The Orphan of Awkward Falls (26 page)

The risk of a Full Stenchley occurring in the middle of the day was small, however, and Howard assessed that it was safe for him to venture out. They would be home long before the moon made its late-night appearance, in plenty of time to stock up on red meat and lock all the doors. Still, they parked the Volvo as close to the
gravesite as possible and left the motor running, in case a speedy getaway was required.

Aside from the transformations, having Thaddeus around the house for the last few weeks had been mostly a good thing. Glancing over at him now, his nose protruding like a tomato from beneath Eggplant, Josephine wondered how long he would stay with them. Her parents seemed to have pretty much accepted him as a member of the family. Felix had become an honorary Cravitz as well, and was content to be wherever Thaddeus was, as long as it wasn’t out of doors on a freezing day. The cat had called them all nuts for going out in such weather, preferring to stay in the car. While it was true that Josephine had always wanted a sibling, Thaddeus wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind. He was sort of endearing in his curmudgeonly way, but he didn’t really fit in with the family. If the Cravitzes had been an unusual family before, they were downright outlandish with Thaddeus and Felix in the mix.

On the other hand, thanks to Thaddeus, Josephine’s prediction that her life would descend into bottomless boredom in Awkward Falls could not have been more wrong. Thaddeus seemed to be the epicenter of bizarre occurrences. Since meeting him, she had been bagged by a robot, bitten by a cannibal, attacked by mutant monsters, and chased by a dead guy. She had helped burn her own house down, rescued Thaddeus from the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane, and fed the finger of a deceased Nobel Prize winner to a buffalo-panther, and now she was attending the funeral of a formerly famous actress
and sauerkraut heiress in subarctic weather. With Thaddeus stationed in the room across the hall, boredom might be banished from her life entirely. And although that probably meant safety would be banished as well, the bad driver part of Josephine’s brain decided it was, all in all, an acceptable trade-off.

Curiosity about the human burial ritual was the only thing that got Thaddeus out of the car. The cemetery, with its hundreds of tombstones and vaults, was filled with places Stenchley could be hiding. The boy was somewhat comforted by the Cravitz parents, who flanked him as they stood at the grave, each holding one of his hands, though he was disappointed that they had refused to carry weapons of some kind. As an added precaution, Felix was stationed inside the Volvo with a pair of binoculars with which he promised to scan the area for any sign of the killer. Two beeps on the car’s horn would signal a sighting.

Thaddeus also held out hope that he might see the professor. The boy speculated that there was a slight chance the wandering corpse could be in the vicinity, since it had been heading in roughly this direction when Thaddeus had last seen it. There was unfinished business between the boy and his creator. Thaddeus knew he was the professor’s clone, an exact genetic copy; but did that mean he was doomed to do the same terrible things Celsius Hibble had? Was
Thaddeus inherently evil? It was a long shot, but he hoped that seeing the professor again, looking into his eyes, might provide insight of some kind.

The funeral began, turning Thaddeus’s attention to the odd scene at the gravesite. The ceremony, with the corpse locked in an ornate box suspended over the hole where it would be interred, and the clergyman reciting words in a language no one spoke, struck him as theatrical and inefficient. It seemed such a waste of both the box, which would have made a nice coffee table, and the body, to simply toss them into the earth and cover them up the way a dog might bury a bone. Surely a few of the woman’s organs were reusable, despite her age. In many species, the spleen in particular tended to hold up quite well in elderly specimens. And why was the hole so deep? Was there a concern that the corpse might escape? It was baffling.

If only Norman were here,
thought Thaddeus, he could explain it. Norman could explain nearly anything. Thaddeus’s happiest memories were of sitting on the sofa with a perfect cup of cocoa as the ditzy robot rattled on and on, scribbling explanatory diagrams and notes on a chalkboard. He missed the old robot. In the days after his rescue from the asylum, Thaddeus had badly wanted to return to his former home to retrieve Norman’s remains for repair. This had proven too risky as Officer Cole had decided to declare the place a crime scene, and had cordoned off the entire estate with yellow police tape. They had driven by a few times and seen Deputy Flange’s cruiser parked at the gate. The rebuilding of Norman would have to wait.

Now that Thaddeus was living with the Cravitzes, Josephine’s parents performed many of the functions that Norman had at Hibble Manor, though Howard and Barbara were far less obedient to Thaddeus’s demands. Barbara only laughed when he announced that he would have his breakfast in bed. And despite his assurance that he was clean enough, she required Thaddeus to engage in a ridiculously inconvenient and unnecessary amount of washing daily. In her favor, she had tried to make cocoa for him using her bland, organic ingredients, though the result always fell far short of Norman’s sweet, creamy confection.

The family’s vegetarian meals were even worse. At their first supper together, Thaddeus realized that normal food was unheard of by these strange people. On his plate were piled several varieties of horrid things that seemed to be shrubbery clippings. Some were little more than raw leaves, others were thin and twiggy, some orange and cigar-shaped. A slice of yellow-and-green-speckled pie offered hope, until he found it contained only more clippings and not a molecule of whipped cream or butterscotch.

