Alistair Grim's Odd Aquaticum (5 page)

The eyes of their scowling black face masks brightened, and then the samurai uncrossed their spears to let me pass. I knocked and called out Nigel’s name, but upon receiving no reply, I slowly opened the door and crept inside the dimly lit chamber.

Unlike Father’s quarters, Nigel’s room was sparsely furnished with only a bed, a small desk piled high with books and papers, and a couple of chairs. Covered with a sheet at the center of the chamber was a large, lumpy mass with all manner of tools and mechanical parts scattered on the floor around it. I must admit I was tempted to take a peek—whatever Nigel had been working on this past week was under that sheet—but given Father’s demand for secrecy, I resolved to keep my nose out of it.

Besides, something else had caught my attention.

Pinned to the wall above Nigel’s desk were over a dozen newspaper articles with titles like,
ABEL WORTLEY’S MURDER MOST FOUL!
and
WILLIAM STOUT SENTENCED TO HANG!

Now, for anyone unfamiliar with my tale, the names Abel Wortley and William Stout will mean nothing to you. But to Nigel, they were everything.

You see, Abel Wortley, an elderly collector of antiquities and former friend of Father’s, was murdered a decade earlier, and William Stout, his sometime coachman, was hanged for the crime. William, however, was innocent, and so Father brought him back from the dead with his animus. William changed his name to Nigel and pretended to be his own twin brother so as not to arouse suspicion. And for the last ten years, in addition to building the Odditorium, he and Father had dedicated themselves to solving Abel Wortley’s murder.

Unfortunately, they’d had little to show for their efforts—that is, until Prince Nightshade showed up. Father believed that Prince Nightshade and Abel Wortley’s murderer were the same person. As to the
identity
of that person…Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it?

My heart sank as I gazed at Nigel’s things—not because he’d been framed for something he didn’t do, but because as a result he’d been separated from his daughter, Maggie. There she was, in miniature portrait upon his desk. The little girl looked much as I’d imagined her—rosy cheeks and yellow ribbons in her curly red hair. She’d be about thirteen now and was living happily with Judge Hurst’s sister in the country. Still I could never picture her in my mind as anything but that sad little girl who lost her father ten years earlier.

I soon became aware of a low humming sound behind me. I crept around the covered mass in the center of the room and discovered Nigel standing in the corner with a large, barrel-shaped helmet upon his head. The helmet was attached to the wall by a mechanical arm, along with a jumble of pipes and wires that ran along the length of it. Even though the big man’s face was obscured by the helmet’s visor, the blue light flashing behind its eyeholes told me at once what I was witnessing.

Nigel Stout was recharging himself with animus.

“Is anyone still there?” Father called on the talkback. Startled, I rushed over and flicked its switch.

“I’m here, sir. But Nigel—er—well, he’s still charging himself, sir.”

“He should have more than enough power by now,” Father shouted—a bunch of hammering was going on behind him. “Just make sure he brings down that large coach wrench I loaned him, will you? And for goodness’ sake, chop-chop, lad!”

Father turned off his talkback and I dashed back to Nigel. “Wake up, Nigel!” I hollered, but the big man didn’t hear me. For some reason, I felt strange touching him in his present state, so I stepped up onto a chair and tapped gently on his helmet.

Nigel flinched, and then the helmet automatically lifted off his head and retracted back on its mechanical arm into the wall.

“Hallo, Grubb,” Nigel said, his eye sockets bright with animus. “Fancy meeting you in here.”

“Forgive me for intruding, Nigel,” I said, and quickly brought him up to speed on the capture of the Gallownog, as well as Father’s request for the coach wrench.

“Oh dear,” Nigel said, and he gathered up a handful of wrenches from the floor. “Gallownogs are not to be trifled with. Right-o, then. Let’s be off, Grubb.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked, and I pointed to a pair of thick black goggles on his desk. Embarrassed, Nigel pointed to the helmet contraption.

