The curious case of the Clockwork Man bas-2

by Mark Hodder

  They danced at the periphery of his vision, whispered in his ear, and followed him wherever he went. He cried and screamed for them to stop hounding him. He reasoned and demanded and begged.

  They ignored his pleas.

  He staggered into the Bricklayer's Arms on Bedford Street, intent on imbibing his tormentors into oblivion. Drink, when taken in copious quantities, always worked. Fairies, he'd discovered, were particularly allergic to burgundy.

  The pub was heaving with all manner of lowly types but that didn't matter because in recent weeks the working classes had looked with great favour upon the Rakes. As one man had said to him: “You hoity-toity types need teachin’ a blimmin’ lesson, mate, but since you be one o’ them Rake geezers, the only fing what I'm gonna teach yer is ‘ow ter git legless!”

  Glass after glass was purchased for him. Doyle emptied them assiduously, and the next thing he knew he was waking up in a doorway halfway down a dark, mist-swathed alley.

  How much time had passed? He didn't know. He could hear shouts and screams and violence in the near distance.

  He went back to sleep.

  The fairies came skipping into his dreams.

  “It is in thy blood to see us,” they told him. “It was in thy father's and it is in thy sons’.”

  He awoke again. Hauled himself upright. Staggered onward.

  “God in heaven,” he slurred. “Are they going to plague my boys, too?”

  Young Innes already showed signs of levelheadedness. Perhaps he would resist his tormentors, but little Arthur-dear little imaginative Arthur!-how would he cope?

  The memory of his children and his wife and his inability to keep them brought the tears to his eyes. He began to weep and couldn't stop.

  Time, chopped and jumbled, went by. Streets tumbled past. Smoke. Steam. Turmoil.

  Doyle found himself in another grubby backstreet and another filthy tavern. As before, a boisterous crowd willingly financed his raging alcoholism.

  Despite the wine, the fairies started to skip around his feet again. Either they were getting stronger or he was getting weaker.

  He drank and walked and drank and cried and drank and ranted and, quite suddenly, Big Ben was chiming midnight and he was aware of his surroundings.

  Clarity!

  There was something he had to do, a place he had to be, an urge he couldn't defy.

  Doyle found himself on the outskirts of the Strand. It was closed off and secured by a police cordon. Access and egress were impossible from Trafalgar Square in the west all the way to Fleet Street in the east.

  He had no idea why he wanted to get onto the famous thoroughfare but the determination to do so was all-consuming.

  Kingsway and Aldwych were blocked, as were the various roads abutting the main street from the north and those leading up to it from the Thames, to the south. Only Bridewell Alley had been overlooked, due, perhaps, to its extreme narrowness and the fact that it was clogged with rubbish.

  Doyle slipped into it, tottered along its length, and lurched out into the wide street beyond. The Strand had once been among London's most glamorous playgrounds but now broken glass crunched underfoot and many of its buildings were gutted, blackened, and windowless.

  It was teeming with thousands of Rakes and wraiths. The latter, Doyle was used to. He himself had ventured out in spirit form on countless occasions in recent months. The corporeal bodies, though, unnerved him. Their milky eyes, bluish-grey skin, and dragging walk spoke of the grave. Indeed, the air was heavy with the cloying odour of putrefying flesh.

  He kept his eyes downcast and shoved his way past them until he reached a grand old edifice, undamaged by the rioting. Only vaguely aware of what he was doing, he stumbled into the opulent structure and ascended five flights of stairs. He banged on a door and entered.

  Fairies darted between and around his ankles.

  He sat at a table.

  His hands were gripped.

  Someone said, in a dry, husky voice, something about the greater good of mankind.

  “The greater good of mankind,” he chanted, like an automaton. Then: “Freedom! Liberation! Anarchy! No God!”

  “Thy shackles are unbreakable, soft skin,” a fairy whispered.

  “Leave me alone,” he hissed, then aloud: “Rules must be broken! Propriety must be challenged! The status quo must be unbalanced! True liberty!”

