The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves Page A

of the house straight toward him. The madman crouched low beneath the bushes and watched her sprint past. His hump quivered as Cynthia’s nostrils picked up the delicious aroma of the girl’s flesh.
    Breakfast,
the snake murmured. The girl was just about the size of a suckling pig, which is considered a delicacy among pythons.
    Stenchley silently followed the girl down the path, keeping his distance, but not losing sight of her. He trailed her out of the maze and saw that she was heading for the garden wall. She grabbed a vine and began climbing up, completely unaware that her death was moments away. Stenchley closed in, his mouth watering. Cynthia coiled tightly inside the killer’s hump, anticipating the feast.
    Strike now. Get her!
the snake hissed.
    But Stenchley stopped, suddenly distracted. He found himself standing amid the crumbling tombstones of the Hibble family cemetery. One stone in particular had caught his eye. Stenchley had never learned to read, but he was able to recognize the name of his beloved master. With the realization that the body of Professor Hibble lay somewhere beneath his feet, the madman’s tiny gizzard of a heart felt a twinge of something greater than the lust for blood. Stenchley stared at the monument, forgetting all about the girl, who cleared the top of the wall and disappeared to the other side. Momentarily deaf to Cynthia’s angry hissing, he ran his fingers over the letters carved into the tombstone and recalled the professor’s clear blue eyes. Even the thousands of Treatments he had received at the asylum had failed to erase the memory of their beauty.
    Then, as madmen often do, Stenchley became obsessed with a very bad idea. He longed to see his master again. Like a hungry worm, this overwhelming desire bored into the hunchback’s mind and began to chew up all reason and logic. Stenchley rammed his hands into the earth of the professor’s grave and started digging.

Josephine had no sooner slipped into bed and pulled up the blanket than she heard her father’s footsteps going down the stairs. As she lay there replaying the unbelievable scenes of the night before in her mind, she was filled with conflicting emotions. Part of her wanted to run downstairs and tell her father every incredible detail of what she had seen next door. After all, he was a scientist and would be just as fascinated by the orphaned boy and his weird companions as she was. He often said Josephine had inherited the “why” gene from him.
    Her mother would find the whole thing very interesting as well, though she would definitely have some problems with Josephine sneaking out for an all-nighter at a strange house. There would be a long lecture about safety and all the disastrous what-ifs of her actions. But, in the end, Josephine was pretty sure they would understand. After all, this certainly wasn’t the first time she had done something a little crazy to satisfy her curiosity.
    But talking to her parents was out of the question this time. Josephine had, after all, sworn an oath not to tell, and she had no desire to find out what was meant by “unimaginably dire consequences.” And even if she hadn’t sworn, she was pretty sure her parents would blow Thaddeus’s cover. He was an orphan kid hiding in a creepy old house with only a machine to look after him. Not even Josephine’s open-minded parents could keep a secret like that. They would call the police, or whoever was in charge of stray kids, and yadda yadda, he’d be in the orphanage in an hour. Josephine couldn’t let that happen. It wouldn’t be easy, but she would just have to keep the whole thing under her hat somehow, at least for now.
    She closed her eyes, trying to force herself to sleep, but she was still way too excited for that to be a possibility. Instead, she lay there and listened to the routine sounds of Howard banging around in the kitchen beginning to make breakfast. Josephine’s dad was always the first one up in the morning,