Ernst Drexler returned from his meeting with the Council of Seven and slammed his office door behind him.
Was he being paranoid, or was the Council up to something: planning something, or already running some operation without telling him? He was one of the Order’s top actuators, damn it! He should be kept current on all the Order’s activities.
Ernst told himself he shouldn’t allow these free-form suspicions to distract him, but he couldn’t let it go. He’d find out what they were up to and—
A knock and Brother Slootjes entered without waiting to be summoned. They’d known each other long enough to dispense with such formalities.
“Alone?” Slootjes said. “Good.”
Ernst recognized the manila envelope cradled in his arm: the memoir from Mrs. Novak. The loremaster looked shaken. That was not good. Ernst’s stomach turned.
“So you’ve read it?”
Slootjes nodded. “I have.”
“And?”
“It’s quite intriguing, even disturbing, one might say.”
Ernst was finding the loremaster’s penchant for creating drama more vexing than usual today.
“As disturbing as Winslow’s novel? Spit it out, man!”
Slootjes dropped into a chair and looked lost for a few seconds. Then he shook himself.
“If true, it’s a shattering document, but I’m a long way from being convinced of its authenticity.”
“Did you ever believe it could possibly be true?”
“We both know the Order has its enemies, but I’m finding it hard to imagine them expending this amount of time and effort to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax.”
“Details!”
“Very well.” He tapped the envelope. “This purports to be the memoir of a British immigrant who graduated MIT in 1903 and went to work for Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe tower. It’s common knowledge that J. P. Morgan promised to finance Tesla’s broadcast power project, but balked when he realized he would have no way to charge for all the electricity Tesla would be transmitting through the air and the Earth. Atkinson says the Order secretly took over the financing of the tower when Morgan backed out.”
“Can you verify that?”
“Probably, but I haven’t had time. There’s too much else going on in this so-called memoir. According to Atkinson, the tower was successful in transmitting wireless energy, but in doing so it was thinning the Veil, allowing influences and entities to pass from the other side. He states that toward the end he and your grandfather witnessed untold horrors existing on the other side, horrors that would invade our world should the Veil be permanently rent. It says Rudolph realized the Order had been duped into lending a hand in its own destruction. But before he could return to report his findings to the Council, he…he disappeared.”
“‘Disappeared’ how?”
Slootjes’s gaze shifted away. “I’d rather you read it yourself. The events grow increasingly disturbing through the course of the narrative and by the end are downright fantastic. I’m not sure I believe it, but the fact remains that no one saw your grandfather leave Wardenclyffe. In fact, he was never seen again.”
Silence hung in the air.
Ernst didn’t know how to respond to that…his grandfather’s unexplained disappearance had been a blow to the Order and even worse for his family. Ernst’s father, Ernst the first, had confessed to him of being traumatized, feeling he’d been abandoned by the father he’d worshiped. But since grandfather never surfaced again, despite the Order’s best efforts to find him, he was presumed dead, the victim of fatal happenstance or foul play.
But no one had ever mentioned vanishing into thin air.
Finally he cleared his throat. “It must be a hoax. That scenario—that we are dupes who are unwittingly bringing about the annihilation of humanity—mimics the propaganda the Enemy’s apologists have been spewing for generations.”
“Yes, I know,” Slootjes said, nodding vigorously, “but the parallels between this and that fellow Winslow’s novel are alarming, to say the least.”
“He’s a crank.”
“Not so this Charles Atkinson. The devil, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is in the details, and he gets certain details right. He accurately describes the chew wasps your grandfather put on display here. He even goes so far as to say that after Rudolph disappeared through the Veil, he is the one who drove his touring car back to the city, parking it behind this Lodge with his cane on the seat.”
Ernst grabbed the cane from where he always left it leaning against the wall. In 1906 it had been returned to Germany where Rudolph’s son, Ernst the first, his father, had still been a boy in his early teens. That Ernst eventually passed it on to his own son. Ernst loved this cane.
“He…he mentions the cane?”
“Absolutely. Describes it right down to the silver head with the Septimus sigil and rhinoceros-hide wrapping. Whoever wrote this either had enough access to our archives to allow him to create a monumental hoax, or…”
“Or it’s true?”
Slootjes gave his head a violent shake. “But it can’t be true. I need to delve into the archives for verifications. I’m sure I can find ample evidence of fakery.” He rose and placed the envelope on Ernst’s desk. “In the meantime, you read it. You mustn’t simply take my word for it. You must read it for yourself while I comb the archives. We can discuss it further tomorrow.”
So saying, he made a hurried exit.
Ernst stared at the envelope. He didn’t want to read what was inside. Even if it was pure fiction, he didn’t want to read about his grandfather, a revered actuator in his time, losing faith with the Order. Nor did he want to read about him disappearing forever.
But Slootjes’s description of the memoir’s contents echoed his own worst fears: that the Septimus order had been fooled and duped for thousands of years, and that in the end the One would betray them all.
He snatched up the envelope and settled back to read.