The Orphan of Awkward Falls (16 page)

Sometime before dawn Norman and the little freight train arrived at the lab door with his master’s “Late-Late” dinner. This meal was traditionally a large one, made up of all of the master’s favorite food groups. In addition to the usual staples of candy and soda, there was a fried pie for its fruit content, canned Beanie Weenies for protein, and a can of spray cheese for dairy. This feast was always the boy’s most anticipated feeding of the night. It was for this reason that Norman found it troubling that the young master and his guest were nowhere to be found when he brought the platter into the lab and announced that dinner was served.

Felix had hungrily followed the robot downstairs to the lab as well, since the meal usually included a can of Kitty Gourmet for himself.

“That’s weird,” the cat said. “The kid hasn’t missed chow in forever.” Felix wrinkled his sensitive nose at the sour fumes he detected in the air. “What’s that smell?”

“Though there is a protrusion of sorts between my eyes, I have no olfactory capabilities,” the robot droned. Norman put the tray down and set his logic cylinders spinning in the hope of generating an idea as to where his master might be.

“Perhaps Master Hibble and his companion are playing the hiding game,” the robot speculated. “When he was somewhat shorter, the master often engaged me in such an activity. I believe I was required to count to three hundred while he concealed himself in some obscure place, then I was to search for him. For some reason, the longer it took me to find him, the greater pleasure the master found in the process.”

The cat, sniffing around the floor of the lab, shook his head. “I don’t think they’re playin’ hide and seek, Rusty. They’re a little old for that kind of thing now.”

Felix followed the odor to the open drain under the operating table. “Hey, look at this.”

The lanky robot laboriously lowered himself down onto all fours and looked under the table.

“Someone has removed the cover from the drain,” Norman observed. “Perhaps this is relevant to our search!”

Felix stuck his nose down into the drain and tried to see where it went, but the pipe was too dark. “Okay, I’ll make this simple. Here’s what I want you to do: Hold me by my tail and lower me down into the drain as far as you can so I can take a look around. Got it?”

Norman hesitated. “Will that not be unpleasant for you? I would not like to hurt your tail.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Felix said. “You could drive a truck over my tail, and I wouldn’t feel a thing. It’s all gristle at this point. Just don’t let me fall down the hole, whatever you do.”

“You may rely upon me, sir.”

“Drop me, and you’re toast—got it?”

“I have it, sir.”

“Don’t drop the kitty.”

“Your wish could not be more plain.”

“Good man.” The cat crouched at the edge of the hole and raised his tail toward the robot. “I’m ready when you are.”

Norman locked Felix’s tail in his iron grip and lowered him into the dark drain.

“I can’t see a thing,” Felix shouted from below. “But I can hear something down there. Can you get me any lower?”

“I’ll try, sir.” Norman lay flat on his chest and extended his arm as far down the drain as possible.

“I can hear things rattlin’ around, and voices. A little lower!”

Norman clung to the tip of Felix’s tail with his fingertips to allow him to descend a few inches further. Suddenly, they both heard Thaddeus’s voice faintly call out, “Norman! I need you at once!”

The robot’s rusty old circuits sparked and popped at the sound of his master. “That is Master Hibble! He is at the bottom of the hole!” His voice box crackled with static as he called back instinctively,
“I AM COMING, MASTER HIBBLE! I SHALL BE THERE DIRECTLY!”

All of the robot’s power was immediately rerouted to the sole task of reaching his master. Since Thaddeus had existed, Norman’s primary directive was the boy’s protection, and whenever the robot sensed Thaddeus was in danger, all other functions ceased immediately.

Unfortunately for Felix, who was dangling by the tip of his tail in the dark drain, this meant that Norman’s hand was now needed for more important things. The cat’s tail was immediately released, and the poor beast tumbled down the hole.

The fact that Norman was much too wide to fit into the drain was an unimportant detail to the robot. The shortest route to his endangered master was through the hole in the floor, so that was the way he intended to go. If it was too small, then he would simply have to make it bigger.

Like a huge piston, Norman rammed himself into the drain headfirst and began breaststroking his way down the hole. The lead pipe was no match for Norman’s great strength. With each swipe of his powerful steel arms, Norman smashed steadily downward, sending chunks of rubble and pieces of pipe tumbling into the secret lab below.

After Stenchley finished preparing the Friend for the operation, he opened the hatch of one of the sarcophaguslike tubes built into the large machine behind the gurney and slid the body inside. Next, he prepared his own body and climbed into the adjacent tube. An automatic timer would set the process in motion. The entire procedure would be complete in less than two hours.

