She followed Andrew down into the cellar. As she descended the hum of the generator became audible. It buzzed unpleasantly along her nerve endings. Much more of this and her teeth would chatter along with the vibration. The rain outside had soaked her clothes and they clung coldly to her skin.
The cellar was warm though.
Andrew seemed neither alarmed nor surprised to find her beside him. He pointed, suggesting he go one way; she the other. His way lead to a curtained area. Undoubtedly he’d taken the more dangerous option.
She tore her gaze from the curtain. Janey could be hidden behind it. But if she was, Andrew would find her. Ivana had to concentrate on what her search revealed.
The clear electric lighting showed an area resembling an aboveground study. Only windows were missing. Blueprints, watercolours and bookshelves covered most of the unfinished brick walls.
The figure of a man with wings growing from his shoulders caught her eye. Nothing mattered but that they find Janey—still, she couldn’t help her attention sliding back to the images. They were definitely not angels. Then she recognised a picture from her schooldays. Feathers covered a man’s outstretched arms.
“Icarus.” They were all of Icarus, all images of man’s desire to fly. She stopped and looked back along the wall. No. She couldn’t see a copy of the most famous and ironic painting of the myth, Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
A faint rattle of curtain rings brought her attention back to their task. The curtain hid only a sink and a gas stove. Dirty dishes sat on an upturned bucket.
Andrew crossed the cellar, coming back to stand beside her.
“The Metal Man’s obsessed with Icarus,” she whispered to him.
He gave the images a cursory look before focussing on the books. They were scientific texts covering everything from automata to biology, evolution to alchemy. Abruptly, he reached out and pulled a blueprint towards them
“Oh God.” Ivana clapped her hand over her mouth, feeling sick.
The blueprint was part anatomical sketch, part technological mechanism. The sketch fused wings to the shoulder blades of the skeleton. The skeleton was all too obviously child-like.
“Janey,” she whispered.
Andrew’s hand closed tight on her shoulder. “We’ll find her. There has to be more to this cellar. Look for a hidden door. And be careful.”
Ivana cast a glance at the trapdoor, but it remained open and she had to trust to its security. The problem was, the very act of securing their exit would also serve to alert the Metal Man of his unwanted guests if he returned before they’d found Janey.
So they had to hurry.
“The bedlam extends above us in this direction.” Andrew strode to the wall opposite the curtained alcove. “Here we are. Obvious.” He pushed a high-backed chair away from the wall and without its obscuring shadow, the electric lighting revealed a wooden door crudely painted to resemble the worn red brickwork around it. He grasped the doorhandle. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
He pushed it open.
The illusion of domestic comfort vanished. A gust of cold air, carrying a damp unhealthy smell, the miasma of despair, engulfed them. Ivana choked.
There’d been no attempt to extend electricity this far. Andrew unshuttered his dark lantern and raised it high, seeking to reveal the space they entered.
The space was massive, the size of a ducal ballroom, eating the light from the single lantern. Striping it in patterns on the stone floor.
Ivana shuddered at the brutality of the sight. Evidently, while the bedlam had been operating, some of its inmates had been banished here. Cages, barred and corroding, ran down the right hand, river-side of the underground chamber.
A small huddled shape lay in the nearest one.
“Janey!” Ivana ran forward.
The shape stirred and separated to reveal two tiny children. “Miss Ivy.”
“Oh, Janey. Sweetheart.” Ivana clutched the iron bars. They were immovable. The door to the cage was locked with what appeared to be its original lock, a solid, clunky thing. She turned desperately to Andrew. “There has to be a key. Where is the key?”
He swept the lantern around the entrance to the cage and back around the door to the hidden cellar. “Nothing. He must have the key with him. I’ll have to pick the lock.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.” Andrew set the lantern at his feet and drew a small packet of tools from his pocket.
“The key might be in the other room, in the study.”
“I didn’t see one.” He angled the lock, frowning at it.
