The Orphan of Awkward Falls (20 page)

Barbara shrieked as another creature smashed through the opening. It leapt through the hole into the basement, landing with a heavy thunk behind the buffalo-headed creature. The thing had the flat, wet snout of a boar and the remnants of a throw pillow speared on one of its long curved tusks. Two extra legs, ill formed and useless, hung from its front shoulders. Its wide red eyes looked panicked.

“How are you coming along with the window, Jo?” Howard called. “These rags won’t burn for long!” The flames were already smaller than they had been just a few seconds ago.

“Almost done, Dad.” Josephine found it nearly impossible to stay focused on her task of hammering out all the glass from the little window with such frightening mayhem taking place behind her. She frantically smashed the last of the jagged shards away and raked the bits to the side with the hammer. “Okay, the window is cleared, you guys. Let’s get out of here!”

Howard took her torch. “Barbara, you and Jo go first, while I hold them at bay. I’ll follow right behind you!”

Barbara quickly climbed up on the washer and boosted Josephine up to the window. Josephine reached through the small opening and pulled herself through on her belly. The window was just above ground level, so she crawled directly out onto the frozen earth of the backyard.

“Hurry, girls!” yelled Howard. “Get out, now!”

Barbara looked back and saw that Howard was in big trouble. The two torches were about to go out. The turpentine-soaked rags
balled up on their ends had already burned down to small black cinders and were barely creating enough fire to keep the creatures from pouncing. The smaller the flames became, the bolder the beasts were.

Howard swung the torches back and forth at the creatures, who reacted by growling and stabbing their paws at him with little regard for the dying flames.

Felix prowled at Howard’s feet, his back arched and fur on end, hissing at the creatures and shouting advice to Howard like a corner man in a prizefight. “Jab, Pops, jab! Give him the left! Watch out! Duck!”

More of the mutant creatures upstairs were now turning their attention to the commotion in the basement. They fought each other fang and claw to gain entrance. The hole in the wall and the bashed-in door quickly became one big gash, and the creatures dove in on top of each other. Hungry teeth flashed in the orange light of the flames, as the monstrous herd crept closer.

“Look out, Howard, there’s one on your left!” Barbara called, as an ugly canine-ish creature tried to sneak up on Howard’s flank. Howard spun quickly and smacked the beast’s muzzle with the red-hot torch. It yelped and ducked away, but clearly would not be deterred for long.

Howard was losing ground fast. The buffalo-headed creature swiped a huge paw at him, ripping three parallel slices in his forearm with its claws. The blow knocked the torch from his hand, and it fell to the floor. Barbara panicked when she saw the blood begin to soak through Howard’s shirt. With nothing to lose, and no other defense,
she started throwing anything she could find at the creatures to hold them off. She bounced a full pickle jar off the buffalo creature’s black head, temporarily causing it to step back. She flung cans of insecticide, books, rubber boots, spray paint, a baseball, a mirror, until she had emptied all the shelves within reach. The creature snapped at the missiles, swallowing the baseball whole.

Josephine could hardly bear to watch. Howard, down to one torch now, his gashed arm dripping blood, was moving a bit slower, his energy beginning to flag. She was starting to doubt that he would make it out of the basement before the creatures overcame him, when she spotted the jar of turpentine, still three-quarters full, sitting on the workbench. The smoldering torch her father had just dropped lay in perfect position on the floor.

“Felix, use the turpentine! It’s on the workbench!”

“Right!” The cat hopped onto the table and kicked the glass jar off. It hit the cement floor and shattered, its flammable contents splashing across the floor under the buffalo creature’s paws. When the pool of liquid touched the torch, a wall of flames exploded between the herd of creatures and their intended victims. The buffalo-headed beast bellowed madly as it danced in the fiery puddle.

“Time to go!” shouted Felix.

Howard climbed onto the washer and hurriedly boosted Barbara up to the window. He pushed on her feet as she worked her head and shoulders through the narrow space and went crawling out onto the snow. Howard managed to pull himself up far enough to
reach through the window and take Barbara’s and Josephine’s hands. They braced their feet against the metal outer frame of the window and tugged with all their strength. Little by little, Howard inched his way out of the window and onto the snowy ground outside, where Josephine and Barbara lay trying to catch their breath.

Felix, his hind quarters smoking, yelled a particularly salty curse word as he came scratching his way out of the window and plunged his singed bottom in the snow. The creatures inside roared and howled as smoke poured out of the open window and the basement filled with flames.

Howard stumbled across the snow toward Josephine, Barbara, and Felix. “Get away from the house! The furnace is full of fuel. It could blow any second now.”

Josephine quickly scooped up the dazed Felix, Howard pulled Barbara to her feet, and they all ran. They had hadn’t taken ten steps when an earthshaking boom knocked them all to the ground again. A huge yellow fireball blew out the back of the house, leaving a gash in the wall. Fire and smoke poured out of the hole, and the entire house lurched backward.

