The curious case of the Clockwork Man bas-2

by Mark Hodder

The temperature plummeted. A weird silence pressed against his ears, as if he'd suddenly become deaf, and an odd sense of timelessness muddled his senses.

  The tunnel tapered. It felt fleshy and damp and it glowed a sickly green. Burton squirmed forward on his stomach, cursing under his breath.

  “Do you mean to crush me, woman?”

  “ No, malchik moi. Let me help you. ”

  The ectoplasm started to exude a clear slimy substance.

  Burton felt his companion tangling against his legs as the tunnel behind them suddenly contracted. They were both pushed forward, sliding along the clammy pipe, picking up speed, helplessly out of control. Ahead, a sphincter-like opening dilated. Burton shot through it and splatted onto the floor in a high-ceilinged room. The brass man thudded onto his back.

  They lay sprawled in a heap, dripping slime.

  “Damnation,” Burton grumbled. “That wasn't very dignified.”

  “Dabro pazhalavat, Gaspadin Burton. What is this device you have brought with you? ”

  “He's my valet,” the king's agent responded, clambering to his feet and surveying the chamber.

  A liquid chuckle gurgled in his head. “ It is good that you have him. The staff here has been very unreliable of late. I cannot remember when I last saw a concierge or even a maid! ”

  The library was completely buried beneath huge ribs of glowing ectoplasm. They curved down from a big tangle of material in the centre of the ceiling, over the walls, across the floor, and melded together in its middle, where they rose up to form a slender three-foot-high plinth. At its top, delicate fingers of the material held a plum-sized black diamond-the Tichborne stone. The South American Eye of Naga.

  It hummed faintly.

  “ You realise, of course, that I have allowed your companion to approach merely to satisfy my curiosity. ”

  “I was counting on it.”

  “ Mechanisms of that sort do not normally function in my presence. ”

  “You are far too confident in your abilities.”

  “ I am? ”

  The king's agent turned to his valet and snapped: “Get the diamond!”

  The brass man bounded across to the plinth, reached for the stone, and stopped dead.

  A peal of laughter sounded from the ceiling.

  Burton looked up.

  “Fool!” Madam Blavatsky crowed, her voice deep and resonant. “You think you can defy me with clockwork?”

  She was enmeshed in a snarled knot of ectoplasmic tubes, naked; a middle-aged thick-bodied woman, suspended upside down above the plinth, with her arms stretched out horizontally. Her skull had cracked and broken open like an eggshell pushed apart from the inside, and bits of it hung loose. Her swollen brain bulged horribly out of the fissures. Thin ribbons of grey wrinkled tissue dangled down, entwining with her long brown hair and brushing against the diamond below.

  Her fathomless black eyes seemed to suck at Burton's very soul, so dreadfully intense were they; they stabbed him like pins transfixing a captured moth.

  “You are defeated, Gaspadin Burton. Soon the king will fall, the poor will flood out of your East End, and London will belong to the working classes. The disorder will spread from the capital like a disease. It will infect the entire country! Think of all those downtrodden, exploited, destitute workers in Britain's great manufacturing cities-Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds-where civilised man is lured from his peaceful labours in the countryside and turned back almost into an animal! What barbarous indifference they have suffered! How passionate shall be their revolt!”

  Burton snorted in disdain. “Don't try to hide your agenda behind false philanthropy, madam! You care naught for Britain's workers. You regard them as a means to a nefarious end, and nothing more. You've made your intentions quite clear!”

  “I do it to save Mother Russia.”

  The king's agent took three long strides and reached for the Eye of Naga.

  “You do it because you're a demented meddler and you have no control over yourself!” he barked.

  “Keep back!”

  Blue lightning crackled from Blavatsky's hands, hit Burton in the chest, and knocked him off his feet. He thumped down onto his back. For a second, it felt as if the flesh was boiling off his bones, but the torment passed in an instant, and, with an involuntary groan, he pushed himself up and faced his opponent again.

