“But people will equate it with the supernatural, that Satan can walk on water as well as Christ.”
“Don’t attribute satanic powers to him yourself then, Griff.”
“But then, they say the Devil doth take a pleasing form.”
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“This particular devil has chosen an invisible form.”
“He is that.”
“Don’t hold back. Tell me what you think.”
“Gut feelings, first impression?” asked Griff. “I thought him harmless, but I soon learned he had no allegiance to Keane.”
“Are you saying he’s a back-stabbing cock-sucker?”
“OK . . .”
“And why so?”
“At each scene, he laid a seed of doubt about his employer—quietly, mind you.”
“Yes, this is his way, and being a small man . . . one you are so much more likely to let your guard down around . . .”
“Yes, many a deadly viper is—”
“Indeed! A small man with a garrote, a man about your own size, Grif—”
“Can do a helluva lotta damage in a matter of seconds.”
“Precisely.”
“Hey . . . hold on. You thought . . . back there at the lagoon . . . when I came up on you, and you started fooling with your shoe buttons and bending over . . . do you mean to tell me that—”
“I had a loose lace is all.”
“You thought me the Phantom, didn’t you? Damn you!”
Alastair hesitated, mired in silence, unsure what to say.
“Out with it, big man! The truth!” Griff laughed and mut tered, “Wait till O’Malley and some of the lads hear this.”
Alastair realized that rather than taking it badly, somehow Griffin found a strange mix of humor and pride in it, somehow still impressed by the notoriety given the Phantom by the newsies. “Imagine . . . thinking me the Phantom of the Fair.” “Will you quit bloody calling him that, please? He deserves no title, no crown, no ink in the damned press; he deserves no ‘sir’ or ‘gentleman’ before his name. He deserves none of our respect or misguided ballads written about him, and he certainly merits no admiration.”
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“Waldo Denton . . . my God, Alastair, how did you figure it out?”
“The ring.”
“The one in your bowels?”
“This ring!” he produced his pinky with the ring upon it.
“How do you suppose it went from Merielle’s hand to Philo’s pocket and the killer counting on it’s still being there?”
“Philo admitted to taking it in trade.”
“How better to implicate his mentor than to lead you and Kohler to Philo’s coat pocket or the frock in which you found the ring?”
Griff gave this a moment to sink in as if revisiting the moment. “ ’Twas Denton who first identified the disembodied ring as having belonged to—”
“Precisely, yes . . . led you to suspect wrongdoing at the studio. Was he also helpful in uncovering Philo’s collection of nudes?” asked Ransom as the cab walls and wheels whined and strained under the whip, the speed, and the angles.
“Yes, and now, tonight,” began Griff, “he leads you off on a wild goose chase to stand bait at the park.”
“To rid himself of my being on hand tonight at Gabby’s birthday celebration. I just know he heard Jane—Tewes and I—speaking of it.”
“He’s cunning enough to know it’d take an elephant gun or Moose Muldoon to bring you down.”
“Well . . . Muldoon’s been set straight.”
For a moment, they thought the carriage would go over on its side.
“Do you think he’d really dare strike the ladies in their home with Tewes present?”
“He’s likely planning to kill them in their beds.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Sensationalism, to strike a deeper fear in us.”
“To say we’re unsafe when snug in our own beds?”
“And he’s reaching higher along the scale of respectability, money, and social standing.”
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“He really is a hatter, isn’t he?”
“A mad hatter.”
“But why? Just because he can?”
“He alone holds the answer to that.”
“Faster!” Griff now shouted even as he tumbled about the cab, banging into every wall and door.
“Get what you can from the whip!” shouted Ransom.
The wheels spun madly beneath them, screaming, and on sharp turns now left the ground.
Stumpf did it . . . he did it all. All the killing, that is.
Waldo didn’t even feel he was inside his body when Stumpf, at that moment of taking life—willed the essence of the dying into him. It was why Stumpf liked mirrors, liked killing them before mirrors.
He’d done it both ways of course, but the thrill and satisfaction became so much more heightened if he could stare into both their eyes and those of Stumpf at the moment of knowing. The moment of crossing over. From behind the garrote, before a mirror, he could watch all the eyes!
Stumpf could more readily act at the instant of death to net and catch the soul within his web of wanton lust if he knew the very instant of the soul’s leap toward the next dimension. Wanton lust—part and parcel of it—as Stumpf so enjoyed what Waldo Denton’s body felt at the death leap.
Stumpf got Waldo an erection—that true insignia, emblem of corporeal lust.
“All of life becomes more pronounced and clear and worth the discovery if a man is in his right spirit,” Waldo Denton was telling Jane Francis Ayers and Gabby—as he’d come to know their names. He’d first been attracted to them and their home that night he’d killed Purvis at the train station. The same night he’d seen Gabby and Cliffton kissing below the lights near the lagoon. He’d been kicking around the fair, wandering, exploring, one side of him determining good locations for murder as he scouted for Stumpf, while 310
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another side looked and hungered for precisely what that college boy had—a future, yes, but also a future with a beautiful young thing. A promise at a fulfilling life of happiness, warmth, camaraderie, mutual respect, admiration . . . mutual pleasure. All things denied him.
How was it Shakespeare put it in the performance he’d seen at the theater? “If I cannot prove a hero, I shall prove a villain. . . .” Words to take heart in. Words that indicated to Waldo that he might be considered important by everyone he came into contact with, that he could affect their lives.
But even more, the play was the thing that informed Waldo that deviant thoughts belonged to others as well—even to the most famous author on the planet, William Shakespeare.
Giving hope that he perhaps was not so absolutely alone and craven as he’d felt since childhood.
Stumpf and Waldo had wormed past the Tewes threshold to allow Stumpf his chance. That was what Waldo had become—a pimp to the base Stumpf inside, who didn’t even want to spare Gabrielle, the most beautiful and innocent and pleasant and most kind person ever to address Waldo. She, and the idea of a future relationship with Gabby, remained the only thought in his head that held Stumpf back now.
So far as the older woman was concerned, Waldo had no compunction about turning Stumpf loose. When he did let Sleepeck Stumpf have his way, however, it would destroy any hairsbreadth of a chance to make Gabby see him . . . really see him and eventually see into him and eventually somehow understand the so-called Phantom of the Fair.
Enough to eventually accept his past ill behavior and forgive his transgressions as only unconditional love could free the beast within to slink off elsewhere, back to its den to hiber-nate and hopefully die of its own loneliness and suffering, which, in the end, Waldo Denton had no part of and had never had any part of—and so his mind raced at the moment of sipping tea and chewing birthday cake.