Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

Tarvek jerked upright. “We must stop the moon from eating the mushrooms!” Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell back.

Agatha looked around. “Castle! Is there a medical lab anywhere we can get to?”

“The nearest medical laboratory is thirty meters behind you, down the hallway to the right.”

Agatha blinked. “Well. That’s a stroke of luck.”

Moloch shook his head. “Not really. This place is lousy with medical stuff.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yes,” the Castle confirmed. “When the urge took the Masters to do a little experimentation—say, upon an erstwhile ‘guest’—they didn’t like to have to drag the body very far.”

“That’s horrible!”

Moloch slung one of Tarvek’s arms around his shoulders. “I think it shows a bit of respect for the working man.”

Agatha stared at him.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Those old Heterodynes wouldn’t have lugged their own bodies about.”

“Not if they could help it,” the Castle admitted.

They entered a small, but remarkably well-equipped facility. There was a row of stone topped benches, several walls covered in storage cabinets fronted with now-cracked laboratory glass, inside of which were rows and rows of jumbled containers. In the middle of the room was a top of the line medical slab. Although it showed obvious signs of disuse, it was still better than Agatha had dared hope to find.

“The Red Playroom,” the Castle announced. “Iago Heterodyne’s favorite.”

Agatha shoved a small pile of rubble off of the slab and indicated that this was where Tarvek should be set down. “Twenty years worth of dust and neglect,” she muttered.

Violetta shrugged. “Everything is still sealed up in jars and there isn’t a lot of leakage.”

Moloch wrestled Tarvek onto the slab with a grunt. Agatha and Violetta started examining him. Moloch found a tap and with a herculean twist, got a stream of filthy water going.

“I can’t use that,” Agatha declared.

Moloch was wetting down some rags and wiping down a table. “The cisterns on the roof are still working. They filter and aerate the water automatically. The pipes are kind of sludgy when they start running, but give ’em a few minutes and they’ll clear out.”

A little less than an hour later, Agatha slumped back, and found a stool positioned to catch her. Before them, Tarvek lay still, but now he looked more relaxed and was warmly swaddled in musty sheets.

“I don’t really think we can do much more for him,” she said flatly.

Violetta shook her head. “Yeah, I think we got him stabilized, but I won’t know what we’re dealing with until I see some more symptoms.” She looked at Agatha with respect. “He never said anything about you being a doctor.”

Agatha shook her head wearily. “I’m not. Oh, back at Transylvania Polygnostic I attended lectures. I observed hundreds of operations and other procedures, but they never let me do anything. I never had any hands-on training.” She glanced over at Tarvek. “But even if I had, I don’t think it would be doing me any good now. I never saw anything like this. He’s still got a fever, that dart wound on his arm is draining green, and he smells terrible.”

Violetta shrugged. “The smell’s pretty normal.”

Agatha stripped off her gloves. “Well I guess he’s getting what he wanted after all. I’m going to find Gil.”

Elsewhere in Castle Heterodyne, Gil stared at the barrels of the guns held in the sweating hands of the false Heterodyne’s minions. It was obvious that, after some of the things that they had seen, they would have cheerfully started shooting at anything. Gil had been briefed on the false Heterodyne’s coterie and he noted that there were now less than half of the number he had been told had entered.

The false Heterodyne herself, resplendent in a pink work outfit, pushed to the fore and glared at him. “Gilgamesh Holzfaller! It is you!”

Gil blinked. The incongruity of the circumstances had prevented him from recognizing her, but now he stammered: “Zola?”

This seemed to throw the girl into a rage. She stomped towards him and began furiously punching him in the arm. “You idiot,” she screamed. “I told you! Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?”

Gil frantically tried to understand what she was talking about while blocking her punches. She switched tactics and smartly kicked him in the shins. “I told you to shape up, you dope!”

To his astonishment, Gil saw tears in Zola’s eyes. “Even back in Paris I could see that you were heading for a bad end! And now—!” She waved her arm about. “Here you are in Castle Heterodyne! Caught like a common thug!”

“Actually,” Gil remarked, “to get in here, you have to be a pretty uncommon thug.”

Zola punched his arm again and smiled lovingly up at him. “Well I guess I finally get to help you out for once!” The thought obviously cheered her up immensely. “And I can do it, too! Because…” she paused, “I am the Lady Heterodyne! Surprised?”

Gil made an effort to close his mouth. “More than you can possibly imagine.”

Zola clapped her hands. “Ha! And you thought I was just another chorus girl!”