The Dead Gentleman (6 page)

“What’s she waiting for?” the first voice asked. “Why isn’t she bringing her crunchy and juicy bits in here for us to bite?”

“Because she heard you!” the second voice scolded. “Now she waits to see if she is dreaming. She hopes that she’ll wake up with the closet closed and safe and snug in her warm bed.”

“Then let’s get her first! We can have more than just fingers! We’ll leave enough so that she can tell us where the master’s bird is.”

There was a clatter of movement from within the closet—the sound of something being shifted around, of bodies squeezing past shoeboxes and hangers. At the sound of movement, Jez managed to yank her body back into action, though it felt like cracking a layer of frost from her joints, and she grabbed the open closet door and shoved at it, hard. The door stuck again, but this time it was because of something blocking the doorframe—something small and fat had wedged itself in the way.

“Ouch!” the thing shouted in its full voice, which sounded like the squeal of a chair leg being dragged across the kitchen floor. “She’s got me! She’s going to mash me in the door! Stop her! Save me!”

The first voice answered from somewhere inside the room, from the nooks and crannies of shadow that the window glow wouldn’t touch. “I can’t get to her! She’s still standing in the nasty city light.”

Jez kept her weight on the door, but whatever it was that she’d trapped was pushing back, and it was surprisingly strong. Her arms were shaking with the effort and her mouth had gone dry. Her tongue tasted of metal, of adrenaline.

“Eww! I’m crushing, I’m breaking,” said the thing in the door. “Get the shade! Pull the shade and we’ll have her!”

There was a scurrying then, as something ran on short legs around the outer edge of her room. It was keeping to the shadows, avoiding the light of the window, hopping over her laundry basket and scampering over her desk. A cup of pens went spilling over the edge and onto the floor, rolling across the hardwood floor like the rattling of bones.

The little creature was almost to the open window shade. One tug on the dangling cord would smother the outside light behind thick vinyl, leaving Jez in nearly total darkness.

Jez gave the closet door one last, strong kick—eliciting a satisfying squeal from whatever was trapped inside—and made a lunge for the desk lamp. Her knee banged against something hard as she skidded and slid on the spilled pens littering the ground. On her hands and knees now, she crawled across the floor. The way suddenly went dark as she heard the rip-cord sound of the window shade drawing shut, and then Jez was moving through blackness, feeling her way to where she prayed her desk was.

The little creatures began to giggle as she heard the thump of plump bodies landing on the floor, accompanied by the pounding of little feet and the smacking of lips and chomping of teeth.

Her hand found the desk leg just as something cold found her ankle. She kicked it off and pulled herself up, frantically feeling for the lamp switch.

She heard the snap of tiny jaws as her sock was pulled halfway
off her foot. Several clawed fingers pulled her pant leg up, exposing her skinny calf.

She found the switch.

There was a click, then a brilliant flash that left spots in her eyes. When they cleared, she was alone in her room. The shade was drawn, the closet door ajar and pens and pencils scattered along the floor. One sock had been stretched and twisted and now hung limply from her toes. Her left pant leg was hiked up to near her knee. But she was alone.

She pulled herself to standing and grabbed the nearest heavy object—a soccer sportsmanship trophy that she didn’t deserve—and examined the innocent-seeming closet. She nudged the door aside with her foot while holding at the ready the marble base of her only trophy. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Clothes and shoes. Solid walls and shelves. Nothing out of the ordinary, no more whispered voices. It was a closet, the same as it had been this morning and every other time she’d opened it.

Maybe Jez was really losing her mind. Perhaps all this was just a continuation of the same delusion that had begun in the basement. First she was seeing ghost boys, and now she was battling monsters in the dark. But Jez knew herself better than that. She was not flighty, not prone to fantasies or daydreams.
Someone
had been in that basement today.
Something
had come out of that closet just now.

She opened the bedroom door and peeked down the hall. Her father’s light was still on; she could see it beneath his bedroom door, but she could hear his snores even from here. He’d probably fallen asleep reading again.

She gently closed her door and took a look around the room, surveying the damage. A few broken pencils, her desk chair was
overturned, but not much else. She wouldn’t be turning off her light tonight, that was for sure, but nevertheless there was something that needed doing right away. The window shade was hung between two unused curtain rods and was easily removed. As Jez rolled the vinyl shade up she looked approvingly at her newly bare, unobstructed window. The light of a thousand New York street lamps and neon signs shone down upon her bed, and it would never go dark again.

She stowed the rolled-up shade, appropriately, in her closet behind a hanging shoe rack and some poster tubes. As she did so, she tested the walls for hollow sounds that might indicate a hidden door or false floor. But it all felt solid; there were no exits except for the door itself. It occurred to her as she closed it tight that it was a shame closets didn’t lock from the outside. She knew she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight anyway, so she busied herself with one last sweep of the room. Trophy-mallet in hand, she peered behind every book, under the bed and in every corner, looking for any trace of her attackers, but there was no sign of them. It was just another rainy night and her closet was just a closet.

I stared at the bird. The bird stared back at me. This had been our routine for the better part of two weeks. The contest would go on for most of the night until I finally mumbled, “What are you looking at, you stupid bird?” and rolled over, hugging the frayed, moth-eaten woman’s coat I’d been using for a blanket, and closed my eyes.

Sleep didn’t come easily. It hadn’t ever since I’d looked into the face of a dead man and seen him smiling back at me. My dreams had rarely been pleasant things, but they’d lately turned downright nightmarish. Grinning skulls and pauper’s graves visited me now. When I was very young, I’d been taught to say prayers for the well-being of loved ones before bed. Since taking to the streets, and since I had no more loved ones to speak of, I’d altered the practice more to my liking and offered up a nightly list of curses instead.

