“Excuse me, Mr. Hearst,” Rowland said, soothingly, “but none of us is supposed to know about any of that. I don’t think Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller...”
“Don’t be an idiot, man, I’m not going to print it. I’ve got real news to print, about preachers’ love-nests and actresses’ bastards.”
“Guards with guns aren’t going to quiet rumors, sir,” Hodgson said. “if anything, they’ll just inflame them further. Will you try to talk to the people in steerage again, Captain?”
“If you’ll pardon the suggestion,” Quatermain put in, “I think it might be a good idea to change our tactics. Instead of going down to the steps of the third-class deck to talk to anyone who cares to listen, perhaps we might invite a few of the ringleaders up to your stateroom–sit them down, offer them a cigar and a few bottles of champagne, talk about the situation like civilized men. I’m sure we can make them see sense and convert them into ambassadors of reason. Especially if Mr. Hearst can promise to give due acknowledgement to their contribution in the Sun. Perhaps Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller might offer their services in finding the anxious gentlemen employment, when they reach New York.”
“That’s exactly what I was about to suggest,” said Rowland. “A capital plan, worthy of a true naval strategist. Organize it, Hodgson. Put the armed guards on the hold anyway, though. Can you see to that, Black? As soon you’ve arranged for the disposal of the bodies.”
“Yes, sir,” said the two mates, in unison.
“Have you really got fossils in those boxes of yours, Quatermain?” Hearst asked, in the meantime, having evidently calmed down. “Dinosaurs, do you mean?”
“Not dinosaurs, Mr. Hearst,” Quatermain said. “I’ve seen a few dinosaurs in my time, but I never managed to bag one, worse luck. These are humanoid bones. I intend to make a gift of them to the New York Museum of Natural History.”
“Who told you about that, damn it?” said Rowland, whose attention had only just returned to his passengers’ conversation.
“I didn’t know it was a secret,” Quatermain said, equably. “Surely everyone knows that New York has the second best Natural History Museum in the world?”
“Not for long,” Hearst assured him. “It’ll be the best soon enough.”
“It certainly will,” Rowland agreed, in spite of being an Englishman.
“It would be if we could catch one of these vampires for its exhibition halls,” Quatermain said. “Especially if it turned out to be a mummy. Two attractions for the price of one!”
“If anyone touches one of my sarcophagi,” Hearst said, darkly, “they’ll end up wrapped in bandages themselves.”
By mid-afternoon on the 28th, Allan Quatermain’s plan seemed to have worked like a charm. Harmony had been restored to the lower decks, and everything was running smoothly on the Titan in spite of the worsening weather. The vessel was sailing into the teeth of a force nine gale from noon till 6 p.m., and the rain was torrential, but the wind slackened in the evening and the deluge relented. As the crew were about to go into dinner, Black reported that a good proportion of the steerage passengers were dreadfully seasick, and that more than one had expressed the thought that exsanguination by a vampire would be a mercy.
There were a few absentees from the first-class dining-room too, but the writers’ table was full. Several of the faces on display were a trifle green, but these were men with nibs of steel, and they were not about to let a little nausea prevent them from enjoying a meal whose price had been included in their tickets. The fish was only cod, but the main course was roast lamb with mint sauce, with prune flan to follow.
“You don’t suppose that Hearst’s mummies are really rising from their coffins by night to steep their bandages in blood, do you?” said the man from the Telegraph to the man from the Mail.
“Who cares?” said the man from the Mail. “It’d be a great story if we were ever able to print it, but your editor wouldn’t wear it any more than mine would. We could try hawking it to Pulitzer, I suppose.”
“He wouldn’t touch it either,” said the Telegraph man. “The good old days are long gone; it’s all one big cartel now. These other chaps might make something of it, though–benefits of poetic license and all.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Mr. Twain. “The trouble with being an honest liar is that you have to maintain plausibility. A Yankee at King Arthur’s Court is one thing–vampire mummies on a transatlantic liner is another.”
“Perhaps so,” said Monsieur Féval fils, regretfully. “Although...”
