The automaton was still. The silence was heavy. Suddenly it was broken by the clatter of a glass overturning on the table, which made Matthew almost jump out of his chair. Jonathan Gentry’s hand must have gone nerveless due to the Juice of Absence, and now the good and drug-addled doctor held the offending hand before his face and examined the fingers as if they belonged to someone he did not know.
The gearteeth moved again. So did the head, tilting backward a few degrees.
“One of you,” said the voice of the machine, “has been brought here to die.”
Matthew was near wetting his pants. If his heart was running any faster it was going to tear from his chest and roll across the room.
“To be punished for your sin,” the automaton continued. “You know what you have done.” The right hand lifted, the index finger beckoned, and Sirki withdrew from his black robes the wicked curved dagger with the sawtoothed edge. Then the East Indian giant strode forward, walking slowly and leisurely behind those guests sitting on the side opposite Matthew. “You have betrayed me,” spoke the tinny tongue of metal. “For this you shall not leave the room alive.”
Sirki continued his stroll, candlelight gleaming from the knife’s inset jewels and edge of horror.
“I offer you a chance to speak. To confess your sin before me. In so doing, you will receive a quick and merciful end.”
No one spoke. No one moved but Sirki, who now rounded the foot of the table and crossed behind Adam Wilson.
“Speak,” said the machine. “I will not abide a traitor. Speak, while you have life in your veins.”
There was no speaking, though Aria Chillany drew in her breath as Sirki passed behind her, and already Matthew’s nuts had seemingly pulled themselves up into his groin.
Sirki continued onward. Behind Mother Deare he stopped, turned and began to retrace his steps. The knife was held low, at the ready.
“This involves the Cymbeline,” came the hideous voice, which now held a note of taunting. “You know nothing can be kept from me. Confess it now.”
No tongue moved, though perhaps even in this rough company hearts pounded and pee puddled.
“Alas,” spoke the machine, “your moment of redemption has passed.” And then it added: “Doctor Gentry.”
“What?” Gentry asked, his eyes bleary and saliva breaking over his lower lip.
Sirki’s progress stopped. Standing behind the good, drug-addled and doomed doctor, the giant swung his arm back and with tremendous force smacked the sawtoothed blade into the right side of Gentry’s neck.
He gripped Gentry’s hair with his free hand. And then he began to saw the blade, back and forth.
Matthew flinched as the blood jumped upon him. In truth, in any other arena he might have let out a bleat of terror but in this room it might be another kiss of death. But horror came quickly upon horror, as Gentry turned his head toward Matthew even as it was being sawed from his neck, and there was more puzzlement upon Gentry’s face than pain as the crimson blood flowed from the deepening wound. Matthew realized that the Juice of Absence was at work, and perhaps too well it had deadened the nerves and taken the doctor to a distant room.
But this room, unfortunately, was where his head was being methodically—and somewhat joyfully, it must be said from the grim smile on Sirki’s face—cut off.
Augustus Pons gave a strangled gasp, though it was not his throat being opened. Toy was pressed up against his master like a second skin, or at least a second suit. The blood leaped and sprayed from the wound in Gentry’s neck, and though the body began to tremble and the hands to grasp and claw at the table yet the doctor’s face was placid and composed as if he were hearing the voice of a patient sitting at his knee.
And indeed, in the next moment Gentry asked Matthew with the gore dripping from his lips, “Tell me. What ails you?”
Across the table, Jack Thacker had recovered his nerve enough for a hollow laugh that Mack Thacker finished, with a ghastly chuckle. Between them, Fancy’s hair was in her face but her gaze was riveted to the tides of blood that flowed between the glasses and platters.
The right side of Gentry’s neck and his shoulder were both masses of red connected by darker threads and clumps, like a hideous suit coming apart at a crucial seam. The wound had the appearance of a gaping, toothless mouth. Matthew, to his absolute terror, could not look away.
Gentry’s eyes had seemingly sunken into a once devilishly-handsome face, now gone suddenly gaunt and sallow. When he spoke again, his voice was a hollow rasp. “Papa?” he said, addressing Matthew. “I’ve finished my lessons.”
The blade sawed back and forth, and forth and back. A sheen of sweat had risen upon the giant’s cheeks.
Aria gave the first burst of a scream but she choked it down. Her eyes were wide. The sapphires had turned to onyx. Toward the foot of the table, Adam Wilson leaned forward toward the carnage, his eyes alight behind his spectacles and his nostrils twitching as if entranced by the smell of so much blood. Cesar Sabroso, his mouth slack and eyes deadened, had hold of a wine bottle in each hand, gripping them like life itself.
Suddenly Gentry seemed to realize what was happening to him and he gave a shuddering cry and tried to rise but the giant’s hand was firm in his hair and just that quickly all of the doctor’s ebbing strength had run its course. The Juice of Absence was obviously a very potent formula. Gentry collapsed back into the chair, his head hanging to the left, and his hands twitched and jerked on the armrests as his legs kicked underneath the table and tried to run. Yet there was nowhere to run to.
“Oh,” moaned the mangled voice of a dead man, as the body whipped and spasmed, “Papa…I kissed…kissed Sarah today.”
A gush of nearly black blood met the next tearing of sawteeth. What came from the center of the thick red flood issuing out of Gentry’s straining mouth might have been a voice, and it might have been a pitiful cry for a life lost or a small handsome boy’s last boast: “I think she likes me.”
The sawblade met bone and scraped with a noise that made Matthew’s hair stand on end. There was a crash as Minx Cutter’s chair went over; she had risen to her feet and was backing away. It appeared that she had reached her fill of this particular dinner.
“Leave here if you’re going to be ill!” Mother Deare snapped at her, in a not-very-motherly way at all. Minx took the stairs, but she did it at her own speed: a deliberate and almost disdainful walk.
Sawblade on bone. The kicking of Gentry’s heels against the bloodied floor. Matthew nearly rose to his feet and also departed the room, but it seemed to him that the tough-minded and grim-hearted Nathan Spade would have stayed it out, and so then should he.
But by the hardest effort did he remain in his place, for in the next excruciating moments Sirki cracked through the vertebrae and cut through enough flesh to tear the head off its streaming stalk. Sirki deposited the head of the formerly-living Jonathan Gentry upon the table in front of its former body, and as the sallow and sunken-eyed face continued to grimace and contort in its agonies of dying nerves the body slithered down under the table with all the boneless grace of a raw oyster.
There was silence, but for the dripping.
“Thus endeth the lesson,” said the automaton, its right index finger pointed into the air.