Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal

by Mike Mignola

  He asked them yet again, “Please … why?”

  Maybe it had something to do with his age, finally being in the right place in life where he could act on their behalf. Or maybe it was because this time he had asked nicely, begged them please. Bentley wasn’t sure.

  Whatever the reason, they came to him in droves, and he could not hold them back. One after another they flowed at him—touching him with their preternatural coldness—telling him their tales of woe.

  And leaving a little bit of themselves behind.

  He tried to scream, to cry out, but it was simply too much for him to handle as he sat there inundated with the spirits of the dead and their stories.

  As they came at him, some so eager that they forced their way upon him two and three at a time, Bentley Hawthorne saw the connection.

  Suddenly he knew why they haunted him, haunted his home.

  At last, he understood.

  All of them, each and every one, had died as a result of a weapon … A pistol, rifle, or bomb had cut their lives short.

  A weapon made in the factory of the Hawthorne family munitions business. It all became painfully clear to him as the hundreds, if not thousands, of ghosts crowded the room before him and beyond.

  They all had died because of his legacy.

  They all had died because of something he was now responsible for.

  It took him a while to recover, and in that time he thought many thoughts, and eventually came to a conclusion as to how to make things right.

  Exhausted by the experience, Bentley left the study, walking the halls of the great manor until he finally reached his destination, determined to share his decision with the one who had been like family to him since before the death of his parents.

  “Pym,” he cried, throwing open the door to his manservant’s room.

  The butler shot up in bed, eyes wide with shock.

  “Bentley, what is it?” he asked. “Bad dreams again, sir?” He started to get out of bed, grabbing for his robe. “Let me warm some milk for you, and—”

  “No need, Pym,” Bentley said proudly, still standing in the doorway. “I’ve figured it out.”

  “Figured it out, sir?” Pym asked, slipping into his heavy robe. “What have you—?”

  “Why they’re here,” Bentley said, turning around to see a small legion in the hallway behind him. “Why the ghosts are still with us.”

  “Ah yes, the ghosts,” Pym said. “Still about, I imagine?”

  “Yes, yes, they are,” Bentley said, watching as some flowed into the butler’s room. “And I think I know what I need to do to put them to rest.”

  “Very good, sir,” Pym said. “Now, let’s go downstairs to the kitchen where I will prepare you that milk, and maybe…”

  “I’m going to shut it down, Pym,” Bentley said.

  “Shut it down, sir?”

  Bentley nodded. “All the death it creates … all the innocent lives that are lost because of what’s made there.”

  Pym looked at him strangely, the idea of what he was talking about finally permeating. “Are you talking about the factory, sir?” he asked. “Hawthorne Munitions?”

  Bentley nodded ever so slowly.

  “You can’t be serious,” Pym said, a look of shock appearing on his tired face.

  “I’m completely serious, Pym,” Bentley said. “We’re shutting it down, so it can’t cause any more harm.”

  “But, sir, I don’t think…”

  “It’s already decided,” Bentley said with finality, looking at the ghosts that now gathered around him. “Hawthorne Munitions will be closing as soon as possible.”

  They both stood there in the deafening silence of the early morning, and Bentley wasn’t sure if he remembered ever feeling quite so right.

  So serene.

  “Pym,” he said, seeing the butler’s face fill with the hope that he’d changed his mind and come to his senses.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Could we have pancakes?”

  “Pancakes?”

  “Yes, I’d like to celebrate.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bentley swam in a sea of novocaine, enfolded in its embrace of total numbness.

  At first there was no pain, but gradually …

  “Unggh,” he said oh so eloquently as he opened his eyes, looking out through the eyeholes of the skull mask he wore to see the shape of the Human Dynamo pacing stiffly back and forth before him.

  Grim Death noticed at once the strangeness in his movements, that weird look that he’d also seen in the gorilla’s eyes. It told him something …

  But what?

  The Dynamo lunged, grabbing the mask on Bentley’s face and tearing it away. The hairless man then stared with that strange, bottomless gaze, tilting his head from side to side.

  And then the Dynamo spoke, and remembering how the hairless man had spoken to himself and Gwendolyn in the Chamber … Bentley knew it too was totally wrong.

  “You,” the Dynamo said. “Something told me you would be trouble when I saw you … you and that pretty little girlfriend of yours.”

  The Dynamo sneered, and his eyes lit with pent-up internal energy, a bluish flash eerily illuminating the sclera of his wide eyes.

  Bentley tried to move, to get to the other pocket of his coat for his second gun, but the Dynamo lunged forward, his hand filled with hissing sparks.

  “I thought we’d catch both of you at the pretty little thing’s house,” he growled, snakes of electrical current slithering around the corners of his awful smile.

  At first Bentley was confused by the words, but suddenly realized that the Dynamo was talking about Gwendolyn, and that she was in danger.

  “But I guess we’ll just deal with you here,” the Dynamo said as he reached for Bentley. “While my other puppets deal with the girl.”

  Bentley attempted to move, to squirm away from the electrical man’s grasp, but he knew that his actions weren’t enough, and prepared for the feeling of thousands of volts coursing through his body, boiling his blood and cooking his internal workings.