Stenchley’s puny brain was in fantasyland. He imagined how wonderful life would be when he was no longer trapped inside the scarred and deformed body that had always been his prison. People would no longer look at him with fear and repulsion. After the cell transferral, the Friend’s features, so amazingly like the professor’s, would be his. The madman would walk proudly out of the lab beside his revived master like the hunchless son he had always wanted to be. “Look!” he imagined people saying, “there goes Professor Celsius Hibble with his handsome son. What a handsome pair they are,
with their handsome white hair and their handsome blue eyes! The lad is a chip off the old block!”

In Stenchley’s twisted mind, no one would notice that the professor was a rotting, mumbling zombie. Everyone would be so entranced by the marvel of the well-fed youth at the famous man’s side that they would forget that the professor had been dead for ten years and that he was missing several key body parts. He would be a famous boy with his famous father, admired by all. No one would ever lock Stenchley in an insane asylum again.

All these happy thoughts put Cynthia in the mood for a snack. The python noticed that the girl, lying slumped against the wall, was beginning to stir, making appetizing little murmurs as she regained consciousness.

Cynthia needs a bite,
the python whispered, nosing her head into Stenchley’s throat.
I let you have the boy to play your little games with, but now I want the girl!

Stenchley felt a hunger begin rising inside him like a fever. He fell onto all fours and stalked over to the girl, his teeth bared. The hunchback sniffed his prey’s delicate skin, saliva dripping from his lips. The aroma of her flesh made him dizzy with hunger.

An exposed inch of the girl’s shoulder was too tempting for Stenchley to resist.
Let’s start with that bit, dear,
Cynthia cooed. The madman’s mouth snapped. As his yellow teeth bit at her skin, the girl’s eyes popped open.

“Ow! Get away from me!” she screamed, clawing and kicking at him furiously. “Thaddeus! Help!”

But a twelve-year-old girl could not overpower Fetid Stenchley. Though she managed to scrape her nails across his face a couple of times, his apelike hands and feet held her down easily. Cynthia would gladly suffer a few nicks and scrapes to enjoy this meal.

Stenchley was so focused on his prey that he was unaware at first of the rubble and debris that began trickling from the open vent in the ceiling behind him. In seconds, however, the trickle became a cascade of rock raining down onto the floor. Stenchley turned to see a scrawny cat leap out of the old shipping crate just before a boulder smashed the box to splinters. He could have sworn the cat yelped a swear word as it scurried out of harm’s way.

Instinctively, Stenchley crouched low over his victim as cracks began to open all around the hole. Then a huge section of the ceiling worked loose. With a loud boom, the chunk of rock hit the floor, followed immediately by a large, familiar robot.

Norman found himself lying in a pile of rubble, unsure which way was up. He raised his head and tried to identify his location. The place looked familiar, and the robot suspected he had been there before, but could not recall the details. He tried moving his long arms and legs, which were sprawled awkwardly about him, and sensed that
there was some malfunction. The gyroscope in his head whirred back online and he found his sense of balance. Slowly, he rose from the debris, rocks and dust cascading off his tuxedo. Norman methodically scanned his body, counting fingers and limbs, and immediately found a problem. Colored wires stuck out of his shoulder, their frayed ends sparking, where his left arm had been.

Felix appeared, gray with dust, and looked up at Norman. “Well, that was fun,” he grumbled sarcastically, spitting a pebble from his mouth. “I’m gonna forget that you dropped me down the hole, even after I specifically asked you not to drop me down the hole, but only because I feel sorry for one-armed guys.”

“Your sympathy is unnecessary,” Norman stated. “I only hope my detached appendage will have no bearing on my ability to aid Master Hibble. I am sure I detected fear in his voice when he called.”

Norman’s steel head swiveled left and right, searching for some sign of the boy, until he spotted two people in the corner, half hidden behind a large broken piece of machinery. He identified one of the people as his master’s female guest, the trespassing spy, but the other did not appear to be his master. The girl seemed to be engaged in a game of some kind—possibly wrestling—with the other person, whose back was turned.

“I beg your pardon, but is that you, Madame Prisoner?” Norman called politely, as if he were asking if she’d like some tea. “I am searching for Master Hibble. He called for me rather urgently a few moments ag—”

“Help me, Norman!” the girl yelled desperately. “He’s biting me!”

