The rain continued into the night, lashing in dense and chilly sheets against the windows, seeming to cling tenaciously to every outside surface of the penthouse at 919 North Michigan. It was unseasonable for November, a month that generally presaged snow with an almost clockwork regularity; but if any of the quartet encamped there in the close, comforting gloom bothered to ponder this, they most likely dismissed it as the least unusual of the past few days’ events.
Nora, through diligent foraging, had turned up a cobweb-coated brace of thick white wax candles in the depths of an abandoned cabinet, and with help from Sully’s lighter, they soon had warm, flickering orange puddles of light dotting the ever-thickening blue-black of Chicago night. Outside, the twinkling brilliance of the city was dimmed and swaddled in fog, and a dull orange glow radiated down over all, reflected from the clouds.
With light provided for, and a ready supply of decades-old wonderfood in shiny new tins, the foursome turned to their next most urgent priority. Sully and Nora waited outside the narrow door in a far corner of the penthouse, listening intently.
“Flip you for it,” Nora said.
“Heads,” Sully replied. Nora fished out a quarter from her jeans, flicked it deftly into the air, and caught it in one palm, turning it over onto the back of her other hand.
“Tails,” Nora grinned. Sully made a low, gravelly sound in the back of her throat, and narrowed her eyes in unconscious imitation of her great-grandfather.
From behind the door came a thunderous torrent of sudden water, a hiss of pipes, a smaller splashing, and a final squeak of valves. The door opened and Rafe emerged, patting his hands dry on the side of his slacks.
“Ladies,” he exulted, “we have indoor plumbing. Hot water. Soap, even.”
Nora all but shoved him aside and slammed the door behind her. Rafe shrugged and padded off in the direction of dinner.
“Go fast!” Sully hollered through the door, and continued to wait, fidgeting only slightly.
The canned Morrowmeals proved vastly more exciting than expected in preparation; a yank of the pin from the chamber at the bottom of each can, and the binary chemicals inside combined, reacting to produce intense and instant heat. As the contents in the upper chamber warmed, the non-toxic, organic sealant securing the lid weakened; by the time the vacuum-sealed food was thoroughly heated and ready for eating, the top simply popped off, unleashing the savory aroma of its waiting meal.
“This,” Rafe said with his mouth half-full, “is easily the best -- “ he paused to check the label -- “peach cobbler I have ever had.”
Nora regarded him suspiciously over her tin of chicken noodle soup. “You ever had peach cobbler?” she cross-examined.
“Many times,” Rafe egregiously lied, and continued eating. “Are you going to finish that?”
Sully left them bickering genially, and with her can of rice and beans in one hand and a container marked BEEF STEW in the other, she followed the trail of candles and their dancing shadows back down the corridor to the lab.
“Hey. Eat something,” she said to the figure hunched over the work table, elbow deep in a pile of strange rotors and coils and components scavenged from the surrounding shelves.”
“Be there in a minute,” Trip said, not looking up from his work. He had the pages of his grandfather’s journal pinned open with one hand, while the other traced a pattern of wiring on some gizmo under assembly on the table beside him.
“You said that an hour ago,” Sully sighed. “Eat. Come on, it cooks itself. Bachelor like you, that’s gotta be a plus.”
This got Trip to look up, if only briefly. “I cook,” he insisted, candlelight glinting off the lenses of his glasses.
“The hell you do,” Sully smirked, setting down both cans with a clank on the work table, displacing something covered in bolts and coils and wires. “I don’t even cook.”
“I work,” Trip said, stripping plastic coating from the end of a spool of wire, “with my hands, every day. I like to solve puzzles. Assemble components. Figure out how things work in balance with each other. Any of that makes you think I don’t cook?”
“I had you pegged as the absent-minded professor type,” Sully grinned. She pulled the tab on the bottom of the beef stew can and heard the heating chemicals hiss and gurgle satisfyingly within. “All living off ramen in some studio apartment crammed ceiling-high with half-built gadgets.”
Trip threaded the bare end of the wire into one end of a crude circuit board, checked the diagrams in Tom Morrow’s journal, and nodded to himself. “I’ve got a loft, actually,” he said. “And I try to keep everything but the workship clean. Try.”
Sully thought of her one-bedroom condo in a twenty-story high-rise in downtown L.A. — the place she went, on occasion, for those few hours of each day when she tired of the office. She tried to remember whether she actually had any food in her fridge, then mentally subtracted any leftover origami boxes of lo mein and orange chicken that might gradually be achieving sentience therein.
“You might want to back up a little,” Trip told her, hoisting a soldering iron. “This thing tends to throw off sparks.”
Sully studied his face, the dead-earnest sincerity that spilled out of it, and couldn’t help but smile, even if she didn’t know quite why. “You say that like sparks are a bad thing,” she found herself saying, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“Suit yourself,” Trip shrugged. He switched on the soldering iron, and, as he’d done more times than he’d ever admit to anyone, promptly burned himself.
“Ow! Dammit,” he winced, hissing in air through involuntarily clenched teeth. He fluttered the burned finger back and forth, feeling the air congeal around his hand from the constant motion.
“Here,” Sully said, moving around the table. “Let me see. Come on, let me see.” OMG burned his fingers often, too — his precious, actually insured for real money fingers — albeit under different circumstances, generally involving butane lighters and sophisticated bongs. And since OMG’s girlfriend, sweetheart that she was, assumed First Aid was some sort of benefit concert, Sully had gained more experience than she would have liked at tending to minor injuries.
“It’s nothing,” Trip said, as she grabbed him firmly by the hand and yanked the injured finger into view.
“Let’s get it under some water,” Sully sighed.
They found an industrial sink in the back of the lab, and after some knocking deep in the pipes, and a few alarming barks of rust-red muck, clear, cold water poured forth. Trip held his finger under the faucet, and quietly felt like an idiot.
“Geez, look at your hands,” Sully said, and whistled softly. They were crisscrossed with thin whitish lines of scar tissue, some more faded than others.
“Hazards of the tinkerer’s life,” Trip shrugged. “That big one’s from the engine block of a tank, and there — that’s from when I cut myself on the armature for Death House 2. And that, that, and, uh, I think that’s just from working on my bike.”
“Your bike?” Sully smirked, with the instinctual resident smugness bred from living in a town where bicycles were largely considered target practice.
“I like it a lot,” Trip protested, “but I don’t think the feeling’s mutual."
“So what is this?” Sully asked, nodding at the pile of components on the workbench, as Trip shut off the faucet and dried his soothed fingertip on the hem of his shirt.
“Actually?” Trip said. “I’m, uh, I’m not entirely sure yet. Grandp — uh, Tom’s sketches are a little vague on that. But I think it’s a weapon. Multipurpose, and strictly nonlethal, which I kinda like, truth be told.”
“You’re building a weapon, and you don’t even know what it is?” Sully said. “I mean, you spent more time with the guy than I did, but do you really think it’s a good idea to just blindly build exactly what he’s sketching out for you from a couple generations in the past?”
“One, yes I do,” Trip said, cautiously picking up the soldering iron again. “And two, I’m not blindly building anything. I mean, the design — he’s clearly a genius, but I’ve picked up a few shortcuts of my own over the years. See this, right here? I think if I can wire it in parallel with another capacitor, I can geometrically increase the output, and — you’ve just gone crosseyed, haven’t you?”
“I was with you right up until ‘wire,’” Sully shrugged. She popped the top off the can of beef stew, now perfectly heated and steaming, and pushed it over to Trip. “Come on, eat something. We’ve both been going since this morning. You’re gonna drop if you don’t get some food in you.”
“Was it really just this morning?” Trip sighed. He reached a hand up to probe the still-fresh mark of the Black Lotus on the side of his neck; huge, cold, impossible thoughts of his own death swam suddenly up from the dark of his mind, and he pushed them down again quickly.
“Mmm-hmm,” Sully nodded, equally weary, handing him one of the spoons Rafe had liberated from a dusty drawer. “And these boots? Really not built for this kind of use. Can a girl get a seat around here?”
Trip pulled a stool creaking over from one of the workbenches, and the two of them sat around the table, elbows bumping strange components, and ate for a while in mutual silence. The intensity of his own hunger surprised Trip the moment he swallowed the first spoonful of rich, warm stew, and before long, he found himself scraping at the last dregs at the bottom of the can.
Sully exhaled with post-prandial satisfaction, setting her empty Morrowmeal tin to one side, and instinctively dug in the pockets of her jacket. Her fingers emerged clutching the slender box of cigarettes Mister Gaunt had given her, and she hesitated.
“Tell me I should quit,” she said, without looking at Trip.
“I figure you’re smart enough to figure that out for yourself,” Trip said, carefully, taking a fresh look at his grandfather’s schematic.
“Nobody says no to me anymore,” Sully told him, turning the box of cigarettes over in her hands. “I’ve been realizing that. I set myself up as the boss, and at some point, I think I just made everyone too terrified to say anything but yes to me.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” Trip said, but there was something measured, probing, in his tone.
“You’d think,” Sully smirked. “I just… it’d be nice to know someone cared enough about me to risk pissing me off now and then.”
Trip soldered one last set of wires, then looked up at her, all seriousness. “You should quit,” he said.
Sully laughed and rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t even know me.”
“Do I have to know you?” Trip said. “To care, I mean? All the crazy things that happened to us today — I don’t know if I could have made it if I’d had to do it all alone. That’s gotta count for something, right?”
Sully felt an unfamiliar warmth in her cheeks, and it took her a few seconds to recall what blushing felt like. “God,” she said, “are you always this cornball?”
“I think it’s genetic,” Trip laughed. “So — you pick up anything useful from this superbadass great-grandfather of yours? Rafe’s been showing off with those knives of his, and I didn’t want to ask her about it, but I think Nora’s packing heat now.”
Sully grinned, slyly. “Oh, you want a demonstration, huh? Okay.” She rolled up the sleeves of her leather jacket and brandished her bare forearms. “Nothing up my sleeves.”
“Of course,” Trip said, making a few quick solders.
Sully tapped the cigarette box once on the table and deftly withdrew one long, slender smoke from the half-dozen remaining inside. She walked it back and forth across the knuckles of her right hand, snatched it into the palm of her left, brought her hands together quickly, and opened them. Empty. She showed both hands, front and back; no cigarette
“Do I clap now, or should I wait?” Trip grinned, and Sully stuck her tongue out at him.
“Hold your horses,” she said. “You’ve got something behind your ear.”
“Let me guess,” Trip told her, holding still as she leaned over and reached in back of his right ear. “The cigarette?”
“Nope,” Sully said, and brought forth her silver lighter, flame flickering. “That’s your other ear.” And sure enough, from behind his left, there was her cigarette. Without thinking, she brought the tip of it up to the flame to light it — and stopped, catching Trip’s steady, trusting gaze.
“I meant it,” Trip said. “You should quit.”
Sully let a smile break, slow as dawn, across her face. “All right,” she said. “You hold onto it.”
She snapped the lighter shut and put the cigarette back behind his left ear, though Trip felt nothing there; and on its return trip, her empty hand paused, her knuckles just resting on the light sandpaper stubble on Trip’s cheek.
“You need a shave,” she said softly.
“Why?” Trip asked, equally still. “Any special reason?” He could feel the beat of his heart reverberating seismically through his entire body.
“Maybe…” she began, and swallowed. “Maybe somebody might want to—”
Down the hallway, from the main chamber of the Lookout, glass broke, sudden and loud, and Trip and Sully nearly fell off their chairs.
“Get the hell in here!” Nora shouted, and before they even knew they were moving, Trip and Sully were in the corridor, at a run.
Broken glass glittered like fallen starlight across the empty expanse of floor in the Lookout’s main chamber, scattered from the jagged remains of the glass doors that led out to the patio. The few panes left intact looked punched and scarred, hail-pocked. Outside, the world seemed strangely dark, the rain seeming to writhe in the faint reaches of the candlelight within the Lookout, only admitting brief glimpses of the city lights beyond. Rafe and Nora stood next to the work table, Rafe’s inky knives gleaming in his clenched fists, and Nora propping up a heavy-looking revolver pistol in shaking hands.
“What happened to the rain?” Trip asked, edging closer. The air held a terrible stillness. “Why can’t we see outside?”
“Listen,” Sully said, her voice dropping to a whisper. Around them hung a strange silence, and Trip realized that until just a few minutes before, the Lookout had hummed with the steady drum of rainfall on the roof above. Now there was nothing.
“I don’t think that’s the rain,” Nora said, cocking back the hammer on the pistol, breathing deep.
And then the dark outside surged in, serpentine, a thousand thousand storm-dripping metal tendrils, seemingly alive with malign purpose. They boiled together in a giant, probing arm, and then split into dozens of seeking branches, slithering through the air and across the floor toward the Lookout’s four terrified occupants.
Rafe slashed out with his knives as a writhing coil of black reached him, and it fell away twitching blue sparks, shuddering as if it were some wounded beast. “Mechanical!” Rafe shouted, as Nora squeezed two rounds into the black heart of the thing, and Trip and Sully hefted chairs. “The thing’s mechan— oh, bollocks!” A vine of black ensnared his arm, and he hacked at it with his free hand, desperately trying to break free.
The black tendrils, humming and whirring, grabbed and bit at Sully’s chair, and she could see tiny metal teeth at the end of every strand. She fought with the thing, trying to yank the chair back, but it was pulled from her grasp. The tendrils diverged, each ensnaring a different corner of the chair, and in one neat jerk rent it to bits and splinters.
“We’ve gotta get out of here!” Sully cried as Trip leapt forward to swing at the dark, wriggling mass with his own chair. “The door!”
“I’ll cover you!” Nora said, gritting her teeth, fighting back the cold terror clenching at her stomach. She fired once more at the core of the thing, and it seemed to shrink back for a moment, giving Rafe purchase enough to finally cut himself free. He bled in ribbons where the tendrils had gripped his forearm, but hardly seemed to notice, his eyes alive with a strange, savage energy.
Timing her shots — three more, now two — Nora backed slowly toward the rest of the group as Trip gripped the latch to the unbreakable door and, with Sully’s help, swung it open. He pushed Sully through, then made way for Rafe, as Nora backed away from the searching tendrils.
“Nora!” Trip cried, one foot in the antechamber where Sully and Rafe waited. “Come on!”
She put her last bullet sparking and roaring into the thick of the invader and turned, reaching for Trip’s outstretched hand. He grabbed tight and pulled her through, into the white stillness of the anteroom.
“Close it!” Nora shouted. Rafe and Sully sprang forth, helping Trip tug at the door—
The tendrils surged forward, boiling through the gap in the door, wrenching it out of their hands. Before any of them could move, the darkness grabbed Nora, cables encircling her arms and legs, and yanked her shrieking back into the room. She clawed desperately at the floor, fingers scrabbling for purchase and finding none, as the dark dragged her steadily through the field of glittering glass, toward the broken windows.
Sully was the first to find her legs, darting back through the door, crossing the floor of the Lookout in a few swift strides, and grabbing Nora’s outstretched arm in both of hers. She dug in her heels, but it wasn’t enough — the two of them were still being hauled inexorably toward the dark without.
“Little help?” Sully shouted through clenched teeth, though Trip and Rafe were already racing toward her.
“Don’t let go!” Nora pleaded, fighting as the tendrils cruelly squeezed her limbs.
“Hey,” Sully grunted, “we girls gotta stick together, right?” Trip seized her around the waist, and Rafe locked his arms up under Trip’s, and for a moment, it seemed they were winning.
Then the writhing thing gave another hard jerk, yanking Nora out into the dark, lifting her bodily into the air. Sully could only keep one hand gripped to Nora’s, and another vicious tug nearly wrenched her from Trip’s grasp. He shout out his hand and caught hers; behind him, still gripping him under the arms, Rafe wedged his heels at the corners of the doorframe and strained in the opposite direction with all his might.
Trip felt Sully slipping from his grasp, inch by inch, finger by finger. He looked up at her, desperate, helpless, and saw the fear in her own eyes. He watched her fight it, and win, and give him one last confident smirk. And then her fingers seemed to fly from his, and Nora and Sully vanished upward, drawn into the dark. Trip caught a glimpse of something black and massive overhead, retreating up into the fog, and then the rain returned, pounding down, and he could see nothing more.
Trip and Rafe staggered back inside, aching, defeated, and collapsed side by side in the floor, breath burning in their lungs.
“Have we come at a bad time?” came a voice, crisp and English, from the doorway to the anteroom.
“Oh no,” Rafe groaned, before he even looked. “Oh, no, no.”
The anteroom seemed suddenly filled with Needlemen, fringes of their dark coats brushing the floor, each pointing a silver Needle at the two prone men. They were led by a compact, grey-haired, steely-eyed woman who stepped neatly through the doorway, into the Lookout. “Oh yes, Mr. Windham. And hello to you as well, Mr. Morrow.”
“You must be Mrs. Stitch,” Rafe spat, and wished he had the presence of mind, or the breath, to say something suitably cutting.
“Where did you—” Trip said, and coughed, and started again. “Where did you take them? Sully and Nora?”
Something strangely like sympathy flitted across Mrs. Stitch’s face. “I sincerely wish I knew,” she said at last, “although I suspect it’s no place any of you would want to be. However, your friends are presently the least of your concerns, I fear. Maximillian!”
The hulking man, silent as ever, stepped forward through the parting crowd of black-coated minions, crading a large metal suitcase in his outthrust arms. He caught Rafe’s glare, and nodded, and narrowed his eyes in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
“You’ve caused us quite a bit of trouble,” Mrs. Stitch sighed, as Trip and Rafe dragged themselves to their feet. “And in light of our current situation, I feel it’s high time we had a good, long talk about that.” She nodded to Maximillian, who undid the snaps on the suitcase and slowly opened the lid.
A pizza box sat inside, the aroma of cheese and tomato sauce suddenly filling the room.
“We brought Gino’s East,” Mrs. Stitch said primly. “I hope that’s all right.”
Trip and Rafe looked at each other, baffled.
“We just ate,” they said in near-unison.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Sunday, February 04, 2007
1932: Through the Looking Glass
From behind the vast, circular steel door to Tom Morrow’s Lookout, the sounds of mortal combat echoed.
Ruby Gale and Harker Windham listened, ears all but pressed to the cold metal surface of the door, to the scuffles and grunts and impacts of fist and foot on flesh and bone seeping through from far side of the door. At his workbench in the center of the room, seemingly oblivious to his friends or the calamity just outside, Tom Morrow sketched a design in his battered, leatherbound journal. His green eyes were narrowed, his brow set in unbending concentration.
From beyond the door, Hark and Ruby heard a final thud, a series of low, wet gurgles, and then, for a moment, silence. Something heavy squeaked and dragged against the anteroom’s floors, and then elevator doors dinged and rumbled open. There were more awkward scufflings and thumpings; the elevator doors slid shut, hesitantly, with a few false starts; and the elevator car could be heard descending away into the shaft.
On the opposite side of the door, someone cleared his ragged, scarred throat in familiar annoyance.
Without even looking up, Tom nodded, and Hark and Ruby turned the latch to the unbreakable door. It swung wide, revealing Mister Gaunt, brushing off the sleeves of his smoke-reeking coat.
“Thanks for the help,” he rasped, fingering a newly opened knife-gash in one sleeve.
Tom’s head lifted, fixing Gaunt with a cool green stare. “There’s been enough death in here today.”
“But the anteroom is fine, apparently.” Gaunt shot back, pushing the door shut behind him.
