Night Music

by John Connolly

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s an old bootlegger’s myth,” said Tendell. “At the full moon, you leave a bottle for Razorshins.”

  “Razorshins? What is Razorshins?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Now you’re curious? Fuck you. Go to sleep.”

  Tendell went into Wallace’s bedroom and found some cushions, pillows, and spare blankets. He distributed them to his men, keeping one pillow for himself, then lay down on a bearskin rug with his coat over him. He saw Blum pour himself another cup of coffee. He closed his eyes.

  Tendell was not a superstitious man—he was not even particularly religious—but he understood the necessity of being tolerant of the convictions of others, especially when those individuals were doing one a favor, even if it did come at the cost of a little booze. He knew that those who lived and worked in the North Woods had their own mythologies. They did not harm gray jays because they believed them to be the reincarnated spirits of deceased woodsmen, and white owls were regarded as omens of ill luck, to the extent that there were woodsmen who avoided the areas in which they dwelt. Tendell had also spent time with men who claimed to have glimpsed the Wendigo, the Indian spirit, although such tales invariably involved dark references to cannibalism and were less to be believed than tolerated.

  Razorshins was not new to Tendell, for men of his acquaintance claimed that their fathers and grandfathers had long paid obeisance to it, leaving out jugs of moonshine once a month so that it wouldn’t interfere with their stills. During the previous century, a handful of scalpings and mutilations in the region, blamed on rogue natives, were later secretly ascribed to Razorshins. Nobody had ever seen the creature, so no one could say for sure, but Tendell knew of Maine moonshiners, men who were no fools, who swore that they had left out jugs and came back in the morning to find them empty or gone, and unfamiliar tracks in the vicinity: almost skeletal, they said, the feet strangely narrow, with six toes and, some said, a kind of spine or spike at the heel.

  Tendell opened his eyes. Blum was still seated by the fire, sipping coffee. Beside him, Wallace moaned in his sleep. The old man would live, but they’d never be welcome on his land again, no matter how much liquor they offered. Blum had pissed on that patch for sure.

  Tendell closed his eyes again and tried to sleep.

  •  •  •

  He was woken by a groan from over by the fire. He saw Blum on his feet, clutching his guts. Tendell tried not to smile. If a man wasn’t used to eating critters, it could do funny things to his digestion. He heard Blum break wind loudly and swear. Around him, the others snored.

  Tendell raised himself up on an elbow.

  “You better get to the outhouse before you gas us all,” he said.

  “That fucking stew,” hissed Blum. “It’s tearing up my insides.”

  “You’re just not used to rich food, I guess,” said Tendell. He glanced at the window. “Can’t tell for sure, but it looks like the snow’s stopped. That’s something.”

  Blum had removed his boots. He pulled them on, wrapped his coat around him, and staggered to the door.

  “You see my hat?” he asked.

  “No,” said Tendell. “I got no idea where your hat is.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “You better hurry, or you’re going to shit yourself.”

  Blum took one last look around for his missing hat, then resigned himself to managing without it.

  “You might want to reconsider that bottle while you’re out there,” said Tendell, but Blum did not reply. He stepped into the cold and pulled the door closed behind him. One of the drivers stirred in his sleep, but none appeared to wake.

  “Tendell.”

  The voice was Wallace’s.

  “You okay, Earl?” asked Tendell.

  He got up and walked over to the fire to check on the old man. The flames were dying. He placed a log on them, positioning it so that it would burn and not smother.

  “Lock the door,” said the old man.

  Tendell thought he had misheard.

  “Say what?”

  “Lock the door. Do it now. There isn’t much time.”

  “What are you talking about? Blum’s out there.”

  “And he’s not alone. Listen! Do you hear it?”

  Tendell listened, but heard nothing.

  “It’s all quiet,” he said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  And then the sound came: the faintest pressure on snow, the crunching of fallen flakes, and something else—a clicking, like bone striking on bone.

