Wardenclyffe Page 9

  “They’re coming back!” he shouted.

  Who was coming back?

  I ran to Scherff. “George! What’s happ—?”

  His eyes widened as he saw me. “Charles! Into the office!” He reached behind him for the doorknob. “Quickly!”

  I stopped. I wasn’t going anywhere until I knew what was happening. I certainly wasn’t going to let him protect me like I was some helpless woman. I was neither.

  “Why? What’s—?”

  “We’re under attack! Now get—”

  “By whom? Locals?”

  “No.” He dropped into a crouch and pointed up. “Them!”

  At first I didn’t know what he meant, then movement in the air a dozen feet off the ground caught my eye.

  “Bloody hell!”

  Winged things—three of them—that might have escaped one of Doré’s visions of hell. Roughly the size of large lobsters with shelled bodies and numerous dangling claws, but these had narrow waists like wasps and were held aloft by diaphanous dragonfly wings, blurred by the speed of their beating. But neither lobsters nor wasps had teeth, and certainly nothing ever born on Earth had teeth like these—wide, drop-hinge jaws packed with long, sharp, transparent fangs like diamond stilettos.

  I instantly surmised what had befallen the dead man’s throat.

  What were these things? I might have wondered where they’d come from, but had a sickening feeling I already knew.

  The three creatures diverged and dove to the attack—two angling toward Drexler and his men, the other toward George and me.

  Drexler shouted, “Cover me!”

  He was fiddling with some wood contraption, trying to attach it to the whiskbroom handle of his pistol as he backed toward the surviving Septimus members. In response, they stepped forward and began swinging their two-by-fours at the monsters.

  I lost interest in their plight when I realized the remaining monster was headed straight for me. I dropped to the floor as it zoomed above with an angry buzz. It overshot me but quickly banked around and came in for another pass.

  Scherff was shouting something I couldn’t understand while I looked frantically about for something to use against it. I spotted a metal strut on the floor about twenty feet away. Staying in a crouch, I made a dash for it but the angry buzzing grew so loud behind me I feared the thing was almost upon me, so I threw myself flat on the floor.

  As it came around for another run, I had an idea. Jumping up, I raced back toward Scherff.

  “You can’t outrun it!” he shouted.

  “I know! I’m bringing it to you! Get ready!”

  I hoped he understood, and when he raised the lumber in a two-handed grip, I knew he did.

  The buzzing grew louder and louder behind me. I feared I’d feel those teeth in my nape any second. As I reached Scherff I dropped into a slide, leaving him with a clear shot at the thing.

  “Don’t miss!” I cried.

  I didn’t see him swing but a loud crunch! and the sudden cessation of the buzzing told me he’d connected. I rolled to my feet and turned to see him pounding the monstrous thing again and again as it flopped and fluttered on the ground.

  Beyond him, Drexler had fitted a stock to the grip of his pistol, transforming it into a kind of short-barreled rifle. As I watched, he dropped to one knee, raised it to his shoulder, and took aim at the two remaining creatures.

  His first shot made an impressive crack! that echoed through the interior but missed both. With his second shot, one of the things flipped in the air and went into a descending spiral. When it hit the ground, one of the Septimus men ran toward it with his club raised. He made the mistake of taking his eyes off the remaining creature, which went into a dive toward him. He shouted with shock and pain as it sank its dagger teeth into his upper thigh. Blood gushed from the wound as the thing tore out a chunk of flesh.

  Before it could fly off, however, his Septimus companion arrived to smash it to the ground. And while he clubbed it to death, Drexler stepped up and administered a coup de grâce to the toothy head of the one he’d wounded.

  And then…silence.

  We all stood where we were, doing slow turns as we searched the air for further threats.

  “Are there more?” I finally said.

  “No,” Scherff said with a quick shake of his head. “At least I hope not. I saw three come out of the shaft and—”

  “The shaft? How did they get into the shaft?”

