Ned’s reaction to all this is elemental. He sleeps in Quiddle’s bed, eats Quiddle’s food, drinks Quiddle’s laudanum. He pours Maitland’s croton oil down the hole in the outhouse, quaffs Runder’s alcohol, spends two hours a day waving his fingers at an earnest Mrs. Minor, and scrupulously avoids Delp. He continues to wander about the halls, his eyes stricken, hair tastefully arranged, lips sealed. Of all the theories put forward to account for his affliction, he privately concurs with only one: Dr. Delp’s.
Oh, he was hoarse for a day or two — who wouldn’t be? He lay there in the dark, grinning, the words dropping off his tongue like bits of solder as he rehearsed the miracle of his resurrection and the fevered ecstatic version he would deliver to Fanny. In person. He would stride up the steps at Brooks’ house, shove his way past the astonished butler and burst into the parlor, a ragged noose dangling from his neck. “I’ve come back from the grave to exact my vengeance, you pervert!” he’d shout, and bring Brooks to his knees with a single blow. Then he’d take Fanny in his arms, whisper that she shouldn’t be frightened and then reveal the whole story. Brooks would be moved, write them a check, call a carriage, and off they’d go. Or something like that.
But for now Ned is lying low. Licking his wounds, getting his strength back, trying to grapple with the horror he’s been through. Every time he closes his eyes it’s there, pitiless, unrelenting — the gallows looming over him like some gigantic carnivorous insect, the snow sifting down like ash, the dead cold gaze of the hangman and the inescapable sense that the black hood conceals some nameless inhuman terror. Awake or asleep, it haunts him. He shudders and writhes on Quiddle’s narrow pallet, the nightmare descending, noose poised, and then he starts up in a sweat thinking, What if they come for me again? What if Banks or Mendoza or Twit’s sister gets word of it? Sinking, he can feel the whole nasty cycle beginning again, the wheel creeping round on him, exquisite torture, slow and redundant. He wants to shout out, screech till the walls shatter — but he doesn’t. Silence is the key. Keep them guessing. Just a day or two more and the leg will be healed, a day or two more and—
The door cracks open. Quiddle. Sidling in with a tray: cold chicken, kidney pie, a mug of ale. But wait: this isn’t Quiddle. It’s someone taller, broader — who?
Decius William Delp stands over the bed, tray in hand. As he bends to set it down, Ned instinctively draws back. For a long moment the tray sits there between them, steam feebly rising from the meat pie. Delp’s eyes are locked on Ned’s. Ned looks away.
“Feeling better, I take it — huh, Sleeping Beauty?” Delp says finally. He is a big-boned man, very pale, with black hairs on the back of his hands. “Well — aren’t you going to sample the offering for the day. . Ned?”
Ned sits up as if he’s been slapped. “How—?”
Delp is smiling — a cold merciless sort of smile that digs deep into his face, flattens his ears and reveals his ravaged teeth. “Suddenly recovered the use of your tongue, have you?. . Well, speak up, I can’t hear you — Ned. Ned Rise, isn’t it?”
Suddenly Ned is up and breaking for the door, but Delp takes hold of his arm and flings him back down as if he were a disobedient child. “I’m not finished yet, friend.” The doctor pauses to light his pipe, the smoke squinting his eyes and riding up over his head like a hood. “I’ve been on to you from the beginning, you know. I’m no pushover like that ass Quiddle and the rest — I know you for what you are: a con man and a murderer. My first impulse was to toss you back to the hangman after the novelty wore off, but then another alternative occurred to me. It occurred to me that you’ve eat pretty well here, that you might even want to stick around, take a new name, lie low for awhile. Soft living and anonymity, eh?” Delp is pacing now — striding up and down in front of the door, head bent, pipe streaming. He looks like a bear in the pit just before they throw the dogs in. “I really see no reason why people like Sir Joseph Banks should need to know about your ah, recovery, do you?”
Ned is slouched against the wall, knees cocked under him. For the first time his eyes make contact with Delp’s. His voice is weary with resignation.
“All right,” he says. “What do you want me to do?”
♦ THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT ♦
The lights have winked out in the last cottage along the New Road, the sky is moonless and cold as a stone roofs are white with frost, doors latched, the healthy, sane and wise snoring in their beds or nodding before the fire. Out on the highway the stillness is broken by the slow plod of a mare’s hoofs and the barely perceptible snick-snick-snick of a rusted wheel. Ned Rise hunches in the bed of the creeping cart, huddled, muffled, gloved and hatted, while up front Quiddle keeps a numbed grip on the reins. Trails of vapor stream from their nostrils and their eyes water with the cold. The smell of the horse mingles with the faint acrid aroma of woodsmoke and the clean antiseptic bite of the air. Overhead, leafless trees claw at the sky.
Suddenly Quiddle pulls back on the reins and clucks softly to the horse, the wheels grab with a screech and the cart jerks to a halt beside the road. “This is it,” he whispers, securing the reins and springing down from the cart.
Ned looks round him glumly. He can’t make out much, objects drifting in and out of focus, murky, phantasmagoric, identifiable only as dense clots of darkness against an impenetrable backdrop. No more than a yard away is the black slash of a stone wall, the gray or white of individual stones aligned in a shifting ghostly grid. And there, beyond the wall, the silhouette of an enormous crippled yew snaking out into the night. The church steeple is invisible, black on black, a massive erasure in the corner of the sky. “I don’t like it,” Ned says.
“Shhhhhh, keep it down.” Quiddle lifts a pair of shovels from the back of the cart and hoists himself to the top of the wall. “Come on,” he whispers, “follow me.”
♦ ♦ ♦
After Delp left him that night, Ned lit a pipe and lay back on his pallet to sort things out. He’d kept his ears open around the hospital and knew that Delp needed cadavers badly — desperately even. The new term was starting, the other hospitals were in competition with him, his former source — Crump — had proved unreliable. And furthermore, society was against him — dissection was verboten, taboo, as unthinkable as cannibalism. If the afterlife was seen as corporeal as well as spiritual, how could a man enjoy his eternal bliss or suffer the torments of his damnation if he were in sixty-eight pieces? Accordingly, the public coffers provided for the interment of all those who expired in a given parish — vagrants, paupers and half-wits included. The only legal means of obtaining specimens was to visit the hangman and hope that one of his victims would go unclaimed by friends or relatives. All this, Ned realized, made Delp a very dangerous antagonist indeed. He was desperate. Manipulative, unscrupulous — and he held a knife to Ned’s throat. All he need do was drop a word — a single word — and Ned would find himself back in prison, dangling from a rope, dead meat on the dissector’s table.
When Delp came for his answer the following morning, Ned managed a smile and held out his hand. “I’ll do your bodysnatching for three shillings a week,” he said. Delp slapped the hand aside and pointed an admonitory finger at him. “You’ll do it for two. Another word out of you and you’ll do my bidding gratis, understand?” Ned understood. Of course, what he neglected to tell Delp was that he had no intention of doing anything whatever for him. He was merely buying time. As soon as his leg could take the strain he’d slip out and go to Fanny. She’d have something. And if she didn’t he’d force it out of Brooks — God knows she had earned it. Then they’d disappear and Delp be hanged.