"God's teeth!" he swore. Smythe and Wentworth looked at him in confusion. "Turn that thing off!" he commanded, waggling his gun at the machine.
Not wanting to risk the wrath of their employer any further, his lackeys moved cautiously towards the now sparking control console of the matter transmitter.
The machine wasn't running as it had been before. Whether it was as a result of something Ulysses had done to sabotage the sphere, or thanks to one of Dashwood's poorly-aimed shots in the dark, something was most definitely wrong with Oddfellow's invention.
There was something feral and untamed about the arcs of lightning zigzagging between the crazily orbiting rings.
"Hurry up!" Dashwood bellowed, hastening Smythe and Wentworth over to the console with another wave of his pistol.
And that was when Nimrod struck. He caught Dashwood firmly between the shoulder blades with the wine bottle, smashing it across his back and sending him reeling. As the villain stumbled forwards, Ulysses made his move. He flung himself out of the shadows and, catching both Smythe and Wentworth around the side of the head, brought their skulls together sharply.
Smythe reeled sideways, a silent expression of pain on his face. Wentworth slumped onto the control panel, stunned. As he slid down the front of the console, he fumbled for purchase with a flailing hand and caught hold of a large, gleaming brass switch, and pulled.
Ulysses leapt from the control platform, sprinting past the bewildered Dashwood, covering the cellar with long strides, as the sphere activated one last time. There was a sound like a thunderclap, deafening within the cellar. Blinding white light flooded the lab, burning Ulysses' eyes even though they were closed. It was as if they had been caught at the very heart of a violent electrical storm, where the turbulent skies birthed their lightning progeny.
His ears hurt, his eyes hurt, his skin felt like it was on fire.
And then the light was gone, leaving glaring after-images on his abused eyeballs, and the acrid stink of obliterated ozone in its wake.
Ulysses fought to open his eyes despite the pain. He could see nothing. The exposed skin of his hands and face stung.
He cast his gaze around the cellar, blinking all the time, and then he saw Nimrod through the gloom. His faithful retainer's eyes were watering and his exposed skin looked like he was suffering from a bad case of sunburn.
And then Ulysses realised something; he could see Nimrod, he could see the workbenches of the lab behind him, he could see the cloud of smoke left by the lightning explosion. He looked around the cellar space again, hardly able to believe the what he was seeing, or rather, what he wasn't seeing. The reason he had seen nothing when he first opened his eyes, beyond the shadows sliding over his tortured corneas was because there had been nothing to see.
Caught within the matter transmitter's zone of influence, Dashwood, Smythe and Wentworth were gone. And so was the sphere. All of them had disappeared - villains, sphere, logic engine, all - teleported to God alone knew where.
Considering how Oddfellow's machine had failed before, Ulysses wondered darkly whether their final destination had been anywhere within the physical realm at all.
"Won't you stay, just for a little while?" Emilia beseeched him, practically on the verge of begging. "We have so much to catch up on." She found herself absent-mindedly stroking the material of his waistcoat.
Ulysses noticed that she was wearing her hair down, loose about her shoulders. He put a hand to her chin and raised her head, gazing into her darkly-lidded eyes. The day had dawned bright and clear, the storm having blown itself out in the night. The cold crystal blue sky of the first day of November was now reflected in those dark eyes of hers.
He could have lost himself in those limpid pools at that moment, he thought, but he had to be strong. The way fate and personal preference had dictated how he live his life was no life for a delicate flower like Emilia Oddfellow.
"I'm afraid there are matters awaiting my attention back in London," he said in all honesty, without actually giving away any pertinent details.
"I mourned you once," she said, "when The Times reported you lost over the Himalayas. Just as I mourned my father. But now I have you both back. I do not want to mourn you again."
"Which is why I must go," Ulysses stated flatly. "Go to your father now. Be with him. He needs you."
