The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  Mrs. Moffett clenched her fists at her sides and screamed again—WOMWOMWOMWOMWOM!—but this time Archie was ready for it. He dug his heels in the hard-packed salt flat and leaned into the pounding sound. It beat against him like the waves of the Don Francisco Bay.

  Mrs. Moffett kept coming at him. The sound waves got stronger, harder to fight, but then she ran out of breath and had to stop, taking in huge gulps of air. Archie staggered toward her, his ears ringing, and threw a wild punch at her. She danced out of the way on her octopus legs.

  “You should be honored,” Mrs. Moffett told him, still sucking in deep breaths. “You’re witnessing history. The start of the Monster War.”

  A dog-creature leaped for a cowering woman nearby, but Buster was there to swat it away. Mrs. Moffett screamed at the steam man, and Buster staggered, knocked sideways under the oscillating sound waves.

  “Don’t get close!” Archie yelled. He charged Mrs. Moffett, but she turned her sonic scream on him again. Without his feet planted, he flew through the air and slammed into the ground.

  Mrs. Moffett glided over to him on her tentacles. “The way the Dragon Lantern works,” she said, “is by activating latent Mangleborn DNA in humans. It’s there, in some of us, after millennia of interbreeding. Hideous, horrible interbreeding between Manglespawn and humans. And sometimes Mangleborn and humans. Or maybe we’re related, somewhere back in the mists of time. Maybe we’re all monsters of one kind or another.”

  Archie wasn’t on his feet yet, and Mrs. Moffett was taking another deep breath to scream again. He thumped his fist on the salt flat, knocking everyone around them off their feet. Everyone except Mrs. Moffett. She was thrown back, but her swarming mass of tentacles caught her and righted her before she could fall.

  “Oh, good,” Mrs. Moffett said. “Primitive, but good. I suppose my weapon isn’t much more sophisticated.”

  Mrs. Moffett screamed. Archie dug in just in time, throwing his arms up in front of his face to avoid the beating the scream gave him. The ground ripped up and flew away all around him and his white hair whipped into his eyes, but he stood his ground.

  Mrs. Moffett’s scream died, and Archie lurched toward her, trying to catch her with a punch again. But Mrs. Moffett was still too fast for him.

  “Stalemate, Archie Dent. They made us both too well,” Mrs. Moffett said. “Not all of us have it, mind you. Mangleborn DNA. Only about forty percent. That’s what Dr. Echohawk and the others at the Forge discovered. That’s why the lantern only worked on some of these people. And that’s why it only worked on some of the children at the Forge. Just the lucky ones. It doesn’t work on your fox-tailed friend because her Mangleborn DNA was already activated. She was born a monster.” Mrs. Moffett looked up at Buster saving another person from the Manglespawn. “I wonder if it would work on your other friend? We’ll find out when I pry open that tin can he’s driving.”

  Archie wiped salty dirt from his mouth. “You’re trying to make me mad,” Archie said. “You can’t beat me, so you’re trying to make me lose control. But I’m not going to let it happen again,” he told her. “Not after what happened to Sings-In-The-Night.”

  “You think so?” Mrs. Moffett said sweetly. “You think nothing can make you that angry again? Oh! I have a wonderful idea! What if I told you where you come from, Archie Dent? How you were made? I thought it was more torture for you not to know, but now I think the truth may just do the trick. I think knowing how you were born might just make you mad enough to lose control. Forever.”

  * * *

  A cold breeze swirled in the little room above Marie Laveau’s shop, flickering the candles on the table where the five of them held hands—Fergus, Hachi, Marie Laveau, and her daughter and granddaughter.

  “Papa Legba, I beseech you,” the oldest Laveau said. “Open the door to the afterlife, that we may speak once more with one you have taken past the crossroads. Papa Legba, bring to us the unsettled spirit of Helena Blavatsky, dark bokor of Russia, so that she can make right in death the wrongs she did in life, and find rest for her soul.”

  Fergus felt Hachi’s hand tighten in his own as she looked up sharply. “Find rest? You mean by telling us what she knows, she’ll earn a better afterlife?” Hachi asked.

  “She may,” the elder Laveau said. “In voodoo, good deeds are rewarded.”

  “But I want her to suffer.”

  “Then say so, and I will bring this séance to an end,” Laveau told her.

