Alistair Grim's Odd Aquaticum

by Funaro, Greg

  Readers of The Times will also recall how, after wreaking havoc along the Thames on the very same night as the “Meteorite on the Marsh,” the Odditorium simply vanished into thin air, leaving in its wake a path of destruction even worse than that of its exodus from London early last October. In addition, The Times has recently learned that the wreckages of at least a half dozen underwater boats, or “submarines,” have been found amidst the rubble near Charing Cross, thus delaying construction of the new railway bridge and deepening the mystery as to why Mr. Alistair Grim—inventor, fortune hunter, and, some say, mad sorcerer—has once again seen fit to lay waste to our fair city.

  Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source for The Times reports that, simultaneous with the Odditorium’s appearance on the Thames, a forced entry occurred in the evidence room at Scotland Yard. What items, if any, were stolen, the source could not say. However, as there can be no doubt that the aforementioned submarines are another example of Mr. Grim’s mechanical wizardry, it is the proposal of The Times that the title of “river pirate” be added to the growing list of Alistair Grim’s dubious professions.

  Nevertheless, despite Mr. Grim’s continued disregard for the welfare of his fellow man, it is nothing short of a miracle that no deaths have been reported in the aftermath of his most recent visit. However, it is the opinion of The Times that, unless the unhappy man and his Odditorium are quickly found, Londoners will not be so fortunate the next time Alistair Grim rears his villainous head.

  * * *

  The afternoon light hung heavily in the library as Professor Bricklewick finished reading the newspaper and laid it on Father’s desk. All of us were there except for Cleona and Gwendolyn, and upon hearing the news that Alistair Grim had been blamed for both the theft at Scotland Yard and the invention of Wortley’s sharks, what little hope we had that the truth might someday be revealed was shattered in an instant.

  Ever since our escape from London, Professor Bricklewick and I had been fetching newspapers for Father. Excalibur had disintegrated Judge Hurst’s body and the prince’s minions during the battle on the wharf, but we were certain that the authorities would find some evidence that would shed light, or at least cast doubt, on what really happened that night. However, it now appeared that any such evidence, except the sharks, had been blown to bits when Wortley’s spirit took over the Odditorium. Even Mr. Smears had vanished—either drowned or got away, we wagered. My gut told me it was the latter, for like all rats, my old master had a knack for surviving.

  As for that business near Shepherd’s Bush, Professor Bricklewick and I had seen the crater up close a week earlier, along with hundreds of others who’d traveled there to gawk at the “Meteorite on the Marsh.” Father had been right. The explosion from the Eye of Mars incinerated Prince Nightshade’s castle and its contents upon impact, while at the same time its magic paint helped contain the blast so that the damage wasn’t too widespread.

  “So now you’re a pirate, eh?” Lord Dreary said. “Well, as long as you don’t start sporting an eye patch and ask us to call you captain, I can live with such a title.” The mood in the library lightened. Mack, who was sitting on my shoulder, gave a hearty chuckle, and Father smiled and leaned back in his chair.

  “Pirate indeed,” he said. “It appears old Wortley has a knack for framing people even in death.”

  My eyes darted to Nigel. The big man stood in the very spot where Nightshade’s armor had crumbled into dust. Broom had long since swept all that up, but I kept expecting it to appear again at any moment with Abel Wortley back inside. Professor Bricklewick, however, had assured me that both the armor and its former occupant were gone for good.

  “As is often the case with supernatural entities,” he told me earlier, “fairies, Shadesmen, goblins, and trolls—as well as Odditoria like the Eye of Mars—usually vanish once they cease to function. Thus, since Wortley’s spirit had been bound to the Black Knight’s armor, once it was released, the armor no longer served a purpose and disintegrated. Just as the old man’s spirit did when it hit the water.”

  The professor still felt awful about losing the transmutation dagger, but given the circumstances, not to mention the burn on his hand, one could hardly blame him.

  “But come now, sir,” said Mrs. Pinch. “Can it really be there’s no evidence to implicate Abel Wortley in all this? No chance of you clearing your name or Nigel’s?”