  Her voice echoed in his skull: “ Pah! There is no satisfaction in wounding your body, but your mind, malchik moi- ah!-what great value you place upon it, and how fragile it is! ”

  She drove a pitiless spike of shame into that part of his memory where regrets and disappointments dwelt, expecting to cripple him as she had in their previous encounter.

  Burton reeled and groaned, but then steadied himself and turned his awareness inward. His Dervish meditation had fortified and strengthened his mind to such a degree that her assault did no damage, but rather gave him a route through which to respond. He thrust mortification along the mediumistic channel that linked them, stabbing it deeply into her preening arrogance.

  She recoiled and cried out, shocked at the power of his riposte.

  “ Oh bozhe! You bite back! ”

  “Stay out of my head!”

  “I will do as I please, rebenok. And conceit?” She laughed. “You think that is my weakness? Nyet! Eto vlast! It is strength!”

  The king's agent shook his head. “No, madam. The love of one's own excellence serves only to obscure one's own mistakes.”

  “I have made no mistakes!”

  Burton looked into the woman's eyes and treated her to one of his characteristically savage smiles.

  “Haven't you?”

  She attacked again, digging fear into his insecurities, but his qualms had been modified by the conception that weaknesses are, in fact, the seeds of future strength. She was easily repelled, and his response-doubt driven into her confidence-was devastatingly effective.

  She moaned and twisted in her web of ectoplasm.

  “This self-assurance of yours was not there before!” she gasped, and there was a hint of anxiety in her tone.

  He felt her poking around his mind, preparing for another thrust. He pounced, locked her into position, and pierced her with a sharp edge of fear.

  She screamed.

  “That was breaking time followed by a prise de fer,” he said. “I learned it from an expert.”

  Blavatsky hung silently and he saw that she was trembling.

  “Good,” he said. “Perhaps now we can talk?”

  “Speak,” she whispered.

  “Your plan, madam, is defective for two reasons. The first is that you regard Russia's future as predestined; something fixed in time; a fate it is sure to suffer unless you interfere.”

  “I watched it happen.”

  “You watched a possibility, but there are many, many possible futures.”

  “You are wrong! I have seen what I have seen.”

  “Does your certainty not seem a little peculiar to you? Destiny is far more malleable than you think!”

  “You cannot know this!”

  “But I do-and I shall show you how!”

  He guided the writhing, invasive tendrils of her consciousness to a seemingly insignificant path in his own mind and pushed them along it into his recollections of Spring Heeled Jack.

  Blavatsky absorbed the memories, and he felt her astonishment.

  “ Oh bozhe! A man who jumped through time! How can this be possible? ”

  “The point is this, madam: the time we are living in is not the time that was meant to be. Maybe, before Edward Oxford came back to change his past, Russia's prospects were far less tragic. We shall never know. His actions altered the course of future history for the entire world, and now you are seeking to do the same. If he can do it, and you can do it, then surely it's entirely possible that someone else will do it, too. In fact, I contend not only that anyone can do it, but that we all do! Destiny is not fixed. It is the ever-changing consequence
of uncountable actions-actions undertaken by every single person on the face of the planet, each with a unique understanding of reality and of how to deal with it. Even the most obscure, uneducated, unimaginative nobody can, and does, make a difference.”

  “Burton,” came a faint hiss from above, “I have to save Mother Russia.”

  He looked at the suspended woman and shrugged. “Then you have to use your clairvoyance to predict every single action taken by every single person every minute of every day from now until whatever future date you decide that her fate has been fulfilled to your satisfaction. If you don't, then someone, somewhere, will do something that will modify the results you seek. It is inevitable. No single person can make future history entirely what he or she wishes.”

  Blavatsky hung silently. Her black eyes flicked nervously from Burton, to the motionless clockwork man, to the quietly singing diamond, and back to Burton.

  “All this for nothing?” she mouthed.

  “As I said, your plan is defective for two reasons.”

  “What is the second?”

  Burton sighed and braced himself. “The second fault, Madam Blavatsky, is that it's not even your plan.”

