The Dead Gentleman

by Matthew Cody

  “I wouldn’t make such an assumption,” answered the Gentleman. “But it’s no matter. Captain Scott’s toy boat is little threat now.”

  “Can’t say I care much for that sun, either, Captain,” said Macheath, shielding his eyes against the sky. “You won’t mind if I scurry on back belowdecks?”

  “Once I have the soul, my power will be such that you will not need to worry about the sun ever again,” said the Gentleman. “But every minute I spend here without it uses up vast reserves of energy. If I remain as is, I shall surely perish.” As he spoke Jezebel noticed that he did seem weaker, somehow. There was a haze about him, almost a transparency to his bones.

  “BRING ME MY PRIZE!” he called, and a pair of Grave Walkers crossed the deck to him. One of them carried Merlin in his hands. One of the bird’s wings was bent sharply in the wrong direction and flapped uselessly at its side.

  “You have a plan?” asked Tommy.

  “I have an idea,” admitted Jez. “But I don’t know if it’ll work. We need to create a distraction.”

  Tommy nodded. “No worries.” He pulled a cylinder from his belt pouch. It was a funny-looking thing with a strange crank on the side. He flicked his wrist and it extended to several feet.

  “Spare Tesla Stick,” he said. “Grabbed it off the Nautilus. Just hope it didn’t get too wet.” He turned the little crank and the end of the staff sparked blue.

  “Wait, Tommy,” said Jez, but it was too late.

  “See you soon,” he said, and smiled as he leapt across the deck, shouting as he ran at a full charge toward the Grave Walkers.

  “Stupid boy,” she muttered as she began circling around. She hadn’t meant for him to charge them head-on, but perhaps she could take advantage of the chaos and get close enough to grab Merlin.

  The Grave Walkers turned and met Tommy’s charge. The Gentleman was shouting at them to ignore the boy and bring him the bird, but Tommy had already stunned the first one with his Tesla Stick and was threatening the other, who still held Merlin tight. Tommy’s attention was fixed on the Grave Walker, however, and he didn’t see Macheath sneaking up on him from behind, a long blade in his pale hand.

  “Tommy, look out!” shouted Jez. Oh well, she thought. So much for stealth.

  Tommy turned just in time to deflect Macheath’s attack, but it gave the Grave Walker an opportunity to escape. The black uniformed cultist ran for his master, Merlin in hand.

  “Bring it here!” the Gentleman cried. “Quickly!”

  Jez remembered the netgun slung over her shoulder. She took aim at the running Grave Walker and fired. The shot flew wide and struck the deck where the cultist had just been standing. Bernie had warned her—four shots only. That meant she had one left. This time Jez aimed in front of the Grave Walker and fired.

  He fell to the floor in a heap of tangled filaments. The Gentleman let out a howl of rage. As he did so, Jezebel noticed that the cloud cover was disappearing in the east and pink-orange sky was just barely visible on the horizon. The Gentleman’s grip on this world was slipping. The sun was coming out. He was racing against the dawn.

  Merlin rolled from the Grave Walker’s fingers. He hopped away, flapping his useless, crippled wing. Jez ran for the bird, tossing the spent netgun away as she went. She dove, skidding along the deck and skinning her arms and legs. But her fingers found Merlin.

  “Gotcha,” she said, and she was greeted with a tweet in response.

  “An impressive shot, and a brave move,” said a cold voice. “But now what are you going to do?” The Gentleman stood over her, his skull face more ghostlike than ever. “The battle is finished. What can you possibly do to stop me from taking that from you and crushing your soft head between my fingers?”

  Jez fought down the brutal wave of panic. Every nerve in her being was filled with the intense desire to beg for mercy before this dark creature. But she struggled through the pain in her head as she remembered what the other Gentleman had done, in a different time. She pictured where he’d placed his fingers near the bird’s throat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and Merlin gave her a soft, reassuring chirp. It didn’t struggle when she placed two fingers under its chin and found the indentation there. She pressed down and heard a metallic click. The shine went out of the bird’s eyes as its head flipped back on its hinged neck, revealing the soft ball of light underneath.

