They sat in silence, pretending to work. Now that the room was nearly empty, it had gone cold. The light-bulb hissed. There was hardly a sound from the other rooms; only a skeleton staff remained at night to continue the Engine’s operations.
The first sign of the fire was distant shouting, from the direction of the lower-numbered rooms. That gave Arthur a chill, but it hardly surprised him; not after what had happened to Simon.
He said, “Another one gone.”
“Poor fellow,” Vaz agreed.
“Ah well,” Malone said.
The shouting continued and the sound of men running in the corridors joined it. Vaz closed his ledger and looked around, smiling rather nervously. Harriot and Malone bent closer over their desks. Arthur stood. The bell at the front of the room began to ring, yanked by the rope that stretched up into the ceiling and thence to who knows where. At the same time the telephone rang.
If it was meant to convey a message, Arthur didn’t know what it was, or where it originated. His understanding was that the bells of each room were connected, but their signals were meant only for the foremen—Mr Irving and his ilk. Meanwhile, the noise of running feet subsided.
The telephone continued to ring. Harriot and Malone lowered their pens and stared at the telephone. Like the bell, the telephone was for Mr Irving’s use, and no one but him ever answered it. This was a message the men of Room 13 were not prepared for, and did not know how to answer. It was as if, during a suburban séance, the table had begun to rap, rap, rap, the noise of the spirit-world echoing through the dark room but no medium there to interpret.
Arthur said, “What nonsense!” walked to the front of the room, and answered the phone. He held the glistening black trumpet to his ear and waited for someone to speak but heard only ghostly crackling.
Many of the men in Room 13 had never seen a telephone before they came there, and most had never listened to one, so the thing was widely regarded with a sort of superstitious awe. As if there weren’t enough that was strange about Gracewell’s enterprise, without inventing superstitions!
Vaz said, “What?”
“There’s no one speaking,” Arthur said. “Nothing.”
“Sit down,” Harriot said. “That’s Irving’s business. You’ll make trouble. What if we miss a day’s instructions because you’re fooling about with the telephone; and then a whole day’s work gets—”
Vaz shrugged. “We are paid the same for idleness as for the Work.”
Harriot banged his fist on his desk. “Shut up, you! Shut up.”
Arthur lowered the telephone back into its cradle.
There was most certainly a smell of smoke in the room.
The light-bulb went out. The room went utterly dark.
“Bugger it,” said Malone as he lit a match. He was a sickly looking fellow at the best of times, and the shaking light did not flatter him.
The room was on the edge of panic. Arthur supposed that it fell to him to lead them. God help them all, he thought.
“Smoke,” Vaz said. “Fire.”
“What did you say?” said Malone. “What did he say, Shaw? What did he say?”
Vaz got up and walked to the door on the right-hand side of the room, and looked down the corridor. He uttered a string of obscenities. Arthur understood very few of them.
The air was singed and acrid. The light-bulbs were out and the corridor was dark, except for a frightening red light from the open doorway of one of the nearby rooms.
“Fire,” Vaz said. “Fire!” He slapped Arthur on the shoulder and ran past him into the corridor, where he stood, looking from side to side, then set off to the left.
“Fire?” Malone said.
Arthur shouted, “Yes! Fire!” then ran in after Vaz. Harriot and Malone followed.
They ran past closed doors leaking smoke and light from their cracks. They stumbled past open doors through which they could see the fire at work, crawling up the bell-ropes, playing across the desk-tops, and eating red holes in the walls. Somewhere along the line they acquired three other men, strangers from a distant room. They doubled back when their route was blocked by flames and fallen timbers. They cut across the rooms into another corridor, and then another, where three young and terrified women joined them. They left the doors to the Rooms wide open as they ran, and the fire took advantage, rushing in to fill the open spaces of the Rooms, hurrying joyfully down the paths laid out for it.
“Down,” Vaz kept saying, “down!” He meant that they should stoop low, to avoid breathing the smoke, which pooled blackly on the ceiling everywhere they went. Arthur was dizzy, and his eyes stung as if they were being tormented by devils.
