Public Appearance Announcement

Chronicler's Note:

Greetings, all. Nathaniel Hicklin here, head chronicler for Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie, as well as for the Seekers of Truth and the Ikosian Ministry of Inquiry. I will be appearing at the Bloomington Writers' Festival at the Bloomington Theater and Arts Center, 1800 W. Old Shakopee Rd, Bloomington, MN, on Saturday, March 23, 2013. Come one, come all to meet local authors, buy books, and attend panels from prominent individuals in the industry. Hope to see you there!

Entry #10: The Spirit of St. Louis (1932)

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974)

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Charles Lindbergh had an early passion for motor vehicles, starting with cars and motorcycles and moving into airplanes. Following his college career, he became a journeyman barnstormer, then an airplane mechanic in Billings, Montana, and then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Reserve Corps. After his military training, he became a pilot for the new U.S. Air Mail service and was one of its most vocal advocates.

When a French-born hotelier in New York named Raymond Orteig offered a prize in 1919 for the first person to pilot an airplane between New York City and Paris within ten years, Lindbergh set out to claim the prize, the pursuit of which had already claimed the lives of six well-known fliers. He took off on Friday, May 20, 1927, at 7:52 a.m. from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He flew through fog, above storm clouds, and along the tops of waves, navigating only by the stars or by dead reckoning. He landed on Saturday, May 21, at 10:22 p.m. at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, and he was hoisted on the shoulders of 150,000 Parisians for more than twenty minutes. In 33 hours, he had achieved virtually instantaneous worldwide fame, and he was a public figure for the rest of his life.

*             *             *

The incident with Maria had earned me credibility among London’s occult crowd. The only people with a sense of my relationship with Maria were those who had been at the pub that night, and they were the only ones that understood the personal tragedy that had befallen me. Every other member of the local supernatural community simply knew that a nearly unstoppable, nearly indestructible entity had run amok through the streets of London, and that I had managed to both stop and destroy it through my ingenuity and resource. Even though I was an independent operator, not affiliated with any of the bodies that had a seat at the great occult table, I was now nonetheless respected by those in London who represented them. The firm of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie had gained a great deal of clout indeed, and the name of Dr. Israel St. James was now spoken with reverence by a great many people.

I used to spend my days compiling my notes, performing research, and simply passing the time while I waited for the Novoscope to notify me of work. Now that word of my expertise was spreading, though, I was seeing people in my office nearly every day. I was known as a man who dealt with unusual or aberrant objects, and so there was a steady flow of objects through my door. It reminded me of the early days of my tenure at Cambridge as the curator of the Abnormal Relics Collection, when people would send me anything that they couldn’t explain and didn’t want around their own offices. I needed to clarify for my visitors that I was primarily a gatherer and not an appraiser, but for the most part, they were satisfied to let me keep the various baubles that they brought me. On those occasions that their own continued custody of the items was desired, they were willing to pay a reasonable fee for my expert advice. Most of the time, my payment was in the form of favors or some other sort of quid pro quo, the occult world not being one that relied largely on currency.

The other side of my newfound renown was that I was now very easy to locate when I wasn’t out on a job. The supernatural community had beaten a wide enough path to my door that my office was no longer the den of relative anonymity that it had been when I established it. I had therefore invested in some security measures for my office, as well as a new aluminum carrying case for my standard kit of relics that was better organized and better secured than my old satchel. It enabled me to carry more relics on my missions than usual, ensuring that I was less likely to be caught unprepared. It even included compartments for the Rod of Asclepius and the Tesla Resonator that enabled them to be conveniently stored and quickly retrieved, which was no mean feat, since they were easily my two most cumbersome tools.

I got a chance to test out my new luggage when I arrived at work one morning to another late-night event. Sometimes I suspected the universe of deliberately arranging for these events to occur in the middle of the night. The coordinates pointed to a town in New Jersey called Hopewell. I loaded my new case with as many relics as it could hold, which was a large number, and I dialed the location into the Orrery. I hoped that the time difference would work in my favor, since the working day was beginning in London while the residents of the American east coast were still fast asleep, even taking the murderous Puritan work ethic into account. I maintained a certain amount of pride in the nation of my birth, but that was one thing I was glad of about Britain.

It was indeed still dark when I arrived in New Jersey, but I could hear a commotion not far away. I walked a few blocks, following a steady stream of police cars and other government vehicles. When I arrived, I saw an ordinary house surrounded by dozens of cars and enough lights to create a second sun. I used the Badge to get as close to the scene as I could, but even with the Badge, I was outranked. Surrounding the official presence was a ring of reporters and photographers, and I pressed in among them to get a sense of what was going on. The information was varied and copious, but the prevailing wind was that Charles Lindbergh’s young son had been kidnapped.

This was truly a formidable event. I might have expected less of a hullaballoo if President Hoover’s son were taken. Charles Lindbergh was an American hero. Whoever had decided to twist his tail like this was either a juggernaut or a colossal fool, and with this massive law enforcement presence, a fool would have been caught by now.

Mr. Lindbergh had pulled out all the stops to ensure the safety of his son. At the moment, he was talking to three men in the uniforms of a U.S. Army Colonel. According to a local reporter I was talking with, he had made their acquaintance upon his own promotion to colonel in the Army Air Corps. One was the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf. Another was a Wall Street lawyer and former Olympic fencer named Henry Breckenridge. The third was one Colonel William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, a First World War veteran and Medal of Honor recipient. The four of them were huddled around a piece of paper. It was obviously more important than the other evidence at the scene for it to command the attention of such illustrious men.

The Badge was not going to impress these men. If I was going to get a look at that paper, I needed to show them something they hadn’t seen yet. If this kidnapping had supernatural motives, then I was likely to be the only true expert on the scene, and I needed to tell them so.

