him?’ His voice was heavy with menace.
The guard merely grunted. Lorimore glared. ‘You’re useless,’ he spat. ‘And you,’ he said advancing on Liz, ‘are very clever.’
His voice froze with his body as he caught sight of the slight movement — the hands clapping together. His mouth dropped open — surprise and anger mixed with sudden fear.
A spark flew. The end of the fuse flared, burned. The weight of the miniature keg delicately balanced on the metal plate lightened as the fuse burned away. Lorimore reached out, but too late. The plate sprang upwards, pivoting at one end, flinging the tiny wooden barrel high into the air towards the outside walls.
The keg turned end over end. The fuse burned to nothing. Close to the main laboratory window, at the height of its trajectory, the little powder keg exploded.
The wide expanse of glass that made up the end wall shattered under the blast. Liz and Sir William threw up their hands to protect themselves from the sharp splinters and flung themselves to the floor. The man who had been holding Sir William wasn’t quick enough. A blast of broken glass knocked him off his feet and tore through his flesh as the glass ceiling rained in, sweeping him bloodied to the floor.
Lorimore was screaming with rage. A percussive thump as the thunder roared above them. Rain poured through the broken windows and shattered roof as the storm finally broke. Lightning arced down. The battery fizzed and spat. Power hummed along the wires.
And Eddie and George leapt into the laboratory, racing to help their friends.
Sir William pulled Liz to her feet. He had blood on his face, from a small cut below one eye — a line of red, dripping. One of the men on the floor groaned and shifted. But he did not get up. Lorimore was looking about him in furious amazement, shouting at the remains of Albert Wilkes. A slice of glass had embedded itself in Wilkes’s arm and stuck out like a blade. But he seemed not to notice or care. More, smaller pieces of glass peppered his face. But there was no blood. Wilkes lurched forwards, arms out. Lightning flashed off the facets of the glass as he lumbered towards Liz and Sir William. Then a figure swept past them as George flung himself at Wilkes, driving him back.
‘Hold him!’ Lorimore screamed at Wilkes. Liz heard the hiss of pistons, saw the metallic claws that had been grafted to the end of Wilkes’s hands snap shut on George’s arms, holding him vice-like. George struggled and kicked, but to no effect.
Lorimore seemed to have recovered. He was standing beside the workbench, the trace of a smile on his face despite the loss of his henchmen and Blade and the chaos all around him. He looked as if he was once again in total control. He was standing beside the bank of levers, and he was holding a gun. He pointed it directly at Liz.
‘I advise you not to try anything,’ he said to Sir William, standing beside Liz. ‘I can kill you both in less time than it would take you to call out.’ He raised his reedy voice slightly to add: ‘And that goes for you too, Mr Archer. And your urchin friend, whatever may have happened to him.’ The gun remained steady, fixed on Liz as Lorimore’s eyes swept the room. ‘Where are you boy? Come out wherever you are.’
When George had hurled himself at Wilkes, Eddie had dived across the end of the workbench and ripped the fossilised egg — his lucky stone — from its metal mount. With the egg, they still had a chance. Now he emerged sheepishly from underneath the workbench. He was holding the stone defiantly, but he knew it was over. Lightning stabbed into the room, flashing off the broken glass. Thunder roared as Lorimore stretched out his hand and Eddie reluctantly, hesitantly, placed the stone in his bony palm.
‘I apologise for the slight delay,’ Lorimore said, though it was not at all clear whom he was addressing. Keeping the gun aimed with his right hand, he reached across with his left and replaced the stone in the metal bowl. Then he stepped back and pushed home the second of the three levers on the workbench. The hum of power was rising. Lightning again split the retreating night. Acid steam flowed over the top of the battery tank like a waterfall of fog.
‘Remember me, Albert,’ George pleaded to his inhuman captor. ‘You must remember me. I’m George — George Archer, remember? And you were — are — Albert Wilkes. You knew me before, at the Museum. Please remember!’
The creature that had been Wilkes made no reply. Made no movement that might show it understood. Held him firm as Lorimore laughed and stretched out his arm triumphant.
‘Now we have the power. Now it happens!’
The howl from outside might have been his monstrous creation agreeing with him.
‘Now what happens?’ Sir William shouted above the roar. ‘What lunacy? What madness?’
Lorimore did not answer. Sparks showered down from the wires above, fizzing in the rain. The metal bowl was glowing white hot, the stone itself a dull red.
‘Now!’ Lorimore shouted. He threw the final lever.
Chapter 24
When the monster had lunged out of the foggy dawn, bearing down on George and Eddie, they were ready for it.
There had been a guard patrolling just inside the main gates of the house, but George had quickly dealt with him. Even as the man fell to the ground, stunned unconscious, Eddie heard the baleful cry of the creature further off in the grounds.
‘Sounds like we still have company,’ George said. He checked that he had done no lasting harm to the man at his feet, then straightened up. ‘Now that I’ve had a good look at it, or as good as we can hope for without being bitten in half, I have an idea of what we can do.’
They crept through the thinning fog towards the house. Eddie guessed that Lorimore intended to work on his fossilised dinosaur egg. But before they went searching for that, Eddie had a job of his own to do. He was carrying a wooden crate, awkward but not heavy. He held it carefully, not wanting to unbalance or damage the delicate apparatus inside. The clock that he and George had spent several hours discussing, designing and adapting.
‘How do I look?’ he asked George as they approached the front door.
George nodded. ‘Fine,’ he decided, pulling down Eddie’s cap so the peak obscured his face almost completely. ‘Keep your head down. In every sense.’
Afterwards, they crept warily round the house, keeping to the grass to avoid making a noise on the gravel driveway, making for the large room at the back. The light was on, and that seemed to be where Lorimore and Blade had come from when they went to tend their monster. George had explained what he wanted Eddie to do when the creature found them, as they were both sure it would. Strangely, George seemed to be looking forward to the moment. Eddie was less keen.
For a while they watched through the laboratory window. They saw Lorimore and Blade examine the ship. They saw Liz and Sir William join them, and hoped their friends could guess what George’s modifications had done. Sir William had seen the clock before, and Liz had seen the mechanism George had built to hurl a ball bearing across the room, if only briefly, at the theatre. Eddie recalled how she had done little more than glance at it, but he said nothing.
Then the monster came at them. Bathed in the full moonlight, for the first time they could clearly see the enormous creature that roared up above them. They could see the metal jaws lined with fossilised teeth; the machined claws that slashed down towards them; the steam from the engine snorting out through exhaust pipes set into its head. The creak of hydraulics and the clanking of machinery as the huge creature — part automaton, part prehistoric recreation; part metal, part bone — lumbered towards them.
The ground shook. Greasy vapour swirled round the creature’s monstrous head. Machine oil dripped from its jaws and the roar of its engines shattered the night. Razor-sharp metal claws split the air as an arm of overlapping steel plates hurtled mercilessly towards Eddie and steam enveloped him in a fog of terror.
He shouted and waved, trying to draw the creature’s attention. It had seen him before, had been given his scent. He hoped it could be drawn again.
As the monstrous beast lunged down at Eddie, George disappeared into the fog behind it. Eddie pictured him climbing on to the thing’s tail. Making his way up the slippery metallic scales of its back. Reaching for the pipes and connections and joints.
