The Constantine Affliction

by Tim Pratt

  There were frilly underthings inside—including, shockingly, some garments in bright scarlet—and a small whip, and a riding crop, and bits of leather and metal of uncertain utility, and deeper layers of folded cloth she didn’t investigate too closely. Ellie clucked her tongue. Cooper wouldn’t let her describe most of these things, alas. If she did, half the readership would swoon, and though the other half would be secretly titillated, Cooper would err on the side of caution. Perhaps she could do an unexpurgated article for the Lantern; they would print anything…

  She hadn’t dared bring a notebook or a pencil, afraid she might be searched and recognized as a journalist, so she couldn’t take down any notes, but she doubted she would forget anything important. The time had come to study the thing itself —the love-doll, the clockwork courtesan, the automatic trollop.

  Ellie circled the bed, examining the woman—well, the woman-like thing—from all angles before finally giving in to the inevitable and climbing atop the covers. This model, Delilah, had wavy auburn hair and blue eyes and lovely creamy skin, and her—its—body was dressed in a black silk robe with short sleeves and a shorter hemline. The thing was too lifelike to seem a doll, but though the chest moved with artificial breath, it did not seem alive: there were none of the small shiftings and movements that characterized the living. No, this was more like a corpse on a slab, despite the perfectly even and regular breaths, and Ellie could not imagine how any man could lay down with this and pretend it was a real woman. Most men must have far better imaginations than she’d realized. Ellie reached out a hand to touch the flesh of the thing’s arm—

  —and the clockwork courtesan came more fully to life, half-turning its head toward her, eyelids fluttering, mouth parting, a warm and sultry “Mmm” sound emerging from its throat. Ellie jerked back, surprised as much by the warmth of its flesh as by its sudden movement. The skin was not exactly like that of a real woman’s, but it was soft, yielding, and pliant. She’d expected something like the gutta percha rubber used to make the dolls she’d played with as a child, but this flesh was far more… flesh-like. It seemed almost real, though the smell was wrong—too neutral, too inhuman—and the movements were somehow indefinably artificial.

  Ellie reached out and placed her palm between the automaton’s small breasts, and yes, there was a heartbeat there, and little eager-sounding moans emerged from the courtesan’s throat with each exhalation.

  You are a journalist, Ellie thought, and opened the thing’s robe.

  The clockwork courtesan’s skin was not perfectly unblemished, as Ellie had expected—there was a mole drawn on below one breast, and a few dark hairs leading down from its belly button to the fuller thatch at its crotch. Leaning in close, Ellie could see where the hairs emerged from the skin, each one hand-sewn with great care. Running her fingertips through the hair between the courtesan’s legs, curious whether the hair was human or animal—it seemed human—she was shocked to touch warm wetness, and her fingers came away moist. She smelled her fingertips, and there was, perhaps, the faintest scent of some pure, neutral oil. Had the butler or some other functionary hurried up here and… lubricated the thing, after Ellie chose this model? But, of course, that would be necessary, wouldn’t it? “Welcoming to a man’s touch” indeed.

  Ellie shuddered and wiped her hand on the comforter. She and her fiancé had shared kisses and a few more intimate moments before his dispatch to India, but as they never married, they never had the opportunity to explore one another any further. She understood how these things worked, of course, but it was a bit disconcerting to be with this doll, something built so obviously for that purpose and no other. Was this really what men wanted? Something with the shape of a woman, but with no mind, no will, no personality? Surely they’d prefer the company of a real woman, if it weren’t for the danger of contracting the Affliction and becoming one.

  She rolled the courtesan over, and was surprised when it moved on its own, getting first on all fours, then lowering its arms and head to the mattress, leaving its bottom tilted provocatively up in the air. This was a sophisticated machine. Ellie had seen an exhibition, years before, of famous automatons, including geese that laid eggs, boys who cast fishing lines, and women playing lutes, but those devices were both smaller and obviously unreal. This machine was of a different order altogether. From a distance—even quite a close distance—something like this would be indistinguishable from a human. Ellie smiled to herself. A few of the sleepier members of the House of Lords should consider commissioning clockwork imitations of themselves to sit in their places during sessions of Parliament, freeing themselves up to play cards or go shooting. If the engineers here could make a clockwork woman put her bottom in the air, surely they could make a clockwork old man capable of shouting “Hear hear!”

