“Was she?” I said. “Was she worth dying for? Worth killing for?”
“Yes!” he said. “She was. Anyway, they got what they deserved.” The stars above darkened, and the braids of crystalline light floating all around us began to crack and crumble as they collided, leaving sprays of sharp, brittle shards to glide weightlessly through the skies like flocks of wicked birds. “We all got what we deserved.”
“Did Jenny?” My ire was nearly boiling.
The earth shook as the cogs in the distance suddenly ground to a halt. Carson breathed in and out slowly, his eyes downcast.
“What do you know about Jenny?”
“Jenny is a dear friend, Mr. Carson. So tell me, do you really think she got what she deserved?”
“Jenny.” His head came up. His voice had lost its edge, and he looked as though he had been punched in the gut. “You’ll have to tell me,” he said. “Is she . . . is she happy?”
“Happy?” His concern seemed so earnest. I faltered. “You don’t know what happened to her, do you?”
“How could I know?” he said. “I did what I could to protect her, but in the end all I could do was hope the bastards would not come after my Jenny, too. I’ve taken comfort in the fact that she has not joined me yet, but there is not a day that passes that I don’t worry that the mistakes of my past will be the ruin of her future.”
I tried to make sense of what Carson was saying. “Then . . . there was no other woman?”
“What? Never.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carson. I think you’ll have to start from the beginning.”
Carson nodded. The world around us melted away. The planets above faded to black. We hovered in empty space. “They are called the Dire Council,” said Carson.
As he spoke, a familiar structure rose up around us. Tall walls stretched up on all sides, and soon we were inside the cavernous Buhmann building.
“How are you doing this?” I asked.
“Practice,” said Carson dolefully. “I have relived each moment of it in my own mind often enough. It is no great undertaking to recreate the details for you now.”
I gazed around me. This time the building was not empty but was filled with complex machinery and busy with workers moving to and fro. A familiar fat man with a curly mustache walked the floor like a foreman, his secretary scurrying after him with her clipboard. It felt like being inside Jenny’s memories, but this time my head did not ache.
“The Dire Council,” Carson repeated. “Mayor Poplin simply called them his benefactors, and for many months I knew them as nothing else, but I do pay attention. At first the work was glorious. I was encouraged to pursue the projects that inspired me. I was given raw materials and seemingly limitless funding. Gradually, though, directives came down with increasing specificity.”
The Buhmann building fell beneath us, and we were suddenly floating over New Fiddleham. We coasted until we reached a stretch of paving stones I knew very well indeed—but 926 Augur Lane looked different. The garden was symmetrical and dotted with common rhododendrons instead of the more exotic fare I had become accustomed to. The structure of the building was simpler, as well. It was not the house of the mad detective I had come to know, riddled with irregularities and architectural augmentations—it was simply a house.
“Jenny’s instincts were keener than mine,” Carson said as we neared. “She wasn’t comfortable with any of it. She wanted me to leave the project. I agreed with her, although later than I should have. We were going to be married in the spring, and I was fretting about saving enough money to support us. Jenny only fretted about saving me from myself. I went to Mayor Poplin and told him I was done. I thanked him for the opportunity and I left, just like that. But when I came to meet Jenny again the next day, she was acting strangely.”
We drifted over New Fiddleham, and I spotted them in the street below. Jenny Cavanaugh was skipping down the cobbles ahead of Carson. He was stumbling to catch up, calling after her, imploring her to wait, but she kept constantly ahead of him so that as he turned each corner she was always just dashing around the next.
“It wasn’t really her,” I said.
“No. It wasn’t,” Carson confirmed. “I should have known. I did know. Something inside me was screaming, but it was Jenny’s face—it was Jenny’s voice.”
Augur Lane whipped away, and we soared over the rooftops again until we came to a massive red brick building with a tall domed tower. It was incomplete, still encased in scaffolding, but once finished it would be easily one of the tallest buildings in the city. It sat on a hillside not far from Mayor Spade’s neighborhood. Six or seven workers were struggling to move an elaborately constructed piece of machinery through a broad front doorway. I recognized the apparatus as one of the contraptions Carson and his associates had been assembling back in the Buhmann building in the Inkling District.
“I don’t know that building,” I said. “I’ve been all over New Fiddleham, and I’ve never seen it. Is it an observatory?”
“Mayor Poplin told us it was to be New Fiddleham’s grand new Technology Center,” Carson replied, “and I believed him. Maybe he believed it himself, I don’t know. The Dire Council had other ideas.”
We floated down until we were inside the building, where a colossal mechanical construct was taking shape. Owen Finstern’s portable device was like a weed to an oak tree compared to that wonder of steel and copper and glass. Wheels spun and boilers hissed. Now and then a spray of sparks would burst from within the belly of the metal beast and workers would scramble to correct the problem.
“I followed her right into the heart of this place before she abandoned the ruse,” said Carson.
Beneath us, the woman’s hair rippled and lightened to a strawberry blonde. She spun around and Jenny’s face was gone. I had never met the stranger, but something about her was eerily familiar. She had a hard chin and bright green eyes—the left ever so slightly higher than the right. The asymmetry struck a chord in my memory. She slipped out with a cruel laugh and slammed the door behind her.
