by Damien Love
Alex forced himself to start moving before he had time talk himself out of it. He worked at the spring-heels with fast, trembling fingers until he had them fastened around his own feet. He examined the harness, then pulled the painting across his back.
On the roof across from him, the tall man suddenly stiffened, peered, crouched.
Alex cinched the buckle tight at his waist. Too late. The shadow had launched in a high, arcing jump. The leaping figure passed over him and landed close behind.
Alex turned to face him, only to be knocked aside as Kingdom came sprinting past, her dogs right behind her. Without breaking stride, she pulled her rapier from its sheath on her back.
“Go, Alex, get it away!”
The tall man swung his knife at her in a ferocious swipe. In one fluid motion, Kingdom ducked, moved forward, and thrust at his throat. He backed up. She attacked again, dodged another lethal blow—then her foot slipped on the wet ground and she was on her back.
The tall man closed in. One of the dogs bolted from the pack.
“Maia!” Kingdom shouted. “No! Stay!”
The big animal ignored her. It crouched to leap. The man flung a savage fist to meet it—but it was as if the dog had predicted his reaction, because she feinted left, only jumping when the tall man had already started his swing and was off-balance. Maia pounced and crashed into him with all four paws, sending him sprawling. The dog skipped safely away, trotting happily back to her owner.
“Bad girl,” Kingdom said affectionately. “Alex, just get it out of here! I’ll hold him off.”
Alex started running back across the road toward the old museum as fast as he could, although with the heavy equipment at his ankles, it was more an ungainly stumble. He glanced up, urgently calculating distance and height. He crouched, turned his heels in the motion he hoped would engage the mechanism, and pushed hard.
Alex leapt.
XXXI.
OVER STUTTGART
An explosion went off beneath him, but this time he was ready. For an instant, as he rocketed upward, Alex experienced a thrill similar to that which he had felt when soaring with his flier. His elation was whipped away on the wind as he realized he had been flung far too high. He saw the old museum dropping away beneath him. Then he was plummeting toward its roof, arms and legs windmilling wildly, trying to grab the air.
His flailing right foot hit first. Part of Alex’s mind briefly noted how the machine strapped around it acted to absorb the shock of the impact with a violent hiss. Then he was sent tumbling forward.
He hauled himself up, panting, surprised to find he could stand, and surveyed the strange terrain. The sky felt close and cool. City lights gleamed low around him. A section of peaked roofs stretched dimly away toward the new part of the museum. He searched for the best spot to land, gauging the distance, and tried to recall everything his grandfather had told him about the devices, which wasn’t much. Basically, the spring-heels multiply the force of your leap. Although it gets a little exponential after a certain point. . . .
A sharp hiss from behind announced the tall man’s arrival. Alex didn’t look back. He jumped.
This time he put less force into the leap. He told his body it was just like jumping over a large puddle in the road. As he sailed through dark air, a gust of wind caught the canvas at his shoulders, slowing his flight, dragging him back. He landed lightly, the heels sighed, and for a millisecond he was pleased with himself. But he had undershot. Now he was sliding backward down a slick slope of tiles, the edge coming up fast.
In frantic reflex, he stamped down hard with one foot, forgetting what would happen. The single spring engaged. The lopsided eruption sent him somersaulting high and helpless, heels over head.
His feet slammed down on another part of the roof, then flung him up again. He shot toward a sheer wall, curled instinctively, forcing his legs to lead, kicked and cannoned away. As he bounced like a rubber ball, the next few seconds were a jumble of rushing impressions. Walls and roofs, Stuttgart spinning, night sky and streetlights.
Some calm section of his mind was determined to solve the problem. In his desperation, he was trying to cushion the expected shock instead of just letting the heels do their work. That was his mistake. With a huge effort of will, he forced himself to surrender control. Suddenly, he was falling, straight down, but he hit the ground almost gently, the spring-heels exhaled, and he flopped forward onto his hands and knees, gasping.
Lifting his head, dizzy, Alex shrank from a group of tall people gathered around him. Then he realized they were statues.
