Ether & Elephants (15 page)

Two men stepped out from the walls beside the door, so silently neither of them heard a sound until a hand closed on Nell’s shoulder. With a shriek, she pulled her stun gun, turned and fired. The man crumpled in a heap at her feet, twitching more than she’d ever seen anyone do.

Meanwhile, Tom was engaged by the other. The large thug seemed immune to the blows of Tom’s fists, which was no small feat. Finally Tom picked up a crowbar from the floor and swung it at his opponent’s head. The bruiser went down hard, moaning incoherently. After one more whack, he stopped moaning.

Nell stepped over to the man who’d finally stopped twitching. “Dear lord,” she said. “He’s dead. It’s never done that before.” Her stomach lurched and she turned away to swallow loudly.

“This one isn’t, but he isn’t normal, either.” Tom tied up the man he’d knocked down. The man was awake now, staring blindly into space. Tom waved a hand in front of the bruiser’s eyes and they didn’t even track it. “It’s like he’s under a spell.”

“Or some kind of potion,” Nell agreed, looking around the room full of scientific equipment. “Well, it’s definitely a laboratory.” She stated the obvious just to keep the grim silence at bay. “Chemical rather than mechanical, it would seem.”

Overhead gasoliers would light the place as bright as day, but now hung cold and dark. The northern section was split into two stories, with some kind of loft above, and halfway up, a platform with a desk overlooked the workspace. Tom pointed toward the desk. “That’ll be where any papers are hiding.” He crossed the floor, not hampered by the semi-darkness. Neither bothered to remove their masks.

Nell picked her way along behind him with a little more care. By the time she reached the platform, he’d finished rifling the desk.

He grunted. “Nothing. A few invoices for ordinary chemicals like lye, glycerol and bicarbonate of soda. Castor oil, and laudanum, which could have been for a headache as the amount isn’t great. But there’s nothing to give us any idea where to look next, or even what we’re looking for.”

Nell ran a finger over the desk. “No dust. Whoever cleaned this out did so recently. And likely in a hurry if there’s anything at all left behind.” She pulled a match from the desk and lit the oil lamp on one corner. “Any magickal sensation?”

Tom lay both hands on the desk and closed his eyes for a moment. “Businesslike, routine, even tedious tasks. This desk didn’t belong to the man in charge and the middleman was working for the money. Distaste for the methods, and a little bit of fear. He didn’t entirely trust his superior. I get the feeling he may have hared off on his own.”

“Well, there has to be something that will give us a clue.” Nell inspected each drawer for secret compartments, finding nothing.

“Right.” Tom picked up the wastebasket by the desk. “You’d be amazed at who forgets to check the dust bin when they clear out.” He pulled up a business card identical to the one Nancy had quoted. He set it aside and handed the rest of the papers to her rather than studying them himself. He picked up the card and closed his eyes.

His face was nearly green when he dropped the scrap of paper. “It’s him. Barrowclough, Berrycloth, whatever.” He shuddered. “It appears I react much more strongly when I try to find out about things that have to do with my own problems.”

Nell rifled through the stacked papers and pulled one out. “Well, that would explain your collapse at the school. Oh my goodness.” Nell held the paper nearer to the light. “It’s an experimental report, torn from a journal, probably due to this large inkblot. But around the blot, it talks about the subjects of the experiment with columns headed talent, age, sex and survivability. ‘Number 257: mild telepath, eight, female, ten months. Number 258: fire starter, ten, male, three weeks, four days.’ Not one survival. This is exactly what we feared, Tom. This monster is experimenting on children. But where are they now?”

Nothing in any of the documents yielded that information. Tom held every one of them, but finally dropped the pile onto the desk in defeat.

“Here’s something.” Tom began to read some of them as well. “A letter to one Mr. Barton:

‘My dear Esteemed Colleague:

I have studied your notes regarding the blending of magick and science, and believe you to be on the path to great discoveries regarding the treatment of diseases of the mind. I have searched my library for references to magickal items that would meet your criteria and have found three. First, in the Andes, there is a mystical plant worshipped for its powers of soothing the soul. I’ve attached a botanical drawing. Secondly, in the Darjeeling region of India, there is rumored to be a Buddha crowned with a ruby known far and wide for its miracle cures of mental illnesses. During the wars there, however, the holy relic was lost. And finally, here in England, there is a circle of standing stones, located near York and carved with Viking runes. Although less than portable, it may be of use for you to study.

