Lord Bobbins and the Romanian Ruckus (A TeslaCon Novel Book 1)

by Sean Little

  “Do your best.”

  Csupo shed his thick overcoat and woolen hat. He stepped toward the crag and tentatively put his head into it, trying to find the space where the gap was the largest. “It’s tight. Very tight,” he said. He wriggled and fussed, moving a centimeter at a time. He stopped, pulled back out, and shed his shirt and pants. He wore a pair of whole-cloth boxer shorts. He was almost skeletal, a stick-thin pile of bones with skin draped over it. Csupo stepped back into the crag and with much effort pushed himself halfway through. “I think I’m stuck. Give me a push.”

  Clarke and Bobbins each grabbed one of Csupo’s legs, and with a shove, they birthed him to the other side of the crag. Csupo landed hard, but picked himself up without fuss. They handed him his clothes and boots through the crag and he dressed himself. “I hope there’s another exit. I do not want to do that again.”

  Clarke passed Csupo a lantern. “Look around. See if you can find a latch or a button or something. See what you can see.”

  Csupo stepped away from the crack. The flickering of light was faintly visible as he moved away from the group. “I see footprints in the dust here. Human footprints.” In the cavern, Csupo’s voice was faint and echoing.

  “Keep going,” urged Clarke. “Can you move toward the other tunnel location?”

  “I can. There are several tunnels here, though. I see some tools.” A few moments later, Csupo returned to the crag and passed Clarke a steel pickaxe and a shovel. “Tools! There are more. Wrenches and hammers. There is a forge further on, with a vent pipe that goes into the wall of the cave.”

  “A forge? Someone is bending metal here?” Bobbins was incredulous.

  A massive cacophony of noise erupted somewhere deep within the tunnels. It was a combination of animal roar and crashing metal, an ear-splitting hammering of rage and confusion. Everyone froze. Even the unflappable Tesla shrank back a few steps.

  Csupo’s face paled as fear gripped him. “What was that, Mr. Clarke?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” said Clarke. “Maybe you better get back through that crack.”

  Csupo shook his head. “I don’t think I can. This side is sharper and lined with crystals. I would get cut to ribbons.”

  “If you got through once, you can do it again,” said Bobbins.

  Clarke shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s like a funnel this way. Ever try to pour water back through the wrong end of a funnel?” He pushed his face into the crag. It was incredible the Csupo had even gotten through it to begin with. To come back through was almost unthinkable. “Go toward the other tunnels. Hurry. We’ll go that way and meet you there. Find the door latch.”

  They left Csupo to his own devices in the labyrinthine caves beyond and returned to the left tunnel. Clarke had to carry the Tesla weapon and Tesla’s backpack contraption. Neither Tesla nor Bobbins seemed overly concerned with carrying luggage. To his credit, Bobbins did bring the shovel and pickaxe, though.

  They waited impatiently at the door. Bobbins and Clarke strained to hear anything on the other side. The occasional metallic squall blistered through the caves to let them know that something was beyond this door, something that was possibly hunting young Csupo.

  After several agonizing minutes, Clarke grabbed the pickaxe and began hacking at the wall out of pure frustration. Rock chips cracked away with each strike, some launching straight back into Clarke’s face stinging him. Fueled by the constant fear of the subsonic noise and the additional panic that the monster’s screams were creating, Clarke smashed at the wall like a wild man. One end of the double-headed pick broke and the iron shard came directly back at his face, slicing his cheek. Clarke spun the pickaxe head and continued to hack away.

  Bobbins finally grabbed his shoulder. “I think you’ve done enough, son,” he said in a quiet voice.

  From somewhere in the caverns, a shrill, human scream echoed forth. It was the sound of pure panic. It was, without a doubt, Csupo.

  Clarke shrugged off Bobbins’ hand and hacked at the wall again. He chipped away at a divot he’d created earlier. More shards flew. The wall eventually gave way to his attack. The end of the axe broke through solid rock to the other side. Clarke continued to hack at the newly created hole until it was the size of a ship’s porthole. A tight squeeze, but possible for someone who was determined. “I’m going through.”

