Jackaby

by William Ritter

  “That’s quite an arrangement,” I said. My bread crumb offerings had slowed, and the duck waddled closer, giving me significant looks.

  She shook the fondness from her face with a roll of her eyes. “That was before he tore up the kitchen for his silly laboratory. It was such a pretty kitchen, with tiles and lace curtains—and you’ve seen it now. Nearly beat yourself senseless at the sight of those garish bones he’s got strung from the ceiling, not that I blame you.”

  I massaged the back of my head at the memory. “You saw that, did you?”

  Her eye twinkled in amusement, but she moved on, thankfully. “At least this floor turned out for the better. Wide-open and beautiful, it’s the opposite of that mess of a laboratory. But that’s Jackaby in a nutshell. Science and magic, beauty and bedlam, things that ought to be at odds—they just don’t follow the same rules when Jackaby’s involved. For all his faults, he really is a remarkable man.” She looked out over the rippling pond while she spoke, and her silvery expression betrayed a hint of longing. “I don’t exactly get to go out and about much,” she continued, “so this place has really been a lovely escape. Of course, most of the junk he had stored up here migrated to the rest of the house. I’ve stopped trying to tidy up after the man . . . and the guest room—!” She stopped suddenly with a gasp.

  “What, what is it?”

  “You need somewhere to stay! You can finally get him to drag his rubbish heaps up to the attic! Do you keep a clean room, Miss Rook?”

  “I—er—I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable asking for room and board. I’ve only just been hired on as it is.”

  “Douglas takes room and board! Jackaby can’t turn you down. It’s perfect!”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged. “And who is Douglas?”

  “You’re the new Douglas. He used to be Jackaby’s assistant, just as you are now. These days Douglas just tends the archives.” She gestured at the cabinets against the wall, the tops of which were carpeted with moss and wildflowers.

  “Where does Douglas sleep?”

  Jenny giggled at a joke I didn’t get. The duck ceased waiting for me to toss another handful and flapped his wings in a brief flurry to land gracelessly on my knee. The bird was not small, at least a foot and a half from beak to tail, and his perch put us more or less face-to-face. He stared at me, and not the bread in my hand, and his tiny eyes bore into mine.

  “Douglas?” I wagered.

  A reddish orange bill bobbed once. One wing craned out, and the bird wobbled unsteadily to keep balance. Talons on the ends of his webbed feet poked into my leg uncomfortably.

  “Well?” Jenny giggled again. “Go on, then. Don’t be rude. Abigail, meet Douglas.”

  I took the duck’s extended feathers with my right hand and shook them carefully. Douglas returned to a more dignified stance, briefly preened, and then snatched the remaining half of a baguette and took off. He swooped in a lazy arc to land on the plum-colored armchair in the center of the bushy island and peck at the bulky morsel.

  “Jackaby felt really guilty about Douglas,” Jenny told me when he had flapped away. “He used to be a person, of course. Jackaby sent him in alone to check out a lead that might have been nothing, but Douglas stumbled right into the thick of it. By the time Jackaby realized his mistake and hurried to help, it was too late. All he could do was shout out a warning before Douglas was hit with a powerful wave of untempered magic.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He warned him to . . .”

  “Duck.” It was Jackaby’s voice that finished the sentence, and Jenny and I both turned to see him step off the path and onto the grassy hill. “That’s right, and the irony that my attempt to help Douglas became the final mark of his curse was not lost on me. I vowed never to let anything distract me until I had found a way to reverse his metamorphosis.” The detective came to stand just behind the bench, scowling at the memory.

  “My goodness,” I said. “But, then . . . are these recent murders somehow connected to the case that transformed Douglas?”

  “What? No. The incidents have nothing at all in common.”

  “Then, what made you abandon your vow?”

  “I didn’t abandon it! I fulfilled it,” he answered. “The solution presented itself after an exhaustive evening’s research and one short trip into the country for supplies.”

  “Then, why is Douglas still a duck?”

