The Dead Gentleman (10 page)

The cover was faded and cracked. I could barely make out an illustration of the Earth, surrounded by a ring of other, smaller planets. “Silly drawing,” I said. “So, what’s the lock about? This thing hollowed out or what? You keep your cash in there?”

“The
Encyclopedia Imagika
isn’t worth anything in currency. But the lock does guard a treasure.”

I tested the cover—it was unlocked. I felt a familiar itch in my fingertips. “So what sort of treasure? Jewels?”

“Words.”

That gave me pause. “Words? Words are your big treasure? You’re joking, right?” I flipped open the book, which was no easy task, given the size of the thing, and looked. It was no joke. It was filled with words. There were some sketches of strange buildings and such, but mostly just words.

“Turn to page one thousand five. Under the heading
Lemuria, Ancient
.”

I flipped until I found the page marked one thousand five—which was not even close to the halfway point—and looked it over. About halfway down was a drawing of some kind of temple built into the face of a giant hunk of rock. “This it?”

“Yes. Now read the entry. Out loud, if you please.”

“It’s all faded,” I said, quickly letting go of the page. “Besides, I lost my spectacles in the tussle with the Duke.”

“Glasses? You?”

“Fine, I’ve just never had much use for reading, all right?”

“Fair enough,” answered the Captain gently. “There’ll be time enough to correct that, I suppose. What it says is that the Lemuria Outcropping was part of the ancient Lemurian civilization,
which disappeared thousands of years ago beneath the waves.”

“Disappeared? How?”

“No one knows for sure. Could’ve been an earthquake. Some say it was swallowed by a kraken, though I think that’s a load of poppycock. Regardless, the Outcropping is what they left behind. A single shelf of rock, and the ruins of a temple. But what’s even more astounding, what makes this place so very special, is that Lemuria never existed on Earth!”

“Sorry?”

“The ruins fell through the Kraken’s Gorge portal, but they fell through the
other side
. Into our world. What you are looking at is a chunk of another planet, Tommy.”

“Can’t see much of anything right now,” I said. The view outside the portal was just mostly black water and shadows again.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about that.” The Captain threw some kind of switch and the powerful floodlights on the outside of the hull grew even brighter, illuminating more of the dark ocean around us.

I’ll admit now that I hold on to a few happy memories of my mother. Despite what I said before, there are one or two times that I don’t mind talking about. One was the night she took me to see a play. I can’t remember the name, or much about the story, even—something to do with gods and heroes. But I do remember the scenery. It seemed enormous at the time, a wall of tall stone columns and ornate arches, lit by flickering footlights and multicolored lanterns. The backdrop was a painted landscape of purple clouds drifting over a burning orange sun. Though my mother explained that the whole thing was just a construction of paint and wood, I hadn’t believed her. It was too massive, too
solid to be anything but real, weather-beaten stone. It was the most awe-inspiring thing I had ever seen.

All that was gift paper compared to the temple of Lemuria. Perched atop a tall outcropping of rock, the underwater temple dwarfed the
Nautilus
. It was so gigantic that the ship’s floodlights could light up only a small portion of the whole thing. A twisting archway, broken in places and barnacle-covered, shone green-gray in the lights. Beyond were the ruins of a once-great building, now a graveyard of toppled statues and crumbled chambers.

But what unnerved me, what caught my breath in my throat and kept it there, were the proportions of the place. They were all wrong. The steps were not carved for ordinary feet. The gates were not built to be opened by human hands.

This was not a massive temple built for men … this was a small temple built for something much bigger.

“Giants,” I whispered.

“Hmm?” asked Scott. “Oh, yes. I suppose so. The Lemurians were on the largish side. Which, again, makes the kraken theory a bit suspect.”

The
Nautilus
slowed as we approached the arch. The water here was hazy and thick with silt. The effect was like driving a carriage through the fog—the diffused light played tricks on your eyes.

“I … it’s just … I’ve never dreamed …”

Scott chuckled. “I know, I know. This is all a whirlwind, Tommy, and for that I apologize. But I had to take quite a detour to come get you, and that’s put us behind schedule. You’re going to have to learn as you go—”

The Captain was interrupted by a bell dinging somewhere, followed by another even shriller than the first. Merlin began to
whistle and chirp in a way that I recognized. I’d heard that song plenty of times in the last few weeks—it meant trouble.

“What’s wrong?”

Scott pulled a long cylinder down from the ceiling and peered through a kind of window at its base. It looked like one of those moving-picture boxes you’d see at fairs and the like.

“Unbelievable,” the Captain said, clucking his tongue. “Of all the things …”

“What?”

“Bit embarrassed to say it, but it looks like we’re about to be swallowed by a kraken.”

Bernie removed his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as he let out a long, worried sigh. “I know how it sounds. But you must believe me, Tommy Learner is long dead and buried.”

“It sounds like a load of—”

“Language, now, young lady.”

“Forget my language, Bernie. I’m telling you he’s not dead. He can’t be—I saw him. He spoke to me!”

“A great poet once said that there was more to this Earth than is imagined in your philosophy.”

“Okay, there is something weird going on—but it has got to be something explainable! Something to do with, like, magnetic fields or gas leaks that cause hallucinations or … 
anything
other than a … a ghost story.”

“Would you prefer that? Would you really rather learn that
this is all in your head? A silly daydream, maybe?”

Jezebel started to answer in the affirmative, but she hesitated. What did she want the truth to be? As of yesterday, when she first saw Tommy in the basement, her life had become … unique. Terrifying, yes, but also unique. In the last day and a half she’d experienced excitement that had nothing to do with ex–best friends or first kisses or growing up. Her life had suddenly turned mysterious; did she want to chalk all that up to an overactive imagination?

