Entry #7: The Music of the Spheres (1902)

Abu Simbel

The temples at Abu Simbel were built in the 13th century BC by the pharaoh Ramesses II, third pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, also known as Ramesses the Great and Ozymandias, said to be the most powerful pharaoh in Egypt’s history. They served to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh, to impress his Nubian neighbors to the south, and to immortalize himself and his queen, Nefertari. The Small Temple is, after Akhetaten’s temple to Nefertiti, the second monument in Egyptian history dedicated to a queen. The Great Temple is aligned such that the rays of the sun shine into the building and illuminate the statues of the gods in the sanctuary sixty-one days before and after the winter solstice, said respectively to be the birthday and coronation day of Ramesses II.

By the 6th century BC, the enormous statues adorning the Great Temple were already covered up to the knees with sand. Eventually, the entire complex was lost beneath the dunes of the Sahara, until they were rediscovered and uncovered by two explorers, one Swiss and one Italian. The site was named Abu Simbel in honor of the local boy who originally saw the temples poking out of the desert and led the first expeditions to the site.

*             *             *

As the century turned, so did my fortunes as the curator of the Abnormal Relics Collection. Following the advice of my friend Nikola Tesla, I rechristened the collection as a private enterprise, funded with careful investing and long-term banking strategies. I was based out of a modest but adequate office on the edge of central London, I was getting very good financial advice from a broker in the city and an accounts agent at the bank, and I was on sound financial footing given my modest requirements.

However, I still felt that my operation needed a name, some sort of entity greater than myself to lend weight to my presence at the scene of a relic-related event. Without an organization to grant me their authority in the field, I decided to invent one. I realized that a private group, perhaps a law firm or club of some kind, could theoretically wield sufficient power to fund a small retrieval operation like mine without such a public face that their activities could be easily investigated. They could conceivably operate in the shadows, with no information known about them but rumor. As long as I was careful only to drop their name in connection with relics and spread their name only by word of mouth, I could gradually build my fictitious law firm an occult reputation to be reckoned with while keeping myself safely out of the public eye.

I therefore conducted all of my official business as an employee of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie, purportedly a small London law firm with a very private clientele. All of my loans and investments were in their name, and my broker and banker never looked past the respectable-looking calling card I showed them. The Pinkerton Badge was a great help in getting the ball rolling, but the name made sure that it remained so.

When I had a decent amount of money at my disposal and had fully established Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie as a small but mysterious body in the city, I went to a local maker of novelty clocks and a Blackpool electrician and commissioned from them a mechanism I had devised to allow me to work more easily on my own. I disguised the mechanism as an apparatus for taking scientific measurements, and I was able to use the name to keep him from asking too many questions. As a final touch, I requested on behalf of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie that he take care whom he told about the existence of this project. With a warning like that, I felt confident that he would spread the name around and add a little mystique to the image. Word was bound eventually to spread to London’s supernatural denizens, and I would gain that much more credibility with them.

In actuality, the device I had commissioned was an automatic rig for taking readings from the Novoscope if I happened to be out of the office at the time of an event. A circle of electrical contacts was aligned with the top of the Novoscope, one for each compass bearing, and a wire attached to the dragon on top would complete a circuit in the direction of the event, indicating the correct bearing. The mechanism would then activate to position a carbon ribbon and paper tape over the numeral readout beneath the dragon’s head and take a rubbing, thus recording the distance to the event. Finally, the current time would be stamped on the tape by an automatic punch clock.

The finished product was a thing of beauty, if a little ungainly. The Novoscope was nearly invisible inside the mass of wires and cogs. All I would have to do was read from the paper tape to find the position and time of the event, assuming that the clockwork monstrosity worked properly. Tesla had suggested a couple of people when I sent him a wire about my idea, and the quality of their craftsmanship did not disappoint. As soon as another event occurred, I would know whether my design concept had lived up to their engineering acumen.

I got my chance in mid-May in 1902. I happened to be in the office at the time, but I still sat back and watched as the new machine did its work. The electrical contacts sparked a little, the gears and belts clanked away, and at the end, a little strip of paper curled out of the mechanism printed with the distance, bearing, and time of a new event. I did my calculations on a globe, which led me to a location along the Nile in southern Egypt. I recognized the location as the site of Abu Simbel.

To tell the truth, I had been expecting a relic event for the last couple of years, when an ancient Roman shipwreck was discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera. Many statues, coins, and other artifacts had been recovered from the wreckage, and I had been keeping an eye on reports from the site in the papers. I felt sure that a relic event was due to accompany the turn of the century, and the discovery of this wreck was just too neat. Something was bound to come from this, and I would eat my hat if the event at Abu Simbel weren’t related.

Sure enough, there was an article on the front page of the paper the next day about a new discovery from the Antikythera wreck. While sifting through the detritus from the ocean floor, one of the rocks was found to have a gear embedded in it. Soon, other gears were found, appearing to belong to a device more complex than any to have existed in ancient Greece.

Among the various gears was a sealed box encrusted with sediment from the ocean floor, and when this was forced open, it was found to contain a set of scrolls, only slightly damaged from the little seawater that had penetrated the seal. The scrolls contained several diagrams of people using some kind of device, which was concluded to be the source of the gear wheels that had been found. The scrolls also mentioned the names of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, and Archimedes in conjunction with the device. There was a series of images of people performing rituals and astronomical measurements at the temple complex at Abu Simbel. Finally, there was a slightly smudged reference to an ancient civilization of great sophistication and powerful magic, which was claimed to refer to the lost continent of Atlantis.

These scrolls were the topic of fierce debate in the pages of the paper. Most of the academics who responded to the story doubted the interpretation of the find. They claimed that the scrolls were too damaged to discern their meaning with any certainty, and that the Atlantis connection was likely the result of local sensationalism. Several claimed that the Atlantis scrolls were a hoax, along with the mechanical device found in the wreck, since the scrolls seemed too well preserved and the gears seemed far too complex for either one to date back to ancient Greece. However, most of the responses to the article were from lay people, and it was as if the entire population of London had caught the Atlantis bug. Everyone was hailing the new find as the dawn of a new, spiritually enlightened age. People were asking to see the scrolls in more detail, hoping that they showed the location of the lost city or some other ancient secret. Some were insisting that the scrolls go on tour like Christian relics, so that everyone in the world could see them for themselves.

I was glad that these scrolls were opening people’s eyes to the possibility of a world greater than our own, but the people in actual authority were sadly having none of it, as usual. The most prominent example was a piece written by one Dr. Sergey Fyodorov, a professor from St. Petersburg University in Russia. He wanted to strike a blow for rationalism and debunk the whole Atlantis myth once and for all. To that end, he said, he intended to mount an expedition to Abu Simbel, compare the images in the scrolls to the carvings in the temple, and determine once and for all if the scrolls had any basis in fact. He ended his letter with a request that any parties interesting in sponsoring his expedition reply to his office at Oxford, where he was a visiting lecturer.

