The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  After leaving the boardinghouse, Bob had sent Edwin to fetch Hammie at his family home on Beacon Hill while Bob was at Phillip’s, a few streets over. Hammie was told only that they wanted to play another grand dodge on some Harvard fellows, but he relished the interruption. Once they reached the college yard, they secured a ladder from a maintenance shed, climbed it to the top of one Harvard building, pulling it up after them, and then used it as an unsteady bridge to the next roof, where they now were crouched. Had they lowered their lantern on the far side of the roof they would have seen a wooden coffin dangling below.

  “Did you say Constantines?” Edwin asked Hammie. “Do you mean to tell us that you’ve made Greek fire in those bottles?”

  “I do, Hoyt.”

  “What are you two gabbing on about?” Bob asked.

  “It’s on my list of impossible inventions and discoveries, Bob. Like Archimedes’ mirror, it’s an ancient weapon nobody has ever been able to decipher the formula for! It is said that an angel communicated the composition for Greek fire to the first Constantine, to be used as an overpowering weapon against their foreign enemies, but threatened heavenly vengeance were they ever to reveal its secrets.”

  “The angels did not count on Chauncy Hammond, Jr.,” Bob said lightly, to smooth the hint of jealousy in Edwin’s voice.

  Edwin squatted closer to Bob and whispered to him as Hammie continued his preparations. “I don’t know, Bob. For Hammie, it’s just another grand dodge. But Marcus might be down there. We must think of his safety first.”

  “We have to try something,” Bob said, his usual confidence noticeably lacking. “I have heard stories—more than one over the years—about persons supposedly snatched by the Med Fac having a way of disappearing, sometimes for weeks, sometimes … well, nothing was ever proven, but it’s why they were suppressed in the first place. We must not fail to act.”

  “I hope your brother told you the truth,” Edwin said gravely.

  “I am confident he did; he didn’t have much choice. But he could still be wrong about the building. The society moves their meetings to a new location every three or four years, so we can only hope this is still it. Hammie, are you ready? I can hardly bear the suspense.”

  They moved over to the chimney. Bob held the first tin bottle over the opening and nodded to Hammie, who leaned in with a match and lit the fuse. Bob let go, listening to the bottle rattling against the chimney walls on its way down.

  “Let us pray for Mansfield,” he said, bowing his head.

  “Amen,” Hammie said, then added, dreamily, “How Miss Swallow’s waxy gray eyes would sparkle at my achievement!”

  “Pardon me?” Bob looked at him in astonishment just as the roof began to shake.

  * * *

  A FEW MOMENTS EARLIER, inside the chambers of Med Fac, the dragon and the skull together cranked the handle of the windlass. The strained rope suspended from the window began to fray.

  “That’s enough!” said the skull. “It’s too much weight on the rope. Pull the coffin back up!”

  “I said dowse him more!”

  “It’s enough!” the skull protested vehemently. “It’s not even the fellow you wanted, Will!”

  The devil rounded on him. “Use a real name in these quarters again, rebel, and you’re next inside that box!”

  “Try it, Blaikie!”

  A noise in the wall interrupted them, a terrific banging, growing louder by the second. Then a wave of bright orange liquid fire burst from the fireplace, washing across the entire length of the chamber, and licking the windows and walls before retracting like a jack-in-the-box. Clouds of white smoke billowed in its wake. They tore off their masks and fell to the floor coughing, the dragon and the skull relinquishing their hold on the windlass, which spun wildly.

  “What in damnation was that?” one of the men asked a few seconds later as the shocked members of the society began to recover.

  “The fellow,” stammered a skinny junior with uneven teeth, who was formerly the skull. “We’ve just drowned him!” He leaned out the window, where the coffin had dropped into the basin.

  “By Jesus,” gasped Blaikie, “get down there right off!”

  They plunged en masse out of the room and down the stairs. By the time they reached the water, only the loosely coiled rope was to be seen. They seized it, hauled the coffin out, tore off its cover, and carried the drooping, drenched body of their victim onto the grass near the water pump.

