The Orphan of Awkward Falls (10 page)

Probably.

She let herself focus instead on the tantalizing news that the man in the photograph was actually the boy’s mysterious grandfather. What was his picture doing in the upstairs bedroom of Twittington House? And who was Sally? She was suddenly dying to get to the library to search for clues.

The O. R. MacManus Library and Bait Shop was the only library in the world where a person could check out a book and buy a bucket of minnows at the same time. Fishing for the northern pike—a toothy, evil-looking fish—was an obsession for the citizens of Awkward Falls. Their love for catching the pointy-nosed pike leaked into almost every aspect of their lives. People thought nothing of buying a box of worms at the pharmacy or picking up a pair of waders at the maternity store. It was only natural that they had also found a way to blend the sport with the borrowing of books.

Barbara Cravitz fell in love with the place as soon as she and Josephine walked in the door.

“Isn’t this colorful, Josephine?” Barbara picked up a reel and turned the crank excitedly, even though Josephine was sure her mom had no idea what it was for. “Maybe we should take up fishing now that we’re Manitobans. I’ve heard it’s a very meditative sport.”

Josephine hadn’t given much thought to fishing before, and she was too preoccupied to get very worked up about it.

She strolled through the narrow aisles, trying to figure out the bizarre filing system. Instead of the books being separate from the fishing gear, the librarian had tossed the two enterprises together in a strange salad of books and fishing paraphernalia. Displays of rubber waders and racks of fishing rods flanked the nonfiction book section. Children’s books were interspersed with bins of colored bobbers and corks. The biography collection was stacked below a wall of dusty trophy pike, shellacked and mounted on wooden plaques. Occasional open spaces on the bookshelves held clearance items, such as bags of used hooks, artificial lures shaped like frogs and crayfish, and very old packets of freeze-dried beef Stroganoff. As a unifying decorative touch, fishing nets and life preservers were draped from the ceiling, giving book browsers and fishing enthusiasts alike the feeling that they were in some bait shack on a wharf instead of in a shop in downtown Awkward Falls.

Josephine realized right away she would never find what she was looking for without help. The service counter at the rear of the room was deserted, so she rang a little silver bell next to the cash register.

A gravelly voice called out from a back room, “Hold your water—I’m comin’!”

The owner of the voice then began a long fit of coughing that sounded as if he or she might hock up an organ at any moment. Out shuffled an ancient, grizzled woman in overalls and a long-billed
fishing cap pulled low over her eyes. The second her coughing fit subsided she pulled a pipe from her pocket, lit it, and began puffing away.

“What can I do ya for?” the woman asked. “I got night crawlers on special today, big fat guys for only half price!”

Josephine fanned the smoke away from her face and tried to breathe as little as possible. “Are you the librarian?”

“Yes’m. O. R. MacManus, at your service. I’ve been librarian, bait cutter, and chief floor sweeper for a good sixty years now. Are ya lookin’ for a book, then?”

“Yes. Could you tell me where your historical reference books are?”

Barbara, who had been trying on a floppy canvas hat with mosquito netting over the brim, walked over and said, “We’re looking for information about old houses in the area. We just moved into Twittington House yesterday.”

“That would be in outboard motors.” O. R. led the way to an aisle dominated by boat motors and gas cans. She pushed a stepladder up to the bookshelves, climbed to the top, and pulled a fat volume off the shelf.

“Let’s look at this one.” The woman carried the book over to a table stacked with tackle boxes. Josephine and Barbara watched over her shoulder while she sat and flipped through the pages, apparently intending to lead them in their research.

She smacked her palm on the page. “There ‘tis. Twittington House, built in 1897 by Elmer Twittington, founder of Twittington Sauerkraut Cannery.”

Josephine and Barbara were astonished. The page showed a photo of Twittington House in its prime. A group of well-dressed people posed on the lawn in front of the house.

“It’s beautiful,” Barbara exclaimed. “And those must be the Twittingtons.”

Josephine bent down for a closer look. The house and the Twittington family both looked brand-new, basking in the bright sun of that long-gone day. Underneath the photo was a caption identifying each family member. Josephine found Sally in the center of the group, kneeling on the bottom row.

