by Clay Moore
He looked around for something to lift the trapdoor with. He saw a crate hook on a worktable; He grabbed that. He pushed the hook through a crack in the door’ He turned his wrist a quarter turn. He pulled up. The trapdoor opened, revealing the tunnel under the workshop; He took out his clockwork flashlight. He turned it on.
This room was rather large. It had taken someone a long time to excavate the room and the small tunnel that lead to the sewers. William swept the light around the room.
There were small, medium, and large footprints down here. The small prints were the dolls that the Toymaker sold. The medium was a new class of automata. The large prints probably represented people-sized dolls.
William stood for a moment in the room under the workshop. The Toymaker was a genius, or he worked with one. Evangeline had to be one of the large-sized prints. When he saw her first, he thought there was something “off” about her. Now it was apparent what it was. Evangeline was a very sophisticated automaton with a breakthrough in the control system. She could simulate human feelings and conduct a conversation.
He wondered for a moment if the Toymaker could have built life-sized soldiers for the Confederacy. They would know no fear. They probably could shot better than the average human being. They would also obey the orders of their officers without thinking. An attack by such an army would require its complete destruction to defeat. So long as one of the automata still existed and could bear arms, it would continue to shoot.
He looked down the tunnel that leads to the Washington sewer system. He wondered if he should continue and find the new Workshop without Thomas. The last he knew of Thomas, he had seen the notebooks of the Toymaker. William decided he would do what he did best. He would be extra careful and walk into the sewer.
William walked down the dugout passageway to the sewer. The sewer was tall enough for him to walk along with the conduit without having to stoop. He came across nothing on the way down the sewer. Then he stopped when he saw a lit area ahead. He pressed against the stonework of the sewer culvert.
He listened for a moment; He heard no talking or speech. He did not see any movement. He carefully moved don the sewer, trying to be careful not to make any noise. The first area he came to was the antechamber of a gallery. He could smell the banked up forge fire. In this antechamber, he saw one of the larger Great ape toys resting on a table.
The Gorilla was the only one of the toys in this room. Then against the Sewer wall rested a pinewood box. William’s need to know things made him approach the box. There was a simple latch on the side. He worked the lock and lifted the top.
He looked down at the dead body of the Toymaker. Somehow the toys realized that their maker had died, but still they worked. Was this the end of the Toymaker adventure? Did all of these toys work until their clockwork ran down? Were they all dead as their maker now was?
William was too focused on the dead body to watch his surroundings. The great ape medium-sized doll picked up a club and smacked William on the head. William saw stars for a moment and went unconscious.
The more that Thomas went over the sound in his head, the more troubled he became. It was not a scream, but more of a grunt. A grunt was more like something that William would do when hit.
Thomas drew his electromagnetic gun; He went into the showroom and walked to the workshop. Thomas saw the open trapdoor. He could guess what his partner did.
William opened the trapdoor and went down into the darkness below. That was so like William, the Adventurer. This was the reason that he did not want his sister, marrying William. He really did not understand women. Logically William was more likely to die a heroic death. He could not make her see it. If anything, his recklessness seemed to make him more attractive to her. It did not help that Johnny considered William his surrogate Father, and started to call William Dad.
The thoughts dashed through his mind as he climbed down the ladder. He took out his own clockwork flashlight, which was a favorite among the agents. No need for matches unless one smoked.
He was about to go down the small tunnel that leads to the sewers. Then he heard the unmistakable sounds of work being done somewhere in sewers. It made him think twice. If William was with him, he would have gone. Now he wanted more people with him.
Thomas hoped that his friend and brother-in-law would still be alive when he returned with a posse of Secret Service Agents. Thomas climbed out of the subterranean lair. He gathered the notebooks and journal of the Toymaker.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Getting William Back
*****
WILLIAM WOKE WITH a splitting headache. As his vision slowly came back, he saw a strange sight. Evangeline was topless while a clockwork without skin was turning a clockwork crank in her back;. Even this was highly detailed. She had breasts as if she were a real female.
“Are you surprised to see that I am a clockwork being?”
“Yes, though I had my suspicions.”
“My father made me, and my mother made my mind. You saw my father in the antechamber?”
“Yeah, I did. What hit me?”
“Oh, that was Claude, one of the gorillas.”
“How did your father die?” William was wondering how much she had lost of her so-called humanity
“My father was dying from heart failure. The night of our attack on your house, he came home and died in his bed. So, now I am an orphan and a mother to a new race of creatures, a race of clockwork
“I am not interested in selling new toys, so I have stopped the use of the skin. All the clockworks now show their metal bits. The clockworks, I am building now, are for me to use to complete my father’s commission he had with the Confederacy. My father taught me to always keep my word and by extension, my father’s word.”
