by Mike Mignola
Bentley looked to the bird again.
“You?”
“Not this time,” the raven said.
And Bentley felt a sudden, sickening feeling as he realized what had likely caused the lights to dim.
It wasn’t the stars that had gone out, but a life.
An innocent life.
“I’m too late, then,” he said, looking to the bird.
“For this, yeah,” Roderick agreed. “But not for what’s next.”
Bentley was confused, and was about to demand that the bird explain, but the raven was gone.
He looked around for Roderick, the thickness of the mist absorbing the sounds that would have come from the flapping of the raven’s wings. He caught a glimpse of the black bird as he flew toward the prison entrance.
And Bentley felt he had no choice but to follow.
Chapter Thirty-four
BEFORE:
Bentley had been dozing but jerked awake at the sound of the door to the townhouse opening. He quickly retrieved the skull mask from where it rested on his knee and slipped it on to meet the man he had come to punish.
The mask clung to his skin. Becoming his face.
Bentley had become Grim Death for the man who had murdered his mother.
* * *
Phillip Chambeau let himself into his home.
His home.
He liked the sound of that and smiled, the warm alcohol buzz that he was feeling making the experience all the more pleasant. He’d had a good night, though he had been required to shed a few crocodile tears when condolences for his dear, departed mother were offered.
His mother being gone brought another smile, as he came into the apartment, tossing his keys upon a small table. Phillip had tolerated his mother for so many years, and when she became sick, he had believed that with just a little more patience, he’d finally be free of her.
But then she had started with her ideas about charity and helping the needy, before and after she was gone.
He shook his head in disgust as he removed his overcoat and threw it across a chair just beyond the entranceway.
The idea of all that money—all his money—going into the pockets of some filthy beggar was enough to send him over the edge.
And he guessed it had.
He started up the stairs to his bedroom, feeling the weight of the evening pressing down upon him. As he reached the point on the stairs where his mother had hit her head after he’d pushed her, he felt a stabbing chill at the nape of his neck, and stopped. He saw her again as she hit, sliding down the remainder of the steps, leaving a trail of scarlet on the marble behind her.
“You stupid, stupid cow,” Phillip muttered, as he had that night when he’d done the deed, standing over her body as he watched her die.
She’d left him no choice really, he thought, turning back to continue his ascent up to bed. What was he supposed to do without the money he’d grown accustomed to? Get a job? The thought was both terrifying and hilarious.
Phillip started to laugh, lifting his gaze to the top of the darkened staircase. The laughter came to a sudden, choking halt when he saw the figure standing there.
“Who…?” he began, but didn’t have the chance—the figure’s arm shot out, grabbing Phillip by the tie as he recoiled backward, shoes precariously balanced at the edge of the marble steps.
“Phillip Chambeau,” the skull-faced intruder said in a voice ragged and raw, halting his fall backward by holding the red fabric of his silk tie. “Payment for your cruel act has come due.”
“Wait!” Phillip screamed, knowing full well what his fearsome attacker was talking about, but hoping for a way to escape his fate. “This is all some terrible misunderstanding … please, let me up and I’ll explain!”
It was then that he thought he saw something, white and shimmering—like smoke—and for the briefest moment, he thought it had taken a nearly human shape.
And that it had appeared as his—
“Your mother has a message for you,” the deathly visage said as he released Phillip’s tie and let him fall backward down the steps.
“She always thought you were a snake.”
Chapter Thirty-five
The unusually thick mist had found its way inside the prison as well.
Bentley was at first confused by what was happening, the dreamlike quality of it all making him doubt the moment.
Was he actually asleep? Dozing in the back of the car as Pym drove?
He stood still, turning to look at the guardhouse, where the prison’s security detail stood. They appeared dazed, frozen by the moment, staring out dreamily as the dense fog billowed and roiled around their feet and legs.
They hadn’t even given him a look as he passed.
The sound of a raven’s cry broke his contemplation, and Bentley looked back to the prison entrance. The door was slightly ajar, as if beckoning him to enter.
He remembered the layout of the foreboding structure, and found himself walking the halls to the warden’s office. He found the loathsome man sitting at his desk, as Tianna’s vision had shown him, hunkered over a pile of papers, pen clasped tightly in his swollen hand. The floor was obscured by the preternatural fog as a single light burned at the desk’s corner, and Bentley was compelled to go behind the desk, to verify what it was that would have the warden working so late.
The warden had indeed been signing William Tuttle’s execution papers, the final bit of bookkeeping to put the murderer in the ground. For a moment, Bentley thought there might still be time, that maybe with these papers incomplete, William might have been spared.
Roderick called to him from somewhere close by.
Bentley left the office, following the mist-covered corridor to another more secure building that housed the general population of prisoners. He remembered the clamor of his last visit and was taken aback by the eerie quiet and stillness. The mist had found its way up and into all the cells, blanketing the floors in a roiling carpet of white. As before, the ghosts were there, standing in or outside the cells of those they haunted, but tonight their focus appeared to be on Bentley.
