Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  “I didn’t think it important,” Brundle muttered.

  “Not important? How could it be not important?”

  “I just thought it was a by-product of the transformation process itself. Look, I’m a psychologist, not a blood specialist.”

  “So they do have something in common,” Ulysses mused, “other than the unfortunate condition they now share!”

  “But what is it? What can it be? Do you know?”

  “I’m not a doctor of any description.”

  “But it sounds as if you might have some idea what it could be.”

  “An inkling, perhaps. Nothing more. Without having seen a lab report on a sample myself, I wouldn’t like to comment. But I could have a pretty good guess.”

  “Then what is it, man?”

  “Look, it’s too soon to say. I don’t want to lay my cards on the table just yet. I’d rather let someone else take a look first,” he confessed. The professor looked suddenly deflated. “But I’ve seen something like this, yes. But it didn’t work in quite the same way, didn’t have quite the same effect.”

  “You’re talking about the Wormwood Affair, aren’t you? You’re talking about the apemen.”

  “You know about that?” asked Quicksilver.

  “I know that the escapees from the high security wing of the Tower weren’t just the usual inmates, if that’s what you mean. I know that something happened to them – had been done to them – before they engaged in their attack on the jubilee celebrations and that it wasn’t just a mass breakout.”

  “But that was what was reported in the press.”

  “Come now, Mr Quicksilver.”

  “I’ve got it!” Ulysses suddenly announced. “I thought it was a product of their transformation, or a rogue quality that had somehow made them susceptible to this transformation. But what if it was something they had taken, somehow, ingested perhaps, and it was that which triggered the change? Some unknown agent.”

  “And how are we going to find out what this agent is?” the professor asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Ulysses said, giving the fretting professor a broad smile. “I know someone who can help.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Fleet of Foot

  BLIP. BLIP. BLIP.

  Thomas Sanctuary looked up.

  Blip. Blip. Blip.

  The sound came again, and this time he saw the corresponding oscilloscope ripple on the Babbage engine’s screen.

  Hurriedly placing the soldering iron back in its cradle, he jumped up and ran over to the desk, turning the cogitator’s monitoring screen round so that he could see it more clearly.

  Blip. Blip. Blip.

  The transmitter he had managed to place on the Limehouse Golem, the last time he had encountered it, was working a treat.

  The droid behind the attacks attributed to the mythical Jewish vengeance-seeker, the same automaton that he had sent to the bottom of the Thames, was still operational and was on the move.

  Excitedly he flicked a switch on his Babbage engine console and the waveform disappeared to be replaced by a map of the capital made entirely from glowing green lines. At the heart of the map appeared a pulsing red dot.

  Using the engine’s rotational arrow targeter, Thomas zoomed in on the area surrounding the winking dot. It was in the East End. Somewhere close to the river. He zoomed in. The emerald lines now came into crystal sharpness, and Thomas could immediately see that he was looking at the Southwark stretch of the Thames. He watched the progress of the dot for a moment, now shown to be travelling along the river itself. Somehow Thomas doubted that it had been hoisted onto a barge but rather suspected that the droid was slowly making its way west along the river, back upstream, following the path of the river-bed, trudging through the mud and sucking silt. Its circuits were obviously well-shielded to survive the unkind attentions of Old Father Thames.

  And as long as the golem was operational, Thomas knew that his purpose was to hunt it down and put it out of action for good.

  He estimated that, once he was fully kitted up, it would only take him a matter of minutes – perhaps quarter of an hour at most – to catch up with the droid again. He was glad that he had refuelled the jetpack as soon as he had risen that morning.

  Thomas glanced at what he had been working on before the transmitter-signal receiver alerted him to the fact that the golem was on the move again. Work on the second, improved model jetpack would have to be put on hold for the time being.

  He looked out of the window. It was still daylight. He had not taken his masked vigilante persona out during the day before. Doing so brought a whole new element of risk to the venture, and a new buzz of excitement too.

  Thomas ran the length of the room to where the tailor’s mannequin stood silhouetted against the conservatory windows and the amber sky of the Smog-laden late afternoon beyond, his eyes meeting the lifeless goggle-eyes of the suit, pleased with the improvements he had made, from the armoured plates and gauntlets to the powerful jetpack and ominous bat-winged cape folded behind it.

  The addition of the body armour made the suit – and by extension Thomas – an even more imposing and threatening presence, giving him some of the more sinister aspects of the knights of old. This, combined with the image of the bat, that reminded the primitive, ancestor-inherited part of the psyche why people once feared the dark, worked to turn Thomas Sanctuary into Spring-Heeled Jack, as the press had christened his alter-ego. A sinister symbol of justice not bound by the law – a dark knight.

  I really will have to think of a better name for myself, Thomas pondered as he strapped on the whole shebang once again.

  The Man of Iron, he thought. The Bat-wing... the Night Wing... Bat Knight...

  None of them seemed quite right, somehow.

  “I’ve got it!” he shouted as he buckled the last leather strap on his suit. “‘The Armoured Avenger’!”

  With boots and gloves on, the jetpack securely strapped to his back and the cape in place over that, Thomas picked up his fob watch. But it was a very different timepiece to the one he had been given by his father to commemorate his eighteenth birthday. He had made a few modifications to it since the last time he had been out.

