Free The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) by Thomas E. Sniegoski Christopher Golden Page A

liked
the pain and what it did for him.
    It made him feel alive.
    The sound of a key turning in a lock distracted him from his
ruminations, and he gazed over to see an older woman, toy poodle cradled in her
arms, letting herself into the park. She was from old money, her family having
lived in Number Ten Louisburg Square since the 1830's. Not long ago he'd had a
conversation with one of the bricklayers who had worked on the Number Ten's
construction and didn't have very flattering things to say about the family
then, or the generations that followed. Greedy bastards and bloodless crones,
Graves believed the laborer had called them. He watched as the woman put the
fluffy white dog — Taffy — down in the grass, and in a baby talk,
urged the animal to relieve itself. Taffy looked in his direction, sensing his
presence, and began to growl menacingly, or at least as menacingly as an
eight-pound poodle could. The woman chastised the dog with more baby talk.
    Graves looked away from the pet and smiled. What had Eve
called the animal when she saw it from the window of Doyle's parlor the
previous night? A ratdog?
    Thoughts of Eve returned his mind to the task that had drawn
her and Doyle out of the house. Graves wished he could have accompanied them,
but they had little need of a ghost. After sixty-odd years, it still irked him that
he had been taken out of action. The great Leonard Graves, explorer, scientist,
adventurer extraordinaire, put out to pasture by an unknown assassin's bullet.
    Stay and monitor the murmurings in the ether, Doyle
had told him as he and Eve departed. Those same murmurings had alerted Graves
to the potentially catastrophic situation in the first place, but since his
comrades' departure, the voices had grown strangely silent, as if too
frightened to speak.
    A sudden chill went through him. Graves wasn't sure how it
was possible, for he had no real sense of feeling, but he knew, even before
looking up at the sky, that something had happened to the sun.
    An unusual cloud of solid black, miles wide and thick, was
moving across the sky, blotting out the burning orb. He studied the dark,
undulating mass and determined that it wasn't an atmospheric condition, but
something altogether horrible. A droning hum grew in intensity, caused by the
beating of millions of insect wings. Flies blotted out the sun, more flies than
he had ever seen. His concerns went to his compatriots, and their mission, when
a screech cut through the air like a surgeon's knife through flesh, diverting
his attentions yet again.
    The woman at Number Ten Louisburg Square was screaming, her
hands clawing at her face as she looked down upon the grass in the grip of
terror, her feet stamping the freshly cut blades as if in the midst of some
wild, ceremonial dance.
    Graves drifted closer, and arrived just in time to see the
last of the Taffy's fluffy, white fur disappear beneath a sea of glistening,
black-haired bodies and pink, fleshy tails. Rats, many of them the size of
housecats, had swarmed the dog, the sounds of tearing flesh and the crunching
of bone perverse evidence of an unnatural hunger.
    The sky sun blotted out by flies, a dog attacked and
consumed by rats. Graves again thought of Doyle and Eve, suspecting that he
already knew the level of their success.
    It was enough to fill him with fear.
    Enough to frighten even a ghost.
     
     
    All shadows were connected.
    A twisting maze work of cold black passages entering into
realms of further shadow, or worlds of light.
    Squire had parked the limousine, after their five-hour drive
back from the Big Apple, inside the townhouse's private garage. Parking was at
a premium on the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, and he thanked the Dark Gods
that Doyle had the foresight to purchase the property behind his residence and
eventually convert it from storage to garage space.
    Eve wasn't doing too well. She seemed better than she had
when Doyle first helped her into the back of the car after their little