The Dead Gentleman (9 page)

Bernie cleared off a portion of the couch for her to sit on and walked over to the closet on the far wall. Jezebel stiffened as he grabbed the handles.

“Don’t worry,” he said, seeing her alarm. “It’s not that kind of closet.”

He opened the door to reveal a small space not much deeper than her own closet. But there were no hangers or shoe racks. It was filled with shelves of funny-looking equipment. No spare parts here; these were complete gadgets, though what practical use they might have was anybody’s guess. Some kind of old-fashioned-looking gun with a net attached to its front, a number of small boxes covered in dials and strange knobs. There was a pair of goggles with blue lenses, like the kind the boy had been wearing, and they were dangling from a peg on the wall. Everything in there looked old, despite the meticulous condition it was obviously in. It reminded Jez of those antique toys you sometimes see behind collector’s glass—all the care in the world cannot erase age.

In the center of it was what looked like a robot bird on a perch. When it swiveled its silver-feathered head to blink at Jez, she nearly shouted.

“What … what is that?”

“That,” said Bernie, gesturing grandly at his little assortment, “is what remains of the Explorers’ Society. A few odds and ends, some tired old tricks and our friend Merlin.”

The bird chirped proudly as it settled on its pedestal. Its song skipped like an old scratched record.

“Merlin?”

“Well, he’s had several names over the years. Wei-fung, Herodotus. Merlin was what Tommy called him. Tommy being the boy you met in the basement yesterday.”

“So, he is real!” Jez said, her earlier fear and trepidation washed away with a feeling of sudden, exhilarating
I-told-you-so
.

“He’s real, all right,” said Bernie. “Tommy Learner was the greatest Explorer, ever. He was also the last Explorer,
ever
. But
that’s water under the bridge, as they say. All that happened a long, long time ago. I doubt anyone even remembers his name.”

“Remembers his name?” said Jez. “But I just saw him yesterday, and he’s no older than I am.”

“And that, young miss, is what’s so troubling. You see, Tommy Learner has been dead for nearly a century.”

Jez stood up, opened her mouth and shut it again. For just this once, she could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Sit down, Jezebel,” he said, “and I’ll tell you everything. I promise, all will be revealed.”

“We’re Explorers, Tommy,” said Captain Scott as he gave the ship’s wheel a turn. The man cut an impressive figure, standing tall in his naval cap and long shipman’s peacoat. But I have to admit that my attention wasn’t on the Captain himself. I couldn’t take my eyes off the enormous porthole behind him and the blue expanse of water beyond. We were bouncing along on top of the Atlantic Ocean.

And I was going to be sick.

The Captain continued. “The Explorers’ Society is a unique club. We conquered the last frontier of this planet long ago, but now we navigate far more exciting places. Adventure is always out there—you just have to know where to look!”

I tried answering from my place on the floor, but all I managed was a low moan. The cool metal, at least, felt good against my forehead, and if I closed my eyes I didn’t have to see the
roiling, lapping ocean outside. Unfortunately, I could still feel the motion, all the way from my toes to my stomach, as Captain Scott’s strange ship rode the choppy waves like a leaf in a storm. Each lurch threatened to upend what little remained of breakfast down my front—I’d had to change clothes three times so far since daybreak, and I was now draped in one of Scott’s oversized shirts. I would’ve felt ridiculous if I hadn’t been so busy praying for a quick death.

“Still feeling seasick?” asked Scott, in what I suspected was the man’s one-and-only tone of voice—that of the booming announcement. He shouted commands as if he were piloting a ship of eighty men, but from what I saw, he and Merlin made up the whole crew.

“Don’t worry, it’ll get easier,” he said.

Something that Scott mentioned earlier suddenly struck me. “What do you mean, you conquered the last frontier of
this planet
? What other planet do you mean?”

The Captain smiled. “Countless others, my boy. Countless! Other worlds, hidden under our very noses. Stuffed away in the folds of time and space!”