“I tried to run, but it was too late,” continued Carson. “The council’s liaison was there, waiting. He was a despicable cretin, pale as death with a nasty temper.”
“Pavel,” I said as the pale man stepped out of the shadows.
“You’ve met?” said Carson.
“I may have planted a brick in his face earlier.”
“I can see why Jenny likes you,” Carson said. “Pavel told me that if I finished my task, no harm would come to Jenny.”
“He was lying.”
“Of course he was lying,” said Carson. “And even greater harm would come to a lot of people if I gave them what they wanted. I had never seen all the parts assembled—I hadn’t dreamed that they were ever meant to be. I thought that all of us were working on separate projects. Andrews was developing a power generator with a capacity ten times the ones they were installing up in Crowley. Shea and Grawrock were turning the most far-fetched theories about energy field manipulation into realities, and Diaz had stumbled on a breakthrough in a wavelength transmission amplification that was going to make the most advanced studies in radio waves look like tin cans and bits of twine.”
“And you?” I asked.
We floated down through the ceiling into a jumbled workroom. “The human mind,” Carson’s spirit answered. “Our full and limitless potential.” The Carson from the past was beneath us, working frantically as the windows behind him bled from deep orange to a rich crimson in the light of the setting sun. He set down a file and blew metal shavings from a piece of meticulously machined steel, peering at it intently in the warm light.
“You didn’t think it was perhaps a tad dangerous to go tinkering with the human mind using metal files and rolls of copper wire and all that?”
“I know it sounds mad. I guess it was—but it was meant to do great things. My final thesis at university had been designed to quell the surging fashion of mysticism and the occult, but I encountered
the strangest results in my studies. Even those purveyors who openly admitted to dealing in smoke and mirrors seemed to be doing more good than ill. Thaumaturgy and hokum saw recovery times plummet and chronic illnesses recede. Against all reason, I saw faith trump medical logic time and time again.
“That’s where my real studies began. I pored over Haygarth’s essays on the placebo effect and exchanged correspondences with Richard Caton in Liverpool about cerebral activity. It’s all electricity, you see. The brain is essentially an electrical machine, regulating the rest of the body. Mind over matter. The human brain has the power to do amazing things—even surpass the furthest limits of the flesh—and it does so through electrical impulses. Given adequate stimulation, there are very few boundaries we can’t push past. Empower the mind, empower the body.”
“Please tell me you didn’t electrocute people’s brains to make them healthier.”
“No, no, it was a field of influence, not a direct current. Electrical impulses can be amplified or dampened through the precise manipulation of concurrent energies. It was an exciting project. The early results were mixed, though. Some subjects responded astonishingly well to the treatment—increased strength, speed, stamina, even heightened motor skills and capacity for problem solving. A few showed adverse results, though—lethargy, and a sort of hypnotic state that left patients highly susceptible to suggestion.”
“I can think of a few things a sinister organization could do with a super-scientific machine that can brainwash targets with the push of a button,” I said.
“Jenny had precisely the same concerns, but neither one of us had any sense of the scope. They were putting all of it together—all of our designs were culminating into one machine. They weren’t housing an observatory; they were building a transmitter, one that overlooked a bustling metropolis. I began to understand it when I could finally see the thing up close. The power, the control, the range—it was a weapon unlike the world had ever seen. Or it was going to be.”
“What did you do?”
“I did what they had brought me to do. I worked on my part of the machine. Pavel was my watchdog, but it was a wonder that simpleton could even work the buttons on his coat—he had no idea what I was creating. He watched me build it. He even helped. He had the chemicals I asked for delivered by the barrelful. By the time I had finished, it was too late to undo what I had done.”
“The explosion! You’re the one who sabotaged Poplin’s project! That was you!”
We were hovering outside the building again now. The neighborhood was coated in velvet darkness until the bomb went off with the light of a miniature sun right in the heart of the city. Cogs and pipes and bricks rocketed past, and when the light died down enough to see anything, the building had been reduced to rubble and fused scraps of metal. A broad sheet of steel halfway down the hillside shifted, and out from underneath it crawled Howard Carson.
“You survived!” I said.
“Nearly—but we wouldn’t be having this conversation if I had, now would we?” said Carson’s ghost. Below us, a second figure whipped in front of Howard Carson with inhuman speed. Pavel’s hair looked even thinner from above. He was short, and his clothes were old and frayed, but that made him no less intimidating as he rounded on the battered scientist.
Pavel was enraged. He gripped Carson’s shirtfront and held the man’s feet off the ground as he roared a stream of curses at him. Carson attempted to land a punch across the pale man’s face, but Pavel batted his fist away like it was a pesky fly. Carson groaned. His hand hung at an unnatural angle from the wrist. Pavel snarled. Two sharp fangs glistened in the moonlight, and in another second they were buried in Carson’s throat.
Beside me, Carson’s ghost chuckled.
“You just died!” I said. “What about that is funny?”
“My last invention,” the spirit replied. “It was crude, but effective.” He nodded down at the scene and I saw Pavel reel backward. The vampire howled in pain and surprise, clutching at his mouth. When his hand dropped I saw that he was missing a tooth.
