Dawn of the Dreadfuls

by Steve Hockensmith

  Dr. Keckilpenny’s custom-built zombie net fit over the unmentionable’s head and upper torso snugly enough, pinning its arms to its sides. But the only way to get the creature to do anything other than hurl itself, snarling, at the nearest sign of life was to push or pull it by the attached rod. And even with Elizabeth and the doctor pushing and pulling together, the dreadful was almost too strong for them, and either they or it were continually being jerked this way or that. Accordingly, their path through the forest was a staggering zigzag, and twice the unmentionable jerked the net pole from their hands and ran madly in some random direction only to crash into a tree and collapse.

  Eventually, the trio stumbled into view of the sentry stationed on the road, and it was only much shouting of “We’re alive! Still! Really! Believe us!” that spared them another greeting from his Brown Bess.

  “I think you might want to fetch the lieutenant and a few of your mates, Private Johnson!” Dr. Keckilpenny called out when the man finally lowered his musket.

  “Jones,” Elizabeth corrected.

  “Sorry! Jones!”

  The dreadful lunged at the sound of the doctor’s voice, scratching wildly with its gray fingers.

  “If you could hurry, it would be appreciated!” Elizabeth added.

  Jones scampered off.

  Within minutes, he was back with Lt. Tindall and a small squad of soldiers. The lieutenant came striding up tight lipped and hard eyed, but most of his men slinked cringingly behind him, looking only slightly less reluctant to go where they were told than the dreadful was.

  “I didn’t believe it, but I see it’s true.” Lt. Tindall drew his sword. “All right, then … release it and stand back. I’ll finish it for you.”

  “If our intention had been to finish it, we could have easily done that ourselves,” Elizabeth replied. The words felt good until the dreadful thrust itself at her, nearly knocking her over. Fortunately, she managed to retain her footing and, in the process, her dignity (or whatever dignity one can have when being jostled by a zombie in a butterfly net).

  “Perhaps I should explain, Lieutenant,” Dr. Keckilpenny said.

  “There is no ‘perhaps’ about it.”

  “No, I suppose not. Well, here’s the gist of it …”

  When the doctor was through outlining his intentions—that the “gentleman in question” was to be held prisoner in order to “accommodate certain vital experiments”—Lt. Tindall’s response required but one word and a suitable scowl to go with it.

  “Abominable!”

  “There is little ‘perhaps’ about that, either, I suppose,” said Dr. Keckilpenny. “But do remember: The War Office has given me carte blanche, and I should think you’d at least want to consult with your commanding officer before contravening orders that have come down to you from so very high.”

  The lieutenant devoted a long moment to grinding his perfect, pearly white teeth before speaking again.

  “All right, then. You may keep the wretched thing on three conditions. One, it is to be sequestered out of sight. Two, all possible steps will be taken to ensure that it does not escape. And three, at the first sign that it is in any way endangering anyone, it will be destroyed.”

  “Done, done, and done!” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “In fact, I can accommodate your first two provisos in one fell swoop. Just wait till you see my laboratory!”

  Soon enough, that’s just what the lieutenant and the others were doing—though the doctor’s “laboratory” turned out to be nothing more than Netherfield’s largest, draftiest attic. Dr. Keckilpenny had found it, he explained, while exploring the house that morning, not letting anything so prosaic as a locked door keep him from getting inside.

  “Medical student, remember?” he’d said when Elizabeth asked where he’d learned the fine art of lock-picking. “Every morgue or cemetery has its … well. Let’s let that lie, shall we? This way, everyone, this way! Allow me to present the pièce de résistance!”

  He swept his long arms out toward a particularly gloomy, cobwebbed corner. Hanging from the wall was a pair of thick, black iron chains, each ending in manacles.

  “What in heaven’s name?” Lt. Tindall muttered.

  “I imagine some mad maiden aunt or idiot son spent many a year up here,” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “It’s what one does in the best families, I’ve found. You’re not considered a true aristocrat until you’ve got at least one daft relation howling away up in the attic. How fortunate for us that the penthouse, as it were, is currently untenanted.”