“I’ll look.”
“The man gave us boiled eggs and rice pudding, and now we have bread and milk wiv real sugar, and then, he puts the key in his pocket,” Janey contributed.
Ivana’s heart sank. “It’s worth a look, though. He might put it in a drawer…I’ll be back, Janey. We won’t leave you here. Or your friend.” The little boy was even smaller than Janey, all round eyes and caution, like a starving nestling.
The soft clink and scratch of metal on metal drew everyone’s attention to Andrew.
The lantern at his feet lit his face at an odd angle, emphasising the frown of concentration. A frown that deepened as he exchanged on lock-picking tool for another. It didn’t need a genius to realise the lock was a stubborn one.
Ivana glanced around the dark, damp chamber and shivered. The lock had probably rusted in the unhealthy atmosphere. “I’ll look for that key.”
He caught her arm. “You said you had a gun.”
“A weapon,” she corrected him. The electric zapper her friend Thea had designed and which had allowed Ivana to take down Bruiser Bill.
“Have it to hand,” Andrew said. “And shout for me. Don’t be heroic or worry about warning the Metal Man. The first instant you here him returning…”
She nodded, found a smile for the children, and hurried back through the door, into the small cellar with its incongruous electric light, gas fire warmth and comfort.
Her first glance was for the open trapdoor above. She held the zapper in her right hand and searched with her left. Drawers, shelves, somewhere handy but not necessarily obvious. Nothing!
She looked back through the doorway. Andrew still struggled with the lock. The children stood in front of him, separated by the bars of the cage. Locked in.
Disgust rose in a wave, engulfing her in a heat akin to rage. Near the children, on the floor, were the bowls they’d eaten from. Bowls that innocent Janey had said held nursery food. What kind of monster recognised that they were children, fed them as such on foods to comfort and fill little tummies, and then tortured them in his experiments to blend humans and machines?
And if Andrew didn’t get the lock open soon, the Metal Man would surely return while they were still present.
She studied the electrifyer she held. It had worked against Bruiser Bill, but less because of its charge—the effect of which she’d tried against her own skin before using it on anyone else. The charge hurt, but it was a short, non-incapacitating jolt. What had devastated Bruiser Bill was his fear of the strange new technology. However, given that the Metal Man had his own generator and electric light, he wouldn’t fear her electrifyer.
Andrew’s pistol she considered and reluctantly decided wouldn’t be enough. They didn’t know what the Metal Man was capable of or if he’d left defences here in his hideout that he could trigger. A pistol could be quite wildly inaccurate over any distance.
Her gaze went back to the open trapdoor and the ladder leading down from it. The iron ladder. Could she risk it? She thought of Janey and the other boy trapped in the cage, and of the ugly inhuman blueprints on the desk. She put her zapper down and approached the Metal Man’s electric generator.
Her friend Thea’s enthusiasm for electricity had bubbled out in long discussions of its possibilities—and dangers. Ivana remembered everything she could, assessed the generator and its likely voltage, and disconnected the wiring t
o the lighting system, just for a few minutes. She knotted the exposed wires around the iron ladder from the trapdoor, and said a quick prayer. She really didn’t want to kill a man. Then she reconnected the wiring originally intended to power the lighting, and the ladder was live.
“I hope I’m doing the right thing.” She returned to the large chamber to warn Andrew of her defences.
The children sat on the floor inside the cage.
“Did you find the key?” Andrew asked.
“No.”
His long-fingered hands continued gently teasing the lock. “The tumblers are moving,” he said. “The lock is more complicated than I’d expected. If only we knew when the da-darned man would return. Maybe we should attempt to subdue him and then take the key from him. It’s risky and I’d rather—” He broke off and gave his full concentration to the lock for a second. “That’s it. Nearly there.”
“About subduing the Metal Man,” Ivana began.
Andrew shot a glance at her.