This was a problem. A competing academic at Abu Simbel seeking to debunk the supernatural was as likely to destroy or forever bury any relic to be found there out of sheer bullheadedness as he was to want to take its power for himself. I had to leave for Abu Simbel at once, before this Dr. Fyodorov could get his affairs in order. I made arrangements to leave for Alexandria on the next available ship, and I packed a bag containing some clothes, notebooks, and several of my more useful relics.

Among the items from the Apothecary that I made sure to bring along was a translation I had made years ago of one of the documents that had been inside it from the beginning: Plato’s lost dialogue, Hermocrates. Its prequels, Timaeus and Critias, had introduced the idea of Atlantis to the public consciousness, and it was theorized that Hermocrates might have gone into greater detail on the subject. I remembered Atlantis having been mentioned from when I was translating the document into English, lo those many years ago, and I would have plenty of time to refresh myself on the journey through the Mediterranean.

According to Plato, Atlantis was indeed an island in the ocean that would later be named for it, located just west of the Straits of Gibraltar. It had been approximately the size of the United Kingdom and had supported a powerful maritime empire that had stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caspian Sea, although they had strongholds and outposts on nearly every coastline in the world. They were masters of metallurgy, astronomy, meteorology, engineering, and many other sciences, and they were also well versed in all sorts of magic. It was even possible that they were the first to understand the roots of magic, the forces from which all the other forms of magic derived, the prime mover that made all the worlds turn.

As their power grew, so did their hubris. They began to perform experiments in both science and magic, to push the bounds of possibility. Ultimately, it was their study of magic that did them in, when an experiment caused the entire island to slowly disintegrate and vanish from the world into the swirling void between worlds. Of the inhabitants of the island that managed to escape by water, most were lost at sea and never made landfall. The fragments of their culture that they carried with them were forever consigned to the ocean floor, never to be seen again. A few, however, managed a safe escape using a magical device that sent them to various of their settlements around the world via a portal. Some of them escaped to Greece, some to the Yucatan Peninsula, and others to Babylon. The last one to leave opened a final portal to Egypt, dismantled the key components of the device, and brought them with him, stepping through the portal just as the device was destroyed behind him and the connection severed for all time.

That must have been what was waiting for me at Abu Simbel: the key components of a device that would allow a man to travel anywhere in the world instantly. That would certainly be a saving on ship passage. But if there was really a relic from Atlantis at Abu Simbel, then there may well be more. There could be all sorts of artifacts and artwork from Atlantis. I couldn’t let it fall into the hands of someone set on disproving it, not without careful handling.

I spent the rest of the journey poring over Hermocrates, making sure I had every detail pat. When the ship docked at Alexandria, I had a pretty firm idea of what I ought to do, so I gathered my belongings and headed for the river docks to catch a steamer up the Nile. When I got there, there was a crowd gathered. Lots of locals and several newspaper people were on hand, apparently to see someone off. I headed closer, and as I got in line to board the steamer, I spotted the face of Dr. Fyodorov among the throng. We were heading to Abu Simbel on the same steamer. Perhaps I could use the time to have a chat with him and suss out his motivations.

The steamer had a decent bar onboard, and Dr. Fyodorov had a table to himself. From what I had read about Dr. Fyodorov, he seemed a congenial man, more than willing to talk with anyone who shared his interests, so I took the seat across from him at his table.

“Excuse me, but would you be the celebrated Dr. Sergey Fyodorov?”

“I am indeed, sir.”

“I thought so. I saw your picture in the paper, where it said that you are traveling to Abu Simbel to resolve this Atlantis business. Is that true?”

“It is, sir. Are you with a newspaper yourself?”

“No, sir, in fact I am a fellow academic. Dr. Israel St. James, formerly of Cambridge University.” We shook hands. He had a firm handshake and an easy smile. I could tell that he had ample practice with them.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. St. James. What brings you to Egypt? Are you also investigating the Atlantis story?”

“I am indeed.”

“But if not for Cambridge, then for whom?”

“I am here on behalf of my employers, the firm of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie. They want me to investigate the connection between Abu Simbel and the legend of Atlantis, and if it is valid, to recover or document anything that may be of interest.”

“Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie? I’ve not heard of them. What sort of business are they in?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” I had used that reply dozens of times. It seemed to do the trick.

“And do your employers believe that the stories of Atlantis may be true?”

“Suffice it to say that they are willing to keep their minds open,” I said. “I take it that you do not hold with the popular belief in Atlantis?”

“As a scientist, I must avoid forming opinions ahead of the facts.” Despite the standoffish response, he was clearly hoping that I would pursue my questioning further. I could tell that he enjoyed talking to a receptive audience.

“Oh, certainly. You would not want to taint your observations with a preconceived notion. But as a human being, surely you must have some hypothesis about Atlantis. Doesn’t the idea intrigue you that there may have been a great civilization before us with astounding secrets that have been lost to time and tide?”

“I admit that the idea does hold a certain boyish fascination with me, but this is the twentieth century. We must move beyond such superstitions and focus on the facts, the things that are real and can be proven. These beliefs cannot benefit us without evidence.”

“Ah, well, a man can dream, can he not? Personally, I always cherished the possibility that I might one day discover something truly unexpected, something that changed everything that we thought we knew and shifted the course of human knowledge in a whole new direction.”

“Well, of course,” said Dr. Fyodorov. “It is the dream of every academic to make a discovery to shake the halls of learning. As schoolboys, we are surrounded with the names of great men, names that are attached to laws and theories and are carved into marble busts. It is the only way for a man to achieve true immortality.” I chuckled to myself at his desire for academic immortality while I had already achieved the more literal version.

“Who knows?” I said. “Perhaps such immortality awaits us at Abu Simbel, if these rumors of Atlantis are true.”

“In a truly infinite universe, I must concede that such a thing is possible, Dr. St. James. However, I must yield to Occam’s Razor and assume the more logical outcome, otherwise I would surely be laughed out of my university.”

As a man who actually had been laughed out of a university, I began to bridle at that statement, but I managed to keep the bile out of my voice. Mostly. “You mean to say that you take the road of the non-believer because it is safer? If Atlantis is a myth, then you are proven right, and if not, then you are the first man to prove it?”

He bowed his head slightly as if to concede the point. “The important thing is not who is right and who is wrong, but that the truth is revealed. It is not particularly important to me that Atlantis exists, merely that I can resolve the issue before the world once and for all.”

“You need not do it alone, Dr. Fyodorov. I will of course be there to serve as a witness, if necessary.”

“Certainly, but I think the reporting of this find would be better suited to a university than to a group of lawyers, would you not agree? No offense intended, of course.”

“None taken.” It always amused me that people found it so easy to say “no offense intended” and so difficult to avoid being offensive. “As long as I can fulfill my assignment for my employers, I don’t much care where the credit lies.”

“Well, if you would like to accompany me on my journey, you would of course be welcome. If there do turn out to be artifacts of interest at the temple, I’m sure the university can come to an arrangement with your employers regarding their custody. It is better that we work together in this endeavor, rather than obstruct each other so that neither of us succeeds.”