  “He’s dead!”

  “Untie him, quickly!”

  They frantically loosened the rope around Marcus’s wrists and ankles.

  “I told you we oughtn’t have kept him down there so long,” the junior shouted hysterically. He pulled and pushed. Another began slapping Marcus’s face and murmuring frantically in his ear.

  Blaikie said, panting, “Why doesn’t he come to? Is he breathing?” He sounded as if on the verge of tears. “Come to, man! Don’t die! You scoundrel, you runt, you bloodsucking Technology drone!”

  “Will!” the junior cried. “Are you cracked in the head? That won’t help!”

  “What should I do?” Blaikie, his face bloodless, asked contritely.

  “Hush, and pray.”

  XXXV

  A Hundred Tech Boys

  MARCUS LIFTED ONE EYE OPEN. He let out the long breath he’d been holding.

  “You’re alive!” the young man leaning closest to him cried out with hysterical relief.

  Marcus reached his arm up in a single smooth motion, grasped the handle of the water pump above the student’s shoulder, and smashed it down onto his head, eliciting a loud crack and moan.

  He pushed himself to his feet and wheeled around, dripping wet, to face the five remaining startled Med Facs. “You’ve abandoned your masks. You can be sure I will not forget your faces. Now I know who you are and where to find you. Harvard isn’t a place you can hide in very well, is it?”

  There were five of them, five Harvard men, five Med Facs, and Marcus was just one Tech. But they did not seem to know how to react without their usual weapons: fear, anonymity, rumor, and, most of all, legend. They stood exposed in the middle of the college yard. It took a moment to sink in that the secret society that the Harvard authorities had failed to identify and stop for forty years had just been exposed by a single outsider.

  “Oh?” said Blaikie, pushing forward. “Oh? We’ll see what you remember when we’re finished with you.”

  “I will fight all of you if you wish it. But I will also enjoy watching you run away. I give you the choice,” Marcus said, smiling and raising his fists.

  Blaikie scowled and took a step closer, but paused as two of his followers scrambled away. Two others remained.

  “That suits me,” Marcus said.

  As they started toward him, a ladder clattered over the side of the building and three figures half-climbed, half-slid down into their midst.

  “Mansfield! Are you all right? You are wet through. Are you hurt?” asked Bob. Edwin and Hammie were close behind him. Bob glowered at Blaikie and his two comrades.

  “You wretches,” Blaikie snarled. “How dare you challenge us on our own yard? A hundred Tech boys couldn’t match us … if there ever were a hundred in existence. You’re all pathetic.”

  “Indeed?” Bob asked. “Is that what you think, Blaikie?”

  “Indeed! Look at yourselves! Posing as collegies at an institution that four years ago was nothing but mud in a marsh, and a year from now likely will be mud again. Do you realize what we do here? The burden we bear for the traditions and moral principles of all our forebears? We are as strong and as weathered as the elms you see around us. You insult all of it!”

  “Don’t you see yet, Blaikie? You can’t win for once,” Bob said.

  “Really? Watch me, Plymouth. I fight my own battles. I’ll lick all of you—mark that, old salt.”

  “We’ll see—” Marcus started, but was interrupted by a war whoop as the president of the Technologists hurled himse
lf into Blaikie, driving him to the ground. The rowing captain managed to toss Hammie over, pinning him down, even as Marcus had Hammie by the back of the collar, hauling him off from the fight.

  “Let go, Mansfield!” Hammie cried.

  “Mansfield,” Bob shouted, trying to pry Marcus away as a chorus of whistles erupted around them. “We have to run! Now!”

  “The college watchmen!” Blaikie gasped at the sounds of the whistles, then tumbled over his friends to get away.

  The Tech boys would be in just as much peril as the Med Facs if they were caught and turned over.

