Sol saw her and hopped to his feet. "Are the others coming?"
"No."
His face fell. "Are they in trouble?"
"I'm pretty sure some people are planning to torture them to death. So I'm going to break them out of jail. I'll need your help, though."
They stared at her, Sol round-eyed, Mick thoughtful. Then Sol squared his shoulders. "All right. What do you want us to do?" His gaze dropped to her waist. She had the cop's pistol holstered on one side, and Falconer's gun poking out of her pocket on the other side. "I guess if we each take a gun..."
"No guns." She longed to throw the cursed things into the ocean, but it was a dangerous game she was involved in. She might need them yet, but there would be no gunfire unless there was no other way.
Sol's eyebrows rose. "No guns? But if we don't use guns, how will we get them out?"
She grinned. "We'll use steam."
Thirty minutes later she stood on the shore, as close as she could get to the police station, the hurricane lantern sending a narrow beam of light straight out to sea. The Persephone was a hundred feet out, her stern toward the shore, and the splash of oars told her that the boat was on its way.
The boat scraped bottom and Sol and Mick jumped out, dragging it higher on the beach. A huge coil of rope filled the stern of the boat and trailed into the water. The rope was nearly as thick as her arm, and both men grabbed up loops of it. Colleen led them inland. They staggered along behind her, paying out rope as they went. When they reached the police station she grabbed the end of the rope, ran to the window, and looped the rope through the bars.
"Colleen! What are you doing?"
She ignored Carter's urgent whisper, picking up the hurricane lantern as Mick tied the rope off. As soon as he nodded she stepped to a gap between buildings and swung the lantern shutter open and shut, sending a flashing beam of light to the waiting ship.
The rope went taut as the Persephone's engines engaged. Colleen called, "Get back from the window," then joined Sol and Mick in scrambling out of the way. She heard a murmur of voices from inside the cell, then Carter's voice urging everyone backward. And then the window frame tore free, taking a large section of the back wall with it.
The window frame went bouncing off between buildings and people came pouring out of the police station in a wave. Diggers took off running in every direction. Carter clambered through the hole, looking irritated, then turned to help Maggie. She scrambled out without his assistance and gave Colleen an ear-to-ear grin.
"This way," said Colleen, and led them at a trot to the beach.
As Sol and Mick dragged the boat into the water, Carter gave Colleen a hard look and said, "You don't take directions very well."
Maggie sank an elbow into his ribs, making him grunt, and said, "Don't pay any attention to him. Come on, let's go."
They splashed through the surf, climbed into the boat, and left Suderland behind.
Colleen never set foot on the island again. Carter went ashore with a shovel and recovered the tablet, but she didn't see him go. She was in her cabin by that time, with a worried-looking Sol acting as assistant while Maggie cleaned and stitched the wound in her arm.
They left her there with strict instructions to rest. The pain from her stitches gradually faded to a dull ache, easy enough to ignore. It seemed impossible that she could sleep after the tension of the last several days, but in minutes she was yawning uncontrollably.
There would be bad dreams, she knew. Her mind had to process all the horrors she had been through. The cult of Katharis was still out there, still strong. There would be more challenges, more danger, more loss. More nightmares. But she had resisted the siren call of Katharis's unholy rage. There would be more bad dreams, but at least they would be her own. She would face whatever came next with her innermost self intact.
She nodded, satisfied, and drifted off to sleep.
Hell's Gate
Chapter 1 - The Madman
From the outside, the insane asylum didn't look so bad.
It was surrounded by a wall of sandstone, seven or eight feet tall. Ivy covered the stone and gave everything a pleasant, natural look. Colleen could see the main building through the wrought-iron bars of the front gate. It was a grand stone edifice that wouldn't have looked out of place at Harvard, shrouded in ivy and roofed in red tiles.
You had to get pretty close to see that the windows were all barred. There was an air of desperation to the place as well, though Colleen realized it might have been her imagination.