“I thought we were meant to leave our work at home for this one,” Hark said lightly, grinning. The deep brown suit he wore was impeccably tailored to the dimensions of his muscular frame, yet it seemed slightly, subtly wrong for him nonetheless.
“The League of Disrepute is regrettably persistent,” Gaunt rasped. “He followed me through the sewers.”
Ruby rolled her eyes in sympathy. “I remember one time, I flew all the way back from San Francisco with one of those guys tucked up in the wheel well. Musta been half-froze by the time we landed, but I get out of the plane, and sure enough, there he is trying to put a dagger in me.”
“You did put him in the secret elevator, right?” Tom asked, and Gaunt sighed.
“How many times must I apologize?” Gaunt said. “Besides, that was last year.”
“The Tenants’ Association has a long memory,” Tom shrugged, “and they really didn’t appreciate a laundry cart full of dead Thugees rolling through the lobby in the middle of the Society Matron’s meeting.”
“I’d suggest you cultivate fewer enemies, but...” Hark began, and Gaunt spat out a knowing, contemptuous laugh.
“I’m... sorry about your people, Morrow,” the magician said, his voice turning somber. “They were kind to me, and to Miss Sullivan besides. She tells me this is urgent.”
“Tal Xan Sherat,” Tom said. “The Sanctum of Sleeping Gods in the Himalayas. Ruby, Lasso, and I went there the summer before last.”
Hark nodded. “Nasty business, I heard.”
“We’ve got to go back,” Tom said. “Satel’s gone, and the dust I found in what’s left of his lab matches the black magnetic soil Lasso collected near the Well of Aeons Lost.”
“Okay, so whoever took Satel was there,” Ruby offered. “But how do we know he still is? I mean, no offense -- you need wings, I’m your girl. But we had a hard enough time getting in and out of there in one piece the first time. I’m not exactly looking forward to a second trip.”
“I called Parkersville,” Tom told them quietly. “Jef went missing a couple of months back. His folks are... the sheriff had to think a bit before he settled on ‘dead,’ which tells me something. He said they found something in Jef’s notes -- his latest project. From what the sherriff said, it looked an awful lot like this.” He unfolded the diagrams Satel had sent him and handed them to Ruby, who frowned, and passed them along to Hark and Gaunt.
“Some kind of electrical ring,” Hark mused. “I shouldn’t be surprised, knowing Satel. The man’s positively mad about voltage.”
“It’s more than that,” Tom replied darkly. “Satel was trying to create an extremely focused field of energy -- wear the fabric of space-time thin enough to study its elemental properties. Trying to see the building blocks of the universe.”
“So?” Gaunt rumbled.
“So Satel’s device --” Tom began, and then stopped. The fine hairs on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck were prickling. The air had suddenly filled with the heavy, pregnant scent of ozone, precursor of storms.
Hark’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Tom,” he said, “have you any machinery active at present?”
Tom opened his mouth to speak, shut it suddenly, opened it again. “The Looking Glass,” he said softly.
The blue light was spilling out of the laboratory door, casting strange, rippling shadows on the walls. The four edged slowly into the room as the device hummed and crackled, sparks corsucating around the edges, weaving a web of undulating radiance at its center.
“Tom,” Ruby said softly, “what the hell is that thing supposed to do?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Tom said. “It was a just a crazy notion Danny and I had about...”
“About what?” Hark asked cautiously.
“About time travel,” Tom sighed.
Gaunt moved almost imperceptibly, and there were guns in his hands, hammers cocked, aimed at the widening web of light. “At least when I broke the laws of physics,” Gaunt growled, “I was only pretending.”
“How did you activate it?” Ruby asked Tom, as the light intensified to eye-searing brightness.
“I didn’t!” Tom said, beginning to shout over the rising whine of the coils. “There’s no way to activate it from this end! It uses the alignment of the Earth’s magnetic field to connect a single point in space at two different points in time, measuring the decay of a small quantity of harmless isotope to determine the distance in time! But it can only be activated from the future -- and then only theoretically!”
“How theoretical is that?” Ruby asked, and pointed to the portal. There, amidst the almost overwhelming glow of the open portal, was a human hand, stretching through.
Gaunt raised his guns, but Tom flung an arm out to smack them down. “Wait!” Tom shouted. “The ring!”
The hand wore a silver-and-amber signet ring -- exactly like the one Tom had received from the Order of St. Fiacre.
Before anyone could stop him, Tom charged toward the device, seizing the protruding hand with both of his own. And with a single, swift jerk, Tom pulled an entire person through the Looking Glass to land in a heap on the floor of his lab.
Tom Morrow looked down on the floor, and for an instant, saw himself staring back. Then details resolved themselves; this him was more slender, with a different nose, and eyes a thoughtful brown instead of unearthly green.
“Grandpa?” the young man on the floor said, and Tom, Hark, Gaunt, and Ruby all looked at one another in an instant of commingled horror and amazement.
“Hey!” barked a voice from the Looking Glass, a young woman’s. “Get the hell away... from...”
The four adventurers cast their eyes once more toward the portal, where two young women and a nervous-looking man had emerged, standing stock-still, gawking at the assembled group.
“Excuse me, young man,” Harker Windham said at length, in a cold and even tone. “Might I ask how it is you’ve got my sacred knives in your hands?”
“Um,” said the Tom-looking one on the floor. “This is going to take a great deal of explaining.”
“No foolin’,” Ruby Gale said, turning back from the railing of the balcony to look at her granddaughter. “I married Lemondrop?”
Nora tried to stifle a laugh, but it leaked out around the edges as a snort. “You called him ‘Lemondrop’?”
“Everybody called him that,” Ruby smiled. “OK, maybe not those stuffed shirts at the firm he was clerkin’ at, but everyone who counted. Hell, he was an undercard at the Tunney-Dempsey fight at Soldier Field.”
“And now?” Nora asked. Ruby turned away again, back to the skyline. Her hands were crossed over the railing, and Nora saw engine grease smudges shining against her skin.
“He works,” Ruby said, pointing hazily at some point southward, in the Loop. “Hell, I don’t know where he works. Started up his own firm a couple years back, though, so he’s doing good I guess.” She drew in a deep breath and let out slow. “Got himself a nice little fiancee, too. They sent me a Christmas card.”
“I’m... I’m sorry,” Nora told her. “This is so weird. In my memory you’re a sweet old lady baking cookies and pinching my brother on the ear for running in the house.”
“My daddy -- your great-granddaddy, I guess -- used to laugh at me,” Ruby grinned. “Said young people couldn’t see any further forward than the ends of their noses. We all think we’re gonna be young forever. Maybe not young, but... you know. Just like this.”
Nora joined her at the railing, trying to fit the strange geography of this city of the past into the map she kept in her head. There was the Tribune Tower, and the Wrigley Building, but the absence of the looming John Hancock building just a block away was almost palpable.
“So what do you see in your future?” Nora asked, and Ruby chuckled.
“Well, I sure as hell didn’t see you,” and they both snorted in amusement, then paused, then did so again, at the discovery that they shared a laugh.
“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “Hell, I can’t see any further than the horizon anymore. I got myself locked into this damn blood feud with Wicked West, and I’m not gonna give her the pleasure of winning.” She smiled ruefully. “You know, it’s almost a comfort she’s out there? So many kinds of evil in this world you can’t do nothin’ to. Can’t shoot ‘em, can’t hit ‘em. At least she’s real. Tangible, you know?”
Nora realized that she did understand, better than she’d thought she would, and she nodded.
“So what about you?” Ruby asked at length. “What you doin’ with your life, alternate-future granddaughter of mine?”
“Not what I should be,” Nora sighed. “I wanted to fix planes -- went to school for it and everything, and what is that grin for?” Ruby, poorly concealing a burst of familial pride, motioned for her to continue. “Anyway, I wanted to fix planes, but the economy, you know. So now I’m helping to figure out... uh... how they crash. NTSB.”
This drew a blank look from Ruby, and Nora’s memory caught up to her. “Forget it,” she said. “Not gonna exist for another few decades, anyway. But, yeah, it’s an all right job. Quiet. Lots of paperwork. Way better than having crazy people in helicopters try to kill my ass, that’s for sure.”
“So it’s better in the future?” Ruby asked, quietly. “For us, I mean. People like us.”
It took Nora a moment to catch on, and then she smiled, slowly, distantly. “It’s not perfect,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be. But it’s better, yeah. Little bit better all the time.”
“Little bit better all the time,” Ruby repeated. “Hell, I think that’ll do. For a start.” She smiled widely, and Nora saw traces of her own smile, of the lines around her own eyes, in that face.
“So come on, Grandma,” she said jokingly. “We got, what, another hour or so before that doohickey in there’s supposed to burn out?Teach me something grandmotherly.”
“It sure ain’t gonna be baking cookies,” Ruby laughed. “Something grandmotherly, huh? All right. Sounds like you could do with this.” She drew a six-shot revolver from the holster inside her battered flight jacket, checked it, cocked it, and handed it carefully to Nora. “You know how to use one of these things?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Rafe Windham said, from the floor. “In fact, I’m not terribly sure I have legs at all anymore.”
“Oh, that?” Harker Windham replied, not so much offering his apparent grandson a hand up as lifting him bodily from the floor. “It goes quickly. I think I struck a nerve cluster.”
“And there they are,” Rafe said, looking down.
“You held on to the knives this time,” Hark told him, nodding at the blades in Rafe’s hands. “That’s progress. Otherwise, I’m disappointed. Living in an alternate universe has made you weak.”
“Has not,” Rafe retorted, knowing immediately that this was, at least in part, a big fat lie.
“Where I come from,” Hark sighed, pausing to unbutton the cuffs of his dress shirt and roll them up to his sleeves, “you would probably have been left out in the jungle at birth, as an offering to the Great Reptile.” He caught the shocked look on Rafe’s face and grinned. “Just larking with you. Come on, now. Again.”
Rafe sighed, squared his shoulders, and let the knives in his hands guide him forward through space, at his grandfather.
Hark seemingly melted to one side, effortlessly, and seized Rafe’s attacking wrist in a powerful grip. “Right about here’s where I’d do something painful to you,” he said. “Likely involving twisting or some such.”
“I think I saw you move that time,” Rafe offered.
“Right,” Harker nodded, and released his grip, then stepped back and squared off once more with Rafe. “Progress, then. Again.”
Rafe started to move -- Hark could read it in the slight twitch of his shoulders. Then he stopped. Crossed the blades in front of himself, defensively. Waited.
“Now that?” Hark grinned. “That’s progress. Never attack unless you’ve absolutely no choice. Let the enemy come to you. Like so.”
He lashed out a fist, working years of muscle memory dating back to his long afternoons of training on the stone courts of the island. Rafe dodged -- clumsily, and only just, but it counted -- and struck back, catching a glancing blow with the butt of one of the knives off Hark’s shoulder.
“Good! Almost felt that one!” Hark said. He ducked under a wide swing from Rafe, leapt up and backward, and landed in a crouch on the work table in the center of the room. With a quick motion, he picked up a newspaper lying half-open on the table and flung it flapping pigeon-winged into Rafe’s face.
“That’s another lesson!” Hark crowed as Rafe too-slowly swatted the paper out of his face. “Use your environment! Don’t just rely on what’s in your hands -- the world is full of weapons waiting for a clever man to use them. I could’ve killed you twice just then.”
Rafe swung again, and Hark leapt, somersaulting through the air, to land just behind Rafe. He was all set to swing a leg and knock Rafe’s legs out from under him --
The cold edge of the knife sat under his chin, the point resting lightly against Hark’s adam’s apple. He looked up the length of the knife and locked eyes with Rafe.
“You let me win that one,” Rafe said, deadly serious, and withdrew the blade. Hark rose slowly, chuckling.
“Have to keep your confidence up somehow,” Hark said. “But no, you did well. I could have gotten out of that in at least four -- no, wait, five, definitely five ways. But still.”
“Not bad for a wastrel down the wrong branch of the family tree,” Rafe grinned, wiping small beads of sweat from his brow with the back of one hand.
“Oh, you’re not so bad,” Hark said, fishing a handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket he’d neatly folded over a chair, and dabbing at the perspiration on his own forehead. “Truth be told, I rather envy you. I’ve got no one left to disappoint but myself, and that seems to take all the fun out of it.”
Hark turned the chair around and seated himself in it, his posture straight and crisp. Rafe, slouching at first as he took a seat opposite, found himself almost unconsciously sitting straighter himself.
“There was a girl,” Hark said, his eyes refocusing momentarily to the distant country of the past. “On the island where I was born. She had the loveliest eyes -- like a cloudy sky, just before a storm. I think I loved her, like no one before or since. But I had to leave. I had... responsibilities. To my family name, to the world, I thought. Still do. But sometimes...”
“She’s still there, right?” Rafe said. “It’s not too late. You could go back.”
“Isolated population,” Rafe sighed. “Living on an island for, oh, centuries and centuries on end. My parents were lucky they didn’t bring some cough or sneeze that would have wiped them all out. I could go back, but who knows what I’d take with me? And even if we were... if we could be together, I couldn’t stay there. I’d have to bring her back with me. And God knows how she’d even adapt. No. I couldn’t do it to her, and I need to be here.” He nodded at the blades Rafe cradled loosely in his hands. “Ours, you may gather, is a dangerous world, in need of men of courage.”
“And yet?” Rafe prompted, and Hark sighed again.
“And yet,” Hark sighed. “I wish I had your luxury -- turning my back on responsibility, saying, to Hell with it. Doing what I pleased.”
“There was a girl,” Rafe told him. “No island beauty, but my God, you could hear her laugh clear across the dining hall. She had this, this funny way of reading, where she’d kind of rabbit up her nose and tuck her feet up under her. And she loved Laurel and Hardy, which, I assure you, is increasingly rare in my day and age. And I failed her.”
Hark leaned forward, concern newly written on his face. “Was she hurt?”
“Only emotionally,” Rafe sighed. “It wasn’t some fantastical enemy. It was me. I did something... terribly, terribly stupid, and selfish. I did it of my own free will. And it well and truly broke her heart. And even if I could somehow get her to forgive me, take me back -- I’d still know I didn’t deserve it.”
Rafe looked up at his grandfather, this impossibly young face, the same face across the table in his dream. Saw his own eyes, the line of his jaw, perhaps some aspects of the nose, staring back at him.
“I guess I’m saying I could have done with a bit of your responsibility,” Rafe said. “Not to sew a button on it or anything. But you should be proud. Even in my world, you were someone extraordinary. Thus far, I seem to have only been extraordinarily lucky.”
“Lucky isn’t bad,” Hark chuckled. “Lucky can be useful. Come on. I left my pocketwatch at the hotel, but I’m fairly certain we’ve enough time for me to humiliate you in a few more go-rounds. Might even learn something in the process.”
“Goody,” Rafe sighed, and stood up, ready to be knocked down again, and again, again.
They stood at opposite sides of the room, casting eerie shadows that stretched and flickered on the walls in the pulsing light of the Looking Glass, neither seeming to know what to say.
Sully leaned against one wall, eyes roving the strange shelves full of half-assembled gadgets and impossibly clunky, crude equipment. Mister Gaunt stood stock-still in the far corner, hands in the pockets of his long black coat, and she could feel his unsettling eyes boring right through her.
“So,” she said at length. “You got a smoke?”
One of Gaunt’s hands emerged from his pocket, empty; then, with a flick of his wrist, there was a silver cigarette case in his hand, snapping open to reveal slim, neatly rolled white cylinders.
“Oh, thank God,” Sully sighed, and crossed the room to him. “Civilization.”
“They’re slims,” Gaunt rumbled hestiantly, in a voice Sully could feel in her back teeth. “I keep them for... a friend.”
“You don’t smoke?” Sully said, clenching a single slender cigarette in her teeth as she flicked open her silver lighter. She saw Gaunt flinch, almost imperceptibly, when the flame flowed liquid up to surround the tip of the cigarette, and felt bad without entirely knowing why. She sucked pure cancer deep into her lungs and felt almost obscenely good, and horribly guilty.
“I’ve had... enough smoke in my lungs,” Gaunt replied, and then chuckled, a sound that suggested gravel being shaken in a coffee can. “Besides. Morrow says it’s unhealthful. Ceaselessly.”
“He’s not wrong,” Sully sighed, blowing a thin stream of smoke out between pursed lips, and watching it disperse in the air. “And yet...”
“Bad habits,” Gaunt said, and nodded. The indigo ribbons encircling his head rustled softly. “I have some familiarity with them myself, I suppose.” He moved his hand again and the cigarette case vanished, replaced by a ragged-edged silver dollar. As Sully watched, he proceeded to walk the coin across his gloved knuckles, back and forth.
“I could never quite get that part,” Sully said, as Gaunt flipped the coin deftly between his pinky and ring fingers. “I mean, I can do it, but not that smoothly. Drives me crazy.”
“You know coin tricks?” the tattered man asked, a ember of curiosity lighting in the black coals of his eyes.
“I know a little,” Sully nodded, brushing a lank of hair away from her face. “I’m not good enough to go professional, but my grandfather taught me some, and I learned a little more from some of his old books. He always told me he never saw anyone work a coin better than you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gaunt said, turning his eyes away.
“Got any advice?” Sully ventured, taking out a quarter and proceeding to walk it over her own knuckles.
“You’re asking me... to show you a magic trick?” Gaunt asked. He tilted his head quizzically, the folds of his indigo wrappings suggesting upraised eyebrows.
“You’re a magician, right?” Sully nodded, taking another drag off the cigarette. For such a little thing, it packed more of a kick than she was used to. “Nobody ever asks you to show them tricks?”
“Not in quite some time,” the magician told her. “Generally, they beg me for their lives. Or attempt to take mine.”
“So you work, what, birthday parties?” Sully offered, risking a smile. Gaunt’s eyes narrowed, catlike, and she unconsciously took a half-step back.
“Hold out your hand,” he said, and she did. And he showed her, patiently, for a good five minutes, demonstrating with his own silver dollar. He was a good teacher, Sully found to her surprise; not quite like her grandfather, who, for all his kindness, sometimes stumbled with his explanations or struggled to make them simple enough. Gaunt spoke simply, and deftly, with the sparse accuracy of a knife-thrower. And as he explained, she caught him stealing glances at her face from time to time.
“You are named Sullivan,” he said, when she’d gotten the coin running fluidly across her knuckles, finally feeling the same confidence with the trick that she’d seen in OMG’s own performance of it so many times before.
“Yeah, after my great-grandma. Her maiden name,” Sully said. “My mom always liked it. Said she wanted to have a connection to the family. But everyone calls me Sully.”
“Zully?” Gaunt said quickly, his eyes flicking sharply to hers, and Sully flinched. Gaunt saw this, and took a slow step backward.
“My apologies,” he said. “I knew a woman once...”
“Your... first wife?” Sully offered, slowly. “Grandpa told me some stories he said he’d heard from you.”
“What happened to her?” Gaunt asked. “My -- my first wife?”
“I’m not sure,” Sully said. “There was some kind of accident... he said she was your assistant, and a trick went wrong at a show you did in Los Angeles. Something about bad flash powder.” She saw Gaunt put a hand out to steady himself on a nearby workbench.
“Two stops more...” she heard him say quietly, and when her eyes met his, probing, he waved off the unspoken question. “You said first wife. I married again?”
“Violet Sullivan,” Sully said. “Her, we had pictures of. Some kind of heiress from here in Chicago. You were out of the business when she met you, and she, I dunno, she coaxed you back in. Gave you a stake to go out on tour again. Apparently, there was some big to-do with her family about it; they didn’t much like you, but Grandpa said she didn’t care. Which, you know, was lucky for him.”
