by KW Jeter
"For Christ's sake!" shouted Scape. "Are you going to just stand there, looking at that stupid mutt? Bring the friggin' dog along – what do I care? But let's get this show on the road, okay?"
Miss McThane gave me a forceful shove in the small of my back. "Out the other way – the carriage is in the alley. Move it, move it."
"One more thing–" Scape grabbed my arm. "You got something ol' Bendray's real interested in. And we know it's here. Get it," he ordered. "Quick."
The commotion from the crowd had grown both louder and higher-pitched. I shook off the befuddlement with which the rapid course of events had seized my thoughts. The device that the Brown Leather Man had lodged with me – that was the item of which he spoke; no doubt it had been Lord Bendray who had commissioned their unsuccessful attempt to steal it from these premises. So he desired it still and the promise of sanctuary was dependent upon my furnishing it to him. Without hesitation, I ran down the hallway to the workroom and came staggering back with the weighty mahogany cabinet in my arms.
In a matter of moments, my trunk was lodged on top of the carriage with Creff and the driver – one of Bendray's men, I assumed – and the balance of the party was safely installed inside. My father's creation, the source of so much skulduggery, lay on the carriage's floor between us.
Abel, as he was newly christened, scrambled up into my lap as the carriage, its brace of horses whipped into flight, shot from the alley. He barked furiously out the side window at the sight of Mrs Trabble's mob moving from its point of assembly towards my now-empty shop, their torches waving in gleeful anticipation. The shrill whistles of the constabulary, summoning others of their number to the scene, echoed through the surrounding lanes.
Such was to be my last sight and memory of that small haven, once so peaceful and undisturbed, for many a day to come. The carriage clattered on towards the dark boundaries of the city, and beyond.
PART TWO
An Evening's Entertainment
8
The Complete Destruction of the Earth
Long periods of travel induce a somnolence that neither refreshes the body nor soothes the mind. Whether one is enduring the nauseating roll of a ship caught between the crests and troughs of the ocean, or having one's spine jerked by the lurching crash of a carriage's wheels in the ruts and holes of England's roads, the effect is the same. One cannot sleep; dismal vistas pass by one's gaze, in day or night; one swallows over and over again the sour, nagging protest of one's digestion, rising constantly into the throat; comfort there is none, nor peace sufficient to order and reconnect the thoughts shaken against each other like the fragments of a crumbled mosaic.
I have little patience with the Oriental maxim It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. (Who has not savoured the delicious pleasure of stepping once more on to motionless ground and feeling one's muscles and bones sweetly unlock themselves?) Rather I believe that, if a dull and cramped Hell were to be one's final punishment, it would be best achieved in a perpetually rolling carriage.
Such was the nature of my reflections, once the initial excitement of my flight from the hands of the street mob had ebbed. We passed the greater portion of the journey in an uncomfortable silence. From time to time I would open my eyes and look about the vehicle's dim interior, lit only by the moon and starlight slanting through the side windows. Across from me, Miss McThane had managed to fall asleep, her mouth open to emit a soft, ladylike snore. Beside her, Scape sat with folded arms and chin heavy on his chest; his blue spectacles made it impossible to determine if he was unconscious or merely sunk in the contemplation of further villainy. When we had first left the precincts of the city, the carriage entering the deep quiet of the Kentward road, he had spent some time bending down to inspect the mahogany cabinet on the floor; he had at last given up the attempt to fathom the mysteries of the device owing to a lack of sufficient light. Abel – the only creature inside the carriage worthy of my trust, Creff being stationed atop with the driver – rested his chin oil my leg, only closing his eyes in an ecstatic swoon whenever my hand strayed to scratch behind his ears.
My own thoughts – or fragments thereof – chased and battered themselves against my brow. I knew not where we were bound, nor what my reception would be when we arrived. Perhaps I had been inveigled thus to my own murder; one attempt towards this end had already been encountered by me; of the circumstances that had delivered me from the cold embrace of the Thames, I still awaited explanation. Certain it was that ruthless forces had arrayed themselves in the London night: the corpses of Fexton and the Brown Leather Man attested to that. (The vision of the latter overturning the ruffians' boat I was even more certain of being a delusion; the sight of the poor man's fatal wounds remained sharp in my memory.) If Scape and his employer Bendray were not in league with these desperate men, there was still little else to recommend them to my confidence. Surely, I asked myself as the back of my head jolted against the carriage's thinly padded leather, surely these people were insane? How else account for the lunatic blasphemy of their attentions upon the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe? (A blasphemy, and lunacy, that I bitterly knew was now attributed to me.) I had yet to wake from the dream that my life had. become; my sleep had been rewarded not with the dawn's returning of my old dull life, but with the continuation of awful night and chaos.
These and similarly cheerless ruminations were interrupted by the dog Abel. His ears pricked up, and he started from his doze; in a trice he had scrambled into my lap the better to unleash a volley of furious barking against the window, his front paws pattering on the glass.
"Jesus H. Christ." Scape had been apparently asleep behind his dark spectacles; they rose for a moment up on to his forehead as he rubbed his stiff face. "What the hell's all the racket about?"
