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Danko Netter stepped into the mansion’s candlelit foyer and looked around, knowing what to expect, yet stunned just the same.
Heads.
A hundred of them, maybe even double that. Moose heads, eagle heads, bear heads. Even rare animals like a basilisk. Hardly an inch of space had been left between them. They were all stuffed and mounted on similar slabs of polished oak, each wearing a death scowl. Interspersed among them were a handful of human heads, although these were clearly mock-ups, like theater masks, coated with bronze and fixed into wild expressions.
“Impressive, yes?” said Ulva Cane, the owner of the mansion. She was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties. “My husband certainly thought so.” Her lavender-tinted lips twisted wryly as she gazed up at the heads. “I’d have them all burned if it were up to me.”
She closed the front door, locked it, and then turned down a hallway, her hips swishing beneath a pumpkin-colored evening gown. “This way, please.”
Danko, a professional exterminator (or ratter, as he preferred to think of it), hefted the twin ferret cages he’d brought and followed, feeling as if the heads’ eyes were watching him. He’d sensed something off about Mrs. Cane’s comment on the heads, too. Something about her tone. A little nervous, maybe?
More heads lined the hallway, leaning in at shoulder level as if they might lick Danko’s ear.
Ulva glanced back at him. “How long have you been doing this?”
“’Bout ten years now.”
“Well, I’m sure this won’t take you long.”
“Usually don’t.”
“My husband’s office is just down this way.”
Her late husband. The legendary hunter, Rugerstyke Cane. The news of his death had been received with shock and disappointment throughout Dagenport. Everyone knew the story. How he’d bravely sacrificed himself so the rest of his hunting party could escape. His funeral (a sealed casket, lit on fire, and launched into Dagenport Harbor) had been quite an affair for the city’s upper crust; Danko hadn’t been invited.
Ulva opened a door for him. “You followed my instructions?”
There was that tone again. But clients asking Danko to be discrete were not uncommon. No one wanted her neighbors gossiping about a rat infestation—especially not well-to-do types. Mrs. Cane’s envoy, however, had been adamant about him keeping it quiet. And the jingling bag of coins he’d offered had spoken volumes.
“Yup,” Danko said. “To the letter.”
She nodded. “It’s just inside there. Between the two bookshelves.”
Danko walked into the room, set his cages down, and inspected the candlelit office. It was impressive, sure, but compared with the heads in the others, it looked plain. A desk occupied the center of the room, made of stained pine, with no drawers. Books were stacked neatly on one side, and a pile of paper—notes, he guessed, or maybe a work in progress—on the other. The chair was padded leather; it looked comfortable and expensive. The walls showed a few empty art frames. The shelves were also mostly bare. Only a handful of hardbound books leaned here and there, looking forgotten, as if the unwanted vestiges of an estate sale.
The rathole was obvious. It sat just above the floor’s oak molding, three inches wide. A trap lay on the floor beside it, the bait untouched.
His ferrets chittered and dooked in their cages, sniffing the air, eager.
Ulva stepped back from the cages. “Are they dangerous?”
Danko grinned. “Not to us.”
“But to the rats—”
“Very.”
She pointed at the rathole. “That’s where they come in.”
“So I gather. Any idea what’s on the other side of the wall?”
“No. Why? Do you need to get behind it?”
That tone. “Probably not. We’ll see.”
Ulva hesitated. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.” She turned and strode away, her dress ruffling behind her.
Danko changed his mind. It wasn’t just the heads. This whole place was unnerving. The sooner he got this over with, the better. So he got right to it. He flipped the locking lever on the cages, setting his ferrets loose. Twin bolts of gray-black lightning shot for the rathole, squirming through it with the agile physiques of creatures designed for just such a purpose.
He sat back on his haunches.
“Thirty-two seconds,” he said to himself.
And started counting.
He usually wasn’t far off. His ferrets were fast. And merciless. Sometimes Danko might miss by ten seconds or so, but it had been a while since it had taken Geno and Saka more than a minute to return with the first of the pink-tailed carcasses.
He readied the shoulder bag he would use to collect the dead rats, still counting, and pondered all those hundreds of heads in the other rooms again. It was spooky. That’s what it was. As a ratter, he sometimes dealt with guilt (strong ale was his usual treatment for it) wondering if there might be...repercussions for his chosen profession in a larger sense. Like a cosmic balancing he’d thrown out of whack. But didn’t he also protect his clients and their children? Spare them the horrors of disease and tainted food? He hoped that counted. And at least, at least, he wasn’t chucking rat heads up on a wall so he could gloat like Rugerstyke Cane. That was just awful. Plus, unlike many of the beautiful animals out there, rats weren’t, near as he could tell, good for much of anything.
He glanced behind him, shaking off a chill. For a second there, he would have sworn he was being watched. The hairs on the back of his neck felt prickly.
Damn heads.
He focused on the rathole, still counting.
And counting.
“Fifty-three...”
Were the rats nested up in the rafters? That would explain the delay.
“Minute five, minute six...”
A faint thunk sounded from the rathole, as if a book had tumbled to the floor in the room beyond. Or a meat cleaver had struck a cutting board. Or a box trap had closed?
Danko listened.
Nothing more. And nothing from his ferrets.
He crouched down, peered into the hole, looking for light. Yes...there. A dim flickering way back in there. He pictured the mansion’s layout from what he remembered upon his arrival, but it was impossible to guess what might lie beyond this wall. He crouched even lower, making clicking sounds with his cheek. “Geno...Saka...here, here...here, here...”
No response.