  Tendell left Wallace and walked to the window. The sky had cleared, and the woods glowed in the moonlight. He could see the barn where the Cadillacs were locked away, and to the right of it the little outhouse in which Blum was doing his business, the only marks on the snow his footsteps leading up to it.

  “I can’t—” said Tendell.

  He saw it. He might have ascribed the movement to the breeze, had there been a breeze, to branches moving and casting shadows, but the night was entirely still. He struggled to comprehend what he was looking at, because the creature kept to the woods as it worked its way toward the outhouse, but the closest comparison he could find was to a massive stick insect, or a praying mantis. It was seven feet tall at least, and the color of buttercream gone sour. It was almost without flesh, for Tendell could count every bone beneath the skin that draped its body. Its knee joints bent backward so that it leaned forward as it walked. Its arms were raised before it, the hands probing at the air, the fingers long and ending in curved talons that clicked against one another. Bone spikes protruded from behind the knee and ankle, and from its elbows and wrists. A ragged line of them ran down its spine like the plates on dinosaurs that Tendell had seen in natural history museums. Its head was curved like the blade of an ax, a similarity that was confirmed when it turned toward the window, revealing a face no wider than Tendell’s closed fist, and a mouth filled with sharp, fishlike teeth. It had no eyes, or none that Tendell could discern, but its nostrils were massive and wet and sniffed at the night.

  “Lock it!” said Wallace.

  “What about Blum?”

  At that moment, Blum emerged from the outhouse, still buttoning his pants.

  “Blum!” Tendell rapped at the window. “Blum!”

  He heard movement behind him as the other drivers began to wake.

  “Keep quiet,” said Wallace. “You must keep quiet.”

  Blum looked over, squinting at the window. A shadow fell across him, and his hands dropped to his sides as he saw what was coming for him. His trousers fell to his ankles. He tried to run, and there came a sound like the hissing of a scythe, and suddenly Blum was lying on the snow, his right leg entirely severed below the knee.

  Blum let out an animal cry.

  Tendell turned to get to the door, but Riber stood in his way, just as he had earlier come between Blum and Wallace. Behind him, Conlon had moved to secure the cottage.

  “We have to help him,” said Tendell.

  “We can’t,” said Riber.

  “If you go out there, you’ll die,” said Wallace from the chair. “We may all die yet.”

  Tendell tried to slip by Riber, but he was no match for the Dane, who pushed him back.

  “No,” said Riber.

  Tendell again looked out the window. Blum was trying to drag himself through the snow, trailing blood behind him. The creature towered above him, and as Tendell watched, it began slashing at Blum with its arms and legs, tearing through the fabric of his coat to leave bloody gashes in its wake. And all the time Blum kept crying out, over and over, until finally the creature grasped his hair in its left hand, and its right spur scalped him with a single swipe.

  Tendell looked away. When he turned back, the creature was holding Blum’s body upside down by the left leg. It swung him, and Blum was tossed into the darkness of the woods, but the creature remaine
d staring at the house.

  Tendell saw that Riber, Conlon, and Marks were now all armed.

  “Guns won’t do any good,” said Wallace. “Just get away from the windows. Come to the fire.”

  The four men did as he said, but nobody set aside a gun. A shadow passed across the nearest window, and then the door was tested. They heard a tapping against the wood of the walls, and a scratching at the glass by the far window. Finally there was silence, until a crashing noise came from outside.

  “It’s in the barn,” said Tendell.

  Glass broke. Metal was crushed and wood splintered, then all was quiet again. Ten minutes went by, then fifteen, until Tendell found the courage to approach the window.

  “I think it’s gone,” he said.

  “No,” said Wallace. “It’s still out there. It’s waiting.”

  “For what?” asked Riber.

  “For one of us to go out. I think,” said Wallace, “that sometimes it forgets how much it likes blood.”

  None of them moved from the fire, until at last dawn came. The night departed, and with it went Razorshins.

