The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie)

The Nimble Man

About the Authors

Other Works by Christopher Golden and
Thomas E. Sniegoski

Within the silent halls of the Boston Antiquities Museum the
shadows were in motion. Red alarm sensors shone brightly but recorded nothing
out of the ordinary. Only the nearly somnambulant passing of security guards
disturbed the dust that eddied up on currents of air. Hidden cameras revealed
only exhibits and artifacts in otherwise empty rooms.

Yet there was one room that was not empty.

The exhibit was Egyptian, devoted almost wholly to the
Twelfth Dynasty. Though its collection of stone fragments, papyrus, masks, and
sarcophagi might impress schoolchildren, to those educated in the area of
antiquities the exhibit would have been wholly unremarkable. Or nearly so. Those
who noticed anything at all out of place would likely have attributed it to
simple human error, a curator who had made an honest mistake.

In one corner of the room Mr. Doyle thoughtfully stroked his
thick mustache and admired a small sphinx. The piece had been unearthed at
Katna millennia before and bore the name of a daughter of Ammenemes II, but the
curators of the museum had badly mislabeled it. He shook his head and his heavy
gray brows knitted with disapproval. If he had them there he would have given
them a tongue-lashing for being so careless. Of course, on this night their
carelessness had worked in his favor.

The moment he tore his attention away from the priceless
sphinx, Doyle caught sight of the object that had drawn him here. With a grunt
of satisfaction he crossed the room to a marble pedestal and peered through the
thick glass enclosure atop it at the artifact inside. It was a crystal spider
set inside a gold frame, perhaps five inches in length and four at the widest legspan.
A small placard rested atop the enclosure.

Crystal Spider, circa 1995 B.C., discovered at Lisht,
believed to have been a gift to the illegitimate pharaoh Nebtawyre Menthotope
III during the "seven kingless years" preceding the Twelfth Dynasty.

"Well, well. Hello my little friend," Mr. Doyle
rasped, standing a bit straighter and smoothing his greatcoat as though he was
in the presence of respectable company. Which was not at all the case.

"So?" came a voice from a shadowy corner of the
exhibit. "How did I do?"

He glanced in the direction of that voice. There was a
large, ornate sarcophagus on display, and beside it several lighted glass
enclosures that contained burial jars apparently associated with whomever had
been put to rest within the sarcophagus. Eve stepped from amidst this tableau
of death with grace and nonchalance, the same way she would walk into a bar or
step onto a subway train. She wore crisply new blue jeans and a tight green
turtleneck beneath a stylishly long brown suede coat. With her silken black
hair and exotic features she was beautiful in a way only cruel things are. A
tragedy, to be sure, for though Eve could be cruel she had so many other
facets, so many better qualities.

They were old friends, these two, but it had been quite some
time since they had seen one another. Doyle understood. He was just as guilty
as Eve of letting their acquaintance grow fallow. With lives as busy — and
as long — as they both led, the years could go by with the deceptive
speed of clouds in the sky. When each one was so much like the last, it was
easy to lose count.

As always, they were becoming reacquainted in a time of
crisis. It was the nature of their friendship. He had contacted Eve for
assistance and her efforts had produced results in less than a day. He had
located her on the island of Mykonos. Fourteen hours later she had knocked on
the door of his sprawling townhouse on Beacon Hill with the news that led them
here.

Doyle smiled indulgently at her, as he would have at a
daughter of whom he was particularly proud. "How did you do? Remarkably
well, Eve. I've inquired all over the world in search of a Lemurian Spider."
He turned his focus back upon his prize. "Bangladesh, Cyprus, Istanbul,
Minsk. I confess to feeling more than a little foolish that you located one
right here beneath my nose. And so quickly. How did you manage it?"

Eve strode across the room to join him, leather heels
scuffing the floor. "We all have our specialties, Doyle. For instance, how
did you get us in here without setting off any alarms? Without the guards
noticing?"

A rare tremor of amusement passed through him. There had
been so little humor or camaraderie in his life of late. Too many times in the
past he had been betrayed by colleagues and friends, so that he had come to count
on his enemies as far more reliable. Eve was one exception. There were others,
but he had not seen most of them for a very, very long time.

With a mischievous smile he touched the enclosure around the
spider and whispered a minor incantation. The glass turned to damp mist that
fogged the air around their heads and warped the thin beam of red light that
should have triggered an alarm the moment the enclosure had been removed. It
did not. When the mist had dissipated, Mr. Doyle picked up the crystal spider
and examined it more closely.

"As you say," he mused, "we all have our
specialties."

