The Orphan of Awkward Falls (7 page)

“Wait!” Josephine said, as the robot loomed over her. “I can’t leave yet!” She had barely scratched the surface of this puzzle of a boy, and now he was talking about repairing weasels? Questions were piling into her head by the dozen. If she left now, she’d go nuts with curiosity.

But Thaddeus had already turned and started toward the door to the stairs. “I have work to do.” He made little sweeping motions with the back of his hand toward her, as if he were brushing away a mess of cookie crumbs. “You are released.”

“But…couldn’t I stay just a little longer?” Josephine couldn’t believe what she was saying. She suddenly had no interest in escape. Her brain’s reckless driver had taken over again and thrown caution out the window. “My parents won’t be getting up for a few hours. Maybe I could watch you repair the weasel.”

“Unthinkable. My work is top secret, spy or not. Besides, I tire of your chatter.”

The robot’s claw seized Josephine’s arm firmly and led her toward the double doors.

“But I won’t chatter.”

Thaddeus did not look back.

“I promise!” She tried a new strategy. “Please, I’ve never watched a true genius work before. I could learn so much from a great scientist like you.”

This time he hesitated. His posture improved slightly.

“It would be such an honor. After all,” she continued, piling it on now, “you’re so much more brilliant than my father. He’s a microbiophysicist at the university.”

Thaddeus stopped and looked back at her. “I suppose I am a rather singular talent, though few are aware of it, due to my seclusion.”

“I saw it right away,” Josephine said. “You’ve got that genius twinkle in your eye. Kind of like Einstein.”

A small, cavity-dotted smile creased his face. “He is my idol. How perceptive of you to notice the similarity.”

She had him now. Simple flattery was often all it took to get what one wanted. “Oh, yes, you’re very similar. Though Einstein, of course, loved an audience. But,” she sighed dramatically, “if you’re not up to it, I certainly understand. I’ll just go away and let you work your magic all by yourself.” Josephine turned to leave.

Thaddeus’s brow wrinkled as he took the bait. “Well…I suppose I could allow you to watch, just this once, if you promise not to bother me again.”

“I promise.” But she knew it was a promise she would never be able to keep. Bothering Thaddeus Hibble was about to become Josephine’s primary occupation.

Fetid Stenchley sloshed through a bog in the foggy darkness, deep in the forest that stretched beyond the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane. He had been running steadily for hours, fleeing from the wailing sirens and thumping helicopters that were hunting him. The police had badly underestimated the mad hunchback’s speed, however, and he was miles farther away than anyone would have thought possible. Loping swiftly through the forest on all fours, leaving barely a footprint behind, Stenchley ran like a creature born to the wilderness.

Since clearing the asylum wall, the madman had stopped only once, and then only long enough to remove Lulu, the hairless Egyptian spaniel, from his nose. The little dog’s viselike jaws had remained clamped stubbornly to the madman’s face after his escape, and it had somehow held on as Stenchley tore through the woods. At the first opportunity, the madman had crouched in a gulley and wrung the pooch’s neck, carefully detaching its teeth from his swollen and
bleeding nose. He made a quick snack of the pampered pet, then ran on, not daring to stop again until after nightfall.

Feeling his way through the murk of the bog, Stenchley found a grotto beneath a fallen hemlock tree where he could rest and feed. Wild-eyed and panting, he lapped water from a black puddle at the foot of the tree, jerking his head up nervously every couple of seconds to scan the area for any sign of his pursuers. After he drank his fill, he crawled under the curtain of dripping roots and munched on beetles plucked from the mossy underside of the tree. As Stenchley crouched there in his muddy hooch, enjoying the crunch and pop of the bugs’ exoskeletons between his teeth, it dawned on him that after so many nightmarish years of captivity, he was finally free. No more surgeons. No more Treatments. No more walls. Even a cold, damp hole under a tree and bugs for dinner were vastly preferable to life in the asylum.

