by Oisin McGann
He was walking along the Grand Canal, his fragile body still able to maintain a brisk pace, when he was suddenly aware of someone behind him. A hand took his arm, and before he could protest he was turned bodily around and a finger held up in front of his face to silence him. The man before him was Nathaniel Wildenstern. He was older, his face a little more lined and weathered, overshadowed by a peaked cap and concealed behind a blond beard, but unmistakable to Bloom nonetheless. The mysterious Duke of Leinster himself.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Mister Bloom,” Nate said. He led the old tailor across the road to the door of a small terraced house that opened to admit them. “But I’ll have to ask you not to enter your building today. It may not be safe.”
As they walked through the door, Bloom found himself facing down the business ends of three revolvers and two rifles.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, his spectacles nearly falling from his gaunt face as his expression changed to one of abject shock.
“Easy, lads, easy.” Nate motioned at the five Fenians to lower their weapons. “Mister Bloom is an innocent bystander in all of this.”
Nate led the tailor into a tiny, modestly furnished living room, sat him down in the most comfortable chair and seated himself in the chair opposite, leaning earnestly forward to address the old man.
“Now,” he said, “I have reason to believe that should you and I enter your business premises, there is a strong chance that an attempt would be made on my life, and that your life would be put in grave danger as a result. The man who has his sights on me is rather ruthless and will not shy away from innocent casualties if it means getting the job done. Once again, I apologize for involving you in this, Mister Bloom.
“However, I still mean to collect my suit—which I assume you have ready?”
Bloom nodded, badly shaken by what he was hearing.
“Excellent.” Nate smiled. “One can always count on Rudolf Bloom for satisfactory service. So here is what I’d like to do. I will go on my own to your shop and pick up the suit myself. I will need your keys and instructions on where to find the suit—”
“But I will need to fit it, your Grace!” Bloom pleaded. “It may require adjustment!”
The idea that a customer might leave his shop with an ill-fitting suit was almost as alarming to Bloom as the thought of a customer being assassinated while collecting it.
“I will have to make do,” Nate replied. “You can rest assured that any hint of a poor fit will be down to my haste in taking it away, rather than any lack of quality in your work, and I will make a point of mentioning it when I am in company. And you will, of course, be suitably compensated for tailoring above and beyond the call of duty. Now, I’m afraid time is pressing. May I have your keys, Mister Bloom?”
When Nate came out into the hallway, leaving Bloom in a state of mild consternation, he found Duffy and Dempsey waiting for him.
“This is foolishness,Wildenstern,” Dempsey grumbled, his dark face and beard adding to his glowering look in the dim light. “Gordon knows you’re coming to the shop. Why give him an ideal opportunity to kill you before you even get home?”
“I have to concur with Mister Dempsey, your Grace.” Duffy nodded. “This seems a needless risk.”
“It’s nothing of the kind, gentlemen,” Nate told them. “Gerald has equipped himself with knowledge that gives him extraordinary advantages over us. He has unmeasured control over engimals, and any number of them to use against us. If you see him pick up a musical instrument of any kind, or even purse his lips to whistle, you can kiss your free will goodbye. I promise you, gentlemen, you have never faced an opponent like him. And these are only the abilities I know of. He is trying to master an ancient science, a potentially catastrophic one. I need to see what level his research has reached, and I need to see it before I walk into Wildenstern Hall, an environment over which he has absolute control.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go and pick up my suit.”
The smog was not as thick in the area that morning as it was in other parts of the city, but it still had the effect of softening the edges of the buildings along Lower Rathmines Road and giving them a grainy appearance. Nate had left Flash in the back yard of the little house on the canal, so as not to attract attention. After a short walk, he came within sight of a three-story terrace of buildings facing out onto the street. One of the shop fronts that occupied the ground floor of the terrace was adorned with the sign “Bloom & Son.” Nate did not approach it immediately. Standing at the corner of a building fifty yards back, he studied the scene before him. After watching for a few minutes, he turned and went down a side street and found the lane that ran down the back of the terrace. Again, he watched and waited, his heart punching against his ribs, before continuing down the narrow laneway with its high walls. One key on Blooms key ring let him in through the gate into the small backyard, another opened the door to the basement at the bottom of a short flight of steps. This was where deliveries were normally taken. He slipped into the building and closed the door behind him, but left it unlocked.
Another set of stairs brought him back up to the ground floor, but after a quick peek into the shop area, he went upstairs to the fitting rooms and the workshop. Without lighting any lamps, he checked those areas quickly and then climbed up again to the storerooms and office on the next floor. Only when he was satisfied there was no one else in the building did he make his way back down to the fitting room at the front of the first floor, where his suit had been left lying out waiting to be fitted.
It would have been in character for Gerald to choose Nate’s most vulnerable moment to strike, so Nate was not about to undress in order to try on the suit. Keeping a wary eye on the doors and windows, he held the jacket and trousers up in front of the mirror to check the size, then the shirt, and bundled them carefully and wrapped them in some brown paper, tied with string.
Still nothing happened.