“Head gets a bit loopy after all that,” he said, and then his face dropped with alarm. “Er, uh, you didn’t by any chance peek under that sheet, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good lad, Grubb,” Nigel said, relieved. He slipped the goggles over his eyes, and without a word more we hurried down the hallway, dropped three floors in the lift, and dashed into the engine room.

The yawning chamber was a bedlam of activity. The furnaces blazed fiercely, bathing the walls in a frenzy of flickering shadow as swarms of giant mechanical wasps buzzed about in every direction. Some hammered and welded, while others crawled along a tangle of pipes that connected the Odditorium’s massive flight sphere to a smaller, glowing sphere in the center of the room. Father’s spirit prison. I could see Lorcan Dalach pounding on the walls inside, his form hazy and green behind a force field of sparkling yellow fairy dust as he struggled to break free. Gwendolyn spun madly in the flight sphere to keep her dust flowing to the spirit prison—but something was wrong. The force field was flickering and flashing as if it would fizzle out at any moment.

“Thank heaven you’ve arrived!” Father cried, rushing over. He took the largest of Nigel’s wrenches and handed it off to a wasp that was buzzing past. The wasp flew up to the engine room’s honeycombed ceiling, where it joined a cluster of other wasps and began tightening a pipe coupling that was leaking great spurts of fairy dust. The problem was clear. If the leak wasn’t mended soon, then the Gallownog would escape.

Father screamed, “Now, Gwendolyn!”

In a flash I saw her change into a monstrous, toothy ball of yellow light—the form in which she gobbled up nasty grown-ups—and then a blinding explosion filled the engine room. When next my eyes cleared, the force field around the prison sphere glowed steady and bright.

Nigel and I sighed with relief. Lorcan was secure.

Father raked back his hair. “Well that was a close one,” he said, and Number One, the queen of the wasps, flew down to him and handed him the coach wrench. Father thanked her and pressed some buttons on a nearby control panel, upon which all the wasps flew up to the ceiling and settled into their combs—their bulbous blue eyes shining down on us like stars.

“I’ve never seen a Gallownog before,” Nigel said, peering cautiously into the prison sphere. Lorcan Dalach had stopped struggling, and sat slumped in a shadowy green heap inside. “I thought he’d be a lot scarier looking, quite frankly.”

“Don’t let his appearance fool you,” Father said. “A Gallownog is one of the spirit realm’s fiercest warriors, and should he escape…Well, I don’t need to tell you how that would throw a wrench in our works.” Father tossed his coach wrench upon a pile of other tools, and a loud
clang!
echoed through the chamber. I flinched.

“I realize that, sir,” Nigel said. “But if you use this crystal ball to house the Gallownog, which one will you use to house the—”

Remembering my presence, Nigel caught himself and clamped his lips tight.

House the what?
I wanted to ask. I knew it had something to do with Father’s secret plan to defeat Prince Nightshade, but I also knew the only way Nigel would ever tell me anything was by a slip of the tongue—which, luckily for me, he was prone to do now and again.

“I appreciate your secrecy on the matter, Nigel,” Father said, winding his pocket watch. “But the witching hour is fast approaching, and so the first phase of my plan will be revealed to Grubb very soon.” Father inspected a massive gauge at the base of the flight sphere, the needle of which read
FULL
, and then he hollered up to Gwendolyn to stop spinning.

Dizzy, the Yellow Fairy flew out of her dust-filled sphere and shook the cobwebs from her head. According to the gauge, the Odditorium’s flight reserves and its new spirit prison would be charged for quite some time. And as a reward for her hard work, Father tossed Gwendolyn a large chunk of chocolate.

“Oooh!”
she cooed, and flew up to her dollhouse (which was hung from the ceiling) and began munching away on the front steps. Father crossed over to the talkback and flicked its switch. “Cleona, darling, any sign of our destination?”

“The coordinates indicate we’re well over the English countryside now,” she replied. “But it’s hard to tell our precise location with all this fog.”

Father rolled his eyes and sighed. “What next?” he muttered. “Very well. Divert all power from the Eye of Mars to charge the searchlight, will you? We’re on our way up now.”

