The ship groaned and tumbled for what seemed like ages, until suddenly there was quiet; I experienced a sharp falling sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“I’m guessing our landing will not be a gentle one,” Doctor Omega announced. “Brace yourself!”
A bone-wrenching impact followed and all movement stopped. The lights flickered and the room was cast into darkness.
“Denis?” Doctor Omega asked. “Are you injured?”
“Not beyond repair,” I replied, wincing, and then climbing unsteadily to my feet. My body ached, reminding me of an unfortunate term at school when I joined (and then quickly resigned from) the rugby team. “Am I to guess that, against all odds, we did collide with something?”
“Most likely a meteor or some form of energy helix,” the Doctor mused, amazingly unruffled by the excitement. He had been traveling in the Cosmos long enough, before I joined her crew, that he had no doubt grown accustomed to the occasional incident such as this.
I fumbled in the dark to reach Doctor Omega’s side, helped him back into his chair and then limped over to a cabinet. Finding a lantern, we soon had enough light to see. Nearly all the furniture was bolted to the metal floor, so there was little mess to worry about. A spilled cup of coffee, some scattered books and writing implements, and a large tear in the left knee of my trousers were the extent of the damage.
Leaving the elderly Doctor to recover, I made my way to a circular hatch set into the floor. As I reached for it, the hatch flew open and a large, bearded face poked through the opening.
“We’ve crashed!” he bellowed.
“Thank you, Fred,” Doctor Omega said. “It had come to our attention.”
“You gentlemen are all right?” Fred asked, climbing up into the room. Tiziraou, the last member of our crew, soon followed him.
He was a tiny creature, standing waist-high to myself, with an oversized round head and arms and legs that were floppy to the point of appearing boneless. His thin body was smooth skinned and pale.
Coming from the temperate climate of ancient Mars, his macrocephalic people had seen little need for anything beyond basic clothing. Sympathetic to his more modest traveling companions, Tiziraou was dressed in a hand-me down plaid bathrobe. One of the sleeves was torn and there was a large, fresh food stain down the front of the garment. He held a thin, three-fingered hand to his pumpkin-like head and walked unsteadily as he joined us, muttering in his native tongue.
“There’s a burst pipe in the galley and the time rotor has stopped,” Fred said, wiping at a cut on his cheek with a large red handkerchief. “Tiziraou and I are going to see about getting the engines back in order. You gentlemen might want to have a look outside. Check for damage to the hull.”
Doctor Omega nodded and the four of us climbed down through the hatch, Fred and our Martian companion to the lower levels of our craft, the Doctor and I to the exit hatch.
Ensuring that the air was breathable, we exited the craft.
The Cosmos was lying on its side, in the center of a rather sizable pit, no doubt caused by our unplanned landing.
A barren landscape stretched all around us. The ground was a dry, white crust, which our every footstep broke through, raising tiny plumes of dust. The vegetation consisted of a few tiny, gnarled trees, patches of lichen and grey moss.
“It would appear,” Doctor Omega mused, adapting a lecturer’s pose, hands clutching his lapels, “that the collision knocked us out of the aether into ‘normal’ space, forcing us to make this rather ungraceful landing. Hmm... Curious.”
We carefully made our way around the Cosmos, scouting for signs of damage. Aside from a rather sizable dent in the stellite plating, just below the tip of the craft’s bullet body, it appeared unharmed.
“That’ll cause us to wobble a bit,” Doctor Omega said, thoughtfully. “I’ll leave it to Fred to decide if it can be banged back into shape or if that plate will need replacing.”
I left him to ponder the damage and made my way up the side of the pit to see if I could spot whatever had caused our impromptu landing. The crunching of my footsteps echoed in the still air. Despite my artistic nature, I am not without athletic prowess, but found myself feeling a bit winded upon reaching the top of the crater. The air felt thin and stale in my lungs.
“Doctor!” I called down. “Have a look at this!”
