The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie)

by Christopher Golden, Thomas E. Sniegoski

  At the end of the hall he peeked around the corner, remaining out of sight, and when he saw Ceridwen he caught his breath.

  This new corridor was far longer and halfway down its length was a balustrade, and a stairwell that came down from above and continued on toward the first floor. Danny had no idea what floor they were on now. The dim light upon the walls was from somewhere below. At the landing, just beside the stairs, were two creatures unlike anything Danny had seen before. They were stooped, hands twisted into claws, long talons dangling by their knees. Their skin was leathery brown and rutted with lines that might have been scars or wrinkles or grooves in tree bark. And yet he had the idea that if they stood up straight and hid their faces, they might have been able to walk the daylight world and pass as human.

  Just the way Danny did.

  But he would have seen them for what they were. He would have smelled them. They had the stink of raw meat and sewer on them, these things. Danny had heard enough from Conan Doyle and the others to know they had to be the Night People. The Corca Duibhne. Seeing them made him tremble, but not with fear. He shook with the urge to kill them.

  Ceridwen was in the hall as well, only ten or twelve feet from the Night People. The ice blue sphere atop her staff glowed softly. Danny could not help but notice the way her long limbs moved beneath the sheer fabric of her dress. She was breathtaking. Her whole self seemed illuminated by the same ice blue light that glowed within that sphere.

  Magic, he thought. For even as he watched she moved nearer the two hideous creatures, and neither noticed her.

  With an elegant flourish, Ceridwen spread her arms and glided toward the Corca Duibhne; to Danny it almost seemed as though she were dancing. It was a strange moment of ballet, that ended with Ceridwen reaching out to touch the nearest of the two Night People. A blue light blossomed from her fingertips, blue-white mist leaked from her eyes in streams that floated on the air, and the sphere atop her staff flared with a moment of brilliance.

  The monstrous creature froze, leathery skin turning that same ice-blue. A wave of chilling cold swept up the corridor and Danny shivered, staring at the scene that played out before him.

  The second Corca Duibhne turned, shivering at the blast of frozen air, and its eyes widened. It opened its mouth, flashing yellow razor teeth, but before it could sound an alarm Ceridwen's free hand flashed out and gripped it by the throat. Her muscles were taut, but even in profile Danny could see her face was expressionless. Her eyes were as cold as the ice of her magic. The creature let out a single groan, but no cry of alarm came.

  The ice formed first upon its yellow fangs. Then its eyes froze in its head. Moments later it was little more than an ice sculpture, just like the other.

  "Holy shit," Danny whispered from the shadows.

  Ceridwen swept her staff around in an arc that shattered them both. Thousands of shards of ice cascaded along the floor of the corridor. Then she stood still once more, as though she had not even moved, and she held her staff before her in both hands.

  Danny felt a warm breeze begin to ruffle his hair. A wind sprang up in the corridor. One moment it was gentle, even pleasant, and the next it whistled in his ears and nearly knocked him off of his feet, a tropical blast of heat that seared his lungs when he inhaled. His claws dug into the wall and he clung to the corner, knowing if he fell he would give himself away. He watched in awe as the frozen remains of the two Corca Duibhne swirled and eddied in the hot wind.

  They melted away to nothing, leaving not a drop of condensation on the floor.

  Gone.

  The wind died and Danny held his breath, staring at Ceridwen. The Fey sorceress went to the stairs and glanced upward, and then leaned over the balustrade, getting her bearings.

  Then she turned her icy eyes upon him.

  Danny shuddered. He had cloaked himself in darkness, had felt sure that his stealth was part of what he was, one of the few benefits of his supernatural genesis. If this was to be his life — the life of a monster — he'd thought at least there might be something good to come of it.

  "Come here," Ceridwen said, and though she spoke in a whisper her words carried to him.

  Abandoning any effort to hide himself, Danny hurried down the corridor to her. He glanced around at the many doors along the hall and at the stairs, worried that at any moment more of Morrigan's followers might discover them.