He looked around at the shelves and rolls of fabrics in different colors and patterns, the wood and leather tailor’s dummy standing in one corner, the pairs of scissors and neatly coiled measuring tapes lying on a table beside it. Nate exhaled, pushing all the air out of his lungs and then inhaled slowly. What should he do now? He had been so sure. On another table in the corner, there lay two more coiled measuring tapes, lying amidst some scraps of patterned materials. One of them moved. Nate’s stomach tightened and he stopped breathing. He felt the serpentine move in his gut, felt his hairs stand on end and his body tremble with adrenaline.
First one, then the other measuring tape uncoiled and slid down onto the floor. In the poor light, he had made a foolish mistake; these were not tapes, they were engimals. His eyes narrowed, unsure if he could believe what he was seeing. In fact, they were not a complete engimal, but two parts of a larger, extraordinary creature named Apple. They were identical, each one a little over three feet long, formed of white ceramic, their bodies segmented with so many tiny hinges that they were able to flex into tight angles and spirals. They had a single silvery eye each. Unlike a snake, they were triangular in cross-section. And Nate knew why. Each one was one third of the original creature. And the final piece was deep within his own torso.
As they wound across the floor towards him, a cry emitted from Nate’s throat, though it was not his voice that made it. He felt a knotting pain in his abdomen that rose up into his chest and blocked his throat. He gagged, falling onto his knees. Collapsing forward onto his hands, he retched once, twice, and then a length of white snaking ceramic emerged from his mouth, slightly stained with blood and bile. His lungs were spasming from being unable to breathe. It wriggled, causing him to flinch in pain. He retched again, and then, knowing the damned thing wasn’t about to give up until it was free, he grabbed it with one hand and eased it inch by desperate inch from his constricted throat.
Coughing and hauling in air, he spat a few drops
of blood, threw the serpentine at its fellow worms and fell forward onto his hands again, head hanging between his shoulders as he caught his breath, groaning. He raised his head to see the three strands of engimal entwining, winding together like three strands of a rope. In moments Apple, the serpentine, was complete again and she weaved across the floor in front of him, making a contented mewling sound, not unlike a cat.
“Well, I hope you’re happy,” he snorted at it. “That bloody hurt.”
Apple was whole and free again, and he was not entirely sure how he felt about that, after the years she had spent inside his body, influencing his thoughts. But he was already on his guard again. Gerald had been here and left those things for him. Why? It made no sense. With her power over intelligent particles, Apple would be worth so much to Gerald, and whoever possessed her would benefit from her miraculous powers of healing. Why would he allow Nate to put her back together, knowing what kind of advantage Apple gave him?
Because he had no intention of letting him keep her.
Apple let out a weak, troubled cry. Then she shrieked again, high-pitched and loud enough to hurt Nate’s ears. Smoke rose from her open mouth, from her eyes, and from the joints that spiraled along her body where her three parts had reunited. Nate looked on helplessly as she began to thrash around, wriggling in agony as something ate away at her insides. In wild motions, she whipped around the floor, smacking against the floorboards, screeching like banshee. And then she lay, shivering, twitching and then falling deathly still. He did not touch the limp body, just staring at it as he remained on his hands and knees, trying to grasp what this meant.
Gerald had rigged the other two segments, poisoned them somehow, in order to destroy Apple. The message could not be clearer. He meant to put an end to Nate, no matter what it took. Even a treasure such as this serpentine was expendable in order to achieve this jail. Nate felt a trembling in his hands. At first he thought it was his own body that was doing it, and then he realized he was feeling it through the floorboards. It was getting steadily stronger. Of course, the entire street must have heard Apple’s dying screams. What better signal for an ambush could you ask for? There came the sound of a deep, rumbling engine.
“Trom,” he muttered, just as that rumbling rose to a thunderous bellow.
Snatching up Apple’s body, he wound it up and pushed it into his pocket. Then he grabbed the package containing his suit, and darted out the door. The building shook around him as the bull-razer struck. He heard the sound of masonry being demolished beneath him, felt the floor lift under his feet and saw cracks snake up the walls. The room behind the fitting room, at the back of the building, was a small storeroom. He shoved the door open, crossed the length of the room in a split second and hurled himself feet-first through the lower half of the window. The white wooden sash in the middle of the window grazed his head, and then he was falling in a shower of broken glass and wood.
He landed clumsily on the tiled roof of an outhouse, thinking it was going to hold for a moment, but then the tiles gave way under him and he fell through, dropping another seven feet to knock a sink off a wall with his backside and shove one foot down the bowl of a toilet. Still holding onto his suit, he let out a string of curses as he clutched his buttocks, yanked his soaking foot out of the toilet and kicked open the flimsy door. Lunging out, he sprinted across the back yard as the enormous bulk of Trom came piling through the building, its massive plough-shaped jaw bursting up from the basement through the back wall. The bull-razer crashed out into the yard and Nate vaulted over the back wall seconds before the wall was crushed beneath the engimal’s rolling feet. Behind it, the remains of Rudolf Bloom’s building collapsed in on themselves, all three floors effectively demolished in one unstoppable charge.