  Jezebel heard the Gentleman’s gasp.

  She threw Merlin as hard as she could over the side of the ship and into the river. As it flew through the air, the ball of light separated from its metal body and drifted up while the rest sank beneath the water’s surface. For an instant it hovered there, a glowing orb. But then the light shifted, coalescing into a smiling, fat face before fading away into nothing.

  A lightning flash lit up the sky; a thunder crack rattled Jezebel’s teeth, it was so close. She looked over her shoulder at the portal and saw that the funnel cloud had reversed itself—it was shrinking, collapsing in on itself and on the fleet of black ships. As she cupped her hands over her eyes to see, Jezebel realized that she was squinting in the bright glare of the morning sun, which had broken through at last.

  The Gentleman bellowed at the day, screaming, as Jezebel began to crawl away, scooting on her hands and feet. But he saw her and easily blocked her path. His skull’s face was barely visible in the glare of the sudden sunlight, but his eyes still burned with anger—two great black pits that threatened to swallow her whole. His long, skeletal fingers wrapped around her throat and he squeezed.

  And nothing happened. His fingers, his arm, his everything had become as insubstantial as shadow. In the light of day, with his powers disappearing, the Gentleman was reduced to nothing more than a ghost. You wouldn’t have known it from his expressionless face, but Jezebel felt it—the Dead Gentleman was afraid.

  He dashed past Jezebel, but he had no more power than a cold gust of wind. He began shouting orders to the crew. A familiar rumble started in the bowels of the ship as the crew of the Charnel House began, desperately, to prepare to open a new portal. They were fleeing.

  Jezebel screamed as a hand grabbed her shoulder.

  “It’s me,” said Tommy. “Come on!”

  Macheath was gone. A steaming skeleton was all that was left of the vampire, his bones already crumbling to dust under the bright sunlight. Tommy’s Tesla Stick was broken in two and he had the beginnings of a second black eye, but otherwise he seemed unhurt.

  The pair ran together through the chaos that had taken hold of the Gentleman’s crew. The Grave Walkers seemed more interested in escaping than in stopping the two of them, and those that weren’t trying to get the ship moving seemed to be dying before their very eyes. As their master faded, so, too, did they.

  As they ran, Tommy pulled the little brass compass out of his pocket and flipped open the lid.

  “I’m calling the Nautilus,” he shouted. “There, to port!”

  “Where?” asked Jez.

  “The left! To the left!”

  They reached the rail and, without stopping, Tommy pulled Jez over the side and into the river. But the splash Jez was expecting never came. They landed instead on a hard metal surface and tumbled into an open hatchway.

  “You all right?” asked Tommy.

  “My butt,” groaned Jez.

  “You can sit in a bucket of ice later! Close the hatch behind us and come on!”

  They were inside Tommy’s submarine. Jez pulled the spherical door closed and gave the wheel-shaped handle a turn, just like she’d seen them do in the movies. Then she followed Tommy down a long hall and into a large room—the ship’s bridge. She’d been there before, but the memory stabbed at her skull.

  “You get the door closed?” asked Tommy as he took his place behind the Captain’s wheel.

  “I think so,” answered Jez. “I’ve never actually closed a submarine door before.”

  “A what? This is the Nautilus. An underwater ship! A one-of-a-kind.”

/>   “Yeah, but …,” started Jez. “Never mind. What are we doing?”

  Tommy pulled a lever and a large viewport opened up front. They could see the Charnel House. On the deck, a group of Grave Walkers were wheeling the Gentleman’s portal archway, the one she’d seen them use to leave the Hollow World, into position.

  “They’re going to open a new portal beneath the ship—they’re making an emergency escape,” said Tommy. “All hands prepare to fire torpedoes!”

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Jez.

  “My crew.”

  “Your crew?”

  “Okay.” Tommy shrugged. “You.”

  The Nautilus gave a little shudder, and Jezebel watched as two objects launched through the water at the Gentleman’s ship. The first explosion tore a hole in the back, and the second cracked the ship in half. The rear half sank fast beneath the still-tossing waves.

  Tommy lowered a periscope sight from the ceiling and pressed his face against the viewer.