  As he approached, Ceridwen grabbed his wrist and drew him up to her. Her fingers were ice upon his skin and that frozen mist still leaked from her eyes. She towered over him and he had not realized before just how tall she was. A shiver went up and down his spine but it was not the cold that made him tremble. Ceridwen was indeed beautiful, but it could be a terrible beauty, a cruel flawlessness.

  "What do you think you're doing?" she demanded in a terse whisper.

  "Helping," he said. "I wanted to help."

  "Arthur told you to stay behind."

  Danny had no response to that and so he said nothing. He felt his brows knit, felt his upper lip curl into another snarl, but could not prevent these reactions. They were instinctual. As much as he feared her, if Ceridwen did not let go of his wrist, he thought he might try to hurt her.

  His ears twitched. Voices reached them from the stairwell. Someone was coming up from below. Ceridwen turned toward the stairs and raised her staff, but this time it was Danny who grabbed hold of her wrist.

  "No," he whispered. "We're here to learn. To do that, we listen."

  She glared at him a moment, and then she nodded. Danny moved swiftly and silently to the nearest door. It was unlocked, and he led Ceridwen inside. He left the door open several inches and knelt to put his eye to the crack. The room was dark, and once more he gathered the shadows around himself, hoping Morrigan's followers wouldn't be as perceptive as Ceridwen, hoping the darkness would keep them from noticing him spying.

  He knew Ceridwen was behind him. Even now she would be standing above him, trying to peer into the hall. Danny could feel her there, could feel the cold. And that was the two of them. Ice and shadows.

  Together they waited, and they listened, in the cold and the dark.

  The glass was shattered in the doors of the Museum of Fine Arts. The broad stone stairs in front of the building's grand façade were swarming with the dead. Corpses crawled over one another, trying to get to the doors. The red mist that enveloped the entire city churned and rolled in clouds that obscured the horror surrounding the museum for a few seconds before thinning once more. Flags beat the air, jutting from the brow of the building, and banners advertising their latest exhibitions covered part of its face.

  There were walking dead who were crumbling with every step, who were clothed in tatters. Some of them had lost arms or hands, even lower jaws, and what skin remained was parchment stretched across their cheeks or sunken eye sockets. Muscle tore as they walked, but the magic that propelled them was merciless. Some of them were brittle and withered.

  Eve moved through the dead with her long sword like the reaper with his scythe. Yet this was a bloodless harvest. Her blade hacked into them with the pop and dry cracking noise of snapping kindling. Her coat flowed around her like a toreador's cape, but she did not need any red flag to draw their attention. The restless dead had been sent to the museum for a reason, but presented with targets, with vibrant, alive creatures to kill, they deviated from their mission.

  She felt the blood race through her, her mind descending into a primitive rage that often enveloped her in combat. Her mouth opened and she howled a cry of battle that echoed out across the empty street. Her heightened senses brought to her the scent of Clay nearby, but he and the specter, Dr. Graves, were lost in the mist and the sea of staggering dead.

  Cold fingers clutched at her jacket and snagged in her hair. Eve spun, bringing the sword around with both hands upon its grip. This time, however, the blade met more resistance. Some of the walkers were freshly dead, their flesh and muscle more substantial, their bones harder. Two hands grabb
ed her head and a pale, fat man in a three piece suit dipped his jaws as though he might tear out her throat.

  Eve gave a cruel, rasping laugh as she thrust her sword point through his mid-section. With her preternatural strength she hoisted the fat cadaver off the ground and dumped him on top of several others. A dead woman, her face painted in the garish makeup of morticians the world over, seemed to grin as she reached out and twisted her fingers in the fabric of Eve's blouse, tugging at the spaghetti straps as though intent on tearing it off. Eve hacked her hands from her wrists.

  It was a perverse death dance, a black-tie event, every corpse dressed in its Sunday best. But Eve wasn't getting anywhere. The limousine was back at the curb and she had made some progress, but not enough. She was at the bottom of the museum steps and cutting through the dead was taking too long. There were just too many of them. The sword was too slow.

  "Squire!" she roared into the sky, into the red mist.

