Pax Britannia: Human Nature

by Jonathan Green

  The tunnel proceeded in a straight line for some forty yards until it reached another set of steps. These had been cut from the bedrock itself, rather than being laid stones, like the first flight, and were slick with water. Steadying himself against the sides of the rock-cut passageway, Nimrod descended still further, the uneven, steps twisting this way and that down through a chimney in the rock, a natural formation in part creating by the erosive action of water seeping through from the moors above and into the fissure-riven sandstone on which Ghestdale rested.

  Reaching the bottom of this haphazard flight, Nimrod found himself on one side of a wide gallery, the roof of which ascended out of reach of the lantern's circle of light, and knew exactly where he was. He could make out the marks left by digging tools on the rocks around him quite clearly. The air was moist down here and Nimrod found himself pulling his coat tighter about him against the bone-numbing chill that permeated the tunnels.

  He was inside the hollowed-out innards of an abandoned mine, any deposits of jet it might once have had having been stripped out long ago, possibly as far back as the end of the nineteenth century. It had since become absorbed into the Umbridge estate, providing a network of secret tunnels that connected the gamekeeper's cottage to the main house, Nimrod expected, and who knew where else? Nimrod surmised that there were half a dozen hidden entrance points up on the moors and possibly as far away as the coast and Beast Cliff itself that led into and out of the Umbridge estate.

  One of them could even have been the shaft into which Master Ulysses had first bundled the Barghest. And if the beast had originated from somewhere within the estate, it may well have already been familiar with the tunnels, using its enhanced sense of smell to sniff its way out again, and back onto their trail.

  The Barghest may well have known its way around these tunnels, but that did not change the fact that Nimrod did not. And so, although he might know in principle where he was, he didn't know where he needed to go next. And so the question remained: which way should he go now?

  Hearing the skitter of stone on stone he held his breath. In the eerie stillness he listened for the sound again. And then, there is was; the sandpaper scrape of grit on stone. It had come from his right.

  Nimrod set off. There was no point dousing his light - without it he would be utterly lost. Instead he reached for his holstered pistol.

  He could hear the footfalls ahead of him quite clearly now, their pace quickening, any pretence at stealth rejected in favour of flight. His quarry was on the run.

  Picking up the pace, Nimrod hurried on through the worked-out mine. The tunnel twisted and turned, the ceiling of bedrock undulating above him, so that from time to time he found himself having to duck again to avoid knocking himself out on the downward pointing rocks.

  For a moment he saw the bobbing will-o'-the-wisp flicker of another light source ahead of him. But then it was gone. He came to a halt. The running footsteps were gone too.

  Slowly, ever so warily, Nimrod continued his advance, trying to tread as lightly as he could on the sandy floor of the tunnel, avoiding the noisy ripple and splash of stepping into puddles. Gun in hand, he kept going, trying to judge at what location the second light had disappeared.

  Ten yards. Nine yards.

  He kept going at the same steady pace, pistol tight in his hand, muzzle pointing forwards.

  Five yards. Four.

  His steps slowed, footfalls near silent in the smothering darkness, the only other sounds disturbing the oppressive stillness, the drip-drip-drip of water elsewhere within the mine, the sound carried as hollow echoes by the eerie acoustics of the place, and -

  Two. One.

  - nervous, panting breaths.

  Nimrod spun round, shining his light into the natural cleft within the rock face in front of him, taking aim with his pistol.

  Something hideous and misshapen - a lumpen body, uncoordinated limbs, a face that was only human thanks to it having the requisite features - surfaced from the thickly-cast shadows like a phantasm walking through a wall.

  Its equally misshapen mouth agape, fists like cudgels raised before it, pin-pricks of eyes amidst the mass of deformities that was its face glittering in the light of the hurricane lamp, strangled vocal cords giving voice to a terrible wailing howl, the horror threw itself at Nimrod.