“Then what is the truth, Bernie? What’s going on?”

The old man shook his head. “I don’t know everything, myself. But Tommy Learner was a member of the Explorers’ Society, a secret organization that existed over a hundred years ago. The Explorers are all gone now—disappeared. But if you are right, if that really was Tommy, somehow, miraculously, alive and in the flesh, then he’s the very last one.”

Jezebel looked at Bernie, this little old man surrounded by bits and pieces of junk, and thought of people who sit in their basements wearing tinfoil hats, afraid the Martians are trying to get into their minds. But if Bernie needed a tinfoil hat, then Jez should start making one, too. She was just as crazy as he was.

“How do you know all this stuff?” she asked.

Bernie walked over to the closet and pulled down a giant, leather-bound book. The old man grunted and groaned as he hauled it over to the table. The mechanical bird whistled at him.

“It’s all right, Merlin,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I’m lifting with my legs.”

The book landed on the table with a loud thump, spilling
newspapers everywhere and sending little springs and cogs rolling in all directions.

“This book,” he said, breathing heavily, “is called the
Encyclopedia Imagika
. It’s part history of the Explorers’ Society, part encyclopedia of the bizarre, and part textbook. You can see it’s a bit unwieldy.”

Jezebel stepped forward and ran her hands along the spine. It felt old and sturdy. On the cover was a kind of padlock that dangled, broken, from its clasp.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but according to this book, these Explorers traveled between different worlds,” Bernie said.

“What, you mean like astronauts?”

“No, more like
inter
-nauts. They didn’t travel through outer space. They traveled through inter-space. You’ve heard of quantum mechanics?”

Jez nodded. “Sure. A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and somebody’s cat explodes here in New York.”

“Eh, not quite, but close. At its most basic, it means that everything is connected. And beyond your charming butterfly/cat example, that means that many planets in our great universe are connected by more than just distance. The Explorers called them portals. Today we would call them wormholes.”

“Uh-huh,” Jez said. “Bernie, ghosts are one thing, but now you’re getting all science fiction-y on me.”

He held up his hand. “Just bear with me. These Explorers used these wormholes, these little doorways in reality, to travel the cosmos. They are rare, but they are definitely real. Hidden from the perceptions of most people.”

Bernie looked over his shoulder at the mechanical bird, and though she couldn’t be sure, Jez thought the bird nodded at him,
ever so slightly. As if it was encouraging him to continue.

“But the book also talks about something else—a great evil that the Explorers discovered. A thing totally malevolent and filled with hatred of all living things.”

Jez went cold as she remembered what the ghost boy had said.

“The Dead Gentleman,” she said. “Tommy warned me about him.”

Bernie nodded as he patted the book. “I couldn’t be sure until just now, but hearing that nearly confirms it. The Dead Gentleman is coming. He may already be here.”

“Bernie,” said Jez. “How do you know about all this? I mean, where did you get that book, and that … Merlin thingy? Who are you? Really?”

Bernie took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt as he squinted at the little mechanical bird.

“I’m someone who’s trying to make up for lost time. I’m trying to set things right, in my own small way.”

“Well, that’s great, but you still haven’t answered my question. I need to know what is going on—last night I was attacked in my own room! Monsters came out of my closet, Bernie!”

“Your closet?” Bernie put his glasses back on and peered at her. “I’ve long worried about the basement of this old building, but this is a troubling development. Your apartment could be a direct portal to the Dead Gentleman’s world. You cannot go back there. It isn’t safe.”

Jezebel suddenly pictured her father sleeping, oblivious. She imagined her closet door slowly creaking open and a dead, rotted hand reaching out of the darkness.

“Dad! He’s still up there!”

Jez turned and started for the doorway. How could she have been so selfish? She had been so caught up in whether or not he would believe her that she hadn’t even bothered to consider that he might be in danger, too.

She ran to the stairwell.

“No, Jezebel! Wait!” Bernie started after her, but his leg stiffened up on him. He fumbled around, looking for his walking stick. Jezebel didn’t wait for him to find it.

Into the lobby and past the elevator she ran. As she bolted by the elevator doors, Jez noticed that the number was lit on twelve—her floor. It didn’t move. It stayed there.

She heard Bernie’s voice calling after her, but it soon disappeared as she began sprinting, two steps at a time, up the long stairs.

She was halfway there, and totally out of breath, when things began to slither in the shadows. The stairwell was not very well lit, and the weak fluorescents barely kept the darkness at bay. Jez was careful to avoid the small pools of shadow that had settled into corners and around doorways, for whenever she turned her back on one she’d catch a glimpse of
something
moving. It wasn’t a shape exactly, it was more like a disturbance in the dark, like the ripples on a pond when something big comes too close to the surface.

Whether the pounding of her heart in her ears was from exhaustion or fear, she wasn’t sure, but she tried to calm her panic and keep going. One foot at a time. Around floor seven she began to hear voices. She was taking the stairs slowly now, her calf muscles trembling in protest, and she’d just slipped past a shadowy spot on the floor when the lightbulb overhead began to flicker. Its strobe light effect made her dizzy. She saw then that on the floors
above her, it was all darkness. Beneath the buzz of the faltering lightbulb she heard a low, unintelligible murmuring followed by a single whispered answer:

“Jezzzzzebeeeel …”

Once again her arms and legs threatened to turn to stone and she could barely move. Just like her experience at the closet, she was being held in place by more than simply her own terror. Shaking off this strange paralysis was like forcing oneself to wake from a bad dream, but since she’d broken free once before, it was easier the second time.