Alistair Grim's Odditorium (19 page)

“Cor blimey!” I said, relieved. “You mean you’re not going to beat me, sir?”

“Beat you?” said Mr. Grim, aghast. “Certainly not, Master Grubb. Everyone makes mistakes, but you have shown courage and honesty in the face of adversity—not to mention
quite a bit of resourcefulness—which is why I’d like to offer you a job as my apprentice.”

“Your
apprentice,
sir?” I asked, amazed.

“I’m not getting any younger, and I’d be lying if I said all this Nightshade business hasn’t made me mindful of my own mortality. I could use a boy like you to help carry
on here, should something happen to me. And so, I am promoting you from resident chummy to sorcerer’s apprentice—that is, if you want the job.”

“But of course, sir!” I cried, my heart swelling. “Oh, thank you, sir!”

“Very well, then, we’ll work out the particulars later.” Mr. Grim pulled down on a nearby sconce, and his desk slid back to reveal the trapdoor in the floor. “But for
now, you run along with Nigel. And send in Lord Dreary, will you? I did promise him an introduction to Gwendolyn, did I not?”

Mr. Grim winked, and the giant birdcage began its descent from the ceiling.

“Yes, sir, oh, thank you, sir!” I cried, and I dashed out into the parlor. “Mr. Grim would like to see you now, Lord Dreary, sir!”

Lord Dreary, oblivious to my happiness, muttered something about a stiff upper lip and then hurried into the library.

“Looks like you swallowed a bucket of sunshine,” Nigel said. “Everything turn out all right, then?”

“Oh yes, Nigel! Mr. Grim asked me to be his apprentice!”

“Well done, lad!” Nigel said, patting me on the back. “A wise choice, I might add, but no time to celebrate now. We’ve got work to do.”

Nigel motioned for me to follow him.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Why, to the garret. If the boss wants to find out where the Odditorium has jumped to, the garret is where we must begin.”

Nigel opened the secret panel beside the lift, and I followed him inside. The shaft was pitch-black. Nearly all of the Odditorium’s blue sconce lights had gone out—a result, Mr. Grim
had explained earlier, of having to run on the power reserves. And as we climbed the stairs, Nigel removed his goggles to light our way.

“Watch your step, Grubb,” he said.

The animus from his eyes certainly was bright enough, and as we passed the first landing, I spied a door that I determined to be a secret entrance beside the lift on the fourth floor—the
same floor on which the long hallway with the marred portraits was located. I so badly wanted to ask Nigel about Cleona the trickster; but as we pressed on, I decided it was not the proper time to
talk about swirly chalk mustaches and A.G.’s spotty bottom.

“Here we are, then,” Nigel said as we came to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Nigel pushed it open, and the two of us hoisted ourselves up into the garret.

As with most garrets, the ceiling was low, and Nigel had to hunch over to keep from bumping his head. In the center of the room was a pair of ladders, each leading up to a hatch that opened onto
the roof. Beside each ladder stood a pair of samurai with their swords drawn. The late afternoon sunlight shone down on them from the hatches, casting their face masks in shadow so that only the
blue of their eyes could be seen.

“Hallo, hallo,” Nigel said. “You gents still hanging about?” The samurai, as usual, did not respond. “Carry on, then. Back to your posts.”

The samurai promptly sheathed their weapons and shuffled past us, one by one disappearing down through the trapdoor.

Nigel stepped over a large pipe and skirted around one of the ladders. The garret was nearly filled to capacity with a massive tangle of clockwork gears and flues—all of it packed together
so tightly that it seemed impossible that any of it could actually work.

“Over here, Grubb,” Nigel said. And as I joined him beside the ladder, I noticed that he was staring up at a colony of bats hanging upside down from the ceiling.

I gasped and backed away. Being a chummy, I’d had my share of run-ins with bats, thank you very much, and I knew better than to go bothering with them—unless, of course, I wanted to
get my ears bitten.

“Don’t be afraid, Grubb,” Nigel said, unhooking a bat from the ceiling. “These ain’t your typical belfry bats.”