  Hachi looked imploringly at Fergus.

  “You came here to find out what this woman knows about how your father died, about why they killed all the men in your village,” Fergus told her. “You can’t go home without that. Not after all this. She may not find rest if you don’t ask her, but neither will you.”

  Hachi squeezed his hand. “I guess dead is dead, after all.”

  “Well, not so much here in New Orleans,” Fergus muttered.

  “Shall I continue?” Laveau asked, and Hachi nodded.

  “Helena Blavatsky, bokor of Russia, I call thee to our table,” Laveau said. “Speak to us, witch. Speak to us from beyond the grave.”

  The smoke from the candles swirled over the table and hung there, gaining form, until Fergus saw the head and shoulders of Blavatsky take shape. He heard Hachi suck in a sharp breath beside him.

  “I am here,” the smoke Blavatsky said.

  Laveau nodded to Hachi, who for the first time in her life seemed afraid.

  “Blavatsky,” she said, her voice hoarse and shaking. “Tell me what happened eleven years ago at Chuluota. Tell me why my father and ninety-nine other men were killed.”

  The smoke Blavatsky raised her hands. “Oh, no. Don’t ask me that,” she begged. “It’s too awful.”

  “Tell her, and your soul may at last find rest,” Laveau said.

  The smoke Blavatsky cried, which surprised Fergus. Real tears dropped into the candles, making them hiss and splutter.

  “Forgive me. Forgive me!” Blavatsky sobbed.

  “Not until you tell me what you did,” Hachi said.

  Blavatsky nodded. “I will tell you. May the Hidden Masters have mercy on my soul, I will tell you. Where shall I begin?”

  “Tell me who else was there. The names of the other men and women, the strangers who came to Chuluota that night and killed the hundred and anyone else who got in their way.”

  “There were seven of us,” Blavatsky said. “I will tell you our names.”

  “Do you want me to write this down?” Fergus whispered to Hachi.

  “No,” Hachi said, her voice hard and cold. “I’ll remember.”

  34

  “I don’t care,” Archie said. He took a swing at Mrs. Moffett, but she danced out of the way. “I don’t want to know where I come from.”

  “Of course you want to know!” Mrs. Moffett crowed. “That’s how I got you to abandon your friends and go after the Dragon Lantern in the first place. Because you had to know.”

  Archie could feel himself getting angrier. He could feel himself losing control. But no—he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not after what he’d let happen when he lost control the last time. Archie clapped his hands, making a sonic boom of his own. It knocked Mrs. Moffett back off her octopus legs before she could catch herself. Archie rushed her and tried to jump her, but she caught him in her swirling mass of tentacles and held him helplessly up off the ground.

  “Last chance, Archie Dent,” Mrs. Moffett said. “Join me, and I promise I won’t tell you where you come from.”

  “No,” Archie said. “No! I’m not a monster.” He wriggled in her grasp, trying to get free.

  “Oh, but you are a monster, Archie Dent. I told you they used the Dragon Lantern on you when you were a baby, but that was a lie. They never used the Dragon Lantern on you. They couldn’t. Because you were never human,” Mrs. Moffett said, her eyes bright with excitement.

  Archie’s blood was boiling. He had to get away before he heard any more, but he couldn’t get any kind of pow
er to his punches and kicks with Mrs. Moffett holding him. Instead he pulled his hands toward each other and yanked away the tentacles coiled around each wrist. More of Mrs. Moffett’s tentacles grabbed for him, but he punched her in the head.

  Mrs. Moffett howled and rolled away, her human hands holding her face. Her tentacles had kept him from throwing a full punch, or she’d be dead. Instead she wiped a thin line of blood from her mouth and smiled a wolfish smile.

  “Still not angry?” she asked.

  WOMWOMWOMWOMWOM! She hit him with another blast of her sonic scream, and he went tumbling again, slamming into one of the locomotives. It tipped over and crashed onto its side with a thundering clangor of metal and wood. As the sonic waves petered out again, Archie caught sight of the second train, running backward away from the fray. Jesse James and his gang were escaping with the humans who had survived the Dragon Lantern and its hideous creations.

  Mrs. Moffett glided over to him. “You’re not human, Archie Dent. I’m more human now than you ever were,” she said.