Leaning heavily upon his cane and grumbling as he made his way up, the elderly scientist soon joined me. He paused at the lip of the crater to catch his breath and dab at his forehead with a threadbare checkered handkerchief.
I pointed out a groove in the ground, roughly three feet wide, trailing off into the distance.
“While my mental capacity does not rival yours, Doctor, I would hazard a guess that we’ll find whatever we collided with at the end of that rut.”
His expression told me he did not share my light-hearted view of the situation, nor relish the thought of more walking. Several hundred yards later, we arrived at the end of the rut, where lay a craft nearly as wondrous as our own.
It was a projectile, roughly six feet long, sleeker and smaller than the Cosmos, made of a blue metal that glimmered in the faint sunlight like polished ceramic. One of its red tail fins was bent.
“A shell of some kind?” was my first thought, but Doctor Omega shook his head and pushed at an indentation on the object, with the end of his cane. We heard a hum and a panel slid open.
The Doctor and I both instinctively took several steps backwards. In my travels with him, I had quickly discovered that the universe was full of hazards as well as wonders, and it paid to be careful while you sorted out which was which.
“Bub. Ba-hah,” a voice babbled from the opening.
We took a hesitant step forward and peered inside.
An infant lay in the compartment, wrapped up in blankets of red and blue.
“A child! Who would be so heartless to shoot a child off into space...?” I asked.
Doctor Omega tapped at his chin, then taking a much-used notebook and the stub of a pencil from his pocket, peered up into the starry sky. Occasionally, he would jot something down.
The child looked up at me with wide, curious eyes. I reached into the craft gingerly, as the exterior was still warm from its descent, and lifted the child, a boy, up.
“Hello there,” I said, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “Why would someone abandon a fine boy like you?”
I have no children of my own, but a rather large and fertile crowd of cousins has allowed me to spend a goodly bit of time with infants and I have found that, for short intervals, I rather like the little fellows and seem to have a knack for bonding with them. This unusual foundling was proving to be no exception. He gave me a smile and took hold of my finger.
“Quite a grip,” I winced, swearing I could hear the cracking of bone over the boy’s gurgling laugh. I struggled to retrieve my finger. “Grow up to be a strong boy, no doubt.” I shifted my hold on the child so I could attempt to shake some feeling back into my injured digit.
“Remarkable,” Doctor Omega said, looking over my shoulder at the child.
“I find the whole thing rather beastly. Treating him like a... laboratory rat or something.”
“No, my boy, I rather think we are seeing the galactic equivalent of leaving a baby on the doorstep of an orphanage,” he said.
“What? It’s inhuman! We must return him to his home.”
“Well, since, appearances aside, the child is most likely not human, that’s neither here nor there,” the Doctor said, pressing his fingers against the child’s skin at several spots. “Hmm, dense musculature. Raised in a high gravity environment. Yes, now I see...” He nodded to himself, smiled briefly at the child, then glanced back my way. “According to my understandably hasty calculations, I would guess the craft came from there.”
He pointed into the night sky, to a spark of green, far off in the distance.
“That light, if memory serves, is the last trace of a once pr
oud world. An advanced race of scientists. There’s no point trying to get him back home, you see, as there’s no longer a home for him to return to.”
“His world is gone?” I muttered, sadly peering at the boy. “So, this little rocket was a lifeboat?”
“Exactly. His being sent into space was an act of parental love,” the Doctor said, chucking the baby under the chin.
“If he’s the last of his people, what will happen to him?”
“I think that was thought of already. Rough calculations of the course he was on when we collided, I believe he soon would have arrived... let’s see... ah-ha!”
The Doctor’s thin finger now pointed towards a familiar blue-green planet.
“Earth!” I breathed, holding the baby up to see the Earth. “You’re going to Earth, little fellow!”
“Yes,” Doctor Omega said, looking over his calculations. “Most likely, the United States.”
“America?” I said, to the child. “Well, I imagine you’ll turn out all right despite that. So, do we just send him on his way?”
