The Falling Machine (19 page)

And another voice answered her. It came from a chair in the darkest corner of the room. “Sir Dennis used to say that it was only worthwhile judging the character of a man in a crisis.”

Sarah gasped. “Mr. Wickham!”

“Indeed, my dear.” He unfolded slowly out of the chair and stood up. Sarah could almost feel the aches in his bones as he stretched with a series of audible cracks and pops. “Although I can't think why you should be surprised. This is where I told you we should meet, and at about this time.” He was wearing his full costume; although this time he was carrying a cane with him as well. The top end was a hollow sphere of brass with a magnifying glass mounted into the center of it. As he walked toward her he leaned on the cane heavily. He seemed frailer than the last time she had seen him. “Where else would I be?”

“Nathaniel has me all wound up.” Sarah tried to force herself to smile, then gave up the effort. “But if you'll pardon me for saying so, sir, you don't look well.”

The grin that the Englishman flashed back at her was less than convincing. “No…I suppose I don't.” He pulled off his long black coat and threw it on the settee. “So far it has been a grueling investigation, both physically and mentally.”

“Sit down, then. I'm sure we can find you something to drink.”

He swayed slightly as he leaned against the sofa. “No, no liquor my dear, thank you. I find that it dulls the mind, and at my age there are enough natural impairments to my reasoning that I would rather not pile on any artificial ones.” He pointed at the couch and Sarah took a seat.

“I did some searching around my house.”

His eyes grew wide. “I never told you to—”

“I know you didn't, but I wanted to see if there was something there that could help you.”

“You're a very silly girl. There was no need.”

She pulled out the folded piece of paper and pressed it into his hand. “I don't know what it means, but I found it in my father's closet.”

He unfolded it and read it out loud: “‘Section 106 removed and reordered as requested.’”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

He pondered it for a moment and then looked up at her. “Not particularly,” he said as he refolded the page and slipped it into his pocket. “But I'll look into it.

“Now, Tom will be along any second, and there's something I must tell you before he arrives.”

“Surely there's no need for us to keep any secrets from him?”

Wickham stood hunched above her. “He has many admirable qualities, but his grasp of guile is a bit…unreliable. It might be better if we only told him what he needs to know.”

The irregular clump of Tom's footsteps could be heard from the corridor outside.

Wickham reached into his collar. Pulling out the necklace, he slipped the lead key over his head. “Take this,” he said, grabbing her hand and pressing it into her palm.

“Your element?” She wrapped her hand around it, pulled it to her chest for an instant, and then held it back out to him. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

He shook his head and used his hand to wrap hers back around it. “Keep it safe, of course.”

“But…”

“There's no time to argue. No one must know you have it.” Standing above her he looked her straight in the eyes with a serious expression. “Not even your father. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I mean, I don't understand why, but—”

Tom came into view behind the glass. “And you must only ever use it if something should happen to me.”

“Use it? How would I use it? And is something going to happen?”

“Hush, now put it away!”

Sarah stuffed it into a pocket just as the doorknob turned and the tall French doors to the room opened wide. Tom hobbled in.

“Close the door behind you. And you may drop the act in front of Sarah, Tom.”

“Yes…Mr. Wickham.” Tom straightened up as he pulled the doors closed, any trace of his hobbled gait vanishing as he glided toward them, as graceful as he had ever been.

Sarah clapped her gloved hands together. “But you're fine!”

“I have repaired myself, Miss…Stanton.”

Wickham whispered to her conspiratorially. “But the others mustn't know, my dear. It was done quite without their permission.”

She stood up and put her hand on his shoulder. “It's abominable the way you're being treated, Tom. This is your house, and you're one of the Paragons!” She stood up and looked him over. “They're selfish, foolish men.”

“Foolishness, I've discovered, is an unavoidable human trait,” Wickham sighed. “But they're far worse than that, I'm afraid—they're weak and afraid.”

Sarah let out a sardonic laugh. “All my life all I've ever heard them talk about is how powerful they are. What could they be afraid of?”

Wickham looked her in the eye. “Progress, disease, old age—all the things that eventually rob every man of his power and glory.” He stood up, a touch of the old gleam back in his eye. “But only one of them is afraid that the Sleuth will uncover his secret.”

Sarah rolled her head slightly to one side. “Please, Mr. Wickham, I'm in no mood for riddles. What do you mean? What secret?”

“The seeds of my investigation have borne bitter fruit. I'm now sure that there is indeed a traitor amongst the Paragons.”

