by Arthur Slade
Also by Arthur Slade
OTHER BOOKS
IN THE HUNCHBACK ASSIGNMENTS SERIES
The Hunchback Assignments
The Dark Deeps: The Hunchback Assignments 2
Empire of Ruins: The Hunchback Assignments 3
Jolted: Newton Starker’s Rules for Survival
Megiddo’s Shadow
Dust
Tribes
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Arthur Slade
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Chris McGrath
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto, in 2012.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slade, Arthur G. (Arthur Gregory)
Island of Doom / by Arthur Slade. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (The Hunchback assignments; 4)
Summary: Modo, the shape-shifting, masked spy, and fellow spy Octavia Milkweed learn that Modo’s biological parents are still alive but when the Clockwork Guild find Modo’s parents first, Octavia and Modo chase them across Europe and North America to the Island of Doom.
eISBN: 978-0-307-97574-4 [1. Disfigured persons—Fiction. 2. Shapeshifting—Fiction. 3. Spies—Fiction. 4. Europe—History—19th century—Fiction. 5. Islands of the Pacific—History—19th century—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S628835Isl 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2012006130
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
FOR TORI AND TANAYA,
with all my love
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Other Books by This Author
Dedication
Prologue: Resurrection Men
Chapter 1: A Most Mysterious Letter
Chapter 2: The French Connection
Chapter 3: Such a Playful Language
Chapter 4: Through the Window
Chapter 5: Setting His Mind to the Task
Chapter 6: Yet Another Fraudulent Marriage
Chapter 7: A Clockwork Mind
Chapter 8: Operating on Instinct
Chapter 9: A Slight Skip of the Heart
Chapter 10: The Root of All Evil
Chapter 11: The Heart of the Agency
Chapter 12: Transporting the Dead
Chapter 13: A Stronger Woman
Chapter 14: The Strength of Seven Men
Chapter 15: Mad Horses and an Englishwoman
Chapter 16: Sanctuary
Chapter 17: More Meat, Please
Chapter 18: Eyes That Are Blind
Chapter 19: A Sudden Revelation
Chapter 20: In the Village
Chapter 21: Four-Wheeled Pursuit
Chapter 22: A Hole in Your Skull
Chapter 23: A Moment of Beauty
Chapter 24: The Boy with the Iron Shoulders
Chapter 25: Valuable Cargo Arrives
Chapter 26: A Better Woman Than I
Chapter 27: Stepping Out of the Trenches
Chapter 28: Westward Ho!
Chapter 29: Experiencing Elocution
Chapter 30: An Old but Young Friend
Chapter 31: Bolts of Anger
Chapter 32: A Statue Stands
Chapter 33: Over the Falls
Chapter 34: Contentment Under Adverse Circumstances
Chapter 35: A Peculiar Boat with Peculiar Cargo
Chapter 36: Element of Surprise
Chapter 37: Aboard the HMS Shah
Chapter 38: Sounding the Alarm
Chapter 39: The Island Assault
Chapter 40: Applauding the Designer
Chapter 41: One More Die to Cast
Chapter 42: Cauldron Boils
Chapter 43: A Horrible Whistling
Chapter 44: Shelling at Sunrise
Chapter 45: Bed of Stone
Chapter 46: The Power Vested in Me
Chapter 47: A Game Well Played
Chapter 48: A Timely Burst of Anger
Chapter 49: How Hannibal Was Defeated
Chapter 50: To Fight Again Another Day
Chapter 51: A Battle Amongst the Gods
Chapter 52: Taking the Lift
Chapter 53: Cleanup Duty
Chapter 54: Miscalculations
Chapter 55: Into Blue Water
Chapter 56: Ever South
Chapter 57: One for the Army, One for the Lord
Chapter 58: A Vast Departure
Chapter 59: A Warm and Calloused Hand
About the Author
WILLIAM “MAD DOG” MIDDLETON faced the gallows rope with a jaundiced eye. He’d lived thirty-six years, the last five in Sumpter, Oregon, during the dregs of a dying gold rush. In a fit of cold anger he’d murdered three prospectors for their meager findings, and now he was about to hang. It was that simple. He’d never been maudlin and felt only a slight annoyance as he stared back at the gathered crowd: faces he recognized from the saloons, from brawls, all eager to watch him swing. Life had been harsh. He had been harsh. He was happy to go.
His heart didn’t skip a beat when the hangman placed the rope around his neck. “Get it done” was all he said, his last words. The trapdoor opened, and one minute later a doctor pronounced Middleton dead. The law had been upheld along with his neck.
Middleton’s journey didn’t end there. The sheriff, who was also the coroner, barked at the gravediggers, “Take him up to Stoney Cemetery and throw him in a hole!” They placed his large body in a wagon and drew it to an unmarked grave in the half-frozen ground outside Sumpter. It was shallow because of the frost and stones. There was no one to mourn him. The men who threw the dirt did their job quickly and left before nightfall. There were other new graves. Some Chinese laborers who had died of consumption, and the miners whom Middleton had shot. He lay only yards away from his victims.
