The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  “Thank you. That’s very flattering,” she told him gravely, hiding the merry light that had risen to her eyes. “In that case I shall stay on for a time, Mr. Lacey. My own room is safe enough, and I suppose you’ll want the Andrews pair to stay on.”

  “Yes. I’m not through with Kohler Andrews just yet!” he concluded. “But wouldn’t it be better if you got someone, even a personal maid, to stay with you?”

  “I’m quite capable of taking care of myself, thank you!” she flashed. “Now, about dinner, Mr. Lacey?”

  “Call me Cube!” he begged. “I’ll be very, very formal in addressing you, Miss Jeffries. Really, I won’t presume, but I’ve been Cube to everyone so long I scarcely know my last name, especially when it’s hitched to a Mister. If you’ll do that I’ll—I’ll promise to do my share with the biggest dinner Mrs. Andrews can cook!”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t think of it!” she retorted. “How would it sound if I took a liberty you did not reciprocate—Cube?”

  “Shake, Irene!” he cried joyfully, thrilling to the sudden knowledge that this girl could be more to him than any of the pretty women he had known previously. She would be a constant gratification to his senses, but beyond that she also possessed the wit and sense of humor so necessary in a real friend and pal.

  After dinner, which was one of the most sumptuous meals that Cube had tasted for months, they searched the upstairs rooms for any sign of intruders, or other assurance that Lacey had met a violent end, but in vain. Irene was tired out, so she retired early. Cube tried to get in touch with Guest, but failed. Next morning after breakfast, Irene conducted him to the basement in the automatic elevator—a hidden device reached by springing back a wall panel of Circassian walnut—which gave the only known means of access to Noah’s laboratory from the upstairs.

  Cube found himself awed by the laboratory. High-ceiled, it formed one huge room corresponding to the entire floor plan of the house. Rows of concrete posts, extending the length of laboratory, supported the weight above. The room, in spite of its size, seemed crammed with apparatus, yet this was not what first caught Cube’s attention. The walls were more striking. Formed entirely of fictile material, they were a conglomerate, apparently, of thousands of experiments with brick, tile, and porcelain. Though cemented together cleverly—pieces the size of mosaics lying side by side with building tiles a yard square on their faces—the whole effect was of highly-colored, patchwork draperies hung all about. Here was every shade of the spectrum, every glaze and finish known to ceramics, flung together in an array like the disassorted fragments of a picture puzzle!

  “Mr. Lacey experimented for years and years, attempting to reproduce pottery and porcelain the equal of those from old China,” Irene explained. “See, here are his earlier bits, near the bottom of the wall. He built it all by hand, as you know. This wall does not support the house. Behind it is another, of ordinary stone and mortar. If you’ll notice, there is a line here,” she paused to indicate an irregular demarcation approximately four feet from the cork-carpeted floor, “which separates quite distinctly his first work from that which he did during the past ten or eleven years. You can see an abrupt difference. Below, the mosaics and tiles are finished and glazed poorly. Above, they possess delicate shading, luster, iridescence, almost like some of those vases and jugs upstairs. I don’t know whether you were told this, or not, but Mr. Lacey made all but five of those vases, and almost every other figure and bit of porcelain in the house! That yellow-brown vase out in the front hall he considered his finest bit. It is an exact reproduction of the Hsien-te nien chih vase by Ch’ai Yao now in the Chinese Government Museum at Peking.”

  Lacey gazed at her astounded. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that my uncle could duplicate these art objects?”

  “Not only that he could duplicate them, hut he could originate vases, urns, and cremation receptacles which the greatest critics pronounced genuine relics of Sung or T’ang periods! Once I remember he was offered three thousand dollars for a tiny piece; offered it by Reynolds Nasmyth, the critic, too! Of course Mr. Lacey didn’t accept, but he chuckled over that for weeks afterward. He considered the offer ample recognition of his efforts. I don’t think he ever told Mr. Nasmyth, who still thinks he lacked only a few thousand dollars of consummating his happiness by actually owning an antique piece of superlative beauty. Mr. Lacey valued that particular piece simply because of the offer. He never would part with it, but he did send as a present to Mr. Nasmyth a water jug purporting to be of Ming porcelain. That jug made the poor man happier than a ten-year-old boy with a new electric engine!

