The Nimble Man m-1

by Christopher Golden

  "This should be interesting," Clay murmured, mostly to himself, as he put the car in park and killed the engine. He opened the door but paused when he felt Eve's hand on his arm.

  "Hang on."

  Clay turned to her and was surprised to see pain in her gaze. Eve was usually all hard edges and slick smiles.

  "It's really nothing you did," she said. "It's me."

  One leg already out the door, he held it open and studied her more closely. "How, exactly? How is it you, I mean? We've worked together before, Eve. I've got you and Doyle to thank for setting me straight when my life was a mess. But it's obvious I get under your skin. Why is that?"?Eve nodded slowly, then pushed her hair out of her face and met his gaze. She could be fierce, but at the moment there was vulnerability he had never seen in her before.

  "Think about it. Think about what you are."

  "What I am?"

  She gave him a look that made him feel incredibly stupid, and then pointed upward. "You're His clay. You're connected to Him in a way that nothing else on Earth is. After the suffering he's put me through, you have to ask why being around you hurts me?"

  His heart went cold. Clay stared at her but Eve looked away, opened her door and stepped out, the soles of her boots clicking on the pavement. She shut the door and started toward the house. After a moment Clay followed her, pocketing his keys. He wore the same face, the same form, he had worn in New Orleans, a persona had adopted many years before to make himself feel more human. But he had never been human. Sometimes, when he was particularly fortunate, he forgot that.

  Eve rang the doorbell. With the buzz of mosquito swarms and the blood-red sky the utter normality of that sound seemed grotesquely incongruous, and yet for some reason it set him at ease.

  They stood side by side on the doorstep.

  "You're not the only one He has made suffer," Clay said, his voice low, unwilling to look at her now. "Perverse as it might be, I'd rather be suffering because I was the subject of His vengeance, as you've been, than because He couldn't spare a moment's thought to my fate."

  There were noises inside the house, voices and the staccato noise of rushing footsteps on wooden floors. Clay's attention was drawn to the curtains in the bay window upstairs and he saw the face of a woman appear amidst the bone-white, lace-trimmed fabric. She was perhaps forty and might have been attractive without the fear that was engraved upon her features. Mrs. Ferrick, he assumed. She stared at her two visitors for a moment and then gestured to him to be patient, that she'd be right down, almost as if they were ordinary callers at her door and that the city was not being besieged by hellish occurrences fit for the Biblical book of Revelations.

  Once more Eve gripped his arm, but this time her touch was gentle.

  "You remind me," she said. "But maybe that's not so terrible. Hard as it is, you also remind me that I'm not alone."

  Clay smiled and then there were footsteps on the stairs inside and the sound of the chain being slid off the lock, and the door was pulled open from within. In the woman's hands was a white business card that had once been crisp and new but had now been bent and had its edges made ragged by Mrs. Ferrick's anxiety. According to Squire, Doyle had given her the card years earlier. She had lent him little credence then, but Clay figured recent events had made her more open-minded.

  "He sent you? Mr. Doyle?" she asked hopefully.

  "Yes. You're Mrs. Ferrick?" Eve asked.

  She nodded. "Can you… can you help Daniel?"

  Clay felt for her. This woman's world had started to fall apart long before the sun had disappeared from the sky. "We can try. But it might be better if we talked about it inside."

  Mrs. Ferrick glanced upward and then looked around her neighborhood, the landscape cast in a crimson gloom, and she nodded. "Of course, I'm sorry." She stepped away from the door. "Please, come in."

  Danny Ferrick lay on his bed, staring at his ceiling with headphones on. His MP3 player wasn't working for some reason and so he had to resort to old CDs. He had a mix on at the moment that he'd burned himself, with The Misfits, Primus, Taking Back Sunday… all kinds of stuff, including some old school Zeppelin. If he could have gotten away with it with his mother just down the hall he would have dug through his closet to get the small bag of weed he'd scored the previous week and lit one up. He wasn't as into weed as a lot of the guys he knew — he couldn't call any of them friends, really — but the times he had smoked, it had taken away some of the weight that he felt pressing on him all the time. Right now, he would have liked to smoke some weed because he thought it might kill the urge to itch at his skull, just above his temples. He tried desperately to ignore the feeling, to ignore the way his sickly yellow skin had reddened around the hard protrusions on his head.

