by Alan Gratz
“No thanks to us,” Dalton said. “It was all her.”
The nightmarish woman who’d spoken for him crossed the room to sit at Dalton’s table. Dalton pulled away from her in disgust and fright as she bared her razor-sharp teeth at him.
“Thirty days hath September,” she said.
Dalton was stunned. He gave the second half of the Society’s secret pass phrase automatically: “Seven heroes we remember. You’re—you’re a Septemberist?”
The woman signaled the barkeep for an ale. “Name’s Hellcat Maggie,” she told Dalton. “And you’re welcome.”
“Yes, thanks. I—” Dalton began, but she cut him off again.
“What in Hades did you think you were doing, showing up Kit Burns like that?”
“Showing him up?” Dalton said. “We saved his life!”
“Which amounts to the same thing here in the Five Points. You made him look like a whiffler in front of his gang. You can’t never do that, not and expect to live. Kit Burns is one brickbat away from being knocked off his precious hill, and he knows it. Every gang chief knows it.”
“You’d think he’d be grateful,” Dalton said.
Hellcat Maggie slammed her brass claws into the wooden table, making Dalton jump. “Getting saved by some fancy-jack from Philadelphia doesn’t help his reputation as a hackum. There’s no honor here, no matter what they make you swear. Only ego.”
Dalton didn’t know what a “fancy-jack from Philadelphia” was, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a compliment.
“Well, I’m one of the gang now,” he told her.
Maggie huffed. The pretty barmaid Dalton had seen when he’d entered brought Maggie her ale. Dalton tried to give the barmaid another of his patented smiles, but this time she kept her eyes on the floor. Hellcat Maggie caught him trying to chat -up the girl and scowled at him.
“Why am I a dancer? And what’s this ‘black joke’ I swore my undying loyalty to?” Dalton asked when the barmaid was gone.
“A dancer’s a shooting star. A fellow what don’t stay in one place too long. You moved from Philadelphia still a young man. You’re a dancer. The Black Joke is the Dead Rabbits’ fire engine. All the gangs have one. Love their fire engines more’n their girls, they do,” Maggie said.
If they all look like you I can imagine why, Dalton thought.
“So, what’dya think?” Maggie asked.
“About the fire engine?”
“No, you muttonhead. About the monster!”
“Oh! Marvelous,” Dalton said. “Absolutely marvelous. A Manglespawn, to be sure. Not a product of the original Mangleborn/human pairing, I’d say. It looks too human for that. What do you think, Mr. Rivets?”
“I concur, Master Dalton,” the machine man said. “Fourth generation Manglespawn. Perhaps fifth. A descendant of the Mangleborn whom Iroquois mythology calls Tawiscara, and whom the Greeks and Romans called Prometheus.”
“The fire-breathing Mangleborn? The one Heracles set loose when he lost his mind? You think he’s chained to the bedrock underneath New Rome?” Dalton said excitedly. “That’s an interesting theory, Mr. Rivets. If that’s true, we might—”
Hellcat Maggie hissed at him. “I didn’t send in that report to the Society so they’d send me some bookworm and his walking ‘cyclopedia. I want to know how to quash it!”
“Well, it will take time to study it first,” Dalton said.
Maggie slammed her empty mug down with a thump. “If you don’t have any answers, I can take care of Mose meself.”
“Oh, really?” said Dalton “I didn’t see you or anyone else taking care of him today. Who was it who kept him from killing everyone? Oh, wait, that’s right. It was me.”
Hellcat Maggie growled, but she didn’t argue with him.
“Who was the little man giving him orders?” Dalton asked.
“Mohawk dwarf named Tihkoosue.” Hellcat Maggie spat on the floor. “Just a dog eating scraps off the Bowery Boys’ floor until Mose came along.”
“Any idea why Mose listens to him?”
“‘Cause he’s stupid?”
“Or when Mose will return?”
“When he feels like it?” Maggie shrugged. “Next big rumpus, I guess. He doesn’t always come out. Fights, then disappears for a while. Lays low.”