“Excellent. Then I believe I shall see you at the temple, Dr. Fyodorov.” We shook hands, and I returned to my room.

Not only was Dr. Fyodorov resistant to the idea of the supernatural, but it now seemed that he was a shameless self-promoter as well. He seemed less concerned with the nature of the connection between Abu Simbel and Atlantis than that it be he who uncovered it. I was no longer worried that he might hide or destroy the relic if he reached it first. The greater risk now was that he would parade it before the world for a shot at glory and let it fall into the hands of some dangerous idiot. And with his treasured faith in rationality, I dared not risk revealing the true nature of my expertise, lest he change his tune and attempt to keep me from the temple entirely. Best to play along for the moment and bide my time until I could get the relic out from under him.

After a few days of leisurely steamboat travel, we arrived at Abu Simbel, near the southern border of Egypt. I discovered that Dr. Fyodorov hadn’t been traveling alone; he was joined on the dock by a photographer and a research assistant, who had evidently been traveling in more humble circumstances, possibly in cargo for all I knew. Dr. Fyodorov was certainly treating them like luggage. As far as he was concerned, their only purpose on this expedition was as a vehicle for him to achieve his glory.

We weren’t even off the boat for ten minutes before Dr. Fyodorov had his photographer set up a shot of him posing in front of the temple. Dr. Fyodorov offered me a place in the picture next to him, in what I’m sure he meant as a gesture of generosity, but I declined. It may well have been good publicity for Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie to be officially associated with this expedition, but I didn’t want to see my picture in any newspapers. After the brief photo session, which inevitably took nearly an hour, we proceeded into the temple. Dr. Fyodorov made a show of examining the statues and the bas-reliefs and dictating notes to his assistant while the photographer took pictures, and I merely examined the walls and inscriptions for any sign of a secret Atlantean sigil that might mark the location of the relic. Every so often, when I felt confident that Dr. Fyodorov had everyone’s attention, I would sneak a peek around the room with the Mary Celeste Sextant to aid in my search.

We examined the carvings and pillars in the main chamber of the temple, followed by the hypostyle hall and second pillared hall. Finally, we made our way to the sanctuary, the room that was aligned to catch the rays of the sun on exactly two days of every year. The rest of the temple was filled with art to glorify Ramesses II, but this was where the gods were depicted. Dr. Fyodorov was at his most poetic in this room, and he was thoroughly enjoying the sound of his own voice. Meanwhile, I simply stood and considered how I would be regarded if I were an emissary from Atlantis in a fledgling culture.

The Atlantean exodus had helped to seed civilizations around the world, as they sought to find fertile ground for the ideas that they had rescued from the cataclysm. How might such a man be received upon his arrival? I imagined a man arriving through unknown means, carrying highly advanced technology and speaking of advanced philosophy, in a settlement of primitive farmers and herders. How might I myself be received in a poor aboriginal village, were I to arrive in a hot-air balloon carrying a revolver and a paraffin lantern? I hesitated to believe that they might do something as simple as worshipping the newcomer like a god, but then Egypt was well known among archaeologists for the breadth of their pantheon.

I took a good look at the statues in the sanctuary: Ra-Horakhty, the god of the sunrise; the deified form of Ramesses himself as the god-king; Amun-Ra, the king of the gods; and Ptah, said to be the creator of the universe. The first three were all associated with the sun in some way, but Ptah was associated with the underworld. When the sun illuminated the sanctuary, the first three statues would be lit, but Ptah always remained in shadow.

The Atlantean visitor would have helped to shape the rise of Egypt from behind the scenes, always remaining in shadow, just like Ptah. He would have carried knowledge of the fundamental forces that governed the cosmos, just like Ptah. And he would have brought with him devices the likes of which no one had seen before, perhaps demonstrating their function to the craftsmen of the day. Ptah was a god of craftsmen, especially stonemasons and tomb builders. Could Ptah have been the deified version of the Atlantean visitor?

I took out the sextant and examined the Ptah statue on the side against the wall, the part of the statue that absolutely would have stayed perpetually in the dark. Through the eyepiece, I could just make out a faint aura on the wall behind the statue. I brushed my fingers against the spot, and I made a discovery that I truly had not been expecting.

I received a rush of knowledge about a secret maze of tunnels beneath the temple. The statue concealed a lever that, when pulled, would reveal the entrance to the lower temple. Beyond that, I saw nothing, but it seemed that more information would be forthcoming once I had ventured further. I couldn’t believe it. The entire place was an enormous relic.

I called out to Dr. Fyodorov, interrupting him in mid-speech. I pulled the lever, and the entire statue of Ptah slid backward into the wall, along with the section of wall next to it, revealing a ramp that sloped down and around a corner into the bedrock. He gave me a brief look that almost seemed like admiration, but the look quickly faded as he directed his photographer to take a shot of him next to the secret door. I just managed to turn away from the camera and close my eyes as the flash went off.

The lot of us descended into the catacombs, Fyodorov narrating to his assistant the whole way. Unlike the rest of the temple, there were no carvings on the walls down here. As we proceeded, I brushed my fingers along the walls, waiting for the maze to tell me the right way forward, but no such luck. I remained uninformed until we came to a hallway with passages leading off in all directions. Dr. Fyodorov took his assistant, his photographer, and his lantern and headed off along one of the passages, leaving me in absolute blackness.

I thought he’d never leave.

I opened my case and took out an object I’d been given by a geologist when I was still at Cambridge: a piece of rough marble that gave off a gentle white glow, regardless of the ambient light conditions. It helped to be able to see the walls in natural white light, rather than the dirty yellow of Fyodorov’s lantern. It also helped to be away from his constant nattering and self-aggrandizing. With the air clear of his speeches, I could finally hear myself think.

I took a quick sweep of the area with the Sextant, which revealed an aura on one of the flagstones in the floor. I ran my fingers along the stone, and the catacombs gave me the rest of the information I needed. I got back up and put my weight on the stone, and it gave an inch, causing a bronze ring to descend from the ceiling on a rope. I placed my foot in the ring and held onto the rope, and a few seconds after it had descended, it retracted back up to the ceiling. I stepped off the ring when it was halfway through its journey, and I stepped on top of the wall of the maze.

The Atlantean had designed this little puzzle quite well. Anyone who managed to find this place would be so focused on the walls of the maze that they would not think to consider the ceiling, especially without a ladder or any other obvious pointers, and the ceiling in here was higher than it seemed in the dark. By the light of the glowing rock, I could see the tops of all the walls, forming a pathway into the secret sanctuary in the center of the massive room. If I shielded my eyes from my light, I could just see the lantern light where Fyodorov was, still dictating to his assistant as he wandered around in circles in the dark.

I walked along the tops of the walls and up a narrow set of steps, and I found myself in a room above the center of the maze, the location of the relic that the maze had shown me. It was a simple, cylindrical room, its walls carved with bas-reliefs depicting the history of Atlantis, from rise to fall to destruction. At the center was a large stone doorway, slightly elevated above the floor on a scaffold of bronze. At the top of the doorway was an iridescent black sphere, about the size of a football. Surrounding the door was a series of interconnected, concentric bronze hoops, supported by a brass mechanism of gears and worms in the pedestal beneath the doorway. Set into one of the hoops was another sphere, this one a translucent white and about the size of an apple.