“I do hope there isn’t going to be a mutiny,” said Mr. Henley.
“Really?” said Monsieur Apollinaire. “Why?”
“A mutiny might be quite amusing,” Monsieur Jarry agreed.
“There isn’t going to be a mutiny,” Mr. Huneker said, “unless the vampires start picking on the crew. The passengers might let off a little steam, but nobody with an ounce of common sense goes in for serious rioting on a ship in mid-Atlantic, especially in the dead of winter.”
“We shall meet our fate soon enough,” opined Mr. Vane.
“You talk like a one-book writer, Mr. Vane,” said Mr. Chambers, a trifle snappishly. “Think of the delights awaiting us in New York. Think of the romance of America, and the newborn century!”
“We’ve got to get to New York first,” Miss Lee pointed out. “Have you been out on the promenade deck today?”
“Certainly not,” said Monsieur Lorrain.
“We’ll get to New York all right,” said Mr. Robertson. “A little late, perhaps, but we’ll get there. I trust this ship implicitly.”
“Everyone trusts his ship implicitly, until it starts to sink,” Monsieur Jarry observed.
“An allegory of life,” said Monsieur Apollinaire, with a sigh. “I must mention it to Mallarmé when I get back.”
“Didn’t I read that he was dead?” Mr. Henley put in.
“Probably an exaggerated report,” said Mr. Twain.
“Happens all the time,” 12 voices chorused, before Mr. Twain could draw breath.
“The deaths in steerage weren’t exaggerated, though,” said Mr. Chambers, pensively. “We’ve another four nights at sea yet–maybe five if the storm sets us back a long way. That’s 20 or 25 more bodies, at the present rate.”
“Enough to devastate the whole of our table,” Mr. Huneker agreed, “if the vampires get tired of slumming. Except, of course, that we all have ink in our veins instead of blood.”
“There might be worse things aboard than vampires,” said Mr. Twain, who had recovered quickly enough from his momentary embarrassment. “I talked to your friend Rocambole today, Monsieur Féval, and he dropped a few dark hints about secret lockers in the refrigeration hold. Now, it happens that I was also talking to the crewman who’s in charge of the refrigeration unit–that Kitchener fellow–and he jumped like a jackrabbit when I asked him what he had in his secret locker. Denied everything, of course–just ice, he said–but one of his kitchen staff muttered something about monsters of the deep that never really died, even if they were cut to pieces.”
“Sea serpents, you mean?” said the man from the Mail.
“Not likely,” said the man from the Telegraph. “I heard a rumor about that ship that went down in the Channel last week–the Dunlin, I think it was, or maybe the Sandwich. There was talk of that being sunk by a monster that should have been dead but wasn’t.”
“There can’t be any sea serpents in the Solent,” Mr. Henley put in. “They’d never get away unobserved in Cowes week.”
“That’s just the point,” said the man from the Telegraph. “This was something tinged with a far more sinister superstition than any mere sea serpent.”
“Like vampire mummies, you mean?” asked Mr. Chambers.
“Something of the same order, I suppose,” the man from the Telegraph admitted, “but there was talk of Madeira....”
“Rowland’s favorite tipple seems to be Scotch,” Monsieur Jarry put in.
“Mine’s a
bsinthe,” Monsieur Apollinaire added.
“I heard a rumor that these sarcophagi in the hold don’t actually have mummies in them at all,” the man from the Mail told his colleague, competitively. “They’re actually stuffed full of gems, bullion and bonds. All shady, of course–but that’s how these millionaires stay ahead of the pack, isn’t it?”
“Let’s hope it’s all still there when we reach New York,” said the Telegraph man. “I’d hate to think of those French bandits who robbed Asprey’s and the palace making off with it, wouldn’t you?”
Meanwhile, Allan Quatermain was responding to a query from the Duke of Buccleuch as to whether he had ever encountered a mummy.”
“Several,” Quatermain answered. “But only one that was given to wandering around.”
“And was it a vampire, too?” inquired Hearst, sarcastically.
