Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  Ruby’s pleading whine and her wet haunches against his trousers alerted Samuel to her desire to leave his fanciful experiment behind and return to the warmth of the fire. He was about to acquiesce when a great bolt of lightning ripped the sky above them and a cannon-shot of thunder peeled.

  His terrified hound backed away, ducking low to the ground, and before Samuel could calm her skittish nerves, Ruby had escaped her tether. The honey-colored hound barked furiously at the sky. Whimpered. Then she set off in a blinding tear, leaving Samuel with a damp leather strap and a look of surprise on his face. A gust of wind pulled hard against the bowl of his umbrella, sending him back a step, but this concession to motion proved to be a necessary goading. He ran after his dog, into the storm, through dim, empty streets, lit only by flickering lamps and flashes of lightning.

  In the distance he heard the muffled yaps of his companion, and they guided him, but the clatter of the weather muddled his sense of direction. He turned right, certain Ruby’s voice had risen from that direction, only to have the familiar bark rise at a great distance to his back. The poor creature was obviously traumatized by the storm, running aimlessly for someplace warm and dry, a place she would perceive as safe. If she were a rational animal she’d return home, flee to the north where an old soup bone and the roar on Samuel’s hearth would assure her comfort, but for all of her fine companionship, Ruby was not a great thinker and instead had to rely on inaccurate instinct for guidance.

  Samuel followed her on a winding path beneath tall brick homes. Caught sight of her twice, dashing like she had a fox in her nose, ignoring his calls and vanishing around a distant corner.

  Finally he came upon his dear hound in an alley between two grand structures—a large, fashionable house and another building which, save for its intricate architectural detail, including a cornice of brass about the eaves, he might have taken to be a carriage house or stable. The corridor between them ended in a high stone wall, and rain coursed over the barrier, giving it the appearance of a great perspiring beast. The door to the house stood open, as did the one to the detached building. A dull glow oozed from the opening on his right, providing a trifling illumination to the scene before him.

  Ruby crouched facing the corner between the outbuilding and the wall. Her growls were all but eaten by the torrential clatter, but she seemed to have cornered something, perhaps a cat or one of the raccoons that scavenged the city’s waste. He hoped it wasn’t a rat. Samuel loathed the creatures and a chill ran over his neck and spine as he considered having to face one.

  But as he moved closer to the scene, a flash of lightning bathed the alley and Samuel gasped. The bleaching light revealed Ruby’s prey in brief, vivid detail. It was no rat. But exactly what this creature was he could not say.

  Though the size of an average cat, and possessing some feline traits about the head, this beast was hairless and the color of muddy water. It’s legs jointed awkwardly, reminding him of sketches he’d seen of the crocodiles said to roam the Nile Valley. The unnaturalness of the animal lodged in Samuel’s throat and knitted a web of uncertainty in his mind. His curiosity insisted he carefully observe and catalog this beast; understand something of its composition, but a potent dread kept him at a distance.

  He called for Ruby, wanting to keep his precious pet from the mouth and claws of this sinister oddity, but she disregarded his appeals, focusing her full attention on the thing she’d cornered. Seeing no option, Samuel stepped forward, affixing a sliding loop in the tether so that it would secure tightly to the dog’s neck unlike the manufactured collar attached at its end, which had proven something less than reliable.

  Just as he reached Ruby, her head whipped up as if finally hearing her name being called. Samuel lunged forward, repulsed at the idea of getting too close to the unnamable creature, but instead of managing to slip the lead around the dog’s head, the loop passed through wet air. Ruby eluded his attempt at capture and raced to the side disappearing through an open door in the building on his left.

  Samuel backed away from the corner, uncertain if its occupant might find him less threatening than his hound had been. He shuffled several steps until he stood inside the threshold. Lantern light glowed at the far end of the hallway, and he saw Ruby at its center. He searched for the panel of the door but found nothing save splintered planks, barely clutching twisted hinges. The state of the door disappointed him as he should have liked a means to lock out the creature in the alley, but since this option had been denied him, he decided to collect Ruby quickly and get her home.