Beside him, Miss McThane burrowed her shoulder deeper into the corner of the seat, in a futile attempt to escape the sudden noise. "Shut your goddamn dog up, Dower," she muttered unladylike.
"Abel… I say–" I grasped the thin collar that his former master had bestowed on him and tried to pull him back from the window. "Calm down, old boy."
A small gap at the top of the window had been left open for ventilation during the journey. With renewed determination, Abel wedged his sharp muzzle in the space and howled even more vigorously.
"You know – I think he's seen something." I positioned the side of my face against the window, the better to view behind the carriage. "Something out there."
This pronouncement brought Scape sitting bolt upright, his irritable fatigue forgotten. Miss McThane lifted her head as well, her eyes widening.
Scape leaned forward, balancing himself with one hand against the opposite seat, and joined me in my scrutiny of the night unrolling behind the carriage's progress. We had been travelling out from London for such a time that dawn was no more than one or two hours away; already the darkness had thinned sufficiently to bring a thin grey outline to the black tracery of country hedge and tree.
The shapes of cloaked riders moved against those, keeping pace with us.
"Shit," muttered Scape. He had lifted his spectacles in order to discern the silhouettes following us; the slight radiance of the stars produced a slow tear from the corner of his overly sensitive eyes. "It's that friggin' Godly bunch."
"Them again?" Miss McThane sounded peeved. "How'd they find out about us coming here?"
He adjusted his spectacles to their original position. "Beats me – must have an inside line somewhere. Maybe ol' Bendray's butler or somebody is working a double."
"Godly bunch?" I echoed. "Who are they?"
"Never you mind." Scrape lowered the window and shouted to the driver: "You wanna pick it up a bit?" The whip snapped in response and the carriage jolted harder in the ruts as Scape began rummaging through the pockets of his coat. "This'll take care of those suckers."
I saw that he had extracted a bulky cap-and-ball pistol of considerable antiquity. "Watch it with that thing, will ya?" said Miss McThane. "
The last time–"
"Yeah, yeah," said Scape irritably. Part of the gun's mechanism had fallen off, and he screwed it back into place with his thumbnail. "Don't worry." To me: "Slide over."
Restraining the still-agitated dog, I moved aside. Scape took his position, bracing his arm against the sill and squinting over the top of the pistol. A dull click of metal against metal sounded when he drew the trigger.
"Shit. All this friggin' rain." He banged the pistol against the inside wall of the carriage as both Miss McThane and I cringed in the opposite corners. As soon as he pointed the pistol out the window again, it went off with a deafening report and burst of flame.
"Chinga tu madre." Scape nursed his singed hand with his mouth. The several pieces of the gun had flown out of his grip. "Son-of-a-bitch."
The shot had seemed to cause no damage, the bullet having gone slanting into the muddy road. Its noise, however, had managed to inspire our horses to greater effort. Peering out the window, I saw that our ghostly escort had wisely fallen back as well.
Scape nodded with satisfaction when I pointed this out to him. "Chicken-shit bastards," he said as he prodded the small burn on his palm.
"Jee-zuss," said Miss McThane. "You idiot." She gave Scape a final glower before adjusting her wrap about her shoulders and resuming her interrupted slumber.
When the morning light broke over the horizon some time later, there was no longer any sign of our pursuers; they had vanished as though they had been but animate fragments of the ebbing darkness. From the carriage's window I looked out on to a passing landscape of remarkable cheerlessness and foetidity. The rising sun glinted red across weed-choked marshland. At irregular spacing though these fens, the rounded hillocks of high ground supported a few stunted, crookbranched trees and decaying hovels. Thin-shanked pigs rooted though mud distinguishable from the surrounding countryside only by intervening walls of rough stone, shaggy with ancient moss. A figure in the distance, blurred by the mists drifting up from the stagnant waters, toiled with stick along one of the muddy paths winding through the mires.
The thick, musky odour of rotting vegetation prompted me to draw my head back into the carriage. Scape looked at my appalled expression with some amusement. "Great place, ain't it?" he said with a thin smile.
I made no reply. The carriage slowed down, and I saw that we had entered a small village. Low buildings, some appearing to have subsided so far into the muck that their thatched eaves nearly touched the ground, squatted around an open space. At its centre, marked by a well that was little more than a circle of stones outlining a crumbling hole and a slanting cross-beam with bucket and rope attached, a ragged cluster of the locals stood about.
"Where is this?" My spirits, already drained by the rigours of the long journey, were further oppressed by this picture of rural squalor.
"The scenic village of Dampford," said Scape. "These poor slobs are all Bendray's tenants. His Hall is just a little further on."
As I gazed out, the carriage's wheels spattered mud across the backs of the clustered villagers. Some of them turned, tugging at their caps in respectful deference. I saw their faces and fell back against the seat, horrified. "God in Heaven!" I faintly heard Scape's and Miss McThane's mocking laughter.
The faces of the Dampford villagers were the same exophthalmic, slope-browed visages as those of the residents of that London borough called Wetwick.
