by Mike Mignola
Abraham’s eyes darted about the room, at the machines of all sizes and shapes that had been built to Professor Romulus’s detailed specifications—at considerable cost to the Hawthorne fortune, no less.
“This,” Abraham said, hearing the edge to his voice, “all this”—he moved his hand around, indicating the room, as the Professor listened and waited—“will it be ready when the time comes?”
Professor Romulus looked about the room as well. “I guess it all depends,” he said. “It depends on when it might be needed.”
Abraham moved toward the man, fixing him with a powerful gaze.
“Soon,” he said, attempting to keep his emotions in check. He did not know how he knew this, but he sensed that time was indeed running out.
“Oh,” Professor Romulus responded, walking toward his special mechanisms. “Well, there are still some things to be done … I’m not sure we’ll be ready before—”
Abraham surged forward, taking hold of the professor’s arm in a powerful grip and spinning him around. “It needs to be ready,” he said, the intensity in his voice saying it all. “And you will do all that you must to make it so.”
The dying boy’s father paused for effect.
“Do we understand each other, Professor?” Abraham asked.
“Completely,” Romulus replied.
Abraham released the man’s arm, fully aware of how tightly he’d been gripping it.
“Then I’ll let you return to your work,” he said, turning toward the door.
And just as he was about to leave the solarium, he looked back to see Professor Romulus standing as he’d left him, rubbing his arm where Abraham had gripped it.
* * *
Bentley didn’t recall what had happened exactly, only that his head had felt incredibly light before the entire world had somehow been plunged into total darkness.
He’d come around eventually and found himself back in his room, stuffed beneath the covers of his bed.
Things like that were beginning to happen more and more often, and he pondered briefly the quality of the life that was ahead of him. This might be something that he would need to discuss with his mother and father in the not too distant future.
He was about to attempt to climb from his bed when the door to his room swung open to reveal the imposing figure of Pym.
“Pym,” the boy said. “I was just getting up.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” the butler corrected, coming into his room, making sure that the covers were down on both sides and he was nicely tucked beneath them.
“I feel fine,” Bentley said as Pym swiped wrinkles from the heavy duvet.
“I found you unconscious in the kitchen,” the manservant informed him. “You are not fine.”
The boy considered the argument presented.
“I wasn’t then, but now…”
Pym made a sound Bentley had learned to associate with displeasure.
“You need to rest.”
“For how long?”
“Until you are rested.”
“I feel rested now.”
“But you’re really not.”
“Am I going to die?”
Bentley watched for Pym’s reaction, searching for any tic or twitch that might let on that things were perhaps worse than he suspected. He saw something going on around the man’s eyes that was concerning.
“What kind of question is that?” Pym scolded, proceeding to straighten the sheets and blankets again. “You just need your rest.”
“We all die, Pym,” Bentley told him. “Some just sooner than others.”
Pym stared at him for what felt like quite some time, the activity around his eyes becoming even more intense.
“And your time is a long ways off,” he finally said briskly. “I’m going to go down to the kitchen and fix you a bowl of soup.”
“I really don’t want soup,” Bentley told him.
Pym stood taller, clasping his hands behind his back.
“I will fix you soup, and I will bring it to your bed, and you will eat it, even if I’m forced to feed it to you myself.”
Bentley considered that.
“I’ll eat the soup,” he said. “But only if you let me get out of bed after.”
Pym was silent for a moment.
“After the soup, we will discuss the matter further.”
“Deal,” Bentley said, and brought his hand up and out from beneath the covers, extending it for Pym to shake.
Pym considered the boy’s hand for a moment, and then, slowly, brought his own to it. They shook. Pym’s grip was strong, powerful even, and Bentley wasn’t sure if he’d ever realized the strength Pym had inside.
“Rest,” the butler then ordered, tucking Bentley’s hand and arm back beneath the covers.
He left the room, closing the door behind him and leaving Bentley alone with the silence of the room and his own thoughts.
He pulled his hand out from underneath the bedclothes and looked at it, still feeling Pym’s warmth and the pressure of his grip.
He also noticed a tremble, and could not make it stop no matter how hard he thought about it. Pushing his hand back down beneath the warming layers, he tried to forget his shaking limb, and to do what Pym had asked of him.
To rest.
Bentley was just on the verge of falling asleep when he heard a very faint tapping upon his window. At first he thought it to be rain, but there was something more—something solid about it.
Unable to lie there any longer, the boy squirmed out from beneath his protective coverings into the cold of his room, and looked toward the window.
He smiled at what he saw there. He had been right—it wasn’t rain at all.
It was snow.
He ran to the window, looking out at the gray world now made a little more special—a little more magical—by the frozen flakes drifting down from the sky.
And to make it even more special, even more magical, he saw her out there.
