He turned his attention back to his work, quickly unsnapping the last of the clasps and swinging open the hatch. Then he turned back to her. “There’s still time to come in. We could go together.”
She made no move towards him. “You know what’ll happen if you’re in there when the beams fire.”
“I think that we did. Change it, I mean. I think that concentrating on the numbers made it closer. But they were always there, always. Waiting for us. In the dark.”
He stepped through the hatch and onto the internal walkway. The hum of the tubes intensified, building for a surge of power.
“You’ll die,” she said. “The beams...”
“Didn’t you feel it in your dreams, Rebecca? Soon the numbers will change forever. And then they’ll come back. But I’ll be gone. You can come too, if you like.”
He pulled the door towards him, closing it against her. His voice was muffled now. “The numbers spoke to me. You can hear them too. In your dreams. It’s started here, but soon all the world will be dreaming with us. And every dream will bring them closer. High-energy particles, Rebecca. That’s the way. Blasted out of this world, out of the world beyond. They won’t have me. They won’t be able to get me then.”
The door stopped. It didn’t close from inside. She could still see him through the gap between hatch and frame. “I can’t close it. I can’t close it. I can’t close it.”
She released the door handle and took a step towards him. Another. He looked out through the gap between hatch and frame.
“I can’t shut it from inside. Please. Shut me in. I don’t want to be around when they break through. I’ve seen it. In my dreams.”
The hum was building to its crescendo now. Seconds to go. If the door was open, the safety interlocks would halt the firing and she could go to the doctor, get him some help.
He whispered something. Too quiet to hear.
“What?”
This time louder. “Save me. Please.”
Rebecca closed the door on his thankful face, and turned the clip to seal it shut.
She closed her eyes and waited for the crack that would set him free.
1884
by Michael Grey
It was all Tesla’s fault. Or his kindness perhaps, depending on your discretion.
Nikola Tesla was the most dangerous man on Earth, but only those very few who had read the most deeply of all could have guessed it. Desperate to prove the safety of his alternating current, he undertook increasingly drastic public demonstrations. The grandest of these was the floating battery-barge The Future. It was an unfortunately apt name.
The world’s press and assorted dignitaries gathered at Liverpool docks to listen to the genius describe his latest creation. The new boat was to harvest an entire storm front, hold its captured electricity for a while, and then safely and harmlessly discharge all that unfathomable power into the ocean.
The demonstration was an incredible success, according to an attending reporter who wired his editor from the boat. Just an hour later though, The Future was gone, sunk into the calm sea, cause unknown. With it went Tesla and fifty-six journalists, industrialists, and crewmen.
In the aftermath, an odd spree of coastal abductions and impersonations barely caused a stir. A few days later, Her Imperial Majesty the Queen Victoria announced subtle amendments to her titles and honours – and, it was noted, to her voice and manner and preferences. The Future, such as it had been, was quietly forgotten.
♦
Martin Fisher was thinking about the girl again. The little match seller had worked at the junction of Dockins Row and Fletcher Street. She could not have been older than nine, and had done nothing more unlawful than stand on the wrong street on the wrong day.
It had been his first arrest for Dissent, under one of a slew of new laws brought in since Her Most Ancient and Imperial Majesty had assumed that title. What was to have been a quiet affair turned into a brawl when the man he tried to arrest bolted into the streets. Fisher gave chase, finally tripping him on the corner of Dockins Row, just yards from the matchstick girl, and held him there until the wagon arrived.
Those wagons were another new thing, painted matt black, windowless and devoid of ornamentation – bar the Queen’s new coiled seal, done in silver on the door. The Agency’s men, the Black Hoods, jumped wordlessly from their ride. They took custody of the dissenter, pulling him from Fisher’s embrace on the ground and forcing him towards the wagon. He fought them and screamed wild accusations the whole way to the carriage. What he shrieked, Fisher could not remember. His attention had been on the girl, drawn by the force of some cruel prescience.
The Hoods waited until the man was by the wagon, already shivering from its cold miasma, before they opened the door. The sunlight couldn’t touch the utter darkness of its interior, yet the girl stared into it, fixated. The man was thrown in, and the door slammed. The carriage rocked in time with his muted shouts once, twice, then it fell still and silent.
That was when the girl started screaming.
Fisher had watched the colour seep from her face as she looked into the carriage. Her abject terror had kept her silent, denied her dread a voice. Why could she not have held on?
If she’d lasted thirty seconds more, the carriage, the Black Hoods, and their unfortunate passenger would all have been gone. But... she’d failed. The Hoods turned, first staring at the girl, then looking at each other. Body language gave away their uncertainty, and for a moment, Fisher thought he might be able to save her. Pick her up, and carry her away. Then the man climbed down from the driver’s bench.
Fisher didn’t know his name. It was the first time he had seen him, but even so, on that first day, he knew one of Them when he saw one. The man moved oddly, walking as if unused to just two legs. While the others all wore those black hoods, he was undisguised, his face bare. It was all the more chilling that this fellow, so otherwise undistinguished, would allow everyone to see his face and know what he did, whom he served. What he was.
