The Friday Society

by Adrienne Kress

  Perfection in all things. And until that was reached, you could not stop. You would not stop.

  She was going to return to the scene of the crime and track down that man in the fog.

  And she was going to defeat him.

  17

  A Field Trip

  NELLIE STOOD IN the corner watching the widow. The woman wasn’t crying. She didn’t wear an expression of any kind. And her words were few. She simply knelt down beside her husband and took his hand in hers.

  “I told him this would happen,” she said quietly.

  Nellie didn’t say anything back. She didn’t know what to say.

  “What would happen?” asked the Magician softly from his position at the foot of the sofa.

  The widow shook her head and rose to standing. Then she nodded, and the two men who’d accompanied her carefully took hold of the body and carried it out of the room. Out of the apartment. Out of Nellie’s and the Magician’s lives and into theirs.

  “Thank you,” said the widow, taking the Magician’s hand.

  “I did nothing.”

  It had taken some effort, but the Magician had discovered the man’s identity and that of his wife. It was why he’d been out so late coming back after the party. He’d been following a lead. A surname: Thompkins.

  The widow said nothing further. Face as hard as stone.

  When she was gone, Nellie said, “What do you think she meant?”

  “I don’t know. Clearly the man lived a dangerous life.”

  “He was a scientist.”

  “And your point?”

  Nellie thought for a moment. She didn’t know. But it seemed strange that someone as harmless as a scientist would be in such trouble. That sort of peril belonged to gang leaders, or soldiers. Or theater reviewers. But a man of science? Why would anyone wish such a person harm?

  “You’re curious,” said the Magician, sitting on the now-empty sofa, which Nellie found both brave and gross.

  “’Course I am.”

  “Well,” said the Magician, “I have errands to run today. And the Smiths have asked that I witness their daughter’s wedding. Why don’t you have a bit of fun and investigate?”

  “Is this because you’re curious, too?”

  The Magician smiled. “Maybe.”

  Nellie smiled, too. It wouldn’t be too bad a way to spend the day. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were just being nosy. The man had sought them out. Like it or not, they were a part of this.

  And by “they,” she meant the Magician, of course.

  Lunch was eaten and partings were made, and soon Nellie was on her way to the Medical and Scientific Institute. It was the only place she could think of to start her investigation. Even if Thompkins had had nothing to do with the institute, it was likely that another member of the Society of Heroes worked there. And such a person was likely to know at least who Thompkins was.

  She’d tried to dress science-y. She opted for a tweed skirt and jacket, even though they were pink. And she wore a pair of glasses, a prop she’d gotten from one of the comics back at the burlesque house. The purse she’d grabbed from her costume box was a plain black thing that she normally used in performance to hide props or some glitter or a flashcube. She’d also tried for a respectable bun at the nape of her neck, though she couldn’t resist giving the hair on top of her head a bit of volume, releasing a curl from its bond to dangle by her right cheekbone.

  It was clear, however, as she passed through the front doors of the large Gothic building, that her attempt had failed. Evidently science-y meant all black suits and white lab coats. Oh well. She smiled as she passed the woman behind the desk, who squinted in suspicion at her from behind a large red book with “Personal Aeronautics” written across the front in gold lettering.

  Nellie took a left and found herself in a long narrow hall.

  “Can I help you?” A man with a thick mustache skidded to a stop after doing a double take.

  Nellie was about to explain her situation in a straightforward manner when it occurred to her that just maybe this Society of Heroes was an underground kind of thing. One of those clubs that men kept secret so they’d feel extra special. If she asked about it, even if he was a member, he might not be honest. He might go further and find other members to warn them that she was coming. No. That wouldn’t do at all. Her gaze flitted to his hands and she noted a lack of ring.

  “No, thank you,” she said. And just in case he was about to ask her to leave, she flashed him what she dubbed “the dazzle.” A smile so broad, so sincere, so . . . well, guys seemed to like it.

  This guy certainly seemed to, as he turned a deep red and immediately ran off. Nellie sighed. This might take longer than she thought. She’d have to prowl the halls until she saw someone wearing that ring. Who knew how many or how few were in possession of it?

  Well, she had all day, after all. No show that night, and nothing better to do. Time to be systematic. She began searching through the halls, one by one.

  It was easy enough to look for a ring. Every man she passed on her route slowed when he saw her approaching. Some were even brave enough to say hello, though, as she’d often suspected of science guys, most were ridiculously shy. She kind of liked that. It was way better than the grabby guys at the stage door.

  Shy. She thought of the police officer from last night and smiled. What a sweetheart. A bit of not bad as well. And she’d totally embarrassed herself in front of him.

  “Can I help you?” again.

  “No, thank you, I . . .” Nellie said automatically, glancing at the man’s hands. The ring. She looked up at him. This one was bald, with no facial hair. He didn’t even have eyebrows or eyelashes. “Oh my, what’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “Wrong with me?” he said in almost a whisper, and a thick northern accent.

  “You’ve no hair!”

  “I was born this way.”