  “Run!” Marcus yelled, a watchman appearing right at their heels. Bob and Hammie went one way through the yard, Marcus and Edwin the other. “Come on!” Marcus said, glancing over his shoulder just as Edwin crashed to the ground, shoved from behind by the watchman.

  “Marcus!” Edwin cried.

  Marcus reversed course and tackled the man, who tumbled back the other way with a curse. Marcus pulled Edwin up and they ran on together, with a few yards’ lead on their pursuer.

  “I’ll lure him away from you.”

  “No, Marcus! Please don’t leave me!” Edwin cried, struggling to keep his footing.

  “Get into the woods and stay low until you can get out. Meet back at Bob’s boardinghouse.”

  Marcus gave Edwin a boost as they scaled the college gate. Once on the other side, the two fugitives divided up, charging headlong into the thick, gloomy woods that draped them with welcome darkness.

  XXXVI

  Power

  THE DREAMS HAD NOT STOPPED. Always, back on State Street, fighting his way through the unruly crowds as they began to pull and push one another. He turned around and around, taking in a kaleidoscope of fear, and however much he willed his feet in the dream to run, he felt himself pausing, as if commanded by fate, then knocked to the ground in the whirlwind of people.

  There was the garish pink girl in glass, falling. There was the boy’s hand thrust through the melting window, fingers clutched into a seared fist. Horror after horror, some remembered, some imagined from the newspaper accounts he pored over endlessly.

  In the dream he would stir from his swoon, as he had on the last day of his life as he had known it, watching the gauzy remains of a window float leisurely down, down over him, feeling its fiery tendrils settle into his scalp, his hair burned through, flowing over his ear, peppering the pores of his face. He pulled three people down to the ground as he dove for the nearest fireplug and opened the valve, expecting a torrent of water, but as though it were a cruel joke, nothing came out.

  He was up, he was running for the horse trough, scattering more people in his path, groping for the valve until he released its merciful flow over his face and head.

  Always at that moment he’d wake up again, and his fingers would find the craters of his face, and Joseph Cheshire would scream as loudly as his weary lungs would allow.

  His fine life gone forever, he could no longer look in a mirror and know himself. It was not him, not Joseph Cheshire the stockbroker; it was an artificial monster who looked back at him, a monster who had to be covered in a hood just to appear in public without frightening people. The Pinkerton detective he’d hired, Camp, had found the identity of the collegians who had been seen around the damaged wharves, as reported by the old wharf rat, and then again near the wrecked region of State Street by the union man who had accepted Camp’s bribes for information.

  “What is it they’re doing?” Cheshire had asked the detective after he made his report.

  “I cannot say for certain. Perhaps merely making schoolboy adventures out of observing these foul deeds,” Camp had replied.

  “What is this college they attend?”

  “It’s not yet been there for four years. It’s scientific, you know, as they say, polytechnic,” Camp explained without confidence that he could. “They learn mechanics and chemistry and practical arts. It is housed in an immense building over in the new land, the Back Bay, too large for the number of students enrolled. It’s said by most the place cannot survive. They’re worthless to you, I say.”

  “You don’t have the power to say that—I do.”

  Camp nodded slowly at this and took a puff from his dwindling cigar. “As long as you pay my fees, Mr. Cheshire. I am a professional, you know.”

  “Well, I do pay, so you continue to do as I command.” Cheshire’s hot temper flared up even faster and more frequently since the day he had lost his face.

  Camp touched his bowler hat and grinned. “Yes, sir, Mr. Cheshire.”

  After confronting Marcus Mansfield, Cheshire was even more certain those miserable students knew something. He would see to it they were forced to reveal whatever it was. In the meantime, he had been pursuing another piece of information from the wharf rat, tracing every sailboat and yacht named Grace registered to all ports around Boston. Unfortunately, it was not an uncommon choice for a name.

  He’d come tantalizingly close one recent evening, he believed, when he’d climbed aboard one Grace where he’d found it docked, and felt the boat rocking in the water. He raced to the other side, in time to see a fleeing figure jumping from one boat to the next. Cheshire had no chance to catch him. When he sent Camp to watch the boat, it was gone.

