The Dead Gentleman

by Matthew Cody

  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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  JEZEBEL

  NEW YORK CITY, TODAY

  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 bee
n 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.

  “What’s she waiting for?” the first voice asked. “Why isn’t she bringing her crunchy and juicy bits in here for us to bite?”

  “Because she heard you!” the second voice scolded. “Now she waits to see if she is dreaming. She hopes that she’ll wake up with the closet closed and safe and snug in her warm bed.”

  “Then let’s get her first! We can have more than just fingers! We’ll leave enough so that she can tell us where the master’s bird is.”

  There was a clatter of movement from within the closet—the sound of something being shifted around, of bodies squeezing past shoeboxes and hangers. At the sound of movement, Jez managed to yank her body back into action, though it felt like cracking a layer of frost from her joints, and she grabbed the open closet door and shoved at it, hard. The door stuck again, but this time it was because of something blocking the doorframe—something small and fat had wedged itself in the way.

  “Ouch!” the thing shouted in its full voice, which sounded like the squeal of a chair leg being dragged across the kitchen floor. “She’s got me! She’s going to mash me in the door! Stop her! Save me!”

  The first voice answered from somewhere inside the room, from the nooks and crannies of shadow that the window glow wouldn’t touch. “I can’t get to her! She’s still standing in the nasty city light.”

  Jez kept her weight on the door, but whatever it was that she’d trapped was pushing back, and it was surprisingly strong. Her arms were shaking with the effort and her mouth had gone dry. Her tongue tasted of metal, of adrenaline.

  “Eww! I’m crushing, I’m breaking,” said the thing in the door. “Get the shade! Pull the shade and we’ll have her!”

  There was a scurrying then, as something ran on short legs around the outer edge of her room. It was keeping to the shadows, avoiding the light of the window, hopping over her laundry basket and scampering over her desk. A cup of pens went spilling over the edge and onto the floor, rolling across the hardwood floor like the rattling of bones.

  The little creature was almost to the open window shade. One tug on the dangling cord would smother the outside light behind thick vinyl, leaving Jez in nearly total darkness.

  Jez gave the closet door one last, strong kick—eliciting a satisfying squeal from whatever was trapped inside—and made a lunge for the desk lamp. Her knee banged against something hard as she skidded and slid on the spilled pens littering the ground. On her hands and knees now, she crawled across the floor. The way suddenly went dark as she heard the rip-cord sound of the window shade drawing shut, and then Jez was moving through blackness, feeling her way to where she prayed her desk was.

  The little creatures began to giggle as she heard the thump of plump bodies landing on the floor, accompanied by the pounding of little feet and the smacking of lips and chomping of teeth.

  Her hand found the desk leg just as something cold found her ankle. She kicked it off and pulled herself up, frantically feeling for the lamp switch.

  She heard the snap of tiny jaws as her sock was pulled halfway off her foot. Several clawed fingers pulled her pant leg up, exposing her skinny calf.

  She found the switch.

  There was a click, then a brilliant flash that left spots in her eyes. When they cleared, she was alone in her room. The shade was drawn, the closet door ajar and pens and pencils scattered along the floor. One sock had been stretched and twisted and now hung limply from her toes. Her left pant leg was hiked up to near her knee. But she was alone.

  She pulled herself to standing and grabbed the nearest heavy object—a soccer sportsmanship trophy that she didn’t deserve—and examined the innocent-seeming closet. She nudged the door aside with her foot while holding at the ready the marble base of her only trophy. She couldn’t stop shaking.

  Clothes and shoes. Solid walls and shelves. Nothing out of the ordinary, no more whispered voices. It was a closet, the same as it had been this morning and every other time she’d opened it.

  Maybe Jez was really losing her mind. Perhaps all this was just a continuation of the same delusion that had begun in the basement. First she was seeing ghost boys, and now she was battling monsters in the dark. But Jez knew herself better than that. She was not flighty, not prone to fantasies or daydreams. Someone had been in that basement today. Something had come out of that closet just now.

  She opened the bedroom door and peeked down the hall. Her father’s light was still on; she could see it beneath his bedroom door, but she could hear his snores even from here. He’d probably fallen asleep reading again.

  She gently closed her door and took a look around the room, surveying the damage. A few broken pencils, her desk chair was overturned, but not much else. She wouldn’t be turning off her light tonight, that was for sure, but nevertheless there was something that needed doing right away. The window shade was hung between two unused curtain rods and was easily removed. As Jez rolled the vinyl shade up she looked approvingly at her newly bare, unobstructed window. The light of a thousand New York street lamps and neon signs shone down upon her bed, and it would never go dark again.

  She stowed the rolled-up shade, appropriately, in her closet behind a hanging shoe rack and some poster tubes. As she did so, she tested the walls for hollow sounds that might indicate a hidden door or false floor. But it all felt solid; there were no exits except for the door itself. It occurred to her as she closed it tight that it was a shame closets didn’t lock from the outside. She knew she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight anyway, so she busied herself with one last sweep of the room. Trophy-mallet in hand, she peered behind every book, under the bed and in every corner, looking for any trace of her attackers, but there was no sign of them. It was just another rainy night and her closet was just a closet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TOMMY

  NEW YORK, 1900

  I stared at the bird. The bird stared back at me. This had been our routine for the better part of two weeks. The contest would go on for most of the night until I finally mumbled, “What are you looking at, you stupid bird?” and rolled over, hugging the frayed, moth-eaten woman’s coat I’d been using for a blanket, and closed my eyes.

  Sleep didn’t come easily. It hadn’t ever since I’d looked into the face of a dead man and seen him smiling back at me. My dreams had rarely been pleasant things, but they’d lately turned downright nightmarish. Grinning skulls and pauper’s graves visited me now. When I was very young, I’d been taught to say prayers for the well-being of loved ones before bed. Since taking to the streets, and since I had no more loved ones to speak of, I’d altered the practice more to my liking and
offered up a nightly list of curses instead.

  “A pox on Nate the Twist for taking more than his fair share of last week’s score,” I recited. “May boils burst on Eaglesham the Scrivener for running me off his shop’s stoop yesterday. May Quick-Bladed Jenny’s knives snap for telling me there were meat pies being tossed out near Brown’s Bakery when there weren’t any. A curse on Copper Bryant, Copper Scott, Copper Black and that big, hairy-knuckled Copper who walks the beat near Church but whose name escapes me now. A curse on …” My little list had been getting longer of late, lasting ten minutes or more until I reached the end: “Lastly, may this squawking piece of junk rust its beady little eyes shut, and may my own eyes be cursed for ever looking upon it. Amen and good riddance.” And with this, Merlin would cock its head at me quizzically and let out a long, tired whistle.

  In the weeks since my daring robbery of the fantastic clockwork bird, I’d made quite the discovery—that it was impossible to make any money from a fantastic clockwork bird when the entire underworld of New York was looking for it. Sure, I’d been on the lam before, but never like this. Within hours of the heist, word had gone out to every ne’er-do-well and vagabond in Manhattan that something very valuable had been stolen by a common street boy matching my description. The missing item was a shiny metal bird statue, a toy for the very rich, and a very rich man was willing to pay a king’s fortune to get it back. And beneath those rumors were darker whispers that this very rich man was actually someone very well-connected and spiteful, and he was preparing to make life hell for all the street folk of Lower Manhattan if he didn’t get his pet prize back in a hurry. Greed and fear were working together to make a nasty little brew on the streets out there.