  Off to her right was a statue of a man on horseback. She heard the goblin replying even as she spotted him, emerging from the dark shadow beneath the statue.

  "What can I do ya for, darlin'?" he called.

  Eve sheathed her sword. A pair of dead walkers, one only days dead and one rattling with every step, tried to take advantage of the moment. She lashed out at the fresh one, grabbed it by the face and yanked it toward her. With her left hand she dug her talons into the flesh at the back of its neck, plunged her fingers in around bone and gristle, and tore out its spinal column. The other, the crumbling, brittle one, she shattered with a single kick of a designer boot.

  "This is taking too long!" she called to the goblin. "I need something that's going to clear a bigger path."

  Even through the mist she could see Squire grin. The goblin slipped back beneath the statue and disappeared in the darkness there. Squire could fight when necessary, but that was not his purpose among Conan Doyle's agents. He drove, yes, but only because he enjoyed it. Squire was the armorer, the weapons master. As long as there were shadows for him to pass through, Eve knew she would never be without a weapon when she needed one.

  The dead continued to grab at her but now Eve was less concerned with fighting them. Destroying each one would take forever and was a waste of time. Getting through them, past them, that was the priority. She felt her rage begin to subside. Had these been living enemies, bodies humming with fresh blood, she would have found it much more difficult to sublimate her fury and her bloodlust.

  But they were dead, hollow things.

  Obstacles.

  Eve tore through them, picking up one dead walker and tossing it at the others. With a single swipe of her hand she tore the head off of the corpse of a teenaged girl. Her gaze swept the crowding dead and she saw a skull-faced cadaver, a man who had been extremely tall. She pulled the arms from the withered corpse and drove it down in front of her. It fell across several others and they scrambled to get up, to get free, to get at Eve. Planting a boot solidly on the dead man's chest she launched herself over the heads of a dozen of the staggering zombies.

  Eve landed in the midst of another horde and began to fight them as well. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard Squire call her name. She turned to see him slip from the darker shadows up against the wall of the museum.

  "How about this?" Squire asked.

  He raised a pump shotgun in one hand. Eve grinned and raised her own hand and Squire threw the weapon to her. She snatched it from the air.

  "I could kiss you."

  "Don't flatter yourself, babe," Squire replied, and then he was gone again, lost in shadows.

  Eve turned the shotgun and aimed in the general direction of the museum's front door.

  "All right, numbskulls. Now the fun starts."

  She pumped the shotgun and fired. The blast tore the torso out of a corpse right in front of her, ripping through two others behind it, and knocking down several others that were clustered with them in a tangle of clawing arms and twitching legs. Tiny bits of human gristle spattered her shirt, but at last she was beyond caring about her clothes. There were always more shops, always something pretty to wear. But she didn't get an evening like this very often.

  Again she pumped and fired, racing forward, leaping up stairs. She found her footing where she could, crushing bones under her boots, darting in amongst the dead. The shotgun boomed in her hands and she neared the top of the stairs.

  Then the shells were spent, the shotgun smoking. Eve dropped it to clatter on the stone steps and drew her sword once more. The museum doors had been torn open and they hung off kilter in their frames.

  "In," she snarled.

  Clay could be anyone. He had met warriors in his long, long life who were terrifying in every aspect. Some of them were unnaturally strong, some large enough that ordinary men would have called them giants. Some were like gods to the simple people who worshipped them. But he could also be anything. A tiger. A grizzly. A snake. Even some things that had only existed in the imagination of the Creator, things that had never walked the Earth but that He had considered.

  The dead were quicker than they looked, jerking and lunging and clawing. But Clay did not need swiftness or skill, did not need agility to deal with these mindless abominations. All he needed was power and an appetite for destruction, and he had both in quantity today.

  Once outside the limousine, and away from the eyes of his comrades, he changed. There were times when he felt awkward about his nature, about the malleability of his body. He wanted them to see him as Clay, to have an identity in their minds, and experience had shown them that anyone who saw his flesh run like mercury and his bones reshape often enough could lose track of who he was.