It was only the discovery of ketchup that saved Thaddeus from starvation. He had been pillaging the pantry for anything that might satisfy his sweet tooth when Howard pointed out a substance he claimed often improved the taste of certain things. Thaddeus tried a squirt and found it delicious. From that moment on, the bottle of tangy red goop became his constant companion at mealtimes. He slathered mounds of it on everything from salad to oatmeal. As long
as it was buried under ketchup, he had found he could eat any fiber-rich, vitamin-packed, chlorophyll-crammed concoction Barbara foisted on him.

Thaddeus forgave the Cravitz woman’s many shortcomings, however, when he discovered that she, too, was a board game enthusiast. In many ways she reminded Thaddeus of his own mother, the one he had created in his fantasies, when they played. Barbara was not as glamorous or as beautiful as the mother who had lived in his dreams, of course. But he had to admit there was something pleasing about the ratio of gums to teeth when Barbara smiled. Plus she was a satisfyingly formidable opponent at Candyland, and was nearly unbeatable when the game was Mousetrap.

Howard Cravitz assumed the role of Thaddeus’s tutor once Josephine started at Awkward Falls Junior High. To Thaddeus’s chagrin, Howard insisted on spending ridiculous amounts of time on such useless piffle as social studies and poetry. But his science lessons made it tolerable, and their discussions on physics, chemistry, and biology often went on for hours. Thaddeus wished they were having one now, over a pot of hot cocoa.

When the clergyman came to the end of his reading, the undertaker began turning the crank on a squeaky contraption that lowered Sally’s casket into the freshly dug hole. The priest took a handful of dirt from a pile next to the grave and tossed it onto the coffin as it descended, then crossed himself. Olga did the same, followed by Howard, Barbara, and Josephine. Thaddeus tossed a handful as well,
but felt silly doing it. Instead of dirt, O. R. MacManus dropped a fishing lure onto the coffin. The priest said a few more words, then turned and headed for the parking lot.

Just like that, the funeral was over.

As everyone hurried for the shelter of their vehicles, Olga caught up to Josephine and Thaddeus. She pressed an envelope into the boy’s gloved hand.

“I expected you might be here. I found this among Ms. Twittington’s possessions. It is addressed to you.” With no further explanation, the nurse spun and walked away.

“Wait, what is this all about?” He started to run after her, but she was already closing the taxi door. A second later, she was gone.

“Wow,” said Josephine. “Pretty weird.”

Once inside the relative warmth of the Volvo, Thaddeus took his gloves off and fingered the envelope. In swishy cursive lettering was written Thaddeus Hibble, Esq.

He had never received a letter before, and tore it open carefully. The paper was thick and creamy-white, covered with neat hand- writing that was almost too pretty to read.

Dear Thaddeus,

I write this as I wait in the wings before my final Parisian performance. I will be brief, as my entrance is nigh. Since your recent visit, I have come to realize that you are the most innocent player of all in this macabre tragedy and the least deserving of the role
fate has dealt you. Seeing your face that night, so perfect a copy of Celsius’s own, stirred dark memories I have spent a lifetime trying to forget. Yet there is one scene I feel I must recount, for your sake.

I received a note from Celsius some years ago, our first communication in decades, beseeching me to come to Hibble Manor and meet with him. He had made a major breakthrough in his work that he wanted me to see. Although I had sworn never to enter Hibble Manor again, the desperation I sensed in his note led me to break my vow.

Upon my arrival, the robot led me into the underground laboratory where I saw Celsius. Though I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, I was taken aback. Some sixty-three years after our last encounter, my former fiancé’s face was unchanged—there was not even the tiniest sign of aging. I felt embarrassed by my wrinkles and gray hair, which stood in such stark contrast to his unending, virile youth.

But the man inside the impossibly youthful body had changed in other ways. His sparkling blue eyes, though as piercing as ever, were now furtive and unfocused. His hands fidgeted and swiped at invisible things in the air. He laughed at odd moments, and when he spoke, words poured out in torrents, many of them senseless. It was clear that Celsius was insane.

After leading me past enormous test tubes containing things too bizarre to describe, we came to a smaller set of containers
separate from all the rest. Celsius stopped and pointed proudly. Inside each bubbling tube was something so small, I would have missed it had he not shown me where to look. They were human embryos. I was appalled. He was cultivating human beings as if they were tadpoles. Yet, despite the macabre nature of the endeavor, it was obvious that, for Celsius, this was no mere experiment. The look in his eyes as he gazed at the tiny beings in those tubes was as innocent and as full of love as a parent’s.

“These are my sons,” he said, his voice trembling, “my babies.”

One of them was you, Thaddeus.

Celsius, though immortal in body, had become mad with loneliness over the years, cloistered in his laboratory with only the robot and a madman for company. His damaged mind foolishly fantasized that I might rejoin him and together we would rear his new “family.” But I was more convinced than ever that my decision all those years ago to leave him was correct. Celsius’s use of his talent was wrong, immoral, and unforgivable. He created many monsters in his quest for immortality, but you were not one of them. In his way, I believe Celsius loved you as much as he could love anything. Alas, the curtain rises. My public calls.

Adieu,

Sally Twittington

It would have been nice if the northern Manitoban sun had peeked out from behind the clouds at that moment, giving Thaddeus a sign from above that even a parentless boy cloned by a mad professor had reason to feel good about himself, but it did not. The sky actually became darker, and the wind blew harder and colder than ever. Still, he felt a degree or two warmer when he read Sally’s words.