"Don't you need me, Ulysses?" she asked. He looked away to where a sunburnt Nimrod was loading his luggage back into the boot of the Silver Phantom.
Ulysses turned back to her and, a forced smile on his face, said: "It's been a pleasure, as always."
"Oh, I see. It's like that." Now it was Emilia's turn to look away. "So are we to live parallel lives now," she challenged, "never to meet again?"
Ulysses said nothing, but gazed out at the mist rising from the croquet lawn.
"Well, thank you for all you've done," Emilia said, suddenly prim. "Good day to you, Mr Quicksilver. I hope you have a safe journey back to London."
"Good day, Miss Oddfellow."
Feeling lonelier at that moment than he had in a long time, turning his back on Emilia and Hardewick Hall, Ulysses Quicksilver descended the steps to the gravel drive.
Two other vehicles were waiting in the cold crisp morning. A team of horses and adapted carriage sent by the local constabulary were taking Madam Garside's body to the morgue and the broken Renfield for further questioning. The second vehicle was a private ambulance. A pair of medical orderlies was lifting a stretcher-bound Sigmund Faustus into the back, his young aide looking on anxiously. The German still looked pale, unsurprisingly, but at least he was still alive.
"I meant to thank you, and apologise," Ulysses said holding up a hand to the stretcher-bearers to wait as he humbly approached the prone philanthropist. "I was wrong to accuse you. What you did was incredibly brave."
The German smiled weakly. "I was foolish and incredibly lucky, Herr Quicksilver. You, on the other hand, saved the day."
"I couldn't have done it without you," Ulysses admitted.
"Very well then, if you insist, I will - how do you say it? - take my share of the blame." He held Ulysses' gaze for a moment, suddenly serious. "Your father, Hercules, would have been proud of you."
An unsettling chill began to gnaw away within his gut at Faustus' mention of his father, as the injured man was loaded into the ambulance. Ulysses had not realised that Oddfellow's mysterious benefactor had known his father. What else didn't he know, he wondered.
There was a tug on his arm and before he really knew what was going on, Emilia was there in front of him her scent heady in his nostrils, her lips crushed against his. And at that moment their parallel lives seemed to converge and all his doubts and conflicting emotions vanished.
The End
WHITE RABBIT
I
1901
The door opened and the single candle within the shuttered room guttered in the breeze. The door was closed again quietly and the new arrival joined the four men already seated around the table.
"What news, doctor?" one asked.
"The Queen is dying, Prime Minister," the new arrival replied.
"Then it is as we suspected," said another.
"I fear so."
For a moment nobody said anything, the silence disturbed only by the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece above the cold hearth.
"Then the Angel of Death hovers over Osborne House, even now," said a third.
"Do you have to be so bloody elegiac?" snapped the first.
"Sorry, Prime Minister. But I am Poet Laureate, you know?"
"There are dark days ahead of us; the darkest. The Queen is adored - venerated even. With Her Majesty gone, with the figurehead of our great and honourable nation lost to us, the rot will soon set in."
"You speak as if she's already dead, Salisbury," the second said.
"She is as good as, is she not?"
"There is nothing more I can do, certainly," the doctor added. "And I doubt there is more anyone could
do for her."
"'You are old, Father William'," the second added with a smile.
"Really!" the first fumed. "I hardly think that comments like that are appropriate at a time like this!"
"You do not know your Carroll then?"
"What? You would talk of childhood nonsense at a time like this? What's wrong with you man?"
"It's one of Her Majesty's favourites. Did you not know?"
"And what, sir, is the relevance of this bowdlerising?"
"I was merely making the point that age is nothing but a number, thinking that we might look for inspiration elsewhere."
"She is an old woman," the first stated emphatically. "She is eighty-one years old. She has reigned for an unparalleled sixty-three years. She is tired and she is ill. She is not long for this world."
"And what happens when she is gone?"
"Why, all the nations of the world will be circling the corpse of our once great empire ready to move in for the kill."