  “That is what I would like to know. I was out there with Rourke”—he indicated the dead man—“when we saw these three things rise through all the flashings from below and hover around the pipe. When we stepped forward for a closer look, they came at us and we ran. We managed to close the rear door to keep them out, but the side door was open. We ran to shut it but one of them caught Rourke before we could reach it.”

  Tesla joined the group after a slow, hesitant trip from the far side of the workspace. His slack expression indicated shock.

  The wounded Septimus worker dropped to his knees then, clutching his bloody thigh. His companion helped him up and supported him as he limped back toward the first aid room.

  Drexler took up the story.

  “I unwittingly opened the rear doors, allowing two of them in. They buzzed around and appeared to leave, but came back before I could close the door again.” He waved the pistol. “I ran and got this.”

  “You carry a pistol?” I said.

  “In my briefcase always. Good thing too, ja?”

  I had to agree. “Ja.”

  I walked over to the thing Drexler had killed. A bullet had pierced its waist area and the coup de grâce had blown away the upper part of its head, but it had the least overall damage compared to the victims of the two-by-fours. Close up now I could see a string of bioluminescent dots running along its flank, still glowing faintly, even in death.

  But the teeth…those teeth held my attention. I’d seen drawings of piranha fish from the Amazon and had thought they looked like perfect killing machines, but this creature left them in the dust. And it could fly. If you want safety from a piranha, stay out of the water. Where was safe from this thing?

  Tesla, Scherff, and Drexler joined me as I squatted next to it.

  I said, “Does anyone have any idea where these things came from and how they got into the tower shaft?”

  “I never saw them go in,” Scherff said. “I only saw them come out.”

  “But they had to go in,” I said. “You and I have been down there hundreds of times. We’ve seen common everyday beetles and such, but never—”

  “They came through the wall,” Tesla said.

  We all stared at him. He did not look well. His eyes lacked their usual focus.

  I said, “The wall of the shaft, sir?”

  “The wall I was warned about,” he said in a flat tone. “The one the woman said I was cracking.”

  Drexler’s sudden laugh sounded forced. “That crazy Gypsy you told me about? Such silliness. I have my own theory about these things and it has nothing to do with a crack in a wall that isn’t here in the first place.”

  “I wish to hear this,” Scherff said.

  Drexler began slowly, as if gathering his thoughts. “Well, you have heard of dinosaurs, ja?” When we all nodded, he went on. “And so we have seen the drawings of the skeletons of the flying dinosaurs, ja?”

  “Pterosaurs,” I said.

  Dinosaurs had always fascinated me. I was well aware we were not terribly far from the site where the Haddon hadrosaurus had been discovered.

  “Ja, pterosaurs,” Drexler said with growing excitement. “I believe you are right about the name. I am wondering whether it is possible that we have before us prehistoric creatures, left over from the days of the dinosaurs, that were trapped in the soil around the shaft. Could it be that all the electric discharges from the coil at the bottom of the shaft awoke them? And, once awake, they flew up the shaft to appear in the modern world. Naturally, being predators—considering thos
e teeth, what else could they be?—they attacked the nearest food: us.”

  “If you’re right,” I said, “then we’ve discovered a new prehistoric species.”

  Reanimated prehistoric creatures…a fantastical concept, yet one I found more easily acceptable than a crack in an even more fantastical invisible wall.

  “I am sure I am right,” Drexler said. “And to prove it, we must take these to an expert on prehistoric creatures.”

  “Where would one find such a person?” Scherff said.

  Drexler shrugged. “I am only a visitor in this land. I do not know these things. But you must have someplace.”

  I had an idea for that. “The Museum of Natural History in New York City. If anyone can identify this monster, you will find him there.”

  “Yes!” Drexler slammed a fist into his palm. He had passed beyond excitement into some strange exalted state. “Then that is where I shall take them. Help Herr Tesla back to his office while I prepare these for transport to the city.”

  Tesla didn’t need help, merely guidance. He still seemed dazed by the incident. As I led him toward his office, Scherff said, “What about Rourke here? We’ll have to call the authorities.”

