The Technologists (43 page)

“The college watchmen!” Blaikie gasped at the sounds of the whistles, then tumbled over his friends to get away.

The Tech boys would be in just as much peril as the Med Facs if they were caught and turned over.

“Run!” Marcus yelled, a watchman appearing right at their heels. Bob and Hammie went one way through the yard, Marcus and Edwin the other. “Come on!” Marcus said, glancing over his shoulder just as Edwin crashed to the ground, shoved from behind by the watchman.

“Marcus!” Edwin cried.

Marcus reversed course and tackled the man, who tumbled back the other way with a curse. Marcus pulled Edwin up and they ran on together, with a few yards’ lead on their pursuer.

“I’ll lure him away from you.”

“No, Marcus! Please don’t leave me!” Edwin cried, struggling to keep his footing.

“Get into the woods and stay low until you can get out. Meet back at Bob’s boardinghouse.”

Marcus gave Edwin a boost as they scaled the college gate. Once on the other side, the two fugitives divided up, charging headlong into the thick, gloomy woods that draped them with welcome darkness.

T
HE DREAMS HAD NOT STOPPED
.
Always, back on State Street, fighting his way through the unruly crowds as they began to pull and push one another. He turned around and around, taking in a kaleidoscope of fear, and however much he willed his feet in the dream to run, he felt himself pausing, as if commanded by fate, then knocked to the ground in the whirlwind of people.

There was the garish pink girl in glass, falling. There was the boy’s hand thrust through the melting window, fingers clutched into a seared fist. Horror after horror, some remembered, some imagined from the newspaper accounts he pored over endlessly.

In the dream he would stir from his swoon, as he had on the last day of his life as he had known it, watching the gauzy remains of a window float leisurely down, down over him, feeling its fiery tendrils settle into his scalp, his hair burned through, flowing over his ear, peppering the pores of his face. He pulled three people down to the ground as he dove for the nearest fireplug and opened the valve, expecting a torrent of water, but as though it were a cruel joke, nothing came out.

He was up, he was running for the horse trough, scattering more people in his path, groping for the valve until he released its merciful flow over his face and head.

Always at that moment he’d wake up again, and his fingers would find the craters of his face, and Joseph Cheshire would scream as loudly as his weary lungs would allow.

His fine life gone forever, he could no longer look in a mirror and know himself. It was
not
him, not Joseph Cheshire the stockbroker; it was an artificial monster who looked back at him, a monster who had to
be covered in a hood just to appear in public without frightening people. The Pinkerton detective he’d hired, Camp, had found the identity of the collegians who had been seen around the damaged wharves, as reported by the old wharf rat, and then again near the wrecked region of State Street by the union man who had accepted Camp’s bribes for information.

“What is it they’re doing?” Cheshire had asked the detective after he made his report.

“I cannot say for certain. Perhaps merely making schoolboy adventures out of observing these foul deeds,” Camp had replied.

“What is this college they attend?”

“It’s not yet been there for four years. It’s scientific, you know, as they say, polytechnic,” Camp explained without confidence that he could. “They learn mechanics and chemistry and practical arts. It is housed in an immense building over in the new land, the Back Bay, too large for the number of students enrolled. It’s said by most the place cannot survive. They’re worthless to you, I say.”

“You don’t have the power to say that—I do.”

Camp nodded slowly at this and took a puff from his dwindling cigar. “As long as you pay my fees, Mr. Cheshire. I am a professional, you know.”

“Well, I do pay, so you continue to do as I command.” Cheshire’s hot temper flared up even faster and more frequently since the day he had lost his face.

Camp touched his bowler hat and grinned. “Yes, sir, Mr. Cheshire.”

After confronting Marcus Mansfield, Cheshire was even more certain those miserable students knew something. He would see to it they were forced to reveal whatever it was. In the meantime, he had been pursuing another piece of information from the wharf rat, tracing every sailboat and yacht named
Grace
registered to all ports around Boston. Unfortunately, it was not an uncommon choice for a name.

He’d come tantalizingly close one recent evening, he believed, when he’d climbed aboard one
Grace
where he’d found it docked, and felt the boat rocking in the water. He raced to the other side, in time to see a fleeing figure jumping from one boat to the next. Cheshire had no chance to catch him. When he sent Camp to watch the boat, it was gone.

But Cheshire felt sure he was drawing nearer to his quarry. He would discover who mauled his face with chemicals and destroyed his life, and would tear apart anyone in his way. Indeed, it was all he lived for now. Simple vengeance. Feed the monster. More lines from the Bible he had been forced to memorize as a child returned to him each day, sometimes jumbled or mixed with words from his own dreams.

Those responsible would suffer as much as and more than he’d suffered.

He applied the ammonia solution to his face ten times a day, at first, then five times a day. As he dyed his mustache, which had been bleached ghostly white, he prayed those long hours for satisfaction against his unknown enemies. His life’s chief mission.

