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.