Infernal Devices

by KW Jeter

  My fellow passenger Scape came across me as I was deep in just such a reflective mood. I sat against the frame of an open hatchway, idly scratching behind the ears of Abel, panting from his labours of chasing gulls from the deck. "Yo, Dower," Scape greeted me, before sitting down. He rested his arms on his raised knees, studying the smoke from a cigarette he had cobbled together from tobacco cadged from one of the Godly Army, rolled in a Bible page from the same source.

  "That's what you get," he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, "when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains." The stub of his cigarette had a few words of Scripture still visible, before he flicked it over the rail and into the sea.

  I shrugged noncommittally. "They seem pleasant enough sorts. Doing their duty, and all that. And they are letting us live all this time, instead of dispatching us immediately, as they could have done."

  That brought a disgusted snort from him. "Get real. They've got their reasons for what they're doing. They want to pop us off, leave the bodies on that stupid island, and make it look like ol' Bendray had a hand in it. Groughay's his island, remember? These people just wanna stir up a ruckus on the old boy's head. So they can't very well kill us now – they want us to be fairly fresh meat when somebody else finds us."

  As usual, Scape had a base explanation for anyone else's actions. Unfortunately, I could find no flaw in his reasoning. As the practical results were the same whether he were right or wrong, I let the matter drop as being of no importance. After a moment's reflection, I spoke again: "There are many things that still puzzle me–"

  "Yeah, I bet."

  "–such as how a person of your character came to be involved in these matters–"

  "My character?" He gave me a glare of mock severity: "Hey, watch it!"

  I pressed on: "–or the reasons for so many apparently nonsensical actions. Say, for instance, back in London, at the church that night–"

  "Oh, that." He shrugged. "I could give you a reasonable explanation for all sorts of things."

  "Such as?"

  "Yeah, well, sure; why not? Got plenty of time now, I suppose." Scape flexed his spine against the edge of the hatchway, making himself comfortable.

  The discourse that followed so impressed itself upon my memory that I may safely warrant the accuracy of its transcription here. A good deal of Scape's speech various words, different cant phrases – had puzzled me since the blackguard's initial appearance in my Clerkenwell shop. The mystery had been continuously reinforced by the certain strangeness (for lack of a more precise word) in his general aspect; alien, yet at the same time familiar, as though I were seeing him in a clouded, distorted glass, one that magnifies certain aspects while diminishing others. We view such a wavering reflection, and say that we recognize the figure contained therein, but cannot say from where. So with the enigmatic Scape his divergence from myself, or any Englishman, was made more unnerving by the similarity that still remained.

  As to the veracity of the history he related to me, on board the Virtuous Persistence, I can give no avowal. At the time, tête-à-tête in our mutual captivity, the vision be spun from the empty air, of fabulous machinery and the Future revealed by it, weighted my soul with an oppressive certitude. At this remove, safe by my sanctuary's fire, I entertain neither Belief nor Unbelief; in this one matter, at least, I have fallen into that dismal position, below that of the most wretched atheist, of not knowing what I believe. The reader must determine his own stance with no assistance from me.

  "The thing is," said Scape after a moment's thought, "I wasn't always this – what d'ya call it, 'person of your character'. I mean, I didn't talk like this, f'r instance. Maybe you've noticed I sound a little bit different from you?"

  "It had struck my attention."

  Scape nodded. "You see, I used to talk pretty much like you do; that kind of stodgy way. Maybe a little hipper, because I was – how d'ya say it – in the business. The life. You know what I mean?"

  I hazarded a guess: "Criminal activity?"

  His brow furrowed from the wince behind the blue lenses. "Christ, Dower; you don't have to make it sound that bad. Let's just say I was out there, doing a little… hustling. Just sorta getting by, no great shakes. Me and Miss McThane, she's still down below, sleeping; she had a late night, trying to put the moves on one of these Godly Army guys, before she gave it up as a lost cause anyway, the two of us had a little travelling-show sort of thing, what we called "An Assemblage of Curiosities". You see quite a few of 'em out in the towns and villages; those yokels really go for that sort of thing. We didn't have anything too impressive – a stuffed seal with a wig on it that we tried to pass off as a mermaid, a wind-up mannikin that could raise a horn to its mouth and go toot-toot except that it usually stuck it in its eye; just junk. Because, you see, the whole thing was really just an excuse to go travelling around from place to place, kinda give you a reason for pulling into some of these burgs." He nodded again, this time relishing some memory. "You'd be surprised, man, at the amount of money some of these old country squires have got stashed away. Or some pillar of the community in one of these grimy-ass manufacturing towns – fat city. Ab-so-lutely ready for the plucking. Because they got nothing else to spend it on, right – the old guy and maybe his hot-blooded eldest son – they're grateful for a little excitement in their lives. Plus they all think they're too friggin' clever to get taken, because they've had nothing to compare their brains to except a bunch of dumb dirt-farmers out in the field." He smiled to himself, deep in his reminiscence. "I tell ya, it was great. Shoulda stuck with it – me and her could've retired by now, instead of being stuck out here with the glum bunch."