“That’s her, Mom!” Josephine pointed to a pretty little girl of about five or six in blond pigtails, smiling happily.

“What an adorable child,” Barbara said.

“Yep.” O. R. wheezed out a lungful of blue smoke. “Sally was a beauty. She grew up to become a star of stage and screen. Voice like a nightingale. She was famous all over Europe.”

“You knew Sally?” Barbara asked the librarian.

“Ha! You betcha. Taught her how to catch pike!” The woman’s laugh was a dry, smoky cackle. “Sally used to sneak away from her mother’s fancy soirees and go fishin’ with me. She loved getting her lace dresses all muddy.”

When Josephine turned the page, she found a series of photos featuring Hibble Manor in its gothic heyday. The mansion looked newer in the pictures, but still darkly forbidding. She gasped and pointed to a figure in one of the pictures.

“Look, Mom, it’s him!” Standing at the mansion’s grand entrance was the man from Josephine’s mysterious photo. There was no mistaking him. The eyes, the wild white hair, even the suit was the same as in her photo. She read the caption. “Professor Celsius T. Hibble.”

“He’s so striking,” Barbara said. “If his nose was smaller, and if he had dark hair, he’d look kind of like Errol Flynn.”

“That dang fool,” grumbled the librarian. “Sally should never have gotten involved with him, and I told her so from the start. She could’ve had her pick of any fella in town. But when Celsius came to Awkward Falls and bought the place next door, it was all over but the shoutin’. He was a big celebrity back then. Rich and good-lookin’ to boot, even with that strange white hair. Once he got a look at Sally, hardly a day passed that he didn’t come traipsing over with a bouquet of red roses in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other. She fell for him right off.”

“You knew Professor Hibble, too?” asked Josephine.

“Can’t say I knew him personally. He was a real odd duck, didn’t say a whole lot.” The woman sucked on her pipe and frowned. “I do know he was the worst thing that ever happened to Sally, though. Broke her heart in two. Even after she moved to Paris and married that big movie director, she still pined for Celsius Hibble. For years, she used to call me every Christmas just to reminisce and talk about fishin’.”

The librarian rolled the ladder farther down the aisle and climbed up again. The woman ran her finger down a row of books
under a shelf of plastic gas containers until she found what she was looking for. She slid a book out and dropped it on the table. “There’s a bit about Hibble somewhere in this book, as I recall, though you might have to dig for it.”

Josephine thumbed through the pages of the old book, which was titled
Geniuses of North America.
The yellowed pages smelled like mothballs and featured a different genius on each page.

“I can’t believe that house is next door to us.” Barbara examined the picture closely. “How could I have missed something so incredible?”

“It was hidden by the fog yesterday, Mom,” said Josephine. “I actually caught a glimpse of it from my window last night when I was reading. It looked really spooky.”

“Oh, no, I think it’s very stately. It has a real presence.”

The librarian nodded. “It was a real palace once, before Celsius went around the bend.”

“You mean he went crazy?” asked Josephine.

“After Sally canceled the wedding, he disappeared into that house and was rarely ever seen in public again. Lost his mind, they say. I never thought the man was right to begin with, myself.”

“They were going to be married?”

“Yep. The whole affair was to take place right there at his mansion. It was going to be the biggest wedding ever seen in these parts. Sally was on cloud nine right up until the night before they were supposed
to get hitched. She left town on the last train out that night. Celsius was so broke up about it, he had ‘em leave the decorations up till they all finally rotted away years later. Sally never told me why she left, never wanted to talk about it. Must’ve been something awful, though. She finally came back to Awkward Falls for good a while ago. Lives in the big white house down the street, if you can call it livin’. She’s all alone except for her nurse, never sees anybody anymore, not even me.”

“What a tragic story.” Barbara sighed wistfully. “I wonder what happened between her and Professor Hibble?”

The old librarian shook her head and puffed. “Only Sally and Celsius knew for sure. It was mysterious.”

“Does anyone live in Hibble’s house now?” asked Barbara.

The librarian shook her head. “Just the caretaker. An automaton specially designed back in the old days by Celsius to look after the house.”

Barbara looked skeptical. “Do you mean the caretaker is a robot?”