“A spy perhaps, or a new villain, but—”

“Only a Paragon could have removed Tom's replacement body from the hall the morning of Sir Dennis's death. Only the Paragons knew where Darby was going to be the morning that he was killed. He hadn't even told you where you were going before you left for the bridge.”

“That's true.” Sarah sat back down. “But then who was it?” She thought of the paper she had given him, and of her father's ascension. She stared straight into the Englishman's eyes. “You think it's my father.”

“What?” The Sleuth sat next to her. “No, I don't….I'm sorry, my dear. I didn't think about how that might affect you….” He took her hand. “I'm not sure who it is, not yet, although I have my suspicions. But I'm almost positive your father is innocent. Alexander Stanton is one of the founders of the Paragons, and if he has one great failing it's that he's too loyal to this group. He may care too much about costumes and not enough about actual people, but he's no turncoat.”

“But if it did turn out to be him…you'd have to stop him, wouldn't you?”

“Sarah, if the new leader of the Paragons turned out to be a traitor, I'm not sure what stopping him would even mean. I can only promise that I'll follow every clue wherever it goes.”

“I understand, Mr. Wickham.”

“And I'll tell you what I've discovered the very moment I have something worth telling. But right now I need you to be brave and to do what it is I ask of you, no matter what happens. I think that many lives may soon depend on that, not the least of them your own.”

He stood. “But it seems to me that you've already been through more than enough for one night.” He pulled a silk rope by the door, and a bell rang in the distance. “My footman is in the pantry. He'll get you home. Tell him I'll be spending the night here.”

He had her moving through the door before she could find a moment to object. “Now I have things I need to discuss with Tom, privately.”

Sarah resisted Wickham's attempts to sweep her along, but it was almost as if he was dancing her out of the room. “But I can still help!”

“Of course you can, my dear. But the best help you can be right now is to not be here.” He leaned forward and kissed her on her forehead. It seemed like his ability to send women on their way was a move that had been well practiced. “You're a brave, beautiful girl, Sarah Stanton. It's obvious to me why Dennis held you in such high regard.”

Sarah kissed him on the cheek. “You'll take care of yourself?”

His eyes turned to Tom and then glanced back at her. “Of course I will.”

“And we'll talk soon?”

“Yes, my dear. But it's getting late, and your father will be worried, I'm sure.”

She pursed her lips together for a moment, deciding just how obstinate she wanted to be. Then she stuck out her hand. “Good night, Mr. Wickham.”

He put out his own, and they shook. “Good night, Sarah.”

She walked down the hallway toward the entrance, leather soles clicking as they struck the marble floor. When she reached the main entrance she turned and looked back. Reflected in the lamplight she saw the Automaton's hand as it…as
he
, closed the door to the study.

T
he silence inside the warehouse was only broken by an occasional tapping as the howling wind outside knocked the door against its frame. Each rattle was followed by a long, strained tone as the air was sucked out through the cracks, moaning like a demented oboe.

The back-and-forth of rattle and moan had been going on uninterrupted for hours when the calm was broken by a violent thump against the door that made it shudder, sending small crumbs of dust and brick raining down.

The second attack quickly followed, even more violent than the first. The third thundering blow was more than the lock could take, and the thick bolts snapped free, followed, an instant later, by a series of pings as pieces of broken metal landed on the floor.

A gust of wind blew the door open wide, slamming it up against the side wall. Behind it came a blast of light and snow from the street, revealing—had anyone actually been there to see it—a shadowed figure standing ominously in the doorway.

Snow had stopped falling from the sky hours before, but the temperature had dropped precipitously as the clouds were blown away. In this crisp and gusty winter's night, the cold had tempered the snow that had already fallen, and the north wind was now blowing the brittle flakes around the streets in swirling drifts.

The Automaton stepped into the building. He attempted to shut the door behind him, but without the lock there was nothing to hold it in place, and it began to fly back toward him the moment he relaxed his grip.

Tom removed his right glove, revealing a palm sliced from a bronze cylinder, a squared section along the bottom acting as his wrist. He wedged his hand against the edge of the heavy iron door and pushed hard against it until the frame bent inward slightly, forming a small pucker in the metal. He grabbed the edge of the door and heaved it closed. The wood ground into the iron with a rough squeal, wedging it tight. The wind could no longer make it rattle at all.

With the winter wind sealed away, the moist warmth of the warehouse's interior settled around him, dew instantly forming on his exposed metal surfaces. The snow that clung to his clothes melted to liquid, then vanished into the fibers of his jacket and pants.