  •  •  •

  They found some of Blum’s remains in the woods, but identifying them as such would have been a problem for anyone unfamiliar with the manner of his passing. They buried what was left of him in the woods.

  “What’ll we tell King Solomon?” asked Conlon.

  “Nothing,” said Tendell. “My orders were to drop Blum off in Portland. As far as anyone here is concerned, that’s what I did.”

  “The King won’t believe it.”

  “Let that be Dan’s problem.”

  One of the Cadillacs was damaged beyond repair, but most of its cases were salvageable. They redistributed them among the remaining cars, and Tendell used Wallace’s plow to clear a path to the road, for Wallace himself was too weak to help. They left him with two more cases for his trouble, but he didn’t thank them, and Tendell never saw him again.

  It was only as they were leaving that Tendell saw Motke Blum’s hat. It was lying by a fence post, beside an empty bottle. Around it were narrow, six-toed prints.

  Tendell did not mention it to the others.

  •  •  •

  The disappearance of Motke Blum caused friction between Dan Carroll and King Solomon that threatened to erupt into violence, but later that same year two gunmen named Burke and Coyne put an end to the King in the men’s room of Boston’s Cotton Club, while Big Dan Carroll rode his luck, just as he always had, and eventually passed away in 1946 at the age of sixty-three.

  Shortly before Dan died, my grandfather shared with him the real story of Motke Blum’s death. By then Carroll was a shell of the man he once had been, but he still had his mind.

  “You should have told me the truth,” Carroll said.

  “You’d have believed me?” asked my grandfather.

  “I always believed you,” said Carroll. “The only time I didn’t was when you said that you left Blum in Portland, but it seemed better to accept your story and live with it than start poking holes in it and bring King Solomon down on us all. And, you know, the King might also have believed you, too, had you told him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the day before the King died, someone left a bottle on his doorstep. Inside it was a human scalp, preserved in Canadian liquor. I always wondered about that. You think Wallace sent it?”

  “Probably.”

  “You know that Blum killed his cousin?”

  “No, I never heard that.”

  “He lived in New Hampshire. Made moonshine and got ambitious. Blum was sent to bust up his still and busted him up, too. He wasn’t supposed to kill him, but he went too far.”

  Carroll shifted on his sick bed, and, like an old dog, found a patch of sunlight in which to warm himself.

  “You think Wallace knew that Blum was coming north?”

  “I believe he did.”

  “And the storm?”

  “Good luck, or something more,” said Carroll. “That snow came down real sudden. Took everyone by surprise, from what I can remember.”

  “Wallace wasn’t no shaman.”

  “Wasn’t he? Maybe he didn’t have to be. You ever wonder what he did with all that liquor you gave him? He sure didn’t drink it. Wallace was a teetotaler all his life.”

  “He had a still.”

  “If he did, he never sold anything from it.” Carroll eyed my grandfather. “I thought you knew everything there was to know about those people up there. I reckon you might have been mistaken.”

  “Damn,” said my grandfather.

  “Yeah, damn,” said Carroll. “Everyone, and everything, requires payment. Even King Solomon knew that.”

  Carroll’s eyes began to close. He was nearing his final rest. This would be the last conversation my grandfather had with him.

  “You ever go up there again, Tendell?” he asked. He did not look at my grandfather as he spoke.

  “No, not after what happened.”

  “I’d say that was very wise of you,” said Carroll. “You think it’s still in those woods?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “What do you think it’s doing?”

  And my grandfather remembered Wallace’s words to them, after Razorshins had scalped Motke Blum.

  “Waiting,” he said. “Just waiting.”

  ON THE ANATOMIZATION OF AN UNKNOWN MAN (1637) BY FRANS MIER

  I

  The painting titled The Anatomization of an Unknown Man is one of the more obscure works by the minor Dutch painter Frans Mier. It is an unusual piece, although its subject may be said to be typical of our time: the opening up of a body by what is, one initially assumes, a surgeon or anatomist, the light from a suspended lamp falling over the naked body of the anonymous man, his scalp peeled back to reveal his skull, his innards exposed as the anatomist’s blade hangs suspended, ready to explore further the intricacies of his workings, the central physical component of the universe’s rich complexity.