He had dropped down into a circular courtyard in the middle of the museum complex, its high walls open to the cloudy sky. The pale statues stood on plinths, robed stone women with staring blank eyes. Arched windows loomed behind them. A curving ramp ran up around the walls.
And at the top stood the tall man.
The dark figure launched at him. Alex got to his feet and jumped—or tried. Something grabbed his leg, just for a second, but it was enough to pull him slamming back down onto the paving slabs.
Alex dragged himself behind a statue and risked a look from behind its legs. The tall man stood in the shadows on the other side of the circular arena.
“Please, now. Come out where I can see you. Let us stop this foolishness. We can talk, you and I, and avoid further unpleasantness. Please.”
Alex flinched back in confusion. This wasn’t the voice he had been expecting. But the soft, treacly tones were all too familiar.
He snuck another glance. The figure took one stiff, heavy step into the courtyard, peering in Alex’s direction. The man removed his large sunglasses to reveal round, wire-framed spectacles beneath. He wore a yellow-and-black spotted scarf around his throat. His long black coat hung open. Faint shapes moved strangely inside.
“I wish you no harm. Please.”
It took several seconds for Alex to process what he was seeing. This wasn’t the tall man at all. This was little Hans Beckman. Yet somehow he stood massively tall and broad. There was a look of intense satisfaction on his face.
Alex could just make out vague, horrible details. As far as he could tell, Beckman had hollowed out the body of a life-sizer robot, and attached himself hideously inside, wearing the machine’s colossal carcass like a mechanized suit of armor—an awful, powerful extension of his body.
Medical-looking tubes ran from grubby, bandaged spots around Beckman’s head and neck, disappearing inside the machine. The things Alex could see writhing softly within his coat were thin, coiled wire attachments, like Slinkys. They hung from Beckman’s robotic torso as ghastly extra arms, six in all. At the end of each bobbed a twitching, glove-like hand.
One of the hands suddenly came shooting out, the coiled wire stretching across the courtyard with a fast, stinging shish. As Alex stared at the padded white fist flying at him, he found himself thinking dumbly about the cheerful hands of Mickey Mouse, until he remembered to duck.
The wire wrapped around the statue above him. He heard a grating, slicing sound. Something fell crunching down beside him.
The marble head lay at his feet, shorn clean off.
“Apologies.” Beckman snickered. “This is only a rough prototype. I have yet to refine control. See?”
Another fist lashed out. This one a cartoonish boxing glove. Another stone head dropped heavily to the ground.
“I always had trouble controlling the big machines, you see,” Beckman murmured, gesturing humbly at his great mechanical physique. “My mind doesn’t have the muscles. I needed always to stay close to keep control. So I thought: why not get as close as I can? Wire myself in? Hardwired. Like this, my thoughts go directly through the mechanism. I really don’t know my own strength. This is how I killed your friend Morecambe. It was an accident. I only meant to knock him out. I gave him just a tap, like this.”
Beckman lashed a huge arm a
t the wall behind him, gouging a hole in the concrete.
“But I mean you no harm. Quite the opposite. Please, now.”
Alex said nothing. He was furiously concentrating.
“Very well.” Beckman came striding toward him.
Reaching out his mind, Alex finally found his flier. It lay not far away on the roof above. One wing was damaged, so it kept veering left as it haltingly flew. He fought to compensate, urging the flier to move faster, up. Looking down from its eyes, he saw the circular courtyard below, the shadowy figure stalking across it. He dived at Beckman in a jackknife.
Beckman somehow sensed the attack. He turned, sending a glove-hand shishing up to meet the flier midair. In the same moment, the dark windows behind the broken statues blazed with light. Inside the museum, shadowy police and guards came running. Beckman whirled around to them.
The distraction was enough. Alex took his chance and leapt. Beckman swatted the flier spinning away over the roof with a blow that left Alex feeling like his mind had been stabbed with a glass shard. He slammed against the top of the wall and hung clinging to the edge, scratching at slippery stonework for a grip. The weighty heels were dragging him down. A padded white fist smashed into the wall, inches away from him. Alex heaved himself over, pain ringing in his head.
