Twelve Minutes to Midnight

by Christopher Edge

  She glanced up at Monty, her eyes shining with a fierce determination.

  “I found out what I needed to know.”

  Alone in the drawing room, Lady Cambridge slowly rose from her chair. Reaching for the light switch, she dimmed the lamps and then stepped towards the back wall and the towering bookcase which loomed there. Running a manicured hand along one of its shelves, she spoke softly to herself, her words almost lost in the cavernous hush.

  “What a vulgar little man,” she murmured. “How on earth could he imagine that I would use you, my darlings, to help him to write his catchpenny potboiler?”

  Her hand trailed past the leather-bound volumes and buffed ornaments set upon on the shelf, her finger catching against one of the curios with an audible click.

  The bookshelves began to slide noiselessly back, gliding apart to reveal the darkness hidden behind. Lady Cambridge stepped out of the drawing room and into what looked like a jungle. Towering branches and ferns arched skywards behind a glass screen, lit from within by a strange blue-tinted glow. A skein of sticky webs hung from every surface; some were messy jumbles of gossamer threads hanging like hammocks between leaves and branches, others, delicately spun circles of silk strung across the ferns. It was a vast vivarium filled with countless scurrying spiders of every size and every colour.

  From an overhanging branch, a snaking stream of tiny spiderlings spilled out from a bulbous cocoon, clambering up the mossy limb and out across the shrouding leaves. In the shadows beneath these, the corpse of a mummified mouse lay wrapped in a silken shroud as a giant tarantula crawled greedily towards it. Behind the glass, every inch of the spidertorium was crawling with arachnid life.

  Lady Cambridge rested her head against the glass, staring into the pale blue mists that clung to the ferns and branches.

  “You are destined for a much higher purpose,” she purred, as the spiders scurried to and fro before her eyes. “We’re almost there. Soon, all will be revealed.”

  XV

  The drawing room lay in darkness, the vast bookcase now back in position along the far wall. Through a crack in the curtains, a slender shaft of moonlight illuminated the door as it softly swung open. A slight black-coated figure crept into the room like a thief, pausing with every footstep as the tick of the grandfather clock standing in the corner kept time with her thumping heartbeat.

  Penny glanced around the room, its furnishings now shrouded in shadows. As she moved forward, her leg brushed against a corner table and she quickly had to reach out to right a glass vase as it teetered precariously. She could barely see more than a few inches in front of her face, but she couldn’t risk turning the lights on. The danger of discovery was too great.

  So far everything had gone to plan. The master key in her pocket had opened every locked door that Penelope had encountered. It had been a close run thing to acquire the key, her light fingers surreptitiously lifting it from the loop of keys on the butler’s belt as he had handed her back her coat earlier that day. As they had been bustled out of the front door, she had scanned the duty roster of servants lying on the hall table by the entrance and had carefully noted the number of servants on duty that night, registering the times when they changed over and the manner of their duties. From this information, it had just been a case of timing her return, sneaking in through the servants’ entrance as the clocks rang two.

  Penny edged her way forwards, taking care not to trip over any of the furniture as she crept through the darkness. As she reached the far end of the room, the sheer cliff-face of the bookcase rose up in front of her, blocking her path completely. She shook her head in puzzlement. As well as the master key, Penny had the carefully folded plans to the house tucked into her pocket. She had obtained these from the Land Registry offices that very afternoon, bribing the clerk there with a signed copy of the latest Penny Dreadful. According to these plans there should be a set of steps to a whole other room here, a chambered vault spanning the width of the house.

  She walked the length of the wall, her hand trailing along the bookshelves for guidance. Perplexed, Penny reached inside the pocket of her overcoat, drawing out the plans with one hand, whilst with her other she fumbled free a box of matches.

  Spreading the plans out across a shelf, she sparked one of the matches into life, its phosphorescent glow casting an eerie light across the architect blueprints. Penelope could see the drawing room clearly marked on the plans and beyond this, steps leading down to a basement space. She glanced back along the bookcase as the flame guttered and died. There were no steps here.

