by Mike Mignola
“What brings you out to the house, Gwendolyn?” he asked, in an attempt at being sociable.
“It’s like I said,” the young woman said, “I haven’t laid eyes on you in a while, and I thought I’d stop by to see how you were doing.”
“How … nice,” Bentley said, watching as the ghost returned to him and floated mere inches from his face. He tried his hardest not to look at her.
“Yeah, I thought so,” she said, strolling around the library. “So, read anything interesting lately?” she asked, her hands stroking the bindings of the books in the case before her.
“No,” Bentley said. “I’ve actually been too busy to read.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, strolling back to his lunch tray, where she picked up a folded copy of the New York Inquisitor, the paper owned by her family and managed by her father. “I hear that some mighty impressive works of investigative journalism have been published lately.”
She tapped the folded newspaper on the palm of her hand, trying to get him to notice.
“Really?” he asked, trying to sound interested.
“That’s what I hear,” she said, eyes widening as she suddenly seemed to notice the copy of the Inquisitor that she was holding. “Hey, wait a sec,” she said. “I think one of those amazing pieces might actually be in here.”
“You don’t say,” Bentley said.
She was over to him in a flash, unfolding the paper to find the story.
To find her story.
“I started out working an angle on a string of arsons that have been going on in the Bronx since last summer, but Daddy caught wind of me poking around and put the kibosh on the whole story.”
“So it’s not the arson story?” Bentley asked, scanning the newsprint.
“Naw,” she said disgustedly. “Daddy was afraid his little girl might kick up a little too much dust and get herself in too deep with a less-than-reputable element.”
“So what did you…?”
“Flower show,” she said, poking the bottom of the page.
“Flower show,” he repeated.
“Yeah, not as good as arson, or even murder, but I’m working on it,” she said. “All I need is for Daddy to let me have my big break, or to at least get the jump on a story so big that he couldn’t say no if he wanted to.”
She left him where he sat and began to pace around the library again. Gwendolyn had lots of energy, and always had. Bentley remembered how she’d always been this way: inquisitive, eager to uncover a mystery even when there wasn’t one present. She had always wanted to be a reporter, just like the ones at her father’s newspaper.
Gwendolyn went back for more grapes, only to find that she’d eaten them all.
“It’s too bad about the arson story, though,” she said, leaning back against the table and crossing her thin, bony ankles. “I did all kinds of research. I figured the firebug was traveling from state to state. Maybe a traveling salesman of some kind … maybe selling encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners! Going from town to town, setting fires and then taking off before…”
Something clicked then. Bentley practically heard it, like some heavy locking mechanism falling into place.
“The newspaper,” he said, the mechanism of his brain—the tumblers—clicking into place.
“Yeah?” she asked.
The ghost of Tianna knew something was happening and slowly drifted closer to him, watching him with expectant eyes.
“There are ways that you can track things,” he said, trying not to look at the ghost before him.
“Track things? How?” Gwendolyn asked, the look on her face telling him that she wasn’t quite sure what he was going on about.
“If I needed to know where something was … say, a stage show, or a carnival? With your amazing connections and reporter’s skills, you could probably tell me where it is.”
She pushed off from the table, thinking about his statement. “Yeah, that would be kid’s stuff. Why? What do you need to find?”
Bentley looked up into the face of the murdered woman—into the face of her ghost—and saw that she was smiling sadly.
She knew.
“Tell me, Gwendolyn,” Bentley said, his eyes twinkling. “How do you feel about circuses?”
Chapter Fourteen
BEFORE:
The former sunroom had been transformed.
Carrying the delirious boy in his arms, Pym could only stare at the strange machinery as it hummed and flashed about the room, making the air itself feel charged with electricity.
“Put the boy on the table,” Professor Romulus commanded, heading toward one of the machines, examining one of its many dials and turning a succession of knobs.
“What are all these…” Pym began, rooted in place, the moaning child in his arms.
“You needn’t concern yourself with anything, Pym,” Abraham Hawthorne said as he took Bentley’s limp body.
They had forbidden him from entering this room since the professor had come to stay with them, and although he’d known that changes were being made, he’d never imagined anything like this.
The butler had no idea what it was he was looking at.
He watched as Bentley’s father brought the boy to what looked like an examination table and gently laid him down.
“What are you going to do?” Pym asked, not entirely forgetting his place in the household, but suddenly not caring. He needed to know.
“It’s not your concern,” Mrs. Hawthorne informed him, moving to stand with her husband.
Bentley moaned and suddenly sat up. “Where is she?” he asked, his eyes wide and glassy. “Where is my friend?” He looked to the large windows that made up one entire wall of the sunroom. The storm was raging even harder now. “She’s so cold … so cold,” he said, staring, eyes wide but not really focused on the here and now.
