Serial Sunday: The Renaissance Man and the Strange New World, Part V
- Jul 19
- 7 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
In the docklands of New York City, a gang of armed ruffians approached Eileen Wong and Benjamin Williams with felonious intent. An eight-foot chain fence topped with barbed wire blocked their escape to the busy streets of the metropolis. Each of the five ruffians carried a weapon, but whether brass knuckles, a chain, axe handle, or a longshoreman’s hook, the implement would mean bad news for the two members of the Renaissance.
Their options limited, Williams stepped forward even as the gang still advanced upon he and Eileen. He hoped that he might be able to deprive the first of them of their weapon and even the odds slightly in favour of he and his comrade.
Eileen remained stood in place, not paralysed with fear but her mental energy devoted elsewhere. She thought of their situation in terms of a mechanical problem, running through potential solutions in her mind but dismissing them one after another for likely ending in either she, Williams, or them both out of commission. At best, it would be a temporary state of disrepair for them.
Their surroundings offered no potential solutions, and she cursed whichever bureaucrat on the Board of Aldermen had saw fit to install a fence on a route from the docks to the city proper. She knew it would have been framed as preventing trespassers on the dock, but the direction of the barbed wire told her the intent was more likely to keep dockland urchins from the rich and powerful arriving in their automobiles.
A dockland urchin like she herself had been in her younger years.
It was the past that struck a light and revealed a potential solution to their predicament. It was a slight chance, but a slight chance was better than nothing.
She stuck her pinkies in her mouth and whistled as loud as she could. Two long whistles, a short whistle, and then another long whistle.
The gang actually stopped, some looking nonplussed and others smirking. Even Williams turned around in slight confusion. Eileen just waited for what seemed like an eternity.
Within seconds, lights began turning on from windows on the upper floors of the buildings bounding the alleyway.
Eileen breathed a sigh of relief, it had worked!
A pair of men climbed out of a window on the building to her right and onto the fire escape, whilst another opened an elevated pair of double doors that had once been used to haul cargo on the building to her left.
The fire escape and the doors were both behind the gang.
“What’s going on down there?” called one of the men on the fire escape.
Some of the gang turned, whilst most of them just skulked up against the wall and hoped they were now out of sight of the public. It did not matter, since others, men and women, were now arriving at the entrance of the alleyway.
One member of the gang, the one with the brass knuckles who walked at their head, saw the changing situation and decided to make a break for it. His slower accomplices followed his lead and also sprinted towards the alley entrance. Some of them lashed out at the responding public as they passed, which did little damage but just encouraged some to give pursuit to them.
“What was that?” Williams asked.
“One thing you learn growing up around here,” Eileen smiled. “Morse has uses outside telegraphy.”
***
Across town, in a setting that could not have been more different from the docklands, two more members of the Renaissance were hard at work. As the main planners and researchers of the group, Reginald Cullen and Annie Thomas had been hard at work to see if there was any precedent for the new continent that had been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. One that was apparently not there until it had been discovered a few days prior.
The library of the brownstone on the West Side that the group made their main base boasted one of the biggest private collections of scientific, cartographical, and engineering texts in the world. It also boasted a respectable collection of arcane lore and other esoteric texts. Respectable, but by no means the largest private collection, not even in New York City. After exhausting their own texts, Annie and Cullen had made their way to the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.
A librarian herself by profession, Annie had cultivated for the group a mutually beneficial relationship with the Public Library system. They were often allowed unfettered access to rare books in exchange for frequent donations of the same. She often arranged too for the public persona of the Renaissance Man to appear at fundraisers and other affairs on behalf of the Library, even if the man behind the Renaissance Man persona’s reading preferences gravitated towards dime westerns and the sports pages.
It was on the behalf of the Renaissance Man that she and Cullen were able to continue their research in the Main Branch outside of its normal hours, with access to the restricted sections and volumes that would otherwise be denied to the public.
Cullen might still have been able to talk his way into it, Annie sometimes thought, but she, librarian or not, might always run up against rigid enforcement of the rules in her case.
