The Dead Gentleman

by Matthew Cody

  She flipped the light switch, and for a second the stairwell was a flash as the light sputtered on, followed by a pop as it went dark again.

  Bernie shrugged his shoulders. “Bad bulb,” he said. “You should come back when I’ve had a chance to replace it. Like I said, it’s no place for stumbling around in. Especially for little girls.”

  Little girls? Jez rolled her eyes and hit the button on the flashlight—at least that worked. The light was steady, strong. “If I don’t come back you can have my stuffed animals, Bernie. And all of my pink socks and hair ribbons, too. You’ll look good in them.”

  She pushed past him and placed a single foot on the top step. It creaked worryingly.

  “Have it your way, miss,” Bernie said. “But do me this favor—if you see any spiderwebs, let them be. Don’t go bothering things best left undisturbed.”

  “Right. Live and let live,” she answered, taking another careful step.

  The stairs continued to creak more than Jez would’ve liked, but there was an old wooden railing that gave her a bit of comfort on the walk down. The steps were surprisingly steep and shallow, shallower than modern steps. It made her wonder if people’s feet had grown longer over the last hundred years. She took her time.

  The bottom was terribly disappointing. It turned out to be just a basement, after all. An old basement, yes, but still a basement. There were piles of junk strewn about, a few musty old sofas and recliners, thick with dust. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Bernie’s silhouette still standing at the top of the steps. She waved, but he didn’t wave back.

  What a weird old guy.

  Jez began winding her way through the debris, poking here and there with the flashlight, kicking the occasional armchair with her shoe. The only mildly interesting thing down here turned out to be the floor. Most of it was still the original tile—she guessed that it was probably over a hundred years old. Her father would know. He always knew about things like that.

  But in the center of the room was a long patch of slate, obvious despite the grime. It looked newer than all the rest. She wondered, what could have happened to damage the floor like that? It was pretty obvious that the luxurious Percy building had once had a big old hole in its basement.

  Maybe Bernie knew something about it.

  When she turned around to head back up, she saw something under the stairs. A dark shape was standing just behind the stairwell, next to the wall. It was a boy, and he startled Jez at first. She would’ve heard someone come down those creaky old stairs, so that meant he must’ve been down here the whole time, watching her. She nearly hollered when she saw him.

  Creep.

  “Hey, you. What do you think you’re doing?” She shined her flashlight at him to get a better look, even as she took a cautious step backward. He was around her age but dressed in some kind of costume. He wore a long coat, one of those dusters that cowboys wear in the movies, and he had a ridiculous pair of goggles pulled down over his eyes. Yet there was something indistinct about him, kind of fuzzy at the edges. There must have been a lot of dust down there playing with her light.

  When he didn’t answer right away, Jez began to get nervous.

  “Hey, Bernie,” she shouted, trying to sound a bit rougher than she really was. “Did you know that there is a creepy kid in a Halloween costume down here trying to scare me?”

  That’s when she heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut.

  Now her nervousness turned to actual fear. The boy stepped forward. Jez took a stumbling step back. “All right, listen. If you come closer I’m going to call the police and smack your teeth out with this flashlight. And not in that order!”

  “It’s you,” the boy said.

  “Oookay, it’s me. Now who the heck are you?”

  “There’re things you need to know,” the boy said. “The closet in the dark room—there are monsters in there. The reason you’re afraid to let your arm dangle when you’re sleeping is because things are waiting under the bed for you. The space under the stairs is bigger than the space above it and people do disappear there. Attics can be wonderful or deadly, and when you’re alone at home and feel eyes watching you—those are real, too. An overgrown garden’s never just an overgrown garden and an old basement’s never, ever just an old basement.”

  The boy stopped talking for a moment and checked a bulky brass device strapped to his gloved wrist. It looked like a cross between a wristwatch and a nautical compass.

  “I don’t have much time. But you’ve got to be warned. Keep safe and trust your instincts. Be careful. Be smart. Be afraid. The Dead Gentleman’s coming.”

  The device on his wrist made a small dinging sound.