“What’s he going on about?” Abraham Hawthorne asked, going to his son and pushing him back upon the table.
Pym looked to the windows … at the storm outside. “He said that he has a friend out there.”
The boy started to struggle under his father’s hands.
“Where is she?” Bentley asked, attempting to sit up again. “She was out there with me … outside in the snow like soft pillows…”
“He’s delirious,” Edwina said, laying a hand upon her son’s brow. “He’s burning up.”
The professor strode away from his machines to approach the examination table. From the pocket of his laboratory coat he produced a stethoscope and listened to the child’s chest.
“His heart is weakening,” he said with authority, returning the listening tool to his pocket. “Good.”
Good?
Pym must have been mistaken—must have misheard.
Stepping toward the scientist, he took hold of his arm. “What did you just say?”
Romulus glared at the offending hand. “Remove your hand at once, sir,” he growled. “We haven’t the time for this.”
Abraham glared. “Pym,” he said, voice dripping with authority. “That will be enough.”
Pym released the professor’s arm, looking to his master.
“But the boy…”
“That will be enough, Pym,” Abraham repeated even more forcefully, his hand lying flat upon Bentley’s chest, holding the boy in place.
Pym hesitated, unsure of what to do. To see his charge, the boy he had practically raised, quite possibly on the brink of death—it was more than he could tolerate.
“Sir, I must insist that I—”
It was the child’s mother who spoke next.
“Please, Pym,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “It’s for his own good … please understand.”
He started to protest, but the look in her eyes, the intensity of the love he saw there, was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. And he knew then that whatever they were about to attempt was for the sake of the child.
And how could he deny them that?
He started to walk
toward the exit, fighting the urge to stop—to demand that he be allowed to stay—to witness what was going to be done, but …
“Please,” Edwina mouthed.
He fought the compulsion to remain, and stormed out into the hallway where he stopped. Slowly he turned to look back into the solarium, now transformed into some form of wild laboratory.
The boy’s father was standing there, a look Pym would never forget etched upon his stony features.
A look that told him something was about to be done.
Something that had never been attempted.
Something that shouldn’t be attempted.
And he slammed the doors closed, leaving Pym standing outside.
Waiting.
But for what? And why did the anticipation fill him with such dread?
* * *
Abraham spun around to face the lab, the doors closed at his back.
“Do it, Professor,” he commanded. “Save my boy.”
Romulus had slipped on a pair of long, black rubber gloves and was wearing a pair of circular goggles. He approached the child on the table, observing him carefully.
“Things are proceeding as I expected,” he said. He reached down with rubber-covered fingers and pried open the child’s eyes. The pupils were dilated; the boy’s skin was now cast with a deathly gray pallor. “It shouldn’t be long now.”
Abraham heard his wife gasp, a hand going to her mouth as she stood at the opposite end of the table. He went to her, placing a strong arm around her shoulders.
Professor Romulus was already on the move, practically running across the solarium toward a six-foot-high, metal-framed glass case. Carefully he got beside it and began to wheel it across the room to where the boy lay dying.
“What can we do?” Abraham asked, feeling so anxious he thought he might rip from his skin. He kept looking at his child, his boy lying there—dying upon the table. Seeds of doubt began to germinate within his mind, and he began to curse himself for not seeking out traditional, more conventional methods to save his son.
The words to suggest that they might want to reconsider danced upon the tip of his tongue when he was again caught up in the moment.
“The stasis chamber should be placed close enough to pick up on the death energies that should begin to manifest at the moment of the child’s demise,” the professor was saying. He reached down to one of the chamber’s wheels and locked the container in place.
“Bring me those cables, quickly!” the professor commanded.
Abraham immediately crossed the room, bending down to retrieve a jumble of thick electrical cables and dragging them across the room to Romulus’s eager hands.
“The power that will run through these cables will create the field which will hopefully allow us to entrap the entity,” the professor explained breathlessly, attaching the ends of the cables to ports on the bottom of the glass container.
“Death,” Abraham said to him.
The professor looked up at him. Abraham could see his own haggard face reflected in the dark glass of the circular goggles.
“Excuse me?”
“Death,” Abraham repeated. “We’re going to trap Death.”
The professor seemed to think about that for a moment, as though he might have been unfamiliar with the concept before—
He quickly looked away, securing the last of the cables and then jumping to his feet to examine the box once again.
“Professor,” Abraham called out, causing the man to look his way once more. “You can do this … you can save my son?”
The professor’s goggled eyes looked into the emptiness of the glass cabinet, as if imagining it full.
Filled with Death.
“We are most certainly going to try.”
* * *
“We’re going to trap Death.”
The child’s father forced Romulus to confront what they were about to do.
To seriously look at, and consider, and wonder—Do we dare? Have we the right to attempt such a thing?
