Babylon

by Richard Calder

  ‘Where’s Mr Kirchner?’ said Cliticia, unperturbed.

  ‘Ha! Her precious Mr Kirchner!’ Madam Lipski stamped her foot on the floor. ‘Why am I so cursed? This one: always, always she popustu tratit vremya!’

  ‘I am not playing around,’ said Cliticia.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said a burly man who, it seemed, was Madam Lipski’s companion for the evening. ‘You’ve caused your mother a lot of ’eartache today. Get along with you back ’ome, go on.’

  If Madam Lipski was beautiful, her beauty was past its zenith, and waning towards a point where it would no longer respond to the alchemy of cosmetics. I wondered if her daughter provoked in her a measure of jealousy.

  ‘Mr Kirchner!’ said Madam Lipski, turning to her companion. ‘Oh, for all the saints, tell me I have a daughter who is just a fool and not a villain!’ She took a sip of her half of bitter. ‘He’s over there,’ she added, abjuring the defamation of her offspring to cock her head towards a corner of the bar. ‘This Kirchner-—’ She narrowed her eyes and became suddenly meditative. ‘There are some very odd stories going around about him.’

  ‘The man doesn’t belong ’ere,’ said her companion. I studied him more closely. His face betrayed the telltale signs of nympholepsy: deep-sunk eyes, a pale, rather greasy complexion, and a flabby, tic-animated mouth. Nympholepsy, of course, only rarely culminated in death. But it always resulted in submission. Whether he knew it or not, he was a slave of Ishtar, and by extension, a slave of the Illuminati, too. "E’s one of them that’s from up West, slumming it, I reckon. Best stay out of ’is way. Such as them ain’t for such as us. Know your place, I reckon, young lady. Know and keep your place.’

  ‘Perhaps “slumming it” is all my daughter can now expect,’ said Madam Lipski, unable to resist a calumnious passing shot before again presenting us with her back.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Cliticia, with contrived humility.

  She led me to a table where a tall, fair-haired man sat alone staring lugubriously into his pint of Black Eagle.

  ‘Well, knock me down with a fewer, it’s Mr Kirchner,’ said Cliticia, with mock surprise. ‘Fancy seeing you ’ere!’ She had taken care to imbue her voice with just the right note of sauciness. ‘And talking of fevvers, I reckon I could spit ’em. ’Ow about buying a girl a drink?’

  Slowly, the man looked up, and even more slowly, smiled. His face was well-proportioned; I might have called it handsome, I suppose, even if the sharp cheeks, jaw line, and ‘cruel mouth’ suggested a certain lupine disposition.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, ‘it’s little Cliticia Lipski. How delighted I am to be re-acquainted with you, Miss.’

  ‘Pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure,’ she said, with coy sarcasm. Good lord, I thought, does Cliticia have an admirer?

  ‘And what can I do for you this time?’ He was well spoken. I had to admit that. In fact, he spoke like a toff, even though his rough, workingman’s clothes seemed at pains to offer a denial, framing him in terms a Punch cartoonist might use to portray a gentleman who had succumbed to evil ways. ‘And you’ve brought a friend with you, I see,’ he added, arching an eyebrow as he gave me the once over. ‘A very pretty friend.’ His accent: if it seemed aristocratic, then there was something foreign about it, too.

  Cliticia bent over and whispered something in his ear. As he turned his head to accommodate her he revealed a scar on his left cheek. A duelling scar, perhaps. He frowned, looked briefly up at me, and then focused once more upon Cliticia.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, seemingly not caring who heard. ‘But it must be now. Tonight. His lordship has tarried here long enough.’ He got up. ‘I’ll collect him,’ he added, ‘and meet you at our prearranged trysting-place.’ Once more, he looked me up and down, and this time, more boldly. Indeed, I thought him quite impudent. Nevertheless, I must admit that I felt an unaccountable rush of excitement as his steely-blue eyes took stock of me. I might have been an adventuress in a Gothic romance, and he the mysterious stranger who, if at first seeming a scoundrel, will reveal himself at the last to be the hero of the hour.

  ‘Can she be trusted?’ he continued, out of the corner of his mouth. He reached out and placed his thumb and middle finger against my left cheek. Then he squeezed, smiling at me the while, as if I were a child he expected to submit to being trifled with. I shied away. Gazing down at the imprint of rouge on his fingertips, his smile became wry. He rubbed the two fingers together, like a man who has recently chalked a snooker cue and thought to rid himself of a residuum of dust.

