The Dead Gentleman (25 page)

“I am what I am at the moment, Tommy Learner,” the High Father said. “Having recently died, I was born again into this body. It is the way of the monks of the Hidden City to endure a cycle of reincarnation until our appointed task in this universe is complete. Only then may we become one with the cosmos.”

He winked conspiratorially. “It drives the Dead Gentleman to a most furious distraction. He has killed me several times since you and I last spoke, Tommy, but alas, I refuse to stay dead.”

“So why are you here?” asked Jez. “Where did you come from?”

The High Father shrugged. “I came here to find you two. I knew you would come, but I had hoped you’d arrive a bit earlier.” He gestured to the darkening sky. “I’d hoped we would have a chance to talk before the Gentleman’s army awoke.”

“What army?” asked Jez, and at that moment the glimmer of western sun vanished in the sky, swallowed by storm clouds. Night had finally settled over the Academy.

At first the noise was just a distant shuffling, like the brush of fabric on stone. It had been disguised by the steady rhythm of the falling raindrops, but within minutes the city was alive with the sounds of doors opening and wooden floors creaking under the weight of shuffling footsteps. Hundreds and hundreds of footsteps. Thousands.

“I’m sorry, my friends,” said the High Father. “But
that
army. The Explorers who died defending this place. Their souls are at rest, but what’s left serves the Gentleman.”

Jezebel and Tommy ran to the wall and peered into the gloom
below. It was too dark to make out many details, but something was moving on the streets down there. Silent and steady, shapes were stirring everywhere, and they were all headed toward the same place—the Tower Library.

“The dead are coming for you. Your warmth, your
life
, burns like a fire in their eyes and they hunger for it,” said the High Father. “There is no place safe here for you now.”

“What do we do?” asked Jez.

The High Father held out his hand. In it was a small, familiar device.

“A Cycloidotrope!” said Tommy. “I thought there was only one!”

“There are as many as I deem necessary at any given time,” said the High Father. “No more, no less. And since the Gentleman took yours from you, I have decided that there should be another.”

He continued to hold out his hand and the Cycloidotrope glowed golden in his small child’s palm. “You must use it,” he said. “You must jump through time.”

Neither Tommy nor Jez said anything for a second.

“Jump through a Cycloidotrope?” said Tommy, finally. “Are you out of your little reincarnated skull?”

“I once explained to you, Tommy, that at certain points in time the future is not set. There, different choices can affect the entire timeline, yield different outcomes.”

The High Father leaned in, his small eyes bright and shining despite the darkening night. “This moment we are at one of those crossroads,” he said. “Tonight, if you activate the Cycloidotrope you will see the place you are trying to go. I believe if you jump through you will arrive there safely.”

“You told me that traveling through the Cycloidotrope was almost certain death!” said Tommy. “You said I’d be torn into a million pieces.”

“I did not lie,” said the High Father. “The odds of survival are grim. And yet, it is what you must risk if you are to survive this night.”

“It worked for me,” said Jezebel. “Maybe it’ll work again.”

“A once-in-a-lifetime break,” answered Tommy. “You saw what happened to that Harvester. We’d be ripped to bits in the time stream.”

“Most likely,” the High Father agreed. “But if you don’t jump you will
certainly
be ripped to bits here. At least the Cycloidotrope offers you a chance, however slim.”

With that the High Father activated the little device, and once again they were gazing at the future, at Jezebel’s bedroom.

“Does everyone have a Cycloidotrope that peeks into my bedroom?” Jez snapped.

The High Father didn’t answer.

Jez walked over to the bedroom hologram. It looked so real, except for the rain—as the rain fell from the sky it created little shimmers in the image. She had jumped through once, and though it wasn’t at all pleasant, she had survived. Could she beat the odds a second time? If she closed her eyes all she saw was the memory of that Harvester being torn apart.

Tommy and the High Father were arguing.

“You expect us to jump through there just because you say so?” he asked.

The High Father’s smile faded. “Actually, no. I knew you would not believe me, but I had to try.”

Jezebel thought she heard the creaking of steps from somewhere
below. Running to the door, she listened. Someone
was
definitely climbing the stairs. More than one, from the sounds of it, and they were getting closer.

When she turned back, Tommy and the High Father’s argument had become heated. But the rain was coming down harder now and it was difficult to hear what they were saying. Their voices were drowned out by a thunderclap in the distance, but from the way Tommy was gesturing, it was obvious they were talking about her.

There was no time for this. The crack of thunder was followed by the crack of splintering wood, like a small crash from somewhere not far below. Jez poked her head through the doorway, but in the failing evening light the tower had gone pitch-black—she couldn’t see a thing. She remembered Tommy’s paralight goggles strapped to her forehead.

Self-consciously, she pulled the goggles down over her eyes. At first there was nothing different about her vision, just a slight bluish tinge. She flipped a switch, and it was like seeing the world through a lightning flash. Everything was illuminated in a washed-out blue, including the tower stairs beneath her.

Standing there on the steps not ten feet away was a human corpse in a tattered Explorer’s uniform. Its leering face was mostly bone, with only a few strips of flesh clinging to the skull. It was reaching, awkwardly, for her, but its foot had fallen through a weak spot in the stairs, and the splintered wood was clamped around the rotted meat like a bear trap.

And behind it, more corpses as far as the eye could see. They lined the stairs—a scrambling, squirming mess of putrid arms and legs. The only thing keeping them at bay was the one stuck up front. He was creating a bottleneck, but not for long. As soon
as they spied Jezebel they surged forward, trampling the leader underfoot. Jez heard the breaking of bones, like the cracking of dried twigs, as the mindless masses crawled over each other to get to her.

