by Eoin Colfer
In the wormhole, Riley would have cried if he could. Garrick murdered my parents and stole me away, he realized, and knew it was true. And for all these past years he has been swearing that he saved me from a bunch of street cannibals in the alleys of Bethnal Green. But it was he who orphaned me.
Riley allowed this statement to repeat itself in his consciousness, in case he forgot when he woke.
Garrick killed my parents. Garrick killed my parents.
Riley did not want to forget, because remembering this fact would steel his resolve.
For one day soon I must bring Albert Garrick to justice or be snuffed out me own self.
Their journey through the wormhole ended gradually as spacetime dissipated around them like cloudy fragments of a deep and detailed dream. Riley and Chevron Savano found themselves in a Victorian London basement, both smiling broadly in the grip of what Charles Smart called the Zen Ten.
“Garrick did in my whole family, except my brother, Tom,” said Riley. “I am truly an orphan.”
Chevie hugged the boy. “Hey, so am I. Two orphans, together against the world.”
“And my father was a policeman, like you.”
“Like me?”
“An agent in the FBI. He showed me his shining badge and his Timekey.”
“I saw that vision too, somehow,” said Chevie. “Your dad was a Fed. How did that happen?” This, she decided, was an important detail that she would definitely come back to when her mind was a little sharper.
“He was protecting someone who wore a horseshoe ring,” continued Riley.
“Horseshoe ring,” repeated Chevie, a little dopily, like a patient coming out of anesthetic. “And neither of us is a monkey.”
The basement had the same shape as it would in the future, differing only in the bare walls and floor of compacted earth, with brick pillars to support the rooms above.
Chevie stamped her foot and the ground resounded with a hollow bong. “A metal plate. We need that to land in one piece. This plate is specially designed to act as a guide for the wormhole, like a lightning rod.”
“I say we dismantle it,” said Riley, raising his hand as though voting in the House of Commons. “Perhaps Garrick will find his hands growing out of his backside if he manages to follow us.”
Chevie was trying to think beyond the time fugue, and Riley’s joking was not helping.
“Stop with the cracks,” she said, giggling. “We should check ourselves to make sure nothing is out of place. Sober thinking now.”
“I am sober. You won’t let me drink, not even beer.”
Chevie stepped from the plate. “We should get out of here. Put some space between us and Garrick. I need to get a gun. Do you know anyone? Gun . . . bang bang?”
“Bang,” said Riley. “Bang bang.”
Chevie pulled Riley from the buried platform and noticed a disk of light hovering in the air, like a spinning silver dollar.
“Silver dollar,” she said conversationally, pointing at the dwindling wormhole.
Riley nodded.
“Men with sacks,” he said, pointing at two men who had entered the basement and were stealing across the mud floor, holding open the mouths of two flour sacks.
Chevie spotted a third man, emerging from a corner, his mouth full of food.
“Not all of them. That one’s got a chicken wing . . . and a blackjack.”
“I claim the chicken wing,” said Riley.
Chevie was still laughing when the sack went over her head.
HALF MOON STREET. SOHO. LONDON. NOW
Garrick tumbled into the pod less than a minute after his quarry disappeared and no more than ten seconds before the entrance to the quantum tunnel disappeared altogether. Just before his dematerialization, the woman, Victoria, had staggered down the stairs and shot him in the good leg with a small-caliber bullet from an almost dainty rifle, and so focused was Garrick on the diminishing wormhole that he forgot to smother his nerve endings. The sudden hammer blow of agony almost rendered him senseless, which would have been a disaster inside the wormhole. A man needed his senses marshaled and ready for duty inside the time tunnel.
The fault is mine, he thought, for allowing that woman to live.
The last sounds he heard from the twenty-first century before he disappeared were the bitter curses of the old woman, damning him to hell for a murdering scoundrel.
Garrick had an inkling that sparing Victoria was not all his own doing. The ghost of that Scot muck-snipe, Felix Sharp, was making a nuisance of itself in Garrick’s own gray matter. The photographs of Sharp’s father lining the wall and the notion of harming Victoria caused a swelling of phantom emotions that had stayed Garrick’s hand twice now.
