Adam of Albion

by Kim McMahon

  That stung, but Adam knew he was right. They were just a couple of kids—what could they do on their own?

  Artemis, however, had a look in her eyes that underlined the word stubborn. It made Adam nervous about her all over again. Maybe she would keep quiet about this, but what if she insisted on pulling something stupid?

  “We’ll start looking for those people first thing tomorrow,” Adam said—although he didn’t have a clue how they’d start looking, or who they were looking for.

  But suddenly, Orpheus didn’t seem to be paying any attention. He tipped himself back so his small, chiseled nostrils were pointing upward, and they flared as he took in a deep breath. And in spite of all his troubles, he seemed to be cheering up.

  “Ahhhh—I detect the fragrance of wine, very fine wine,” he declared. “I haven’t sampled its delights since the Marquis de Sade helped me escape from the Bastille, disguised as an onion in the executioner’s lunchbox. Had some strange ideas, the Marquis, but also a certain je ne sais quoi.”

  “How can you even drink?” Adam asked.

  “I can’t—I just inhale the aroma. But it’s still intoxicating.” He gave Artemis a look that was polite, but made it clear he didn’t expect no for an answer. “So, my dear, might I invite myself to partake of this household’s bottled bounty? Drown my sorrows, or at least take them for a swim?”

  “Well—Daddy does keep a cellar, and he is a connoisseur,” she said hesitantly. “I’m not supposed to go in there.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Of course not. I go anywhere I please.”

  “So your hesitation doesn’t seem to be on either tactical or moral grounds,” Orpheus pointed out, with his nose twitching longingly. “Is there another reason?”

  “Yes. I want a quid pro quo,” she said. “If I take you, you have to promise that we’ll keep discussing this situation with Eurydice. Deal?”

  Great, Adam thought. As if it was tough getting Orpheus to talk anyway, let alone with wine involved.

  “Signed, sealed, and delivered, as Cromwell was so fond of saying,” Orpheus said, obviously impatient and not about to argue.

  “All right,” she said, jumping up off the bed. Adam got up, too.

  “We’d better hide him, just in case somebody else is up,” Adam said. “Orpheus, I’m afraid you’ll have to go back in the pack.”

  Orpheus glared at him sourly. “Come on—if this place can afford a wine cellar, there’s got to be a classier ride around here.”

  “How about my tote?” Artemis said. “I can cushion you and make you comfortable.” She hurried to the secret passageway and brought back a black leather bag that seemed half as big as she was, then quickly arranged some things and gently set Orpheus down inside.

  “Lovely,” he said, with a contented grunt. Then, glancing snidely at Adam over the rim, he added, “Smells a lot better in here, too.” There was no arguing that—the fragrance of perfume came wafting out like a mini-mushroom cloud.

  They left Adam’s room cautiously and tiptoed along the long hallway, then down the back stairways until they came to a final roughhewn flight that led deep into the musty—and very dark—stone basement.

  “Watch your step carefully,” Artemis whispered. “I don’t want to turn on any lights.”

  “I can take care of that,” Orpheus said, his voice muffled inside the purse. “Lift me out and hold me in front of you.”

  Artemis opened the purse and Adam cupped Orpheus in his hands. Suddenly, his entire head took on a beautiful glow with tones of gold and blue, and his face shot a more intense beam of it ahead like a powerful flashlight. Both kids gasped, too startled to move.

  “We could just stand here all night,” Orpheus pointed out coolly after a few seconds. “Then again, we could pick up our feet and put them down again—those of us who have feet, that is—and move on to our destination, which, my refined olfactory sensibilities inform me, lies just ahead. There, to be precise.” The light beam pulsed in rapid bursts, illuminating a heavy arched wooden door with a huge brass knob.

  “Yes, of course,” Artemis said quickly. Adam noted with satisfaction that she was flustered. She might be able to one-up him, but Orpheus was cutting right through her snooty veneer.

  The door opened quietly on well-oiled hinges. He’d never been in a wine cellar before—they weren’t the kind of thing you usually found back home in ranch country. It seemed to go on for quite a ways, with floor-to-ceiling racks of bottles lying on their sides and several wooden barrels with spigots along one wall. The old stones were damp with condensation, and the air had a sharp sweet-sour smell that hinted of grapes.