  Setting off toward the dog, who sat at the edge of the dim light, Samuel fell under the distinct impression that he walked on a balcony, rather than an expanse of floor. To his left the wall seemed to end at his waist, forming a banister, and though he had no clear sight of the space beyond—merely shapes of gray atop sheets of black—he felt certain it stretched out and down from him. At his club, they had wired one of the studies with electric light in a rare concession to progress, and though this man-made incandescence was neither as soothing nor as dependable as the gas-lit fixtures, he thought it would be nice to bring illumination to this peculiar and unfamiliar space with the simple turning of a knob, but having no such modern novelty, Samuel bolstered himself and made his way toward the muted light ahead.

  Yet he was forced to pause, because another shape had joined that of his hound. This form was decidedly human, though quite small.

  “There’s the pretty Milly,” a girl’s excited voice cried. “There’s my ever-so good girl.” Samuel detected a lilt of brogue in the words, likely one of the Irish working as a servant for the owner of the adjacent home. But why was she claiming familiarity with Samuel’s pet?

  Was it simply the exuberance many youths showed toward domestic animals, or had Ruby once belonged to this girl and gone stray only to find her way back after a month in Samuel’s care?

  “Excuse me?” he said forcefully, so as to be heard over the marching rain. “Miss?”

  He now stood close enough to see the girl, but was surprised to find it wasn’t a girl at all, but rather a fully-grown woman, though quite certainly petite. Her hair was the color of carrot soup and her skin as white as bone.

  “The dog’s mine,” the woman snapped, clutching tightly to Ruby’s neck. “You piss off home. He don’t need you no more.”

  The vulgarity startled Samuel, and he puffed up with outrage as he was not accustomed to being addressed so harshly from the likes of a servant, but the woman’s claim gave him ammunition. “You have no rights to that dog,” he charged. “Clearly, you don’t even know it’s gender. You said ‘he’ doesn’t need me, and it’s quite apparent the animal is a female.”

  “Not the dog you nancy,” the girl spat, “Him, the one that sent her to you… He don’t need you no more. The dog is mine. He had no right giving her away.”

  “No one gave me that dog,” Samuel replied, infuriated with the diminutive woman’s impertinence. “The dog was left to stray, and I cared for her.”

  “You got all the brains of a shite stew,” she replied. “That bugger, Mr. Dodd, sent her to you, made it all a game ‘cause he thought it would be a fine story to tell.” The woman pulled something from her pocket. She held it up and back so that it caught the light. “This here calls my Milly home,” the woman said. She put the instrument to her lips and made a great show of blowing, but no sound emerged from the pipe. Still, Ruby’s ears pricked, and she shot to her feet, searching the landing as if her name had been called. “You see that there? I don’t know how it works, but it does. He trained her to come when this was blowed on. Proves she’s mine. Now piss-of home.”

  “Miss, I will only warn you once about your language.”

  “Good,” she said, swiftly returning the pipe to her pocket. “’Cause I don’t give a piss if you like the way I talk or not, and I don’t want to hear nothing more about it. I just want my dog.”

  “And what would your master, Mr. Dodd, have to say about the
way you treat his guests?”

  “Don’t think he’d give a donkey’s cock one way or another. He’s right out of his fucking skull. Now get out of the way and let me and my Milly go.”

  Lightning flashed above, and the space to Samuel’s left lit up as if it had no ceiling at all. Something large and confounding occupied the center of the space, but he’d only managed to see it from the corner of his eye. Before he could turn to take it all in, the atmosphere was again as black as velvet.

  The lightning had a different affect on the woman. She yelped as if it had burned her, and as the thunder rolled through the rafters, rumbling the very walls of the structure, she quickly struggled to lift the dog.

  Samuel’s heart sank when he thought he might lose Ruby forever. In their brief time together, he’d grown fond of the bitch, liked having her at his feet and lying next to him at night kicking her legs as she scampered over dream landscapes. He loathed the idea of her being kept by this crass and horrible woman.

  “I’ll pay you for the dog,” he said.