Suddenly, like a circus lion leaping through a flaming hoop, the buffalo-headed creature crashed through the opening, bellowing madly, the fur on its back smoking. The other creatures came stampeding behind it, several of them in flames. The beasts wailed and shrieked furiously as they charged out into the snow in every direction. In the panicked confusion, several creatures smashed into each
other in a multibeast pileup, while others simply ran in circles trying to catch their smoldering tails. All were too busy to spot Josephine and the others, who would have been easy pickings now, lying on the ground not fifty feet away. Finally, the buffalo-headed creature seemed to find its bearings and loped off toward the tree line behind the house. The other creatures followed suit, and the entire herd thundered off down the slope into the dense forest.

Howard directed the group to a hiding spot behind a small pump shed. “Everyone stay down. There could be others nearby that we haven’t seen yet.”

Barbara went right into nurse mode. She quickly looked Josephine over but found no new injuries. Howard was next. She carefully pulled his sleeve up and frowned at his wound. “These lacerations are bleeding pretty badly, dear. They don’t appear to be very deep, though.” She ripped a swath of cloth from her skirt and began wrapping Howard’s arm. “Thank goodness we’ve kept up with our tetanus boosters.”

Josephine winced when she saw the blood on her father’s shirt. “Oh, Dad, you’re really hurt!”

“No, no,” he said, with a shrug. “Your mother’s right. It’s a very superficial wound. How about you, Felix? Are you okay?”

Felix grimaced as he piled snow onto his blackened rear end. “My caboose is a charcoal briquette, but other than that, I’m swell.”

Josephine peeked over the top of the small shed and watched the burning house. She had never seen such a big fire up close, and
the violence of it was shocking. Towering orange and yellow flames leapt out of the windows, hungrily devouring the house’s curlicued wooden trim and climbing quickly to the upper gables. The red-hot roof hissed and sizzled as snowflakes drifted down onto the shingles. The old house was completely ablaze. Any beastly creatures still inside were surely toast.

Now that they were safe for the moment, Josephine’s mind turned to Thaddeus. It had been at least an hour since she had left the boy in the lab, locked inside the strange machine—plenty of time for awful things to occur.

Waking up was not something Thaddeus enjoyed, even under normal circumstances. It seemed that the best, most luxuriously restful part of sleep, the only part that truly felt worthy of the word slumber, was the part that went on just before waking up. For this reason, there were strict rules in Hibble Manor regarding the manner in which the master was to be awakened. Every evening at precisely six o’clock, Norman arrived at the boy’s bedside with a tray of perfectly heated, heavily sugared cocoa and a cookie. Only after the robot had rung a tiny silver bell three times and then put on an old gramophone recording titled
Songbirds of Appalachia
did Thaddeus’s eyes open and his day (or night, actually, since he usually slept through the risky daytime hours) begin.

So it was with great dismay that Thaddeus found himself awakened by the rude sensation of having his pants stolen. When he opened his eyes, his head foggy from the anesthetic, he remembered in a nauseated rush where he was and who had put him there. He
was still strapped to the operating gurney, the strange helmet still on his head, the tube still attached to his belly. He felt awful.

“Stop that,” Thaddeus groaned. He attempted to kick at the person removing his pants, but the restraints on his legs kept him from it. “Those are my trousers, you barbarian!”

Thaddeus blinked and tried to focus, though it was hard without his glasses. The thief had taken those as well. He fought through the wooziness of the anesthetic, forcing his mind to sort out what was happening. Was the pants thief Fetid Stenchley? He must be, though even through the blur of Thaddeus’s myopia, he could tell that the person did not possess the killer’s unique hunched shape. In fact, generally speaking, the person rather resembled…Thaddeus himself.

But that was impossible.

Could it be one of Thaddeus’s deformed clone siblings? That wasn’t likely. None of them had appeared to be alive. Who, then?

The mysterious thief did not speak as he worked the pant legs off Thaddeus’s feet, which were now shoeless. The boy noticed then that his shirt and jacket were gone as well. He was down to his undershirt and boxers. Thaddeus panicked when he realized that the dastardly pilferer might intend to relieve him of those, too. The thought of being naked at this moment was most unappealing.

“Why are you taking my clothes?” The blurry person did not answer, but appeared to be dressing himself in the white suit. “I demand to know who you are!”

The thief’s snorting laugh, full of mockery and chronic nasal congestion, answered the question. Regardless of the thief’s Thaddeus-shaped silhouette, the boy knew that only one person could produce that disgusting sound.

“Fetid Stenchley! What devious depravity are you up to now?”

Stenchley grunted. Thaddeus couldn’t tell if he was smiling or grimacing.

The truth, though Thaddeus had not discovered it yet, was even worse than he imagined. At that moment, a commando force of Stenchley’s cells was working inside Thaddeus, ambushing the boy’s own CC cells and replacing them with Stenchley’s.

If Thaddeus had been anywhere near a mirror, his own reflection would have terrified him. Hanks of thin, greasy hair had sprouted from his shaved scalp, his nose had begun losing its roundness, his eyes had become more mud brown than sky blue. Even worse, like a newborn volcano rising from the ocean floor, an ugly hump had begun bulging up from his shoulder. The person Thaddeus would have seen staring back at him from the mirror would have looked a lot like Fetid Stenchley.