  Archie struggled to his feet. “That’s not true,” he said. He reached into the wreckage of the locomotive and grabbed it, lifting it high over his shoulder like it was a lacrosse stick and Mrs. Moffett was the ball.

  “Oh, but it is,” Mrs. Moffett told him, unperturbed. “Blavatsky and the others made you out of clay.”

  Archie froze. Clyde and Buster stomping on Manglespawn, Kitsune jumping from podium to table to chair—everything around him slowed to a stop like it was frozen in ice. He shuddered in the chill.

  “What did you say?” he asked with a voice that came from someplace far, far away.

  “I said, Helena Blavatsky made you out of clay,” Mrs. Moffett said, and she blasted Archie with another sonic scream.

  * * *

  “Why?” Hachi asked when Blavatsky had told her the names of the others who’d been with her at Chuluota. “Why were you there? Why did you kill all those men? Why did you kill my father?”

  “To create the Jandal a Haad,” Blavatsky said.

  Fergus got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “But—but that’s what the Mangleborn call Archie, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Fergus felt Hachi’s hand go slack in his. Whatever it was he didn’t understand yet, she did.

  * * *

  “The Boy Made of Stone,” Mrs. Moffett said. She hit Archie with another sonic scream, and he went rolling. “Blavatsky read how to do it in an ancient manuscript she found in Siberia, written by the First Men,” she said, following Archie. “The First Men were as cold and heartless as your Septemberists at the Forge. They had no problem sacrificing people to destroy the giant monsters in the world. What are a few human lives to save an entire race? So they carved you from stone, put you on an altar over the closest Mangleborn they could find, stirred up some lektricity, and said the magic words. But they needed one more thing,” Mrs. Moffett told him. “One more very precious thing.”

  * * *

  “Blood,” Blavatsky said. “We needed human blood. The blood of a hundred men to make a single boy with the strength of those hundred men.”

  Hachi shot to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor behind her. “No!” she cried.

  * * *

  “Yes,” Mrs. Moffett said, standing over Archie. He lay covered in dirt, curled up into a little ball. “Now you understand why you’re truly a monster,” Mrs. Moffett told him. “Why you’re more a monster than any of these Lanternspawn. More a monster than me. You exist only because Blavatsky and her friends murdered one hundred men to make you.”

  “Where?” Archie asked, his face to the ground. But he already knew the answer.

  “Does it matter?” Mrs. Moffett said. “Somewhere in Florida.”

  It mattered, Archie knew. He closed his eyes. It was bad enough that a hundred men had been killed to create him, but one of them mattered to Archie even more than the rest.

  “Hachi…,” he said, sobbing into the salty dust. “Oh Hachi, I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  “I’m so sorry,” Blavatsky sobbed. She reached out for Hachi, but Hachi ran past Erasmus out of the room.

  “Please, be merciful. You have to forgive me. I thought we were creating a champion, a servant of the Hidden Masters,” she said, her voice small. “And after all we did, after that awful night, it didn’t work. The child didn’t live.”

  “It did,” Fergus said. “He did. His name is Archie Dent.”

  “The Jandal a Haad—it survived? But it was lifeless when the Septemberists took it from us! We thought we had eluded them, but they caught us. They stole the homunculus and drove us apart. But you say we did it? We brought forth the Jandal a Haad? Glorious!”

  “At the cost of a hundred lives,” Fergus reminded her.

  “Wouldn’t you trade the lives of a hundred men for the greatest hero the world has ever seen?” Blavatsky asked.

  “I think the question is, would he?” Fergus said.

  Blavatsky’s face fell.

  “Be gone, spirit,” Laveau said. “Papa Legba, take this wretched soul back to whence she came.”

  “Forgive me,” Blavatsky said again, and she disappeared as her tears put out the candles that gave her form.

  “This information, what Blavatsky had to say, it means something to you and Hachi?” Queen Laveau asked.

  “Aye,” said Fergus. “It means everything.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Moffett cackled, hitting Archie again with her sonic scream. He did nothing but lie on the ground and take it.

  “I thought you would be mad. I thought you would lose control, and I could loose you on the rest of the continent with my monster army. But all you do is whimper and cry!” Mrs. Moffett crowed. “If I had known it would do this to you, I would have told you where you came from sooner!” She hit him again, and again, and again. Maybe if she blasted him enough, he thought, he would finally break apart and die.