Gracewell’s building was something of a labyrinth, and they were all quickly lost. The building had only one exit, and the fire had forced them in quite the wrong direction to escape that way. The question, then, was where to find a window. The building had a few, though not many.
Arthur said, “Stop! Stop. We have to get our bearings.” At least, he meant to—it came out as a wordless roar, then a splutter.
He stopped by a closed door. He leaned with his hand against the wall and he peered closely at the number on the door, blinking away tears and attempting to read the number. It was more than ten, and less than twenty. That was all he could make out before the door swung open, and Dimmick came charging out.
Dimmick looked wild and in pain. His eyes darted furiously from side to side before settling on Arthur.
Arthur said, “Dimm—”
Dimmick seized Arthur by his collar and shoved him against the wall. His ugly face was war-painted with soot and hideous red scars. His hair was patchy, his eyebrows gone.
“Bastards,” he said. “Who did this?”
“Dimmi—”
“Who did this? Eh?”
“Let go, Dimmick—don’t be a fool, let go—let go!”
Arthur shoved. Dimmick’s eyes flared with rage as he struck Arthur’s legs out from under him with his stick.
“Eh? Shaw?” Dimmick crouched over him, his stick at Arthur’s throat. “Was it you, then? Sneaking about—was it you? You working for them, are you, Shaw?”
“Dimmick, I—”
“I’ll kill you first, you little—”
Vaz’s face appeared behind Dimmick’s shoulder, as Vaz lifted up his leg and brought his foot down with great force on the back of Dimmick’s neck.
Dimmick grunted, fell on top of Arthur, rolled off, swore, bounced back up, and had his stick at Vaz’s throat almost at once—almost before Vaz’s foot had touched the ground again.
“Eh? You in it with him? Hey? Hup.”
Dimmick’s head snapped forward into Vaz’s nose. A gush of fresh blood covered them both.
“Up, up! I’ll gi’ you a—”
Arthur stood, swaying.
He’d been good at boxing at school. His old lessons came back to him; he squared up to Dimmick and threw a punch, which Dimmick effortlessly evaded. Dimmick grunted and turned to shove Arthur so hard that his feet left the floor. Arthur fell through the open door and landed on his back, sliding across the dusty floorboards of the dark room until he hit his head on the leg of someone’s abandoned desk.
* * *
When Arthur woke he was lying on his back in an empty Room. He didn’t know how much time had passed. Not more than a minute or two, he supposed; but that might as well be an eternity. He was alone. Smoke hung thickly from the ceiling and it was agony to breathe. The corridor he’d come from was fire-lit. He got to his feet and staggered across the Room to the other door and out into yet another corridor, which was dark. He navigated with a hand on the wall, his eyes closed. He saw Josephine’s face in the dark before him. She was still, she said nothing, and he could think of nothing to say to her, except for the obvious things.
When he opened his eyes again there was light. The corridor ahead of him was on fire. Beams had fallen to block it. On the other side of the fallen beams he saw a man approaching.
I
t was Mr Irving, the Master of Rooms 12, 13, et cetera. His suit in tatters, his face streaked with soot, his eyes red. Under his arm he carried a number of ledgers. Despite his sorry condition he stood straight and seemed remarkably calm.
“Hey there!” Arthur called. He waved, then started coughing. “Hey! Irving!”
Mr Irving approached the obstruction. He peered through the flames and smoke and nodded to Arthur as if making a note of his tardiness.
“Irving!” A croak, unintelligible. Feeble.
Mr Irving put the ledgers down on the floor, and held up a hand for Arthur to be silent. He seemed to be thinking.
It looked as if the corridor behind Irving was also blocked by fire. The man was trapped, but he showed no fear. Mr Irving’s calm was in its own way as unnerving as Dimmick’s fury.
“Irving!” Arthur wasn’t sure what he meant to say. Go back was futile, help me was futile.
Mr Irving reached out to move the fallen beams from his path. Instantly his sleeves caught fire and the skin of his hands reddened and swelled and blackened and cracked. He didn’t flinch or retreat. Arthur had never seen such extraordinary self-control. Irving leaned in, shoving at the timbers. His shirt went up. He didn’t make a sound. Arthur reached out to help him but the heat drove him back. Irving pressed forward. His hair went up with a sudden flash. He stumbled. The beams were too heavy, jammed so that he couldn’t move them. Arthur looked away as he fell to the ground.