  The recital disturbed me a bit. "What part did Miss McThane play in your enterprise?"

  "Oh, she was in on the hustle, too. She pulled her weight."

  "Are you saying–"

  He caught my meaning straightaway. "Naww – she didn't have to put out, or anything. Well… not often, at any rate. Didn't have to. She'd just give the marks the eye while they were at the table, and they'd jack up their bets just to try and impress her. By the time they figured out they'd been fleeced, we'd already have split, down the road to the next town." His voice took on a more philosophical tone. "It's a living. But then one time, this old dude – I think it was up around Birmingham – he got into us for more than he could pay off. Said he had a couple of interesting clockwork devices, valuable collector's items; made by that renowned inventor George Dower, Senior. I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I took 'em instead–"

  I interrupted him: "And one of the devices was the Paganinicon."

  "Yeah, right. They filled you in on that, didn't they? Helluva thing, ain't it? Musta really knocked you on your ass when you saw it – I just about shit when I went back to Bendray's hunting lodge and there it was, walking around and talking."

  "It was indeed… marvellous," I agreed.

  He leaned closer to me. "Well, get this; the other device I got off the old guy, it was even wilder."

  "Indeed? What was it?"

  "To look at it," said Scape, "you wouldn't have thought it was much, of anything. I mean, compared to a whole clockwork violinist, for Christ's sake. What it was, was a box about yay big" – he held his hands a little over a foot apart – "like one of those slide projector-type things… what d'ya call 'em… magic lantern, right. With a little compartment for a paraffin lamp inside, and a lens on the front. But no place to put in slides or anything like that; most of the device was just filled up with your father's weird gears and stuff. It took me a while, but I got the thing working. And it was wild."

  "What did it do?"

  Scape gazed at me with smug complacency. "It flashed," he said simply.

  For not the first time, I was mystified. "'Flashed'?"

  "You looked into the lens, see, and it flashed at you. The clockwork controlled a shutte
r opening and closing in front of the light. Real fast, and with a certain rhythmic pattern." He nodded, pursing his lips for a moment. "Damnedest thing lever did see."

  "What was so wonderful about it?" Perhaps my earlier impressions of him were correct, and he was simply demented.

  "You looked into it while it was flashing, and you'd see things." His voice lowered, imparting the secret. "You'd see… the Future."

  The fervour in his voice, almost religious in nature, traced a shiver tip my spine. "The Future, you say."

  He nodded. "Yeah – I thought I was going crazy when it started to happen. But it all just went on unreeling inside my head, and I knew it was the real thing. Really the Future; a hundred years or more ahead. Seeing everything that was going to happen, through the eyes of my children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Wild, huh?"

  "Indeed," I murmured.

  "You see, Dower," he said excitedly, "your old man – what a genius that sonuvabitch was! – he figured out a way to alter, like, brain waves and stuff – all the things that go on inside your head – through this goddamn flashing light. And he wasn't even the first, man! Ol' Bendray showed me some stuff from the Royal Anti-Society archives; Catherine de Medici, back in the sixteenth century, had a tower built for her pet prognosticator Nostradamus, and that was how he worked it. He'd sit up there looking at the sun, and fanning his fingers in front of his eyes – real quick, like flickering – and then he'd see stuff! The Future! That's how he made all those predictions; more of 'em are gonna come true, too; you just wait and see. But anyway, what ol' Nostradamus just bashed away at, your father worked out scientific how to do it right. The Paganinicon – did he tell you a buncha stuff about a sort of medium, that certain fine vibrations from the human brain travel through?"

  I nodded.

  "Okay; what the deal is – that medium's not limited by spatial dimensions, like he told you. But it's not limited by Time, either. It extends through Past, Present, Future, all together. No difference, everything simultaneous. And the flashing light – if you get the speed and the pattern just exactly right – it can alter what section of that medium you perceive. Instead of this little piece that you normally see, you can just go sliding off into the Future. It's like genetic time-travel. What you get are the perceptions what they see, what they think and know – of your own descendants, laid on top of your own. Dig it: you see the world to come through your own children's eyes."

  I hadn't understood some of the words he used, but I gathered the general import of his explanation. "So this is what you did? Used my father's device for this… Future perception?"

  "Sure did. Me and Miss McThane both. We spent so much time staring into the lens on that box, while it went flickity-flick into our eyeballs – Christ, I'm telling ya." He shook his head. "I've spent so much time in the Future… I don't really belong back in this time any more. That's why I talk like this, you know? This is the way some grandkid of mine is gonna talk some day. And I got the personality, too – a Future personality. I mean, I was pretty much of a crook before; but since I've taken on the characteristics of the way people are gonna be in the next century – jeez, I'm a real sharp dealer. I guess it's just the way everybody's gonna be some day."