“Biting? What type of game is that?”

“It’s not a game, Norman! He’s trying to kill me!”

“How rude!” Norman kicked the rubble away from his feet and stepped over of the pile of rock. “I am coming, madame. You may depend on me!”

Norman stomped toward the girl and her attacker. As he neared the two, the robot had a rare flash of recognition. The hunched back of the person holding her looked repulsively familiar, like a stain he had removed from valuable upholstery long ago, but that had somehow reappeared.

When the person turned to look at Norman, there was no doubt about who it was. Even with the man’s head encased in the ridiculous helmet, with its mane of wires hanging down, the robot recognized his former enemy.

The last time Norman and Fetid Stenchley had seen each other was the night of the professor’s murder. Norman had been too late to save his master from the mad killer then, but had managed to keep the death toll that awful night to one. If the robot had arrived in the lab even a minute later, the Hibble family cemetery would have had two new residents.

If not for Norman’s heroics that night, the police never would have dragged Stenchley away in shackles, screaming like a wildcat, to the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane. Now, somehow, the fiend had come back.

Fetid Stenchley and Norman had a long and bumpy past. When Professor Hibble first found his assistant and future murderer on the streets of Awkward Falls so long ago, Norman, still shiny and new, was at the wheel of the Rolls Royce they rode home in.

From the first moment they met, the robot and the hunchback rubbed each other the wrong way. Norman, with his regal posture,
impeccable manners, and built-in revulsion toward anything less than spotlessly clean and orderly, was naturally annoyed by the grimy creature the professor brought into the robot’s harmonious domain.

The professor had created Norman specifically to oversee all aspects of domestic life at Hibble Manor, and the robot was expert at his job. A tidier, more efficient household could not be found anywhere. Since the celebrated Professor Celsius Hibble loved to entertain his many notable acquaintances in those early days, Norman was accustomed to being surrounded by the erudite elite of society.

Until Fetid Stenchley arrived, all who entered Hibble Manor were bathed, groomed, and expensively dressed. No guests ate potatoes and gravy with their fingers, lapped up their soup like hounds, or blew their noses on the tablecloth. All preferred their meat cooked, at least a little. All slept in beds, rather than under them. All were, for the most part, sane.

When Norman realized the professor intended for Stenchley to stay at Hibble Manor permanently, he was appalled. To make matters worse, the professor decreed that it would be Norman’s job to civilize the brutish creature. This was simply too much for the robot’s logic circuits to handle, and they immediately shorted out, causing a small fire in his tuxedo. Several of Norman’s key wiring bundles melted and had to be replaced.

The thought of Stenchley feeding at Norman’s impeccable dining table, sleeping on Norman’s crisply creased and ironed linens, traipsing about Norman’s immaculate halls leaving footprints and
fingerprints everywhere, and shedding on Norman’s furniture, the foul creature’s dander wafting about Norman’s house like ragweed in springtime, was more than the robot could withstand.

But Norman accepted his task dutifully, for he was nothing if not professional. He followed the scruffy beast around like a frustrated mother whose toddler is more chimp than child. Norman found it constantly necessary to remind the little troll to remove his muddy boots before walking on the priceless twelfth-century carpet, to use the silverware to shovel his gourmet nine-course French meal down his gullet, to douse himself occasionally in one of the twenty-seven bathtubs the house possessed, to refrain from leaving droppings in the rose garden, and to do, or not do, a thousand other things.

After months of trying to force civility on Stenchley, Norman persuaded the professor that it was hopeless. A compromise was settled on, which satisfied everyone and brought harmony back to the house. Professor Hibble decided to allow Stenchley to create a living area for himself inside a small closet in the laboratory where Stenchley and the professor worked. A door to the outside was put in to allow the little hunchback easy access to the nearby forest to attend to his sanitary needs as well as his taste for raw game.

Since Stenchley preferred sleeping on straw instead of a bed, and had such crude dining habits, the closet soon resembled a stable more than a bedroom.

For a long time, this arrangement kept the peace at Hibble Manor. Even though rust and age eventually eroded Norman’s
built-in penchant for order and cleanliness, Norman never allowed him to enter again. As long as Stenchley confined himself to the lab and the outdoors, and Norman kept his nose out of Stenchley’s closet, there were few confrontations. Even so, Stenchley had always despised the persnickety robot, and Norman had never trusted the beastly hunchback.

And then, of course, the uncivilized beast had committed the most unthinkable offense of all: murdering the professor.