In the cloud of dust and debris, the slow-witted engimal did not see Nate racing down the laneway. But it was built for destroying structures—the crushing of people was largely incidental, and it was convinced it had completed the task its master had set for it. As Nate ran further from the noise of the demolition, he heard strains of music. Coming out into the side street, he slowed down, making his way more carefully onto the street where Bloom’s shop front had once been.
The dust cloud mingled with the smog to form a shroud of thick fog on the street. Lights were coming on in the houses up and down the road and cries of alarm and anger could be heard. But beyond them, Nate heard the strains of a violin, and recognized Gerald in the strokes of the bow. Keeping in close to the wall of a house, he watched Trom reverse back onto the street and begin making its way home. A bugle was sounding in Portobello Barracks, only a few hundred yards away, and Nate knew the British cavalry would be coming, but it would be too little, too late.
Everyone knew who owned Trom. He wondered if Gerald’s control over it was sufficient to see the ponderous beast back to Wildenstern Hall without it being steered directly, but he doubted it. Gerald would take a velocycle back to the estate, and the army would waylay the bull-razer if they could. They had behemoth engimals of their own, if they could be mustered in time—though no one of them was an equal to Trom. The Wildensterns would be blamed for this outrage, and their money and influence would not save them from the disgrace it would bring. Gerald clearly did not care. He was not fool enough to anger the Royal Irish Constabulary or the British authorities … unless he had no choice. Or he was powerful and arrogant enough to brush off any punishment they might try to inflict upon him.
“But you’re still using music,” Nate muttered under his breath. “Then maybe there is still hope. You haven’t figured it all out yet, old friend. Maybe I can even stop you before you do.”
Tucking the packaged suit under his arm, he started walking quickly away from the scene of the disaster. The army had soon spread out through the streets, forming a cordon around the site of the destruction, stopping people and questioning them. Cavalry gave helpless chase to a bull-razer that paid them little mind. Nate took a wide route through Ranelagh and then back along the canal, where a group of soldiers waved him on past the end of Rathmines Road, allowing him to walk on to the small house where the Fenians awaited him.
“What the blazes happened out there?” Dempsey demanded as he ushered Nate in the door. “It’s as if you’ve started your own little apocalypse!”
“Not yet,” Nate replied. “But give me time. And I’m afraid the family will have to buy Mister Bloom a new building. Where’s Duffy?”
“Gone to gather the rest of the men, and pick up the documents your sister-in-law gave him. He means to be ready to walk into Dublin Castle as soon as she sends word that everything is in position.”
Nate had been informed of Daisy’s plan, which would apparently be triggered by his arrival at Wildenstern Hall. He had agreed to play his part, not because he was convinced it would work, but because it was better than anything he had come up with. He smiled as he considered how prepared these veteran fighters were to follow a plan laid down by a woman—one who had no experience of military strategy except that which she had learned from her malignant relatives. At that moment, he felt immensely proud of Daisy. In rare instances of hope for his future, he had wondered if they might both survive this, and whether they could salvage some kind of life together if they did. Whether she would have any feelings for him, after all she had endured.
But he never let those embers grow into anything brighter. He could not allow himself the luxury of dreams for the future. Ever since Clancy had found him, Nate had resolved to confine all plans of his future to the death of Gerald Gordon. For the sake of his son, and all those he loved, that was the only future he dared hope for.
“Time to get scrubbed up, I think,” he said, looking into a mirror on the wall and brushing his hand through his beard. “I’ll need to look my best when I show up at the old manor.”
“I don’t hold with the idea that a good suit makes a man any less of a vagabond,” Dempsey remarked with a snif
f. “I doubt your family will be fooled. Still, I’m sure they’ll welcome you no matter what. There’s no place like home, as they say.”
Nate stared at his reflection in the looking glass, blinking older, tired eyes.
“Well, there’s certainly no place like mine.”
XXIX
HOME SWEET HOME
THE GOTHIC, TOWERING, MENACING SHAPE of Wildenstern Hall had changed little in the time he had been away. As he rode through the tall wrought-iron gates hung from marble pillars, Nate looked up the gravel driveway to the towering building that loomed above the rest of the manor house and the sight caused him to take a deep, shaky breath. Established in Norman times, Wildenstern Hall had been partly ruined, rebuilt, enlarged and refurbished many times. The tower that now formed the main part of the house was thirty stories high. Steel girders, anchored deep in the stone core of the mountain, formed the bones which supported the flesh of brick, wood and stone. There was no other building like it in the country—and very few like it in the world. Steam turbines powered its mechanical lifts and it was plumbed up to the very top floor and lit by gas-lamps.
Gothic turrets jutted from its roof into the sky and gutters emptied the rainwater they caught out of the mouths of gargoyles. Any eye looking over the structure would find itself caught by the high arches, flying buttresses and the sculpted terracotta paneling that formed a skin around it.
But these were merely the features that were visible to the casual observer—someone not familiar with the building and its inhabitants. Nate viewed the place from a very different perspective. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the layout of the complex structure, mapping out its more idiosyncratic features from memory, such as the armories, the small weapons caches, the alarmed doorways, the secret passages and the dozens of lethal booby-traps. He had grown up here, playing in the maze of passageways, learning to survive this place in much the same way that other children learned to play schoolyard games.