  “Yes,” the lieutenant drawled. “How very.”

  Still, despite his obvious reluctance, Lt. Tindall ordered his men to unpack the doctor’s prize, the zombie having been brought into the house stuffed in a trunk so as not to alarm the servants or the other soldiers. (This precaution met with only partial success, as “Dr. Keckilpenny’s equipment” kept moaning, kicking, and scratching as it was carried inside and up the stairs.) After a few frantic minutes of tugging and shoving with the zombie net, the soldiers had the dreadful chained in place.

  “I’m going to keep a guard posted outside the door at the bottom of the stairs, with his musket loaded,” Lt. Tindall said as his men hurried down the staircase. He turned to leave, as well, then stopped and faced Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet,” he drew in a deep breath, “if you’re still interested in musketry instruction, I would be happy to have our Sergeant Meadows see to it.”

  He couldn’t quite pull off the “happy” without a quiver in his voice, nor could he completely erase the look of distaste upon his face. He managed to jut out an elbow, though, bowing slightly as he offered to escort her outside.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Perhaps another time.”

  Lt. Tindall dropped his arm.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, spinning crisply on his heel and marching to and down the stairs.

  Elizabeth actually felt a little sorry for him as she watched him go. The man was still a starchy martinet, but at least he’d tried.

  “Thank you for staying, Miss Bennet,” Dr. Keckilpenny said. He was eyeing Elizabeth with a strange intensity, as if she were an experiment yielding unexpected—yet pleasing—results. “It’s an honor being chosen over the company of Sergeant Meadows and a Brown Beth.”

  “Brown Bess. And … well, I … I just have so many questions.”

  That was certainly true enough. Some of them Elizabeth couldn’t even find words for.

  She turned away from the doctor’s stare and found herself looking into another.

  The zombie was straining against its chains, wide eyes fixed on her. The creature seemed calm, though, as if it had accepted its captivity. It didn’t thrash, didn’t grimace, didn’t bite at the gag the soldiers had tied around its mouth to keep its screams from escaping the trunk. It almost could have passed for a living man—a youngish, not altogether unhandsome one out sleepwalking or staggering around drunk—if not for the putrid smell, the dingy tint of its skin, and the viscous black fluid that trickled from its ears and nose and mouth. Whoever he’d been, he hadn’t died violently, that much was obvious. No zombie had cursed him with a bite or scratch. The strange plague had awakened him from his grave.

  “A fine specimen, isn’t he?” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “But I wonder how in the world we’re going to get him undressed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The doctor nodded in the general direction of the unmentionable’s pants. “Those clothes of his—they’ll have to go. We don’t want him in the wormy old things he was buried in. He needs to be in something more … aliveish.”

  And finally one of the questions in Elizabeth’s mind became refreshingly obvious, with obvious words to match.

  “Doctor, what are you up to?”

  Dr. Keckilpenny grinned. “It is a joy hearing you ask that. It can be so lonely being the only one thinking these things! May I have permission to babble?”

  “Always, so long as it’s not about the weather.”

 
“I knew it! I knew it! A kindred spirit!”

  To Elizabeth’s great surprise, the doctor took her by the shoulders and shifted her a few steps to the left. When she was directly before the trunk they’d used to haul up the zombie, he pushed down gently until she was seated atop it. Then he stepped back and clapped his hands together.

  “In the old days, during The Troubles, many men of science studied the zombies, yes. But always the goal was the same: How to destroy them? What are their weaknesses? How best to fight them? No one stopped to ask, ‘Why do they want to eat us?’”

  “I suspect no one bothered asking because the dreadfuls were not inclined to reply.”

  Dr. Keckilpenny stomped a foot and thrust a pointed finger toward the ceiling, yet he never lost his broad, almost manic smile.

  “That is an assumption! What if the zombies would tell us, if only they could? It’s clear some part of the mind survives in them. Exempli gratia: They’re drawn to places where they can find food, that is, people—roads and homes and the like. There are eyewitness accounts of them using rudimentary tools, such as rocks or logs, to break through windows and doors. And they were known to flee when faced with superior numbers of well-armed men—proof that the instinct for self-preservation lives on. And if they retain that, who knows what else might still reside in those rotting heads of theirs?”

