The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (34 page)

"I made a mistake," Mr. Doyle said roughly. He
cleared his throat and raised his head a bit, meeting their gazes with more
assurance. "I made assumptions, you see."

"No. We really don't," Danny told him.

Conan Doyle nodded. "All right. Plain as can be. Morrigan
has always been cruel and calculating. She rejoiced at the pain of others and
schemed to get what she wanted. This was her nature. Arrogant cruelty, deceit,
betrayal.

"When I learned from Ceridwen and her father Finvarra
that Morrigan had turned upon her own people, had made a gambit for control of
Faerie, I assumed she had simply reached the inevitable point where her spite
and jealousy and her lust for power had eliminated what little caution and
patience she might have had. Upon her defeat, she came into this world, and I
thought all of this was about power, for her. About destruction and bloodlust
and the pleasure she receives from others' pain, yes, but mainly about power. Having
someone to rule. To subjugate.

"But it wasn't about that at all.

"It's about faith for her. She's a religious fanatic,
not a dictator. And that is oh, so much worse."

Danny had been following him, at least for the most part, up
until now. He shook his head. "I don't understand. What do you mean?"

Julia Ferrick sat a bit forward on the sofa, peering at Mr.
Doyle with keen interest. "This Nimble Man. She worships him? He's . . .
some kind of god?"

Mr. Doyle smiled at her as though he had seen her in a new
light, and his expression revealed a newfound respect. Danny found himself
oddly proud of his mother.

"Precisely," Conan Doyle said. "Or near
enough. The myths of heaven and hell speak of the
Fir Chlis
, the angels
who rose up against the Creator. They were defeated and banished, cast out of
heaven and forced to build a new order for themselves in damnation.

"All but one. None of the myths record the name of this
once-angel. They refer to him only as The Nimble Man. Somehow he escaped the
full brunt of the Creator's wrath, but though he avoided hell, he could not
return to heaven. He became trapped in stasis in the ether between those
realms. Neither of heaven nor hell, he nevertheless could see both, could hear
and sense them. He had the gifts of the Creator, and the fires of hell at his
command, but also the desires of the damned, and the guilt of the sinful. Emotion
shredded his mind.

"I've been misreading this situation all along. The
omens and portents we've seen have been happening as harbingers his arrival. The
Nimble Man has the powers of heaven and hell at his command, but he is utterly
and completely insane. And Morrigan is trying to bring him to Earth."

Red mist had started to gather inside the museum, seeping in
through broken windows and shattered doors. Clay raced through the museum with
an ancient battle axe in his hand, hopes and suppositions coalescing in his
mind. The dead had not deviated much from their purpose here, and so most of
the exhibits and corridors were untouched. He ignored those undisturbed places.
But where there were broken display cases or other traces of the passing of the
dead, he paused to look around.

But he did not pause for long. He had an idea that he would
find what he searched for back in the grand entry hall of the museum. Behind
him, he heard Eve and Graves coming along. There were still some of the walking
dead in the gift shop, of all places. Clay thought that perhaps they had gotten
themselves stuck in the aisles or in a corner and were confused, like rats in a
maze.

The dead could not think clearly. Their minds were muddled,
their souls numbed by being forced back into flesh that was rotting. They were
able to understand Morrigan's commands — go to the museum, retrieve the
Eye of Eogain, and return to her — but little more than that. And some of
them could not even retain that much thought.

As he raced into the grand hall he heard shouting.

"No! Get away from me!"

Beneath the final few steps of a circular stairwell that
went up to the second floor, a night watchman had tucked himself away, hiding
from the dead. Six or seven of the shambling dead, these so rotten that bits of
flesh flaked off of them as they moved, had begun to encircle him. Their bodies
were too far gone, their minds too desiccated, for Morrigan to continue to
control them. Now they fell into the instinct of the walking dead, the hatred
of the living, the hunger for supple flesh and hot blood, for life.