  “You can bloody well ask him!”

  “But . . . he’s a duck.”

  “He’s stubborn is what he is.”

  “It didn’t work,” Jenny chimed in.

  “Well, of course it didn’t work,” snapped Jackaby. “He has to want to change back! It has to be his own will.”

  “But . . . why should he want to stay a duck?” I asked.

  “Because,” Jenny answered, “no one wants to let go of himself. Douglas may have all of the memories of a man, but he is a duck.”

  “It’s not as though he came by it naturally,” Jackaby grumbled.

  “It wasn’t his choice to lose the life he had—it was taken,” said Jenny. “But it is his choice whether or not to lose the life he has now—to lose himself.”

  “He would still be himself! He would be Douglas. He just has to decide to be human, again.”

  “No.” Jenny’s voice was patient. “He would be a different Douglas. The Douglas who has to make that decision would be gone.”

  “Utter foolishness. It’s birdbrained stubbornness.”

  “Don’t be so hasty to impugn a stubborn spirit, Detective,” she said meaningfully. “You’re speaking to one.”

  Jackaby rolled his eyes and sighed. “Fair enough, fair enough,” he conceded, “but don’t think being dead makes you the authority in every argument.”

  “No, but being right tends to. No one wants to let go of themselves, whatever form they may take—and I do know a little something about that.” Jenny rose from the bench and began to descend, slowly, through the grassy ground. “And now, I think I’ll leave you two to your business. Don’t forget to ask about the room, Abigail!” In another moment her silvery hair melted out of sight beneath the floor.

  “What was that about a room?” Jackaby asked.

  I stood. “Nothing. Find something in your research?”

  “Too much.” He brandished a small crumpled envelope and handed it to me. “And we’ve gotten our telegrams.”

  “Ah, excellent. Did your hunch lead to something after all?”

  “Oh yes.” answered Jackaby. “Yes, indeed, Miss Rook. It seems the plot is much larger and more wicked than we’d feared.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The envelope contained telegrams from three cities. Contacts in law enforcement, the identities of whom Jackaby did not feel compelled to reveal, had responded quickly from Brahannasburg, Gadston, and Glanville. The telegraph office had collected and sent the posts all together, per the detective’s request. Two or three more would likely arrive soon, he told me, but from just one he could extrapolate the content of the rest. They all bore the same message in various shorthand phrases, and the message was simple: murder.

  I looked over the pages while we climbed down the spiral staircase back to Jackaby’s office. CONFIRM INCIDENTS IN BRAHANNASBURG -STOP- read the top sheet. DETAILS FIT DESCRIPTION -STOP- NOVEMBER ELEVENTH BUTCHER COD NECK WOUND -STOP- DECEMBER FIFTH POSTMAN COD CHEST WOUND -STOP- DECEMBER TWENTY-SEVENTH TRANSIENT COD CHEST WOUND -STOP-

  “Cod?” I asked as we descended.

  “Cause of death,” he said simply.

  ALL INCIDENTS UNSOLVED -STOP- NO RELATED CASES ON RECORD -STOP- ASSISTANCE WELCOME -STOP- There the message ended. A quick glance at other pages revealed similar notes with varying dates and occupations of victims from Brahannasburg and Gadston.

  “My God,” I said, reading over the pages a second time. “But there are so many!”

  “Yes. Mr. Bragg seems to have been following a trail of serial murders extending back for several months, probably lon
ger. The marks on his map, N. Wd. and C. Wd., denote neck wounds and chest wounds. It seems our killer favored the chest. All of them appear just beyond the jurisdiction of New Fiddleham, which shows that the killer made an effort to keep the authorities in the dark. Bragg’s attempts to connect and shed light on these deaths only brought him to his own, it would seem.”

  Back in Jackaby’s office, the detective unfolded the dead reporter’s hand-drawn chart and placed it on top of a massive, finely detailed map already shrouding most of his desk. He rummaged in a drawer and produced a small box of pins with fat, shiny heads. He emptied the box onto the surface and compared the two maps.

