The Providence Rider by Robert R. McCammon
Twenty-Six
A TAPPING at the door brought Matthew up from the pit of a fitful sleep. He hesitated, listening. And yes, there it was again. Someone definitely at the door. And what time was it? A squint at the candle clock: nearly two in the morning. Now what the hell was this? Matthew wondered. He sat up on the bed’s edge. “Who is it?” he asked, but of an answer there was none. A third time: tap tap tap. Someone definitely wanting him to open that door. Matthew started to call again, but he knew it would be no use. If they had wanted to reply, a reply would have been given. Still…perhaps it was someone who didn’t wish their voice to carry in the hallway. Or…more ominously…it could be one or more Thackers, wishing to finish the job they’d started yesterday. That thought made him mad. He’d had a damned gutful of those orange-haired nubbers. If they wanted some of him, they’d get it…in the form of a candle clock smashed across their skulls. He got out of bed, plucked up the candle clock and, oblivious to the wax dripping onto his right hand, went to the door, unlatched it and opened it a fraction. A caped and hooded figure was standing there, touched by the golden glow of its own candlelight. “Who are—” Matthew began, but he could not finish the question because in the next second the figure blew its candle out, pushed the door open, blew Matthew’s candle out before light could reveal the face, and pressed her lips against his own. And very definitely, from the shape of the body beneath the cape, it was a her. He pulled back and started to speak again, to ask the same unasked question, and now in the velvet dark the figure fairly flew upon him and, dropping her own candlestick to the floor, clasped his arms to his sides and kissed him again. Whoever she was, she was strong. Lithe and nimble, he thought. Her body strained against his, a powerhouse of earthy passion.
It had to be Fancy.
He started to speak her name, and yet her mouth upon his was unrelenting in its quest to consume every word he might try to utter. She backed him across the room to the bed, proving that an Indian could see, catlike, in the dark. He fell back before her, upon that selfsame bed, and she proved also that an Indian maiden could be far from maidenly.
She began a campaign to disrobe him, if it meant tearing the nightclothes from his body. And they were not even his nightclothes, but provided to him from Sirki, and Matthew thought that if the East Indian giant wanted them back after this misadventure he would have to settle for the rags the West Indian girl had rent them into with fingers and teeth. Her haste was ridiculous, but also flattering.
“Wait!” he said, stunned by the speed of this disclosure of desire. He couldn’t get out the second wait, for she clamped a hand over his mouth and bit his belly just south of the navel. With his nightclothes torn into tatters and himself nearly naked, Matthew found the girl hellbent on pinning him to the bed and having her way with him.
She kissed his mouth, grasped his tongue with her lips, and nibbled his throat. What could he do, but lie back before this onslaught? He returned her kisses and would be remiss—actually insane—if his body did not respond. And so it did.
She wore no clothing under the cape. She had no time for formalities nor foreplay; she got astride Matthew and mounted him with the dampened ease of wanton and needful urgency. He did not protest this action, but when he tried to reach up to touch her face and hair beneath the hood she gripped his arms all the harder and held them fast to the bed.
If any member of her tribe had attempted to mark time to the thrusting of her hips with a drum, his hands would’ve been beaten bloody within the first minute. “My God!” Matthew said, or thought he said; he wasn’t sure, since his senses were beginning to fly in mad circles round the room. He thought he wouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow, but what a hell of a run he intended to have tonight.
She leaned forward then and harshly bit his lips. Very harshly, in fact, and most painfully, and Matthew realized from the roughness of her toothy attention this was not Fancy at all.
It was Aria Chillany.
Of course it was. She of the cold soul and brutal demands. She was demanding of him right now and he intended to deliver. Her intention was strictly to enjoy his flesh, and all else be damned. He could bear that hardship. In fact, her soul might be cold but something else was quite hot. Quite.
He decided to give as good as he got, and so he met her halfway on each stroke and their banging together might have broken bones if it had been any more violent a wallop. His teeth cracked together in his head and he feared his eyeballs would jump from his skull. The woman was wild. She ground down on him and moved her hips around and around and Matthew who had not experienced anything like this since the episode with the sex-crazed nymph Charity LeClaire could only hang on for the pounding and try to keep the impending explosion from knocking Madam Chillany through the ceiling.
But no, no…he had to withstand this assault as long as he could. Therefore he sent his mind out on an errand of imaging himself a man swimming under the cold sea, whereas in this room the pulsing heat and violence of their frenzied encounter promised the seaman must in a short time certainly rise from the depths.
He tried to reach up for her again and was again promptly arm-pinned. Then her rhythm changed to a softer beat and she leaned forward and kissed him gently on the mouth, the touch of her lips stirring a not-so-distant and very pleasing memory.
It was not Aria Chillany. He realized it must be Minx Cutter.
Yes. He was sure of it. Though not entirely certain, in that he would not have bet his life upon it. Now they were meeting more gently but still with a powerful thrust, and her mouth was upon his and her tongue questing within. Minx, he almost said, but his mouth was no longer his own. She kissed him and bit him playfully, as her hips circled around and around and she held him tightly within. Yes. Certainly Minx Cutter, he thought. Maybe.