The interior of the building seemed oddly immune to the weather outside. The concrete floors still held enough heat from whatever had gone on here during the day to keep the temperature inside tolerable, if not actually warm.

Except for a two-story office that had been built along the far wall, the building was a single open space. Every window on the floor level had been blacked out with brown butcher paper covered over with a thick coating of pitch, and the whole space was dark and quiet. Whoever had decided to seal the room off clearly had no desire for anything from the outside to peer in, nor any need to see out.

The thick gloom was broken only by the glow coming from the pilot lights in the gas lamps, as well as pinpricks of light leaking in though the wooden slats that made up the front of the building where the walls no longer fit together tightly.

Tom lifted up his faceplate. It slid up on little rails that lifted it up and back over the top of his head until it clicked into place. Locked into the front of his brass skull was a large lens set in a brass tube.

He held up his right hand and wrapped the fingers of his left around his steel wrist and pushed downward. A collar slid free and revealed a circular frame that held a small piece of quartz crystal surrounded by wires. He reached up and pulled back his thumb until it almost touched the back of his hand. There was a popping sound, and a bright spark appeared in the middle of the quartz. In the light the shape of the entire room was revealed. At the same instant the lens in his head clicked open, taking a photograph.

The building wasn't huge, considering its original purpose—four thousand square feet with a forty-foot roof. But its current occupants didn't seem interested in using it for storage. There were a few crates around, but they were empty and open. The rest of the room was occupied by large pieces of machinery bolted to the floor, including a huge black metal tube that stood near the entrance.

But the most notable feature was the long row of dismembered metal limbs hung carefully along the far wall.

There was a whir as the photographic material in the back of Tom's head shifted the next slide into position. He rotated his head and fired another spark.

After he had finished with his photographs the Automaton lowered his mask back into place, pushed his hand back into its normal position, and walked into the room.

He weaved his way through the bulky machines. The first one was clearly designed for hand milling and rolling metal plates. Next to it sat a strange iron box with a series of metal wands sticking out from the side of it. Tom grabbed one by the tip and pulled. It came free, with the other end connected to a cloth-wrapped cord that ran back into the box.

On closer inspection the tip of the metal stick was scorched. Near the base of the wand was a switch, but when Tom moved it nothing happened.

He let go of the object, and the cord retracted. The stick slithered back to its metal home like a snake sliding into a hole.

Tom walked on, reaching the row of arms and legs that hung on the far wall. They were all fit for a giant, and if they had been put together into the relative shape of a man he would have stood over twenty feet tall.

Tom tapped one of them, and it sang out with a distinct metallic note.

The limb was squat and heavy and lacked a hand, ending instead in an empty hole encircled with a wide metal ring. As the ringing faded he pulled down an arm from its hook. It was made from four rounded plates of dark iron, each with a long, flanged edge pressed together so that they formed a tube. Tom ran a finger along one of the joins, but there were no bolts of any kind holding it together. Instead the seam held thick beads of steel, and it appeared that they had somehow been glued together using the metal itself.

Tom slipped his right arm down into it. The interior was empty, and his arm was easily able to travel all the way up its length until his hand found a crossbar that was placed just below the wrist.

He grabbed the bar and rotated his own hand. As it moved, a series of metal pins fanned up from the end of it. He quickly realized that he could move the bar in multiple directions, sending out a different combination of pins each time, reaching out to send information to whatever weapon or hand this device had been built to interact with.

Pulling his arm out, he hung the limb back onto its hook and examined one of the legs. It was as tall as a man, and the locking ring at the ankle was much thicker, with a second, reinforcing circle of metal above it. Wires poked out of the end. The interior was lined with a thick fabric, and a series of long wires travelled up and down the length of the limb, leaving just enough room for a human limb to fit inside. He stood the leg on the floor and lifted his face mask. He pointed the lens in his head directly at it and pulled back his thumb to let off another spark.

Leaving the leg standing on the floor, Tom walked back across the warehouse, heading toward the giant tube that sat near the blacked-out windows.

It was lumpy and ugly, covered with bands of steel and painted over with a thick layer of pitch that was flaking off in some places, oozing in others. The cylinder was the size of a steam locomotive but stood vertically, rising up toward the ceiling. Rather than the usual patchwork of brazed metal plates, the body had been constructed from a single rolled sheet of metal, formed into a perfect tube and sealed up the center with the same kind of boltless seam that had been used on the limbs.

A large symbol had been drawn across its surface in white. The paint had bubbled and dripped, but it was still legible. Tom ran his hand across the side of it, letting his fingers trace out the image, a perfectly drawn Greek symbol: Ω.