  It also looked like somebody liked to hang out here. There was an old overstuffed armchair, a tattered rug on the rough floor, and a table with different kinds of glasses lined up and several corkscrews that looked like instruments of torture.

  “Is that stuff your Dad’s?” he asked Artemis.

  She’d recovered enough to flash him her by now familiar scathing look. “Heavens, no—Daddy’s far too cultured. It’s Reg, the gardener. Totally unacceptable, of course, but the P’s turn a blind eye because he does a good job otherwise.”

  The thought of Reg made Adam swallow nervously, remembering that he was the owner of the moped Barry had stolen. No—that Barry and Adam had stolen. He’d been in on it too, just like Barry said

  “Set me down,” Orpheus commanded. “The table will do fine.”

  Adam obeyed, although Orpheus was getting on his nerves, too. He was awfully pushy for a pint-sized head, and along with his insults, it was wearing thin.

  The light beam shot out from Orpheus and darted across the bottles, examining the labels.

  “Let’s see,” he murmured, verbally rubbing his hands in anticipation. The beam stopped on a dusty dark red bottle. “Domaine Canet Vallette, ‘47—Adam, bring that here at once.”

  That did it, Adam thought—enough was enough. Even if he had gone insane, imagining that he was in a wine cellar with a blustery little head and a girl who looked like a satanic Alice in Wonderland, he didn’t have to be an insane wimp.

  “Let’s get something straight right now,” Adam said. “I’m not your servant, and we’re going to get along a lot better if you learn to say ‘please.’”

  “Oh, really,” Orpheus said, doing his patronizing act. “Well, I stand corrected by your superior manners. Never mind that I’ve been around this planet since humans were wearing skins and finding lunch under rocks. Forget that I’ve been worshipped by kings and caused more wars than Helen of Troy. What does any of that matter, compared to the feelings of one scrawny, uneducated boy?”

  “Go ahead and brag about what a cool guy you are,” Adam shot back. “It’s no excuse for being rude.”

  Orpheus gave him a weary, condescending smile. “Then I’ll say this as courteously as I can—I can’t believe I’m wasting my time with you two! Why don’t you take me back where you found me, and I’ll wait for an adult to come along?”

  “I’ll be glad to—and I’ll bet you won’t have to wait long. You were tucked away in the backpack so you might not know this, but there’s a killer out there looking for you. I saw two people get shot.”

  They glared at each other.

  “Did you say—somebody got shot?” Artemis asked, with a tremor in her voice.

  Adam nodded curtly. “I’ll explain—if we can ever get him to quit acting like a spoiled brat at his own birthday party.”

  “So I did hear the sound of muskets firing,” Orpheus muttered, settling back down. “I’d only been awake a minute or two. I thought maybe it was just my synapses reconnecting.” Muskets? Adam thought. But it made perfect sense, given that Orpheus was coming from the French Revolution.

  Orpheus exhaled. “Look, I am sorry. But in my defense, let me just say I’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t have much going for you in the muscle department, it can pay to be verbally forceful.”

  Artemis nodded sympathetically.
“He is a bit height-challenged, after all,” she murmured to Adam. That made him feel guilty. He hadn’t even tried to put himself in the place of someone who went through life the size of a navel orange, without a body to carry him around.

  “We don’t need to be forceful with each other,” Adam said. “Let’s just all be reasonable, and maybe we can get somewhere. So which wine was it again?”

  The light beam streaked back to the bottle of Canet Vallette. “Just lay it down in front of me with the cork under my nose, and I can inhale the bouquet right through it.” Orpheus paused, then added, “If you would be so kind.”

  Adam got the bottle and positioned it on the table. Orpheus closed his eyes and breathed in deeply for what seemed like a full minute. Then he opened his eyes again, looking happy and slightly dazed.