  ‘I can be trusted,’ I said.

  He took a half-hunter out of his fob pocket and checked the time.

  ‘One hour,’ he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Is he German?’ I stood inside the massive, Venetian portico that comprised Christ Church’s western aspect. Leaning against a Tuscan column—one of four that supported the portico’s arched roof—I gazed down the steps to where Cliticia had stood a moment earlier. She had been gazing up at the belfry, hopelessly trying to descry the clock and thus ascertain how much longer we might have to wait. ‘Gawd,’ she’d said. ‘It’s ’taters out ’ere.’ Then she had taken a step backwards and disappeared into the fog.

  ‘I said is he—’ The usual clatter of hansoms, omnibuses, trams, and growlers was absent; no gig-lamps were in sight; everybody, it seemed, had retreated, either to their lodgings, or the public house. The night was still. ‘Cliticia?’ I whispered, hardly daring to break that stillness. ‘Cliticia, where are you?’

  When she reappeared her plum-dark complexion glistened like moonlight upon the Thames. It was as if the night had seeped into her pores.

  I sighed in relief.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not German.’ Again, she looked up towards the clock, still unable to distinguish its face. The pea-souper hid belfry and steeple as effectively as it obscured the streets.

  She walked up the steps and joined me.

  ‘Not German,’ she repeated. ‘Aryan. Pure Boreal stock.’ She stooped, opened the carpetbag that lay at my feet, and then took out a cigarette and a box of matches. Straightening herself, she put the cigarette between her bright red lips and proceeded to light up. ‘Luv-erly,’ she said, exhaling a long, grey-blue plume. I’d never seen her smoke before, and wondered if she were engaged in yet another futile attempt to impress me, or whether she shared my apprehension and was trying to calm her nerves.

  ‘Aryan?’ I queried.

  ‘What’s it matter?’ She smiled. ‘A masher’s what ’e is, doncha fink? A real masher. Not that you’d know it, the way ’e ’as to sometimes dress. But when ’e’s done up proper, I tell you’—she fixed me with wide, mock-ingenuous eyes and chucked me playfully under the chin—"e’s almost as ’andsome as you.’ She laughed, and then began to sing:

  ‘My girl’s an out-and-outer,

  That is she’s not a muff,

  There’s no two ways about ’er,

  She’s a proper bit o’ stuff.

  When on Sunday dress’d all in ’er best,

  She’s flash but she’s discreet,

  She’s as straight as any sausage,

  And a dozen times more sweet.’

  ‘Shh!’ I said. A little way off, in the desolate wasteland of the church grounds, men lay asleep: drunks, fakirs, loafers, and sturdy beggars. Men whose wretchedness precluded the niceties due two unchaperoned maidens found wandering the streets on a foggy night.

  I walked to the edge of the steps and looked up towards the sky. Hidden behind the dirty pall of the pea-souper was the dread constellation of the Bull. And as I continued to look, I felt Aldebaran, the bull’s red eye, staring back at me, unseen but all- seeing, like the eye of an invisible, vengeful God. ‘Sumi-Er,’ I mused, a little more confidently. If those sleeping rough were too deep in drunken torpor to be roused by the constant biting of vermin or the chill depredations of the night, then they would hardly be stirred by the prattle of two young girls.

  ‘Sum
i-what?’ said Cliticia.

  ‘That’s the name of their planet,’ I said, still gazing skyward into the impenetrable canopy of fog, ‘sixty-eight light years from Earth.’

  She walked to my side. ‘You believe all that?’

  I looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  Cliticia blew out her cheeks and expelled another long plume of smoke.

  ‘I know that they want to enslave us,’ she said. ‘And I know that there ain’t much we can do about it.’ She took a longer, more thoughtful drag on her cigarette. ‘Except submit.’ I turned to look her in the face. ‘What more is there to know?’ she concluded. If I wondered at her boldness, I wondered still more at her sincerity. She gazed back at me, made a big oval of her lips, and then, tipping her chin to the stars, blew a smoke ring into the air. For a moment it hovered above her head, a nicotine halo that seemed a symbol of how artlessness and vulgarity could, in her, so sweetly combine. Then it dissolved into the night. ‘Bloody ’ell, Maddy, you’re so serious.’ But to go by the expression on her face she might have been rebuking herself. ‘Life’s more than book- learning. Ain’t you ever thought of ’aving a bit of fun?’