A ladder ran up the side, bolted to metal straps that encircled the tube every few feet. Tom grabbed the rungs and moved quickly and quietly to the top, his legs and arms making only a light tapping sound as they touched each one.

Reaching the top, he pulled himself up through a hole cut into a wooden platform surrounding the broad slab of metal that capped the cylinder. In the center of it was a hinged door with a glass viewing portal and a brass handle sticking straight up into the air.

Tom walked over to it and gave it a tug. The hinged door opened smoothly until it moved past the tipping point and fell against the iron plug with a slam that echoed through the room.

He pulled his thumb, and the light sparked brightly, illuminating the hole.

A second later another light flickered out from an unexplored corner of the room. Tom's attempt to spin around and locate its source was interrupted as he was struck by the bullets rising from the warehouse floor. They exploded as they hit him, throwing him onto the wooden platform. His desperate scramble for balance was lost as his feet snagged against the edges of the hole he had climbed through.

Tom tumbled over the edge, bouncing against the ladder once before he crashed to the floor, and lay there motionless as a cloud of steam rose up through his clothes.

The gas lamps around the walls flared up, melting away the darkness in the warehouse as their fire burned brighter.

A man stood next to the wall, his hand leaning on the gas control handle. He was just a few inches shy of five feet tall, covered in a long white smock made from thick quilted cotton smudged with long gray streaks, with a thick leather apron strapped tightly over the top of it. A pair of large brass goggles hung down from a heavy collar wrapped around his neck Like the rest of him, his face was lean and pointed, and there was something about his features that gave him the look of a perpetually angry insect, his face framed by curls of hair that spilled out from all sides underneath a dirty bowler hat.

But none of these things was his most noticeable or striking feature. That distinction was reserved for the object that sat where the right arm of a normal man would have been—a small Gatling gun, black smoke still rising up from the brass barrels that had just been fired. The back of the gun was set flush against a squat metal box above his shoulder that was clearly designed to feed ammo into the device.

The contraption was held in place by the collar, along with a brace that traveled down to a metal belt strapped around his waist and upper thighs.

His pulled his left hand free from the gas control and held it out in front of him. The barrel of the gun swiveled around to meet it, and he grabbed the end of the brass handle sticking out of the side of the weapon.

“I gotcha,” he said. The voice was surprisingly deep considering his lanky frame, and layered over with a thick Yiddish accent.

Tom lay in a heap, unmoving on the floor. Wisps of dark smoke curled up from where the bullets had struck his body.

The man took a few steps closer to him, the gun held pointed down at him. “All right. What kind of schmuck would be stupid enough to come breaking into my lab so late at night?”

He kneeled down and tried to shove the body over, but he could barely move it. “You're heavier than you look, my dead friend.” Bracing the top of his gun arm on the floor the man tried again, managing to roll Tom over completely this time.

His face mask had somehow survived the fall intact, although it had come loose from the top of his head and was sliding around on its hinges. The photographic lens had been smashed in the fall.

The gunman jumped back in surprise. “You! I know you! You're the Automaton!” A broad grin split his almost-lipless face. “I shot the Automaton! Oy, I don't believe it!”

“Oh, Eli, so much bad luck, and now a little good!” he said to himself as he nudged the unmoving figure with the gun barrel, “Maybe today is your lucky day!”

In a single movement the Automaton's hand swept out and swept the man's legs out from under him. “Today is not over yet.”

There was a loud crack as the gunman's back brace smacked against the floor. A moment later it was followed by an involuntary groan.

Tom rolled up and over, then attempted to leap back onto his feet. Instead he stumbled and almost crashed to the floor. Using his momentum he tried again, managing to rise up to his knees before Eli was able to crank his gun.

The weapon fired wildly, a thick puff of black smoke blowing out of the end of the barrel after each shot. Wherever the bullets collided with various metal objects inside the room, they exploded with a flash. Others smacked into the wall, sending out chips of brick in all directions.

Tom attempted to get out of the way by dropping to the ground, but an exploding bullet caught his right side, sending him spinning across the floor.

Eli scrambled to his feet and pointed the gun at the sprawling Automaton. “There's nitroglycerin in these bullets, machine-man. You try that again and I'll shoot so many of them into you, the only thing you'll be good for is a sieve.” He moved a step closer. “I'd rather have you working, but if not, then not.”

Tom said nothing. Instead he grabbed his thumb and pulled, sending out a blinding flash from the exposed crystal in his wrist.