Theodore Romulus had always had a fascination with death, beginning with the death of his mother from smallpox when he was but a toddler. The woman who had loved him, who had satisfied his every want, had been removed from his life.
Something had taken her from him.
It was at that point, Theodore believed, that he had become aware.
Suddenly conscious of that force, he had begun to see its presence everywhere: in the changing of the seasons, bloodred leaves falling from the trees to dry and wither upon the ground, in the swollen bodies of the forest animals void of life lying by the side of the road, and in the people in his life—those for whom he cared the most—who always left him.
That force of nature had become his obsession, and he’d thrown himself into the study of death, as well as life, for one could not fully understand the existence of one without knowing the other.
Romulus had traveled the world, familiarizing himself with all beliefs and religions regarding these powerful forces in the universe, coming to understand the various interpretations that had formed as civilizations had developed.
It was while studying with a holy man in the hills of Nepal that Romulus’s theory about the entities that he would call Death Avatars had begun to take shape.
He had been asked to partake in a kind of farewell ceremony for one of the village elders who was very near death, and he believed that he had glimpsed something as the old man had passed from life.
Was it a trick of the light? Or an aftereffect of the smoke that wafted from the ceremonial pipes being passed around as they sat in a circle around the dying man?
But he was sure that he had glimpsed something as the man had died.
He believed that something had come for the spirit … the soul … the life-force of the man.
But he needed to be sure, and threw himself into his research, experimenting with cameras and films sensitive to specific kinds of energies. After years of trial and error, Professor Theodore Romulus believed that he was, in fact, successful, and that was what had led him here, to this moment.
The next step in his pursuit of the truth.
“We are most certainly going to try,” he said.
The beginning of an all-new adventure.
* * *
Edwina could not take her eyes from her son, paralyzed by the sight of him dying.
She held tightly to his cold hand, imagining that it was growing colder with every passing moment. This was how it had to be, she told herself, in order for the professor’s plan to be put in motion.
She would do anything to allow her son to live, even if it meant allowing him to die.
He seemed so much smaller as he lay there, his body twitching from time to time, his colorless lips moving ever so slightly, the words he spoke barely audible.
Something about …
Something about a friend.
* * *
Bentley floated someplace between here and there.
He could feel the pull of there, the darkness at the bottom of it like a vast pool of nothing, threatening to take him from the moment.
From the here and now.
He was vaguely aware of the activity around him, the professor running about. Why is he wearing those goggles and rubber gloves? He could feel his mother’s hand in his, and knew that was what held him here, not allowing him to slip beneath the ocean of oblivion.
He could sense his father close by, the man having such a powerful and overbearing presence that one could feel it in the very air when he was near.
Bentley wanted to ask him what was happening, what all the machines were about, for he could hear the click of switches and the hum of electricity as they came to life.
But what were they all for?
The tug of the void finally became something he could no longer fight. He felt himself begin to slip away, to fall, and not even the touch of his mother’s hand was enough to stop it.
But all was made right by another tou
ch.
In his other hand he felt it, delicate and fragile like a flower, and he managed to turn his head.
She had found him, smiling so sweetly as she took his hand and promised him that everything was going to be all right.
* * *
“Professor!” Edwina called out over the infernal humming of the machines.
Abraham rushed to stand with her beside their son, and knew at once what had caused her reaction. There was no doubt in his mind that their child was close to death.
He wasn’t sure if the scientist had heard. The man scuttled about, moving from machine to machine, checking—rechecking—before finally acknowledging their presence again and returning to the table where the boy lay.
Dying.
Again the stethoscope appeared, and Romulus checked the child’s life signs, as faint as they were, and growing fainter. Abraham and his wife watched this man, this man of science who had become their last hope for their son.
Romulus reacted, having heard—something—through his instrument, pulling the earpieces from his ears and allowing the listening device to hang from his neck.
“Is it now?” Abraham asked, wanting to prepare psychologically, emotionally, for what was about to be attempted.
The professor did not answer, instead pushing past the Hawthornes to get to the machines closest to the glass cabinet. He dropped to his knees, pulling on the cables that snaked across the ground, making sure that they were secure, and then checked the two closest apparatus again before turning to face them.
Abraham was about to speak again, to ask the question that hung tingling and fat from the tip of his tongue, when Professor Romulus grew incredibly still, his head cocking ever so slightly.
It was if he were listening.
And then …
Abraham could feel it, and was sure his wife could as well. There was something in the room with them, something that might have been there before but had not made its presence known until …
“It’s time,” Romulus said, his rubber-gloved hand reaching over to the machine closest to the glass case. He flipped a switch.
Abraham was surprised that he could hear it over the clicks, hums, and buzzes of all the other apparatus in the room, but the sound that this simple switch made, turned from off to on, was nearly deafening.