The blue Model T rolled into the small parking lot and stopped near the front gate. It was a grey and blustery day, and only a handful of patients were in sight, clustered near a side door smoking cigarettes.
"Well," said Maggie Nelson as she turned off the engine, "here we are." She was a stern-looking woman with grey hair drawn up in a bun. Colleen knew her to be tough as nails when she needed to be, but far nicer than her severe features suggested.
Colleen nodded, doing her best to hide her nerves, and got out of the car. There was no way to be entirely at peace. She was here to visit a madman who had once been a friend.
"He's much improved," said Maggie. "Of course, he's not the man he was. Far from it. But he seems better."
Colleen nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and followed the older woman into the building. A couple of orderlies in white uniforms gave her startled glances as she climbed the front steps, and she sighed. Somehow it was perfectly fine to wear the new dress styles, scandalous skirts that almost showed a girl's knees, but trousers were still something shocking.
A bored clerk at the front desk asked them who they had come to see, then got them to sign a visitor book and gave them directions to a meeting room. They walked past a propped-open steel security door and into the asylum proper.
Colleen followed Maggie down a dingy corridor painted an institutional green and lit by flickering, inadequate light bulbs. The meeting room was as depressing as the corridor, with mismatched chairs and a battered table with one leg shorter than the others.
They sat and waited, making small talk about the weather, until Colleen heard the sound of shuffling footsteps in the corridor. Then the door swung open and a man came in.
Dirk Smith had always been thin, but now he was gaunt. His long, saturnine face had been shaved somewhat carelessly, and his hair, cut quite short, stood up in clumps. There was more grey in it than Colleen remembered.
She recognized him despite the changes, but when his eyes wandered aimlessly around the room he suddenly seemed like a stranger. The man she'd known had been one of the most focussed and purposeful people she'd ever met. Now his body was like a puppet being moved by a smaller, weaker, much lesser person.
An orderly came in behind him, a beefy young man with a flat, inscrutable face. The orderly helped Smith find a chair and get seated. Smith sat slumped in the chair, staring at the table top, clearly no danger to the women, but the orderly gave him a long, suspicious glance. "I'll be right outside," he said. "Shout if you need me." Then he stepped out, leaving the door open a crack.
"Hello, Dirk," said Maggie, and Smith raised his head. His eyes were blank and lifeless. Maggie gestured at Colleen and said, "Look, I brought Colleen."
Smith's eyes didn't move.
Maggie shrugged and chattered away, telling Smith about their recent mission to the South Pacific and the artifacts they'd brought back. Smith's eyes slowly sank to the table top, but Maggie kept chatting. Her tone was light and unconcerned, but Colleen could sense the strain just below the surface. This was breaking her heart.
Finally Maggie's voice trailed off. She looked at Colleen, her eyes sad, and said, "Next time we'll come first thing in the morning. That's when he's at his sharpest. It's also when he's the most agitated, poor thing, but at least he'll recognize you. They give him a pill at bedtime, you see, and another one in the morning. If we get here before the medication kicks in, sometimes it's almost like having the old Dirk back."
She reached out and squeezed Smith's hand. "We're going to go now, Dirk. You hang in there, okay? I know you're in there somewhere, getting stronger, fighting your way back. I only wish I could help you. But you take as long as you need to take. We'll be here."
She let go of his hand, and she and Colleen stood. He sat unmoving, and Maggie reached for the door knob.
"Thanks."
The single word was so low that at first Colleen thought she'd imagined it. She looked at him, and found his dull blue eyes looking back at her. Then he turned back to the table top.
Colleen rested a hand on his shoulder. He had retreated back into himself. She gave his shoulder a squeeze and followed Maggie out of the little room, down the hallway, and into the grey world beyond.