I took my fate in my hands and approached the gathering. “Excuse me, Colonel?”

The four of them turned toward me, and I felt the gazes of four Army colonels. I was surprised my eyebrows didn’t sizzle. “And just who the hell are you?”

I faltered for a moment, but I managed to muster my courage. I had been traveling the globe seeking wonders when the eldest of these men had been the merest glint in his father’s eye. I had nothing to fear from them. “Dr. Israel St. James, with the firm of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie.” Lindbergh and the others looked at Breckenridge, but he shrugged his shoulders. The name clearly hadn’t become renowned among legitimate law firms. “I have a unique expertise in matters such as these. I’d like to help.”

“What help do you offer?” asked Lindbergh. “If you have anything to bring to the table, by all means share it.”

I had nothing but sympathy for the man. He was doing his best to remain calm and in control of the investigation, but I could see the pain he was in. He had just lost that which was most dear to him, and it was tearing him apart. I knew a little of what that felt like.

“May I see that paper, please?” He handed it over, and I took a look. It looked like a ransom note that had been written by a kindergarten child:

“Dear Sir!

Have 50.000$ redy 25,000$ in 20$ bills 15.000$ in 10$ bills and 10.000$ in 5$ bills After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the mony.

We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police The child is in gut care. Indication for all letters are singnature and three holes.”

Beneath the text of the note was what I assumed to be the signature mentioned: two interlocked blue rings with a red circle in their intersection. A hole was punched in the middle of the red circle, and two more were punched to the left and right of the rings.

“Well, obviously this was written by someone with better command of German than English. I assume you’re looking into local criminals of German heritage?”

“Naturally,” said Col. Donovan. “We’re looking into a potential organized crime connection. What do you make of that symbol?”

I set down my case. “Nothing yet.” I opened the case and drew out the St. Jerome Reliquary. If this symbol represented any sort of language, the Reliquary would let me decipher it. On the other hand, if deciphering the symbol’s meaning took more than five minutes or so, my ability to distinguish languages and express myself intelligibly would begin to decay, and I would be bound for a madhouse for sure.

I prepared to put the Reliquary’s chain around my neck, and I turned to Lindbergh. “Give me four minutes, and then get this thing off my neck by any means necessary. Do you understand?” He nodded, and I fully donned the Reliquary. With the sight that it granted me, I saw the symbol nearly glow with renewed meaning. The shapes and colors danced, and I understood the meaning of the signature.

The symbol was a pictograph in a language used by goblins and other low-level fairy flunkies from Tír na nÓg. I recognized a reference to Krampus, the ancient German counterpart to Father Christmas who stole away naughty children on Christmas Eve. It was common practice for fairies to kidnap children and replace them with doppelgangers to exert their influence on the world, like a spy assuming a role to infiltrate a rival organization. The changeling would be raised as a human to act as a secret operative of Titania, and the child would be brought to her court to serve as entertainment, ornamentation, or quarry.

From the German slant of the message’s idiom, the culprits were probably kobolds, German sprites that often appeared as children. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could start a proper search. I took off the Reliquary and replaced it in my case.

“Well? What is the symbol?” said Lindbergh.

“It’s a good start,” I said. “May I see the crime scene, please?”

“It won’t do you any good,” said Superintendent Schwarzkopf. “We swept the room already, and we didn’t find a single print, not even from the nursemaid.”

“I understand. I still need to see the room.”

The three colonels were confused, but Lindbergh overruled them and led me to the nursery. I swept the room with the Mary Celeste Sextant and saw a line of faint glimmers in the carpet, like drops of water from a leaky bucket. The line led out the open window. I followed the trail through the house to its source, a display case on the wall with broken glass around it. The case was full of the awards and accolades Mr. Lindbergh had been given after his historic flight, but there was a gap where a couple of the trophies ought to have been. I examined the glass on the floor, and some of the pieces had more glowing flecks on them. Some sort of magical creature had broken the case and removed some of the contents, and it had cut itself on the broken glass and left a trail.

“Mr. Lindbergh, was this case full last night?”

He took a look at the case and made a quick check of the contents. “Yes. Two of the awards are missing.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Certainly. They were the Key to the City awards that I was given from London and New York. Why would the kidnappers have taken them and not any of the others?”

That sounded like my relic. I picked up my case and made for the front door. “I intend to ask them that myself. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Lindbergh, I think I’ve seen everything I need here. The next time you see me, God willing, I will have your son with me.” We shook hands, and I walked out of the house. I went around the nursery window, reacquired the blood trail with the Sextant, and I got to work.

There had been a tire track behind the house, but the fairy blood trail led off in a different direction. There was no chance that a band of kobolds would use something with that much iron in it. Iron isn’t exactly poisonous to fairies, but they definitely don’t like being too near it. It feels to them like the sound of nails on a chalkboard in their brains. They would never want to sit inside a giant cage of steel for any length of time. They must have carried the child away on foot, which at least meant that they couldn’t have gone far. According to Lindbergh, the kidnapping had occurred at around 9:30 that night, and I had arrived at between 3 and 4 a.m., which gave the kidnappers about a 30-mile head start.

I followed the trail to a small grove of trees about five miles from the house. I examined the area with the Sextant from a safe distance, and there was a strong fairy presence there. I had to assume that they had the child with them. If I wasn’t careful in my approach, they might harm the child to keep me back. I put away the Sextant and took the Titania’s Kiss from my case, tucking it into an inside pocket of my waistcoat. Thus armed, I walked toward the grove to confront the kidnappers.