With a scream she slammed the door. She looked around for something to barricade it with, but there was nothing.

“Tommy! They’re here!” she shouted, but her words were lost in the roar of the winds and rain. He was so busy arguing with the High Father that he wasn’t paying attention to her or to the doorway.

The door creaked as something smacked against it. The handle began to turn.

“TOMMY!” Jez put her weight into the door. Still Tommy didn’t hear. The storm raged around them so fiercely that her own words sounded muffled in her ears.

A push and the door opened an inch, despite Jez’s efforts. A rotten hand slipped through the gap, wriggling and grasping at nothing. With a shout, Jez gave the door another shove, throwing her shoulder into it. She felt, rather than heard, the crunch as a pair of gray-fleshed fingers snapped off at the knuckle. They landed at her feet but refused to stop moving. They inched toward her like grotesque worms.

A shudder tore into the door as a second body joined the first. Jez nearly lost her balance as the wood begin to splinter and crack. Her shoulder had gone numb from the effort, and she knew she couldn’t hold it a second time.

When the next blow came, she was ready for it. Instead of resisting, she jumped out of the way as the door came crashing down and two rotten corpses spilled out onto the ground, their broken bodies in a tangle.

I’m crazy
, she thought.
This is it, I’m officially crazy
.

Then she flipped up the goggles—she didn’t want to see what she was about to do—and ran. She ran straight at Tommy. He turned and saw her and the throng of dead Explorers spilling through the doorway. He shouted something, but she wasn’t listening. She was too busy yelling “I’m crazy!” as she tackled him into the light of the Cycloidotrope.

Jezebel awoke just as the pain hit her, a spike of agony straight down the center of her skull and a cramping nausea deep in her stomach.

“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts,” she repeated over and over.

Pizza for breakfast. Discovering a drive-in movie theater on a family road trip to Florida. Sitting on the car’s hood between her parents as they watched
Psycho
on the big screen and burying her head in her father’s arm during the scary scenes, but still peeking past his jacket at the reflection in the car window. Somehow it seemed less frightening that way, watching the mirror of the real thing.

The sickness passed.

“I’m home!” said Jez, sitting up. She looked around and saw that the room was just as she’d left it—the unmade bed, the
scattered pencils and broken trophy. And there was the forest mural on the wall. Best of all, she was in one piece.

Tommy lay next to her, hugging his knees to his chest, his face contorted in pain.

Jez pulled him to her and whispered in his ear. “Happy thoughts,” she said. “You told me yourself, you have to picture happy thoughts to make the pain go away.”

Eventually his face unclenched and he began to relax. His eyes fluttered open and he looked up at Jez. “I once discovered a barrel of pickles that had fallen off a delivery cart. I ate as many as I could stand and when I’d gotten sick from the smell, I sold the rest for a penny per. Felt like an honest businessman for a day. Even ran a special on the broken bits and pieces—handful for a half penny.”

He sat up and squinted at the room. “Unbelievable,” he said. “We’re alive.”

“We did it.” She smiled and hugged him close. He returned the hug with a halfhearted backslap—for a boy thrilled to be in one piece, he seemed awfully subdued. He looked around the room like he’d been tossed back into the Gentleman’s dungeon.

“You know this place?” he asked.

“Of course,” answered Jez. “This is my room! Why, what’s the matter?”

Tommy shook his head and offered her an unconvincing smile. “Nothing’s wrong. Just a bit of a surprise is all.” Still, he looked troubled. Jez decided to chalk it up to future-shock and got to her feet.

“Dad?” Jez called, ducking out into the hallway. She ran through the apartment, from room to room, but all were empty.

Maybe he was out looking for her, or maybe … no, she wouldn’t consider the other possibility.

“I’m sure he’s all right,” said Tommy as she returned to her bedroom. He was staring out her window at the dark city. “Keep a chin up.”

“We still have time,” Jez said, nodding, wiping at her cheeks. She didn’t want him to see the tears. “We can still find Bernie and get Merlin back.”

Tommy shook his head and pointed at the window. It was dark outside. “We have other problems.”

“What? So, it’s nighttime! We might have lost a few hours, but that doesn’t mean—”

“No, look.” Tommy pointed to the sky over the Hudson River. Just past the river were the bluffs of the New Jersey shoreline, and above that was a twisting, yawning vortex of black clouds and crackling lightning—the Gentleman’s portal. The storm raged everywhere, and the winds were blowing into Manhattan like a typhoon through the streets.

“He’s here,” said Jez. “He’s coming for us.”

Tommy shook his head. “
We
don’t matter anymore,” he said. “It’s Merlin he wants.”

Jezebel ran to her desk and powered up her computer, the little laptop’s battery whirring to life.

No signal.

The light of her desk lamp flickered for a moment but then came back on. Outside, windows were going dark everywhere. Whole buildings had blacked out—across the river the lights from New Jersey still burned bright, but the growing storm was quickly eclipsing even those. And here in Manhattan the dark buildings looked like dead fingers pointing at the sky. She grabbed
a watch from her desk drawer—the time read 4:36 a.m. There was still at least an hour before dawn, plenty of time for the Gentleman to recover his prize.

“There’s no Internet, and whole blocks are losing power,” said Jez. “I bet this storm is even messing with the satellite signals. He’s completely cutting off Manhattan from the outside world.”