The Journal of Dr. Tiberius Hess
Week Three: The Aftermath of Death
The Nautilus Gears of Dr. Tiberius Hess is a time-travelling treasure hunt designed by the Hamilton Public Library (HPL). The HPL was given a battered journal written by the Victorian physician. It contains descriptions of his life in the Hamilton of 1850-1860. Remarkably, it also contains mention of a time machine Hess claims to have invented and which is driven by mysterious nautilus gears.
Hess claims to have hidden a set of the gears in the city when he time-travelled to present day Hamilton. Each week for six weeks, the HPL is releasing excerpts from Hess’s journal along with clues he crafted that seem to reveal where he hid his gears. If you figure out where they are hidden, you could win a mahogany puzzle box and a golden gears brooch, both created by young local craftsmen.
Learn more at hpl.ca/gears and join the discussion forum at reddit.com/r/gearscontest
August 7, 1854
Adelaide and Miranda are both lost to me! Miranda’s thin body lies in Mrs. MacKenzie’s bed, wrapped in sheeting. Two coffins lean upon my own home, one so tiny it could not hold all my daughter was in life. The hollow service, my more hollow home, its every scent, possession and memory — precious mockeries.
I am told that the night of the funerals, the good Reverend Burnet found me prostrate at the doors of St. Andrews, screaming at the God who had so forsaken me. Mrs. MacKenzie, spared from the pestilence, took me in and nursed me through days and nights I could not bear to emerge into the light.
My patients meant nothing to me, nor did life itself. After two weeks I returned to my own home and drowned myself in bitter laudanum, its mad sleep my only respite. In the dreams it brought on, I was scrabbling in the dry earth of a nearby street. Flies covered an object buried there. I brushed them aside and discovered the watch Adelaide had given me. It appeared to me that the case was transparent and I could see the gears within. But they were distorted, twisted into strange spirals.
The hands of the watch were skipping forward in an erratic St. Vitus’ dance, as though a mockery of cholera death throes. All around me the landscape changed, now the dirt and dung of my own time, then a strange hard surface, black as tar and marked by worn, painted lines. Dust returned and through that dust came a snail, its shell spiraling inward as it moved. Sunflowers burst from the dry ground, their centres likewise spinning inwards, endlessly. Upon my ears came harmonies so sweet and pure I thought though God had abandoned me, he had left his angels in his wake.
I began, slowly, to return, during the day, to a semblance of life. I saw my patients and did my best by them, but at night I let the purple bottle of opiate coax what little sleep I could squeeze from my mind, as I felt myself forever drifting in a time no longer my own.
“Gunsights, or no,” I told MacDonald, “I have in mind to create a remarkable conveyance!”
“Which might be?” he asked, gathering up the chess pieces from the board.
“I call it the Chronocycle. It is that which I intend my nautilus gears to control.”
“Chrono, as in time, of course,” said MacDonald, through a smoky haze. “But you said yourself earlier tonight such time travel would take massive amounts of power. How would you come by such brute energy, my young friend?”
“We all know of the great waterworks now underway near the lake,” I said.
“A prodigious undertaking indeed, supplying fresh water to all of Hamilton from water pumped from Lake Ontario to a reservoir on the Mountain.” He paused, grinning around his cigar. “The pump …”
“Exactly,” I exclaimed. “It has two mighty 100 horsepower engines, but more vitally, they each have the force over distance, the torque, I require to propel the Chronocycle into the time stream! But I have months of work ahead of me before that can be accomplished.”
“Then work with stealth and strategy, sir,” said MacDonald, placing a few pieces on the board. “No more outbursts such as tonight’s display, I beg you.”
Read more of this week’s exciting instalment at hpl.ca/gears