Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  When all their plans were fully formed and vetted, Bran had returned home alone to Boston, leaving King and company to follow.

  Greeted warmly by Warner Gilead at their Charles Street manse, Bran had facilely unloaded an invented fable about his time in Brattleboro with the Slowey family, feeling immense chagrin and guilt all the while. He sought to salve his conscience by telling himself that his actions, although duplicitous, would have no adverse effect on Gilead, but only a positive effect for King, and the world in general.

  And now was nearly the time to carry the scheme out!

  A member of the Parker House staff caught everyone’s attention by hammering a small gong, thus summoning the partygoers to the collation laid out in the grand ballroom, a lush spread prominently featuring the famous Parker House Rolls and signature Boston Cream Pie.

  In the bright, large, high-ceilinged, pillared room, the guest of honor could be observed at last: big as life, luxuriantly bearded, straining the buttons of his waistcoat, alternately smiling and puffing on a cigar. General Grant held court as informally but as commandingly as if still on the battlefield.

  Warner Gilead corralled Bran. “Come, son, I want you to meet the General.”

  On his way across the room, Bran rotated the ring he wore, so that the sharp, jagged piece deliberately affixed to the band would project downward underneath his finger.

  Grant extended his hand. “So, Warner, this is the scion of House Gilead, hey? A fine young buck!”

  Bran clasped the General’s hand, then jerked his palm across Grant’s flesh, as if suffering a reflexive action from an excess of nerves.

  “I say, what a sting!”

  Bran had a handkerchief in his hand. “Oh, General, I’m so sorry!” He dabbed up blood from the shallow gash, then hastily repocketed the stained cloth.

  “No harm done, lad! ’Tis of no account compared to a Minié ball in the gut!”

  Bran made his excuses then and left, while Warner was busy introducing someone else.

  Feeling queasy, Bran hastened upstairs to Hedley King’s room.

  To his surprise, King had a companion other than Jellyneck: an overblown doxie, some woman of low virtue with exposed décolletage. But King introduced her to Bran with insouciance.

  “Roland, this is Trixibelle. She’s deigned to keep me company tonight.”

  “How’s it hanging, sweetie?”

  “But, but—”

  “No, don’t trouble yourself to comprehend; it’s all part of the plan. Now, you have the sample?”

  Bran handed over the bloody cloth. King trimmed out two small squares of crimson fabric and placed them in the Resonator.

  “Jellyneck’s blood already lies in one dominant drawer matched now with Grant’s submissive drawer. My blood is paired submissively with Grant’s second, dominant sample. Now, we just need to wait for the signal that our quarry is alone.”

  In less than twenty minutes came a knock from a Parker House servant, liberally bribed, betokening that he had observed General Grant hieing himself off to a secluded water closet.

  King instantly set the Morphic Resonator a-humming!

  In less than an eyeblink, Hedley King assumed the mortal form of General Ulysses S. Grant while, unseen several stories below them, Bran knew, Grant had morphed to the semblance of Jellyneck.

  “Ha!” exclaimed King in Grant’s very tones. “Let the General try to convince everyone of his identity now!”

  Bran regarded his birth-father with some trepidation. “Remember now, sir, you promised—”

  “Promises,” said King, “mean nothing to a politician! Jellyneck, secure him!”

  Bran was pinioned helplessly in a trice by the abnormally strong dwarf. King, wearing Grant’s phiz, swiftly drew blood from the lad with a pin.

  Then he pulled the locket from around Bran’s neck, painfully snapping the chain!

  King moved to the Morphic Resonator and opened three new pairs of drawers while the machine still whirred its infernal tune. He shouted like some cheap prestidigitator:

  “Bran to Jellyneck! Jellyneck to Bran! And Trixibelle to Pella!”

  Filial blood and maternal hair properly emplaced, drawers shut, and the evil deed was done!

  Again the dwarf had split the seams of his clothes, assuming Bran’s bulkier nature. Regarding himself in a mirror, feeling his own fine garments hanging loosely on his shrunken frame, Bran knew himself to be the spitting image of the dwarf.

  But worst of all, the common whore Trixibelle now wore the semblance of Bran’s dead mother!

  “Oooee, coo!” she trilled. “Ain’t I the Queen of Sheba now!”