And where he was going.
The raven called out, his voice echoing in the distance, and Bentley moved toward the sound. As he traveled the twisting halls, Bentley freely passed through normally locked metal doors meant to keep the wretched population from escaping, now ajar, allowing him to go as he pleased. To his right, he passed the meeting room where he and William Tuttle had first talked, and where he had become doubtful of the large man’s guilt.
A fat lot of good that had done him, Bentley chided himself, finding his way to a staircase that descended into the bowels of the prison.
The raven’s caw drew him down.
Bentley needed to hold on to the railing as he traveled downward, the roiling gray fog so thick upon the stairs that it obscured his feet. That was all he needed—to trip and fall upon the steps and break his neck.
The lower level was even darker and more depressing than the floor above, if that was even possible. There was a smell in the air, like a hot August night just before a powerful storm. The smell of burnt ozone.
Two guards were in the corridor, and he immediately froze, watching them through the holes of his mask. They were very much like all the others, awake but almost in a kind of trance. One stood very still, staring down at his polished black shoes, his mouth moving ever so slightly as if in prayer, and the other leaned against the stone wall, staring at the caged lightbulb on the ceiling. Bentley passed them, completely unnoticed.
At the end of the corridor was where the action against William Tuttle was taken. He entered the room where the electrocution had taken place. The heavy wooden chair, which often went by the name of Old Sparky, sat there looking satisfied over its latest offering. The burnt ozone smell was incredibly strong, but there was another smell as well. Something sickeningly sweet, and greasy, and strangely—horribly—appetizing.
The smell of cooked meat.
> His stomach burbled hungrily, and he suddenly felt the need to vomit, but Roderick again cried out for his attention, distracting him from the urge.
He left Old Sparky’s room and went around the corner, where he found another heavy door standing ajar. This led to a stone corridor with a rounded ceiling.
The sound of the raven came from somewhere at the end, and he knew deep down in his soul that this was where he would find William Tuttle.
Bentley walked the corridor to the end, the burnt ozone smell slowly starting to fade, to be replaced by something heavier, an antiseptic smell of bleach and isopropyl alcohol. He was in the infirmary. An old, grizzled, bespectacled doctor stood outside his examining room, a cigarette burning in his mouth, an incredibly long piece of ash dangling precariously at the end, ready to fall. There was a stethoscope around his long, scrawny neck. Bentley looked inside the room for any sign of William, but he was nowhere to be found.
And then Roderick cried out from somewhere in the room.
Bentley passed through the doctor’s office, then through the infirmary itself with its four beds. Two of the beds held prisoners, gripped in the hold of unusual sleep. The mist swirled around their beds, and they moaned ever so slightly, caught in the grip of nightmare, their sins haunting them as they slept.
Beyond the infirmary was another, smaller passage, which led to an area of the lower section of the prison reserved for those who had escaped in a far more finite way.
The morgue was nothing fancy: a square room with a heavy metal door, compressors humming and rattling nearby as the contents of the room were kept at a temperature much colder than the rooms outside it.
The door was closed, but it opened with an ominous click and an inner sanctum–type creak, beckoning him to enter. The mist roiled at his feet as he walked through the doorway into the frigid confines of the chamber. A stretcher sat in the room’s center, the large form upon it covered with a sheet.
Bentley’s heart sank at the sight of the figure lying perfectly still upon the stretcher.
His failure.
The ghost of Tianna Hoops materialized from the fog upon the floor, standing over the sheet-covered corpse of her lover.
“I’m so sorry,” Bentley told her. “I tried to get here in time, but…”
She looked at him, but he did not feel the sadness leaking from her that he’d experienced before. There’s something different in her face, Bentley thought. A look of …
Tianna raised her delicate hand, pointing to the figure upon the stretcher.
… expectation.
Chapter Thirty-six
BEFORE:
Phillip lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the marble staircase, still alive but unable to rise.
The man twitched and moaned pitifully where he lay. There was an enormous gash on the side of his head, which bled freely onto the marble floor at the foot of the stairs.
Grim Death slowly descended the stairs, the ghost of the man’s mother floating by his side.
Phillip was positioned in such a way, at the steps’ end, that he could see Grim Death’s approach.
“Puh … please,” he begged, blood bubbling up from somewhere broken inside.
“It’s useless to beg,” Grim Death said, standing on the steps above where Phillip sprawled. “For the act you carried out, a price must be paid.”
The man squirmed and moaned, a pathetic attempt to escape Grim Death, who now loomed over him.
“Yes, your mother was dying … her time in this world was limited, but it was still her time.”
Grim Death paused to let his words sink in.
“You took that time from her. You stole the life she had left.”
Phillip was trying to move, to rise, but he was unable to, his injuries crippling him.
“The penance for the crime you committed?” Grim Death asked him.
Phillip’s mouth was bloody, and he tried to speak, to beg for mercy, but his pleas went ignored.
