manager, stood with a clipboard. Loeser didn’t know if he could apprehend Bailey on his own, but Ziesel had bulk. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
‘I think we might have lost one of the carnival masks,’ said Ziesel.
‘Come with me right away,’ Loeser repeated. So Ziesel followed him back to the prop table — where Bailey and Adele were no longer waiting.
Loeser looked around. Dismissing an unhelpful recollection of the time Rackenham had taken Adele away from him at the corset factory, he was about to begin a search for the pair. But then he realised what must have happened.
Bailey knew that he knew.
Loeser’s cough alone couldn’t have been enough to betray him, but something in his eyes, or something in his voice, or just something in the psychic torsion of the space between them must have told Bailey that Loeser had finally worked it all out.
‘Fire!’ Loeser shouted. No one noticed. ‘Fire!’ he shouted again, and this time a couple of student stagehands turned to look at him. ‘Fire! There’s a fire! There’s a huge, raging fire!’
‘Egon, what in heaven’s name are you doing?’ said Ziesel.
Loeser ran past the flats to the curtain and pushed through it to the stage. There was some confused applause. ‘Fire!’ he shouted. No one moved. ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!
Running back into the wings, he almost collided with Slate. ‘Make sure everyone gets out,’ he said to the janitor. ‘Everyone!’
‘Where’s the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just do as I say.’
Backstage, Loeser found Ziesel again. ‘If your stage fright was really that bad, Egon, you could just have—’ began Ziesel before Loeser grabbed his arm and pulled him towards an exit. At a creditable pace they sprinted together across the lawn to the Obediah Laboratories, and then up the stairs to room 11. Loeser pushed open the door.
‘No further, please, Mr Loeser,’ said Bailey. With one hand he covered his assistant’s mouth to stop her screaming, and with the other he held the pearl-handled nail scissors to her carotid artery, the two blades hinged halfway open like a drafting compass ready to plot a small circle on the pale plane of her neck. Behind him, the heavy steel door of the teleportation chamber was wide open, and the ultrasonic accordionist was making a noise like a portable vacuum cleaner. Loeser thought he could feel a static itch in the hairs on his arms.
‘We’ve evacuated the theatre,’ said Loeser. ‘I don’t know what your “novel theatrical effect” really was, but it won’t hurt anyone now.’
‘Then Miss Hister will have to be the sole subject of this experiment,’ said Bailey. ‘There is void in things. Remember that, Mr Loeser, whatever happens. There is void in things. Cross this country in a wheelbarrow and you will see it.’ Unsteadily, as if practising some awkward new dance step with a reluctant partner, he began to pull Adele backwards towards the teleportation chamber. Loeser’s hands were both fists of panic but he didn’t know what else to do except stand there next to Ziesel and watch. He’d known Adele for twelve years, longer than anyone on this continent, and she was going to be made a human sacrifice right in front of him.
Then Bailey, not seeing where he was going, knocked the back of his thigh on the edge of a desk. And he relaxed his grip on Adele for an instant, but it wasn’t quite enough for her to get free — until she lunged sideways, grabbed the toy steam engine from the desk where Loeser had put it down earlier, and jammed it backwards into Bailey’s left eye.
Bailey gave a surprisingly feminine scream and thrust the nail scissors into Adele’s flank. ‘Adele!’ Loeser shouted. Which was when Ziesel bowed his head, charged forward like a rugby player, and propelled Bailey backwards into the teleportation chamber.
‘Dieter, don’t let him close the door,’ cried Adele through tears of pain. ‘There’s a time lock! You’ll be trapped in there with him!’
So Loeser, galvanised at last, made his own dash forward. But just as his fingertips brushed the handle, the door of the teleportation chamber swung shut with a terminal clunk. With one hand, Ziesel had been trying to wrench the nail scissors out of Bailey’s grasp. With the other, he’d locked himself inside.
Loeser punched the door in frustration and then dropped to his knees to attend to Adele, who lay curled on her side. The twin wounds from the nail scissors, like bite marks from a vampire bat, didn’t look especially deep, and Loeser was grateful that he’d designed Adele’s ballerina costume in tough Neo-Expressionist stingray leather instead of the more traditional silk. Near by lay the toy steam engine, its tinplate pilot slick with optical gore.
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Adele. ‘But we have to save Dieter.’
Loeser pressed his ear to the steel door for a moment, but he could hear nothing from the other side. ‘How can we get into the chamber?’
‘I don’t know. Run. Find someone.’
Loeser kissed her on the lips for the second time in his life and then did as he was told. Outside, a crowd was milling around by the doors of the Gorge Auditorium. Mrs Jones, still in costume, stood hugging a purposeless fire extinguisher. He rushed up to the Muttons.
‘Egon, what in the world is going on?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘We need help. We don’t know what to do.’
When Loeser returned to room 11 with the Muttons, Adele was sitting up against the wall with her hand pressed against her punctures. She explained to the Muttons about Ziesel and the time lock.
‘Can’t we just break the mechanism somehow?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘Even if we could, it’s on the inside of the door,’ said Adele.
‘Disconnect it from Bailey’s device?’ said Loeser.
‘The timer’s already started — that won’t do anything.’
‘Then we need one of those oxya-such-and-such cutting torches,’ said Mutton. ‘Like my bank robbers used in
‘Dr Pelton used to have one of those for taking apart his old rocket prototypes,’ said Adele.
‘Where would it be now?’
‘I don’t know. They cleared out his lab after he … After the Professor…’
‘We’ll split up and search,’ said Mutton.
So Loeser went down to the basement, but he tried every storage locker that wasn’t locked, even Marsh’s erstwhile tomb, without success. Upstairs, he found Mutton returning from a similarly fruitless search of the nearby laboratories.
‘There must be some other way.’
‘I know how to to to get in.’
Loeser turned: it was Slate.
Hobbling as fast as he could, the janitor led Loeser along the corridor, up a flight of stairs, and along another corridor, where there was a lavatory with a padlock on the door and a sign that said ‘Out of Order’. Loeser realised that they must be directly above room 11. With a key from the loop on his belt, Slate got them into the lavatory, in which Loeser observed an extendable metal ladder leaning against the wall and a neat square gap in the floor about two feet on each side. Then Slate got down on his hands and knees, reached down into the hole, and hauled up what Loeser recognised from its grey rubberised panels as a section of the teleportation chamber’s ceiling. Evidently not every inch of the chamber had really been lined with lead.
Frightened, Loeser peered down into the room below. Ziesel lay on his back next to the platform, his head in a halo of blood, his eyes wide open, nail scissors still protruding from his neck. The struggle had probably ended within a few seconds of the door shutting.
Bailey, however, was gone.
With no one to rescue and no one to apprehend, Loeser turned back to Slate. ‘Did you set all this up yourself?’ he said, gesturing at the hole and the ladder.
Slate nodded.
‘Why? Why would you want to go down into there while the time lock is on?’
Slate didn’t reply, but instead turned and went out of the lavatory. Loeser followed him back down two flights of stairs to the basement, where Slate unlocked a storage locker in a far corner with another key from the