  “Mr. Lacey often told me that if he wanted to hoax the public, he could make more money out of his pottery wheel downstairs than the whole brick business earned. He never did that, however. He was a lover of beauty. I think he planned to make public his processes and secrets. At least he seemed to be writing all of the time he did not spend down here in experimentation.”

  For a time Cube said not a word. In silence he traced the line of difference between Noah’s early work, and that which had formed the culmination of his life of artistic striving. The difference was remarkable.

  “What caused the change, Irene?” he asked. “Do you know?”

  She hesitated. “I have thought it over many times, but I cannot be sure,” she replied. “Perhaps it was the length of time which Mr. Lacey spent in the Orient. It was following that period that he put all these safety devices in and about the house. You see, I have been here only a little over two years. Mr. Lacey was not a man much given to confidences, of course. I only can guess.”

  “Sounds rational enough,” commented Cube. “I have to look it up. Do you think—?”

  His sentence was interrupted by a raucous, horrible squall—an inhuman voice which seemed to come from the ceiling directly overhead.

  “Cube! Cube!” it cried. “Help! They’re tearing me to pieces! Help! Help!”

  “My heavens!” cried Cube, yanking out his automatic and running toward the point from which the sound seemed to emanate. “It’s—that’s Sherrod! Where are you, old man? I’m coming!”

  Chapter VII

  No answer was returned. For several minutes Cube raced about the laboratory, searching for any sign of Guest, but in vain. Besides Irene and himself the entire basement was empty of human occupant!

  Irene shivered. “It’s spooky!” she said. “That voice was not human!” She also held a revolver, but Cube did not appear to notice.

  Cube shook his head decidedly. “Of course it was,” he objected. “He was here somewhere. We must find him, for Sherrod never squeals unless he’s badly hurt.” Resuming the search, and calling out time and time again, he opened the zinc-lined bins that held clay and plaster, the damp box, and the drying cupboard. He peered behind the “kick wheel,” and even opened the doors of the oil kiln and muffle kiln.

  Outside of these and benches holding chemical reagents and bacteriological apparatus, a large electric furnace and what seemed to be an aquarium completed the list of sizable apparatus. The supposed aquarium was glass-sided, and covered with heavy plates of the same material. Cube lifted away one of the latter, and peered down into a stagnant, fetid pool of green slime in which sticks of wood and small boulders were placed. No fish or other large organism could live in such water; the odor fairly snatched at human respiration.

  “Ugh!” grimaced Cube, drawing back and allowing the heavy plate to slip into place. “He can’t be there.”

  He hallooed again, this time putting all strength of his lungs in an attempt to reach Sherrod’s ears. A cackle of raucous, fiendish laughter burst out from a point within a yard of his head! There, clutching the side of one of the concrete pillars near the ceiling, was a common green parrot!

  With wings outstretched, the bird glared down, as he snapped his great, curved beak malevolently.

  “Don’t look down there!” he screamed in a wicked falsetto. “Dash my eyes, I’m right here! They’re killi
ng me! Awk!”

  Involuntarily Cube dropped back. Irene seized his arm, and he felt the girl tremble as a glint of reflected electricity turned the bird’s sinister, knowing eyes into blank circles of red fire. “Wh-where did that thing come from?” he gasped. “Did my uncle—?” Wordless negation was his only answer from Irene. She was staring at the parrot with fascination akin to that of a rabbit transfixed by the glare of a cobra.

  “I’m Sherrod Guest!” came the weird, unreal pronouncement again. “Help, help!” With startling suddenness the parrot deserted its precarious perch, swooping with a beating of heavy wings to a shelf of pottery moulds, there to balance and cock his head sidewise at the two.

  “We’ll have to catch him!” whispered Irene, as the bird started again his strident refrain.