  King addressed the transfigured Jellyneck. “Mr. Bran Gilead, please eject this hideous troll from my rooms!”

  Jellyneck stripped Bran’s clothes from him for his own use, leaving the lad in his floppy drawers and camise. Then Jellyneck-as-Bran picked up Bran-as-Jellyneck and hurled him out in the corridor, where he lay in broken-hearted funk.

  * * *

  The next day, several papers in the city—the Boston Daily Advertiser, Boston Evening Traveler, Boston Herald, and Boston Journal, among others—would report upon a most curious incident attendant upon General Grant’s reception.

  TWIN DWARVES DISTURB GRANT’S FETE

  MISSHAPEN BRAWLING HOOLIGANS EJECTED FROM PARKER HOUSE

  INTENTIONS OR ORIGIN OF GNOMISH INTRUDERS UNKNOWN

  CONSTABLES SEEK MISSING RUMPELSTILTSKINS

  These bulletins would be played lightly and for laughs, taken up in the same spirit by the newspapers’ eager readers, who could only find this three-days-wonder to be a most amusing diversion from more serious news.

  Of course, that was how the affair looked from the outside, the morning after. But while the contretemps was still in progress, and when you were one of the reviled and suspect dwarves, matters bulked considerably grimmer.

  After a minute or three, a bruised and shoeless Bran roused himself from his crumpled condition on the corridor floor. He knew better than to beat and rave upon the door to King’s room. The man’s treachery was complete and seamless, and without an iota of mercy. No, Bran’s only hope was to convince someone else of the true nature of affairs. Because if he did not, soon Hedley King would be inserting himself inextricably into General’s Grant’s entourage, assuming the future President’s identity entirely.

  Bran found the service stairway and descended to the kitchen. He met no one on the stairs or among the pots and pans and stoves, and the reason why soon became plain. All attention was focused on the outrageous scene in the ballroom.

  A dwarf wearing the loose-fitting garb of General Grant was raving at the center of an astonished and horrified crowd.

  “But I tell you, I am Ulysses S. Grant! Damn your eyes, I am!”

  Someone shouted in response, “It’s a Democratic prank!” Quickly a chorus of agreement sounded, accompanied by guffaws and oaths. Someone threw a Parker House Roll at the dwarf.

  And then General Grant himself appeared, or rather, the imposter Hedley King.

  “Restrain yourselves, folks! There’s no need to descend to the level of my jejune opponents!”

  That saucy affront was too much for Bran, and from the edge of the crowd he yelled out, “It’s true! That little man is General Grant, but bewitched!”

  Now all eyes turned to Bran.

  “There’s another one!” “Grab him!” “Make him confess!”

  Bran felt a cold spike of fear go through him, as women shrieked and fainted. But the reaction of the real General Grant was even more disconcerting. He clutched his head and shouted, “A second new me! I’m going mad!”

  Then the ensorcelled General Grant ran from the room, in a hailstorm of rolls and catcalls. Subjected to identical treatment, Bran had no recourse but to do the same.

  Outside on nighted School Street, Bran looked for his doppelganger, hoping to team up with the General. Bran could explain what had happened, and together they could devise and enact some
scheme to right matters.

  But the General, possessed by some temporary insanity, babbling nonsense, had continued to flee willy-nilly, and was nowhere to be seen.

  Bran ducked down an alley alongside the hotel. He knotted his shirt and trews at their hems so they would not fall off. Despite the summer temperatures, his bare feet and state of undress rendered him chilled. But he could not seek shelter. He had to appeal to his father, his last hope.

  Monitoring the front door of the hotel for hours, Bran shivered, coughed, and waited. Finally, Warner Gilead emerged.

  Bran dashed over to the millionaire, calling out, “Father, Father, it is I, your son, Bran! Take me with you to our Charles Street home!”

  Warner Gilead’s face assumed a look of absolute confounded horror. He held up a forbidding hand and averted his face. “Get back, get back, I have no connection with you!” The old man scrabbled out a cloth change purse and threw it at Bran’s bare feet. “Here, take this money and be gone!”

  Bran began to weep. “But, Father, don’t you recognize me?”

  At that moment, Jellyneck showed up. “Father, our carriage is here. What’s the matter?”