“Now you’re just talking nonsense,” I said. “You’re having me on.” A fancy underwater ship was one thing, traveling to other planets was another.

“Was that bridge troll nonsense? You think that fellow came from your neighborhood? Or Brooklyn, perhaps?”

I didn’t answer. He had a point, there.

“BEGINNING PREPARATIONS TO DIVE! You see, Tommy, that troll came through a portal—kind of a doorway to another world. Most people think of reality as being a dependable, solid thing, but it’s actually more like a block of Swiss cheese.
Full of little pockets and holes. Full of doors. Can’t say we understand the science behind the portals, but they tend to appear in the most ordinary places. Old gardens, cellars, behind bookcases, even. Your troll came here from another world where blokes like him are commonplace. Probably the world of Faerie, judging by his looks, or maybe New Hamelin. Usually the doors stay closed, but it happens sometimes that a creature finds his way through. Most keep a low profile, since it doesn’t pay to draw too much attention. This nasty fellow just got too big for his britches, started making waves.”

My stomach gurgled again at the mention of “waves.”

“Besides,” the Captain continued. “The vast majority of people wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual about him if he were napping in their own bed. They wouldn’t see past the Veil.”

“The Veil?”

The Captain nodded. “The Veil is a kind of energy field that hangs over everything. Invisible, imperceptible, but it’s a part of nature, as real as the open sky or this vast ocean. And it’s very good at reckoning what belongs on Earth and what doesn’t. It softens the harsh realities of things that are too
different
—things most folks aren’t ready to face. It blurs the edges, so to speak, and makes the unbelievable into something … acceptable. It hides the portals to those other worlds and disguises the beings who come through them. To the common eye, a troll that crosses into our world becomes a big, ugly lug of a man, though still just a man. But the Veil is not all-powerful, and there are those who can see past it, who can lift the Veil and see the truth. Children often have the gift, which is why you’ve been having so much trouble these last few weeks. I’d say your Veil has been lifted—and then some.”

“I’m not a child,” I said, maybe a bit too quickly. “I take care of myself.”

“Mm-hmm.” Scott nodded. “Of course, my mistake.” He looked at me for a moment. I felt my cheeks redden beneath their greenish tinge.

“But as I was saying,” he went on. “There are precious few adults these days who can see past the Veil. Some artists manage glimpses, but even they usually blame it all on an overactive imagination in the end. Take this ship, for instance. I knew a Frenchman once who looked out the window of a coastal hotel one blustery afternoon and spotted a great metal ship rising up out of the waves! A ship that had emerged intact from beneath the sea! Being a literate fellow, he immediately put pen to paper and wrote about what he’d seen. But within hours the Veil had worked its magic on him, and instead of the truth, he ended up with a novel!

“Perhaps you’ve read it?
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
?”

I shook my head. I had no use for novels. Not that I had any problem with other people enjoying them. After all, it was much easier to lift a man’s wallet if his nose was buried between the covers of a book.

“Well,” said Scott. “The book made him famous but left him none the wiser to the truth of reality. I rechristened the ship after the name of the one in the novel—the
Nautilus
. Seemed the least I could do.

“There are other, sadder cases of those with the gift, but they are often, well, a bit soft in the head. Take those poor bridge folk of yours. The Duke was able to take over their home because they could see him for what he truly was and were rightly terrified.”

I remembered the look in Prune-face’s eyes when the Duke
came stalking toward them. How many horrible things had that old woman witnessed over the years?

“And what about you?” I asked. “You saw him. You’re not a child. You an artist? Or …”

The Captain chuckled. “Neither! It’s training, my boy! We Explorers join when we are children, well,
young men
like yourself. Then we train for years to see past the Veil. Some make it. Most, unfortunately, do not. It takes a steel mind to discipline oneself to avoid the Veil … ALL HANDS PREPARE TO SUBMERGE! TO YOUR STATIONS!”

