Дэвид Нордли - How Beer Saved the World

Liquid dribbled on the carpet. Now the Master turned his face toward her, his wide eyes shiny as polished agates. Her gaze shifted downward. His black shoes moved and pointed straight toward her own. Eleanor tilted back her head, lifting her chin. Master Harte stood fully before her. Except it wasn’t there. His right arm really weren’t all there. Just ended at the blooming elbow, it did. Holy saints and Trinity! Eleanor let out a high-pitched shriek.

“Quiet, woman,” Master Harte said and shoved the empty tankard into her hand.

“What’s happened to ye?” Her heart raced. A man missing half-an-arm might need a tourniquet. She must help him now. “Should I fetch a doctor?”

“Hush.” His thick eyebrows blended into a single black, blurry line.

Master Harte leaned back against the glass doors of a bookcase. No mangled stump gushed blood or even dripped. He didn’t seem in pain, neither. Inch by inch, his lower arm appeared—sleeve and all—as if he pulled the half-limb out of a magician’s top hat. The sulfur stench receded.

His fingers wiggled, pink and healthy. There he was, all put back together. Blimey.

“For now,” he said. He rubbed his regained arm. “Safe.”

What did he mean, for now? First, no arm. Then plenty of arm. What the bleeding heck had happened? Why was he safe only for now?

“That will be all for the evening, Eleanor.” He glanced down toward the soiled carpet. “A good stain to mark the spot, don’t you think?”

The grandfather clock chimed the hour from the hallway. Eleven o’clock. Eleanor couldn’t move. Speak. Do anything.

“I said that will be all.” His piercing brown eyes stared into hers. “Be a good girl now and get some rest. It tried to get me again, that’s all.”

Eleanor inhaled the aroma of cooked bacon and served Master Harte his breakfast eggs and rashers. A morning greeting squeaked its way out of her mouth. The Master appeared to lavish the majority of his attention on the morning newspaper. Just as well, after last night’s unnatural events. They’d deprived her of sleep, they had. Did the other servants know about them strange happenings? Her fingertip itched to tap the sleeve of Master Harte’s suit coat. Surely real flesh and blood now lay below.

The newspaper rustled. The Master turned another page. Black-and-white headlines facing Eleanor declared the latest goings-on in and around London. The temperance ladies stirred up a fuss in Kensington. Parliament argued about the cholera outbreak in Whitechapel. Anarchists had rioted near Hyde Park. No obvious front-page reports of unexplained disappearances of hands or arms.

“I have a research project in the library this morning,” Master Harte said. “It can’t wait until Parker’s return.” He folded his newspaper, until it matched the size the delivery boy had left upon the front door stoop an hour ago. “You would be of great service to me if you kept notes.”

“The library, sir?” The room had to be daemon possessed. Why couldn’t the Master wait until his valet got back from London? ‘Twas him who sent Parker to the city in the first place. “Yer sure about going in there so soon?”

“Most definitely,” he said.

“Then,” Eleanor said, “I’d be… pleased to take notes for ye.”

She was not at all pleased. Not anyhow, but wouldn’t say so. Her fingers rubbed her elbows. What if one of her arms disappeared? Best she bring along a tankard of beer?

“The stroke of nine it will be then,” Master Harte said. He cleared his throat and slipped a folded piece of paper—the size of a calling card—into Eleanor’s hand. “In the library.”

A message? Eleanor dropped the paper into her apron pocket, then poured Master Harte more tea. Dared she read this note in the kitchen? She didn’t want Mrs. Blake, the cook, to start rumors about special attentions. The upstairs and downstairs maids, neither. She was a good girl, she was.

“Nine’s a civilized hour for a project, sir.” She curtsied. Better than eleven at night.

Master Harte grinned, like he knew a secret she didn’t. That note? Serving tray in hand, Eleanor hurried toward the kitchen.

“Beware the nine.” The warning scrawled on that piece of paper from Master Harte still rang in her brain like parish bells before a funeral. He hadn’t written the message. The pen strokes wasn’t bold enough to be his. She patted her apron pocket and opened the library door. What was the nine the message mentioned? The hour of nine?

“It’s safe to enter,” Master Harte called from across the room.

“Yes, sir.” How could he be so blooming sure? Regardless, she wouldn’t step anywhere near that stain on the carpet.

Inside the wood-paneled library, a variety of brass and wooden instruments rested upon the drafting table. Compass. Level. Only an inventor could know what all them other items was. Master Harte motioned her toward the desk, which held a typewriter.

Brenton Parker—the most accomplished gentleman’s gentleman in Brighton—usually served as his scribe. Parker was attending to an errand up in London, but he’d taught her a little shorthand so she could fill in when necessary. She hadn’t mastered the letter clacker, though. Her fingers was so slow.

Master Harte picked up a stick with a wheel on one end. He paced this way and that, the wheel of the upright stick clicking as it rolled across the floor.

“Bookcase to desk,” he said, “three feet seven inches.”

Oh, the thing was a measuring device. Now Master Harte called out the size of several angles. He stepped on the stain and gave her another reading. An estimation of where half his arm had gone the night before?

Beware the nine. A shiver crossed the back of Eleanor’s shoulders. Might the number of feet, inches and degrees add up to a multiple of nine? How could any sum of numbers make a body part appear to vanish? How could spilled stout set things right?

“That’s enough, I think.” Master Harte rested his clickstick against a bookcase.

Eleanor translated her shorthand, her two index fingers typing on a sheet of paper. She removed the sheet from the clacking machine and laid it on the drafting table. Master Harte cupped his palm around his chin. Over and over, he mumbled what she’d recorded. The first finger on his other hand traced imaginary lines on the table’s surface.

“Just as I thought,” he said. “No theme of nine in my measurements. Wasn’t in the other place either.”

In the other place that tried to get him?

“In what place, sir,” she said, “would that be?”

“Our London house,” he said. “In my bed chamber.”

“Oh.” A blush warmed her face. A good thing he’d not asked her to take notes there.

“Holes, that’s what caused it,” the Master said. “Rare cavities in the air around us. Something like painted-shut windows suddenly opened.” His finger tapped the typed paper on the table. “The holes can be closed when nothing blocks the way. Stout seems to have the right combination of alcohol and organics to do the job.” He frowned. “Trouble is, I don’t know if those openings lead to individual little pockets or to a huge foreign world in a separate dimension.”

Such talk of a separate dimension. More likely, the matter involved malevolent spirits or a passageway to the devil’s den. May heaven protect all the folks at Brighton House—even Mrs. Blake, whose scolding voice reminded Eleanor of crows.

“Mrs. Blake knows a medium, sir.” Actually, the cook knew a variety of odd folks who might prove helpful. A strange one, that woman was.

“We’re dealing with science.” Master Harte scratched his mutton chop. “Not the supernatural.”