I’m not sure what to say. I’m not sure how to feel. And I really don’t know what I’m going to say when everyone else comes running.
Uncle Ellis is dead. But it’s not how I thought it would happen.
He’d been so full of night last night, all cheers and chortles. Beer frothing from under his moustache and red veins throbbing in his eyes.
“More,” he was saying, mostly, probably. It was his favourite word. “More, more more.” More food, more drink, more admiration, more respect, more praise. More more more more.
All of us handing him it, nodding at him, smiling at him, and wondering when it would be enough. And which one of us would do it.
Would it be kindly cousin Harvester, with his twinkly eyes and frizzy beard, who’d put too much money into too many of Uncle Ellis’s sure-fire investments?
Would it be miserable old Uncle Paul, who’d never stopped complaining since his little, little, tiny sister had up and married?
Would it be ferocious little Laurie, the most ignored niece in the history of family, who saw her brothers and sisters lavished with praise and expensive uselessness while she got pats on the head and tousled curls?
Or maybe it would just go to Borgia, the dog who lived as a footstool. Lord knows I’d have snapped years ago, but the thing was fifteen and counting and had yet to bark, snap, or even whine under the weight of those pudgy feet.
More, more, more. Uncle Ellis always wanted more. And he never shared what he was owed for it, not one morsel.
Not alive.
More was never enough, but he took a break then, eventually, seven courses in. Pulled out his pipe, sucked it down to a cinder, threw the ashes on the table and said “look!”
In came Aunt E, so small she didn’t get a name, and with her came the journals and the papers and the collection jars.
Here were all the astounding articles on the exotic wildlife that Uncle Ellis had told his servants to write.
There were all the vibrant sketches of magnificent wilderness that Uncle Ellis had described to someone with artistic talent.
And in sealed jars and displays cases, pinned and pickled and glassy-eyed, were the creatures Uncle Ellis’s employees and staff had snatched from their burrows, dens, webs, nests, and branches. Some of them had scales, some of them had feathers, some of them had fur and some were just bald and clammy. Many of them were segmented and crunchy.
And one of them was in a big, smooth glass tank that wasn’t filled with formaldehyde but plain, nourishing air.
We couldn’t see it, and said as much.
Uncle Ellis laughed at that, then picked up his pipe and gave the glass a good whack.
Something small and alarmed darted across the tank’s gravel and slipped underneath the big dead branch that had been, until that second, the only thing inside it we could see.
“Ribbon snake,” he said. “Leptogracilis fragillimus, as I’ve called it. See its spine? So tall and thin. Prickly too! Funny thing. Took a keen eye to spot it, which I did.”
We all smiled and agreed that the incredibly thin snake – almost as narrow face-on as a page of paper – was indeed a lovely creature, worthy of intense praise. Truly he was astounding, a genius, a true noble, a worthy soul.
Then we all retired to our rooms, waited, and wondered who’d go first.
Maybe Grimbly. He was a good friend of Uncle Ellis’s son, Hubert. Hubert who’d been bright, who’d been curious, who’d been disinherited for asking questions that made his father feel foolish. Not that it had taken much to do that.
Maybe Edith? She’d been a maid for a long time, she’d cleaned a lot of floors, she’d carried a lot of laundry, she’d put up with a lot of shouting, and she could use a little cut of a promised inheritance if she’d just put a foot in and speed it all up a bit. Accidentally confuse the rat poison with the salt shaker, maybe.
Speaking of meals, what about poor trembling Joshua? Best friends for forty years, ever since the day Uncle Ellis knocked him down and broke his leg and laughed at him. Through thick and thin, like the time Uncle Ellis drove away his fiancée by starting a fist fight with her father. Comrades ‘till the end. Which frankly, he might appreciate being sooner rather than later.
Or of course, me. No particular motives there beyond annoyance with blowhards and a fondness for money, but I counted those as honest commonalities with the folks seated around me at dinner that evening.
So. Who first?
Creak, crack, crunch. The floorboards are whispering and whining, shaking and twisting in their old wooden beds, trying to get comfortable underfoot.
Who’s taking a stroll? Who’s visiting the privy? Who’s just getting some fresh air?
Better wait it out, better not go just yet. If they’re innocent, they’ll ask questions. If they’re guilty, why interrupt them?
It had been well past midnight before the real dead of night hit over Uncle Ellis’s manor, before I really felt comfortable moving. Soft slippers, a careful tread, and not even a candle to wander by. I had felt my way along the halls like a drunken spider, waving limb by careful limb and squinting in the odd patch of starlight a window leaked in.
I had a plan, a very simple plan. I would creep up to Uncle Ellis’s bedchamber and smother him with his own pillow. No muss, no fuss, no wounds, no blemishes. A nice softy mushy pillow. He’d have at least three of those.
Of course, this was assuming someone else hadn’t reached him first. Like Burroughs, his assistant, who had illustrated, composed, and edited so many of those papers he claimed as his own. Or Taft the batman, who had lost a leg to sepsis after saving him from a crocodile, and had found his pay cut by half as recompense for his new tardiness.
