The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  Satisfied with his night’s work so far, the man in the grey coat slipped to the door and peered outside. A single lamp hung down from a house bridging the end of the narrow street; at the other end, another faint light burnt by the doorway of a small church, its stones stained black with soot. Across the way was the high wall of a workhouse, all the lights long since out, and the gate chained shut for the evening. He listened for the sound of movement, and heard nothing more than the scuttle of a rat somewhere in the churchyard, the hiss of a cat that has seen its prey, and, in the distance, the shout of the butchers as they started to prepare their meat for the morning’s market, and the bleating of a flock of sheep being herded through the arches of Smithfield for slaughter.

  There was no sign of another person on the street.

  The man let out a sigh, closed the inn door quietly behind him, and started walking, his feet barely making a sound now as he moved up the side of the road, hands in his pockets. He passed under the light and glanced round the corner, into more quiet streets, all darkened now. He took a moment to recover his bearings, glanced up out of habit to see if there were any stars - the clouds were too thick that night to tell - and looked down again, into a pair of bright green eyes, so bright he could see their emerald colour even though the owner stood just outside the light.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t even have time for the surprise to show on his face, but dragged one hand out of his pocket and opened his fingers, hurling something small and silverish on to the floor. It shattered, the fragments of glass lost behind a sudden explosion of smoke and sparks that hissed and spat around his feet, obscuring him in a second. He turned and ran. Down the street, past the door of the inn, over the old rusted fence of the church, into the churchyard, bounding over graves and past ancient memorial slabs, over the fence on the other side - a longer drop than he expected; his feet almost went out from under him on the street as he landed - crouching low beneath the raised bank of the churchyard wall, turning and running again, down an alley that smelt of the sewers and old refuse, into a courtyard criss-crossed with empty washing lines, round the side of an old trough converted into a washer-woman’s basin, searching for an alley at the other end, a flicker of light ahead, the sound of a voice calling, ‘Two of the clock, two of the clock!’ somewhere in the distance, and a policeman’s whirling rattle. He chose a direction based on the sound and ran blindly into the darkness, feeling his way along a wall, across shut doors spiky with splinters, until the wall stopped and turned into an alley so tight he had to swivel sideways to edge through it, pressing his back against one wall and shuffling his way along it towards the darker patch of darkness at the end that suggested, dear God, perhaps another street.

  He stepped out into it, looked left and right, and saw just a second too late a white-gloved fist swinging towards him. He turned his face in time for it to hit his shoulder, knocking him back; heard steps, and felt another hand grab his other arm, dragging it back, another hand somewhere across his face, leather-covered fingers scraping over his teeth and nose, pulling his head to one side. And there it was again, the flash of green eyes that he shouldn’t be able to see were green, like the gleam of a cat’s gaze in the night, before it darts away. Knowing too well what he might see, he closed his eyes as tight as he could even as he gave up fighting, feet scrabbling in vain for a foothold, slipping half to his knees, held up only by the hands that restrained him.

  Silence settled. The only breathing he could hear was his own, fast and heavy. He took a deeper breath and held it, letting his ears adjust to the quiet in those few seconds, and heard other, softer breaths near by, from at least three or four people, and the sound of shoes on the cobbles. He let out his breath in a rush as fear and adrenaline took control of his heart again and made it hammer.

  Gently, a voice said, a woman’s voice like the sound of wind chimes, ‘Open your eyes.’ He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter and rammed his chin into his chest, bending his head down towards the ground. ‘Please open your eyes,’ said the voice. He didn’t respond. ‘You know, I could try my subtle womanly graces on you,’ continued the voice easily, ‘or I could cut off your little finger. Which would you rather?’

  When he didn’t answer, someone took his left hand, which was duly raised, turning his palm skywards. He blurted, still not opening his eyes, ‘Subtle womanly graces, please! Any day!’

  The fingers across his hand stopped moving, although the grip on his arm wasn’t relaxed.

  ‘Where is Berwick?’ He could feel the warmth of the woman’s breath in his ear as she whispered the question.

