The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (4 page)

Behind the remembrance of a torrid lesbian affair with a
beautiful dark-haired girl nearly half her age, and beyond an exceptionally
awful production of
La Boheme
, Doyle found the elusive bit of
information that he had been searching for, and claimed it as his own.

He plucked his fingers from the skull, tossed the now-empty
shell back into the flames, and wiped the viscous, hideously warm gray matter
from his fingers upon his scorched handkerchief. The fire raged all around him,
attempting to block his path and consume him, but the mage knew the language of
fire, speaking to the conflagration politely and with respect, and it allowed
him to pass unharmed through the doorway and into the smoke-filled hall.

In the corridor, where smoke billowed and flames had already
begun to lick across the ceiling and ripple up the walls, Eve waited. Her face
was covered in dark patches of soot that resembled war paint. Her eyes darted
about like those of a desperate animal. Her kind did not do well with fire.

"I can't believe you're not burned to a crisp."

Doyle moved past her silently on his way toward the exit.

"At least tell me that you got whatever it was you
risked being burned alive for," she said, following close on his heels.

"I did indeed," he said as they hurried across the
entryway and out into the damp night air. "Time is short, now. We must act
swiftly. He's far closer than I would have guessed."

Squire awaited them on the sidewalk in front of the burning
brownstone. The goblin held an open umbrella, rain sluicing over the edges, and
he wore a nervous expression upon his grotesque features.

"A real gentleman's gentleman," Eve muttered as
she reached him.

Sirens wailed in the distance, but they would be far too
late to save this building. As they moved toward the car, Eve cursed loudly. Doyle
turned to face her, only to flinch as something wet and heavy struck his
shoulder, slippery on his neck. Suddenly the pre-dawn was alive with the
staccato thunder of one damp impact after another. In the midst of the rain,
something else was falling from the sky.

"What the Hell?" Eve snapped, shielding her head
as the toads continued to fall, bouncing off the brick steps, the streets, and
the cars below them. Multiple car alarms wailed, partially drowning the rather
offensive sound of soft flesh striking hard pavement.

Doyle stared about in alarm.
Things are far worse than I
thought
. Squire scrambled up the steps to shield them both from the
pummeling rain with the large, black umbrella.

"This can't be good," Eve snarled, pushing bloody,
ruptured amphibian corpses out of her way with the tip of her designer boot.

"Be thankful it ain't cats and dogs," Squire said,
as the rain of toads continued to fall all around them.

Far worse.

Julia Ferrick turned off the engine of her Volvo wagon in
the underground parking garage on Boston's Boylston Street and wondered, as she
so often did, what had happened to her
real
son.

"I was listening to that," the imposter growled
from the passenger seat. He had insisted on listening to one of his homemade
music mixes on the drive to their family appointment, and when she had turned
off the engine, it cut off a headache-inducing grind in mid-verse.

"And you'll hear the rest of it on the way home,"
she said with exasperation, placing her keys and the parking garage receipt
into her handbag. His name went unsaid. More and more, of late, she had trouble
calling him Daniel, or even Dan. She didn't know him anymore. Jesus, she craved
a cigarette.

"I wanted to hear it now," he said curtly,
refusing to make eye contact with her.

Julia looked at him, avoiding her gaze as if he would turn
to stone if their eyes met, and wondered when exactly the aliens or the goblins
or maybe even the Gypsies had come and taken away her real son and replaced him
with this grim doppelganger. She ran her thumb over the tips of her fingers,
where the nails were short and ragged. It was a nervous habit born out of
quitting smoking. Any time she looked at her nails, she thought maybe lung
cancer was preferable to the complaints she got when she tried to get her
manicurist to fix them.

"C'mon," she told him, opening her door. "We're
going to be late."

