Mister Slaughter (51 page)

"Noggin!" she shouted, loud enough to wake the widow Ford. "Come
here
!"

Matthew knew he was finished when Noggin came. He bent to pick up a length of chain, but the woman charged him once more. The axe flashed with lamplight. Matthew jerked his head back, and the blade thunked into the wall. Then Matthew grabbed hold of the axe and they fought for it, spinning each other around and around, banging into barrels and staggering back and forth across the cellar. Everything was blurred and chaotic, a mad nightmare, Mrs. Sutch kicking at his legs, spitting in his eyes and biting at his hands, he trying to pull the axe out of her iron grip.

Suddenly she shoved him hard against a wall. A knee came up and caught him square in the groin. Pain stole his breath and nearly crippled him. His legs sagged and he slid down. She stepped back to give herself room to bash his brains out, but before she could steady her legs to deliver the blow Matthew had scrambled away from her, almost on hands and knees. He found himself in the passageway that Noggin had come out of, and desperate to buy some time and find a weapon he half-ran, half-stumbled toward the lamplit room that had thrown such hideous shadows.

"Noggin!" she screamed, her throat shredding.

Matthew knew she'd be after him, Noggin or not. He flung himself into the chamber, fell onto his knees, and there through his pain-hazed vision saw the depth of Mrs. Sutch's pleasure.

Hanging from the ceiling beams in this dirt-walled room, along with a few blood-spattered lanterns, were a half-dozen chains each ending in a sharp iron hook about five feet off the floor. Items impaled on some of these hooks looked at first to be nothing more than marine creatures from the deep brought up in a fisherman's net: here twisted blue coils like an aquatic worm, there a gleaming mass like a crimson skate, here a grayish-purple fist-sized lump with cords dangling down like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Two buckets full of blood stood beneath a wooden trough, within which lay a ferrago of gore and matter that was best not too closely examined. The chamber's smell was also nautical, of sea brine and low tide. On the floor very near Matthew were, oddly enough, a pair of bare feet chopped off at the ankles, a pair of wrinkled hands and beside them the white-haired decapitated head of an elderly mermaid, her eyes half-open as if groggily awakening from sleep and her gray lips pressed tight to keep a secret.

The widow Ford had come to pieces in here. An extra bit of spice, to be added to the next batch of sausage.

Matthew stared at the hanging internals, which were swinging ever so slightly. He thought it was very economical that Mrs. Sutch used all the body as she did. All the organs, as well as the meat. Bone marrow too, most likely. Didn't want to get the nails into the mix, though. Or the teeth. The head was probably due to be cracked last, for the brains. Then everything into the pot along with the pork, and after the sausages were shaped and cased they went into the smokehouse. Very economical of her, very efficient.

He thought he could lose his mind, kneeling here before this altar of evil.

With a shriek of rage Mrs. Sutch hurtled into the room. She lifted her axe, and when it fell it cleaved deep into Matthew's head.

Or, rather, the head he'd picked up from the floor, which had belonged to the widow Ford and which Matthew had thrust up in front of his own to take the blow.

Mrs. Sutch saw she'd chopped the wrong head and began to try to fling it off the axeblade, but it was stuck tight. She beat the head against the floor, to no avail. Then she gave a scream of frustration, put her foot upon it and pushed, adding indignity to the sorry fate of the widow Ford. As Mrs. Sutch was so occupied, Matthew crawled to one of the buckets of blood and took hold of it. He struggled to his feet against the ache of his bruised stones and threw the gore full into her face.

Spitting blood that was not her own, her face, hair and the front of her gown streaming crimson, Mrs. Sutch dropped the axe and the head it was buried in. She staggered back into the passageway, her hands up to clear her eyes. For good measure Matthew flung the bucket at her, but she was already moving and the bucket only crashed into the wall where she'd been.

Matthew knew she wasn't done. He knew also that she'd gone to find something else to kill him with. He looked around and saw a second axe leaning against the trough, this one with a bloody blade. The handyman's tool. But where the hell
was
Noggin? Matthew heard Mrs. Sutch shout for him again, her ragged voice carrying the high note of desperation. She knew, as well as Matthew did, that if Noggin wasn't here by now he wasn't coming.

