by Mark Hodder
All in all, their style was at least fifty years out of date.
“Good afternoon, Captain Burton,” said the tall but slightly hunchbacked man on the left. Like his companion, he was holding a stovepipe hat. Unlike his companion, he was extremely bald, with just a short fringe of hair around his ears. As if to compensate for this, he sported the variety of extremely long side whiskers known as “Piccadilly weepers.” His face hung in a naturally maudlin expression: the mouth curved downward, the jowly cheeks drooping, the eyes woebegone. He shifted the brim of his hat through his fingers nervously.
“My name is Damien Burke.”
The second man bobbed his head. He was shorter and immensely broad, with massive shoulders and long, apelike arms. His head was crowned with an upstanding mop of pure white hair that descended before his small puffy ears in a short fringe, angling around his square jawline to a tuft beneath the heavy chin. His pale grey eyes were deeply embedded in gristly sockets; he had a splayed, many-times-broken nose and an extraordinarily wide mouth filled with large flat teeth. In his left hand, he held a big canvas bag.
“And I’m Gregory Hare,” he said, in a rumbling voice. “Where do you want it?”
Burton, who’d risen from his desk, paced over to the men and held his hand out.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.
Burke looked down at the proffered hand in surprise. He licked his lips then held out his own, as if unfamiliar with such niceties.
They shook.
Hare, who had his hat in one hand and the bag in the other, moved indecisively, put on his hat, quickly shook Burton’s hand, then snatched the stovepipe back off his head.
“Where do I want what?” asked Burton.
“Ah, well, there now—that’s a question,” replied Burke in funereal tones. “What indeed? Perhaps you have a suggestion, Captain? Messenger pipe? Canister conveyor? Communications tube? For the life of us we’ve not yet come up with a suitable moniker.”
“Are you referring to the contrivance on Lord Palmerston’s desk?”
“Why, of course, sir. But unlike the prime minister, you seem to be replete with desks. Is there a preferred?”
Burton indicated the desk by the windows. “I use this one the most.”
“Very good, sir. We’ll have to take the floor up but it’ll all be done in a jiffy and we’ll leave it as we find it. Would you mind clearing the desk? We wouldn’t want to disturb your work. Incidentally, sir, I read your First Footsteps in East Africa—most fascinating; most fascinating indeed!”
The hunchback turned to his colleague. “Come along, Mr. Hare, we don’t want to inconvenience Captain Burton for longer than necessary.”
“Of course not, Mr. Burke,” replied the apelike Hare. “That wouldn’t do at all!”
While Burton shifted books and documents, his two visitors unpacked tools from their bag and started to jemmy up the floorboards by the window.
An hour later the boards were back in place. The pipe, which entered the house below the study window, now ran under the floor until it reached Burton’s desk. It then turned upward and passed through a hole in the boards and desk until it joined a steaming device identical to that which the king’s agent had seen in front of Palmerston.
“The operation is simple, Captain,” advised Burke. “This part here must be topped up with water every day. This dial here is how you direct your canisters. Dial one-one-one when you want to send to His Majesty, two-two-two when you want to send to the prime minister, and three-three-three when you need to contact us. You’ll forgive me for saying so, I hope, sir, but you have a reputation for not being backward when it comes to being forward. I feel I should advise you that communicating with the king is a privilege that shouldn’t be abused. In fact, I’d recommend only speaking when you’re spoken to, if you get my drift.”
“Understood,” responded Burton. “What heats the device?”
“Don’t worry about that, Captain; we take care of it at our end. The heat is conducted along a special wire in the lining of the pipe. Rather complicated. No need to go into details. Remember—dial three-three-three if you need us. You can also send a parakeet or runner—I believe you have the address?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. One last thing, sir. Mr. Montague Penniforth’s remains were recovered by the river police in the early hours of this morning. His widow has been notified, his funeral paid for, and her pension arranged. In the future, should you encounter such unfortunate occurrences, if you can manage to have the deceased either left alone or stored somewhere, we will act the moment you notify us to ensure that disposal is civilised and respectful. Right, then, we’ll leave you to get on, Captain. We’re sorry to have bothered you, aren’t we, Mr. Hare?”
