The Orphan of Awkward Falls (8 page)

The early morning sky was at its blackest when Fetid Stenchley finally emerged from the forest. Creeping through the cold fog on all fours, he found himself at the stone wall behind Hibble Manor. He opened the rear gate and entered the familiar grounds cautiously. Spackled with mud and twigs, the surgical gown he still wore now ragged, he looked like something from the underworld.

As Stenchley looked out at the familiar silhouette of the stately house, fragmented memories began pricking his damaged mind. Inside the mansion’s moldy stone walls, Stenchley had once experienced something like happiness. There, he had spent almost his entire adult life living and working side by side with the famous Professor Celsius T. Hibble.

Long ago, the professor had found Stenchley starving and homeless, begging on the streets of Awkward Falls. The great scientist had taken the deformed man into his home, fed and clothed him, and unlike anyone else in Stenchley’s miserable life, treated him like
a human being. Stenchley’s grateful devotion to the professor had been boundless. No labor was too difficult, no hour too late, no burden too heavy, if the good professor asked it of him. Fetid Stenchley had loved the professor with all his twisted heart.

Ironically, it was the power of this love that would eventually drive the madman to kill his master. Stenchley coveted his status as the professor’s closest companion, and deeply mistrusted any others whose relationship with the great man became too close. After Hibble’s near marriage to the Twittington woman, the hunchback took it upon himself to protect his master from the devious influence of outsiders.

Stenchley was diligent in his task. One spring morning, a certain French ambassador, whose visits to Hibble Manor Stenchley had deemed suspiciously frequent, mysteriously hanged himself in his room before breakfast. No one noticed that the rope was the same one the hunchback had been fooling around with the previous evening.

On another occasion, the glamorous daughter of an oil magnate, who had begun to spend more evenings than Stenchley would have cared for attached to the professor’s arm, slipped and fell to her death from the third-floor balcony. Everyone agreed it was a tragic accident.

Then one of the professor’s favorite nephews came to spend his summer vacation at Hibble Manor, but disappeared after only six weeks. The police deduced that the boy must have wandered into the forest and been attacked by wolves, who probably carried him off to
their den. Such incidents were not unheard of in northern Manitoba in those days.

Coincidentally, at the time of each of the mysterious deaths, Stenchley’s gardening activities increased. He seemed to always be digging a new hole, planting yet another pear tree. Visitors often commented on the hunchback’s green thumb, as the trees consistently produced surprisingly large fruit. When they asked what fertilizer he used, Stenchley only grinned.

Now, as the mad hunchback wandered through the grounds of the manor, there was an entire orchard of pear trees, all as healthy as that first one. Stealthily, he made his way from the fruit trees to the overgrown hedge maze, which he had planted as well, avoiding the house itself, for fear of being seen. He crawled under the hedge, within sight of the front door of his old home, and scratched out a shallow nest in the dirt. Exhausted from his long night of running, he spun around in the nest once, then curled into a tight ball and fell asleep.

In the dim light of Thaddeus’s lab, Josephine watched with a mixture of amazement and disgust as Thaddeus meticulously sorted through the gnarled body parts of the widow Gladstone’s dead weasel. Felix nibbled happily on a discarded bit of lung that fell on the floor. From a walk-in freezer, Norman fetched various replacement parts sealed in jelly jars and Ziploc bags. He placed the frozen liver of a raccoon, a pig’s spleen, a fox’s eyes, a rat’s tail, and some other things Josephine did not recognize in a bowl of water to thaw. The boy periodically reached into the bowl, fished out what he was looking for, and deftly stitched it onto the carcass. His stubby fingers handled the scalpel like an experienced surgeon, and worked so quickly, Josephine could barely follow what he was doing. Norman seemed to read his master’s mind, handing him the appropriate tool just when he needed it. Only occasionally did he snap, “Not that one, Norman—the one with the hook on the end!”

Josephine was amazed at Thaddeus’s skill. “How did you learn to do that?”

He shrugged, without looking up from his work. “Genius runs in the family, I suppose. I’ve spent a lot of time studying Grandfather’s notebook, at least the few parts that I can understand. Most of it is in some kind of code that I can’t decipher.”

“Why would he write in code?”

“Obviously he wanted to keep his experiments secret. Judging from his diagrams, it’s clear that Grandfather was working on far more complex things than the simple procedures I piddle around with. I suspect that a genius of his stature was onto something really big.”

“Can I see the notebook?” she asked, casually reaching for it.

The boy snatched the book off the table and looked at her as if she were mad. “Don’t touch it!” he said. “This book is the most valuable possession I have. It is written in Grandfather’s own hand. If it were to be damaged, I could never replace it!”

Josephine held her hands up and backed off. “Okay, okay! I won’t touch it, I just want to look. I won’t even breathe on it.” She gave him her most innocent smile. “Please?”

The boy squinted and pushed up his spectacles thoughtfully. After a moment, he set the book back down and opened it to the page he had been working from. “I suppose it will be all right if you only look. But you must be careful!”

Josephine tried to make sense of the hieroglyphic-style symbols and equations scribbled across the page. Carefully drawn diagrams
were crammed into the margins and on top of the text, with little care for legibility.

“A daunting puzzle, as you can see,” said Thaddeus.

“Yeah,” she nodded. “The diagrams look sort of like the stuff in my dad’s books, but in some weird language. Like this one here.” She pointed to one of the larger drawings. “It reminds me of a genetic sequencing diagram, except it’s written in Martian or something.”

“I have heard of the genome work being done of late, but I unfortunately lack the resources to delve into it. I wonder what creature was being sequenced?”

“Is this the only notebook your grandfather left?” she asked, noticing the number twelve written on the upper corner of the cover.