  But Cheshire felt sure he was drawing nearer to his quarry. He would discover who mauled his face with chemicals and destroyed his life, and would tear apart anyone in his way. Indeed, it was all he lived for now. Simple vengeance. Feed the monster. More lines from the Bible he had been forced to memorize as a child returned to him each day, sometimes jumbled or mixed with words from his own dreams.

  God is a righteous Judge; and in strength he is angry against the wicked every day.

  The patient man is better than the valiant, and he that rules his spirit than he that taketh cities.

  It is written, Judgment is mine, I will repay.

  I am the avenging angel and my tongue is my flaming sword.

  Those responsible would suffer as much as and more than he’d suffered.

  He applied the ammonia solution to his face ten times a day, at first, then five times a day. As he dyed his mustache, which had been bleached ghostly white, he prayed those long hours for satisfaction against his unknown enemies. His life’s chief mission.

  Cheshire always had a plan in reserve; this was no exception. If the newspapermen failed to act, he had another way in mind. Camp had reported Marcus Mansfield walking arm in arm at the harbor with a serving girl named Agnes. As a domestic, she would be an easy target to capture, and then he could force the Tech boy to give answers in return for her life. She was a pretty maid, Camp had told him. This plan, indeed, could promise an even greater personal satisfaction for the stockbroker.

  He was ready for the day. His first stop would be the office of the Boston Telegraph, where he would leave a detailed description of what those Institute of Technology boys had been doing. There would be an investigation, and everything they had discovered would be revealed. Technology fools! He’d use that information, along with Simon Camp’s help, to track down and destroy his real prey.

  He walked down his front steps, wearing the hood he had grown accustomed to using as a cover for the painful half-healed scars on his face. Though others grumbled about the heavy rains that had fallen this spring, he welcomed them, for the dark clouds masked his hideous looks and protected his scars from the sun. He carried his dagger with him, having a vague sense as he stalked his enemies that they might be stalking him. That instinct grew sharper as he proceeded at this hour, and he kept his hand on the handle of his dagger inside his coat, alert for any sign of danger.

  “Cheshire.”

  The call reached his damaged ears in an echo; it could have come from some distance or from close proximity. He unsheathed his dagger and swung around. Let them try to catch him off guard.

  “Cheshire, here!”

  He looked up and was nearly blinded by the flash of metal from what appeared to be a milita
ry uniform in the window opposite. Decoration Day was coming, and more uniforms, some battered and others fresh, could be seen up and down Boston being aired out. He squinted and realized that he was looking right at a rifle pointed at him.

  “Technology lives!” came the cry, as the blast of the rifle sounded.

  In a reflex, Cheshire’s eyes closed and he felt faint, as he had that day on State Street. But then he realized he had been untouched. Opening his eyes, reality rushed in on him. The shot had flown behind him, hitting a gas main. Cheshire gripped his dagger and grinned at his good fortune: He was looking squarely at his enemy’s face, and would now have his chance for revenge. Then he heard a hiss, hypnotic and loud. He realized he was standing over a sewer. He tried to jump away, but it was too late. From below the grate, a geyser of flames swirled up and over him, enclosing him entirely in its white-hot vortex.

  XXXVII

  Dirty

  THE SUN SHOWED ITSELF that morning, though a flock of clouds was drifting in. When the bell sounded for Sunday services in the Harvard chapel, the young men appearing around the campus yard rubbed their eyes and yawned with great spiritual emphasis. One of those strolling along the middle walk of the yard was more exhausted than the rest. Yes, some of the Harvard seniors might have been jollifying late into the night in their rooms; certainly a few of the freshes had been much occupied, systematically breaking the windows of the most hated sophs. But this particular collegian had been in Norton’s Woods right outside the college yard for half the night, in hiding, covered in bugs and inspected now and then by the frogs.