He wondered if that dogma about her father could change the instructions in her tape. He had to find out. Sun Tzu taught that you had to know your enemy to defeat them. God, his reading Sun Tzu was so long ago, in the Academy. He smiled when he showed Rowena his Academy transcript. That silenced her forever on his choice of University. Well that, and his trouncing her over the chessboard.
“Where did you just go,” asked Evangeline?
“Someplace that I doubt that you would understand.”
“How can you know what I would understand. You have not talked with me.”
“You want me to understand you better? What do you plan to do with your father’s knowledge of Gadgeteering?”
“I am going to carry off my fathers commission. I am going to retrieve the Naval plans he contracted with the Confederacy to take.”
“What after that?”
“I had not through that far.”
Her winding was completed; She put on her white linen shirt. She did up her dirndl.
As she buttoned the dirndl, she said pensively, “Do you know that I had four offers of Marriage?”
“In Germany?”
“Bavaria actually.”
“I was told that I was special and not to worry about having boyfriends. I did not understand. I thought I was as human as you and your Rowena.”
That was a verbal punch to his stomach. If she knew of Rowena, she also knew of Johnny.
“Yes, I see your concern for her. We have been watching your house since you started to meddle in my father’s affairs. He did not know that. I did this on my own. I wanted to know more about you. My father can go off half-cocked sometimes.
That was when I decided I had to know who you were and for whom you worked.”
“Have you read Sun Tzu?”
“I read his work.”
William knew how much Thomas would want to trade places right now. He was carrying on a conversation with an automaton. There were a few long pauses, and he wondered if she was consulting some data to determine how to steer the conversation.
The conversation ended up as merely a series of questions and answers. In between the issues and the solutions was a seriously long pause. When William used a non sequitur, she
seemed almost to collapse, figuring out how that fits into the conversation.
William knew that adult humans also had problems with dealing with non-sequiturs. The significant difference was that humans were able to access the correct response faster than a machine could.
When she asked where he lived, he quipped that he lived in a state of bliss. There was a long pause, the longest part of the conversation. Almost for a moment there, he thought that he might have done her harm. When she returned, she turned the Conversation towards the weather. Apparently, if she doesn’t understand where the conversation went, she always seems to steer towards the weather.
William saw something that made him wonder if indeed a new species has been created. Without saying a word, she opened her mouth, and a sequence of clicking noises came out of her mouth. Almost instantaneously, the two gorilla automatons approached William. They took his own handcuffs. They cuffed him. They hooked the cuffs to a hook raised above his head until he was dangling by his hands.
Evangeline opened her mouth and sent that freaky clicking noise. The two gorillas very effectively pat-down William. When they found something, they dropped it on the table in front of Evangeline.
The first thing to be put on the table was his gun. They found the device that Thomas made that injected a derringer into his right hand. It was added to the growing pile of things on the table in front of Evangeline. They found the dagger in the sheath in the back of his coat. For good measure, the gorilla Took off his hat and threw it on the table as well.
The last thing they found what is the box of matches that Thomas made. It was so ordinary that they really didn’t think that there was something wrong with it. The gorilla showed it to Evangeline. She considered it very carefully.
“You can keep the matchbox if you want.”
“I would like to keep one match because I may want to smoke later.”
With that strategy, William cast his dice that they may not understand cause-and-effect correctly. They did not find any tobacco products on him, and yet he wanted to have a match to smoke later. Evangeline sat for a very long time. Then she gave in an imperceptible nod to the gorilla.
The gorilla opened the box and took one match out of it. The gorilla very carefully put it into William’s right hand. William made a fist around the possible key to his escape. Then he realized he needed to stick around a little bit longer because he wanted to know what they were going to do.
*****
Thomas was in an interview that he did not want to have with his sister. It was the main reason that he did not want her to get involved with William. The life expectancy of the Secret Service agent was measured in days during this Civil War. Thomas knew that William was kind of the exception to the rule. William did things that the ordinary person just could not carry off because they did not have the training that William had. Thomas knew that once the war was over, the Secret Service would want William to be an instructor for the incoming class, a Secret Service agent.
Thomas felt nervous, one of the reasons is that she insisted on him coming to the library. He wanted her to have privacy to express her feelings. The library would take that away from her. If she had a swoon feeling, she would have to keep a stiff upper lip to prevent the other agents from seeing her grief.
“Row, I have some bad news to tell you.”
Rowena heard this line before with her husband. If William had died, it would not be her brother talking to her. It would be the Director of the Secret Service. So, she stoically sat and pierced her brother with her eyes.
Her brother blanched at the penetrating stare. He knew that he was the smartest, but she was the most active. In the past few months, she was working with her fiancé in the gym. He could hear her grunting and barbells clinging most of the time, the two of them were in the gymnasium. The other times he put on his hearing protection because he did not want to hear his sister making love to her fiancé.
