“Yes, I suppose it did.”
“Now if I could just be right about the room being the crypt for the treasure, we’re all set.” She slips into the room.
I follow, closing the door behind, turning the handle back slowly so it doesn’t clunk, then turn, shocked to find the room in complete disarray.
“Looks like someone may have beaten us to the treasure,” Eyelet says, standing in the middle of the room, long-faced. I’ve not seen her this close to tears since the day she ran off in the Vapours.
Boxes are overturned, papers lie strewn about the floors, and chairs are tipped, as if somebody’s already ransacked the place.
“Hogswaggle,” I say, crossing the room in a few staggered strides. “Looks to me like whoever was in here before us left pretty frustrated.” I turn over a broken cup. “Besides, whoever it was didn’t have the benefit of your father’s magic message, now did they?” I cup her sagging chin in my hand.
“No, I suppose they didn’t.” She smiles.
“That’s right. Now,” I drop her chin and dust off my trousers, “I believe we’ve got a riddle to solve. Where’s this blooming sun you’ve been going on about?”
“Over here,” she grins. “Can you help me with this?” She stalks over to her father’s desk and takes hold of the edges. “It should be under the rug beneath.”
Together we hurl her father’s desk aside, reach for the carpet, and throw it back. A shimmering oracle of the sun appears embedded in the floor. Each ray of sunshine forms a separate spoke in the wheel that surrounds the intricate drawing.
“Well, I was right about one thing.” She falls back to admire it. “It’s just as I remember.”
“Now what do we do?” I bend at the knees.
“Solve the rest of the riddle.” She paces. “As fast as we possibly can. Let’s start with the tortoise.” She wrings her hands. “We need to find the tortoise.”
“You work that side of the room and I’ll work this. Once we find it, we’ll move onto the next clue.”
“Good thinking.” She scurries to the opposite side of the room and dives into a stack of papers.
I lower my head and start digging too. “Oh God,” I hear her gasp.
“Everything all right?” I turn around in time to see a rat cross over the end of her boot. The skin on the back of my neck crawls a little. I shudder, shaking off the feeling.
“I’m fine—” she clutches her heart. “Just wasn’t expecting that.”
We return to our search, her tossing over boxes, me combing through stacks of paper.
“This is futile.” She slams her fists down over the lid of another box. “I don’t even remember him having a tortoise.”
“Perhaps he didn’t.” I step toward her. She glares at me. “I mean, perhaps he didn’t mean a real tortoise. Like he didn’t mean a real bird. Perhaps he meant something like a tortoise, or some representation. He was talking in the text of a riddle.”
“All right.” She charges across the room, her eyes fixed on something in the rubble. “So, perhaps something like this?” She holds up a shadow box. Inside is a drawing of a mechanical tortoise. Its shell is made of scrap widgets and gadgets with gears pasted below to form its legs. Some sort of wheel sits embedded in a hole in the middle of the tortoise’s scrap-metal shell.
“Precisely,” I say. I’m across the floor in a blink, letter opener in hand, and use it in one smooth movement to break the glass, throwing a towel over the top first to muffle the sound.
Eyelet can hardly contain herself. She reaches in, twisting the wheel-like ornament in the middle of the tortoise’s back. Nothing happens at first and her face falls in disappointment—then we share an astonished glance as the wheel suddenly spins in the opposite direction and sinks into the depths of the shadow box. A moment later it pops loose from the box altogether, in a dramatic puff of silvery steam.
Eyelet grabs the abandoned wheel piece, pokes her finger through the center of it, and holds it up for me to see. “This is it.” She spins the wheel off the end of her finger. “Get it? ‘At the spin of a velocipede, or two.’ The answer to the second clue. This makes one—”
“So, there must be another one somewhere.” I dash across the room, prepared to search.
“What was that?” Eyelet freezes. Her eyes are twice their size.
A creak in the floorboards sends us scuttling off into the corner like bedbugs, hiding behind her father’s desk. Eyelet reaches up, clutching her necklace, concealing its flash within her palm. I pull her close and wrap my arms around her, preparing for the worst.
The tick of the clock on the wall by the door echoes throughout the room, challenged only by our racing breath, nothing more.
“Whatever it was,” I swallow, peeking out around the leg of the desk, “it appears to be gone.” I creep out slowly, then wheel my feet.
“Urlick.” She stares past my shoulder. “What is that?”
I turn, half afraid to, tracking her hand to where she points. Across the room, in the corner behind the door, stands a stack of timber crates. Leaning against the wall behind them is an object hidden by a blanket. Just a sliver of its rusty rim is exposed.
I’m across the floor in a breath, tossing aside the crates. Eyelet follows, yanking away the blanket once I’ve cleared the way. Together we gasp at what we’ve found. “The second wheel,” Eyelet shouts. “We found it!”
“Now the question is, what do we do with it?”
Eyelet pulls out her petticoat message.
“Heed the underpinning of the raven’s troubled wing, for beneath it hides the master key,” she reads. “The master key—” She throws up her skirts, pulling the pin again from her stocking. “This is it! The master key!