I supposed I would raise a fuss, once I was sure the coast was clear. Maybe faint away, so nobody thought to accuse me. So long as uncle was dead, fair enough, but there’s a special kind of unfairness in being blamed for a murder you didn’t even get to do.
The floor was dusty here, bar the center. Feet had shuffled, fingers had groped. Uncle Ellis’s private chambers had to be close by, near at hand.
Near at foot, however, was a corpse. I almost fell flat-out, but caught myself on a giant and hideous door handle that was probably the entrance to the study.
The body, I determined by feel and smell, belonged to my cousin Janice, who had many of my own qualms about the likelihood and magnitude of her inheritance. She seemed extremely dead, with little trace save for some froth along her lips.
This puzzled me as much as it alarmed me, and it was with this in mind that I put paid to notions of true darkness and filched a candle from the wall, which I lit.
Illuminated (faintly) Janice became slightly more edifying – there was a faint red swelling on her palm. I considered this, then considered the door whose handle I had grasped.
It was festooned with ornate images of sea shells from Uncle Ellis’s voyage of a decade and more ago. Beautiful, colourful, coiled.
I looked closer.
One of the sea shells – a cone snail I believe – had a small dart protruding from its tip. Something cloudy glistened off it in the candlelight.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t shriek, didn’t gasp, didn’t mutter ‘hmm!’
But I DID reconsider how easy this might be. Clearly Uncle Ellis was less unaware of his popularity than I’d presumed.
Carefully, gingerly, daintily, I opened the door with a single finger and slid inside without so much as a creak.
The study was in some disorder, and I decided to put some time into taking stock.
Dark-paneled wood, with thick black curtains drawn firmly around what must be quite high and sweeping windows. A desk that could anchor a ship of the line, built right into the floor. Several chairs so overstuffed they sighed to themselves in the draft of the opened door. Rugs so plush that my feet nearly vanished in them. And a big sturdy door, with the key still in the lock.
After I was through with that, I began to catalogue the causes of death.
Laurie had stepped on the wrong floorboards, judging by the large and ferociously bladed beartraps that were latched around her ankles.
Grimbly had paused to check the desk for something – perhaps the key? – and appeared to have instead found an exotic and large spider, whom I hurriedly shut back into its drawer, where it hissed angrily.
And finally the door appeared to have been opened by Cousin Harvester, because when I stepped through it and found myself in a stairwell it was his bobbing body that I found, suspended rather alarmingly from a leg-trap that had misjudged and caught his neck instead. Rest assured, I was very careful to check the stairs as I went.
The staircase was clear, as far as I could tell – though I did leap the last five steps, and so can’t verify their safety. The hallway was similarly safe, although my careful and suspicious proddings at the closed and silent doors did lead to my discovery of Uncle Ellis’s bathroom, where Joshua had stepped onto a bathmat – hunting for a weapon in the medicine cabinet, perhaps? – and into a twelve-foot tiger-pit that must’ve eventually emptied into the furnace, by the smell.
The master bedroom was surprisingly simple to locate – Uncle Paul had gotten halfway through the door before a pair of decorative axes had collapsed on him. The other half remained in the halfway, leaking.
I had stepped gingerly over him, into marvels and horrors.
Heaps of papers, all crisply unruffled by any prying eyes or greedy fingers – Uncle Ellis did not like to read.
Great mounds of fine clothing and luxurious canes – Uncle Ellis did not like to dress up.
Opulent furniture crafted from the heaviest and most indestructible timber, gilded in pearls and gold, with dirty plates sitting atop them – Uncle Ellis left that sort of things for maids.
Edith, the maid herself, face down and ghastly pale on the floor, where she’d slipped and cracked something vital – Uncle Ellis appeared to have left his slippers in the most peculiar place.
And finally, quiet and deadly vast as a mountain, heavier than the roots of the world, the bedframe and sheets and covers and mounded pillows. Because Uncle Ellis always wanted more.
I picked a sizeable pillow, whipped back the blankets, aimed for the face, and smacked down, hard. And it wasn’t for a good minute that I risked to raise it for curiosity at the ease of it all, and found the thing soaked to its eiderdown in blood.
Such a thin little cut across his throat, like a papercut. And when I looked around for explanation, for excuses, all I could find was the little glass tank with its one dead branch and a perfect missing circle of glass. Like somebody had taken a little blade to it.
Good lord, I’m still thinking on that. Good lord.
What kind of snake SLITS someone to death? Can’t it just bite them?
There’s shouting and gasping and running feet. Someone – Taft? Burroughs? Loyal for their salaries, unless they were paid off to tuck themselves to bed early – must’ve come looking for him when he didn’t call for breakfast. I should be running, jumping, screaming with the rest, fixing my alibi and making my excuses.
But all I can do is sit here, like a stone on a riverbed, and let the current rush around me. Thinking about that ribbon snake, and where it might’ve gone.