Stenchley was too caught up in the excitement of his own transformation to bother paying attention to the irate creature whose stolen cells had given him a new body.

He looked himself over and spoke to the python inside him. “Ain’t we handsome now, sweet? Looky how the Master loves us now!”

Cynthia hissed. She was restless and irritable since the cell transfer had reduced Stenchley’s hump, her den, to a fraction of its normal size. She had reluctantly taken up residence in his plump new belly, though it quaked and rumbled incessantly.

The professor’s corpse, tottering nearby, did appear to be transfixed by the killer’s altered appearance. A moan drifted up from the dead man’s rotted throat as his hand reached out and stroked Stenchley’s newly soft cheek.

Admiring his reflection in a shard of broken glass, Stenchley was thrilled to see that the operation had been a success. He now inhabited the handsome body of the Friend. The killer marveled at the old
Friend lying there whimpering and straining against the straps of the surgical gurney. The revolting features, the bulging eyes, the leathery scarred face, the greasy hair, the apelike arms that the madman had borne his whole life now belonged to that pathetic creature instead.

The former hunchback was so anxious to get out the door and greet the world in his glamorous new guise, he almost forgot to finish his work. Instinct told him the Friend should be disposed of.

Stenchley wasted no time. Since the victim was conveniently immobilized by the gurney’s restraints, a few minutes should have been more than enough time to kill and run.

But things did not go as planned.

Stenchley’s new hands were limp and soft, instead of knotty and powerful. They were hands built for the delicate stitching of spleens and for the tearing of chocolate bar wrappers, not for snapping ribs or ripping flesh. The plump, pink appendages failed even to tear the fabric of his victim’s undershirt, much less affect the skin underneath. Undeterred, the madman bit hungrily at an exposed arm, but no blood came. He found his new jaws were weak, his teeth small and dull, unlike the jagged weapons that had lined his gums before. Instead of tearing flesh from bone, the best he could manage was an unsatisfying gnawing.

Thaddeus, on the other hand, had the distinct feeling that he had suddenly become very strong. He had no idea that his cells were being overrun by Fetid Stenchley’s, and he was not able to see that his own features had grown to resemble those of the madman. All
he knew was that he felt very strange. His bones and muscles, the majority of which he had never even been aware of, let alone used, were tingling with a feeling that was part itch and part sting. He was aware of the blood pumping through his arteries with a vigor he had never experienced before.

With astonishing ease, he broke the straps that had held him to the gurney. He flung the helmet aside and snapped the suction cup off his stomach, leaving a ring of tiny punctures in his skin where the device’s connection points had been.

Thaddeus leapt from the gurney and attacked Stenchley, his body acting almost on its own without consulting the boy’s mind at all. It was a strange feeling, tackling what appeared to be himself, seeing fear in what appeared to be his own face.

A wave of nausea washed over Thaddeus as his insides continued to shift and churn. He fell to his knees and nearly retched, giving the killer a chance to wriggle free. When the sick moment passed, he saw that Stenchley had run out the lab door.

The professor’s corpse had appeared as well and was ascending the stairs in Stenchley’s wake. The dead man reached out after the killer as he climbed, moaning as if trying to call him back.

An aggressive new instinct told Thaddeus to pursue the madman, but what he saw on the floor of the lab kept him from obeying it.

“Norman!” He shoved his way through the debris until he came to his faithful servant’s broken steel body, looking like so much useless junk.

Thaddeus fell to his knees and laid his hands gently on Norman’s dented silver face. “Norman, what has happened to you? I command you to speak to me this instant!”

But the domed top of Norman’s head was bashed in and dislocated, with wires spilling out the sides—his circuits were smashed to bits. His steel hand was gone from his one remaining arm, its connectors twisted and frayed. Desperately, Thaddeus opened a small panel in the robot’s chest and began twisting and turning the knobs and switches inside, trying to restart his servant. Norman remained motionless, however, the red lights of his eyes dark.

Thaddeus had never considered the possibility of Norman’s demise. The robot had always been with him, seemingly indestructible, his only purpose to attend to the boy’s every whim. Every sugary morsel of food Thaddeus had ever eaten had been served to him on a silver platter by the robot. Every mug of cocoa that had ever touched his lips had been prepared and heated to exactly the right temperature (126 degrees Fahrenheit) by Norman. Every time Thaddeus had ever been woken by a nightmare, Norman’s steel claws had been there to soothe him to sleep again with a gentle back scratch. The doddering old contraption had been mother, father, friend, valet, teacher, toolbox, and Candyland opponent since Thaddeus had entered the world.

And now he was gone, destroyed by the mad killer who had stolen Thaddeus’s body.

A pitiful expression appeared on the boy’s awful new face. His bottom lip quivered, the outsized teeth of Fetid Stenchley overhanging it like shovel blades. He backhanded a tear off his cheek as a towering rage grew inside him. Some new part of the boy wanted revenge.

Thaddeus flew after the madman. He was surprised to find himself galloping on all fours at an unprecedented speed, like some beast from the African savanna. It felt so natural, he wondered why he had never tried running this way before.