Inside a spoked and circular tomb,” she continues. “You will find the treasure you seek. Spoked and circular.” Her eyes land on the giant wheel. “Help me with this, will you?” She bends to pick it up.
I lunge to help her and it nearly takes me down. I can’t believe the weight of it. Together we drag it across the room, to the emblem of the sun beneath her father’s desk. “You see,” she says, pointing to it. “It’s a match. An exact match.”
“It is, too,” I marvel, dropping the wheel to the floor on top of the sun, amazed at how the rim is exactly the same size and shape as the circle that surrounds the sun in the design on the floor.
“Stand it upright, will you?” Eyelet turns as I do, and jabs the slotted raven pin through the wheel like an axle. It clicks as it passes through, then locks into place halfway.
“Now, toss me the small one, will you please? I have an idea.”
I grab the small one and lob it her way. She holds it up, and sure enough, the circle at the center of the sun’s design is the exact shape and size of the smallest velocipede wheel. She slips it over the top of the pin, just like the first one, and pushes it down. It, too, clicks into place.
“I knew it!” She grins. “Now for ‘the spoked and circular tomb, beneath a shimmering sun.’’ Steady this for me, please.” She motions for me to take hold of the pin. Her gaze drops to the floor. She bends, picking at a metal cover at the oracle’s center.
“What are you doing?” I say.
“Looking for a keyhole.” The metal cover pops up, exposing a thick brass ring. She loops it in her fingers and pulls. “It’s stuck.” She looks to me.
I drop to one knee and give it a yank, steadying the pin-skewered wheel in my other hand. The ring gives way like a stopper from a tub. I crash backward into the glass cabinet behind. Beakers and instruments rattle and jump and shatter on the floor around me. “Now we really need to hurry,” I say, leaping to my feet, kicking bits of broken beaker beneath the cabinet legs, trying to cover our tracks.
“Ready,” she says, lifting up her side of the wheel.
I race to lift up my side. Together we hover over the center of the oracle, feeding the rod of skewered wheels—the mostly unlikely key—into the plug in the center of the floor.
“Inside a spoked and circular tomb, you will find the treasure you seek.” She grins. “Let’s hope so. Ready?” She grabs the smallest wheel, I grab the larger. “Turn!”
She spins hers one direction and I spin mine the other. When nothing happens we switch directions and try again. Sure enough, a pulse of steam begins to rise from the seams in the floor. Jumping back, we hear the grind of a piston shunting and then the floor begins to peel back. Each ray of the sun, in a neatly cut triangular section, curls upward from the floor, like the individual petals of a flower extending in the heat. Cool white clouds of steam waft out of every section of the oracle, filling the room in white billowing mist.
Eyelet gasps, as do I, as below each and every section of spoke appears a slot in the floor, a tiny crypt containing one hidden journal, twelve in all.
Thirty six
Eyelet
I’ve found them. After all the years of searching, they’re really here. My father’s journals. I can’t believe it.
I sink to my knees and run a finger down one of the spines of the red hardcover journals. “Volume One – Rayon. That’s French for ‘ray’—this one has to be connected.” I yank it from its crypt and start leafing through the pages. Drawings of parts of the Illuminator appear. Urlick drops to his knees beside me. “Do you know French?” I say.
“Some, why?”
“It appears my father’s coded the journals. Look for words like ‘cathode ray,’ or ‘particulate matter,’ or ‘radiate.’ Only in French.” Urlick looks up at me through queried brows. “Oh, and anything that means ‘light’ or ‘lightning,’ or ‘ray,’ as well. We can leave the rest and come back for them later.”
Urlick rolls up his sleeves and busies himself, pulling journal after journal out of the ground and sorting them. “So, yes to Foudre and Un Éclair, but no to Sang and Cellule?”
“That’s right.”
“What about Noir?” He holds it up. “Another one of your father’s riddles, perhaps?”
I frown at the volume. “Pass it here.”
He tosses it over then continues to weed through the rest, stopping to thumb through the volume that sits in his lap.
I open Noir to the table of contents and drag my finger down the list. Just seeing my father’s penned words affects me. The way he looped his ‘m’s, his exaggerated ‘s’. Seeing them again brings me to tears. I recall his hand, how swiftly he moved it across the page. The way he dunked his nib into the inkwell twice for luck before beginning a new line. I swallow, remembering how he’d let me help hold the pen as he wrote his final nightly entries. The smile on his face when we finished.
A ball of emotion lodges in my throat.
I fight through the tears that come and continue my search, flipping page after page, looking for relevant entries, but I can’t understand a one. Though penned of my father’s hand, they seem to be in a language I can’t understand. An expertise only he understood.
“Particulate radiate matter readings higher than the highest reading last month. Soil clearly contaminated. Abundant traces of radiate matter found in human hair? Equal trace amounts detected in the plaster of the walls?”
What does this mean? What is he talking about, particulate radiate matter?
I suck in a splintery breath.
I turn the page and a letter slips out of the center of the journal and drifts into my lap. I pick it up, examine it. The letter’s never been sealed. Nor sent.