“Once we have Fred straighten out that guidance fin, he’ll be able to continue on his journey. Best thing for the tiny chap. A ship full of bachelors like us would hardly be a suitable home.”
Fred, Doctor Omega and I were soon standing on a ridge, watching the repaired rocket and its occupant soar off towards Earth. It had been the work of a hour for Fred to make the craft spaceworthy again.
“Hope he’s found by a good family,” I said, wistfully.
“I’m sure he’ll do you proud,” Doctor Omega smiled.
“So, we crashed on the Moon, eh?” Fred said. “In school, they said it was a lifeless world, so we’ll have some quiet time, while we get the Cosmos back in shape. Should be able to hammer out that dent and have the time rotor humming along by dinner time.”
Just then, Tiziraou came running towards us, his thin arms flapping wildly, his robe billowing out behind him, like a cape. The Moon’s thin atmosphere and light gravity caused him to bounce several feet into the air with each step.
In close pursuit of our martian traveling companion were a trio of short, bandy legged creatures, encased in leathery armor and wearing goggles with dark lenses. Each held a metallic spear in their tentacle-like hands.
“Selenites,” Doctor Omega mused, in happy astonishment. “How interesting. Notice how the muscle structure of their upper bodies...?”
Fred and I each grabbed one of the Doctor’s arms and dashed for the safety of the Cosmos.
Rick Lai’s unfolding saga continues to focus on Josephine Balsamo, Arsène Lupin’s arch-enemy whose budding career among the Black Coats is fraught with perils, and her rival, the young detective Irene Chupin (or Tupin), “rescued” from the cult horror film La Residencia (a.k.a. The House That Screamed). While the following tale can be read independently, readers wishing to reacquaint themselves with Irene and her ghastly trials at Madame Fourneau’s College for Young Women in Provence, as well as Josephine’s role in the Bluebeard Murders in Paris, may find it useful to reread the tales published in our second and third volumes before choosing to enter the…
Rick Lai: Corridors of Deceit
Paris, London, 1896
To the population of London in November 1896, the House of Crafts was merely the headquarters of a reputable fashion company. In reality, the building was the headquarters of the nefarious criminal society known as the Black Coats. Its basement served both as a dungeon and a torture chamber. Presently, a young woman wearing a brown blouse with a black tie and a black skirt was unceremoniously dragged inside a cell.
“Your new abode, Dodger,” coolly announced her flamboyant jailer.
She was a woman with short brown hair, brushed from the forehead in a wide stock, giving the impression of a bird-like crest. Her tall, lean body was attired entirely in black. A patch covered her right eye. Her open coat was styled like an Inverness cape. Her outfit also comprised a shirt with a cravat plus pants and boots. A ring of keys dangled from her belt. An amulet in the shape of a cat’s head was chained around her neck. Her right hand clutched the back of the captive’s chestnut hair.
“Please don’t hurt me, Milady,” whimpered Dodger.
“I don’t intend to. As a talented thief, you’re a valuable asset for us. A period of incarceration should cure your stubborn streak, however. You disobeyed my order to steal Baron Gruner’s diary.”
“I couldn’t let you blackmail the man I love!”
“You little fool! You were merely expected to flirt with Gruner. He cares nothing for you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Enough of this nonsense! I let you have the ‘Dodger’ sobriquet. Your insolence merits a demotion. Remember the nickname of ‘B. F.’ from our schooldays? It suits you so well!”
Releasing Dodger, Milady secured the door and left the basement. The cell’s door had a small window covered with bars. Light from a small lamp poured through it. Dodger removed a folded page from her sleeve and held it to the light. Though she knew the inscription by heart, reading it consoled her:
“Dearest Berenice, pray for my soul, I will pray for yours…Irene.”
Dodger knew it was dangerous to hide this paper. Milady would punish her if it was found, but seeing the words reminded Dodger to perform a ritual every day. She did it now.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven….”
