Kleft gestured for Nathan to follow, and got out of the coach. The robbers were unshaven, dirty men in torn clothing, each of whom held a large knife.

"What do you miscreants want?" asked Kleft. "Do you know who I am?"

"You're somebody traveling in a coach on a lonely road after dark," said the first robber. "Therefore, you are prey."

"My name is Professor Kleft. I command great respect amongst those civilized enough to know who deserves respect. I am happy to forgive you this transgression and allow you to wander off in whatever direction your loathsome forms wish to go, but if you do not retreat I promise you will both lie dead at my feet."

The first robber grinned, revealing black gums and rotten teeth. "That's quite a promise. Now give me all of your money before I cut you into a series of long, thin strips."

"Let me explain to you, through an anecdote, how little your threat scares me. When I was a child, barely older than the boy next to me, my father and I rode in a coach, much like this one. It was a pleasant, calm journey, until the driver stopped the horses, even though we'd given the horses a rest barely an hour ago. We-"

"Is this going to be a long story?" asked the second robber.

"Extremely long. And if you continue to interrupt, I shall tell it at a slower rate. We got out of the coach, only to see a pair of robbers-"

"I have no interest in your anecdote," said the first robber. "Give us your money and whatever valuables you have concealed in there."

"-only to see a pair of robbers waiting for us outside. Their hair glistened with the shine of being unwashed, and the horses batted their tails to and fro, trying to wave away the stench as if shooing away flies."

"Are your ears merely decorative? We do not care! Not a whit! Not a speck! Not a pinch! Your anecdote is of no interest to us, and I swear to you, if you don't stop I will twist the knife each time I plunge it into your body, rather than merely withdrawing it before I stab again."

"My father refused to give these robbers any of his money and began to tell them about the origin of his lack of fear," Kleft continued. "And we watched happily as his driver, producing a gun from inside of his coat, shot both of the robbers dead while they were distracted by his meaningless anecdote."

"We don't care! How many times must we repeat this? This is easily in the top five stories of which I've had the least amount of interest, and yet you continue to share it, despite our threats upon your life. You've now vexed me so intensely that even if you do stop reciting the tale, I'm going to kill you. And then I'm going to kill your driver, and then I'm going to kill the boy. All because you wouldn't stop telling that story. Three deaths when there might have been zero."

"Well, there would've been at least one," said the second robber.

"That's true, that's true. We are sociopaths, after all. But still, had you not wasted our time with that pointless-"

Nathan had never seen a bullet strike somebody in the forehead before, nor had he seen their brains exit from the back of their skull at such an accelerated rate. He'd actually thought the process would look more like when somebody jumped into a swimming pool, where the water splashed outward, but instead it looked as if standing behind the first robber would have posed the greatest risk of getting splashed.

"You killed him!" the second robber screamed. "You've created orphans of his nine children! You've made a widow of his wife, who hasn't got the looks to ever find another husband to care for her! And in his spare time he was on the verge of finally discovering a cure for-"

The second robber's head burst open in a similar manner to his partner's. His body dropped.

Nathan cried out in horror.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," said Kleft. "It's never a pleasant thing, watching your driver kill a pair of men."

"Well, it can be, under the right circ.u.mstances," said the driver.

"Yes, but not when it's self-defense." Kleft sighed and clapped his hands together. "All right, let's get to work. We've got two corpses to skin before anybody else comes around."

"I beg your pardon?" asked Nathan.

"We're not just going to leave them here with their skins on. That would be madness. If we each take a knife and start sc.r.a.ping we'll be done in no time."

"I'm not doing that."

"Perhaps where you come from human skins dangle from trees and you can just pluck one or two whenever it strikes your fancy, but out here they're a little more scarce. Do you know how many coins a human skin fetches on the underground market?"

"No."

"It varies, based on the size of the human, the number of scars and warts, and most importantly-and realize that I am not being racist when I say this, I'm merely sharing a reality of the contemporary market-the color."