  Clarke accepted a boost from Bobbins, and he squeezed and struggled through the hole. He landed hard on the other size. No sign of Csupo. Bobbins handed a lantern through the hole, followed by the Winchester Yellow Boy and Clarke’s gun belt.

  “What do you see, man?” asked Bobbins pressing his face to the hole.

  Clarke shone the lantern around him. He was in a cavern half the size of the great hall at Castle Bobbins, all crags and jagged rock. Stalagmites clung to ceiling, small ones—not the type that felt like the Sword of Damocles hanging over a man. At the end opposite him a large hole in the floor loomed, twice the length of a man. Clarke could make out faint footprints in the dust on the stony floor, some from a man. Some not.

  Clarke looked frantically for a lever or a switch to the false wall. Instead, he found a small, black square attached to the backside of the wall. It had two small curved holes cut out of it. A thin layer of sea-sponge covered the holes. The cutouts made him think of the f-holes in a violin’s body. “I can’t find anything to open this door,” he said. “There’s a small box anchored to the wall here, but no keyhole or levers.”

  Tesla’s face appeared next to Bobbin’s in the hole in the wall. “Sound. I imagine it works on a sonic principle. Sing to it.”

  Bobbins’ eyes widened and he looked at the Serb incredulously. “Did you hit your head?”

  Tesla’s face remained impassive and blank. “The fear is being generated by sound. I imagine someone with enough knowledge of sound and its properties to do that would also be able to engineer a door lock that works on a sonic principle.”

  Bobbins blinked twice and then looked at Clarke. “You heard the man, Mr. Clarke. Give it a few verses of Maggie Murphy’s Home and see what happens.”

  “I’m no singer,” said Clarke. Once as a child in church, Father O’Byrne had made him be the page-turner for Mrs. Harness on the piano just so he wouldn’t add his voice to the congregation.

  “Oh, very well,” said Bobbins. He cleared his throat and sang William Blake’s hymn Jerusalem, his clean tenor echoing in the cavern. When he finished, he looked expectantly at Clarke. “Well?”

  Clarke shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Bobbins looked back at Tesla. “Any other bright ideas?”

  “It was a long shot to begin with,” said Tesla. “I have no idea what will unlock the door. It could be a song. It could be a pitch. It could be a succession of pitches. Maybe it is not a sonic lock at all, but something else.”

  Bobbins looked at the hole and sized it with his hands. “There’s no way I’m getting through that. Too many bread puddings, I fear. Maybe you could, Beanpole.”

  Tesla’s dour face inspected the hole. His nose wrinkled in distaste. “I could. I would rather not.”

  “I just want to find Csupo and get him out of here. Everything else is secondary,” said Clarke. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called Csupo’s name. The name rang through the caverns, echoing and returning multiple times. When the initial call died away, it was followed only by silence. Wherever he wasn’t Csupo either didn’t hear, couldn’t hear, or couldn’t respond. Clarke hoped it was the former, not any of the latter.

  “Do you feel that?” said Tesla, his head sticking through the hole like a hunter’s wall trophy. “It is near. The fear generator. I can feel it.”

  Clarke became aware of a pulsating pressure in his teeth, it wasn’t rhythmic, but it was there. He could feel a change in the air every so often. He moved closer to the hole in the back of the cavern and the feeling intensified. He lay on his belly and craned his head over the edge of the hole. There was only d
arkness below, a pitch-black abyss that the lantern couldn’t penetrate. The feeling was stronger, though.

  Clarke walked back to the porthole in the wall. “I think it’s down that hole.”

  “It would make sense,” said Tesla. “The machine at the bottom of the whole could be generating some sort of low sound, something below the range of human hearing. The hole, the caverns of the tunnels—they would magnify the sound, projecting it out over the forest and town like a megaphone. It could make everyone in the area feel as if they were touched by madness.”

  The fear was heavy in Clarke’s gut. It was all he could do not to run screaming. The prospect of having to spider his way down a cavern wall in darkness was not something that he would have stuck up on his chart of life goals. Who else would do be able to do it, though?

