by K. W. Jeter
“A few of them—”
“Perhaps in more than you previously thought. How are you to know the exact number? You were but a babe when he ascertained the exact frequency trembling in your skull, which has remained at the same pitch your entire life, as other men’s apparently do as well, from the cradle to the grave.”
He raised a sore point with me, upon which I had grudgingly meditated many times before. Whatever filial piety I bore toward the senior Dower was considerably eroded by the knowledge that he used a mere child such as myself, the progeny of his own loins, as a useful implement in his endless mechanical tinkerings. Given the inconvenience it had caused me in my later life, his having done so did not seem an act of paternal fondness.
“I fail to see the application to our present concerns.”
“Is it not obvious?” His hand described another rhetorical arc in the carriage’s pent air. “The machines respond to you, a vibration to which they are precisely calibrated—as was evidenced by the mechanical Orang-Utan so passionately hurling itself upon you.”
“The beast did not do so upon any urging from me, I can assure you. The conjugation it desired was entirely its own idea.”
“Give yourself some credit, man. It never responded to anyone else so forcefully.”
The tender mercies of Lord Fusible and his associates began to seem less onerous to me. “Leave the steam-powered monkey out of the discussion.”
“I am more than happy to. I was merely referring to it by way of illustration. All that I was attempting to impress upon you is the clearly evident fact that your father’s creations were designed by him to respond to you. Simple reciprocity would indicate that you respond to them in turn.”
The intent of his argument began to dawn upon me. “Am I to understand that you desire to use me as some sort of dowsing stick, similar to those employed by rural witches to locate sources of underground water?”
“Rather so.” He nodded. “The principle would be the same, at least.”
“If you believe for a moment that I will coöperate with being carried about hand and foot by a crew of your workmen, and prodded toward every door and window in London as though I were some sort of battering ram—”
“That would hardly be necessary,” said Stonebrake. “And in fact, ill-advised. Even in London, such a performance would draw comment from bystanders in the street. We still have need for secrecy, if our schemes are to reach fruition.”
“Then how is all this to be accomplished?”
“You agitate yourself for no cause. You are perfectly capable of ambulation; a solitary man might stroll about any quarter of London without notice. All that is required is that you locate the Vox Universalis device by means of those subtle vibrations to which both you and it are tuned, then report back to Featherwhite House with the information. I wasn’t anticipating that you would haul it back to us upon your own shoulders.”
“This sounds perilous,” I darkly muttered. “Who knows in what seedy district the thing is housed?”
“For God’s sake, Dower, steel yourself. Wherever it is, you hardly will be in greater danger there than that in which you already find yourself. ”
I was reluctant to allow the validity of this point, but did so at last, just as the carriage slowed in its progress, having reached the rusting gates of that dilapidated townhouse to which we had returned.
“You’ll see—” Stonebrake’s manner was abominably cheerful—easy enough for him!—as he pushed upon the carriage’s door. “The entire matter will be simply achieved, and thus we will sail away from the rockstrewn shoals, and toward a calmer and more profitable harbour.”
No rejoinder came from me. I followed him toward the unlit doorway, my heart already possessed with an appropriate dread of the morning to come and what it would require from me.
CHAPTER
11
Of Matters Fexual
WE have so been looking forward to making your acquaintance, Mr. Dower.”
Sentiments such as these, accompanied by overly widened eyes and a general manner of rapacious sociability, have often preceded the most unpleasant moments in my life. While my preference for a hermit’s life, far from the vexing encounters of everyday society, might be an innate component of my nature, the tendency has been reinforced over the years by my fellow man’s unexcelled ability to annoy me.
“Indeed?” I found it difficult to form a cogent response. “I can’t imagine why such would be the case.”
“Must you?” Stonebrake grasped me by the arm and drew me a few paces away, his whisper seething at my ear. “For God’s sake, man, we are engaged on serious business here. Try not to make the task any more difficult than it needs to be. These people can assist us; a trifling amount of courtesy wouldn’t go amiss.”
I refrained from pointing out that by my personal standards, I was being courteous. Nothing in my normal inclinations would have ever brought me into a commercial establishment such as the one in which we now stood, somewhere upon the more mercantile stretches of London’s Kings Road. When I had been a shop keeper years before, upon my inheritance of my father’s legacy of watches and other timepieces, I had maintained the premises in the Clerkenwell district in a subdued and tasteful fashion, befitting the elegant and well-to-do clientele which I had hoped to attract. By contrast, the emporium to which my fellow conspirator, Stonebrake, had bodily dragged me—the first morning after his revelation to me of how desperate were our actual circumstances—seemed to have been modeled upon one of those infamously lurid Parisian bordellos, rumoured to be the haunts of those whose wealth enabled them to achieve depths of sensuous debauchery undreamt of by the safely penurious. Great swathes of darkly red velvet, of the oppressive weight from which theatre curtains were ordinarily made, hung from the ceiling’s unillumined recesses and obscured every nook and corner. The effect achieved thereby rendered so perceptibly close the space about oneself, that one might as well have been magically inserted into the ruder coloured plates of a physician’s gynecological atlas. No daylight penetrated the similarly shrouded windows; my eyes strained to adjust to the murky glow cast by guttering candelabra, placed with ineffectual artfulness about the furniture as though readying the set for the final scene of an amateur dramatic society’s Gothic melodrama; all that was required to complete the effect would have been a fetchingly poisoned young woman languishing on top of the eight-foot-long Bechstein grand piano as though it were some accommodating catafalque. The air trapped between the draperies smelt of camphor and old iniquities, depleted of so much of its original oxygen that it might well have been the canary-annihilating atmosphere of an abandoned mine shaft.
