The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  And for five pounds, she had called him Mr Havelock. For the same five pounds, she promised to do just one job for him, on a house on that strange class barrier between the slums of Blackfriars and the streets off the Strand, where the medieval buildings of Fleet Street decayed into rotting wooden sheds or were replaced by new brick houses, and where Mr Horatio Lyle patiently carried out his experiments, long into the night. For five pounds she would have run to Edinburgh and back and still had change from the expenses - but things were different now. Things had changed the night she went to earn her five pounds, and now she only remembered Augustus Havelock as a bad dream.

  Horatio Lyle clearly remembered Augustus Havelock with more distinct feeling, apparent as he systematically tore Berwick’s bedroom to pieces, dragging pillows off the bed, peering under the mattress, opening every drawer and even looking behind every book, running his fingers down their spines and scowling at every title on the shelf.

  ‘Magnetism, magnetism, magnetism!’ he chanted, turning from the bookshelf. ‘Berwick, Havelock and bloody magnetism!’

  ‘It might be all right?’ hazarded Tess. ‘I mean . . . like this bloke Havelock, he ain’t done nothin’ evil for a while, yes?’

  ‘Apart from hiring you to break into my house?’ suggested Lyle.

  ‘Well, yes, but that were all his fault and nothin’ to do with me!’

  ‘Augustus Havelock is a bad person,’ hissed Lyle. ‘He ’s never doing anything but it ’s for something bad.’

  ‘How’d you know him anyway?’

  ‘Oh, we ’ve met many times,’ he rumbled, running his fingers round the edge of the wall in the forlorn hope it might not be as solid as it looked. ‘He likes to say he’s a scientist.’

  ‘Well, that can’t be so nasty!’

  ‘He’s a scientist who’s stolen every idea he ’s had from better people, a scientist who bullies and threatens and buys his way into power. Everything he ’s ever done that’s been in any sense original work has all been about power; power is the end of learning, he learns for wealth and ambition and studies for greed and personal gain and reads to use what he knows, to manipulate it and ...’

  ‘That don’t sound bad.’

  ‘Teresa, he will only study the ocean if he’s sure there’s buried treasure under it. He will only study the stars if he thinks he needs to navigate, he will only study the soil if he thinks it can be tilled to grow a cheaper kind of tobacco.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He has never once looked at the stars and . . . and just stopped. He has never once thought that the moon is beautiful and that the sky at night is a marvel. He has never once looked at the ocean when the sun is coming up across it and thought it would make a picture. He has never once looked at the mathematics of a pine cone and seen an infinite regression of numbers, a dance of numbers in nature, and smiled to think that there is something more we do not understand, smiled to realize that there is more to learn, more to see, more to marvel at, he . . . he does not marvel at it. There is no beauty in the sun unless it is warming his crops, there is no miracle in the maths unless it is winding the spindle on the loom, there is no joy in the stars unless they are falling to earth to be counted and sold again. Everything he does is for himself. He is nothing but . . . coldness. Calculating, dispassionate coldness.’

  ‘Is that why he . . . wanted stuff stolen from you? ’Cos you and him . . . are all grrry an’ all?’

  ‘Teresa, he wanted my plans for a . . .’ Lyle froze. ‘Oh my goodness.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He told you to steal the papers in the study, didn’t he? Top left shelf, behind the silver nitrate?’

  ‘So? An’ remember, it ain’t my fault an’ all an’ how I’m all nice really an’ you promised not to turn me in ’cos . . .’

  ‘Teresa, those were preliminary designs for a capacitor bank.’

  ‘A whatty?’

  ‘A tool for storing charge, but I mean a lot of charge, I mean millions and millions and millions of coulombs of charge, billions - do you know what a billion is?’

  ‘No. What ’s that?’

  ‘It ’s a number with nine zeros after it.’

  ‘An’ ... that’s big?’

  ‘All right, put it another way. If everyone in Britain and France and probably Italy too all came to London and stood shoulder to shoulder, they would fill every street of the city to the very, very edge, and there would be no space to move, no space to breathe, every house and every floor of every street in the city full of people, yes?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Now take about eighty Londons full of all these people and put them all shoulder to shoulder and you have roughly a billion people.’

