by Guy Adams
Precisely the sort of thing her father loved.
The two halves of Lord Jeremy Forset. On one hand, the inventor and engineer, a man who worked iron, oil and steam, beat the solid into shapes that pleased him and created new—and frequently lethal—contraptions. On the other, the dreamer, the man with his head in the clouds, susceptible to every passing fad and notion.
She had once spent six weeks trying to stop him building a replica of Noah’s great ark in the grounds after a chance comment from the local vicar convinced him they were heading for another flood.
On another occasion it had been his determination to reach the stars. A few hours in the company of an HG Wells novel had convinced him of life on other planets, and filled him with bloody-minded plans to set out and find them.
Most of these convictions passed as quickly as they had come. Wormwood was at least a constant.
Perhaps that’s why the trip worried her more than usual. She knew that her father’s beliefs were as slippery as the grease that frequently stained his hands and trousers; when the balloon burst, it was rarely a great loss. But when he discovered—as she honestly believed—that Wormwood was not real, she worried that it would destroy him. How then could she let him travel alone? Even if she could rely on him to stay safe during the trek—which she most certainly could not—she could hardly abandon him to the ultimate disappointment she believed lay at its conclusion.
QUARTERSHAFT CLOSED THE adjoining door behind himself and buried his head in his hands.
He was not a stupid man, though he knew others thought so. He despaired at his own weak behaviour just as much as—if not frequently more than—the people subjected to it. He simply couldn’t help himself.
He knew that Elisabeth Forset assumed he simply had designs on her sex (and he would be lying if he didn’t admit to a sizeable lust in that regard) but his desire to be in her company was driven by something even simpler than that. Quartershaft was that rare and untenable thing: an explorer that couldn’t abide being alone.
His room was dark, the lamps unlit, and he felt the blackness swell around him, thick with the weight of absence. He moved forward, tripped over the rug, and found himself, even more pitifully, lying next to his own bed like a child cowering from imaginary monsters.
He had always been a man that found terror easy to conjure. The world seemed to him to be nothing but a minefield of fears and dangers. In fact, that had been his first motivation to write, a belief that setting the very worst life might have to offer on paper might box those nightmares away at arm’s length.
He had begun with ghost stories, written under his real name of Patrick Irish, but they had been limited, unsuccessful affairs, the spooks too tame, the heroes too weak.
Then he had tried crime stories, but he knew nothing of their mechanics, and his plots were so transparent it was a dim child indeed that couldn’t finger the murderer within the first couple of pages.
So, finally, he had written adventures, catalogues of faraway lands and the perils and monsters they contained. He had written of cannibal tribes, savage reptiles, terrors beneath the sea. They were good. But still he struggled to sell them.
“Readers prefer something real,” the editor of Fireside Quarterly explained. “I like the stories a great deal, but they seem a little too absurd, too unbelievable. Our readers love journals, essays written about real expeditions, real monsters. Of course, they’re often terribly dull; who gives a tinker’s topknot about a bunch of fellows hunting for rare orchids and such? Well... my readers do, God bless them, but I’m damned if I can see why.”
“Well,” Irish had said, “it seems to me that we don’t know half of the terrible things that might be found out in the wild.”
“Oh, your average London reader gets a cold sweat on when he thinks about visiting Nottingham,” his editor had agreed. “That’s why the jungles and mountains of far off lands have such an appeal.”
“In that case, would there be any real reason why we couldn’t pretend...?”
And that day, Roderick Quartershaft was born.
The stories gained traction. Everybody loved a good monster, especially if it was located an ocean away and unlikely to trouble the reader with any more tangibility than the sketches that accompanied the stories. As far as most people were concerned, Roderick Quartershaft was the most thrilling, brave and wise gentleman in the Empire.
Of course, most of his readers had never met him.
He pulled himself up on the bed, ferreted in his waistcoat pocket for a box of matches and reached for the bedside lamp. Let there be light before he despaired entirely.
The soft orange glow matched the brandy in his system, and he regained some of his composure, swallowing the panic and disgust as he sat staring at the wall of his room.
There was a terrible oil painting hung there, a ship in a storm, tilting its way through grey waves tinted with titanium white froth. The damned thing made him feel sick just looking at it.
He got up and read the title: “The Settler’s Journey—Sailing to a New Life.”
“Well bully for you,” he said, unhooking the picture and placing it on the floor, face to the wall.
The journey across the Atlantic had been the most terrifying experience of his life. Every night he had fallen asleep only by drinking sufficient alcohol to knock him out. Even then, barely able to latch on to a cohesive thought, his brain so pickled, the one thing he had never doubted was that he would be dead by morning. Every new day he had proven himself wrong; and every new day he had found himself slightly disappointed.
Now, with feet finally on dry land, he faced yet another journey his nerves could barely cope with. Travelling away from civilisation and into the unsettled, dusty terrain that lay to the west. He had read enough stories (usually those either side of his, in Fireside Quarterly) to know that it was a world of poisonous snakes, vicious bears, mountain lions and—terror of terrors—rampaging Indians. The red devils were violence incarnate, remorseless killers who sought out the white man, filled him with arrows and then held him down to cut the scalp from his head.