She wondered what he’d heard in her voice. Her reluctance, her dread? “I—”
From the cellar came a crack, a cry and a heavy thud.
“I think I’ve killed the Metal Man.”
Chapter 8
“We’ll be back,” Andrew said briefly to the children and ran for the door to the cellar.
“Don’t touch anything,” Ivana shouted, running after him. “I electrified the ladder from the trapdoor.”
He stopped just inside the door and she edged around him.
The Metal Man lay sprawled at the base of the ladder. Without electric light, Andrew’s dark lantern was the only illumination. Its orange glow danced over a metal mask, as sharp and angular as an axe head, if more human, and over a wicked-looking metal hand, the tips of the fingers resembling razor blades. That monstrous hand lay stretched out in their direction, ominous and yet, coupled with the limp figure, oddly pathetic.
“Do you think I’ve killed him?”
“Shut off the generator.”
Ivana did so, grateful when its hum, and the vibrating edge it gave to the atmosphere, ceased.
Andrew held his pistol in one hand, bent and checked the figure’s pulse at its throat, beneath the harsh cover of the mask. “He lives. The generator is off?”
“Ye-es.” She had to clear her throat and lean a moment against the desk. Monster though he was, her relief at not having a man’s death on her conscience was extreme.
Reassured that the generator was shut down, Andrew pulled at the loose knot of electric wiring that she’d tied to the ladder. As it fell, he tugged sharply. The wiring came free, the electric light bulbs falling and splintering.
“Good grief.” The sharp explosions of the destruction impacted her nerves.
“Sorry. I need to tie him before he regains consciousness.” Andrew coiled and twisted the wire, turning the unconscious man on one side to bind his wrists and ankles, the wire cutting into the Metal Man’s boots. Those highly polished boots were incongruous to the large grey overcoat worn open over a brown wool suit of aged and cheap appearance
Only when he’d secured their captive’s limbs did Andrew search the man’s pockets. “The key.” He held it up, then threw it to Ivana. Despite the wire bonds imprisoning their prisoner, Andrew kept his attention and his pistol trained on the Metal Man.
She caught the unexpected weight of the old key and ran back to the children.
She’d thought they’d be scared, but they waited, dozing together. Life on the streets had inured them to violence and danger.
The key rattled in the lock, resisted and then turned. Ivana swung the cage door wide. “Come along, Janey, let’s get you and your friend home.”
“Home to what?” The deep male voice, with its clear, educated diction, wasn’t Andrew’s, although it came from the cellar.
Ivana’s arms froze around the two children.
“What have they to return to? What have any of us?”
“Andrew?” Ivana despised her own shaky voice.
“It’s all right, love,” he said. “Our host has woken. Come in. You’re safe.”
During her short time releasing the children, the Metal Man had sat up, negotiating the impediment of bound limbs, to prop a shoulder against the ladder that had been his literal downfall. Meanwhile, Andrew had found and lit two other lamps, hanging them from hooks fastened to the ceiling.
Ivana regarded these changes dubiously. “We should leave.”
“How long do you think the children will last on the streets?” the Metal Man asked.
“Longer than with you,” Ivana refuted the cruel reality of his question. Street children died, of starvation and violence, of cold in winter and typhus in summer, of cholera. So many ways to suffer and die.
“The world is barbarous.”
It was eerie to hear such a beautiful voice with its edge of authority issuing from behind the brutal mask; knowing its owner was mad.
“We can’t leave him, here,” Andrew said. “But I don’t want you traversing the city alone with the children at this hour of the night.”
Ivana held the children closer. Nor did she.
“You should shoot me,” the monster said. “But I suspect you won’t. Unless I threaten the woman and children. It is a long time since I conversed with a gentleman. I am mad, you know.”
“We know,” Andrew said grimly.
“It started in the war, on the battlefields. I was a major. I would send my men in to die. I would walk in the mud and the blood and through the agony, and I would look up at the sky. I would dream that I could sprout wings and fly away.” He paused. “It was cannon-fire that did this to me. As it did to so many. And home we come, with our missing limbs and minds, and home closes its doors to us.”