  Then he was gone. He didn’t move and it wasn’t a trick of the light in this dark basement. The boy just disappeared. Vanished.

  After that Jezebel did the only logical thing she could think of—she screamed. She screamed as loudly and for as long as she could, and when she was finished, she screamed some more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TOMMY

  NEW YORK, 1900

  Right, then. Back to the beginning. Let’s go back a bit, to when I was still just a cutpurse in the Bowery, thieving out an honest living.

  Coachmen are never easy pickings, but their riders are. That was one of the first lessons I learned. I never bothered picking the pockets of Bowery folk, since the people who lived in my neighborhood were no better off than I was. At best you’d lift a few coppers and some pocket lint; at worst you’d end up in a life-or-death street brawl. You see, the poor fight for every penny like it’s their last, because it is. The well-to-do, on the other hand, those pretty ladies and their fine gentleman escorts with waxed mustaches and soft hands, they are guaranteed to have a few fat wallets or heavy purses that they can afford to lose.

  Coachmen, now, they are tricky. The clever ones drop their earnings into a sturdy lockbox mounted beneath the driver’s seat, and they don’t carry the key. The dangerous ones even carry blades of their own, and not for cutting purses. I nearly lost an ear the first time I reached for a coachman’s wallet.

  All this is by way of explanation, mind you—don’t think I’m bragging. Captain Scott was fond of saying that you should never forget where you came from, because that, more than anything else, will steer your choices in the years to come. Considering where I started out—as an orphan street thief stealing pennies and lifting pies out of widows’ windows—on this one point, I hope the Captain got it wrong. And for a while, under his instruction, I did dream that I might amount to something more.

  I freely admit to an unsavory background, and many of my current habits probably seem distasteful to the soft-bellied types. But thanks to the Captain I am not an uneducated lug—I can string a sentence or two together, enough so that I can tell my story in a pleasing way. And that’s useful, seeing as how my circumstances have me thinking a lot about my life—its beginnings and, Lord forbid, its end.

  Only let’s be clear about one thing—this is not a Last Will and Testament. I do not plan on dying. I am not a quitter. I’m an Explorer.

  Some might think the early years of my life a sad tale, but it is hardly unique. Ask a hundred street kids their stories and you’ll hear a hundred versions of the same. It goes more or less like this: everyone has a father but I never knew mine. I knew my mother and I like to think she loved me, but the older I got the poorer we got, until we ended up living on the street. She might be alive today, or she might be dead, I don’t know. All I know is that one night she left me in a church as she went out to forage for food and she never came back. I left the church to look for her and got lost in turn. I’ve been fending for myself ever since.

  Truthfully, I don’t much like talking about her, so I’ll just jump to the part that gets really interesting—to Merlin and the Gentleman. To the night I decided to rob a black-canopied carriage clattering through the mist along the Bowery.

  I was still a young boy at the time, one of man
y thieves working the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. I’ve got trouble when it comes to my exact age, seeing as how I can’t remember ever celebrating a birthday. I’ll say this, though—I’m still shorter than a squat stool and waiting for my voice to drop, so back then I couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten. The night I met Merlin, I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, and that generous meal had been a hunk of stale bread and someone’s leftover porridge. So as I watched a fancy carriage approaching my corner, I began to dream of filled pockets and a full belly. This wasn’t some open-topped penny cab; this was a grand covered carriage, the windows draped in shiny black silk. The coachman was dressed in the finery of a proper servant befitting a private coach, and anyone who could afford a private coach was certainly worth my time and trouble.

  As it never pays to be overanxious, I took a few deep breaths to clear my head and quiet my growling stomach. Even at that tender age, I’d already been on the streets for years as a begging urchin brat, but begging was an unpredictable trade and I’d recently moved into the full-time profession of cutpurse and all-around sneak. I’d found it much more to my liking, but that kind of work needs a set routine and a steady hand. I triple-checked my tools—a sharpened purse-cutter (just a plain old shaving razor with the handle removed) and a cop’s whistle I’d lifted from an officer who’d tried to pick me up for truancy. Truancy, of all things!