The problem was, he could not touch her hair or her face nor could he smell. His bashed and swollen nose prevented all aromas from entering. He could not tell if the woman astride him smelled of earth, of fire, or of seafoam. He tried to inhale her scent and found nothing. As the woman began to thrust down upon him harder and harder still, as she began to moan softly in a voice that could belong in its passionate strain to any one of his three suspects, Matthew was at a loss to know who it truly was. And then he met her one thrust too many, their heat blending and melding, and he could hold back no longer. He was lit up as if by a white-hot blaze, his mind was filled with a spinning of colorful wheels, and he emptied himself into her as she clutched him tighter and deeper and made noises of both passion and satisfaction that served to inflame him to a hotter candle. When Matthew was all served out, the mystery paramour gave him one slow and final grind that was pain mixed with pleasure, as love must be. Then she dismounted, grasped his most valued instrument and kissed its ticklish tip, and without a word departed from the bedside. He heard the door open and close, and that was the end of the affair.
“Damn,” he managed to say, to the dark.
The dark answered, in its own way, for there was suddenly the slightest tremor of Pendulum Island shifting like a beast in its sleep, and in the castle there came a beggar’s symphony of creaks, cracks and pops issuing from the walls.
Matthew got out of bed. On shaky legs he went to the door, opened it and peered into the hallway. It was, as he’d suspected, empty. Fancy…Aria Chillany…Minx Cutter. Who? He somehow doubted he might ever know. Therefore he closed and latched the door, he relit the candle clock estimating to his best judgment the amount of time that had passed, and he returned to his bed ready for sleep and whatever the next morning might bring in this strange new world he found himself a part of.
At as near to six o’clock as he could manage Matthew was dressed and waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The sun was rising over the sea, the air was still and the day vowed to be warm indeed. In a few minutes a middle-aged black servant arrived in the high powdered wig and the sea-blue uniform that seemed to suit Professor Fell’s taste for drama and color. The servant held a black leather bag and
“Good mornin’, sir,” he said to Matthew, his face impassive. “If you’ll follow me?”
Matthew followed the man out another door beyond the staircase. They walked through a manicured garden where early birds sang from the trees. Purple and yellow flowers lined the walkway, which led to a series of stone stairs going down the cliff face to the sea.
“Careful with your step,” said the servant, as they started their descent.
Suddenly a voice called, “Daniel!” A second servant who’d been standing among the trees approached them as Daniel and Matthew paused. “I’ll take the young man down,” this second man offered.
“I was told to do it,” Daniel said.
“I know you don’t like it,” was the reply. The recent arrival—or had he been waiting for them? Matthew wondered—was dressed in the usual fashion and looked to be a few years older than the first man, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes that held both sadness and determination. “I’ll do it for you.”
“You don’t like it neither,” said Daniel.
“Who does?” asked the second servant, with a lift of his eyebrows. He reached out for the bag.
Daniel removed the leather gloves and the second man put them on. Then the bag changed hands. Daniel gave a very audible sigh of relief. “Thank you, George,” he said, and he nodded at Matthew, turned away and retraced his steps to the castle.
“This way, sir,” said George, who started down the long and—to Matthew’s eye—extremely dangerous and sea-damp stairs.
At the bottom of the cliff was a wooden platform jutting out over the sea, and low enough that some of the harder waves were smashing against it. A wide plank extended from the platform another ten or so feet over the turbulent water, and at the end of that plank was a highly-unsettling metal spike coated with what could only be dried gore. Matthew noted what appeared to be the top of a wire fence, exposed in the trough between waves, that made a circle about a hundred or more feet around. Keeping something caged, he thought. But what? The sweat had begun to rise under his shirt.
“If you’ll stand where you are, sir,” cautioned George, who set the leather bag down and opened its ram’s-horn clasps. Matthew was perfectly glad to obey, as the wind and the sea spray hit him full in the face.
George reached carefully into the bag and drew out by the unruly hair the severed head of Jonathan Gentry. Matthew caught his breath and drew back another few feet. The face was gray with a touch of green on the sunken cheeks. George held the head at arm’s length and walked out to the spike, where he did what Matthew feared he was going to do: he impaled the head on the spike, and then he walked back along the plank and stood looking out to sea. He removed the gloves and dropped them with the briefest shiver of revulsion into the bag, which he promptly closed once more.
They waited.
“What’s in there?” Matthew dared ask, his voice pitched nearly an octave higher than normal.
“The professor’s prized possession,” said George. “It will show itself soon. Please don’t move when it does.”
“No concern there,” Matthew answered, watching the blue waves and the white swirling foam within the wire enclosure, which had to be secured by chains many feet underwater.
Still they waited.
And then George lifted his chin and said, “It’s coming now. Time for its breakfast.”
Something was indeed rising from the depths. Matthew could see a brown shape coming up, a thing that looked to be blotched with barnacles and stained with seaweed. George stood his ground about midway on the platform, and though Matthew’s brain begged him to turn tail from this ascending nightmare he was profoundly curious. His curiosity always won over his sense of impending danger, which he reasoned would someday be his undoing.
