Lost in Imola

Magda drifted. Sometimes, she dreamed of Dickinson and of a fat cat who circled her ankles, and Ezra who scolded her for being late. “Sorry!” she called out, glad that she was there in the bakery because she was cold, and the oven was sure to warm her, and then a cool wind blew over her face and arms and next she stood on the deck of a dirigible, her fingers brushing against the wooden railing. The rail felt strange and she saw that her maimed hand was whole, no mark or heavy scar to mar its smooth planes, and she held it up to the sun to examine it, in wonder and delight. She turned it first one way, and then another. It was healed, the ponderous scar vanished.

But the roar of the aircraft’s turbines created a rattling hum that shook her bones and caused her to sway from side to side, and she griped the railing tighter least she fall, they were so high up in the sky, and far from the brown and greens of the earth, it made her dizzy. Harvey Proctor leaned over and touched her elbow. “It’s all right,” his green eyes crinkled in a kindly smile, and her heart contracted with his nearness. “We’re safe.” But the turbulence was frightful, and a siren sounded its panicked alarm. Black bats circled overhead, and she saw that they were large and the size of humans. “Air pirates!” she cried, and watched, struck with horror as they swooped in their winged suits, graceful, fallen angels, and they held repeating rifles in their hands and opened fire at the cruiser. Their weapons tattooed the side of the ship, and the sides of the interior envelope expanded grotesquely like a frog who had swallowed a like-sized competitor, and the helium began to swirl and spark and with crystalline certainty, she knew the gases were about to ignite and explode. The sky turned orange and red. It was happening.

“It’s all right, my love,” Proctor repeated—he was so calm! His hair rose about his shoulders in flames, the lapels of his suit curling and smoking, and his pocket watch turned black on its chain. He smiled. “It’s merely a diversion from what they want, remember that…”

Rippling with heat and fire, the airship exploded, and she was falling, a comet to the earth. The stars raked the heavens and her clothes fluttered and snapped around her, but when she gasped aloud and opened her eyes, she lay on the floor in the cabin of a horse-drawn ambulance, her arms and legs tied so tightly that the numbness of her limbs shrieked in protest, every bump and rut in the road driving the floorboards deeper into the muscles of her back. She was rattled and shaken, for the vehicle raced with a recklessness that left her battered and sore. Inside the cabin it was near pitch black, the only light a small window with bars opposite her. It was loud. Above the groans of metal and wooden struts, the harsh shouts of a driver berated the horses, cursing the slow beasts, and the sound of a whip was a lightening crack in her ears.

“Gee up, crow bait!” the driver cried above the wheeling flying over the stones. Bruises, new and old, thrummed and her head ached, and the wound from which she had been poisoned burned with a fire that caused the nerves above her knee to spasm and shake. She ached to touch it, to massage the awful pangs and shooting sparks that lingered deep in her tender flesh. Magda could not move however, and the straps binding her to the stretcher dug deeper and deep every time she roused herself in the blackness behind her eyelids.

The throat to her long jacket was open, and the buttons on her shirt undone to the top of her collar bones. Cold night rushed into the interior of the enclosed cabin. A horrid, medicinal taste filled her mouth. Her last memory, a crowded San Francisco street at night, made no sense to her in her current condition. How she had come to be trussed up in the back of an ambulance wagon was stupefying. Magda remembered nothing from the time she disembarked from the Air Sutro tower. She squeezed her eyes shut again. Everything was too diffused, too jumbled.

Her teeth chattered, from the chill, and from whatever it was that had pierced the skin of her thigh. Blood still leaked there, a sluggish trickle that dripped and stained the rich fabric of her traveling habit. Exhausted from her bewildering evening, she drifted and dreamed again. Now, she reclined with Harvey in his study, his fingers toying with her hair, a habit she found strangely annoying this time. “Don’t do that,” she told him. Magda did not want him near her. “You know I find it tiresome,” and tried to slap his hand away, but she could not, her arms asleep and tingling with a thousand pin-pricks.