  In the flat section of his desk, we could see that the two maps corresponded well. Bragg had been diligent in his copying. Jackaby began marking each of the original Xs with a pin on the larger map, jamming the points deep into the wood and effectively tacking the chart in place for the time being. From across the desk I scooped up a few pins and helped him finish the job.

  “That’s the lot,” I said.

  “Not quite,” said Jackaby.

  I scanned the original map again and counted out the marks. Jackaby swept the extra pins back into the box while I checked. We had stabbed all twelve points. The detective handed a single pin to me, with a somber, purposeful look. I took his meaning and, leaning in to find the right section of the city, plugged Arthur Bragg’s own pin into the map. Thirteen shiny markers stood like polished gravestones.

  “Bragg was not marked on his own map for obvious reasons. What else do you notice that sets his death apart from the other murders?” he asked.

  I looked at the map. Bragg’s pin looked very alone in the center of the chart. The others stood in little groups of twos and threes, circling his like school-yard bullies.

  “He’s the only one in New Fiddleham,” I ventured.

  “Very good. What do you make of that?”

  A frightening thought occurred to me. “It means . . . that the murderer kills a few victims in each city, then moves on to the next. Now he’s here in New Fiddleham . . . and he’s only just begun!” I had been to the theater, and knew very well that a revelation like that one merited a dramatic chord from the pipe organ and a collective gasp from the audience, but in the real world, the words were left to stand on their own.

  “Clever,” responded Jackaby, “but also wrong.” He pulled a ball of twine from the top drawer and glanced up at the board, where our list of dates still sat in neat, chalky rows.

  “October twenty-third,” he read, and tied the end of the string to the corresponding pin in Gadston. “And next was here, on the thirtieth.” He drew the twine to the opposite side of the map, looping it around a pin in Crowley. “Then November fifth, down here.” The line cut across the map again, down to Glanville, then up to Brahannasburg. He brought the string back and forth. The murders were never in the same town twice in a row, rarely even in an adjacent town, but always bouncing around to alternating corners of the map. The end result resembled a sloppy starburst, with lines zigzagging across New Fiddleham. Finally, Jackaby snipped the end and tied it to the lonely pin in the middle of the mess.

  “He planned his marks to delay detection for as long as possible,” Jackaby said. “Weeks, even months would pass before he returned to the same location, allowing time for attention to die down. Because he jumped jurisdictions, we might have seen even further months of this before police forces finally began to work out that they were even tracking the same culprit. Thanks to Bragg’s stumbling onto the plot, the killer was forced to break his own rule in a rather significant way.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “He killed where he lived. By the pattern of deaths before now, he had avoided New Fiddleham, but he clearly gravitated around it. Police tend to look with suspicion at a man in the center of a pile of dead bodies, and so our killer carefully perpetrated his crimes just beyond their vision. His home is here, though. I’m quite certain of that.”

  “What—here in town?” I asked, my eyes darting inadvertently to the window and the dimming light of the early evening. The moon was low in the sky but already clearly visible in the waning daylight, an almost perfect orb of white framed by the sinister, dark fingers of barren branches. “Wouldn’t it be easier for a monster to hide out in the forest? Lurk about in the shadows and come out at night, or something?”

  “It’s possible, certainly—but we have reason to suspect we are looking for a man, and a man of property,” Jackaby said. “Hatun claims to have gotten a good look at the murderer. The creature she described may or may not actually exist, but I believe she was there as our villain attempted to flee out the window. He left his traces on the windowsill, but not on the balconies below, which corresponds with her account. Now, if you were a cold-blooded killer, capable of tearing a hole through a grown man’s chest, would you be worried about facing a hobbling, gray-haired old lady?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Ah, but if you could not see who or what awaited you? Then, like our cautious fiend, would you not find an alternative escape, just to be safe? If the culprit looked down upon the alleyway and saw nothing, as Hatun says, then that shawl of hers may have the power to alter perception, after all. If the villain could not see Hatun, then he has a home, and if he has a home, we can be confident it is within New Fiddleham, and if he dwells within New Fiddleham, then not a soul in the city is safe.” Jackaby finished at a rush, and stopped, at last, to breathe.