  Tess thought about it. Finally she said, ‘That’s ... big, right?’

  ‘You’re there.’

  ‘So ... this big, big number ... what ’s it doin’ exactly?’

  ‘That was what the drawings were about. So much energy, all locked up in one place, ready to be discharged at any moment. They were only preliminary plans, of course, I don’t think it could really have been built, the resource needs were too high, not to mention the gold, but . . .’

  ‘Gold?’

  ‘. . . but Berwick expressed interest in the designs too . . .’

  ‘You said somethin’ ’bout gold . . .’

  ‘My God, what ’s he got himself involved with?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Thank you, Teresa.’

  ‘Just tryin’ to be helpful.’

  ‘I’ve got to find him.’

  ‘Really? ’ She saw his face and let out a pained little sigh. ‘Right. ’Course. What we needs is a clue. Oh oh oh oh . . . maybe!’

  ‘Maybe?’ asked Lyle hopefully.

  ‘Erm ... no. I don’t think it’s going to work.’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘How’s about ...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Erm ... uh . . . maybe Tatey-watey could track him down?’

  Two pairs of sceptical eyes turned to Tate, who, aware of the attention fixed on him, rolled over with his paws in the air, ears sprawled out on either side of his head, and belly up, waiting to be scratched. Lyle said in a strained voice, ‘I’m not sure if Tate appreciates his role in this investigation.’

  ‘You’re always sayin’ how he’s a bloodhound an’ how he’s really good at stuff an’ all! Maybe he could just smell this Berwick fella and then we just follow Tatey-watey, because he’s a good little Tatey, aren’t you, yes you are, yes you are . . .’

  ‘Through the rain?’

  ‘Well, we’d have to wait, I suppose, ’til after. An’ we ’d need some kind of thing of this Berwick’s.’

  Lyle ’s eyebrows twitched for a moment, and Tess stabbed a triumphant finger in the air. ‘Ah-ha!’

  ‘Ah-ha?’ he echoed, confused.

  ‘You just looked all pen . . . pensi . . . thinkin’, like! You reckon my idea ain’t a bucket of pure!’

  ‘Language!’

  ‘What? I was bein’ good!’

  ‘Polite young ladies don’t refer to buckets of pure in decent conversation,’ he said primly.

  ‘But ... it’s dog poo,’ she said, in the voice of one trying to get her head round an important but difficult distinction. ‘I didn’t go and say how my idea ain’t a bucket of dog poo, now did I?’

  ‘You know, you’re right.’

  ‘See!’

  ‘I want to see Berwick’s clothes.’

  They found them in the scullery, which was essentially a stone sink an easy totter from the outside pump. It was filled with all the equipment of a modern laundry room, such as a metal and wood scrubbing board, a bar of soap that dissolved into acidic little flakes and hissed with an ugly chemical smell on the faintest contact with water, and a pair of rollers set in an iron frame that Tess had always associated with crushed fingertips, designed to squelch the water out of even the thickest of fabrics. Lyle went straight for the dirtiest-looking clothes he could fin
d and held them up, sniffing deeply. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly, a snort later. ‘Tess, what do you smell?’

  ‘Erm . . .’ said Tess, leaning away from the clothes like a cat from off milk.

  ‘Come on, come on, this whole smell thing was your idea, what do you smell?’

  She took a cautious sniff and turned white. ‘It’s horrid!’

  ‘I’d say . . .’ Lyle took another long, luxurious sniff, which made Tess turn even paler. ‘. . . copper dust, eel pie, ammonia, pure ethyl alcohol, coal and raw sewage.’

  ‘An’ this makes you all happy?’

  He rummaged in the jacket pockets, and his face split into a grin of delight. ‘It gets better!’ His hand came out, holding a small papery stub. ‘A used single ticket, Baker Street to King’s Cross.’

  ‘A single ticket for what?’