I laid my hand on the white sphere, and I had another vision. The device that occupied this room was an orrery, except that instead of aligning planets, it aligned locations. It caused doorways in two places on Earth to become connected to each other by exploiting the metaphysical nature of doorways. According to Atlantean cosmology, there were many planes of existence beyond the eight that Tesla had shown me, and one of these planes was devoted to travel and crossing boundaries. The orrery allowed one to travel between doorways that were thousands of miles apart by connecting one to the other through this plane of travel.

I remembered what I had read in Hermocrates about this device. The man who came here from Atlantis had aligned his location with that of a doorway in ancient Egypt, and once the doors were connected, he had brought the vital components with him and destroyed the doorway behind him, severing the connection. I wouldn’t able to fit the stones into my case, so if I were going to get this relic out of here without alerting Dr. Fyodorov to its existence, I would have to do something similar.

I knelt down by the brass mechanism, and I spotted a small globe among the various parts. The globe had a small sliding pointer that could be moved to indicate anywhere on its surface. I slid the pointer to indicate London, and I felt my mind being drawn to memories of my office. It was almost as if the orrery was trying to narrow down my destination for me, like it wanted to make sure that I got where I really wanted to go. I turned a key in the mechanism, and the bronze hoops began to rotate. The white sphere spun around me and came to rest, and then both spheres began to give off a faint hum. I stepped up to the doorway in the middle of the orrery and opened the door.

As I stepped through the doorway, I found myself in a space surrounded by white light on all sides. There was no floor, no walls, and no ceiling, just the stone door behind me, whiteness all around me, and a familiar wooden door before me. I opened the door, and I found myself stepping into my office in London. I could hear the sounds of activity outside my window. It was raining.

I stepped back into the orrery room and gently disengaged the stones from their mounts. I was vaguely worried that this would terminate the connection, that I had misjudged what I had seen in Hermocrates and the Atlantean refugee had moved the stones some other way, but the stones’ hum remained steady. I carried the stones into my office and set them down next to the Apothecary. Cataloguing them properly would have to wait until I concluded my business with Dr. Fyodorov. After all, he might get suspicious if I didn’t return soon, and if he thought I was lost down here, he might come back with a search party. I couldn’t have that.

I left my office and closed the orrery doorway. I then turned the key back and moved the pointer away from London. When I opened the doorway, I saw nothing but the back of the room. The connection was severed, and the stones were safely away in London. I took a notebook from my bag and made a few sketched of the orrery mechanism so that I could have it replicated when I got back.

I made my way back to the entrance to the maze in time for Dr. Fyodorov and his team to meet me there. “Ah, Dr. St. James,” he said, “did you find anything of interest for your employers?”

“I’m afraid not. It seems that you were right, Dr. Fyodorov. There is nothing here related to Atlantis at all.”

“I must concur. The existence of this catacomb is interesting, but I must return to Oxford and relate the news that the story of Atlantis is nothing but a myth.”

“Fair enough, Dr. Fyodorov. Fair enough.”

Entry #6: The Lightning Wizard (1899)

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla is one of the most iconic scientists in history. Born in what is now Croatia in 1856, he did some of the first research in such fields as robotics, radiation, wireless power transmission, and superconductivity. He is also responsible for inventing the induction motor, radio, and the modern system of polyphase electrical distribution, and he is believed by many to have invented countless other electrical devices.

Tesla arrived in America in 1884 and got a job with Edison Machine Works as an electrical engineer. He quickly advanced in the company and solved many of their most difficult engineering challenges. His long history of conflict with Thomas Edison began when he was given the task of devising improvements to Edison’s direct-current motor and generator designs, for which he was promised a fee of $50,000. When he went to Edison asking for his payment, Edison simply replied, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.”

*             *             *

Following my recovery of the Mary Celeste Sextant, my job became a walk in the park. All I had to do was look through the eyepiece, and anything in my line of sight with a supernatural aura would be revealed. After further experimentation, I realized that subtle adjustments to the sextant’s controls would enable me to see objects concealed beneath people’s clothing, the nature of secrecy having a sort of aura all its own. I could easily discern whether a suspicious and aggressive-seeming character was wearing a firearm under his coat or hidden within a sleeve.

With the sextant to guide my way and the Pinkerton Badge and Titania’s Kiss to remove obstacles in my path, I was unstoppable. Following notification of an event from the Novoscope, I simply showed up at the scene, used the Pinkerton Badge to demand a report of recent events, and scanned the area with the Mary Celeste Sextant to pinpoint the relic. Archimedes’ Apothecary was filling up by leaps and bounds, inasmuch as such a thing was possible.

Over the decades, though, I found that my successes in my missions overseas were doing nothing to help my reputation in my own university. The true nature of my office remained a secret known only to the college council, so the professors in the history department resented me somewhat. They didn’t understand why I was the only member of the faculty with no teaching or administrative duties, and they certainly didn’t understand why I, a mere curator with a collection that appeared in no library or museum, had such a generous and permissive grant in comparison to my perceived importance in the university.

I found out something else over the next several decades. When I gazed into the inner workings of the Apothecary all those years ago, it attuned me to more than just the nature of relics. Apparently, the wave of . . . whatever it was from the Apothecary also bound me somehow to the relic nearest me at the time, which turned out to be the Rod of Asclepius. Its healing aura was somehow woven into the very fabric of my soul. What this meant for me was that the ravages of time had no effect on me. I would still be wounded by a blade or a bullet, but the ordinary wear and tear of the years was negated by the aura of the Rod. I had been twenty-three years of age when we discovered the Apothecary and when my old professor was murdered, and outwardly I would grow no older.

Unfortunately, my supporters on the college council did not share the same level of protection from the attentions of Father Time. As the years passed, I saw the members of the council, the sole custodians of my secret, fall ill and die while I remained exactly the same age. Few of them saw fit to pass their mantle onto their successors, and of those, none of them seemed to pay any heed to the conspiratorial ramblings of old men. I offered to demonstrate my work to them, but they were uninterested in crackpot stories from a mere graduate student, even though I had been with Cambridge for longer than any of them.

I counted myself fortunate that at least I could continue my work, regardless of my standing with the new council. Then, in 1893, in light of several labor uprisings that had come to an unnecessarily bloody end, the United States Congress passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act forbidding the Pinkerton Detective Agency from being hired by any agency of the federal government. With one legislative swipe, the authority of the Pinkertons was taken from them, and with it, the ability of the Pinkerton Badge to cut through every bureaucratic Gordian Knot I encountered. I could now only claim authority on a state or local level, and I wasn’t even sure that the badge would work outside America. I wasn’t only losing the support of the council; now my relics were beginning to fail me as well.