  Father shrugged and smiled sadly. “I’m afraid that, at least for the time being, any hope of vindication seems to have vanished into the Thames along with the Gallownog.”

  Again, a heavy silence fell upon the library. And while the rest of us hung our heads in sorrow, Father poured us some brandy to honor our friend.

  It had been nearly two weeks since Lorcan Dalach sacrificed himself to save us, and yet in my mind I could see the moment when he hit the water as clearly as if it was happening again before my eyes. A sob rose in my throat. That Cleona should have wailed the Gallownog’s death as if he were part of our family meant only one thing: Lorcan Dalach, in his heart, had joined us at the Odditorium after all.

  Our glasses now full and in hand, Father raised a toast and said, “To Lorcan Dalach. May his memory live on forever here at the Odditorium.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Lord Dreary, and we drank. This wasn’t the first time we’d toasted our friend, and whereas I had once been quite fond of brandy, in the days since his passing its taste had grown bitter with mourning. Our grief, however, could not compare to Cleona’s, and although most of the time she managed to keep a stiff upper lip for the rest of us, on more than one occasion I’d heard her weeping alone in her chamber.

  Poor Cleona, I thought. I really should check up on her.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” I said, setting down my glass. “May I be excused?”

  Father took my meaning, and with a glance at the clock, said, “Just be mindful of today’s lesson, my young apprentice. The hour draws near.”

  Before I could answer, Mack said, “You can count on me to keep the lad on time, sir.” I snapped his case shut and tucked him inside my waistcoat.

  “Yes, blind me, will you look at the time,” said Mrs. Pinch. “I’d better get cracking on supper if it’s to be ready when you get back.”

  “Jolly good,” said Lord Dreary, and as the old folks hurried off to the kitchen, Kiyoko rose unsteadily from her chair.

  “There, there, miss,” said Professor Bricklewick, and he held her elbow. Kiyoko had suffered quite a blow to the head, and even after a steady diet of Mrs. Pinch’s magical remedies, had yet to fully recover. Father insisted that she stay on at the Odditorium until she was better. The professor agreed to stay on with us too. After all, there was more work to be done, he said, and how could one go back to teaching after an adventure like that? I, however, suspected an even bigger part of his reasoning had to do with Kiyoko. The professor had been assisting in her recovery the entire time and had clearly grown fond of her—and she of him, from what I could tell.

  “Some fresh air is what you need,” said the professor. “Would you do me the honor of accompanying me onto the balcony?”

  “I would,” Kiyoko said with a smile, and as the two of them strolled arm in arm outside, Father crossed to Nigel and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Take heart, old friend,” he whispered. “We’re closer now than ever.”

  Nigel was about to reply, but upon noticing my presence, jerked his chin at me. Father glanced back over his shoulder and was surprised to see me still standing there.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said, and without a word I dashed from the room.

  As I traveled upward in the lift, I began to wonder at the meaning behind what Father had said to Nigel. “We’re closer now than ever.” He must have been reassuring him about seeing Maggie someday, I concluded, and by the time I reached Cleona’s door, the matter was forgotten.

  I found Cleona gazing out the chamber’s single porthole from high above in th
e Sky Ripper. The room was cold and drafty, and yet her mirror-paneled walls gleamed warmly with amber twilight.

  “Father and I will be off shortly,” I said. Cleona nodded, her eyes never leaving the sky. We’d been flying in and out of the clouds for most of the day, due north above the English countryside, so heaven only knew how long she’d been sitting there. “Just checking to see if you needed anything,” I said after a moment.

  Cleona turned to me, and I noticed her normally crystal-blue eyes had grown gray from weeping. “Do you know why Uncle’s library is always so warm?” she asked.

  “Begging your pardon, miss?”

  “Of course, we spirits do not feel temperature. But you, Grubb, did you ever wonder why, especially on a cold day like today, the library stays warm even when the balcony wall is raised?”