  I was not long ago in England and witnessed there the hanging of one Elizabeth Evans—Canberry Bess, they called her—a notorious murderer and cutpurse, who was taken with her partner, one Thomas Shearwood. Country Tom was hanged and then gibbeted at Gray’s Inn fields, but it was the fate of Elizabeth Evans to be dissected after her death at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, for the body of a woman is of more interest to the surgeons than that of a man and harder to come by. She wept and screamed as she was brought to the gallows and cried out for a Christian burial, for the terror of the Hall was greater to her than that of the noose itself. Eventually, the hangman silenced her with a rag, for she was disturbing the crowd, and an end was put to her.

  Something of her fear had communicated itself to the onlookers, though, and a commotion commenced at the base of the gallows. Although the surgeons wore the guise of commoners, the crowd knew them for what they were, and a shout arose that the woman had suffered enough under the law and should have no further barbarities visited upon her, although I fear their concern was less for the dignity of her repose than the knowledge that the mob was to be deprived of the display of her carcass in chains at St. Pancras, and the slow exposure of her bones at King’s Cross. Still, the surgeons had their way for, when the noose had done its work, she was cut down and stripped of her apparel, then laid naked in a chest and thrown into a cart. From there, she was carried to the Hall near unto Cripplegate. For a penny, I was permitted, with others, to watch as the surgeons went about their work, and a revelation it was to me.

  But I digress. I merely speak of it to stress that Mier’s painting cannot be understood in isolation. It is a record of our time and should be seen in the context of the work of Valverde and Estienne, of Spigelius and Berrettini and Berengarius, those other great illustrators of the inner mysteries of our corporeal form.

  Yet look closer and it becomes clear that the subject of Mier’s painting is not as it first appears. The unknown man’s face
is contorted in its final agony, but there is no visible sign of strangulation, and his neck is unmarked. If he is a malefactor taken from the gallows, then by what means was his life ended? Although the light is dim, it is clear that his hands have been tied to the anatomist’s table by means of stout rope. Only the right hand is visible, admittedly, but one would hardly secure that and not the other. On his wrist are gashes where he has struggled against his bonds, and blood pours from the table to the floor in great quantities. The dead do not bleed in this way.

  And if this is truly a surgeon, then why does he not wear the attire of a learned man? Why does he labor alone in some dank place and not in a hall or theater? Where are his peers? Why are there no other men of science, no assistants, no curious onlookers enjoying their pennyworth? This, it would appear, is secret work.

  Look: there, in the corner, behind the anatomist, face tilted to stare down at the dissected man. Is that not the head and upper body of a woman? Her left hand is raised to her mouth, and her eyes are wide with grief and horror, but here, too, a rope is visible. She is also restrained, although not so firmly as the anatomist’s victim. Yes, perhaps victim is the word, for the only conclusion to be drawn is that the man on the table is suffering under the knife. This is no corpse from the gallows, and this is not a dissection.

  This is something much worse.

  II

  The question of attribution is always difficult in such circumstances. It resembles, one supposes, the investigation into the commission of a crime. There are clues left behind by the murderer, and it is the work of an astute and careful observer to connect such evidence to the man responsible. The use of a single source of light, shining from right to left, is typical of Mier. So, too, is the elongation of the faces, so that they resemble wraiths more than people, as though their journey into the next life has already begun. The hands, by contrast, are clumsily rendered, those of the anatomist excepted. It may be that they are the efforts of others, for Mier would not be alone among artists in allowing his students to complete his paintings. But then, it could also be the case that it is Mier’s intention to draw our attention to the anatomist’s hands. There is a grace, a subtlety to the scientist’s calling, and Mier is perhaps suggesting that these are skilled fingers holding the blade.