The final straw came when I was summoned to the office of one of the members of the council. He told me that the members had voted to revoke my grant, effective as of the end of the month. I was being kicked to the curb, and I hadn’t even had a chance to defend my position. I was only being informed of a decision that had been made behind closed doors without my knowledge. The one consolation that I could take from this disgrace was that I was being allowed to maintain custody of the Apothecary and its contents, although he actually told me that the college simply did not wish to keep such nonsense on their property. On the other hand, finding a safe place to keep the Apothecary would be difficult in London on my nonexistent budget.

As I loaded my possessions onto a small cart that had been lent to me, I could feel everyone’s gaze on me as they walked by the college. It reminded me of the reputation I had once had at the university. I was looked upon as an eccentric, but I had respect. People knew that when they found an antiquity doing things that they couldn’t explain, I was the man to whom to turn. I had recognized expertise and renown. Sadly, everyone who had once held those positions was now either dead or had been supplanted by younger and more doubting staff, believers in a rational world of science and reason. The physicists, chemists, and astronomers were making great strides in their field, and they had convinced the world that there could be nothing beyond their ken, no force or entity that could not be explained by pure science. Acknowledgement of the supernatural was waning, and I was becoming increasingly marginalized. I even heard the word “insane” being uttered once or twice by onlookers as I vacated my office.

Following my eviction from Cambridge, I dragged the cart to the office of the bursar and requested the remainder of my grant money, which was delivered in the form of a check. I cashed the check at the Bank of England, and I walked out into the street with the cash in a small satchel. My worldly possessions consisted entirely of a satchel of money and a big shiny box, covered by a tarpaulin. Well, if I was going to maintain my duties as curator in an unofficial capacity, I would at least need a secure place to set up the Novoscope so I could watch for new events.

“If” being the operative word.

I eventually made a deal with a family in Kensington to provide tutelage in history for their son in exchange for the use of their cellar. I spent the next two years teaching him the basics of ancient Greek and Roman history while spending every spare hour watching the Novoscope for signs of activity. I was beginning to grow resigned to the life of a basement-dwelling private tutor, until I got a signal from the Novoscope in 1895. An event had taken place in New York City.

I would be lying if I said that I was as enthusiastic about this job as I had been when under official university sanction. Going out to recover relics had always had a sort of thrill when I was working for Cambridge. I felt like I always imagined my old professor had felt, uncovering long-lost pieces of history, only I was getting to witness history being made right in front of me. I was helping to paint a picture of a world that nobody knew existed. I suppose I’d always thought that my work might be enshrined in a museum eventually. Maybe I’d even have gotten a wing named for me. I mean, imagine that: The Israel St. James Collection of Abnormal Relics. And now, I was living in someone else’s basement, sleeping next to a brass box with my entire life’s work stuffed inside. I no longer had any official reason to continue my work. Whether I chased after this lead or not was up to no one but myself.

For whatever reason, I found myself packing a bag of essentials and booking passage to New York, using as little as I could of my remaining money. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps I had been doing the same job for so long that I had simply fallen into a rut. I wasn’t going to New York out of a sense of academic duty, but because I always had. I just couldn’t think of anything else to do.

The idea that I had grown addicted to the pursuit of relics weighed heavily on my mind for the entire transatlantic journey. I didn’t want to turn into an academic Miss Havisham, wandering the world searching for relics solely because I had nothing else in my life. I began to wonder whether this mission ought to be my last. Perhaps it was time, after thirty years, to pursue another line of work. There must have been something to which I could apply myself, especially given the collection of relics I had amassed. By the end of the voyage, I had resolved to look for a new job that might benefit from my unique equipment. I couldn’t continue as before without a means of support, so I would continue in a different direction entirely. I would hang up my academic robes for good and set out for myself, just as soon as my current mission was over.

Having a firm grasp on a goal again helped put a spring in my step. I stepped off the ship in America once more, and I headed for a newsstand to begin my final relic hunt. The recent news revealed nothing out of the ordinary, so I shouldered my bag and headed for a high vantage point. I had seen a likely site on my way into the harbor, and it happened to be a place that I had wanted to visit since I had heard of it.

Half an hour later, I disembarked the ferry with the other tourists and stood at the base of the recently unveiled Statue of Liberty. I read the Emma Lazarus poem on the pedestal, and I suddenly felt a great kinship with the immigrants who saw this statue on their way to America. I may not have been wretched refuse or a huddled mass, but I was certainly tired and poor, and I too was looking for a fresh start.

I climbed the stairs to the observation deck in the statue’s crown and withdrew the Mary Celeste Sextant from my bag. I took a sighting on Manhattan Island, and I spotted a faint, distant aura from somewhere in the city. I stepped to the other end of the viewing deck and sighted the same aura. By my rough calculations, the aura must have originated from a point about a mile along the long axis of the island, somewhere near City Hall if my mental map of Manhattan was still reliable.

I took the ferry back to Battery Park and headed for the area that I had pinpointed. As I approached, I could see a pillar of smoke rising into the sky from South Fifth Avenue. That had to be my destination. I broke into a run and made my way to the scene of the fire as quickly as possible. The building was surrounded with distraught tenants. A few of the onlookers were wearing lab coats. If there was a relic behind this fire, whoever had activated it might still be inside.

I asked a couple of the lab boys if anyone was still inside. One or two of them mentioned an eccentric gentleman of an inquiring mind, some scientist or other, with a laboratory in the building. That sounded like my quarry, all right. I felt for the reassuring shape of the Rod of Asclepius in my bag, and I headed inside. Maybe I was feeling unwisely emboldened by my apparent immortality, but I felt confident that I could handle a burning building.

The other tenants said that this laboratory was on the fourth floor, right where the fire was, but the building looked sturdy enough. I picked my way up the stairs, where I immediately saw a door that looked like it had been broken open. The ruined doorway led to a room full of electrical equipment of all kinds, and even a few kinds that I could not discern. The room took up the entire floor of the building, and the ceiling was held up with bare girders. This had to be the laboratory. There was a desk at the far room stacked with papers that appeared to be technical schematics and notes, most of which had already been burnt beyond recognition.

At the far end of the room, I found a man lying unconscious on the floor. There wasn’t enough smoke in the room for him to have suffocated on it. His arm was pinned to the ground by a bookcase. He didn’t seem to be personally on fire, and he still had a reasonably steady pulse, so I figured that I could spare a few seconds to sweep the room with the Sextant. If the relic was in here somewhere, then I had to find it quickly and get it out of here, along with the unconscious man. Once I got him and the relic out of the building, then I could ask him what had happened that rendered him unconscious and knocked over his furniture.

I took out the Sextant and took a quick look over the room. I detected a strong aura from somewhere in the desk across the room, but I was surprised to detect an equally strong aura from the man lying senseless on the floor. I had never met a person who radiated the aura of a relic. Suddenly it was more important than ever that I get this man to a place of safety so we could have a quiet chat. I lifted the bookcase off of his arm and moved it aside, and the man groaned in pain. Now that I could see his arm more clearly, it appeared to be broken.

“Sir?” I asked. “Are you all right? Can you move?”

“Oh, my head is throbbing,” he said. “Is something burning?”