I glanced around the empty ship as Scott shouted orders to a crew that wasn’t there and wondered, for what wouldn’t be the last time in our career together—was it discipline that kept the Veil away, or did this Captain have more in common with the bridge folk than he liked to admit?

But even if the Captain was a touch delusional, the
Nautilus
was certainly real. Scott continued to bark orders as he flipped a barrage of switches, and the entire vessel began to rattle. A bell dinged somewhere in the distance as my eardrums began to crackle and pop.

“What’s going on?” I shouted, covering my ears with both hands.

“Shift in pressure,” the Captain shouted back. “We’re diving!”

The noise of waves chopping at the ship’s hull gave way to a muffled roar as it was surrounded on all sides by ocean, aft to stern, top to bottom. The nausea lessoned a tad as the ship’s motion steadied, but it was replaced with the cold sweat of absolute terror. I knew we were going to die. The
Nautilus
would sink until the pressure crushed it like an empty snuffbox. I’d
escaped a dead gentleman and a bridge troll, only to die in the deep ocean.

Or not.

After a time, when the ship’s quivering had ceased and the pops in my ears subsided, I opened my eyes just a squint and risked a peek. The porthole was dark, and the interior lights of the
Nautilus
’s bridge lit up the glass like a mirror. But at least the room had stopped spinning. If not for the constant thump of the ship’s engines, I wouldn’t have been able to sense any movement at all. We might have been standing still in any posh room in New York.

“Are we really … underwater?” I asked.

“Not quite twenty thousand leagues under the sea, but we are deep enough.” Scott smiled, his teeth shining white beneath his sandy mustache.

“Have a look.” With that he turned a crank on the wheel, and the lights in the cabin dimmed as the floodlights on the outside of the craft blinked and sputtered once … twice … and lit up with a flash. The deep, impenetrable black of the ocean outside came alive all at once as a school of brightly colored fish zigzagged past the porthole, and for a few seconds it looked like we were in some kind of painter’s dream. But they soon cleared, and what was revealed was … unbelievable. Never had I imagined such a sight. The
Nautilus
was traveling above a giant trench in the ocean floor. Towering shapes loomed in the distance, which I could only guess were the shadows of some kind of mountain range—a mountain range on the bottom of the ocean! The waters between our ship and those peaks were filled with schools of strange fish swimming through a tangled coral forest. And below, the yawning mouth of the chasm a mile wide, the blue-black ocean disappearing over its edge and from view.

“That is Kraken’s Gorge. And at the bottom is a very, very big portal.”

At that moment there was a dull rumble somewhere along the hull of the ship.

The Captain must’ve caught my worried expression. “Not to fear, just the
Nautilus
adjusting to the deep water. A kraken hasn’t slithered out of there in a hundred years or more.” This was answered by another, more distant rumble that seemed to come from somewhere much lower, somewhere in the depths of the gorge. Merlin, who’d been perched contentedly on the railing, let out a low whistle.

“Of course, no need to sail
too
close, at any rate.” The Captain coughed into his hand and turned the wheel, steering the
Nautilus
farther from the chasm’s edge. “What I wanted to show you is
there
anyway,” he said, pointing to the far edge of the coral forest. “The Lemuria Outcropping.”

“The what-what?” I asked. I was glad to see the chasm mouth growing smaller in the porthole, but I was getting awfully tired of understanding only every fifth word out of the Captain’s mouth. “I thought you said we were going to some kid’s bedroom! What are we doing on the bottom of the ocean?”

“Miles Macintosh lives in England, which is where we’re headed. I just couldn’t resist taking the scenic route. We are about to pass one of the most awesome sights on this planet. Why don’t you look it up for yourself?
L
for Lemuria.” Scott gestured to a pedestal that stood a few feet from the Captain’s wheel, and resting atop it was the biggest book I had ever seen. It looked old, with sturdy brass bindings and a fat padlock on its front. It was the lock that piqued my interest, of course. Books are nothing to get excited about, much less really big books, but people only put
locks on things that are valuable, and I definitely have an interest in valuable things.