No more, thought Albert Garrick. I will be a dead man’s cat’s-paw no longer.
Once the orange energy transmogrified his atoms, enveloping him in the sea of quantum foam, Garrick felt a calm descend over him.
I am nothing but soul now. Immortal.
Contentment draped the magician, but then he felt Riley’s fear trail ahead of him, and it snapped Garrick back to himself. He followed it to the mouth of the wormhole, borne easily as a corpse in the Thames. As the end of his journey neared, he gathered his bodily parts, reassembling himself, healing his wounds and expelling wisps of Felix Sharp’s willpower from his thoughts, while retaining his multifarious knowledge. This was a delicate maneuver and Garrick felt that he had not been entirely successful, but certainly he had expunged enough of the Scotsman’s foibles that the notion of putting an end to Agent Chevron Savano did not upset him in the slightest.
Killing that girl will cause me no grief whatsoever, he thought, and with a catastrophic loss of energy his particles coalesced, subliming from gas to solid just as Garrick wished them to, relying on his muscle memory to rejuvenate his body.
My sinews and bones are young, but my mind is full of wisdom.
His powers were not infinite, he knew. There would be no more healings or transformations for Albert Garrick, but he felt young again, with a brain full of twenty-first-century knowledge, which should be more than sufficient to ensure that his life was a long and comfortable one.
Garrick emerged from the wormhole grinning . . .
HALF MOON STREET. LONDON. 1898
. . . to find himself in an empty dungeon. Garrick’s grin shriveled, but his disappointment soon burned off like brandy from a pudding.
I am home.
There was no doubt that he had returned to his own time. Even below street level, as he was, London’s signature blend of smells penetrated the air. The combined excretions of three million souls, and another million beasts besides, created as foul a stench as had ever been known by man. A stench that was breathed in by all, from the queen in her palace to the lunatics in their Broadmoor cells. There was no escape from it.
Garrick inhaled deeply, inflating his lungs with tainted air, and for the second time in his life, gave thanks for London’s foul fog, as it was known.
“I am home!” he shouted now to the ceiling, and a savage glee filled his breast.
And home would feel Albert Garrick’s presence soon enough. No matter that Riley and Agent Savano were in the wind. Where could they run to but the tenement rookeries, and maybe catch a knifing on account of their clean faces? It was true that Riley could lead the bluebottles back to High Holborn and the Orient, the foreclosed theater that Garrick had purchased and turned into digs for him and Riley; but it seemed more likely that the lad would get himself and his protector right out of harm’s way and not call any attention to either of them.
I will track him easy as pie, Garrick thought confidently. Riley is leaping in the dark, whereas I know every shadow in this city and every dagger monkey concealed there. I will squeeze my sources and spread the chink if need be, and before the morning slop pails are flung, there will be two more angels in heaven.
There were neither tenants nor squatters in the house on Half Moon Street, though Garrick could smell coo
ked chicken and found evidence of someone keeping watch. Cigarette ends and beer bottles. Waxed paper and a makeshift toilet dug in a corner.
Someone has been keeping a sharp eye here.
Albert Garrick did not like to be seen unless it was on the stage. He would have preferred to take some time to dismantle the landing pad, but, with eyes on the house, he decided to return when the heat was off. Garrick skipped upstairs, checking the pockets of his greatcoat for weapons. He was delighted to find that the three FBI handguns had made it through the wormhole with him, one with laser sights attached.
These weapons alone will make my fortune, he thought. I shall engage a gunsmith to tool up ruder versions, then it’s off to the patent office. This time next year, I shall be taking tea with the Vanderbilts in New York City.
Garrick toted up his bullets and vowed to stab contracts to death whenever possible in the future to conserve these precious shells.
“Thirty bangs, and that’s my lot,” he muttered.