“A pox on Nate the Twist for taking more than his fair share of last week’s score,” I recited. “May boils burst on Eaglesham the Scrivener for running me off his shop’s stoop yesterday. May Quick-Bladed Jenny’s knives snap for telling me there were meat pies being tossed out near Brown’s Bakery when there weren’t any. A curse on Copper Bryant, Copper Scott, Copper Black and that big, hairy-knuckled Copper who walks the beat near Church but whose name escapes me now. A curse on …” My little list had been getting longer of late, lasting ten minutes or more until I reached the end: “Lastly, may this squawking piece of junk rust its beady little eyes shut, and may my own eyes be cursed for ever looking upon it. Amen and good riddance.” And with this, Merlin would cock its head at me quizzically and let out a long, tired whistle.

In the weeks since my daring robbery of the fantastic clockwork bird, I’d made quite the discovery—that it was impossible to make any money from a fantastic clockwork bird when the entire underworld of New York was looking for it. Sure, I’d been on the lam before, but never like this. Within hours of the heist, word had gone out to every ne’er-do-well and vagabond in Manhattan that something very valuable had been stolen by a common street boy matching my description. The missing item was a shiny metal bird statue, a toy for the very rich, and a very rich man was willing to pay a king’s fortune to get it back. And beneath those rumors were darker whispers that this very rich man was actually someone very well-connected and spiteful, and he was preparing to make life hell for all the street folk of Lower Manhattan if he didn’t get his pet prize back in a hurry. Greed and fear were working together to make a nasty little brew on the streets out there.

And there were
other
things after me as well. They’d been waiting for me when I returned to my hideout—the small attic of an abandoned tannery near the riverfront. I’d heard their chattering as I perched on the fire ladder that I normally used to come and go. Peeking through the loose slats over the boarded-up window, I made out smallish shapes moving around in the darkened room, but I’d never managed to get a good look—they kept to the shadows, the unused nooks and crannies, the very places where I used to feel safe. I’d heard them several times since then, in back alleys or cellars I’d mistakenly thought empty. Always, I’d be warned just in the nick of time by a low whistle from Merlin. I had to admit, without the bird I’d have been snatched up a long time ago. That clockwork canary had a knack for anticipating trouble, especially trouble of an unusual sort.

Not that the bird’s gift excused anything. Because of him, I was now reduced to sleeping under an overturned iron bathtub, wrapped in a moldy coat, with the rest of the crazies who squatted beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The sounds of the East River, the bells of the barges and the swell of lapping waves, mixed with the smells of campfires and the people there. Few voices competed with the river; mostly it was just hushed whispers and sickly coughing, but every now and then someone would break down crying or burst out in hysterical laughter. The bridge folk were nuts, mostly, but at least they didn’t have the wherewithal to chase a bribe, and they were already so far down in the pecking order that you couldn’t really threaten them with less. It seemed that the bridge folk were the only ones
not
looking for me, and therefore they were my best bet if I wanted to disappear for a while—at least until the saner folks forgot about me and the stupid bird.

“Hey, you put a deposit on this here tub, or what?”

My eyes popped open as my hand reached instinctively for my missing razor, which was on the floor of a dead man’s coach somewhere. A shriveled prune of a face was talking to me, flapping lips working on toothless gums. The face belonged to one of the bridge folk, a well-seasoned one judging by the smell.

Prune-face was tugging hard on my makeshift blanket, trying to get me to move. I tugged back, harder. “Clear off, will you? I’m not looking for any trouble, you crazy old … person.” I honestly couldn’t have told you whether I was talking to a man or a woman. Merlin let out a short whistle that was absolutely no help at all.

Prune-face let me have the blanket but didn’t quiet down. “Hey, I’m talking at you. You hear? You gotta leave a deposit with the Duke if you want to sleep here in this tub. So’s you don’t ruin it. Maybe you leave me that shiny parrot there and I won’t tell him.”

I glanced over at Merlin in his cage, then at the cracked, muddy, weed-encircled tub I’d squeezed myself under for shelter. It didn’t seem like much of a trade. “How am I going to ruin rubbish?” I asked. “And who are you talking about? A duke owns this tub? I suppose that makes you some sort of baron? Or maybe you’re the pope himself, right?” I slowly inched my fingers toward the one weapon I did have—a stout ax handle I’d nicked off a lumber cart. So far this crazy seemed harmless enough, but you never knew when they might turn. Then it pays to have a nice piece of hickory at your side.

“Do I look like the pope? I’m just trying to give you some good advice, friend. That there tub belongs to the Duke Under the Bridge, and you don’t want to be caught sleeping in it without leaving him a little something. Else he’ll take a little something
off of you.” With that, Prune-face held up a hand, wriggling the stumps of three missing fingers in my face. “Get my drift?”

I got it. This “Duke” person must have been one of the bridge folk who thought of himself as a kind of boss. Maybe he was a thug who was slumming it for a while, bullying the crazies for kicks. Whatever the case, the last thing I wanted was a run-in with him.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the tip,” I said as I began rolling up my things. “Like I said, I don’t want any trouble, so I’ll just be moving on.”

Prune-face’s face scrunched up even more, if that was possible. “No, you don’t get it, friend. There’s no time for moving on. The Duke’s here now!”

“What’s this squatter doing here?” asked a voice full of stones. “Lazy sack o’ bones enjoying the luxuries of my home without so much as an apple core left out for the Duke?”

He was at least as tall as an elephant, nearly as broad and
fat
. A patchwork robe of stitched-together blankets strained to cover his layers of girth. And atop his square, lumpy head, resting crookedly on two pitted black horns—
horns
—was a dull, dented crown of gold. The Duke Under the Bridge.