  Not just reddened. He was just pretending to himself, being a pussy about it. The redness and swelling around those bumps had been just the beginning. Now the skin had begun to split.

  His heart beat wildly in his chest and, though he tried to force himself to pay attention to the music, to listen to something, anything else, he could not. He was terrified and excited in equal measure. What the hell did it mean? The sky was turning red. Mosquitoes had eaten the neighbors' cat. Those kids he'd seen throwing up maggots. And it had rained blood. Blood. He knew it was because he had tasted it, just thrust out his tongue and let it drizzle into his mouth.

  He shuddered now, there on his bed, the back of his head cradled upon his pillow. Why had he done that? It was disgusting. Completely.

  Yet not completely. Not really. His shades were drawn but he didn't need to be able to see out the windows to know what was happening. He had seen enough. The world was going to Hell. Or Hell was coming to Earth. It wasn't really a long stretch for him to begin imagining that what was going on outside and what was happening with his own body were connected. If that was Hell out there, then maybe Hell was coming out in him as well.

  Chillax, he told himself. Just derail that thought train. But he could not.

  How else to explain the way his skin continued to harden to rough leather, or the way his fingernails had become thick and sharp. Even now he reached up to idly scratch at the dry, cracking skin around the protuberance at his right temple. Before he even realized he was doing it he had peeled a strip of parchment-like skin away and his nail — his claw — had struck something beneath that was hard and marble-smooth, like a tooth.

  Danny froze.

  Shit.

  It was one thing to think it. Another to discover the truth.

  He sat up in bed and stripped off his headphones in the middle of a Blink-182 tune. Danny swung his legs over the side, hitched up his baggy black pants and went to the mirror above his dresser. There was a small light on the bureau and he clicked it on, then plucked off the shade for better illumination. He bent over and stared at himself in the mirror. Sure enough, where the bump protruded from his skull above his right temple the dry skin was gone. Beneath it, something else had been revealed. Something sharp and enamel-hard, black as oil.

  A horn.

  Oh my God, he thought. Then he gave a laugh that sounded weak and trembly, even to him. Maybe not my God after all.

  Danny reached up to scratch away the dry skin that encased the horn on the left side of his head and it was like tearing at a scab. It came away with little resistance. His upper lip curled back in disgust and he saw his teeth, which seemed longer and sharper than ever to him.

  "Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck me," he snarled. "This just so completely sucks."

  In the mirror he saw motion behind him and he turned and stared at the woman who had just stepped into his room. She had mocha skin and long, raven-black hair, dressed like a fashion model, and wore the most playful smile he'd ever seen.

  "I don't know," she said. "I think they're kind of cute."

  Storm clouds roil above the city of New York, a thunderstorm pregnant with the promise of heavy rain. It's All Hallow's Eve and the year is Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-Eight. Far, far below, the ci
ty is alive with teeming life, hidden within cars and beneath umbrellas, New Yorkers determined to enjoy the night in spite of the storm.

  Dr. Graves grits his teeth and his breath comes too fast. His heart hammers in his chest and the torn muscles in his shoulder burn. With one hand he grips the railing of the observation deck, the rest of him dangling over the side, rain sluicing off his coat. The wind buffets the face of the Empire State Building, helping him to cling there. But if it should shift direction, Graves knows he will be dead.

  Since birth he has worked to hone his body and his mind, urged on by his widower father, who raised his son to be an example of what their people could accomplish if only they set their minds to it. Anyone else would have let go already. The pain that sears up each finger and along his arm is unimaginable. But Graves refuses to let go. Too many lives are depending on him. He's not going to give Zarin the satisfaction of taking his life.