  He hated that, for there were times when the only way he could know himself was to see how he was reflected in the eyes of others. That was the fundamental truth of what he was.

  He was Clay.

  Now his hot breath snorted from his nostrils and he felt his muscles ripple in his chest. Black fur stood up on the back of his neck and he felt the crimson mist caressing the tip of each hair. He was a five hundred pound mountain gorilla, a silverback. Clay marched forward, trampling the walking dead beneath him, feeling their bones crushed to dust under his feet. Seconds passed as he cleared the area around him of zombies. His massive hands closed on the heads of the corpses. Some of their skulls shattered in his grip. Others he tore away from their shoulders.

  "Having fun, big boy?" a voice asked.

  With a grunt, the massive gorilla turned and stared as a slit appeared in the undulating darkness beside him. Like some grotesque birth, Squire slipped through the womb of shadows and stood before him, holding out a huge Turkish battle axe, a weapon almost as large as the goblin himself.

  "Fun," Clay replied.

  He snatched the axe from Squire in one enormous gorilla hand. The goblin took two steps backward into darkness and was gone, even as the walking corpses tried to grab at him. Clay swung it with such power that he cleaved the heads from two of the dead and in the same blow cut a freshly dead man completely in half, the divided portions of his corpse striking the paved sidewalk with moist weight.

  He threw back his head, free hand pounding his chest, and let out a gorilla roar that echoed back from the enveloping mist. The dead surrounded him and Clay began to trample them again. The axe swung out, clearing a path, and with his free hand he slapped others down to the ground. He reached the stairs, huge feet cracking the stone beneath him. The dead fell before him. His progress was slow, but inexorable.

  Then, with another snort of hot air, the mountain gorilla paused. There were times when Clay transformed that he lost himself in his new shape. It took him a second to clear his mind, to make sense of what he was seeing.

  Just ahead, the ghost of Leonard Graves walked toward him down the stairs. The dead sensed the phantom of the dead adventurer. They could feel Graves's presence. But they could not touch him. Their fingers, sometimes little more than bones, snatched at the spectral form of
Dr. Graves, tried to tear his flesh, to grab hold of his clothes. But there was nothing there. It maddened them, and some of the mindless dead seemed somewhat less mindless now, their faces etched with a vicious frustration.

  "Clay," Dr. Graves said calmly as the decaying corpse of a woman in military uniform reached through his ghostly flesh and grabbed hold of another of the dead.

  With a shudder and a grunt, Clay twitched and transformed back into the human form he most often wore. There was something in Graves's tone and bearing that made him feel foolish. And now that he no longer wore the body of an animal, he thought he knew what it was.

  "There are too many to fight," Clay said.

  He swung his axe, not to cut but to batter, and knocked away three of the dead who were clutching at him.

  Graves could not be touched, but his expression revealed his frustration. Abruptly he tore his gaze from Clay and reached out to the two zombies nearest him. His hands, pure ectoplasm, reached inside the rotting corpses, disappearing within. Their spirits had been forcibly pulled from the afterlife, restored to dead flesh, to rotting brains and madness. Now, with a single tug, Dr. Graves ripped those souls back out of their bodies.

  The ghosts screamed in torment, eyes wide with unspeakable agony. But in the moment before they shimmered and dissipated like smoke on the breeze, they gazed at Dr. Graves with profound gratitude.

  "You're wasting time out here." Graves told him.

  Clay frowned. "Eve?"

  "Already inside," said the specter.

  "Shit," Clay said, kicking a zombie in the chest as he started toward the stairs to the museum. "It's just second nature. Something like this happens . . . you know once they're done here these deadheads are going to look for more populated areas. That's what they do, zombies. They kill. I've never understood if they're hungry or just angry, but that's what they do. It doesn't feel right, leaving them walking around."

  Graves floated beside Clay, ignoring the carnage as the shapeshifter tore and hacked through more of the dead. "There are already too many of them for us to stop them. It would take hours. Maybe days. We don't have that kind of time. It's not why we're here. And if we do the job —"