I got all the way into the middle of the grove before I saw anyone. I spotted a glimpse of a kobold, and then the trees spewed them out around me. There were between six and nine of them, all no more than three feet tall and armed with crude stone-bladed knifes and spears. They were dressed in clothes seemingly made from old sacking and rags, and they stared at me with impish, toothy grins. They might have stepped out of a Disney cartoon, if not for the smell.

“Declare yourself, trespasser,” said one of them, in a strong German accent. He may have been the leader, but I couldn’t tell.”

“You took a child this night,” I said. “I have come to negotiate for his return.”

“There is no child here,” said another one of them. The ring of kobolds began to giggle.

“What happened to the child?”

“The emissary of our Lady has come and gone,” said one of them. “The child has gone from this world.”

I was too late. Damn it. Well, if I couldn’t do anything for the Lindberghs, I could at least fulfill the goal I came for in the first place. “Is your only job to kidnap children for your Lady?”

“What mean you by this?”

“You took more than a child. You also took a pair of keys from a glass case. What interest are they to you?”

“The Keys are no concern of yours!” said one of them.

“The Keys are a fine prize for our Lady!” said another.

“What is it to you about the Keys?” said the first one, the one who might have been the leader.

“The keys are why I came here,” I said. “It is my business to gather such relics.”

The supposed leader thought for a moment. “What are you called, human?”

“My name is Dr. Israel St. James.”

The kobolds were in an uproar. “It is the Israel Doctor!” “The trinket gatherer!” They seemed very excited to meet me. I felt honored.

“Tell me something,” I said. “If you were the ones who took the child, whose are the tire tracks behind the house?”

“The wheels belong to the human called Bruno Hauptmann,” said the leader. “He was our agent in this world. He is our trickery for the mortal policemen. But never you mind this,” he said, digging into a pouch on his belt. “You are the Israel Doctor. You should have the trinkets.” He drew from his pouch a pair of large brass keys, and he tossed them to me. As my fingers tightened around them, the knowledge of the relics flowed into my brain.

The Keys to the City awarded to Charles Lindbergh by the cities of London and New York had been imbued with the spirit of their recipient. After his flight, he had been an icon of humanity. No door had been closed to him. This, combined with the nature of a Key to the City as a symbol of freedom of passage, had given the Keys the ability to unlock any lock in their path. Lucky Lindy’s Keys gave their holder the power to pass through any door in the world. Each key could unlock a different kind of door. The Key to Old London Town was attuned to “old” locks, and the Key to New York to “new” locks. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I was sure that these relics were the ultimate thief’s tool. The holder of these keys could go anywhere and take anything they liked.

So why had this band of kobolds been so eager to hand them over?

When I recovered from the information shock, the kobolds were pointing their weapons at me.

“We only took the Keys to gain favor with our Lady,” said the leader. “Such a prize would grant great power to our Lady’s emissaries and agents in this world. But you did our Lady a great insult many summers past. You tore her servant from her and stole her sleeping stone. She will grant us many fine boons when we deliver you. You may hold the Keys while we bring you to her court, and then you will dance for our Lady at long last, Israel Doctor.”

Oh, dear. Apparently, Titania had not forgiven me for my little dalliance in the Adirondacks sixty years ago. One of her emissaries had been sending railroad workers to sleep so their minds could be sent to Tír na nÓg for Titania’s pleasure, and I put a stop to it. I wound up keeping the Titania’s Kiss stone for myself, concealed in the handle of the letter opener in my inside pocket, and the emissary had been exiled to the world. I hadn’t anticipated the level of offense that Titania had taken to my actions, but it must have been considerable. She obviously wasn’t accustomed to being bested by a mere mortal.

I took a look around the circle of kobolds. Their weapons had flint edges that looked handmade. A steel blade was much sturdier than stone, but a well-knapped flint edge was much sharper, like a broken pane of glass. The era when early humans were first able to conquer the beasts of the field wasn’t called the Stone Age for nothing. On the other hand, the heads of their spears were very close to me, and I had trained in stick fighting after my first violent encounter. I got ready to grab at one of them when I saw a faint oily sheen on one of the spearheads. It looked like some kind of poison. It could have had any of a number of effects, but not one of them was worse than being brought to Titania’s court.

I took my fate in my hands and lunged for one of the spears. Its wielder jabbed at me, but I managed to dodge his thrust and took the spear in hand. I spun it around and swung the blunt end at his head. The shaft was made of a good, heavy hardwood, and the little kobold went down on the ground clutching his head. One of the others stuck out his spear and cut a little furrow in my arm, tearing the sleeve of my shirt. I could feel the poison on his spear start to take effect as a warm, prickling feeling spread from the wound, and I knew that I had no time to waste. I swung the spear around madly in an attempt to parry any further incoming attacks, and I kicked at any kobolds that tried to get close.

A couple of them climbed trees and pounced on my shoulders and back and forced me to the ground. While I was briefly pinned, two more of them moved in on my ankles and tried to hamstring me, but I kicked as hard as I could and knocked both of them unconscious. The two on my back drew their own knives, but I caught their arms and flung them at a pair of tree trunks. They hit hard and fell to the ground, barely moving.

There were less than half a dozen of them left, and they were definitely playing for keeps now. They started darting in and out, trying to get in their licks with their own blades. I threw the spear away into the trees and pulled out the Titania’s Kiss from my pocket. I doubted that the stone would have any effect on fairy folk, but it was contained in the handle of a steel letter opener, and though the opener’s blade would not have worried a human assailant, the steel would do just fine against a fairy. As soon as the next kobold moved in for an attack, I drove the blade between his ribs, and he screamed as a dark green fluid oozed from the wound. Another one leapt at me from the opposite direction, and he got the same treatment.

This kobold snatch crew was not prepared for combat against anything more formidable than an 18-month-old infant, and they were definitely not expecting someone like me to put up a fight. I spun around to catch any further attackers, but they were beginning to back away and look to their leader for guidance.

