Prospero in Hell (34 page)

“A photograph of Gregor seated on the set of a talking heads show. Looks like a recent photo,” Erasmus replied, peering closely.

Mab pulled the article back and began reading aloud. The music of wind and thunder of the falls made it difficult for us to hear him. I walked over and pushed a lever that closed the flues. The music of the winds fell silent, to Cornelius’s dismay. With a gesture, I instructed the Aerie Ones to increase the solidity of the permanent barrier of air blocking the opening. The sound of the waterfall fell to a dim distant roar.

Mab read the headine first,
MAN FOUND WANDERING IN GRAVEYARD, CLAIMS TO HAVE DIED IN
1924, before continuing:

Chicago, IL. Eli Thompson has been making news recently with his unlikely claim that he died in 1924, shot by a man who had provided him with a new face. According to his claims, Mr. Thompson had been a small-time criminal in Pennsylvania in the teens. In 1921, the police were closing in on him when a stranger offered him a chance at a new life, a chance Mr. Thompson accepted. The stranger, calling himself Ulysses after the then-popular James Joyce book, altered Mr. Thompson’s shape by some unknown process until his face and body were those of a completely different person. Three years later, the stranger returned and shot Mr. Thompson point-blank in the
chest. This is the last thing Mr. Thompson claims to remember, until he woke up this September beside the gravestone of Gregor Prosper, the man whose identity Mr. Thompson had adopted.

We all sat on the edges of our seats, hanging on every word. Our chairs were arranged in a rough circle, so we could see one another’s faces. Erasmus and I sat stony-faced, our wooden armchairs positioned to either side of the couch upon which Titus slept. To Erasmus’s left, Theo rocked angrily in a rocking chair. Cornelius, brow furrowed, reclined beside Logistilla, who sat ramrod straight, looking downright frightened. Beside them, Mephisto and Calvin shared a cream-colored love seat. Calvin—who was looking more and more familiar to me, though I could not place him—sat comfortably, but Mephisto listened so actively, leaning forward to hear better, that he slipped off the love seat and ended up sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor.

Beyond the love seat, Ulysses chewed nervously on his nails. He was still seated in the plush green armchair to which Cornelius’s staff had directed him. Mab had bypassed the second armchair and was reading the article from the piano bench, just outside the circle.

When Mab paused, Ulysses broke in, objecting. “I am not named after the Joyce character! I’m named after the bloke from
The Odyssey.
Joyce wrote well after I was born. Doesn’t anyone read the classics nowadays?”

Cornelius’s cell phone emitted a series of beeps as he flipped it open and dialed. A moment later, he sighed and pocketed the phone.

“Out of range,” he said mildly. “This man must be stopped. Shapechange and men rising from the dead… these things should not be spoken of. The
Orbis Suleimani
will have to perform a clean-up operation. Very clumsily done, Ulysses.”

“What makes you think it was me?” My youngest brother’s voice squeaked as he spoke.

“What indeed? Other than that you just admitted it, with your comment about Joyce,” said Erasmus. Pulling the letter from Elgin from his pocket, he read aloud the passage from the sheriff’s journal that described the murderer.

“I say… you don’t think that bloke with the gun was me? Just because we both wear gray? Many people wear gray,” insisted Ulysses, hastily removing his domino mask and stuffing it behind his back.

Without the mask, his blue-gray eyes seemed larger and darker. The skin about his eyes and nose, where the mask had rested, was several shades
paler than the rest of his face. The look reminded me of Theo, whose face, over the centuries, had often borne a pale, reverse-raccoon imprint from where his goggles had protected the skin around his eyes from the deep tan he acquired from repeatedly firing the
Staff of Devastation
. Ulysses had admired Theo tremendously in his youth. I wondered if Theo’s goggles had been the original inspiration for Ulysses’s ubiquitous domino mask.

“We would like an explanation,” said Cornelius. His cane twitched in his fingers, but the gem remained dark.

“Certainly, I can explain,” Ulysses said huffily. His eyes flicked from face to face, taking in our hostile expressions. He raised his hands and crossed them nonchalantly behind his head. “You see, it’s like this…”

A whirling whine issued from the large sapphire ring on Ulysses’ right hand. A dart shot out of the center of the ring trailing a slender silk line, flew across the music chamber, and embedded itself in the wood of his staff in the umbrella stand beside the door. The mechanism in the ring immediately retracted the silk, and the staff flew across through the air, landing in Ulysses’ outstretched hand. White light was already beginning to swirl along the length of the wood.

Erasmus leapt forward and lunged at Ulysses, but he was too late. Ulysses was gone.

“Imbeciles! You let him get away,” screeched Logistilla. “You should have been using your staff to control him, Cornelius!”

“Of all the hypocritical…” Erasmus snorted with laughter.

Mab had risen to his feet and now moved about Ulysses’s chair, taking readings on a brass instrument and tossing rice into the air. As he bent down to squint at the trajectory of the falling rice, Erasmus, grinning like a boy, rose from his seat and came forward to watch what Mab was doing.

“Amazing! I’ve known that supernatural travel creates fractional drift anomalies for several centuries now, but I never thought of using it to detect gates. How exceedingly clever!” exclaimed Erasmus.

“Could you please back up?” growled Mab. “You’re disturbing the evidence,”

“Oh… right.” Erasmus took a small step back.

“It troubles me that you encourage this abomination, Erasmus,” Cornelius commented. “Even if the great project requires such a thing, it does not mean that we should fraternize with it.”