  Above us, the church bells rang out, tolling the hour.

  I heard the clip-clop of hoofs. A hansom cab materialized out of the fog, pulled up to the kerb and then, like an apparition, as quickly departed, to be once more subsumed by the dark.

  Two men emerged from the gloom and walked up the steps.

  One of them was Mr Kirchner. The other was an older man carrying a little black bag who dressed like Mr Kirchner spoke.

  ‘That’s right,’ whispered Cliticia, quickly interpreting the look I had bestowed upon him. ‘Got up like a real lord, ain’t ’e?’ The collar and cuffs of his long, black coat were trimmed with astrakhan. He wore a top hat of richest silk plush. His black necktie was fixed with a horseshoe pin and his unbuttoned chesterfield revealed a massive gold watch chain hanging from his waistcoat.

  ‘W, w, w, what shall I call him?’ I said, my stammer threatening to embarrass me.

  ‘Call me—’ he said. Oh God, he had heard. I wanted the ground to open up beneath my feet.

  ‘Your lordship?’ suggested Cliticia, nudging me in the ribs.

  He paused and doffed his hat in salutation. Then, replacing it on his head, he continued his ascent. ‘Are we ready, ladies?’ he ventured, when he stood before us. He was taller than Mr Kirchner, but only slightly older, I saw now; in his mid-thirties, I would have guessed. Like him, he possessed a head of thick, blond hair; his eyes were steel blue; and his accent was clipped. He and Mr Kirchner could almost have been brothers, one a prince (it was immediately apparent that ‘his lordship’ was a man of authority), the other born on the wrong side of the bed. Consumed in a somewhat over-earnest study of my interlocutor’s demeanour, it was some seconds before I realized that his attention was upon me, and me alone. ‘Perhaps your friend, Miss Lipski, has already told you, but Mr Kirchner here’—he gestured towards his factotum—‘has been employed to effect renovation work. And a fine job he’s doing, too.’ Mr Kirchner smiled thinly, as a chef might who has been complimented on serving a particularly fine gruel. ‘The legacy of Hawksmoor has of late, it seems, been ill-served.’ His lordship gestured more expansively. ‘Proceed, Mr Kirchner, proceed!’

  Mr Kirchner pulled a key from his pocket and walked up to the church’s front doors. ‘In 1836 a fire destroyed the tower,’ he said, treating us to the rationale that gave him access. ‘In 1851 the original altarpiece was sold. The communion table, also.’ The key engaged the wards. Placing a gloved hand against the door, he slowly eased it open. ‘In 1866 they took away the side galleries, altered the windows, removed the box-pews, and replaced the pulpit.’ He looked over his shoulder and waved us forward. ‘And the work continues, of course. It has to. Hawksmoor may have been one of us, but he lacked the requisite scientific expertise to keep the Gate permanently open.’

  Nicholas Hawksmoor, a member of the Black Order? Impossible, I thought. The Black Order could not possibly be that old.

  Mr Kirchner stepped inside; Cliticia and I followed, once again carrying the carpetbag between us. His lordship brought up the rear.

  ‘Everything all right, ladies?’ said his lordship, in a possible effort to reassure us.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, nervously.

  ‘Tickety boo,’ said Cliticia.

  The space beneath the belfry was filled with shadows. They were darker, more menacing, than those that had swarmed about the portico and infested the streets. I stumbled, lost my grip of the carpetbag and heard it fall upon the floor.

  ‘Let me assist you,’ said Mr Kirchner. Effortlessly, he picked up the bag with one hand and then once more strode ahead. I held out my own hand and found Cliticia’s. Supporting each other, we walked deeper into the church.

  As we reached the nave, the shadows gave way to light. Mr Kirchner had found a bull’s-eye lamp and lit it. Depositing our luggage next to a small table, he swung the lamp this way and that, perhaps to ensure that the church was empty. Then, setting the lamp down on the table, he retraced his steps, passed under the balcony seating, and closed the door. Oh God, I have to go back. I thought. Go back before it’s too late. I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Your name?’ said his lordship.

  ‘Madeleine,’ I said, ‘Madeleine F, F, F—’

  ‘Fell,’ said Cliticia.

  He offered me his arm. I took it. This is unreal, I thought. Go, you stupid girl, run!

  ‘Shall we, Miss Fell?’ Leaning against his arm, I allowed myself to be led up the aisle. The church was deserted and would have been as uncommonly quiet as the fog-shrouded land outside if it hadn’t been for the clicking of the deathwatch beetles.