“We are, Mr. Burke,” rumbled Hare. “Very sorry, Captain. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Captain,” echoed Burke.
“Good-bye,” said Burton.
The door closed. He heard their footsteps on the stairs. The front door opened and closed.
He crossed to the window and looked down at Montagu Place. He couldn’t see them.
So that was Burke and Hare! What an extraordinary duo!
Thirty minutes later, the newly installed contraption began to shake and hiss; it rattled and whistled and a canister thunked into it. Burton opened the door on the side and caught the canister as it plopped out. He cracked off the lid and withdrew a note from inside. It read:
Gifts in the garage. A.
A for Albert. A message from the king of England!
Intrigued, he went downstairs to Mrs. Angell’s domain, where he unlocked and opened the back door, and ascended the exterior steps to the backyard. He crossed it and entered the garage. Inside he found two pennyfarthings and a rotorchair.
Later that afternoon, he used one of the velocipedes for the first time, perched high on the saddle, steaming back down to Battersea.
When he returned some hours later, he had a large basket propped on the handlebars.
Three days passed without progress.
There were no reported sightings of Spring Heeled Jack.
Algernon Swinburne was somewhere in the depths of the Cauldron.
Sir Richard Francis Burton fretted and worried. He tried to occupy himself with his books but couldn’t concentrate; he researched Moko Jumbi but found little besides the superficial resemblance to connect the African god to the stilt-walker.
Early on the morning of the fourth day there came a knock at the front door. It was young Oscar Wilde, the paperboy.
“Top o’ the morning to you, Captain,” he said. “I’m of the opinion that no good deed goes unpunished, but there are some people who I’m prepared to risk all for. Therefore, please take these, and I’ll be bidding you good day.”
He held out his hand and released something into Burton’s palm, then spun on his heel and walked away, turning once to wave and grin.
Burton was left holding three pebbles. A summons from the Beetle.
He acted immediately, bounding up the stairs, through his study, and into the dressing room, where he donned a roughly woven suit, chopped his beard down to stubble—though keeping his moustaches long and drooping to either side of his chin—ruffled his hair, dirtied his face, neck, and hands, and slipped into a pair of scuffed and cracked boots.
When he left the house, he was not alone.
Burton was tempted to use one of his new vehicles, but where he was going, modern technology was liable to be stolen on sight or vandalised, so he waved down the first cab he saw—a horse-drawn growler—and cried: “Get me to Limehouse Cut as quickly as possible! Hurry, man!”
“Have you the fare?” asked the driver, looking at him suspiciously.
Burton impatiently flashed a handful of coins at the man.
“I’ll pay you double if I’m there within thirty minutes!” he cried, pushing his companion into the four-wheeler before clambering in himself.
“Easy money!” muttered the driv
er, cracking his whip over the two horses’ heads.
The growler jerked into motion and went flying down the street. Burton was thrown about and banged his head as the vehicle careened around a corner, but he didn’t care—speed was essential now!
The carriage skidded and swerved wildly on the wet cobbles but the driver steered it with an expert hand and delivered his passengers to St. Paul’s Road, close to the factory, well within the allotted time.
“Good man!” exclaimed the king’s agent, passing coins up to the cabbie. “Money well earned!”
The rain was beating down hard, rinsing the city’s muck into the filthy artery that ran through its middle, washing Sir Richard Francis Burton’s hopes away. It could ruin his and Swinburne’s plan. It could mean the poet’s death.
He hurried to the factory and, leaving his companion at the bottom of the ladder, climbed it to the roof, then continued on up to the lip of the chimney.
The rain lashed his face as he dropped the three pebbles into the flue.
Minutes later, the Beetle said, “You look different.”
“What’s the news?” snapped Burton.