“Yep. I saw it once when Celsius was showin’ it off to Sally. The contraption poured us a glass of lemonade. It was a pretty nifty gadget back then, though I’d be surprised if the thing still works. It never leaves the house, as far as I know, although some folks claim they’ve seen Hibble’s old Rolls drivin’ around in the middle of the night with something strange behind the wheel.”

“Sounds fascinating,” said Barbara. “I’d love to go over and have a look sometime.”

O. R. waved the idea away. “Don’t bother tryin’. The gates are always locked. After the murder, the house was closed off to the public for good.”

“The murder?”

“Hibble was strangled some years back by his assistant, a lunatic named Stenchley. He’s the nasty little booger that busted out of the asylum just yesterday.”

“Oh, my gosh, that’s awful! Why would his assistant do such a thing?”

“That’s what everybody wanted to know. Police never figured out his motive. Stenchley had been with Hibble forever, I wasn’t surprised, though. Stenchley always seemed more like a wild animal than a man to me. Followed Celsius around like a mutt, but you could tell he wasn’t quite right. When the police found the body, a couple of parts were missing. There were teeth marks all over it.”

Barbara and Josephine gasped. “You mean he ate…” Josephine could not finish the question.

O. R. nodded solemnly and sucked on her pipe.

Barbara put her arms around Josephine and hugged her close. “It gives me the creeps to think something so horrible happened right next door!”

“Yep. Pretty as it was, for a long time, that house was snakebit. Seemed like every few years somebody turned up dead there or went missing. Makes you wonder.”

It certainly made Josephine wonder. “I hope they catch him soon.”

The librarian shook her head. “Don’t count on it. According to the news, he’s heading north. If he makes it into the wilderness, they’ll never see him again. The good news is there’s a norther blowin’ in any minute now. If Stenchley’s traipsing around the north woods when that thing hits, he’ll be an icicle by mornin’ for certain. If that’s really where he’s headin’, that is.”

Josephine gulped. “You don’t think he’s going that way?”

“The man’s crazy, remember. No rhyme or reason to what he does. A creature like that could turn up anywhere.”

“Do you think we’re safe in Twittington House?” asked Barbara.

“As long as that lunatic is loose, nobody’s safe.” The librarian wagged her crooked finger at Josephine and her mother. “You’d be smart to take precautions. Do you have a firearm?”

Barbara was taken aback. “You mean a gun? No, of course not! We’ve never owned one.”

“That’s too bad. I’d hate to go mano a mano with that fellow if he was to come callin’. I’d at least keep a butcher knife or a sharp cleaver handy!”

The old woman struck a match and stoked her pipe again, bringing on the early signs of another nasty coughing jag. Before the fit began in earnest, she managed to croak, “If you change your mind about the firearm”—cough—”I can make you girls a good deal on a shotgun. I got a twelve-gauge on sale that’ll blow a hole in a moose”—cough, cough—”from fifty yards. You can bet I’ll be sleepin’ with mine cocked and loaded tonight.”
Cough.

There is a simple reason why human corpses are often dressed in suits and ties or beautiful gowns, and their faces caked with makeup before their family and friends are allowed to have one last peek at them. The dead are not very attractive.

The primary cause of their unattractiveness is hungry bacteria, who live inside the body and consider fresh corpses to be an all-you-can-eat buffet. Within a week of a corpse being tucked into his or her coffin and lowered into a hole in the ground, billions of bacteria are having breakfast, lunch, and dinner around the clock on what were once the deceased’s most delicate parts. In a surprisingly short time, a human body begins to look more like a Halloween decoration than a person.

Professor Celsius T. Hibble’s corpse, aboveground now for the first time in a decade, was different. He was a dead man, but he looked a little better than most. His skin, now beef-jerky brown and shriveled, was still mostly intact, with a only few bones protruding here and there. His lips were long gone, leaving him with a bucktoothed,
gumless grin, but clumps of the Nobel Prize winner’s distinctive white hair still protruded from his scalp. The hole in the middle of his face where his handsome round nose used to be was unfortunate, but most of one ear still clung to the side of his head.

Miraculously, both of the professor’s eyes still rested in their sockets. Their irises were paler now, but they retained remnants of the blazing blue tint they had possessed during life.