Arthur turned and staggered back the way he’d come.
Josephine, my dear, he thought to himself, I think I am going mad. I think I have already gone mad. As a matter of fact, I don’t see how I can go much madder.
Set aside the mystery of Irving’s superhuman calm. Where had he come from? From his office, perhaps, where some of the men imagined that he slept. Perhaps the fire had woken him. But his office was just outside Room 13. If that was Irving, and if Irving had perished in the vicinity of his office, then Arthur had run in a circle.
There was a dumbwaiter hatch on the wall. Arthur wiped his eyes again, and saw that it was labelled D. He tried to remember what the hatch outside Room 13 had been labelled.
Then he let out a great roar of joy, and he threw himself forward and flung up the hatch.
Behind it was a rope, and a chute into which he was just about able to squeeze once he’d abandoned his coat. His shirt tore at the shoulders, and his elbows scraped and bled as he squeezed his way with frantic violence up the chute. He supposed he must have resembled an overgrown chimney-sweep—a chimney-sweep who’d indulged in one of Alice’s potions and now found himself swelling, stretching, his head fit to burst! He felt dizzy. He thought he might be stuck. Smoke tickled his feet. He kicked and bellowed.
* * *
The hatch at the top of the chute opened onto a dark corridor on the building’s second floor.
The second floor of Gracewell’s building had no rooms, no workers. So far as Arthur knew it held nothing except storage rooms. Perhaps the bell-ropes led there, too.
The corridor ran all the way to a window, which he broke. It opened onto fresh cold air and an expanse of flat rooftop.
At the end of the rooftop he lowered himself down then dropped to the ground. He stumbled away as far as he could before he came to a fence. He leaned on it, heaving and retching.
Behind him Gracewell’s building was ablaze. Hellish flames reflected out over the river. A crowd had gathered in the firelight. He couldn’t make out who they were. Workers who’d escaped the fire, he supposed, or neighbours who’d come out to watch the blaze.
He didn’t join them. Dimmick might be among them, and he had no desire to see Dimmick again.
He breathed in freezing air and winced. His throat was in agony and he thought he might have a broken rib. His head was still ringing. His legs wobbled.
Vaz and Harriot and Malone had either escaped Dimmick and got out, or not. Nothing he could do about it now.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to see Josephine again.
He walked all the way back to Rugby Street, barefoot and bleeding through the cold night—dead beat and staggering and half-frozen. All the way home he thought of Josephine. He thought of the warm and boozy offices of The Monthly Mammoth. He thought of his uncle George, and his friends Waugh and Heath, and he even spared a few fond thoughts for his foster-parents, who were not such bad sorts after all; he would write to them, he thought. He thought of hot coffee, and curried rabbit, and bacon, and sausages, and oxtail, and kidneys, and fried fish, and hot pea soup, and ragout of lamb—and sometimes he thought of Dimmick, or Irving, or whatever had happened to Mr Vaz, and shuddered.
He got to Rugby Street shortly before dawn. In his exhaustion, it didn’t strike him as at all odd that instead of his own home, he’d come to Mr Borel’s shop, and Josephine’s flat above it. Where else would he go? He banged on the door until Borel came out clutching his broom, and Josephine came downstairs to meet him.
She clapped a hand to her mouth in shock.
“Arthur! Where were you? What happened? What happened to your moustache—Arthur, what on earth happened to your shoes?”
He swept her up in his arms, lifting her bodily from the floor, and kissed her. She smelled extraordinarily sweet.
His knees started to wobble, and he put her down again. He saw that his hands had left streaks of blood and ash on her face and on her dress. He noticed that she was fully dressed, though it was the small hours of the morning, and briefly wondered why.
“Arthur—”
His legs seemed about to give out entirely.
“There was a fire,” he said. “I handled myself tolerably well, I think. I shall tell you about it one day, but now I think I should go to bed.”
He stumbled. She tried to catch him as he fell toward the floor, but missed.
