Hero of the Five Points
Page 5
The truth, Dalton knew, was somewhere between legend and reality.
“Revisionist history,” Dalton told Agatha as they stood arm in arm, waiting with Mr. Rivets for the submarine ferry that would take them across the Hudson to the Palisades Airship Park in Jersey. “The same way humanity can take the true story of a colossal fire-breathing Mangleborn chained to a rock and turn it into a mythical titan who brought the knowledge of fire to mankind. We like to temper our horrors, don’t we? Though we don’t always turn them into the heroes of comic operas.”
“Mose had a good heart,” Agatha pointed out.
Mose single-handedly killed more than 450 people, most of them in hideously alarming ways, Dalton wanted to argue, but he enjoyed the warm sensation standing arm-in-arm with Agatha gave him, and was loath to ruin it. And Mose had, in his stunted, simpleminded way, protected the children of the Five Points. Even the dead children in his lair. He hadn’t kidnapped them, they realized later. The children had gone into the tunnels because they heard the Call of the Mangleborn beneath the city, and Mose had saved them from marching mindlessly to their deaths in the puzzle traps the only way his tiny brain knew how: by putting them behind bars. That too was why he softened at the sight of Agatha at the Old Brewery—it wasn’t that she looked like his doll, but that they both looked like children. It was why he’d taken orders from a dwarf, and run into a burning building again and again and again until he had burned himself to death. Mose had loved children.
Agatha’s arm aside, Dalton was forced to admit that perhaps some monsters could also be heroes.
“And your Septemberist Society? They’ll take care of the orphans?” Agatha asked for the hundredth time that day.
“Our Septemberist Society,” Dalton reminded her, for Agatha, much to his heart’s delight, had decided to leave her home in the Five Points and return to Philadelphia with him and join the Septemberist Society. She wanted to study ancient Atlantean and Mu and Lemurian with him and save the world from monsters. Not that she had any real home to go back to. The fire from the Five Points Riot burned day and night for a week, taking out everything from Canal Street in the north to Broadway in the west to City Hall and the Tombs in the south. Punishment, Dalton considered it, for city officials barricading the Five Points and letting it burn. “And yes, the Society will find homes for them all. They frequently do the same for other children orphaned by Mangleborn or Manglespawn. Perhaps one day they’ll grow up to be Septemberists themselves.”
“And Edison?” Agatha asked.
“I’ve given the Society a complete report on him. They’ll keep an eye on him, you can be sure,” Dalton told her as they stepped aboard the submarine, away from the Five Points and toward their future together. “You needn’t worry, my dear. Edison won’t be raising any Mangleborn or creating any golems with the strength of a hundred men. Not while the Septemberist Society is on the case.”
Copyright © 2014 by Alan Gratz
Art copyright © 2014 by Red Nose Studio
eISBN: 978-1-4668-8208-9
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