  I wanted less and less to be out and about finding lodging tonight. “But why should he begin to hunt in New Fiddleham?” I asked. “Maybe this was a special circumstance. Bragg was onto him. As you said, the reporter was probably only killed because he had begun to piece together the other murders.”

  “You mean, as we’ve just been doing?” Jackaby asked with a raised eyebrow. “I see your point, but the killer must have known his plot would only delay things for so long. Now he must know that he is at the end of his free rein. Like a caged goose, he will be more erratic, more unpredictable, and more deadly to anyone caught up in the trap with him.”

  “A goose?” I asked.

  “Yes. Geese are terrifying. Whatever the metaphoric animal, we who have taken up Bragg’s research find ourselves most squarely in the creature’s sights. I think it may be prudent to heighten the building’s defenses, and our own, until this affair is over. It’s only a matter of time before the villain gets wind of our inquiries around town and pays us the same visit he paid Arthur Bragg.”

  A chill ran up my spine, and I darted a nervous glance over my shoulder. I began to speak, but was cut off by a sudden, deafening clamor of crashes and thuds from the floor above. The detective and I exchanged wide-eyed looks, and then he snatched a gnarled, wooden club from the shelf behind the desk and hurried into the hall to investigate. I scanned the office frantically, finding nothing intimidating to wield, and settled for a particularly heavy book. I carried it like a shot-putter, hefting the clumsy thing by my ear. My wrist was shaking, but I remained tensed to launch it fiercely at any ne’er-do-wells.

  My nerves vibrated like a plucked harp, and I silently cursed the spiral stairwell as I crept upward in a cold sweat. The last turn revealed a massive heap of artifacts splayed across the passageway. They had clearly tumbled from the cluttered room on the right, and out into the hall. A china plate with gold inlay was still wobbling to a stop, and the feathers drifting slowly downward suggested that a ruptured pillow was probably somewhere in the mound.

  Jenny stood in the doorway, her knees vanishing into the side of the upturned phonograph, which lay toppled and propped on its bell. The ghost’s expression was difficult to read. Her face, a study in silver, seemed flushed, her cheeks and nose darkening to an iron gray. Behind her, Douglas flapped to a landing on the curved headboard of the bed, which had been half unearthed since my last visit. He had two silk neckties draped across his neck like ceremonial vestments.

  “What—?” Jackaby began.


  “Oh, hello,” said Jenny, smiling sheepishly. She wore a pair of lacy silk gloves, whose substantiality stood out in odd contrast to her translucent figure. “Just helping you get started. Got a lot to move. You’d be surprised how tricky it can be to stay solid while you’re trying to maneuver the big, awkward stuff.”

  Douglas quacked and wobbled on his perch.

  “Oh, like you were any help!” Jenny jabbed a silky white finger in his direction, then turned back to us. “I knew you would say yes, of course, Jackaby. So Douglas agreed to help me find space in the attic.” She looked from the detective to me, reading expressions. “You are staying here, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t—,” I started, but Jackaby burst in at the same moment.

  “Of course she’s staying here! Where else would she stay? That’s no reason to go throwing my things across the house!”

  And with that it was settled. Jenny clapped her hands together and smiled brightly, and Jackaby turned to look at me. “What in heaven’s name are you doing with my copy of Historia Lycanthropis?”

  “I—what?” I answered eloquently.

  “That book. What on earth are you doing with it?”

  “Well, you had the stick.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “This is a shillelagh. It was cut from Irish blackthorn by a leprechaun craftsman, cured in the furnace of Gofannon, and imbued with supernatural powers of protection. That”—he gestured to the book—“is a book.”

  “It’s heavy, though. A leprechaun? Like, the tiny fellows who keep pots of gold at the ends of rainbows?”