The Falling Machine (12 page)

The panel, the lamp, the painting, the wall…Possibilities flashed through her mind, but each option seemed more useless than the last.
The door.

Desperation gave wings to her feet as Sarah bolted across the room. But her constricting garments made her graceless, and her hip grazed the edge of the massive oaken table as she tried to clear it. Pain lanced through her, but she still managed to finish bolting across the carpet, landing on her bustle with a thump before she wedged the heel of her shoe against the lower corner of the door.

A moment later the lock shifted, and she felt her father's strength pushing against her foot. The pressure was ferocious, and she half expected the wood to flex, bulge, or crack.

She held her breath and prayed that she would be strong enough to hold him back. Even if the door only moved the tiniest bit he would be able to guess that it wasn't jammed….Sarah shuddered to think what her father would do if he imagined that some intruder had invaded the security of his office.

But the quality of the door allowed it to remain as unmoved as an Englishman hearing a ribald remark.

“Damnation!” her father swore as he gave it a second mighty shove. She imagined that he would not have cursed so loudly if he knew that it was his daughter that was the obstacle on the other side of the door. But then again, Sarah thought to herself, if he knew
that
he would be doing a great deal more than simply attempting to shove his way in.

Even through the excitement, her hip was beginning to ache from where it had smashed into the desk. It was painful enough that she wondered if she might have broken the skin. Creating excuses to explain bruises to the housemaids was difficult enough, but at least they were used to her clumsy, boyish ways. But actual bloodstains were sure to give rise to questions that would be almost impossible to answer.

“Ungh!” her father exclaimed as he shoved against the frame one more time. “What is the matter with this blasted door?” Her foot was aching now, too, ready to give up in its war against Alexander Stanton's legendary stubbornness.

Then the pressure was gone.

“O'Rourke!” her father cried out, his voice fading as he turned away. If he was calling for the butler that might mean he was giving up. She waited for another moment, then heard his footsteps fading as he moved down the hall. “O'Rourke!” he shouted again, louder this time.

For a moment she considered opening the door and attempting to slip out. But with all the commotion going on in the house, there was no way that Sarah would be able to make it to the stairs without being caught and questioned. There was only one way out….

Sarah scrambled across the rug, barely managing to get to her feet as she grabbed for the mechanism that controlled the secret panel. She turned it again, and the panel in the ceiling began to descend.

As Sarah prepared to duck inside the secret room, her eye caught the dropped painting that still sat on the floor.

A fresh wave of panic flooded through her, although with less force than it had a few minutes ago.
Perhaps it's the pain in my hip
, she thought to herself.

Sarah considered her options: she could drag the canvas with her into the secret closet—but that would only postpone her troubles. Her father would find the painting where it shouldn't be, and Sarah would be the only suspect.

Despite the fact that his daughter had revealed to the world that her father was a Paragon, the existence of the secret room was still known only to a few select members of the household. After he had saved her from danger, Alexander Stanton had sat his daughter down and made her promise to never again enter that room. “You are,” he told her, “its special guardian. You must help me keep it safe from prying eyes, as well as the ever-hungry dusters wielded by the housemaids!” It had been a long time since they had shared a moment together like that.

The ceiling continued its relentless downward slide. There would be no way to get the painting back onto the wall and still sneak inside the room. She would need to quickly find a hiding place.

The painting was too tall to hide behind the couch, and neither the fern nor the globe was a genuine option.

“The safe!” she exclaimed with relief. Sarah wrestled the frame into her arms, trying not to notice the dent in the gilt where it had banged into the wall. She carried it over to the side of the cast-iron monstrosity and placed it on the floor next to the wall. She gave it a shove, sliding it behind the squat metal box. At least the safe was tall enough to hide it. As it disappeared from view, her father's painted eyes seemed to be giving her the most disapproving look in the history of pigment.

Once it was completely hidden, she ran for the back wall. She scrabbled underneath the falling panel just as it was about to reach the floor, her hip loudly reminding her of the indignity that it had already been subjected to. It was followed by a popping sound as some of the boning in her corset snapped from the pressure. “More questions from Jenny,” she whispered to herself.

The wall closed behind her, and the clanking mechanism dwindled away into silence as it wound down. Sarah's sigh of relief was interrupted as it dawned on her that she was surrounded by utter darkness.

Through the wall she heard the sounds of her father entering the room.

“D
amnation!” The day had already been going badly by the time Alexander Stanton found himself vexed by the door to his office. He supposed he should have expected it. Since taking over the leadership of the Paragons it seemed that every time he turned around there was another bit of bad luck attracted by all the others. The feeling of having a dark cloud hanging over his head was, he had to admit, more than a bit ironic for a man that wore a chimney for a hat.

But superstition was nonsense for the weak, and Alexander Stanton had spent his entire life attempting to define himself through the power of rationalism, reason, and science. Whatever was going wrong had to have an explanation beyond being a curse. But reason also said that if the handle turned, the door must be unlocked.