“That Hellcat Maggie’s nothing but a dilapidated, bandy-legged bint,” someone across the room said, loud enough that no one in the bar could fail to hear it, least of all Maggie.
Maggie knocked her mug to the floor, shattering it as she stood. “Come and say that to my mazzard, you maggot-arsed jackanapes!”
Hellcat Maggie and another Yankee woman wearing a man’s pants and galluses threw themselves at each other, and within moments there was a circle of cheering, jeering Dead Rabbits around them, and Dalton and Mr. Rivets were alone.
“I’ll just wait here then, shall I?” Dalton said to the empty seat across from him.
“Ms. Maggie’s information, though abridged, does give us something to go on,” Mr. Rivets said. “Does the monster’s absences mean it requires extended periods of rest and recuperation? A kind of hibernation?”
Dalton’s eyes fell on the pretty barmaid across the room. While everyone else was occupied with the fight between Hellcat Maggie and her attacker, the barmaid stuffed a sack full of bread and cheese stolen from behind the bar. She gave the mob a quick glance to make sure no one had seen her, then disappeared out the back door.
“Or perhaps instead of generous amounts of sleep,” Dalton said, “Mose requires someone to bring him copious amounts of food.”
The pretty barmaid carried her sack of food through the back alleys of the Five Points, which were even more wretched than its main arteries. Dalton was tempted to pull his handkerchief from his pocket and cover his mouth and nose again against the stench, but he knew that would give him away as an outsider. In places the alleys were shoe-top deep in steaming filth and mud, and drunkards and madmen haunted the back doors to tenements little more inviting than the streets.
Dalton and Mr. Rivets hid behind a stack of empty barrels as the barmaid stopped at an open manhole cover and looked around to see if she was being followed. Something rustled in the barrels—man or beast, Dalton didn’t know, and didn’t want to know—but he held his ground until the barmaid slipped down a ladder into the hole.
“Looks like I’ll have to go it alone from here,” Dalton told Mr. Rivets, and the machine man agreed to meet him back at the Dead Rabbits’ headquarters in Sportsman’s Hall.
Dalton gripped his father’s raygun tightly, made sure the aggregator was full, and descended into darkness. The ladder led down into a dank, moss-covered stone tunnel with a trickle of water running down the middle. Just ahead, Dalton could see lantern light moving away from him. He hurried to stay close.
The tunnels were narrow and old—a relic of the Roman city that had been there hundreds of years before. Now the brass tubes of New Rome’s pneumatic post ran through them, but old Roman numerals still marked the corners, and broken glass domes appeared every few yards along the walls. Lektric lights, Dalton guessed. He’d seen evidence of such things before in other ruins, but didn’t understand how they worked. That was the province of the Septemberist Society’s tinkers—and they understood lektricity only so far as to know what to sabotage when they saw somebody developing it.
Dalton moved as quickly as he dared through the dark tunnel, more than once putting his foot down on something that squeaked in protest. The light up ahead waned. He turned a corner, and suddenly he was in complete and utter darkness. There was no hint of the barmaid’s lantern from any direction.
“Damnation,” Dalton whispered. He spun in the darkness, trying to see more than two feet in front of him. When he stopped, he realized he’d turned himself around so much he didn’t even know which way he’d come in. Not that he could remember all the turns he’d taken to get there. He cursed himself for being a fool.
The tunnel suddenly flooded with li
ght, and Dalton threw his arm up to shield his eyes. Someone wrenched the raygun from his hand and stepped back, the person’s feet splashing in the thin water.
“What’s your chant?” a young woman’s voice asked him.
“My what?”
“Your name, noddle. Who are you?”
“Who are you?” Dalton asked, the light still too bright to do more than squint.
“I’m the girl who has your raygun pointed at you,” she said. “Now what’s your story?”
“My name is Dalton Dent.” Dalton could only blink, and still had to shield his eyes with his arm. He couldn’t see who he was talking to. “How did you know I was here?”
The girl laughed. “You make more ruckus than your bolt bucket. Why were you following me?”