"Precisely. The glory days of the British Empire - our Magna Britannia - will be over. Our noble Queen is not known as the grandmother of Europe for nothing. Her descendants will all consider themselves owed a piece of pie when the greatest monarch the world has ever known goes into the ground at last."
"That is the future as I see it, yes," confirmed the first.
"But what if Her Majesty were not to die?" The second left the thought hanging.
"Man, you're talking nonsense again. This is poppycock! You talk in riddles like your beloved Carroll."
The second turned to the doctor. "You said that there is nothing more you can do for her, doctor."
"That is right, sir."
"I would beg to dispute that fact."
"I beg your pardon?" the doctor managed.
"Quicksilver," the second said, addressing the last member of the party seated at the table, a portly middle-aged gentleman with wire-rimmed spectacles, "would you care to explain?"
"Gladly," Erasmus Quicksilver replied.
He shuffled to his feet and straightened the front of his frock coat. His moment had come at last.
"Gentleman, during Her Majesty's glorious reign we have seen advances in science and medicine that we could not have predicted when she first came to the throne. Now we have Babbage's Analytical Engine, the Lovelace Paradigm and we have even taken the first steps in cybernetics. There are even those who say that, in another sixty years, we'll all be living on the Moon. Who knows what another hundred years of such scientific advances will bring? Perhaps we will even be able to create perfect replicas of living human beings from the smallest samples of biological tissue."
"And your point is?" the first fumed.
"My point is that the Queen need not die."
For a moment nobody spoke.
"But you said it yourself, man," the Prime Minister managed at last, "that such accomplishments are all in the future. They remain the preserve of writers of fanciful tales and penny dreadfuls. And yet we are on the verge of a national crisis right now. We teeter at the brink of disaster!"
"Be in no doubt; the Queen is dying," the doctor persisted. "Her lungs are riddled with pneumonia. Her major organs are simply worn out."
"Gentlemen, things have already progressed far further than the man on the street knows, than even you may have realised. So her lungs are useless - we replace them with something better. Her heart gives out - we fix a steam-powered pump in its place. Gentlemen, the Queen need not die. We can rebuild her - we have the technology. We have the technology available now."
"Go on," the first said, slowly.
"Gentlemen, I present to you, a little something of my own invention. I give you, the Empress Engine!"
II
Through The Looking Glass
He was falling again.
The gondola dropped like a stone through the freezing fog, stinging ice crystals - like a million tiny knives - whirling all about them as they fell through the white hell of the blizzard.
And then the sensation of falling halted abruptly and he was thrown clear of the shattered wreckage of the hot air balloon's basket.
He lay in the snow, his whole body numb, dimly aware of the fact that Davenport's body was lying next to his, the man's blood freezing black in the sub-zero temperatures of the mountaintop. As the cold took hold, he closed his eyes, welcoming the embrace of oblivion...
He opened his eyes.
He was falling again, his view of the dirigible and the noted London landmark expanding as he dropped towards the oily black river. A gaseous flame blossomed like an orange rose above him.
And then he hit the surface of the cloying Thames and the waters closed over his head...
He opened his eyes.
He was inside the airlock now, the huge pressurised suit he had been bolted into barely fitting inside the conning tower of the submersible. The smaller sub was closing on the other at last; against all the odds, or so it seemed.
He waited with bated breath, his heart thumping against the cage of his ribs, every sense heightened by the rush of adrenalin surging through every fibre of his being.
It was now or never. His mouth suddenly dry, he punched the emergency eject and the airlock opened in a torrent of swirling seawater and bubbles. The abominable pressures working on the craft sucked out the air, the pressure suit and him within it...
He opened his eyes to see the beast rearing above him, its impossible anatomy exposed for all to see. Sticking out of its reptilian flesh was the glinting pommel of his sword. Reaching up, he grabbed the bloodstone hilt and pulled. The blade came free with an obscene, sucking gasp.