His special friend. He hadn’t seen her in a few days, and he felt his heart begin to pound as he saw her moving out from behind the cover of the forest trees.
Bentley was about to rap upon the glass when she darted out from behind an oak and ran toward the back of the house, stopping abruptly beneath his window to look up at him. She smiled and beckoned to him.
Come out, Bentley, her dainty hand said as she started back toward the wood.
Come out, and we will play in the snow.
Bentley ran excitedly for the door to do as she requested of him.
How could he not?
Chapter Nine
Lost in thought, Bentley didn’t realize where his wanderings had brought him. He looked up, surprised to see that he was standing in front of the high double doors to the solarium.
Even though the room still bore the blackened scars from the fire that had nearly burned down the southern side of the mansion, as well as the painful memories of what had transpired within, Bentley often found himself drawn to this burnt-out shell.
It had become a kind of church to him, a place where he was able to gather his thoughts.
He pushed open the doors and stepped inside, remembering how it had looked before the incident; recalling when it had been just a sun-room, before Professor Romulus had come to stay with his strange machines.
Bentley made a mental note—as he had many times in the past—to talk to Pym about hiring a crew to clean out the space and haul away the blackened remains of the professor’s devices. Maybe the room can be used again, he thought as he looked around at the charred wood and walls.
Or maybe it should just be left alone.
A memorial to remind him, and anyone else who should enter, of the dangers in playing with the forces of nature.
The powers of the universe.
He closed his eyes and breathed in the thick, damp, smoky smell, attempting to gather his thoughts on the murder of Tianna Hoops and what he still had to do to satisfy the needs of the ghostly trapeze
artist.
“What more is there to do?” Bentley found himself muttering as he moved piles of ash around with the tips of his shoes.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” The voice came out of nowhere, so very close to Bentley’s ear, that it seemed to come from inside his skull.
“Where are you?” he asked, startled, eyes darting about darkness.
“Right here,” the raven named Roderick said.
It was if a piece of shadow had come alive, emerging from a wall of black in the corner of the room to perch atop the wreckage of one of Professor Romulus’s machines.
“Oh, I thought I was alone.”
“Alone and talking to yourself,” the bird muttered, fluttering his shiny wings. “They say that’s one of the first signs that you’re cracking up.”
“Not cracking up,” Bentley said. “It’s just like you said … I’m not very good at this whole ‘agent of Death’ rigmarole.”
Roderick spread his wings and flew to a machine closer to Bentley.
“You had better get better,” the bird warned. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint the boss.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Bentley asked, seeing a glimmer of hope in the situation. “If I perform the job badly enough, maybe he’ll fire me.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to be fired.” Roderick pretended to shiver, the shiny black feathers around his neck puffing out. “It’s nothing pleasant, getting let go by the boss.”
Bentley wasn’t quite sure exactly what job the raven filled in the afterlife, but the bird would appear from time to time in the living world to offer the young man some guidance.
“All right, do you have any suggestions, then?” Bentley asked, more than confident that Roderick already knew every detail of the case as well as he did himself.
The raven tilted his black head from side to side, fixing Bentley with his dark brown eyes. “Hey, you’re the avatar.”
Bentley started to pace about the remains of the sunroom. “I know that, but I’m not sure where to go with this one. My job is all about finding the guilty—to punish those who have interfered in the natural order of things by taking a life early.”
“Well, at least you have that part down,” Roderick said with sarcasm.
“But this one,” Bentley said, feeling his frustration surge. “This case…”
“Go on,” the bird urged.
“This one isn’t like the others,” the young man said.
“How so?”
“We know who killed the girl,” Bentley told the raven. “We know that Tianna Hoops was killed by her boyfriend, William Tuttle.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah,” Bentley went on. “He confessed to the crime, was tried, and now is awaiting execution upstate.”
“Fascinating,” Roderick said, lifting his taloned foot and scratching at the side of his feathered neck.
“Not really,” Bentley said. “It’s terrible … She really loved him … Still loves him, actually. I felt it when she showed me what happened.”
“Why’d he do it?” the bird croaked.
Bentley shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know.”
“And you don’t find that strange?”
“People kill each other all the time,” Bentley said. “The reasons are all over the place … jealousy, anger, fear.”
“Did you feel any of those when she showed you her murder?” Roderick asked.
Bentley remembered the feelings that had washed over him when the ghost flowed into his body. He remembered all of her emotions until the moment of her death. But he felt nothing from him. Nothing from William Tuttle that would bring him to murder.
“No.”
“Strange,” Roderick said with a tilt of his head.
“Yes,” Bentley agreed thoughtfully.
“I think there are still some questions to be asked,” Roderick said.
“I should speak with him,” Bentley said. “I should ask William Tuttle the questions.” He looked to the bird for confirmation, but as it usually was with Death’s messenger, Roderick was gone.
