“I don’t mean to argue with you, Cyrus, what with being surrounded by your undead minions, but I’ll just say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and leave it at that.”

“Oh, yes,” Cyrus said, turning to me once he was done with his morbid meditation. His eyes lit up. “I almost forgot . . . Thanks to your little magic hands, you’re a bit of an expert on art, aren’t you? Don’t worry. I have something better lined up for you, too. Something special.”

“For me?” I said, trying to hide my nervousness. “Gee, you shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, believe me,” Cyrus said, walking off to another end of the great hall. “It was my pleasure. I’ve got something lined up for everyone who brought down my Ghostsniffing operation. The good thing about being in hiding as long as I have is that downtime is good for the creative soul. I’ve had plenty of time to think up fitting ways to make everyone’s life miserable, especially yours.”

Cyrus breathed out a small chant and his zombies started moving me across the floor toward an ever greater assortment of cases. If my hands had been free, there was a chance I might have escaped, but I couldn’t with them bound behind my back as they were. I missed my bat already.

“Had Mina followed through with her end of the bargain, you would have been dead by now,” he said, stopping by another case, this one covered with a red curtain, “but when that seemed unlikely, I started thinking. The artist’s mind is always turning, and you know what? I’m glad she didn’t kill you. Death would have been too easy on you, I realized. Then I was struck with inspiration. I wondered how and when I was going to be able to get ahold of you. I knew I shouldn’t have worried. I should have known that you possess the meddling gene and it was only a matter of time before you found me.”

“Hey,” I shouted defensively. “I didn’t just stumble across your little project here. I worked this case very hard to get as trapped as I am right now, thank you very much.”

“Take what little pleasure you can in that, I suppose.”

Small comfort that it was, I did take a perverse joy in having gotten this far. Of course, right now it would have been much better to have Connor or the Inspectre or, heck, even Godfrey at my side. The closest thing that I had to a friend in all this was Mina, but she was currently occupied. I chanced a look back at her. She was still freaking out in the glass coffin, but given the deep shade of red that the mist was, she looked safe enough for now. Relatively speaking.

I turned back to Cyrus, only to find him standing less than a foot away, holding a coil of rope in one hand and a foul-smelling rag in the other.

“I’m afraid that this next part is going to be a little tricky,” he said, placing the rag over my mouth and nose.

As my eyes slid shut, my last thought was how much quicker chloroform seemed to act in real life than in the movies.

33

Compared to the last few times I had regained consciousness, waking up this time felt relatively pleasant, although what I guessed to be chloroform had given me a headache. I’d have to get myself checked out by a doctor if I got through all this. The assortment of traumas today couldn’t be good for my body.

As I struggled to rouse myself, I found it hard to breathe. I thought it might be due to the drugs, but when I opened my eyes, I found I was inside a sealed clear box myself, this one more confining. My hands stuck out of the front of it through two small, circular cutouts and were tied together on the outside. When I looked down at my arms, I realized that I wasn’t even in my own clothes anymore. Around my waist was a fake wooden table with a crystal ball on it, but above that I was wearing a shiny gold shirt and a brown vest, and in my reflection in the glass I could see I was wearing a turban with a large red jewel in it.

“What the . . . ?” I started, but my mouth was thick with spit. I swallowed. “What the hell am I doing in this getup?”

“Don’t you recognize it?” Cyrus said.

The cloud over my mind lifted a little.

“Am I . . . one of those gypsy fortune-telling machines? Like in Big?”

“Zoltar!” Cyrus said, putting his finger on the point of his nose. “Ding! Yes. Think of it, a living, breathing Zoltar machine, reading the psychic fortunes of others. It borders on genius.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not going to participate.”

Cyrus tapped on the see-through box.

“I don’t really see where you get a choice,” he said, and then looked down at my hands.

Yes, they were tied, but they also were no longer covered. My gloves were gone.

“I’ve added a feature or two so our patrons get their money’s worth,” Cyrus said, gesturing to a button on the front of the machine. “Nothing too dangerous, mind you. Wouldn’t want to accidentally kill one of our star attractions.”

He pressed the button and a mild but slightly more than annoying electric shock ran up my leg from a metal cuff I hadn’t realized had been there until now. My teeth clamped shut, gnashing against one another in pain. My body shook with the mild dose of electricity until Cyrus released the buzzer.

“I trust that will win your cooperation,” Cyrus said, and backed away from the machine.

He studied me. I felt like an animal at the zoo.

“Perhaps we’ll need to add a little facial hair to get the look right. A goatee or a Fu Manchu.”

“Good to see you’re paying attention to the details,” I said. Muscles throughout my body twitched.

“You should see the Edward Gorey section I have planned. We’ve done the whole alphabet, a different death for all our foes.”

“I’d love a look around,” I said, then rattled my hands where they were tied, “so if you just want to undo these . . . I promise I’ll keep the swami outfit on.”

Cyrus came up to the case and started rapping on it.

“We can’t have our little Zoltar escaping on us,” he said, “not before we have a chance to see our most favorite piece of art brought to life in re-creation.”

Mad pirate Cyrus danced his way across the floor and up to the wall where The Scream hung. I could hear the sound of Mina pounding on her glass box, no doubt enraged that Cyrus was showing it off. Next to it was a contraption that was waist high and clearly meant to hold a person in it. There was more to the diorama now that had been set up while I was unconscious. There was a torture device set up in the center, a torso-high container riddled with slits, all of which had blades on the outside just waiting to be inserted.

Cyrus stood before the painting, his hand hovering over the lone figure, almost like he wanted to caress it.

“The look on this face, the pure horror, the agony . . . The real artistry here, of course, will be to re-create it as a three-dimensional vision.”

Cyrus rapped his knuckles on the top of the Pain-o-Matic machine.

“I’m sure we’ll find just the right amount of blades to get the look right on his face,” Cyrus said.

“He? He who?”

“Why, the biggest betrayer of them all, of course,” Cyrus said. “Thaddeus Wesker. All that time with the Sectarian Defense League and all the while deep cover for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. He’s got a good time coming to him, believe me.”

I had no love for the guy, and if there was anyone in the Department who might deserve a bit of torture, it was Wesker, but honestly, even I didn’t think he guy deserved to be shish-kebabbed.

It looked like Cyrus had really given some sick, twisted thought to how he would seek his revenge on everyone he blamed over at the D.E.A. If this weren’t the project of a deranged mind, I would have been even more impressed. I kicked myself a little for having slept through the seminar “Madmen & Their Master Plans: Downfalls or Dastardly?”