  As I watched, the carriage pulled up not ten feet from the entrance to the Crown, a popular music hall and one of my regular hunting grounds. I was well-placed on the opposite side of the street, just another passerby sifting the garbage for scraps. An unusually thick fog had fallen across the city this night, which could only work to my advantage. In seconds the carriage’s doors would swing open and its occupants would be swarmed with ragamuffins and neighborhood kids begging for pennies.

  But, surprisingly, the carriage continued past the Crown’s front and pulled into a side alleyway. Whoever these rich folks were, they had business that required them to use the back door. My pulse quickened. The possibility of a real score had just increased, but so had the risk. People came to the Bowery because they wanted to do things in private that they didn’t want their neighbors to know about. People used back doors when they were up to something they really didn’t want their neighbors knowing about. Such people could be easy marks, or very dangerous.

  I carefully picked my way across the street, and instead of avoiding the piles of horse droppings that littered the cobblestones, I grabbed a handful of the stuff and smeared it onto my shirt. Rich folks are awful fickle about stink, and bad smell could buy me a few seconds if I was unlucky enough to get grabbed.

  Slipping down the alley, I hugged the walls. Despite the soot of a thousand stovepipes and chimneys clouding up the sky, there was still just enough moon to see by. The carriage had parked next to a rickety-looking loading dock that marked the Crown’s rear exit. Two men in dark cloaks waited there, and one of them held what looked to be a small birdcage, the other obviously keeping guard. I gave a signal and waited as a small tangle of beggar children followed the carriage, calling out cries of “alms” and “pennies, please” as they went. Fever had culled the slums something terrible that season, and among the beggar children I spotted at least three new faces, orphaned by disease.

  The coachman shouted curses at the filthy urchins as he cleared a path with his riding crop. This fellow was particularly nasty, and there was something about his sickly, pale sheen that gave me a queasy feeling. Already the beggars were scurrying away with angry red welts across their faces as the coachman spit and lashed at their fleeing backsides, his attention no longer on his precious coach. I’d promised to share a few coins with the kids just to keep everyone happy—we all shared the same turf, and by now they’d learned that they’d get more by helping me than from the pity of the well-to-do. As the carriage’s side door creaked open I crept up onto its ledge, the one facing away from the dock.

  I crouched there a moment, unseen, with my fingers on the door handle. The younger men of the party—the stronger, faster ones—would exit the carriage first to help any lady companions down the steps. The slower, fatter and older ones (the ones I naturally was interested in) would haul themselves out last. I felt the shift in the carriage’s weight as the first passenger exited on the opposite side. There seemed to be some kind of exchange going on between him and the men on the loading dock—I heard the clank of coins changing hands. Still crouching low, I opened the door a crack and risked a peek.

  Only one person remained inside the cab. A single man sat in the shadows, facing away from me. Despite the dark, I could spy the glint of rich cuff links and the shine of a gold watch chain. Though the man’s face was hidden in shadow, his white-gloved hand was reaching out to take the gilded birdcage of brass and wire. I’d obviously stumbled upon some kind of handoff. And inside the cage was a thing I’d never seen before—it looked like a bird fashioned out of metal, like a child’s toy. Only this toy shone with silver and gold and its eyes sparkled like jewels. And it was singing. Its little head pivoted back and forth as it let out a soft, sad tune of whistles in a kind of clock-chime birdsong.

  Leather creaked as the gentleman shifted toward the far door. From my vantage point I could see through the open cab and onto the dock beyond, where the coachman now waited with another, hulking figure, presumably the other man out of the carriage. It was now or never.

  I let the door swing wide as I pulled myself in, behind the well-dressed gentleman. If I had been bigger I might’ve been able to reach the man’s coat pocket from the doorway, but seeing as how I’m a bit of a runt, I had to climb all the way into the cab. In one swift motion, and careful not to alert the men waiting outside, I reached for the man’s waistcoat. In cramped quarters like that, your only hope is a quick snatch-and-run. With any luck, I’d have the man’s wallet and watch and be out the door before any of them had time to shout “thief.”

