The Eldritch New Adventures of Becky Sharp, page 9
“Look!” Campbell exclaimed with a smile. “It’s the sheriff himself now! Speak of the devil and —”
McCormac’s smile was as sharp as the knife he clenched. Campbell’s stupor and surprise left him helpless as the blade sliced between two of his ribs and into his heart. He barely had time to register the shock of what was happening to him before he folded dead to the street at the mouth of the alley.
Becky leaped back to avoid the corpse collapsing upon her. McCormac unsheathed the knife from Campbell’s chest and quickly pulled the body into the darkness of the alley. He emerged with his knife held at the ready. Becky’s eyes started as she felt her face pale, and fear choked the scream in her throat: had McCormac overheard her attempt to betray him to Campbell?
In another moment McCormac was upon her, grinning wildly, pressing the flat of his blade against her cheek and bringing the point dangerously close to her eye. Then he slid the blade back, gently, leaving a trail of Campbell’s blood on her face.
“Allow me to put a little color back into your cheeks, Rebecca,” he laughed. He returned his knife to his side, then snatched out and ripped the shoulder from her dress, tearing until he revealed her cleavage. Becky leaped back, pulling the torn cloth back over her exposed flesh.
“Unhand me!” Becky commanded him, barely able to hide her fear.
“You’ll forgive my sartorial enthusiasm, my dear, but the rags with which I’ve left you will serve our purpose more than a party frock fit for Victoria herself. You see, Becky, you are now going to return to the vicarage, your murdered brother’s blood on your face, your dress rent from resisting a fate worse than death. All this, you will tell Perditio, occurred at the hands of slave dealers who bore you a grudge from your opposing their efforts in the jungle. They followed you here to take their revenge, and you barely escaped with your life, let alone your virtue!
“You will beg Perditio to hide you where no one will find you — and I wager, if he and his cohorts are not currently using it, he’ll take you to the secret base from which they operate. There’s certainly no place you’d be safer.”
“Why, McCormac?” Becky asked him after a moment. “I had no affection for Captain Campbell; still, to strike him down without a care — what has this Clegg done to justify such ruthless acts?”
McCormac’s eyes darkened. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a snuff box. “My right hand man had a frightful tobacco habit. Snorted the stuff so much that the tip of his nose was permanently stained brown. He tossed the snuff box to Becky. She caught it. “Open it!” he ordered her.
Becky did. Inside the snuff box was a small gobbet of flesh, brown stained about the still discernable nostrils.
Becky’s mouth twisted with distaste. She shut the box quickly and tossed it back to McCormac who snatched it out of the air and thrust it back into his breast pocket. “The handiwork of Clegg’s ‘familiar!’ They have taken all my best men from me, one by one, until I am the last left!” he spat.
“But they’ll not find Donal McCormac meekly waiting for them. You find out what I want to know,” he ordered, stabbing his index finger at her face, “and I will play no longer the part of the prey but rather the hunter! Clegg and his familiar have made a desperate man of me, Rebecca, and should you fail to give me what I desire, I will take my anger out on you!”
A frantic, insistent staccato at the back door of the vicarage summoned Perditio, still in his night gown, candle in hand. He was shocked to find revealed by the small, yellow light the distraught, disheveled Miss Sharp, her dress rent, her face blood stained.
“Merciful saints!” Perditio exclaimed. “Whatever happened? Who hurt you, lass?”
“Please, let me inside. Hurry!” Becky pleaded. “I don’t know if they’ve managed to follow me!”
“Of course, of course,” he said, standing back to let her enter and then securing the door behind her. “Whatever have you been through?”
This Padre was no frail, sedentary man, but a robust one, and Becky suppressed a smile of triumph when she saw his gaze drop more than once to her cleavage — and not, she wagered, to admire the figure of Zervan Akarana that rested there.
“It was terrible, Padre,” Becky exclaimed, tears trembling on her cheeks. “This was no random assault on my person — or my dear brother’s.”
“Where is your brother?”
“My brother . . . Campbell . . . is dead at their hands,” Becky said, clinching fresh tears from her eyes as she shuddered violently.