It was neither luck nor an unusually well-sealed coffin that had kept the corpse from becoming germ food in the grave. During his life, the professor had often used himself as a guinea pig for testing various procedures and vaccines, which caused certain fundamental alterations in his body’s chemical makeup.

Stenchley knelt next to the grave, cradling the rotting corpse, marveling at its hideous face. He thought it was beautiful. “Look! The master is smiling at us,” he whispered to the hissing Cynthia. “He sees us.”

Stenchley had always theorized that the professor’s eyes, the only ones that had ever looked at him with anything other than disgust, must be made of a different substance than other eyes, something rare like sapphires or ocean water. With the great man’s remains now lying defenseless in his arms, the madman couldn’t resist the opportunity to test his hypothesis. He carefully stuck a grimy finger in one of his master’s dead eyes, but was disappointed to find that they seemed to be composed of the same rubbery gristle as the dozens of other eyes he had handled.

The pale light of dawn began to spread across the grounds, threatening to expose Stenchley’s filthy deed. He needed a safe place to hide his trophy. Instinctively, he dragged the body, stiff and brittle as a piñata, to the back of Hibble Manor to a door ingeniously concealed by the mansion’s masonry. His hands quickly found a certain stone in the wall and pushed it. A slab of the house’s granite foundation pivoted open with a screech, revealing a dusty hallway. Stenchley carried the body inside. As the stone automatically closed again behind him, the hallway became pitch-black. Stenchley’s feet knew exactly where to go, making several turns and descending a long, narrow set of steps carved into the bedrock of the house’s foundation. At the bottom of the steps, Stenchley pushed a lever on the wall and a sealed door swung open, releasing a whoosh of refrigerated air. He entered a cavern filled with a dim blue light.

Once his eyes adjusted, Stenchley could see that the cave was almost exactly as he had left it so long ago. This had been the professor’s secret laboratory, where his most advanced and controversial work was done. The equipment here was sleek and modern, with stainless-steel surfaces and computerized controls. Except that everything was now blanketed by a film of dust, it was almost as if Stenchley and the professor had stepped out just yesterday instead of ten years ago.

This was home. Oh, what happy days the hunchback had spent here in the lab, working at his master’s side! The two of them had accomplished great things over the decades, though the madman
was never quite sure exactly what they were. They had been together, and that was all that mattered to Stenchley. Only a few outsiders had even known the lab existed, and most of them were no longer living.

One half of the room was dominated by an array of huge glass columns filled with bubbling liquid, like giant cylindrical aquariums. Stenchley dropped the professor’s body to the floor and stepped over the thick electrical cables that snaked out from the bottoms of the cylinders to a power grid built into the wall of the cave. He was not surprised to find the intricate machinery still running perfectly on its own after all this time. The cylinders and their valuable contents had been his master’s top priority, and the professor had spent years devising an electrical generator to provide perpetual power for them using geothermal steam vents as its energy source. An automatic monitoring system ensured that this portion of the lab was completely self-sustaining.

Stenchley had always been fascinated by the surprising things that grew inside the aquariums. It amazed him that specimens that began as tiny shrimplike organisms could evolve into the incredible creatures he saw bobbing inside the cylinders now. Rows of colored lights blinked on control panels at the base of each cylinder, illuminated switches pulsed, and long trains of digital numbers crawled across lighted screens, tracking every change of the creatures’ continuing metamorphoses.

Long ago, the professor had patiently taught Stenchley how to tend the sensitive equipment to keep it running at optimum
efficiency. Even now, the madman could not keep himself from bustling about the columns, adjusting certain knobs and flipping switches as he had years ago.

In an alcove, he came to a group of smaller, globular containers. These were segregated from the rest and contained creatures Stenchley couldn’t tear his eyes away from. Alarms went off inside his deformed brain at the sight of the plump pink things bobbing inside the vats, their white hair undulating slowly back and forth like seaweed.

These were the professor’s “Friends.”

He crept closer to the globe nearest him. Inside, the thing’s arms floated out from their sides, the hands seeming to wave at Stenchley. Cynthia hissed and coiled angrily, causing Stenchley’s hump to throb. The snake writhed with pure hatred. The madman’s mouth opened, and the python’s head peered out, its tongue flicking.
Kill it, love! Kill it!
the snake demanded.
That is the evil one!

