A Stranger in the Garden Read online

  That depends. It’s in chaos that the true opportunity for power arises.

  “So I once believed,” Charles said. He sighed, wishing he could fall asleep.

  But the Grue murmured on and his hunger gnawed at Charles so terribly that at one point he found himself kneeling on the floor, trying to chew at the bedpost.

  “What is this madness?” he whispered, and the words fell into echoes around the guttered candle on the nightstand.

  He climbed back into bed and slid under the coverlet, though his blood seemed to run hot and cold. He was thankful the doctor and his colleagues hadn’t seen fit to bleed him as a physick of New London might have. The blood would have driven him mad with hunger.

  Before dawn had even begun to seep through the shuttered windows, they came for him. Dr. Gully and a manservant stripped him naked and then wrapped him in cold, wet sheets. They covered him again with blankets. He froze and burned for an hour before they returned and put him on a gurney, which they wheeled down corridors and passageways to a high-ceilinged, stone-lined room.

  They sat him in a chair and tied him to it.

  There was a little arched window high above him where the morning light poured through. Everything turned white, and he was reminded of nothing so much as Corinna turning the fog into living starlight.

  The first bucket caught him unawares. In fact, in his weakened state, he imagined it was Corinna returning again to warn him of how much good he still had left to do. But as the light poured down, it became water. The freezing cold Malvern water slapped him. For a moment, he was startlingly awake and alive. Then, he was in terrible icy pain.

  When that was finished, Charles was wheeled into the Malvern pump room where he was fed dry biscuits and more of the water.

  The Grue hated it.

  The water was pure, unadulterated magic.

  It was the same kind of odd magic he had felt when he’d tried to summon it in this world for the first time, the same he’d discovered in the standing stone circle, only thousands of times more powerful and pure.

  It was a magic the Grue hated.

  STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP. His howling was like a fire in Charles’s brain.

  He began vomiting and they rushed him to his room. They administered the laudanum again, laced perhaps with the concoction they’d discussed earlier. They wound a thick, damp sheet laden with herbs—a Neptune’s girdle—around his waist. The Grue could feel the herbs, and he hated them, too.

  He gasped in pain as the Grue moved toward his back, but the girdle was woven all about him.

  The next morning was the same treatment: cold sheets, dousing with buckets of water, ingesting the waters. They gave Charles more of the poison remedy this time, and then they put him in a hot sulfur bath.

  Lastly, they administered the syrup of ipecac. Charles had no idea what to expect, but suddenly everything was on fire inside him. Dr. Gully watched him.

  “Get a bucket,” he said to his nurse. “A big one. And line it with the syrup.”

  It was as if he was being torn asunder. The Grue was coming out and there was no stopping him.

  Charles remembered how delicately he had opened his mouth to the Grue, the way it felt when the Grue had crawled inside him, small as a slug. He remembered the illness that took over for days as his body tried unsuccessfully to reject its new inhabitant. It was then the Grue had driven him to feed for the first time as he tried to gain control. Their odd union had been reinforced by the raw myth of sylphs devoured in the Cataloging Room.

  Now it was all that in reverse. Charles’s body was desperately trying to rid itself of the Grue, and the Grue was at last trying to rid himself of Charles. The nurse placed the bucket below him as he heaved out of the tub of hot water, wet sheets dragging at his limbs.

  And then, like a worm popped from a canker, the Grue was out.

  Charles’s throat was raw and burned and he could not speak, but at long last there was silence in his head.

  He knew who he was again.

  Charles convinced them to put the Grue in a specimen jar. He found it more than fitting, considering the number of specimens the Grue had consumed in his hunger. The Grue was a sad, shriveled thing—a wizened rat of the starlit being he must once have been.

  Dr. Gully wanted to study him, but Charles demurred. The Grue had caused enough trouble.