  Penelope frowned as she folded the plans, carefully returning them to her pocket as she puzzled over this enigma. Casting a nervous glance towards the door, she struck another match, its flickering flame warm against her face in the frigid air. She leaned in more closely to inspect the bookcase, its solid oak shelves giving every impression of having stood there forever and a day. The flame of the match illuminated the books lining the shelves, their titles spelled out in shining gold letters across their spines: The Natural History of the Arachnid, The Spiders of South America, Journals of the British Empire Arachnological Society. No trace of Montgomery Flinch’s fictions or the pages of The Penny Dreadful anywhere on these shelves.

  Penelope bristled at the recollection of Lady Cambridge’s dismissal of her stories as tawdry shilling shockers. The shadows cast by the flickering flame of the dying match danced across the bookcase. If this was some shilling shocker she mused, then there would be a secret entrance to the basement hidden somewhere behind this. As the flame died away, she quickly lit another match and then reaching out with her free hand, ran her fingers along the underside of the bookshelf, searching for some kind of hidden button or catch. She sighed in disappointment; there was nothing there.

  Then Penelope heard the faint sound of a click, and from beneath the door to the drawing room a warm pool of light spilled out. The sound of footsteps and two female voices grew louder as electric lamps glowed in the hall outside. Panicking, Penny quickly turned to hide, her eyes frantically searching the room for a place of safety. She darted towards the window curtains, but as she turned, her foot snagged on the edge of a rug, pitching her forward with a startled gasp.

  Flinging out an arm to save herself, Penny’s hand caught hold of an ornament on the bookcase. The figurine tipped as she fell, catching with a click as she sank to her knees in the shadow of the bookcase. Then, with a hushed whirr, the bookshelves slowly began to slide apart and Penny stared up in disbelief into a darkened jungle. She could see ferns and creepers twisting towards the ceiling as night-blooming flowers unfurled their petals behind the glass. Twining branches hung heavy with silken webs, every inch of their bark swarming with spiders.

  Leaning closer in wonderment, Penny watched as a fly blundered into a loose spiral of spider’s web, captured in its shining strands of stickiness. At the heart of the web, a large black spider sat motionless, waiting patiently as the fly twitched and struggled, the captured insect only succeeding in binding itself more tightly in the spider’s trap. Despite the warmth of her coat, Penelope shivered. She watched as the spider skittered across the web, stealthily moving closer to the fly with every movement it made.

  A sudden clatter of footsteps outside brought Penelope back to her senses. Quickly rising to her feet, she glimpsed a darkened set of steps to the left of the vast glass case. The plans had been right after all! Stepping to her left, she righted the figurine on the bookcase, the ornament snapping back into position with a click, and the shelves began to slide shut once more. Penny darted through the narrowing gap and down the steps into the darkness as they closed completely behind her.

  As she stood there alone in the blackness, Penny heard the muffled sound of voices and footsteps. Her heart thudded in her chest, the noise of it almost drowning the soft murmur of voices on the other side of the bookcase. Penelope strained her ears to make out the words.

  “—I don’t see why we should have to prepare rooms t
o entertain visitors at a time when all decent folk are in bed. It’s not proper.”

  The muffled grumble of the woman’s voice was cut off by a sharp shushing sound.

  “Hush,” a second voice warned. “Don’t let Her Ladyship catch you saying those things. Not unless you want to find yourself out on the street.”

  The fear in the woman’s voice was obvious to Penny, even as the bookcase between them muffled the sound. Standing frozen in the darkness, Penny breathed with slow silent breaths, frightened that any movement would alert the servants to her presence. The blackness surrounded her, solid as a wall pressing against her face, but slowly her eyes began to get used to the darkness. She could make out a soft glow in the gloom, the twisted shape of a branch coated with a phosphorescent moss. And crawling across this, the silhouette shape of a black widow spider only inches from her face.

  Penny stumbled backwards, her footsteps clattering down the steps as the bustling noise from the servants above slowly moved away. Breathing heavily, she froze, terrified that she had been overheard. She listened intently, but there was no answering sound from the room above. The servants had gone.