She slammed the driver side door closed but the sixteen-
year old did not move. Dan just sat there, sweatshirt hood pulled up over his
head, arms folded across his chest. His skateboard was on the floor in the back
and her eyes flickered to it. The skate punk thing was just the latest identity
he'd tried on, and she wondered how long it would be before he shed this one. Every
time she saw him in those baggy pants she shivered. To her eyes, he looked like
a criminal. That was a terrible thought, but there was no escaping it. It was
difficult for her to conceive that these kids looked at one another — or
at each other — and thought that they looked good.

The one thing that never changed was the music. Whether it
was Taking Back Sunday or Rancid — and wasn't that band name apropos?
— it was much the same as the clothes he wore. Julia simply could not
understand the attraction. She wasn't a fool. She didn't expect him to listen
to things she liked, old Peter Gabriel and David Bowie, or Genesis. Music was a
personal thing. It spoke to your heart, or it didn't. But with a couple of
exceptions, the sort of thing Danny listened to was just . . . it was awful. Ugly.
How could he not see that?

Julia knew that he'd had a rough year — his father
walking out on them, the condition that gave his skin a weathered, leathery
texture — and she wished she could make it all go away, give him the
perfect life she'd hoped for since he was a baby. But life threw you curves. No
way could she have predicted his medical problem. Trying to balance her
sympathy for him with her frustration at his behavior was enough to drive her
to drink . . . or at least to run back to her cigarette habit and beg a pack of
Winston Lights to forgive her.

Things were bound to get better. That's what she told
herself while she was biting her nails. Things
had
to get better. She
was determined to help Dan in any way she could and had begun home schooling
him with the finest tutors and making appointments with the best dermatologists
and psychologists. Julia still remembered the loving little boy he had been. He
had filled her with so much happiness. She wanted that boy back.

No matter what it cost.

"Daniel Ferrick, get out of that car right now,"
she yelled, her voice reverberating against the low concrete ceiling of the
garage. There was a quaver in it, but she promised herself she would not break
down.

Slowly, he turned to look at her through the glass and
scowled. His skin was getting worse right along with his attitude. They had
first diagnosed it as a unique form of eczema, but she soon came to realize
that none of them really had the first clue what it was. They kept going for
tests and various special medications, and pills were prescribed, but nothing
seemed to help. When the two pronounced bumps appeared just above his temples
last week, he had nearly had a breakdown. And in private, in her bathroom with
the shower running, Julia had wept for him. She'd snuck a cigarette and blown
the smoke out her bedroom window, hoping he wouldn't smell it. Whatever else
might be done for him, Julia knew they both needed to see the family psychologist.

"Doctor Sundin is going to be really ticked if we're
late again," she said, tapping the glass with the knuckle of her hand. "Let's
go."

She couldn't even remember the last time she'd heard him
laugh or seen him smile. It tore her up inside, but at the same time, it was
becoming increasingly difficult to live with.

The passenger door popped open and Dan slunk from the
vehicle. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled so far down over his head that
it completely hid his face in shadows. Over the last week or so he had begun
wearing gloves in public to conceal his skin condition, and the way his
fingernails had started to grow tough and jagged. The way other kids dressed
these days, nobody had seemed to notice.

Julia reached out to her son and rubbed his head through the
heavy cotton hood. She remembered her teenage bout with acne but could not even
begin to imagine what it must be like for the boy. He roughly jerked away from
her affections.

"Don't do that," he spat at her. "It hurts
me."

The boy's mother bit her tongue and walked toward the garage's
Boylston Street exit. She glanced at her watch. If they hurried they would only
be a few minutes late. Julia hoped Daniel would speak to Doctor Sundin about
his self-image problems, and how they affected his relationship with her and
his father. She planned to avoid any mention of his clothes or his music. Those
things got under her skin, but they were superficial. The real problems were so
much deeper.

As she glanced back to confirm that Daniel was indeed following,
she wondered how much of his personality change could be attributed to Roger
walking out on them. Irreconcilable differences, he'd told his lawyer.
The
son of a bitch took the coward's exit
, she thought, remembering all the
sleepless nights as her son yowled in his bed, the skin condition so irritating
that he scratched himself bloody trying to stop the itch. Then there were the
violent mood swings, and the complete change in the boy's personality.
Yeah
,
she thought.
Roger got off easy
. There was a small part of her that
envied him.
The bastard
.