As Nigel held the bat close to his glowing blue eyes, I could tell right away that the creature wasn’t a real bat at all, but a mechanical bat made entirely of black metal.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Nigel whispered, and a thin bolt of animus shot out from each of his eyes, enveloping the bat in a shimmering ball of sparkles. The bat instantly sprang to
life, its eyes aglow with animus as it flapped its inky black wings and let out a screech.

“Cor blimey!” I gasped. Perhaps Nigel was the source of the animus after all.

“Good morning, child,” Nigel said, and then he set the bat atop his shoulder. Nigel did the same for all of them, one by one bringing them to life and wishing them good morning until
he had a dozen or so of the black mechanicals perched atop his massive shoulders.

“Come along then, children,” he said. He replaced his goggles and headed for one of the ladders. “That means you, too, Grubb.”

The big man climbed up and squeezed himself through the open hatch. I followed him, and as I stepped out onto the roof, I spied the upper gunnery for the first time. One of its cannons had
indeed been blown off, and the turret’s blue energy was deactivated.

“Over here, Grubb,” Nigel said, and I joined him at the edge of the roof just as he set down the last of the bats on the Odditorium’s castlelike battlements. Nigel didn’t
seem worried about their animus attracting the doom dogs, and so I knew that the tiny mechanicals had to be covered in Mr. Grim’s magic paint. Just like the Odditorium.

“Be mindful of danger, children,” Nigel said. “I expect all of you to come back safe and sound, do you hear?”

The bats nodded their mechanical heads and chomped their mechanical jaws.

“Right-o, then, off you go!” And with a loud clap of his hands the big man sent the bats scattering away in every direction. “Safe and sound, children!” he called after
them. “Safe and sound!”

The bats screeched their good-byes, and the two of us watched them fly away—their cries quickly fading as they grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Finally, when the last of the bats
had disappeared into the setting sun, I asked, “Where are they going, Nigel?”

“In search of land,” he replied. “It’ll be dark soon. Mr. Grim can steer the Odditorium by the stars, but first we need to know how close we are to land. Wouldn’t
be sensible for us to travel west if land was closer east.”

Nigel heaved a heavy sigh and leaned with his elbows upon the battlements. I wasn’t tall enough to do the same, so I just stood there gazing up at him.

“Will they be able to find their way back?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Nigel said. “That is, if they don’t run out of animus first.”

“You mean they fizzle out like Mack?”

“No, the bats have to be recharged from time to time, as does everything else what runs on the animus. Mack, on the other hand, fizzles out but then comes back. He
never
has to be
recharged. And for the life of him, Mr. Grim can’t figure out why.”

“Is that why he’s always in the shop?”

“That’s right, Grubb. So, until the Odditorium is up and running again with blue animus, we won’t be able to go anywhere.”

“But if that space jump drained the Odditorium of its blue animus, how come it didn’t drain you of yours too?”

Nigel shot me a look of surprise—not the best way to ask him about his blue energy, I had to admit—but then the big man heaved a heavy sigh, as if he knew this question had been
coming.

“The animus works differently in a person than it does in a machine,” he said simply. “Same reason why the doom dogs don’t come for me. The animus is safe inside my body.
However, unlike Mack, I have to be recharged from time to time.”

Guess I was mistaken, I thought. If Nigel has to be recharged, then he cannot possibly be the source of the animus.

“I suppose you’re afraid of me now, eh, Grubb?” Nigel said quietly.

“But of course not! Why would I be afraid of you? Animus or no animus, you’re still my friend, aren’t you, Nigel?”

“That I am, Grubb,” Nigel said, smiling. But as he gazed out over the sea, once again his face took on the same sad expression that I had seen in the marketplace.

“Begging your pardon, Nigel,” I said after a moment. “But since we’re friends, may I ask what you’re thinking about when you look so sad?”

The big man turned to me. “You can tell I’m sad without seeing my eyes?”

