The Dead Gentleman

by Matthew Cody

JEZEBEL

  THE HOLLOW WORLD, 1902

  Jezebel had a migraine once, back when she was little. It was brought on by a bad reaction to a medicine, and it had left her trapped in her room, in the dark, as her father pressed a cool, wet towel down over her eyes. Her head had felt then as if it might split open with the pain, and her body was an exposed nerve causing her to wince at every creaking floorboard, every outside noise. Even the glowing cracks under the door hurt.

  She felt like that now. The last thing she remembered before the flash of light was the dark stairwell and reaching out for Tommy. Then she woke up here, wherever this was, with a head full of crawling, stabbing needles.

  Again, she was in a mostly dark room. What illumination there was came from a flickering candle nearby, but when she tried to look directly at it, the pain in her head made the light halo and blur, and it was just too hard to focus.

  Her father was here with her at least, cooling her forehead with a damp rag, just like before.

  “Take it easy,” he was saying. “You’re sick from the jump, but it’ll pass in a few minutes. Just close your eyes and try to think of something pleasant.”

  Jez did as she was told. She chose one of the pictures he’d given her—the one he’d done on their family trip to Ireland. They’d come across a little fishing village on the western coast where people still spoke Irish. The town was known for the dolphin who lived there in the bay. For a few euros, fishermen would take tourists out to watch the animal dance and play in the boat’s wake. On the day that Jezebel looked for him, however, the town’s local celebrity apparently had better things to do, and despite three boat rides, he never appeared. That night her father unwrapped a bundle of colored charcoals and drew his own dolphin for Jez, on the back of her mom’s map. Jezebel’s dolphin was bright green, and he swam with her amid the blue and white waves. The soft colors of the charcoals blurred together like sea spray.

  The pain was gone.

  She blinked up at her father, but it wasn’t her father at all. It was a gap-toothed boy with a dirty face who somehow seemed shorter in person than he had as a ghost. Standing, he might come up to Jezebel’s neck, if that.

  The famous Tommy Learner was a bit of a twerp.

  “I know. Strange, right?” he said, misreading her frown. “Thinking happy thoughts and all that, but it does make the pain go away. Usually that stuff’s a lot of nonsense, but when you’re talking time travel, it works. The Captain explained why once, but it didn’t make much sense. Something to do with good memories being anchors in the time stream and blah, blah, blah. The man did go on.”

  Jezebel sat up slowly, cautiously, and rubbed her eyes. She was lying on a little cot of pale palm leaves. And the candle wasn’t a candle at all—it was a hollowed-out shell, similar to an oblong coconut, and filled with a burning taper of something like black pitch. Whatever the sticky stuff was, the smoke it gave off smelled terrible, like burnt hair and sour milk. A tunnel twisted to the right and disappeared in a faint glow.

  “Where are we?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at the nasty smoke.

  Tommy stood up straight and gestured around the dank chamber. “I think it was once a trog cave—they’re great rock shapers, you know—but it’s abandoned now. Well, it looks abandoned, don’t you think? Anyway, it isn’t cozy but it’s home, at least for the moment. But that’s not the important part. Where is not the most important part.”

  “You said something about time travel,” Jez said softly, but she already feared the worst.

  “Yeah. See, I was talking to you from here—which to you is the past, I guess—through a sort of open window in time. And when you grabbed me, you accidentally jumped through. To here. To now.”

  Jez closed her eyes again and let her head fall back with a small bump. The meager leaf pallet might as well have been solid rock.

  “Ouch,” she said, rubbing her head. “Okay, putting aside that first part about trogs or whatever …”

  “Well, I call them trogs. They’re a kind of tunnel-dwelling beastie. Big yellow eyes. Sort of like an ape but bad-tempered,” Tommy said.

  “Whatever,” said Jez, ignoring the sudden swell of panic in her chest. “All right, then … when am I?”

  Tommy pointed to a section of wall near the rock where someone had etched a number of hash marks into the stone. Tiny groups of five lines spread out over several feet of earth.

  “Well, if my numbers are right, and I’m not sure they are, I’ve been here for about two months,” he said.