  Oh, yes. The poor dead man. The fight for our lives had pushed his tragedy into the background.

  “Nein-nein!” Drexler said. “We shall handle it. Septimus takes care of its own.”

  Scherff was shaking his head. “I do not know if that is a good idea. We could be in trouble.”

  I motioned Scherff to follow me into the office. He arrived as I was guiding Tesla into his desk chair.

  “I think Drexler is right,” I said in a low voice. “If we report Rourke’s death, we will have to show those things as the cause of death. How do we explain them without risking a panic? If people hear that the tower is reanimating prehistoric creatures…”

  Scherff had started nodding so I stopped there.

  “I see, I see. We will let Drexler handle the body and the beasts then.”

  “The beasts,” Tesla said in a flat tone. “I breached the wall and let them through.”

  “No, maestro,” Scherff said. “That was just a crazy woman talking.”

  The wall…I couldn’t help hearkening back to the Machen story and its poor woman who had a glimpse of the “spiritual world” and lost her mind. I couldn’t accept that those creatures had come through a breach in an invisible wall between our existence and another. And even though Drexler’s theory sounded preposterous as well, it seemed less so.

  I tried to focus Tesla on some good news: “I never got to tell you both that the experiment was a resounding success. The bulb lit at the ten-mile mark.”

  “But we breached the wall in the process,” Tesla droned.

  Scherff turned to me. “He’s in shock. He’ll come around.”

  Yes, he would. But not before the horrors multiplied to an unimaginable degree.

  * * *

  By Wednesday we’d had no word from Drexler and I was growing impatient.

  He, along with the three Septimus men—two living, one dead—and the remains of the creatures, had departed under cover of night as soon as the fog lifted.

  I’d checked the waterline the next morning and was heartened to find no dead fish.

  Tesla improved overnight but was not quite himself. He deserted Wardenclyffe to recover in comfort in his Waldorf Astoria quarters. And George Scherff…well, Scherff was his practical Teutonic self, keeping everything up and running in the maestro’s absence.

  The big question, which no one was addressing yet, was whether or not we should continue the experiments. By some unspoken agreement, Scherff and I did not bring it up between us, even for idle discussion. After all, the decision was not ours. We needed Tesla to return to Wardenclyffe as his old self.

  With everything in limbo, and finding myself at sixes and sevens, I decided to call the Natural History Museum. I was burning with curiosity about the identity of those creatures and the prehistoric era that had spawned them.

  Since Tesla’s office was not in use, I used the phone there to call. I had visited the museum twice since my arrival from Boston, and found it fascinating. Upon reaching the switchboard I asked the operator to connect me with anyone in paleontology. The man who answered had no idea what I was talking about. No, they had received no prehistoric specimens from Long Island or anywhere else this week. When I told him they had been alive on Sunday and that these could be the find of the century, he became angry, saying he had no patience for hoaxes nor those who perpetrated them, and hung up.

  His anger had seemed genuine, lending credence to his denial. No question that the arrival of specimens such as the creatures that had attacked us would have caused quite a stir at the museum. Even the lowest secretary would have been aware of this sort of find.

  Which told me that Herr Drexler had not turned them over to the museum. At least not yet. What could have delayed him? They would be decomposing by now.

  I opened the broad middle drawer of Tesla’s desk and quickly found Drexler’s card. ASFO…Actuator…no telephone number but, along the bottom, a New York City address.

  I pocketed the card and headed for my quarters in the loft. With the maestro gone, Scherff could manage quite well without me. As for Herr Rudolph Drexler…he was going to have a visitor, one in search of an explanation as to why he had reneged on his promise to deliver the specimens to the museum.

  * * *

  Dressed in my suit and derby, I trained into Long Island City and took the side-wheeler ferry across to Manhattan. I’d read that workers had started tunneling under the East River to provide train access directly into the city, but that project was years from completion. I found a map of Manhattan posted on one of the ferry’s inside walls. After a squinting search that made my eyes ache, I found Drexler’s street on the Lower East Side. The ferry would drop me off up on 34th Street, but the morning was cool and crisp and I didn’t mind a two-mile walk after so much sitting.