  You might not want to do it, Clarke’s father used to say, but if you don’t want to do something, then you’d better believe it’s likely no one else wants to do it, either. That don’t mean no one does it. In the end, if it has to be done, then someone has to do it. A real man understands his duty and does what needs to be done, no matter how much he don’t want to. That’s part of what makes a man a man.

  His father initially told him this about plowing ten acres on a particularly warm spring morning. It served him well when he was in the Union army, as well. It still held true. Clarke swallowed his fear and hoped that he wouldn’t piss down his leg.

  “Give me a rope,” said Clarke.

  Bobbins passed through a coil of stout hemp and Clarke tied off one end to his waist. The other end he looped around a fat stalagmite and tugged it until it was secure. He dropped the coil over the edge of the hole and listened as it fell. He didn’t hear it hit the ground. He hoped there would be enough rope to get him to the bottom. He looped the handle of the lantern into the loose end of the rope at his waist and let it dangle. It would give enough light to light up his immediate vicinity. It would help. He wouldn’t be able to carry the Winchester, so he passed it back to Bobbins. The Colt in the holster at his hip would be the only weapon that could accompany him.

  Clarke took hold of the tether line and began to rappel himself over the edge. The first step in rappelling into the unknown is the worst. It’s the moment when your brain sends a panicked signal to the rest of your body in the form of electric fire in all your nerves. It is how the brain tries to stop the body from doing something stupid that is likely to get the body killed. Couple that sensation with the fear force that was getting more and more intense by the second and it’s a miracle or a testament to his strength of will that Clarke didn’t soil his trousers.

  Clarke inched down the rope, his feet seeking toeholds. The hemp was rough and nicked his fingers with straw-like splinters. The fear blocked out all sensations of pain, though. They would hurt like a house on fire later, Clarke knew. The light on his belt bobbled and twisted. It cast jittery shadows across the walls.

  There is nothing to fear, Clarke thought to himself. He reminded himself repeatedly that the fear was false. It was a machine. He reminded himself that he’d rappelled down the side of a cliff many times and it was no different doing the same thing in a cave. Only darker.

  “How is it going?” Bobbins called from somewhere above him.

  “Slowly,” Clarke called back.

  “Slow and steady! That’s the way!”

  Each step took a small eternity, or so it felt. Clarke became ensconced in the little bubble of light at his waist. Above him, darkness. Below him, darkness. The pulsing grew more intense. It filled his ears with a low, sibilant murmur, like wind through rushes. When he got to the end of the rope, there was still darkness below him. But how much more?

  Clarke pulled a bullet from his belt. He held it at arm’s length and dropped it. There was a second of silence and then a sound of the bullet hitting something. He’d expected the metallic clink of steel on stone, but the bullet hit something else entirely. It was a thin, dull thunk, like a faint tap on a drum.

  One second of drop time was equal to somewhere around twelve feet of falling—give or take—someone had once told Clarke. He could make a twelve-foot drop. It wouldn’t be fun, but he could make it. What would he land on, though? A horrible image of being impaled on a spear-like stalagmite ran through his head. What was below him that he couldn’t see? What had that bullet hit?

  Clarke used one hand to crane the lantern around, shining it below him. There was something there, all right. A massive contraption filled the floor of a large cavern. It was wood and steel, with a thick piece of leather stretched across a monumental frame, like a massive drumhead. It was at least thirty feet across. A large arm stretched across the leather and a thickly padded leather sack wrapped in fur was on the end of the arm.

  It was not something Clarke expected to find at the bottom of a hole in a remote mountain cavern in the middle of nowhere in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.

  The arm spasmed slightly and the fur-wrapped sack lightly touched the drumhead. There was a sudden pressure in the back of Clarke’s teeth and at his temples, and his eyes felt like they were being lightly pressed, but his ears didn’t register the noise.

  Above, the crack of a pistol being fired rang out. The report echoed through the caverns. Was someone in trouble? Clarke started to climb back up the wall, trying to walk his feet up the stone while leveraging himself on the rope with his hands.

  The lantern-lit face of Lord Bobbins poked over the lip of the hole far above him. “How is it going down there? Find anything useful?” Bobbins’ face held a persistent optimistic smile. The dour face of Tesla appeared next to Bobbins, as impassive and inscrutable as always.