Eve allowed herself an appreciative nod and then began to
stride impatiently around the exhibit hall. It was typical of her.

"Relax, Eve. We're not leaving just yet." He shot
her an admonishing glance. "If the whispers Dr. Graves has been hearing
are correct, we don't have time for certain niceties. I'm not going to be able
to take my new toy home to play with it."

He began to pry the crystal spider out of its golden frame.

"Hold on," Eve protested, hurrying to his side
with a rasp of suede and denim. "Do you have to do that? You know how much
I love the sparkly things. The spider would look nice on my mantel next to that
Buddha with the clock in his belly."

He ignored her. It had grown warm in the museum in spite of
the cool air blowing out of the vents, but Mr. Doyle had been a magician long
enough to know the heat had nothing to do with the actual temperature. His face
felt flush and the gold softened in his fingers, peeling away like hot wax.

"Fine," Eve sighed. "This thing wasn't easy
to find. Just doesn't seem right to ruin it. How many bits and pieces of flea
market junk do you think survived from Lemuria?"

Doyle sniffed in contempt. "More than you realize. I
doubt there's a major museum in the world that doesn't have at least one
Lemurian piece misclassified as Egyptian or Greek or Etruscan, even Japanese. It's
one of the great failings of the human mind. One of our primary
irrationalities. We see the improbable and call it impossible, and would rather
accept convenient untruths than seek out unpopular solutions."

"Do you have to be such an elitist asshole about
everything?"

The man flinched and, crystal spider in his hands, turned to
glare at her. They were allies and sometimes friends and he was fond of Eve,
but there were times when her behavior puzzled him. Other times it reminded him
that though he had put a great deal of distance between himself and the odd
primness of the era of his birth, he had not entirely escaped it.

"No," he replied at last, "just about some
things. And most certainly about history and archaeology. I would think you of
all people would understand."

Her eyes narrowed and a hint of fury glimmered in them a
moment, and then passed. She sighed. "You are the most aggravating man."

Mr. Doyle cleared his throat, back rigid, and nodded once. "Yes.
I believe I am." Then he bent to his task once more. The job was nearly
done and it took him only another minute or so before he had removed the gold
entirely from the elegantly designed crystal spider. It was a marvel from an
age far more distant than anyone would have guessed.

"So are you going to tell me how this is going to help
us find your dead sorcerer friend?"

The edges of Doyle's mouth tugged upward, his mustache
twitching in the smallest of smiles. He stared at the Lemurian Spider in his
hand, felt its edges sharp against the callused flesh of his palm.

"Our quarry is not precisely dead, lovely Eve. And
this? With the proper incantations, it will weave us an answer."

Eve arched an eyebrow. "What the hell does that mean?"

He felt the words rising from deep within his chest, as
though they had been born not of his mind but of his heart. When he spoke them
his voice was higher and lilting, the way he had sung the melodies his mother
had taught him as a boy in Edinburgh.

"Atti mannu kashshaptu sha tuyub ta enni."

Mr. Doyle turned from her, raised the spider, and hurled it
with all his might at the wall. Eve shouted and lunged to stop him but for all
her uncanny speed she was too late. Her eyes were wide and her gaze ticked
toward the wall. It was clear she expected the spider to shatter.

Instead, it stuck to the wall.

For several long moments nothing happened. The only sounds
in the room was the hum of electricity in the walls and the shush of the air
filtration system, and Doyle's own breathing. The illumination cast by the
display lighting in the otherwise darkened room only lent to the gathering and
shifting of shadows in every corner and they seemed to darken, to cluster more
closely, as Doyle and Eve stared at the crystal spider.

"All right," Eve said, "what the hell is —"

She never finished the sentence.

With a grating, clicking sound, the spider began to move. Its
legs scratched at the wall as it crept upward and Mr. Doyle narrowed his gaze,
peering more closely until he could make out the thin strand of crystalline
webbing it was leaving behind.

Eve slid her hands into her pockets and gave her hair an
insouciant toss. "You know, with all I've seen — which is pretty
much everything — you'd think I couldn't be surprised any more. What is
it doing?"

"Watch," he chided her.

And so they stood in silence in the midst of the Egyptian
exhibit and watched as the spider spun its crystal web, clicking up the wall
and then to the left, moving back down to diagonally cross its original line. Soon
enough a pattern began to take form.

"It's a map," Eve said. She stepped closer and
looked up, head tilted back as she studied the circumference of the web pattern
and the shape it had taken, the grid that was forming along the length of it
and the large open rectangle in the center.