  He was sick for days after that, and he continued to take the water cure, sans poison. When he was strong enough, Charles did the full treatment, walking five miles between all the springs of Malvern and drinking the water along the way. It was a beautiful little town, and he was grateful to be able to notice this. He had not truly seen beauty with his own eyes in more than a year.

  It made him long to stay, but Corinna’s words goaded him. You must get back to your world. You cannot long be separate from the magic of your birth.

  He felt in his bones that this was true. Malvern’s waters were sustaining him now, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was the wrong kind of magical fuel. Eventually, he would burn out.

  The problem was quite simply that he had no idea how he was going to get home.

  The Grue had brought him here. Without him, Charles didn’t know how he would get back. He mused over this as he wandered the tree-lined path and came to the next spring. He wished, oddly, that Vespa were here, though they had never been friends. But she had always been so very clever and could get herself out of any scrape. Surely she could have figured out this one.

  When he entered the pump room, a man with dark, wavy hair a bit older than him bent over the wellhead, inspecting it. He drank from his own cup, eschewing the one provided. He was the first person Charles had been near besides Gully and his staff since he’d been brought here.

  Then the man turned and looked at him, irritation crossing his face at being intruded upon. Once again, Charles was faced with meeting a Saint in the flesh. Saint Tesla of the New Creation stood before him.

  “Sir,” he murmured, before he scooped up the waters in the cup and drank.

  Tesla nodded and departed rapidly after that, as if Charles had interrupted his reverie with the machinery.

  But a tiny idea sparked in Charles’s brain.

  If Tesla had opened the doors between worlds once, surely he could do it again.

  Charles pursued Tesla in a leisurely fashion, rather like the Grue would have done but without his darker purpose. He was finally allowed to take mealtimes with other recovering patients, so Charles watched for Tesla in the canteen, hoping for an opportunity.

  He was never there, of course. He preferred to take meals on his own.

  Charles didn’t want to make inquiries about Tesla, as word might have gotten back to him and made him even more unapproachable. Their next meeting had to be as natural a discovery as the one in the pump room, and the timing of Charles’s request must be perfect. Charles sensed that Tesla was prickly, not to be trifled with. He had read descriptions of the Saint that said he was a prideful man, deeply obsessed with his own creations. If he appealed to Tesla’s ego and inventiveness, Charles hoped he would be interested in his proposition. First, though, he needed to earn Tesla’s trust.

  Charles just wished he wasn’t running out of time.

  When Dr. Gully next examined him, he was pleased with his progress, but still concerned over how anemic and wasted Charles looked.

  “I think you will be ready to be released in a fortnight,” he said, “though I do worry about how you’re going to get on.”

  Much as he owed them, Charles hoped he wasn’t here in a fortnight. Still, he said, “If you might consider me as an apprentice, I would love to stay on and work off my debt to you. I have no other means of repayment.”

  “I’ll consider it,” Dr. Gully said. He glanced at the nightstand on which rested the jar where the Grue swam in alcohol. “Though I am guessing you could sell that at auction to a collector and become more than wealthy enough overnight to repay me.”

  Charles shook his head. “I
think it would be best if I keep it. It’s a powerful reminder of my failings. I think every man should have those nearby to help him strive to do better.”

  “Well said,” Gully replied, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. “Well said, indeed.” He looked Charles over once again. “I think you can dispense with the Neptune’s Girdle now. The herbs have done their work. Just keep up the exercise and stick to the diet we feed you, and bathe in the waters once a day. And drink them, of course.”

  Charles nodded. He would be glad to finally be able to wear normal clothing again. Walking about in wet sheets had been odd. The only consolation had been that everyone else did it too.

  When Gully left, Charles considered the jar. What the doctor had said was true. People in New London had kept all sorts of collections, and he guessed it was the same here. The right collector of oddities would surely find this homunculus very appealing.

  He walked over to the chair and bent so he could peer directly into the Grue’s shriveled red eye. He swore he almost saw a tiny twitch. He was not certain the Grue was fully dead.