  “What?”

  “No one-not even a lunatic like you-could possibly believe themselves exclusively capable of shaping future history. Not unless, that is, the history they're trying to manipulate is actually their own past.”

  Bolts of etheric energy started to crackle around the woman's body. The library filled with the tang of ozone.

  “I do not understand,” she whispered.

  The king's agent paused, severed his mediumistic connection to her, and said: “I mean simply this. You consider yourself the puppeteer. The truth is: you're the puppet.”

  Blavatsky suddenly arched her back and shrieked. Etheric energy crackled over her entire body. Blood sprang from her eyes, ears, and nose. It oozed out from her brain tissue and dribbled down onto the Eye of Naga.

  She twisted and struggled and her scream rose in pitch then died to a bubbling gasp.

  She hung limply, and for a moment, there was complete silence.

  Her mouth opened.

  A man's voice, deep and gurgling, heavily accented, and saturated with evil, came from it: “Very clever, tovarishch. You are correct. Man from future know history and can change history to make new future. Kukolnyi -you say puppet, da? -very useful!”

  The king's agent gave a grim smile. “About time,” he said. “I was beginning to think you'd never stop hiding behind the woman, Grigori. She didn't even know you were there, did she?”

  “ Nyet. ”

  “All this while, thinking she was acting under her own volition, she's been doing your bidding. Tell me, how does it feel to have foreseen so clearly the manner of your own death?”

  “I see assassination. See death. I think it… disappointing.”

  “How soon? From your perspective, I mean.”

  “Two years from now.”

  “Then you are speaking from the year 1914?”

  “ Da. But I must tell you: I am to make different-umm-schedule for us both. My death, I vill delay; yours vill be much more soon, nyet? ”

  “ Nyet,” Burton replied.

  Grigori Rasputin chuckled maliciously.

  The rivulets of blood that had been trickling from Madam Blavatsky slowed to irregular drips. Burton could see that the woman was close to death.

  “So let me venture a guess,” he said. “Your clairvoyance revealed to you the circumstances of your future betrayal and demise, and the subsequent fate of your country. You could have saved yourself by simply avoiding the assassins, but still there would be Germany, still Nietzsche, and, in all probability, still more assassins. So you traced the history of the war back to its origins, seeking a way to alter its course, intending to prevent your own murder and the disaster that would befall Russia afterward.”

  “Entirely correct, tovarishch.”

  “It just so happened that while you were looking back through time, Madam Blavatsky was peering forward.”

  “ Da. We touch.”

  “And you projected your astral body into her mind.”

  “ Da. It vas easy for such as Rasputin. In future, I have Eye of Naga. I use it to transfer into woman.”

  “And to your good fortune, it just so happened that she existed at exactly the point in history where the seeds of the war were planted, if you'll forgive the unintentional pun.”

  “Pun? Vot is that?”

  “I refer to Richard Spruce's eugenically altered plant life, the devastation of Ireland, and his and the Eugenicists’ subsequent defection to Germany.”

  “Ah. So.”

  “And the Naga diamonds, Grigori-you say you have one?”

  “Cambodian and African stones are, in war, used to- povyshenia? ”

  “Enhance.”

  “-minds. I have African. Germany has others. Of South American diamond, nyet, it is not found in my time. I make Blavatsky find it in yours.”

  “Leading her to the Tichbornes. So, the African Eye will be found, will it? Interesting.”

  “Found by you.”

  “What?”

  “No matter. I change that. You die today.”

  “I think not.”

  Rasputin laughed, a nasty sound. “I congratulate you, tovarishch ,” he said. “You are-umm-impressive. Speech you give Blavatsky-very interesting. No person can make future entirely vot they vish. Da. Da. This maybe is true. But I, Grigori Rasputin, am already in future. I speak to you now from future. Votever I change in past, still, future I am in. You die. You do not find African Eye. Yet here I have African Eye. It is-umm-big paradox, nyet? ”

  “An intriguing situation,” Burton mused. “Whereas Edward Oxford travelled to his past and accidentally wiped himself out of the future, you are seeking to change the past from the future. You know that whatever your interference here, the consequences will never threaten your existence there, for if it did, how can you be interfering?”