He could just make out the road where Harry had parked ahead. Alex saw his stunned flier lying between him and the roof’s edge. Another fist pounded down behind him, sending up a dust cloud of pulverized concrete, glittering in the moonlight. This glove resembled the clawed, furry paw from a Wolfman costume. It began scuttling like a crab straight for him.
Alex lurched up and ran stiffly, staggering as he picked up the unresponsive flier. Wind tugged at the painting on his back as he hurled himself off the roof.
He jumped wildly, arcing over the street in a leap that sent him crashing down into the roadworks opposite, sprawling face-first in a mound of damp sand. Abandoned tools scattered about him as he tumbled forward.
He sat up, wiping grit from his eyes. There was a strange heaviness pressing down on his neck. A traffic cone had wedged itself firmly around the top of his head. No sign of Harry or Kingdom or the Rolls-Royce. But a group of well-dressed people now stood outside the opera house along the road, staring at him openmouthed. Many clutched wineglasses and cigarettes. It must have been intermission. Some started coming toward him.
More footsteps were sounding from his side, closer. Police were running, almost on him. No one seemed to notice Beckman watching, crouched like a shadowy gargoyle atop the museum.
Alex grabbed at a broom lying amid the debris and, with a desperate yell, swung it wildly to ward off the nearest policeman, then crouched and jumped hard, passing over the operagoers. Dumbfounded faces swung up to watch him go.
When he touched down, he instantly sprang back up, leap-frogging along the dark street until a blast of wind threw him off course. His ankle twisted as he hit the ground. The traffic cone dropped from his head. Rain lashed down.
Alex gingerly tried a step and gasped at the pain. Not far ahead, he spotted a narrow alleyway between buildings. He still held the broom. Ramming it under his arm for support, he made a hopping run for cover.
Stumbling into the alley, he cursed as the edge of the painting cracked against the wall. Beckman couldn’t be too far behind. The picture frame scraped the brickwork again. It was hampering his movements, both on the ground and when he tried to leap.
Shrugging out of the harness, he dug from his pocket the nail scissors Zia had thrown him in the well. The little blades were honed to wicked sharpness. He looked at the painting. If he could remove it, it wouldn’t catch the wind. He paused for just a moment, then stabbed the blade into the canvas, cutting it from the frame.
He thought he heard a hiss in the street, not far away. Several inches of painting remained attached. Alex ripped it out. He left the painting rolled against the wall, tucked the frame under his arm, then ran for the far end of the alley.
He came out onto a tree-lined street. A few people hurried along, hunched in hoods or hidden behind umbrellas. Cars swished past. Alex limped fast, head down, forcing his thoughts into order.
He’d left his phone in the car, where they had been keeping the line open to Metz on lookout. Why hadn’t they spotted Beckman on the roof? They had planned to meet in a nearby park after the robbery. He tried to recall the map he’d been shown and work out where he was. Maybe he could use the flier, if it wasn’t too badly damaged. But when he tried, he couldn’t feel anything from it.
As soon as he got his bearings, he would double back to where his grandfather had fallen. Harry might have found the old man already, or maybe his grandfather had come to. But he had to check. If there was nothing there, he would head for the rendezvous. It was as much of a plan as he could manage.
Through the traffic ahead, he spotted the headlights of a car flashing quickly on and off as it came toward him. Then again. With a surge of relief, he recognized the car. It was unmistakable. Kingdom’s Silver Phantom.
Metz was behind the wheel.
“I got it,” Alex gasped as he clambered in and slammed the door. “The frame. Is my grandad okay? Where’s everyone else?”
“Hmm?” Metz glanced over as they started moving. “Oh, looking for you. Yes, the old man is fine. We split up. They’re on foot. We decided I should take the car. My leg, you see.”