"I'm not doing it."

"Yes you are. You're going to skin your share of those corpses, and there won't be any complaint. In fact you will grin while you do it, is that understood?"

"No!"

"You will grin, and you will speak in creepy whispers as if to a second mind inside of your first, and you will smear residue in your hair on purpose, and you will stop acting like a sheltered baby and start acting like a proper member of my show, for G.o.d's sake!"

"Make him use his teeth," said the driver.

"Now that would be a show worth the half-coin admission by itself. Watch the Astounding Tooth-Boy skin a corpse in three minutes! All of the money that would bring in would far exceed the cost of importing the corpses."

"I'd rather be shot!" Nathan said.

The driver pointed his gun at him. "Are you sure?"

"I am not."

"One should think about the types of comparisons one makes about things one would rather be doing before saying them out loud," said Kleft. "I once told an ex-girlfriend that I'd rather be buried alive than kiss her again. Do you know how difficult it is to dig your way out of a grave? Oh, sure, it looks easy, just sc.r.a.pe away some dirt, la de da, no problem at all, but did you notice how all of my fingers are wooden?"

Actually, Nathan hadn't, but now that Kleft had pointed it out, he could see that he had a flesh palm with five pieces of finger-shaped wood attached to it.

"Let me a.s.sure you, young one, that when a man is forced to dig through cold earth so frantically that he wears his fingers completely off, he discovers that a kiss isn't quite so bad, even with the cold sore. So we're going to allow you to re-evaluate your prior comment about getting shot being preferable to skinning a corpse with your teeth. Keep in mind that once you've been shot, we will skin your corpse as well. You may think 'Well, I'll be dead, it won't matter to me anyway,' but can you be a.s.sured that you won't feel anything? What if you're up there, floating around in the afterlife, and you feel every poke and slice of our knives? And St. Peter says 'Sorry, we can't let you into heaven, because your screaming and thrashing will disturb the other angels.' My advice is to not get shot."

"Can't I...can't I just use a knife, like you two?"

"Thirty seconds ago I would have said yes," said Kleft. "Thirty seconds after that, which brings us to the current moment, I am saying no. I'm afraid you have no choice but to regress into savagery."

Nathan wanted to throw up. So he did. He couldn't skin a body with his teeth! That was insanity! He didn't even want to bite down gently upon the bodies of the robbers, much less puncture anything! What would the sisters think if they were watching him right now? Would they even want him to send them coins that were acquired under these circ.u.mstances? "Oh, goodness no, we can't buy food with these," Penny would say. "They have the scent of blood, and our meals will be tainted with the imagined taste of human flesh."

But he couldn't refuse, could he? He didn't want to get shot. n.o.body did. Getting shot was awful.

Skin a corpse with his bare teeth or get shot...skin a corpse with his bare teeth or get shot...skin a corpse with his bare teeth or get shot...?

Then something occurred to him.

"You're bluffing," he said.

"In what way?"

"You said that the members of Professor Kleft's Parade of the Macabre are two days south of here."

"Yes."

"That's in addition to the day we've already traveled."

"Yes."

"So you traveled three days to fetch me."

"Yes."

"Six days of travel, there and back, and you're just going to shoot me? That seems peculiar. Therefore, Professor, I call your bluff."

Kleft grinned. "You are a clever one. But allow me to offer my reb.u.t.tal. Considering that I have threatened to shoot you if you do not commit an act of grisly mutilation, is it more likely that I am bluffing, or that I am medically insane and thus my actions are not based on any type of solid logic?"

"I..." Nathan trailed off. "d.a.m.n!"

"So which choice have you made?"

Nathan hung his head. "I'll follow your orders."

"An excellent selection."

"I've never done such a thing before," said Nathan. "You'll have to show me."

"That won't be a problem at all, as we have two bodies available," said Kleft. "Watch and learn, boy, watch and learn."

