THE NIGHTMARE COME TO LIFE
1902—New York
The moment that Jack had planned for weeks had finally arrived. The first three tableaux had captivated the audience, enraptured them with the demonstrations of his and the Book’s power—not that they realized that was what they were seeing. He was well aware that they thought the feats he’d accomplished were nothing more than parlor tricks. They were, compared to what was coming.
As the third set of curtains closed, Jack slipped two more cubes of morphine into his mouth before he stepped in front of the final set of curtains. He looked out at the audience as he waited for the room to grow silent. There were the men of the Inner Circle, the High Princept, and the rest of society. Men from Tammany were there as well, and another face, a particular friend he’d invited himself—Paul Kelly, who had turned out to be another disappointment. But Kelly would get his soon enough.
He waited until every pair of eyes was looking only at him—seeing him for what he truly was. And then he waited a moment longer, just because he could.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we come to our final tableau. Tonight the Order has presented a veritable bounty of beauty and wonder. You have been transported to the alchemist’s laboratory and witnessed the moment when man began to take control of the dangerous powers that surround us. You have seen art come to life, revealing the long and tortured history of feral magic, of those unwilling to control the dangerous power inside themselves for the good of a just and enlightened society. But now our evening is nearly at an end.”
He paused, let the anticipation grow in the room until he could practically feel their desperation for the curtain to be pulled back . . . until he had them in the palm of his hand.
“I present to you Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. . . .” With another flourish of his hands, the curtains opened and the final tableau of the night was revealed.
Evelyn, clad in a blond wig and a wisp of a gown, was splayed out on a low couch, just as the woman in Fuseli’s famed painting. Her arms arched gracefully to the floor and her eyes were closed in a semblance of sleep. Just as in the painting, sitting on her chest was a creature meant to represent the embodiment of nightmares. Jack had created the figure himself, a gargoyle-like incubus that looked like the image of the one in the painting.
The audience rustled in wonder and in fear. He could tell it was fear from the way the air seemed to go out of the room. It was the most exquisite of the tableaux, the most horrible and beautiful all at once, and it was about to be more so.
“Those who cling to the old ways, who lurk in the shadows of our streets, are a mark upon the perfection of our union. They represent a danger. Like the darkness that creeps into our dreams, those with feral magic lie in wait until we are at our weakest. Like nightmares come to life.”
At his words, the incubus began to move, turning its head to stare out at the crowded ballroom, and Jack was more than gratified to hear the audience gasp. The incubus was, of course, no ordinary carving. It was a sort of golem, an impressive piece of magic that had been revealed to Jack during one of the long, morphine-filled nights when he woke with no memory of parsing the Book’s secrets. That he’d been given this particular secret was a gift, and he considered it nothing less than a divine sign of what he was meant to do. Evelyn’s feral power might affect the flesh and blood, but he doubted it would do much to the misshapen creature he’d fashioned out of clay.
“But nightmares are meant to be tamed, just as those who cling to the old ways must be tamed.”
He could feel Evelyn’s fear even from where he stood, and that along with the singing of the morphine in his blood only emboldened him.
“Tonight you have seen the wonders of the alchemist’s discovery, sirens, and witches, but now I present a true siren. A witch who would try to destroy the Order.”
At his words Evelyn seemed to sense the danger she was in. She tried to sit up, but the moment she began to move, the incubus caged her with its arms and pressed her back to the couch. Even as she screamed, he could feel the heat of her magic brushing at him, trying to tempt him and sway him from his path, but it didn’t touch him. She couldn’t touch him. He’d learned too much since that girl in Greece. He’d learned too much from the Book.
“Evelyn DeMure pretends to be a simple actress. Perhaps you’ve seen her at Wallack’s Theatre?” From the rustling among the men, Jack assumed that some had more than seen her. “But she, like so many of their kind, is not what she pretends to be. She intended to fell us all. She was there the night that Khafre Hall burned. She thought she could enrapture me with her evil ways, but as you can see, her power is weak compared to the secrets of enlightened study.”
He was close—so close—he thought as he lifted his hand, and the clay figure did the same. He brought his fingers together in a fist, and the creature mirrored his action over the tender skin of Evelyn’s throat.
By now people were starting to come to their feet. Some were calling for him to stop, but Jack was calm. Allowing the golem to do his bidding, he turned back to the crowd. “But Miss DeMure, as charming as she pretended to be, isn’t the only snake in our midst tonight. There is another, one who pretended to be an ally but in truth was doing the bidding of the very people we are trying to protect ourselves from.”
He found Paul Kelly in the audience, the low-life bit of Bowery trash who had pretended to befriend him. Kelly had not only allowed Jack’s enemy to live but had also aligned himself with one of the people responsible for Jack’s greatest embarrassment.
“You all might have noticed that Mr. Kelly is here with us tonight. I’m sure you wondered why someone of his ilk had been invited to besmirch our event,” Jack said, watching Kelly’s eyes narrow at him. But he dismissed the threat.
This was his room, his moment.
“Officers,” Jack called. “If you would be so kind, please escort Mr. Kelly and his colleagues to a more appropriate venue, where they can be dealt with.”
A scream went up in the crowd, and Jack turned to see that some of the waitstaff had dropped their trays and were pulling pistols from their dark dinner jackets and taking hostages. Kelly’s men. No. They can’t— They are ruining everything, he thought with a burst of rage.
The Book felt warm against his chest as Jack watched victory slip through his fingers. Kelly simply smirked and darted into the crowd, which had broken down into complete madness.