Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  He was interrupted then, by an unexpected event.

  Allan Quatermain, who happened to be looking out of one of the portholes, observed four bolts of lightning descend simultaneously from widely disparate parts of the sky, converging upon the funnels of the Titan. All four struck at the same instant, each one picking out a funnel with unerring accuracy.

  The cables connecting the ship’s internal telegraph system had been imperfectly repaired, but there was nevertheless a continuous circuit running from the bow to the stern, and from the crow’s nest to the keel. It ran through every bulkhead and every compartment, every cabin on every deck, every hold and locker, every davit and stanchion, every rivet and joint. The lightning surged through the hull, possessing every fiber of the vessel’s being.

  The Titan’s wiring burnt out within a fraction of a second and Mr. Edison’s machine collapsed in a heap of slag, although it left the man himself miraculously untouched, perched upon his stool. So diffuse was the shock, in fact, that the men standing in the saloon, their womenfolk in their cabins, and even the masses huddled in steerage felt nothing more than a tingling in their nerves, more stimulant than injury.

  Nobody aboard the Titan died as a direct result of the multiple lightning strike, but the flood of electrical energy was by no means inconsequential. Communication between the Titan and the world of the dead was cut off almost instantly–but almost instantly was still a measurable time, and the interval was enough to permit a considerable effect.

  Exactly what that effect was, no one aboard the Titan could accurately discern, and the only man aboard with wit enough even to form a hypothesis was Jean Ténèbre, who had briefly borrowed the identity of the elephant-hunter Allan Quatermain.

  If the real Quatermain had made any posthumous protest, his voice went unheard.

  What the Chevalier Ténèbre hypothesized was that by far the greater portion of the power of the multiple lightning-strike, which had so conspicuously failed to blast the Titan to smithereens or strike dead its crew and passengers, had actually passed through the ship’s telegraph system and Mr. Edison’s machine into the realm of the dead, where it had wreaked havoc.

  What the realm of the dead might be, or where it might be located, the Chevalier had no idea–but he supposed that its fabric must be delicate and that the souls of the dead must be electrical phenomena of a far gentler kind than the lighting of Atlantic storms.

  Thomas Edison had presumably been correct to dispute William Randolph Hearst’s claim that Edison’s machine might only enable the Titan’s passengers to hear the screams of the damned in Hell–but if the souls of dead humankind had not been in Hell when Edison closed his master-switch, they obtained a taste of it now.

  And they screamed.

  They screamed inaudibly, for the most part, because the pipes of Edison’s machines had melted and their connections had been dissolved–but there was one exception to this rule.

  The Brothers Ténèbre and Count Lugard’s party were not the only individuals on board the Titan who might have been classified as “undead.” The fragment of the creature that had washed up on the beach at Nettlestone Point, having earlier been found by a fishing-vessel off Madeira and lost again from the Dunwich, also had an exotic kind of life left in it. Like many supposedly primitive invertebrates, the part was capable of reproducing the whole, under the right existential conditions and with the appropriate energy intake.

  When this seemingly dead creature screamed, its scream had only to wait for a few microseconds before it was translated back from the fragile realm of the dead into the robust land of the living.

  It was a strange scream, more sibilant than strident, and it was a strangely powerful scream.

  As Edison’s machine had briefly demonstrated–confounding all the skeptics who had refused for centuries to believe in spiritualists and necromancers, ghostly visitations and revelatory dreams–the boundary between the human and astral planes was not unbreachable. When the unnamable creature, whose close kin had died by lightning in the Mituba Mountains, was resurrected by lightning, its scream tore a breach in that boundary, opening a way between the worlds–and through that breach, the newly-agonized souls of the human dead poured in an unimaginable and irresistible cataract.

  The breach, Jean Ténèbre subsequently decided, could only have lasted for a few microseconds more than it took to make the scream audible in the first place–but while it lasted, the souls of the dead had a chance to assert themselves in the world of the living, of a kind they had never had before–not, at any rate, in such quantities.

  The souls of the dead vied with one another to dispossess the souls of the living: to claim the bodies of the Titan’s 3,000 passengers for their own use and purposes.

  The competition was understandably fierce.

  There were eight people aboard the Titan whose souls could not, as it turned out, be dispossessed. The two Brothers Ténèbre, the Count who had inverted his name and his three lovely brides were six of them. The seventh was Edward Rocambole, whose opinion of his own heroism was so unshakable that he simply could not be persuaded to vacate his mortal habitation. The eighth was an 11-year-old girl in steerage, by the name of Myra, who was just lucky.

  As December 31, 1900, whiled away, Jean Ténèbre made some slight attempt to figure out who might now be inhabiting the bodies of his fellow passengers and the Titan’s crew. He spoke seven languages himself, so he made a little more progress than another man might have, but it was still an impossible task. The dead turned out to be very discreet, and they clung to their assumed identities as stubbornly as the Chevalier had ever clung to any of his multitudinous pseudonyms.