“Your friend has been taken. He was dragged out of the Squirrel Hill graveyard in Wapping by seven cloaked men. It was witnessed by one of my sweeps, a boy named Willy Cornish. He didn’t see the men’s faces—they wore hoods—but he says they moved in an odd fashion.”
“The loups-garous,” said Burton.
“Yes, I believe so. You think you can follow their trail?”
“In this rain, I fear not, but I have to try. I must go.”
“Good luck, Captain Burton.”
The king’s agent descended to the roof, then down the side of the building to his friend waiting below.
“I hope old Ted Toppletree wasn’t exaggerating about that nose of yours, Fidget!” he said. “Because if he was, we might never see Algernon Swinburne again!”
The basset hound looked up at him mutely.
Swinburne’s mind was a kaleidoscope of confused memories. The werewolves had carried him at great speed through the labyrinthine alleys of the city, gripping him so tightly that he could barely breathe, carrying him sometimes upright, sometimes upside-down. Talons had dug into his arms and shoulders, thighs and calves; and there’d been a long, dark tunnel that seemed to descend into the spongy, dripping flesh of the Earth itself.
He recalled that, at one point, he’d recovered his wits enough to start screaming at the top of his voice until his cries were smothered by a musky smelling paw.
Then, oblivion.
He opened his eyes.
He was in a huge chamber, on an upright but slightly inclined metal rack, his limbs splayed wide, straps tight around his wrists and ankles.
Artificial light flooded the cathedral-sized space; not gas light, but the white incandescence of lightning which had somehow been locked into globes hanging from the high ceiling. Beneath them, bathed in their brilliance, was machinery the like of which Swinburne had never seen nor even imagined before. There was no steam here; it was all electricity, which fizzed and crackled across the surfaces of megalithic devices, whipping from one bizarrely designed tower to another, filling the place with the smell of ozone and with sharp snaps, claps, and buzzes.
In particular, a great many bolts of energy were shooting into a chandelier-like structure suspended from the ceiling in the centre of the room. It resembled a big cast-iron wheel, with vertical stacks of disks arranged around its circumference. To these, wires and cables were affixed.
Swinburne’s eyes followed their draping lines down to where they joined a crownlike construction below; a metal frame in which a number of long needles were secured, projecting a few inches outward. To these, the wires were attached. The other ends of the needles were embedded in the skull upon which the crown sat.
It was a hairless and grotesquely swollen dome, which bulged out over the ears of its owner; a head twice normal size; a phenomenal and hideous cranium! It projected forward over the wide face below, pushing bushy brows down low over eyes that glittered coldly from within their shadow. The nose was small, the mouth wide and set sternly, the jaw decorated with a big white beard which flowed down to the man’s waist—for yes, the distorted creature was unmistakably a man.
Beneath the bloated head, a grey suit hung from a skeletal frame. The body was extremely withered, every visible inch of skin scored with wrinkles; rubber tubing emerged from the wrists to join devices that pumped and groaned beside the metal throne on which the man sat.
He looked, thought Swinburne, like a fetus cradled in a mechanical womb.
He also looked familiar.
“Charles Darwin!” cried the poet.
The eyes glistened, looking the poet up and down.
“You know us, boy?” Darwin’s voice was deep and possessed a weirdly harmonic quality, as if two people were speaking at once.
“Of course! What’s going on here? What are you up to? Who’s ‘us’?”
“We do not explain ourselves to children. Be quiet.”
A figure silently stepped into view from behind Swinburne. It was a tall, smartly suited man with long sideburns and a handsome but entirely expressionless face. Just above his eyebrows, his head ended; the top of the skull was missing entirely, and where the brain should have been, there was a baffling device of metal and glass in which a great many tiny lights blinked on and off in a seemingly random manner. From the back of this, a cable descended to the floor and snaked across to Darwin’s throne, disappearing into its base.
The machine-brained man stepped over to a trolley and lifted from it a syringe with a fearsomely long needle.
“What are you doing?” squealed Swinburne.