  Glancing down, Penny saw a soft orange light spilling up from the bottom of the steps on which she was standing. Moving as noiselessly as she could, she left the spiders scurrying beneath the glass behind and retreated down the steps in search of the hidden room below. Reaching the bottom of the steps, Penny looked around to see a spacious chamber, dimly lit by a handful of yellow bulbs that hung down from the ceiling, each half-covered with a broad metal shade.

  The basement seemed to extend endlessly back into the gloom. Penny saw several rows of tall wooden cabinets, arranged at regular intervals between the oak-panelled walls, with narrow aisles leading between them. In front of the cabinets were two plush easy chairs set beside a long, low table covered with scattered papers.

  Penny walked over to the table and reached down to gather up one of the pages that lay abandoned there. The spidery scrawl of the handwriting told her what she had already suspected. This was where Bradburn had brought the Midnight Papers. She peered more closely at the sheet, trying to decipher the words scratched across it.

  … an electronic eye staring out into every room … BBC, MTV, ITV, CCTV … the watched and the watchers … flickering pictures beamed across the globe in an instant … thousands of channels filled with the babblings of fools …. all must obey the remote control …

  The same unsettling certainty she had seen in the other patients’ writings haunted these words, but the meaning of them was lost in the minds of the Bedlamites. Placing the paper back on the table, Penelope moved towards the nearest row of cabinets. Lady Cambridge had stolen these papers for a reason and she was determined to find out why.

  Under the glare of the dim yellow bulb hanging overhead, the golden grain of the oak cabinet glowed slightly. The narrow filing cabinet was fronted by nine drawers, each with a brass handle with a name holder above it. Penny pulled out the drawer at the level of her waist, the printed label in the name holder reading “1903”. The drawer rolled open to reveal a stack of index cards, disappearing back into the depths of the cabinet. It looked like some kind of library catalogue. Penny drew out a card from the crowded drawer. Bringing it into the light, she saw clipped fragments of the patients’ writings, carefully pasted on to the card.

  … with twin propellers, man launches into the sky on slender wings … Oliver and Wilbur Wright, pilots of the future … at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Flyer soars …

  Beneath the patients’ scribbled handwriting, a neater, more controlled hand had printed the following comment:

  The invention of heavier-than-air flight? Track down the Wright brothers to investigate further.

  Mystified, Penelope leafed through the other cards in the file. More fragments from the Midnight Papers were found on each one, the meaning behind the patients’ words still evading her understanding. But on each card, the same neat hand as before had printed an accompanying commentary.

  Britain takes over the Fulani Empire – Lord Salisbury dies – Edward VII proclaimed Emperor of India

  Shaking her head in confusion, Penny placed the cards back into the stack and slid the drawer closed. She moved along the row of cabinets, pulling drawers open at random, each with a different number printed across the name holder. 1917. 1939. 1966. 1997. 2001. Penelope flicked through the cards, trying to piece the mystery together. On each and every one, the patients’ fantastical visions were translated into cold hard statements of fact.

  As she reached the end of the row, Penny turned and stared back along the cabinets, her mind whirring with questions. She glanced down at the last card in her hand, an ominous prophecy that chilled her blood.

  Great iron birds fall from the sky on the Empire State … nations weep as the twin towers fall …

  New York attacked – America at war.

  Standing there in the gloom, Penny realised for the first time that the numbers in the name holders had been rising with every step that she took. From 1900 to 2001, each of the labels matched a year from the twentieth century to come and beyond. With a sudden gasp of revelation, she understood what the patients’ writings were. Their visions were visions of the future, predictions of a time yet to come.

  Lost in thought, Penelope didn’t hear the sound of footsteps until they had almost reached the bottom of the stairs. The caustic tones of Lady Cambridge’s voice echoed across the subterranean chamber.

  “I do hope you have a good reason for disturbing me at this hour of the night.”