  Ellie pressed her ear to the automaton’s back and could hear, faintly, the whirring of some engine. They weren’t steam-powered, obviously—perhaps they ran on some electrical or alchemical battery? If only she had tools… though she couldn’t see where the thing would come apart. She would have to examine it as best she could anyway.

  Ellie carefully tested the movement of its joints, and touched its hand—the fingers closed on hers and began gently tugging in a disturbingly rhythmic fashion until Ellie pulled away. She brushed her hand against the thing’s cheek, marveling at the smoothness of its skin—and then the automaton turned its head and parted its moist and shapely lips. It sucked at her fingers like a piglet at a teat, moist tongue undulating, and Ellie pulled her fingers out, which necessitated further disgusted wiping of lubricant on the coverlet. Ellie considered exploring the courtesan’s capabilities more thoroughly, but the idea was repugnant to her. Who knew how it would react if she pressed a finger into… or even into… No matter. Cooper wouldn’t print the details even if she found out.

  She’d discovered all she could, and certainly had enough for a memorable article. A glance at the case clock on the dresser told her she had another forty-five minutes with this creature. Should she pull the bell cord, then, and declare herself done early? Would such behavior be suspicious?

  Ellie opened the door and glanced down the hallway. No sign of anyone, mechanical or otherwise. If she could only get her hands on those drawings of the models—that would be a great coup, and a boon to circulation, if reproduced in the paper. Perhaps she could find an unattended sheaf of the materials and slip them into her pocket.

  If nothing else, she could creep across the hall and get a look at another model. She tiptoed to the door across the way, number five, and listened at the keyhole. There was the faint sound of grunting and squeaking springs, and she hurriedly moved away. Door number seven was quite silent, however, and when she touched the doorknob, it turned. Did she dare? If caught, she could always claim she’d stepped out for a moment, gotten confused, and returned to the wrong room. Her article would benefit from descriptions of more than one of the amorous devices.

  With a last glance down the hall, she pushed open the door, and stepped through.

  Inside, she discovered a man wearing a set of complexly-lensed goggles, holding a long screwdriver, and poking around in the exposed mechanical guts of the naked creature on the bed.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” Ellie said—squeaked, really. Clearing her throat and roughening her voice, she said, “Wrong room, my mistake, I…”

  She stared. She knew this man. Not personally. But he had a very recognizable face.

  He pushed the goggles up to his forehead. The eyes that looked at her were bright and curious, but not particularly kind. “The door should have been locked, the madam must not have—” He stopped speaking and cocked his head. “Oh, dear,” he said. “I see you recognize me.”

  “I—I don’t know what you mean, sir—”

  Sir Bertram Oswald, noted scientist, leading expert on pneumatic alchemy, famed experimentalist, head of the Royal Alchemical Society, and close confidant (and rumored lover) of Queen Victoria, sighed and reached over to
pull the bell rope dangling by the bed. “I do hope you aren’t anyone terribly important,” he said, almost apologetically.

  Interviews with Horrible Men

  Pimm took a hansom cab as close to the address as he could. None of the electric omnibuses serviced this route, and horses generally refused to get closer than seven hundred yards or so from the walls that enclosed the remnants of Whitechapel (and a small bite of Mile End), so he had to walk the last mile or so. He strolled along the largely deserted street, past shuttered shops and sagging warehouses, aware of the eyes watching him from alleyways and empty windows, and from behind the safety of rubbish heaps. He kept to the center of the street, and frequently paused to glance behind him, to make sure no one was attempting to take him by surprise. He was dressed entirely too well for this vicinity, and though daylight robbery was rare even in this wretched part of London, twilight was near, and it was best to be vigilant. He was more worried about the walk back, when it would surely be full dark. The West End and parts of central London had electric lights now, but streets in the East End were still lit only by gas lamps, and only intermittently by those.