“Was he an only child, your grandfather?” Gaunt asked softly. Sully nodded, savoring the last few glowing centimeters of the cigarette, before responding.
“Yeah,” she said. “Ryan Gant. Good Irish name, right? ‘Course, when he went into the magic business, he called himself Cormac the Conjuror.”
“And you?” Gaunt rattled. “Did you follow him to the stage? Are there -- are there even stages? Morrow says we’ll be on the moon by your era. That always sounded to me like a world with little need for magic.”
“I, uh, I wasn’t good enough,” Sully said. “I studied it some, like I said, but I just don’t have the gift, I think. Watered down the bloodline too much, maybe. My mom wound up marrying an accountant, and I’m really not seeing a lot of magic in that line of work.”
“But you have... gainful employment?” Gaunt asked, casting an uncertain eye at her boots, her stockings, her jacket. It took Sully a moment to get this, and then she didn’t know whether to smirk or hit him, the latter of which seemed like a fairly bad idea.
“I manage a magician,” Sully said. “Set up his appearances, take care of the licensing, that sort of thing. He’s good. Dumb as two bricks, but he’s got the gift. You sound like you would have loved the last trick we did.”
She told him about the “disappearing skyscraper” trick, having to fudge a few facts here and there to get around little things like the Internet for a man born only a few years after powered flight. He would nod, appreciatively, even chuckle here and there.
“I don’t think about magic much,” he said when she’d finished. “It’s no longer a luxury I can afford. Mine has not been -- is not a kind life. The things I now make vanish... they don’t tend to reappear.”
“Are you happy?” Sully asked, and knew it was a stupid question the moment it left her lips. Gaunt made a short, bitter, mirthless sort of laugh.
“In all the worst ways,” he told her, ice scraping ice in his voice, and Sully felt a chill run down her back. “Mine is not a face you would wish to see smiling out from photographs. If I could smile, I mean. So I’m left with... bad habits. Like I said.”
Sully took the cigarette from her lips, stubbed it to ask on the workbench, and flicked it into a waste bin. She sized him up, this strange, dangerous, smoke-reeking mummy of a man with who she supposedly shared kinship, and for all the unease he provoked in her, she felt an equal measure of... not pity. That was too unkind a word.
“For what it’s worth,” Sully told him, “I think you were really happy in my world. My grandpa loved you. Said you were a great dad, even for someone who spent so much time on the road. I don’t remember it, but my mom told me once you got to see me, a couple weeks after they brought me home from the hospital. Said you started singing old Irish drinking songs to me whenever I’d start crying, and that’d shut me up.”
“And Miss--” Gaunt began, and stopped. He turned his ribbon-shrouded face away from her “And my wife. We were happy?”
“I think so,” Sully said softly. “You, uh, you died a couple days after she did. In your sleep, just like her. My grandpa liked to say you knew when to get off the stage.”
She heard Gaunt exhale slowly, in a tortured wheeze, and saw his shoulders shake just one, just a little. Things hidden somewhere in his coat chimed and rattled ominously. When he turned back to her, his eyes were softer than she’d ever seen them, and his voice even thicker.
“I would like,” he said, and seemed to choke on the words, and sounded them out again, one syllable at a time. “If you would tell me more about your life... about your family... I would like that very much.”
“So I figure it’s like air pressure. Whenever you’ve got an area of high air pressure adjacent to a low-pressure area--”
“It creates a vacuum.”
“-- it creates a vacuum, exactly, and the high-pressure air gets sucked into the low-pressure area until it all equalizes. Now, and this is just theory, what if time’s like air? What if it accumulates as it goes on? Gets more and more densely packed together, like air molecules. Now, if you can somehow connect two points in space at a single point in time, you’re naturally going to move from an area of higher pressure to lower pressure. Beef stew?”
“I, uh, I think Sully’s a vegetarian,” Trip Morrow said in the midst of the Lookout’s fully stocked pantry, both hands occupied by a clanking canvas sack rapidly filling with clanking containers of patented, vacuum-sealed, nutrionally balanced Morrowmeals.
“Presbyterian?” Tom Morrow called down, from halfway up the sliding ladder that ran on rails around the semicircular chamber. “What’s that got to do with it?”
Trip blinked. “Vegetarian. Uh, in my time, there are people who only--”
“Kidding,” Tom laughed. “I’ve known a few Buddhists in my time. I think I’ve got some beans and rice for her, then. Take the beef stew. It’s based on my aunt’s recipe.” He snatched a fat cannister from the shelf and chucked it in an effortless spiral into the sack in Trip’s outstretched hands.
“You could feed an army with this stuff,” Trip marveled, his eyes roving across shelf after shelf of neat, brightly labeled cans.
“That was kind of the point,” Tom said, sliding down the rails of the ladder on the sides of his feet to land smartly on the floor. “I’ve eaten my share of army tuck, and I figured Uncle Sam’s boys might appreciate stuff that tastes better than their boots. Plus, you know, I get hungry, too.”
“You sure I’m not taking too much?” Trip asked, despite the looming shelves. Tom shook his head, and for a moment, the elder Morrow’s smile faltered at its corners.
“I... I don’t think I’ll have as many dinner guests for a while,” Tom said. “Present company to the contrary.”
“I’m sorry,” Trip said. “I-- sorry, I’m kind of a compulsive reader. I saw those telegram slips you were sending. To their families. I didn’t -- you never seemed to know any of them in my world, so I don’t know what they were like. But it must have been hard.”
Tom just nodded, and for a moment, a great gulf of darkness seemed to swell in his eyes. Trip watched him visibly force it back, and settle into a look of deliberate calm. “They were good people,” Tom said. “Good friends. I guess I’m glad you folks showed up. Kind of reminds me how life goes on. Anyway, if you’re gonna be holing up from these Needlemen for a while, better safe than sorry when it comes to food. I think I’ve got a camp stove around here somewhere, too.”
“You like camping?” Trip asked, and Tom chuckled.
“I wouldn’t say I like it,” he said, “but last time I checked, there wasn’t a four-star hotel in the Valley of Kings. Or a one-star, for that matter. Why?”
“You -- my grandpa, he and my dad and I used to go camping in the summers,” Trip said. “Just the three of us. He really seemed to love it. I remember how he’d go on and on about this leaf or that bird. Guess it was more of a change for him.”
Tom’s face grew still, his eyes thoughtful. “I’m not around anymore in your time, am I?”
Trip couldn’t meet his gaze. “No,” Trip said. “You, uh... you died. Just a few days ago, really. I hadn’t... we weren’t close or anything, not especially. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Tom said gently. “Are you pulling my leg? You’re from, what, 2000? 2003, tops?”
“Something like that,” Trip said. Having seen any number of time travel movies, he’d been hedging his bets with regard to specific future details -- just to make sure he didn’t return to a world of Nazis or dinosaurs or anything.
“The World Yet to Come,” Tom sighed, seating himself on a crateful of Morrowmeal canned ham and biscuits. “I’ve been dreaming of it all my life. To think I might actually have a fighting chance of living to see that.”
“It’s actually--” Trip began, and trailed off. He thought of his conflict-riddled, smog-choked, self-absorbed world, fraying itself to bits for nothing, and tried to match it to the golden dream-spires he could practically see rising from his ancestor’s imagination.
“Don’t tell me,” Tom said. “Give me the luxury of pretending it’s not all set in stone already. I want to see how it turns out for myself.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Trip said, setting down the bag with a series of nearly musical rattles from within. “All this. The secret headquarters, the science lab... why? Why aren’t you at a university somewhere, or working for some company?”
“Well, for one,” Tom grinned, “because I’d be bored stiff faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And for another... what was my life like? In your world, I mean?”
Trip paused for a moment, rummaging through dusty bins of memory. “Um,” he said. “Your parents ran a bookstore, in Boston. I remember you saying they were going to go to Europe, but then the war broke out, and they decided it wasn’t safe. You grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, got a job at Bell straight out of college... the rest is history. Figuratively speaking.”
“My parents took that trip,” Tom said quietly. “And me with them. And... it wasn’t safe.” He ran a thumb under the strap of one suspender, pensively.
“There were 200 other people on our ocean liner when it went down, Trip. And of all those people, I’m the only one who lived. Not because I was smart, or brave, or strong. I was just lucky. Right place, right time. That’s all. Does that seem fair to you?”
“I guess not,” Trip said, thinking of rainy streets, and bad brakes, and Trish.
“It’s not enough for me,” Tom said. “One life. One ordinary life. I know it should be, but it’s not. All those people on that ship, my mom, my pop... they all got cheated somehow. They should’ve had more.”
“So it’s... what?” Trip said. “Guilt?”
Tom thought on this for a moment, looked up, and smiled at his descendant. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
They passed the door to the firing range on the way out of the pantry, pistol fire cracking from within, and made their way down the narrow corridor and out into the main chamber of the lookout. Harker and Rafe Windham were locked in some sort of genial death struggle on the work table, straining red-faced for control of one of the stone knives.
“Easy on the furniture, Hark,” Tom said as they passed by.
“I’m good for it,” the Lord of the Lost World chuckled, through clenched teeth.
“For the fruit bowl, sure,” Tom laughed. “But I’d like to see you replace the Crystal Skull.”
Trip caught Rafe’s wide-eyed stare as the Windham heir wrestled for the blade, and Rafe mouthed: Help. Trip could do nothing but shrug and keep following Tom.
They passed into the hallway on the far side of the room, the same one Trip had first explored not more than an hour before, and nearly eight decades into the future. The weird light of the Looking Glass rippled out from the lab and down the walls of the hallway, undulating like jellyfish, and as Tom approached the sealed door Trip had tried and failed to open before, Trip heard Sully’s laughter ring out, startling and lovely, from within the lab. It was an arresting sound, honest and unguarded, and for a few moments, Trip didn’t even realize that Tom was talking.
“-- got it set up so it only recognizes the unique chemical signature of my blood,” Tom said, sticking a fingertip into the slot Trip had previously tried on the thick metal door. “It’s great for privacy. And I wanted there to be... I dunno. A price. A reminder.” He withdrew his fingertip and showed it to Trip; a fat red globe of blood pearled at the center of it, as if it had been freshly pinpricked. “Plus, it makes sure I don’t spend too much time moping in here,” Tom continued. “I mean, it hurts.”
The door swung open slowly, and yellow-gold illumination bloomed within. Trip followed Tom inside, and let the door close.
The room was still and silent, no windows, no light save for the golden glow coming up through vents on the floor. There was a bench set into one otherwise blank wall. On the opposite side, tiny lights winked on, one by one, illuminating two ten-by-ten grids of clear glass boxes, each big enough to fit comfortably in one hand. Each box contained a different object: A comb, a pocketwatch, a brace of leaden toy soldiers. Most were full, though a scattered few remained empty and dark.
“Genevive Coxswain,” Tom said quietly, reverently, pointing toward an elegant silver hairbrush. “Seventeen years old, and heading to make her coming-out to polite society on the Continent. I think I remember seeing her on board. Oh, she was pretty.”
“Dougal Malloy,” he continued, pointing to a small, wooden-framed daguerrotype of a young boy with a startlingly grave stare. “He was one of the stevedores. His mother gave me that.”
“What is this place?” Trip breathed, and in the half-light, Tom smiled once more at him.
“This is my Room of Remembrance,” he said. “This is why I do it, Trip. Who I do it for.”
“All the people on the ship,” Trip said, the pieces clicking together in his mind. “You tracked them down.”
“I didn’t want to forget them,” Tom said. His voice had the hushed, slow quality that seems to descend in the presence of holy ground. “Who I was living for. I wanted to make sure I’d remember what they deserved.”
“It’s not guilt,” Trip said, studying a tiny, handmade rag doll in one case. “Is it?” Tom shook his head.
“It’s love,” Tom said. “The world’s just too big. There’s too much goodness in it. Too much wonder. I do this because I love it all, Trip, and I don’t want to miss any of it.” He rested one hand against a particular box, containing a rusted-out harmonica. “I can’t afford to. I owe them too much living.”
Trip looked down at the bag in his hands, the cans inside. He thought of the terror he’d experienced over the past few days, the panic and confusion and dread. He thought of hiding away in the empty rooms that had once been his grandfather’s, wondering when the men in black coats would come for him, hoping that it would all just pass. So he could get back to his small and ordinary and, he now realized, painfully limited life.
No.
“We’re not going to need this much,” he told Tom. “I mean, I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong--”
“You’re sure,” Tom said. “You could be holed up a while, and it sounds like whoever’s after you means business.”
“They absolutely do,” Trip said, and smiled, and for the first time consciously felt his face curve to match the contours of his grandfather’s own grin. “So we’ll rest up. Get our strength back. But then we’re going to find them, and whatever they’re trying to do, we’re going to stop them. Whatever it takes.” He found himself laughing a little, maybe because he was scared. Maybe be cause he thought he should be, and found that he wasn’t.
“What’s so funny?” Tom asked. Trip shook his head.
“Everything, I guess. A couple days ago, I would have thought all of this was impossible,” Trip Morrow said. “Now it just seems like it’s going to be fun.”
Tom Morrow nodded, and clapped a hand on Trip’s shoulder. “Let me tell you something about ‘impossible’...” he said.
The Looking Glass shuddered and smoked, and burned out. The coruscating light vanished, leaving Tom Morrow’s lab somehow plainer and poorer for its absence.
“Not a moment too soon,” Ruby Gale sighed. Somewhere, on the other side of that strange light, was a granddaugher she might never have. And, perhaps, a better world waiting.
“It worked,” Tom said quietly, patting the still-warm frame of the device. “You see that, Danny? We did it after all.”
“You all right, Gaunt?” Harker Windham asked, all refined concern.
“Something in my eye,” Mister Gaunt rumbled, but he kept his face turned away for a few seconds more.
“Tom,” Ruby said gently. “Look, I don’t want to rain on your triumph of science here. And that was ... I think ‘amazing’ doesn’t begin to describe it. But if you’re right about Jef, and what he’s planning, seeing those kids? That’s bad news all around.”
“I’m refuse to believe that,” Tom said. “I know what you’re thinking, but there are lots of ways--”
“She’s right, Tom,” Hark joined in. “Even I can see that. If that’s how events are destined to play out, if those are truly our descendants--”
Gaunt finished the thought, and even more than usual, his voice sent a chill through all who heard it. “We lose,” he said.
And then the portal sizzled shut in a last shower of sparks, and the room was still and dark again, and all around them, Trip and Sully and Nora and Rafe could hear the drumming of torrential summer rain on the roof and walls and windows. And each, in his or her own way, felt strangely bereft, and strangely complete, all at the same time.
“So,” Rafe said at last, as their eyes all adjusted to the dimness, and the smudgy, garish afterimages of the Looking Glass light swam away and faded from their vision, “any bets on just how badly we’ve altered the present?”
“Planet of the apes,” Sully offered.
“I’ll see your apes and raise you dinosaurs,” Nora said.
“Anybody else hungry?” Trip offered. “We’re gonna need our strength. We have work to do.”
“Ah, yes,” Rafe sighed. “Sinister conspiracies to topple, worlds to save. I’m sure my four-and-a-half credits of Greek literature will work wonders. I mean, honestly, they’ve got needle things that can apparenty rewrite time and space. And I’ve got--” he hoisted the obsidian blades -- “really big knives.”
“Notting Hill’s got a point,” Sully said. “I mean, go team and all, and I for one am kind of psyched to discover that alternate-reality great-grandpa was fifteen kinds of hellacious badass. But this isn’t the Rotary Club we’re up against. At least, I’m assuming.”
“And I haven’t heard anybody mention the big, obvious, nasty point in all this,” Nora added. “You talked to them, right? Any of them seem like the settle-down-and-raise-kids type? And if Trip-- sorry, Tom Morrow’s right, and somebody back in their world messed with time itself -- God, I can’t believe how Star Trek that sounds -- what happens when we change it back? What happens to us?”
“I don’t know,” Trip said at last. “But we’ve seen how the Needlemen work. We’ve seen them hurt people, kill people, just for trying to help us. You can do what you want, but I’m not just going to accept that. Not while I’ve got a chance to stop it.”
“Great speech,” Sully sighed, “but if you’re going to pull this off -- and I say this as a professional sort-of-magician -- you’re gonna need one hell of an ace up your sleeve.”
Trip grinned, and fished around in the backpack he’d left on the floor when he’d first been pulled through the Looking Glass. He came up with his grandfather’s journal, now all but covered in exotic, colorful stamps from distant locales. With his keylight for illumination, he paged quickly through it, looking for a particular date. Then he whooped with sudden delight, and held the page up for the others to see.
“I think we have our ace,” Trip said.
There, in the latest new entry to appear in place of the old, in Tom Morrow’s careful, neat handwriting, they saw schematics, and diagrams, and two prominent words.
Hello, Trip.
Next: The finer points of ray gun assembly; Trip and Sully get even better acquainted; the party is well and truly crashed.
Ruby Gale and Harker Windham listened, ears all but pressed to the cold metal surface of the door, to the scuffles and grunts and impacts of fist and foot on flesh and bone seeping through from far side of the door. At his workbench in the center of the room, seemingly oblivious to his friends or the calamity just outside, Tom Morrow sketched a design in his battered, leatherbound journal. His green eyes were narrowed, his brow set in unbending concentration.
From beyond the door, Hark and Ruby heard a final thud, a series of low, wet gurgles, and then, for a moment, silence. Something heavy squeaked and dragged against the anteroom’s floors, and then elevator doors dinged and rumbled open. There were more awkward scufflings and thumpings; the elevator doors slid shut, hesitantly, with a few false starts; and the elevator car could be heard descending away into the shaft.
On the opposite side of the door, someone cleared his ragged, scarred throat in familiar annoyance.
Without even looking up, Tom nodded, and Hark and Ruby turned the latch to the unbreakable door. It swung wide, revealing Mister Gaunt, brushing off the sleeves of his smoke-reeking coat.
“Thanks for the help,” he rasped, fingering a newly opened knife-gash in one sleeve.
Tom’s head lifted, fixing Gaunt with a cool green stare. “There’s been enough death in here today.”
“But the anteroom is fine, apparently.” Gaunt shot back, pushing the door shut behind him.
“I thought we were meant to leave our work at home for this one,” Hark said lightly, grinning. The deep brown suit he wore was impeccably tailored to the dimensions of his muscular frame, yet it seemed slightly, subtly wrong for him nonetheless.
“The League of Disrepute is regrettably persistent,” Gaunt rasped. “He followed me through the sewers.”
Ruby rolled her eyes in sympathy. “I remember one time, I flew all the way back from San Francisco with one of those guys tucked up in the wheel well. Musta been half-froze by the time we landed, but I get out of the plane, and sure enough, there he is trying to put a dagger in me.”
“You did put him in the secret elevator, right?” Tom asked, and Gaunt sighed.
“How many times must I apologize?” Gaunt said. “Besides, that was last year.”
“The Tenants’ Association has a long memory,” Tom shrugged, “and they really didn’t appreciate a laundry cart full of dead Thugees rolling through the lobby in the middle of the Society Matron’s meeting.”
“I’d suggest you cultivate fewer enemies, but...” Hark began, and Gaunt spat out a knowing, contemptuous laugh.
“I’m... sorry about your people, Morrow,” the magician said, his voice turning somber. “They were kind to me, and to Miss Sullivan besides. She tells me this is urgent.”