Never mind. He knew what he had to do. Turning around, he strode through the room with renewed purpose and direction. But as he reached the doors, swinging them open into the hallway, he questioned how he might achieve that.
How would he get into a maximum-security prison and how would he convince a convicted murderer to speak to him?
Bentley smiled, the answer to his question suddenly materializing before him like a certain raven.
He had to pay a visit to the attic.
Chapter Ten
BEFORE:
Reginald Pym had never married, nor had he ever experienced the true bond of fatherhood, but he imagined that what he’d been experiencing throughout the years in his service to the Hawthornes, and more specifically to the boy, Bentley, was somehow akin to it. He worried about the child, about his worsening maladies, as well as his strange disconnection to the living world about him. Pym had lost count of the times he’d found the child sitting alone, nose planted in the rather gloomy works of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, or William Blake.
He’d done as much as he felt he could to encourage the child to mingle with children of his own age, partaking of the outdoors and the many seasonal activities that were offered, but the boy would only feign the effects of illness and return to his books. To his comforting solitude.
Pym often wondered if he shouldn’t have done more to encourage the boy, but would then pull back, reminding himself that he was not the child’s father.
No matter how it sometimes felt.
As he climbed the winding staircase up to the boy’s room, carrying a tray with the promised soup before him, he attempted to imagine what it would be like if Bentley should succumb to his ailments. How he would feel. A sudden and sickly feeling passed through his body, and he found himself thinking of the mister and missus, and the strange guest they’d allowed into their home.
The man and his machines.
He hadn’t bothered to ask them about the man … this so-called professor, but he couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversations they’d had over coffee.
Somehow the professor was there for the boy; somehow he and his machines were going to save him. Pym had no idea what that meant, or how it was to be, but if it were true … if this man could somehow save young Bentley …
He stopped in front of the child’s door and, balancing the tray upon one hand, knocked before entering.
“Now, I expect you to eat every bite of this or—”
Pym’s eyes fell upon the empty bed, staring at the slight indentation where a body once lay.
“Bentley?” he called out, looking around the room, paying extra-close attention to the patches of shadow where the boy sometimes liked to hide. The room was empty. He set the tray down on the boy’s desk and looked around again, just to be sure.
“Bentley? Where are you?” he called out a little louder, just in case the boy was out of the room nearby.
He was about to begin a search of the house’s upper levels when he heard it—something just below the sound of the snow ticking off the room’s windowpanes. Pym moved closer the window and was surprised to see how hard it was coming down, the snow piling up much more quickly than he would have thought.
And then he saw.
At first he thought it might be his imagination, but stepping closer he saw the back of Bentley trudging through the collecting snow, heading deeper into the woods.
“Dear God,” Pym muttered, as the boy was quickly swallowed up by the storm.
* * *
Bentley shivered as the snow piled up around him.
“I don’t feel so well,” he told his friend, as he looked back in the direction from which he had come. His footprints were already nearly filled in by the storm.
She came out from behind a tree, took his hand, and smiled at him, the warmth of her loving look making him feel not quite so cold or sick.
<
br /> “Maybe you just need to play some more,” she suggested.
The little girl turned her gaze up to the falling snow, letting the large, downy flakes land upon her face. He noticed again that she wasn’t dressed for this kind of weather; a pretty party dress was not sufficient, as far as he was aware, for keeping one warm.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked her.
She looked down from the sky to him, and he noticed that the snow that had fallen upon her face had formed a crusty mask; the heavy flakes had not melted.
Bentley started to laugh, and she did as well.
“No, silly,” she said as she bent down to scoop up a handful of the powdery white stuff and threw it at him.
“Hey!” Bentley shrieked, jumping backward as snow struck his front.
The little girl was laughing hysterically as she ran deeper into the woods.
“C’mon!” she called to him.
“Where are we going?” he asked, running after her.
He noticed that she moved incredibly fast, leaving no visible trace of her passing in the snow as she ran.
How odd.
“Over here!” she cried out as she stopped in the center of a clearing surrounded by swaying birch trees and waited for him to reach her.
“What are we doing?” he asked, feeling the cold as it flowed beneath his coat to his skin, and down into his bones.
“We’re going to make angels,” she said, again with that brilliant, warming smile.
He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and was a bit shocked as she lay down upon her back in the collecting snow.
“What are you doing?”
“I told you,” she said. “Come here and join me.” She patted the snow at arm’s length.
For some reason that he couldn’t quite explain—maybe it had something to do with that smile—he did as she suggested.
It was freezing, and he could feel the chilling dampness being absorbed by his pajama bottoms as he lay there.
“What … what now?” he asked, his teeth beginning to chatter.
“Do what I do,” she said, spreading out her arms and moving them up and down. She was also opening and closing her legs.
She looked over to see him still watching.