  ‘The Metropolitan train, Teresa. Raw sewage and an Underground ticket: only one place now to look for Berwick.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Underground

  Tess, although she had to admit she was growing less alarmed by the whole science thing, didn’t hold with these new-fangled ways of travelling. She understood big, overland trains, giant snorting things with gleaming green engines and giant wheels that gave off belches of steam, and compartments and travel in general, and she was even willing to come to terms with the iron steamers that were starting to be seen everywhere, with their big paddles churning at each side. But the new London Underground Metropolitan Line, advertised as the first of its kind in the world, running Paddington to Farringdon, unsettled her. The strange little steam engines that pulled open-air carriages through the cut-and-cover tunnels between the stations seemed insufficient for the task assigned to them, and the smoke and steam billowed through the tunnels, making them suffocating and claustrophobic, despite the tremendous cheers of first-time travellers whenever they experienced the novelty of taking the steam engine underground, and the strange sensation of rising up into the light at King’s Cross. Only in a confined space, however, did you begin to realize quite how much steam a steam train gave out.

  ‘Technology!’ proclaimed Lyle as they dropped down under the giant brick arches of Baker Street Station into the sooty blackness of the Underground. Along the platform, the dimness was broken up by a lamp under every other arch and above each low wooden bench. ‘The new way to travel!’

  ‘It ’s smelly,’ said Tess.

  ‘Teresa, in this city you can smell like horse manure, or you can smell like coal dust; it’s your choice.’

  ‘You went and said manure!’

  ‘Well ... yes ...’

  ‘An’ you go an’ are all . . . adult when I say pure,’ she scowled. ‘Typical.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lyle in a strained voice, ‘but when I talk about manure I use it in its scientific sense, to guide and direct the mind in a precise direction that more delicate language might not permit. When you say manure, you say it because it makes you giggle.’

  Tess beamed. ‘Yep!’

  ‘Teresa, do you smell that?’

  ‘I smell lotsa things, and it ain’t good.’

  ‘All right, let me rephrase. Teresa, can you please coax Tate out from underneath that bench?’

  Tate was indeed hiding under a bench, eyes watering in distress, head tucked so far into his belly that he looked like a pair of paws surrounded by ears, with no other attached limbs to speak of. It took Tess less than a second to notice what was causing Tate so much dismay. The overwhelming stench of sewage rose up from a grate set in the floor at the end of the platform. It didn’t even bother with the nose but went straight through the throat and settled on the lungs, making every breath oppressive; it seeped into the skin so that she could feel her own sweat crawling with the odour of it, as if the smell was static that snapped and rippled with her every movement, or a gauze veil draped in the air, that had to be physically pushed aside.

  ‘Raw sewage and the Underground,’ said Lyle, though even his customary brightness in the face of New and Interesting Revelations had diminished a little in the presence of the stench. ‘All good so far.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Teresa,’ declared Lyle firmly, ‘a Good brush with death and adventure is a . . .’

  ‘. . . is a Safe brush with death and adventure, Mister Lyle,’ chanted Tess dutifully. ‘What we gonna do now?’

  ‘Follow the smell.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down there.’

  His toe, being the only part of him sufficiently insensitive to move much closer to the smell, pointed straight at the grate, and downwards. In Tess’s arms, Tate started to struggle and whimper. Tess stood rooted to the spot. ‘You have got to be takin’ the ... I mean . . . got to be havin’ a laugh, with all undue respect an’ that.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a new pair of shoes?’ hazarded Lyle, seeing that Tess was not about to be moved.

  ‘What’s that s’posed to do?’

  ‘I’m told it’s something you’re supposed to say to young ladies of a certain age as an incentive,’ he mumbled, the tips of his ears starting to turn a little pink. ‘You say that you’ll buy them shoes or ... or a ribbon for their hair or ... or a new set of lock picks or the latest efficiency of hydraulic piston or something . . .’ Lyle’s voice trailed off into silence, withered out of the air by the heat of Tess’s glare. ‘It was just a thought.’

  ‘A ribbon for my hair?’

  ‘It did seem like a silly idea at the time.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘How about a new set of lock picks?’

  ‘Mine work fine! Although . . . you never know when that acid stuff ...’