“Well?! Do you still mean to bring me to your Lady?!” The feel of the poison had spread to nearly my entire arm, but I was still drunk on adrenalin. I could have fought off twenty more kobolds at that point without slowing down.

“Please!” said the leader. “Cease your fight! We surrender!” He lowered his weapons and gave a shudder. I saw his skin shift and his clothes change color, and he transformed into the spitting image of a human child. He seemed to be the one who would have taken the Lindbergh child’s place in the crib. He looked up at me and pleaded. “Please do not harm me, sir.”

He must have thought that metamorphosing into the shape of his victim would endear me to him.

I have encountered fairies on several occasions, and I have never truly known them to show the slightest understanding of human nature.

I wiped the blade of the letter opener off on the grass and replaced it in my pocket. I then picked up my case and struck him in the head, not stopping until I could see the dents in his skull.

The others stood around behind me, shocked.

“Now you run back to your Lady,” I told them, as calm as I could manage, “and you tell her that the children of this world are protected. You tell her not to provoke me again, unless she wants to incur more losses like those she suffered today. Because every time I am threatened, I grow stronger, and I will meet many more challenges before she hears of me again. And you tell her that if she continues to prod at this world, I will hear about it, and when that time comes, I may get angry.”

The remaining kobolds, bruised and bleeding, gathered their fallen and ran off. I opened my case and put the Titania’s Kiss away, along with the Keys. I then took out the Rod of Asclepius and took it in hand as I propped myself up against a tree. The snake untwined from the rod and sank its fangs into my wounded arm, knitting the wound closed and counteracting the effect of the poison.

As the sun rose, I made my way out of the grove of trees, covered in dirt and with one sleeve torn. The kobolds, in their panic, had left behind the transformed body of their leader, and it still lay where it had fallen.

Eventually, the police would discover the body of what appeared to be Charles Lindbergh’s missing son. The family would be inconsolable, but there was little to be done. The child was already long gone, off to serve in Titania’s court until he died or managed to escape.

I judged that the situation was bad, but the best had been made of it. Better that the Lindberghs discover their child’s corpse than a fairy in human guise, and so invite the tendrils of Titania into their home. I had known many families to recover from a tragic loss, but I had never known one to recover from such a cruel deception and betrayal as that. The family would grieve and mourn, but in the end they would trim sails and survive, and they would be stronger for it.

And as far as young Charles Jr. was concerned, his father had flown a pile of steel, wood, and canvas across thousands of miles of ocean because he thought it ought to be done. If the boy was anything like that, he’d be just fine.

Entry #9: The Electric Lady (1930)

Metropolis (1927)

The film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is a German expressionist science-fiction film about a worker uprising in a world where the upper and lower classes are heavily stratified, both socially and literally. The main character is the son of the city’s founder, who wants to act as a mediator between the workers and the managers. He is working with a woman who wants to unify the workers against the managers. His father hires a scientist to create a robot duplicate of the woman in order to disrupt the labor movement, but the scientist has plans of his own for the city. The film features visual effects and design that were decades ahead of their time, and it is still held as one of the finest films ever made.

The film was made during the Weimar Republic, a liberal democratic period of stability and prosperity in Germany following the First World War. A profusion of foreign influence led to a renaissance in culture, architecture, and art that brought about a golden age for Germany, which ended in 1929 when the Great Depression sent the world economy into a tailspin and paved the way for a conservative backlash.

*             *             *

After so many decades of hunting relics, I realized that I had to try to pursue some sort of a social life, lest I wind up a complete and maddened wreck like the unnamed thief I had met in Paris. I resolved to spend at least a few hours a day away from the office and in the company of other people. There was no shortage of pubs and other communal watering holes around London, so I tried my luck with a pint at a few of the places nearby. I knew that it had been quite a few years since I had tried to chat someone up, but surely the protocol couldn’t have changed that much.

It didn’t take me long to realize how wrong I was. I was completely lost at sea with regards to the fairer sex, even more so than I had been as a student. When I was at Cambridge, women had worn capes, bonnets, and full skirts with crinolines. Since then, the style had evolved short hair and knee-level hemlines with nary a corset to be found. Meanwhile, I was still wearing the same bowler and waistcoat that I always had. It seemed that whoever opened the taps of change for the 20^th century must have gone away for the weekend and left them running.

After I adjusted to the fashion culture shock, I still had a basic problem to address. One of the primary topics of conversation for young men was still the activities of their daily business, and there I was sadly lacking. I couldn’t discuss the true nature of my work with anyone on this side of the metaphorical tracks, and I was completely hopeless at inventing activities suitable to impress a young lady. I had grown used to the name of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie as a way to alleviate further questioning, but as soon as anyone expressed an interest in my job, I found myself unable to make my cover employers seem even the least bit engaging.

I then went about a similar quest among the denizens of the supernatural side of London, a crowd with more common ground to myself but with a far narrow breadth of options. Unfortunately, the aspects of life that hampered me in a normal pub did the same in a paranormal one, only in the opposite direction. I was free to discuss my work in the pubs that catered to the occult crowd, but it was held to be universally uninteresting. In a world of spiritual mediums, wizards, and demon-hunters, I was a man with a glorified filing cabinet. For every story I could tell about retrieving some relic, the woman on the other side of the table could tell several dozen. Furthermore, I had thought that the rules of social etiquette in the normal world were complicated, but they were merely an amusing puzzle compared to the supernatural world, which was far more liberated and egalitarian than its mundane counterpart. Apparently, female wizards were no longer referred to as witches, and it was considered rude to be unaware of this. I had a lot of lonely drinks in occult bars until I got to grips with little nuggets like that.

