The Dead Gentleman (5 page)

Instead the man bent down, his face finally coming out from the shadows, and smiled. A lipless, grinning skull looked at me from beneath the brim of that rich gentleman’s cap. Dried flesh was drawn tight over a face like parchment. Patches were missing here and there, and he glared at me with empty, eyeless sockets circled with ragged skin. I was staring right into the face of a corpse in its funeral best, but this corpse still moved. I could feel his hot breath on my cheek as he leaned in close. It smelled like rot. It smelled like the grave.

I don’t think my mind was working right, just then—I was looking at something too unbelievable, too horrible to be real. But luckily my body was working just fine and instinct took over. I dropped the useless razor and swung my legs around, kicking with all my might. This corpse-man looked brittle, but his grip was strong and I couldn’t shake him loose. Outside, the coachman and his big companion had noticed the struggle. The cab door swung wide open and a bald-headed giant reached inside. His hands were easily the size of my whole head, and he was trying to wrap them around my scrawny neck. But this man, at least, was flesh and bone. I knew how to deal with flesh and bone, even when outsized.

The big man grabbed my other hand, and though I’d dropped my razor in the struggle, I still had teeth. I hissed like an alley cat as I bit down on the man’s little finger. The man shouted in pain and anger, bringing his other hand around in a heavy, backhanded slap. I curled my shoulder around to take most of the blow,
but the edges of my vision went black with spots. Blood dribbled down my chin, and only some of it belonged to the giant. But suddenly I was free—the force of the man’s wild slap had broken the corpse-man’s grip as well.

The corpse-man was trying to push past the giant’s bulk to make another grab at me, but the two men got twisted up in each other’s arms. As I scurried across the seats to the far door, I put a foot on the step, preparing to launch myself out onto the street. But something caught my eye—there on the floor of the carriage was the delicate birdcage. Inside, the little metal bird was looking at me with its head cocked in a curious expression.

Wasting a precious few seconds to grab the birdcage would be the dangerous and reckless thing to do, and maybe that’s why I did it. I left the carriage door hanging open as I lunged, wrapping both hands around the cage’s wire handle. By the time I made it back to the door, the giant had untangled himself and the corpse-man was reaching for me again. Things had suddenly gotten worse.

I just managed to dodge the man’s grab and jump out the door—and into the waiting coachman. He’d come around to cut off my escape while I’d tussled with the giant. If the coachman had tried a grab then I would have been done for, but he tried using his whip on me instead. The whip crack missed my face by mere inches as I rolled under the cab’s wheel well. I’d escaped the lash, but now I was trapped beneath the carriage. The coachman was shouting at me from one side; on the other, the giant’s tree-trunk legs stomped back and forth. And above, in the carriage, was a grinning dead man.

The clockwork bird gave out a worried chirp.

The copper’s whistle was still in my pocket. I stuck it in my
mouth and wrapped my legs around the undercarriage, lifting myself up with my free hand, the other gripping the birdcage close. Hugging the underside of the carriage, I cleared six inches between the ground and myself. Then I blew. The whistle cut through the night. It was intended to summon other police officers in the event of a ghastly crime, though here in the Bowery no such help would ever come. But the high-pitched, shrieking whistle did have another, more useful effect—it spooked the carriage horses.

Rearing on their hind legs, the horses shook the carriage loose from its steps and began a panicked gallop down the cobblestone alleyway, taking me with them. They made it as far as Bleecker Street before I dropped to the hard stones, praying that my arms and legs would escape the crushing back wheels. The hard landing knocked the wind out of me, and it was all I could do to lie there and watch the out-of-control carriage disappear into the heavy fog. Before I lost sight of it, the back window shutter slid open, revealing a leering skull behind it.

After a moment, I gathered my wits about me, listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. The coachman and the giant would be in hot pursuit, but this was my neighborhood and I could disappear in its knot of shacks and alleys and never be seen again. I was bruised and sick with shock, and I wanted to get far away from the unholy things I’d seen that night and the memory of a dead man that walked among the living.

But first I held up my prize and risked another few seconds studying it. The cage was bent from the fall, but the bird seemed undamaged.

“I don’t suppose you have a name, then?” I asked.

The bird’s little glass eyes blinked at me, but it made no sound.

“Well, you certainly are a remarkable little toy. Magical, really.”

The bird cocked its head at me.

“Merlin,” I said, remembering a story my mother used to tell about a wizard and his boy king. “Yeah, Merlin it is.”

Then, as I dusted myself off, I added, “Hope you’re worth the trouble.”

Well, it stunk to be insane but it was nice to be loved. And her father, Bernie, and the half of Manhattan who’d heard her screaming now thought Jez was certifiable. In the hours since, she’d begun to wonder if they might be right.

As she lay on her bed staring at the unfinished fairy-garden mural, Jezebel’s gaze kept drifting back to her closed closet door. And she remembered the ghost boy’s warning.

The closet in a dark room—there are monsters in there
.

It wasn’t even a particularly menacing closet. Just a plain door. Coat of fresh white paint, cheap aluminum doorknob. It wasn’t even a walk-in. The last time Jez checked, it had been full of hanging clothes, a shoe cubby and a few hatboxes of dolls that she was too self-conscious to play with anymore but too sentimental to throw away.

What I should do is go over there right now and open the darn
thing up and prove that it is still just a closet. Then I can go to sleep and forget that this whole embarrassment of a day ever happened
.