But just as he had begun to relax, his hammering heart finally slowing down to something like normal, Stenchley heard the sound that all creatures on the run dread more than any other. Echoing through the woods somewhere in the distance came the yelps and whoops of bloodhounds. Though he enjoyed the mild flavor of the smaller canine breeds, Stenchley had a deep-seated fear of anything larger than a dachshund. The thought of the fanged, slobbering jaws of a pack of hounds snapping at him sent a jolt of terror through his brain. So he set off again, fear driving him faster than before. He leapt and dodged through the dense bramble of the woods, circling
back many times to cover his trail, splashing through streams for long stretches, making it hard for the hounds to follow his scent.

In the wee hours of the morning, he found a tall tree and clawed his way to its highest branch. He took the opportunity to feed again when a squirrel, no doubt surprised to find a drooling killer squatting just outside its nest, scurried out onto the branch at his feet. The hunchback chewed swatches of the squirrel and listened for the hounds. Their baying was farther away now and heading in the opposite direction.

He slid down the tree to the forest floor and ran on at an easier pace. An occasional police helicopter passed overhead, invisible in the soupy fog, but the noise of their engines gave him plenty of time to hide. Stenchley could easily have spent the rest of his life like this, prowling the woods by night, hunting and scavenging for food, then disappearing into holes or trees by day. In the vast wilderness, which stretched northward for thousands of miles, all the way to the edge of the Arctic, he would have been impossible to find. In time he might simply have become another legend of the great northern woods, like Sasquatch, never to be seen again, except by unfortunate hikers who would not live to tell the tale.

But Cynthia had other plans for Stenchley. There was a score to settle, now that he was free. The vile, white-haired child who had come between Stenchley and his beloved master, who was the cause of all Stenchley’s suffering in the horrible asylum, had to die. No more than a useless, babbling toddler at the time, the pathetic thing
had escaped the python’s coils ten years ago. The robot had intervened and hidden the child away before Stenchley could get at it. Cynthia vowed the child would not be so lucky this time. This would be a meal she would truly savor.

Though Stenchley had no conscious idea of where he was going, his filthy bare feet ran steadily on, guided by the whispering python inside his hump. If one were to look at a map of Awkward Falls and draw a line following Stenchley’s path, it would begin at the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane, travel out into the forest where it would scribble around crazily, then turn back toward town again, heading straight for Oleander Alley.

Josephine followed Thaddeus and the robot down the long flight of narrow stone steps into chilly darkness. At the bottom they entered the lab through the kind of heavy steel door one normally saw on a meat locker or possibly a nuclear waste facility. When Norman closed the door behind them, it became a virtually seamless part of the wall. Thaddeus flicked a switch, and the room’s lone light source, a bulb dangling at the end of a wire, flickered and came on. The room looked nothing like the immaculate modern labs where Josephine’s father worked. This place was filthy. Dust and grime coated everything in sight.

All around the room stood a collection of odd machines, some refrigerator-sized, some smaller than a toaster oven, most somewhere in between. All were very old and heavy looking, made of thick steel held together with bolts and rivets. Crisscrossing the walls and ceiling was a mad jumble of pipes, valves, and gauges reminiscent of the
boiler room of a steamship. A workbench crowded with beakers and glass tubes from neglected experiments extended along one wall.

The only part of the lab that was even remotely clean was a steel table in the center. There, under the lightbulb, was the most grotesque thing Josephine had ever seen in her life (though that record would fall in less than twenty-four hours). It was a dead animal, its organs exposed.

“Is that the weasel you were talking about?” she asked, feeling one of her own organs lurch sideways at the sight.

“Yes, this is Coco. She belongs to the widow Gladstone.” Thaddeus snapped on surgical gloves. He had to stand on a chair to reach the work area. “I think the beast is looking rather good, considering.”

“Considering?” The mess of fur, bone, and gristle looked hideous.

“Considering it was hit by a speeding Zamboni at the ice rink a week ago,” he said.

“But isn’t it…dead?”

“Obviously.”

“So how can you fix something that’s already dead?”

“I use a microwave oven, of course,” he said, as if only an idiot would ask such a thing. He licked a spot of chocolate off his top lip. “The widow Gladstone is our best customer. We repaired her Chihuahua when it fell off the roof last year, then a month later, her parakeet flew into a fan. She’s particularly hard on her animals.”

“You mean people pay you to fix their dead pets?”