* * *
He spent the better part of a week in bed. The bruise on his head swelled and he developed a fever. He had burns on his hands and his face and the back of shoulders, where falling cinders had burned through his shirt. His moustache was mostly gone. His friend Waugh, the medical student, came to help move him from Josephine’s bed to his own, at the other end of the street, and gave a lot of advice about draining this and elevating that and compresses and not being such a bloody fool as to walk into a burning building in the first place. Then Waugh assured Josephine that if Arthur had walked into a burning building, it was no doubt for good reason, and that he had probably acquitted himself heroically. She thought perhaps Waugh was a little drunk. He kept winking at her.
She nursed him for a few days. He could hardly stand. She was no Lady of the Lamp but she managed to feed him soup and dab his burns with hot water and apply all the compresses and ointments that the housekeeping magazines recommended. She tried not to upset him with questions, or to wake him when he moaned in his sleep. He wouldn’t say anything more about the fire than that it had been an awful accident, and that the worst part was that he thought his job was gone. She read him the newspapers. It really was remarkable, they agreed, how a clever newspaper writer could make DUKE’S KILLER STILL NOT FOUND into a new story every day for a week, or at least into something that seemed like a new story long enough that you were half-way through it before you noticed. She said nothing about Atwood or the events of his séance. At first she didn’t want to frighten him; then after a while the secret grew too big to be released. She was afraid of what he might say, or do. She was afraid he wouldn’t believe her; she was afraid he would.
Arthur’s condition improved. On Wednesday afternoon he asked what day it was (the answer made him groan). By Thursday he was well enough to sit up and take her hand as she sat beside his bed reading him the newspapers. He said that she looked troubled. She said that she wasn’t; then she said that of course she was, of course, of course. She fell against him, suddenly tearful, frightened but overjoyed to be alive. He winced—his ribs. She laughed. He was solid, sane, apparently indestructible. He laughed too, and kissed her. She ki
cked the newspaper away. Then the bristly remains of his moustache were tickling her neck, while she traced the bruises on his ribs with one hand under his nightshirt—the other hand fumbled with the sheets. The bed was too small for the both of them. He was suddenly on top of her. He still smelled faintly of smoke—not unpleasantly. They both breathed heavily, as if from the sheer joy of being alive and breathing. She could hear her heart beating like a metronome, its rhythm alternating with his. She closed her eyes and remembered Atwood’s words: our souls, made of star-stuff, burning bright. Arthur tugged urgently at buttons. His fingers on her skin were electric. That spark might, Atwood had said, be mistaken for something carnal. Good, she thought; she was happy to be mistaken, then.
* * *
It was silly, she thought afterwards, but his bruises and burns had made it all seem rather—well, chivalrous, as if he were a wounded knight or a lost explorer, and that made it all rather less alarming than it might have been, and sweeter. She lay awake listening to him snore, studying the red scars on his back with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, as if they were a map of some unexplored and dangerous territory.
There would be consequences, she supposed. Well, so be it. She felt that nothing in the world could scare her; not after what she’d seen.
It was a fine, warm night, and the moon shone brightly through the window and across the floorboards. She wondered what Atwood and Jupiter were up to.
THE
FOURTH
DEGREE
{Analysis}
Chapter Ten
Arthur was up on his feet again in no time. Sooner than Waugh had predicted. He should have bet money on it! Well, he had the best nurse in London, and the best medicine, and no time to waste.
After thinking on it for a day or two, he decided that the only decent thing was to tell Josephine everything. A clean sweep of all his secrets. He considered his oath to Mr Gracewell to have been cancelled—if not by fire, then by Dimmick’s attempt to murder him. He told her about the numbers, the instructions, the ledgers, Vaz and Simon and Harriot and Malone and Dimmick. He told her about the headaches, and the nightmares, and the other unpleasant side-effects of the Work. He edited the confrontation with Dimmick a little, so as not to worry her unduly—and hadn’t it just been a misunderstanding, after all? He left out the Irving Incident entirely, having half-convinced himself that it had been a hallucination brought on by the smoke.
The Revolutions Page 10