  His thoughts briefly went to William Tuttle, how he and the circus roustabout were going to be sharing a similar experience …

  The first bullet ricocheted off the concrete just in front of the electrical man, causing him to hesitate and allowing Bentley the moment he’d been hoping for.

  Pym rushed around the corner of the alley waving a pistol of his own, commanding the hairless, electrical man to step back and away.

  Bentley was already on the move as the Dynamo raised a hand, the crackling volts of electricity collecting in his palm like a humming swarm of angry bees. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but Bentley snatched his skull mask from the bottom of the fire escape stairs and pulled it on over his face before throwing himself wantonly at his foe, connecting with the bald man’s midsection, driving him back and to the floor of the alley.

  The Dynamo hadn’t even a moment to react before Grim Death had pulled his other Colt .45 from the pocket of his coat, and even though there was a powerful part of him that wanted to kill this man, he was able to restrain his bloodlust, instead brutally striking the man’s wide forehead with the butt of his pistol, driving his bald head down onto the ground.

  “Stay down,” Grim Death growled, looming above him with gun in hand. “You will tell me … things.”

  And that was when Bentley noticed something incredibly strange. The Dynamo was blinking his eyes furiously, almost as if he was waking up from a dream.

  “Bentley,” Pym said coming up alongside him.

  “Don’t call me that,” he snapped. “Grim Death … when I’m like this, I’m Grim Death.”

  “Of course you are,” Pym replied coldly. “Maybe next time I’ll just stay in the car and let Grim Death handle the whole thing.”

  He ignored the butler’s anger, choosing instead to focus upon the strangeness happening below him.

  The Dynamo stiffened as he looked around, his eyes growing ste
adily wider with disbelief. As he gazed upon the skulled visage looming above him, the look turned to sheer, undiluted terror.

  “Where am I?” the Dynamo asked fearfully. “What’s going on?”

  He tried to get up, but Grim Death pointed the barrel of his gun at the Dynamo’s face, forcing him back to the ground.

  “Who sent you here?” Grim Death demanded.

  The Dynamo’s mouth worked, but little that he said was comprehensible. He was scared beyond reason, and Grim Death could see it. It was all in the eyes: the electrical man’s eyes were completely different than they had been moments earlier.

  “Please,” the Dynamo begged. He started to roll over in an attempt to curl himself into a ball when he saw the injured animal.

  The gorilla lay shivering just beyond the truck.

  “Bippo?” the Dynamo called out. “Is that you, boy? What in God’s name is going on?”

  The man started to crawl toward his friend, and Grim Death allowed it.

  “Yes, what is going on here, Bent—Grim Death?” Pym asked.

  Grim Death wasn’t sure exactly, but something was beginning to slowly, inexplicably take shape.

  “You!” Grim Death barked, striding over to the man, who now cradled the injured gorilla.

  “He’s hurt,” the Dynamo said. “We need to get him some help.”

  “Never mind that,” Grim Death commanded. “You say you don’t remember any of this … If that’s the case, what’s the last thing you do remember?” He aimed his pistol again for effect.

  The Dynamo was still afraid—and why wouldn’t he be, with a skull-faced figure holding a Colt .45 on him?

  “The last thing I … I remember?” he stammered. “I was closing up for the night … I was closing up the Chamber.” He paused, remembering.

  “What?” Grim Death demanded, jabbing the weapon at him.

  “That’s when I heard the singing,” the Dynamo said. “The singing … and then I don’t remember a thing.”

  The gorilla moaned fitfully, and the Dynamo held him tighter.

  “You gotta help him,” the man said. “Please … he’s hurt.”

  Grim Death ignored the man’s pleas, turning toward his accomplice and his transportation.

  “We need to get home,” he said, already on the move to where he remembered the car was parked.

  “But…” Pym began.

  “Gwendolyn might be in danger.”

  * * *

  Slumping in the backseat of the car, he pulled the skull mask from his face and laid it on the seat beside him.

  Bentley sighed, feeling the beginning of exhaustion brought on by his massive adrenaline surge back in the alley.

  “Would you mind explaining what happened back there?” Pym demanded from the driver’s seat.

  Bentley looked toward the rearview mirror, at his butler’s bulging eyes.

  “Things have just begun to come into focus,” Bentley said cryptically, his brain already putting the bizarre picture together from the scattered puzzle pieces of the story.

  “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Pym cursed, pounding the steering wheel in his frustration. “A man with electricity leaking from his body … a gorilla, Bentley? Really? A gorilla in a suit? If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, smelled the scent of gunpowder … If I didn’t still feel the weight of the pistol in my pocket, I would think this all some sort of fever-induced nightmare.”

  “I know, Pym,” Bentley said, attempting to rouse himself, his eyes drifting down to the mask on the seat beside him—staring up at him.

  Did it just whisper for me to put it on?