A full moon appeared in the sky, the type William had preferred when he hunted deer. Three men arrived. They were small, wiry, and dressed in black, faces covered by balaclavas. They unearthed Middleton’s body, placed it in a coffin, covered it with ice, and adjusted several dials on the lid. They were professional resurrection men from the Far East, the finest at their job.
The body was transported by cart to a train and settled beside the first-class baggage, the closest Middleton had ever come to riding in luxury. At the coast, he was loaded onto a midsized paddle steamer alongside several other coffins from America and Canada. There had been three other hangings in the Rockies. One coffin contained the recipient of a bullet—a common cause of death on the frontier. There were stakes to be claimed, cattle to be rounded up, and land to be purchased, all of which often led to arguments that ended in gunfire.
William wouldn’t know it, but his coffin was next to the body of a magistrate and sometime novelist named Duncan McTavish. He’d been locally famous for his wit, his loquacity, and his love of money. He’d poisoned his wife to inherit her fortun
e and instead had been hanged. If he and Middleton had both been alive at the same time, they wouldn’t have been able to find much to converse about. Since they were dead, this presented no problem.
The steamship was named Triton II, and it navigated the Pacific without the flag of any nation, the caskets rattling in its hold. Most smaller ships would hug the shore for safety as they traveled, but this one ran on compressed coal and an engine that would be the envy of the Royal Navy. It sped directly west, cutting through the waves.
Two evenings later the vessel arrived at an island and was met by armed patrol ships. Messages were relayed by lantern, and the ship was guided into a port as large as any in London. The eyes of the resurrection men widened, for in the center of the island was a fortress of glass. The moon painted it a glowing yellow. They knew that inside that palace was the man they referred to as the dragon master. This man was a visionary, renowned for the magnificence of his ideas and philosophies—philosophies that the resurrectionists happened to agree with. And as it turned out, the dragon master paid rather well.
It was the middle of the night, but gas and electric lamps lit the work of the soldiers building barricades. Others were hauling wagons of dirt from excavations. Several gray-clad soldiers helped the resurrection men unload the caskets and carry them to a cave a short distance away. The resurrectionists returned to their ship and the search for more flesh. And there on the cool stones lay William “Mad Dog” Middleton’s coffin, his body as dead as ever.
Shortly thereafter, four men in white coats came out and lifted each coffin. Middleton’s was brought into the cave and set beside a worktable littered with flasks, surgery tools, and electrical cables. One of the assistants awakened an old man dozing on a cot in the corner.
“Your supplies have been delivered, Dr. Hyde, sir,” the assistant said.
The doctor nodded, shook the sleep out of his balding head, fumbled to put on his glasses, and approached the coffins. The first one he opened was William Middleton’s. When he saw the size and the condition of the corpse, he smiled.
He began his work immediately.
1
A Most Mysterious Letter
A courier in a gray bowler hat and a frock coat approached a tall brick house on the outskirts of Montreal, Quebec, unaware of the professionally trained eyes watching him from a bedroom window. He was measured, weighed, and classified in the space of a few heartbeats.
“Five feet six inches,” Modo whispered. “One hundred and forty pounds. Twenty-five to twenty-seven years old.” He was alone in the room and had reverted to his childhood habit of talking to himself. “Slight limp indicates hip difficulty, perhaps from poliomyelitis.” Modo’s years of espionage training made the measuring of the man a rather easy task. It would be even simpler to jump down from his second-story window and dispatch the courier with a blow or a sleeper hold. Now, that would make him wet his britches!
Modo carried out this surveillance to break the monotony of his day. He hadn’t had an assignment for months and consequently his skills hadn’t been tested by either Tharpa, his weapons trainer, or his master, Mr. Socrates. They continued to train Octavia, his fellow agent and friend; every day she was in the courtyard huffing and puffing and practicing martial arts or shouting her way through elocution lessons with Mrs. Finchley. But Modo was persona non grata—an unwanted agent.
Three months ago he had twice disobeyed a direct order from his master to send innocent Australian natives into battle. Mr. Socrates had not forgiven him his trespasses.
Modo threw himself back on his bed and opened his copy of Middlemarch. The arrival of the courier would likely be the most exciting thing to happen this week. Occasionally, to entertain himself, Modo would go through the painful process of shifting his deformed body and face into one of the many personae he had perfected, such as the Knight, the Doctor, and others. He would wander out to the market to practice his French, though the Quebecois spoke a different dialect than Parisians. He did enjoy this little city in the Canadian wilderness with its French citizens, Irish merchants, and British magistrates. It was like several small countries all rolled into one. But he always returned to Montreal House and his life in limbo.
He scratched at the little finger on his left hand. It often itched; the skin was fresh and pink now, but in a few weeks it would shed. He had lost the finger to an enemy saber only three months before, and, to his great and absolute surprise, it had regenerated itself: proof that he was the oddest, strangest human being to have ever walked the earth.