  “Wait a minute,” cautioned Cube in a low tone. “He’s some kind of a messenger, I think. Yesterday, Sherrod Guest went to see what he could discover concerning the mysterious Chinese who have been haunting this household and my office. This parrot must have heard Guest talk. Otherwise he could not imitate the voice. I believe—yes, I’m sure the tong has captured Sherrod.”

  Slowly then Cube approached the green-plumaged bird, doing his utmost to cajole him into further revelations. His promises of crackers which did not exist, and compliments to the bird’s supposed beauty obtained no result, however. Common house parrots might yield to such blandishments, but not Sun Yat, who had dwelt many decades among men whose wisdom he respected much more than that of this foolish American who tried to tempt him with baby talk and empty promises. He squawked his disapproval, and, when pursued from perch to perch by Cube, leaned forward suddenly and pecked a sizable strip of skin from the back of the young man’s extended hand.

  “Damn!” exploded Lacey, staring down at a spot from which the blood was beginning to stream.

  So that was the game! This foolish fellow thought he knew something about swearing, did he? Sun Yat lifted one foot and scratched his head contemptuously. Forthwith from his horny beak there issued a stream of blasphemy and denunciation which would have made a Tien-Tsin desperado blush for shame.

  Cube, staunching the blood with his handkerchief, was more wary about approaching the feathered demon, yet he stuck with the job pertinaciously, not suspecting that the bird could elude him. He overlooked one of the narrow, barred windows above the level of the ground, however. One pane of glass had been removed neatly from this. Sun Yat, driven from one place to another, decided finally that he did not care for the basement after all. Hopping to the window he paused to chatter back a final expletive, and then fluttered out into the chill air to spread wings in flight.

  Denouncing his carelessness, Cube hastened outside, but the bird was gone. Encircling the house, Cube trod accidentally upon the two-yard strip of brick which gave under his weight. Apparently this strip completely circled the building, and was part of Noah Lacey’s intricate burglar-alarm system, for while Cube remained standing on the spot jangling bells sounded within the house. When he stepped off the noise ceased.

  Kohler Andrews, sawed-off shotgun in hand, came stealthily from the rear. Cube motioned to him that there was nothing to fear. “This particular bird is probably on his way to Chinatown by now,” he explained cryptically.

  * * * *

  It took only a short session with the telephone to prove that Sherrod Guest had not been near his office. The client, Myers, was angry. He had kicked his heels outside a locked door for twenty minutes after the time of his appointment; now he expressed coarsely but adequately his opinion of ham detectives who didn’t have sense enough to perform a job satisfactorily when they got it.

  Cube did his best to assuage the man’s temper, but in truth Cube himself was too disturbed to bother about a matter like possible evidence for Myers’s possible divorce. He phoned the rooming house in which Guest lived. The landlady informed him that Sherrod had not put in an appearance the previous night, and had left no word concerning present whereabouts. Sickening certainty began to descend upon Cube. Guest had gone after information and had been trapped by members of the suspected tong. Cube himself knew little of such organizations, yet in newspaper offices he had heard gruesome tales of Oriental torture and punishment. He shuddered. For the time being he would have to abandon this end of the investigation, for duty to a living friend superseded duty to a dead man. Irene agreed with him. She promised to be watchful and careful in his absence, and said that if no word from him arrived by evening she would repair to a hotel for the night.

  Cogitating whether or not to place this new development in the hands of the police, Cube went downtown. He decided finally not to mention the fact until he discovered that it held a more direct bearing upon one or the other horn of the dilemma. Inspector Harris and the rest would not listen to a wild tale of clues furnished by a talkative parrot. They would scoff, and Cube realized that the problem long since had ceased to be a laughing matter.

  On the way to the office Cube remembered the scraping which he had taken from the telephone chair. An analytical laboratory lay on his way, so he dropped in, searching out Lester Krahn, a young scientist who, combining extensive knowledge of physiological chemistry and bacteriology, had been depended on by newspaper writers for years. Krahn took the specimen, listened to a brief sketch of the circumstances and Cube’s desire, and promised to have a report ready in the course of three hours.