The house on Half Moon Street was in reasonable nick, but it was obvious from the knee-high rising damp on the walls that this place had been a dead lurk for quite some time. Garrick slipped out the servants’ entrance at the rear and vaulted from the coal bin to the yard wall. From there he leaped nimbly to the alley, enjoying the shock of the impact thrumming through his young bones. All of his old twinges and weaknesses had been subsumed by the wormhole.
Garrick ducked into a gateway and held himself stock-still, to see if anyone was on his coattails. When he was satisfied that he was not being followed, he drew himself erect and strolled around the corner, setting his beak toward Piccadilly.
In a hundred years’ time, he thought, I would not be able to escape so easily. There will be DNA and fingerprinting and UVwanding, not to mention cameras on every corner and in outer space. But now, in my time, once I am clear, I am gone, and none can say different who did not witness it with their own eyes.
The sun was shining here, as it would be in a century’s time, though it had a harder job busting through the smog. Garrick spotted a boy wearing the familiar red coat of the Shoe-black Brigade and hailed him.
“You! You there! What day is it?”
The boy shuffled across the street, not bothering to avoid the puddles of seeping sewage. As he came up, Garrick could see that his jacket was tattered and closer to dirty pink than red from a hundred rough launderings.
He scowled at Garrick. “Well, it ain’t Christmas Day. And you ain’t no Mr. Scrooge.”
On a normal morning Garrick would have striped the cur’s cheek with his glove, but today he was feeling charitable toward most of England.
“Yes, well spotted, you educated scamp. Now, fetch me a cab to Holborn. Hop to it and there’s a shilling in it for you.”
The boy stretched out a hand. “Shilling in advance, guv’nor.”
Garrick laughed. “In advance? You’ll be getting your payment when I see you on the backboard of my cab. As you so cleverly pointed out, I ain’t no Ebenezer Scrooge.”
As the boy hurried off, whistling the customary three-note cabbie summons, Garrick realized that he had lost his wallet in the wormhole.
No journey can be embarked on for free, he thought. Not even one through time itself. Another thought occurred to him: I hope that boy can wait for payment; I don’t like to commit murders this early in the day.
The morning was not progressing swimmingly for Riley and Chevron Savano. Just moments before Garrick’s arrival in the basement, the time-traveling pair had been swathed in rough burlap, torsos mummified by bailing twine, and manhandled up a flight of stairs.
By the time Chevie shook off the wormhole bliss, she was on her back on polished floorboards with a knee wedged to her throat. She tried to call out to Riley but could do nothing more than croak through an obstructed windpipe.
Apparently her croak was enough to arouse the ire of her captors, as one rapped her on the crown.
“Shush yer gob, miss,” he ordered. “We is tired and hungry men and not in the mood fer shenanigans.”
Chevie responded by heel-kicking her captor in the knee.
How do you like those shenanigans? she tried to say, but all that emerged was a series of grunts.
Her stricken captor howled lustily, to the great amusement of his comrades.
“Aw, Jeeves, did the maiden injure your person?” said one, the chicken-wing man by the smell of him.
“Shall I carry you to a hospital, or is you too far gone?” said another, then spat noisily to punctuate his derision.
The injured party recovered himself, cracking Chevie once more on the head. “Do we need ’em both? Malarkey might be satisfied with one to spill the beans.”
Inside his sack, Riley jerked at the mention of the name Malarkey.
Otto Malarkey? The king of the Battering Rams? How had they come into his sights?
As there was no knee on his throat, Riley spoke to the men. “Which one of you bludgers wants to tell Mr. Malarkey how you murdered his kin?”
This question was met with a moment’s silence, until Jeeves spoke. “Oh, ho! That’s a fine bluff. A man would have to admire a lie so brazen, would he not, Mr. Noble?”
Noble spoke. “Are you calling it, Jeeves? ’Cause I certainly ain’t.”
“It’s no bluff,” shouted Riley through the sacking. “Trussing us up was insult enough, but threatening our persons will land you in the river by moonlight.”
Noble whistled. “Malarkey does favor the river by moonlight for his bye-bye business.”
“There is a safe way to put the quiets on these two,” said the third man.