  That was a daunting prospect. A world of Scapes – perhaps it was best that I was not meant to see anymore of such a dismal vista's approach.

  "Actually," continued Scape, "I think I might've looked into it a little too much. All that flashing kinda screwed up my eyes – can't take anything too bright. That's why I wear the shades all the time. I guess it's a good thing that the device finally wore out and flew to pieces; otherwise I would've gone on staring into it until I was blind."

  The subject worked a horrible fascination upon me. "What… what is the Future going to be like, then?"

  "Hey, it's gonna be a gas," Scape assured me. "If you're into machines and stuff – like I am – you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey – in the Future, everybody will want to!"

  He had satisfied my curiosity; I wished to hear no further of these dreadful days to come. "This device, then, is no more?"

  "Yeah – when it went, it went like a bomb. I couldn't even begin to put it back together. So me and Miss McThane – with our new improved brains – figured maybe we could sell the other thing – the violinist we couldn't get started up – for a lotta money. We heard that sonuvabitch Sir Charles Wroth was interested in stuff like that, so we trekked down south with it to show him. To make the sale, we had to give him that line about being able to get the Paganinicon working if we went into London and got the Aetheric Regulator from you. He assumed we knew what we were talking about; actually, if I'd known that there was a regulator already inside the Paganinicon, and all it needed was to be brought close to you in order to start it ticking, I could've saved myself a lotta trouble. As it was, I only had an idea of what I was looking for when I broke into your shop because Sir Charles had recommended me to his Royal Anti-Society buddy Lord Bendray, and he told me what the Regulator he wanted for his earthsmashing machine looked like. Then when Miss McThane and I were staking out your place, we saw that dark-skinned guy bring around just the thing we needed, so we tried to get it off you. That's all."

  "So you were employed by both Sir Charles and Lord Bendray?"

  He nodded. "Yeah. I was trying to build up kind of a clientele among all those old farts in the Royal Anti-Society. You know, as sort of a consultant on the stuff that your father built for them; except I had to be careful not to let on that some of it was just a bunch of fakes, like that big contraption your old man unloaded on Bendray. No sense spoiling their fun."

  I was still puzzled. "But what about the church back in London – with all that fishing tackle? What were you doing there?"

  He laughed and shook his head. "You know – I'm still wondering about that, myself. I think it just goes to show that ol' Bendray's gone round the bend. We were there in London, me and Miss McThane, trying to get that Regulator off of you, and he shows up with that crackbrained scheme of going around to that old church and stuffing it with all that Izaak Walton stuff, and fishing rods and things. Weird. Just a weird business. Something to do with those ugly-looking people that hang out there. I didn't know there were any like that living in London until that night they showed up at the church; I had seen ones like 'em in Dampford, that village next to his estate, so I assume they're related in some way. Country and City cousins, I suppose. But what Bendray wanted to accomplish by showing 'em a church with fish-hooks and lines all over it – beats the hell out of me."

  We lapsed into silence together. I was about to put another question to him, when I heard the sound of him snoring. Lulled by the motion of the ship, and warmed by a momentary parting of the clouds, he had fallen asleep with his head tilted back against the hatchway.

  I pushed Abel's head from my own lap, and stood up. With Scape's wild expositions – what part dementia, and what part truth, I still could not determine – whirling in my head, I made my way towards my cabin below the deck.

  An ambush was sprung upon me before I reached my destination. In the dark passageway, a pair of arms encircled my neck and pulled me off my feet.

  Miss McThane's breath was warm against my face. "I heard you talking," she whispered in my ear. "I was down in the hatchway, and I could hear you two."

  "Please–" I endeavoured to free myself. The white expanse of her throat, and the soft shapes below, seemed almost luminous in the dark. "Please restrain yourself–"

  "Hey–" Something wet touched the inside of my ear, startling me further; I was just able to discern the tip of her tongue withdrawing behind her salacious smile. "Everything Scape told you – it's all true. Everything."

  "That – that may be–" The fervour of her embrace had expelled most of the air from my lungs. "But–"

  She threw her head
back, the sharp points of her small teeth glinting fiercely. "I got a brain out of the Future inside my head. This is the way it's gonna be some day – no more of that ladylike crap. In the Future, women are just gonna take what they want." Her mouth swooped down upon me again, an eagle on its prey.

  "God help us." I broke free of her grasp, but was within seconds pinned against the door of my cabin.

  Her voracious gaze locked into my eyes. "Not just women," she breathed. "Women – men – everybody. It's all they'll think about – all the time." Her panting breath became even more rapid. "Not like you – you drive me crazy. You're so goddamn cold – unexcited – like a goddamn machine. You're the one that's clockwork." Her eyes narrowed to slits. "Well, all that's gonna change, right now. I can't stand it – get ready, sucker–"

  The door sprang open behind me, and I fell backwards, tearing free of Miss McThane's embrace. This sudden event so took her by surprise, that there was time for me to scramble to my knees, slam the door shut, and brace my shoulder against it to prevent her entry.