  Chapter Eighteen

  An Appointment with Doktor Seziermesser

  Ulysses half-opened his eyes and then shut them again tightly, against the brilliant fury of the lights in front of his face. Aware of the glare now, he tried again, still blinking against the harsh glare. He could feel the raw heat of the bulbs against the skin of his face, hot as sunburn.

  He tried to raise a hand to shield his face from the incandescent glare. It was only then that he realised his arms had been restrained at the wrists. And now he was also aware that he was lying prostrate on his back. That certain knowledge didn't help how he was feeling right that moment, not when he considered what had almost happened to him the last time he had come to lying on his back and restrained.

  He tried his legs but these too had been strapped down, restrained by what felt like a leather strap around his ankles. Somebody didn't want him going anywhere in a hurry.

  He turned his head as he tugged against the restraint binding his left arm. The old injury his shoulder had suffered nearly two years ago now - as his hot air balloon plummeted groundwards amid the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the basket locked in a spiralling, deathly embrace with the Black Mamba's gondola - grumbled in protest.

  He understood now: he had been strapped to some kind of operating table. His arms had been restrained so that they were at right angles to his torso. They were held tightly at the wrists by buckled leather straps and Ulysses could also feel a tightness just below the ball and socket joints of both his shoulders. And he was shirtless.

  In frustration Ulysses pulled and kicked and attempted to arch his back, but all to no avail. There was another belt strap around his middle.

  He still felt muzzy-headed, his recollections of what had happened to him prior to ending up in this most undignified and uncomfortable of predicaments a jumble of sepia-blurred images, like out of focus photographs. Focusing all his mental energies on recollection, Ulysses tried to piece together what had happened. If he could re-order his dream-like recollections perhaps he then might remember who it was that had done this to him and why? And if he could understand his enemy's motivations, then he might yet talk his way out of this predicament.

  He remembered the meeting with the industrialist. He remembered being escorted to the front door by the dour-faced butler. Then he remembered the first itch of prescience at the back of his skull, a moment before the butler opened the door and a hulking silhouette appeared there, quickly resolving into the outline of the elusive Mr Rudge.

  Ulysses was already going for his sword-cane and pushing Jennifer aside as the brute came at them, cosh raised. And there had been someone else with him, a snivelling weasel of a man. Ulysses remembered thinking that two against one weren't such bad odds but then his tingling sixth sense screamed a warning and he turned to see that it wasn't two against one at all, but three. As the butler came at him with the chloroform-soaked handkerchief, Rudge barrelled in too.

  Distracted, suddenly forced to defend himself on two fronts, with Jennifer's screams filling his ears, he took on none of his attackers particularly effectively. His broken fingers didn't help. Rudge's cosh descended, black stars going supernova inside Ulysses' brain, and then the butler's doping cloth finished what the thug's beating had started.

  Cold panic gripped his heart and squeezed, as Ulysses' mind turned to thoughts of Jennifer. What had happened to the girl?

  Violently twisting his head from one side to the other, Ulysses struggled to see if she was anywhere nearby. He tried calling her name but his tongue felt thick and heavy inside his mouth, and all that came out was an incomprehensible splutter.

  'Ah, I see you are awake.'<
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  Ulysses turned his head in the same direction that the voice had come from. It took his addled mind a moment to realise that the words he had heard had been spoken with a clipped German accent.

  An indistinct shape moved between him and the punishing lights. His eyes taking a moment to adjust to the sudden change in light levels, Ulysses peered at the features now sharpening into focus from the man-shaped shadow before him.

  There was something unsettlingly familiar about the man's appearance, as he regarded Ulysses from behind curiously protruding, telescopic spectacles, a haughty expression on his time-worn face. It felt to Ulysses as if he must have once run into the man's son, or the man himself, only when he was younger. He was wearing what must have once been a white lab coat, but was now a faded grey, interspersed with patches of rusty brown.

  And he could see other things now behind the man, beyond the glare of the lights - walls of crumbling red brick, metal work surfaces, a range of wheeled stands and gurneys bearing all manner of surgical instruments and devices.

