Bascomb was shaking badly after that.
Some confessions were good for the soul, maybe, but others were destructive and dangerous. This one was one of those.
He had to use both hands to light another cigarette. His lips were gray and twisted like two dead worms pressed together. “I know… I know Ronny must have been awake, must have been screwing around with me, but I wasn’t sure, I just wasn’t sure. I started getting whacko ideas that maybe Piggy had bitten him, disciplined him for making a mess of the performance. But dummies… they don’t bite people, do they? I mean, no, they don’t have teeth and they couldn’t bite if they wanted to… because… because they’re only dummies… right?”
Kitty just sat there, something white and cold in her vitals. She wanted to tell him, yes, dummies are just dummies… but she wasn’t so sure anymore herself. She wasn’t so sure of a lot of things. And teeth? Yes, Piggy had teeth. Long teeth like the Big Bad Wolf. Awful, crooked teeth.
She’d seen them.
Bascomb seemed to recover after a moment. “Oh, I could go on and tell you other things, things that would turn your hair white. Shit about that dummy, about Piggy… well, none of it’s good. Far as I’m concerned, Ronny McBane is insane. And Piggy? Well, that’s something I don’t want to think about more than I absolutely have to. Now, I don’t know the full picture here, but I do know that there’s something spooky about the McBanes themselves. I’ve picked up bits and pieces, hard not to, and what I heard I didn’t like. Suffice to say that Ronny’s mother was some kind of fanatic and I’ve heard stories about him being abused and the like. Bits about Ronny having a brother and sister who died under some pretty suspicious circumstances.”
Kitty sighed, soaking it all in and beginning to wonder—and not for the first time—just exactly what she was getting herself into here. This wasn’t just some crazy ventriloquist and his dummy, this was something more. Something that had a history, something that was black and tangled at its roots.
“Is the mother still living?” she asked.
“No.” Bascomb stopped there, hesitated, maybe wondering if he should go any further. He looked decidedly older than he had when he began talking. “What I’m going to tell you here is just… well, it’s second-hand stuff. I can’t really corroborate any of it.” He paused again, licked his lips with a tongue dry as a strop. “Apparently, the mother was murdered… well, at least, she died violently. That’s how the story goes. They found her in bed a few years before I took the act on. She lived alone, no cats or dogs, yet they found her all mauled and mangled. Bitten up. Something had torn her throat out and from what I hear, whatever it was, it took its time.”
Kitty wanted to know more, grisly as it all was. What had been at the old woman? What had been chewing on her? But she could see from the look on Bascomb’s face that he was playing it straight with her; he was telling all he knew. When he was done, he dismissed it all with a wave of his hand, but there was something in his eyes… something very frightened.
He went on to tell her that while he managed Ronny and Piggy, he got word that they were having problems with some caretaker out at Harvest Hill Cemetery. No, Ronny had not admitted it to him, but Bascomb had heard, all right. When you manage an act, when you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into something like that, you find out things. Apparently this caretaker was having problems with Ronny and the dummy. They would go into the family crypt at night to visit dear old dead mom. Far into the wee hours of the morning they could be heard in there—Ronny and Piggy—shouting and singing and shrieking out things to the dead woman. The caretaker described what went on in there as being “profane.” Which, Bascomb fully admitted, was a pretty arbitrary term when you came down to it. It depended entirely on the user.
“Did you find out what that was?” Kitty asked.
“No and yes. Ronny wasn’t defiling her or her coffin if that’s what you were thinking, but the conversations in there… well, that combined with the racket of them fighting and screaming, it was just bad. The caretaker said he found blood in the crypt after they left… Ronny’s, I suppose.”
He told her about Eddie Bose.
“Eddie was a good kid, a real perfectionist, you know? He was one of the best vent artists on the circuit,” Bascomb explained. “Well, he took a real interest in Ronny and Piggy. He knew what he was seeing and what that dummy was capable of was, well, not right. And he was an expert, he knew all the tricks. As you can imagine, Ronny being the way he is, he did not want another ventriloquist around. But Eddie wasn’t about to give up that easy…”
Eddie Bose was among the best.
He was expected to go to the top of the business and maybe he would have if he’d left things lie. But it wasn’t his way. Ronny’s dummy was like no other and Eddie planned on finding out how and why. If there was a secret there, a revolutionary mechanism that made Piggy do the things he did, then Eddie had to know what it was. What ventriloquist wouldn’t? Bascomb said that Eddie began following Ronny and the dummy around. Ronny didn’t let Piggy out of his sight, but sooner or later, he would have to. He would have to sleep. And when that happened, Eddie planned on borrowing Piggy and finding out what made him tick.
And it was the worst thing he’d ever done.
“He trailed them back to an old, rotting house up in Edgewater,” Bascomb said, his voice worn now. “That’s what Eddie did. It was Ronny’s mother’s house… some big old mausoleum they should have torn down years before. The perfect sort of place, I guess, for true madness to have free reign. Well, make a long story short, one night Eddie forced a window and went in there. He wasn’t in that godawful place long, but what he saw there, Miss Seevers, what Eddie looked upon in there… well, it ruined him.”
Kitty tensed. “What do you mean?”
Bascomb studied his hands, exhaled through his nostrils. “Eddie just dropped out of the scene. No more gigs, nothing. Well, shit, the kid had real talent and he also had a lot of friends working the vent racket. People had a lot of questions. So, well, I tracked him down. It took weeks, but I found him in a dive downtown… oh, Jesus, I barely recognized him. He was a good-looking kid, I tell you. But what I found in that bar… well, it scared me. Scared me bad. He was thin and spindly, shaking so badly he could barely suck down the whiskey there. Eddie had jet-black hair last time I saw him and at that bar? Well, there were white streaks in it. He wasn’t even thirty and he looked sixty, face full of lines, the left side paralyzed or something. It was hanging loose as a hound dog’s jowls… except down at the corner of his mouth, it was pulled up into this horrible grin like something a corpse might wear. This toothy, sardonic grin that made my guts go to sauce. I asked him if he was all right, if he needed a doctor or something, but he told me flat out that he’d never be all right again…”
Bascomb was thinking he’d suffered a stroke and maybe a nervous breakdown to boot. And he was right on both counts. For Eddie Bose had seen something in the McBane house… something so gruesome, so harrowing, that the very shock of it had physically and mentally deranged him.
Bascomb was deadly pale now and his lips were thick, rubbery like they were numb. He seemed to be having trouble getting them to form the words his brain told them needed to be said: “So there I was in that dirty, stinking place with Eddie Bose… or something that had once been Eddie Bose… and dear God, the look in his eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it—those eyes were like bullet holes in plaster. Just staring and bloodshot. And insane, completely insane like the way a guy’s eyes get after they’ve been in a war. Those eyes had seen things, Miss Seevers, shown Eddie things that had shattered his mind.