“Tal Xan Sherat,” Tom said. “The Sanctum of Sleeping Gods in the Himalayas. Ruby, Lasso, and I went there the summer before last.”
Hark nodded. “Nasty business, I heard.”
“We’ve got to go back,” Tom said. “Satel’s gone, and the dust I found in what’s left of his lab matches the black magnetic soil Lasso collected near the Well of Aeons Lost.”
“Okay, so whoever took Satel was there,” Ruby offered. “But how do we know he still is? I mean, no offense -- you need wings, I’m your girl. But we had a hard enough time getting in and out of there in one piece the first time. I’m not exactly looking forward to a second trip.”
“I called Parkersville,” Tom told them quietly. “Jef went missing a couple of months back. His folks are... the sheriff had to think a bit before he settled on ‘dead,’ which tells me something. He said they found something in Jef’s notes -- his latest project. From what the sherriff said, it looked an awful lot like this.” He unfolded the diagrams Satel had sent him and handed them to Ruby, who frowned, and passed them along to Hark and Gaunt.
“Some kind of electrical ring,” Hark mused. “I shouldn’t be surprised, knowing Satel. The man’s positively mad about voltage.”
“It’s more than that,” Tom replied darkly. “Satel was trying to create an extremely focused field of energy -- wear the fabric of space-time thin enough to study its elemental properties. Trying to see the building blocks of the universe.”
“So?” Gaunt rumbled.
“So Satel’s device --” Tom began, and then stopped. The fine hairs on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck were prickling. The air had suddenly filled with the heavy, pregnant scent of ozone, precursor of storms.
Hark’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Tom,” he said, “have you any machinery active at present?”
Tom opened his mouth to speak, shut it suddenly, opened it again. “The Looking Glass,” he said softly.
The blue light was spilling out of the laboratory door, casting strange, rippling shadows on the walls. The four edged slowly into the room as the device hummed and crackled, sparks corsucating around the edges, weaving a web of undulating radiance at its center.
“Tom,” Ruby said softly, “what the hell is that thing supposed to do?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Tom said. “It was a just a crazy notion Danny and I had about...”
“About what?” Hark asked cautiously.
“About time travel,” Tom sighed.
Gaunt moved almost imperceptibly, and there were guns in his hands, hammers cocked, aimed at the widening web of light. “At least when I broke the laws of physics,” Gaunt growled, “I was only pretending.”
“How did you activate it?” Ruby asked Tom, as the light intensified to eye-searing brightness.
“I didn’t!” Tom said, beginning to shout over the rising whine of the coils. “There’s no way to activate it from this end! It uses the alignment of the Earth’s magnetic field to connect a single point in space at two different points in time, measuring the decay of a small quantity of harmless isotope to determine the distance in time! But it can only be activated from the future -- and then only theoretically!”
“How theoretical is that?” Ruby asked, and pointed to the portal. There, amidst the almost overwhelming glow of the open portal, was a human hand, stretching through.
Gaunt raised his guns, but Tom flung an arm out to smack them down. “Wait!” Tom shouted. “The ring!”
The hand wore a silver-and-amber signet ring -- exactly like the one Tom had received from the Order of St. Fiacre.
Before anyone could stop him, Tom charged toward the device, seizing the protruding hand with both of his own. And with a single, swift jerk, Tom pulled an entire person through the Looking Glass to land in a heap on the floor of his lab.
Tom Morrow looked down on the floor, and for an instant, saw himself staring back. Then details resolved themselves; this him was more slender, with a different nose, and eyes a thoughtful brown instead of unearthly green.
“Grandpa?” the young man on the floor said, and Tom, Hark, Gaunt, and Ruby all looked at one another in an instant of commingled horror and amazement.
“Hey!” barked a voice from the Looking Glass, a young woman’s. “Get the hell away... from...”
The four adventurers cast their eyes once more toward the portal, where two young women and a nervous-looking man had emerged, standing stock-still, gawking at the assembled group.
“Excuse me, young man,” Harker Windham said at length, in a cold and even tone. “Might I ask how it is you’ve got my sacred knives in your hands?”
“Um,” said the Tom-looking one on the floor. “This is going to take a great deal of explaining.”
“No foolin’,” Ruby Gale said, turning back from the railing of the balcony to look at her granddaughter. “I married Lemondrop?”
Nora tried to stifle a laugh, but it leaked out around the edges as a snort. “You called him ‘Lemondrop’?”
“Everybody called him that,” Ruby smiled. “OK, maybe not those stuffed shirts at the firm he was clerkin’ at, but everyone who counted. Hell, he was an undercard at the Tunney-Dempsey fight at Soldier Field.”
“And now?” Nora asked. Ruby turned away again, back to the skyline. Her hands were crossed over the railing, and Nora saw engine grease smudges shining against her skin.
“He works,” Ruby said, pointing hazily at some point southward, in the Loop. “Hell, I don’t know where he works. Started up his own firm a couple years back, though, so he’s doing good I guess.” She drew in a deep breath and let out slow. “Got himself a nice little fiancee, too. They sent me a Christmas card.”
“I’m... I’m sorry,” Nora told her. “This is so weird. In my memory you’re a sweet old lady baking cookies and pinching my brother on the ear for running in the house.”
“My daddy -- your great-granddaddy, I guess -- used to laugh at me,” Ruby grinned. “Said young people couldn’t see any further forward than the ends of their noses. We all think we’re gonna be young forever. Maybe not young, but... you know. Just like this.”
Nora joined her at the railing, trying to fit the strange geography of this city of the past into the map she kept in her head. There was the Tribune Tower, and the Wrigley Building, but the absence of the looming John Hancock building just a block away was almost palpable.
“So what do you see in your future?” Nora asked, and Ruby chuckled.
“Well, I sure as hell didn’t see you,” and they both snorted in amusement, then paused, then did so again, at the discovery that they shared a laugh.
“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “Hell, I can’t see any further than the horizon anymore. I got myself locked into this damn blood feud with Wicked West, and I’m not gonna give her the pleasure of winning.” She smiled ruefully. “You know, it’s almost a comfort she’s out there? So many kinds of evil in this world you can’t do nothin’ to. Can’t shoot ‘em, can’t hit ‘em. At least she’s real. Tangible, you know?”
Nora realized that she did understand, better than she’d thought she would, and she nodded.
“So what about you?” Ruby asked at length. “What you doin’ with your life, alternate-future granddaughter of mine?”
“Not what I should be,” Nora sighed. “I wanted to fix planes -- went to school for it and everything, and what is that grin for?” Ruby, poorly concealing a burst of familial pride, motioned for her to continue. “Anyway, I wanted to fix planes, but the economy, you know. So now I’m helping to figure out... uh... how they crash. NTSB.”
This drew a blank look from Ruby, and Nora’s memory caught up to her. “Forget it,” she said. “Not gonna exist for another few decades, anyway. But, yeah, it’s an all right job. Quiet. Lots of paperwork. Way better than having crazy people in helicopters try to kill my ass, that’s for sure.”
“So it’s better in the future?” Ruby asked, quietly. “For us, I mean. People like us.”
It took Nora a moment to catch on, and then she smiled, slowly, distantly. “It’s not perfect,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be. But it’s better, yeah. Little bit better all the time.”
“Little bit better all the time,” Ruby repeated. “Hell, I think that’ll do. For a start.” She smiled widely, and Nora saw traces of her own smile, of the lines around her own eyes, in that face.
“So come on, Grandma,” she said jokingly. “We got, what, another hour or so before that doohickey in there’s supposed to burn out?Teach me something grandmotherly.”
“It sure ain’t gonna be baking cookies,” Ruby laughed. “Something grandmotherly, huh? All right. Sounds like you could do with this.” She drew a six-shot revolver from the holster inside her battered flight jacket, checked it, cocked it, and handed it carefully to Nora. “You know how to use one of these things?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Rafe Windham said, from the floor. “In fact, I’m not terribly sure I have legs at all anymore.”
“Oh, that?” Harker Windham replied, not so much offering his apparent grandson a hand up as lifting him bodily from the floor. “It goes quickly. I think I struck a nerve cluster.”
“And there they are,” Rafe said, looking down.
“You held on to the knives this time,” Hark told him, nodding at the blades in Rafe’s hands. “That’s progress. Otherwise, I’m disappointed. Living in an alternate universe has made you weak.”
“Has not,” Rafe retorted, knowing immediately that this was, at least in part, a big fat lie.
“Where I come from,” Hark sighed, pausing to unbutton the cuffs of his dress shirt and roll them up to his sleeves, “you would probably have been left out in the jungle at birth, as an offering to the Great Reptile.” He caught the shocked look on Rafe’s face and grinned. “Just larking with you. Come on, now. Again.”
Rafe sighed, squared his shoulders, and let the knives in his hands guide him forward through space, at his grandfather.
Hark seemingly melted to one side, effortlessly, and seized Rafe’s attacking wrist in a powerful grip. “Right about here’s where I’d do something painful to you,” he said. “Likely involving twisting or some such.”
“I think I saw you move that time,” Rafe offered.
“Right,” Harker nodded, and released his grip, then stepped back and squared off once more with Rafe. “Progress, then. Again.”
Rafe started to move -- Hark could read it in the slight twitch of his shoulders. Then he stopped. Crossed the blades in front of himself, defensively. Waited.
“Now that?” Hark grinned. “That’s progress. Never attack unless you’ve absolutely no choice. Let the enemy come to you. Like so.”
He lashed out a fist, working years of muscle memory dating back to his long afternoons of training on the stone courts of the island. Rafe dodged -- clumsily, and only just, but it counted -- and struck back, catching a glancing blow with the butt of one of the knives off Hark’s shoulder.
“Good! Almost felt that one!” Hark said. He ducked under a wide swing from Rafe, leapt up and backward, and landed in a crouch on the work table in the center of the room. With a quick motion, he picked up a newspaper lying half-open on the table and flung it flapping pigeon-winged into Rafe’s face.
“That’s another lesson!” Hark crowed as Rafe too-slowly swatted the paper out of his face. “Use your environment! Don’t just rely on what’s in your hands -- the world is full of weapons waiting for a clever man to use them. I could’ve killed you twice just then.”
Rafe swung again, and Hark leapt, somersaulting through the air, to land just behind Rafe. He was all set to swing a leg and knock Rafe’s legs out from under him --
The cold edge of the knife sat under his chin, the point resting lightly against Hark’s adam’s apple. He looked up the length of the knife and locked eyes with Rafe.
“You let me win that one,” Rafe said, deadly serious, and withdrew the blade. Hark rose slowly, chuckling.
“Have to keep your confidence up somehow,” Hark said. “But no, you did well. I could have gotten out of that in at least four -- no, wait, five, definitely five ways. But still.”
“Not bad for a wastrel down the wrong branch of the family tree,” Rafe grinned, wiping small beads of sweat from his brow with the back of one hand.
“Oh, you’re not so bad,” Hark said, fishing a handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket he’d neatly folded over a chair, and dabbing at the perspiration on his own forehead. “Truth be told, I rather envy you. I’ve got no one left to disappoint but myself, and that seems to take all the fun out of it.”
Hark turned the chair around and seated himself in it, his posture straight and crisp. Rafe, slouching at first as he took a seat opposite, found himself almost unconsciously sitting straighter himself.
“There was a girl,” Hark said, his eyes refocusing momentarily to the distant country of the past. “On the island where I was born. She had the loveliest eyes -- like a cloudy sky, just before a storm. I think I loved her, like no one before or since. But I had to leave. I had... responsibilities. To my family name, to the world, I thought. Still do. But sometimes...”
“She’s still there, right?” Rafe said. “It’s not too late. You could go back.”
“Isolated population,” Rafe sighed. “Living on an island for, oh, centuries and centuries on end. My parents were lucky they didn’t bring some cough or sneeze that would have wiped them all out. I could go back, but who knows what I’d take with me? And even if we were... if we could be together, I couldn’t stay there. I’d have to bring her back with me. And God knows how she’d even adapt. No. I couldn’t do it to her, and I need to be here.” He nodded at the blades Rafe cradled loosely in his hands. “Ours, you may gather, is a dangerous world, in need of men of courage.”
“And yet?” Rafe prompted, and Hark sighed again.
“And yet,” Hark sighed. “I wish I had your luxury -- turning my back on responsibility, saying, to Hell with it. Doing what I pleased.”
“There was a girl,” Rafe told him. “No island beauty, but my God, you could hear her laugh clear across the dining hall. She had this, this funny way of reading, where she’d kind of rabbit up her nose and tuck her feet up under her. And she loved Laurel and Hardy, which, I assure you, is increasingly rare in my day and age. And I failed her.”
Hark leaned forward, concern newly written on his face. “Was she hurt?”
“Only emotionally,” Rafe sighed. “It wasn’t some fantastical enemy. It was me. I did something... terribly, terribly stupid, and selfish. I did it of my own free will. And it well and truly broke her heart. And even if I could somehow get her to forgive me, take me back -- I’d still know I didn’t deserve it.”
Rafe looked up at his grandfather, this impossibly young face, the same face across the table in his dream. Saw his own eyes, the line of his jaw, perhaps some aspects of the nose, staring back at him.
“I guess I’m saying I could have done with a bit of your responsibility,” Rafe said. “Not to sew a button on it or anything. But you should be proud. Even in my world, you were someone extraordinary. Thus far, I seem to have only been extraordinarily lucky.”
“Lucky isn’t bad,” Hark chuckled. “Lucky can be useful. Come on. I left my pocketwatch at the hotel, but I’m fairly certain we’ve enough time for me to humiliate you in a few more go-rounds. Might even learn something in the process.”
“Goody,” Rafe sighed, and stood up, ready to be knocked down again, and again, again.
They stood at opposite sides of the room, casting eerie shadows that stretched and flickered on the walls in the pulsing light of the Looking Glass, neither seeming to know what to say.
Sully leaned against one wall, eyes roving the strange shelves full of half-assembled gadgets and impossibly clunky, crude equipment. Mister Gaunt stood stock-still in the far corner, hands in the pockets of his long black coat, and she could feel his unsettling eyes boring right through her.
“So,” she said at length. “You got a smoke?”
One of Gaunt’s hands emerged from his pocket, empty; then, with a flick of his wrist, there was a silver cigarette case in his hand, snapping open to reveal slim, neatly rolled white cylinders.
“Oh, thank God,” Sully sighed, and crossed the room to him. “Civilization.”
“They’re slims,” Gaunt rumbled hestiantly, in a voice Sully could feel in her back teeth. “I keep them for... a friend.”
“You don’t smoke?” Sully said, clenching a single slender cigarette in her teeth as she flicked open her silver lighter. She saw Gaunt flinch, almost imperceptibly, when the flame flowed liquid up to surround the tip of the cigarette, and felt bad without entirely knowing why. She sucked pure cancer deep into her lungs and felt almost obscenely good, and horribly guilty.
“I’ve had... enough smoke in my lungs,” Gaunt replied, and then chuckled, a sound that suggested gravel being shaken in a coffee can. “Besides. Morrow says it’s unhealthful. Ceaselessly.”
“He’s not wrong,” Sully sighed, blowing a thin stream of smoke out between pursed lips, and watching it disperse in the air. “And yet...”
“Bad habits,” Gaunt said, and nodded. The indigo ribbons encircling his head rustled softly. “I have some familiarity with them myself, I suppose.” He moved his hand again and the cigarette case vanished, replaced by a ragged-edged silver dollar. As Sully watched, he proceeded to walk the coin across his gloved knuckles, back and forth.
“I could never quite get that part,” Sully said, as Gaunt flipped the coin deftly between his pinky and ring fingers. “I mean, I can do it, but not that smoothly. Drives me crazy.”
“You know coin tricks?” the tattered man asked, a ember of curiosity lighting in the black coals of his eyes.
“I know a little,” Sully nodded, brushing a lank of hair away from her face. “I’m not good enough to go professional, but my grandfather taught me some, and I learned a little more from some of his old books. He always told me he never saw anyone work a coin better than you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gaunt said, turning his eyes away.
“Got any advice?” Sully ventured, taking out a quarter and proceeding to walk it over her own knuckles.
“You’re asking me... to show you a magic trick?” Gaunt asked. He tilted his head quizzically, the folds of his indigo wrappings suggesting upraised eyebrows.
“You’re a magician, right?” Sully nodded, taking another drag off the cigarette. For such a little thing, it packed more of a kick than she was used to. “Nobody ever asks you to show them tricks?”
“Not in quite some time,” the magician told her. “Generally, they beg me for their lives. Or attempt to take mine.”
“So you work, what, birthday parties?” Sully offered, risking a smile. Gaunt’s eyes narrowed, catlike, and she unconsciously took a half-step back.
“Hold out your hand,” he said, and she did. And he showed her, patiently, for a good five minutes, demonstrating with his own silver dollar. He was a good teacher, Sully found to her surprise; not quite like her grandfather, who, for all his kindness, sometimes stumbled with his explanations or struggled to make them simple enough. Gaunt spoke simply, and deftly, with the sparse accuracy of a knife-thrower. And as he explained, she caught him stealing glances at her face from time to time.
“You are named Sullivan,” he said, when she’d gotten the coin running fluidly across her knuckles, finally feeling the same confidence with the trick that she’d seen in OMG’s own performance of it so many times before.
“Yeah, after my great-grandma. Her maiden name,” Sully said. “My mom always liked it. Said she wanted to have a connection to the family. But everyone calls me Sully.”
“Zully?” Gaunt said quickly, his eyes flicking sharply to hers, and Sully flinched. Gaunt saw this, and took a slow step backward.
“My apologies,” he said. “I knew a woman once...”
“Your... first wife?” Sully offered, slowly. “Grandpa told me some stories he said he’d heard from you.”
“What happened to her?” Gaunt asked. “My -- my first wife?”
“I’m not sure,” Sully said. “There was some kind of accident... he said she was your assistant, and a trick went wrong at a show you did in Los Angeles. Something about bad flash powder.” She saw Gaunt put a hand out to steady himself on a nearby workbench.
“Two stops more...” she heard him say quietly, and when her eyes met his, probing, he waved off the unspoken question. “You said first wife. I married again?”
“Violet Sullivan,” Sully said. “Her, we had pictures of. Some kind of heiress from here in Chicago. You were out of the business when she met you, and she, I dunno, she coaxed you back in. Gave you a stake to go out on tour again. Apparently, there was some big to-do with her family about it; they didn’t much like you, but Grandpa said she didn’t care. Which, you know, was lucky for him.”
“Was he an only child, your grandfather?” Gaunt asked softly. Sully nodded, savoring the last few glowing centimeters of the cigarette, before responding.
“Yeah,” she said. “Ryan Gant. Good Irish name, right? ‘Course, when he went into the magic business, he called himself Cormac the Conjuror.”
“And you?” Gaunt rattled. “Did you follow him to the stage? Are there -- are there even stages? Morrow says we’ll be on the moon by your era. That always sounded to me like a world with little need for magic.”
“I, uh, I wasn’t good enough,” Sully said. “I studied it some, like I said, but I just don’t have the gift, I think. Watered down the bloodline too much, maybe. My mom wound up marrying an accountant, and I’m really not seeing a lot of magic in that line of work.”
“But you have... gainful employment?” Gaunt asked, casting an uncertain eye at her boots, her stockings, her jacket. It took Sully a moment to get this, and then she didn’t know whether to smirk or hit him, the latter of which seemed like a fairly bad idea.
“I manage a magician,” Sully said. “Set up his appearances, take care of the licensing, that sort of thing. He’s good. Dumb as two bricks, but he’s got the gift. You sound like you would have loved the last trick we did.”