“Wake up!” Cookie keened from the deepest part of her memory. Nanette Durand laughed, a gurgling spray of blood leaking from the red seam in her neck. “Sleep, dear Magdalena,” she whispered in her wet croak, “sleep is better than what awaits you.” The slayer’s warning frightened the girl, but she remembered, her eyes twitching against her closed lids, that Nan was dead.

A dream, Magda thought, relief washing through her heavy limbs. She must have fallen asleep on the dirigible home, tired from her assignment in Sacramento. This strange delusion was nothing more that. a nightmare, and she comforted herself even as a small part of her mind knew that it was not so, and that she must fight the bonds that restrained her limbs. She lifted her head.

The street lights of some nameless town splashed against the walls of the cabin, and she had the impression that she had been insensible for a long time, and the that the distance she and her unknown captors had traveled was considerable. She spied a dark figure hovering the corner of the ambulance.

It was stooped and thin with elongated limbs like a human-sized spider. White, glowing eyes saw that she watched him, and it detached itself from the corner, a mass darker and more solid that anything else in the fantastic half-light, and she cringed from the flashing of reflective light from where its eyes should be, and she knew it savored her as avidly as a black widow anticipated its helpless prey struggling in its web.

Against her will, a whine of protest left her parched lips. Maneuvering himself against the lurching wall of the cabin, his white-gloved hands bracing against the timbers, the man in a top hat, his spectacles gleaming in the half-light, scuttled over her and Magda saw the faint moue of concern on the pale, waxen face.

“Not a dream,” she thought as she gazed up into Doctor Neil Cream’s thoughtful, patrician countenance. Dread suffused through her veins and she remembered her knife and wished she could use it now against this vile creature looming over her. The outlaw physician had evidently escaped the destruction of Bootjack and the girl shuddered, remembering the terrible night in the alley. Dr. Cream blinked, his large eyes sensitive and luminous behind his golden spectacles.

“My dear!” he breathed. “How is that you are conscious so soon?”

Magda moaned, the curses she uttered mangled and trapped upon a paralyzed tongue. She’d nearly died, she realized, trembling, died from his bungled dosage administered from the sharp end of a poisoned umbrella. Above her, Cream frowned, disturbed by her resilience, near death as she had been. The girl was recovering faster than he liked.

He did not wait for her to formulate a coherent answer, but shot out a gangling arm to reach for a black medical bag by her head and opening it, withdrew a large hypodermic. It was silvery and cold in a way that reminded the terrified girl of the silk thrown by spiders to ensnare living things, and she cringed from it. He changed his mind the next instant, however. The ambulance rebounded off a rock and the needle almost dashed from his hands. He snatched the lethal thing from the air at the last second, a mere hair’s breadth from plunging, tip down, into Magda’s heart. He giggled behind his handlebar mustache, a simpering, nervous reflex.

“Now, that wouldn’t do,” he said, the lens to his glasses flashing in forced merriment. “No sense in injecting you with a fatal dose, eh?”

Stricken by the near-miss Magda sought to inch away from the doctor, restrained as she was. He stroked his broad chin, watching her futile efforts with a placid and calculating eye. Cream pulled a corked glass phial full of a luminescent liquid that swirled and clouded as it was shaken by the rolling vehicle.

He pounced on her, and she tried to bite him, the only weapon afforded to her in her current state. Dr. Cream was no fool, however, and his gloves, while white and expensive, were also thick and crafted with the goal of treating difficult patients like Magda in mind. He smothered her nose and mouth with his broad hands while she thrashed and fought.

Weakened by the umbrella’s poison, she was soon dizzy and breathless. Quick as a striking tarantula, a cold beaker was tipped between her teeth and a foul-tasting liquid dribbled over her lips as she struggled to draw a lungful of air.

It burned as it was forced down, her nose pinched by long fingers and a clammy hand tightened around her throat. The man’s large hand worked her slender neck, stroking the sides of her windpipe, and forced her to drink. It burned, this stuff, and she choked. At the last, she tried to spit it out in his face, but whatever he had given her worked with the speed of a round fired from a pistol, and within seconds Magda felt the world, already crazy and tilted, flip completely on its side. She drifted again.