So it was the barmaid. Even better. Dalton had been trained to track and kill all manner of monsters, but a girl of twenty had bested him without a fight. It was a red-letter day for the Society’s newest solo agent.
“Why were you following me?” the girl asked again.
“I saw you stealing food back at Sportsman’s Hall. I thought—I thought perhaps you were taking it to Mose.”
“The Bowery Boys’ monster? Are you playing the Mad Tom? Is that really what you thought?”
“Well … yes.”
“Come on,” the girl said. “I’ll show you who the kitchen physic is for.”
The stars in Dalton’s eyes cleared as the barmaid carried the lantern away from him. Dalton followed the girl down another tunnel until they came out into a larger, more open chamber where multiple tunnels converged. Here, under the smoky glow of torches set into the broken glass domes of the Romans’ lektric lights, lived perhaps two dozen children. At the sight of the barmaid they leapt up from their straw pallets and crawled out from inside their overturned barrels to rush her, their grubby hands grabbing for the sack she carried. None of them was over the age of ten. They were doleful things, gaunt and grimy and hollow-looking, a few of them Yankees but more of them First Nations. Apparently the girl didn’t hold to the Dead Rabbits’ prejudices against the other tribes.
“Share,” the barmaid said as the children pulled the sack from her hands. “Share. I mean it. I have a raygun now.” She brandished Dalton’s raygun, more to embarrass him than to impress the children, Dalton thought, for though they showed dutiful awe they really only had eyes for the food.
“Are they all orphans?” Dalton asked.
“Only a few,” the barmaid said. “Their parents don’t want them, won’t feed them, so they take to the streets. Become palmers and sneak-thieves. The gangs’ll take them in one day, give them a purpose, such as it is, but not until they’re old enough to scrap. Until then, only the sweatshops have a use for them.” She took a small girl in her arms and held her while the girl gnawed on a heel of bread. “A straw pallet in a sewer is better than that, any day.”
It was incredible to Dalton that there were still sweatshops that used human labor in the city, but machine men were expensive and human life was cheap. Especially here in the Five Points.
“You take care of them all?” Dalton asked.
“The ones who end up here. I bring them peck when I can. They scavenge and hook the rest.” She sang to the little girl. “Poloma put the kettle on, Poloma put the kettle on, Poloma put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea.”
“That nursery rhyme,” Dalton said, “why did you sing it just now?”
The barmaid frowned and shrugged. “No reason. I often sing it. Why?”
“It’s no matter,” Dalton said.
The barmaid looked about at the children stuffing their faces with bread and cheese. “Where’s Etlelooaat?” she asked the children. None of them answered her. “Harriet, where’s Etlelooaat?”
A grungy little girl pointed into the darkness at the far side of the room.
The barmaid looked as though Mose had just swallowed one of the children. “No! Not another one!”
“What is it?” Dalton asked.
The barmaid put down the girl she carried and stepped away from the children. “Some of them hear voices,” she said. “The weak ones, mostly, though I confess I’ve heard it once or twice too. Whispering to me. Calling me down into the old tunnels, farther below. The voice of evil. But you’ll never believe me.”
Dalton assured her that he did. And he knew just whose call it was they were hearing. Or more precisely, what’s call.
“Once they go down there, they never come back,” the barmaid said. “Well, not this time. I’m going to find him.”
The young woman picked up her lantern to go, but Dalton stopped her. “You can’t,” he told her. “You’re right—there is something evil down there. Something that calls to the weak-minded. The same something that makes the gangs of the Five Points fight incessantly. They’re called the Mangleborn.” She was on the front lines, as it were. She deserved to know. So he told her everything. He told her how the Mangleborn—giant, misshapen monsters that fed on lektricity—had been in the world since before the dawn of man, and how they rose from their slumber every few hundred years to destroy civilization each time humanity covered the world with lektric generators and lektric wires. He told her how a new League of Seven—seven super-powered heroes from all over the world—always arose to put the Mangleborn back down, and how the Septemberist Society had been founded in the wake of the last cataclysm centuries ago to monitor the Mangleborn, kill their Manglespawn, and keep the world from rediscovering lektricity, all in the hope that the titans would never rise again and a new League would never be needed.