  “Here,” he said, gesturing to Jezebel. “Look.”

  Through the magnified sights of the periscope she could see a shadow clinging to the broken prow of the sinking ship. It looked like a flutter of black cloth in the wind, but Jezebel knew it was the Gentleman. It writhed and curled under the bright sun, but it had nowhere to go. Just as the last of the ship sank from view, the shadow seemed to catch fire and explode into a weak puff of smoke.

  “He’s gone,” said Jez.

  In a few minutes the rest of the ship sank beneath the river, and all that remained to remind them of the Charnel House was the scattering of debris upon the waves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  JEZEBEL

  NEW YORK, TODAY

  During the worst thunderstorm in a hundred years, Jezebel Lemon had been sitting comfortably in Bernie’s apartment having a nice cup of tea while her father was out in the gale-force winds searching for her. He’d been grateful to find her safe and sound, of course, if slightly annoyed at his own drenched state. He, like the rest of New York, was saddened to hear of the explosion that sank a barge on the Hudson, but they were thankful that it was unmanned when it broke free from its moorings and drifted out into the stormy waters. It could have been a real disaster had anyone actually been on board.

  This was how the Veil worked, explained Tommy. The Veil softened her father’s panic and fuzzied his recollection, so that as the days went on he asked fewer and fewer questions about where she’d disappeared to that night. And he was as anxious as she was to keep the whole thing from her mom—he didn’t want her to know that he’d lost their only daughter for a night. Soon the whole incident was a distant, unexciting memory. Her parents were still too tangled in the Veil, in their own tiny war, to see that their daughter had been a part of a real war. And she’d won. She might even have saved the whole planet.

  There were some who’d come close to the truth, of course. There were those who’d heard strange sounds rattling beneath the stairs, or who might’ve glimpsed terrible things watching them from the shadows. There were even a very few who had looked out their windows at the Hudson River and seen, instead of a fierce lightning storm, a ferocious naval battle between some kind of submarine and a towering black zeppelin. But these were told by their parents to stop making up stories, or else they were told by their peers to seek professional psychiatric help.

  The Storm of the Decade would go down in the history books, but the real story would be recorded in only one place—the Encyclopedia Imagika.

  Every other weekend at her dad’s, Jezebel helped Bernie write up the story of the Battle of the Hudson, as well as update the entries on Thomas Learner, Merlin aka Brother Theophilus, and the Dead Gentleman (she took a special joy in denoting the Gentleman as “destroyed,” since “deceased” would have been redundant). Together they wrote the sad final fate of the Academy, but they did leave room for an entry to be titled New Academy—after all, as long as there was still a single Explorer, the Academy was not gone, not entirely.

  The trickiest entry of all was the one titled Lemon, Jezebel. With Tommy’s help, she’d dictated the details of her adventures to Bernie, believing that it would be more honest to then let him write it. But she couldn’t help suggesting an extra adjective here or there, such as “fearless” or “ingenious.” After a while Bernie shut the door on her and forbade her from interrupting until he was finished.

  Tommy showed little interest in the Encyclopedia. By day his legs twitched incessantly and he shifted about like he had saddle bugs in his pants. But at odd hours, Jezebel spotted him scribbling away in a notebook of his own. She tried to catch a peek at the contents, but the boy’s handwriting was nearly illegible and his spelling atrocious. But she did manage, with some difficulty, to decipher the words on the cover. In bold, messy boy-scrawl they read:

  The Incredible Life and Times of Tommy Learner, Explorer.

  When Tommy saw that Jezebel had spotted his secret project, he surprised her by looking at his shoes and speaking in a very un-Tommy-like way. A soft, almost self-conscious whisper.

  “A dumb idea,” he’d said. “That encyclopedia is so ridiculously huge, I just can’t stand the idea of making it any bigger. So this is a rough draft of all the important stuff I’ve seen. People I’ve met. Put some of the Captain’s learning to use. Thought maybe I could go back someday and polish it up, when I’ve got more words under my belt, and prettier ones to tell it all with. Or at least the good parts.”