He pressed his cheek against the oak molding, straining his eye...then—
A sound.
Behind him.
A tiny squeak. Not a rat, no, something mechanical—
THWUMP!
His forehead struck the wall as someone clubbed him in the back of the head.
THWUMP! THWUMP!
Everything went dark.
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Danko blinked, and fire shot through his skull.
My head...
He couldn’t move. Other than his eyes, he was paralyzed. But he could feel everything; his neck and head and face throbbed with pain.
He could just make out a blurry candlelit room. He was on a table. And...somebody was moving near him. A bald man. In a gray robe. Leaning in, breathing heavy, fogging up the spectacles that perched on his bony nose.
How did Danko get here? He’d been peering into that rathole. He’d been searching for his ferrets—that squeaking sound!
A smaller table sat to the side, and upon it lay a syringe. Its reservoir was filled with a rust-colored fluid. And was that a slab of polished oak next to it? Danko tried to struggle free, but he’d been bound with rope; he could generate no force. The drug, he thought, and then: Where’s my boots?
The man in the gray robe leaned in closer, gripping a pair of pliers. His breath tickled Danko’s face, smelling of mint. A shapeless chunk of bronze dangled from his other hand, shimmering dully in the candlelight.
Others, Danko realized, were in the room, too—back in the shadows, watching. One standing. One in a wheelchair. They moved closer, and the wheelchair made a tiny squeak.
That sound! That squeak!
It was Ulva Cane, pushing the wheelchair out of the shadows into the pool of light, still in her pumpkin-colored gown. The wheelchair held a broken-looking old man. The man’s bearded face was slack, his jaw agape. He gripped a wooden club, but his fingers and limbs were curled and deteriorated, looking mostly useless. His eyes, though, gleamed with intense enthusiasm.
It was Rugerstyke Cane.
Even in that wretched condition, Danko would know him anywhere. Paintings of him, barrel-chested and exuberant, hung in the Dagenport Library alongside nobles and kings and gods. So, he wasn’t dead.
Ulva parked the wheelchair, orienting it so Rugerstyke could gaze at Danko. The twisted smile on the old man’s face filled Danko with dread. Danko tried to cry out to Ulva, but his voice didn’t work.
Rugerstyke mumbled something to his wife that Danko didn’t catch. Ulva leaned down, listening, then laughed in a tinkling, almost girlish way.
“Yes, my darling,” she said, “my brave hunter.”
The old man mumbled again, asking questions.
“Yes, of course you get to finish him. Do you still want it the slow way?”
Rugerstyke nodded eagerly, then mumbled again.
“A jeweller,” Ulva answered him. “At the end of next week. I’ll put my vanity box just there.” She pointed at a small pedestal, like an indoor birdbath. “He’ll be busy with the appraisal. You,” she giggled again, “will be on the prowl.”
Rugerstyke laughed—a wretched, phlegmy gargle that nearly made him drop his club. He slumped then, as if spent.
“Come,” Ulva said, pushing the wheelchair out of the room with a squeak. “It’s time for your nap, my brave hunter.”
And Danko was alone with the gray-robed man. Breathing heavily, the man regripped the chunk of bronze with the pliers, then lifted the syringe. Moved in again.
Danko felt a prick...
And then a rush of blood to the head.
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Danko’s vision swam back into focus. He was woozy, hurt all over, and now found himself looking through something (a pair of slits?) into a candlelit foyer he recognized instantly.
Heads.
All along the walls. Except now, he realized, he was looking down into the foyer.
The pain!
He still couldn’t move, and the pain was increasing as if a numbing agent was wearing off. He strained his eyes to the left and right, and was that a gleam of bronze around his eyes? Reflecting the candlelight? And—
He saw his ferrets.
Geno and Saka. One hanging to his left and one to his right. Stuffed. Mounted.
No...no!
He peered at the human heads interspersed among the animals—at the faces coated with bronze and fixed into wild expressions. He’d assumed they were mock-ups. Because they had to be.
Had to be.
Right?
He could see a dim reflection in the polished oak of Saka’s mount. His face? Or at least, a ghastly bronze representation of it. Enough for a keepsake—but not enough for evidence. He thought back to Ulva’s instructions. To her envoy’s insistence that they meet at the Dagenport Library, and that only there would he receive the directions to his client’s home and the next installment of his payment. He’d chalked it up to wealthy eccentricities. Yet now, he understood with horror, no one knew where he’d gone.
Ulva strode into the foyer, her heels making sharp clicks on the polished tile. She glanced up at Danko as she continued into an adjacent room. Danko again tried to cry out, but his voice was still as paralyzed as the rest of him.
Ulva returned, once more pushing Rugerstyke’s squeaky wheelchair. The old man, fresh off his nap, looked rejuvenated. Ulva parked him. Rugerstyke gazed up at Danko with a drooling, hungry expression, gripping his club.
“They’ll come any moment now, dear,” Ulva told him.
Rugerstyke nodded and grinned.
Behind Mrs. Cane, the gray-robed man entered the foyer, toting a leather supply bag. He accepted a jingling coin pouch from her. As he left, she locked the front door behind him, and then disappeared down a hallway.
Drool leaked down Rugerstyke’s chin, his eyes gleaming. Only the hunter, and the prey, remained.
For a heartbeat, all was quiet.
Then...squeak! The sound had come from behind Danko. In the walls.
Not mechanical this time.
Squeak! Squeak!
Danko pictured long pink tails. Beady eyes. Scrabbling little claws. His skin erupted with gooseflesh as he realized what would come next—
And then he felt the first nibble at his toes.