He walked to the girl, still screaming, still staring, and reached down to take her hand.
“What are you doing?” asked Fisher, somehow finding his voice.
The man looked at him. His expression was enigmatic, but gave the faint impression of confusion – as if, at dinner, a bowl of stew had quietly asked not to be eaten.
“The gi-rl saw.” His voice was like his gait, staggered and ungainly.
“She has done nothing,” Fisher said. He forced himself to step between them and the wagon.
“The gi-rl saw,” he said again. “She will come.”
“No.” Fisher shook his head. The girl had fallen silent, but she still stared at the ominously still wagon.
“She will come. Or you will come, Officer Fi-sher.”
It was the way the bare-faced man had said his name, rather than the fact that he knew it at all. God help him, but he’d stepped aside and let the man go. Let her go.
He’d visited that corner every week since, and every week he stood there alone for an hour before wandering home. The rest of his free time, he attempted to remain in drunken oblivion.
“Officer Fi-sher.”
Fisher flinched and looked up from the table. Silence had replaced the regular hubbub of the inn around him. The bare-faced man stood above him, towering over the table and its empty gin bottles. He didn’t know how the man had found him, and didn’t ask. They’d have found him wherever he was. “What?” He laid his head back down on his arms, to ease the painful thumping.
“Officer Martin Fi-sher. You are wanted.”
The memory was still too raw for him to summon much concern. “Yes? And what am I wanted for?”
“You are wanted at the Pa-lace, Officer Fi-sher.”
His eyes snapped open. “Why?”
“You are want
ed at the Pa-lace, Officer Fi-sher. Tomorrow. Nine o’clock.” The man turned and walked away.
The noise of the inn returned by degrees, reassuring him that the man had gone.
He’s not truly gone, Fisher thought. They never will be.
♦
France was mobilising, according to the Times. ‘The rest of Europe watches the second rise of the British Empire with jealousy,’ it declared. With fear seemed the more likely truth. Britain truly ruled the waves, and continental fleets had been sunk, or just gone missing. So France prepared to defend her shores with her old war machines. The tractor-pulled basilics with their flame throwing cannon, the repeating rifles of the Grande Armée, even the almost legendary Earthmovers.
“My great-granddad fought against the Earthmovers,” Fisher overheard one old man say to another, as he walked by St James’s Park.
“He never did. He’d be dead, and you’d not be here.”
“He did too. He were at Waterloo. Said there were four of ’em, and had his Generalship not had his agents fix ’em proper before, the battle would’ve gone the other way. Like moving castles he said they were, with cannons the size of barges.”
They won’t help, Fisher wanted to say. The biggest guns in the world can’t help you when it only takes one in an army, just a single one of them to reach one of your officers, and then it’s all over.
He kept his mouth shut. Either one of them could have been an informer or a Black Hood. The Hoods were everywhere, with and without their black hoods, becoming the everyday people of the street. The man behind you at the pie stall, a woman in the crowd at the playhouse... or one of a pair of old men, leaning against a wall swapping tales, listening to what they heard around them and remembering every name and face.
He found it hard to despise the Hoods. They were just people, like him, caught in times where you did what you had to do if you wanted to survive. But even if he couldn’t find hate for them, he still guarded his words and his actions. It was madness not to.
So he went on his way, leaving the two old men to their stories.
The frightening thing about Buckingham Palace, the most insidious arrogance, was how much it had not changed. The Scots Guard arrayed themselves around the gates, but it was otherwise the same. It told London that They were not frightened of the people – ‘We do not have to defend ourselves from you.’
The only notable difference to the Palace was the state of the telegraph towers. Steepling wooden poles, they had connected the Queen to the airdock towers at Greenwich. The telegraphs had fallen into disrepair now, the wires dangling useless and the poles split with rot. The palace had no use for them, not since the continental governments cut communications. As for the airdocks themselves, They hated anything which took them further away from water.
He presented himself to the gate. The guard there just snapped his heels and asked Fisher to follow, marching off to a side door. Fisher did so, and was led through ante-chambers and narrow halls, into a book-lined study and out, and finally to a gallery with high ceilings and windows, and an unlit hearth at its centre.
The guard left, after instructing him to wait. And wait he did, standing in the spot he’d been left in. Fear that being discovered out of place would earn a punishment rooted him to the spot.
But minutes passed, and then tens of minutes, until boredom more than bravery sent him over to look at the paintings along the wall. They were so many, and so large. The first was a seascape, featuring a battle of a hundred ships. He recognised HMS Victory in the fray, and surmised that the artist had depicted Trafalgar. He admired the bold strokes and fine detail. Everything was captured through the smoke and movement of battle.
He moved onto the next, and found himself at a loss. It showed a land battle, although he couldn’t identify the regiments, or even the armies. Two sides fought in a barren landscape, under a red sky. Not the red of sunset, either. Fisher got the impression of a sky deliberately and perpetually crimson, with black clouds sailing over the ruined scenery. The men who fought did so not with an appearance of determination or pride, but with the wild delight of zealots. Even those caught in the blasts of cannon or pierced with bayonets seemed to have no regrets, no sadness. It was as if they would gleefully die or kill for their cause, and welcomed either with equal relish.