“This one is inquisitive, isn’t he?” muttered Darwin to himself. “Yes, he is. Tall, too, which is unfortunate. Shall we test or discard immediately? Test, I think. Child, tell us: you are an orphan? Do you remember your parents? Were they also tall?”
Machine-brain levelled the syringe, its point touching Swinburne just below the centre of his forehead.
“For pity’s sake, Darwin! I’m not an orphan, my parents are none of your damned business, and I’m no child! I’m twenty-four years old! I’m Algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet!”
There came a pause, then the syringe was lowered.
Machine-brain stepped away.
“You are a chimney sweep,” declared Darwin. “Your skin and clothes are covered in soot. It is under your fingernails. Our collectors smelled it on you. They do not make mistakes.”
Swinburne wrenched at the straps holding his wrists. They held firm.
“If by ‘collectors’ you mean those wolf-things, I’m afraid they’ve been fooled this time. I’m a poet, I tell you! Let me go!”
“Fooled?”
“I was posing as a sweep.”
“Why would a poet do such a thing?”
“To find out where the cursed wolves come from and why boys are being abducted!”
Darwin was silent for a moment, then said, “We are intrigued. Observe: we seem to have before us a man of a profoundly nonscientific bent. An evolutionary oddity, think you not? Of what use is a poet? Is he not merely an instance of self-indulgence; a decoration, if you will? That might be so, but pray consider the decorative qualities of certain species, say, for example, tropical birds. Do their colours and patterns not serve a purpose: to attract a mate or to confuse a predator? This creature, though his hair is of a remarkable hue, is notably puny in his development. Might we propose that his vocation has developed to compensate for his lack of physical prowess? Could it not be that, in the absence of an ability to attract a mate at a physical level, he has developed a ‘song’ in much the same manner as a lark, which is a small dull-coloured bird with an extravagant call?”
“What the bleeding heck are you jabbering about!” shrilled Swinburne. “Let me off this damned rack! Unbuckle these straps at once!”
Darwin’s huge head leaned to one side
slightly and the beady eyes blinked.
“We must ask, though—why would a poet concern himself with our research?”
“What research?” demanded Swinburne. “Tell me what’s going on here. Why are you abducting chimney sweeps? And what in the name of all that’s holy has happened to your head, Darwin? It’s damned disgusting! Why are you attached to those contraptions? Who is this automaton?”
A strange rattling emerged from the seated figure. Was it laughter?
“My, how inquisitive it is! So many questions! We have a proposal; a minor experiment; would it not be of interest to answer the young man? We have never explained ourselves to a nonrational mind. Will he show any capacity for thought that transcends moral outrage or will the fiction of God guide his response?”
“I don’t believe in God!” screeched Swinburne.
“Ah! Listen! He claims disbelief. A faithless poet! We understand they classify themselves as ‘Bohemians.’ On what basis does a mind that has neither scientific rationality nor superstitious faith operate? This is truly fascinating, do we not think? We do. We do. Proceed! Explain to him, and when we have analysed his response, he will be disposed of.”
“What?” screamed Swinburne. “Disposed of? What does that mean?”
“Observe: the survival instinct in action,” declared Darwin. “Algernon Charles Swinburne, we will explain our programme. We will then ask you to respond. Please do so clearly and in detail. To begin with, on the subject of our head. Your reaction to it is based on aesthetic values which serve no purpose. It is this size in order to incorporate the two brains which lie within. This body is that of Charles Darwin. The individual you call an automaton was once Francis Galton. The brains of those two men have been grafted together to create a four-lobed organ with comingled psychic fields which allow for the instantaneous transfer of thoughts. In effect, we have become one in order to overcome the limitations of language. We are no longer forced to resort to the symbolic in order to communicate our theories to one another; communication is direct and unsullied. There can be no misunderstanding or lack of comprehension.
“The body of Francis Galton we employ as a limb, for we are confined to this machinery which Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed to support us. Unfortunately, the human body is unable to maintain two brains without mechanical assistance.”
