The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (3 page)

With preternatural swiftness she darted inside the
brownstone, swinging the gaping double barrels of the shotgun around as she
scanned the parlor on her left, and then the formal living room on her right. Nothing
moved. Nothing breathed.

Doyle stepped in behind her. Eve glanced at him and saw the
corona of pale blue light that encircled his eyes, the aura of that same glow
surrounding his fingers. The illusion of the kindly, aging gentleman had
disappeared. This was the magician. This was who Doyle was.

"Anything?" he asked.

Eve's eyelids fluttered as she inhaled. She glanced at the
stairs that led up into darkness. "Nothing that way." Then she
narrowed her eyes as she stared into the shadowed corridor that led toward the
back of the brownstone. "But that way . . ."

"Magic. Yes. I feel it."

Doyle went past her, heedless of any danger. The blue light
around his fingers and leaking from his eyes grew brighter and he was a beacon
in the darkened corridor. Eve tried to make sense of the layout of the place in
her head. Living room and parlor in front. Probably a back staircase somewhere,
a pantry, big kitchen, and the sort of sprawling dining room that had been
popular in the first half of the twentieth century.

There were framed photographs on the walls that had
obviously hung there for decades and wallpaper that had gone out of style
before John F. Kennedy was President. Yet there was no dust. No cobwebs. No
sign that time had continued to pass within that home while it went by on the
outside.

The corridor ended at a door that was likely either a closet
or bathroom, but there were rooms to either side, elegant woodwork framing
their entrances. Doyle did not even glance to his left, but turned into the
room on the right. Eve was right behind him and nearly jammed the shotgun into
his spine when he came to a sudden stop.

She moved up beside him, staring into the dining room.

Six figures sat in a circle around the elegant dining room
table, all of them clasping hands as if joining in prayer — or a séance. There
were candlesticks on the table and several on a sideboard; Doyle waved his hand
and each of the wicks flickered to life, those tiny flames illuminating the
room. Perhaps the old magician needed the light to see by, but Eve did not. She
saw better in the dark.

Of the six, five were very clearly dead, and had been so for
a very long time. Though their skeletal fingers were still clasped they were
withered, eyes sunken to dark sockets, only wisps of hair left upon their
heads. In many places all that remained of their flesh were tattered bits
clinging to bone, like parchment paper. Eve peered more closely. She had not
smelled death in this place and so she wondered if it was some sort of illusion.
But no. There was an earthy, rot odor that lingered in the air. It was simply
that, like dust and other sediment of time, the stink of putrefying flesh
seemed to have been suspended somehow.

The five withered corpses were of indeterminate age and race
but at least one of them had been female. And then there was the sixth member
of this chain, a woman in a blue dress, her brown hair up in a tight bun, with
small-framed glasses resting on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were closed
and her face peaceful, as though she might well have been in the midst of a
natural slumber rather than eternal repose.

"Yvette Darnall," Doyle observed.

Eve glanced at him, saw the puzzlement on his face and knew
that it matched her own. "You know her?"

"A mystic and psychic. She disappeared in 1943."

"Or maybe she didn't," Eve said, her gaze once
more surveying the hideous gathering, the sunken faces waxy and yellow in the
candlelight. "Maybe it was just that nobody knew where to look."

Doyle frowned thoughtfully and stepped further into the
room. Eve followed but her nostrils flared and the hair rose on the back of her
neck. Her fingers hooked into talons. She sensed something in the room and she
knew that Doyle had felt it too.

Yvette Darnall opened her eyes.

Eve and Doyle froze. For just a moment there was a kind of
terrible awareness in the psychic woman's gaze and then her eyes rolled upward
so that they seemed completely white. Her head lolled back and her jaw went
slack, mouth falling open.

One by one, the five cadavers did the same. Some of their
jawbones cracked. When the most desiccated among them lay his head back it
simply tore off above the jaw with a sound like snapping kindling. Upon hitting
the hardwood floor his skull shattered into dust and bone fragments.

Yvette Darnall began to moan, and so did the chorus of the
dead.