  Cube thereupon visited his office which, naturally, was empty. Steam heat had been left turned on, and excessive temperature inside denied that anyone had visited the place that day. Cube did not waste much time here, but started a systematic search for his associate throughout the Loop. When this proved fruitless he sought the telephone and located a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Chicago. Making an engagement with the latter, he taxied out immediately. Albert Benson, Ph. D., had little that was reassuring to offer, though.

  “Your case is exceedingly interesting,” he answered, after listening to a résumé of the story, “but I scarcely see wherein I can help. Now that tong of which you were speaking; few white men really know anything concerning Chinese secret societies. No white man, or even half-caste Chinaman, ever became a tong member, however. I believe that even Chinese born in the Western Hemisphere are excluded.”

  The good man would have gone on interminably expounding these views which did not seem to Cube to be especially pertinent. The detective, though, managed to precipitate more concrete information. He asked point-blank if the professor ever had learned anything concerning the T’ao tong.

  “I never before have heard the name,” was the answer. “It does not occur in the list of forty-three known societies of that kind. This does not mean that such a tong is not in existence. Practically all of the Chinese in this country come from the single province of Shensi. Natives of other provinces might have a hundred more tongs for all I know. Probably they have. The word Tao appeals to me as decidedly interesting in light of what you have told me. I suppose you know that it means pottery and ceramics—embracing all of the fictile arts, in fact.”

  Cube’s eyes narrowed. This was information indeed! “No, I didn’t know that,” he answered. “Thank you, doctor, I guess that narrows the sphere of my investigation considerably!”

  * * * *

  Another and still greater surprise awaited Cube when he returned to the laboratory, however. Lester Krahn approached him with a puzzled frown on his countenance. “See here, Lacey,” he began quizzically, “are you trying to spoof me, or what? This stuff never flowed in the veins of a human being, or if it did I’d certainly like to see the person!”

  Wonderingly, Cube assured him that there had been no practical joke intended, and asked the reason for Krahn’s surprising statement. Silently the scientist beckoned him to a stand near the window where a microscope was focused upon a freshly prepared slide. “Take a look!” bade Krahn succinctly.

  Cube glanced into the low-powered lens. After a moment of careful focusing throu
gh the depths of a murky spatter lying beneath the cover glass, he could see a picture which brought an involuntary exclamation of puzzled surprise to his lips. It seemed that he was looking upon a vast field of gigantic poppies! The flowers seemed to be growing in a profuse tangle. A time or two he had glanced at human blood under the microscope, but the picture before him now held no hint of the same character which appealed to his unpracticed eye. “Why, it looks like a flower garden!” he muttered.

  “Exactly!” confirmed Krahn. “Tonight I’m going to take that slide over to McKenzie the botanist. Perhaps he’ll be able to tell me something more about it. First though, was the surface of the chair from which you got the scraping moist or moulded at all?”

  “No, it was highly polished mahogany. Not even dusty.”

  Krahn nodded grimly. “I know you’re not lying,” he commented, “and so I’ll tell you a funny thing about that specimen—a fact which may go far to help solve the mystery of your uncle’s death. In that slide appear scraps of fibrin, platelets—the substances in blood which cause it to clot, you know—a terrific number of white blood corpuscles, which are the buzzards of the circulating stream, but almost no red blood corpuscles at all! Something seems to have attacked them—that something being the mysterious ‘poppy field’ you see. I’m not going to say what I suspect those growths to be until I see McKenzie, but you can bet your boots I wouldn’t want them rioting around in my blood!”

  Chapter VIII

  By nature something of a fatalist himself, Sherrod Guest did not struggle longer against either the smothering cloth or the ropes which trussed his arms and legs. Upon loss of the automatic he realized resistance to be useless. Trusting himself to the tender mercies of Sam Lee Moy—particularly, when engaged upon a deliberate quest of the men who had wrecked his office—had been the ultimate in folly. Regrets were of no avail now, however. He felt himself borne on swiftly along a corridor which seemed ever to descend and turn to the left. Judging that he had been below street level at the moment he had been overpowered, Guest’s imagination ran away within him. Though actual descent was only in the neighborhood of fifteen feet, he would have sworn that he was being taken to the very bowels of the limestone stratum underlying Chicago.