  Dr. Graves feels his fingers slipping. The rain has made the railing even slicker. The air itself is moist and it is hard to breathe. He closes his eyes and slows his breath, forces his pulse to match it. Then, with a grunt, he hauls himself up and shoots his free hand upward, latching onto the railing. With both hands secured, he struggles to pull himself up.

  His eyes are squinted against the rain and the wind whips against his back. Exhaustion seeps into his bones. He is stronger than an average man, with ten times the ordinary human stamina. He has worked to make his body the pinnacle of human physical achievement, yet Dr. Graves is not superhuman. He draws a long breath, knowing that should he lose his grip he will be little more than a smear on the pavement far below, washed into the sewers by the punishing rain.

  Thunder shatters the heavens, rolling through the storm clouds above. Lightning strikes the needle atop the Empire State Building, followed by booming thunder even closer than before. He thinks of Zarin and the storm, the pure rain falling upon Manhattan, and he knows that he has no choice but to live. He must live.

  Dr. Graves seethes, muscles popping as he drags himself upward until he can get an elbow on the railing. A sudden gust of wind nearly dislodges him, and then he is able to throw his upper body over the edge, and he is sliding over the railing and onto the observation deck. He tumbles into a wet and heaving ball upon the floor of the deck, rain still soaking him, but it takes him only a moment to catch his breath before he is up once again. Graves stands in a crouch, expecting an attack, but apparently Zarin has already presumed Graves has been dealt with, for he is nowhere to be seen.

  Alarm stabs his heart. If Zarin is gone, then it may be too late to stop him from seeding the storm clouds with his poison, from having a deadly, toxic rain fall all over the city. Cradling his right arm, the torn shoulder muscles throbbing in agony, he rises and begins to run along the outer edges of the observation deck.

  Graves rounds the corner and Zarin is there, a short, ugly little man bent over a tray of small canisters, each tied in a net and attached to a large balloon. Zarin is filling a balloon with gas from a portable tank, and Graves knows at once that it is helium. And now he knows how the madman plans his attack. The poison canisters must have timers. The balloons will carry them into the storm where they will spray toxins into the air, and the rain will become fatal.

  Wiping the water from his eyes, Dr. Graves shouts Zarin's name and races at the killer.

  Fog encroaches at the edges of his vision, enshrouding him, and for a moment Graves is lost. Then from out of the fog he sees a figure emerge… it must be Zarin!

  But it is not.

  Gabriella is wearing a dress he bought for her that falls upon her curves in such a way as to make his heart and lips both stutter. She smiles at him, her chestnut eyes brightening, and the fog begins to thin. There is an electric hum around him and Dr. Graves feels as though he is awakening from a terrible dream. He glances about and finds himself in the familiar setting of his Washington Heights laboratory. To many he is an unwelcome neighbor, but the prestige of his reputation balances out their concerns about the color of his skin, and the fact that Gabriella's does not match his own.

  "Leonard," she says, her voice still thick with the sultry accent of the little fishing village on the northwest coast of Italy where they had met. "We were supposed to meet your friends at Birdland an hour ago." There is no chastisement in her voice, only that playful, loving patience. "Come, now. Enough of science for tonight."

  Graves glances down at the beakers on the table in front of him, at his notebook and the thick black pencil he has been writing with. A warmth spreads through him that has been rare in his life and he leans forward to shut off the burners beneath the beakers, snuffing those small flames.

  When he looks up expectantly, she is gone.

  The lab is gone.

  The air is thick with humidity and the buzzing of flies and the heat is oppressive. Sweat drips down his back and stains his shirt at the armpits, his body so warm that the droplets of it are a cooling relief where they trace their paths on his skin.

  Tangled jungle stretches as far as he can see in every direction. Things chitter and rustle in the trees but he pays them no mind. He did not hike all this way to let the wildlife drive him off. This is the Yucatan, where his next step could be into any one of a hundred agonizing deaths. There were far more ways to dive here than there were ways to live. But Dr. Graves was not returning to New York without the object of his quest.

