The Buhmann building fell beneath us, and we were suddenly floating over New Fiddleham. We coasted until we reached a stretch of paving stones I knew very well indeed—but 926 Augur Lane looked different. The garden was symmetrical and dotted with common rhododendrons instead of the more exotic fare I had become accustomed to. The structure of the building was simpler, as well. It was not the house of the mad detective I had come to know, riddled with irregularities and architectural augmentations—it was simply a house.
“Jenny’s instincts were keener than mine,” Carson said as we neared. “She wasn’t comfortable with any of it. She wanted me to leave the project. I agreed with her, although later than I should have. We were going to be married in the spring, and I was fretting about saving enough money to support us. Jenny only fretted about saving me from myself. I went to Mayor Poplin and told him I was done. I thanked him for the opportunity and I left, just like that. But when I came to meet Jenny again the next day, she was acting strangely.”
We drifted over New Fiddleham, and I spotted them in the street below. Jenny Cavanaugh was skipping down the cobbles ahead of Carson. He was stumbling to catch up, calling after her, imploring her to wait, but she kept constantly ahead of him so that as he turned each corner she was always just dashing around the next.
“It wasn’t really her,” I said.
“No. It wasn’t,” Carson confirmed. “I should have known. I did know. Something inside me was screaming, but it was Jenny’s face—it was Jenny’s voice.”
Augur Lane whipped away, and we soared over the rooftops again until we came to a massive red brick building with a tall domed tower. It was incomplete, still encased in scaffolding, but once finished it would be easily one of the tallest buildings in the city. It sat on a hillside not far from Mayor Spade’s neighborhood. Six or seven workers were struggling to move an elaborately constructed piece of machinery through a broad front doorway. I recognized the apparatus as one of the contraptions Carson and his associates had been assembling back in the Buhmann building in the Inkling District.
“I don’t know that building,” I said. “I’ve been all over New Fiddleham, and I’ve never seen it. Is it an observatory?”
“Mayor Poplin told us it was to be New Fiddleham’s grand new Technology Center,” Carson replied, “and I believed him. Maybe he believed it himself, I don’t know. The Dire Council had other ideas.”
We floated down until we were inside the building, where a colossal mechanical construct was taking shape. Owen Finstern’s portable device was like a weed to an oak tree compared to that wonder of steel and copper and glass. Wheels spun and boilers hissed. Now and then a spray of sparks would burst from within the belly of the metal beast and workers would scramble to correct the problem.
“I followed her right into the heart of this place before she abandoned the ruse,” said Carson.
Beneath us, the woman’s hair rippled and lightened to a strawberry blonde. She spun around and Jenny’s face was gone. I had never met the stranger, but something about her was eerily familiar. She had a hard chin and bright green eyes—the left ever so slightly higher than the right. The asymmetry struck a chord in my memory. She slipped out with a cruel laugh and slammed the door behind her.
“I tried to run, but it was too late,” continued Carson. “The council’s liaison was there, waiting. He was a despicable cretin, pale as death with a nasty temper.”
“Pavel,” I said as the pale man stepped out of the shadows.
“You’ve met?” said Carson.
“I may have planted a brick in his face earlier.”
“I can see why Jenny likes you,” Carson said. “Pavel told me that if I finished my task, no harm would come to Jenny.”
“He was lying.”
“Of course he was lying,” said Carson. “And even greater harm would come to a lot of people if I gave them what they wanted. I had never seen all the parts assembled—I hadn’t dreamed that they were ever meant to be. I thought that all of us were working on separate projects. Andrews was developing a power generator with a capacity ten times the ones they were installing up in Crowley. Shea and Grawrock were turning the most far-fetched theories about energy field manipulation into realities, and Diaz had stumbled on a breakthrough in a wavelength transmission amplification that was going to make the most advanced studies in radio waves look like tin cans and bits of twine.”
“And you?” I asked.
We floated down through the ceiling into a jumbled workroom. “The human mind,” Carson’s spirit answered. “Our full and limitless potential.” The Carson from the past was beneath us, working frantically as the windows behind him bled from deep orange to a rich crimson in the light of the setting sun. He set down a file and blew metal shavings from a piece of meticulously machined steel, peering at it intently in the warm light.
“You didn’t think it was perhaps a tad dangerous to go tinkering with the human mind using metal files and rolls of copper wire and all that?”
“I know it sounds mad. I guess it was—but it was meant to do great things. My final thesis at university had been designed to quell the surging fashion of mysticism and the occult, but I encountered the strangest results in my studies. Even those purveyors who openly admitted to dealing in smoke and mirrors seemed to be doing more good than ill. Thaumaturgy and hokum saw recovery times plummet and chronic illnesses recede. Against all reason, I saw faith trump medical logic time and time again.
“That’s where my real studies began. I pored over Haygarth’s essays on the placebo effect and exchanged correspondences with Richard Caton in Liverpool about cerebral activity. It’s all electricity, you see. The brain is essentially an electrical machine, regulating the rest of the body. Mind over matter. The human brain has the power to do amazing things—even surpass the furthest limits of the flesh—and it does so through electrical impulses. Given adequate stimulation, there are very few boundaries we can’t push past. Empower the mind, empower the body.”
“Please tell me you didn’t electrocute people’s brains to make them healthier.”
“No, no, it was a field of influence, not a direct current. Electrical impulses can be amplified or dampened through the precise manipulation of concurrent energies. It was an exciting project. The early results were mixed, though. Some subjects responded astonishingly well to the treatment—increased strength, speed, stamina, even heightened motor skills and capacity for problem solving. A few showed adverse results, though—lethargy, and a sort of hypnotic state that left patients highly susceptible to suggestion.”
“I can think of a few things a sinister organization could do with a super-scientific machine that can brainwash targets with the push of a button,” I said.
“Jenny had precisely the same concerns, but neither one of us had any sense of the scope. They were putting all of it together—all of our designs were culminating into one machine. They weren’t housing an observatory; they were building a transmitter, one that overlooked a bustling metropolis. I began to understand it when I could finally see the thing up close. The power, the control, the range—it was a weapon unlike the world had ever seen. Or it was going to be.”