by Mike Mignola
He paused, remembering her.
“She was a trapeze artist,” he said smiling. “It was as if she could fly when she was doing her act.”
“Tianna,” Bentley said softly.
William slowly nodded, remembering his love.
“What did you do that night?” Bentley asked, wanting to understand. He needed to know how this man, who seemed to have loved so very strongly, could have performed such a heinous act. “Where did you go when Tianna was done with her show?”
The man thought for a moment, tears continuing to run down his face and spatter upon the wooden tabletop.
“We stayed at the circus,” he said. “Just walking around doing nothing … but saying everything.” William chuckled, remembering. “She said that she wanted to know everything that there was to know about me … my job … everything!”
The ghost of the trapeze artist was lovingly holding the man now, her own ethereal tears flowing from her eyes to drift about their heads like wispy clouds.
“Nobody that I’d ever known gave two shakes for a roustabout like me. She wanted to see what I did there … know how I did it, so I showed her around, pointing out everything that I was involved with.”
He stopped talking, and Bentley could see that the ghost of Tianna Hoops was reacting as well. She was staring at the man who loved her … the man who …
“We’d made our way to the exhibits,” he said, his voice going flat, emotionless. “I guess it was in the Chamber of the Unearthly when…”
Bentley leaned forward on the desk.
“When … when what, William?”
“When I lost my fucking mind,” he said with a ferocious growl, bending his head down to wipe away the tears that dampened his face. “I think I’ve talked about enough to you,” he added.
Tianna had drifted back away from the man, watching him with an accusatory stare.
“Why, William?” Bentley persisted. “Why did you lose your mind?”
He shook his large, blocky head. “I don’t know … I don’t know anything. One minute I’m the happiest palooka on the planet, and the next thing I know, I’m waking up looking down at the thing I had done.”
William was clearly remembering it again. The horrible moment.
“I strangled her,” he said. Even then the disbelief in his tone was evident. “I killed the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
The man then looked Bentley square in the eyes.
“And I have no idea why I did it,” he said, rage and sadness twisting his features into something horribly pathetic. He looked at his large, powerful hands: the weapons that had committed the act.
“It was like I wasn’t me … like somebody else had done it.”
Bentley allowed the words to nestle in his brain, snuggling down into the gray matter, where their potential meaning could begin to grow.
The door to the room opened, and Fitzgerald entered.
“Time’s up, Father,” the guard said, walking over to William and starting to unshackle him from the table.
“That’s fine,” Bentley said, leaning back in his chair, continuing to let the information that he’d heard percolate. “We were just about finished.”
“Don’t you waste any of your blessings of forgiveness on me, Father,” William said as Fitzgerald began to escort him from the room. “I’m getting what I deserve … going where I deserve …
“For what I did, I’m going straight to Hell.”
William Tuttle’s words echoed in Bentley’s mind as he sat there, waiting for Fitzgerald to return.
The guard came back to escort him from the place of punishment and ghosts, even asking him for a special blessing. To keep up appearances, Bentley did what was requested of him, laying a hand upon the guard’s head, and muttering something unintelligible beneath his breath, before stepping outside and heading back to the Packard where Pym patiently waited.
“I was beginning to think they’d convinced you to stay for dinner,” Pym said from behind the wheel as Bentley climbed into the back of the car.
“No, thank you,” Bentley said, completely distracted by his thoughts. “I’m not hungry.”
Pym turned in his seat to look at him.
“Please tell me that it was worth the charade, and the trip.”
Bentley focused on the man.
“Yes, yes it was,” he answered.
“So?”
“More questions than answers, I’m afraid. Take me home, Pym. There’s much that I still need to think about,” Bentley said, his mind already beginning to wander again.
Chapter Twelve
BEFORE:
The butler had never been so scared.
He’d rushed downstairs, frantically calling Bentley’s name, but garnering no response.
He had hoped the boy would return, would come to his senses and come back in from the storm, but alas.
Pym ran into the kitchen and found the back door ajar, snow having already collected upon the floor just inside. Without any hesitation he grabbed his coat from one of the hooks near the door and tugged it on even as he was heading out of the house and into the storm.
The snow was piling up, and in no time at all his soft-shoed feet were cold and saturated, but it didn’t stop him from searching out his charge.
“Bentley!” he called over the howling wind, struggling through the yard and into the woods where he’d seen the child disappear. “Bentley … where are you, boy?”
Pym stopped to listen, holding a hand up before his eyes to keep the particles of frozen moisture from striking his face. All he could see was white, wherever he looked, the ground and air merging to create a reality of shifting alabaster. He had to look up to the tops of the waving trees to help with his bearings.
It was freezing, and his concern for Bentley and the boy’s delicate constitution began to escalate. He almost began to panic.
Almost.
Panic would get him nowhere, Pym decided, tromping down the useless emotion and surging ahead into the forest, squinting through the blowing bits of ice that nearly blinded him.
