“What,” I gritted, chafing at goose bumps that had erupted all over my arms, “the mother-loving hell was that?”
“You can come down, Hope,” my aunt called. “I assure you it’s perfectly safe.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Excuse me if I don’t take your word for it.”
With a glance to Moira, Lucinda approached the closer of the two machines. “You were correct in your assumption. This is an original Tesla design. I understand you were once quite intrigued by the man?”
I huffed at that.
While most girls probably obsessed over singers or movie stars, I’d been infatuated with famous historical figures. And Tesla . . . well . . . he was amazing. A genius. More than a genius, really. When I was ten, I’d papered my room with pictures and articles of the troubled inventor. I’d always felt an odd kinship with him. Like me, Tesla had a photographic memory. Except unlike the vast array of historical facts and figures that lay dormant and useless in my own brain, Tesla had spun magic out of his incredible mind, creating some of the most impressive inventions ever known. Alternating current. The tesla coil. The man had invented lasers and robots in a day where people still traveled by horse and buggy, for God’s sake.
Yeah. Intrigued. You could say that.
And if what they claimed was true, I was standing in a room with one of his original inventions.
Wow.
“They look like mini versions of Wardenclyffe Tower, don’t they, Hope?” Doug chimed in.
From the way he was beaming at me, and based on the large photo taped to his desk, I knew I’d found a fellow fan.
“Yeah, I’ve seen the pictures. It was supposed to transmit power wirelessly,” I said. “But it didn’t work. What are these? Prototypes?”
Lucinda cleared her throat. “Not exactly. Earlier I explained how my ancestor Hubert Carlyle and his friends found this chamber, quite by accident. When they experienced the same sensations you just felt, Hubert contacted his son Jonathan, who was attending university at Oxford. On a recent trip to Paris, Jonathan happened to have become acquainted with a young inventor named Nikola Tesla. Jonathan wrote and entreated his new friend to come investigate.”
“Alternate power source,” Doug put in. “That’s what Tesla thought at first. He was keen on finding a way to harness it.”
“But . . .” I glanced around the chamber, empty but for the machines and the people scattered about. “What kind of power? From where? I don’t understand.”
“They didn’t either,” Moira said. “Not then, anyway.”
Aunt Lucinda approached and held out a hand. I hesitated, gnawing at my cuticles until I nipped into tender flesh. Ignoring her outstretched hand, I stepped down onto the floor. I felt it immediately, like an invisible current. As we walked the perimeter of the room, stepping carefully between the wires, the power seemed to flow from every direction at once.
The lines beside Lucinda’s mouth deepened. “Tesla’s machine did not work as he’d hoped. Oh, it harnessed the power here, no doubt. But in a way they could never have dreamed.”
Collum snorted and leaned against the wall. “Aye. No one could’ve predicted that, could they?”
When Lucinda gestured to Doug, his wide face lit with glee. “Oh, I’ve been waiting forever to show this to someone new.”
He flicked the switch on a small metal box lying near the door. When it kicked on, white smoke blasted from holes in the top.
“Don’t worry,” he called over the hiss. “This is just a fog machine. Helps you see it better.”
It?
A fan blew the heavy mist toward the ceiling. Soon, I could smell it. Damp and cold and vaporous. He clicked it off. “Okay. That’s enough. Get the lights, will you Coll?”
The lights went out. And so did all the air in my lungs. Above our heads, laser beams seared across the room in the exact pattern I’d seen on the computer screen upstairs. Lines of brilliant neon green, with a few flashing red in a continuously changing pattern. Hundreds of them, all intersecting at the very center of the chamber, like a psychedelic spiderweb.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
“The first time it happened,” Lucinda said quietly as she stared up, “was in 1888, during a soiree to celebrate the engagement of Jonathan Carlyle to Julia Alvarez, Dr. Alvarez’s daughter. Tesla had given up and moved on, but the three men—Hubert, MacPherson, and Alvarez—filled with whiskey and swagger, decided to operate the machines for themselves. Jonathan and Julia followed their fathers down the stairs, worried that in their drunken state they might come to harm. The young couple arrived just in time to witness the three men, standing directly in the center of the symbol, being surrounded by a whirling cyclone of rippling power. Julia was struck dumb with horror, but Jonathan acted quickly to power down the machines.”
“When everything settled,” Moira spoke. “The three men were gone. Vanished into thin air.”
I flinched as the lights clicked on. The lasers dimmed, though I could still see a phantom glimmer through the remnants of the fog.