  The king's agent stepped closer to the black diamond.

  “You must feel indestructible,” he said.

  “No man can stop me.”

  “Really?”

  Burton extended his hand toward the stone and was instantly stricken with paralysis.

  “ Nyet, my enemy. Not even you. Now life of Blavatsky woman is finished, you I vill possess. You are close to prime minister, da? This is very good. Through you, I vill assassinate Palmerston.”

  A glowing, shapeless wraith oozed out of Blavatsky's shattered skull and began to slide down the strands of brain tissue and hair.

  Burton managed to move his mouth: “Maybe I can't stop you, Grigori, but I can warn you. Stay away from the Eye!”

  The Russian's voice sounded inside his head: “I think not. The diamond vill be -moct?”

  “A bridge.”

  “ Da. It allow me to cross into you. ”

  The wraith flowed over the diamond and seemed to soak into it. A long feeler of energy coiled out toward the famous explorer. Cold fingers closed around his brain.

  Straining, the king's agent managed to turn his head until he was looking at his valet.

  “Now would be a good time.”

  The clockwork man of Trafalgar Square gave up the charade of immobility, nodded its canister-shaped head, reached out with its mechanical arm, and plucked the Eye of Naga from its ectoplasmic plinth.

  “ Vot? The toy moves? ”

  Rasputin's reaction was accompanied by a blaze of ectoplasmic energy. It sizzled across the room, and a bolt of it lashed at Burton and writhed over his body. He cried out with pain and dropped to his knees.

  The storm lessened but continued to splutter and jump around the library walls.

  “ Vhy cannot I stop it? Things such as this, they not vork close to Rasputin unless I allow! ”

  Burton pulled himself upright and said: “Yes, that was rather a giveaway, Grigori. When Blavatsky shared with me her vision of your futur
e, it included details of your parlour trick; of how the guns of the British spies failed when they attacked you. I asked myself: why would the woman be afraid of assassins? The answer was that there was no reason for her to be. I therefore concluded that she wasn't responsible for all the stopped clocks, slack springs, and jammed trigger mechanisms.”

  “ But this machine clockvork, da? How working now? ”

  “Willpower. Allow me to introduce to you the philosopher Herbert Spencer. One of the most remarkable intellects I have ever encountered.”

  “ Man? This is not man! ”

  “In body, no, but Herbert Spencer died with the seven fragments of the Cambodian Eye in his possession. His intellect was imprinted upon them. Those fragments are now fitted into a babbage device designed specifically to process the kind of information they hold. In other words, what you took to be a machine is sentient. It possesses willpower enough to resist your attempts to interfere with its functioning, and it can do a great deal more. Are you aware of the legend of Kumari Kandam?”

  “Nyet! No more talk! Put stone down! ”

  “The Eye was shattered by a man who possessed a perfectly ordered brain. When that happened, the intelligences previously bound together through means of the diamond were destroyed.”

  “Tovarishch! Vot is this nonsense? ”

  “The Choir Stones still have that event imprinted upon them like a memory. If a sufficiently powerful mind-say, for instance, that of a philosopher whose thoughts are ordered by a babbage-could focus that memory upon another Eye, well, I suppose you're aware of the phenomenon of resonance?”

  “ Nyet! Nyet! ”

  “Where these stones are concerned, I believe only equivalence can lead to destruction. Let us see if that's the case. Proceed, please, Herbert.”

  The clockwork philosopher didn't move, but the glow from the room's ectoplasmic walls, floor, and ceiling suddenly dimmed, seeming to concentrate itself around the diamond held in his metal hand, and the bolts of energy that had been playing across the walls now arced inward and danced over the stone's facets. Simultaneously, the diamond's soft humming increased in volume and deepened in tone until it passed below the range of human hearing. To Burton, it felt as if invisible hands were pushing hard against his ears.