  “Slave to oppositions!” the fairy mocked. “There are but two eyes in thy head! Will the third not open for thee?”

  The Russian woman materialised, just as she'd done many times before.

  “Go forth, apostles,” she said. “Liberate the downtrodden and the oppressed.”

  She reached out to touch him.

  He knew what would happen, and he knew it had happened too many times before. This time would be the last. After so many separations, he was too exhausted for the rejoining.

  He tried to say no.

  He failed.

  Her nebulous finger brushed his forehead.

  Time distorted and space warped out of shape.

  Somehow, impossibly, he was in two places at once.

  He shuffled along the Strand, feeling heavy and sodden and empty and lonely and mindless and lost.

  He also drifted, amorphously, elsewhere on the thoroughfare, and the Russian woman's force of will resonated like a church bell through what little substance this aspect of him possessed.

  A fairy floated before his two sets of eyes-the corporeal ones and the formless ones.

  “Thou hast fulfilled the role assigned to thee. Recurrence, not transcendence, shall come,” it tinkled.

  “Leave me alone, you bloody lizard!” he snarled.

  He wondered at his own words.

  Lizard?

  At the Trafalgar Square end of the Strand, Commander Krishnamurthy, his entire face mottled with bruises after his ordeal at Tichborne House, squinted through the dense atmosphere and addressed a gathering of constables.

  “Now then, lads,” he said, “who's got a headache?”

  More than half the men raised their hands.

  “Me too. And let me tell you, I've had quite enough of it. So tonight we're going to sort it out. However, I'm afraid that, for some of you, the headache is going to get worse before it gets better. We're close to the source of the public disorder that's been disrupting the city these days past, and, whatever it is, it's going to wheedle its way into your brains to try to make a defector of you. You all know fellow constables who've gone absent without leave to join the rioters-”

  The men muttered an acknowledgment, and one of them growled: “Bloody deserters!”

  “No,” Krishnamurthy objected. “Their minds are being controlled-and, as I say, over the next few hours, it's likely that the same thing will happen to some of us.”

  “No, sir!” the men protested.

  “We have to be prepared for it. We don't want to be adding ourselves to the enemy forces, hey? So here are my orders, lads, and I pray I never have to tell you to do anything like this ever again: in the event that you notice one of your fellows supporting, or beginning to support, the opposition, take out your truncheon and clock him over the head with it!”

  The constables looked at each other, perplexed.

  “I mean it!” Krishnamurthy said. “If needs must, render your colleague unconscious. Knock him out! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” came the hesitant responses.

  Krishnamurthy knew that not far away, at the top of Kingsway, Detective Inspector Honesty was giving the same speech to another gathering of constables, though probably in a rather more concise fashion, while in Fleet Street, Detective Inspector Trounce was doing the same.

  The three groups of policemen were each about a hundred and fifty men strong. Much smaller teams were guarding the various minor routes into the Strand.

  Krishnamurthy estimated that a force of a little over six hundred constables had congregated around the area. From what he'd seen so far, he suspect
ed that at least four times that number of Rakes lurked inside the police cordon.

  “Is this really all we can muster?” he muttered to himself. “I knew the force was haemorrhaging men but I'd no idea it was this bad!”

  He peered into the rolling ground-level cloud. There was a full moon somewhere above, and its light gave the mist a weird and deceptively bright silvery glow. However, the shadows were dense, and, with most of the street's gas lamps destroyed, visibility was far worse than it seemed.

  Sergeant Slaughter approached, stood beside him, and noted: “If it's not one thing, it's another, Commander.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This murk, sir. There's been a lot fewer vehicles on the streets what with the rioting, so where's the bally steam coming from?”

  “Hmm, that's a very good question!”

  “Then, of course, the steam got mixed up with the smoke from the fires, so we got this dirty grey soup. But most of the fires in this area burned themselves out a good while ago. So, again, Commander: where's it coming from?”

  Krishnamurthy suddenly became aware that his breath was clouding in front of his face.

  “By jingo!” he exclaimed. “I hadn't realised! The weather's on the turn!”