  “This vile beggar!”

  Jellyneck grinned cruelly, employing Bran’s own features. “Shall I trounce him, Father?”

  “No, no, just get us away from here!”

  With filial devotion, Jellyneck escorted Warner Gilead away, turning his head once to leer at Bran and stick out his tongue.

  Wearily, Bran bent to retrieve the change purse. Here was his patrimony from Warner Gilead. His legacy from Hedley King he wore in his flesh.

  The finest neighborhoods in the Athens of America, those precincts with their upstanding citizens that had congenially accommodated Bran all his life, proved generally inhospitable to a dirty, partially clothed, poverty-stricken, ranting dwarf. Likewise, the police took offense at his very existence. When they saw Bran, they began to shake their rattles to summon help, or charge at him with their six-foot-tall blue-and-white staves. They disseminated news of his travels via the police telegraph stations. Only Bran’s fleetness of foot helped him stay free. He felt oddly grateful to the original Jellyneck for keeping his physique well toned.

  Eventually, Bran ended up at the only place where his kind fit: Fort Hill, that bisected, steeply terraced den of turpitude and iniquity. He found cheap accommodations at a place called Mother Juniper’s Caravansary, where the insect lodgers far outnumbered the human ones. Obtaining some tawdry used clothes and holey shoes diminished his funds further.

  And so for three days Bran nursed in quiet his injured pride and shattered trust, eating the cheapest foods without appetite and ruminating on how he could regain his own estate and restore General Grant to his.

  Shutting off the Morphic Resonator and destroying it seemed the only adequate solution. Then all the altered people would instantly revert to their congenital forms. Even if Hedley King were ever able to rebuild the device and restock it with vril, he would surely be stymied from gaining the necessary biological samples he needed to wreak havoc, thanks to an awareness of his perfidy.

  But how to accomplish this! Bran did not even know for sure that the Resonator remained at the Parker House. Maybe King had secreted it in some safer location. Could he enlist the aid of a friend such as Baldrick Slowey, or one of his father’s employees, like Stan Lambeth? Unlikely. They would not believe such a fantastical story for one minute, especially issuing from the mouth of a strange dwarf.

  On the evening of third day of his fruitless cogitations, his money almost extinct, Bran lost all hope. He resolved to drown his cares with liquor, and then perhaps throw himself into the Bay. He began drinking at a place called Jimmy Tingle’s, and then charted a staggering course around Fort Hill’s gin mills.

  Long after midnight, he found himself in a seedy drinking place that seemed half-familiar to his fuzzed brain. But what did it matter? What did anything matter? He had been such a fool! Damn Hedley King! But damn Bran Gilead too!

  Only when a brawny fellow plopped down onto the low stool at the table beside him did Bran realize he must have been talking aloud.

  “Bran Gilead, you say. I knew him. Queer cuss. Hired me to burgle his own home.”

  Bran tried to focus his blurred vision and concentrate.

  “Bucko? Bucko MacMahon!”

  “Aye, that’s my name, don’t wear it out! Do I know you, runt?”

  “I’m Bran Gilead!”

  Bucko unleashed gales of laughter. When he had regained control of himself, he said, “You’ve come down in the world a notch or two, I see, since our last encounter. Well, Master Gilead, it’s been nice chatting with you, but I have to go now.” Bucko got to his feet.

  Inspired by desperation, Bran recited Bucko’s well-remembered apologetic note to him: “That warn’t no Adams-Hammond, but somethin newfangled what stubrinly resisted all me talents, so I used some guncotton, mayhaps a bit too much. But all’s well what ends well, I allus say!”

  Bucko sat back down. “How’d you come across that there missive?”

  His heart bursting with some small-renewed hope, his drunkenness burned away by eager anxiety, Bran laid out all that had happened to him. Then he sat back, feeling like a man who had staked his entire fortune on the single roll of a die.

  Bucko peered intensely at Bran, pulling at his stubbled chin for a while, before he finally spoke.

  “Well sir, I once knew a fellow from up the North Shore a ways who only came into his unnatural fishy heritage when he reached his majority, and what a difference that endowment made in his looks! So I’m more’n half-inclined to accept what you say as being halfway possible.”