  “Exquisite—much obliged,” he said, with a slight hiccup. “Just by the way, if you think I’m grumpy, you haven’t seen anything. Take Vlad Dracula, for instance. All you had to do was look at him wrong and next thing you knew, you’d be a human scarecrow on a stake. Horrible breath, that chap—only had two front teeth, the rest had rotted away. No wonder he was always in a bad mood.

  “Then there was Ivan the Terrible. Rub him the wrong way, and he’d nail your cap to your skull. I ought to know, I did a stint hidden inside the mallet head. Messy work, let me tell you.

  “Grumpy? How about Bloody Mary? One day she was this, next day she was that, and whoever wasn’t this or that at the same time was all of a sudden on their way to their own barbecue—”

  Just as Adam had feared, now that Orpheus had a couple of snorts in him he seemed prepared to ramble on all night. But Artemis interrupted tactfully.

  “Yes, you’re an angel compared to those famous serial killers,” she said. “Now, it’s time for you both to tell me how all this happened.”

  “Go ahead, Adam,” Orpheus said—obviously making an effort to be nicer, or maybe it was just the wine.

  But as he was about to start, Orpheus’s eyes suddenly flared in warning, like they had when he’d heard Artemis’s secret door sliding open.

  “There’s somebody else in here,” he hissed.

  Then came a sound that the kids heard, too, from farther inside the wine cellar—a grunt like a bear tearing into a rotten log to find grubs.

  They stared in horror at the burly shape of a man appearing in the gloom, staggering forward with an open bottle clutched in his hand, grabbing the wine racks to steady himself.

  Reg! He must have been passed out back there!

  “Somebody playing games with me, is it?” Reg snarled. “Come on out, I ‘eard you.”

  “We’ve got to book!” Adam whispered, grabbing for Orpheus.

  But Orpheus whispered back, “No time! Disappear—I’ll handle this.” His glow cut off abruptly, plunging the room into darkness.

  Artemis caught Adam’s hand and yanked him over to the big chair. They crouched behind it, trying to stifle their panicked breathing. How on earth could the tiny head handle a hulking, drunken, angry brute?

  “No use ‘iding,” Reg said. “I’m going to give you a ‘iding.” He laughed coarsely, apparently thinking he’d made a good joke.

  For several more seconds, nothing happened. But Reg was bound to turn on a light any time now, and Adam braced himself to scuttle forward, grab Orpheus, and make a run for it.

  Then—a faint, low moan started echoing through the old stone chamber, so creepy and menacing it made Adam’s scalp bristle.

  “Oooooohhhhhhwowowooooohhh . . .”

  It was coming from where Orpheus rested on the tabletop.

  Reg’s clumsy footsteps stopped dead. “Wot the bloody ‘ell is this?” he said. But there was no laughing now—his voice had turned uncertain.

  “WAAAHHHHaaaahhhhoooowowowowOOOOOHHHH!”

  Orpheus started to glow again—this time, a hot flickering red the exact color of burning coals. In the surrounding darkness, he appeared to be hovering in mid-air, with a fiendish scowl and his eyes slanting wickedly. He’d even somehow twisted up locks of his hair so they looked like little horns sticking up from his forehead.

  Crash! The bottle that Reg was holding dropped from his petrified hand and shattered on the floor.

  “Regggg—iiii—nallddd,” Orpheus intoned in a slow, hoarse growl. “Thou art a sinner—and the wages of sin is death. I am come to carry you away—to eternal fire!”

  He suddenly flared up, with the smoldering red color shooting out fiercely all around him.

  Reg teetered there like a tree that had been chainsawed most of the way through. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he fainted dead away backwards, landing like a sack of grain dropped from a truck bed.

  Artemis burst into giggles like a schoolgirl, and Adam let out his own breath in a shaky laugh. As they jumped to their feet, Orpheus, wearing an impish smile, switched back to his gold-blue light.

  “One of my favorite acts,” he said modestly. “Kit Marlowe saw me do it in a game of charades one night, and he went right home and penned Dr. Faustus. Wanted me to play Mephistopheles, of course, but he couldn’t figure out how to give me a tail and wings.”