“I suppose I can, yes. Is it because you miss your brother William?”

Nigel hung his head a bit, then turned back toward the sea. “No, not William,” he said. “I don’t give him much thought anymore. The one I’m missing is
Maggie.”

“Who’s Maggie, Nigel?”

“Maggie is William’s daughter.”

“Oh,” I said, swallowing. “Is she—?”

“Dead?” Nigel asked, and I nodded. “No, Grubb. Maggie is as alive as you are. A little older than you, in fact, and healthy as one of Mr. Grim’s horses.”

“Where is she?”

“It’s all a bit complicated, Grubb. But since you’re going to be Mr. Grim’s apprentice, I suppose I’ll have to explain it to you sooner or later.”

Nigel and I sat down with our backs against the battlements.

“Maggie’s mum,” Nigel began, “died in childbirth, so right from the start it was up to William to raise Maggie on his own. He had a hard go of it at first, but eventually
he managed to make a comfortable life for the two of them working as a coachman for Judge Mortimer Hurst.”

I gasped. “The same Judge Hurst what caused all that fuss today?”

“That’s right, Grubb. William used to work at the stables where Judge Hurst boarded his horses. The judge took a liking to William and offered him a job—took a liking to little
Maggie, too, and would often let her ride with him in his coach.

“But you see,” Nigel went on, “Judge Hurst, when he wasn’t sentencing people to hang, was also a collector of antiquities. And along with Mr. Grim and Lord Dreary, he
sometimes did business with an elderly gentleman by the name of Abel Wortley.”

“Abel Wortley—the man Judge Hurst said your brother William done in!”

“Right-o, Grubb. Abel Wortley was a purveyor of antiquities just like Mr. Grim used to be. And oftentimes Judge Hurst would send William to fetch the old man for society meetings where
they could show off their latest acquisitions.

“Well, one night when William went to pick up Mr. Wortley at his house, the old man didn’t come down. Neither did his housekeeper, for that matter. William thought this strange, of
course, but Judge Hurst told him not to bother about it and gave him the rest of the night off. And so William spent the evening playing with Maggie at his lodgings. She was just shy of four years
old at the time but smart as a whip, she was, and the apple of her father’s eye.”

Nigel smiled, but I could hear in his voice that he had grown sad again.

“Anyhow,” he said with a sigh, “an inspector from Scotland Yard met William at the stables the next morning. You see, Abel Wortley and his housekeeper had been done in the
night before. Stabbed to death and robbed, they was, around the same time William was there. And so he became the prime suspect. William protested his innocence, of course, but when the inspector
found some of the stolen items in the judge’s coach—”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes, Grubb. Judge Hurst could easily account for his whereabouts, so who else had been at Wortley’s around the time the old man got himself done in?”

I swallowed hard, speechless.

“Needless to say, the evidence against William was damning. However, when Judge Hurst visited him in the clink, he told William that if he went quietly to the gallows, Maggie would be
provided for. Gave William his word that he would send her off to live in the country with his sister. A proper lady, she is, what can’t have children of her own. So you see, that’s
where Maggie lives today. With Judge Hurst’s sister.”

“So then William confessed his guilt?”

“Either way, he was going to hang, so why not give his daughter a better life? The judge’s sister could provide for Maggie in ways that William never could. And best of all, she
could set Maggie on the path to becoming a proper lady.”

“But Nigel, if William didn’t murder Abel Wortley, then who did?”

“Well, that’s where things get a bit tricky. And that’s where Mr. Grim comes in.”

“Mr. Grim?”

“You see, Mr. Grim had been a friend of Wortley’s too. And being his friend, he spent a lot of time in the old man’s study. Even after Elizabeth—” Nigel abruptly
stopped and cleared his throat. “That is, even after Mr. Grim removed himself from society and began collecting Odditoria, Mr. Wortley was one of the few friends with whom he still
associated. And being that he spent so much time in the old man’s study, when he visited the crime scene, he had a fair idea of what the robbers had taken.”

“The items found in the coach?”