“Magnificent, are they not?”
He caught himself, crushed the urge to spin, and managed to turn calmly. A man walked towards him, slim and unassuming, dressed well but sombrely. He was pale, too. What Fisher had first taken for a powdered wig of the old style was in fact a shock of grey hair, and the man’s cheeks weren’t rouged, but bore the redness found under the rimmed eyes of someone who had not slept well in a long time.
“They are,” he said, keeping his voice pleasant and agreeable.
“These,” the man pointed to the Trafalgar painting and its neighbours, “were originally hanging in the National Gallery.” He waved past the last painting Fisher had looked at. “These others were... Well, I’m not exactly sure where they came from, but her Majesty desired them hung.”
Fisher’s glance followed the man’s gesture. He saw more of the paintings of the latter sort. The next in line was dominated by the livid greens of rainforest. Vines and grass crept up a statue which hurt his eyes when he tried to focus. He blinked, and looked back at the man. “Sorry, sir. I am at a disadvantage,” he said.
“Of course, my apologies. My name is Benjamin Disraeli. I have the good fortune to be the Prime Minister for Her Most Ancient and Imperial Highness, may she live forever.”
Fisher recognised the man then – what he had become, anyway. Disraeli had been Prime Minister before Tesla’s demonstration, and had remained so. There was never a question of elections being held. But the man bore little resemblance to the vital, energized pictures in newspapers and posters. It occurred to him that Disraeli’s portrayal in the newssheets had not altered with time. The fellow you could see in the papers today was years past his date, and bore little resemblance to the withered, hunted man before him.
“May she live forever,” Fisher echoed.
Disraeli smiled, as if he were pleased to hear him repeat the phrase. “And you would be Officer Martin Fisher. I am glad you could make it at such short notice. Your reputation precedes you. Not many individuals have worked to make the Empire safe as you have.”
“I do my duty as best I can, sir.”
“Quite, quite.” Disraeli turned and began to escort Fisher down the gallery. The Prime Minister’s arms were crossed behind his back, shoulders a little slumped. “I presume you were told nothing about why you were called?”
Fisher shook his head, careful not to look at any of the paintings on either side.
“Such are the ways of some of our, hm, people. We require a service of you, Mister Fisher. Something beyond your usual remit. Tell me, do you know much about your great-grandmother?”
That gave him pause. “Do you mean Joanna Fisher?”
“The very same.”
“She caused some stir in her day. She hunted ghosts and spirits, sir, and advocated suffrage for women.”
“She did that, yes. But I’m referring to her marriage.”
“She was married?” Fisher was surprised enough to stop.
Disraeli paused. “Why, yes. It was very hush-hush. I believe she thought it would damage her public image as a strong, independent woman, or some such. That it was not common knowledge in your family surprises me, though.” He nodded that they should continue. “Your grandfather was born inside wedlock, Mister Fisher, and that is why we need you.”
They reached the gallery’s end, and stood before an arched double door. Disraeli twisted the handle one half turn, then paused. “You have not been in the presence of royalty, have you, Mister Fisher? Please try and remain calm.” He twisted, pushed and stepped
through.
The room seemed cramped after the scale of the gallery. Tall windows on the right-hand wall allowed anaemic light to fall in, highlighting the shadows rather than illuminating the room. A hearth, set but unlit, dominated the far wall. A rug of complex patterns and hunting animals covered most of the floor, and in its centre, on a stick-thin chair, sat the Queen.
She wore her customary black, and faced the windows, showing the door her profile. Her head tilted slightly back, mouth and eyes open and unmoving. Fisher wondered if she had heard their entrance. If she had, there was no sign, but even so Disraeli placed his palms together and gave a short bow.
“Your Supreme Majesty, may I present Officer Martin Fisher?”
There was no response.
Stuttering, Fisher said, “It is an honour, your Majesty.”
“You are welcome here, Martin Fisher.” The words were cold and layered, and seemed to enter his head without touching his ears.
He blinked, but her Majesty had not moved, offering only the same still profile. “I... Thank you, Ma’am.”
“You are confused. That is to be expected. Come stand before us, where we can see you in the light.”
He looked at Disraeli, who nodded, so he edged around towards the windows.
Halfway through his circuit he stopped, took a quick breath, and swallowed the scream clawing up his throat.
He stood obliquely to her, enough to see that she sat as one would expect any other person to sit – straight-backed, hands crossed on her lap. But he could not take another step, save at his sanity’s risk.
Mottled grey tentacles fingered through the Queen’ hair. One tip protruded from her bun, waving as if it were a snake’s tongue tasting the air. Another was plastered across her forehead, curling around her face, framing it. The narrow end was feeling around inside her open mouth. Within that insane vision, he spotted a pallid inflation at the other side of her head, something slickly damp, which rose and fell like a breathing sack. Nothing on Earth could have compelled him to move even one inch further, but he forced himself to stand his ground.
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 3