Even as Clay raised his battle axe and rushed across the
room, one of the dead fell to its knees and tried to reach beneath the steps. Its
skeletal fingers clawed the watchman's navy blue uniform pants and the man
began to shriek, kicking out with both feet. Black shoes cracked dead fingers,
and when the watchman saw this, he began to curse loudly again, fear replaced
by fury. He slid out a little, landing a solid kick in the zombie's face that
collapsed its skull like papier mache. But now that the man had moved, the
others were able to get hold of his legs, and they began to drag him out.

"This is becoming tiresome," Clay muttered to
himself.

With all of the zombies on the ground, trying to grab at the
watchman, he waded into them, kicking and stomping. The axe was idle in his
hand as he crushed the spine of the nearest creature. He swung his heavy boot
and kicked the head off of a second. Clay stomped another skull to powder, but
by then they were rising and he stood back, brandishing the axe.

"Oh, my Lord," the watchman whispered as Clay went
at the withered corpse of a woman in a blue cocktail dress, hacking off her
head. "Is this real? Is it the End Times? I . . . I thought I'd be saved. I've
been faithful."

The axe fell, cleaving a skull in two, then Clay swung it
low and cut the corpse of a uniformed soldier in half at the midsection.

"Good for you," Clay said.

He finished off the last of the zombies in the museum, their
moldering corpses sliding to the ground with the thunk of bone and the rustle
of autumn leaves. One of them continued to moan, its voice like storm winds
raging outside a lonely cottage. Clay stamped a foot upon its head, cutting off
the eerie sound, and freeing the soul within.

The watchman flinched when he looked up.

Clay raised both hands, including the one with the axe. "I
just saved your life, friend. A little gratitude."

The man's jaw dropped and he nodded quickly. "Yeah. Yeah,
of course. Thank you. Th-thank you so much. But . . . you didn't answer me. Is
this it? The End Times?"

The shapeshifter studied the man for a moment and then shook
his head. "Not if I have anything to say about it. Look, you couldn't have
been the only one on duty."

The watchman shook his head. He pulled himself out of his
hiding place and stood. With a shaky hand he pointed into the darkness on the
far side of the massive hall. Clay frowned as he followed the man's trembling
finger. Sprawled on the floor beside a statue of a man and a woman locked in a
romantic embrace, with a child seated at their feet, was another figure. This
one was as unmoving as those in the statue, but it was flesh, not stone.

"Hank, you idiot," the watchman whispered, grief
in his voice. "You idiot."

"What happened?" Clay asked, studying the man
intently. "Tell me exactly what happened."

The watchman was not a small man, but he trembled as he
spoke, and he shook his head, still not quite believing what he had just
survived.

"We . . . we were trapped in here. With that fog and
the power out and, well, we were arguing. He didn't want to leave his post. I
wanted to go home, be with my wife, if this was really it. When we saw . . .
when we saw them coming . . ." His eyes went wide and he laughed, more
than a little hysterical. "Zombies! When we saw them coming, we hid behind
the counter."

Clay glanced over. It was a long marble counter where
visitors could get information and buy tickets. He had passed it on his way in.
The watchmen must have been hiding behind it even then. If he had known . . .

"It got quiet for a bit, but I made Hank sit tight. Then
. . . we heard them coming out. The moaning, the sounds they made, I felt like
I couldn't breathe just listening to them. But Hank, he had to look, had to
raise his head, see what they were up to. Idiot.

"'Dave,' he says, 'I think they're stealing something.'
And he starts to get up! Can you believe that? He starts to get up. I drag him
back down, practically wetting myself. I'm a good Christian. I never thought I'd
still be here when the Beast took hold of the Earth. 'Who cares?' I say. 'Let 'em
take whatever they want! These are the Last Days.' But Hank's not going for
that. His eyes got all crazy. He always took the job too seriously, like it was
an honor, working here, like the exhibits were the Shroud of Turin. He loved
all this stuff. He started shaking, just out of control, and then he was gone
before I could stop him. At first there were only five or six of them, and
maybe he thought he could take them, they didn't look real fast. He grabbed the
nightstick off his belt and went in swinging.

"The fool."

Clay nodded, putting it all together. Time was wasting. He
couldn't spare another minute with the watchman. Not if he was going to stop
Morrigan from getting the Eye. He grabbed the watchman by the wrist and pulled
him toward his friend's corpse, but when the man held back, not wanting to see
what had become of his friend, Clay relented and continued on his own.