Riley heard the pop of a cork from a bottle, and a sharp odor cut through the dull musk of burlap.
Ether! he thought. They’re putting us under.
“Chevie!” he called. “Close yer gob.”
Jeeves cackled. “That’s wot I told her,” he said.
Riley felt a dampness spread across his face as the liquid anesthetic seeped through the material. He held his breath until one of the men jabbed him below the rib cage, forcing a sharp intake of etherized air.
I pray that Garrick is not already here or we’ll never wake up, was the last thought he had before his mind sank down like a stone dropped into the midnight Thames.
Riley did survive to wake up, but before he opened his eyes to whatever new dreadfulness awaited them, he spent a moment reexperiencing his visions from the wormhole.
My family lived in Brighton, where Father was in the FBI. Mother was Irish and the most beautiful lady I have ever seen. My mate Ginger is in actuality my own half brother, Tom. Ma and Pa were slaughtered for money by Albert Garrick. But who shelled out for the job? And was my own pa from the future? How do these strands tie together? Where is Tom now?
These were big bites of information to swallow in one gulp. Everything he had taken for gospel was a falsehood spooned into his ear by Garrick.
Riley opened his eyes and was relieved to find he could see. A second cause for relief was the sight of Chevron Savano seated opposite him, tied to a sturdy chair, and they were alone. Her bonds, though not expertly fitted, were many and varied. Her captors had used whatever hodgepodge of tethers that lay handy, and therefore her torso was bound with twine, her ankles with manacles, and her forearms and wrists were done up with twists of waxed paper. There was a leather lanyard drawn tight around her neck, securing it to the chair’s high back.
At least she still has the Timekey, he thought, seeing the instrument’s outline through Chevie’s shirt.
Riley was sure, without glancing down, that he was similarly trussed.
“Chevie,” he whispered as loudly as he dared. “Agent Savano. Stir yourself.”
Chevie opened her eyes, blinking away the ether’s aftereffects.
“Riley! You’re okay.”
“I am well, Agent. The ether fog will lift momentarily, trust me—I have experience.”
“Get out your pick,” said Chevie. “Free yo
urself, then me.”
Riley wiggled his ankle. “My pick is gone. Lost in the day’s exertions, or found by the coves what lifted us.”
Chevie breathed heavily through her nose, like an angry young bull. “Great. So now we gotta sit here, trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys, and wait for this Malarkey character to show himself. Who is that guy, anyway?”
“Otto Malarkey is a person of considerable importance in the city. He is the mister-master of the Battering Rams, a criminal gang of bully boys who take a slice of everything from thimble rigging to opium dens. Nobody pulls a stroke in the Great Oven without first tipping their cap to Mr. Otto Malarkey.”
“I understood about half of that,” admitted Chevie. “So what you’re saying is that we’re in trouble again.”
Riley looked around. They were imprisoned in a large storeroom, possibly underground, judging by the chill. Sides of beef lurked in the shadows, suspended by chains from a ceiling beam, and wedges of light shone through gaps in the ill-fitted floorboards overhead. The hubbub of both commerce and merriment filtered down from above, punctuated by crashes and cries of dispute. Various liquids slopped through the boards, splashing on the mud floor. Riley saw wine, beer, and the slow drip of blood.
“We ain’t swine food yet, Chevie. Now, tell me a tale.”
Chevie started. “Tell you a tale? I gotta say it, Riley. I was not expecting that request.”
Riley began to tense and relax his muscles. “I am Garrick’s apprentice in murder and magic. One leaf of that book is escapology. But a get-out like this one is the veriest devil of a job. I don’t know the knots and I ain’t humping no tools. So tell me a tale while I wriggle my way free.”
Chevie was stumped. “I don’t have any stories, Riley. Books are not my thing. I like a good movie, though.”
“Tell me something of yourself, then. Why the strange tattoo?”
Chevie glanced at her right sleeve, which covered the tattoo spanning her upper arm. “The Chevron? Yeah, maybe that is a story.”
“This may be your last chance to tell it.”