Chapter 2 – Retaliation
A cutting torch was a dangerous tool, and the absolute concentration it demanded was exactly the balm Colleen's spirit needed. She worked her way through half a dozen steel rods, then turned off the torch and pushed her dark goggles up onto her forehead. There was something deeply soothing about crafting something of value from brass and steel. It gave her a sense of purpose and control that was too often missing in the endless war with the cult.
She looked around her workshop with a satisfied smile. Supposedly she was researching the properties of the mysterious "hot rock" the team had unearthed on an island in the South Pacific. In reality she was building a marvellous machine the likes of which hadn't been seen in centuries, if not millennia.
Her workshop was the former carriage house of the McDougall building, once a grand country estate a mile from the Anacostia River. Now a victim of urban sprawl, it stood on the outskirts of Washington, DC. When the Federal Government had annexed the estate, President Wilson turned it over to Department Nine, the innocuously-named secret organization charged with dealing with occult matters. The McDougall building was the team's headquarters.
The manor house held offices and training facilities and storage of documents and artifacts. There was a small clerical staff, few of whom knew exactly what Department Nine was really for. Security was provided by Hank and Frederick Carlson, veterans of the trench war in France. They were brothers, haunted-eyed men in their thirties who looked older.
The carriage house was Colleen's domain. She'd transformed the airy building into a modern metalworking shop, with everything from lathes to a milling machine. She even had assistants, a trio of eager young college students on a practicum. She felt a bit odd giving them directions, since all three of them were older than she was, and certainly better educated. But all of their knowledge was theoretical, while Colleen had been repairing gear assemblies with her father since she was twelve years old.
She turned to their latest iteration of her grand design. Her goal was to build a mechanical man, a steam-powered robot that would be tireless, powerful, and nearly indestructible. She had envisioned something human-like, but her early prototypes had toppled over when they tried to walk. The current version looked less like a man than a gorilla.
Six feet tall at the shoulders, weighing nearly a ton, the metal monstrosity had short, thick legs and long arms, and rested on its hands and feet. The torso leaned forward at a 45-degree angle. There was no head, though she was tempted to add one just for appearance's sake.
There were elaborate shoulder joints, and simpler joints at the hips. So far there were no other joints, but she wanted to add elbows, and eventually wrists and hands. For now the arms and legs were simple steel cylinders ending in padded plates.
The torso was a flattened cylinder about six feet long and nearly three feet wide. Eventually she planned to cover the controls with hatches, but for now the back of the machine bristled with knobs, levers, and dials. It was a mishmash of brass and steel, with a row of slots near the top for the strips of metal that controlled the machine's movements.
Most of the torso was filled with the hot rock, a pair of water tanks, and a steam condensing system. The rest was pulleys, springs, cables, and steam pipes, and the control system that ran it all.
"Good heavens. It looks like you've been busy."
Colleen turned and smiled, trying not to look too pleased with herself. Phillip Carter, the leader of Department Nine, looked like an unremarkable businessman at first glance. He wore a tweed jacket no matter what the weather, and a bowler hat. With his stout build and tidy brown mustache he seemed unprepossessing and forgettable, but Colleen knew him to be tough, relentless, and almost suicidally courageous.
"I'm glad you're here. We can give you a demonstration of the latest model." He'd seen all the other models, the ignominious failures that had led her to the current design, and she was eager to redeem herself in his eyes.
"Tom," she called, and the three college students looked up from a drafting table at one end of the room. They were much better at design work than she was. She'd mostly worked on repairing or improving damaged machinery, not building it from scratch.
Tom came ambling over, with Archie and Susan trailing in his wake. Tall and angular, with the biggest glasses Colleen had ever seen, Tom showed no real aptitude for metalwork. However, he had an innate genius for the design of control systems.
"Let's put Woody through his paces," Colleen told him.
"Woody?" Carter's eyebrows rose.
"That's what we've been calling him. After the Tin Woodsman. Did you ever read 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?'" She gestured as Tom pressed a button on Woody's back. A faint gurgle of water came from inside the metal torso. "He's just released the top water tank. The water's reaching the hot rock now. We should have enough power for movement in about thirty seconds."