  “Really? That’s amazing.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. Really stared. It was as though he was trying to look through her head and into her brain. Finally: “You’ve got beautiful eyes.” That same whisper, though it wasn’t as if he was trying to flirt with her or anything. It just didn’t seem like his voice got any louder than that.

  “Thank you.” She’d been told that a lot. She’d also been told her skin was like porcelain, her hair like gold, and, once, that she had divine earlobes.

  “I was wonderin’ . . .” she continued, “if you could help me with somethin’.”

  He cocked his head to the side.

  “Uh . . . is there anywhere we could talk . . . in private?” She gave a coy smile after that, hinting at something, even if it wasn’t anything.

  The man looked at her, astonished. She knew he wouldn’t say no. Not when she asked him to be alone with her. She felt that familiar flutter in her stomach, the one that reminded her she wasn’t nearly as worldly as she pretended. It was a useful flutter. It protected her from making bad choices.

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  She followed him up a flight of stairs to an empty office with “Dr. Mantis” painted onto the door. It was a small and windowless room, and when the door closed, the only light came from the four electric fixtures humming on each wall. They highlighted, with strange shadows, the jars standing side by side on shelf after shelf. And each individual jar contained a body part. An ear here, a liver there. Nellie didn’t look too closely, but she assumed that there were enough pieces to make up a full human.

  “. . . Nice . . .” she said as she moved into the middle of the room.

  Dr. Mantis sat down behind his desk at the far end and looked at her.

  “So?” he asked, dropping his hands into his lap and looking at her with the same concern she felt about his collection lining the walls.

  “So,” she said, and pulled up a chair opposite him, “I just find this the most interestin’ room.” She smiled. He immediately avoided her eye contact.

  “Thank yo
u.”

  “Whatever do you need all those bits for?”

  “I study them.”

  “You do? How fascinatin’.”

  “Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “Would you mind if I continued with my work as we talk?”

  Nellie nodded. “Oh yes, please. It would be so interestin’ to watch.”

  Dr. Mantis leaned down behind the desk and pulled up a metal tray. It had a lot in common with a tray one might use to serve breakfast in bed. It had a plate in the middle with a set of instruments on either side that sort of resembled a knife and fork. And on the plate was a human hand. It was lying palm up, the skin peeled open and pinned back. In fact, it appeared several layers were pinned back as the white bone was clearly visible.

  Nellie observed this closely, unable to look away. She wanted to. She really wanted to. But she just sat there, staring at the hand, as Dr. Mantis quickly picked up the instruments and pulled at the open flesh, and then began to gently cut at something as if he was working his way daintily through a steak.

  “Uh . . .” said Nellie. “So . . . I wanted to talk with a scientist about somethin’.”

  Dr. Mantis nodded but didn’t look back up at her.

  “My father passed away recently, and as I was goin’ through his things, I noticed that he had a letter from somethin’ called the Society of Heroes.”

  “Can’t talk about that.”

  “Oh.” She sat silently watching him picking at the hand. His nonexistent eyebrows appeared furrowed in frustration. “Is everythin’ okay?”

  “. . . It’s . . .” He sighed hard and leaned in toward the hand.

  “Here, let me help,” she said, standing and coming to his side. “What can I do?”

  He looked up at her, finally making eye contact again. “You hold that muscle open. Use those.” He nodded toward two long thin round tools that looked a bit like pencils, but were made of metal and had much sharper points. Nellie picked them up and bent down next to him. She took one in each hand and placed them where he was now stretching the muscle. He let go and proceeded to pick at a tendon between what she held open.

  They stayed like that for what felt like ages. Once she’d brought herself close to him so that her side was touching his shoulder, but he’d pulled away as if he’d been electrocuted. She could tell her presence was starting to make him feel uncomfortable, and not in the good way. As she held the hand apart as diligently as she could, she racked her brain for something to say, anything that would help her get to the heart of her purpose.

  But not a literal heart. She glanced up at the wall opposite.

  “Oh my,” she decided to say.

  “Yes?” Dr. Mantis didn’t look up from his work.

  “I think I’m feelin’ a wee bit faint.” It was an old trick, but reliable.

  That made him look up at her finally. He didn’t say anything, though. Clearly his mighty scientific brain was at a loss as to what to do about the situation.

  She’d have to help him out. “Uh, I was wonderin’ if you maybe could get me some water?”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the hand and furrowed his nonexistent eyebrows again. Then he slowly removed the implements from within the tendon and gave Nellie a nod.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She smiled brightly and watched him shuffle slowly out of the room.

  The second the door was closed behind him, Nellie set to work. First she dropped the tools and examined the desk the hand was sitting on. Drawers were always a very good place to start. She pulled each one out and found piles and piles of paper, seeming to be in no particular order. Some were ripped in two, others crumpled into balls. There were many more just stacked haphazardly on top of one another. All of them had detailed drawings of various body parts on them, labeled with an attention to detail not given to the organization of the paper on which they’d been written.