“My dear girl,” Perditio said, tentatively stepping toward her. Becky quickly closed the distance, throwing herself in his arms, and the good Padre suddenly had the flesh of a woman’s warm, heaving bosom pressed to his own. It was quite the rush she was giving him, to judge by the flush in his cheeks. Had ever a conquest been achieved so easily?
She pushed away from him after a moment and began to fumble with her torn dress. “Oh, forgive me, Padre! I am so embarrassed — those fiends barely left me with any clothes, as you can see. But . . . they did not . . . that is to say . . .”
“Shh . . . There, there, Miss Sharp! I understand. You need not be ashamed. But you said this assault was not random. Did you know your attackers?”
“Slavers,” Becky said. “They’ve borne a grudge against my brother and me, since our preaching converted some of those tribal chieftains with whom they had heretofore trafficked.”
“I will alert Sheriff McCormac immediately, of course!”
“That will do no good. You do not know these men! United in their fury, they are virtually unstoppable — especially by a backwater bumpkin sheriff!”
“My dear, our sheriff and his men are more than equal to the task . . .”
“It doesn’t matter: by now the slavers are watching whatever paths would take me to him.”
“Then I will go —”
Becky bunched her rags to her bosom. “And leave me alone and unprotected?” she asked, eyes wide, voice tremulous. “They may yet trace me here to your home in the meantime. Perhaps they’re here already! Oh, they’ve watched Campbell and me like hawks since we’ve come to this city, I’m sure! Is there no place you can hide me? Where I can rest assured I will not be found?”
Perditio stared silently at the trembling girl.
“Please?” she breathed haltingly.
“Yes, of course. I will fetch some things you’ll need. Food, of course, and a darning needle and some thread.” He blew out the candle. “I know my way around this house in the dark. If they are watching, your assailants will have no idea of our movements. You stay here. And under cover of darkness, I promise to take you where no one will find you.”
The Padre was true to his word. Becky soon found herself clinging to him on horseback as his steed’s hooves kicked up the dirt, thrusting them forward into the night. Attached to the saddle, the bundle of provisions Perditio had supplied slung wildly, back and forth with the horse’s charge. Soon, the dark village was behind them, the moonlit beach ahead, the surf’s growing cacophony like applause from a vast audience sympathetic to their flight.
Reaching the beach, they galloped along its edge, spray hissing out at them from the darkness, plastering Becky’s skirt to her legs. She could see the shoreline rising into a range of cliffs. Perditio turned hard to the left, and then they were climbing. Becky consigned all landmarks to memory. She did, after all, have to be able to tell McCormac where the lair of Perditio and his friends was located, or she was as good as sold into slavery.
Now they were in a field of high grass whose long, large blades lapped roughly against their legs and lashed the horse’s sides and belly. After they dismounted and pushed through on foot, the tall grass continued to snatch at and cling to them. Finally, they reached the remains of an old building all but covered by the undergrowth.
“An old mission,” Perditio explained as he tied the horse to a remaining stone column, then detached the bundle of provisions from the saddle. “I discovered its location when I found parchments left in a secret panel by one of my predecessors to the vicarage.” Now he was pushing back a section of the long grass that had been broken and folded over, to reveal a trap door apparently set in the ground but actually part of the old mission’s floor.
A large key appeared in Perditio’s hand, and he was soon turning it in the lock. Becky furrowed her brow: would he insist on locking her in, to keep her safe? That could complicate her getting back to McCormac. Further, without the key, how would the sheriff gain admission to the lair . . . all assuming that this was indeed the entrance to the base of operations he sought.
Now Perditio pulled open the heavy door, and they quickly passed through the ingress, Becky first. The Padre passed the bundle of provisions down to her, then followed, pausing to close the door and lock it behind him. They descended warily some steps and, though in the dark, Becky was aware her surroundings were spacious. Perditio lit lamps and candles about the large chamber, and she saw Christian iconography all about: crucifixes, statues of the Madonna and Child and Jesus as the Good Shepherd, crook in one hand, lamb held to his breast in the other.