  But whatever luck I had hoped for that night ran out when the little toy bird in the cage swiveled its head toward me and let out a squawk. I might as well have knocked over a stack of empty tins for all the noise the little contraption made. I tried pulling my hand away, but the gentleman’s other glove, the one not holding the bird, was too fast. He wrapped his fingers around my wrist in an iron grip. Reflexively, I pulled out my straight razor and slashed at the man’s hand. I’m not one for violence, and I’m certainly no mugger or garrote killer, but the streets are unforgiving and when things go bad there’s no choice but to draw a little blood—just enough to give a scare. So I sliced the razor across the back of the gentleman’s knuckles. The white silk of the glove slit open, but there was no stain of red underneath, and worse, he didn’t even flinch.

  Instead the man bent down, his face finally coming out from the shadows, and smiled. A lipless, grinning skull looked at me from beneath the brim of that rich gentleman’s cap. Dried flesh was drawn tight over a face like parchment. Patches were missing here and there, and he glared at me with empty, eyeless sockets circled with ragged skin. I was staring right into the face of a corpse in its funeral best, but this corpse still moved. I could feel his hot breath on my cheek as he leaned in close. It smelled like rot. It smelled like the grave.

  I don’t think my mind was working right, just then—I was looking at something too unbelievable, too horrible to be real. But luckily my body was working just fine and instinct took over. I dropped the useless razor and swung my legs around, kicking with all my might. This corpse-man looked brittle, but his grip was strong and I couldn’t shake him loose. Outside, the coachman and his big companion had noticed the struggle. The cab door swung wide open and a bald-headed giant reached inside. His hands were easily the size of my whole head, and he was trying to wrap them around my scrawny neck. But this man, at least, was flesh and bone. I knew how to deal with flesh and bone, even when outsized.

  The big man grabbed my other hand, and though I’d dropped my razor in the struggle, I still had
teeth. I hissed like an alley cat as I bit down on the man’s little finger. The man shouted in pain and anger, bringing his other hand around in a heavy, backhanded slap. I curled my shoulder around to take most of the blow, but the edges of my vision went black with spots. Blood dribbled down my chin, and only some of it belonged to the giant. But suddenly I was free—the force of the man’s wild slap had broken the corpse-man’s grip as well.

  The corpse-man was trying to push past the giant’s bulk to make another grab at me, but the two men got twisted up in each other’s arms. As I scurried across the seats to the far door, I put a foot on the step, preparing to launch myself out onto the street. But something caught my eye—there on the floor of the carriage was the delicate birdcage. Inside, the little metal bird was looking at me with its head cocked in a curious expression.

  Wasting a precious few seconds to grab the birdcage would be the dangerous and reckless thing to do, and maybe that’s why I did it. I left the carriage door hanging open as I lunged, wrapping both hands around the cage’s wire handle. By the time I made it back to the door, the giant had untangled himself and the corpse-man was reaching for me again. Things had suddenly gotten worse.

  I just managed to dodge the man’s grab and jump out the door—and into the waiting coachman. He’d come around to cut off my escape while I’d tussled with the giant. If the coachman had tried a grab then I would have been done for, but he tried using his whip on me instead. The whip crack missed my face by mere inches as I rolled under the cab’s wheel well. I’d escaped the lash, but now I was trapped beneath the carriage. The coachman was shouting at me from one side; on the other, the giant’s tree-trunk legs stomped back and forth. And above, in the carriage, was a grinning dead man.

  The clockwork bird gave out a worried chirp.

  The copper’s whistle was still in my pocket. I stuck it in my mouth and wrapped my legs around the undercarriage, lifting myself up with my free hand, the other gripping the birdcage close. Hugging the underside of the carriage, I cleared six inches between the ground and myself. Then I blew. The whistle cut through the night. It was intended to summon other police officers in the event of a ghastly crime, though here in the Bowery no such help would ever come. But the high-pitched, shrieking whistle did have another, more useful effect—it spooked the carriage horses.