My position appeared untenable. I was an unfathomable mystery to most of the women in London, and I was an uninteresting office drone to the rest. The other members of the supernatural fraternity could at least be social with others like themselves, but I appeared to be a member of a group of one. I had no one like myself that could relate to me. What was worse, as I approached my ninetieth birthday, I found it less and less easy to pursue any kind of relationship without acknowledging the fact that I had been in my current occupation when the woman in question was still in swaddling clothes, no matter what community she was a part of.

It was in this mood that I arrived at work later than usual one morning, having spent some time in the company of a stiff drink and his friends the previous night and still somewhat feeling the effects. I stumbled over to the Novoscope with a glass of water and an aspirin, and there was an event notification waiting for me. I did the calculations, and it led me to Berlin, where an event had taken place in the wee hours last night. I could never understand why so many of these events seemed to occur in the middle of the night.

I packed my bag and dialed the coordinates into the Orrery, and I stepped through to Berlin. I found myself in a rundown part of the city, strewn with abandoned buildings and derelict vehicles. There were no obvious landmarks to guide my search, so all I could do was wander around the immediate area with the Sextant and hope that no one saw my shiny toy and tried to rob me. After about an hour of wandering, I didn’t see anything with an aura, but I did find an apparently derelict building with an unusual number of heavy electrical lines leading into it. Someone had tapped into a city power line and was siphoning electricity. The building appeared to be empty, but I did find a cellar door that had clearly been maintained.

I descended the stone steps and found a room that I could only describe as an altar to science, because the word “laboratory” would not have done it justice. The walls were lined with electrical apparatus of every size and shape, stacked together in crude piles and wired together with an ad hoc network of cables. There was a large table at one end of the room that had been converted into a workbench, surrounded by metalworking equipment. I had last seen a room like this under the command of a man named Tesla in New York, but Tesla’s lab was far more refined than this. This was clearly the domain of a formidable intellect forced to make do with whatever he could scrounge. However, a quick sweep with the Sextant revealed that this was not the laboratory of a cryptoscientist, as they were calling themselves now. This was simply a makeshift laboratory, in which a lone genius had possibly built a relic by pure accident. I did not yet fully understand the process that caused relics to be born into the world, but I shivered at the brilliance, or perhaps madness, that would be required for the mind of a single man to absorb that sort of power. Tesla and his colleagues had lost a valuable ally, or they had narrowly avoided a formidable adversary.

There was a faint aura around the laboratory, not strong enough to represent a relic, but enough to reveal that one had likely been used on someone or something in the room. The victim had more likely been a person than an object, because the aura was thickest at the center of the room, where a long table held a canvas tarpaulin that covered a human shape.

I approached the table and drew aside the canvas, and I saw a woman’s body strapped face down to a gurney. Her arms and legs were all secured individually, and her head was held in place with pads pressed against her temples with threaded rods. The back of her neck was marred with a circular puncture wound, as though she had been injected with a large needle. I examined her again with the Sextant, but there was only the faint aura of the relic that had been used on her, with no sign of that of a living being.

Without any sort of hint as to where the relic had gone, I started sifting through a pile of notebooks on a nearby desk, hoping to find some information on the nature of the thing that had been built here. I had a decent command of German, but I could not hope to decipher anything as technical as this without the St. Jerome reliquary, which I did not tend to carry with me. However, I did find a recent entry in which the author described a garage above his lab that he had cleaned out to make ready for an upcoming procedure. He seemed very excited about the near completion of his device, and he was eagerly looking forward to its first test. He referred to his invention as der Lazarus-Käfer, the Lazarus Beetle. I sifted through the mess of papers and uncovered an engineering schematic that depicted an evil-looking contraption the size of a serving tray, with six legs, a pair of vicious-looking jaws, and a large needle protruding from its underbelly. Just the look of the thing frightened me. I was not looking forward to hunting this thing down, but I had to press on and get the job done before any more people died.

I headed up the stairs and searched the abandoned building above the laboratory, until I found a large door in one wall suitable for an automobile. This must have been the garage mentioned in the inventor’s notes. There was a man-sized door next to it, and by the looks of it, it had been smashed open from the inside. I shone my light inside, and I saw a grisly scene. A car sat partially disassembled in the middle of the floor. Some of the windows and outer panels were missing, but there was no broken glass or spare parts in evidence. Next to the stripped-down car was the body of an older man, wearing a long coat that had once been white but was now stained from the pool of blood that surrounded the body. His head appeared to have been smashed against the floor with great force, and his forearms were broken, indicating self-defense. I stepped gingerly over the body and found the Lazarus Beetle sitting idle on the other side of the car, an intricate contraption built of shiny steel and polished blue crystal that shimmered with a faint glow. It appeared to be inactive. I carefully laid a hand on its steel carapace, and I understood the nature of the relic.

The Lazarus Beetle was the result of the bitterness and despair of a nation, all funneled through the mind and hands of an insane maniac. Germany had been brought to its knees and forced into subservience after the First World War, and something in the national consciousness yearned for rebirth, for a return to greatness. It was that spirit, that Zeitgeist that had caused the Lazarus Beetle to manifest as a relic, and not merely the tinkering of a madman with a lust for power. The Lazarus Beetle was designed as a means of attaining immortality. A person who wanted to live forever would use the Lazarus Beetle to remove their own essence, all the things about them that made them who they were, and then the Beetle would scuttle off and build them a new body from whatever sufficiently sturdy materials were available. Once the body was complete, the Beetle would inject the person’s essence into the new body, which would never age, grow weary, or need sustenance. They would simply live on forever, self-sustaining and all but indestructible.