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Little fingers are surprisingly useful; it’s difficult to play an octave on the piano without your little finger. Where is Berwick?’

  ‘Uh . . . south of Wensleydale?’

  ‘Mr Berwick, Mr Andrew Berwick Esquire.’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong man, ma’am.’

  The fingers that had seized his hand let it go, then brushed his chin and gently pulled it up. ‘Why do you close your eyes?’ breathed the voice.

  ‘Nervous reaction?’ hazarded the man.

  ‘Don’t you want to see who I am?’

  ‘No, not at all!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You might . . . not want a living witness?’ he suggested.

  ‘To what crime? Here we are, pleasantly discussing an acquaintance of yours. Where is Berwick?’

  ‘Never met the man.’

  ‘He was your father’s closest friend.’

  ‘Children never pay attention to their parents; it’s all part of learning about life!’

  ‘Are you scared of being bewitched?’

  ‘I’m superstitious, me, never open my eyes anytime I get mugged in case of the evil eye and the pox and ... and ... other bewitching things.’

  ‘I thought you were a scientist.’

  ‘Why’d you think that, miss?’

  ‘The contents of your pockets are unusual for an ordinary working man.’

  ‘I’m a physician’s apprentice.’

  ‘You’re too old to be an apprentice.’

  ‘A physician’s life is one of constant learning, miss!’

  ‘You’re certainly a poor liar, whatever else you may be.’

  ‘You catch me at a bad time.’

  A foot hit somewhere behind his kneecap, not particularly hard, but enough to send him staggering, sliding awkwardly down on to one knee, head immediately pulled up from behind to look at what he guessed must be the darkness in which stood the woman with the wind-chime voice. She said, ‘You are carrying a magnet inside your coat pocket, sir. And you’re still afraid of us? Does it not make you wonder why, after all that you have done and all you have seen, we do not just kill you now? Don’t you desire to know answers? Don’t you want to know where Berwick is?’

  The man hesitated. Slowly, he said, ‘Why do you want Berwick?’

  ‘He is building something; a machine. It is a terrible thing, this creation; he should not have started it, and he now realizes this. Others are looking for it, others will know that you know him, others will ask you these same questions that we ask, but they may not be so sparing of your little finger. So, I ask you again: where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘With your eyes shut, your imagination must run wild. You must be thinking, “What are these people going to do? What next?” It is a strange security and a strange danger, not being able to see - security in that the pain may be less without seeing what is done to you, like an amputee who didn’t see the leg being removed and can’t quite believe it ’s gone, who still thinks he can twiddle his toes. Or like the blind prisoner who knows that pain must come but doesn’t know where from, and so imagines a thousand different ways of dying, a thousand different kinds of torment, until his mind is so wild with terror that the pain he merely thinks of becomes real, more real than anything that could be inflicted on him.

  ‘Which are you, sir? Do you ima
gine a thousand horrors worse than anything you could survive? Or do you cherish the comfort of not needing to know; do you need to see to believe that you really are dead, that you really are dying, that you really have been hurt? Have you ever had occasion to find out?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is! I swear, I haven’t seen him for years, I don’t know what you want! I don’t know where Berwick is!’

  Silence. Then a sound of movement in the air, and the grip on his arms was relaxed. He flopped forward on to his hands and knees, still keeping his eyes tightly shut. There were footsteps moving quickly away.

  Her voice overhead said, ‘I believe you.’ He heard an intake of breath, a hesitation; then, in a rush, almost an apology. ‘You have to understand; the thing he is building will kill my people, without discrimination. They will set it off and never even know those who die, but they will rejoice in their deaths. It is blind, cold, effortless murder. Do you know all your enemies well enough to say that every one of them is evil, that every one of them must die? I choose to let you live, Horatio Lyle.’

  He opened his eyes, saw black leather shoes capped with shiny silver buckles, looked up at a huge black cloak and half-concealed white-gloved hands, thence to a fur-lined collar, to a chin the colour of almond, past a warm, lightly amused smile, to a pair of emerald green eyes, crinkled at the edges, and a face framed by tightly tied and plaited long black hair.

