The bogeyman had come, as the Scarecrow had known he would. Obedient to the end. Willing to do whatever he was told, no questions asked. All it had taken was a strategically timed text message with the hotel’s name, room number, and instructions to wait inside should the presumed sender not have arrived yet, and he’d come running. And, as expected, he’d come alone so that none of his underlings would suspect how completely he was owned by the man under whose name the room was registered.
Marchment knocked one final time before testing the knob and finding it unlocked. The Scarecrow sensed the bogeyman’s indecision and prepared to improvise, but it relaxed when it heard the soft squeal of hinges and footsteps entering the suite. Even after all these years, it recognized those sounds and experienced the same ingrained physiological response. In that moment, it was once more a helpless child, its heart hammering in its chest, its pulse rushing in its ears. Its breathing accelerated, producing a rasping sound from the respirator of its gas mask and threatening to loosen the stoma cover on its neck. It battled the fear, forcing it down into the hollow core of its physical vessel, reminding itself that the child was dead. The Scarecrow had killed it and usurped its form, mercifully saving it from a lifetime of misery that could be traced back to the man on the other side of the wall.
This was the lone point of weakness in its plan. All Marchment had to do was turn around and leave and it would never be able to isolate him again. It had to trust that the bogeyman’s fear and confusion would override his better judgment, that the message it had sent him using the bodies of the other surviving men from Edgewood would convince him to take just this one risk so he could find out why this was happening to someone like him, someone who was supposed to be untouchable. More important, he had to find out if the Novichok was really here and how quickly he needed to get out of the city.
Both Marchment and his master had come to this dreary metropolis for one reason and one reason alone: They’d known that this was one of the few places in the world where the Novichok wasn’t. Or at least that was what they’d thought. Quintus didn’t even suspect that his plan had been co-opted by another, who’d given the Scarecrow something far more valuable than money; he’d given it a collection of classified black-and-white films that showed what had happened to it as a child, not to mention the men responsible for its never-ending misery, men who, by the time the clock struck midnight, would all be dead. And of equal consequence to its new master, Tertius Decimus, the Langbroek name would be destroyed and he would ascend within the Thirteen on the deaths of nine million people, a fraction of the carnage Quintus had envisioned, but more than enough to allow the man known as Thirteenth to implement the machinations of the insurrection he’d started with his subversion of the release of Secundus’s flu virus.
It was a double cross on an apocalyptic scale. Surely Langbroek was beginning to understand that he’d never had any control over the events he’d set in motion, that he’d been manipulated from the start by an adversary of his own creation. Neither he nor Marchment had so much as suspected who the Scarecrow truly was, at least not until they learned the identities of the victims it had left for them in the cornfield. Maybe they’d even dismissed the killings as coincidental clear up until they found Raymond in Central Park, and now, with Mikkelson’s body undoubtedly being swarmed by investigators, there was no mistaking what was about to happen to them. Within a matter of hours, they would experience the same suffering they’d inflicted upon it.
And the coup of Tertius Decimus would begin in earnest.
The front door of the suite closed with a nearly inaudible click. The Scarecrow held its breath and listened. Several seconds passed before it heard footsteps in the interior hallway. It smiled beneath its mask, knowing with complete certainty that it had Marchment now.
In its mind, it envisioned not the aged man with the silver hair and expensive suit, but the younger version with the buzz cut and olive-colored uniform, walking down the sterile white corridor with its father. It imagined the bogeyman raising the mask he’d used to expose it to the chemicals, but rather than pinning it over the mouth and nose of a child, he affixed it to his own face. And instead of inhaling sarin, he was breathing diethyl ether halogenated with fluorine, oxygen, and nitrous oxide, a homemade anesthetic of its own design, which was currently diffusing into the main room from a vaporizer unit hidden behind a chair, an invisible gas that would render him unconscious in under three minutes.
The Scarecrow silently opened the closet door, stepped out into the bedroom, and crept down the hallway into the main room, where the bogeyman stood silhouetted against a circular window with red velvet curtains, his hands clasped behind his back. It was an irresistible view that people paid tens of thousands of dollars a night to see, one within mere feet of the source of the faintly sweet-smelling gas.
Marchment flickered before its eyes, as though projected from an eight-millimeter reel, only every other frame showed a different version of the bogeyman. Old man and then young. Suit and then uniform. Silver hair and then buzz cut. And yet the Scarecrow felt no corresponding change within itself. The child was dead and all that remained was a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together not from mismatched parts but from biomechanical components; rotted not by death but by disease; animated not by electricity but by hatred.
The bogeyman swayed ever so slightly and had to brace himself against the wall. He stiffened at the realization that something was terribly wrong and glanced to his left. His eyes met those of the Scarecrow in the reflection from the window and the bogeyman saw it—truly saw it—for the first time.
Marchment turned around, but by then it was already too late. His legs went out from underneath him and he collapsed to his knees. He grabbed onto the Scarecrow and tried to pull himself back to his feet.
“No…” he said. His voice was watery from the anesthesia, his eyes unfocused, his grip growing weaker by the second.
The sensation of his hands upon it ignited a fiery rage inside the Scarecrow. It grabbed the lamp from the end table and swung it with all of its might. The base struck Marchment squarely in the forehead, knocking him backward and spattering the window with a crimson arc. He folded in reverse, his body contorting awkwardly until his legs twisted out from underneath him and he collapsed onto his back. Blood trickled from his temple and dripped to the black-and-white patterned carpet.
The Scarecrow could have stayed there all day watching the bogeyman bleed, but it had so much more in store for him.
And so much more blood to shed.