  “Don’t need it. Got my pogue from the bugger when he lost his mind, and after what he done to me, I deserve every penny. You know what it’s like to serve a monster? You see what he did to that door? Him’s got the luck I come back to board up the other down there,” she said throwing her index finger toward the staircase at her back.

  “I’ll be quite generous. I have grown fond of the animal.”

  “He said he’d be generous, too. The only thing he ever gave me was this here dog, and then he took her away. The rest I’m taking myself, because he don’t need it anymore and the dirty bugger don’t deserve none of it no how. He’s against God that one. He’s the Devil himself. That there,” she said, pointing into the vast space on Samuel’s left, “that there is Hell, and you can go on down and wait for him in it.”

  Obviously, the small woman had lost her mind, and it occurred to Samuel that she may have become delusional and murdered the master of the house in her derangement. It happened all the time with the immigrant classes. Samuel bore them no ill will generally, and he certainly didn’t believe they were the beasts his friends at the club often claimed, but they were raised harshly by rough hands and their morality—their value of life—differed from that of men like Samuel and Hubert Dodd. Her fixation on Ruby seemed to contest this cold-blooded perception, but Samuel felt an instant chill and wondered if his colleague from the club lay bleeding somewhere in the main house, struck down by a servant who’d succumbed to religious mania.

  “Where is Mr. Dodd?” Samuel asked.

  “He’s in another Hell,” the girl replied. Ruby wriggled in her grasp. “He made a Hell here and found one in his own damned head.”

  Seeing no use in arguing with a lunatic, Samuel decided to change his tack. He gripped the handle of his umbrella quite tightly, should he need to use it in defense, and then he squared his shoulders.

  “I can run much faster than you,” he announced.

  “Who said we was gonna race?”

  Ruby whimpered and looked at him with the same pleading expression she used when she needed her constitutional.

  “My point being that with the dog in your arms, I can reach a constable and bring him back before you make it to the end of the road. Now, I have offered to pay you generously for the animal. I suggest you allow me to do so. Otherwise, I shall be forced to involve the authorities.”

  Apparently, Samuel’s logic worked on the woman, because the tension left her shoulders and face. “Bugger,” she muttered, surrendering to the futility of her situation.

  She dropped Ruby, who had only a short distance to fall. Immediately the dog raced to Samuel, taking a seated position next to his leg. Samuel presented the servant with an ample number of bills, enough to make her eyes light.

  “Take care of Milly,” she said, tucking the bills into her boot. “She’s a good dog. The only good thing to come out of this place.”

  A moment later, the dreadful little woman was gone, tromping through the mud in the alley toward whatever destination summoned such people. Samuel bent low to scratch Ruby behind an ear.

  “I hope I wasn’t being presumptuous,” he told her. “If you’d rather accompany that foul woman, I should quite understand, though I think remaining with me will provide you a more comfortable future.”

  In response, Ruby opened her mouth as if to yawn, but instead gave a weak yap, which Samuel took as acceptance of his decision. Ruby pressed close to his woolen trousers, and Samuel was finally able to slip the tether around her neck without incident.

  An explosion sounded at his back, startling both man and dog as a cloud of brilliant white erupted around them. Unlike the previous flash of lightning, this one did not come and go.

  Rather the light, shocking after so much gloom, remained. Samuel spun, his heart lodged in his throat. Surely, lightning had struck the building and the persistent illumination suggested fire, but what Samuel saw upon completing his turn was no natural element.

  The ceiling of the building was made of glass. Hundreds of small panes captured in an intricate steel web partitioned the dark sky beyond into a grimly colored grid. A great metal pole descended from this ceiling, ending at an immense platform, which while no taller than a steamer trunk spanned a good thirty feet. From this suspended panel a series of tubes and wires and rods dropped to a great apparatus of gears the smallest being no larger than Samuel’s head, while the largest being the size of a respectable carriage. Burnished wood, perhaps mahogany, and tarnished metal were used to fashion the complex series of cogs, all of which now groaned and cranked. The distance from Samuel’s location on the walkway to the floor was no less than forty feet. There he saw the base of this grand mechanism: a thick glass column, wide enough for Samuel to stand within and stretch his arms. The tube rose into the heart of the complex works, which creaked and turned like the heart of a great watch. Within the clear tower, dozens of coils glowed, throbbing energy as if they had captured the lightning itself.