Archie and Susan watched with proprietary pride as Tom rummaged in a box beside the robot and drew out a handful of copper strips. Each strip was half an inch wide, a foot or so long, and perforated with small, irregularly-placed holes. Tom selected the strip he wanted and slid it into a slot in Woody's back.
The metal man was facing one wall of the carriage house. A series of clicks came from within his torso, and then all four limbs began to move. He shifted around until he was pointing about thirty degrees farther to the left.
"Extraordinary," Carter murmured, and Colleen smothered a smile. What he'd seen so far was nothing.
Tom took the end of the strip, lifted it half an inch, and pushed it back down. Woody obediently repeated his movements. Tom kept him turning until he was facing the middle of the room. Then he chose another strip. "What do you think?" he asked. "Five or six feet?"
"Let's send him all the way across the room," Colleen said, and Tom nodded. He chose a different strip and slid it home.
Woody lurched into motion. His left arm and right leg swung forward together, his weight shifted forward, and then his right arm and left leg moved to catch up. He loped across the workshop and came to a stop just before the far wall.
"Wow," said Carter. Then, after a moment, "Is that all he does?"
"So far," said Colleen, a touch defensively. "His arms could move to the sides if we wanted. We just haven't written any controls for it. Tom's working on that. I'm building some new arms, with articulated elbows, and Archie and Susan are drawing up plans for hands." She sighed. "It's going to be a long time before those are working."
"I see."
"Are you getting anywhere with the tablet?" she asked. They had one other relic from their trip to the South Pacific, a stone tablet with elaborate carvings and an unknown purpose. The cult of Katharis seemed to want the tablet very badly indeed.
"Nothing so far," Carter said. "I may have to leave the research to Maggie for a while." He looked at the three students, then gestured toward the door.
Colleen said, "Good work, guys. Leave Woody there for now. I guess you can get back to what you were doing before." They nodded and she followed Carter outside.
"There's been an increase in cult activity in the area," he told her. "I have no idea what it's about. But I've asked the President for additional security. We're going to h
ave some soldiers here, starting tomorrow. I wanted to let you know."
The McDougall estate had seemed like a safe haven. Colleen frowned at the unwelcome reminder of the cult's reach and power.
"Anyway, don't worry about it," said Carter. "Just make sure you lock up tonight. I'll see you at dinner."
She nodded, troubled, and headed back into the workshop.
In late afternoon she was going over a diagram of a finger joint with Archie and Susan when the first hint of trouble came. Susan, a willowy blonde beauty with a southern drawl, hadn't wanted to work with Archie at first because he was black. Colleen had made it clear that she thought the idea of segregation was ridiculous, and Archie had quickly demonstrated that he was an excellent draftsman and engineer, and the two of them had become an effective team.
Engrossed in the diagram in front of them, neither of them looked up at the distant squeal of tires, but Colleen stood up and walked to the carriage house door.
The first thing she saw was a dust cloud on the gravel road outside. Then two cars swept into view, Packard sedans, one black, one dark green. They were moving fast, barreling down the road, each car crammed with people.
She knew something was wrong but there was no time to react. The cars raced through the front gates of the estate, skidding and sliding to a stop in front of the main house. Then the doors flew open and men came pouring out.
When she saw guns, Colleen dropped into a crouch. She glanced back. The three students were watching her, and she gestured at them to get down. They just gaped at her, uncomprehending.
The sound of shots brought her head whipping back around. Hank, one of the ex-soldiers providing security, stood on the porch of the house with a rifle in his hand. A man in ragged denim clothes was blasting away at him with a pistol, Hank's body jerking with every shot. A woman in a flapper dress, her face lit with glee, held a pistol in each hand. She ran up to Hank as he fell and stood over him, shooting bullet after bullet into his inert body.
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