He had an accent from somewhere in Eastern Europe. I couldn’t quite place it. “Sir, the building is on fire. I have to get you out of here.”

“Right,” he said. He moved to get up, but he gave a cry of pain as he attempted to put weight on his injured arm.

“Be careful, sir,” I said. “I think your arm is broken. Do you have any valuables that you need to save? Anything in your desk, perhaps?”

He gave me a somewhat suspicious look, but he relented. “Pull out the bottom drawer. There is a metal portfolio behind it.”

I found the portfolio in his desk and placed it in my satchel. “Is there a back door out of the building?”

“Yes. I will guide you.”

With the man leaning on my shoulder, I followed his directions to a fire escape that led to an alley behind the building. I helped him away from the building and set him down a safe distance from the conflagration. I pulled the Rod of Asclepius from my bag and handed it to him. “Grip this, and it will take care of your arm, but I warn you. It is going to hurt like the blazes.”

He seemed dubious that such an archaic-seeming artifact could help with a broken arm, but all doubts were laid to rest when the snake untwined from the rod and wrapped around his arm, wrenching with its coils to set the bone and injecting its healing elixir to heal the man’s minor burns. The man had a look of shock and amazement on his face. I was rather more blasé about the whole affair. It was nothing that I had not been through myself, although my first experience with the Rod was much more invasive.

I was impressed with the level of self-control that this man had. I could remember screaming at the top of my lungs as the Rod reattached my innards from being run through with a pirate captain’s cutlass. The man from the lab was managing to restrain himself to a simple grunt and gritted teeth. While he recovered from his injuries, I opened the portfolio to see what this man had in his desk that had triggered the Novoscope. If this was going to be my final relic, I wanted it to be a good one.

Inside the portfolio was a collection of schematics, nothing more nor less. I took a look at a few of the sheets, but I only saw two or three until I was struck with a blinding migraine. Through the glaring white light of that headache, I could just make out some sort of information similar to that which I got from other relics, but I couldn’t quite make it out. It seemed to be something of a technological nature, but I couldn’t discern any more than that. Every time I tried to focus on a detail, another blossom of pain would open in my head.

Once I was able to clear the headache and close the portfolio, I saw the Rod of Asclepius finish its work and return to its inert state. The man sat up, his broken arm and burns fully healed, and he looked at me quizzically. He seemed to be trying to size me up.

“Now that you’ve recovered, sir,” I said, holding up his portfolio, “how did you come by these documents?”

“Never mind that,” he said. “Who are you? I know you’re not an Akashic Librarian, else you would have left me behind. Are you a wizard, or perhaps a Whisperer? Hold on a moment.” He pulled a device from his pocket that seemed to consist of a galvanometer connected to a stethoscope, and he held the pad of the stethoscope against my temple before I could protest. I put my hand on the pad to pull it away, and I got another brief rush of information. The device he was using was similar to a relic, in that the power of the Apothecary could help me discern its function, but its aura was woven with a thread of a distinct timbre. The feeling reminded me of the man’s own aura that I had seen when I observed him with the Sextant, as if he were metaphysically tied to the object. As for the object’s nature, it seemed to be similar in function to the Sextant, allowing him to read my aura and determine if I was supernaturally attuned.

He seemed puzzled by the readings he was getting, replacing the device in his pocket. “You’re not a wizard or a Whisperer. What are you, sir?”

“I’m just an archaeologist,” I said.

“Bosh,” he said, handing the Rod of Asclepius back to me. “No mere archaeologist carries a scepter such as this. You are not a man to be satisfied with digging in dusty pits for old pottery. You search for more exotic quarry.”

“Exactly. I search for quarry such as that portfolio and its contents. What are those drawings, and how do they pertain to you?”

“You truly have seen nothing like those drawings before?”

“No, never.”

He appeared to think for a moment. “You are clearly a man of great insight. You appreciate that what we see in the streets every day is not all that is there to be seen. And you saved my life today. You deserve a thorough answer to your question. Follow me.”

He led me out of the alley and to a building near Houston Street and Broadway, where he had a second lab. This one was much smaller and located in the building’s basement, but it was more crowded with equipment, which looked much stranger than what I saw in South Fifth Avenue. As I looked around at the various bizarre devices and tools that filled the room, he took the portfolio back from me and examined its contents, presumably inspecting them to check that they were still in good condition. I was somewhat suspicious that he was filing his schematics away, as far as I could tell the very thing that I had come to retrieve, but the portfolio was clearly just the tip of something much greater.

“First of all,” he said, “what do I call you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, remembering that with one thing and another, we hadn’t actually been introduced. “Dr. Israel St. James, formerly of Cambridge University. And you are?”

“Nikola Tesla, with Westinghouse Electric Company.” We shook hands. “As you suspect, I am not an ordinary scientist. I am one of many who perceive the set of scientific laws that govern our universe as but one of many possibilities. We can use these other laws to work marvels of science and technology, to create devices that defy what normal men think possible.”

“How many are there like you?” I asked.

He gave a little smile. “Excellent question. Shall we find out?” He led me to a machine in the center of the room, a large open structure made of coils and pylons nearly the size of a privy closet. He threw a large switch on the side of the machine, and the pylons began to crackle with electricity. Arcs of miniature lightning flew between the spikes, and the air within the structure began to waver as though in an intense heat. As Tesla adjusted the controls, the electricity flowing through the air within the machine began to form the image of a globe dotted with millions of tiny points of light. He twisted one final dial, and most of the points went away, leaving less than a hundred behind.

“There,” he said. “It appears that there are fifty-seven like me in the world, and there are more now than ever before. Before the modern era, the last great age of genius was in the Italian Renaissance, led by Leonardo da Vinci. Before that was the age of ancient Greece and the School of Athens, led by Archimedes.”

“Archimedes was a man like you?”

“At least. The history is unclear on that. Some believe that he may have been much more than that.”

“I found a creation of his in the ruins of the Grand Library of Baghdad.”

“Archimedes created many things. Most of them went to the defense of Syracuse, however.”

“This one was a brass box a little more than three feet square.”

Tesla was delighted by this. “You found Archimedes’ Apothecary? What was it like?”

“I am not exaggerating when I say that it changed my life.”

“How so?”

“Well, I found it in 1863.”

He looked me up and down. “Fascinating.”

“And what happened to you that led to all this?” I asked.

“I was attending the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz when I experienced a sudden burst of inspiration. It was as if I could see the inner clockwork of the universe, how everything fit together. I saw all the rules as though they were engraved across my brain, and then I saw all the other rules. I worked non-stop for a week, creating machine after machine, until a door opened.”

“A door? What do you mean?”

“It is difficult to explain to one who has not experienced it for himself. All I can say is that I saw a door, and I stepped through. I saw a city unlike any other in the world, made of great towers of steam and spires of steel and brick a mile high. Everywhere I looked, I saw laboratories, workshops, factories, and testing arenas. An entire city devoted to science. The source of all scientific genius.”

“Where is this city?”

“This city is not found on maps. It is not of this world.”