Becky bit her lower lip in disappointment: this was not what McCormac was looking for. She was as good as headed for the slave market already — unless she kept up her pretense with Perditio. Here, after all, was a refuge where she would not be found, where she might lie low until she could arrange passage off the Barbary Coast.
“This was a meditation grotto for the mission’s priest, where he withdrew for prayer and fasting,” Perditio explained. “I have found it serves my purposes as well . . . such as now. I’ve been planning to spirit you away here ever since I saw your talisman at dinner . . .”
Becky went stock still, unsure of what she was hearing. “You were planning to bring me here?”
“I hardly imagined you to be so obliging as to come to me and save me the effort of thinking up some pretense. I had my suspicions about your career as a missionary, but when you pressed your bare, heaving bosom against mine, my doubts were confirmed.”
“Why did you bring me?”
“First, your talisman, Miss Sharp. Zervan Akarana. I want it. Now. Give it to me.”
Becky’s mouth went dry, and then she bolted up the steps and began pushing futilely against the door she knew would be unyielding. But she had to escape. Else all would be lost . . . the whole world would be lost!
Perditio was rushing up the steps toward her. She turned and flailed out at him with her fists, but he easily grabbed her and threw her, kicking and pummeling him, over his shoulder. He carried her back down into the grotto, threw her onto a couch, and then he was atop her, grabbing at her person with intrusive familiarity —
— and then he had what he wanted: he snatched from her bosom the figure of Zervan Akarana.
“Come now, Miss Sharp. Your ruse has failed, and you and I both know . . .” and here he looked down at her, still lying beneath him on the couch, “. . . that this body in which you behold me is not my own.”
“Get. Off. Of. Me,” Becky said as, by degree, she struggled to regain her composure.
“Of course,” Perditio said, hefting his weight from atop her. Becky began to rise from the couch. He reached out, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back down, but this time only into a sitting position. “I didn’t say you could get up. Now, tell me what it is your damned alien race wants from me this time.”
Again, Becky was unsure of what she was hearing. “What are you talking about? I am not the one from Yith. You are! You just admitted as much!”
“No, my human mind inhabits a body your people gave to me.”
Becky frowned, but managed to restrain her temper. “I am not given to repeating myself, but perhaps you are hard of hearing, so I will make an allowance this time and tell you again: I am not a ‘Yithian.’”
Perditio held up the figure of Zervan Akarana. “This says otherwise.”
“I told you where I got that —”
“You told me a load of nonsense. You claimed you had this of an African Mithra worshipper, and that you knew nothing of Zoroasterism . . . while giving the Zoroaster name for the god represented by this idol. For future reference, for any other subterfuge you round-headed, stalk-necked, lobster-clawed, three-eyed Cyclopean monstrosities may be planning — (here Perditio caught his breath) — Mithra worshippers called this lion-headed chap ‘Aion.’ Your ruse is thus exposed, so stop denying that you are not of this world.”
“Because I made a mistake in comparative religion? Pardon moi, Monsieur ‘Je sais tout’! And a Cyclops only has one eye!” Becky snapped back.
Perditio scowled. “Pardon moi, mademoiselle, but ‘cyclopean’ is an adjective meaning ‘gigantic’ — which accurately describes your true, girthy Yithian proportions.”
Becky put her hands over her ears, rolled her eyes, and shook her head side to side. “Do I have to say it again, man?!”
“A falsehood does not become truth by stubborn repetition!”
Becky exploded: “Fou! Vous etes sans cervelle!”
“I understand everything you say, mademoiselle! My previous parish was just across the channel,” Perditio said as he tucked Zervan Akarana into an inner coat pocket. “I dealt with the French on a regular basis.”
Becky paused. “The English channel?”
“It could hardly have been any other: my parish was at Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall.”
The expression on Becky’s face immediately told Perditio that he had been far too forthcoming. Looking at him sidelong, Becky said, “Donal said that the pirate Clegg was buried at Dymchurch.”
Perditio shifted his weight on the couch but met her gaze. “Yes, fifty years ago! And it’s ‘Donal’ now? How long have you and the good Sheriff McCormac been so familiar with one another?”