  Her question caught me off guard. Oddly, in all my time at the Odditorium, I’d never asked myself that. “I’m afraid it never occurred to me, miss,” I said, thinking. “But now that you mention it, I suppose it has something to do with the Eye of Mars.”

  Cleona shook her head. “Years ago, when Uncle started building the Odditorium, often I’d find him working in the library with the balcony wall wide open. This was before the Eye was hooked into everything, when there were screens and curtains up outside, hiding what the wasps were doing. And there was Alistair Grim, in the dead of a London winter, tinkering away in just his shirtsleeves. ‘Aren’t you cold, Uncle?’ I asked him, and he just smiled and said, ‘How could one be cold amidst all this magic?’ Of course, him being Alistair Grim, I thought he was having me on. But then, at some point over the years, I came to realize he was telling the truth.” I furrowed my brow in confusion. “Don’t you see, Grubb? It’s the books. Alistair Grim had been speaking quite literally. It’s the magic in his books what keeps the library warm.”

  “Cor,” I gasped as my mind began to spin. Even though what Cleona was saying sounded impossible, I knew it to be true. After all, if the odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim’s, that meant the impossible was the possible too.

  “The warmth,” Cleona said, her eyes distant. “Why is it, I wonder, we always take magic like that for granted? And yet, only when it’s gone—when it’s cold—do we realize how magical it truly was?”

  I knew what she was driving at, but didn’t quite know how to answer. “Sort of like the loss of a loved one, you mean?” I said in the end, and Cleona nodded. “I don’t rightly know, miss. But I suppose that’s why people give gifts to one another. So, when they’re apart, they can feel close to the person who gave it to them.”

  Cleona sighed and turned again toward the sky. It pained me to see her so sad, and without thinking, I reached into my pocket and pulled out Moral’s egg. Its polished shell shone like a tiny golden sun in the light from the porthole.

  “I’d like you to have this, miss.”

  Cleona’s eyes widened and she floated down to the floor. “I can’t accept that,” she said. “Moral laid that for you. And Lorcan told me he saw a picture of it on the temple wall.”

  “Good, because I’m giving it to you on his behalf.”

  “But the queen’s prophecy—”

  “I don’t care about that. Lorcan would want you to have something to remember him by. Besides,” I said, pointing at her egg-shaped Sky Ripper and bed. “I should think one more egg is just what this place needs.” Cleona hesitated. “Please, miss. It would mean the world to me if you’d take it.”

  Cleona smiled and took the egg. “I shall cherish it always,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were ice-cold, and yet a bolt of warmth shot through my body as if she’d touched me with the Eye of Mars itself.

  Blushing, I dashed from the room and down the hallway into Nigel’s chamber, where I waited for Father in the front seat of the demon buggy. Despite Queen Nimue’s prophecy, I knew that giving Cleona my golden egg was the right thing to do. In fact, upon seeing her smile like that after so many days of sadness, I decided that I had received the greatest gift of all.

  Soon, however, my mind drifted to another gift. The Black Mirror. Father told me that my mother had given it to him upon their engagement—a gift of love, powerful in its own right. Now that Prince Nightshade was defeated, I wondered, would Father once again embark on his quest to rescue his long-lost love from the Land of the Dead? Would he ever learn the reason why she ran away all those years ago, why she left his son with the Yellow Fairy, and why, of all places, there was a picture of that night in an Avalonian temple? Clearly, Abel Wortley had known more than he was about to tell. Which is why I suspected that, even in death, the fiend still had a few surprises left in store for us.

  Suddenly, I felt a rumbling in my waistcoat.

  “It’s five o’clock!” Mack cried as I opened his case. “Time for your lesson, lad.”

  “Thank you, old friend, but I’m already here.”

  “As am I,” Father said, entering with Excalibur. He threw the lever for the hangar doors and the room was instantly freezing. Shivering, I slipped Mack into my pocket and buttoned my overcoat. I was tempted to ask Father about what Cleona had told me regarding the library, but given that my lesson had officially begun, I resolved to broach the matter another time.