She told him about the “disappearing skyscraper” trick, having to fudge a few facts here and there to get around little things like the Internet for a man born only a few years after powered flight. He would nod, appreciatively, even chuckle here and there.
“I don’t think about magic much,” he said when she’d finished. “It’s no longer a luxury I can afford. Mine has not been -- is not a kind life. The things I now make vanish... they don’t tend to reappear.”
“Are you happy?” Sully asked, and knew it was a stupid question the moment it left her lips. Gaunt made a short, bitter, mirthless sort of laugh.
“In all the worst ways,” he told her, ice scraping ice in his voice, and Sully felt a chill run down her back. “Mine is not a face you would wish to see smiling out from photographs. If I could smile, I mean. So I’m left with... bad habits. Like I said.”
Sully took the cigarette from her lips, stubbed it to ask on the workbench, and flicked it into a waste bin. She sized him up, this strange, dangerous, smoke-reeking mummy of a man with who she supposedly shared kinship, and for all the unease he provoked in her, she felt an equal measure of... not pity. That was too unkind a word.
“For what it’s worth,” Sully told him, “I think you were really happy in my world. My grandpa loved you. Said you were a great dad, even for someone who spent so much time on the road. I don’t remember it, but my mom told me once you got to see me, a couple weeks after they brought me home from the hospital. Said you started singing old Irish drinking songs to me whenever I’d start crying, and that’d shut me up.”
“And Miss--” Gaunt began, and stopped. He turned his ribbon-shrouded face away from her “And my wife. We were happy?”
“I think so,” Sully said softly. “You, uh, you died a couple days after she did. In your sleep, just like her. My grandpa liked to say you knew when to get off the stage.”
She heard Gaunt exhale slowly, in a tortured wheeze, and saw his shoulders shake just one, just a little. Things hidden somewhere in his coat chimed and rattled ominously. When he turned back to her, his eyes were softer than she’d ever seen them, and his voice even thicker.
“I would like,” he said, and seemed to choke on the words, and sounded them out again, one syllable at a time. “If you would tell me more about your life... about your family... I would like that very much.”
“So I figure it’s like air pressure. Whenever you’ve got an area of high air pressure adjacent to a low-pressure area--”
“It creates a vacuum.”
“-- it creates a vacuum, exactly, and the high-pressure air gets sucked into the low-pressure area until it all equalizes. Now, and this is just theory, what if time’s like air? What if it accumulates as it goes on? Gets more and more densely packed together, like air molecules. Now, if you can somehow connect two points in space at a single point in time, you’re naturally going to move from an area of higher pressure to lower pressure. Beef stew?”
“I, uh, I think Sully’s a vegetarian,” Trip Morrow said in the midst of the Lookout’s fully stocked pantry, both hands occupied by a clanking canvas sack rapidly filling with clanking containers of patented, vacuum-sealed, nutrionally balanced Morrowmeals.
“Presbyterian?” Tom Morrow called down, from halfway up the sliding ladder that ran on rails around the semicircular chamber. “What’s that got to do with it?”
Trip blinked. “Vegetarian. Uh, in my time, there are people who only--”
“Kidding,” Tom laughed. “I’ve known a few Buddhists in my time. I think I’ve got some beans and rice for her, then. Take the beef stew. It’s based on my aunt’s recipe.” He snatched a fat cannister from the shelf and chucked it in an effortless spiral into the sack in Trip’s outstretched hands.
“You could feed an army with this stuff,” Trip marveled, his eyes roving across shelf after shelf of neat, brightly labeled cans.
“That was kind of the point,” Tom said, sliding down the rails of the ladder on the sides of his feet to land smartly on the floor. “I’ve eaten my share of army tuck, and I figured Uncle Sam’s boys might appreciate stuff that tastes better than their boots. Plus, you know, I get hungry, too.”
“You sure I’m not taking too much?” Trip asked, despite the looming shelves. Tom shook his head, and for a moment, the elder Morrow’s smile faltered at its corners.
“I... I don’t think I’ll have as many dinner guests for a while,” Tom said. “Present company to the contrary.”
“I’m sorry,” Trip said. “I-- sorry, I’m kind of a compulsive reader. I saw those telegram slips you were sending. To their families. I didn’t -- you never seemed to know any of them in my world, so I don’t know what they were like. But it must have been hard.”
Tom just nodded, and for a moment, a great gulf of darkness seemed to swell in his eyes. Trip watched him visibly force it back, and settle into a look of deliberate calm. “They were good people,” Tom said. “Good friends. I guess I’m glad you folks showed up. Kind of reminds me how life goes on. Anyway, if you’re gonna be holing up from these Needlemen for a while, better safe than sorry when it comes to food. I think I’ve got a camp stove around here somewhere, too.”
“You like camping?” Trip asked, and Tom chuckled.
“I wouldn’t say I like it,” he said, “but last time I checked, there wasn’t a four-star hotel in the Valley of Kings. Or a one-star, for that matter. Why?”
“You -- my grandpa, he and my dad and I used to go camping in the summers,” Trip said. “Just the three of us. He really seemed to love it. I remember how he’d go on and on about this leaf or that bird. Guess it was more of a change for him.”
Tom’s face grew still, his eyes thoughtful. “I’m not around anymore in your time, am I?”
Trip couldn’t meet his gaze. “No,” Trip said. “You, uh... you died. Just a few days ago, really. I hadn’t... we weren’t close or anything, not especially. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Tom said gently. “Are you pulling my leg? You’re from, what, 2000? 2003, tops?”
“Something like that,” Trip said. Having seen any number of time travel movies, he’d been hedging his bets with regard to specific future details -- just to make sure he didn’t return to a world of Nazis or dinosaurs or anything.
“The World Yet to Come,” Tom sighed, seating himself on a crateful of Morrowmeal canned ham and biscuits. “I’ve been dreaming of it all my life. To think I might actually have a fighting chance of living to see that.”
“It’s actually--” Trip began, and trailed off. He thought of his conflict-riddled, smog-choked, self-absorbed world, fraying itself to bits for nothing, and tried to match it to the golden dream-spires he could practically see rising from his ancestor’s imagination.
“Don’t tell me,” Tom said. “Give me the luxury of pretending it’s not all set in stone already. I want to see how it turns out for myself.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Trip said, setting down the bag with a series of nearly musical rattles from within. “All this. The secret headquarters, the science lab... why? Why aren’t you at a university somewhere, or working for some company?”
“Well, for one,” Tom grinned, “because I’d be bored stiff faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And for another... what was my life like? In your world, I mean?”
Trip paused for a moment, rummaging through dusty bins of memory. “Um,” he said. “Your parents ran a bookstore, in Boston. I remember you saying they were going to go to Europe, but then the war broke out, and they decided it wasn’t safe. You grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, got a job at Bell straight out of college... the rest is history. Figuratively speaking.”
“My parents took that trip,” Tom said quietly. “And me with them. And... it wasn’t safe.” He ran a thumb under the strap of one suspender, pensively.
“There were 200 other people on our ocean liner when it went down, Trip. And of all those people, I’m the only one who lived. Not because I was smart, or brave, or strong. I was just lucky. Right place, right time. That’s all. Does that seem fair to you?”
“I guess not,” Trip said, thinking of rainy streets, and bad brakes, and Trish.
“It’s not enough for me,” Tom said. “One life. One ordinary life. I know it should be, but it’s not. All those people on that ship, my mom, my pop... they all got cheated somehow. They should’ve had more.”
“So it’s... what?” Trip said. “Guilt?”
Tom thought on this for a moment, looked up, and smiled at his descendant. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
They passed the door to the firing range on the way out of the pantry, pistol fire cracking from within, and made their way down the narrow corridor and out into the main chamber of the lookout. Harker and Rafe Windham were locked in some sort of genial death struggle on the work table, straining red-faced for control of one of the stone knives.
“Easy on the furniture, Hark,” Tom said as they passed by.
“I’m good for it,” the Lord of the Lost World chuckled, through clenched teeth.
“For the fruit bowl, sure,” Tom laughed. “But I’d like to see you replace the Crystal Skull.”
Trip caught Rafe’s wide-eyed stare as the Windham heir wrestled for the blade, and Rafe mouthed: Help. Trip could do nothing but shrug and keep following Tom.
They passed into the hallway on the far side of the room, the same one Trip had first explored not more than an hour before, and nearly eight decades into the future. The weird light of the Looking Glass rippled out from the lab and down the walls of the hallway, undulating like jellyfish, and as Tom approached the sealed door Trip had tried and failed to open before, Trip heard Sully’s laughter ring out, startling and lovely, from within the lab. It was an arresting sound, honest and unguarded, and for a few moments, Trip didn’t even realize that Tom was talking.
“-- got it set up so it only recognizes the unique chemical signature of my blood,” Tom said, sticking a fingertip into the slot Trip had previously tried on the thick metal door. “It’s great for privacy. And I wanted there to be... I dunno. A price. A reminder.” He withdrew his fingertip and showed it to Trip; a fat red globe of blood pearled at the center of it, as if it had been freshly pinpricked. “Plus, it makes sure I don’t spend too much time moping in here,” Tom continued. “I mean, it hurts.”
The door swung open slowly, and yellow-gold illumination bloomed within. Trip followed Tom inside, and let the door close.
The room was still and silent, no windows, no light save for the golden glow coming up through vents on the floor. There was a bench set into one otherwise blank wall. On the opposite side, tiny lights winked on, one by one, illuminating two ten-by-ten grids of clear glass boxes, each big enough to fit comfortably in one hand. Each box contained a different object: A comb, a pocketwatch, a brace of leaden toy soldiers. Most were full, though a scattered few remained empty and dark.
“Genevive Coxswain,” Tom said quietly, reverently, pointing toward an elegant silver hairbrush. “Seventeen years old, and heading to make her coming-out to polite society on the Continent. I think I remember seeing her on board. Oh, she was pretty.”
“Dougal Malloy,” he continued, pointing to a small, wooden-framed daguerrotype of a young boy with a startlingly grave stare. “He was one of the stevedores. His mother gave me that.”
“What is this place?” Trip breathed, and in the half-light, Tom smiled once more at him.
“This is my Room of Remembrance,” he said. “This is why I do it, Trip. Who I do it for.”
“All the people on the ship,” Trip said, the pieces clicking together in his mind. “You tracked them down.”
“I didn’t want to forget them,” Tom said. His voice had the hushed, slow quality that seems to descend in the presence of holy ground. “Who I was living for. I wanted to make sure I’d remember what they deserved.”
“It’s not guilt,” Trip said, studying a tiny, handmade rag doll in one case. “Is it?” Tom shook his head.
“It’s love,” Tom said. “The world’s just too big. There’s too much goodness in it. Too much wonder. I do this because I love it all, Trip, and I don’t want to miss any of it.” He rested one hand against a particular box, containing a rusted-out harmonica. “I can’t afford to. I owe them too much living.”
Trip looked down at the bag in his hands, the cans inside. He thought of the terror he’d experienced over the past few days, the panic and confusion and dread. He thought of hiding away in the empty rooms that had once been his grandfather’s, wondering when the men in black coats would come for him, hoping that it would all just pass. So he could get back to his small and ordinary and, he now realized, painfully limited life.
No.
“We’re not going to need this much,” he told Tom. “I mean, I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong--”
“You’re sure,” Tom said. “You could be holed up a while, and it sounds like whoever’s after you means business.”
“They absolutely do,” Trip said, and smiled, and for the first time consciously felt his face curve to match the contours of his grandfather’s own grin. “So we’ll rest up. Get our strength back. But then we’re going to find them, and whatever they’re trying to do, we’re going to stop them. Whatever it takes.” He found himself laughing a little, maybe because he was scared. Maybe be cause he thought he should be, and found that he wasn’t.
“What’s so funny?” Tom asked. Trip shook his head.
“Everything, I guess. A couple days ago, I would have thought all of this was impossible,” Trip Morrow said. “Now it just seems like it’s going to be fun.”
Tom Morrow nodded, and clapped a hand on Trip’s shoulder. “Let me tell you something about ‘impossible’...” he said.
The Looking Glass shuddered and smoked, and burned out. The coruscating light vanished, leaving Tom Morrow’s lab somehow plainer and poorer for its absence.
“Not a moment too soon,” Ruby Gale sighed. Somewhere, on the other side of that strange light, was a granddaugher she might never have. And, perhaps, a better world waiting.
“It worked,” Tom said quietly, patting the still-warm frame of the device. “You see that, Danny? We did it after all.”
“You all right, Gaunt?” Harker Windham asked, all refined concern.
“Something in my eye,” Mister Gaunt rumbled, but he kept his face turned away for a few seconds more.
“Tom,” Ruby said gently. “Look, I don’t want to rain on your triumph of science here. And that was ... I think ‘amazing’ doesn’t begin to describe it. But if you’re right about Jef, and what he’s planning, seeing those kids? That’s bad news all around.”
“I’m refuse to believe that,” Tom said. “I know what you’re thinking, but there are lots of ways--”
“She’s right, Tom,” Hark joined in. “Even I can see that. If that’s how events are destined to play out, if those are truly our descendants--”
Gaunt finished the thought, and even more than usual, his voice sent a chill through all who heard it. “We lose,” he said.
And then the portal sizzled shut in a last shower of sparks, and the room was still and dark again, and all around them, Trip and Sully and Nora and Rafe could hear the drumming of torrential summer rain on the roof and walls and windows. And each, in his or her own way, felt strangely bereft, and strangely complete, all at the same time.
“So,” Rafe said at last, as their eyes all adjusted to the dimness, and the smudgy, garish afterimages of the Looking Glass light swam away and faded from their vision, “any bets on just how badly we’ve altered the present?”
“Planet of the apes,” Sully offered.
“I’ll see your apes and raise you dinosaurs,” Nora said.
“Anybody else hungry?” Trip offered. “We’re gonna need our strength. We have work to do.”
“Ah, yes,” Rafe sighed. “Sinister conspiracies to topple, worlds to save. I’m sure my four-and-a-half credits of Greek literature will work wonders. I mean, honestly, they’ve got needle things that can apparenty rewrite time and space. And I’ve got--” he hoisted the obsidian blades -- “really big knives.”
“Notting Hill’s got a point,” Sully said. “I mean, go team and all, and I for one am kind of psyched to discover that alternate-reality great-grandpa was fifteen kinds of hellacious badass. But this isn’t the Rotary Club we’re up against. At least, I’m assuming.”
“And I haven’t heard anybody mention the big, obvious, nasty point in all this,” Nora added. “You talked to them, right? Any of them seem like the settle-down-and-raise-kids type? And if Trip-- sorry, Tom Morrow’s right, and somebody back in their world messed with time itself -- God, I can’t believe how Star Trek that sounds -- what happens when we change it back? What happens to us?”
“I don’t know,” Trip said at last. “But we’ve seen how the Needlemen work. We’ve seen them hurt people, kill people, just for trying to help us. You can do what you want, but I’m not just going to accept that. Not while I’ve got a chance to stop it.”
“Great speech,” Sully sighed, “but if you’re going to pull this off -- and I say this as a professional sort-of-magician -- you’re gonna need one hell of an ace up your sleeve.”
Trip grinned, and fished around in the backpack he’d left on the floor when he’d first been pulled through the Looking Glass. He came up with his grandfather’s journal, now all but covered in exotic, colorful stamps from distant locales. With his keylight for illumination, he paged quickly through it, looking for a particular date. Then he whooped with sudden delight, and held the page up for the others to see.
“I think we have our ace,” Trip said.
There, in the latest new entry to appear in place of the old, in Tom Morrow’s careful, neat handwriting, they saw schematics, and diagrams, and two prominent words.
Hello, Trip.
Next: The finer points of ray gun assembly; Trip and Sully get even better acquainted; the party is well and truly crashed.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
The Gathering Storm
Valencia Stitch had a headache. An old, familiar throb just behind her left eye. It brought back decades-old memories, and a slow, curdling dread in the pit of her stomach. The headache, she had learned, meant her employer was displeased.
“Pull yourself together, Sharp,” she said. “Are you certain they were Operators?”
“They ate Jenkins,” the man with the eyepatch said quietly. He wasn’t looking at her, or her finely appointed wooden desk. By now, he would have ceased to find it even remotely remarkable that this room, like the many that surrounded it, had no windows. He seemed to be tracing the loops and whorls of Mrs. Stitch’s entirely tasteful wallpaper with his remaining eye. The cup of tea he had drunk nearly down to its dregs rattled gently on its saucer, owing to the shaking of his hand. “They ate Hollowell. And McMartin. And... I can’t remember her name, the new girl. Ate them.”
This was decidedly not good. Not the sudden deficit of manpower; Mrs. Stitch was nothing if not thorough in her staffing, and blessed with abundant Needlemen to replace those fallen. But the presence of actual, confirmed Operators -- for the first time since the Burning Night of Cardefax in 1919 -- was the last thing Mrs. Stitch needed to hear. For one thing, it meant that the dimensional gaps were widening -- that, despite the best efforts of her dedicated agents to keep things sewn up, time itself was continuing to unravel. And letting things in through the gaps that most assuredly should not be there.
For another, it meant that with all likelihood, Mrs. Stitch’s manpower deficits would likely accelerate, and soon.
“Do you think they’re in concert with the Morrow or Gaunt Heirs?” Mrs. Stitch asked Sharp, snapping her fingers to divert his attention from her wallpaper. He was terribly distracted, but then, he’d been smashed by his own automobile only a few days back, and perhaps he hadn’t been entirely put back together properly.
Sharp shook his head slowly. “They seemed as surprised as we were.”
“Then perhaps,” Mrs. Stitch offered, allowing herself a brief and luxuriant morsel of hope, “they’ve solved our problem for us? They do have... appetites, these Operators.”
“I don’t think so,” Sharp said quietly. “I think they’re here to speed things along.”
These were the times, Mrs. Stitch thought as the pain behind her left eye momentarily spiked, that liquor on the premises might, in fact, be entirely desirable.
The door to Mrs. Stitch’s office opened, accompanied by a heavy aroma of jet fuel and burnt rubber. Maximillian strode in; from the wisps of smoke still trailing from the edges of his long black coat, Mrs. Stitch judged that he had been on fire in the not-too-distant past.
“Give me good news,” she said.
Maximillian merely narrowed his cold gray eyes.
Mrs. Stitch sighed. Preventing the end of all life on Earth was an even more thankless task than she had imagined.
Thunder struck the anvil of the lake, and rolled across in reverberating booms toward the skyscrapers. The wind picked up, urgent, accelerating, and the sky began to shade itself to gray. Above the water, the thick line of clouds slowly congealed from gray to nearly black, illuminated from within by sporadic flashes of burgeoning lightning.
And inside the roiling mass of growing storm clouds, the fabric of reality hummed, then sizzled. A blinding blue-white line wrote itself sideways across the turbulent air. And something came through.
Time had weathered the Jolly Roger emblems painted on the towering sides of the Zeppelin, and frayed the nest of cables connecting its gondola-slung underbelly. No light or movement could be seen within the great airship’s compartments. But the bristling thickets of electromagnetic harpoons and crackling Tesla guns showed no sign of disrepair.
The Faithless broke through the storm clouds just head of the first heavy barrages of machine-gun rain, accompanied by another echoing growl of thunder, and made for the buildings ahead.
And deep within the heart of the terrible craft, in a room cobwebbed with cables and hoses and tubes through which strange fluids pulsed, a dry chuckle of satisfaction could be heard above the rising thrum of engines. Electric lights along the skin of the blimp flared to life, and the great ship’s hangar bay doors, sprinkling showers of rust, slowly ground open.
