69

69

T HE CONVERSATION IN THE library continued as the rest of the vast house was cloaked in silence. Mrs. Trask was in the back kitchen with an Agatha Christie novel, feet up on a stool after a long day, a pot of Earl Grey keeping warm on the hob. The rest of the house help had retired.

Twenty feet below the library, in the mansion's basement, was the large space, formerly a zinc-lined ice room, that now contained the time machine. It looked different than it had earlier: Mime had added additional processing units, along with a failback system and other enhancements to make the machine more powerful and stable. The room was clean and orderly. A low hum was the only noise. A suite of diagnostic equipment—obtained and installed by Mime—winked and gleamed in a rack that was situated against the wall where, before, Proctor had spent his hours on guard duty making bespoke bullets. The light this assembly generated provided the only illumination.

There was a soft ticking sound, then a louder, mechanical snick as a timer finished counting down. The big machine's subunits began to stir from their electromechanical sleep. Mime had enhanced the master mechanism so it could be operated not only by one person alone, but remotely as well. This was happening now. Each step necessary to bring it online was taking place in orderly succession. A module would come to life, run through self-diagnostics, and hand control to the next stage in the chain. Thanks to Mime's optimizations, the floor-trembling force that had previously been necessary to tear through space-time was now reduced to a low growl, like an idling race car.

And now, the steps complete, the portal came to life. A strange, apocalyptic whorl of undiscovered colors—a kaleidoscope of seemingly infinite depth—materialized between the three rhodium-platinum poles. It swelled to full size, becoming a door to a parallel universe, in the year 1881.

For three minutes, then five, the portal shimmered between the poles, its ovoid surface gleaming like mercury, illuminating the darkened lab with a painful brilliance. Then the light abruptly fluctuated; the portal dimmed as some of its power was temporarily consumed; the center of its surface flickered, coalesced into human shape—and a man stepped through.

Enoch Leng rocked a moment, then righted himself. He shook his head to clear it and—grabbing the emitter railings for support—blinked several times. Then he drew in a deep breath, as if to restore himself after a difficult journey.

Except that he was not restored. His clothes were torn and grimy, and dirt was caked under his nails. Traces of dried vomit were evident on his shirttails and the cuffs of his trousers. His skin had a deathly pallor—save for his left cheek, which had a blistered black-and-red stripe seared into it. He clutched a heavy revolver in his hand.

He bent forward suddenly, coughing, a spasm racking his guts. As he recovered, his hungry gaze probed the lab, taking everything in by the reflected light. His eyes stopped their circuit at a far corner, still in shadow despite the portal's violent intensity.

"You!" he cried, staggering.

"Me," a dulcet voice replied.

Constance Greene sat in a wheelchair, wearing a silk dressing gown, her face pale, dark circles under her eyes. Her legs were covered by a heavy blanket. Beside her was a small wheeled lab trolley, made of steel that winked and shone in the light of the portal. On it sat three items: a book, lying open; a small bottle of medicine; and a large surgical scalpel.

Their eyes met. Then, while still looking at Leng, Constance reached for the scalpel.

Leng raised the gun, while at the same time shaking his head with a tut-tutting sound. "Hands back in your lap, my dear."

She complied. Leng stood before the glowing portal, grasping the railing.

A beat passed, and Constance spoke again. "I knew that, sooner rather than later—assuming you hadn't been crushed in your own mansion—you'd appear in that rathole of an alley, waiting. I could have kept the machine off and left you to die, but I didn't. Instead, I turned it on—knowing you'd come through."

"I see you've managed to cheat death," Leng said after a moment, his voice thick and raspy. "Thanks, no doubt, to the miracles of twenty-first-century medicine."

She did not reply. Leng remained where he was, listing slightly back and forth.

"I'm glad you survived," he continued. "I, too, seek the miracles of twenty-first-century medicine—and you're going to help me with that." He gestured with the muzzle of the gun, keeping it aimed even as he turned partially away, coughing and retching, seized by another bout of cramping. But he recovered quickly, spitting a mouthful of phlegm toward the nearest wall. "When you disappeared, I knew you'd all gone through that magic-lantern show. Well, now, so have I. Expected that, did you? Never mind: I'm here now—and you're going to undo the pain and suffering you've caused me." He again waggled the gun. "So: where are we?"

"In a basement."

"Don't be daft. Where are we?"

"New York City. In our home."

"‘Our'?"

"Aloysius and mine."

"Aloysius… Pendergast. How domestic." Leng tried to smile, but his face was contorted by another spasm of pain.

"In your former house."

He took a deep, shuddering breath. "Enough persiflage. I need you to get me the antidote—the one you told me didn't exist in my century. And for your sake, I suggest you hurry—I may be losing my grip on reality, which makes me unpredictable."