It seemed that the Beetle had been used on the woman downstairs, and then it had crawled up here to build her a new vessel, using the car for raw materials. Presumably, the dead man had designed the Beetle, and he had wanted to witness the construction process, which ended tragically when he was savagely beaten to death. A set of bare footprints led off into the city, where the killer had tracked the inventor’s blood away from the scene. Somewhere out there, if my guess was right, there was a nearly unstoppable metal woman with blood on her hands, set out to do God knew what. I needed to track her down before she posed a danger to anyone else. I made sure that the Rod of Asclepius was ready to hand in my bag, and I headed out into the alley.

As the trail was starting to grow cold, I spotted two more bodies, in much the same state as the first. From the state of their clothes, they appeared to be vagrants. I examined them for clues, and I found nothing to distinguish them from that of the inventor. I was about to move on when I got an idea. I had been using the Mary Celeste Sextant to detect relic auras for so long that I had nearly forgotten how I found it in the first place: from a sailor in Gibraltar who was haunted by the ghosts of the sea’s dead.

I examined the bodies again, this time with the Sextant. I could just make out the ghosts of the two men, They seemed to be beckoning down an alley with looks of terror on their ethereal faces. I only saw them for a moment before they faded away, but they had given me what I needed. I followed their pointing fingers down a dark alley searching for more signs of mayhem. Eventually, if fortune was with me, I would catch up to the unstoppable metal person at the end of the trail. What I would do then remained to be seen, but I couldn’t plan for everything.

I eventually found her in an abandoned shop. She was huddled against the back wall, well out of sight of a casual passer-by, and she had completely concealed herself in a pile of old clothes. I wasn’t sure if she was still capable of feeling discomfort from cold, but it was very likely that she was simply behaving on instinct. She didn’t seem like a ravening killer. She seemed more like a scared young woman trying to survive a hostile environment. More than anything else, she seemed fragile.

“Hello?” I said, doing my best to appear unthreatening. “Do you need any help? Brauchen Sie Hilfe?”

„Kommen Sie nicht näher!“ she shouted.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I am here to help you. I mean you no harm.”

She paused for a moment. „Amerikaner?“

“Yes. I found the Beetle. You are safe.”

“Who are you?” she said.

I stepped gingerly into the shop. “My name is Dr. Israel St. James. What’s your name?”

“My name is Maria.” She had a pleasant accent, clearly a well-educated woman. “I appreciate your offer, sir, but please stay away.”

“I can’t, because possibly no one else in the world can help you endure this.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some discarded rags with blood stains on them. She had cleaned herself up. A murderous monster wouldn’t have done that. “I understand what has happened to you, and I want to help in any way that I can.”

“That is very gracious of you, but I wonder: will you still want to help after you have seen me?”

“Of course I will.”

She rose from her cocoon of rags and stepped out of the shadows, still covered in an old, ratty blanket. I could only see her feet below the ankles, one hand clutching the blanket, and a small part of her face. Every visible part of her body glinted with chrome. She looked my right in the eye, almost afraid of what I might do. She reminded me of a deer, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

She held eye contact with me for as long as she dared, and then she turned away. I reached out and brushed my fingers against her hand, taking it in mine. She turned back to face me with a different look in her eyes. I hadn’t reacted in the way she had expected I would. She seemed intrigued and surprised.

I drew the blanket away from her face, letting it catch the light.

Her hair was made of fine wire and spun glass. Her cheek was made of polished steel. Her eyes were a pair of frosted glass globes with a blue spark of electricity behind them. She was, without a doubt, the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought you would be repelled?”

“Impossible,” I said. “How could I be repelled by a girl as beautiful as you?”

Her smile warmed me like the sun. We held hands and looked into each other’s eyes, for how long I couldn’t say.

I found her some clothes in the shop and brought her back to the laboratory, making sure to shield the bodies I had found from view along the way to avoid distressing her unduly. I also made sure to remove the body from the gurney in the middle of the room and hide it away before I brought her in, in order to spare her the ordeal of seeing her own corpse. Once we were safely sequestered away from prying eyes, I examined her with the Sextant to check the state of her health. I saw her aura tangled with that of the Lazarus Beetle in an ugly knot, almost as though they were fighting each other for supremacy. For the moment, her aura was winning.

I sat her down and asked her a few questions to get her impression of the events of that morning. She told me that she had been the inventor’s assistant. He had been a professor, but he had lost his position when the Depression hit Germany. She had helped him build the Lazarus Beetle, but he had kept secret his designs on her as his Guinea pig. She had resisted with all her strength, but he was able to overpower her and strap her to the table. All her panicked thrashing was no use against the steel and leather. She had felt the Beetle drive its needle into the back of her neck, and the next thing she remembered was waking up in the abandoned clothes shop with blood on her hands. She had no memory at all of killing the professor and the two unfortunates in the street. I described to her what had happened as gently as I could, and she was horrified. I quickly explained to her what I had learned with the Sextant. Somehow, the Beetle was exerting some sort of influence over her, and it was this influence that had caused the deaths of those three men. In no way could she be held responsible, and I would defend her to the ends of the earth against anyone who said otherwise. After I held her in my arms for a while, she calmed down. I may have maintained my embrace for a few seconds longer than necessary, but neither of us protested.

Maria and I spend the next day or so going through the professor’s notes and journals, looking for anything that would undo the damage that the Lazarus Beetle had done to Maria’s psyche. The journals were full of tirades and monographs about lost glory and a desire for power and invulnerability. The professor had been something of a nationalist who despised the influx of foreign culture to Germany during the Roaring Twenties and sought to give his father country the means to rise again, to strike back at the powers that had carved his country up like a Christmas goose after the war. There were some passages in there about the golem myth, which may have informed the design of the Beetle. It was interesting from an academic point of view, but not exactly useful for what we needed.