I took a look at the glowing electrical globe, still gently rotating inside the field of electricity in the middle of the room, and I started slowly walking around it. “You know, I found a relic a few years ago that gave me a glimpse of another world. I saw people dancing around a maypole and bowling ninepins. The whole place was presided over by Titania, queen of the fairies.” Tesla raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Now you tell me that there is an otherworldly city devoted entirely to the supernatural pursuit of science.”

Tesla gave me a look, clearly encouraging me to take my line of thought to its conclusion.

“Just exactly how many of these other worlds are there?”

He gave me a grin, and he spun a wheel on the side of the machine. The image of the globe blurred and spun, performing dizzying gyrations in the electrical field. The image split and warped, no longer resembling a globe but some bizarre sort of astrolabe. When the image came to rest, I saw the landscape that I remembered when I first experienced the touch of the Titania’s Kiss stone.

“This is the realm that you saw. It is called Tír na nÓg, the home of Titania and her fae subjects.” He adjusted the controls some more. The image spun and flipped again, and I now saw a vast city with plumes of colored steam, spinning gear wheels, and pillars sparkling with light and electricity. “This is the place that I told you about. It is called Gorod Geniev, the home of scientific genius.”

“You didn’t tell me about all the electrical things there,” I pointed out.

“I only told you what it was like when I first found it,” he said with a wry grin. “I’ve had some time there to make my mark.” He readjusted the machine so that I again saw the astrolabe shape. “In total, there are eight worlds outside out own, arranged in four opposing pairs, and each reflecting a different aspect of our own.” The image spun as he showed me each world in turn. “Opposite to Gorod Geniev is the Cercle du Coeur, the home of the wizards, the Heart to Gorod Geniev’s Mind. Opposite to Tír na nÓg is Uhrwald, home of the primal beasts, the Low to Tír na nÓg’s High. There are also the Hot and Cold worlds: Burj al-Ifrit, home of the devils, and Fimbulvintr, home of the ghosts. Finally, there are the Dark and Light worlds: Mundus Tenebrarum, home of the demons, and Elysium, home of the angels.”

I was stunned. I had suspected that there was rather more to the world than anyone knew, due to my experiences with the Titania’s Kiss stone and the Mary Celeste Sextant, but I had obviously not even scratched the surface. This Mr. Tesla was a wealth of information, and I needed to stick to him like glue, even disregarding his supernatural aura as I had detected with the Sextant.

“But I digress,” he said, abruptly switching his viewing machine off. “In response to your original question, the documents in that portfolio are schematics for my most recent devices. Working on them was the last thing I remember before you found me in the fire.”

“Just schematics?” I said. “When I looked at them, I felt some of the information inside my head, but then I got an enormous headache and forgot it all.”

“When one of us creates a schematic for a device, we bind some of that knowledge to the page. Our mind is like a safe deposit box, and we must keep the key elsewhere so that the items may be safe. Without those schematics, I would have to store the details of my work in my own memory, and with supernatural devices of this nature, to keep all of that in my mind would surely drive me insane.”

“What happens when the schematics are destroyed, like in the fire in your lab?”

“Oh, none of my schematics were in the fire. I kept them all in that portfolio, to forestall just such a catastrophe.”

“But I saw several pieces of paper on your desk with technical information on them.”

He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Patent applications and so forth, only pertinent to my work with Westinghouse Electric. I am attempting through them to bring some of my ideas out into the world, for the benefit of mankind. Supernatural technology is not yet robust enough to be handled by ordinary people. The laws of otherworldly science do not mesh well with those of the mundane world. I work in the hope that some of my concepts can be adapted for the greater good.”

“I hope that the fire did not set you back overmuch.”

“Well, it is certainly an obstacle. Much of the equipment there was unique, quite difficult and expensive to duplicate. However, the schematics were the core of my work there. Equipment can be replaced, but a lost idea is lost forever. As long as I have my work, I can continue. One must never let any setback cause a loss of momentum, Dr. St. James, for momentum lost can rarely be regained. Now, I believe that I have answered enough of your questions, so fair play dictates that I ask a few of my own.”

I was somewhat apprehensive of the questions that he might think to ask. I looked toward the door in case the questions got too probing, but in truth, I would not have left that room for all the tea in China. Let him probe all he liked. I probably owed him more information than I could even provide.

“Ask away, Mr. Tesla, ask away.”

“You say that you are formerly of Cambridge University. What was your function there?”

“I was the curator of their Abnormal Relics Collection,” I said. He nodded as if he had half expected the answer. “I traveled the world for relics like the Rod of Asclepius, and I brought them back to Cambridge to store in the Apothecary.” I told him a little of what I had learned about relics, as well as my ability to discern their function and utility.

“How did you locate them?”

“One of the relics in the Apothecary when I found it was an instrument created by a Han dynasty polymath named Zhang Heng. It detects and locates the ripples in reality caused by the activity of relics. I call it the Novoscope.”

“And what happened that caused you to leave Cambridge?”

I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. The termination of my tenure at Cambridge still rankled. “I only achieved my standing at the university after I demonstrated a few relics to the members of the council. Even then, I didn’t have many supporters in the History department, and they were all old men. In my nearly thirty years as curator, everyone who ever believed in my work died and was replaced by a younger man, a man less willing to believe that the world might be bigger and more amazing than he thought, whereas I haven’t aged a day since I found the Apothecary. What’s more, relics seem to be appearing less and less in recent years. My studies of the nature of these relics lead me to believe that they make themselves manifest at a moment of great historical or metaphysical impact, but we live in an age when rational and intelligent men honestly believe that they already know everything that is there to be known. Fewer people than ever before are attempting to push boundaries, because they don’t think there are any left.”

Talking about the decline of my work was starting to make me despondent, but Tesla was nodding and looking sympathetic. In fact, just talking about these things out loud to another person was going a long way toward making me feel better about life.

“So, doctor,” he said, “would it be accurate to say that you are looking for a job?”

“Well, I have been working for a family in London as a private tutor, but the answer to your question is yes.”

“Good, because as it happens, I have never had a proper assistant. Of course, I have all the men from the lab, and I am sure that we will reestablish our operation, but in truth, those men all legally work for Mr. Westinghouse. In any case, none of them can properly assist me in my real work. Any normal man that works closely with supernatural science runs the risk of being touched with it himself. There is a danger that the moment of scientific epiphany will overload his brain and drive him incurably mad as the combined knowledge of the cosmos sets his mind on fire. You, on the other hand, have already been touched with this sort of knowledge. You handle supernatural objects all the time. And as you have perhaps just realized, working in this world is much easier with another like mind to talk to. So what do you say, Dr. St. James? Will you join me?”

A chance to work in the occult world again, with regular work in a fascinating field, and not by myself this time? I wouldn’t get another offer like that in a hundred years.

“Absolutely, Mr. Tesla.” We shook hands again, this time as colleagues.