After a long time, she opened her eyes. The light inside had brightened considerably, and she could see her surroundings. Dawn was near. Wherever their destination, they had not yet reached it. The coach had stopped, and it was quiet but for the stilted murmuring of men from nearby. A horse whinnied, and the jangling of a harness was plain, and she knew that they had stopped to change horses. Blinking, she tried to sit up. She was still bound and trapped in an abominable-half sleep. The draught Cream forced on her tasted like metal shavings in her mouth, and she thirsted.

The back of the cabin was closed, and Harvey Proctor hovered over her, his smile sending her heart crashing in her chest. He tenderly caressed her throat, his hand slipping lower.

“Ah, awake again?” he half spoke to himself. “That should not be…”

“Are you real?” she murmured, and the white-toothed smile grew broader.

“Do you not know me?” he replied, and she frowned, her head still so filled with cotton. His voice was wrong, and why did he don wire-rim spectacles? They looked so strange on his beautiful face, his green eyes inexplicably brown in the half light.

“You’re not Harvey,” she said contemptuously but the figure chuckled, his hands roving quite freely.

“Here, love, you are thirsty,” the not-Harvey said, and the drink slid down her throat again. But she fought more fiercely it this time, a thrill of terror spurning her awake as she had once resisted a gash on her palm so long ago. But whatever Dr. Cream had given was powerful, and her blood became turgid and sleepy, and she began to slip.

A spider’s wet claw touched her, and with flesh crawling, she could feel him pawing at the hem of her skirt. She awoke fully to the sound of a fist hitting flesh. Someone grunted, and the back of the coach flew open and the doctor tumbled from the back to land ignobly onto the dirt.

Another face appeared above her. This face was hard and clear cerulean eyes blazed down. He was vaguely familiar, but with the drug in her system, she struggled to identify this frightful, avenging angel.

“Did he touch you?” rage, hot and blistering, showered out from every line of his lean form. If he had been a comet breaking up in the earth’s filament, he could have not been more fiery, trembling fists curled at his sides. Magda’s tongue was thickened by the sleeping draught and she stuttered, slurring, and making no articulate words. She had no mastery over her speech. It was enough for her furious savior. The man, illuminated by a single lantern held by one of the oafish attendants, paled.

Without a further word, he leaped from the cabin as gracefully and purposeful as a tiger hunting something weak, and the sound of more blows grew louder. A body was flung into the side of the ambulance, rocking it in its wheels, and now Dr. Cream groaned, gasping in pain. He did not plead or beg for mercy, but wheezed every time a fist found its mark, and he took the punishment the lean man dealt him. Presently, the sound of the beating diminished and ceased all together. It was silent, and Magda couldn’t hear if the doctor still lived at all.

A low moan answered her, and the blue-eyed man, slightly breathless from his extortions, said to one of the attendants, “Get him up top, and if he molests the patient again, he’s a dead man.”

He paused, adding to the drivers, “And if I find out that if either of you cover up for that sick piece of filth, I’ll skin you both.”

“Yessir, Mr. Langley,” one of the drivers sputtered. “We won’t—”

The drivers shut up at Langley’s low growl of disgust, but the girl had heard enough. Solomon Langley. The pale-eyed man, that was his name. A rush of vomit surged in Magda’s throat, and she gagged. The agent of the Wúzhǔ had her firmly in his grasp, and Dr. Cream’s beating to the contrary, he was still their instrument, their tool. Clarity, cold as icy water, splashed across her skin, puckering, and raking. Fear woke her up.

Magda strained against her bonds as hard as she could, but managed to only crane her head off the gurney mere inches. Through the twin doors of the cabin, a smattering of stars, faint and remote, greeted her. Framed against their ice, she saw the two attendants, both brawny and bulging with over-sized muscles, hoisted up the limp form of the doctor between them. Dr. Cream’s head lolled on his narrow frame, and his face bathed in the pale starlight, was bloody.