  He shrugged, and as he did so a clump of tangled hair fell over one eye, giving him a slightly crazed look. “So that means it’s on or around January 1, 1902,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh. “Happy New Year,” he said.

  Tommy was still talking, but Jezebel was no longer listening. 1902. He had to be lying, or delusional, or have a really, really terrible sense of humor.

  “Two months ago I walked through a door in the basement of the Percy Hotel,” he was saying. “A black door that went straight down, and I ended up here. Well, stranded here is more like. When you saw me just now, I was using a special device called a Cycloidotrope to talk with you in your time, in the future. But when you grabbed ahold of me, something happened—there was some kind of feedback—and you were pulled backward through time and space. Sorry, I guess it’s a shock.”

  Jezebel said nothing. 1902. She stood up, turned around and walked down the tunnel searching for a way out. Tommy came after her, telling her to stop, to wait and listen to what he had to say, but she didn’t need to hear any more. She needed to see for herself.

  She found the cave narrowed to a crawl space, which someone had disguised with a wall of those large palm leaves and tufts of some kind of long-bladed grass. The pieces had been tied together into a makeshift camouflage door, but it was easy enough to pull it aside and crawl through.

  Outside, the first strange thing was the light. Instead of the clear light of day, this place glowed a dull burnt orange—like a smoky sunset. The source of the illumination was an enormous orb of gas and molten lava that hung like a miniature sun overhead. The air was hot and so thick with humidity that it was a labor just to breathe. Below her, and oddly lit by the lava sun, was a lush valley, full of strange fungus plants and toadstools the size of trees. No breeze blew, and a smell of sweet decay hung in the air like a pantry of food gone bad. It was nearly overpowering.

  But it wasn’t the alien landscape or the cloying smell that stopped Jezebel in her tracks. Rather, it was the fact that as she looked into the distance, she could find no horizon. Above every tree line, atop every range of hills, it was the same sight—but it wasn’t the blue firmament she was used to; it was nothing but grayish-brown rock. She followed it with her eyes, past the burning orb above, and saw that it continued in every direction.

  There was no sky.

  “We’re … we’re underground,” said Jezebel.

  Tommy nodded. “Yeah, I guess the where is actually kind of important, after all. This is 1902, but it’s not 1902 on the planet Earth. This is someplace else. And that sun isn’t a sun at all; it’s the planet’s core. That’s where the black door led me, through a portal to this place, and that’s where you’ve jumped back in time to. We’re inside a hollow planet.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Jezebel. “The inside of a … a planet is like a million degrees.”

  “The inside of our planet might be, sure. But not here. Here, life happened almost exactly like on Earth, only it happened on the inside. I’ve even seen big lizards here, like dinosaurs! Dinosaurs! Can you believe it? In fact, I’ve been wondering if maybe our dinosaurs didn’t die off at all. What if some of them escaped through a massive portal into this place? You know, you can find so many similar species on different worlds. I bet that kind of thing happens all the time!”

  Jez gave him a blank look.

  “Well, it’s a theory I’m working on … Anyway, I’ve been stranded here a long time,” he said, looking sh
eepishly out at the valley. “And now I guess you’re stranded with me.”

  Jezebel turned to Tommy and said, “Listen, I’m going to sit down, and then I think I’m going to faint.”

  “Good idea.”

  “When I wake up, you have some explaining to do.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell me about that time travel device,” Jezebel said, slowly pulling strips off one of the palm leaves. Upon closer examination Jez saw that it was spongy, textured more like a mushroom than like a fibrous leaf.

  “Again?” asked Tommy.

  “Humor me. I’m slow.”

  Tommy rubbed his temples and sighed at her. Jez had been grilling him for the better part of an hour, and he was clearly exhausted, but she didn’t care. They’d moved back inside the cave and pushed the leaf door open, leaving just enough room that they could spy out over the valley.