  I’d spent the past nine months in Wardenclyffe breathing the sea air from the Sound and the pine scents from the land. As a result, the stench of the city came as an olfactory assault. Yes, I was walking down Manhattan’s First Avenue, but I might as well have been standing in a stable. Horse-drawn hansoms, barouches, calashes, carts, and lorries everywhere, and every horse leaving piles of manure in its wake. Boston had been the same during my time there, I’m sure, but I’d acclimated to the effluvia—inured to the manure, as it were. The fresh air of Wardenclyffe had spoiled me.

  I’d grown unused to crowds as well. Two miles of slipping past suited men in bowlers and boaters, denim-clad workers, and long-skirted women exhausted me. How quickly this former Town Mouse had become a Country Mouse.

  As always, women’s fashion baffled me. Their bustles and voluminous petticoats were bad enough, but their corseted waists looked so uncomfortable, so tight I wondered how they breathed. The hems of their skirts brushed the offal beneath their shoes as they crossed the streets. Why did they put up with it—sacrificing their quotidian comfort at the altar of fashion?

  The sight of them reinforced my conviction that my choice to live as a man had been the right one. Had I settled for a woman’s life, one day would find me standing in the middle of a busy thoroughfare screaming at the top of my lungs as I ripped off the ridiculous clothing I’d been forced to wear.

  At 23rd Street the Second Avenue El left its eponymous route and ran overhead with a thunderous roar, all the way down to East Houston where it made a westward turn. As First Avenue crossed Houston, it changed its name to Allen Street and much of the signage changed to Hebrew. The store windows were filled with brass fittings and such, and the tenement-lined streets became clogged with pushcarts selling everything from dresses to fish to meats to produce. Crossing Delancey Street I was nearly run over by a freight wagon rushing toward the newly opened Williamsburg Bridge.

  Finally I reached Drexler’s street and was surprised to find it looked like t
he rest of the Lower East Side. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—some sort of oasis of greenery and finery among the tenement squalor, perhaps. I simply could not see a man who drove a Cadillac touring car living in one of these shabby tenements. Many of the buildings were not numbered. As I walked along, wondering how I’d find him, I came upon the answer.

  As a child I’d played a game at school called “Which Doesn’t Belong and Why?” Here was a building that very much didn’t belong.

  There in the middle of the tenement block squatted a massive, ancient-looking three-story edifice of stone block. It sat unattached on its property, not deigning to touch its unkempt, red-brick-fronted neighbors. A narrow alley ran along its east flank, and on the west a wider opening, big enough to admit a delivery wagon—or a touring car, perhaps? With its deeply recessed windows and solid granite walls, the place looked like a bank…or a fortress.

  A heavy inlaid door sat atop wide granite steps. The Septimus sigil above it convinced me I’d reached my destination.

  This had to be Drexler’s base of operations while he was visiting the States; perhaps he lived here as well.

  I walked up the steps and rapped on the door. After knocking a second time with no answer, I pushed it open and stepped into a cavernous marble foyer. A wide set of steps on the right ascended to the upper floors. And directly ahead, a ten-foot Septimus sigil loomed over the foyer. Just in case, I supposed, someone might forget who owned the building.

  To my left I saw what might have been a receptionist’s kiosk, but no one was manning it.

  I doffed my derby and called, “Hello?”

  My voice echoed off the marble walls and ceiling, but no one responded. I did, however, detect a murmur of voices from down the hallway to my right. I followed it until I came upon a large meeting room with some sort of reception in progress. Perhaps fifty men filled the room. A buffet had been set up along the far wall, with piles of food and bottles of Champagne in buckets of ice.

  Obviously I’d intruded on some sort of celebration and was about to back out when I realized that I might very well find Drexler here. I’d come all this way looking. No sense in turning back now.