  Death would be better than living with the truth.

  Archie waited for another blast from Mrs. Moffett’s sonic scream, but she cried out instead.

  “No—no! It can’t be!”

  Archie looked up to see Sings-In-The-Night swooping down out of the sky, the high bright Paiute sun glinting off her beautiful black wings. Sings-In-The-Night wasn’t dead. She was alive! Archie felt his heart glow as Sings-In-The-Night descended like some glorious savior from on high, a heavenly creature come to grant him forgiveness and wipe away the sins done in his name.

  “No—no, I killed you!” Mrs. Moffett cried, backing away.

  Sings-In-The-Night hit Mrs. Moffett feetfirst, knocking her to the ground. She perched on top of Mrs. Moffett, wings wide, while her old friend tried to scrabble away in horror.

  Archie reached for her. “Sings…,” he said, his throat dusty and sore.

  And then Archie was being picked up, lifted by a great brass hand. Buster! The steam man stuffed Archie into his mouth and turned to run away.

  “No,” Archie said, thrown around the captain’s quarters. “No—no, wait!” He scrambled up the ladder to the bridge and grabbed Clyde’s arm. “No, we have to go back!”

  “Are you crazy?” Clyde said. One of Mrs. Moffett’s sonic screams caught them, and Buster lurched forward, almost falling over. Clyde steered Buster out of its path, running as fast as he could.

  “Clyde, we have to go back! Sings-In-The-Night was there! She’s alive! I saw her!” Archie pulled on Buster’s controls, wrenching them back.

  “Archie—Archie! It was Kitsune!” Clyde said. “It was just an illusion to distract Mrs. Moffett so we could get you out of there. It was just Kitsune!”

  Clyde pointed, and Archie saw Kitsune hopping up the length of Buster’s arm to climb into the top hatch.

  Clyde grabbed Archie’s arm and shook it. “She’s dead, Archie,” Clyde told him. “I’m sorry, but Sings-In-The-Night really is dead.”

  Archie sank to the floor. Of course she was. And all Archie wanted was to be dea
d with her.

  35

  Clyde banged on something with a wrench, his blue-and-yellow UN Steam Cavalry pants and black boots sticking out from under a bundle of hissing pipes in Buster’s belly. Kitsune perched high up on top of a water tank, studying a map.

  Archie sat in the shadows, where he belonged.

  Archie had been carved out of stone and soaked in blood, and now he had the strength of a hundred men. A hundred men who had been killed to create him. A hundred men, including Hachi’s father, Hololkee Emartha. No matter what he did with his life, no matter what kind of hero he became, he could never repay that sacrifice.

  “Twisted pistons!” Clyde called. “I can’t get this thingamajig to go back in the whatchamadoodle. Unless it goes in this doohickey…”

  “Sounds very technical,” Kitsune said.

  “Perhaps a break is in order, Master Clyde,” Mr. Rivets said. He came into the tight engineering space bearing a military-grade tea service and three metal mugs. Kitsune hung upside down from a pipe to grab her cup, and Clyde wormed his way out and took his, mopping his brow with a yellow handkerchief.

  “Thanks, Mr. R. This hits the spot,” Clyde said.

  Mr. Rivets offered Archie a cup. “Master Archie?”

  Archie shook his head.

  “You have to have something to eat and drink sometime,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “No, I don’t,” Archie said. “That’s the point, isn’t it? I don’t need air to breathe, and I don’t need food to eat or water to drink. I’m not a real boy. I never was. I really am a shadow. I’m a dark, crooked thing that looks like a person, that moves like a person, but when you put your hand out to touch it, there’s nothing really there.”

  “Well,” said Clyde, “Mrs. DeMarcus used to say you can’t have a shadow without a little light.”

  “Will you shut up about Mrs. DeMarcus?” Archie spat.

  Clyde folded his arms and looked down at the metal gangplank at their feet, and Archie immediately regretted his words. But slag it, this wasn’t something he could just whitewash with one of Clyde’s homilies. He was a monster. An honest-to-goodness horror. He saw now why he could never be the leader of the League of Seven—not with a history like his. When he came right down to it, Archie wasn’t sure he could even be the League’s shadow anymore. He was too awful even for that.