  “Crept up on us, didn't it!” Slaughter said. “The end of the heatwave, and about time, too. Except, it looks like the change has brought on a London particular.”

  “Fog!” Krishnamurthy spat. “Curse it! That's exactly what we don't need!”

  He heard the chopping of an approaching rotorchair.

  “One of your squad, Commander?” Slaughter asked. “He's taking a risk, isn't he?”

  “He'll be all right as long as he stays this side of the cordon. We're at the edge of the danger zone. If he flies past us and over the Strand-” He made a gesture with his hand, indicating something plunging downward.

  “Hallo! He's landing!” Slaughter cried.

  The miasma parted and men ran out of the way as the rotorchair descended, dropping like a stone and only slowing at the very last moment before lightly touching the cobbles and coming to rest. A man, wearing the Flying Squad uniform and with goggles covering his eyes, clambered out of the contraption and ran over to Krishnamurthy.

  “Hello, sir!” he said, with a salute.

  “Hallo, Milligan. What's the news?”

  “Not good, I'm afraid. The rioting is most intense to the east of here, especially around the Bank of England, which is up in flames. As if that's not bad enough, the circle of disorder is fast approaching the East End.”

  “Blast it!” Krishnamurthy whispered. He removed his peaked cap and massaged his temples. Once the madness touched the overcrowded Cauldron, all hell would break loose. If the East Enders began rioting, London would be lost.

  “Milligan, gather together the patrols in the north and west and have them join you in the east. If it becomes necessary, fly low and use your pistols to fire warning shots at the rioters. Shoot a few men in the leg if you have to! Anything that might hold them at bay for a while.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Milligan ran back to his machine, strapped himself in, and, with a roar of the engine, rose on a cone of steam and vanished into the fog. Seconds later, the chopping of the rotorchair's wings suddenly stopped, there was an instant of absolute silence, then the machine dropped straight back down out of the cloud and smashed into the road.

  Krishnamurthy clutched Sergeant Slaughter's arm and looked at him with an expression of shock.

  They ran to the wreckage. Constables joined them. The flying machine had turned upside down before hitting the ground. Milligan lay beneath it, mangled and dead.

  Wordlessly, Krishnamurthy squatted and closed the man's eyes.

  “What happened?” Slaughter asked.

  “It seems our enemy has expanded the no-flying zone.”

  “By the Lord Harry,” the sergeant muttered. “They must realise we're here.”

  Krishnamurthy glanced back toward the Strand. “Damnation!” he said under his breath. “Come on, Swinburne! Hurry up!”

  Charles Doyle was dead and he knew it.

  Only the Russian bitch's force of will was keeping his carcass moving, his spirit self-aware.

  Her words vibrated and throbbed in his mind: “Break free! Cast off your chains! Rise up and overthrow!”

  They cut into him, were magnified through him as if he were a lens, then radiated outward, receding into the far distance, where they touched other astral bodies and were bounced farther on.

  If only he could press his hands over his ears, block out that voice!

  A tiny man with moth wings fluttered in front of his face and sang: “Prepare thyself!”

  He tried to bat the fairy away but his hands were either without substance or too heavy and slow, it wasn't clear to him which.

  A part of him coiled and writhed through the atmosphere near the Fleet Street end of the Strand, while the other part dragged itself along the pavement of Kingsway.

  He was overwhelmed by a voracious hunger. It was not for food, nor even for alcohol. No. This rapacious craving was for the fulfillment of life!

  For how long had he been tormented by this lack? His entire existence, it seemed. The opportunities he'd missed or wasted! He'd been so cautious, so afraid of making a mistake, that he hadn't done anything-instead, he'd escaped into the bottle, and now it was too late!

  “I had life but I didn't live it!” he wept. “I want it back! Please, don't let me die like this!”

  Something registered in his consciousness. There was a figure ahead, moving in the thickening fog. He could sense its warmth, its vitality. There were others beyond it, but this one was close.

  A beating heart! Pulsating blood! Life!