  Father slid into the buggy beside me and handed me Excalibur. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, donning my goggles. Father donned his, and a moment later we were off.

  My ears were numb by the time we reached the lake, and as we splashed down, a brace of ducks scattered noisily from our path. Father turned off the buggy’s engine, and an eerie calm settled over us as we began drifting upon water. In the waning twilight, all but the center of the lake appeared black from the towering mist-ringed fells reflecting down on us from shore.

  “Go ahead,” Father said, pointing to Excalibur.

  I swallowed hard and stared back at him, unsure if I should proceed. Father nodded encouragingly, at which I stood up and, grasping the sword’s ice-cold grip, hurled Excalibur out over the lake. The sword tumbled end over end, and just as it was about to hit the water, a hand—delicate and feminine—exploded up through the surface and caught the hilt. The blade flashed with an unearthly light, and then the hand drew the sword straight down, where it disappeared beneath the water.

  Alistair Grim had kept his promise. Excalibur was on its way back to Avalon, and the last window in the queen’s castle would soon be closed. I gaped at Father in amazement. How could Nimue have known that we’d return Excalibur today? I wanted to ask, but the question froze in my throat.

  “Our worlds are linked in ways that not even I can fathom at present,” Father said, reading my mind. “Given what you saw in her temple, I should think you’d understand that better than anyone.”

  A wave of guilt rippled through me. Of course, given what I saw in the queen’s temple, I still had loads of questions about how my mother and I were connected to Avalon. I’d asked Father about it more than once over these last two weeks, but he always just shrugged and seemed to grow sad. No, now was not the proper time to ask him again. Besides, I was beginning to have doubts about giving Cleona my egg.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” I said as I sat back down. “But I should probably tell you that I gave Cleona Moral’s egg.” Father’s face dropped in shock. “On Lorcan’s behalf,” I added quickly. “To cheer her up.”

  “Did the Gallownog put you up to this before he died?” Father asked.

  “Why no, sir. I done it on my own.” Father gazed out over the water and quickly became lost in thought. “Please don’t be cross with me, sir,” I said after a long silence. “I only done it—did it, I mean—to make Cleona happy.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Father said quietly. “Before he died, Dalach confided in me about what he saw when he returned to the temple a second time. It seems the tiles had formed a picture of Cleona holding Moral’s egg.”

  “Cor,” I gasped. “But what could it mean, sir?”

 
“Only time will tell, I’m afraid. And thus, although our Aquaticum appears to be over, I suspect our business with the Avalonians is not.”

  Father and I pondered this a long time. An owl hooted in the distance, a nightingale began twittering onshore, and then the frigid wind joined them, whistling along with their twilight song. I shivered.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” I said, rubbing my hands together, “but now that we’ve returned Excalibur, shouldn’t we be getting back to the Odditorium?”

  “Not yet. We’ve still got your lesson.”

  Father lit a lamp, hung it alongside the buggy’s windshield, and then retrieved a pair of fishing poles from the backseat. He handed one to me, and my insides swelled with excitement. Father quickly checked our lures, showed me how to cast my line, and then, with the last of the afternoon light quickly fading, we watched our floats disappear amidst the blackened water. A fish splashed somewhere close by, but when I asked Father what I should do if I caught one, he shrugged, and with a smile said:

  “Why, give it back, of course.”

  Alistair Grim’s eyes twinkled in the lamplight, and the nub of his lesson came clear. There was more magic in moments like these than in anything at his Odditorium. For even though the wind was blowing quite fiercely now, I wasn’t cold at all.

  If the odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim’s, then I suppose it came as no surprise that I should find magic in the most unexpected of places: on a lake in the middle of nowhere, fishing with my father. Such magic, I learned, was more powerful than anything Abel Wortley could dish out.

  And yet, the old devil had certainly dished my family a lot of sorrow, much of it dating back to before I was born. I just knew in my heart that he’d had something to do with Mother’s flight from London. But as all that was still a mystery, there was no use in speculating myself silly about it. We had other problems, and soon I would learn just how important—and how magical—my gift of Moral’s egg truly was.