Sincerely yours,

Professor Melville Drake, Trinity College, Dublin.’

I don’t suppose we can find something more damning than that. Can we?” He set the page on top of the stack.

“No. He’s on his way to India, to find the Buddha.” Nell piled all the papers together. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight up and her stomach roiled. She hadn’t seen any ghosts, but there was something here, something horrid. “Tom, I’ve an awful feeling about this place. We need to keep searching.”

“I agree.” He scratched his neck. “My instincts are screaming, and there’s a smell of decay almost too faint for even me to detect.” He pulled the revolver from his belt and gestured for Nell to carry the lamp as he started toward the upper loft.

Nell choked down her revulsion as the flickering lamp illuminated a warren of wire-mesh cages, each containing four or more pallets with threadbare blankets. “This just gets worse and worse.”

Tom clenched his teeth. “Ghosts?”

Nell’s forehead wrinkled. “Not one.”

“I didn’t think so. The place has been thoroughly scrubbed with magick. That’s why I can pick up a sense of wrongness, but nothing specific.”

“Well, let’s go down.” Nell was determined to see this through, no matter how much she wanted to curl up and cry about the fate of so many children.

They found nothing more of interest on the main floor, until Tom moved aside one of the large rolling bins lined up beneath the loft and revealed a trapdoor about four feet square. “It’s not even locked.”

Nell shivered and set the light on a table so she wouldn’t drop it. Her hands shook that badly. “Whatever’s down there, Tom—it’s bad.”

He lifted the hatch. Immediately, they were both assaulted by the odor of decay on such a massive scale it was all Nell could do not to vomit. Tom took the lamp and held it over the opening. “Fuck me,” he said, reverting again to his East End origins. “Fuck me sideways.”

Completely indifferent to his language, Nell gathered her courage and peered over the edge.

Bones. Dozens and dozens of bones, some with bits of flesh clinging to them and some, mostly those at the center of the mound, stripped bare. One skeleton was adult-sized, and a bowler hat and cane lay tossed in a corner—probably the inestimable Mr. Barton. The stench of lye underscored that of rotting corpses. Someone had piled up perhaps fifty small bodies and tried to hide the evidence, only not well. Obviously the scrubbing spell had blocked the foul miasma from reaching the main floor.

Tom slammed the door shut, extinguished the lamp, grabbed Nell’s hand and hastily pulled her out the door into the sunshine. They both dropped to the stoop and he gripped her in his arms as she fiercely clung to him for support. He was so warm, so strong, and she burrowed against him to try to banish the chills that racked her. “Charlie,” she whispered. “We’ll never know.”

“Not unless we find ’im.” She heard the hint of a sob he tried to keep out of his voice and hugged him tighter. “And even so…”

“Yes.” She let her tears drip onto his gray gabardine coat for a while before pulling away. He handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Stuffing it into her own pocket, she squared her shoulders. “We’ll make sure that they’re buried properly of course. And as many as possible identified. We can’t save them. But we can, and will, stop this…creature. We can catch him and we can put an end to his reign of horror.”

Tom kissed the top of her head. “We will, me old mocker. Bet the farm on that.” He stood, his expression transforming back from that of Tommy Porter into the suave Sir Thomas as he got himself under control. “Come along, Nell. We’ve arrangements to make and a passage to India to catch.”

She frowned. “I think we need to go to Oxford first.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Not Cambridge?”

“No. If His Highness is any indication, her base of operations moved to the other university. Any recent traces will be there, and we’ll still be able to catch an airship in the morning and beat the blighter to Calcutta.” A shiver ran down her spine. “And I want to raid the Order arsenal, too. I don’t give a damn if this man ever sees trial. I simply want him exterminated.”

Tom touched her chin. “On that, I completely agree. Let’s be on our way, ducks.”