  The cold knot of nausea took hold of his guts and twisted. He tried to speak again, but panic and his sluggish tongue conspired to ensure that nothing comprehensible came out.

  "I shouldn't try to speak," the other suggested. "I would just relax if I were you. It's better that way." The man wasn't looking at Ulysses as he spoke but was busying himself with laying out the tools of his trade, ready to set to work.

  Ulysses swallowed, grimacing at the taste of stale saliva and old blood in his mouth.

  He tried to speak again. "Where's Jenny?" he managed.

  "Jenny? Who is this Jenny?"

  "She was with me," he struggled, slurring his words with the effort of speech.

  "Ah, I understand now," the German said, as he continued to prepare for whatever was to come next. "All in good time, Herr Quicksilver. All in good time."

  Ulysses craned his head forward in an attempt to see what the man was doing. For a moment, in the reflecting glare of the lights, he saw quite clearly the serrated blade of a bone-saw.

  Ulysses felt sick. With a sudden shout of frustration he kicked and bucked, a part of him knowing that it wouldn't make any difference, but the fighter in him knowing that he had to do something, that he couldn't just lie there and wait for this strangely bespectacled other to decide his fate for him.

  "Now, now, Herr Quicksilver. Struggling will only make it worse."

  With one last muscle-tearing convulsion of effort, Ulysses relented and fell back on the table. His skin was cold against the bare metal, as the sweat of his exertions began to evaporate.

  "Who are you?" Ulysses hissed through gritted teeth.

  The man turned to face him again and this time Ulysses realised that his spectacles had been fitted with decreasing sizes of magnifying lenses, that could be flicked down in front of the main lens as and when required. They gave the impression that his eyes were too big to fit within the orbits of his skull.

  "I am sorry, Herr Quicksilver, how rude of me. Where are my manners? You must forgive me. I was so caught up in my preparations... But, that is not important. I am Doktor Seziermesser and I will be your surgeon for the duration of this procedure."

  Ulysses' mind raced. Procedure? What procedure?

  "You!" he gasped. "You're Mr Bellerophon."

  "I am sorry, but you are mistaken, Herr Quicksilver. No, I assure you, I am Doktor Seziermesser." Ulysses could hear the 'k' in doktor quite clearly.

  Seziermesser. Seziermesser. Where had he heard that name before?

  "I thought you had already met my employer."

  "What?"

  "I am afraid that it was because of me that he had to create the alternative persona of Herr Bellerophon. The mermaid's escape was the result of carelessness on my part. But do not worry, I have been suitably punished."

  He held up his left hand - or at least the stump of where his left hand had been. In its place a prosthetic metal claw had been strapped to the knot of pink scar tissue that covered the nub of his wrist. The claw itself looked like it had been cobbled together from whatever had been lying around the lab that day.

  "I am a surgeon, a master craftsman," Seziermesser continued, gazing at the stump and the artificial claw, a glazed expression on his face. "In fact, I like to think of myself as a sculptor, but one that works in flesh. My hands are my tools. That was why it was only right that I should lose one in payment for my recklessness. But have no fear, I have become quite adept at using this replacement."

  The surgeon's voice belied no sense of malice or sarcasm. Instead he appeared suitably chastened, and seemed to bear his master no resentment for what had been done to him.

  "It was only right that Herr Umbridge have his man show me the error of my ways. I was becoming distracted from the great work, my life's greatest accomplishment. Indeed, the greatest accomplishment in the history of vivisection!

  "And perhaps, if I do a good job on you, when the great work is finished, perhaps Herr Umbridge will deign to let me replace it with something more... appropriate."

  Ulysses watched as the man's eyes fell on his own hand, but was only half aware of the fact that it was his right hand which he was regarding with such lascivious intent. There was nothing else for it, nothing else he could do, and although he had tried the self-same thing already, he couldn't let this madman take him apart like a Sunday roast, and so struggled against his bonds again.

  "Here, this should help you relax."