"A side effect of the poison?" Constance asked. Then: "What happened to your face?"

"When I was waiting in the alley, that pernicious cleric paid me a visit."

"You don't mean Reverend Considine?"

"He had something glowing in his hand, and before I could gather my wits, he branded me—across the face! The brand exiles bore when bound for the penal colonies of Australia. As I fell back, I heard him say: ‘Here's a farewell gift from Constance.' I see now, you little vixen, that he was one of yours."

"Thoughtful of him," Constance murmured.

"No more wasting time. I want medical attention, and right away—as I implied, the last thing you'd want is my growing delusional. I know what a telephone is: use it. Get me a doctor. Now."

"No need for threats," she said. "And in fact, there's no reason to leave this room. I have the antidote right here." And she nodded toward the metal table at her side.

As Leng followed her glance, she picked up a medicine bottle, sealed, with a tiny label covered in writing.

"That is certainly most convenient. And how do I know it's not just another poison?"

"Because that would be too cheap a trick." She twisted the top of the bottle, cracking open the seal. "Your timing is good; indocyanine green only became available as an alpha-amanitin inhibitor quite recently. Before that, there was no true cure for the death cap mushroom."

As he watched, she took a sip.

"Ugh," she said, recapping the bottle and returning it to the medical trolley. "Bitter."

"Let me have it." With his branded face, his crazy eyes, and the infernal halo of the portal ablaze behind him, he could almost have been one of Lucifer's fallen angels.

"I will. Do you think I've been waiting here, in the dark and the damp, for my health?"

Leng scoffed, then looked at her narrowly, as if she might still be feverish. "I tire of this. Let me have it! "

"Very well." As he kept the gun aimed, she reached over, grasped the trolley, and rolled it across the uneven floor. It collided with the vertical post of the emitter railing, then rolled backward a few inches, the scalpel and medicine bottle wobbling slightly under the impact. Leng watched as Constance sank back in the wheelchair. Despite her bravado, it was obvious that simply pushing the tray was still not only painful, but exhausting.

Grabbing the scalpel off the tray and throwing it into a dark corner, he put the revolver down, picked up the bottle, read the label with streaming eyes—there it was: INDOCYANINE GREEN , neatly and officially printed. Steadying himself against another wave of spasmic pain, he twisted off the top, threw it aside, and drank half of the bottle down. It was bitter. He couldn't feel any worse off than he did already, and it wasn't a large bottle—he lifted it a second time and drained it to the dregs.

Then he tossed it away. As he heard it shiver into pieces against the floor, he raised his eyes to Constance.

She was seated in the wheelchair as before. Now, however, the blanket covering her legs had dropped away, revealing a pump shotgun leveled at him, her finger on the trigger.

"You must have wondered why that portal suddenly appeared, after five days of nothing but agonized waiting," she said. "It was bait—and you swallowed it. You see, it wasn't enough for me to kill you in your century. I wanted to see you die in mine , as well."

"You hell-bitch! " And, as Leng snatched his revolver from the tray, she unloaded the 12-gauge into his chest.

The load of double-aught buck knocked him off his feet, throwing him back toward the portal and ripping a hole in his midsection, even as his own gun went off uselessly, the round going wild. Constance's wheelchair lurched under the recoil, impacting the wall behind it. She watched as Leng somersaulted backward into the glowing tunnel, blood and viscera erupting in a fountain of gore. The portal dimmed briefly, as if absorbing a meal, then flared back once again to its full, awful power.

Constance sat for a moment, breathing hard. The lab hummed with the low song of the device; there were no other sounds. It was as if Leng had never been there.

Wheeling herself a few yards along the closest wall, she reached up and painfully opened the dual industrial breaker boxes that fed the machine its 100,000 watts. As she snapped off each SF6 breaker in turn, the portal winked out; then the humming whined to a stop. She took a final glance at the panels, then twisted the three-phase main lug into the off position.

Now she moved the wheelchair to the center of the room, dark save for the glow of Mime's rack of monitoring equipment. She stopped once to check the dressing beneath her robe and to regain her breath. Then, turning the wheelchair with one hand, she faced the machine, racked the shotgun, and raised it.

The first blast tore apart the main control console, ripping it wide open, exposing a fantastically intricate web of circuits and wiring, flinging fragments of logic boards and chunks of microcircuitry outward. Pumping another round into the chamber, she noticed that the impact of her blast had torn away a reinforcing internal panel, exposing a section of much older technology. She lifted the shotgun, aimed with great effort, then sent a load of buckshot directly into the heart of the machine, smashing it into a chaos of pulverized transistors, vacuum tubes, and copper.

This blast sent her wheelchair lurching backward once again, this time tipping it over. Strength gone, in pain, Constance let the weapon slide from her hand as she rested her head on the cold floor… even as rising voices sounded in the corridor outside.