I open it quickly and pull out the contents, smoothing the yellowed three-page letter out over my knee. It’s in my father’s handwriting but is not part of his journal. It appears to contain his Last Will and Testament, dated March 5, 1892, one day prior to his death.
It is in the express interest of the Commonwealth I record this information, out of love for my fellow man and country.
Though I’m confident my science has been placed in the hands of an equally capable scientist, I have my reservations about his sanity, as well as his integrity. And I worry about the future of my machine.
Though his papers claim he’s a doctor of neurological science, as am I, he seems disproportionately obsessed with the mechanical workings of the apparatus itself, showing little to no interest in the human case studies I put before him, referring to their importance as secondary in nature. Furthermore, he refuses to acknowledge my documented findings and ignores me when I speak of the dangers of the machine. Referring to all the data I’ve gathered regarding the negative effects of exposure to the Ray as nothing more than controversial hearsay…
The Illuminator. He’s talking about the Illuminator. He has to be.
I turn the page.
Repeatedly, he inquires about the range of the machine and its potential potency, speaking non-stop about his plans to modify both. He appears to be more concerned with interplanetary exploration than for the science for which the machine was intended.
In a private meeting, he expressed to me his plans to use the Illuminator to ferret out the exact location of an alternate universe—he believes exists beyond the cloud cover—where the dead still live. With the help of the Illuminator he seeks to navigate the heavens to verify this world’s existence—so he may join his dead wife there.
It is for these reasons I fear the newly appointed professor suffers from some kind of degenerate brain disorder. Some strange malady he’s acquired since the tragic death of his beloved wife, who passed while giving birth to their only child—a son of whom he never speaks. Insanely, I’m told that he blames the child for the death of his wife.
Urlick. I glance his way, remembering the things he told me about the night of his birth, about the Illuminator ending up in his father’s lab.
This scientist. It’s Urlick’s father. It has to be…
I drop my eyes and return to the page.
I fear the harm that may come to our society if the cathode-ray program is left in this man’s hands. He cares not about the patients, referring to his clinical trial subjects as specimens, not people. It is as though his heart’s gone cold, made of stone.
Even more disturbing is the close business association this man holds with Professor Smrt.
Smrt? Oh, God no…
Between the two of them, I fear the worst for Brethren, and the Commonwealth at large. If they succeed in manipulating the machine as they’ve indicated, any number of things on Earth could be affected: from the soil, to the air, to the water in the rivers.
Despite my recent findings to convince the Council otherwise, Smrt appears to have the upper hand. He continues to dismiss all pertinent data I lay before the Council—proof that the dangers of this science far outweigh the benefits—as nothing but the ravings of a madman.
Using my interest in Limpidious, he has been able to paint a picture of me as a failing scientist whose capacity is questionable.
That’s why my father was demoted. It wasn’t because he was failing. It was Smrt. He made him out to be crazy, to gain access to his science. The machine. It was taken from him. He didn’t give it up.
He didn’t give up on me.
In absence of support, I’ve decided I must take matters into my own hands. I leave this morning for the Follies, to try and stop my successors.
May this letter (and the research contained within this journal) serve as record of my findings should anything happen to me.
God be with me.
And with the future of humanity if I fail.
He knew. He knew something bad was going to happen. He knew and he went out there anyway…
Addendum: Let the record also show that in recent research, done since the completion of this journal, I have detected trace amounts of radiate particulate matter in both the urine and hair samples of a particular female subject whom I exposed to the Ray, up to a full month after she was photographed. Furthermore, her cells show signs of irreparable damage, to which end I’ve been feverishly working to create an antidote. I have div
ulged this information to both Academic parties named herein, as well as the Scientific Council of the Commonwealth, all of which have ignored me. I did not, however, divulge the name of said subject, but will now, out of fear, should I not return.
Said subject is none other than my very own daughter—Eyelet.
Eyelet? I gasp. The letter drops in my lap.
That’s why he stopped. That’s why he never cured me. Not for the lure of money. But out of the fear he was hurting me.
I bite my lip. My heart rushes in my ears.
That day at the carnival. The business he had in the Follies. The look on my mother’s face when I caught the carnie with the machine. He didn’t give up on me after all. He stopped in order to protect me—
“What is it?” Urlick looks up. “Have you found something?”
I stare. “It’s nothing,” I finally say and drop my eyes to conceal the tears. “Just an old letter my father wrote my mum.”
Thirty seven
Eyelet
“I should have known you’d know exactly where to find them.”
Urlick’s heads shoot up at the sound of the voice. My gaze follows his. Professor Smrt stands before us, black beady eyes leering down at me, his shadowy features glimmering into view, through the veil of leftover oracle steam. The hiss of it must have masked his approach. Neither Urlick, nor I, heard him coming.
I tremble as he steps through the steam, closing the tiny gap between us, the hem of his dark professorial cloak swaying to a stop over Academy-issued red-soled shoes.
“Whose face do you wear? Because I know that’s not your own!” He lunges forward, tearing the mask from my face.
Lumière (The Illumination Paradox) Page 22