  “But this is the world my life has become since Death itself…”

  “No!” Pym said, and again he pounded the steering wheel as he sped down the darkened back roads toward the highway, and home. “It is not your world—it is our world,” Pym explained his frustration. “No matter what you think your fate to be, my being by your side should always be a given. I swore an oath to your father and mother a very long time ago when they brought a sickly baby, weighing no more than three pounds—who was never expected to see his first birthday—home from the hospital.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult your dedication to me, and…”

  “Don’t interrupt, sir,” Pym snapped. “It’s rude.”

  Bentley fell silent, allowing the butler his rant.

  “But live you did, and I would like to think I had some small part in that.”

  Pym paused, and Bentley wasn’t sure if he should attempt to explain himself further or …

  “You are a crucial part of my life, Bentley, and as much as you might struggle with it, I am part of yours,” Pym continued. “You and I are intertwined, and I’m afraid this is how it’s going to be.”

  Pym went silent, continuing to drive far above the speed limit on their journey back.

  “May I speak?” Bentley asked quietly.

  “Yes,” Pym answered, clearing his throat. “I believe I’m finished.”

  “Would you care to know what I’m thinking in regard to this current situation?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “My suspicion about something being wrong at Doctor Nocturne’s Circus of Unearthly Wonderment is a correct one. I believe there’s someone, or something, capable of controlling the minds of those in the employ of the Circus, and I believe that it is connected somehow to the Chamber of the Unearthly, where our assailants tonight worked and where William Tuttle last remembered being before the murder of Tianna Hoops.”

  “Mind control?” Pym said. “Normally I would consider such a thing nonsense, but you were attacked tonight by a man who shot electricity from his hands and a gorilla in a three-piece suit.”

  “I certainly was.”

  “And Miss Gwendolyn?” Pym asked. “How does she fit into all this?”

  “By being unlucky enough to have been with me when I asked too many questions today at the circus.”

  “So you think they may have sent others to silence her in case…”

  “That’s exactly what I believe.”

  There were no further words, just the sound of the car’s steady acceleration as they raced to the Marks estate.

  Chapter Twenty

  BEFORE:

  The ghosts were still there.

  He found it odd that they hadn’t accepted his offering and moved on. In fact, there seemed to be more than there had been before.

  Bentley didn’t understand; he’d done what he’d promised, closing Hawthorne Munitions’ doors as a way of offering up penance for being somewhat responsible for their untimely passing.

  But the ghosts of the dead remained, meandering about as if they’d grown used to their earthbound environment.

  Perhaps closing the factory had not been enough, he thought, wondering what more he could do to somehow appease the multitude that haunted him, and his home.

  Their number grew continuously, and he wondered what would happen when all the space in the Hawthorne mansion was taken up.

  And that was when Bentley had the most wonderful idea.

  If the ghosts of those killed by weaponry produced by the Hawthorne family business insisted on remaining about, haunting him, he would give them their own space. And perhaps, once they got tired of his generous act, they would feel they could move on to the next phase of their journey.

  Pym had not accepted the news well, believing that the young man had truly lost his faculties after the death of his parents. But Bentley had been insistent, hiring the best architects and contractors to add on to the already sprawling mansion and surrounding land, even going so far as to contact Europe’s greatest psychic medium, Madame Marie-Claire Cornellion, to help him formulate and design what might be best for the spirits he hoped to house.

  Madame Cornellion was specific in her ideas, the designs strange and confusing to the architects and builders: stairs that led up to solid walls, doors that opened onto rooms so small that a mouse might hav
e found them cramped. Rooms that were not created for human occupancy.

  But were perfect for ghosts.

  And as the new wings were completed, and the places where the spirits could reside were finished, what Bentley had planned for the restless dead came to be.

  The ghosts gravitated to their new dwellings, and a kind of balance appeared to have been struck. The ghosts remained, but they seemed to enjoy their new residences. Madame Cornellion even returned for a visit to see how he and the spirits were making out, and was quite impressed by how well the restless dead were adjusting to their new homes.

  But she sensed in Bentley something wild—something untamed that she could not identify, and left the young man with a cryptic warning to approach the future cautiously, that something was coming that would change Bentley’s life dramatically.

  Pym scoffed at the predictions of the future, and then grew hopeful that perhaps it meant that Bentley might meet somebody special, settle down, and give up the foolish belief that wandering spirits haunted their ever-growing estate.

  Bentley knew how his friend and manservant felt, but it did little to change his views of the ghosts, which he’d grown rather fond of. Madame Cornellion’s warning was always at the back of his mind, peeking around a darkened corner of his consciousness, but as the years passed and nothing dramatic occurred, he grew less and less concerned.

  It wasn’t long after his twenty-second birthday that his destiny came calling.

  He had been reading in the burnt-out remains of the solarium. For some reason, even with all the construction workers about, adding to the estate, he did not make it a point to have that place restored. He could not quite identify why he liked it the way it was. A reminder of an event that had changed his life.

  And altered his world.

  He was about to learn by exactly how much.

  Sitting in the charred and blackened space reading through the latest work by T. S. Elliot, he noticed the apparition of a woman walking through a wall on the far side of the room. It didn’t faze him in the least, barely causing him to look up from his reading, for ghosts were commonplace in Hawthorne House.

  He sensed her presence close by, a cold air wafting toward him, and looked up to see her standing there.