  The doctor had been waving and thrusting wildly with his right index finger, and now he brought it up to give a hard tap-tap-tap to the side of his forehead.

  “The answers we need are here.” Tap-tap-tap again. “The answers are always here! Even the zombies know it. What is the one thing they hunger for above all else? Brains! They’re trying to regain that which they have lost. I propose to help them find it again. And then, no matter how far the plague might spread this time, it won’t matter, for we shall have peace!”

  “Because we’ll be able to talk to them?”

  “Because—” Dr. Keckilpenny’s finger wilted, and the rest of him wilted with it. “Something like that. We’ll have to see where it all leads. But of this much I’m certain: Understanding a problem is the only way to solve it. You do agree, don’t you?”

  “Well. It sounds …”

  The doctor’s eyes widened. “Mad?”

  “Reasonable,” Elizabeth finished.

  Dr. Keckilpenny smiled.

  And mad, Elizabeth thought. Yet she liked the young man’s smile too much to wipe it away.

  “So,” she said, “how do you propose to begin? Aside from chaining your subject to a wall, that is.”

  The doctor turned and took a few steps toward the dreadful. It pushed all its weight toward him, its shackled arms stretched out straight to the sides, turning its body into a great leaning T.

  “We shall treat him like a man. Remind him that he is a man. And every man’s sense of self starts in the same place. With his name. Miss Bennet, allow me to introduce … Mr. Smith.”

  “Mr. Smith?”

  “Yes, Mr. Smith. It’s as good a guess as any. One in ten Englishmen is named Smith, you know.”

  “I don’t believe we have quite so many in Hertfordshire.”

  “Well, now you have one more. Isn’t that right, Mr. Smith?”

  “Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” Mr. Smith said.

  “Excellent! Your turn, Miss Bennet. Tell him you’re glad to make his acquaintance.”

  Elizabeth tried to force a smile, thinking the doctor was joking. But then he rolled his hands in the air and said, “Go on.”

  Elizabeth looked into the zombie’s eyes. It was still staring at Dr. Keckilpenny, who’d stopped just a few steps beyond the thing’s reach. There seemed to be more … life to it now. Not intelligence, certainly, but awareness, perhaps. Awareness of what, though?

  She cleared her throat.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  Yet she wasn’t—and she wasn’t alone in that.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith,” the doctor was prodding when footsteps clunked up the stairwell behind them, and they both turned to find Mr. Bennet joining them in the attic, a look of revulsion upon his face.

  “What the devil is going on here?”

  “Father, you’re back! Has Jane returned, as well?”

  Mr. Bennet nodded without taking his eyes off Mr. Smith. “She’s in the library with Lord Lumpley making plans for tomorrow. The spring ball is to be held here instead of Pulvis Lodge, and there is much to be done.”

  “The ball? Here? Mrs. Goswick agreed to that?”

  “She will if the baron gets his way, and getting his way is the one thing he’s good at, I suspect. But enough about the ball. Would someone kindly explain the meaning of that?”

  Even if Mr. Bennet hadn’t been pointing at the looming figure chained to the wall, there would have been no question what that was.

  “He,” Dr. Keckilpenny said with a smile of almost paternal pride, “is Mr. Smith.”

  Mr. Bennet gaped at him.

  Before, Elizabeth had fancied the doctor and her father would get along famously, both being intelligent men with a penchant for irony. Alas, things were not off to the start she had hoped for.

  “Lizzy,” her father said, “who is this young man and is he quite sane?”

  Elizabeth launched into introductions and explanations, and it helped smooth things over—somewhat—that Dr. Keckilpenny was the man who’d saved her life not long before. Still, Mr. Bennet never quite shook the look of perturbed perplexity with which he’d arrived.

  “Well, one thing is clearer, at least,” he said to Elizabeth after hearing of the doctor’s plans. “LieutenantTindall told me I’d find you up here tilting at putrid windmills. Now I know what he meant.” He turned to Dr. Keckilpenny and shook his head. “It’s been tried before, you know.”