  Saying nothing, we continued along the church’s longitudinal west-east axis. Like a bridesmaid, Cliticia walked a few feet behind. Mr Kirchner, who once more hefted the carpetbag, accompanied her. Negotiating our way past the latticework screen that separated nave from chancel, we eventually came to a halt before the altar and the great east window that loured above it.

  His lordship took up the lecture from where Mr Kirchner had left off. ‘The loss of the galleries, the side entrances, and the steeple ornaments has damaged Christ Church—in purely aesthetic terms, somewhat irreparably. Nevertheless, it remains compelling, do you not think?’ He raised his arm and swept it through the air. ‘Does it not meet Vanbrugh’s criterion, that churches should have “the most solemn and awful appearance without and within”?’ I followed his gaze. Flattened arches, massive recessed walls, the huge flat ceiling, and the tripartite eastern window that seemed illumined with a strange, black light, all seemed designed to overwhelm with intimations of dread. The church was consecrated to some intangible force; I was surrounded by the monumentality of its dark purpose. ‘Yes, Vanbrugh would have been pleased. Christ Church retains its Dionysiac lines. And more importantly, it remains functional.’ ‘My father has spoken at Christ Church Hall, in Hanbury Street,’ I said, as if I could allay my anxieties by summoning up a spectre of my own: the spectre of normality.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said his lordship, ‘a platform for Radicals. Annie Besant, I believe, has spoken there, too.’

  ‘There was another Annie,’ said Mr Kirchner, ‘who frequented Hanbury Street.’

  The air, already chill, seemed to grow colder. ‘We won’t talk of that,’ said his lordship, somewhat acidly.

  There was a dull thud. Mr Kirchner had tossed the carpetbag towards the altar, and it had come to rest beneath the antependium. I looked up, studying his lordship’s face for some indication of what might now transpire. Ignoring me, he disengaged his arm from my own, and then walked forward and deposited his own bag—the little black bag that so resembled a doctor’s—on top of the altar-cloth. He opened it and retrieved a big, pear-shaped jewel. He held the jewel aloft and I saw that it glinted and sparkled like onyx, or some other variety of dark, semiprecious stone.

  Cliticia fi
xed me with an amused, knowing gaze, and then quieter than before, but just as insistently, began to sing:

  ‘I kissed her twice upon her lips

  I wish I’d done it thrice,

  I whispered Oh, it’s naughty,

  She said—’

  But Oh, it is so nice. The flagstones began to rumble. Vibrations coursed through the soles of my boots and up my legs. And then the church filled with a desperate, harsh noise, as if a thousand steam engines such as had been used at my interview had been stowed in the crypt and fired-up at a moment’s notice. I put my hands over my ears. Then I heard nothing. Felt nothing. The black light that seemed to fill the east window grew brighter. It flooded the altar, the chancel, and the nave, filling me and flowing through my blood, spinning me like a whirligig and drowning me in shadows.

  And all my senses were eclipsed.

  PART

  TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The planet, or rather the urbanized portion of landmass that I stood upon—a supercontinent constituting three-tenths of its otherwise watery surface—was a conglomerate of ruins overrun with blue vegetation and enveloped in a deeper, midnight-blue shade.

  It was night. In Babylon, world-city consecrated to the goddess of the moon, it was always night. Moreover, it was always the night of a full moon. The moon gave Babylon succour; it was the lantern that illumined the indigo depths of its perpetual shadows. And it was moonlight, blue as Arctic ice, but warm as a tropical breeze, that delineated the outcroppings of ziggurats, temples, palaces, and towers of another, half-forgotten age.

  ‘It’s only the south, of course, that is inhabited,’ said his lordship. ‘Here, at the Gate of Shamash, we are in the north, the oldest part of Babylon.’

  When Alexander the Great defeated the Persians he determined to make Babylon the capital of his new empire. But in the centuries after his death in 323 BC, Babylon slowly became a provincial town with a dwindling population. At last—ravaged by the long war between Rome and Parthia—it was abandoned and disappeared under drifts of sand. Not so the other Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, in a fit of unparalleled hubris, had, of course, ordered a replica of the city to be built off-world, faithful down to the smallest detail. Never again would Babylon be destroyed as it had been by the Assyrians under Sennacherib; neither would it be withered by time; whatever its earthly fate, its immortal image would be preserved in a place no man would find or dare to enter.