  It was now attached to a leather strap which went around his left wrist, which also bore a tiny radio receiver and battery. With clumsy gloved fingers, Thomas opened the outer casing of the watch. He checked the time and then turned the knob at the side. The watch face rotated to reveal a tiny screen, bearing the same glowing green lines and pulsing red dot as his Babbage engine monitor was currently displaying.

  Having confirmed that the receiver attached to his watch was working and, having strapped it securely to his wrist, Thomas pulled the mask down over his face. A bloodstained vision of the world swam into being, the conservatory and the cityscape beyond appearing again as though through an angry red mist.

  Thomas checked his utility belt, with its multiple compartments – that he had also added to since his last run in with the Limehouse Golem – especially the dispenser in which he kept a store of his own magnetic micro-mines.

  He stepped towards the conservatory doors, calling to mind the previous two occasions he had gone up against the golem. The first time, outside the Palace Theatre in Limehouse, the golem had been the outright winner. The second time, he had triumphed, or at least had thought so, but he had only managed to achieve what he had with the help of the dandy adventurer and renowned agent of the throne, Ulysses Quicksilver.

  Tonight the Armoured Avenger would face the Limehouse Golem once more in battle, and he was determined that it would be their final confrontation.

  A flicker of traitorous doubt crossed his mind, sending a shiver of uncertainty down his spine and into the pit of his stomach.

  Could he do it alone?

  Perhaps it was time to admit that he needed an accomplice on his mission, and Ulysses Quicksilver seemed like the ideal candidate.

  But how to get hold of him?

  His g
aze returned to the Babbage unit and memories of hacking cogitator systems the world over came flooding back.

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER TROTTED back along the pavement from the decrepit home-cum-laboratory to where the Mark IV Rolls Royce Silver Phantom was pulled up at the side of the road.

  When he had left his two companions – the butler and the whore – to make his house call on the cantankerous Dr Methuselah, Eliza had been sat in the back, not looking wholly at ease with her surroundings, grumpily staring out of the passenger window at passers-by, pointedly not talking to his manservant, while Nimrod had been sat at the wheel, staring out of the windscreen making a point of not speaking to the young harlot.

  But now, as he approached the car he could see that the two of them were obviously in the midst of a heated debate.

  Ulysses took a deep breath, preparing himself for the worst.

  And it was then that his personal communicator bleeped from inside his jacket pocket.

  “AND YOU LOST the signal here, you say?” Ulysses asked, peering into the gloom of the tunnel mouth that yawned before them.

  A stench like the miasma that permeated the tunnels he and Nimrod had explored beneath the streets of Southwark in their search for the missing evolutionary biologist Professor Ignatius Galapagos gusted out in noxious waves.

  “It must be because it’s gone underground,” the masked figure beside him said, his voice sounding deep and gravelly through the speaker-grille of the mask.

  Ulysses looked back over his shoulder at his companions.

  For the time being, his manservant appeared to be more unsettled by the presence of the vigilante in their midst than that of the prostitute – although his attitude was somewhat hypocritical, considering the sort of things he had got up to in his youth. Ulysses noted with a grimace that Eliza was also occupied with the new addition to the group, although, seeing the simpering smile on her face, for a different reason altogether.

  The four unlikely looking accomplices were standing at the bottom of the culvert that lay between the river wall and the built-up ground beneath the north bank footing of Blackfriars Bridge. Grey water slopped and slapped on the stone piers at the entrance to the subterranean waterway only a few inches from where they stood, the percussion of the water amplified by the weird acoustics of the culvert.

  Above them, the sky was, as ever, shrouded by the Smog, bringing a premature dusk to the city and deepening the shadows within the culvert.

  The river mouth was barred by a rusted iron gate, or at least it had been. Something had recently wrenched the bars apart.

  The fetid waters of the Fleet churned and boiled from the stone-vaulted tunnel, disgorging into the Thames, turning the water in the culvert into churning white eddies, stained a tarry yellow and covered in a stinking brown foam.

  The Thames wasn’t London’s only son. As the settlement beside the greater river grew over the centuries, the Roman garrison town eventually became the teeming metropolis of today. Like Kronos, father of the Greek Gods, the hungry city swallowed many of its children. Over the years, the Effra, the Walbrook and the Fleet had all been built over, becoming absorbed into the city’s ever-expanding sewer system.

  Ulysses grimaced, his nose wrinkling as the tunnel exhaled another gagging breath of fetid sewer air.

  “So,” he said, unenthusiastically, “if we’re going to find our golem, we have to go in there?”

  “That’s about the measure of it,” the masked figure said.

  Ulysses looked the caped figure looming at his shoulder up and down. “Your rocket-pack’s not going to do you much good down there, is it?”

  “You’re not exactly dressed for a jaunt into London’s sewers either, are you?”

  Ulysses looked down at his tweed suit and spats. He supposed he could return home and change into something more suitable but that would take time, and he suspected that time was a luxury they didn’t have. He didn’t want to risk losing the golem again.