  ‘Mister Lyle,’ said the woman politely.

  ‘Miss,’ he mumbled.

  ‘You have lovely eyes,’ she said. Turning smartly, she marched off down the street, leaving Horatio Lyle alone in the night.

  CHAPTER 2

  Curiosity

  A brief history of Teresa Hatch. It is brief of necessity, since at the time of her coming down to breakfast the morning after a man ran through the streets of Clerkenwell and a Machine began to move, Teresa Hatch was, in her own words, ‘not so old and proper as how you shouldn’t go and pay for all my things an’ cook for me an’ all’.

  She was born, so she’d been told, in a workhouse in the Aldgate area, and raised to be respectful, God-fearing, dutiful and hard-working, until about the age of five, when she discovered that all of those characteristics put together didn’t put bread on the table half so well as the ability to do a four-hundred-yard sprint with someone else ’s bread stuck under one arm. Upon which discovery she promptly departed by the nearest window from the orphanage where she’d been placed, wandered the streets for a while, fell in with a small but companionable group of snipes whose prime trick was distraction (she would fall down at the feet of a passing stranger and mumble incoherently while someone else did his pockets) and gradually worked her way up through the ranks so that by ten years of age she was widely respected as one of the most adept pickpockets and cat burglars in the East End, capable of crawling down the smallest chimney to grab the largest prize, always sought by the police, and never ever caught.

  Except once; and indeed the one time she ’d been caught, it hadn’t been so much by the police, as by a special constable who always adopted a baffled expression when presented with a truncheon, and held it between the tips of his fingers as if it might explode. Considering his attachment to the use of chemicals that often did exactly that if you gave them so much as a dirty look, let alone picked them up, this was a character trait Tess always found odd. The gentleman’s name was Horatio Lyle, and Tess had quickly struck up a mutually beneficial deal with him. He provided breakfast, a roof over her head, money, relative liberty and the occasional brush with death in unusual circumstances, and she picked any lock he wanted her to, held test tubes with pliers and a frightened expression, learnt the English alphabet and even, under the greatest of pressures, took baths.

  Admittedly, on occasion in Lyle ’s company the brushes with death and adventure were a bit too real: in the few months she’d known him she had seen more things explode, and wielded more nitroglycerin than the average artillery officer, at a wide variety of monsters, demons, battling hordes and insane, occasionally indestructible psychopaths. But overall, the deal between Teresa Hatch and Horatio Lyle was a good one.

  Except for this morning.

  Tess had come downstairs, ready to be fed, at exactly that hour when it’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, so that Mister Lyle would have to cook something huge and greasy just in between the two meals and comprising all Tess’s favourite mid-morning foods, but Lyle wasn’t cooking. He was not at the stove ready to fulfil his side of the bargain in bacon and eggs form. Instead he sat slumped in an old rocking chair, duly rocking, fingers steepled in front of his nose and heavy bags under his eyes. Under the chair was the fruit of their combined toil over the last couple of weeks - an object that Lyle called the ‘High Velocity, Low Torsion Wind Bolt Delivery Device’, Lyle having a somewhat exacting standard for the names of his inventions. Teresa, more accurately, described it as ‘the big crossbow type thing what probably won’t never be safe for no one to handle’. Scattered around the rest of the kitchen were bags of flour, sacks of sugar, preserved hams kept in the cool, bundles of herbs, stacks of cadmium and zinc blocks kept between clay sheets, pots of tubes and wire, ladles and saucepans and charcoal and bottles of silver nitrate, and all the other necessary paraphernalia of Lyle ’s profession, whatever it was Lyle’s profession could be said to be.

  Over the past few months Tess had found a role within Lyle’s household as somewhere between lab assistant and self-appointed spiritual guide, at least in her own mind. This morning she squinted at him suspiciously, considered all the choices available and announced, ‘You’re smelly this morning, Mister Lyle.’

  His eyes didn’t glance up from the floor, where they had locked with a look of suspicion, as if surprised to find the tiles exactly where he ’d left them the night before. His voice, however, was cordial enough. ‘Good morning to you too, Teresa.’