“Bentley!” he called out again. “I’m becoming quite cross with you, boy!” The snow in the forest was up to his knees in places, and the panic he was trying to keep at bay suddenly surged forth as he looked around his frozen surroundings with not a sign of the child in sight.
What am I going to do? Perhaps he should return to the house, find Mr. Hawthorne and the professor; their combined efforts might …
The tip of his shoe caught upon something concealed beneath the drifting snow, and he pitched forward.
“Damn it all!” he cried out, falling into the snow, now even more wet and freezing than he had been before. Pym rolled over, quickly getting to his feet, his flurry of activity revealing what had tripped him, buried beneath the shifting white.
The child’s face was almost as pale as the snow that nearly covered it.
“Dear God,” Pym whispered, throwing himself on the ground before Bentley’s body. He dug his hands and arms beneath the numbing white and hauled the child’s frozen body up from the snow.
“That’s it, my boy,” he found himself saying. “Old Pym has you now … that’s it.” He knelt in the snow, holding Bentley tightly, searching for a sign that the boy still clung to life, but everything was so very, very cold.
Pym touched the child’s face; it was like touching marble.
“Bentley,” Pym said, leaning toward him. “Can you hear me, son?” He began to pat the boy’s cheeks, the gentle furtive strikes turning to out and out slaps.
“Bentley!” he cried, shaking the child. “Can you hear me? Stop this nonsense at once … Do you hear me? Bentley!”
The child remained lifeless, not a sign to be seen or heard that life still clung to him in any degree. Hopelessness washed over Pym; all he felt was despair as he knelt in the snow, cradling the boy, the storm howling around them. He stared at Bentley, the color of his skin reminding him of the delicate china bab
y dolls in the windows of the high-end department stores in the city.
At that moment he was forced to face the horror of a situation that he’d often thought about, but refused to acknowledge.
What if he dies?
With the years of sickness, the question had always been there, but the answer had been avoided when the child bounced back, some new medicine having a miraculous—although temporary—effect.
Each time enough to keep the reality of the question at bay.
What if he dies?
And now here Bentley was, cold and heavy in his arms, and all Pym could do was stare in abject horror as the snow fell heavily around them.
The despair was like a living thing, suddenly surging to life in the center of his chest, rushing up through his body to fill his lungs and escape out into the storm in a cry from his now gaping mouth. The sound was horrible, and he imagined its awfulness calling down the storm in all its fury, the snow falling harder and harder until both he and the boy were covered, swallowed up by the ferocity of nature.
It was something he almost welcomed; the pain he was experiencing was so all-encompassing, he wasn’t sure he could survive it.
The tears and sobbing came next, his entire body revolting against the fury of emotions that threatened to decimate him to the core. He buried his face against the cold of the boy’s neck and continued to cry.
Despondency gripped his heart and soul, and Pym almost missed the flutter of warmth on the lobe of his ear. Pulling his face back, he again looked upon the child’s deathly countenance, still finding no sign of life. He was about to succumb to his misery, believing that he had imagined the heat upon his ear, when he saw something—a flutter of movement beneath the lid one of the child’s eyes.
He went rigid, watching with increasing expectation, but saw nothing else for what felt like the passage of a thousand years.
But then there came a sound.
A low, distant moaning from somewhere deep within the boy’s chest.
He’s alive.
Pym continued to stare, eyes riveted to the youth’s face, watching … waiting …
Bentley’s eyelids fluttered, and his pale blue lips curled into a nasty snarl.
The boy still lives.
Pym struggled to stand on legs that had grown numb from the damp and cold. He almost fell back down to the snow, but somehow managed to remain standing. Clutching Bentley tightly to him, he hoped that the life and heat from his own body would somehow transfer to his charge.
“Don’t you worry, boy,” he said, making his stiffened legs work as he plowed through the collected snow. “We’ll get you home and make you warm and well again.”
Pym forged on, praying to whatever deity that might be listening to keep the boy alive long enough to get him back to the house. And someone, or something, must have heard his pleas, for suddenly Hawthorne House appeared through the shifting white, beckoning for their return.
“Almost … there,” Pym grunted.
He was glad to see that Bentley was conscious now, moving in his arms as if wanting to get down, but as Pym reached the large front doors of the estate, he realized that the boy was reaching, beckoning for something behind them.
“My friend,” Bentley cried out to the woods as they were swallowed by the storm. “She wants me to come play with her!”
* * *
The doors to the grand foyer flew open and Pym practically fell inside, Bentley still clutched protectively in his arms.
The warmth of the mansion surrounded them like eager dogs, lapping at the numbness of their exposed flesh.
Bentley was still going on about his friend out there in the snow; obviously some sort of hallucination brought on by hypothermia. But Pym had to wonder, what on earth would have made the boy go out there in the first place?
Not believing for a moment that the boy was safe, the butler began to call for help as he removed Bentley’s soaking-wet clothing.
“What the devil is all the yelling about?” Pym heard Mr. Hawthorne angrily ask. He looked up see the man and his wife in the doorway of the drawing room.