  Pimm grasped his walking stick—black, heavy, four feet long, topped with a silver ball, and specially modified by Freddy to serve as something more useful than a mere bludgeon—and strode along, doing his best to look confident and untouchable. Such a pose would have been easier if he hadn’t tossed back quite so many drinks before coming this way. He’d only intended to have a single drink to fortify himself around teatime, but one drink had turned into two and then into four, as sometimes happened. He was not drunk—it took a certain concentrated effort over the best part of an evening for him to get drunk, at this point—but his reflexes were not all they could be.

  Hideous yellow fog steamed out of the vents of the dome that covered the devastated area in Whitechapel, just a few streets to the north. Proposals had been made to seal the dome more tightly, to keep in the noxious vapors, but some scientists worried the gases from the alchemical fires inside would build up enough pressure to cause a more air-tight structure to explode. Yellow smoke was considered preferable to a rain of poisoned dome-fragments.

  Finding the address proved difficult, as most of the houses hereabouts didn’t have numbers, but he was in luck: one house did, and it was the house he sought, the address spelled out in brass and affixed to the front door. Pimm’s destination was a tall and narrow structure of old stones and timbers with a steeply peaked roof, pressed in on by long low warehouses on either side. Something about the house seemed vaguely Germanic, or perhaps it just looked like something that belonged in a fairy tale—the residence of a witch, or a more-than-usually genteel ogre.

  Pimm rapped on the door with the head of his cane. After a few moments, a dolorous voice on the other side said, “Well?”

  “Is this Mr. Adams? My name is Pembroke Halliday. A… mutual acquaintance suggested I speak with you.”

  “Ah, yes. Please, enter.” The door swung open soundlessly, and Pimm removed his hat before stepping into the gloomy entryway. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he blinked, because this appeared to be an impossibly vast space—how could the house be bigger on the inside than the outside?

  After another moment, he understood. The interior walls had been torn down, except for the supporting pillars, opening the house up on either side to merge seamlessly with the warehouses that flanked the structure. What appeared to be three properties from the street was in fact a single voluminous space. Shrouded shapes—scientific equipment? old furniture?—hulked at irregular intervals, and filthy rooftop windows let in a thin trickle of attenuated light. The floors were made of great unvarnished slabs of quarried stone, covered here and there with carpets that seemed woefully small in all this space, and lent little warmth.

  Mr. Adams was even stranger than his home. Though he stood hunched over, the man was still taller than anyone Pimm had seen outside of a carnival, towering over Pimm by at least a foot and a half. He wore dark robes of the sort a scholar might affect for a ceremonial occasion, but stained and threadbare, along with dark leather gloves. Strangest of all, a smooth white mask covered his face, giving him a terrifyingly blank affect—but his eyes were alive and watchful. “You are the detective?” His voice was raspy, as if Mr. Adams had damaged his throat. Perhaps he’d been in a fire—burned skin would explain the mask, and inhalation of smoke the rasp.

  Pimm made a point of treating everyone, from tradesman to villain to beggar, with the same geniality, so he merely chuckled. “Oh, heavens no. I have some interest in criminology, that’s all, and I offered our mutual friend my assistance.”

  Mr. Adams didn’t move. “I have heard of you. You worked with Scotland Yard on the Constance Trent case, did you not?”

  Pimm nodded. “An ugly business. The death of a child…” He shook his head. “Nothing was ever proven, of course, which makes it all the worse. The murderer is still free.”

  “We all suffer for our sins,” Mr. Adams said. “If not in the immediate aftermath, than in the fullness of time.”

  “Yes, quite.” Pimm cleared his throat. “Our mutual friend—”

  “You may call him by name.” Was Adams amused? With that rasp, it was so hard to tell. “We are both inclined toward confidentiality, I am sure, and thus need keep no secrets between us.”

  “Mr. Value, then. He says you can show me the bodies of these unfortunate women?”