  NINE

  The three of them snuck back up to Adam’s room and talked on, filling in the story of how this had all come about. Adam explained his and Barry’s lame journey to the Watching Druids concert, getting stuck at the old church graveyard—and then the horrible part about the mysterious gunman who’d shot Jason, and the equally ruthless woman who’d shot him. Just thinking about it got Adam sweating and feeling a little sick again.

  But—while he downplayed what he’d done to try to help Jason—he noticed that Artemis was looking at him with a lot more respect.

  Then it was Orpheus’s turn. “Oh, my saga is a long one—I could go on all night and still barely scratch the surface,” he began. Adam shot Artemis a glance that meant: We’ve got to shut him up—he really will go on all night. But she’d already realized that, and she interrupted tactfully.

  “Of course we’re dying to savor every word of it, so let’s please wait until we can be more relaxed, shall we? A little background would be useful, but mainly we need to focus on how we can help you.”

  “Right you are,” Orpheus agreed, not even seeming disappointed. It was coming clear that while he and Adam were destined to butt heads, so to speak, Artemis had a way of getting him to do what she wanted, but making him think it was what he wanted.

  And even if his stories were sometimes on the tall side, they were great stories. The two kids listened raptly as he gave them a brief bio, sprinkled with fascinating nuggets about the ancient past and his hair-raising adventures getting from there to here.

  As Adam had first guessed, Orpheus was a sort of cyborg, and also a supercomputer—although he had just the same kinds of thoughts and feelings as people. His love for Eurydice was obviously very human.

  And just like humans, he could die.

  He’d started his life in an ancient island kingdom called MaelTarna. Their civilization and science were immensely advanced, and that eventually led to their downfall—a war broke out and their powerful weapons caused a cataclysm that sank the island beneath the sea. He’d escaped sealed up inside a cask, tossing helplessly across the oceans until he finally washed ashore and was found by primitive tribesmen who thought he was powerful magic. As legends spread about him, he was stolen, bought and sold, traded, and warred over countless times. Everyone held him in awe, and most, in reverence—although there were times when fearful rulers or jealous shamans almost did him in. He’d quickly been forced to learn to live by his wits.

  “Like the time I had the bad luck to be on Borneo when a volcano erupted,” he recalled. “The high priest was about to throw me in to pacify the god. But I managed to sink my teeth into his thumb, he let out a howl and shook me loose, and I bounced down the slope disguised as a chunk of lava. When the tribe couldn’t find me, they threw him in instead.”

  Through it all, his
companion and comfort was Eurydice. She was the most beautiful creature in the world, he went on wistfully—glowing with the brilliant emerald radiance that gave him life and strength. They’d traveled, adventured, and been like one person since the beginning. As long as she was with him, he could face anything.

  But then had come that terrible moment in the Third Crusade, when she’d been torn away from him—and he’d never seen her since.

  Thus began his centuries-long search for his soulmate. Every time he heard of anything that suggested her—a work of art, a religious object, a rumor or legend—he’d contrived a way to get there. He could move a little on his own by hopping and rolling, but with his circumference, it took a lot of turns to cover a mile and he couldn’t pick up any real speed except down a steep hill. So he’d become adept at hitchhiking, through persuasion, trickery, or stowing away.

  He usually tried to pass himself off as a piece of lifeless sculpture or a roundish object until he felt he could trust someone, and then he’d open up. But he’d also encountered plenty of people who wanted to use him for sinister purposes. In those cases, he’d con them along until he could escape, which he’d done so many times in so many ways that he made Houdini look like a rank amateur.

  But his hopes were always dashed, his stored supply of energy kept dwindling, and finally he’d shut himself down into sleep mode—until he’d awakened at the Watching Druids concert just hours ago.

  “How on earth did you and Eurydice manage to stay together?” Artemis finally asked him. “Physically, I mean?”

  Then came the next astonishing thing in a night that was already full of them.

  A little panel slid open in the center of his forehead, just below his hairline—like where a Cyclops’s eye would be. Inside was an empty niche about the same size as Artemis’s earring, and with the same ankh shape.

  Adam stared at it, with the realization dawning on him—that was where Eurydice had lived, literally inside Orpheus’s head. Talk about a close relationship!