“Well,” I said as I closed the last journal, “there doesn’t seem to be anything here that will help us.”

“So now what?” said Maria. “Do you have another plan?”

“Yes. I can bring you back to London with me. I know a few people there with occult expertise. One of them ought to be able to do something for you.”

“But all the way to London? Do you think you can get me there without being noticed?”

“Of course. I have a special way of traveling quickly and secretly. We can be in my office by this time tomorrow with no one the wiser.”

“Oh. I should like very much to see that.” She seemed excited. “If your friend is able to help me, then what? What do we do after that?”

“After that, well, we’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.”

“I mean, I can hardly get a job as a scullery maid or something,” she said, wringing her hands. “Most of my work has been as a laboratory assistant.” We were both staring at our toes, too nervous to look each other in the eye. “I don’t suppose you would need an assistant, doing whatever you do?”

“Well, I, uh, I don’t exactly have a laboratory. It’s really just an office.”

She smiled at me. She had the prettiest smile. “I think I could tolerate an office.”

“I’d like that very much.” I held her hands in mine. The moment lasted for the blink of an eye, and then I broke away. “Well, I’d better start packing up some of these books. Why don’t you go grab forty winks, and then I’ll turn in myself once I’m done.” I wasn’t at all sure that she even needed sleep anymore, but it was as good a suggestion as any.

“All right, Israel. I’ll see you in the morning.” She stood up on her tiptoes and gave me a faint kiss on the cheek. “Good night.” I watched her as she went to a corner of the lab and lay down on a blanket.

I was over the moon. I might never get another chance for real companionship as long as I lived, and that was likely to be a very long time indeed. If I could cure Maria of whatever compulsion the Beetle had inflicted upon her, she might go on to live for just as long as me. And better yet, she even seemed to like me. I was no great shakes at courtship, but if I managed to avoid doing anything truly foolish, I might get to live happily with a lovely woman for the rest of our very long lives. I finished packing the professor’s books and papers with a song in my heart and a spring in my step, and I leaned back in a chair with my hat pulled down to try and get some rest before we left in the morning.

I awoke at around dawn to the sound of screaming. I ran over to the corner where Maria was sleeping to see what was wrong. I found her sitting up on her blanket, hugging her knees and breathing heavily.

“Maria? What’s the matter?”

„Gott im Himmel . . .” She was shaking. I knelt down and held her for a few minutes until she calmed down.

“What happened, Maria? Did you have a nightmare?”

“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. I was seeing everything that happened, as though I were standing outside of myself watching it all. Israel, I killed three people.”

“No. This was not you. Yes, you were present, and yes, the blood was on your hands, but this was not you. You have to believe that, Maria.”

“How can I?”

“I told you. The Lazarus Beetle has an influence over you. If we can get you to London, then we have a chance of freeing you from it. Until then, I need you to fight, and I need you to trust me. I will do everything I can to make the nightmares stop.”

“Everything you can?”

“Of course, everything.”

She sat up and looked me in the eye. “Because if the Beetle takes over again, and I start going around killing people, then there will be only one thing you can do.”

“Maria, don’t say that, please.”

“Israel, you know perfectly well that the possibility exists. I don’t want any more innocent people to die.”

“The professor was not innocent. You know that.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one deserves his fate, and it’s to you to see that his fate will come to no more people. If it comes down to it, I have to know that you will do what is necessary.”

“It won’t be necessary. I won’t agree to that.”

“Israel, please! Promise me!”

I had hoped against hope that it wouldn’t come to this.

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

“I promise, schöne kleine Maria.” I held her close to me as I said it, because I couldn’t make a promise like that and look her in the eyes.

That morning, we gathered our supplies and stepped through the Orrery portal to my office in London. Maria was delighted by the journey, as she was by everything I showed her. I put the Beetle away and updated the catalog, and I demonstrated the function of the Apothecary to Maria. She seemed fascinated. She picked up on the multi-dimensional algebra of Archimedes’ bizarre filing system faster than I had. While I went out to make arrangements for Maria’s treatment, Maria spent the day in the office studying the catalog and all of the documents I had collected, not just about the Beetle but everything. She wanted to make sure that she understood as much as she could about the relics without being me. Assuming that this all worked out, she would make a superb assistant. That, and maybe one or two other things as well.

That night, after sundown, I took Maria to a local pub that catered to the supernatural population. She was wearing gloves to the elbow, a long skirt, and a thick veil, which drew some odd looks from passers-by, but not as many as if she were dressed normally. I looked around the place and saw a man and a woman at a corner booth. The woman was a Whisperer named Beatrice with a talent for dealing with mental compulsions, and the man was a werewolf named Thompson who’d come in from the woods and cleaned himself up. She had recommended him as an expert in suppressing one’s own savage urges. I waved to them and led Maria over to the table, and I drew the curtain shut so Maria could have some privacy as she unveiled herself.

While Thompson spoke soothing words to Maria to keep her calm, Beatrice began examining her aura for ways of removing the Beetle’s influence. I kept an eye to the gap in the curtains, making sure that we weren’t interrupted until the work was done. As Beatrice worked, I snuck a few peeks with the Sextant, and her methods looked promising. She was somehow manipulating Maria’s aura to untangle it from that of the Beetle. I couldn’t tell if she was making significant progress, but Maria was responding well to Thompson’s ministrations at least. I didn’t know what could possibly be done to help Maria, but if Beatrice and Thompson were successful, I would owe them at least a round of drinks. For that matter, I would probably buy the whole house a round if this worked.

