“Will you tell me something?” Evelyn asked.
“Of course, my dear. Anything you want to know. There’s no harm in it. Not now.” Haverstock looked at her expectantly.
“Tell me about Angel, who he is, what his real name is. Tell me about his life before he joined the show.”
Haverstock raised his eyebrows and then smiled at her expression and the way the two of them had never stopped touching since he found them. He leaned back in the chair and locked his fingers behind his head.
“Actually, I know practically nothing about him, but I’ll tell you what I can. But let me start back farther than that. You don’t mind? I get so few opportunities to talk of my accomplishments. And they are quite remarkable, my dear, really quite remarkable.”
Evelyn shook her head and kept her voice even. Their only chance was to stall until Tim could bring help. “No. I’d like to hear everything.”
Tim ran down the street, looking for someone, anyone. But the street was deserted. The stores were closed and dark. Lights burned in a few houses. That might be better than going all the way to the courthouse. The sheriff’s office was probably closed anyway. He changed directions and headed for the nearest light.
He stopped when the dog began to bark.
He looked around frantically and saw it, standing on the other side of the street, barking and looking at him. The dog launched itself suddenly and tore across the street, its claws clicking on the pavement. Tim ran in the opposite direction, not looking, not caring, only fleeing. He found himself in an alley, barrels and crates piled against the buildings. He dived behind a wooden crate as the dog skidded to a halt. Tim wormed his way into the narrow space until he could go no further.
The dog sniffed, its nose stuck in the opening. It began pawing at the crate and whining. Then it stopped and barked again. Tim held his ears against the sound and didn’t hear the voice call the dog. It looked up at the voice, then back at the crate, tilting its head and perking its ears. It left reluctantly, glancing back occasionally.
Tim waited where he was for a while, getting his breath back and letting his heart slow down. Then he inched his way out and looked around. The dog was not in sight. He sneaked back to the street. The dog sat on its haunches on the other side, watching him. It stood up, whining, but didn’t move toward him. Tim edged backward into the alley, then turned to look behind him. The alley went as far as the rear of the buildings and made a left turn at a solid wooden fence. He ran to the fence and looked. The alley ran behind the buildings the length of town. Strange shapes loomed all along the dark passage. Tim’s tiny heart pounded with terrors a normal man could never know. He began to walk.
Haverstock pontificated.
“This will all be new to Angel, also, Miss Bradley. I thought it best not to clutter his mind with such things.
“First of all, I believe everyone has the gift. Don’t look surprised, Miss Bradley. Even you have it, but it’s so vestigial, so underdeveloped and untrainable you could never use it. It’s a part of the evolutionary process.” He smiled. “Though I don’t suppose any of you in this little backwater community would know anything of that. Or accept it if you did. It’s against your good Christian upbringing. In another million years, or thereabouts, I think everyone will have it. Fully developed. Of course, there will be those few born without it, just as some are now born deaf or blind or mute, as Angel was.
“There have been hundreds, thousands of recorded instances of people with unusual abilities. They could only have been those able to use a tiny fraction of the gift. I imagine those, like myself, able to develop it to any degree of perfection kept it to themselves.
“My own abilities were, unfortunately, fairly limited. I did what I could to develop them, but there were no guidelines. It’s a little like trying to teach yourself to play the piano when you are tone deaf and can’t read music.” He smiled at his analogy.
Tim moved cautiously down the alley, looking around him nervously. The night’s only sounds were the crickets and the far-off barking of a dog. Suddenly there was a new sound, a terrible, unbelievable sound that made him pale and his blood chilclass="underline" the sound of a cat fight farther down the alley.
“There seem to be few limits to what can be done with the gift,” Haverstock continued, “but specific knowledge is absolutely essential. I can, for instance, remove an appendix far more efficiently than a surgeon with a scalpel but, without medical knowledge, the gift would be as useless for the task as the scalpel would be without the same knowledge. I must confess that my study of medicine and biology was in part motivated by self-preservation.”
He cocked his head at Evelyn. “How old do you think I am, Miss Bradley?”
“I don’t know. About forty-five or fifty.”
He smiled. “I’m eighty-two, almost eighty-three. I expect I could make myself look your age, but there’s no point in it. Youth has certain disadvantages. I believe, with proper knowledge and care of the body, the gift can produce immortality.” He smiled again. “Time will tell.”
He shifted in the chair, making himself more comfortable. “That’s where I centered my first experiments. I manipulated the cellular structure, the genes and chromosomes. It was incredibly easy to do. I could do with selection what nature occasionally does at random. I created new life forms.
“Oh, my successes didn’t come right away,” he deprecated. “It was almost a year before I could even sustain life. My experimental animals gave birth to dead things, some of them quite disgusting.
“My first unqualified success was a giant seven-headed snake. It was with the show for a while before it died. I created a lot of others. You saw two of them: the mermaid and the snake woman. They were the last,” he sighed. “Now they’re all gone. The snake woman was my last experiment with animals. She was so perfect I felt there was no point in exploring that avenue further. I could create any kind of creature I wanted. There was no longer a challenge.
“The next step was, naturally, to work with humans. So, I took a mistress.” He grimaced. “Abysmal girl, but she served her purpose. It was all so very easy, no different really than working with animals. I did only four experiments before I realized that, too, was pointless.
“How did you like my children? They were my children, you know, conceived in the… ah… time-tested way. I merely manipulated their embryonic growth. Their mother, I’m afraid, went quite mad when the harpy was born. You never saw her. She was my first child. I had to perform a lobotomy on her mother. Improved her usefulness considerably. I only wish I had thought of it sooner.
“Medusa worked out rather well, though mentally she was an imbecile. The Minotaur was a splendid fellow. I was really proud of him, but he was too limited in intelligence and had nothing on his mind but sex.” A smile flickered on his lips.
“I suppose my favorite is Tim. He’s really quite brainy, but physically very limited, of course.”
Tim stayed close to the buildings, creeping around clutter, staying hidden as much as possible, and looking for a passage back to the street. He felt helpless. He had taken so much time. It could already be too late. And what good would it do, anyway? If he brought the sheriff, Haverstock could kill him with a look. His feeling of helplessness quickly changed to hopelessness. He should have stayed in the wagon and tried to kill Haverstock the way he had killed Louis. But that had been a lucky fluke. It couldn’t have happened twice. And Louis didn’t have the gift.