The Librarians and the Lost Lamp Read Free Page A

Librarian.
    â€œBah!” MacFarlane spat. “I’ll throttle ye with me bare hands if I have to!”
    Flynn believed it, but he wasn’t about to give MacFarlane an opportunity to carry out his threat. Keeping the transfigured brewer at bay, he flung bottle after bottle at the creature, as the conveyor belt supplied him with a seemingly endless supply of missiles. Bottles shattered loudly, one after another, causing the whole room to reek of spilled beer. Flynn thought it smelled like survival.
    Until MacFarlane shut off the power.
    Crouching low, the crazed science experiment loped across the room to a control panel mounted on an exposed brick wall. His hairy hand flung a switch, and the entire assembly line ground to a halt.
    So much for that bright idea, Flynn thought.
    Hurling the last few bottles to slow MacFarlane down, Flynn darted across the sudsy floor to the storeroom beyond. Glancing around for the exit, he noticed the waiting forklift—and the towering piles of hops and grains stacked high atop the pallets.
    On second thought, maybe he didn’t need to leave MacFarlane running berserk.…
    â€œWhere are ye, meddler?” MacFarlane charged into the storeroom, murder in his bloodshot eyes. Rage contorted his already seriously unattractive countenance. His knotted fists swung at his sides. “No more of yer bloody interference. I’ve got some serious brewing to do!”
    â€œNot without Stevenson’s recipe you don’t,” Flynn shouted from the cab of the forklift. “And you’re not going to go prowling through the city, either.”
    He fired up the forklift’s engine and hit the gas. The loading truck surged forward, slamming into a huge pile of bagged hops, which toppled over onto MacFarlane, burying him beneath their weight. The startled monster only had time to let out a single howl before vanishing under the avalanche.
    Not quite how Hyde was vanquished in the novel, Flynn thought, but if it works …
    Flynn engaged the brakes and clambered out of the forklift. He cautiously approached the fallen bags, hoping that the collapse had only taken MacFarlane out of commission, not killed him. A muffled groan coming from beneath the strewn bags raised Flynn’s hopes, and, straining his muscles, he shifted the bags to uncover MacFarlane’s head, while leaving the rest of the bags to weigh the lunatic down, just in case he still had some homicidal mania left in him.
    â€œMacFarlane?”
    The stunned monster was out cold, but that wasn’t all. Flynn watched in amazement as MacFarlane’s bestial face began to melt and dissolve back into its original configuration. The jutting brow and jaws and tusks retracted, while the bristly red hair and eyebrows receded to a less frenzied state. Streaks of gray infiltrated the man’s lank ginger tresses. Within seconds, the monster’s atavistic features had given way to the blander, much more unassuming face of Duncan MacFarlane, hopefully for good.
    Is that it? Flynn wondered. In Stevenson’s book, it had taken repeated doses of the elixir before Jekyll started turning into Hyde spontaneously, without the aid of the potion. So, in theory, MacFarlane shouldn’t be able to transform again without the formula in the manuscript. Here’s hoping that wasn’t something Stevenson added in the rewrite.
    Stepping away from the unconscious brewer, who was probably going to have a monster hangover when he came to, Flynn checked to make sure the stolen manuscript was still tucked away safely in his satchel before contemplating the brewery itself. As far as he knew, he had disposed of the only batch of contaminated product, but could he be absolutely sure of that? It seemed a shame to let the rest of the brewery’s refreshing output go to waste, but …
    He took out his phone and dialed 999, which was the Scottish equivalent of 911.
    â€œHello,” he said once someone