The shape hung suspended just below the churning surface. Matthew had the sense of looking at a huge mass of moving jelly. Then a tentacle as big as a treetrunk came up through a green-foamed wave and reached upward, questing for the head of Jonathan Gentry.
Matthew did not have to be cautioned to stand perfectly still, for his blood seemed to have frozen in his veins on this warm sunny morning and his muscles turned to lumps of heavy clay.
The tentacle rubbed itself across the hair on the severed head. A second tentacle rose up, blighted with mollusks and ringed with pinkish-green suckers that pulsed and moved seemingly of their own accord. This, too, went to the head and began to caress the face with hideous anticipation.
“It is very intelligent,” said George, in a hushed voice. “It’s exploring its meal.”
A third tentacle rose from the water, snapped like a whip toward the platform and then submerged again. The two others began to work in concert at lifting the head off its spike. Matthew thought he was a stagger and shriek away from Bedlam.
With a noise of sliding flesh the tentacles wrapped themselves around Gentry’s gaping face and pulled the head upward from its mount on the plank. Then, quickly and greedily, the head was brought to the shifting mass that hung just under the waves, and as it went down Matthew could imagine he heard the crack of a skull and the crunch of facial bones under the biting beak of Professor Fell’s huge and nightmarish octopus.
The creature withdrew to its lair below. There was a brown shimmer and a flail of tentacles, and it was gone.
“It usually eats horsemeat, lamb or beef,” George explained, altogether too helpfully. “It does seem to like entrails and brains.” He stared across the platform at Matthew, who had retreated to its far edge. “You’re very pale, sir,” he observed.
Matthew nodded, dazed; he was thinking that never in his worst fever-dream had Doctor Gentry ever thought that not only would his head be sawed off, but that his brain would be a sea-monster’s delicacy.
George picked up the leather bag as if it carried a disease. “I need to tell you, sir,” he said, “that your lady friend is currently in hiding at the house of Jerrell Falco.”
Matthew blinked. “What?”
“Your lady friend,” the servant repeated. “Her name is Berry, I believe?”
“Berry. Yes.” Matthew wondered if he were still asleep and dreaming this by way of a bad oyster; yes, of course, it had to be that.
“At Captain Falco’s house. His wife, Saffron, is my daughter. I was told to tell you, and as I learned you were coming here this morning I waited for you.”
Matthew rubbed the lumps on his forehead with the fingers of his right hand. Surely he’d been injured more severely than he’d first imagined.
“I have a map for you.” George reached into his jacket and brought out a folded piece of rough-edged paper. He offered it to Matthew, who stood dumbly staring at it. “Please, sir,” said the servant. “Take it and put it away. If anyone finds that and learns I’ve brought it for you, I hate to think what would happen to poor George.” He cast a disturbed glance over the octopus enclosure. “It shows you how to reach Falco’s house from here. Please, sir…put it away, and show no one.”
Matthew put the paper into his own jacket. “Thank you,” he managed to say.
“I hope it will help you,” George answered, with a dignified half-bow. He picked up the leather bag, now headless. “If you’ll follow me up the steps, then?”
Behind the locked door of his room, Matthew studied the map and consigned it to memory before he burned it over a candle and then scattered the ashes from his balcony into the sea. Falco’s house was not far from the forbidden road that led to the fort. What in the name of all the demons of Solomon’s Key was Berry doing over there? He had to find a way to get to her, and that was the problem. And finding Zed, too, would be a problem. The largest problem looming upon him now, however, was that he was running out of time.
Don’t fail me, Professor Fell had said.
This whole affair seemed to Matthew like an exercise in failure. He still had the rooms of Cesar Sabroso and Adam Wilson to search through, but the conference of criminals was nearing its end
So where to go from here?
Minx Cutter would be waiting for him at eight o’clock at the stable. Something to show him, where the whales played. If she could get him a horse, fine. If not, he was certainly not walking that distance. Not in the daylight, at least. But when night came, perhaps that would be the time to go Berry-hunting. If he could get out of this castle without being seen by anyone.
Promptly at eight o’clock, Matthew approached the stable and found Minx standing outside on the road there with two horses—Esmerelda and Athena once more—saddled and ready. She was dressed in her brown breeches, her riding boots and a black waistcoat over a pale blue blouse. He didn’t quite know what to say to her—may I ask if you happened to visit my room last night past midnight?—so he said nothing. If he expected her to suddenly gush forth about the encounter, he was sadly disappointed. She swung herself up astride Esmeralda and watched him approach with a blank stare as she held Athena’s reins.
“Good morning,” he told her. Was his voice a shade shaky? Yes, it was. Her stare was formidable, and there was something accusing in it. “How did you get me the horse?”
“I said I needed two horses. One for myself and one for my riding companion. I wasn’t asked whom, and I didn’t volunteer the information. Are you ready?”
He answered by taking the reins and getting up into Athena’s saddle.
“Your nose is better today?” she asked as they started off.
“It’s not quite as swollen. I can breathe a little more through it.”
“And you had a restful sleep?”
Matthew wasn’t sure what he’d heard in that question. “I did sleep, yes,” he said.