Stenchley did want to kill it. It was because of a Friend that the madman had been forced to hurt the professor. It was because of a Friend that he had been locked inside the dreaded asylum. Still, the madman was slow to act. “But the master will be angry! He forbids us to touch the Friends.”

The python’s head flattened and its neck swelled with anger inside the hunchback’s throat, making him gag for air.
The master is dead! He cannot stop us now.

Stenchley yelped as he felt her coils begin to squeeze his heart, sending a rush of blood to his head. His eyes bulged and throbbed.
He was sure the snake would squeeze until he was dead if he did not obey her.

“I s’pose you’re right,” he said. Stenchley punched and kicked at the container, but even the madman’s powerful hands and feet would never be able to break the cylinder’s thick glass casing. He needed a tool. Stenchley scrambled around the laboratory until he found a length of pipe. He leapt from the floor up onto the narrow catwalk that ran beside the vats and howled like a wolf as he swung the pipe with all his strength. With a thundering crack, the glass cylinder exploded, its cold fluid blasting Stenchley off the catwalk and sending him sprawling across the floor. A flood of foaming liquid sloshed across the lab.

Stenchley coughed and sputtered, spitting out a mouthful of the acrid liquid. He got to his feet and found his intended victim lying nearby. The plump, glistening Friend, its arms and legs akimbo, lay motionless on the floor of the cavern. The rubber umbilical tubes that had connected its body to the machine were ruptured and leaking.

Let’s eat,
Cynthia hissed.

But something was wrong. Instinct immediately told Stenchley that his prey was not alive. The madman squatted over the limp form and clawed at its chest, but it did not move. Cynthia didn’t like carrion, preferring to eat her food live, or at worst, freshly killed. Stenchley leaned in close to the fleshy cheek and bared his teeth, but the chemical smell of the fluid the creature had been stored in was so
overpowering even the python was repulsed. Unsated, gnashing his teeth angrily, Stenchley flung the lifeless thing aside.

This was not the Friend they had come for.

As the madman’s panting gradually slowed, the burning in his hump became bearable again. Cynthia’s coils released his pounding heart, and she slithered reluctantly back into her dark nest, still hungry for revenge and flesh.

With the python’s spell broken, Stenchley guiltily stalked over to his master’s stiff body, which lay propped up on the wet floor, and sat on his haunches next to it.

“I am sorry we tried to eat the Friend, Master,” he said. “But Cynthia was hungry, and I could not resist.”

The hunchback idly lifted the professor’s bony hand from the puddle of liquid on the floor and held it as if it were a treasured pet. As he admired the delicate fan pattern of the bones that connected the wrist to the fingers, Stenchley noticed something curious. Patches of the hand’s blackened hide had begun to fade to a lighter brown. He turned it over and saw that the palm of the hand, still moist from lying in the chemical slush puddled on the floor, had become softer and slightly more lifelike. He scooped up a bit of the sour liquid and rubbed it on the professor’s cheek. The dry, papery skin reacted to the moisture by becoming lighter and more supple.

An exciting idea began to bloom in Stenchley’s brain. He had helped the professor reanimate dead flesh many times in the lab. The fact that they had never brought an entire corpse back to life, just bits
and pieces, did not bother Stenchley. Most of the equipment seemed to still be in working order, and the hunchback’s simple mind saw no reason why he shouldn’t be able to perform the same kind of procedure on the professor’s body. After all, Stenchley was good with a knife and had an intimate knowledge of human organs, albeit based on their taste rather than their function. How hard could it be?

There were, of course, numerous reasons why Stenchley had no business attempting such a complex operation. To begin with, the hunchback’s knowledge of the process was limited to the role of an uneducated assistant. Though his excellent memory enabled him to recall nearly every detail of the operations the professor had done, where to insert the wires and which knobs and dials to turn, Stenchley had no real understanding of the scientific principles involved in the procedure. He had no idea of the many bizarre and dangerous things that could happen if he made even the smallest mistake.

Yet Stenchley, full of hope and purpose, began hustling around the lab, gathering the tools and instruments he would need to accomplish his task. He immediately forgot all about the forlorn remains of the master’s Friend lying in a heap against the wall of the lab like a broken toy.