He tried not to think of the woman who had wielded that saber, Miss Hakkandottir, one of the leaders of the Clockwork Guild. The Guild was an organization bent on the destruction of everything British, as far as Modo could tell. The Permanent Association, his organization, was bent on preserving Britannia. Modo had last seen Miss Hakkandottir fleeing into the jungle. He hoped she’d ended up in the gullet of a particularly nasty crocodile. He imagined the beast spitting out her metal hand and couldn’t keep from chuckling.
Alas, even if she were dead, someone else would rise up to take her place. The Clockwork Guild was not a small organization; it could strike anywhere in the world with ease. After all, it was most likely the Guild that had burned down Victor House, Mr. Socrates’ home in England, forcing them to flee here.
At least the Guild had left them alone for several months. Modo turned a page in his book and tried to disappear back into the world of Middlemarch. Would Dorothea ever marry Ladislaw? He was tempted to flip to the end, but stopped himself. He’d done that with Wuthering Heights and regretted it still.
There came a hard knock on his door and before Modo could say “Enter,” or even reach for his netting mask to cover his monstrous face, Mr. Socrates was standing at the side of his bed. His master had dark circles under his eyes, and his white hair was longer than usual. He looked as though he’d aged ten years in the past few months. The stress of hiding from the Clockwork Guild was obviously keeping the poor man up all hours of the night.
Modo had been raised by Mr. Socrates. Or not raised, but trained, for Mr. Socrates had never been a parent. He’d bought Modo from a traveling curiosity wagon. He’d never changed Modo’s diapers or soothed his bruises. He’d given orders for Modo to be shaped, from age one, into a secret agent at Ravenscroft, his secluded country home. Modo didn’t leave the house for thirteen years.
“May I help you?” Modo asked.
Mr. Socrates extended his arm. At first Modo thought he wanted to shake hands, but then he saw what his master was carrying: “This most mysterious letter has arrived for you,” Mr. Socrates said.
Modo took the envelope, briefly touching his master’s hand. How he wished, just once, that hand had patted his shoulder or his head in a gesture of kindness.
Modo cast aside these silly feelings and examined the letter. His name was written neatly along the front, and below that was the address of Montreal House. “But how can this be addressed to me? No one is supposed to know that we’re here.”
“Not entirely true,” Mr. Socrates answered. “Since our great retreat from London, I’ve cut off the majority of communication with the other members of the Permanent Association, but I have left a few trusted channels open.” So, Modo thought, the Permanent Association still operated! The secret organization had employed him for most of his life; its single goal was to keep Britannia ruling forever. One woman and six men, including Mr. Socrates, had created and now controlled the association. Even Queen Victoria didn’t know of its existence.
Modo’s master jabbed a finger toward the letter. “This was delivered to a trusted courier by a French contact.”
“But what would the French want with me?”
“Ah, that is the question of the hour. I’m here to discover the answer.”
Modo held the envelope up. “It’s already open.”
“Of course it is!” Mr. Socrates replied, lowering himself into the chair across from Modo’s bed. “Several eyes have studied it
along the way. But the letter is in a code that no one, including me, has been able to decipher. Open it.”
Modo pulled the single page out of the envelope and unfolded:
20-22-11-22:
33-23-28 32-18-21-21 12-15 30-32-29-27-29-20-30-15-11 25-20 16-11-7-24 13-25-22-20 21-13 11-30-29 30-18-15 30-20-31-33-12-31-20-21 30-8-10-23-23-17-22 …
“But it’s just numbers,” Modo said after scanning the first couple of rows. “Without a key it will be impossible to crack. Have you tried the Vigenère cipher?”
“Do you think I am a fool? That was the first code we applied. The day the French discover that we cracked their cipher will be a bad day for our intelligence gathering. No, whoever sent it has likely used a key only you would be able to decipher. They would know that you are part of the Permanent Association and that other eyes would attempt to read the missive.”
Modo paused. Had he heard that right? You are part of the Permanent Association. Perhaps his exile was nearly over.
Another knock at the door. An unusually busy morning! As was his habit, he drew his netting mask from the bedpost and pulled it over his face. He barely had his eyeholes straight before Octavia entered in her exercise outfit—black pantaloons and a black sweater. Her sandy blond hair was tied back, sweat still on her brow.
“Please, Octavia!” Modo exclaimed. “You really must wait for permission to enter!”
“Oh, Modo.” She waved away his protestations as if she were shooing flies. “Since when did we have such haristocratic stuffery between us?” He gritted his teeth. Yes, he had shown her his real face once, and he couldn’t stand the guarded look she’d given him. Now he thought of the event as the “yours is not the face I’ve dreamed of all my life” incident. Sometimes she seemed entirely oblivious to his feelings. “I’ve heard that a letter arrived for you.”
“Where did you hear that?” Mr. Socrates said.
“Tharpa told me.”
Mr. Socrates raised two doubting eyebrows. “He would not impart that sort of information.”
“Well then, I spied the delivery boy and saw you climbing the stairs through the picture window. You only go upstairs to lecture one of us, sir.”