“Not at all. He was a rather plaintive chap, actually, animated by the desire to be reunited with his long-lost love, Queen Nefertiti. He choked a few people to death, but only because they got in his way. I had to do something about it, though–the business was getting out of hand.”
“Blew him away with your elephant-gun, I suppose,” Carnegie suggested.
“I did try that,” Quatermain admitted, “but the bullets went clean through him, and the dust they blew out simply spiraled around for a few minutes before getting sucked back into his body. I could have been in a sticky situation myself then, but he wasn’t much of a runner.”
“How fortunate,” murmured Mrs. de Bathe.
“I had to set a trap for him instead,” Quatermain went on. “Happily, he was none too bright–the ancient Egyptians used to take a mummy’s brain out through the nostrils with a kind of hook, you know, and put it in its own canopic jar–so he fell right in. I’d filled the pit with oil, and laid a gunpowder fuse, so it seemed like a mere matter of striking a match and retiring to a safe distance.”
“Seemed?” said Rockefeller. “You mean that it didn’t work?”
“Oh, he went up like a Roman candle. The resin that Egyptian mummifiers use to stick the bandages together is very flammable, and what was left of his body was as dry as a stick. If anything, the operation was a little too successful. It turned him into a cloud of thick black smoke in a matter of seconds. The trouble was that the trick he had of sucking back his dust after bullets went through him worked just as well on smoke. One minute there was nothing but a cloud settling slowly to ground-level, the next he was reformulating, a little larger than before and in a far darker mood.”
“How terrible, my dear fellow!” said the Count. “What on Earth did you do next?”
“Ran like hell, old man. He was a little nippier on his pins now, but I still had the legs of him. I needed to rethink the whole problem, but once I’d figured out what was what, it wasn’t too hard to come up with a new plan. Given that fire hadn’t worked, the logical thing to try seemed to be water, for which he seemed to have something of an aversion–but transporting water from the Nile is a tricky business, and he wasn’t about to be lured into the stream.”
“So you buried him, did you?” Hearst suggested. “Got him back into his pyramid and slammed the door behind him.”
“That might have worked, I suppose,” Quatermain said, judiciously, “but it didn’t seem to me to qualify as a final solution. Besides which, I already knew that he was a sucker for pitfall traps–so it was just a matter of figuring out what kind of filling might work better than oil.” He paused for dramatic effect.
“What did you use?” Rowland asked, impatiently.
“Molasses,” Quatermain said. “Nice, thick, sticky molasses. After a couple of days of impotent struggling, he’d virtually dissolved in the stuff. After two days more, it had set rock hard. We broke up the mass and sold the pieces in the souk as dark candy. I didn’t eat any myself, but those who did said it was delicious. I think I’ve got a few pieces left in my cabin, if anyone wants to try some.”
“Doesn’t that qualify as cannibalism?” Edison asked.
“No more so than enjoying this delightful repast,” Quatermain said, indicating the lamb shoulder on his plate. “Or, for that matter, breathing. Where do you think the carbon in our bodies goes when it’s recycled? Julius Caesar’s atoms have been redistributed so widely by now that there’s one in every mouthful we eat, another in every breath we take. And Attila the Hun’s too, of course, not to mention Cain and Solomon, Herod and Apollonius of Tyana. There’s a little of everything human in every one of us, gentlemen–and a little of everything unhuman too: cats and bats, mice and elephants, snakes and dragons. Everything circulates–except wealth, of course. Wealth always flows uphill, from the pockets of the poor to the coffers of the rich. Isn’t that so, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Carnegie?”
Hearst burst out laughing. “I concede, Mr. Quatermain,” he said, “that you’re a cleverer storyteller than I thought. Except, of course, that you’re contradicting yourself. The story you told last night, about the infamous Brothers Ténèbre, suggests that wealth sometimes vanishes into the maws of sharks.”