Julia Ferrick pushed the disturbing thoughts from her mind
and turned to wait for her son to catch up. She was standing in front of a
high, wrought iron fence and beyond it she could see children at play in the
yard of the daycare facility headquartered there. The kids squealed and laughed
as they ran about under the supervision of their minders. It was a nice sound,
one that she hadn't heard in a very long time.

"I'm coming," Dan mumbled, head down, gloved hands
shoved deep into his sweatshirt pockets.

"I know," she told him, trying her best to keep
her temper in check. "I just thought I'd wait for you."

Dan kicked at a piece of gum, crushed flat upon the
sidewalk. "Don't do me any favors," he mumbled as he scuffed at the
pink refuse with the toe of his sneaker.

Julia Ferrick was about to say something she was sure to
regret when she noticed that a little girl, no older than five, now stood on
the other side of the metal gate watching them. The child sniffled, her hand
slowly rising to her face to rub at her eyes. The little girl began to cry.

"What's the matter, sweetie?" Julia asked.

"Don't feel good," the small child whined,
beginning to cry all the harder. Julia moved closer to the gate, wanting to get
the attention of one of the daycare workers, when the child in front of her
began to retch. Thick streams of milky white vomit poured from her mouth to
splash upon the sidewalk, spattering her shiny, black patent leather shoes.

Julia was about to comfort the little girl through the thick
bars of the metal gate when motion at the periphery of her vision caught her
attention. She glanced down upon the puddle of vomit at the child's feet.

It was moving.

Now matter how badly she wanted to, Julia Ferrick could not pull
her eyes away from the horrific sight. The child had regurgitated maggots; not
just one or five or even twenty, but hundreds of them.

"I trew up bugs," the child whined over and over
again in a dazed chorus. "I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs."

Julia felt that she might be sick as well, and finally tore
her gaze away to look upon the playground for help.

"Could somebody — anybody — help here
please!" she cried out, on the verge of panic. Then she saw that the staff
was in a panic of activity, the other children sick as well, all of them
throwing up as the little girl at the fence had done.

One of the staff members fainted, hitting the ground
dangerously close to an undulating pile of maggot infested sick.

"Got to call 911," she mumbled, reaching into her
bag for her cell phone. "This isn't right. It isn't right at all."

Julia hit the emergency button that would immediately dial
for help and brought the phone up to her ear, gazing into the playground at the
children all in the grip of sickness. They were all crying, some curled into
convulsing balls on the ground. Even the little girl at the fence now lay at
the base of the gate, trembling as if freezing.

This was a nightmare,
she thought as the voice on the
other end of the phone asked her to state her emergency.

The worlds were about to leave her mouth when she noticed
that her son now gripped the black iron bars of the gate in his gloved hands. His
hood had fallen away to reveal his closely cropped hair and the condition that
had changed his face and the skin of his entire body. The bumps upon his
forehead seemed more pronounced, red and angry as though ready to burst.

As he stared intensely through the bars at the children
overcome with illness, Daniel Ferrick made a sound the likes of which his
mother had not heard for number of years. In any other circumstance, she would
have paid a great deal of money for a chance to hear it again.

Her son was laughing.

Eve could smell the prominent stink of fear upon the
commuters milling around the main terminal of New York's Grand Central Station.
The city was freaked, but given the circumstances, could she blame them?

The toad rain ended around thirty minutes after it had
begun, followed by random incidents of bizarreness that they had heard about on
the radio in the limousine on their way to the station: spontaneous human
combustion, stigmata, spectral rape, and myriad other claims that were coming
in seemingly by the minute. And if what Doyle was hinting about was even
remotely true, this was just the tip of a really nasty iceberg.