  XVI

  Penelope scrambled backwards, the heel of her boot scraping against the stripped wooden floorboards. Wrapping herself in the darkness of her coat, she crouched behind the furthest of the filing cabinets, sheltering in its shadow as the footsteps entered the room. The echo of Lady Cambridge’s voice was followed by the heavier tread of a second set of footsteps, and Penny held her breath in fear. Then she heard the low rumble of Bradburn’s voice answer in reply.

  “I had no choice – I had to come.”

  Peering around the edge of the filing cabinet, Penny saw the statuesque figure of Lady Cambridge standing imperiously beside the table and chairs at the front of the chamber. She was dressed in a white linen nightdress and shawl, the lace-trimmed material flowing from her neck to her toes, but the stark beauty of her features was marred by a thunderous look. Facing her, Bradburn wrung his grimy cap in his hands, the scar-faced orderly shifting uncomfortably beneath her gaze.

  “No choice?” Lady Cambridge replied sharply. “No choice but to go against all our carefully planned arrangements? No choice but to raise me from my bed at this ungodly hour? May I remind you, Mr Bradburn, that I am a recently widowed Lady of unblemished reputation. If anyone should have seen you sullying my doorstep—”

  “I promise you, Lady Cambridge,” Bradburn protested, “nobody saw me.”

  “My servants saw you,” Lady Cambridge snapped in reply. “Servants see, servants talk. I keep my staff firmly in line here, but even they raise an eyebrow when some guttersnipe arrives on my doorstep at half past two in the morning.

  “And what for?” she continued, brandishing a thin sheaf of papers. “This?”

  Even through the gloom, Penny could just make out the familiar spidery scrawls scratched across the topmost sheet.

  “There are hundreds of patients in Bedlam, yet tonight you’ve brought me the work of only a handful of them.” Lady Cambridge flung the papers down on the table and turned on the orderly with a snarl. “What exactly am I paying you for?”

  Bradburn scowled as the pages scattered in front of him.

  “This was all I could smuggle away,” he muttered in a guttural growl. “It’s not like when I could just sneak the papers out one night at a time and put the ones you didn’t need back the next day. Ever since that blasted author Flinch came sniffing around, Bedlam’s been tight as a drum. Dr Morris is collecting the papers from the cells alm
ost as soon as the freaks finish writing them.”

  Listening from the shadows, Penny felt a nervous thrill of excitement. It seemed that she had already managed to throw a spanner into the workings of Lady Cambridge’s mysterious plan.

  “It’s not good enough,” Lady Cambridge replied, a hard edge of steel entering her words. “For six long months I have laboured at this scheme and only a handful of years are yet to be revealed. The days of the nineteenth century are almost at an end – I need those papers.” She pointed towards the shadowy rows of oak cabinets, her lace-trimmed sleeve draped decorously from her arm. “When the last pieces of the jigsaw are in place, the course of the coming century will be determined by me. I will hold the secrets of all the wonders and the horrors yet to come. The fate of nations, the entire world will rest in my hands.” Her dark-blue eyes flashed in warning. “You would do well not to disappoint me, Mr Bradburn.”

  “But what can I do?” the truculent orderly moaned. “They’ve got the nurses running double-shifts at midnight now – they’re watching the patients like hawks. I can barely slip them their nightly dose without getting caught. How am I supposed to get more of the Midnight Papers out of there?”

  A cunning smile slowly crept across Lady Cambridge’s lips.

  “We just need to change the time you administer the dose,” she replied, “so it takes hold when there won’t be as many people on guard. There’s no need for us to wait until twelve minutes to midnight to find out what the future holds.”

  Tossing her hair back decisively, she strode towards a walnut cabinet at the far end of the room. Craning her neck to follow her path, Penny edged out of the shadows. She noticed for the first time that this cabinet wasn’t a filing cabinet like all the others, but instead a medicine cabinet with rows of jars and bottles neatly arranged on shelves behind a glass door. Opening the door, Lady Cambridge drew out a tray filled with tiny glass vials and turned to face Bradburn.