He was crazed and yet he was right. So many disabled soldiers lived on the streets. The civilian world had no place for them.
“They despise our prosthetics and jeer at our ugly clumsiness. I wanted to show them. To help my men. If we must be different, we would be better. We would fly.”
“I saw your plans,” Ivana said. “They are an abomination, and they would never work. You cannot fuse body and metal.”
“I tried babies.” The Metal Man looked at her and his eyes were blue and cold, crystal clear. “I thought to start by growing their bodies with the wings. And their minds are flexible. They could learn to fly. Cherubs.”
She shuddered and pressed the children’s faces to her. “We must go,” she said to Andrew.
He nodded. Repulsion and pity warred with anger in his face as he studied the Metal Man. He’d lowered the pistol so it pointed at the floor.
“But babes, poor unwanted mites, couldn’t survive the operation. So I took older children. Those just beginning to be independent.” The Metal Man blinked. “You chased me, tonight. You took that child from me.”
“Yes,” Ivana said.
“I had to go to The Chemist. I needed more of my tonic. That is why I am calm, now. I paid and he gave me the elixir.”
“Opiate?” Andrew asked.
“No.” The twisted smile was in the beautiful voice. The mask was impassive, unchanging, relentless. “Opium makes you dream. I wanted to act.”
“Unfortunately,” Andrew said. “Ivana, step aside. You,” he gestured to their prisoner. “Shuffle along here, to the other side of the desk.” It would leave the ladder clear for their departure.
The Metal Man inched along the floor, like a crab. The breadth of his shoulders showed he was still a powerful figure.
Ivana watched his progress, keeping the children with her on the far side of the room, edging with them around the wall till they reached the ladder. The cool iron felt reassuringly solid. It promised an ending to this nightmare, although she didn’t know how Andrew proposed to solve their problem.
If they left the Metal Man alone in his den, even tied up, he might do anything. Police coming to arrest him would risk their lives.
She glanced at Andrew and
he gave a wry tilt of his head. She nodded. First priority was to get the children out of the cellar. Ivana set Janey on the second rung. “Climb up, there’s a good girl.”
The girl climbed three rungs and then slipped.
At her cry, Andrew spun towards them.
Ivana had already caught and held Janey, but as she drew the girl against her, she looked over the child’s head. “Andrew!”
The Metal Man was a credit to his claimed military background in one respect: he was quick to seize his chance. At Andrew’s momentary inattention, the Metal Man twisted, forced his taloned hand over the wire binding his ankles and snipped with those razored fingers. He stood in the same movement, and, ignoring the ladder, made for the door to the underground chamber with its cages and horror.
Andrew fired too late, and Ivana wondered if the Metal Man had judged him correctly. A major in the army would know how to assess a man’s character. Andrew would kill to save her or the children, but not in cold blood.
He didn’t lack courage though. “Stay there,” he threw over his shoulder and ran through the doorway after the Metal Man.
“Stay here,” Ivana said to the children. “You’ll be safe.”
Janey grasped her little friend’s hand. “Yes, Miss Ivy.”
Ivana hoisted her skirts to her knees and ran.
Chapter 9
The underground chamber was black as night. Ivana heard Andrew swear and thumping footsteps as the Metal Man ran sightless through his lair. At least the footsteps were headed away from them.
Ivana ducked back into the lit cellar and scooped up Andrew’s dark lantern.
He took it from her. “You should stay here.”
“The children will be safest if we catch that man.”
They ran together, letting the fading footsteps guide them. Ivana realised she’d misjudged the size of the chamber. It was far larger than any ballroom. Larger, she suspected, than the abandoned bedlam above them.
And then there were no more footsteps, only the discordant clang of metal against stone and a grating sound.
The Icarus Plot Page 5