She choked as a stream of milky, opalescent mist issued from
her throat, and a moment later thinner tendrils of the same substance flowed
from the gaping mouths of the dead. Eve recognized the material.
Ectoplasm
.
Malleable spirit-flesh. But she did not think it was the ghosts of these dead
summoners or even of the medium herself who was manipulating the ectoplasm
here.

It coalesced in the midst of the table and as it did, Eve
saw that Yvette Darnall had begun to decay. Whatever this power was, it was
drawing on whatever essence remained in her; it had kept her here for more than
sixty years as a spiritual battery, and now it was using her up.

The ectoplasm churned like thick, heavy storm clouds and
began to take shape. In a moment Eve could see human features forming there, a
face, a man with a long, hawk nose and thin lips, with wild unkempt hair and a
shaggy beard.

The face in the pooling ectoplasm narrowed its eyes as
though it had seen them and it sneered imperiously, gaze rife with disapproval.
When it spoke, its lips moved without sound, yet its voice issued from the
wide, gaping mouth of Yvette Darnall.

"Doyle,"
the voice rasped scornfully.
"You
damned fool."

The ectoplasmic head of Sweetblood the Mage drifted in the
air above the circular table. Tendrils of supernatural matter extended from the
manifestation to anchor itself to the ceiling, the walls and the table below
it. The ghost flesh moved, its lips forming words, but the voice of the world's
most powerful sorcerer growled at him not from the ectoplasm but from the
grotesquely open maw of the withering spiritualist, Yvette Darnall.

"And to think I once called you 'apprentice
.'"

"I always respected you, Lorenzo," Doyle said,
attempting to conceal the exhilaration he felt at moving so much closer to
actually locating the arch mage. "But I never understood your decision to
retreat, to hide yourself away. The world has need of you."

Doyle recalled his first meeting with Lorenzo Sanguedolce,
in Prague, during the spring of 1891, and their immediate dislike for one
another. Even after the relationship shifted to that of teacher and student,
their animosity stood firm. There wasn't anyone, on this plane of existence
anyway, that he disliked as much, but the ways of the weird did not take into
account one's personal feelings. Sweetblood was needed; it was as simple as
that.

"Do you have any idea the risk you have taken in
searching for me?"
the undulating spiritual mass asked, the power of
its voice causing the psychic's body to visibly quake.
"Do you think I
have stayed away from the world all this time on a whim?"

Eve stood beside Doyle, tensed for a fight. He could feel
the aggression emanating from her lithe form, millennia of experience having
taught her always to expect a fight. "I could be wrong," she said, "but
I'm going to guess he isn't all that pleased to see you."

Doyle shot her a hard look. "Your enhanced senses are
absolutely uncanny," he said dryly. Then he turned his focus to Sweetblood
again.

"You must listen, Lorenzo. Damn me if you will, but
others are on your scent as well. One way or another, you've been found. But
the others who track you have grave intentions."

"
And you, fool that you are, you think I need your
help?"
Sweetblood rasped. "
You
may have done their work
for them, Arthur."

The disembodied head gazed down upon the grotesque gathering
at the table beneath him, at the rapidly degenerating form of Yvette Darnall
and the circle of desiccated corpses clutching hands, with a look of utter
disdain forming upon his spectral features
.

"You're no better than this damnable woman and her
band of psychics. They too attempted to locate me. Their curiosity cost them
their lives,"
the spectral head went on, showing not the slightest
hint of compassion.
"Fortunately, I was able to use their folly for my
own ends."

Eve sniffed. "Nice guy."

Doyle ignored her, focusing on Sweetblood, trying to gauge
by the rate of Darnall's deterioration how much longer their connection would
remain active. "Obviously," he said, gesturing toward the circle of
cadavers. "You used them as an alarm to warn you when someone, or possibly
something, was coming too close. The psychic residue of their search led us
here, drawing us away from your true location."

The acrid aroma of burning flesh permeated the room and
Doyle frowned and glanced away from the ectoplasmic face to find that the body
of Yvette Darnall had begun to smolder, the tight bun of her hair emitting a
gray, oily smoke.