  “How did you get through the door?”

  “I shot the lock! It worked! Rolled back as easy as making a cheese sandwich. As my father would have said, it just needed a bit of Birmingham finesse.”

  “What is down there?” asked Tesla.

  “A big drum, far as I can tell,” said Clarke. “Biggest drum I’ve ever seen.”

  “As I suspected.”

  “You suspected a big drum?” Bobbins was incredulous. “No. No, you did not! Nicky, no one goes into a cave in Romania and says, ‘Gee, I think I’ll find a big drum in there.’”

  “I did,” said Tesla. “It was the only hypothesis that made sense.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Break the drum,” said Tesla. “It will stop the sense of fear.”

  “Easy enough,” said Clarke. He found footholds in the wall and stood on them long enough to undo his safety belt. He blew out the lantern for fear of fire, and dropped it onto the drum below. There was another bolt of pressure when it hit. Then, Clarke took a deep breath and leapt back from the wall. He twisted in the air like a cat and landed both feet on the leather skin of the drum. There was the briefest pause, and then the leather ripped wide open. Clarke lost his balance and sprawled over the collapsing drum. The impact jarred the breath from him and his knees and ankles hurt. A fall like that ten years ago, he probably gets up laughing. Now, Clarke lay on the cold stone floor and groaned for a solid ten seconds, willing his lungs to inflate with air. Getting old is hell.

  When he stopped groaning, he realized that the fear sensation was indeed dissipating. The large arm over the drumhead still twitched, but without the leather skin to contact, there was no sonic pressure. The air was unchanged. For the first time in days, Clarke felt almost normal. He took a deep breath of cold cave air and let it out through pursed lips.

  “I think you did something,” shouted Bobbins. “I feel better! I no longer feel like I’m going to wet myself!”

  “As I said,” said Tesla.

  “Oh, do shut up, Nicky.”

  “Nikola.”

  The caverns shuddered around them. It took Clarke a moment, but he realized it was the sound of some sort of growl thundering around them. He couldn’t from what it direction it was originating, but it was clear that something was riled up.

  Bobbins and Tes
la exchanged worried glances. “That didn’t sound good,” said Bobbins. “We should leave. Quickly. Mr. Clarke, can you climb up the rope?”

  “I can,” shouted Clarke. “It will take me a bit of time to do it, though. That’s a pretty tall climb.”

  Bobbins said, “Then do hurry. We should depart these caverns before whomever or whatever put that device at the bottom of the pit returns.”

  A howl exploded in the caverns, long, loud, and breathy. It was certainly not the howl of a normal wolf. It was far more supernatural, metallic and shrill. And it was close.

  “Go! Run!” shouted Clarke. “Get Ms. Shaw and Andrei! I’ll be fine!”

  Bobbins nodded. “I do believe that will be in everyone’s best interests. If you should die, please understand that I hold you in the highest regards.”

  Bobbins and Tesla disappeared from the lip of the hole taking their lantern with them. Clarke was suddenly plunged into darkness so thick that he could not make out his hand before his face. It was darkness more complete than closing his eyes at night in a new moon. His rucksack was back where the door to the cavern was. His rucksack had matches. Now, Clarke was facing a long, tall climb out up more than seventy feet of cavern wall in profound darkness. Or, he could stumble through the dark of the caverns and hope to find something to help him see.

  Either way, Clarke was no longer enjoying his odds.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Lair of the Mad Scientist

  In the end, Clarke decided being on his feet and stumbling along was a safer call than trying to climb out of the cave. He chose to fumble through the dark with a hand on the wall of the caverns, trying to remember the story of Perseus and the Minotaur, and keeping his left hand in contact with the proverbial labyrinth.

  The darkness of the cave was like a physical thing. It pressed on Clarke from all sides. His eyes were wide open, but the darkness was so compelling that it sent mixed messages to his brain. His mind was telling him to open his eyes to see. There wasn’t even a scrap of light to anchor himself around. No little glowing creatures. No pinpoints of starlight. Nothing but a profound dark.