Cheshire always had a plan in reserve; this was no exception. If the newspapermen failed to act, he had another way in mind. Camp had reported Marcus Mansfield walking arm in arm at the harbor with a serving girl named Agnes. As a domestic, she would be an easy target to capture, and then he could force the Tech boy to give answers in return for her life. She was a pretty maid, Camp had told him. This plan, indeed, could promise an even greater personal satisfaction for the stockbroker.

He was ready for the day. His first stop would be the office of the
Boston Telegraph
, where he would leave a detailed description of what those Institute of Technology boys had been doing. There would be an investigation, and everything they had discovered would be revealed. Technology fools! He’d use that information, along with Simon Camp’s help, to track down and destroy his real prey.

He walked down his front steps, wearing the hood he had grown accustomed to using as a cover for the painful half-healed scars on his
face. Though others grumbled about the heavy rains that had fallen this spring, he welcomed them, for the dark clouds masked his hideous looks and protected his scars from the sun. He carried his dagger with him, having a vague sense as he stalked his enemies that they might be stalking him. That instinct grew sharper as he proceeded at this hour, and he kept his hand on the handle of his dagger inside his coat, alert for any sign of danger.

“Cheshire.”

The call reached his damaged ears in an echo; it could have come from some distance or from close proximity. He unsheathed his dagger and swung around. Let them try to catch him off guard.

“Cheshire, here!”

He looked up and was nearly blinded by the flash of metal from what appeared to be a military uniform in the window opposite. Decoration Day was coming, and more uniforms, some battered and others fresh, could be seen up and down Boston being aired out. He squinted and realized that he was looking right at a rifle pointed at him.

“Technology lives!” came the cry, as the blast of the rifle sounded.

In a reflex, Cheshire’s eyes closed and he felt faint, as he had that day on State Street. But then he realized he had been untouched. Opening his eyes, reality rushed in on him. The shot had flown behind him, hitting a gas main. Cheshire gripped his dagger and grinned at his good fortune: He was looking squarely at his enemy’s face, and would now have his chance for revenge. Then he heard a hiss, hypnotic and loud. He realized he was standing over a sewer. He tried to jump away, but it was too late. From below the grate, a geyser of flames swirled up and over him, enclosing him entirely in its white-hot vortex.

T
HE SUN SHOWED ITSELF
that morning, though a flock of clouds was drifting in. When the bell sounded for Sunday services in the Harvard chapel, the young men appearing around the campus yard rubbed their eyes and yawned with great spiritual emphasis. One of those strolling along the middle walk of the yard was more exhausted than the rest. Yes, some of the Harvard seniors might have been jollifying late into the night in their rooms; certainly a few of the freshes had been much occupied, systematically breaking the windows of the most hated sophs. But this particular collegian had been in Norton’s Woods right outside the college yard for half the night, in hiding, covered in bugs and inspected now and then by the frogs.

Once Edwin had crossed into the woods and separated from Marcus, he’d tripped over a large tree root and fallen into the dirt. He’d only scratched his knees a little, but he felt safer pressed against the earth. The watchman’s heavy footsteps and shrill whistles eventually gave way to eerie silence. He knew Marcus would have eluded the pursuer to meet up with Bob back in Boston, where they would be expecting Edwin to come, too. Nothing ever seemed to diminish Marcus’s inner calm and composure, least of all the threat of danger to himself. But Edwin had felt paralyzed at the notion of making an attempt to show himself in the streets, imagining a barricade of policemen lurking there for him. His forte was chess, not cards; so he would patiently wait for the right move. He did not have the physical strength to run all night, and was hesitant to navigate much deeper into the thick woods all around Harvard’s gates. Besides, if the watchmen were still looking for them, they would be smart to be posted on the edge of the woods. No, the safest way out
was through the college yard itself. He had known the prayer bell would ring in just a few hours, and the yard would be overrun with students. He could walk straight through to the gates. He would blend in. So he had remained on his mattress of pine cones and soil with the bugs.

His clothing wasn’t quite as neat as he’d like, even after brushing off the pine needles and shaking loose the dirt on his vest and coat. But not every Harvard boy was a dandy, and he could see at a glance suits nearly as crumpled and wrinkled as his own at this hour. He found a place behind a group of four or five such fellows sluggishly flowing toward the chapel.

As they neared their destination, the path clogged up with students, slowing Edwin’s advance toward the gates, where he would be clear to exit. Two college watchmen appeared at the edge of the crowd. Were they looking for Edwin, or just ensuring that students fulfilled the college rules by finding their way to the chapel before the second bell?

“You,” said one of the watchmen.

Edwin, swallowing hard, slowly turned around to face him. “Yes, sir?”

“Where is your Bible?”

He looked around dumbly.

“We’ve had too many fellows sleeping in chapel,” continued the official, “instead of reading their Bible.”

“Forgot,” he managed to say in response. “I’ll retrieve it. Thank you.”

“Quickly, boy!”

Edwin steered his steps away from the chapel toward the gates. Keeping his head down so he would not appear too eager, he nearly walked headlong into a man rushing along an intersecting path.