In response, the apes began to screech their song of war.
“I really can’t apologize enough,” Rafe said, nervously toying with the stone knives in his hands -- and then noticing, and ceasing, rather pointedly.
Trip fingered the thin stinging line on the skin of his neck and shrugged. “It’s okay. Understandable.”
“No, no, really,” Rafe insisted. “I feel terrible.”
“Is he always like this?” Sully asked Nora. The two of them had camped out by one wall of the empty room on the top floor of 919 North Michigan. Nora just sighed.
Sully wanted a cigarette. Desperately. She flicked the cap of her lighter off, and on, and off again, to quiet her fingers.
“What were you going to be doing today?” Sully asked Nora, staring out through the wide windows at the storm clouds rolling in toward the city. Thunder had begun to peal distantly.
“What day is it again?” Nora asked. Sully opened her mouth, realized she didn’t know herself, and laughed dryly.
“Guess I’d be doing laundry,” Nora sighed. “Got quarters and everything.”
“I’d be, I dunno, making money,” Sully said. “You see the papers or anything? OMG’s vanishing skyscraper stunt. What’s the reaction on that?”
“Do I look like I’ve had time to read the papers?” Nora smirked. “Hell. I’ve barely had time to eat.”
“Shit,” Sully said. “I bet we killed. I bet we absolutely killed. Probably got agents on the phone right now, leaving messages, and Sally’s gonna try to answer them, and Sally’s a sweet girl, but she couldn’t negotiate free cheese from the government.”
“Not to interrupt,” Trip called from across the room, where he’d been knocking randomly against the walls, “but does anyone else want to go exploring?” There were several frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber the four now occupied, and a narrow, dim hallway.
“All in favor of sitting down for fifteen minutes in celebration of the fact that no one’s trying to kill us for reasons we barely understand, raise your hand,” Sully called out.
Nora immediately put her hand up. Rafe, somewhat sheepishly, followed suit.
Sully raised one hand with a flick of her wrist. “Democracy sucks, chief.” Trip rolled his eyes at her and started trying each of the doors.
They were locked, and peering through the rippling surface of the frosted glass yielded only frustratingly tantalizing outlines of forms within. Trip tried the hallway, switching on his keychain light as the gloom deepened.
There was another door here, different from the rest -- solid steel, cold and thick as the circular vault door that had led into the main chamber. It had no latch, no knob, no lock -- just a finger-sized indentation at roughly eye level. Trip stuck his finger in it, warily, but nothing happened. He shrugged and continued around the corner, particles of dust dancing in the beam of his light.
The hallway widened into a room -- some kind of workshop. Unlike the main chamber, this room was not empty; coils of wire and strange, half-assembled gadgets, coated in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, sat on the various workbenches, casting strange, dancing shadows under Trip’s light. There was an old-fashioned phone mounted on the wall -- Trip tried it, and heard only a great gulf of silence in the receiver -- and row after row of tiny bins mounted high up on the walls, accessible by a sliding ladder on rails.
And, in the corner, something about the size and shape of a door, covered in a while sheet.
Trip unveiled it with a single tug, sneezing amid the fog of dust that arose. It was a rectangle of upright metal, tall and wide enough for a person to pass through, its frame coiled and strung with great tangled nests of wires. Protruding from one side of the frame, there was a sort of shelf, with a semispherical cradle -- waiting, it seemed, for some control device or key.
At first, Trip thought it was the ringing in his ears amid the thick, enclosing silence. But no -- when he leaned his head closer to the device, slowly, he heard it. A low, steady, electrical buzz. He reached out cautiously, expecting a shock, and touched the device. It hummed beneath his fingertips. Trip played the beam of his light across the floor at the base of the device, and saw electrical cables, python-thick, uncoiling from the base of the device into large circular sockets in the wall.
Within his backpack, something rattled and shook.
Trip took a moment to very deliberately not jump out of his skin. Then, once he had convinced his heart that it did not, in fact, want to claw itself free from his rib cage, he unslung the pack, gingerly set it down, and opened it.
Something was moving and clattering inside the cigar box.
Trip set the box down on the floor and opened the lid. The gyroscope he’d seen earlier wobbled, lurched itself upright, and began to spin.
Trip picked it up carefully, the arrested spin of the scope stinging his fingers, and felt the gyroscope humming in his hand. The closer he brought it to the metal archway, the more strongly it began to resonate. He looked again at the cradle extending from the device. It was just the right size and shape.
He placed the gyroscope in the cradle, and it began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, until it was only a blur. Sparks erupted in cascades from the coils on the side of the device, and Trip stepped back as blue veins of electricity began to dance around it.
“Guys?” Trip shouted. “Sully?”
The electricity turned inward, congregating at a central point within the empty metal frame, and began to stitch itself into a web. The web widened, and shimmered. And then the edges of space itself seemed to peel back, like a blossoming flower, and the metal frame was completely filled with a coruscating wall of remarkable blue-white light.
“I think you need to see this!” Trip called out.
He stepped forward, slowly, stretching one hand toward the wall of light. He felt neither heat nor cold, nor the prickling of electrical current. One finger brushed the surface of the undulating light, and Trip reflexively jerked his hand back. But it hadn’t hurt; it had felt like water.
Trip put his hand forward again, up to the light, and then through it. He could feel the odd, liquid sensation shimmering around his wrist and hand, but the tips of his fingers felt normal -- touching nothing but air.
“Holy shit,” he heard Sully say, and turned to find her, Nora, and Rafe in the doorway, gaping at the light from the portal.
“I know,” Trip said, turning to her, grinning with the thrill of discovery. “Isn’t it amazing?”
And then something on the other side of the portal seized his hand tightly, and yanked, and before he could say another word, Trip was pulled bodily into the web of light.
“Pull yourself together, Sharp,” she said. “Are you certain they were Operators?”
“They ate Jenkins,” the man with the eyepatch said quietly. He wasn’t looking at her, or her finely appointed wooden desk. By now, he would have ceased to find it even remotely remarkable that this room, like the many that surrounded it, had no windows. He seemed to be tracing the loops and whorls of Mrs. Stitch’s entirely tasteful wallpaper with his remaining eye. The cup of tea he had drunk nearly down to its dregs rattled gently on its saucer, owing to the shaking of his hand. “They ate Hollowell. And McMartin. And... I can’t remember her name, the new girl. Ate them.”
This was decidedly not good. Not the sudden deficit of manpower; Mrs. Stitch was nothing if not thorough in her staffing, and blessed with abundant Needlemen to replace those fallen. But the presence of actual, confirmed Operators -- for the first time since the Burning Night of Cardefax in 1919 -- was the last thing Mrs. Stitch needed to hear. For one thing, it meant that the dimensional gaps were widening -- that, despite the best efforts of her dedicated agents to keep things sewn up, time itself was continuing to unravel. And letting things in through the gaps that most assuredly should not be there.
For another, it meant that with all likelihood, Mrs. Stitch’s manpower deficits would likely accelerate, and soon.
“Do you think they’re in concert with the Morrow or Gaunt Heirs?” Mrs. Stitch asked Sharp, snapping her fingers to divert his attention from her wallpaper. He was terribly distracted, but then, he’d been smashed by his own automobile only a few days back, and perhaps he hadn’t been entirely put back together properly.
Sharp shook his head slowly. “They seemed as surprised as we were.”
“Then perhaps,” Mrs. Stitch offered, allowing herself a brief and luxuriant morsel of hope, “they’ve solved our problem for us? They do have... appetites, these Operators.”
“I don’t think so,” Sharp said quietly. “I think they’re here to speed things along.”
These were the times, Mrs. Stitch thought as the pain behind her left eye momentarily spiked, that liquor on the premises might, in fact, be entirely desirable.
The door to Mrs. Stitch’s office opened, accompanied by a heavy aroma of jet fuel and burnt rubber. Maximillian strode in; from the wisps of smoke still trailing from the edges of his long black coat, Mrs. Stitch judged that he had been on fire in the not-too-distant past.
“Give me good news,” she said.
Maximillian merely narrowed his cold gray eyes.
Mrs. Stitch sighed. Preventing the end of all life on Earth was an even more thankless task than she had imagined.
Thunder struck the anvil of the lake, and rolled across in reverberating booms toward the skyscrapers. The wind picked up, urgent, accelerating, and the sky began to shade itself to gray. Above the water, the thick line of clouds slowly congealed from gray to nearly black, illuminated from within by sporadic flashes of burgeoning lightning.
And inside the roiling mass of growing storm clouds, the fabric of reality hummed, then sizzled. A blinding blue-white line wrote itself sideways across the turbulent air. And something came through.
Time had weathered the Jolly Roger emblems painted on the towering sides of the Zeppelin, and frayed the nest of cables connecting its gondola-slung underbelly. No light or movement could be seen within the great airship’s compartments. But the bristling thickets of electromagnetic harpoons and crackling Tesla guns showed no sign of disrepair.
The Faithless broke through the storm clouds just head of the first heavy barrages of machine-gun rain, accompanied by another echoing growl of thunder, and made for the buildings ahead.
And deep within the heart of the terrible craft, in a room cobwebbed with cables and hoses and tubes through which strange fluids pulsed, a dry chuckle of satisfaction could be heard above the rising thrum of engines. Electric lights along the skin of the blimp flared to life, and the great ship’s hangar bay doors, sprinkling showers of rust, slowly ground open.
In response, the apes began to screech their song of war.
“I really can’t apologize enough,” Rafe said, nervously toying with the stone knives in his hands -- and then noticing, and ceasing, rather pointedly.
Trip fingered the thin stinging line on the skin of his neck and shrugged. “It’s okay. Understandable.”
“No, no, really,” Rafe insisted. “I feel terrible.”
“Is he always like this?” Sully asked Nora. The two of them had camped out by one wall of the empty room on the top floor of 919 North Michigan. Nora just sighed.
Sully wanted a cigarette. Desperately. She flicked the cap of her lighter off, and on, and off again, to quiet her fingers.
“What were you going to be doing today?” Sully asked Nora, staring out through the wide windows at the storm clouds rolling in toward the city. Thunder had begun to peal distantly.
“What day is it again?” Nora asked. Sully opened her mouth, realized she didn’t know herself, and laughed dryly.
“Guess I’d be doing laundry,” Nora sighed. “Got quarters and everything.”
“I’d be, I dunno, making money,” Sully said. “You see the papers or anything? OMG’s vanishing skyscraper stunt. What’s the reaction on that?”
“Do I look like I’ve had time to read the papers?” Nora smirked. “Hell. I’ve barely had time to eat.”
“Shit,” Sully said. “I bet we killed. I bet we absolutely killed. Probably got agents on the phone right now, leaving messages, and Sally’s gonna try to answer them, and Sally’s a sweet girl, but she couldn’t negotiate free cheese from the government.”
“Not to interrupt,” Trip called from across the room, where he’d been knocking randomly against the walls, “but does anyone else want to go exploring?” There were several frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber the four now occupied, and a narrow, dim hallway.
“All in favor of sitting down for fifteen minutes in celebration of the fact that no one’s trying to kill us for reasons we barely understand, raise your hand,” Sully called out.
Nora immediately put her hand up. Rafe, somewhat sheepishly, followed suit.
Sully raised one hand with a flick of her wrist. “Democracy sucks, chief.” Trip rolled his eyes at her and started trying each of the doors.
They were locked, and peering through the rippling surface of the frosted glass yielded only frustratingly tantalizing outlines of forms within. Trip tried the hallway, switching on his keychain light as the gloom deepened.
There was another door here, different from the rest -- solid steel, cold and thick as the circular vault door that had led into the main chamber. It had no latch, no knob, no lock -- just a finger-sized indentation at roughly eye level. Trip stuck his finger in it, warily, but nothing happened. He shrugged and continued around the corner, particles of dust dancing in the beam of his light.
The hallway widened into a room -- some kind of workshop. Unlike the main chamber, this room was not empty; coils of wire and strange, half-assembled gadgets, coated in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, sat on the various workbenches, casting strange, dancing shadows under Trip’s light. There was an old-fashioned phone mounted on the wall -- Trip tried it, and heard only a great gulf of silence in the receiver -- and row after row of tiny bins mounted high up on the walls, accessible by a sliding ladder on rails.
And, in the corner, something about the size and shape of a door, covered in a while sheet.
Trip unveiled it with a single tug, sneezing amid the fog of dust that arose. It was a rectangle of upright metal, tall and wide enough for a person to pass through, its frame coiled and strung with great tangled nests of wires. Protruding from one side of the frame, there was a sort of shelf, with a semispherical cradle -- waiting, it seemed, for some control device or key.
At first, Trip thought it was the ringing in his ears amid the thick, enclosing silence. But no -- when he leaned his head closer to the device, slowly, he heard it. A low, steady, electrical buzz. He reached out cautiously, expecting a shock, and touched the device. It hummed beneath his fingertips. Trip played the beam of his light across the floor at the base of the device, and saw electrical cables, python-thick, uncoiling from the base of the device into large circular sockets in the wall.
Within his backpack, something rattled and shook.
Trip took a moment to very deliberately not jump out of his skin. Then, once he had convinced his heart that it did not, in fact, want to claw itself free from his rib cage, he unslung the pack, gingerly set it down, and opened it.
Something was moving and clattering inside the cigar box.
Trip set the box down on the floor and opened the lid. The gyroscope he’d seen earlier wobbled, lurched itself upright, and began to spin.
Trip picked it up carefully, the arrested spin of the scope stinging his fingers, and felt the gyroscope humming in his hand. The closer he brought it to the metal archway, the more strongly it began to resonate. He looked again at the cradle extending from the device. It was just the right size and shape.
He placed the gyroscope in the cradle, and it began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, until it was only a blur. Sparks erupted in cascades from the coils on the side of the device, and Trip stepped back as blue veins of electricity began to dance around it.
“Guys?” Trip shouted. “Sully?”
The electricity turned inward, congregating at a central point within the empty metal frame, and began to stitch itself into a web. The web widened, and shimmered. And then the edges of space itself seemed to peel back, like a blossoming flower, and the metal frame was completely filled with a coruscating wall of remarkable blue-white light.
“I think you need to see this!” Trip called out.
He stepped forward, slowly, stretching one hand toward the wall of light. He felt neither heat nor cold, nor the prickling of electrical current. One finger brushed the surface of the undulating light, and Trip reflexively jerked his hand back. But it hadn’t hurt; it had felt like water.
Trip put his hand forward again, up to the light, and then through it. He could feel the odd, liquid sensation shimmering around his wrist and hand, but the tips of his fingers felt normal -- touching nothing but air.
“Holy shit,” he heard Sully say, and turned to find her, Nora, and Rafe in the doorway, gaping at the light from the portal.
“I know,” Trip said, turning to her, grinning with the thrill of discovery. “Isn’t it amazing?”
And then something on the other side of the portal seized his hand tightly, and yanked, and before he could say another word, Trip was pulled bodily into the web of light.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Terrors at the Tower's Top
The Sears Tower was no longer Earth’s tallest building, its lofty claim long usurped by a wave of pretenders from Far Eastern nations hungry to prove themselves. But in a pinch, it would do.
It was a clear autumn day, the light yellow and knife-sharp, the sky painfully pristine blue save for a line of dark clouds building and boiling out above the lake. Had anyone with binoculars or a long enough lens cared to, they could have looked to the very top of the Sears Tower and seen two men standing atop it, without safety harnesses or any other visible precautions, gazing from its precipice across the expanse of the city in the curious, indifferent manner of tourists.
“It’s rude to suck your teeth,” Operator Vore sighed, without looking at his comrade.
“Oh,” Operator Grin said, poking stubby fingers beneath the brim of his hunter’s cap to scratch at an itchy place on his scalp. “Is that what they’re called?” He resumed sucking at his teeth for a few moments, a wet, dental sound, and then casually spat a thin stream of something purplish-red over the side of the building.
Twelve stories below, the wind caught it and blew it back against the glass of the building. Where it hit the window, it sizzled and smoked for more than a minute.
“Funny what that guy in the hat said,” Operator Grin observed. “About how we couldn’t come up here.”
Operator Vore nodded. “And yet, here, we are. I attribute it to a failure of imagination on his part.”
Operator Grin chuckled, and picked a splinter of human bone out from his teeth, hissing and sizzling corrosively, and flicked it away. “He also said, ‘No, no, don’t eat me.’”
“And yet...” Operator Vore began, and nodded once again. “It’s come a long way, hasn’t it? The city, I mean. Even the Kroatan would be impressed.”
“I like that one,” Operator Grin said, pointing at a blood-red skyscraper just a few blocks away. “On account of the color.”
“I like to picture it all on fire,” Operator Vore replied, and smiled thinly.
I am large, Walt Whitman wrote. I contain multitudes. Had he ever encountered Operators Vore and Grin -- at least in the brief seconds before Operator Grin was licking his grimy fingers and hacking up cottony tufts of white beard, catlike -- he would have realized just how accurate that particular statement was.
If you could put either Operator inside an MRI machine, or even an X-ray, two outcomes would result.
For one, a glance at the results would drive you completely and irrevocably insane.
For another, in the brief instants before your every neural connection audibly shorted out from an onslaught of information that the human brain was simply not designed to process, you might have been able to make a simple observation: They were larger on the inside than on the outside.
Yes, the shapes they wore were indisputably human -- had, indeed, once been human, prior to circumstances best not imagined. (Suffice to say that, at some point in the recent past, two otherwise ordinary and anonymous members of the human race had each had an extremely bad, and unexpectedly abbreviated, day.) But the strange life that now boiled and undulated inside each animate bag of skin, hair, and teeth was as far from human imagining as possible, and half again more.
“Invisible jet,” Grin said, punching Vore in the upper shoulder. Vore’s lips pursed, and his eyelids half-descended in annoyance.
“Where?” Vore asked, squinting in the direction of Grin’s outstretched finger. “Oh, I see it. Fascinating. You think that’s the other ones?”
“Look,” Grin replied. “If I close one eye and make my picking-up-or-pointing things go like this, it looks like I’m crushing it. Crushy crushy crushy!”
“I don’t know why I talk to you,” Vore sighed.
“I think it has something to do with your tongue,” Grin said. “And your -- whaddyoucallem -- teeth, maybe.”
Vore sighed again. This was going to be a very long assignment.
Thunder rumbled, distant and digestive, from the black armada of building thunderheads to the east. A new wind swept over the city, and Vore breathed it in, sampling it with organs that were not, in the strictest sense, a nose or lungs. He smiled once more, showing teeth.
“Oho,” he said. “That’s new. I think we’re about to have company.”
“Crushy,” Grin said, in elongated chewing-gum syllables, squinting at the distant invisible plane, pinching at nothingness. “Crushy crushy.”
It was a clear autumn day, the light yellow and knife-sharp, the sky painfully pristine blue save for a line of dark clouds building and boiling out above the lake. Had anyone with binoculars or a long enough lens cared to, they could have looked to the very top of the Sears Tower and seen two men standing atop it, without safety harnesses or any other visible precautions, gazing from its precipice across the expanse of the city in the curious, indifferent manner of tourists.
“It’s rude to suck your teeth,” Operator Vore sighed, without looking at his comrade.
“Oh,” Operator Grin said, poking stubby fingers beneath the brim of his hunter’s cap to scratch at an itchy place on his scalp. “Is that what they’re called?” He resumed sucking at his teeth for a few moments, a wet, dental sound, and then casually spat a thin stream of something purplish-red over the side of the building.