  ‘Hydrochloric acid?’

  ‘That’s the ducky! Never know when that might come in handy.’

  Lyle patted her on the shoulder, a gesture that over the last few months had become a distracted habit. ‘Maybe for Christmas, Teresa. In the mean time, I’m going down that grate and you are more than welcome to stay here, all by yourself, getting bored and impatient while I dance with death and clash with criminality, all by myself. Don’t you worry your head about it; you just stay here.’

  Tess let out a frustrated little sigh. She had a feeling that she was being used, again, but in the end what was she going to do that was any better? So, with a stamp of her foot she hissed through her teeth, ‘An’ whose goin’ to cook me breakfast if you get all dead?’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ said Lyle, leaning down to lift up the grate.

  London’s sewers were almost as new as London’s Underground. But unlike the Metropolitan Line, which had been built to last, the tunnel that Lyle and Tess dropped into had not aged gracefully. Tate had refused to go within a foot of the grate, and Tess didn’t blame him, trusting in his highly developed survival instinct, and increasingly regretting that she hadn’t stayed above ground and cowered with him under the nearest bench. Thin, stagnant water, mixed with something else that Tess didn’t want to contemplate, barely rippled around their feet. Where the tunnel curved up and away from the dark liquid with its oily, rotting sheen, Tess slid her fingers down a wall encrusted with a mixture of hard, rough, crystalline ridges and strangely warm, organic areas of total smoothness, where odd lichens seemed to have forced their way through the darkness out of the brickwork, their surfaces bubbling and fuming with strange bacterial explosions. Tess felt through the darkness for something less sinister and found Lyle ’s waist. ‘I don’t like it here!’ she whimpered.

  In the gloom, there was a faint whu-phumph sound, followed by a billowing of dull, smoky yellow light as Lyle struck a match almost as long as his upper arm. The match dripped shards of loose yellow phosphorus that hissed and faded under the surface of the almost-black-traced-with-yellow sludge beneath their feet.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ muttered Lyle, holding up the light. ‘Look at the brickwork - it ’s at least ten years old.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Bazalgette’s sewer opened more recently than that. Come on, Teresa.�
�

  Tess picked her unhappy way after Lyle as he moved on down the tunnel. The light from the match held out in front of him turned his shape into a black silhouette, picked out against its faint yellow glow. Overhead, Tess heard the clattering as it slowed and the long whheeeeee sound of an engine letting off steam in the station, and the long piping of the stationmaster’s whistle. She felt the brickwork hum as the wheels rattled overhead, a gentle gu-dunk, gu-dunk, gu-dunk as the train picked up speed, until she felt as if her brain was being shaken inside her skull.

  They didn’t have to walk very far. After five minutes the tunnel began to narrow, until Lyle was walking almost doubled over, and the walls were little more than a shoulder’s-width apart. Every ten minutes or so Tess felt the world shake as a train thudded overhead. When Lyle’s match guttered out, Tess was surprised to see that there was light in the tunnel anyway, a spot of greyness far ahead. The ground became more solid, finally condensing to produce a dull crunch underfoot. In the light that Lyle struck again Tess could clearly see the dull ochre-red of the walls, and the black of the filth-encrusted floor, trampled down by a tide of what were just distinguishable as footprints.

  In silence they walked up the tunnel. As it got smaller, the heat became worse, although the smell didn’t; it was as if the body could cope with only one overwhelming sensation at a time and had chosen to concentrate on the dry burning of the skin rather than the distress of the nose. The heat was too great to allow for sweat; it just burnt dry in an instant, dragged the life out of every breath and suffocated even smell. Eventually the tunnel stopped at a grate, which had a shiny new chain drawn across it and through a hook in the wall.

  Beyond, by the thin grey daylight filtering down through a thousand seeming pinpricks set into the ceiling, was a room, all by itself in the middle of nowhere. It was high and domed, made of the same red brick as the rest of the passage, but its floor was clean, except for the odd dirty footprint, and covered over with grey stone slabs. On the far side, shadows lurked beneath a low arch, half-obscuring some long wooden tables and a number of chairs.