He didn’t think it would take this much fortitude to simply say the words, “I think William has been captured by the enemy.”
Rowena took mercy on her brother.”This has something to do with William, correct?”
“You are correct, Rowena.”
“Why don’t you just come out and say it? You’re not telling me that he’s dead. I know my mate. He may have loved to be capture by them so that he can find out what’s going on. I know that somethings going on because you and all of the Gadgeteer’s have been upstairs in that big room smoking trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“The morning after the attack on the house, William and I went out and got a search warrant for the toymaker. We barged into his workshop and he wasn’t there. I went and found all of that information. There were plans of things being done with automaton that had never been done before. I told the Director that we should get a raiding party together to go dow, and find William.”
“Now, see? That did not hurt very much, did it? Sometimes, Thomas, I think you don’t understand who your partner is. He knows his situation with you. Your mind is as developed as his body. He always knew that he was going to be the physical part of the team. He saw something any realize that you were up doing what you could do that no one else could. You could go through his papers and get the things that we would need to know. He made it his mission to physically go to the new workshop.
“Until I see a body he is not dead. I want you to repeat that back to me.” Rowena was pointing at him with her finger, and she always did win; she had a moral high ground.
“Until I see a body, he is not dead.”
Rowena swallowed. Her eyes softened toward her brother. “I know you will get him back. I know because William has been working on you to make you more physically fit. I know he only works you out for an hour a day. I know that he himself works three times for one hour each session a day.”
“what does that have to do with anything.”
Rowena sadly shook her head. “you are addicted to the adventure of it all. I know you. You would not be caught dead inside of a gymnasium. But for an hour a day you let William give you muscles. I want to show you something. These are not for general consumption. Most men would not find them entertaining, while most women would find then highly entertaining.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out a deck of playing cards. Clearly, on the backs of the cards, it said Sexy men of the beach.
Each card had a different man on it. The average man on this deck was entirely naked and showing off his muscles and other things.
“What is this for?”
“This is for those days when I need relief. They help me fantasize. That way I can get relief quicker.”
“Are you telling me that you—“
“Yes I do. When he went off of war, I had to do something or go crazy.”
“Do you still use those cards?”
“No, I am quite satisfied by William. I have these cards for other women. They use them and when things improve for them, they return the deck.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Last one to borrow my deck of cards and return it is Gladys. She came up to me with the cards just swimming in her own World. I wanted you to know that because she is a Secret Service special agent. She may have to take a bullet for someone that she is protecting. And while you are a secret service special agent yourself, you have a partner who has your back. Gladys if by herself or with another as well.
“You might have to suffer through one of these ‘We’re sorry…’ telegrams or a personal call by the sheriff or another Secret Service Agents, or me. I want you to know that if that happens I or William will be happy to help you through.”
“Here I was trying to console you.”
“:I thank you for the thought brother. Now go out there and get my Willy back.”
Thomas nodded. He about to turn and leave when the name she used for William.
“Did I hear you call William Willy?”
“During an intimate mo
ment it slipped out.”
“I would never would have guessed that he would let you call him Willy. He always introduces himself as William. I wonder if he would let me call him Bill?”
“How would you like it if he called you Tom or Tommy?”
“OK I understand. Now I have to go and see how many agents I can get to help me storm the workshop where William is.”
Rowena watched her brother leave the library. She had learned something from the stoicism of William. What Rowena had learned was that Rowena should only grieve when Rowena knows the reality is real. She noticed that her brother said that William had been captured, not killed. She was glad to know of this, but she knew one person who really should not worry about it, Johnny, her son.
To show her that gadgeteers ruled this particular building, all the clock started ringing their individual chimes. All of the agents ran out of her library. She knew for whom those bells tolled. They tolled for William.
Thomas sat in the briefing room with all the other special agents. The man designated to be the lead agent was talking to the other agents about how they would go and get William back.
Thomas knew how William would have done this. He would have taken it about six or seven agents. They would’ve gone down that ladder into the sewers, and they would’ve rooted it out by now.
Instead of doing that, Thomas was sitting in the middle of a meeting with about 30 other agents, including Gladys. The director kept telling William and Thomas that they were if anything, the top agents. He was starting to think that that might mean something. Finally, he just couldn’t stand listening to that agent drone on endlessly.
Thomas stood up and looked at that agent and told him to sit down. He was surprised when the agent smiled and sat down. It struck him that he actually was one of two people who had the authority of command because they have done the most missions. Thomas never looked at the number on his badge. It was kind enough to know that he was either number one or number two. Thomas took out his badge wallet and opened it up. He looked at the number and then closed the wallet he made a Vow at that moment not to tell anyone what number his badge was.