  By the time he had to dress for dinner, Jean Ténèbre had found some reason to suspect that Captain John Rowland might once have been Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard; that Mr. Hodgson might once have been an American gentleman named Edgar Poe; that Mr. Black might once have been Niccolo Machiavelli; that William Randolph Hearst might once have been Judas Iscariot; that John D. Rockefeller might once have been Nebuchadnezzar; that Andrew Carnegie might once have been Cyrus the Great; that the Duke of Buccleuch might once have been Wat Tyler; that Edison might once have been Daedalus; and that the former Lillie Langtry might now be the former Catherine de Medici, but he could not be sure.

  The one thing of which he was sure was that, in the struggle for repossession of the Earth, the meek had, in general, not prevailed.

  That night, however, dinner was served as usual, although the only meat left aboard was chicken, all the remaining pork and beef having mysteriously vanished into one of the storage-lockers adjoining the refrigeration hold.

  At the writers’ table, the conversation ran along lines that were a trifle unusual, but nevertheless perfectly civilized.

  “Are you going to stay in the writing game?” Mr. Robertson asked Mr. Twain.

  “I doubt it,” said Mr. Twain. “Not unless Edison hurries the development of moving pictures. That’s where writers will make money in future–that and broadcasting, Marconi-style. How about you, Chambers?”

  “I’m heading for Texas,” Mr. Chambers said. “Going into the oil business, I think. The 20th century is going to need power, and there’s an ocean of black gold lying around just waiting to be sucked out. Are you with me, Huneker?”

  “All the way,” Mr. Huneker agreed. “But I might just get into automobiles. They’re not much to write home about just now, but I have a feeling there’s scope in them–and a market for your oil, Chambers.”

  “You’re staying with the Mail, I suppose?” said the man from the Telegraph to his friend.

  “Just for a while,” his colleague agreed. “Provided I make editor within two years. It shouldn’t be difficult. Within five, I’ll have Middle England eating out of my hand and every advertiser and propagandist in the country licking my arse. You?”

  “I fancy that I might found a tabloid of my own. The Daily Mirror, say–or The Sun, if I could be sure that swine Hearst wou
ldn’t sue me. I’ll not be in competition with you, mind. Wouldn’t want to confuse the poor lambs with debates or the truth, would we?”

  “We should be thinking in terms of an all-round information cartel,” Mr. Henley added. “Sew up the print media, telegraphy and telephones to begin with, then join forces with Twain, and keep a lookout for anything new that comes along.”

  “Europe,” Monsieur Jarry said to Monsieur Apollinaire, “is ripe for looting. England and Germany will be at one another’s throats even if we don’t stir the pot, with France caught between them. Given that the Sun never sets on their various imperial adventures, that puts the whole world up for grabs or very nearly.”

  “There’s going to be big money in armaments,” opined Monsieur Féval. “Bigger and better guns, tougher and thicker armor. Civilians won’t be able to stay out of 20th century wars, with fleets of airships raining down bombs on cities.”

  “And big money in medicine too,” Monsieur Lorrain put in. “It always pays to have both sides covered in a major conflict–killing and healing always go hand in hand. There’ll be fortunes to be made out of any method of combating infection and syphilis. Armies are wonderful instruments for spreading the plague–all that camaraderie and rape.”

  “High explosives are passé,” Apollinaire mused. “Poison gas is the way forward. Atom bombs, maybe a little further down the line. Germ warfare too, if your medicines can provide the means to protect the folks at home.”

  “The long-term future’s in morphine and human trafficking,” Ms. Lee opined. “Even if populations aren’t displaced en masse by wars, there’s bound to be migration on a scale that beggars the imagination, and even the people who aren’t physically wounded in your universal wars will be in dire need of pain relief.”

  “We shall be judged by our actions,” Mr. Vane asserted, cheerfully. “Let’s make sure that we make more profitable use of our second chances than we were granted time to do with our first.”

  As soon as dinner was over, the entire company repaired to the grand ballroom. Guards were posted at the doors to make sure that there was no eruption from the third class decks, although a number of second-class passengers were admitted in order to remake old acquaintances. Edward Rocambole was not among them.

  Although three-quarters of the former members of the orchestra were no longer able to play their instruments, it did not take long to assemble a new company, which made up in enthusiasm for what it lacked in polish. No waltzes were played that night, but polkas by the score and tangos by the dozen, punctuated by the occasional tarantella. The former Mrs. Langtry was only one of the singers persuaded to perform, although the ballads she performed had never previously been in her repertoire. Individual dance performances included a spirited rendition of the Dance of the Seven Veils by one of the second-class passengers, which proved such a success that Allan Quatermain volunteered to entertain the gathering with a saber dance, which he executed with a speed and skill that belied his years.

  Down below, the third-class passengers were dancing too.

  In one of the storage-lockers connected to the refrigerated hold, something else was dancing in its own eldritch fashion, perfectly oblivious to the cold.

  Although Captain Rowland was famous for maintaining a supply of liquor aboard the Titan that was impossible to exhaust, the vessel was drunk dry that night–but not until well after midnight, when every member of the assembly in the ballroom filled a glass to the brim with champagne in order that they might drink to the health, wealth and happiness of the new era. It was not until that temporal landmark was passed that the assembly crossed the fine definitive line between a party and an orgy, but once the boundary had been cleared, there was no looking back. The Titan had never been host to such a hectic celebration; nor had any other ship in the entire world.