Matthew picked up the axe. He turned to face the doorway, the pain at his groin forcing him into a crouch.

When Mrs. Sutch returned, her face a dripping bloodmask, she was gripping in each hand a knife from her collection.

"I don't want to kill you," Matthew said. He held the axe up.

If she feared the blade, she gave no sign of it. She feinted once, trying to get him to commit, but he stood his ground. "You're in your grave," she whispered, as her knives carved the air between them. "In your grave. Oh yes, in your grave." Her eyes were fixed upon his, both daring and taunting him. She shifted two steps to the left and then came back to the right. "In your grave," she repeated. "Yes, you are. In your—"

She leaped at him, the knives flashing.

Matthew had no time to think, only to react. Neither did he have time to aim. He just struck out with the axe, as Mrs. Sutch slashed at his face with one knife and at his throat with the other.

Before she could get to him, there was a crunching sound. Mrs. Sutch gave an animalish grunt and was flung away. She fell down in the wet red dirt. She blinked, her eyes wide with shock and perhaps more than a touch of madness. Then she began to try to get up once more, but her left arm was no longer a working part of her body.

"Stay down," he told her.

She was on her knees. She stared at the knife in her right hand, as if drawing strength from it. Then, shaking with either rage or pain, she got up on her feet.

"Don't," Matthew said, the axe ready again.

But he knew she was coming. She had passed beyond the human state, into a creature that must kill to survive. At that moment Matthew thought of the monster's tooth in McCaggers' attic.
A supreme carnivore
, McCaggers had said.
Formed for the function of both destruction and survival.

Both she and Slaughter were of the same breed, Matthew thought. Formed for the same function. Kill or be killed.

He watched as she came toward him, but slowly now, with a terrible silence. The blade was thrust forward; the monster's tooth was seeking flesh. He retreated, brushing past the chains with their hanging pieces of meat.

She was now the full creation not of God, but of Professor Fell. Whatever the professor was, he had the power to take the raw clay of humanity and mold it into something monstrous.

The monster's tooth. Evidence of what God had told Job, about the behemoth and the leviathan.

God spoke to Job from the whirlwind
, McCaggers had said.
He told Job to gird up his
loins like a man, and face what was to come
.

I will demand of thee
,
He said
.

Mrs. Sutch attacked with a sudden burst of speed and ferocity, her teeth gritted, her eyes wild in the bloody face, the knife seeking Matthew's heart.

Matthew swung the axe. Even as the blade tore into flesh and broke bone, Matthew was aware that the knife had pierced his waistcoat and shirt because he felt the point of the monster's tooth pressed against his skin, felt it poised to bite into his guts . . .

 . . . but quite suddenly its power was gone.

Mrs. Sutch had lost the knife, and she was falling backward. All of her head was no longer there. She fell into the chains and staggered against the trough and then slid down to the floor, where her body quivered and her legs shook in a hideous palsied dance.

Incredibly, she put her remaining good hand to the floor and looked to be trying to get up again, and she lifted her misshapen head toward him and gripped her fingers into the dirt in an attempt to crawl. The expression of pure, cold hatred on her face riveted Matthew.

It said,
Don't think you've won, little man
.
Oh no
 . . .
for I am the least of what is ahead for you
 . . .

She drew a terrible, shuddering breath, and then he saw her eyes cloud over and her face freeze. Her head pitched forward but her fingers dug deeper into the dirt—once, twice, and a third time—before they stilled. Her hand stayed twisted into a claw.

For a long time, Matthew could not move. Then, at last, the full impact that he had killed another person hit him, and he hobbled out of the cellar next to Noggin's wagon and threw up until he was just heaving and gasping, but never in all this distress did he let go of the axe.

Matthew unbuttoned his waistcoat and opened his shirt. The blade had given him a shallow bite across his ribs about two inches long, but it wasn't so bad. Not as bad as Mrs. Sutch had intended. His groin, though, was a more painful subject. He would think himself lucky if he could walk tomorrow.

But Slaughter was on his way to kill Nathaniel Powers. To settle an account for Professor Fell. Matthew thought he might have trouble walking tomorrow or the next day, but somehow he was going to have to gird up his loins enough to climb on his horse and ride to Nicholsburg, to find some help. It would be an unlucky farmer who answered his door tonight. First, though, there was a box in the cellar that needed to be opened.

