Chapter Eleven Frankie
ELEVEN FRANKIE
I pulled out my gold pocket watch. It was nearly seven in the morning. I’d fallen back asleep in my own quarters just after three.
“You didn’t hear anything, Frankie?” Uncle Thomas interrogated me now.
“Nothing.” My voice came out small, tinny. My head was spinning and my heart was banging so loud it was difficult to hear anything else.
“Are you certain he was dead?” Margaret demanded. She was wringing a dish towel in her hands, knuckles white from the effort.
“Of course I’m certain, Margaret!” Uncle Thomas said, his voice too loud, too stern. “The man was cold to the touch, had no heartbeat or sounds of breath. Frankie and I both examined him. You laid your hand on his chest yourself.”
We all stood staring with disbelief at the empty metal table.
The knackerman’s boots and clothes lay in a pile on the floor. But our deceased patient was missing.
“Well, how does a dead man get up and walk out of the house?” Margaret asked. “And without clothing or boots? Out into that weather?”
I glanced out the frost-covered window to see that the sky outside had lightened enough to show that the storm had settled in and was dumping snow outside.
“It’s not possible,” I heard myself say.
I closed my eyes, his voice echoing in my head. Can you hear them?
First a dead man speaks, then he gets up and walks out into a snowstorm?
This was the stuff of stories told by boys around fires on All Hallows’ Eve to scare each other. This was not real. This was not the stuff of reason and science.
I looked to Uncle Thomas, hoping he would offer up some rational explanation, but he only rubbed his temples like a blinding headache was coming on.
“Possible or not, we’ve got to find the poor man,” Margaret pleaded.
“I’ll go look for him,” Thomas told her.
“I’m coming with you,” I quickly added, but what I was thinking was, And God help us if we do find him.
Uncle Thomas and I put on our hats, sturdy boots, and wool coats, readying ourselves to spend the morning searching the whole town for the knackerman.
We went door to door, asking only if anyone might have seen him.
We dared not tell them the state he was in, nor that it was a man we’d pronounced dead hours before whom we sought. We knew they would think us mad.
I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we were.
We trudged through the deep snow, each of us puzzling over the thing in our minds, doubting what we had seen and heard with our own eyes and ears. We had both been deprived of sleep in recent days. Could we have hallucinated the same thing? The mind, we knew, did strange things when it was wearied.
No one had seen the knackerman.
His cart was still in town, parked right in front of Loon’s Call Pub, where he’d left it yesterday before following us to the house.
The horses that had pulled it were gone; the leather harness holding them to the cart had been chewed through and was soaked with bloody froth. Two more mad animals on the loose.
Had they come to the house? Come and picked up their pale, dead rider?
I shivered the thought away.
The snow was falling in huge flakes that caught on our eyelashes, covered our coats and hats.
We returned home at last to warm ourselves with coffee, taking it into my uncle’s study, where we added liberal splashes of brandy to our cups.
“He was dead, Uncle,” I said at last, unable to take the silence any longer. “We’re both sure of it.”
“I am absolutely certain.” Uncle Thomas added more brandy, stirring it into his cup, the spoon banging against the bone-white china.
“So then, someone must have taken the body.” I tried to sound confident.
“But who? Why? And with no one in the household hearing a thing?” He set down his cup, rubbed at his head again.
“It makes no sense,” he said. “I’ve gone through every possible scenario I can think of, and none of it makes any sense.
” He looked at me, eyes bloodshot, ringed with dark circles.
“I have seen a great deal of death, Frankie. I know what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. I swear on my life, the knackerman was dead.” He picked up his cup, his hand trembling slightly.
I nodded, took a long sip of my own coffee, then pulled out my notebook, wrote: How does a dead man get up and walk away?
We went out again in the afternoon; a few more inches of snow had covered our earlier tracks.
Again, the only trace of the knackerman was his snow-covered cart in front of the pub.
We said nothing to the few people we encountered on our walk about what had transpired in my uncle’s office.
Eventually, soaked and chilled to the bone, we made our way into the pub for a bowl of soup and a pint to sip while we warmed up a bit.
“You haven’t seen any sign of the knackerman, have you?” Uncle Thomas asked Bert Osbourne, the owner of Loon’s Call, as he poured our ales. He was a big man with a red face.