“Your son,” Pym began, as Mrs. Hawthorne rushed to his side and dropped to her knees, sweeping young Bentley up into her arms. “He was out in the snow … I think I found him in time, but…”
Mr. Hawthorne stood paralyzed in the doorway.
“Is he…?”
“He’s alive,” Mrs. Hawthorne said, lovingly touching her son’s face. “But barely.”
She then looked to her husband, and Pym noticed something almost palpable pass between them.
“It has to be now,” she said, and her husband nodded in silent agreement.
A shadow moved in the doorway behind the master of the house, and Pym watched as Professor Romulus appeared.
“Is everything all right?” the man asked, but as he took in the scene in the foyer, his look said he realized it wasn’t.
“It’s time,” Abraham Hawthorne told the professor. “It has to be now.”
The professor wore a startled look for a moment, but quickly seemed to understand.
“Very well, then,” he said grimly, motioning for them to follow. “Bring the boy to my lab.”
Chapter Thirteen
Bentley was exhausted.
Since his return from Blackmore Prison two days ago, the restless spirit of Tianna Hoops had refused to allow him rest.
He sat in the library, surrounded by his favorite works, as well as the favorites of his mother and father, and attempted to close his eyes.
But she was there as well, floating in the sea of blackness, watching him, urging him on, demanding that she be allowed to rest, and that her lover …
“What?” he asked the ghost who floated before him as he sat in the leather wingback chair. “What exactly do you want me to do?” He could hear the intensity in his voice from lack of sleep, but was unsure how to proceed. Yes, something most definitely did not seem right in William Tuttle’s story, but where to go from there eluded him. And time was running out: the man’s execution was scheduled for the end of the week.
“I’m sorry,” he told Tianna’s ghost. “I wish I could do more … I just don’t know what—”
The doors to the library came open and Pym entered, holding a serving tray.
“So sorry to interrupt your conversation with yourself, but I took the liberty of making some lunch,” the butler announced, walking over to a nearby table and setting the tray down with a clatter.
“I wasn’t talking to myself,” Bentley muttered.
Pym turned slowly, looking around the room. “Oh?”
Bentley was tired of explaining; he weakly raised a hand and motioned the butler away. “I’m too tired to eat.”
“The sandwich will give you strength,” Pym said, turning toward Bentley with a plate holding his lunch. “I even cut away the crust the way you like it.”
Bentley took the offered plate, resting it upon his pajama-covered thighs. “I don’t know what more to do,” he muttered, exasperated. His stomach grumbled at the sight of the sandwich, and he picked it up, suddenly ravenous. “I’ve exhausted every resource.”
Pym stood listening, watching him as he took his first bite of sandwich.
“Is she here now?” the butler asked, again looking around. “This ghost making demands of your attentions?”
Bentley nodded, chewing the large bite he’d taken.
“Yes,” he said after swallowing. “She hasn’t left me alone since I got back … She wants something more, but I don’t know what. I saw her boyfriend, I heard his story … he told me he did it. What more can I do?”
Bentley ate more of his sandwich, his aggravation skyrocketing.
“I wish I’d been given a rule book, or perhaps even some training courses before—”
Interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell, both he and Pym looked toward the entryway into the library.
“Who on earth could that be?” Bentley asked, wiping crumbs from his mouth
with the back of his hand.
“I haven’t a clue,” Pym said, walking from the room. “Excuse me while I go check.”
Bentley started on the second half of his sandwich as Tianna floated above his chair. He didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to stare into the darkness of her accusatory eyes.
He’d had more than enough of that, thank you very much.
“Leave me alone,” he muttered beneath his breath.
“Well, that’s a fine how do you do,” a female voice suddenly boomed, and he thought the ghost had somehow gained the ability to speak.
But it wasn’t the ghost at all—it was a guest, the ringer of the doorbell. His neighbor from down the road.
Gwendolyn Marks.
“Oh, hello, Gwendolyn,” Bentley said, setting down what remained of his sandwich.
“That’s more like it,” the woman said, a too-large smile spreading across her face. “What’s cooking, Bentley? Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”
Pym appeared in the doorway.
“Miss Marks is here,” he announced.
“I’m quite aware of that now, Pym. Thank you.”
She had gone over to his lunch tray and was helping herself to some grapes.
“I was starting to worry,” she said, popping a grape into her mouth and chewing. “You don’t call, you don’t write.”
“I’ve been quite busy.”
Gwendolyn Marks was the daughter of multimillionaire newspaperman Aloysius Marks. The Marks family lived ten miles west of Hawthorne House and, with the sprawling Crestwood Cemetery separating the two estates, were Bentley’s closest living neighbors.
As children, the two were often encouraged to play with each other, but Bentley was never quite comfortable with the brash and forceful young girl who had grown up to be an even more brash and forceful woman.
“I thought you might’ve croaked,” Gwendolyn said, continuing to eat his grapes.
“No,” he told her with a shake of his head. “No croaking … yet.”
The ghost of Tianna Hoops hovered closer to the woman, watching her with curious eyes. Bentley almost said something, but managed to keep his mouth closed.