"Indeed. And in this pocket of frozen time, I might
work my power through these decaying idiots and destroy the interloper, the
next fool. I never expected the next fool to be you."

Doyle could not help but smile. "You have always
underestimated me, Lorenzo."

The entity appeared to seethe. Flames burst from the bodies
of the other mystics, as if the very fire of its anger, their clothes and
parchment-dry flesh consumed by fire.
"You're a careless fool, Arthur,
and this latest misstep only proves it."

Eve stifled a laugh with a perfectly manicured hand,
refusing to make eye contact with him. It was moments like this when he
remembered why it was that he so often chose to work alone.

"Cast all the aspersions you like, but they will not
alter the truth. Dark powers descend upon you," Doyle declared, fingertips
crackling with magickal energy leaking. "Better that
I
should find
you than some malevolent —"

"Imbecile!"
Sweetblood bellowed, enraged,
his voice erupting from the gaping lips of the medium who had become his conduit.
The ectoplasmic features that loomed above the fire-engulfed cadaver contorted,
and the ghostly tendrils that connected it to the dead woman writhed and pulled
away to flail whip like above them.
"Persist, and you may doom the
world."

The burning corpse of Yvette Darnall stood up abruptly,
knocking over the flaming chair in which it had sat for the last sixty-one
years. Like some fiery marionette, embers of flesh falling from her form, the
dead woman leaned across the table to point an accusatory finger at them.

"Go home, apprentice,"
said Lorenzo
Sanguedolce, through the charred and smoking remains of the medium.
"You
meddle in matters beyond your comprehension."

And with those final words, the instrument of the mage's
admonition exploded, spewing fiery chunks of flesh and bone. Doyle and Eve
watched as the room was consumed by fire, the ectoplasmic manifestation of the
arch mage evaporating with a sizzling hiss. The spell that had kept the room in
a timeless stasis had collapsed, age rushing forward, drying the wood, speeding
the fire. Time and flame sapped the moisture from the dark mahogany, reducing
it to kindling. The heat seared his face, yet Doyle stared into the flames
until he felt Eve's powerful grip close upon his arm.

"I wouldn't count on the last word," she snarled
over the roar of the fire as she began to pull him toward the exit.

Doyle roughly removed her hand and ventured further into the
room.

"Have you lost your mind?" she shouted after him.

"Go," he told her. "There's still a chance I
can salvage what we came for."

It was becoming ever more difficult to see, as well as
breathe, and Doyle quickly scanned the floor for the precious item he sought. Silently
he prayed to the Ancient Kings that it had remained intact.

"Arthur, let's go!" Eve called from the doorway,
as his tearing eyes fell upon his prize: Darnall's blackened, jawless skull
lying upon the smoking wood floor.

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Doyle folded the
white silk and used it as a buffer to protect the soft flesh of his hand from
the searing heat emanating from the charred skull. There was only the slimmest
chance that what he was about to attempt would work, but there was far too much
at stake not to at least try. He inserted his index and middle fingers into the
hollow eye sockets of the medium's skull, searching for the soft gray matter of
the brain beyond the missing eyes. The tips of his fingers sank into the
gelatinous muscle of thought. He let slip an exultant sigh; the flames had not
yet melted the woman's brain. There were still things to be learned from her.

The beams and walls of the burning room moaned and creaked. It
would not be long before the ceiling caved in, the upper floors of the
brownstone coming down as the entire building was consumed by the supernatural
conflagration. Beneath his breath, Doyle uttered an incantation of retrieval,
letting the ancient magick travel through his body, coursing down the length of
his arm, through his fingers and into what remained of the dead psychic's
brain. Images of Yvette's past — of heartbreak and ecstasy and quiet
contentment — flooded his mind, making themselves at home, as if eager
not to be forgotten with the passing of their host. The deluge of memories was
overwhelming, and he nearly stumbled into the fire as he magickally ransacked
the recollections of a lifetime.