  And now he had found it. He held his breath and stared at a cluster of strange, spiny-barked trees in front of him. They twisted in upon themselves, branches intertwining as though in a dance. The Xuithla tree was dismissed by most botanists as tribal myth. Yet here it is. The rarest tree in the world, and if its legendary healing properties are more than legend…

  Voices erupt around him, echoing through the trees and Dr. Graves spins in search of their origin. He blinks as the branches seem to reach for him, closes his eyes and lifts his arm to knock them away, and then the sounds of the jungle disappear.

  The voices remain.

  When he opens his eyes he is in a movie palace on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. All is dark around him save for the constant flicker of light upon the screen. The voices are speaking French, of course, and he strains to keep up with the translation, trying to make sense of the plot of the film. Even so, he can only lend a portion of his attention to it, for his focus is elsewhere.

  His contact is supposed to meet him here, in the theater. The French government has suffered a terrible loss, a theft from the Louvre that seems impossible, with the only clue left behind three single drops of blood tainted with liquid mercury. His investigation has begun to point back at members of the government himself, and so this meeting must be clandestine.

  "Excuse me," a voice says, and he is startled to hear the words in English.

  Dr. Graves glances over and sees an unfamiliar woman making her way into his aisle, people standing or shifting aside to let her move down the row toward the empty seat beside him. He frowns. If she is his contact, the woman knows little about remaining inconspicuous. Speaking English like that had been foolish.

  She is too pale, this woman, and her hair is pulled back from her face so tightly that it lends a cruel severity to features that might otherwise have been attractive.

  She slips into the seat beside him and makes no attempt to focus on the movie screen. Dr. Graves attempts to keep some semblance of secrecy but it quickly becomes obvious she has no intention of being subtle.

  "You're Leonard Graves," she says, as though this should be news to him.

  He nods.

  "Look at me, Dr. Graves."

  Exasperated, he glances around to be sure he has not been followed, but in the darkened theater he can see only phantom faces, flickering silver in the light from the screen. At length he turns to her.

  "You might be a bit more — "

  "You're dead, Dr. Graves."

  Anger rises in him. His whisper is a harsh rasp. "Are you threatening me, ma'am
?"

  The woman's eyelids flutter with frustration and she sighs. "Simply stating a fact. Trying to remind you. You've been dead half a century. Think. Remember the bullet. You're here for a reason."

  Graves begins to shudder and he feels a terrible pain in his heart.

  Phantom pain.

  For he has no heart.

  Grief swells within him and he turns away from her, only to see the faces of the other theater goers again. The flickering light upon the screen is not what has made them look spectral. Rather, it is the fact that they are specters. Ghosts of the dead.

  The silver light from the screen passes through them, their bodies having little more substance than dust motes swirling in shafts of sunlight. Their faces are etched with fear.

  He turns back to the woman and sees that she too is transparent. Dr. Graves does not look down at his own body, at his hands. He does not like to look at his hands.

  "Who are you?" he asks, the illusion of the Parisian movie palace becoming wispy around them, a ghost all its own.

  "My name is Yvette Darnall. I am… I was a medium."

  And he watches her blue eyes, ghosts in and of themselves, as she tells the tale of her own death, of her efforts to locate Sweetblood the Mage, of the trap that he laid for any who would dare to search for him.

  "The bastard," Graves whispers, trying not to see that the theatre is gone now, completely disappeared, and there is only a kind of river flowing at their feet, a rushing, turbulent stream of souls. Some of them fly past above and around him, but all of them in the same direction, with a fierce momentum, as though drawn on by some inexorable force.

  "Oh, yes, he always was," Miss Darnall says. "But I see it now. I understand."

  For a moment Graves does not hear her. He is distracted by a tugging at his arms and the current that drags at his ankles, the stream trying to pull him in, to pull him on… and he will not look to see what has such power over him. He frowns as her words finally settle into his mind.