Following the fire, the Westinghouse Electric Company began setting up a new lab for Tesla and his men at his Houston Street address. I sent a cable to the family whose son I had been tutoring, in which I told them that I was regretfully terminating my employment with them, having found a new opportunity in America. They hadn’t seemed like the most attentive of people as far as their cellar was concerned, so I trusted that the Apothecary would remain safely hidden where I left it, behind a pile of sacks and old furniture.

Later that same year, Tesla and I oversaw the construction of the Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls using his new polyphase alternating-current generators, the first of its kind in the world, and when we got back, the new lab was buzzing with activity. New equipment had been brought in, and the assistants I had seen in South Fifth Avenue were back at work. The whole place was lit night and day by Tesla’s fluorescent tube lamps, and Tesla himself worked there round the clock, barely taking any time for sleep.

In 1897, the famous War of Currents between General Electric’s direct and Westinghouse’s alternating had nearly bankrupted Westinghouse, so Tesla released Westinghouse from contract to alleviate the burden of the royalties on his patents. However, Tesla was not a man to let a complete lack of funding stanch his enthusiasm. With a series of loans and investments, he soldiered on. In the year following Tesla’s split with Westinghouse, he conducted research in wireless communication, radioactivity, and a new technology he dubbed “the Art of Teleautomatics.” He performed a demonstration in front of representatives from the Navy in which he piloted a boat from the shore using a wireless transmitter. This technology, if perfected, could mean that no man need ever risk life and limb on the field of battle ever again. He even began work on a method for transmitting electrical power through the atmosphere and the earth without wires so that no vehicle needed ever again to carry an onboard fuel source. On the other hand, his research into mechanical resonance led to a device that created tremors in the walls of the lab so powerful that they nearly brought the whole building down. It was an inspiration to me that a man could be so devoted to a task that he would let absolutely nothing get in the way of progress. He knew that what he was doing had value, and the concerns of money and personal well-being could go hang, at least to a point. Would that I could be so focused.

And that was just our above-board activities. We did plenty more that didn’t make it into the newspapers, at least as anything more than unsubstantiated rumor. We took a trip to upstate New York to deal with a pack of werewolves that had been terrorizing local farmers. We helped a Whisperer handle a particularly virulent string of hauntings in the city. We mediated a territory dispute between an interloping wizard from somewhere in India and a local boy known only as the Wizard of Menlo Park – an actual wizard, no relation to Mr. Edison, who wasn’t half put off by the latter’s relatively recent claim to the moniker. I was introduced to a world inhabited by people not unlike myself, people who wielded power and exhibited abilities that were truly otherworldly. I saw nearly every sort of magic that could be wielded, from the Whisperer’s magic of Cold to the werewolves’ magic of the Low to the wizards’ magic of the Heart. I began to refer to the powers of my own relics as the magic of the World, as I first began to realize my place in the great cosmology that Tesla had shown me.

In the four years since I first met Nikola Tesla behind the burning remains of his laboratory, he taught me more than I had learned in forty years of university education and relic hunting. He showed me a world of which I had only gotten the tiniest glimpse, and he introduced me to some of the people that made it spin. He even found time to teach me a few languages out of the half-dozen he spoke himself. I felt the kind of kinship and solidarity that I had sorely lacked in past years. But every now and again, I found my thoughts drifting back to the Apothecary, likely still gathering dust in a basement in Kensington, a wondrous object sitting idle while I was experiencing wonders of my own. I occasionally felt a twang of guilt about abandoning the duty I had taken upon myself, that I somehow owed my industry to a power above Cambridge. Then I remembered why I had left the Apothecary in the first place, and I tamped those feelings back down. Worldwide journeys cost money, and the Novoscope might give its signal at any time. The funds to pay for an international trek and the freedom to undertake it were not to be found in a private tutoring job. Maybe I could find some way to capitalize on the abilities the relics granted me, but somehow it didn’t seem right.

One day in 1899, I arrived at the lab to find it empty. There was no jumble of equipment or bustle of assistants. I went downstairs to his private lab, but it was empty as well, except for a long, narrow box and an envelope. The envelope had my name on it. Inside the envelope was a letter from Tesla.

“To my friend Dr. St. James: Experimental conditions have necessitated my departure from New York. I am relocating west, where conditions are more conducive to high-power, high-frequency testing. Have located prime site in Colorado Springs. Equipment sold off to pay debts, employees released with references.

“With regret, I must bring our partnership to an end. I can truthfully say that these past years have been memorable. I will always treasure the time that we spent as colleagues and brothers in arms, but deep down, you must always have known that you could not remain at my side forever. I know you, doctor. You are a field man at heart. You do not need the constant company of others like you to maintain your own worth. It is within you to become a man of renown in our world, and you could never do that as the trusted colleague of Nikola Tesla.

“When we first met, you had grown weary of life as a servant of Archimedes’ Apothecary. Since then, I have endeavored to show you some of the world on which you almost turned your back. I hope that I have rekindled the fire that the Apothecary lit within you, to help you regain some of your lost momentum. Archimedes chose you for this life whether he intended it or not, and we both know that you will never truly be able to ignore the things that you have seen and that you know wait around every corner and in every shadow. Do not resist the call of the world, doctor. Embrace it. Cherish it. Your life has an indelible purpose. Many are not so lucky.

“Enclosed is a small token of my esteem, a tool for use in your continued endeavors. The idea occurred during our experiments with resonance. You remember the earthquake incident. Thought it might save your life one day. Call it a favor returned.

“Farewell, my friend. May the world never cease to inspire wonder. N. Tesla.

“P.S. Regarding the subject of funding, if you are still wary of appealing to an outside sponsor, might I suggest long-term investments? I may not have that sort of patience, but you may well live long enough to see such things bear fruit. Find a lawyer and a reliable stockbroker. I hear that such things exist in London.”

I opened the box and found inside a sort of scepter made of polished wood and inlaid with copper and steel. The bottom of the scepter could be twisted like a dial, and indeed there was a numbered gauge above it with a moving needle. There was a small parabolic dish set into the top, with an antenna of sorts at its center. I was able to intuit that the scepter was some kind of magnetic resonance feedback device designed to cause a malfunction in any metallic machine. Pointing the scepter at a machine and pressing one of the controls would send a magnetic pulse and cause the machine to resonate. The scepter would then detect the frequency and display it on the gauge. Twisting the bottom dial to the same position on the gauge and pressing the second control would send out a powerful oscillating magnetic field and cause the machine to fail.

In order to inspire me to resume my search for relics, he had built me a new one. I didn’t know what to say, except, “Absolutely, Mr. Tesla.” If he had meant for this entire four-year sabbatical to reinvigorate me toward my work, then he was more of a genius than I had realized. As it turned out, a little time away from the office was exactly what I had needed. And now that I had met more sorts of people from my side of the street, as it were, I better understood where to find them. I could begin building a network of supernatural contacts and making a name for myself in the underground world of the occult, as much for purposes of information gathering as for a social circle greater than one.

And as for the question of funding and manning an operation consisting solely of myself, Tesla had given me a few ideas in that area, as well. I immediately made arrangements for travel back to London. A new century was dawning, and things were going to be different now.