closes his eyes and slows his breath, forces his pulse to match it. Then, with
a grunt, he hauls himself up and shoots his free hand upward, latching onto the
railing. With both hands secured, he struggles to pull himself up.

His eyes are squinted against the rain and the wind whips
against his back. Exhaustion seeps into his bones. He is stronger than an
average man, with ten times the ordinary human stamina. He has worked to make
his body the pinnacle of human physical achievement, yet Dr. Graves is not
superhuman. He draws a long breath, knowing that should he lose his grip he
will be little more than a smear on the pavement far below, washed into the
sewers by the punishing rain.

Thunder shatters the heavens, rolling through the storm
clouds above. Lightning strikes the needle atop the Empire State Building,
followed by booming thunder even closer than before. He thinks of Zarin and the
storm, the pure rain falling upon Manhattan, and he knows that he has no choice
but to live. He must live.

Dr. Graves seethes, muscles popping as he drags himself
upward until he can get an elbow on the railing. A sudden gust of wind nearly
dislodges him, and then he is able to throw his upper body over the edge, and
he is sliding over the railing and onto the observation deck. He tumbles into a
wet and heaving ball upon the floor of the deck, rain still soaking him, but it
takes him only a moment to catch his breath before he is up once again. Graves
stands in a crouch, expecting an attack, but apparently Zarin has already
presumed Graves has been dealt with, for he is nowhere to be seen.

Alarm stabs his heart. If Zarin is gone, then it may be
too late to stop him from seeding the storm clouds with his poison, from having
a deadly, toxic rain fall all over the city. Cradling his right arm, the torn
shoulder muscles throbbing in agony, he rises and begins to run along the outer
edges of the observation deck.

Graves rounds the corner and Zarin is there, a short,
ugly little man bent over a tray of small canisters, each tied in a net and
attached to a large balloon. Zarin is filling a balloon with gas from a
portable tank, and Graves knows at once that it is helium. And now he knows how
the madman plans his attack. The poison canisters must have timers. The
balloons will carry them into the storm where they will spray toxins into the
air, and the rain will become fatal.

Wiping the water from his eyes, Dr. Graves shouts Zarin's
name and races at the killer.

Fog encroaches at the edges of his vision, enshrouding
him, and for a moment Graves is lost. Then from out of the fog he sees a figure
emerge . . . it must be Zarin!

But it is not.

Gabriella is wearing a dress he bought for her that falls
upon her curves in such a way as to make his heart and lips both stutter. She
smiles at him, her chestnut eyes brightening, and the fog begins to thin. There
is an electric hum around him and Dr. Graves feels as though he is awakening
from a terrible dream. He glances about and finds himself in the familiar
setting of his Washington Heights laboratory. To many he is an unwelcome
neighbor, but the prestige of his reputation balances out their concerns about
the color of his skin, and the fact that Gabriella's does not match his own.

"Leonard," she says, her voice still thick with
the sultry accent of the little fishing village on the northwest coast of Italy
where they had met. "We were supposed to meet your friends at Birdland an
hour ago." There is no chastisement in her voice, only that playful,
loving patience. "Come, now. Enough of science for tonight."

Graves glances down at the beakers on the table in front
of him, at his notebook and the thick black pencil he has been writing with. A
warmth spreads through him that has been rare in his life and he leans forward
to shut off the burners beneath the beakers, snuffing those small flames.

When he looks up expectantly, she is gone.

The lab is gone.

The air is thick with humidity and the buzzing of flies
and the heat is oppressive. Sweat drips down his back and stains his shirt at
the armpits, his body so warm that the droplets of it are a cooling relief
where they trace their paths on his skin.

Tangled jungle stretches as far as he can see in every
direction. Things chitter and rustle in the trees but he pays them no mind. He
did not hike all this way to let the wildlife drive him off. This is the
Yucatan, where his next step could be into any one of a hundred agonizing
deaths. There were far more ways to dive here than there were ways to live. But
Dr. Graves was not returning to New York without the object of his quest.

And now he had found it. He held his breath and stared at
a cluster of strange, spiny-barked trees in front of him. They twisted in upon
themselves, branches intertwining as though in a dance. The Xuithla tree was
dismissed by most botanists as tribal myth. Yet here it is. The rarest tree in
the world, and if its legendary healing properties are more than legend . . .

Voices erupt around him, echoing through the trees and
Dr. Graves spins in search of their origin. He blinks as the branches seem to
reach for him, closes his eyes and lifts his arm to knock them away, and then
the sounds of the jungle disappear.

The voices remain.

When he opens his eyes he is in a movie palace on the
Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. All is dark around him save for the constant
flicker of light upon the screen. The voices are speaking French, of course,
and he strains to keep up with the translation, trying to make sense of the
plot of the film. Even so, he can only lend a portion of his attention to it,
for his focus is elsewhere.

His contact is supposed to meet him here, in the theater.
The French government has suffered a terrible loss, a theft from the Louvre
that seems impossible, with the only clue left behind three single drops of
blood tainted with liquid mercury. His investigation has begun to point back at
members of the government himself, and so this meeting must be clandestine.

"Excuse me," a voice says, and he is startled
to hear the words in English.

Dr. Graves glances over and sees an unfamiliar woman
making her way into his aisle, people standing or shifting aside to let her
move down the row toward the empty seat beside him. He frowns. If she is his
contact, the woman knows little about remaining inconspicuous. Speaking English
like that had been foolish.

She is too pale, this woman, and her hair is pulled back
from her face so tightly that it lends a cruel severity to features that might
otherwise have been attractive.

She slips into the seat beside him and makes no attempt
to focus on the movie screen. Dr. Graves attempts to keep some semblance of
secrecy but it quickly becomes obvious she has no intention of being subtle.

"You're Leonard Graves," she says, as though
this should be news to him.

He nods.

"Look at me, Dr. Graves."

Exasperated, he glances around to be sure he has not been
followed, but in the darkened theater he can see only phantom faces, flickering
silver in the light from the screen. At length he turns to her.

"You might be a bit more —"

"You're dead, Dr. Graves."

Anger rises in him. His whisper is a harsh rasp. "Are
you threatening me, ma'am?"

The woman's eyelids flutter with frustration and she
sighs. "Simply stating a fact. Trying to remind you. You've been dead half
a century. Think. Remember the bullet. You're here for a reason."

Graves begins to shudder and he feels a terrible pain in
his heart.

Phantom pain.

For he has no heart.

Grief swells within him and he turns away from her, only
to see the faces of the other theater goers again. The flickering light upon
the screen is not what has made them look spectral. Rather, it is the fact that
they are specters. Ghosts of the dead.

The silver light from the screen passes through them,
their bodies having little more substance than dust motes swirling in shafts of
sunlight. Their faces are etched with fear.