  ‘Ain’t you slept none?’

  ‘Not last night, no.’

  ‘Ain’t good for your health, Mister Lyle. You’ll get all grey and old.’

  ‘You show a touching care for my well-being.’

  Tess hesitated, not sure what he meant but certain that it couldn’t be good. Finally she said, ‘Ain’t we havin’ breakfast this morning?’

  ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘The big - really big - meal what is vital for a healthy and happy day,’ she added helpfully.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked distracted, worried. ‘Haven’t you had breakfast yet?’

  Tess gave him the look that Popes down the ages must have given junior cardinals when asked if they’d found God already. He didn’t seem to notice. Her confidence waned. ‘Oi,’ she said. ‘Summat . . . bad happen?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Like . . . bathtub bad?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a holiday and see if it fixes itself!’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You don’t really mean that, do you, Mister Lyle? It’s the way you ain’t saying “yes” that gives me the clue. When you ain’t saying “yes” what you really mean is “no”.’

  ‘Teresa, did I ever introduce you to Berwick?’

  ‘Nope. Is he rich?’

  The question seemed to take Lyle a little by surprise. ‘Well, I suppose he ’s passably well-to-do.’

  ‘Is he charitable with his money?’ Tess’s face was a picture of innocence.

  ‘He ’s an old family friend, one of the first to really dabble in electricity and magnetism, an acquaintance of Faraday’s, even. Unorthodox, but ...’

  ‘Not charitable?’

  ‘I must admit the idea never crossed my mind.’

  ‘But in askin’ about Berwick you must have an ult ... ulte . . . a nasty plan, right, ’cos there ’s got to be a reason. So I’m thinkin’ as how all this you not sleeping and not cooking breakfast - not even for a poor hungry waif such as myself, for example - and how you’re not cooking breakfast and this Berwick fella are all sorta tied up togeth
er, right?’

  ‘Probab—’ He saw her expression, and sighed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been practising insight when no one’s looking, Mister Lyle,’ Tess confided smugly. ‘Are you going to cook now?’

  ‘Teresa,’ said Lyle in a righteous voice, ‘I find myself in a conundrum.’

  ‘Oh dear. Is it itchy?’

  He tried again. ‘Perplexed. Bewildered. Bemused.’ Tess’s face remained optimistically empty. Lyle sighed and gave in. ‘In a bit of a pickle.’

  ‘Oh, right, yes, in a conunundrum! ’Course. Should’ve said.’

  ‘I think I may be about to do something very, very stupid.’

  ‘That ain’t much like you, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘Do you think you could say that without grinning, Teresa?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you for your devotion and respect. If I do this thing ...’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Let me get to the end of a sentence and I’ll tell you!’

  ‘Oh. All right. You just keep goin’ an’ all. Don’t let me put you off.’

  ‘If I do this thing, it’s quite possible that I’ll be plunging myself, my friend and you into terrible and fraught danger, mystery and entrapment, daring-do and doubt, so on and so forth, you get the general idea - from which there may be no escape.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What do you mean, “uh-huh”?’

  ‘Like how you does when you goes “perhaps”. What thing?’

  ‘But I mean really, where ’s the harm?’

  ‘Hello, Mister Lyle? What thing?’

  His gaze detached itself from the floor and met Teresa’s. For a moment, she saw something unsettling within it. He said, ‘I’m going to go and see Berwick.’

  Elsewhere in the city, waiting in a hansom cab, a woman with white gloves is polishing a crossbow. There are a lot of things wrong with this picture. For a start, crossbows had gone out of fashion even in the most obscure of aristocratic sporting circles several decades ago. And any woman seen handling such an implement, at least if she was from a class that had enough money to care about such things, would be an automatic candidate for the asylum, with its black walls, ice baths, boiling furnaces and faint aroma of opium. To make matters worse, the crossbow that was being polished was of an odd design, all strange bends and tiny spiralling cogs, as if its designer had secretly wanted to build clocks instead and given up at the third stroke. The bolt that was being slotted with surprising ease into the bow was made of brass that shone dully in the lamplight by which the woman worked.