“Lighten up, Cornelius,” Erasmus’s eyes were still fixed on Mab and his efforts. “Not everything is a dire attack on the sovereignty of humanity. Too bad you can’t watch him work. Even you might learn something.”

“Perhaps you should direct your attention back to the matter at hand,” Cornelius replied.

“And do what? Moan and bewail Ulysses’s escape?” asked Erasmus. “I’m waiting to see if Daddy’s company detective can figure out where he went.”

“I’d do a better job if you weren’t breathing down my neck,” murmured Mab.

Sighing, Cornelius inclined his head toward Theo. “Brother, did you notice something inexplicable about this matter?”

“Inexplicable?” Theo asked.

The slightest smile tugged at the corners of Cornelius’s lips as he said mildly, “How did Ulysses manage to change the shape of this Mr. Thompson using the
Staff of Transportation
?”

All eyes turned toward Logistilla.

“Why is everyone looking at me?” she demanded.

“Not everybody,” objected Mephisto. “Cornelius isn’t looking at anyone.”

“Who else could have made Mr. Thompson look like Gregor?” Cornelius asked placidly.

“Yeah, and how come you had Gregor’s knife?” demanded Mephisto. “It was supposed to be buried with him or with…” He frowned and glanced at the article. “Mr. Thompson. Or maybe that was his staff… I forget.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Logistilla began haughtily.

Titus’s hulk loomed up behind Logistilla’s chair. He had risen from the couch without our noticing. Now, his massive hands encircled Logistilla’s pale porcelain throat. He tightened his grip, and Logistilla gasped for air, her eyes bulging in their sockets.

Titus’s voice was still gruff from disuse. His Scottish accent was stronger than was his normal wont. “Woman, me slightest exertion will crush yer windpipe. With as much effort as it takes ye to peel an orange, I can part ye ribs and hold ye cold heart up to the morning sun. All I need do is flex me fingers, and ye will die. Do you know what is stopping me?”

“N-no!” mouthed Logistilla.

The rest of us waited, astonished at this outburst from placid Titus. Seeing Cornelius’s confusion, Mephisto cried out with great excitement, “Titus is strangling Logistilla. Her eyes are popping out, and her face is turning purple. It’s great! Too bad you’re missing it!”

Ignoring him, Titus continued. He was calmer now and his accent less pronounced. “It is because I am a man who values self-restraint. By sheer effort of will, I can resist the desire to do you harm. However, if you push me any further, even my legendary self-control might break.” He paused and took a breath. “I recommend you answer our good brother’s questions as rapidly and truthfully as you are able—before the true horror of what you have taken from me sinks in, and I change my mind.”

Titus spread his hands and stepped back. Logistilla gasped for air and rubbed her neck indignantly.

“Gregor’s not dead,” she wheezed.

“Not dead!” the rest of us replied in chorus.

“Then where is he?” growled Theo.

Logistilla sat tight-lipped, refusing to answer. Erasmus and Cornelius both raised their staffs menacingly. When she still refused, Titus stepped forward again, his big hulking bulk looming just behind her chair. As his hands came toward her throat, Logistilla relented.

“He’s on Mars,” she pouted.

“Mars!”

Mab still crouched beside Ulysses’s chair, flipped open his note book. “Ulysses worked for NASA in the seventies. He may have had access to one of the Mars landers.”

I said, “All he would have had to do was touch it once with his staff, and he could have teleported to Mars when it arrived.”

“Whatever for?” exploded Theo. “Why is Gregor hiding on Mars? Why is he pretending to be dead?”

Logistilla squirmed uncomfortably. “Gregor’s not hiding, he’s…”

“He’s what?” asked Erasmus coolly. “A prisoner, perhaps?”

“Prisoner is such a harsh word,” Logistilla replied, pouting again.

“What word would you prefer?” Erasmus asked sweetly.

“Ulysses got himself into some trouble. To get out alive, he was forced to make some… unwise promises. One of them involved Gregor no longer being ‘a living man upon the Earth.’ He thought it better to have Gregor a ‘prisoner’ than himself dead, or worse,” said Logistilla.

“Why didn’t Ulysses tell us?” Theo cried in anguish. “Gregor and I could have taken out whoever was compelling him.”

“That is probably why his oath was worded so as to forbid him from telling you,” Logistilla replied acidly.

“How come you know?” asked Mab suspiciously, looking up, a compass in his hand.

“I? I… rather found out through my own source.” Logistilla evaded our glances.

“And how come you didn’t tell Theo and the others?” Mab continued, whipping out his notebook and his stubby pencil.

“I had… problems of my own.”

“This line of questioning is not to the point,” Cornelius’s soft voice interrupted. “The point is: How are we going to rescue Brother Gregor?”

“There are only two possibilities,” I said. “A mundane spaceship, or the
Staff of Transportation
. Either we hire NASA or another program like it, or we find Ulysses.”

Cornelius said, “Building a ship to go to Mars might take years, and there would be no guarantee the vehicle would fly as designed. No, it will have to be the
Staff of Transportation
.”

“For that, we need Ulysses,” Logistilla said primly.

“Having Ulysses would clear up a number of things,” mused Erasmus.

“I know,” Mephisto piped up from where he sat on the floor. “We summon him!”

“Come again?” asked Cornelius.

“The staff trees,” continued Mephisto. “We go to the staff tree grove and use the original tree from which the
Staff of Transportation
came to summon it back to us… using the same spell I use to get new friends for my staff, the one Daddy used to summon Miranda’s mother. We summon Ulysses and make him take us. If he lets go of his staff while we are summoning it, we’ll get the staff without Ulysses, which might be even better!”