  He could bury him as Darwin had done with Corinna or toss him into a river and forget about him. But that would leave the possibility that some unsuspecting person might find him. Charles wasn’t sure if destroying him was even possible, but he knew he still lacked the proper magic to do so in this world.

  No, he was fairly certain he could never be rid of the Grue. He was Charles’s burden to manage—the price he paid for his foolishness. Thank goodness that at least the Grue was no longer the puppet master pulling his strings.

  The thought made him feel strangely bereft. He had to go home and right the wrongs there. Somehow, he must.

  He wandered out into the evening, all these thoughts weighing heavily on his heart. He ate in silence at the canteen, grateful for the ability to eat real food once again. He was also grateful that he no longer looked at people as meals on legs. His fellow patients, most of them suffering from consumption or other such mundane maladies, would have been easy pickings for the Grue.

  When he left the canteen and entered the twilight evening, he wished he had a coat to bundle himself against the autumn chill. Wood smoke hung heavy on the air, but beneath that, he could smell the tang of cigars. He knew that Gully forbade smoking or drinking throughout Malvern, so the fact that someone was flaunting the doctor’s edict made him curious.

  Gully provided a library for his patients, mostly books about water cures and homeopathy. Charles had browsed through them, but not lingered long, remembering the dusty books of the Archives and the horror he’d made there.

  Tonight, though, he entered to find a single lantern burning at a table, and Saint Tesla hard at work. A cigar burned down in a tray near him but he obviously wasn’t smoking it.

  Tesla did not look up, but noticed Charles’s attention. “It helps me think, even if it is not healthful.”

  He looked up with a tight smile.

  “I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just saw the light and thought perhaps I’d search for a book.”

  “Help yourself,” he said, waving a hand toward the bookcases before going back to his work.

  Charles browsed aimlessly, glancing at Tesla now and then. What he wanted was not on any of these shelves.

  He edged toward Tesla until he could see a bit over his shoulder at what the Saint was sketching. There were two great poles and between them . . . Charles gasped and tried to hide it too late with a cough.

  Tesla rolled up the paper with a snap and jabbed the pen back into the inkwell.

  He turned to look at Charles with a baleful expression. “I do not appreciate spying, sir,” he said. He stood and continued to gather his things. “Good evening.”

  “I apologize. I certainly did not mean to spy.” He proffered his hand. “Charles Waddingly, at your most humble service.”

  Tesla looked at his hand but didn’t take it. Charles retracted it, and the Saint said, almost but not quite apologetically, “I abhor the touch of human flesh.”

  Unsure what to say, Charles nodded. He had read of some of Saint Tesla’s odd proclivities. It was said that his genius bordered on madness, that the Saint had preferred automatons to humans, and coiled cables and gears to human conversation.

  “I suspect you know who I am and what I do,” Tesla said.

  Charles couldn’t help smiling. “Yes.” Quite possibly more than Tesla himself did.

  “Then I hope you will keep this meeting confidential,” Tesla said. “No one must know I am here. I would lose credibility with my peers.”

  “No one will hear it from my lips,” Charles said.

  “Many would pay to know where I have disappeared to. I am hounded everywhere I go. Edison himself has offered me fifty thousand to come work for him in America. I am on my way, but I needed . . .” He stopped. Tesla was a curious blend of egomania and reticence. Charles had never met anyone like him.

  Edison. He had heard of the minor Saint, but never the land in which he lived.

  “I would guess you needed privacy and time like the rest of us,” Charles said.

  “I am not like other men,” Tesla said, bristling just a little. “I needed to be able to let this vision unfold in the clear air.”

  “This vision?” Charles asked.

  Tesla sized him up as if he could make some determination of his character based on appearance alone. Charles stood firm under his gaze, meeting the Saint’s fathomless eyes almost in defiance. It was a pleasant feeling, to be able to meet another person’s eyes without feeling ashamed.