“I think I know what Harry was trying to say,” Alex panted, talking more to himself, trying to calm down. “When he said, ‘It’s not . . .’ he meant, it’s not the tall man.”
“Oh yes?” Metz turned a corner and slowed, searching the street ahead. “The tall man?”
“It was Hans Beckman,” Alex went on. He dropped the broom into the seat behind without looking, and bent to free his injured foot from the cumbersome mechanical springs. Metz stopped the car. They sat, engine idling.
“Beckman,” Alex repeated, still working it out for himself. His racing thoughts kept colliding. “I can’t remember if we told you about him. . . . But then, that means we’ve not seen the tall man at all. Even when I thought I saw him, outside Harry’s office in Paris. It was Beckman. It was Beckman who stabbed your leg. I heard him laughing. Giggling. So where’s the tall man?”
“He’s right here, silly bunny,” said a voice from behind. Alex felt something sharp scratch gently at his Adam’s apple. In the rearview mirror, he saw Zia sit up, grinning. She held one arm curled around his neck, her little hand clutching a huge, old razor at his throat.
“That’s Father in there, see?”
Alex looked dumbly in the direction the triumphant purple fingernail pointed. Metz smiled back at him.
“A very weak mind, this one. He was almost grateful to give up,” Metz said. Except, Alex suddenly realized, it was no longer Metz at all.
With piercing clarity, he recalled his grandfather speaking as they sat together in a high tree, telling him horrible, impossible things about the tall man: He was exploring the possibility of migrating consciousness. Throwing your mind into another body . . . just slip your personality into someone else, take them over . . .
“All it took was the teensiest wee sample of his blood,” Zia bubbled. “Father’s Soaring Spirit got it during that nonsense at the big house in France. And weren’t you showing off back there with your exploding head, magic bunny. You should be careful with that, Alexander. You might almost have hurt me. And then I would have been very mad indeed. We’ll have to teach you to use it properly. And I still want my scissors back.”
A towering figure was coming along the street, walking stiffly in the rain. As Metz signaled him, the car’s flashing lights reflected from round glasses lenses.
Alex watched Beckman approaching. He felt as though he were drowning in slow motion.
“Now,” said the man who wasn’t Metz. He patted the frame Alex had brought him.
“The gate.”
XXXII.
TOWERS AND MOONS AND EVERYONE FORGOT
The car tore south, Stuttgart fell behind, and neighboring towns passed as smears of light. Then they were out on a highway between fields under the enormous sky. A racing moon kept pace above, playing peekaboo through ragged clouds.
Alex had been forced onto the back seat beside Beckman. His hulking robotic body perfumed the car with scents of oil and metal tinged with sweet, medicinal overtones. Beckman had removed the hand from one of his spring-arms, and the razor-like wire now looped thinly around Alex. Anytime he moved, Beckman’s grip tightened threateningly.
The possessed Metz drove like a demon, but from what Alex could see in the mirror, the man was exhausted. Sweat beaded his gray brow over red eyes. Zia sat alongside him. Once, she placed a hand on his arm.
“Father?” She spoke in a tender tone Alex had never heard from her.
“I find even a will as weak as this tiring now.” The man gestured contemptuously at himself with pale fingers. “I must rest. Rebuild energy.”
“I could drive,” Zia said.
“We’re almost there.” The engine grumbled as he accelerated.
Zia had searched Alex and taken away his damaged flier. Now she wound down her window and stuck her hand out. Between thumb and forefinger, she held the lock of Alex’s hair. He watched it blowing in her grip. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she let it go into the wind. “Stop you getting any ideas.” She smiled over her shoulder as she stowed the little machine inside her coat.
Eventually, the tall man turned onto a side road, driving over a gravel track, then a narrow dirt trail, the car shuddering as the surface changed. They came to a sudden stop, and he instantly slumped forward as far as his seat belt allowed, hanging limp over the steering wheel, out cold.
Alex could make out two vehicles waiting in the lonely blue gloom ahead. The transit van he had seen on the Kandel, and a large, long car it took a moment to identify.