Somewhere out in the pub, a fight broke out. It sounded like someone was accusing someone else of cheating at backgammon or something, a very present temptation when the players were both wizards. The publican was making sure that the whole place didn’t get destroyed by magic run rampant, but the participants were both too inebriated to manage anything truly destructive. They were merely settling for raining merry hell down on each other with wild punches and whatever they could lift and throw. I excused myself from the proceedings and stepped through the curtain to stand in the way of any interlopers, but both men were far more thickly built than me. I could as easily have turned aside a stampeding herd of cattle.

One of the fighters summoned up his will for long enough to throw a table at the other man. The table missed its mark and smashed against the wall, but the intended target was still enraged enough to grapple his attacker and hurl him through the air, directly at me and the closed curtain. I did everything I could to keep him away from Maria and the others, but he slammed into me, knocking me into the curtain and tearing it loose from the rod. The commotion interrupted Beatrice’s working, and the man stared up at Maria in terror. I looked at her, and I saw her face change. She reached out for the man with murder in her eyes, and he scrambled away, completely forgetting about the previous fight in favor of the one that was about to start.

Beatrice immediately backed away, while Thompson stood up and fought Maria to the ground as she thrashed. His arms began to swell and sprout thick fur as she struggled against his grip. I got down on the ground next to Maria.

“Maria, please, you’ve got to resist! Don’t let it take over!”

“I don’t think I can, Israel! You’re going to have to intervene!”

“No, please, Maria! You can do this! Resist!”

“Israel, you promised!”

“No! Please!”

I held her gaze as long as I could, willing her to fight against the influence of the Beetle, but it was no good. I saw in her eyes as the Beetle took over, and she threw Thompson away from her like a rag doll. When she turned back to face me, there was nothing there but rage. I edged toward the door, and as she started after me, I ran out into the night.

I was faster than she was, but she could go on long after I had dropped from exhaustion. I had to find some way to slow her down until the Beetle’s influence subsided, but I couldn’t think of anything that she wouldn’t plow through. Besides, even at this hour, there were still people on the streets, and every minute that she chased me through London put those people in danger.

As much as I was trying to avoid it, it seemed more and more likely that I was going to have to fulfill my promise to Maria, whatever the cost.

I led the chase to a foundry by the river. They were still hard at work, even at this late hour. I ran into the building, urging all the workers away, and picked up an iron bar. I didn’t know just how indestructible Maria was, but there was only one way to find out.

When Maria entered the building, I swung the bar at her chest. She staggered backward, but she was completely unscathed. I took another swing at her head, but she blocked it with her arm. I spun the bar around and swung at her midsection, but she withstood a blow that would have crushed the ribs of a normal person. She swung an arm at me, and I managed to block the blow, but I very nearly fell backward from the force of it. I couldn’t afford to lose my footing in this fight, or I wouldn’t be getting up again.

She stepped into the light of the glowing iron, and I got my first good look at her. The fight in the pub and subsequent chase had caused her to shed much of her covering, and I could see areas of her body that had been formed from glass instead of metal, presumably where the Beetle had used the car’s windows instead of the skin. I took another swing, aiming for the glass portion, but I fared no better. Even her supposed weak points seemed impervious to injury, and the heavy iron was beginning to tire me. I looked around the foundry for anything that might be of use, when an idea suddenly occurred. It would almost certainly prevent Maria from putting anyone else in danger, as she had wanted. I only hoped that she would forgive me.

I took a few more swings with the bar and backed along the floor, hoping to lead her along. When I had drawn her into place, I summoned my remaining strength and threw the iron bar at a lever attached to a large cauldron. As I dove out of the way, a stream of liquid iron poured out of the cauldron and onto Maria. She fell to the ground as her legs were swept out from under her, and she lay still as the molten metal poured over her body.

I headed for the door, and I was about to leave when I heard movement. I turned around and saw Maria rising slowly to her feet. Her clothing had been completely burned away, and her entire body was glowing red-hot. She came slowly at first, but as she regained her bearings, she accelerated.

I hadn’t been certain that that stratagem would work, but I knew that the next step would. I headed away from the foundry at a slow lope, and Maria came after me. I slowly increased the pace, and Maria matched it. When I was certain that I couldn’t possibly run any faster, I grabbed a bollard and made a sharp turn along the Thames embankment.

In her rage, Maria wasn’t cogent enough to perform that maneuver, and in her bare feet, she didn’t have enough traction on the wet cobbles. She slid into the river and let off a massive plume of steam. As I watched her sink, I saw the superheated glass panels crack under thermal shock as the water hit it, and I saw the sparks behind her eyes fade away. She descended to the bottom of the Thames as her body filled with water, and she was still.

I leaned against the embankment railing, and with a shaky hand, I withdrew the Sextant from my waistcoat, hoping to get one last glimpse of Maria before she left me forever. After a minute, I spotted a faint silhouette rising from the murky water. The silhouette stopped in front of me, and the face of Maria gradually appeared.

She appeared as she had been before the Beetle, before this whole rotten mess had begun. She had brown hair and dimples. She was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

She was smiling at me, and there was a tear on her cheek. She said something to me, but I couldn’t quite hear it. She appeared to be saying, “Thank you.” Then she was gone.

I stood up and managed to walk away from the river, tucking the Sextant back into place. I turned a corner and found Beatrice, the Whisperer, waiting for me. She had seen and heard Maria’s ghost with much greater clarity than I had, and she told me that I had done what was necessary. Nobody at the pub or in the street had been seriously hurt, and Maria was now at peace. She led me gently back to the pub, and she lent me her handkerchief.

The atmosphere at the pub was somber. Everyone was watching me, but no one said anything. A few of them raised their glasses in respectful acknowledgement. I sat down at the bar, and the publican poured me a whiskey. He said it was on the house.

I don’t remember how many I had, but I know that it wasn’t enough.