  Ulysses felt the stab of a needle being thrust into his arm and gasped involuntarily. He was dimly aware of a curious sensation of cold spreading along his arm as the injection was delivered directly into his bloodstream.

  The surgeon returned to laying out his scalpels, clamps and bone-saws. Ulysses felt the effect of the drug almost immediately, a strangely welcome warmth taking hold of his aching muscles and easing him back down onto the table, taking him to the very edge of unconsciousness.

  But still that name haunted him. Seziermesser - where had he heard it before?

  Heard it, or read it?

  "Very good. I think we are ready to begin," the surgeon said, turning back to the operating table and Ulysses' prone form.

  "Such a fine specimen," he said, starting to run the fingers of his right hand over the flesh of his arms and torso. His dancing fingertips felt like spiders scuttling over his exposed body. Inside Ulysses raged and riled in frustration but on the outside there was nothing he could do now to resist Seziermesser's probing touch.

  Seziermesser. Seziermesser.

  And then the memory surfaced from the depths of his subconscious like some great Biblical leviathan. Dark, forgotten domes, tanks of something like rancid primordial soup, indistinct shapes suspended in the slime - arms and legs, webs of skin between their digits, gills where necks should be - faded parchment labels and a name, written in a spidery copperplate; Seziermesser.

  "Marianas," Ulysses hissed.

  "Ah, yes. I understand now. I was still a young man then, a protégé of the late Doktor Waldman, a leader in my field; a trail-blazer, you might say. Just defected from the Frankenstein Corps - with your father's help, as it happens - with wonderful new opportunities ahead of me. And then it all went wrong, but not as a result of my work, I can assure you!"

  "But that is all in the past. What we are concerned with today is the future, Herr Quicksilver; the future of the human race. So, let us begin."

  Ulysses tried to say something else, but his thoughts were becoming clouded. It was as if he were sinking into himself, his mind wandering in a world of its own, as if mind and body were no longer quite one.

  A piercing scream cut through the fastidious quiet of the operating theatre, rebounding from the broken brick walls.

  "Ah, such sweet music," Seziermesser said distractedly, as if savouring the agonised sound of a body in torment, and then, flicking another lens down in front of his glasses, returned to his work.

  Dreamily Ulysses turned his head in another att
empt to see what the doktor was doing. Eyes struggling to focus, he saw the crimson tip of the scalpel blade and then watched as it entered the meat of his arm again, as the surgeon made a neat incision right around his arm, just below the ball and socket joint of his shoulder, the man apparently unperturbed by the screaming that now filled the dank chamber.

  And in the split second before he lost consciousness, lost in a world of shock and pain, Ulysses realised that the screams were his own.

  ACT THREE

  The Fall of the House of Umbridge

  November 1997

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Menagerie

  "There. There it is again," the creature slurred, angling its chin upwards and putting its head on one side, as if that, in some way, helped it to hear more clearly. But there certainly wasn't anything wrong with its hearing - despite everything else that appeared to be physically wrong with it - for Nimrod could hear the sound now too, a gaggle of mewling voices, yammering cries and woeful wails.

  Nimrod found it hard to think of the creature as a man: it was the deformities that did it. He looked at the poor wretch again as they moved through the semi-darkness together. Nimrod was no medical man, but it occurred to him that the creature was nothing more than a collection of tumours, his wretched body hung with a conglomeration of abnormal growths. Most noticeable, of course, were those that disfigured his face, giving it a grotesquely asymmetrical structure. The right side of his visage was swollen with sub-dermal growths, that made his ear protrude far from the side of his skull and pulled his mouth into a perpetually open maw.

  But the left side of his face hadn't been saved by whatever disfiguring condition it was that he was undoubtedly suffering from. His forehead above his left eye jutted a good two inches from his brow. Hair covered only some parts of his head, the rest bare areas of warty grey scalp. In fact, in the suffused light of the lantern, all of the creature's skin appeared to have the same rough texture and grey tone.