  “Has it really?” The doctor mused a moment, then shrugged. “Well, not recently. And not by me.”

  Mr. Bennet cocked an eyebrow at that, then slowly approached the dreadful who was now leaning toward him, fingers clawing listlessly at the air.

  “I don’t recognize this man.”

  “Should you?” Dr. Keckilpenny asked.

  “Yes.” Mr. Bennet looked first at the doctor and then, not seeing realization dawn, at his daughter. “I should.”

  “Because the body’s so fresh, so well dressed,” Elizabeth said. “He was given a proper burial, but not in Meryton.”

  Mr. Bennet nodded. “I think I should hurry Lord Lumpley along with Mrs. Goswick. And I suddenly find there are certain other arrangements I must see to, as well. Lizzy—if you would assist me?”

  He took his leave of the doctor with a nod, then headed for the stairs.

  “Good-bye, Dr. Keckilpenny.” Elizabeth went up on her tiptoes to peer past him. “Good-bye, Mr. Smith.”

  Both looked strangely bereft.

  “Until we meet again,” the doctor said.

  “Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” said Mr. Smith.

  Elizabeth suspected they were saying more or less the same thing.

  __________________

  CHAPTER 29

  FOR HER YOUNGEST SISTERS, it would’ve been a dream come true. Sleeping in a plush four-poster bed in a plush bedroom the size of a barn in the plush manor house of a plush nobleman. Yet for Jane Bennet, it was neither dream nor nightmare, for she wasn’t sleeping at all. She was lying on her back, staring up at the canopy stretched out above her, thinking.

  She thought about the ball she’d be attending the next day—and how humiliating it would be when only Lord Lumpley dared dance with those social lepers, the Bennet girls. She thought about how persistent the baron had been when they’d paid a call on the Goswicks that afternoon—and how it had been his seemingly offhand remark about their daughter Julia’s “London friend, Mr. Schwartz” that convinced the couple to put the spring ball in his hands. She thought about her father’s rather anxious good-bye to her that evening, and how he’d looked truly distressed only after she’d told him not to worry about her, as Lord Lumpley had
been a perfect host so far and, she hoped, might still grow into the role of sober, responsible squire.

  But mostly she thought about how much she missed Elizabeth. There could be no dash across the hall for comfort and wisdom here. It would be a long dash indeed to find anyone she knew at all, for Jane had been quartered (for propriety’s sake, the baron explained) in a deserted wing of the house far from the other guests. Lt. Tindall and Capt. Cannon (how wonderfully cheerful the man had been when returning from his “reconnoiter” that afternoon!) had been given rooms downstairs on the opposite side of the grand foyer, along with Ensign Pratt and the company surgeon, a crusty old campaigner named Dr. Thorne. The rest of the soldiers were in tents out on the lawn, the only exceptions being Right Limb and Left Limb (who slept in the captain’s room, though in what arrangement Jane couldn’t guess) and a single guard dozing in a chair outside “Dr. Keckilpenny’s sanitarium” (as Papa had cryptically called it).

  So she was alone—as alone as she’d ever been, except when out walking or riding by herself. Certainly, she’d never felt more alone. And it wasn’t a feeling she liked.

  Of what importance were her feelings, though? So she’d been ruined socially. So no matter what the baron might do, she’d never make a match with a gentleman of the sort she admired most—a true gentle man, as warm and soft and pliant as a puppy’s fuzzy belly. So it would only be cold, hard warriors like Master Hawksworth who’d look twice at a woman who wore the sword, except to gape or sneer. So … what of it? It would be pure, selfish vanity to think of all that when the unmentionables might be on the rise again.

  But, oh, how she longed for love! How she longed for kisses! How she longed for … the rest of it. Whatever that looked like.

  Yet none of this was to be hers. She would be forever denied, forever alone.

  There was a soft knock on the door.

  For a moment, Jane was torn between her nunchucks and her dirk. The dirk won.

  “Yes?” Jane said, lifting the dagger by the tip of the blade.

  A woman answered.

  “Are you awake, Miss?”