But she didn’t. Jez did not get up and swing open the closet door. Instead, she pulled off her shoes and socks and curled up under the covers, not bothering to take off her jeans and hooded sweatshirt. She kept the light on and sat there with a book in her lap, unread. She listened to the sounds of the city outside her window, but she kept her eyes on that door. The storm had weakened to a pitter-patter of infrequent raindrops, and a fog had just begun to roll in. The normal sound track of car horns and traffic had resumed, and every now and then she heard the trot of horses’ hooves echoing along the pavement. That was her favorite city sound. Even though she knew that it was just one of the park’s mounted police officers or tourists braving a carriage ride, the clip-clop still made the city feel exotic, like a place out of time.

At around ten o’clock her father peeked in to check on her. He had a smear of bright blue just below his lip and a few flakes of red in his hair, which showed he’d been working on one of his paintings. Though working was probably too strong a word for what he had time for—these days he mostly dabbled in the same two or three paintings over and over again. Constantly tweaking, never finishing. Like her bedroom mural.

“Hey, kiddo.”

For a moment she actually considered asking him to check her closet. It was something she hadn’t done in years—ask her father to give her bedroom the “all clear” before lights-out. It was the kind of thing that little girls asked their fathers to do, little girls who hadn’t yet packed away their dolls.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Whatcha reading?”

Jez glanced down at the book in her lap. She’d pulled it randomly off the bookshelf in the hall. She hadn’t even bothered looking at the title.

“Uh,
Journey to the Center of the Earth
,” she said, looking at the gold-embossed binding.

“Oh, yeah? Jules Verne. What do you think of it so far?”

“Well, I … I just started it. The jury’s still out.”

“It’s a good one. Ancient secrets, adventure and … dinosaurs!”

Jez caught him looking interestedly at the unfinished mural. “No! Do not get any ideas, Dad. I probably won’t even like it.”

“Hmm, you’re right. A T-rex
and
a unicorn would probably be too much.”

“Dad! Killing me!”

He laughed. “Joking, Jez.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and set a throw pillow in his lap. It was a frilly, girly thing—out of place in this new room. As he spoke he ran the lace border through his fingers, and Jez wondered if he realized that it had been sewn by her mother. She doubted he remembered it. Jezebel had thought about calling her mother to tell her what happened, but she decided against it. When things went wrong, Jez’s first instinct was always to go to her mother. She knew it hurt her dad’s feelings, but while she loved them both, Mom was
home
. After he’d moved out, her dad’s world had just seemed so alien. Her weekends with him were like visits to another world where she could never quite relax. He tried to make her feel at home but it hadn’t worked so far, and it was tiring pretending that it had. But Jez’s mother would’ve handled today’s crisis differently than her father had handled it—was handling it. And if given the chance, her mother would’ve
let everyone know it. The two of them, Jez’s mother and father, had handled so many things so very differently over the years that they’d ruined their marriage in the end.

To their credit, they were trying desperately not to ruin Jez.

“So, I didn’t have a chance to ask you how your session with Dr. Anders went last week,” said her father. “You guys getting along?”

Here it was.

“Yes, Dad. He’s fine.”

“I know your mom said that you can’t keep firing your doctors, but if you feel like someone else might be better, then we could always …”

“He’s fine, Dad. It’s not the shrinks, anyway. It’s me. Now I’m seeing things.”

Her father reached down and stroked her hair. His hands were dry and cracked from the constant washing and rewashing of his paintbrushes. A badge of his trade. “Bernard said that there aren’t any other exits from the basement, and he would’ve heard somebody running up the steps past his door. The draft that slammed the basement door shut came from the lobby. But he’ll ask the other tenants to be on the lookout for any strangers hanging around.”

“So, I’m crazy.”

“Sure, you’re crazy. You’re crazy-smart, crazy-beautiful and crazy-talented. But you’re not crazy-crazy. I know you saw something down there. And you know your mom and I love you no matter what, right?”

She nodded. Of course they loved her. Parents always thought the obvious answers were the profound ones. But they weren’t; they were just obvious.

He smiled, though, satisfied. “Now get some sleep.” He took the book out of her hands and tucked the blanket up to her chin. “We’ll talk more about all this stuff tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll make sense in the daylight.”

Then he kissed her forehead and switched off the light. He mouthed “I love you” as he pulled shut the door with a soft click, leaving her in a dark room, the light of the city shining through her window like a dim spotlight.

As Jez rubbed at the spot on her cheek where her father’s stubbly chin had scratched her skin, a horrible thought occurred to her. It struck her with such force that she nearly bolted upright in bed.

She’d just been
tucked in
.

“No way!” she said as she threw back the covers and marched over to the closet door. She was so mortified by this last, worst indignation after a day of humiliation that she didn’t even bother to switch on the light.

She was not a little girl who needed tucking in. She was not a girl afraid of dark closets.

The door stuck at first. It had recently had a paint job and it needed breaking in. It opened on the second try, after Jez gave it a great two-handed heave, and it swung wide on its freshly oiled hinges. Her eyes had adjusted to the low light of her bedroom, but inside the closet it was ink-black.

She half expected a gust of wind or strange faerie light to burst forth, but the air didn’t move.

“This is so stupid,” Jez said, reaching her hand out to prove, once and for all, that a closet is just a closet, even in the dark.

“Yes,” came a small whisper from inside. “Five plump child fingers! We can snap them off and save them for later.”

“Shh!” said another voice. “You’ll scare her and spoil the treat! She doesn’t even have it yet. Fool!”

Jez froze, her hand outstretched just inches from the doorframe, barely a pinky stretch away from the solid black wall of the closet shadow. She couldn’t pull her hand back, and she couldn’t summon the voice to scream. She felt suddenly unsteady on her feet, like she might fall forward into the dark.