Not that the seemingly ancient accoutrements appeared to have any depressive effect upon the spirits of Miss Stromneth, our hostess. As Stonebrake conveyed me back to her proximity, her powder- whitened face lit up with even more seemingly inappropriate enthusiasm. I had encountered her sentimental type before, when waiting upon certain eccentric gentry in my watchmaker’s shop. In what others, of less crepuscular outlook, found sinister, she took delight; if she could have made her bed in some suitably familial tomb, furnished with the yellowing bones and gap-toothed skulls of ancestors enumerated in Debrett’s Peerage, she would doubtless have shivered with delight inside her mildew- spotted nightgown. At the moment of my encountering her, however, she was dressed in the somber black of expensive widow’s weeds, complete to the faceted jet of the mourning jewelry draped about her pallid neck—I rather doubted that she had been bereaved any time recently, or at all, at least to the degree that she wished to convey.
She picked up the thread of our conversation, just as though the censorious Stonebrake had not whisked me out of her hearing for a moment.
“As to why, Mr. Dower—” Miss Stromneth twinkled at me, in a girlish manner appalling in one who was at least a pair of decades removed from her finishing school days. “Surely it’s obvious?”
“Not to me.” The point of Stonebrake’s elbow l
odged itself in my ribs. “That is,” I corrected myself, “your hospitality exceeds anything to which I, a stranger, thought myself entitled.”
“You are too modest. Your fame precedes you; to be known by one’s reputation is the surest guaranty of others’ friendship and regard, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I am sure you are correct.” I gave the woman a courteous nod. “Even if my own experience has been somewhat to the contrary.”
“That is where you fall into error,” said Miss Stromneth. “All your travails—of which I am greatly aware, I may assure you—are merely the result of keeping company with the wrong sort of person. You are made of finer stuff, as are the entirety of the—shall we say, ‘social circles’ which I am fortunate to frequent. And into which, I hasten to assure, you are now most welcome.”
I had been afraid of exactly that, though I made no comment that might have indicated my trepidation. Which was based not merely upon the fact that virtually everyone I had met recently seemed to have some sinister designs upon my person, but also upon Stonebrake’s assurances to me, upon our morning’s departure from Featherwhite House, that the parties to whom he intended to introduce me—he had named Miss Stromneth in particular, but had indicated that there would be others as well—would be of the utmost assistance in the quest upon which we had launched ourselves. To my current set of mind, such knowledge on anyone’s part seemed more regrettable than strictly helpful.
“Very kind of you, indeed.” I warily eyed the cup of tea that she had poured and set before me. If a comparative innocent such as Lord Fusible’s daughter was capable of poisoning someone, however temporarily, God alone knew what might happen in an establishment such as this. “I hope you will not take it amiss if I inform you that I am rather more of a private creature, than a sociable one.”
“We can work on that.” Eyes half-lidded, Miss Stromneth turned a dismayingly roguish smile in my direction. “In fact, that is rather our speciality here at Fex. Bringing the shy and less—shall we say?— experienced of English society out of the turtle-like shells they so fervently, in their heart of hearts, wish to discard.”
“Pardon me—but what was that you said?”
“Turtles,” elaborated the woman before me. “They are very much like turtles, don’t you feel? Reclusive and guarded, as it were, their innate defenses preventing the embrace of their desires—”
“No, not that.” I had heard as much before; the discretion which maddened reformers such as Miss Stromneth lamented— continuously and tiresomely—had always struck me as one of the more admirable features of our species. “That word—what did you call this place?”
“Oh!” She brightened, features illuminated as though lit by a sudden combustion of animal spirits. “Fex, of course.”
“What the devil does that mean?” A spark of irritation flashed inside me. “I have never heard the term.”
“Why, Mr. Dower it is the name of this establishment. We endeavour to present all that we do in as comfortable and even homey a manner as possible—and I like to believe that we succeed in that to a considerable degree—but at its heart this is a commercial enterprise. However high-minded, we all must make a living. You’ve been a member of the trade; surely you understand.”
“But not of this trade.” I glanced about at the lurid, over- stuffed furnishings, suggestive as they were of blushing flesh and carnal vices. “I sold the occasional watch—and not many of them, I confess. My suspicion is that your customers have needs other than the mere ascertaining of the time of day.”
“Indeed they do,” said Miss Stromneth. “And in that, may a bountiful God bless and keep them. And not just for putting a few coppers in the till. Here at Fex, we amuse ourselves with the pretension that our work is not just mercenary, but missionary in purpose. Our clientele is bettered by having engaged our services—in a spiritual manner, we like to think.”