The Carson standing beneath us grinned at the small victory. It was a tired, defiant smile, as though he knew it would be his last. Just beneath his collar glinted a glimmer of bronze. In another instant the pale man was upon him again. He ripped a concealed metal guard off of Carson’s neck and hurled it down the hill with a clatter. His fingers buried themselves in the man’s jugular and the scene went suddenly black.
Howard Carson’s ghost hung in the empty void beside me. “And here we are,” he said.
“That was very noble of you.”
Carson shrugged. “I was a dead man anyway. I couldn’t leave my Jenny with that awful machine hanging over her. The Dire Council had made me their puppet, but I would be damned if they were going to use my life’s work to make puppets out of everyone I ever loved. It’s best he finished me off, really. If I had managed to escape they would have come for me. They would have come through Jenny to get me. This is better. I hope she’s living a happy life without me.”
I cringed. “She hasn’t been entirely unhappy,” I hedged.
“What is it?”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Carson,” I said. “You did the right thing, but Jenny was already—” I swallowed. “They had already come for Jenny, long before you demolished the building.”
Carson’s expression hardened. “No. She isn’t dead. I would have felt her cross over. I’ve searched!”
“She didn’t cross over,” I said. “She waited for you. She’s up above. She’s outside the gate right now.”
Carson’s eyed scrutinized my face as though searching for a lie.
“It’s true,” I said. “Come with me! Come and see for yourself. And I have more than enough obols left to pay the boatman to ferry us both.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could, Mr. Carson, and you should. You did the right thing all those years ago—but it isn’t over yet. Help us stop the Dire Council from using your research. Help us lay your past mistakes to rest once and for all. Besides,” I added, “you’ve left Jenny waiting long enough, don’t you think?”
Hope crept into Howard Carson’s eyes tentatively, feeling out the unfamiliar territory like a flame exploring the contours of a still-green branch. When it took hold at last it burned hot. “Take me with you.”
Chapter Thirty
We descended the stairs toward the fiery azure light of the river. I felt gravity returning with each step until my feet once again found solid purchase on the rocky stairs. It was as though my soul knew that it belonged in those dark tunnels in a way that it had not belonged in Carson’s private corner of the hereafter. As we approached the dock, I could see the ferryman’s slender ship already approaching. I pulled out Jackaby’s leather purse and passed it over to Carson.
“Here, take one of these,” I said. “You’ll need it for the trip.” Carson peeked inside and pulled out the petrified string of sheepgut. “Why will I need this?”
I grabbed the strip and stuffed it in my pocket. “Not that—a coin. Take one of the coins to pay your passage.”
Carson nodded and took out an obol. His eyes were on the water as he passed the pouch back to me.
Charon was pressing toward us with measured strokes. He was nearly at the platform before I realized the boatman was not alone. A tall figure stood in the boat behind him. The stranger wore a crimson shirt framed by a pristinely tailored suit in a shade of midnight black so pure that I could barely tell where his jacket ended and the darkness of the cavern began. Trying to make out any details made my eyes hurt.
I was so preoccupied watching their approach that at first I did not notice Howard Carson nearing the water’s edge ahead of me. Tendrils of blue and black writhed within the flames at his feet, churning and swelling as he stepped up to the shoreline.
“Wait! Mr. Carson, don’t—” I called out, but I was too late. He was leaning over, inspecting the ethereal flames, when an eager coil unfurled itself like a
whip and snapped around his neck. Carson was hauled face-first into the Stygian waters.
I threw myself forward and seized his legs, pulling back with all my strength. The surface boiled spitefully in response to my efforts. Inches from my skin, the tendrils of liquid flame danced and taunted. I braced my feet against the dusty shore, but Carson only slid down farther. In the dark water below, the undulating forms took shape. Countless scores of marble gray hands—hands with too many fingers—all strained and grasped at him, clutching at his shirt and tugging him down by his hair. I pulled and kicked at the earth, but with all my strength I could not draw him back. I had taken Howard Carson from his eternal reward and delivered him to this.
And then things got worse.
As I struggled in vain, the leather purse shook and shifted in my grip. I was just adjusting my hands for another effort when the coins slipped out. My arms were full of Carson, and I could do nothing but watch dismally as the little obols spun end over end through the air to sink—plop, plop—into the dark water. At the same moment, Carson slid several inches farther down and a chilling cold clutched my wrist.
It had me. I realized with sickening clarity that the waters would claim us next. Plop, plop—just like the coins, we would fall into the darkness, never to be seen again.
Charon’s boat clunked against the old boards a little ways away. Out of the corner of my eye I half registered that the dark stranger had stepped smoothly ashore. I heard footsteps tapping on wood, and then crunching across the dusty ground. The man’s shoes reflected the roiling sapphire firelight in the shine of their polished leather as he drew up beside me.
“That’s enough,” he said calmly. His voice was fathoms deep and profoundly resonant. I felt it vibrating in my chest almost as much as I heard it. Instantly, the forces beneath the surface released their hold and I fell over backward. Carson burst, gasping and sputtering, out of the water in front of me.
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