  She pulled another drawer open and found a file folder in it. She opened it to a single page with another sketch drawn on it. It was hard to tell what she was looking at. It seemed to be a human figure, but it was in bits and pieces, like a puzzle about to be put together. Or maybe just taken apart.

  Nellie didn’t have time to examine further. Nothing she’d seen yet had seemed to have anything to do with the Society of Heroes. She slammed the drawer shut in her frustration.

  It was then that she heard the buzzing sound. So faint that at first she wasn’t sure if it was real or a figment of her not insignificant imagination. But it became clear that the sound came from the thin drawer that ran just under the top of the desk.

  She gave it a pull. It was locked. As she’d suspected.

  One of the very first techniques the Magician had shown her was how to pick a lock. He did this so that she could perform any number of seemingly impossible escapes from all manner of shackles, cages, or what have you. True, often she just had the key to the lock secretly hidden on her person, but she’d also learned how to pick. How to do it, even when her hands were behind her back.

  Compared with some of the extravagant locks the Magician worked with, a simple one on a simple desk was nothing for her. It was as if the drawer hadn’t even been fastened in the first place.

  She pulled it open and there, spinning in the corner, was a small brass ball. Nellie picked it up, and it vibrated in her hand. She turned it over and saw that one side was covered in glass and she could look right into the middle. Small gears ticked away, and a red light glowed through the cracks. It radiated warmth against her palm. Then something opened, just larger than a pinprick, and the red light could be seen more visibly. It grew. Her palm was getting warmer.

  Not good.

  She dropped the ball back into the drawer, where it spun furiously for a moment longer and then sat still.

  Best to avoid that, then, thought Nellie, and turned her attention to the flat black leather checkbook beside it.

  Ah! Now this was more like it. Follow the money. Just what her boss at the burlesque house had always told her.

  She picked up the book and flipped through it. The scientist had spent a lot of money on jars. Also on formaldehyde. There were a couple of small checks written to a Messrs. Staunch and Proper that seemed to repeat each month. She flipped to the back of the book, where the scientist kept very orderly accounts of both withdrawals and deposits. It was there that she noticed a lump sum paid to the order of Dr. Mantis. Two hundred pounds? That was astonishing. Better still, in the margin was scrawled “Heron.” And the extremely generous benefactor? A one Mr. Carter.

  Mr. Carter.

  The name sounded awfully familiar.

  As she racked her memory, Nellie’s gaze shifted, and she noticed a pretty wooden box sitting farther back in the drawer.

  The party! Of course. There had been a Mr. Carter at the party last night. He’d come backstage to introduce himself to Sir Callum Fielding-Shaw. Mr. Carter . . . he was an MP. A Tory, if she remembered correctly. Yes, she was a consummate eavesdropper.

  Follow the money. Mr. Carter.

  Dr. Mantis still wasn’t back yet, and Nellie couldn’t resist. After returning the checkbook to its spot, she picked up the small box. She noticed the familiar heron carved on the top. This could be something. She opened it.

  Staring up at her were half a dozen pairs of eyes. Nellie was frozen in horror. She couldn’t look away. It was like the eyes had drawn her unwittingly into a staring contest that she had no chance of winning. And still, despite it all, she stared. The box was lined with lead, and each pair floated in that blasted formaldehyde, preserved as good as new.

  “That’s private.” It was impressive how Dr. Mantis’s whispery voice could cut through a room like that.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Nellie quickly stashed the box back in the drawer and closed it shut with a bang. She tried to defuse the situation by smiling broadly at him, but then remembered how he didn’t seem to respond to that.

  “How’d you get into that drawer?” he asked, approaching the
desk as Nellie tried as casually as she could to maneuver herself around to the front of it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was locked.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” A quick glance of the room: one door, no windows. Ceiling: one vent, too high.

  “It was.” They were standing at the foot and head of the desk respectively. The door was behind him.

  “I . . . don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry for snoopin’, got bored, see. But the drawer was definitely unlocked . . . sir.”

  Be polite. Be a little stupid. Be pretty.

  She took a small step to the right, and he countered it.

  “That’s my private drawer. That’s private.”

  Each time he said “private,” saliva shot out of his mouth on the “p.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was now as quiet as he was. She watched his hands tighten their grip on the desk. “It’s a lovely . . . collection. Very . . . unique.” She took a step back and absently opened her purse and reached inside.

  He took a step around to the front of the desk and toward her.

  “I imagine it must be a difficult collection to maintain. I mean”—she gave a small laugh—“stamps are one thing; you’ll find them on just about every letter. Eyes, on the other hand . . .”

  “Nothing rare about eyes. Everybody’s got them.”

  “Good point.”

  She felt a grainy substance in the bottom of her purse and recognized it instantly. Thank goodness. Okay, then. For this to work she’d have to let him get closer.

  She took another step back, this time bringing herself close to the wall. He took the bait and stepped in toward her again. One, maybe two more steps, that’s all she needed. Then she noticed the scalpel clutched in his right hand. He must have picked it up on passing the desk. Great.