  He must have it! He must have it!

  His corpse lurched forward, the arms reached out, the fingers curled into claws.

  There came a distant shout: “Constable Tamworth! Come back! Don't wander from the group, man!”

  Detective Inspector Honesty looked at his pocket watch. It was ten to three in the morning.

  He felt weary.

  He loved police work, mainly because he was very good at it, but at times like this his mind tended to drift to what he considered his true vocation: gardening. In his youth, he'd dreamed of becoming a landscape gardener, but his father, one of the original Peelers, had insisted that his boy follow him into the force and wouldn't hear otherwise. Honesty didn't begrudge the old man's stubbornness; policing had, after all, gained him respect, a secure job with prospects, and a loving young wife whom he'd met while on a murder case. He'd been able to buy a house with a large garden, too, and it was the envy of the neighbourhood, with its bright displays of flowers and finely trimmed lawn.

  What, though, would his life have been like had he defied his father?

  He remembered something Sir Richard Francis Burton had told him: that when Edward Oxford, the man they called Spring Heeled Jack, had altered time, original future history had become disconnected. It still existed-in the same way that, if you find yourself at a junction, taking road A won't cause road B to vanish-but it was inaccessible; there was no way back to the junction without a time-travelling device.

  Did that mean that somewhere, some when, there was a Thomas Manfred Honesty, Landscape Gardener?

  He hoped so. It was a strangely comforting thought.

  It was ten to three.

  His watch had stopped.

  He shook it and tut-tutted.

  Only a couple of minutes had passed, he was sure. The signal wouldn't come for at least another hour.

  His men were restless and he was feeling the same way.

  In front of the police cordon, Kingsway had faded from sight, obscured by the fog, which was obviously returning to London with a vengeance. The shambling figures, visible earlier, were now hidden, which made them seem even more uncanny and threatening.

  “Dead Rakes,” he muttered, for the umpteenth time. “Damned peculiar.�
�

  A constable approached and pointed wordlessly back at the men. Honesty looked and saw three wraiths swirling among them. The policemen were swiping at the ghosts with their truncheons, to no effect.

  “Stop that!” he ordered. “Waste of time! Save your strength!”

  They desisted, but one of the men looked at him, his face suddenly contorting with fury, and screamed: “Don't bloody well tell me what to do!”

  “Constable Tamworth! At ease!”

  “At ease yourself, you little jumped-up poseur! Who are you to give me orders?”

  “Your commanding officer!”

  “No, mate. I'll follow no one but Tichborne!”

  Honesty sighed and turned to another man. “Sergeant Piper,” he ordered. “Your truncheon. Back of Tamworth's head. Now!”

  Piper nodded and unhooked his truncheon from his belt.

  “Not bloody likely!” Tamworth said. He took to his heels and vanished into the fog.

  The detective inspector yelled after him: “Constable Tamworth! Don't wander from the group, man!”

  A bubbling wail of terror answered him.

  Three policemen broke away from the cordon and ran toward the sound.

  “No! Menders! Carlyle! Patterson! Come back!”

  “He's in trouble, sir!” Carlyle protested before plunging into the pall.

  Honesty turned to the main group and bellowed: “Stay here! Move and I'll have your guts for garters! Come with me, Piper.”

  He gritted his teeth and, with the sergeant, hurried after his men.

  As they came into view, he saw Menders raise his arm, point his pistol at something, pull the trigger, and curse: “Jammed, damn the thing!”

  He looked to where the constable had aimed and saw Tamworth sprawled on the ground. The man's jacket and shirt had been ripped aside and his stomach torn open. Squatting over him, hands buried in the policeman's intestines, was a thin, bearded, bespectacled dead man. The corpse looked up, moaned, and stood. Entrails oozed from his hands and fell to the cobbles. “My apologies,” he said. “I need life.”

  “Mary, mother of God!” exclaimed Menders. He threw his pistol and it bounced off the bearded man's forehead.

  Sergeant Piper whispered, “Useless. You can't kill a bloody stiff!”