To his surprise, the barmaid believed him. To his frustration, she didn’t care.
“I’m going anyway,” she said. “I’m not going to lose another one. Besides: I have a raygun now.”
She headed toward the darkness at the far end of the room, aether pistol pointed at the ceiling.
“Damn it all,” Dalton said, catching up to her, “at least tell me your name if I’m going to march with you to my death.”
“It’s Agatha,” she told him. “Agatha Lowry.”
They found where he lived a half an hour later, deep down inside the tunnels.
Not where Etlelooaat lived. The boy was still nowhere to be found.
This was the room of a giant.
It was like something out of a fairy tale. Or a perversion of one. In one corner was an enormous table cobbled together from shipping pallets and scrap lumber, too high and too broad for a human being to use. Beneath it, in lieu of a chair, was an oaken wine cask a man could have stood inside. In another corner was something like a nest, a round bed of sticks and trash and mildewed blankets with an imprint in it the size of a steam mule.
In the other two corners were bones.
Along most of one wall, iron construction rods had been driven into the hard-packed dirt floor to create small cells. Within these cells were bodies. Bones. The remains of children.
There were four of them. Two were mere skeletons, their bodies and clothes long since decomposed. In another was a skeleton stretched tight with leathery skin, its lips drawn back from its teeth in a horrible smile. A First Nations boy, from the looks of him. In the last was the body of a young Yankee girl with a dirty white dress and a head full of blonde curls, her rotting body still fresh enough to be home to a million crawling things.
None of them had been Agatha’s children, but she wept for them anyhow. Dalton was more interested in the symbols and drawings painted red with blood on the wall behind the children.
“Lemurian, I think,” he said. “Though I’ve only seen a fragment of a single page of it before. I’ve no idea what any of it says.”
“There are no doors,” Agatha said.
“No what?”
“No doors. To the cells. Just bars. They were put here to stay,” she said, her hands on the bars. “To never get out again.”
Dalton moved on to the other set of bones in the corner. This skeleton was not trapped behind iron bars, and wh
atever it had been, it was monstrous. Its skull was wide and stunted, like a mushroom cap, with a mouth full of too many teeth that were too big around and too flat. The thing’s massive legs bent backwards, not forward, and its hands were more like the toes of an elephant. Its rib cage could have been a grown man’s prison.
“What is this place?” Agatha asked.
Dalton bent down to trace the outline of an enormous footprint in the dirt. “It’s his room,” he whispered. He looked over his shoulder at the doorway, half expecting to see the monster striding through it. “Mose. He lives here.” A chill passed over him, and he fought to control his fear. “Or he did until very recently,” he said, noticing the thin layer of dust that covered every surface. “Perhaps it’s where he grew up. But now he’s gone above ground. Taken in by a gang, like your orphans one day.”
“And this?” she said, looking at the bones in the corner.
“His mother?” Dalton guessed.
Agatha hugged herself. “He captured these children. Kept them like … like pets. And then quashed them.”
“All the more proof that he’s a monster,” Dalton said. “A monster I need to find a way to kill. But we have to find your boy first. Let’s go.”
Etlelooaat was in a room just beyond the place where Mose had grown up. He stood at the far end of a large, domed cavern, using a broken piece of brick to chip away methodically and uselessly at a stone door. Around the walls of the room hung seven giant copper cylinders, each attached to a central point in the ceiling by pipes as thick as Dalton’s head.
Agatha ran across the wooden floor to Etlelooaat and took him up in her arms. He was a tiny Algonquin boy in ragged pants and a torn, filthy shirt, his eyes distant and unfocused. Dalton knew that look. The boy was hearing the Call of a Mangleborn.
“His skin, Dalton. Look,” Agatha said. She pulled back his tattered sleeves. All over the boy were symbols and markings like the ones on the wall in Mose’s room. Ancient Lemurian cyphers and ideograms carved into his skin with the sharp edge of a stone. The wounds were still fresh. “Who did this to him?” Agatha asked.