  “Not a time travel device, exactly,” said Tommy. “It’s a viewer, like a picture show. The Cycloidotrope. It’s like a personal portal, only it can open a hole in space and time. But it’s meant to be a window, not a door. You can use it to see glimpses of the future, or if you concentrate hard enough you can even project an image of yourself into the future—that’s how I was talking to you in the Percy. But it is just an image, a mirage. A body shouldn’t be able to pass through. What happened to you was a fluke. It’s a one-in-a-million chance you weren’t torn to pieces and scattered along the time stream.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m just lucky like that,” she answered. “So, you said that you’re stuck here, with no way back.”

  “Well, the door I used was closed behind me, permanently—buried under rock and dirt in the basement of the Percy Hotel. And I’ve been searching this place for another portal out, but so far I haven’t had any luck.”

  “But that Cycloido-thingy opens windows into other times, right? You used it to see into the future, to see me.”

  “Sort of. When you get down to it, time is just another dimension, but it’s an awfully delicate one. The Cycloidotrope shows certain pictures …”

  For a second it looked like Tommy was going to say something more, but he let his voice trail off.

  “Yes?” asked Jez. “It shows pictures and …”

  He shook his head, seeming to brush the thought away. “Never mind. It’s complicated. It’s enough to know that time doesn’t take kindly to living things messing about with it, jumping here and there. Like you said, you’re very lucky.”

  “Can I see it? The Cyclo …”

  “Cycloidotrope,” Tommy finished for her as he pulled a small device out of his pouch. It looked kind of like an old-fashioned camera, but smaller. The casing was polished wood and brass, and it held a crystal cube that pulsated gently with a soft glow.

  “The ones who made it,” Tommy was saying, “the monks of the Enlightened Hidden City—were a peaceful sort, but they were kind of homebodies. They used it for knowledge but never for travel. Too dangerous.”

  The brass and wood case covered the cube on three sides, and if Jez looked into the open side she could see a tiny, intricate mechanism at the center of the crystal, a turning piece of clockwork. The whole thing fit rather nicely in the palm of Tommy’s hand.

  “How does it work?” she asked. There did not appear to be an on/off switch as far as she could tell.

  “It doesn’t,” said Tommy. “At least, it doesn’t at the moment. It runs on temporal energy—time. It stores up the passing seconds and converts them to energy. Takes a while. It won’t be useful for another day or so.”

  “What’s that in the middle? Some kind of miniature nuclear reactor or something?”

  Tommy blinked at her. “Nuclear?”

  “Sorry,” Jez answered. “It’s a modern thing. Look, can’t we use this to get out of here? I need to get back to my time—my dad could be in trouble.”

  “I guess I wasn’t clear when I said that thing was dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous like tossing-dung-patties-at-coppers dangerous. I mean dangerous. We can’t use it to go anywhere.”

  “But there’s a chance, right? I went through once. There’s at least a chance I can go through again!”

  “There’s a chance you could jump from the Brooklyn Bridge and land on a nice, cushy barge of mattresses that just happens to be floating by. Think of it like that, Jezebel, only with slightly worse odds. I’m telling you, it’s a regular miracle that you’re alive.”

  Jez felt her heart sink in her chest. She looked out of their little hidey-hole to the bizarre land beyond, and missed her home terribly. Every now and again she’d hear the roar of some distant animal echo across the valley. Tommy had warned her that this hollow world was full of strange creatures and that very few of them were friendly, although so far she’d spied only a species of large black dragonflies buzzing about the cave entrance. They were harmless, and when smashed they made a pretty effective slow-burning fuel, as Tommy demonstrated by pulping a few and carrying the tarry remains back to refill the makeshift lamp near his cot. When she’d asked what possessed him to try burning the bugs in the first place, he simply shrugged and answered, “I’m a boy.”

  “So if we can’t use the Cycloidotrope to get home, what good is it?” Jezebel asked. “Other than spying on girls, that is.”

  Tommy threw up his hands, red-faced. But Jez suspected that his embarrassed flush wasn’t entirely due to anger. “I wasn’t spying on you,” he said. “I wasn’t even looking for you, not you specifically. I was looking for something someone stole from me and the Cycloidotrope showed me you. I don’t know why.”

  Jezebel thought a moment. “You said this place is another planet, but you came through a door to get here. Are there more doors on Earth?”