Mumbo jumbo or not, it was an annoyance—every moment spent was a moment wasted. There were papers that needed to be signed and a million things that needed to be done—things that were not going to get done in the hallway. He gave the door another hard, sustained shove.

“Ungh,” he exclaimed loudly as he enlisted his shoulder into the effort. The door didn't budge.

“O'Rourke!” he shouted as he turned and walked down the hall, trying to see where the old manservant had gotten too.

When it came to yelling, the acoustics in the house were spectacular, and most of the time he didn't need to bother with the bell. But lately, he had to admit, his butler had started to act as old as he
looked
, and his hearing clearly wasn't what it used to be. More and more often he would send the Irishman off on some specific errand only to find that O'Rourke had forgotten the task entirely and fallen into some old habit—plucking up balls of wayward dust from behind the settee or strapping on his apron in preparation for scrubbing away at a previously unnoticed bit of tarnish on the silver tea set. Although, Stanton supposed, finding out where his daughter had hidden herself was as much of an old habit around this household as anything else.

“O'Rourke!” he cried out again, louder this time. If he was being honest with himself, it was long past time to let the old man retire. And under normal circumstances he would have worked out some kind of acceptable pension and sent O'Rourke off to live out his remaining days in relative comfort. But he currently had neither the time nor the inclination to break in someone new. Just the thought of attempting to find someone who could anticipate his habits sent a chill down his spine.

Inside Alexander's head his businessman's voice chided him for being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Every day he waited would make the inevitable transition that much more difficult, and when the inevitable day came when he was
forced
to find someone new, O'Rourke might be in no condition to pass on any wisdom. It was, he told himself, one of the occasional poor investments a man must make during his lifetime.
Poor excuses for poor choices
, the businessman shot back. Unsurprisingly, it sounded just like something his mother would say.

Hoping that his call might yet be answered, Stanton looked up the stairwell, then peered down toward the kitchen. Considering the amount of money that went into employing a full-service staff, he was always amazed when it appeared as if there was no one in the house.

Like a rabbit bolting out of its burrow, he saw a figure in black and white scurrying across the hall, attempting to avoid detection. “Mrs. Farrows!” he yelled after her as she disappeared into the next room.

“Mrs. Farrows?” he repeated. For a moment there was no response, and then a woman's face peeked out at him, the rest of her matronly figure still hidden behind the doorframe. “Mr. Stanton, sir?”

“Could you please come here, Mrs. Farrows?”

She scurried toward him, her skirts rustling across the floor. “How may I help you, sir?”

“Mrs. Farrows, I seem to have lost Mr. O'Rourke.”

“I'll go find him, sir!” she said, her body reorienting to head her off in a new direction.

“Hold a minute, please.”

“Yes, sir.” She twisted back again instantly, the skirts swirling around her feet as they worked to catch up.

Stanton considered himself committed to the idea that there should be no aristocracy in an American household, but he had to admit that the proper deference from a servant sometimes scratched an itch deep inside. “If you find
anyone
capable of helping, please tell them the door to my office has become jammed. And,” he continued before she could find another opportunity to bolt, “I'd like you to find my daughter.

“Once you've succeeded, send her to my office.” For a moment he wondered if Sarah and the locked door could somehow be connected. It was preposterous, but not, he noted sadly, completely outside of the realm of possibility.

He realized that Mrs. Farrows was still there staring at him, blinking like a confused forest animal. “Well?” he asked her, trying to make his impatience as plain as possible.

“Is that all, sir?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “I'll meet whomever it is you find first right here.”

He stomped back down the hall in a huff. With his luck they'd have to replace the door completely, or tear it free from its hinges. It had been carved from a solid slab of oak, and it would cost hundreds of dollars to replace it.

With nothing better to do he put his hand to the knob and gave it another twist. This time the door swung open effortlessly. “What in hell?” he muttered to himself as he stepped through.

He felt a bit wary as he traversed the Persian carpet in front of his desk. As he traveled around the edge of it, he threw down the envelopes that he'd held stuffed under his arm and finally plopped himself down into the chair. Both he and the springs let out a groan as he settled into it.

He tapped his fingers on the desktop a few times, hoping that it would help some of his tension dissipate. Darby had always said that calming the nerves was fundamental to preservation of health—although the old man had a saying for everything, and being calm had proved to be of little help when someone had fired a harpoon into his chest.

Alexander shook his head. No matter how difficult the old man could be from time to time, he had deserved to die with more dignity.

And perhaps he was right. In all likelihood Stanton
was
suffering from too much anxiety. How long had it been since he'd last left New York City? But the idea that the door to his office might simply have joined in the conspiracy against his nerves bothered him more than he liked to admit. And superstitious or not, he'd fought with more than one maniacal machine in the past. The days of the great mechanical villains seemed to be slipping behind them now, as even the best wind-up contraptions proved no match for fortified steam, but there had been a good, long while where there didn't seem to be a spring or latch in all of New York that hadn't been connected to some kind of deadly device or mantrap.