He nodded in the direction of the front door. “Only his cart. Been there since yesterday. Horses must have gotten sick and run off. I imagine the knackerman went back up the hill to his place. Strange that he’d leave all his tools and knives like that, though.”
The five o’clock bell at the clothespin factory rang, and men began to gather at the pub to sip drinks, smoke, talk. The place was suddenly packed with men in worn work clothes—overalls and dungarees coated in sawdust.
The pub was warm and had the familiar din of talk, the smell of ale and tobacco.
The coal stove glowed softly, warming the space.
Normally all of this would have comforted me, but right now it felt claustrophobic, too warm, too close.
I heard bits and pieces of conversation, of which there seemed to be two main topics: the weather and the horses.
Luther St. James walked in from the snow. Spotting us at the bar, he pulled a stool up next to us.
I could smell the liquor on him.
“How can it be?” Luther demanded, and I was sure that he was asking about the knackerman. That he knew somehow. I looked frantically to Uncle Thomas.
“How can all the horses have gotten sick like this?” Luther went on. His face was ruddy, the raised pale scar on his forehead glowing white like an albino centipede. For half a second, I was sure I saw it writhe and wiggle under his skin.
“Every horse in town, gone—dead, shot, or run off.” Luther slurred his words, teetering uneasily on his barstool.
I took a sip of my ale, watching Luther closely, and slid my barstool ever so slightly farther from him.
“We depend on these beasts, for God’s sake.
We plow our fields with them. Keep the snow clear and pack down on the roads with them.
Bring timber to the clothespin factory and get the clothespins out of town when the trains aren’t running. ”
Uncle Thomas took a sip from his mug and nodded. “Luther, I understand the gravity of the situation,” he said reassuringly.
“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Luther went on, voice loud, agitated. Several other men had turned to watch, listening, waiting to see what the doctor might say or do.
Uncle Thomas shook his head, took a long sip of his ale. “Nor have I.”
“So what could it be?” Bert chimed in from behind the bar. “Is it like the grippe? The grippe for horses?”
“I can’t say,” Uncle Thomas told him. “I think it would be wise to send for a veterinarian. He can examine the remains. The ones we haven’t burned.”
“I’ll ride down to Montpelier myself when the weather breaks,” Luther stammered. “Have to use the old oxcart. Funny thing, isn’t it? That all the other animals are fine? Even the ones that shared barns with the horses? My cows, oxen, pigs, and chickens are healthy as can be.”
“Can we catch it?” Bert asked now, looking directly at Uncle Thomas.
There was a terrible silence, then all of the men turned toward us, waiting for Uncle Thomas to answer. He took another sip from his mug of ale, then looked into it, as if hoping to find an answer there.
I thought of the knackerman and the yellow glow of his eyes, the hot, sticky sweetness of his breath.
The hollow sound of his chest when I listened in the early hours of the morning: no heartbeat, no breath sounds. Only stillness.
Gripping the pencil tightly, I wrote one word and circled it: Knackerman.
My circle continued, became a spiral, a little hurricane on paper, and there at the very center, the eye of the storm, was the knackerman.
The door to the pub flew open, a burst of cold air coming in with it. I spun on my stool, sure that the wind had carried the knackerman here. He would come tottering in, naked, his skin mottled, his eyes blazing yellow like sparks; the walking dead.
Can you hear them?
I blinked in disbelief to see Pearl hurrying in, her hair and coat mounded with snow. Pearl, who, I was quite sure, had never so much as set foot in Loon’s Call Pub. It wasn’t a place for the well-to-do young ladies of Boone’s Ferry. I stood up as Pearl came right toward me, her eyes wild.
I thought of the mare in Luther’s barn, the mad yellow glow of its eyes as it burst through the wood of the stall, barreling toward us.
“Dr. Endicott!” Pearl cried, without looking at me. “You’ve got to come quick!”
Without thinking, without realizing that every man in the pub was now looking our way, I took my lover’s gloved hand and brushed the snow from her hair and spoke gently: “What’s happened, Pearl?”
A silence had fallen over the room, all the normal clank and rustle and grumble of the crowded tavern had ceased.
“It’s my mother.” The words came out in sobs. “She’s been… attacked!”