  Bran had never been so grateful to anyone in his life. Out of all his friends and relatives and acquaintances, only this common thief had given him credit for telling the truth.

  “You’ll help me then?”

  “Aye, if there’s a suitable reward.”

  “You’ll get more gold than you can carry, Bucko—if we succeed! Now, here’s what we must do. First, find the Resonator, and then destroy it!”

  “Do you think if we follow your fetch, he’ll lead us there?”

  “Yes, that’s perfect! King, as General Grant, can’t be toting the ponderous thingummy around the country with him. It must still be here, with my imposter.”

  “Just leave it to me, laddie. There’s not a valuable item in Boston what don’t come under the lamps of me or my boys. Now, I don’t suppose you saved any funds for a yard of beer or three, did you? The night’s still young!”

  * * *

  Despite Bucko’s boast and his energetic ferreting, the Resonator proved distressingly hard to find. Days went by without a clue. Only when Bran applied his deductive mind to the dilemma did inspiration strike. The necessity to keep the Morphic Resonator supplied with a continuous diet of electricity was the key to its location. Jellyneck-as-Bran could hardly spend all his time cranking the dynamo to charge the cells. But where could a steady, reliable source of current be found?

  Right at the Gilead Toolmakers facility in Brighton, where a forward-looking manager named Norman Krim had been experimenting with the new technology’s applications to machine tools.

  Bucko reported back after Bran’s hunch. “Your fetch goes to a locked room at the Brighton works at least once a day, to check on something mighty important. Your Pa thinks he’s taking an interest in the family business.”

  “That’s it! Round up some helpers and we’ll go in there tonight.”

  * * *

  Bran winced when the lone watchman at the factory succumbed to a cosh upside the head. But that final obstacle to their goal could not be otherwise surmounted. Putting the guilt at the back of his mind for later grief, Bran hurried with Bucko and his two assistants to the door of the Resonator’s hiding place. Using a crowbar, Bucko snapped the hasp, and they were in—

  —to confront by lanternlight a grinning General Grant and Jellyneck-as-Bran, both men holdin
g pistols trained upon the door, guarding the humming Resonator where it sat on a worktable.

  The disloyal hired toughs turned and ran. The General let them go, confident of their silence regarding the illegal break-in. Bucko raised his crowbar menacingly, but thought better of it. Bran remained frozen in shock.

  Hedley King said, “Your friend’s inquiries were very crude, Roland. Mr. Lincoln’s new Secret Service men, tasked to guard me as a candidate, were told to be alert for such feints, reporting all such to me, and they did not question why. And so I was able to learn of your searches and to return here to protect my machine—and to chat with you.

  “I realize now that my plans will never be safe from your interference, until you are dead—or until you join me wholeheartedly. I regret imposing this grotesque mask upon you at the outset, but my reading of your nature convinced me you would not go along with my schemes. I don’t want to kill you, Roland. You’re my natural-born son after all. Just tell me you’ll embrace my cause, and you’ll soon be atop the world again, where we Kings rightfully belong.”

  Bran found his voice. “Your cause! Your cause is pure selfishness!”

  “No, Bran, it’s not. It’s the betterment of all mankind. Allow me to show you. Pella, step forth please.”

  From out of the shadows emerged Bran’s mother, the living, radiant, queenly image stepping forth from his cherished ambrotype. Bran’s heart caught in his throat.

  King said, “You see, son, already in this short time, with the aid of Grant’s pull, I’ve found a way to restore the soul. Pella, tell him.”

  The dulcet, refined voice of Bran’s mother said, “It is true, son. I am Pella Brannock Gilead that was.”

  Bran wanted desperately to believe. To have his mother restored to life—restored to his life, an offset to his superfluity of fathers. To feel free for the first time of the guilt of having caused her premature death by his very coming into being. Wasn’t that what he had been unconsciously seeking when he had so enthusiastically endorsed Hedley King’s researches and machinations?

  “Mother—I want to believe! Prove to me it’s true! Please tell me more.”

  To Bran’s acute senses, all the other interlocutors in the room seemed distant and suspended, as if they too hung on the words of the revenant woman. And if her first speech had been bland and calm, now her voice suddenly assumed a new dynamic emotional heft.