* * *

Neither of them even broached the subject of luncheon as they drove. Just thinking of food made Tom’s stomach lurch. The grim reaper from the death card seemed to hover in his mind. There’d been so much death in that horrible place. He’d dealt with monsters of all varieties, both before and after joining the Order, but this one, though technically human, from all they’d discovered, was worse than any vampyre or giant squid he’d ever encountered. For the most part those things just hunted to feed. Werewolves were just like anyone else, good or bad as they chose to be. Hell, Liam was his brother-in-law and one of the toughest coppers in Scotland Yard. But this Alchemist…whatever he was up to, it was cold and calculated and entirely evil, not a crime of opportunity or necessity. This was a thirst for power on the scale of a megalomaniac. And while they’d dealt with those before as well, including the one who created an army of human automatons to try to kill the Queen, something in Tom’s gut said this was shaping up to be the most dangerous case of his life.

And for the life of him, he couldn’t convince Nell to go home. Why did she have to insist on throwing herself into danger alongside him? Back when they were younger, she was usually content to take a more passive role, usually lookout, which had been more important than she believed. As an adult, she’d shown no interest in working for the Order except when absolutely necessary or if friends or family were on the line. So why now? Did this boy Charlie mean that much to her? If so, did whether or not Charlie was his son have any bearing on that?

“There were no ghosts in that cellar.” Nell sat utterly still, her hands in her lap, her eyes straight ahead, but her voice was firm and clear. “Not one. Something horrible was done to them, something beyond just a physical death. In mass murder cases, there are always ghosts. Some of the souls pass on, but at least a few are angry enough or lost enough to remain behind. That’s part of why I can’t do this sort of thing for a living like the rest of you. In the cellar, though, there was a feeling of silence, as if everything, all the screams, had just been cut.”

“That’s…interesting.” It was, but Tom had no idea what to make of it. “You think whoever did that is somehow trapping their souls? Or simply…dissolving them somehow?”

“I’ve no idea.” Her voice was sad, but not broken. “But something is strange about it. I thought you should know.”

“Thank you.” Now if only it made any sense.

“We have seen something a little like it before.” She turned her head away from him to stare out the side of the car. “At least I have. It was when we were children. Remember when Kendall met Amy? The man who had the artificial arm with the ghosts trapped in it?”

Good lord!
“I haven’t thought about that in ages.” He hadn’t been there for Nell’s discovery that the evil “curses” the man had cast were actually spirits trapped inside gems he’d worked into his mechanical limb. When he put one of the stones into something else, the evil was set free to hurt and even, in some cases, kill.

“He was a soldier,” Nell said. “And he’d gotten the gems in India.”

“Rubies,” Tom remembered. “Just like the Eye of the Buddha.”

Nell shuddered. “Whatever this man is up to, it’s something similar but on a grander scale. Except he doesn’t need the ruby to steal souls. He’s already found a way to do that.”

“Especially from children—gifted children.” Tom had that list of names burned into his memory. How many other pages had there been? In all likelihood, they would probably never know. “But all my instincts are telling me there’s a missing piece of the puzzle we need before we follow him.” Trust his instincts. That’s what Belinda had told him when she’d read the cards. Be the emperor. His gut would tell him where to go.

“Mine too.” Nell finally turned to him. “And I’m afraid it’s in Oxford.”

“It is, most likely, but we need to stop in Cambridge first.” He sighed. “And comfortable as it is to go about unnoticed, I think for this portion of the trip I need to be Sir Thomas and you need to be the Honorable Miss Hadrian. We’ll stop at the next inn and change our clothes.” Having been brought up in the business of investigation, both of them had packed a few changes of clothing, just in case they needed to adopt different identities during the course of the day.

“And telephone Papa or Kendall,” Nell said. “Someone needs to know where to look if we turn up missing.”

“Agreed. We also should have the Order send a detail to start clearing out the bodies. At least they’ll have respect and a proper resting place.” The tang of bile coated Tom’s tongue. “I’m so sorry, Nelly. Sorrier than I can ever say.”

“I know you wish I hadn’t had to see that. I do, too, but it isn’t your fault. You didn’t slaughter those children, Tom. Besides, I came of my own accord. But I’m sorry too. Some things, no one should ever have to look at.”

That’s not what I meant, beloved.