the dark times. If there was one truth that Garrick held like iron in his core, it was that he would never return to the Old Nichol, not even to dodge the noose.
“I would swing before I’d go back to that cesspit,” he vowed quietly through clenched teeth, as he did most nights.
And in this case the term cesspit was not simply a storyteller’s exaggeration. The Old Nichol Street rookery was bordered by the common sewer and had been spared by the Great Fire, but the area had not seen refurbishment for its pauper residents since that time. A true cesspit. A great ditch of putrefaction, dotted with sties, hovels, and dung heaps, where the air sang with the sharp tang of industry and the lusty howls of hungry babes.
Hell on earth.
As Albert Garrick hummed, the words fluttered from the dark shadows of his past and the assassin sang them in a sweet tenor:
One little babby, ten, twenty,
Only last week I had wages plenty
Then Nick came a-stealin’ my babbies away
Now I begs for me supper every bloomin’ day.
Garrick gave a dour chuckle. A cholera nursery rhyme, hardly the subject to soothe a little one’s fears, and more often it would keep him awake than send him to sleep, but then Garrick had lost a family of nine to the disease, and it would have claimed him and his father had clever Papa not slit the Adelphi Theatre’s caretaker’s throat in an alley one night, then turned up to claim his place the following morning. The caretaker had been Father’s bully chum; but it was life or death, and the Thames was chockfull of best friends. Barely a tide passed without someone’s bosom pal washing up on the mud banks at Battersea.
For over a year the father and son slept in a secret space behind the Adelphi’s green room until they could afford digs far away from the Old Nichol.
Garrick knelt on the elaborate fleur-de-lis rug in front of him, banishing memories of his past and concentrating on this night’s business. Carefully he placed the tips of his blades on the central petal of the pattern. Six knives in total, from stiletto to shiv to four-sided bo-shuriken throwing knives; but Garrick’s favorite was the serrated fish knife that had lived under his pillow since childhood.
He tapped the wooden hilt fondly. It was true to say that Garrick held this blade in higher regard than any person of his acquaintance. Indeed, the magician had once risked prison by dallying to reclaim the blade from a mark who had snarled the knife in the farrago of his entrails.
But I would sacrifice even you for a taste of magic , he admitted to the knife. In a heartbeat and gladly.
Garrick knew that men would come to this place when their own magician was returned to them a cold corpse. The old man had promised as much—if you harm me, men will come to make sure you didn’t take my secrets—and Garrick believed those words to be true. The old man’s secrets were magical ones, and the men would come, because magic was power, which in turn was knowledge. And he who controlled knowledge controlled the world. Knowledge was a dangerous thing to have skittering around loose, and so men would come.
A hanging circle of bats clattered in the broad chimney flue, wings slapping like a tanner’s brush.
Perhaps they sensed something? Perhaps the great moment was upon them?
Come, gods of magic. Come and meet Albert Garrick’s steel, and we shall see if you die like men.
Garrick pocketed his blades and melted into the basement shadows by the grandfather clock.
When a traveler emerges from a wormhole and the quantum foam solidifies, there are quickly forgotten moments of clarity when the time traveler feels at one with the world.
Everything is all right and outta sight , as Charles Smart quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.
Of course this was just quantum-jecture, another of Professor Smart’s terms. There could never be any proof of these brief moments of oneness, as they dissipated almost instantly and were all but impossible to record. Nevertheless, Professor Smart was correct: the “Zen Ten” does exist and was being experienced by the hazmat team as their bodies solidified and left them standing in short-lived awe, like kids at a fireworks display.
The team stood on the bed, which Charles Smart had rigged as a