  “One of them, at least. Follow me.” He led Pimm deeper into the house, through corridors made of stacked crates, some of them ancient and furred with dust. While this combined house was in truth one great open space punctuated by pillars, someone had created the illusion of rooms and corridors by artfully stacking boxes, hanging tapestries, and erecting tents beneath the high dark ceilings. Soon Adams halted at a seemingly arbitrary point, a narrow cul-de-sac made of stacked crates—those on one side bore markings like Egyptian hieroglyphics, and on the other each crate bore the single, rather ambiguous, word “Materiel.” Pimm glanced around the narrow space, and realized where they were going next.

  The towering figure crouched—even bent down, his head was level with Pimm’s chest—and drew back the corner of a faded Oriental rug, revealing a trap door with an iron ring set on one end.

  “I’m afraid your trap door isn’t very well hidden,” Pimm said apologetically. “The corner of the rug you lifted is more worn than the rest, and the outline of the door is visible if one takes the time to look. If this place should ever be raided by officers of the law, I fear they might discover this door.”

  Adams nodded. “I suppose so. But the police will never trouble us here—Mr. Value pays well to see I am undisturbed. And while there are certain unsavory elements who might break in and attempt to discover my secrets…” He gestured at the ring. “Try to lift it, Lord Pembroke.”

  Pimm crouched, seized the cold iron ring in both hands, and heaved. He might as well have been attempting to lift the Tower of London by main force—indeed, he began to suspect he was the butt of a joke. “Is the ring just set in solid stone, then?”

  “Not at all.” Adams reached down and, with one hand, lifted the trap door open with an air of ease. After it rose halfway, some mechanism was engaged, and the trap door stood open on its own, revealing a set of wooden stairs leading below.

  “Is there a trick?” Pimm said, squinting. “A hidden switch of some kind, to release a lock?”

  “Perhaps I am just very strong.” Adams started down the steps, and after a moment’s hesitation, Pimm followed. In for a penny, after all.

  Adams threw a switch at the bottom of the short flight of stairs, and the long low room beneath the floor lit up, illuminated by strings of electric lights, the bulbs dangling like strange fruit from wires overhead, and banishing all shadows. The strange giant gestured toward the bulbs. “They are incandescent lights, based on the design of the great magician and passable inventor Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, though I have made certain improvements
to increase their useful life.”

  “The light is marvelously steady,” Pimm said. “Most of the electrics I’ve seen flicker a bit, but these, they’re like suns done in miniature.”

  “My studies benefit from light.”

  Pimm looked around the laboratory. There were racks holding rounded vessels of clay, a long table covered in glassware, a wall entirely taken up by a huge apothecary’s cabinet, and shelves holding countless books, mixed in with specimen jars full of cloudy fluid and half-glimpsed biological oddities. “You are a natural philosopher, sir?”

  “I am principally an anatomist. The human body and its working are my ongoing fascination. Mr. Value is kind enough to send me any dead bodies he discovers, so their misfortunes might at least further the sum of human knowledge.” Adams approached a table covered with a sheet, and Pimm braced himself when the giant pulled the covering aside.

  He had seen many dead bodies since taking up his criminological hobby, several of them damaged by terrible acts of violence—poor Constance Trent was probably the most harrowing, though he’d also seen men with their heads smashed in by andirons, a handful of slashed throats, and people with their faces convulsed in the final rictus of death by poisoning.

  The woman on the table was the least distressing corpse he’d ever seen outside of a coffin. She was young, red-haired, milk-pale, and nude. That final point might have been awkward, but Pimm had long ago learned the trick of looking at the dead clinically—their souls were fled, and their bodies were merely empty vessels, worthy of respect, but no longer in need of the courtesies he would accord them in life. Pimm instinctively took a handkerchief from his pocket to press to his nose, but there was no odor. “How long has she been dead, Mr. Adams?”

  “She was found this morning, on the steps of a house on St. James’s Street.”

  Pimm grunted. “My club is on that street. I had no idea Value kept an establishment there.”