He still remembered the wave of terror that the Reformer had managed to create by installing his self-activating guillotines to the top of random wine bottles across the city. “Temperance or Death” had been the madman's motto, and the city had, for a short period of time, mostly chosen the former.

When they had finally reached his hideout, the Reformer's multibladed “morality machine” had almost been the death of the Industrialist. Even though he had seen the villain chopped to pieces by his own devices, Alexander still got chills whenever he lifted up a bottle and heard a clicking sound.

The thought made him thirsty. He glanced over to the liquor cabinet, considering that he might have a drink to take the edge off the day. But if he was being honest with himself, and lately it seemed he could be nothing but, an edge was exactly what he needed most right now.

Still, something in the room felt off, although for the life of him he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was—something missing? But from where he was sitting, everything seemed to be right where it should be.

Grabbing one of the envelopes he'd carried in with him, Alexander pulled open the flap and slid the contents out onto the desk. Written at the top of the form was the name of a man who was hoping to bolster the ranks of the Paragons. They had received a flurry of applications after Darby's death, and with the Automaton relegated to the basement, Hughes clearly already beyond the rigors of active duty, and the Sleuth too old to truly be of use in a fight, it was time to bolster the ranks with some genuine firepower before they faced a threat that they were simply not prepared for.

As usual, the majority of the applicants had been easily dismissed. Some of them were outright jokes—fake applicants with rude names and ludicrous, impossible powers. He'd long passed the point where monikers such as “The Cocksman” or “Gas Pipe” were even remotely funny.

On the next tier were the would-be heroes who thought that the basic requirements for becoming a Paragon were nothing more than a good workout regimen, a costume, and a desire to fight.

Truth be told, it
had
been more like that in the early days. The hope had been to inspire others to follow their example, and to create a sort of costumed militia of heroes and do-gooders. But beyond the vigilantes who thought that wearing a costume was a license for violence, it had only taken two slit throats and a would-be daredevil blindly tumbling off a rooftop to make most people realize that putting on a costume and risking life and limb was a job better left to professionals and people who had more luck than sense.

Of course there was no way to completely avoid what Darby had referred to as “intense personalities.” After all, it took a certain amount of insanity to put on a costume to begin with. But it wasn't like it used to be…in so many ways. Time had proven that being a Paragon was a dangerous business, and even the luckiest of them had ended up dying from something other than natural causes.

He picked up the application in front of him and read the name aloud: “Hydraulic-man.” It was a good name—simple and direct. The attached daguerreotype showed that he was a strapping fellow in his thirties, clearly of aristocratic stock.

The provided sketches revealed that he had created a series of mechanical devices based around the principles of water pressure, primarily using them as a weapon. Grüsser would be very excited to have another damp hero around….

But the machinery also looked suspiciously familiar. Most probably the basic designs had been purchased (or stolen) from the estate of an old villain, and then “modernized” by a well-paid engineer. Not that there was anything wrong with borrowing here and there, especially from the villains. The trick was being discreet enough to keep the source of your miraculous technology a secret.

At first glance Hydraulic-man didn't seem powerful enough for the Paragons, although a “high-pressure water gun” might allow them to more easily subdue an enemy without the need to resort to lethal force. And any half-decent invention could be radically improved by the judicious application of fortified steam. Without Darby around it would be more of an effort to implement the upgrades, and they probably wouldn't work half as well, but it could be done.

His fingers found the hidden latch without a thought, and he pulled open the desk's left drawer. From the jumble of objects inside he pulled out his self-inking pen. He stared at the device and frowned. Darby's legacy was still all around them, but they would need to find a way to move on, even if it meant going back to nibs and inkwells. Perhaps that was what Darby had had in mind all along when he tried to put the mechanical man in charge. But if it was, he should have said so. And he should have told Alexander about his decision
before
he died.

The old man must have known that Alexander wouldn't have obeyed his orders from beyond the grave.

This time the words in his head were in the stern tones of his mother's voice:
Idealism and daydreams are both equal enemies of success.
He often wished he could banish her from his mind, but it had been that old witch, with all her rules and homilies, who had given him the wherewithal and drive that had made him the man he was today. She'd never leave him completely.

He slid the next application out of its envelope. “The White Knight” was printed across the top of it, along with a sketch and the man's true name: Jordan Clements.

Stanton grimaced slightly as he read through the details. At first glance Mr. Clements seemed to have all the necessary qualifications; born and raised a Southern gentlemen, he had followed it with a distinguished record as a Confederate lieutenant in the last war. He also seemed to harbor little or no outward animosity for the North since it had ended, choosing instead to rebuild his family fortune in a postslavery world by taking advantage of the opportunities in the Reconstruction. And over the last decade it had all come together as a sizable fortune, allowing him to be welcomed back to polite society.

Clements had also recently purchased a sizable piece of property just above the fashionable end of northern Fifth Avenue, not far away from the Hall of Paragons.