  “Someone has to keep Savile Row in business, don’t they?” he said, smiling weakly. He could see that another visit to his tailor would be necessary once this was all cleared up. “Can you even see anything through those?” Ulysses tapped a knuckle against the red lenses of Jack’s goggles.

  “Perfectly, thank you.”

  “Right then,” Ulysses said, slapping the shaft of his cane into his gloved left hand, “what are we waiting for?”

  He looked from the gaping void of the miasmic darkness, back over his shoulder to where his indefatigable manservant stood at the ready, torch in hand.

  “Come on, Nimrod, once more unto the breach and all that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nimrod replied, his icy manner giving no indication as to how he felt about entering London’s stygian underworld again. Ulysses doubted he was overjoyed at the prospect, considering how ill their last sojourn into Bazalgette’s sewer system had made the two of them.

  “After you, then,” Ulysses said to the suited vigilante.

  Being carefully not to snag his equipment on any of the twisted bars, Spring-Heeled Jack stepped into the darkness below Blackfriars Bridge.

  “What about me?” Eliza said, hands indignantly on hips.

  “What about you?” Nimrod asked coldly.

  “Get yourself back home now,” Ulysses told her. “I’ll be in touch again when this is all over. Promise.”

  “You don’t get rid of me that easily!” the harlot huffed, full to over-flowing with self-importance.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m coming with you! You don’t think you can lead me on like this, giving me a glimpse into this other world of yours, and then not expect me to want to know more, do you?”

  “This is no place for a lady,” the vigilante pointed out.

  “Well I ain’t no lady, sunshine,” Eliza remarked, and with that, hauled up her skirts, tucking them into the waistband to improvise herself a pair of pantaloons, “so it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  She barged past Nimrod, pushed past Ulysses and strode into the tunnel.

  THE MOTLEY BAND followed the course of the Fleet upstream as it continued its subterranean journey beneath the city. What little light penetrated the fog and the arched entrance of the tunnel soon gave out and they had to resort to using torches to proceed further, although the vigilante seemed to be able to find his way easily enough without the aid of any light, and led the way through the stygian murk.

  The penetrating beams of Ulysses’ and Nimrod’s torches, revealed a dank underworld, the span of the broad-arched roof of the tunnel hung with ragged moisture-loving plants and mosses while other forms of vegetation thrived where the nutrient rich sewer water splashed the narrow ledge they were following.

  They continued in this way – listening to the constant noise of the churning river, the splash of the water and the drip of moisture from the ceiling, feeling splashes of the fetid liquid landing on the exposed skin of their hands and faces – for what Ulysses judged to be a good hour. Their sweeping torch beam sent rats scurrying to their holes in the crumbling brick walls, their excited squeaking reverberating from their nests. They saw albino slugs oozing over beds of ferns and a myriad sparkling spider-webs covering cracks in the brickwork of the tunnel.

  But what they didn’t see, or hear was any sign of the Limehouse Golem.

  Eliza gave a squeal when a rat dropped from a hole in the ceiling onto her head, before she managed to bat it away, and contributed the occasional unhelpful comment, usually regarding the smell, but in general they continued without anything in the way of conversation passing between them.

  At last the tunnel they were following opened out into a large domed chamber, where the waterway merged with the other tunnels of the sewage system. More twisted passageways branched off from this, while the course of the Fleet continued on the other side. Here the ledge they had been following became a wider walkway.

  “So, which way now?” Ulysses asked the vigilante.

  Spring-
Heeled Jack stopped and looked down at a device strapped to his wrist. “I’ve got a signal!” he declared, the excitement in his voice obvious even despite the distortion of the mask.

  Pain flared in Ulysses’ head.

  “Look out!” he gasped, as he doubled up in agony.

  Nimrod immediately went for his gun, while Spring-Heeled Jack tensed, fists raised.

  As his brainstorm passed, Ulysses fumbled for his sword-cane, pulling the blade free of its scabbard, but by then they were already surrounded.

  The figures seemed to melt out of the shadows, the tunnel walls and even the ceiling. None of them carried lanterns and none were wearing anything like the vigilante’s dark-vision goggles, but somehow they had managed to surround Ulysses’ motley crew without any trouble and only Ulysses’ heightened sixth sense had given them away.

  They wore dark, loose-fitting clothes and in their hands they carried staves, nun-chucks and metal throwing stars, and looked like they knew how to use them. Each of them had the same, disturbingly mutated appearance. Eliza screamed. Their faces were distinctly rat-like, from the warped rodent snouts right down to protruding chisel teeth and twitching whiskers.

  “Don’t try anything funny!” one of the rat-men squeaked. “We got you surrounded. You’re coming with us!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  King Rat

  ULYSSES WONDERED IF he should have at least tried to fight back against the rat-men, as the four of them were led, at knife-point, deeper into the warren of sewer tunnels that branched off from the central chamber. But, he tried to convince himself, such an action would have been futile. They had been wildly outnumbered and were disadvantaged by the poor visibility. Even Spring-Heeled Jack, who could supposedly see as well in the dark as in daylight, hadn’t seen them coming. Not only were they stealthy and agile, they also looked like they knew what they were doing with the weapons they were carrying.