Cursing a little, they lifted his body to the steps of the ambulance’s steps, and dragged him up to the driver’s side. The entire vehicle rocked side to side as they settled the unconscious physician in between them. A moment later, Langley hopped in the back, bearing a lantern.

By its pale light, she saw that his cuff was splattered with blood, and he casually wiped red stuff from his knuckles with a lace-edged handkerchief. He himself looked as cool and collected as if he had merely walked to the corner stand for the latest edition of the Daily Alta instead of half-beating a man to death. The doors shut behind him and with a crack of the whip, they were off again into the early morning chill.

“I know you’re awake,” Langley said after a while. He spoke above the groan of the coach. “Cream’s drugs don’t work on you very well, do they?”

“Langley, Langley, what are you doing?” Magda found her voice at last, her throat aching with the after-effects of Dr. Cream’s fingers bruising the sides of her neck. Sweat trickled down her temples, and she struggled to focus on the elegant brute crouched in the corner. “You know I’ve declared for the Dòuzhēng.”

“Ah,” he said, and tapped he side of his whiskered jaw. Those blue eyes twinkled. “I refuse to give up on my friends, Magda. Is that so wrong?”

“I’m not your friend, Solomon,” Magda tried hard to keep the fear from her voice. “We are on opposing sides.”

He shook his head, indulgence in the slight smile quirking his mouth.

“I will admit, you are a hard nut to crack, but we both know you are better suited for the Wúzhǔ than those charlatans among the Dòuzhēng.”

“I will do what suits me,” she croaked, terrified. Ah, Harvey had warned her all those years ago, DaShifu, too. “They have ways to turn you, and failing that, destroy your mind.” Langley grinned.

“That’s my girl,” he said, hugely satisfied with her grit. “I have no doubt you will present me with a challenge, Magda my dearest friend. You will rage like a tiger in the storm, but in the end, the storm overwhelms even the mightiest hunter.”

“Don’t do this, Solomon—”

“My dear,” he bent down to kiss the sweat from her forehead. “I already have.”

She could fight the drugs no longer, her terror breaking her will, and with Langley lounged comfortably next to her, she fell into the deepest of sleep. Pursued at first by Nan, even the ghost of the slayer was turned away at the gates of Magda’s unconsciousness. She was not awake, therefore, when the ambulance arrived at their destination, far from San Francisco, far from the protection of Harvey Proctor, her lover, or Mr. Rhea, her friend.

Taken from the back by the hulking men, she was ushered through the doors of a vast, imposing edifice, her head lolling and her breathing shallow, still insensible. She remained tightly bound to the stretcher because Mr. Langley left strict orders to keep her helpless, and warned them that she was every bit as dangerous as he.

Magda slept on, and so it was that she was never afforded the opportunity to admire the stately abode constructed of Vermont slate and Colfax marble. She did not gaze upon the four classical Greek statues guarding the entrance, nor ponder their symbolism, or read the accompanying mottos chiseled into stone arch at the building. In bold Gothic font, they said, “In Temperance learn thou to live,” “Faith, hope and charity divine be thine beyond compare,” and “Let Prudence still thy footstep guide with Justice steadfast by her side.”

The young woman was deaf to the lunatic howls and gibbering calls that rang through the corridors as the men placed her inert form on a wheeled gurney and guided her through the crowded halls. Several sharp turns later they came to a small, white-walled room. Unlike many of the cells, this one contained no marker or designation. It was cheerless, and the walls thickly padded, and the bars on the small window exceeding strong.

The attendants wheeled her in, and one thought to spread a single green blanket over her, his gaze lingering on the open neck of her bodice.

“Come on, Joe,” his partner said, and Joe thought better of his impulse and pulled the covering up to her chin. He paused on the threshold, thoughtfully watching the sleeping girl, her black hair undone from its braid and coiled across her neck. Magda was pale, but she still breathed. He turned, shut the heavy door, and pulling a heavy ring of keys from his belt, locked it. The ring whirled around his thick finger, and he whistled as he and his friend walked up the corridor, their footfalls lost in the commotion of the asylum. He thought of the new patient in the unmarked room. He pitied her.