“Was that really the moral of my story?” Quatermain said. “Well, perhaps–I’m just a humble white hunter. If you know anything at all about the Brothers Ténèbre, though, you’ll know that they’re infinitely more skilled at self-reconstitution than any mere mummy. They always come back, and they always have another robbery to execute–but they’re just fleas on an elephant’s back when it comes to questions of serious wealth. I’ll wager that they could clear out the hold of this ship–and the first-class cabins too–without putting any one of you gentlemen to any serious inconvenience, even though your luggage would seem a fabulous fortune to any of those poor folk down in steerage. They’ll have little chance in life but to be vampires’ victims, I fear, even if they reach New York with the blood still coursing in their veins.”
“Not so,” said Edison. “Were your immortal bandits to make off with my machine for communicating with the dead, I’d be the loser and so would the world. It’s irreplaceable. Light-bulbs, phonographs and electric chairs can be mass-produced; once you have the trick of their making, it can’t ever be unlearned, but the machine for communicating with the dead is a different thing altogether–a radically new departure. Its operation isn’t based on the laws of physics, but the principles of pataphysics.”
“What on Earth is pataphysics?” demanded the Duke of Buccleuch.
“It’s the scientific discipline that deals with exceptions rather than rules.”
“It sounds more like scientific indiscipline to me,” said Carnegie.
“In a manner of speaking, it is,” Edison admitted. “It’s a tricky basis on which to build a technology. Every fugitive principle of pataphysics is good for one unique machine, but mass production is awkward. The factory principle doesn’t apply, you see–every one would have to be hand-crafted.”
“Sounds un-American to me,” Rockefeller observed.
“Is it really unique?” Quatermain asked. “I had not imagined that we might have anything so rare and priceless aboard. What about you, my dear? Had you any inkling of this?”
“No,” said Ayesha. “I had not. And yet, we are to be privileged to witness the machine’s debut tomorrow night, are we not?”
“I’m afraid it won’t be tomorrow, ma’am,” Edison said, sorrowfully. “The crewmen Captain Rowland lent me are doing their best, and the ship’s stabilizers are working wonders, but the storm is making things difficult even so. It’ll be the 30th now, I fear.”
“What a pity!” said the count.
“I have no doubt that it will be worth the wait,” said the former Lillie Langtry. “And the pleasures of anticipation will be all the more piquant.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Rowland.
“We shall all look forward to it immensely,” Ayesha assured the inventor.
Later that night, when the last of the first-class passengers had retired to their cabins, Ayesha came into Allan Quatermain’s
cabin. Once through the door, she changed her stance slightly, and when she spoke, her voice seemed a good deal deeper than it had in the dining room.
“You can steal Edison’s machine if you want to,” she said, “but we have to take the rest too. I’m not going without the gems from Hearst’s treasure-trove, Carnegie’s bullion or Rockefeller’s bonds just so you can tinker with some idiot machine. What would we want with a machine for communicating with the dead, anyway? It’s not as if we haven’t been dead often enough ourselves–if our peers had wanted a chat, they could have dropped in on our graves then.”
“It would all depend on which dead people we’d be able to talk to,” Quatermain told his companion, stretching himself out on the bed as he spoke. His Africa-tinged British accent had vanished; one might almost have taken him for a Frenchman by the timbre of his voice. “Some dead people–the aristocracy of the astral plane, you might say–must know many interesting and valuable secrets.”
“You want us to go hunting buried treasure under the advice of ancient pirates and plunderers?”
“The more recently-dead have their secrets too. I’ve always thought that blackmail is a more civilized crime than burglary–and so much more modern. We ought to move with the times, Brother Ange, lest we make strangers of ourselves in a world we no longer comprehend.”
“I comprehend Carnegie’s bullion as well as he does, Brother Jean,” the false Ayesha said. “Nor have I the slightest difficult in comprehending Rockefeller’s bonds. No matter how the world changes, there’ll always be money, and where there’s money, there’ll always be thieves. We are timeless, brother; that is the very essence of our nature. We are the shadows of the love of money that is the root of all evil, and we shall never lose touch with the world, no matter how many times we are banished from it, only to return.”
“The love of money is not the only kind we shadow,” the false Quatermain observed. “You might consider leaving your grosser appetite unslaked tonight. Exsanguinated corpses are a trifle conspicuous on a ship, even one of this gargantuan size.”
Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon Page 31