Pulling himself upright within the embrace of the abomination, he brought the blade to bear and neatly parried the creature's own chitinous blade. As the talon slid free of the sword again, he twisted his wrist sharply to deliver a downward cutting stroke and a pallid, pilfered arm flopped onto the windswept grass at the cliff's edge.
The dreadful screams of the beast suddenly ceased, replaced by a single, breathless cry as it reeled backwards, gouts of thick black blood pumping from the severed limb.
He stepped in again, bringing his blade up in a sweeping arc, the tip making contact once more. The severed stem of the creature's snaking neck writhed in silent agony, and then the creature's body began to fall towards him...
He opened his eyes, half closing them again almost immediately against the full force of the gale howling through the falling Weather Station. Eyes streaming, he started to run along the sloping corridor, searching for the emergency exit.
At the end of the corridor a framed sign, half hanging from the wall read: "Emergency Lifeboats - THIS WAY." Beneath the words an illustration of a hand pointed to the right.
He followed the hand's helpful directions.
The wind grew stronger as the passageway continued to bear right, and then, as he rounded the bend he saw that it came to an abrupt end ten yards further on. Beyond the sheared metal superstructure there was nothing but the cold rushing air and the rapidly approaching Thames.
As the churning brown river-water rushed up to meet the plummeting Weather Station he skidded to a halt. Grabbing the handrail to stop himself tumbling out into the yawning void, he braced for impact...
He opened his eyes to see the woman being crushed by the great weight of the beast now on top of her.
There came a sudden, savage snarl and he heard the ghastly, wet ripping sound as the monster tore out her throat.
Slowly, purposefully, the monster rose up on its hind-legs and turned to face him. The beast gave him a bloody smile, its baleful stare burning through the mist and into his own appalled eyes.
Suddenly his sword didn't seem like it would be enough. And then, with a snarl, the werewolf pounced...
He opened his eyes, blinking the crusted sleep away as he tried to focus on the ceiling. He blinked twice and continued to stare hard at the peeling paint and cobwebs as the memories fled from him.
He blinked again. His eyes fel
t sore - the light in the room was too bright. He could feel the nauseous tide of a rising headache at his temples.
The aroma of antiseptic and urine cloyed the air. It was the smell of bleach and incontinence.
He tried to sit up, fighting to hold back the wave of nausea that threatened to overtake him as he did so, but found he couldn't move his arms. He had to settle for swinging his legs off the tubular steel cot on which he'd been lying, the momentum helping him sit upright. Then he looked down at himself. His fringe flopped into his eyes and he instinctively went to brush it aside, but once again his arms wouldn't respond. And then he saw why.
Groggily he got to his feet, wincing as a veritable tsunami of sickness threatened to overwhelm him.
Every step an effort, he walked barefoot across the cushioned floor until he was standing in front of the locked and bolted steel door of the cell.
"Hello?" he shouted at the pane of wire-reinforced glass. "Excuse me! Can anyone hear me? There seems to have been some mistake. For some unfathomable reason I've been checked into the rubber room and been given the special jacket with the extra long sleeves to wear. Is this Bedlam? I bet it is," he added to himself. "Look can you just run along and find Professor Brundle? Tell him that Ulysses Quicksilver would like a word, then we can get this all sorted out in a jiffy."
Rant over, he listened for a reply, but all he could hear was an asthmatic rattle coming through the grating of a ventilation duct in the ceiling and the distant, tuneless whistling of an attendant as he clattered with his trolley through the corridors.
"Hello!" He called again. "Room service! You appear to have confused my reservation with somebody else's. I distinctly remember booking the Emperor Suite! Hello!"
But still there was no reply.
He shuffled away from the door and back to the wire-sprung discomfort of the bed. He stared forlornly at the seat-less lavatory bolted to the wall and couldn't help feeling that something had gone horribly wrong.
The Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection (Pax Britannia) Page 9