  Jezebel didn’t try any more peeks after that. She let him go about his secretive composition and pretended not to notice, though she dearly wished that if he ever did finish, she might make it in as one of the “good parts.”

  He stayed with Bernie for a few months—they told everyone that he was Bernie’s grandnephew in for a visit. On the weekends when Jez stayed with her dad, she took Tommy out to show him the modern world. She took him to the movies and introduced him to the Internet, and though he enjoyed these things (well, he enjoyed the movies—the Internet just made him angry), he quickly got bored. Jez supposed that after you’d seen the things that Tommy Learner had seen, 3-D must seem a little dull.

  Tommy insisted on visiting the Bowery, though he quickly got lost. And he spent long hours walking the Brooklyn Bridge and staring at the passing barges below. Those were quiet moments, and Jez suspected Tommy was seeing things she couldn’t. He was looking for ghosts.

  During the weeks when Jez was at her mom’s place across town, Tommy worked on repairing the Nautilus, sneaking aboard at night and parking her on the river bottom during the day. He’d become quite the engineer under Captain Scott’s tutelage, and what he couldn’t fix outright he worked around. By the end of a few weeks the ship might not have been as pretty as she once was, but she was working just fine.

  Which meant that he’d be leaving soon. Tommy didn’t belong in this century. He probably didn’t belong in his own century, either—he’d seen too much. He belonged out beyond this world, exploring.

  With the Gentleman gone, Jezebel’s closet was back to being just a closet, though Jez kept a nightlight burning in there constantly just for good measure. Tommy had theorized that since the mysterious mural portal had led to the Charnel House, which was now little more than wreckage on the river bottom, the portal itself would stay broken, and also stay closed, from now on. The mural had returned to being just a painted glade, and during one of Jezebel’s weeks away her father had found the time to surprise her and finish it—unicorn and all. The truth was that despite Tommy’s reassurances, Jezebel still found it hard to sleep in that room, and the gentle-looking unicorn actually seemed to help in a strange way. It was silly, it was childish, but for the first time it felt a little like home.

  There had been no teary goodbyes or drawn-out farewells when Tommy left. There was never any discussion of whether Jezebel would go with him—after all, she had parents who loved her and a life here, such as it was. All Tommy had was being an Explorer. So one night Tommy informed t
hem that the last of the tests on the Nautilus had checked out and that he’d be sailing for something called the Lemuria Outcropping, which to Jezebel sounded like some kind of nasty skin condition. He shook Jez’s hand, patted Bernie on the shoulder and disappeared. He did leave Jez a version of his homing compass. She was to stand facing due north and press the button should she ever need help. And he told Bernie to keep the Encyclopedia, since he never had much time for reading, anyway.

  On another rainy Saturday, several months later, Jezebel found herself pacing her room. Her father was working in his studio and she’d knocked on Bernie’s door, but he was somewhere else in the building attending to a clogged drain or a stubborn radiator. Summer had come to a close, and they were well into fall. The first truly frosty days had arrived. In a building as old as the Percy, the hot-water heating system was temperamental at best and the winters were either freezing cold or boiling hot. She wouldn’t mind a little renovation on the heating system.

  She listened to the rain splatter against her window for a few minutes, noticing that some of the water was already turning to ice, and then made up her mind. She just couldn’t bear to be cooped up in her room during a rainstorm. No way. Too many memories.

  She grabbed a piece of notebook paper and a black magic marker from her desk drawer and scribbled “Be Back Soon” across the front. She would head out to a coffee shop for a mocha-something and wait out the storm there. She looked at the note for a minute and then added “Love, Jez” at the bottom.

  She pulled on her rain slicker and had just started out the bedroom door when something moved in the mural. At first she thought it was a trick of the eye—that had happened before; several times, in fact, over the last few months—but when she looked a second time she was sure that the scene had changed. The sky was lighter; the unicorn seemed farther to the right than he’d previously been …

  Jezebel was surprisingly calm when the mural began to shimmer and an ancient man with a cow’s tail stepped through. She knew at once that this was the High Father, even though when she’d seen him last he’d been just a little boy. That was, of course, a hundred years ago.