  Tesla set his things down on the table again and unrolled the sketch he’d made.

  “This. I believe there are worlds beyond this that men cannot see. I believe that eventually Earth will no longer be able to withstand the weight of her human burden. We will need to find ways to travel to these other worlds. Some of them may be in the physical universe. But others may not be.”

  Charles’s jaw dropped as he smoothed the paper between his elegant hands. There on the page was what he sought. A schematic for a machine that could send him back to New London. A machine that did not require magic.

  “How does it work?” he asked, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

  “Electricity,” Tesla said.

  Charles shook his head. He had seen the few electric lights around Malvern. They reminded him of everlanterns, yet they burned pure white or yellow without magic.

  “Do you understand how it works?” Tesla asked. “Most people do not, particularly the sort of alternating current electricity I have developed.”

  “No,” Charles said. “Why don’t you explain it to me?” Charles didn’t really care about how electricity worked, except for the most intellectual of reasons. Mostly, he could see that Tesla was eager to educate him, to fill a waiting vessel with knowledge and thereby perhaps make him his acolyte.

  Tesla explained the nature of electricity, how a battery stimulated properly will produce current, how his design for electricity alternated or reversed current in direct opposition to Edison’s design. It was a curious thing Charles could barely understand, except that he had seen how myth worked, and he knew that myth once fueled everything in his world. Electricity must be the same thing in this world. Though Charles sensed that one could not put one’s hand into the living fire of electricity and live, as a witch or warlock could do with magic.

  “I suspect that a current powerful enough will make a door between universes,” Tesla said.

  Charles looked at him and decided to take a great gamble. Tesla was a man of Science, but he was also a visionary. He could see truth where others could not. “You are right,” Charles said. “It will.”

  It took a moment for Tesla to register the full import of what Charles had said. Then, his eyes narrowed. He looked as though he wanted to seize Charles by the collar, but Charles guessed he refrained so as to keep from touching him.

  “You know this to be true. I can see it i
n your eyes. How?”

  “I believe it was this experiment that opened the door to the world I come from,” Charles said.

  Now it was Tesla’s turn to gape. “Few people ever surprise me,” he said. “You have just achieved something marvelous.”

  “I suspected as much,” Charles said, smiling.

  “Let me make sure I understand. You are saying you come from another universe. And that it is because of something I did?”

  He nodded. He was wary of telling Tesla everything. He was unsure what that would to do the future or, more importantly, the past.

  “People are always telling me I’m a madman, a dreamer. Always saying that what I see in my visions cannot be done,” Tesla said.

  “I do not know whether you are mad, and as to dreaming, well…it’s in dreams that we do our most important work. But this can be done.”

  Tesla sat down again, running his ink-stained fingers through his dark hair. Then he looked back up at Charles. “Tell me of this world. Tell me what it is like.”

  Charles told him. Of New London and all its strange charm, of the Waste that hopefully had not entirely destroyed it, of all the creatures that haunted its wilds and heights. And of the magic that was its lifeblood, the magic that he needed to survive.

  “Magic, you say?” Tesla sounded doubtful. “I may be a dreamer, but I am not a charlatan. There is no such thing.”

  “Think of it, if you will, as another form of energy. An unlimited supply. If you can make it possible for us to go there, I promise you that you will accomplish wonders far faster than you will ever do here.” Charles couldn’t be certain of that, but it was an irresistible lure to a man like Tesla. He wasn’t ashamed to use it.

  Tesla looked down at his design. “This cannot be done here,” he said. “We will have to go to London to do it. I have a patron there who was willing to build me a secret laboratory in exchange for some work he was interested in.”

  Charles’s blood ran cold. He had the distinct feeling Tesla was talking about John Vaunt. “What is his name?” he asked.

  “That is confidential,” Tesla said. “He did not want his association with me revealed until I had completed the work. And then Edison offered me the fifty thousand. I do not know what to do. I ran away here to think. And to draw this.”