“He’s no friend of mine,” Becky said. “Nor yours.”
“And I will bring my dealings with him to a close in my own time.”
Becky raised her hand to silence him. “Donal —”
Perditio arched an eyebrow at her.
“— Sheriff McCormac, then! He believes you are connected with his enemy, the man calling himself Clegg. Is it a coincidence that your last parish was where the original pirate’s body was buried? I think not!”
“On the contrary: life is full of coincidences.”
“But I daresay this isn’t one of them, is it? What was it you said about Clegg to McCormac at dinner? You said Clegg had obtained knowledge of some sort of Mayan sorcery — power to raise the dead? To raise himself?”
“I was merely baiting McCormac. Really, Miss Sharp! To seriously suggest witchcraft in this enlightened age —”
Becky was clearly having none of it. She leaned toward him. “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you really?”
“Miss Sharp, the body of Captain Clegg had resolved to dust before you were even born.”
“Yet here you are. Here . . . we are. Look, I am not telling you anything new when I say that there are powers beyond human ken in this world. If not sorcery, then . . .” Becky leveled her gaze with his. If ever there was a time for her to try honesty, this looked to be it.
Now Perditio was leaning forward. “Are you admitting, then —”
“I admit to an association with the Great Race of Yith. But I am not one of them. That would be impossible. They attempted to possess me in the past, but my brain chemistry would not allow it. Because of this, I am useful for carrying out the purposes of some secret faction among their ranks when they do not want others of their race to know what they are about.”
Perditio narrowed his eyes, lowering them as he considered her words. His quick flush confused her until she realized where his gaze had wandered. Embarrassed he might have been, but his eyes still lingered on her cleavage.
“I assure you,” she said, slightly tucking her head and smiling under half-hooded eyes, “that was not some alien thing that embraced you back at the vicarage. Not one bit of me. Including those bits of which you have, perhaps, become fond?”
Her coy eyes had been skillfully scanning Perditio’s coat for the impressions that gave away in which pockets he had secured the idol and the key to the grotto door. Having located them, she now made her move. “Do you really believe a — how did you say? — round-headed, stalk-necked, lobster-clawed, three-eyed Cyclopean monster could ever feel as much a woman as this?”
Then Becky closed the distance between them for a second time, pushing herself eagerly and firmly into him. Simultaneously, he seized her curved, soft body tightly to his own, thrusting his mouth forward to meet hers. She grasped him, her scurrying hands feeling his waist and torso passionately until she had located the idol and the key.
But Perditio gently captured her hand just as it was about to reach into his pocket, and, raising it between them, stroked her slender, delicate fingers. “You artful minx,” he chuckled. “You are not the least lobster-clawed, are you? How could I have missed?” Becky laughed softly as well, and then smiled up into his face. In spite of her failed gambit, she was as pleased with herself as Perditio seemed to be.
“Now,” Perditio said, “that is what I call a successful interrogation.”
“It was nice, wasn’t it?”
“Hmm? Oh. Not the embrace or kiss,” Perditio was quick to correct her as he dipped a hand inside an inner coat pocket. “That was just for fun. I had already decided to believe you, when you expressed knowledge of the secret faction of the Great Race of Yith. I have had my own — involuntary — dealings with that rogue element.
“And I also know, from experience, how their mind transference exercises can sometimes fail to meet their intentions. Your brain chemistry explanation seemed perfectly plausible to me. I believe you were looking for this?” He tossed the figure of Zervan Akarana to her. “Don’t worry. A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell. Certainly not a Padre.”
Becky flushed. “A peculiar sort of Padre you are! You’re no more than a rogue! Admit it!”
Perditio sighed and smiled. “I am Nathaniel Clegg, and I have escaped death twice. The first time by arranging a substitute to take my place on the gallows. In penance for my past brigand’s life, I took a new identity and became the vicar of Dymchurch. I was completely reformed. But then, to minister to all of my parishioners’ needs, physical as well as spiritual, it became necessary to become a rogue yet again.