  Samuel gazed on astounded by the intricacies of the contrivance before him. It was impossible and amazing. His gaze ran from ceiling to floor and then back skyward to the mesh of metal above. As he drew his attention downward again, he noticed a series of flat metal plates beneath the wooden platform, a detail eclipsed by the magnificence of the whole.

  The plates, two dozen in all, pushed forward and back along narrow tracks like finely fitted drawers. A great ratcheting suddenly filled the hall. Only when it happened again did Samuel notice that the plates were locking into positions along the base of the platform. This seemed to cause the complexity of gears to become sluggish. One by one, the metal sheets came to a snapping rest, and though this technical marvel thoroughly intrigued Samuel, his gaze was soon drawn away.

  A dark form moved across the far wall. Perhaps it had only been a shadow cast by one of the revolving gears, but the sudden motion caught Samuel’s eye. He followed it over the wall with his gaze, and reared back from the banister when it came to a stop.

  The floor and back wall of the chamber below the walkway were alive with motion. Hundreds of unidentifiable forms in a spectrum of unsavory colors—cheese mould green, rotten beef gray, the filthy yellow of infection’s discharge—swarmed the lower room to create a foul bestiary in the heart of the city.

  Among these insectile and reptilian specimens, another species stalked. This trio of creatures bore a resemblance to man, in that they traveled on two legs and swung two arms, but there was nothing human about them. Their skin seemed to be the color of porridge and it stretched tightly over twig-thin appendages punctuated by knotty, grotesque joints. Tufts of beet-red hair jutted from their scalps. Exhibitions of their savagery proved many, even in the momentary viewing. They beat and tore the others creatures. They stomped them beneath clawed feet. And from all of their adversaries, they took a taste.

  Samuel rushed away from the banister, yanking Ruby along as he made his way to the door. So horrible had been the visio
n, he instantly wiped it from his mind, which proved to be a transient comfort at best, because he forced himself to turn back to see what his mind wanted him to never see again.

  In the room below, the coils within the glass tube faded. Two more plates clicked into place, sounding like pistol reports in the vast chamber. And in the dying light, Samuel saw the writhing bodies of the unholy menagerie scrabbling for their places along the floor and the walls. He ran back into the rain, following his eager hound, without opening his umbrella. Cold water drenched him and brought a little of his sense back, and he stopped in the muddy road, though Ruby struggled with the tether, attempting to drag him away from the perverse scene behind them. Hubert Dodd had risen in his thoughts to cancel his retreat.

  No, they were not friends. Perhaps civil acquaintances, but certainly not friends. Surely the device and the monstrous creatures that guarded it were in some manner of Dodd’s manufacture, but if this were the case, Hubert Dodd would certainly be the most brilliant man alive. And hadn’t the terrible woman told Samuel that Dodd had arranged for them to meet through his discovery of Ruby? Something about a joke? A story?

  Drenched to the bone, Samuel turned, taking great care to pull Ruby to his side so as not to add to the dog’s ill ease. He took a step toward Hubert Dodd’s home. Ruby complained, digging her paws into the mud and barking a frightened tune.

  “Of course, you’re right,” he told her. “It’s a foolish thing to do, but think of what we might learn should Dodd be alive to tell us it?”

  Indeed Hubert Dodd was alive, but just barely. They found him in the front parlor of his home, lying amid a clutter of discarded papers and strewn books, and Samuel believed the man had been attacked by the foul-mouthed servant girl with whom he’d bargained for Ruby’s ownership. Dodd sprawled naked as a jay. His once hearty face now appeared gaunt and his intimidating bulk seemed deflated, with sallow skin creped at his joints and creased below the navel. On closer inspection however, Samuel found no cuts from a guttersnipe’s blade, nor any indication Dodd had been accosted about the head. Rather, he seemed to be under the influence of a powerful opiate. The man moaned solemnly, then burst forth with a startling round of giggles.