  The storm outside died down by slow degrees, but, long into the early hours, its lashing rain and crashing thunder seemed to be beating time to the tempestuous emotions that ran riot within the ballroom.

  Everyone there–and, for that matter, everyone aboard the vessel who was excluded from the ball by the accident of social class and lack of useful connections–was glad to be alive.

  “You know,” Mr. Vane said to Miss Lee, in one particular moment of intimacy, “there’s no reason at all why every sea voyage shouldn’t climax in this glorious manner. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that everyone would be glad to be alive, for every moment of every day, whether they’d actually sampled death or not.”

  “That’s true,” Miss Lee agreed. “But you have to bear in mind that this is the first ship in history–and perhaps the last–that has lost its right to be classified as a ship of fools.”

  The following morning, shortly after dawn, the Titan steamed past Sandy Hook. She soon came within sight of the Statue of Liberty.

  “It’s going to shake things up when this lot get ashore,”, said Ange Ténèbre, still playing the role of Ayesha, as he/she drank in his/her first sight of the home of the brave and the land of the free. “If I weren’t so incorrigible, I might have thought twice about stealing the bullion and the bonds, let alone Hearst’s antique gemstones. Do you think they might go looking for them–and perhaps find them?”

  “I doubt it,” his brother said. “They’re too busy making future plans to care overmuch about minor inconveniences. And if they do go looking, they’ll have to be very careful about opening the wrong freezer compartment. The thing in the other one’s getting distinctly restless.”

  “There might be repercussions, though,” the shorter brother observed. “More so than usual, I expect.”

  “We’re well used to repercussions,” the taller one replied. “We’ve been hung, beheaded or broken on the wheel in half the capitals of Europe. If we end up in Edison’s electric chair, it’ll be one more new experience. And if we don’t... we’ll have a high old time. We can be movers and shakers too, if we only put our minds to it. This could be our century.”

  “You’ve always been the one urging discretion in the past,” Ange pointed out.

  “Times change,” Jean said, firmly. “In any case, we’d have to do something rather spectacular to stand out in a crowd like this one. I doubt that America will notice anything out of the ordinary in anything we might do. It’s always been a land of opportunity.”

  “They certainly won’t give us a second thought once they’ve opened the other storage-locker,” Ange agreed. “The people from the New York Museum of Natural History are going to get one hell of a shock when they unlock it.”

  “I expect it’ll slip over the side and head for Innsmouth when it’s eaten its fill,” Jean said. “One shoggoth more or less won’t be more than a tiny ripple on the flood tide of history–as will the addition of an extra ounce of rapacity to the characters of men like Hearst and Rockefeller.”

  They were joined at that moment by Count Lugard and his three delectable brides.

  “Did you dine well last night, Monsieur Ange?” the Count asked, politely.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Ange. “The poor girl seemed a trifle disconcerted, not having expected her second term on Earth to be terminated quite so rapidly, but her blood hadn’t curdled at all. You?”

  “Likewise–and my three lovelies had a good time also. Irma was a trifle reckless, descending no further than the second-class cabins, but she says that it was worth it, just to see the expression on Monsieur Rocambole’s face when he realized that there is, after all, no such thing as a gang of crazed medical technicians covertly collecting donations for medical research.”

  “The world is full of such misconceptions,” Ange lamented. “The only things in life that are dependable are lust and avarice.”

  “Do you not mean death and taxes?” the Count asked, laughing to emphasize that he was joking. They were, after all, surrounded by conclusive evidence of the evitability of death, and they both knew perfectly well that only little people paid taxes.

  “Aren’t you afraid that the sun
light will shrivel you up and cause you to burst into flames?” Ange riposted, laughing just as merrily.

  The Count looked up into the brightening sky, then lowered his eyes to drink in the sunlight reflected from the myriad windows of a host of skyscrapers. “I shall love it here,” he said. “And my brides will have the time of their unlives. We’ll soon make ourselves felt in Manhattan. Things will never be the same again.”

  “Not according to Jean,” Ange told him. “He doesn’t think the arrival of the Titan will change anything significantly. He’s a great believer in the irresistible tide of history.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant, Brother,” the Chevalier corrected him. “I meant that no one will think that things have changed any more than they would have in any other case. They’ll be expecting change regardless, and our contribution to it–not to mention that of the 3,000 reanimates–will seem to be nothing more than a curlicue in a rich and complex pattern. This is a new century, Brother Ange; even if the Titan had hit an iceberg and gone straight to the bottom, you and I would still be living in interesting times.”

  “Always assuming that we still could come back again, if our graves were lying on the ocean floor,” Ange said, uncertainly.

  “For the Brothers Ténèbre and everything we stand for,” Jean assured him, “fate will always find a way.”

  Credits

  Mask of the Monster

  Starring:

  “Gouroull”

  Judex

  Jules Maigret

  Louise Maigret née Leonard

  Cornelius Kramm

  Fritz Kramm

  Jules de Grandin

  Created by:

  Mary Shelley,