Regardless, they were there now, books stacked half a dozen high on a table, looking almost like a miniature model of the city itself. Their wrists worked their way progressively towards cramp as they noted and cross-referenced anything they could find on lost lands or unexplained sightings.
Even in the Main Branch, they kept running into the same issue that had stymied their research in their own library. Most material focused itself on the Atlantic Ocean.
Atlantis, Avalon, Brasil, Cantre'r Gwaelod, Doggerland, Ys – the Atlantic and its associated waters had no shortage of lost islands and continents.
“There is some speculation that the East Indies, New Zealand, and the Sandwich Islands are in fact remnants of some larger submerged continent.”
“The same one?” Cullen asked.
“Unclear,” Annie surmised. “Although from the extent of the lands allegedly beneath the East Indies and New Zealand there would only be a narrow strait separating them. Like Alaska and Siberia.”
“Weren’t they once connected by a land bridge?”
“True, but much farther north than this newcomer.”
“There’s also Terra Australis, cartographers used to think that Australia and Antarctica were part of one larger southern continent.”
“That strikes me as a possibility, from what we know the Brunswick discovered the new continent near the Pacific’s point of inaccessibility. If there is a submerged Terra Australis it could have extended that far.”
“Some Atlantean scholars also speculate about Mu, a Pacific equivalent of Atlantis or Lemuria, but it’s even more speculative than Terra Australis, or Atlantis itself.”
Annie did not respond immediately, instead she examined one of the more brief monographs they had found tucked away in a dusty box of the Main Branch. It described a manuscript that had been found in the Carolina Islands that itself described a sunken city in the Pacific. The language of the manuscript had been unknown, its translation related to the author of the monograph only verbally. Who knew how much had been lost in translation?
Annie tried to sound out the name of the city.
“Raleigh,” Cullen looked up. “Isn’t that in North Carolina?”
***
Outside the Main Branch, a quiet man waited, skulking beneath one of the stone lions that flanked its entrance. His right arm was bound in a makeshift sling, useless from being trapped in the door of the familiar brownstone of the Renaissance Man earlier that night. He had known better than to head to a hospital with his injury, occurring as it did in an attempt to assassinate one of the most famous men in the city.
He carried a new gun in the left pocket of his trench coat. The hulking figure that had hired him found him in a run-down bar in Hell’s Kitchen as he tried to dull the pain in his arm with the worst kind of rotgut whiskey.
Whilst the Renaissance made inquiries at hospitals, Ironstone had known exactly the sort of place to look for a slightly wounded button man.
His valet uniform swapped for the nondescript clothes that might afford the near-giant as much anonymity as possible, he had not even given the quiet man his true name. He did not need to know Ironstone’s true name to glean his fate should he fail once more.
Returning in a stolen coat and hat as a makeshift disguise, the quiet man waited in the shadows watching the door of the brownstone. He did not register the six-wheeled silver car was now gone from out front, given that the Renaissance Man and most of his associates had already departed for the docklands.
Cigarette butts piled up at his feet as the quiet man watched and waited. Eventually, he saw the butler and the secretary, as he knew them, leave on foot. Hanging back at least a block, the quiet man followed them, believing that they would lead him to his intended target.
A new pile of spent cigarettes began to grow outside the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. If he waited much longer, he would have to purchase a new pack from a passing vendor.
Once more, he saw the butler and the secretary appear in their coats. There was still no sign of the Renaissance Man.
Panicked, knowing what further failure meant, he reasoned that a partial success might earn him a less permanent scolding. Action might even encourage the Renaissance Man himself to make an appearance.
As Cullen and Annie made their way down the steps, the quiet man made his way up them. His left hand gripped the handle of his revolver in his raincoat pocket tightly.
Cullen stood closest to the quiet man as they drew level. Balancing himself unfamiliarly between switching to southpaw with his dominant hand in a sling, the quiet man drew his gun.
He aimed at Cullen, who reached out to in front of Annie in response.
The quiet man fired a single shot.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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