“Uncle,” Cleona said tentatively, “is Lorcan…well, is he all right?”

Father frowned. “You needn’t worry about him,” he said tersely, and flicked off the talkback. Cleona’s question had clearly irritated him. Had he noticed the banshees smiling at each other in the library too?

Father threw a lever on the wall, and the door at the top of the engine room’s stairs slid open. Nigel and I followed him up the stairs and out into the grand reception hall, where we found the Odditorium’s giant birdcage waiting for us. We piled in, traveled up through the reception hall’s ceiling, and then stepped off into the library. The empty birdcage continued upward, disappearing into the garret above, while at the same time Father’s desk slid back over its trapdoor in the floor. The three of us joined Cleona on the balcony—she was right about the fog. It was so thick that I could barely make out my hand in front of my face.

Father pressed some buttons on his pipe organ and a massive beam of bright red light shot out from below the balcony. It seemed to dissolve the fog on contact, cutting through the gloom and forming a sharp circle on the ground below.

“There we are,” Father said. He’d trained the searchlight on a ring of tall, standing stone blocks far off in the distance.

“Cor blimey,” I said. “Is that where we’re headed, sir?”

“But of course,” he said with a smile. “What better place than a hell mouth to catch a demon on All Hallows’ Eve?”

T
he Odditorium hovered high above the circle of stones. I counted at least two dozen of the massive blocks, some of which were joined together by smaller blocks resting across their tops, while others lay tipped over on their sides in the long grass. The searchlight cast the scene in a sinister red glow, but still it was impossible to see anything beyond the outermost stones. And as Lord Dreary joined Father and me on the balcony, Nigel and Cleona hurried off to make the final preparations for the evening’s adventure.

“A hell mouth, did you say?” Lord Dreary asked as he peered down over the balustrade. A sense of dread hung over the place, as if the very air here was heavy with fear.

“A hell mouth, yes,” Father replied. “Didn’t you ever wonder how Prince Nightshade made his castle fly?”

“What are you talking about?” the old man sputtered—he was as anxious about this hell mouth business as I was.

“I must admit, it took me a while to put it together,” Father said, thinking. “But those thick black clouds surrounding the castle’s foundation are what finally tipped me off. Demon dust, don’t you know, expelled from the castle’s exhaust vents in very much the same manner as the green mixture of fairy dust and animus is expelled from the Odditorium’s.”

Lord Dreary gulped and his eyes grew wide. “
Demon
dust?” he said. “You mean to tell me that Prince Nightshade uses a demon to fly his castle?”

Father chuckled and shook his head. “One demon could hardly provide him with enough power to fly something of that size. No, I should think the old devil would need at least a hundred of the little rascals to get his castle off the ground.”

“Good heavens!” cried Lord Dreary, and I shivered as I thought back on my imprisonment in Nightshade’s castle. Somewhere in its bowels had been an engine room much like the Odditorium’s, only instead of a flight sphere powered by a fairy, the prince’s engine room had a sphere that contained a hundred demons.

“So that’s why you were building a spirit prison,” I said in disbelief. “You wanted to capture a demon just like Prince Nightshade done!”

“Grammar notwithstanding, you are correct, my young apprentice. The circle of stones down there marks a hell mouth—a supernatural doorway, if you will, through which demons pass into our world. Problem is, the mouth only opens once a year and for a very short period of time.”

“At midnight on All Hallows’ Eve!” cried Lord Dreary.

“Which leaves us precisely thirty minutes,” Father said, checking his watch. Lord Dreary and I exchanged a terrified glance. There was no denying it now. Alistair Grim actually intended to add a demon to his collection of Odditoria!

“But have you gone mad?” asked Lord Dreary. “Why on earth would you want to bring a demon on board the Odditorium?”

“Do not let the relative calm of these past few weeks lull you into a false sense of security, old friend. You know very well that Prince Nightshade is out there plotting his revenge. Thus, if we are going to defeat him, we must go on the offensive and fight fire with fire—or in this case, a demon with a demon.”