Twelve stories below, the wind caught it and blew it back against the glass of the building. Where it hit the window, it sizzled and smoked for more than a minute.
“Funny what that guy in the hat said,” Operator Grin observed. “About how we couldn’t come up here.”
Operator Vore nodded. “And yet, here, we are. I attribute it to a failure of imagination on his part.”
Operator Grin chuckled, and picked a splinter of human bone out from his teeth, hissing and sizzling corrosively, and flicked it away. “He also said, ‘No, no, don’t eat me.’”
“And yet...” Operator Vore began, and nodded once again. “It’s come a long way, hasn’t it? The city, I mean. Even the Kroatan would be impressed.”
“I like that one,” Operator Grin said, pointing at a blood-red skyscraper just a few blocks away. “On account of the color.”
“I like to picture it all on fire,” Operator Vore replied, and smiled thinly.
I am large, Walt Whitman wrote. I contain multitudes. Had he ever encountered Operators Vore and Grin -- at least in the brief seconds before Operator Grin was licking his grimy fingers and hacking up cottony tufts of white beard, catlike -- he would have realized just how accurate that particular statement was.
If you could put either Operator inside an MRI machine, or even an X-ray, two outcomes would result.
For one, a glance at the results would drive you completely and irrevocably insane.
For another, in the brief instants before your every neural connection audibly shorted out from an onslaught of information that the human brain was simply not designed to process, you might have been able to make a simple observation: They were larger on the inside than on the outside.
Yes, the shapes they wore were indisputably human -- had, indeed, once been human, prior to circumstances best not imagined. (Suffice to say that, at some point in the recent past, two otherwise ordinary and anonymous members of the human race had each had an extremely bad, and unexpectedly abbreviated, day.) But the strange life that now boiled and undulated inside each animate bag of skin, hair, and teeth was as far from human imagining as possible, and half again more.
“Invisible jet,” Grin said, punching Vore in the upper shoulder. Vore’s lips pursed, and his eyelids half-descended in annoyance.
“Where?” Vore asked, squinting in the direction of Grin’s outstretched finger. “Oh, I see it. Fascinating. You think that’s the other ones?”
“Look,” Grin replied. “If I close one eye and make my picking-up-or-pointing things go like this, it looks like I’m crushing it. Crushy crushy crushy!”
“I don’t know why I talk to you,” Vore sighed.
“I think it has something to do with your tongue,” Grin said. “And your -- whaddyoucallem -- teeth, maybe.”
Vore sighed again. This was going to be a very long assignment.
Thunder rumbled, distant and digestive, from the black armada of building thunderheads to the east. A new wind swept over the city, and Vore breathed it in, sampling it with organs that were not, in the strictest sense, a nose or lungs. He smiled once more, showing teeth.
“Oho,” he said. “That’s new. I think we’re about to have company.”
“Crushy,” Grin said, in elongated chewing-gum syllables, squinting at the distant invisible plane, pinching at nothingness. “Crushy crushy.”
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
The Unbreakable Door, The Impossible Key
“You sure you wan’ to do this?” Agent 492 asked, her elbow resting on the seatback, her brow furrowed with maternal concern.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Trip said, risking a quick glance back through his passenger’s side window. “Here they come.”
The two black-coated men who had stood sentinel outside the entrance to 919 North Michigan -- as Trip had half expecred, half-dreaded they would -- had locked eerie gray eyes onto their cab as it made a leisurely pass by the front doors, just another particle in the daily flow of traffic. Now, as one, they were gliding out into the flow of traffic in steady, determined steps, seemingly unnoticed by the passing traffic. They moved through the spaces between the passing cars as if they knew exactly where each gap would be, and with traffic thick and choked from some snarl back down Michigan, the black-coated men were swiftly gaining on the cab.
Trip cast a nervous look at Sully, who exhaled, flicking the cap of her lighter off and on, and winked at him. “Trust me,” she said. “I know from magic.”
“All right,” Agent 492 sighed, her shoulders rising and falling like a mountain range. She scooped up the radio on the dashboard and thumbed the switch. “Agent 270, Agent 531, is you ready?”
Voices crackled across the airwaves in affirmation. Sully put one hand on the door latch and, surprisingly, found the other meshed in Trip’s. His palm was sweating, even more than hers, and his fingers were slender and calloused. Piano hands, she thought.
“Go wit’ God, you two, and if you ever need a cab--” 492 began.
“We’ll call,” Trip said, grinning nervously. The black-coated men were a carlength away, fingers dipping into their sleeves.
A gap in traffic opened, and 492’s cab raced forward, swooping into a new lane. A second cab appeared in the next lane over, driving up from behind it, and from the opposite side of the double yellow line, a third cab pulled forward, drawing even with 492’s cab.
Both rear doors of 492’s cab opened, and the rear doors of 531 and 270’s cabs as well. For the briefest of moments, the ceaseless gray gaze of the pursuing black-coated men was blocked by the jostling traffic and the yellow wings of the open doors.
Then the doors slammed shut, and traffic cleared for a moment, and the cabs sped off in three different directions; one north, one south, and one veering west. The two black-coated men paused, exchanged a chill and silent glance, and began to sprint through the moving traffic in opposite directions, pursuing two of the three cabs.
All of which were, in fact, currently unoccupied, save for their drivers.
Clinging side by side to the utility ladder as the traffic thrummed inches above their heads, Trip and Sully gave one last tug at the underside of the manhole cover. It screeched into place, and they were alone in the semidarkness, hearts hammering and arms aching.
“I didn’t think that would work,” Trip said, flexing his free arm, the memory of team-lifting the manhole cover still fresh. “Ow.”
“Like I said,” Sully sighed, slowly rotating one shoulder, already feeling the impending ache, “magic.”
They began to descend the ladder, Trip first, then Sully. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Sully said, “but... uh... shouldn’t it stink to high heaven down here? Being the sewers and all?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Trip, risking a deep breath. The air was close, and humid, but surprisingly non-rancid. It smelled curiously verdant -- alive, even. Like a greenhouse. “And have you noticed the light?”
“That’s not your flashlight?” Sully called down, concern in her voice.
“Never took it out of my pocket,” Trip said, amid the soft grey-white glow that increasingly filtered into the shaft they descended from the opening not far below.
Trip reached the bottom rung of the ladder, took a deep breath, and dropped the last few feet into the access shaft below. His shoes splashed in a few inches of stagnant water, but again, the expected stench was nowhere to be found. “There’s a tunnel,” Trip called up. “Maybe five feet high, looks like it leads to the main line. Watch your head.”
Sully reached the bottom of the ladder, grimacing as the disquietingly warm water surged up around her boots -- doing the leather no favors, for certain -- and ducked slightly, feeling her hair bristle softly against the concrete ceiling of the tunnel. Ahead, she could see Trip silhouetted by the same soft, strange light, and when she emerged into the main sewer line--
“Holy crap,” Sully said, forgetting to stand up.
“Something like that,” Trip replied, equally awestruck.
It could be recognized, by its general outlines and structure if nothing else, as a conventional sewer tunnel -- the product of doggedly rational society. But the brick and concrete walls were now veined by glowing lines and blooms of strange, radiant white crystals that cast an eerie glow on the surroundings. What should have been reeking, stagnant muck around their ankles was only mildly cloudy, silt-filled water, feeding a sprawling, patchy carpet of leafy green plants that stretched the entire visible length of the tunnels in both directions.
“I’ve heard of things like this,” Trip breathed quietly, bending down to touch one soft, waxy leaf of the tangled plants. “Wetland plants as natural water filtration systems. But never in a city sewer system. I don’t recognize any of these things.”
“Forget the plants,” Sully said, gingerly reaching out to touch one of the masses of crystals spiking forth from the tunnel wall. It seemed to hum beneath her fingers, a sound that resonated up through her bones and into her skull, and she yanked her hand away quickly. “What the hell is this stuff? Did your grandpop write about anything like this?”
“Not so far,” Trip said, standing and shifting his backpack around to dig through it for his grandfather’s journal. Since this morning, it had sprouted a few new stickers scattered around the cover -- Samarkand, Outer Mongolia, Mozambique, and Brazil -- and several months’ worth of mundane observations and workplace sketches had given way to accounts of Tom Morrow and the Special Science Division’s battle with Dr. Wendell Wattson, the Living Dynamo, and their thwarting of the League of Iniquity’s plot to blackmail the President. Trip flipped to one of the newer entries, a crude map of the underground access tunnels Tom Morrow had constructed to and from the basement of 919 North Michigan.
“We’re, what, just south of the Drake, near Lakeshore, right?” Tom asked, consulting his grandfather’s hand-sketched tunnel map by the crystals’ odd glow. He looked up at Sully, who shrugged emphatically. “Oh, right -- not your city.”
“If we were in L.A...” Sully sighed, and the corner of Trip’s mouth quirked in a smile.
“Okay,” he said, letting his hand drift momentarily in the air before pointing out a direction. “I think the entrance is back this way.”
“Lead on, MacDuff,” Sully said, uneasily jerking one boot from a tangle of vines. “Long as we’re going somewhere. I could swear this stuff is moving.”
They set off together down the tunnel, illuminated by the weird crystal-light, the sound of their splashing feet and the lapping water echoing up and down the passageways.
“So tell me something,” Sully said at last, dodging an outcropping of crystal breakthing through the concrete ceiling of the tunnel. Trip lifted his head from the journal and looked at her quizzically.
“Tell you what?” he asked.
“Something about yourself,” Sully replied. “I just really need something to make me forget I’m, you know, in a sewer. How’d you get into the making-stuff business?”
“I guess it’d be Trish’s fault,” Trip said after a few seconds’ pause. “My big sister. Patricia. You have any siblings?”
“Only child,” Sully sighed.
“Lucky you,” Trip smiled. “Oh, man, she gave me all kinds of hell. I was born when she was five, so I was like this eternal tagalong embarassment, her bookworm little brother always breaking into her slumber parties.”
“So why’s it her fault?” Sully asked him, and Trip’s face grew still and quiet for a moment.
“She died,” he said. “She was coming home from theater practice one night -- she was the lead in Our Town -- and it was raining. The best the police could figure, her brakes failed, and she hit a wet patch of road and went into a tree. By the time the ambulance got there...” Trip fell silent.
“I’m sorry,” Sully told him, because she knew of nothing else to say.
“It was weird,” Trip began again, suddenly, speaking quickly, as if each word were another giant step placing him farther from the memory. “My dad was always on the road, and suddenly he became Mr. Stay-at-Home, wanting to spend more time with us. My mom just started cooking and didn’t stop for about a month; I think we had to give some to the food bank after she filled up the neighbors’ freezers. And me -- I was just barely into middle school, and I couldn’t understand why it had to happen. I still don’t -- in a metaphysical sense, I mean.” He paused, exhaled, shaking his head slowly.
“So I started reading about it,” Trip said. He didn’t look at her, Sully noticed. His gaze stayed fixed ahead, as if he were seeing the diagrams in his mind. “About accidents, and brakes -- how they work, why the ones on Trish’s car had failed. And eventually, I -- this is silly, I admit -- I wrote the car company and sent them a diagram for better brakes.”
“And?” Sully said, after several seconds of silence.
“And they, uh, they actually used it,” Trip said. “Sent me a check for five hundred bucks. I think they kept it quiet, because they didn’t want the papers hearing that some twelve-year-old kid had done it. But I checked the statistics, and every model year after, brake failures went down.” Sully watched a calm smile alight on Trip’s face for a moment, then vanish.
“So that was it,” Trip said. “I got bitten by the bug. In high school, my grandpa got me an internship at Bell Labs -- not with him, just making copies and stuff, but eventually I got to work on wiring for switching systems. I did Army ROTC to pay for college at Cornell, and went active duty when I graduated -- you know, see the world, stuff like that.”
“Did you?” Sully asked. So far, in working with OMG, she’d seen a great many suburban shopping malls, most of the great cities of the United States, and once, briefly, Canada. She’d had high hopes for a European tour, provided the man famed for his death-defying feats would ever get over crippling his terror of air travel.
“Sort of,” Trip smiled. “Hang a right up here. I saw the inside of tanks in Turkey, the inside of helicopters in Croatia, the inside of more tanks in Alabama... So I got out when my commitment was up, used the GI Bill for grad school in mechanical engineering, and did some effects work with a friend of mine for a while. He left to join one of the big houses after a few years, and I went freelance, doing industrial design and stuff.”
“And robot magicians,” Sully noted.
“And robot magicians,” Trip added. “Which is way more fun, I should say, than the fake severed arm they had me design for Death House 2.”
“Oh, God, I saw that,” Sully grimaced, remembering video night on OMG’s tour bus. “Is that the one that was all wriggling and flailing and--” Trip just nodded emphatically. “Well, it grossed me the hell out,” she offered.
“Another satisfied customer,” Trip laughed. “Okay, it should be another left, and then-- oh. Wow.”
The tunnel had suddenly opened into a vast room that hummed with the motion of generators and motors somewhere nearby. Concrete stairs led up to a single elevator shaft that rose through the ceiling; in glossy bronze above the elevator doors, the letters 919 gleamed faintly in the half-light from a ring of industrial bulbs on the railing surrounding the ascending shaft.
“Your grandpa had style,” Sully said, letting out a low whistle.
“Can’t believe it was him,” Trip replied. “The Tom Morrow I knew never even got his socks to match.”
They climbed the steps to find a call button set into the wall of the elevator tube, next to the glossy, tightly sealed doors. Trip shrugged and pressed the button, then took a quick hop back as long-unused cables sang and snapped somewhere inside the tube, and counterweights creaked to life. After a minute or so of mechanical groaning, the doors peeled themselves open, revealing the smooth, reflective silver walls of the car within.
“Ladies first?” Trip offered. Sully smirked.
“Thanks loads,” she said, and stepped cautiously into the car. “Huh. There’s only one button,” she noted, studying the panel as Trip joined her.
“At least it’s not complicated,” Trip said, and pushed the button. The doors slid shut, the car lurched, and Trip and Sully’s stomachs registered a sudden but measured upward motion.
The trip took nearly a minute, which passed mostly in silence as Trip and Sully waited, nervous, expectant.
“What if those creepy Needlemen are up there waiting for us?” Sully asked as the car finally began to slow.
“Press the button again,” Trip replied. The car creaked to a halt. The doors slid open.
The anteroom was empty, spotlessly white, and though the air smelled musty and uncirculated, it was free of dust or cobwebs. Trip briefly noted a second elevator door beside the one from which they emerged -- part of the building’s regular system, he supposed -- before his attention was fixed on the huge circular door that faced them.
It could only be a door -- and yet it was completely smooth, featureless, almost perfectly reflective. There was no handle, no keyhole, nothing. An impenetrable wall of steel.
“Hello?” Trip called. Nothing. “Open sesame?”
Sully knocked on the door. “Cold,” she said. “And it feels thick. I don’t suppose your grandpa packed you a key?”
Trip fished out the cigar box and laid out the contents on the smooth, marble-tiled floor of the antechamber. “It can’t be this,” Trip said, holding up the gyroscope, and peering from it to the door. “There’s no interface -- no place to put it. And I’m guessing the black dust is out, too.”
“Damn,” Sully sighed, paging through the pulp magazine. “It talks about Tom Morrow using his ‘secret key’ to open the ‘unbreakable door,’ but it doesn’t say what the thing is.”
Trip picked up one of the tuning forks and struck it against the marble floor. It made a high, chiming resonance, but nothing happened. He tried the other, and a lower tone echoed and reverberated through the room.
The door didn’t budge.
“Wait,” Sully said, a light coming into her eyes. She picked up both tuning forks at once, cast a quick wish-me-luck glance at Trip, and struck them both against the floor.
The two notes rang out simultaneously, mingling -- forming a chord, with a third note seeming to appear in the harmony between the two. And with the clack of tumblers and the grinding of powerful gears, the blank silver door unsealed and slowly swung open.
“You’re good,” Trip said, impressed, and he and Sully packed the artifacts back into the cigar box.
“You’re just now noticing,” Sully shot back, but she was smiling as she said it.
Trip shouldered his backpack, pulled the door wider, and he and Sully stepped slowly into the chamber beyond--
Trip heard Sully yelp, and a sudden crash. Then something moved near him, very quickly, and the world spun itself until Trip was lying on the floor with a very sharp, very cold blade pressed against his throat. A face loomed into his vision -- a young man, disheveled, vaguely aristocratic, and apparently very unhappy.
“Right,” his captor said. “I have a very large knife at your throat, and I’m not entirely certain I know how to use it. Which, upon reflection, is probably rather worse for you than for me. Start talking.”
“Hello,” Trip said, and tried not to swallow.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Trip said, risking a quick glance back through his passenger’s side window. “Here they come.”
The two black-coated men who had stood sentinel outside the entrance to 919 North Michigan -- as Trip had half expecred, half-dreaded they would -- had locked eerie gray eyes onto their cab as it made a leisurely pass by the front doors, just another particle in the daily flow of traffic. Now, as one, they were gliding out into the flow of traffic in steady, determined steps, seemingly unnoticed by the passing traffic. They moved through the spaces between the passing cars as if they knew exactly where each gap would be, and with traffic thick and choked from some snarl back down Michigan, the black-coated men were swiftly gaining on the cab.
Trip cast a nervous look at Sully, who exhaled, flicking the cap of her lighter off and on, and winked at him. “Trust me,” she said. “I know from magic.”
“All right,” Agent 492 sighed, her shoulders rising and falling like a mountain range. She scooped up the radio on the dashboard and thumbed the switch. “Agent 270, Agent 531, is you ready?”
Voices crackled across the airwaves in affirmation. Sully put one hand on the door latch and, surprisingly, found the other meshed in Trip’s. His palm was sweating, even more than hers, and his fingers were slender and calloused. Piano hands, she thought.
“Go wit’ God, you two, and if you ever need a cab--” 492 began.
“We’ll call,” Trip said, grinning nervously. The black-coated men were a carlength away, fingers dipping into their sleeves.
A gap in traffic opened, and 492’s cab raced forward, swooping into a new lane. A second cab appeared in the next lane over, driving up from behind it, and from the opposite side of the double yellow line, a third cab pulled forward, drawing even with 492’s cab.
Both rear doors of 492’s cab opened, and the rear doors of 531 and 270’s cabs as well. For the briefest of moments, the ceaseless gray gaze of the pursuing black-coated men was blocked by the jostling traffic and the yellow wings of the open doors.
Then the doors slammed shut, and traffic cleared for a moment, and the cabs sped off in three different directions; one north, one south, and one veering west. The two black-coated men paused, exchanged a chill and silent glance, and began to sprint through the moving traffic in opposite directions, pursuing two of the three cabs.
All of which were, in fact, currently unoccupied, save for their drivers.
Clinging side by side to the utility ladder as the traffic thrummed inches above their heads, Trip and Sully gave one last tug at the underside of the manhole cover. It screeched into place, and they were alone in the semidarkness, hearts hammering and arms aching.
“I didn’t think that would work,” Trip said, flexing his free arm, the memory of team-lifting the manhole cover still fresh. “Ow.”
“Like I said,” Sully sighed, slowly rotating one shoulder, already feeling the impending ache, “magic.”
They began to descend the ladder, Trip first, then Sully. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Sully said, “but... uh... shouldn’t it stink to high heaven down here? Being the sewers and all?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Trip, risking a deep breath. The air was close, and humid, but surprisingly non-rancid. It smelled curiously verdant -- alive, even. Like a greenhouse. “And have you noticed the light?”
