“Ah, yes, quite right. Very well then, break a leg.”
Others came crowding around Effie, Gilbert, and the fat man, so Liam and Dracula withdrew to the far corner of the stage.
“Count, I have to ask you something,” said Liam.
“What is that?”
“Up there, when were fighting Effie, did I see what I thought I saw?”
“And what was that?”
“I would swear that I saw one of Finn MacCool’s wolves. But then it was gone.”
“Are you sure of what you saw? Any more sure than Everett is that he did not have a visitor earlier this evening? One that told him to take a long nap?”
“Perhaps not. But why, Count? Why did you do it?”
“Partially curiosity. When you are as old as I am you embrace the unknown. By the time we encountered Effie, I had no choice. I was a ‘slave to duty,’ ” he said with a remarkably toothy grin.
Before Liam could speak the assistant stage manager came up behind the men.
“Places for act two, gentlemen,” he announced.
Beast
Amy L. Gruss and Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein
“I told you,” Jerry gloated from behind Al’s shoulder. “I told you Poltwhistle’d come asking for those books. I told you you shouldn’t just go making free with valuable and delicate antiques, but did you listen? Oh no! What’s old Jerry Cartley got to say that the great and powerful Al—”
“Look!” The taller youth whirled on his heel and glared, stopping his coworker dead in his boots. It was a good one, that glare; it had often served him well when the school bullies looked for a thin, asthmatic boy to torment. Al did not scrimp on it now. “I heard what Poltwhistle said, same as you did. Keep them safe, he said.” Al shoved his hands into his pockets and looked over his shoulder at the sunset. “They wasn’t safe up there with the mice in the attic.” He sniffed and strode off down the street again.
“Roof leaked up there,” he muttered, more as comfort to himself than by way of explanation. Jerry was useless in Al’s estimation, more interested in the pastry shop next door than in the volumes of treasure at Poltwhistle’s Papers and Antique Oddities. Tonight of all nights, when speed and secrecy was what Al needed, the dolt found the single streak of determination that beat in his flabby heart.
“Wettest summer since I came down from Scotland,” Al grumbled, once more finding his stride on the sooty cobbles. A fast stride, in hopes of outdistancing Cartley’s endurance, if not his curiosity. “Rained all August, practically. I did Poltwhistle a favour, getting those books to a dry place, and he knows it! I kept them safe! Now there’s a buyer that wants them, I’ll just bring the trunk back to the shop, is all.”
Jerry laughed, a phlegmy, unpleasant sound. “What’s funny then?” Al demanded through clenched teeth. “You. All noble; which is why you kited off with the Sefer Yetzer-moth, and the Sumerian wotsit, and that grim- thingummy, and left the Voltaire and Dumas up there for mouse food.”
“Give me strength!” Al pleaded of the smudged sky, just visible between the last of London’s outlying warehouses. “Any idiot can come by a Voltaire, and there are so many first-edition Dumas in London you could wipe your arse with them!” He turned and backed Jerry into the blood-slimed steps of a fishmonger’s alleyway. “But the Yetzeroth—in English? Unheard of! The Egyptian Book of the Dead—and the handwritten grimoire of the last witch hanged in England? That box held a dozen treasures, and I…” He let the sentence trail off, aware, suddenly, of the street behind him. Not crowded, but hardly bereft of curious onlookers.
Cartley’s eyes bulged in alarm. The smell of his sweat, strong in the evening’s chill, overcame the alley’s fishy ambience. Al coughed, moderated his tone, and put on a smile. “I put them in a safe place. I’ll have them at the shop first thing in the morning, just like Poltwhistle said.” He patted Jerry’s woolen coat, flicked a bit of dust, and backed away. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll walk the rest of the way on my own. Get on home to your supper now, eh?”
Jerry’s eyes narrowed. “You just don’t want me to see if you got anything else from the shop hidden away that hasn’t been missed yet,” he accused. “It’s stealing, Al. They may call it whatever they like in Scotland, but in London it’s stealing, and it’s wrong. You go to Hell for stealing.”
Al smiled grimly. Just like a Londoner to take a jab at his nationality when he couldn’t win an argument any other way. “You go to Hell for buggery too, Jerry, but that doesn’t stop you and that newsboy, does it?” He relished Jerry’s ragged gasp as he realized that Al knew his most dreaded secret. “It’s getting late; what say you run home now, else I walk along with you,” he called. The fat fool backed away, mouth still agape with horror.
“Sorry, Limey,” Al muttered as Cartley turned and ran into the gathering fog creeping with the evening from the river Thames. “Can’t have you tagging on after me. Not tonight.” The thin youth shoved his hands into his pockets and turned back toward his treasure trove’s hiding place. What a perfect hiding place it was, too. He scowled in annoyance. Hardly anyone from London ever went out by way of Carfax House and the locals were all scared to. He’d heard the tales told in Purfleet inns when his studies had kept him late into the night; a clutch of witches, burned in their sleep by Elizabeth the Great’s witchfinders, haunting and wailing and searching for their lost souls—or failing that, the soul of anybody who came near.
He only told the story once, to a flirtatious pub wench who knew no more of the old place than he, and whose eyes grew round at the fear of it. Total fiction—he’d only been thinking of a tumble then, but within the month Al had heard the whole, embellished tale on three separate occasions. He seized the opportunity to add further grisly detail to the history in order to secure absolutely that solitude which his study of the lost arts required. With the caged lunatics baying in the sanitarium next door and Al’s own little additions to the place—hollow pipes to moan when the wind blew, branches in the chapel’s ruined belfry that clattered like bones, the occasional well-placed lantern, mirror, and pane of glass—the ghost story had spread like wildfire. It was perfect.
Perfect until a month ago when a horde of carters tramped through his haven, setting huge boxes on the ground without regard for any of his carefully drawn glyphs. Bad enough that all his experiments had been smudged into oblivion, but the idiots had put the biggest one—a trunk seven feet long, five wide, and four deep—just at the entrance to his hiding place, making it impossible for him to get to his precious books.
Then the real haunting had started, more profound and horrifying than anything he could orchestrate; grisly murders in the city, sightings of fierce rats and dogs with demonic, red eyes, the dead ship appearing in Whitby harbour after a freakish storm. Inspecting the damage after the carters had left that first night, Al had noticed that every one of the boxes that littered Carfax were marked with the doomed vessel’s name:
Still wouldn’t go, given his preference, but he daren’t lose yet another job or his father would, as he had promised, call him back home. Al would rather face down the devil himself than wind up trapped back in that Scottish bog of a village.
“You!” A voice shrilled from above his head, scaring the wits out of him. “You boy!”
Al swallowed his heart. The Lunatic—again. Every time he worked up the nerve to come near the house that mad bastard was at the window, baying like a watchdog. But Al couldn’t afford caution this time, couldn’t hide from the threat of guards or the shadowy, half-glimpsed figure that lurked in the ruin. Al hunched deeper into his collar and tried to ignore the wild-eyed man’s yelling.
“I know why you come here! It won’t work! The Master has promised it to me and you shan’t have it! You with your pitiful scratchings in the dust—you don’t know how to serve him!” Somewhere nearby, a dog began to bark.
“Look, you daft bastard,” he hissed, glaring up at the madman, “I don’t give a haggis about your master—it’s my master’s going to have the Peelers down on me if I don’t get my books back! So do us a favour and shut your