The piscine physiognomies swam in my vision, those from out of the memory of that nocturnal ordeal in the city's depths merging with their apparent brethren gaping after the carriage. There could be little doubt that I had been transported to the native soil – or marsh – from which this enigmatic and ugly race had sprung. And what of Bendray, their landlord? He was not of their blood, yet he maintained some manner of proprietary concern over their cousins in distant London – I had noted the paternal expansiveness in his welcoming of them to the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe. A shiver descended the vertebral ladder between my shoulder blades as I mulled over these affairs – the faces of the Wetwick and Dampford broods had become inextricable fixtures of my nightmares, and here I had found myself amongst them yet again.
The squalid village fell behind as the road began to ascend. I pressed myself into the corner of the seat, my thoughts obscuring the sodden view as I grimly contemplated the possible explanations for my journey hither.
"Dower – how good of you to come. Yes; yes, most welcome. There's so much we have to discuss. Much, much… indeed."
Lord Bendray himself had come down the wide stone steps to the carriage in order to greet us. He clasped my hand in both of his and held it with the tender, if trembling, regard due to a long-lost relation. His rheumy eyes peered at me without benefit of the lenses of the complicated magnifying spectacles pushed up on to his brow; he had evidently been engaged in some scientific endeavour when his manservant had brought the news of our arrival. A similar pair of spectacles had been found by me in my shop's workroom; I could recognize my father's craftsmanship in these adorning Bendray as well.
"How was your journey? Uneventful, I trust?" He took my arm, supporting his own age-feebled steps as he drew me towards the Hall. Its vine-encrusted walls loomed above; the crowning turret of one wing had been amputated at some time in the past, to accommodate a brass sphere, now discoloured with verdigris. An articulated opening in the metal curve revealed the polished barrels of various astronomical apparatus.
I looked behind me to see Creff officiously supervising the unloading of my trunk from atop the carriage, while Scape assisted Miss McThane in alighting. Beyond them, the approach to the Hall slanted down through elaborately terraced gardens, or to be precise, the remains of such. The sculpted ponds were filled with stagnant green, the silent fountains in their midst choked with dead leaves. On either side of the formally laid paths, the topiary hedges had grown vague, their previous shapes lost beneath the unrestrained new growth. The state of decay seemed due more to inattention than to that discreet poverty into which the landed gentry so often decline; Lord Bendray appeared to have no lack of household staff. A pair of grooms were leading the unharnessed carriage-horses to the stables; at the Hall's entrance I could spy a rank of butlers and other servants awaiting us.
I turned my attention back to my host. "There were some men, your Lordship. Riders–"
His other brown-spotted hand made a gesture of dismissal. "Yes, yes; the Godly Army. Tiresome lot. Think nothing of it."
"Here, you – where do you think you're getting off to with that? Personal property of Mr Dower, it is."
We turned about at the sound of my assistant's raised voice. Creff had arrested Scape in mid-stride, grasping him by the lapel of his coat. Under one of Scape's arms was the weighty cabinet that held my father's device.
"Capital!" shouted Lord Bendray. His smile deepened the wrinkles in his face. "Is that it? You've brought the Regulator? Well done!" He beamed at me and Scape in turn; a wave of his hand sent one of his liveried staff over to relieve the other of the burden. "Take that to the laboratory; there's a good man." As he was instructing his servant, he did not observe the silent glare that Scape trained upon Creff. The desire that he had manifested for a closer examination of the device had been frustrated once more. For his part, Creff returned the angry look, seconded by the dog Abel held against his chest.
Lord Bendray's arm linked with mine pulled me up the stone steps. "Great things will be accomplished now, my boy. Your father's creation – the Aetheric Regulator – marvellous thing!" He lapsed into an excited muttering, his eyes brightening with the contemplation of some interior vision. "Yes, yes; your father was a genius, no doubt of that… great things, great… yes; and with the Regulator – and your assistance – the culmination of my researches! You'll see!" His claw-like grip tightened on my arm, his withered face peering eagerly into mine. "Great things!"
We had arrived by this time in the foyer of Bendray Hall, with the train of attendants, Creff, Scape, and Miss McThane following a
fter. Underneath the domed ceiling, I halted, having come to a decision. My various pretences at knowledge, and of membership in the conspiracies surrounding me, had not served to enhance my safety. Indeed, the masquerade had only embroiled me further into hazard and, as evidenced by my hasty flight from London, disrepute. I thus resolved to make a clean breast of my ignorance; I could not envision how it could possibly place me in difficulties greater than those which I had already endured.
I withdrew my arm from Lord Bendray's, and placed myself directly in front of him. "Your Lordship – I must confess – I have absolutely no idea of the matters whereof you speak. I fear I have been introduced into your confidence under false pretences–"
Scape had overheard me; he quickly came up behind me, grabbing my arm to pull me away. "Sorry; guy's a little over-exhausted from the trip, I think." He gave Bendray a strained smile. "Nervous type, you know…" He brought his mouth close to my ear and whispered: "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
