It was not Aria Chillany. He realized it must be Minx Cutter.
Yes. He was sure of it. Though not entirely certain, in that he would not have bet his life upon it. Now they were meeting more gently but still with a powerful thrust, and her mouth was upon his and her tongue questing within. Minx, he almost said, but his mouth was no longer his own. She kissed him and bit him playfully, as her hips circled around and around and she held him tightly within. Yes. Certainly Minx Cutter, he thought. Maybe.
The problem was, he could not touch her hair or her face nor could he smell. His bashed and swollen nose prevented all aromas from entering. He could not tell if the woman astride him smelled of earth, of fire, or of seafoam. He tried to inhale her scent and found nothing. As the woman began to thrust down upon him harder and harder still, as she began to moan softly in a voice that could belong in its passionate strain to any one of his three suspects, Matthew was at a loss to know who it truly was. And then he met her one thrust too many, their heat blending and melding, and he could hold back no longer. He was lit up as if by a white-hot blaze, his mind was filled with a spinning of colorful wheels, and he emptied himself into her as she clutched him tighter and deeper and made noises of both passion and satisfaction that served to inflame him to a hotter candle. When Matthew was all served out, the mystery paramour gave him one slow and final grind that was pain mixed with pleasure, as love must be. Then she dismounted, grasped his most valued instrument and kissed its ticklish tip, and without a word departed from the bedside. He heard the door open and close, and that was the end of the affair.
“Damn,” he managed to say, to the dark.
The dark answered, in its own way, for there was suddenly the slightest tremor of Pendulum Island shifting like a beast in its sleep, and in the castle there came a beggar’s symphony of creaks, cracks and pops issuing from the walls.
Matthew got out of bed. On shaky legs he went to the door, opened it and peered into the hallway. It was, as he’d suspected, empty. Fancy…Aria Chillany…Minx Cutter. Who? He somehow doubted he might ever know. Therefore he closed and latched the door, he relit the candle clock estimating to his best judgment the amount of time that had passed, and he returned to his bed ready for sleep and whatever the next morning might bring in this strange new world he found himself a part of.
At as near to six o’clock as he could manage Matthew was dressed and waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The sun was rising over the sea, the air was still and the day vowed to be warm indeed. In a few minutes a middle-aged black servant arrived in the high powdered wig and the sea-blue uniform that seemed to suit Professor Fell’s taste for drama and color. The servant held a black leather bag and wore leather gloves the same hue.
“Good mornin’, sir,” he said to Matthew, his face impassive. “If you’ll follow me?”
Matthew followed the man out another door beyond the staircase. They walked through a manicured garden where early birds sang from the trees. Purple and yellow flowers lined the walkway, which led to a series of stone stairs going down the cliff face to the sea.
“Careful with your step,” said the servant, as they started their descent.
Suddenly a voice called, “Daniel!” A second servant who’d been standing among the trees approached them as Daniel and Matthew paused. “I’ll take the young man down,” this second man offered.
“I was told to do it,” Daniel said.
“I know you don’t like it,” was the reply. The recent arrival—or had he been waiting for them? Matthew wondered—was dressed in the usual fashion and looked to be a few years older than the first man, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes that held both sadness and determination. “I’ll do it for you.”
“You don’t like it neither,” said Daniel.
“Who does?” asked the second servant, with a lift of his eyebrows. He reached out for the bag.
Daniel removed the leather gloves and the second man put them on. Then the bag changed hands. Daniel gave a very audible sigh of relief. “Thank you, George,” he said, and he nodded at Matthew, turned away and retraced his steps to the castle.
“This way, sir,” said George, who started down the long and—to Matthew’s eye—extremely dangerous and sea-damp stairs.
At the bottom of the cliff was a wooden platform jutting out over the sea, and low enough that some of the harder waves were smashing against it. A wide plank extended from the platform another ten or so feet over the turbulent water, and at the end of that plank was a highly-unsettling metal spike coated with what could only be dried gore. Matthew noted what appeared to be the top of a wire fence, exposed in the trough between waves, that made a circle about a hundred or more feet around. Keeping something caged, he thought. But what? The sweat had begun to rise under his shirt.
“If you’ll stand where you are, sir,” cautioned George, who set the leather bag down and opened its ram’s-horn clasps. Matthew was perfectly glad to obey, as the wind and the sea spray hit him full in the face.
George reached carefully into the bag and drew out by the unruly hair the severed head of Jonathan Gentry. Matthew caught his breath and drew back another few feet. The face was gray with a touch of green on the sunken cheeks. George held the head at arm’s length and walked out to the spike, where he did what Matthew feared he was going to do: he impaled the head on the spike, and then he walked back along the plank and stood looking out to sea. He removed the gloves and dropped them with the briefest shiver of revulsion into the bag, which he promptly closed once more.
They waited.
“What’s in there?” Matthew dared ask, his voice pitched nearly an octave higher than normal.
“The professor’s prized possession,” said George. “It will show itself soon. Please don’t move when it does.”
“No concern there,” Matthew answered, watching the blue waves and the white swirling foam within the wire enclosure, which had to be secured by chains many feet underwater.
Still they waited.
And then George lifted his chin and said, “It’s coming now. Time for its breakfast.”
Something was indeed rising from the depths. Matthew could see a brown shape coming up, a thing that looked to be blotched with barnacles and stained with seaweed. George stood his ground about midway on the platform, and though Matthew’s brain begged him to turn tail from this ascending nightmare he was profoundly curious. His curiosity always won over his sense of impending danger, which he reasoned would someday be his undoing.
The shape hung suspended just below the churning surface. Matthew had the sense of looking at a huge mass of moving jelly. Then a tentacle as big as a treetrunk came up through a green-foamed wave and reached upward, questing for the head of Jonathan Gentry.
Matthew did not have to be cautioned to stand perfectly still, for his blood seemed to have frozen in his veins on this warm sunny morning and his muscles turned to lumps of heavy clay.
The tentacle rubbed itself across the hair on the severed head. A second tentacle rose up, blighted with mollusks and ringed with pinkish-green suckers that pulsed and moved seemingly of their own accord. This, too, went to the head and began to caress the face with hideous anticipation.
“It is very intelligent,” said George, in a hushed voice. “It’s exploring its meal.”
A third tentacle rose from the water, snapped like a whip toward the platform and then submerged again. The two others began to work in concert at lifting the head off its spike. Matthew thought he was a stagger and shriek away from Bedlam.
With a noise of sliding flesh the tentacles wrapped themselves around Gentry’s gaping face and pulled the head upward from its mount on the plank. Then, quickly and greedily, the head was brought to the shifting mass that hung just under the waves, and as it went down Matthew could imagine he heard the crack of a skull and the crunch of facial bones under the biting beak of Professor Fell’s huge and nightmarish octopus.