“The death you deserve,” Grim Death said, reaching down with both hands. One pinched Phillip’s nostrils closed, while the other clamped over his mouth.
“A grim death.”
Philip moaned briefly, his body struggling to hold on to the life it still contained, but he did not last for long.
The ghost of his mother looked down upon the corpse of her son, wearing an expression both satisfied and sad.
She then looked to Grim Death.
“Good?” he asked.
And she smiled, nodded, and faded away like so much smoke.
Yet strangely fulfilled.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Bentley did as the ghost wanted.
Reaching out with a tentative hand, he grabbed the sheet, preparing himself for what he would see lying beneath.
His failure personified.
“Are you sure?” he asked the ghost of Tianna Hoops.
The ghost did not answer, continuing to stare at the shape upon the stretcher.
Bentley pulled back the sheet and looked upon the body of William Tuttle. He was still wearing his prison uniform, and his head of curly brown hair had been shaved at the top, where the metal cap would have been placed to allow the current to course through his body and fry his brain. A severe burn had charred the bare skin there, making it look as though he were wearing a black beanie. Though he was very dead, Tuttle’s skin was still a bright red from the electrical current that had passed through him. The man’s handsome face was locked in a painful grimace, as if he had steeled himself against the onslaught of death.
Bentley stared, not really knowing what he was supposed to do. He could have used Roderick to guide him further.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner, William,” Bentley said, his voice echoing strangely in the freezer. “I tried … I really did.”
Tianna’s spirit had drifted closer, and gazed down at the man she loved.
“I doubt I would have been able to save you, even if I had gotten here in time,” Bentley said. “But at least I would have been able to tell you that you didn’t do this.”
He looked at the ghost.
“You didn’t kill her,” he said. “Yes, it was you physically, but you weren’t in control. Somebody … something else did that. But I took care of that, and they’ll never do it to anybody ever again.”
Bentley felt a bit foolish talking to the corpse, but it seemed like the best idea in the moment.
He was finished now, unsure if there was anything more that he should do.
“I think I’m done here,” he told Tianna’s ghost, feeling the weight of the evening’s activities starting to weigh upon him, his eyelids growing heavier by the second behind his mask. He would need to sleep, to heal, if he were to function again as an agent of Death.
The ghost did not move, continuing to float there, gazing down at her lover’s body.
As he started to pull the sheet back up and over the man’s grimacing face, she reached out and laid a spectral hand upon the body. Bentley thought it a nice gesture, just as he was about to cover William’s face.
A jagged bolt of what looked to be static electricity crackled to life, momentarily connecting him to the dead man. Bentley yelped, yanking back his hand and frantically moving his fingers. There was a numbness there now, and he wanted to get the feeling back. He had no idea where the spark had originated—if it had come from him and entered the corpse of William Tuttle, or if somehow the body of the man had held on to some of the electrical charge that had ended his life.
Still wriggling the feeling back into his fingers, Bentley looked over to see that Tianna was almost gone, her spectral form fading away. Soon, all that remained was the most beautiful of smiles, like Alice’s Cheshire cat, and then that, too, was gone, leaving behind only a memory of what had been there.
Bentley wondered if Tianna was somehow satisfied with what had happened, if she had received enough closure to move on to her next adventure. Whatever had occurred, she’d seemed happy at the
last of it.
William Tuttle sat up on the stretcher, the name of his lover on his lips. “Tianna.”
Bentley stepped back in surprise as the dead man turned his head to look at him.
From somewhere close by came the caw of a raven and the fluttering of ebony wings.
Chapter Thirty-eight
BEFORE:
Pym helped him from the car, into their home.
The sun had just begun to rise as they maneuvered themselves inside.
“Are you sure you don’t require a doctor?” the manservant asked him, as they moved through the front of the house to the back.
“I’m fine, Pym,” Bentley said, his words slurring. “Just tired … so very tired.”
Pym managed to pull out a kitchen chair and helped him to sit. Bentley, still wearing the face of Grim Death, swayed upon the seat.
“I’m surprised,” Bentley said, struggling to keep from sliding from the chair to the kitchen floor.
Pym watched him with stern eyes, finally coming forward and pulling the skull mask from his face.
“I can’t talk to you that way,” he said, throwing the mask down upon the kitchen table. The way he looked at it, Bentley expected it to scuttle off into the darkness to escape, like some loathsome insect.
“What surprises you?” Pym continued. He’d grabbed a dishtowel from somewhere and was wiping the hand that had touched the mask.
“How exhausting it all is,” Bentley said.
He could see that Pym wanted to say so much, but the butler kept it to himself, which was probably for the better. The less Pym knew about this strange new facet of the world that he’d been indoctrinated into, the safer he would be.
“Maybe some coffee,” the butler said, moving toward the stove.
Bentley watched the man through bleary eyes as he prepared to make them coffee. For a moment he put himself in Pym’s place, and felt a nearly overwhelming guilt, mixed with sadness. How strange this must be for him, Bentley thought, looking to the mask lying upon the table. But he continues to unswervingly serve me.