After this mess was sorted out, he was going to have to ride south, to the Carolina colony, and get to Nathaniel Powers before Slaughter did.

Matthew leaned against the wagon, waiting for his head to clear and his nerves to settle. That might take a while. He looked at the empty coffin, and at the shovel lying there in the back.

Something was missing, he realized.

It was the damnedest thing.

Where was the pickaxe?

A solitary rider came along the road, under the gray November sky. The road went straight between young trees. At its end stood a red brick two-story plantation house with white trim, white shutters and four chimneys. On either side of the road, beyond the trees, were the tobacco fields, brown and barren now until April. The solitary rider reined his black horse in for just a moment, while his gaze swept across the landscape, and then he continued on his chosen path.

He was a well-dressed gent, on this cold and somber morning. He wore tan-colored breeches, white stockings, polished black boots, a dark blue waistcoat and a dark blue jacket overlaid with a design of paisley in lighter blue. On his head was a tasteful white wig, not too ostentatiously curly, and atop that a black tricorn. Black gloves, a black cloak and a white cravat completed his carefully-crafted attire.

He had just come from the Gentleman's Rest Tavern and Inn in Kingswood, where he'd spent the past two nights. They knew him there as Sir Fonteroy Makepeace, aide to Lord Henry Wickerby of the Wickerby estate near Charles Town. This title had also appeared in the very formal letter sent from Sir Makepeace by way of a young courier from Kingswood to the door of the plantation house now drawing nearer. Such was the communications of one gentleman to another, and the privileges of breeding.

As Sir Makepeace rode his horse along the drive, a groom who'd been notified to expect the visitor saw him coming and emerged from his small brick watchhouse that stood alongside the main entrance. He went up the front steps to alert the other servants by using the brass door knocker cast in the shape of a tobacco leaf, and then he hurried to bring over a footstool and hold it steady as Sir Makepeace dismounted. The groom offered to take the gentleman's horse around to the barn, but Sir Makepeace said it wouldn't be necessary, that his business would only take a short while and it was fine to just keep the animal here.

The groom gave a respectful bow and said
As you wish, Sir Makepeace.

"Good morning, Sir Makepeace," said the rather stocky, balding servant who came down the steps to meet him. Climbing the steps to the front door appeared to be a bit hard on Sir Makepeace, if anyone was watching. He brought a cloth from his waistcoat pocket and blotted some beads of sweat that had risen on his face. Then he put the cloth away, looked back to make sure the groom was standing firm with his horse, and allowed the servant to usher him inside.

A servant-girl came forward to take Sir Makepeace's cloak, hat and gloves, but he said, "I'll keep these for the while, miss. I'm rather cold-natured." She gave him a polite smile and a quick curtsy.

"Mr. Powers' office is this way, please," said the male servant, motioning up the staircase.

Sir Makepeace looked up the stairs. His face showed just the slightest ripple of unease.

"Men usually keep their offices on the lower floor," said Sir Makepeace.

"Yes sir, that may be true," the servant answered, "but Lord Kent has given Mr. Powers an office on the upper level, so that he might always have a view of the fields."

"Ah." Sir Makepeace nodded, though his smile did not completely take hold. "My business is with Mr. Powers, but is Lord Kent in residence?"

"No sir, Lord Kent is currently in England and shall not be back before summer. This way, if you please."

Sir Makepeace followed the servant up the stairs and to a closed door on the right side of the house. The servant knocked, there was a muffled, "Come in," and the servant opened the door for Sir Makepeace's entry. He closed it as soon as the visitor had crossed the threshold.

Sir Makepeace gave the office a quick once-over. It was richly appointed, with cowhide chairs, a brown leather sofa, and in the corner to his right a gold-and-black lacquered Chinese screen. A chandelier holding six lanterns hung from the ceiling. The desk was on the far side of the room, where a man in his mid-fifties, with dark brown hair gone gray at the temples, had removed his reading spectacles and risen from his chair. "Mr. Powers?" said Sir Makepeace, as he walked across a red carpet toward the desk.