The White Lodge, a late-Georgian mansion in the Blackheath district of London, belonged to Noel Moriarty, a leading member of the High Council of the Black Coats. His wife, known to London’s high society as Madame Koluchy, never appeared in public with her husband. In fact, most people believed her to be a widow. This majestic woman with black hair and dark blue eyes was presently dining at the White Lodge with her father, Count Corbucci, a heavily built man with a large white mustache. Both father and daughter wore gold rings shaped like snakes. The Count was a patriarch of the Camorra, the Italian secret society which had long ago spawned the Veste Nere, a.k.a. the Black Coats. His daughter headed another criminal enterprise known more simply as the Brotherhood.
“Mabuse’s Espionage Hotel will need a competent architect, Catarina.”
“I would recommend the designer of our headquarters, father. This artisan also worked for Marguerite Chavain and Madame Sara.”
“You’ve reorganized the Brotherhood in preparation for the upcoming meeting of the High Council?”
“Yes, I have a new chief of staff, ‘Milady Nevermore.’ ”
“Wasn’t she Antonio’s principal assassin? I’m surprised that my foster son let her go.”
Corbucci was discussing the Black Coats’ head of Asian operations. On a trip to Havana, decades ago, the Count had adopted a homeless waif named Antonio. Before her marriage to Noel, Catarina had been fiancéd to Antonio. Their betrothal had been broken for reasons known only to the Corbucci family.
“She was my operative before she was Antonio’s, father. Six years ago, I sent her to Japan to be trained by the Iga ninja clan. Antonio made the arrangements. She was always slated to be in my employ.”
“What happened?”
“Just as her training was concluding, the Koga clan attacked the Iga village. Nearly all the Iga ninjas were massacred by a ‘Steel-Skin Kung Fu’ expert imported by their Koga rivals. Milady survived, but she suffered extreme injuries. Antonio informed me that she would face a prolonged recovery, so I temporarily lost interest in her and Antonio used her in the meantime.”
“So he stole one of your own. How charmingly bureaucratic.”
“When news of Milady’s activities reached me, I forced Antonio to relinquish her back to me.”
“What happened to your prior chief of staff?”
“Josephine will now report to Milady.”
“Considering her previous failures, I don’t understand why you let her live. Your affection for this former classmate of yours is affecting your judgment, daughter.”
“Not true, father. I have des
pised her since our very first encounter.”
“And yet, you picked her to be your assistant during your tenure as prefect at that school.”
“The headmistress required the performance of certain distasteful duties. Rather than bear the burden myself, I chose a pretentious girl to assume those responsibilities. Since Josephine proved her... expertise, I inducted her into the Brotherhood. But I still relish in tormenting her.”
An attractive blonde woman in a green dress entered the House of Crafts. She was ending a short leave of absence that had been granted her to give her time to recover from some injuries she had recently received in Paris. The blonde woman found Milady Nevermore in her private office rubbing her hands together in a smug manner.
“So you are Josephine Balsamo,” said Milady to the newcomer. “The situation is somewhat awkward. I understand this used to be your office, but I needed to move in immediately. Your possessions have been temporarily stored downstairs.”
“I understand, Milady,” said Josephine, looking around, mentally appraising the furniture. “Your taste is exquisite. I notice a Poe collection on your bookshelf. May I look at it?”
Milady handed Tamerlane and Other Poems to Josephine. The blonde woman noticed the dedication inside: To Kaitlin: A great rarity for a great daughter. Love, Father.
Returning the book, Josephine pondered the inscription. Milady was an enigma to Josephine. This dedication was the only clue to her new supervisor’s identity.
“I was told that Madame Koluchy has approved my posting to New Orleans,” she said. “When do I leave?”
“Your reassignment has been cancelled, I’m afraid. I’ve reviewed the Bluebeard Murders case.2 It was filled with blunders. You wanted Arsène Lupin to pay the law for a murder, but instead of simply committing one, you planned six.”
“I had sound motives. I wanted to create a public outcry.”
Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror Page 9