  “Portals, yeah,” said Tommy. “But they always appear in out-of-the-way places. Like the basements of old hotels …”

  “How about closets?” Jez asked.

  Tommy’s expression turned grim, but he nodded. “A dark closet only ever leads to one place, and no one goes there. No one living, that is. That’s the Dead Gentleman’s domain.”

  The Dead Gentleman. The name made Jezebel remember the dark and the things that were after her. “He’s what you were trying to warn me about. Bernie said that the Gentleman is trying to get into our world. He read about him in that book of his.”

  Tommy looked at her. “Bernie? What did Bernie’s book look like?”

  “Biggest book I’ve ever seen. And old, with a broken padlock on the cover. Why? What’s it all mean?”

  Tommy shook his head. “I knew an Explorer once by the name of Bernard Billingsworth, he was my partner, but it can’t be the same person. He’d have to be well over a hundred years old by your time.”

  “Bernie’s an old guy, but he’s not that old.”

  “We’d better hope not. Because if it’s him then we’re in worse trouble than I thought. Bernard betrayed me to the Dead Gentleman. He brought that basement portal down around my ears, and I had no choice but to escape through into this place.”

  “Well, this can’t be the same guy. My Bernie is harmless. He’s just a crotchety old coot.”

  “Hmm. I hope you’re right,” he said. Then he stood up and dusted off his pants. Pulling back the leaf door, he squinted into the red-orange of the outside. “Looks clear. Want to go for a little hike?”

  “Out there?” Jez asked. “I thought you said it was super-dangerous with all kinds of girl-eating monsters and stuff.”

  “It is. But there’s more you need to know and, more importantly, see. But the dinosaurs are cold-blooded and they stick to a regular cycle of hunting and sleeping. There’s no proper night down here, you see. No proper daytime, either, so right now is naptime. No time’s safer.”

  Ducking to clear the low-hanging entrance, Jezebel followed him back out into the open. After the hour or so spent in the cave, she felt exposed out here in the open, although it did occur to her that “the open” might be a relative term, since this whole valley was
supposedly several miles underground.

  “So where are we hiking to?”

  “You’ll see. It’s not very far. Just on the other side of this ridge, in fact.”

  Without further explanation, Tommy turned and began scrambling up the slope above the cave entrance. It took Jez a while to reach the top, as she wasn’t exactly used to this sort of climb. Her parents weren’t outdoorsy types, and the few camping trips they’d gone on had inevitably ended in hurricane-force rains and pizza in a hotel room. Still, she managed to make it to the summit without major injury, and Tommy was there to greet her. He had hunkered down behind a line of boulders and was gesturing for her to stay low and quiet.

  As she approached on all fours, he pointed over his shoulder to whatever was on the other side of those rocks.

  “Take a peek,” he whispered. “But keep out of sight.”

  Jez peered up over the edge of the rock line and saw that it descended to another valley below. Their ridge seemed to cut down the middle of one gigantic canyon, dividing it into two separate vales of roughly equal size. But size was where the similarity ended. Whereas their valley was tangled and overgrown, this one was a dead wasteland. Instead of a lush jungle, Jez was looking down upon a petrified forest. Tall stalks of stone, broken and brittle caps and long stretches of dust filled the valley floor.

  And above it all floated a ship unlike anything she’d seen. It was anchored to an enormous petrified mushroom cap, the black chain straining against its mooring. Indeed, the word “ship” was the closest that Jez could come to describing the great hulk, though its shape was twisted and wrong—a mass of rigging, sails and wicked-looking cannons. Atop the center mast, where the mainsail would normally be, was a giant balloon, like the kind used on zeppelins. This seemed to be its main source of propulsion, for it floated in midair above the dead forest. And every detail—every rope, every sail, every plank of wood or length of metal—was solid black. Not polished or shining but matte and dull, like a starless night sky.

  “The Charnel House, the black ship of the Dead Gentleman.” Tommy had crawled up beside her and now whispered out of the corner of his mouth, but his eyes were fixed on that dark vessel. “He uses it to travel between worlds and to carry his army with him.”