The next few minutes that followed were a sight so unpleasant that Nathan was certain that flashes of it would pop into his mind for the rest of his life, probably at inopportune moments, such as his wedding or important public speaking engagements. Such untidiness they were creating! He stood there and trembled and gasped and felt terribly sorry for the robbers even though they were already dead.

"You're cutting too deep," said Kleft to his driver. "That's no example to be setting."

"You have the better knife."

"Are you really blaming the knife? I could cut at him with a piece of broken gla.s.s and do the job with more skill than what you're demonstrating."

"Is that so? Prove it!"

"I shall!" Kleft stood up and walked back to the coach. He climbed inside and came out with a mostly empty bottle of wine. He drank up the last sip, then shattered it against the wheel of the coach. He selected one of the largest pieces, returned to the body of the robber, and resumed his work.

"You see?" he asked.

"Well, naturally, when you cut there it's possible to do it with a piece of gla.s.s, but I'd like to see you cut him there with the same accuracy."

"How about that?"

"Oh, my."

"Now don't you feel ashamed?"

"All right, all right, your skills exceed my own. But can you do it with a branch?"

"No, I can't do it with a branch! What kind of tomfoolery are you suggesting?"

"What about a sharp rock?"

"You need to spend less time suggesting odd items with which to skin a man and more time skinning that man." Kleft let out a derisive snort. "A sharp rock. Such balderdash."

"So you can't do it, then?"

"I'll make you a deal. If you can do it, I'll let you ride comfortably in the coach all the way back, and I'll drive the horses. How does that sound?"

The driver's face lit up, as much as such a skeletal face could light up. "That would be delightful! Let me see..." He began to quickly look around on the ground, and then picked up a rock. "Here's one. No, wait, this other one seems sharper." He ran his index finger along the edge of the rock. "Perfect."

"You won't even be able to clean under his fingernails with that."

"You'll see! Oh, I'll be riding two days' south of here in such luxury!" The driver seemed giddy as he went to work with the rock.

"It's not doing anything," said Kleft.

"It's doing a great deal. Look right there."

"Shoddy."

"What do you mean, shoddy?"

The driver, it must be said, knew exactly what Professor Kleft meant by "shoddy." The rock, sharp as it may have been, was doing a dreadful job. It simply was not the proper tool for the task. But for years he'd dreamt of riding in the coach, writing about his own adventures while Kleft dealt with the wind and the cold and the uncomfortable wooden seat and the stench of the horses, and he wasn't ready to give up on that dream quite yet.

Professor Kleft, on the other hand, thought that using the sharp rock looked like a lot of fun, and he sort of wished that he hadn't ridiculed the idea.

Meanwhile, Nathan had changed his mind about the horrors he was witnessing. As disturbing as the activities of his two captors were, he did appreciate the fact that they were paying a great deal of attention to the bodies of the robbers, and very little attention to Nathan. So little, in fact, that he'd been able to take several steps toward the coach without them noticing.

The first step had been a tentative one, covering minimal ground, tiny enough that if he were caught he could explain it away as stretching his leg. The next few steps were less tentative, and his leg-stretching excuse would have thoroughly strained credibility, but Kleft and his driver were still too absorbed in what they were doing to watch him.

Now Nathan knew that he had to make a big move. Being an extra six feet away from where he'd started was not a substantial advantage when dealing with enemies who had indicated a strong willingness to shoot him.

There weren't any woods to run into. No place to hide, except perhaps for under the coach, which would have been sufficient for an extremely brief game of hide-and-seek but was woefully unsuited for a life-or-death situation.

And so, moving as quickly as he could and trying not to scream in terror at Kleft's cry of "Hey!", Nathan scrambled up into the driver's seat.

FIFTEEN.

Nathan frantically yanked on the horses' reins. He didn't know the first thing about driving a horse-drawn coach except that there was some yanking of reins involved, and if this didn't work, he knew he'd be dead.

The horses ran.