This comment evoked a raised eyebrow even from Stonebrake, who had been idly diverting himself with the examination of a mechanical songbird, kept under a glass dome on the chamber’s mantelpiece. He had found the minuscule key required and had wound the device’s mainspring thereby, but no amount of prodding with a fingertip stirred the feathered creature sitting on its cast-iron branch. Disappointed, he returned his attention to the conversation unfolding nearby.
“Didn’t you see the sign, Dower?” He gestured toward one of the windows, hidden behind heavy layers of damask and brocade. “As we came up the street—I wouldn’t have thought that it could be any more obvious.”
In fact, I had. Above the brougham, an ominous green radiance had penetrated the rising clouds of steam. Peering out, I had perceived the outlines of three enormous capital letters, illuminated from within by the same arrangements of flaring gas jets and faceted mirrors employed in Phototrope Limited’s ambulating light houses. The word, if such it was, had been erected higher than any of the surrounding rooftops, as the cupola of an Arabian mosque might overlook all in the vicinity, the better to command the attention of its devotees. Not yet aware of its meaning, I had dismissed the phenomenon as just one more mysterious feature of the transformed London to which I had returned.
“We do like our clients to be well directed,” simpered Miss Stromneth. “Not all of them have the advantage of a knowledgeable escort upon their first visit to us. Despite our reputation—which seems more bandied about with the passing of every day; for which we are grateful, of course—there are still those who pretend to be unaware of our very existence. Which hampers them, when the day comes in which they wish to avail themselves of our services, and they are the victims of their prior reluctance to learn our address.”
The repetition of the term services aroused the direst presentiments within me. Visions were evoked, of procedures more clinical than sensual—or even enjoyable—in nature.
“My apologies, Dower.” At the mantelpiece, Stonebrake replaced the glass dome over the uncoöperative thrush. “I have again underestimated the degree of your ignorance about the modern world. Somehow I had been of the impression that even in your muddy little village, the details of an enterprise as salacious as this one would have penetrated. Were the engines of rumour, pushed along by your local gossip-mongers, as inert as all that? It seems scarcely credible.”
“Believe whatever you wish.” I felt compelled to defend my rural outpost. “Not everybody in the world is as obsessed with their procreational appendages as are city-dwellers. You lot seem positively obsessed with these matters.”
“Procreational?” Miss Stromneth frowned in puzzlement, then regained her characteristic good humour when simple understanding manifested itself. “Oh, you mean genitalia.”
“If you must.” I could feel every bone of my spine lock into place, knit by instinctive revulsion. Would there be no end to this new world’s rudeness? The woman had spoken as easily as one might have regarding the blossoming of the flowers in spring. “I had hoped to avoid such unpleasantries.”
“No need for that!” Stonebrake interjected with oppressive heartiness. “We are all adults here. And of course, nowadays even the smallest prattling children are familiar with subjects that might dismay one of your innocence.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.” I had noted the conspiratorial wink passing between him and Miss Stromneth. “You obviously feel compelled to acquaint me with exactly that of which I would have preferred to remain ignorant. As I apparently have no choice in the matter, so be it. Proceed as you will.” I spoke as one might when lying upon a surgeon’s table, with a well-honed knife posed above one’s abdomen. Though in my case, the operation was designed to place a loathsome matter within me, rather than pluck it from my malfunctioning bowels. “The only consideration I would ask of you is that you do so with as much abbreviation as possible; not only is the span of my attention limited, but the degree of my tolerance as well.”
“As you wish.” The other man spoke with lofty disdain for the feelings I had expressed. “You are not so dull of wit,
Dower, that you have failed to discern the essential nature of this business establishment—”
“Shall I freshen your cup?” Miss Stromneth leaned toward me, a flowered Limoges pot in her hands. “You’ve hardly touched it.”
“That’s kind of you—” My initial suspicions had still not abated. “But I’d rather you didn’t.”
“As I was saying,” continued Stonebrake, “the needs and desires of the customers who are catered to here, as a matter of commerce, are familiar in some degree to you. I would like to believe that I am correct in assuming as much.”
“Assume as you please.” I raised my shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “I wish I could say that I wasn’t aware of what goes on in places such as this, and the low vices that are indulged for the exchange of money—”
“Oh, come, Mr. Dower.” The twinkling smile from Miss Stromneth indicated that she was no more nettled by my comments than if I had pointed out the dust beneath the settee on which she perched. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
“You profit thereby.” I spoke sternly, and perhaps even a little ungentlemanly. “You are hardly a disinterested party to the goings-on.”
“Yes, but it all seems so jolly in the moment.” She blithely disregarded my sermonizing. “Everyone seems to be having such a good time—it would seem rather a shame not to let them do it. And they don’t appear to mind paying for their pleasures—but then again, the particular clientele here at Fex all have absolute scads of loot. I am sure they don’t miss any of it a bit.”
“That is hardly the issue.” Something in the easy bonhomie permeating the room had ignited a reformer’s fire in my breast; I might as well have been ranting from atop a wooden box at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. “These people are degraded enough as it is; you are facilitating them in the process of becoming even more so.”