Hank had been torn apart. His nightstick was fifteen feet
away, droplets of blood all around it. The dead man had been eviscerated. He
was so badly damaged that he would not be coming back from the dead. If Clay
looked closely enough he knew he would find that there were things, organs,
missing. Eaten by the dead. But he did not care to investigate. He turned
quickly back to the survivor.

"The thing that the dead were taking. What was it?"

The man looked as though he might collapse at any moment. His
flesh was as pale as that of the dead. "That's the thing. It was a head. This
preserved thing, from a bog. I don't . . . I don't know more than that. Hank
could have told you. He knew every piece in every exhibit. Lord, he loved this
place."

"Yes," Clay whispered, and he knelt by the ravaged
corpse and put his hand on the man's chest. He twitched several times and his
eyes fluttered and for just a moment his features might have blurred.

"Hey!" the watchman called. "Hey, what are
you doing to him? He's dead! He's —"

His words stopped short. Clay assumed it was because he had
just remembered the battle axe, and what it was capable of.

When Clay stood, he could see a trail of ectoplasm, a pale
stream of spirit energy, a tendril of smoke that extruded from the body of the
dead man, off into the darkness on the far side of the museum. The zombies who
had killed this man were also the ones who had the Eye of Eogain. And the trail
of ectoplasm that linked a corpse to its killer would lead Clay right to them.

"Stay here," Clay told the watchman. "I doubt
they'll be back, but it's not safe outside. Stay until the mist is gone."

"Or until the devil calls my name," the watchman
muttered.

Clay shook his head. "It's not the end, my friend. Just
a taste of it. A sneak preview. You just stay here until it's over."

"How long do you think that'll be?" the man
ventured, his moment of swagger gone and his horror and grief returning.

"Hours. A day. If not by then, then maybe never."

The watchman stared at him. Obviously the man had been
expecting some words of comfort. But Clay had none to give.

Axe gripped tightly in his hand he plunged into the shadows
of that grand entry hall, heading off into the far corner, away from the front
doors, following the tendril of ectoplasm as though it were a leash at the end
of which he would find his goal. At a wall the trail turned left, and ahead he
saw damp, luminescent crimson mist clouding inside, rising up toward the high
ceiling. There were tall windows there. Shattered.

Shattered outward. The soul-tether led him out through the
broken windows, glass crunching under his boots.

An instant later, there were no boots. In the space between
one footfall and another, he dropped to all fours and his hands and feet had
become massive paws. His flesh flowed, bones shifted, and now his head was
heavy and he shook his lion's mane as he raced after Morrigan's undead
servants.

Clay threw back his head, felt his chest expand, and he
roared, the sound echoing off the faces of buildings and sliding through the
bloody fog. He roared a second time and a third, and then he paused to glance
back at the museum.

The ghost of Dr. Graves appeared in the red mist beside him
as though grown from the darkness. Graves stared at him, nodding in approval.

"Remarkable," the ghost said.

Clay swung his massive head toward Graves. "Eve?"
he growled.

"Coming," Clay replied, pointing to a second floor
window.

It exploded outward in a shower of jagged glass and Eve
dropped through the air in a neat somersault, legs tucked beneath her. She
landed in a crouch beside him.

"You roared?"

"Follow me," Clay growled.

He set off at a run, retaining the lion form. The others did
not ask questions. They could not see the soul trail that led him on, but the
three of them were allies, now. Amongst them was a sense of purpose. They all
knew what was at stake.

"Where did Squire get off to?" Eve asked.

Neither Graves nor Clay responded. The goblin would have to
take care of himself, for now. Mr. Doyle had given them an assignment. It was
time to fulfill it.

Claws scraping pavement, Clay followed the tendril of
ectoplasm around a corner and saw their prey. There might only have been a
small number that had left the museum through that shattered window after
killing the watchman, Hank, but now there were dozens of them spread out across
the road, shambling at different speeds. Some dragged a leg behind them,
injured. Others crawled on their bellies, responding to Morrigan's command and
unable to stop.