“Yes, and a good thing, too. The Hibble fortune is not what it once was, and we need cash. After our success with Felix, Norman suggested we offer the same service to others. He is very entrepreneurial, for a robot.”

“Wait, who’s Felix?”

“See for yourself,” Thaddeus said. “Here he is now.”

The same scruffy, mismatched cat Josephine had seen earlier strolled into the lab, carrying something in its mouth. It hopped up onto the worktable and dropped what looked like a dead rat in front of the boy.

“A fine specimen, Felix.” Thaddeus poked at the rodent’s half-flattened carcass. “It looks like the tires missed most of the useful parts. The digestive system should be of adequate size.”

“I aim to please,” said the cat.

Josephine recoiled in shock.

“Whatsamatta, girly?” the cat said, in a gritty voice straight out of a gangster movie. “Never seen a talkin’ cat before?”

“Y-you can talk!” She couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing.

“What a bright kid,” he said. “You oughta go on a game show or somethin’.”

Thaddeus scratched the animal’s bat ear. “Impressive beast, isn’t he? Felix is my greatest achievement so far.”

“You did this? You made a cat talk?”

Thaddeus nodded proudly. “Norman assisted, of course.”

“That’s amazing! You’re like some kind of mad scientist.”

Thaddeus did not think this was funny. “I am well versed in the sciences, Josephine, but I assure you I am perfectly sane. My work on Felix was an act of compassion. He’d be deceased now if I hadn’t repaired him.”

“The kid’s tellin’ you straight,” said the cat. “I had a little run-in with a pair of honkin’ big pit bulls who nearly ate me for lunch a couple years ago. I was down for the count when the boss and ol’ Rusty over there came along and saved my hide.”

“Norman and I were out on an errand and discovered him just in time.” Thaddeus paced casually as he talked, clearly enjoying the chance to brag. “We brought him back to the lab and repaired his parts, where feasible, and replaced the bits that were too badly mangled to fix. Not an easy task, mind you, but a noble one, if I may say so. He’s quite handsome now, don’t you think?’”

Handsome
was not the word Josephine was thinking of. “I’ve never seen anything like him. But how’d you manage the talking part?”

Thaddeus rolled his eyes as if a toddler had just asked how a rocket engine works. “Let’s just say I made certain improvements to the parietal lobe of Felix’s brain and adjusted his larynx. After that, it was a simple matter of tutoring. I’ve charged Norman with teaching him proper English, though the results have been somewhat spotty.” He stroked the cat’s grizzled fur affectionately. “He was a denizen of the street, after all.”

“I ain’t no powder puff,” gruffed the cat as he gnawed a hooked claw. Josephine found it hard to imagine this cat losing a fight to any dog.

“Did you build the little train, too?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Very nice. But I was wondering about those legs on the train…are they real?”

He nodded proudly. “Rats’ legs. A nice touch, I think.”

“Yes, but it’s kind of…well…icky. I mean, how did you…get them?”

“Ah, I see what you’re thinking. Not to worry. The various parts I use in building my little toys are from creatures that are already deceased. Felix finds them and brings them to me.”

“But I don’t kill ‘em no more,” the cat added defensively. “I quit eatin’ rat a long time ago. Too much cholesterol. I’m hooked on the canned stuff now, anyway. I just deliver the stiffs to the kid.” The cat shrugged. “Keeps him happy.”

“Our pet-repairing enterprise is dependent upon Felix’s scavenging. We have a short list of loyal clients, mostly elderly women from the widow Gladstone’s poker club, but they keep us busy.”

“Isn’t that kind of risky? What if somebody tells the police—or the orphanage—about you?” she asked.

Thaddeus waved off her concern. “A minimal risk. Our rendezvous point is elsewhere, and the widow has only met me once or twice. Norman primarily conducts our business with her. I believe she rather fancies him, actually.”

“But she knows he’s a robot, right?”

He shrugged. “The woman’s vision is not keen. Besides, Norman does have a certain charm.”

“How have you managed to stay hidden for so long?”

“It helps that I sleep in the daytime and do my puttering about at night. I’m quite stealthy.”

“You must get really lonely, not to mention bored.”

“My work keeps me busy,” said Thaddeus, “and I have Norman and Felix for company. Besides, Mother and Father will be home soon.”