He shrugged. “It’s the only one I’ve found. There must be others, probably volumes of them. Perhaps they will turn up someday.”

“Did anyone else know about your grandfather’s work? Friends or other scientists, maybe?”

“His early work was widely published, of course, due to his winning of the Nobel Prize. He was an international celebrity. Then he abruptly retreated from the public eye after writing an article for a scientific magazine about a theory concerning the aging of cells. I’ve read and reread the article many times, but I can’t understand the details. Apparently, neither could anyone else. He was roundly criticized by his colleagues, and afterward became something of a laughingstock. He never wrote another article from that point on, as far as I can tell, and mention of his work in science journals became rare.
Grandfather became extremely secretive from that point on. No one knows anything about his work after that.”

“But what about Stenchley?” she asked. “He would have been with him the whole time, right?”

Thaddeus chuckled. “He would have seen things, of course. But by all accounts, Stenchley was a simpleton, too feebleminded to make any sense of them.”

“Hmm, right. Do you think Norman would remember anything?”

The boy shook his head. “I’ve questioned him repeatedly, but his memory circuits are corroded beyond repair. He’s as dotty as a loon.”

The boy stopped talking then, turning his full attention to a delicate bit of stitching.

Having extracted all the info she was likely to get from him for the moment, Josephine flopped down in a chair and pondered the situation, chewing her pinkie nail intently.

When the weasel’s new organs had all been attached and the repairs completed, Thaddeus snapped off his rubber gloves and clapped his hands together. “Now for the best part of the operation. Prepare the beast for reanimation, Norman!”

The robot didn’t need to be told. He was already in the process of inserting various colored pins into the weasel’s body. When this was done, Norman carefully laid the lifeless carcass inside the chamber of
a huge microwave oven that looked more like a front-loading washing machine. He closed the hatch and sealed it using a large wrench. Thaddeus twiddled knobs on a control panel until the indicator needle rose to the correct voltage. He gave the thumbs-up to Norman, who pushed a red button. The machine began to emit a high-pitched buzz, and through the glass door Josephine could see the weasel’s fur suddenly stand on end. The colored pins began to sparkle and smoke, and the weasel’s muscles began to twitch. Thaddeus watched what looked like a radar screen as points of light blipped on and off, getting brighter with each blip. After a couple of minutes, he signaled for Norman to turn the machine off. Smoke and the stink of scorched fur wafted out of the machine as the robot opened the hatch. Miraculously, the weasel staggered out of the chamber under its own power onto the counter and promptly coughed up the nastiest hairball Josephine had ever laid eyes on.

“That’s amazing!”

If this was some kind of trick, it was an awfully good one.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Thaddeus was as proud of the bedraggled creature as a father with his firstborn child. “You may deliver Coco to the widow Gladstone at first light, Norman. Tell her that the repairs were successfully completed and she’s better than ever.”

“Will do, sir,” said the robot. “Shall I rock her to sleep in the meantime?”

“Yes, a nap will lower her blood pressure nicely. But first let’s get some fluids in her.”

Thaddeus poured a fizzing puddle of soda into a saucer and patted the weasel’s head as it lapped up its first post-death meal. When it was finished, Norman picked up the beast with surprising tenderness and carried it to a chair in the corner, where he swaddled it in a blanket and began rocking it to sleep in his rusty steel arms.

The lab’s own cuckoo clock, a miniature carousel with little saddled models of unicorns, dragons, lions, and tigers, suddenly sprang to life. A door in the center column of its round platform opened, and a trio of mice scampered out and climbed onto three of the colorful beasts. On second glance, Josephine saw that the little creatures were only mice from the neck down. Their heads were those of parakeets. Wheezy organ music played as the ingenious gadget made five turns before stopping.

After taking a moment to digest what she had just seen, it dawned on Josephine that the creatures had just announced the time. It was five a.m.! How had six hours passed since she had left her house? It seemed as if she’d just slipped out an hour ago!

Josephine hopped out of her seat. “Oh, my gosh, I gotta go! My parents will flip if they get up and find me gone!”

“STOP!” Thaddeus stomped his foot. “Hold her, Norman!” The robot reached out from the rocking chair and clamped a steel claw onto her wrist before she could leave the lab. “What do you think you’re doing? You haven’t sworn the oath of secrecy. Now that you have seen my secret lab, you cannot leave until you swear the oath.”

“Fine, but can we make it fast? I’m cutting it pretty close.”

Thaddeus gave her a serious look. “Raise your hand and repeat after me.” The robot raised her hand for her.

“I, Josephine, do swear…,” he said solemnly.

“I, Josephine, do swear…,” she repeated.

“To never blabber anything about Thaddeus to anyone who might have him sent to the orphanage…”

“To never blabber anything about Thaddeus to anyone who might have him sent to the orphanage…”

“Or suffer unimaginably dire consequences!”

“Or suffer unimaginably dire consequences.”

“The end.”

“The end. Can I please go now?”

“Not yet.” The boy looked worried. “You do really promise not to tell, don’t you?”

“I really do. Crisscross applesauce.”

Thaddeus looked bewildered. “What does applesauce have to do with anything?”

“It just means I promise,” she said. “Don’t worry, my lips are sealed.”

Josephine could see the boy was still wary, but he nodded for Norman to release her wrist anyway.

“Simply follow the train at the top of the stairs, madame,” said Norman. “It will lead you safely out.”

“I’ll be back!” She grabbed her sweater and dashed out of the lab and up the basement stairs. The train was waiting, its engine puffing. Back through the dark corridors it led her, doors opening as they approached, until they reached the foyer. She threw back the big deadbolt on the front door, slung it open, and dashed out into the breaking dawn, hoping she could make it home before she was missed.