“That’s not your flashlight?” Sully called down, concern in her voice.
“Never took it out of my pocket,” Trip said, amid the soft grey-white glow that increasingly filtered into the shaft they descended from the opening not far below.
Trip reached the bottom rung of the ladder, took a deep breath, and dropped the last few feet into the access shaft below. His shoes splashed in a few inches of stagnant water, but again, the expected stench was nowhere to be found. “There’s a tunnel,” Trip called up. “Maybe five feet high, looks like it leads to the main line. Watch your head.”
Sully reached the bottom of the ladder, grimacing as the disquietingly warm water surged up around her boots -- doing the leather no favors, for certain -- and ducked slightly, feeling her hair bristle softly against the concrete ceiling of the tunnel. Ahead, she could see Trip silhouetted by the same soft, strange light, and when she emerged into the main sewer line--
“Holy crap,” Sully said, forgetting to stand up.
“Something like that,” Trip replied, equally awestruck.
It could be recognized, by its general outlines and structure if nothing else, as a conventional sewer tunnel -- the product of doggedly rational society. But the brick and concrete walls were now veined by glowing lines and blooms of strange, radiant white crystals that cast an eerie glow on the surroundings. What should have been reeking, stagnant muck around their ankles was only mildly cloudy, silt-filled water, feeding a sprawling, patchy carpet of leafy green plants that stretched the entire visible length of the tunnels in both directions.
“I’ve heard of things like this,” Trip breathed quietly, bending down to touch one soft, waxy leaf of the tangled plants. “Wetland plants as natural water filtration systems. But never in a city sewer system. I don’t recognize any of these things.”
“Forget the plants,” Sully said, gingerly reaching out to touch one of the masses of crystals spiking forth from the tunnel wall. It seemed to hum beneath her fingers, a sound that resonated up through her bones and into her skull, and she yanked her hand away quickly. “What the hell is this stuff? Did your grandpop write about anything like this?”
“Not so far,” Trip said, standing and shifting his backpack around to dig through it for his grandfather’s journal. Since this morning, it had sprouted a few new stickers scattered around the cover -- Samarkand, Outer Mongolia, Mozambique, and Brazil -- and several months’ worth of mundane observations and workplace sketches had given way to accounts of Tom Morrow and the Special Science Division’s battle with Dr. Wendell Wattson, the Living Dynamo, and their thwarting of the League of Iniquity’s plot to blackmail the President. Trip flipped to one of the newer entries, a crude map of the underground access tunnels Tom Morrow had constructed to and from the basement of 919 North Michigan.
“We’re, what, just south of the Drake, near Lakeshore, right?” Tom asked, consulting his grandfather’s hand-sketched tunnel map by the crystals’ odd glow. He looked up at Sully, who shrugged emphatically. “Oh, right -- not your city.”
“If we were in L.A...” Sully sighed, and the corner of Trip’s mouth quirked in a smile.
“Okay,” he said, letting his hand drift momentarily in the air before pointing out a direction. “I think the entrance is back this way.”
“Lead on, MacDuff,” Sully said, uneasily jerking one boot from a tangle of vines. “Long as we’re going somewhere. I could swear this stuff is moving.”
They set off together down the tunnel, illuminated by the weird crystal-light, the sound of their splashing feet and the lapping water echoing up and down the passageways.
“So tell me something,” Sully said at last, dodging an outcropping of crystal breakthing through the concrete ceiling of the tunnel. Trip lifted his head from the journal and looked at her quizzically.
“Tell you what?” he asked.
“Something about yourself,” Sully replied. “I just really need something to make me forget I’m, you know, in a sewer. How’d you get into the making-stuff business?”
“I guess it’d be Trish’s fault,” Trip said after a few seconds’ pause. “My big sister. Patricia. You have any siblings?”
“Only child,” Sully sighed.
“Lucky you,” Trip smiled. “Oh, man, she gave me all kinds of hell. I was born when she was five, so I was like this eternal tagalong embarassment, her bookworm little brother always breaking into her slumber parties.”
“So why’s it her fault?” Sully asked him, and Trip’s face grew still and quiet for a moment.
“She died,” he said. “She was coming home from theater practice one night -- she was the lead in Our Town -- and it was raining. The best the police could figure, her brakes failed, and she hit a wet patch of road and went into a tree. By the time the ambulance got there...” Trip fell silent.
“I’m sorry,” Sully told him, because she knew of nothing else to say.
“It was weird,” Trip began again, suddenly, speaking quickly, as if each word were another giant step placing him farther from the memory. “My dad was always on the road, and suddenly he became Mr. Stay-at-Home, wanting to spend more time with us. My mom just started cooking and didn’t stop for about a month; I think we had to give some to the food bank after she filled up the neighbors’ freezers. And me -- I was just barely into middle school, and I couldn’t understand why it had to happen. I still don’t -- in a metaphysical sense, I mean.” He paused, exhaled, shaking his head slowly.
“So I started reading about it,” Trip said. He didn’t look at her, Sully noticed. His gaze stayed fixed ahead, as if he were seeing the diagrams in his mind. “About accidents, and brakes -- how they work, why the ones on Trish’s car had failed. And eventually, I -- this is silly, I admit -- I wrote the car company and sent them a diagram for better brakes.”
“And?” Sully said, after several seconds of silence.
“And they, uh, they actually used it,” Trip said. “Sent me a check for five hundred bucks. I think they kept it quiet, because they didn’t want the papers hearing that some twelve-year-old kid had done it. But I checked the statistics, and every model year after, brake failures went down.” Sully watched a calm smile alight on Trip’s face for a moment, then vanish.
“So that was it,” Trip said. “I got bitten by the bug. In high school, my grandpa got me an internship at Bell Labs -- not with him, just making copies and stuff, but eventually I got to work on wiring for switching systems. I did Army ROTC to pay for college at Cornell, and went active duty when I graduated -- you know, see the world, stuff like that.”
“Did you?” Sully asked. So far, in working with OMG, she’d seen a great many suburban shopping malls, most of the great cities of the United States, and once, briefly, Canada. She’d had high hopes for a European tour, provided the man famed for his death-defying feats would ever get over crippling his terror of air travel.
“Sort of,” Trip smiled. “Hang a right up here. I saw the inside of tanks in Turkey, the inside of helicopters in Croatia, the inside of more tanks in Alabama... So I got out when my commitment was up, used the GI Bill for grad school in mechanical engineering, and did some effects work with a friend of mine for a while. He left to join one of the big houses after a few years, and I went freelance, doing industrial design and stuff.”
“And robot magicians,” Sully noted.
“And robot magicians,” Trip added. “Which is way more fun, I should say, than the fake severed arm they had me design for Death House 2.”
“Oh, God, I saw that,” Sully grimaced, remembering video night on OMG’s tour bus. “Is that the one that was all wriggling and flailing and--” Trip just nodded emphatically. “Well, it grossed me the hell out,” she offered.
“Another satisfied customer,” Trip laughed. “Okay, it should be another left, and then-- oh. Wow.”
The tunnel had suddenly opened into a vast room that hummed with the motion of generators and motors somewhere nearby. Concrete stairs led up to a single elevator shaft that rose through the ceiling; in glossy bronze above the elevator doors, the letters 919 gleamed faintly in the half-light from a ring of industrial bulbs on the railing surrounding the ascending shaft.
“Your grandpa had style,” Sully said, letting out a low whistle.
“Can’t believe it was him,” Trip replied. “The Tom Morrow I knew never even got his socks to match.”
They climbed the steps to find a call button set into the wall of the elevator tube, next to the glossy, tightly sealed doors. Trip shrugged and pressed the button, then took a quick hop back as long-unused cables sang and snapped somewhere inside the tube, and counterweights creaked to life. After a minute or so of mechanical groaning, the doors peeled themselves open, revealing the smooth, reflective silver walls of the car within.
“Ladies first?” Trip offered. Sully smirked.
“Thanks loads,” she said, and stepped cautiously into the car. “Huh. There’s only one button,” she noted, studying the panel as Trip joined her.
“At least it’s not complicated,” Trip said, and pushed the button. The doors slid shut, the car lurched, and Trip and Sully’s stomachs registered a sudden but measured upward motion.
The trip took nearly a minute, which passed mostly in silence as Trip and Sully waited, nervous, expectant.
“What if those creepy Needlemen are up there waiting for us?” Sully asked as the car finally began to slow.
“Press the button again,” Trip replied. The car creaked to a halt. The doors slid open.
The anteroom was empty, spotlessly white, and though the air smelled musty and uncirculated, it was free of dust or cobwebs. Trip briefly noted a second elevator door beside the one from which they emerged -- part of the building’s regular system, he supposed -- before his attention was fixed on the huge circular door that faced them.
It could only be a door -- and yet it was completely smooth, featureless, almost perfectly reflective. There was no handle, no keyhole, nothing. An impenetrable wall of steel.
“Hello?” Trip called. Nothing. “Open sesame?”
Sully knocked on the door. “Cold,” she said. “And it feels thick. I don’t suppose your grandpa packed you a key?”
Trip fished out the cigar box and laid out the contents on the smooth, marble-tiled floor of the antechamber. “It can’t be this,” Trip said, holding up the gyroscope, and peering from it to the door. “There’s no interface -- no place to put it. And I’m guessing the black dust is out, too.”
“Damn,” Sully sighed, paging through the pulp magazine. “It talks about Tom Morrow using his ‘secret key’ to open the ‘unbreakable door,’ but it doesn’t say what the thing is.”
Trip picked up one of the tuning forks and struck it against the marble floor. It made a high, chiming resonance, but nothing happened. He tried the other, and a lower tone echoed and reverberated through the room.
The door didn’t budge.
“Wait,” Sully said, a light coming into her eyes. She picked up both tuning forks at once, cast a quick wish-me-luck glance at Trip, and struck them both against the floor.
The two notes rang out simultaneously, mingling -- forming a chord, with a third note seeming to appear in the harmony between the two. And with the clack of tumblers and the grinding of powerful gears, the blank silver door unsealed and slowly swung open.
“You’re good,” Trip said, impressed, and he and Sully packed the artifacts back into the cigar box.
“You’re just now noticing,” Sully shot back, but she was smiling as she said it.
Trip shouldered his backpack, pulled the door wider, and he and Sully stepped slowly into the chamber beyond--
Trip heard Sully yelp, and a sudden crash. Then something moved near him, very quickly, and the world spun itself until Trip was lying on the floor with a very sharp, very cold blade pressed against his throat. A face loomed into his vision -- a young man, disheveled, vaguely aristocratic, and apparently very unhappy.
“Right,” his captor said. “I have a very large knife at your throat, and I’m not entirely certain I know how to use it. Which, upon reflection, is probably rather worse for you than for me. Start talking.”
“Hello,” Trip said, and tried not to swallow.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Disciples of Motion
The Wheel is all.
You see the Wheel’s presence on scales vast and microscopic. The motion of planets. The rotation of the Earth. The orbit of electrons around an atom.
The Wheel turns, and keeps turning, and brings all of us full circle, and keeps spinning. Each year is another turn of the wheel. So is each lifetime; wheels within wheels.
The Wheel is, perhaps even more than fire, the founding principle of civilization. The thing that connects us, that makes the world smaller, friendlier, more possible and subdivided.
The Order of St. Fiacre serves the workings of the Wheel and all who make its circuit. They serve in secret, in silence, at every minute of the day or night, in every city on the globe, and regions more remote. In taxis, in gondolas, in rickshaws and pedicabs, they keep watch over travelers on journeys long and short, mundane and world-shaking.
The Order began, perhaps surprisingly, in Paris, with the profession that shelters it. From the days when the hansom cabs first lined up outside the Hotel St. Fiacre, the Order has bent its will to the Wheel, and seen its passengers safely on their appointed journeys. All members of the Order are cab drivers, but not all cab drivers are members of the Order. (Should you, in your travels, ever encounter a particularly bad cabbie, kindly remember this.)
St. Fiacre is, of course, the patron saint of cab drivers. More dutiful members of the Order also find significance in his patronage of gardeners, those tireless sowers of the soil, attuned with the eternal cycle of seasons. The Wheel, again. More sarcastic members of the order take a certain delight in noting that St. Fiacre is also the patron saint of venereal disease.
There are 2,354 chapters of the Order of St. Fiacre on seven continents -- yes, seven. All toil in service of the Great Dispatcher, the aged and venerable head of the Order, who has pledged to remain ever in motion all the days of his life, whether in train cars or on airplanes or, most familiarly and comfortably, in the back seats of taxicabs. It is said that, should the Great Dispatcher ever stop moving, he would turn to dust. Many members of the Order will claim to have met the Great Dispatcher, and perhaps they have. (Agent 492 says he has a particular fondness for the deep-dish special from the original Pizzeria Due.) No one knows how old he is, or whether he is still the first and only Great Dispatcher, or the latest in a long and ever-changing line.
The Order’s official history marks 1929 as one of its darkest years -- the year of Mme. Monkeywrench and her Luddite Legion, who sought to drive the mass of man cringing back into the dark, into their solitary caves, on the theory that an ignorant and isolated people were all the more easily conquered. It was year of their unholy war against the Order and all it stood for, of derailments and crashes and a hundred dead cab drivers, Order members or not, in cities from Boston to Bangkok. And finally, most disastrously, the attack upon the Great Dispatcher’s private rail car outside Sioux Falls, and his abduction and captivity in Mme. Monkeywrench’s clutches.
She asked for no ransom. She gave no demands. She simply invited the members of the Order worldwide to enjoy one final week of motion, before she ensured that the Great Dispatcher stopped dead, and the Order with him. She thought it would be crueler that way, and she was entirely correct.
It was this grave peril that brought the Order out of the shadows -- that led the now-legendary Agent 42, of Chicago, Illinois, to seek out Tom Morrow one night on his way home from the pictures with his best girl Jenny Wright, girl reporter for the Chicago Daily Herald. And so began the extraordinary seven-day chase around the world to find the Great Dispatcher. Tom and his team, seeking no reward save justice itself, battled the Luddite Legion in the catacombs of Rome and across the rooftops of Shanghai; on the decks of a freighter in the midst of a Pacific typhoon, and in the cabin of an airliner high above the Grand Canyon. And at last, in St. Louis, Missouri, on one of the two trains which Mme. Monkeywrench had set upon a collision course, to ensure that the Great Dispatcher ceased his earthly motion in the most spectacular fashion possible, Tom rescued the venerated head of the Order, and threw a spanner of his own into the works of Mme. Monkeywrench’s endgame.
The Mme. and her backwards-thinking hordes got their wish, if only on a more specific scale; they got to live out their remaining days in the dark, in a series of tiny cinderblock caves with bars on the doors and windows, utterly alone. And the Great Dispatcher bestowed upon Tom Morrow and his team the Order’s highest honor: the silver-and-amber signet rings, which would grant them immediate, efficient, and dedicated transportation from any Order member on Earth.
And so the Wheel turned, as it must, and things came full circle, as of course they should. And the ring found itself on Trip Morrow’s finger, and Trip and Sully found themselves in Agent 492’s cab, on their way up Michigan Avenue, toward discovery, and destiny, and most of all -- danger.
You see the Wheel’s presence on scales vast and microscopic. The motion of planets. The rotation of the Earth. The orbit of electrons around an atom.
The Wheel turns, and keeps turning, and brings all of us full circle, and keeps spinning. Each year is another turn of the wheel. So is each lifetime; wheels within wheels.
The Wheel is, perhaps even more than fire, the founding principle of civilization. The thing that connects us, that makes the world smaller, friendlier, more possible and subdivided.
The Order of St. Fiacre serves the workings of the Wheel and all who make its circuit. They serve in secret, in silence, at every minute of the day or night, in every city on the globe, and regions more remote. In taxis, in gondolas, in rickshaws and pedicabs, they keep watch over travelers on journeys long and short, mundane and world-shaking.
The Order began, perhaps surprisingly, in Paris, with the profession that shelters it. From the days when the hansom cabs first lined up outside the Hotel St. Fiacre, the Order has bent its will to the Wheel, and seen its passengers safely on their appointed journeys. All members of the Order are cab drivers, but not all cab drivers are members of the Order. (Should you, in your travels, ever encounter a particularly bad cabbie, kindly remember this.)
St. Fiacre is, of course, the patron saint of cab drivers. More dutiful members of the Order also find significance in his patronage of gardeners, those tireless sowers of the soil, attuned with the eternal cycle of seasons. The Wheel, again. More sarcastic members of the order take a certain delight in noting that St. Fiacre is also the patron saint of venereal disease.
There are 2,354 chapters of the Order of St. Fiacre on seven continents -- yes, seven. All toil in service of the Great Dispatcher, the aged and venerable head of the Order, who has pledged to remain ever in motion all the days of his life, whether in train cars or on airplanes or, most familiarly and comfortably, in the back seats of taxicabs. It is said that, should the Great Dispatcher ever stop moving, he would turn to dust. Many members of the Order will claim to have met the Great Dispatcher, and perhaps they have. (Agent 492 says he has a particular fondness for the deep-dish special from the original Pizzeria Due.) No one knows how old he is, or whether he is still the first and only Great Dispatcher, or the latest in a long and ever-changing line.
The Order’s official history marks 1929 as one of its darkest years -- the year of Mme. Monkeywrench and her Luddite Legion, who sought to drive the mass of man cringing back into the dark, into their solitary caves, on the theory that an ignorant and isolated people were all the more easily conquered. It was year of their unholy war against the Order and all it stood for, of derailments and crashes and a hundred dead cab drivers, Order members or not, in cities from Boston to Bangkok. And finally, most disastrously, the attack upon the Great Dispatcher’s private rail car outside Sioux Falls, and his abduction and captivity in Mme. Monkeywrench’s clutches.
She asked for no ransom. She gave no demands. She simply invited the members of the Order worldwide to enjoy one final week of motion, before she ensured that the Great Dispatcher stopped dead, and the Order with him. She thought it would be crueler that way, and she was entirely correct.
It was this grave peril that brought the Order out of the shadows -- that led the now-legendary Agent 42, of Chicago, Illinois, to seek out Tom Morrow one night on his way home from the pictures with his best girl Jenny Wright, girl reporter for the Chicago Daily Herald. And so began the extraordinary seven-day chase around the world to find the Great Dispatcher. Tom and his team, seeking no reward save justice itself, battled the Luddite Legion in the catacombs of Rome and across the rooftops of Shanghai; on the decks of a freighter in the midst of a Pacific typhoon, and in the cabin of an airliner high above the Grand Canyon. And at last, in St. Louis, Missouri, on one of the two trains which Mme. Monkeywrench had set upon a collision course, to ensure that the Great Dispatcher ceased his earthly motion in the most spectacular fashion possible, Tom rescued the venerated head of the Order, and threw a spanner of his own into the works of Mme. Monkeywrench’s endgame.
The Mme. and her backwards-thinking hordes got their wish, if only on a more specific scale; they got to live out their remaining days in the dark, in a series of tiny cinderblock caves with bars on the doors and windows, utterly alone. And the Great Dispatcher bestowed upon Tom Morrow and his team the Order’s highest honor: the silver-and-amber signet rings, which would grant them immediate, efficient, and dedicated transportation from any Order member on Earth.
And so the Wheel turned, as it must, and things came full circle, as of course they should. And the ring found itself on Trip Morrow’s finger, and Trip and Sully found themselves in Agent 492’s cab, on their way up Michigan Avenue, toward discovery, and destiny, and most of all -- danger.
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