He shivered and removed his wig, running his hand over the bald head beneath. How the Indians would roar when they discovered he had cheated them. How he wished he could just stay here in the hotel and write his piece from the safety of the letter desk.
He got up, removed the wig stand from his case and set it on the other side of the bed, giving the hairpiece a drunken comb with his fingers.
Perhaps he could engineer an accident? Something noble yet tragic, brave yet inarguable? He looked out of the window in the hope of spotting someone that might have the decency to shoot him in the foot.
The street outside was busy enough, full of gentlemen and ladies making their way between the saloons and dance halls. These Americans seemed a jolly lot, he thought. Which proved how terribly stupid they must be. He had been in their country for only a few days and he had already discovered that there was absolutely nothing to be happy about.
In his head he began to formulate a plan whereby he might anger a passer-by sufficiently to cause a ruckus. Said passer-by would then pull his gun and... Yes. There was no way of guaranteeing the stranger would only shoot him in the foot, was there? And, as much as he would love to get out of the journey ahead, if he had to risk a bullet in the brain to achieve it, then he would let the idea pass.
That was another thing that concerned him: all those guns! That showed you how dangerous the place must be; what sort of civilisation was it, where everyone needed to carry a murder weapon in order to feel secure?
He wished he had more guns of his own. A rifle and two revolvers might not be quite enough.
It was no good, he was getting himself agitated again.
He dug out his hip flask, drained the little that was left and then searched for another bottle of brandy in his luggage. Finding it, he topped the hip flask back up, sealed it and proceeded to drink from the bottle.
FATHER MARTIN WAS trou
bled.
This was not unusual. For all he maintained a calm exterior with the rest of the brothers, presenting a man of peace, rich in happiness and spiritual enlightenment, this was as much of a sham as the character of Roderick Quartershaft. Perhaps that was why he found he had some small measure of sympathy for the man; he knew how difficult it could be to maintain a character so completely at odds with oneself.
Father Martin worried about a great deal of things. This was not unexpected, given his position of authority. The Order of Ruth were a dedicated, devout lot, only twelve in number. They were philosophical, studiously inclined and terribly clever. They could also not be relied upon to do up their own shoelaces—were they to have any, which thankfully they did not—and it took a good deal of Father Martin’s time and energy keeping them all on the straight and narrow.
This in itself was not currently troubling him. The brothers were all secured away in their rooms, lost amongst the decadence and soft furnishings—Brother Samuel had expressed fright at the bearskin rug on his floor, concerned that the animal’s spirit might begrudge him standing on its shed fur.
What troubled Father Martin was the future. What troubled him was Wormwood.
He stood looking out of his window, watching the people in the street below. They seemed especially carefree, he thought. Revelling in sin, of course, decadents to their core, but he didn’t judge them. The Order of Ruth was easygoing on that score, a group of likeminded believers dedicated to philosophical expansion rather than silent hermits hiding away from the world. A part of him most certainly envied the Americans their relaxed, happy nature. There was nothing he would like more than to be able to walk up this wide street, the sound of music and laughter in his ears and nothing but light carelessness in his heart. But that was not his place in life. He was a man who worried. A man who discovered problems and then fixed them.
His eyes were caught by a flash of red in the crowd. A woman’s bonnet, perhaps? Or a gaily coloured cap?
He pressed his face against the glass and stared at the figure that had caught his eye, the sudden revelation of what it was sinking deep into his belly like the sensation of falling into ice water.
The man was dressed in the robes of his order, light grey habit and black belt. The red that Father Martin had mistaken for a hat was in fact the man’s face, a glistening, peeled head of muscle and teeth, even its eyes lost, become empty black pits that appeared to gaze right up at him.
Who was it? Which member of the order?
And why did nobody else on the street seem to notice them?
The monk extended an arm out towards Father Martin, reaching up through the lamplight to extend a raw, bloody finger that pointed right at him.
“Dear God,” Father Martin exclaimed, “what are you telling me?”
He put his face in his hands, desperate not to meet the gaze of the monk below.
When he looked again, the vision was gone.
THE BRIGHT OMAHA morning was torn in half by the sound of pistons.
The residents had never seen a machine of the sort that made its way through the city’s streets, a behemoth of black metal and clouds of steam. By the time it came to rest on Harney Street, it had gathered a considerable crowd.
“What the hell is it?” one bystander demanded to know, staring at the long convoy with open distrust.
“That, sir,” announced Lord Jeremy Forset, “is the Forset Land Carriage, a marvel of engineering and science the likes of which you will likely never see again.”
“I damn well hope not,” the man replied. “It stinks like hellfire and is as ugly as a buffalo’s ass.”
While both of these observations were unquestionably accurate, Lord Forset ignored them. This was a proud moment. It was the first time he had seen the machine as anything beyond pencil lines on paper. The product of his own design, the Forset Land Carriage was, on the surface, a set of three rail carriages pulled by a traction engine. Beneath that surface there were many modifications, all designed to make the journey ahead easier. The wheels were large and heavily sprung so as to handle rough terrain; the base was heavily weighted in order to provide stability. Most revolutionary of all, the steam boiler was connected to a set of batteries, so that electric supply was maintained even at a standstill, a network of water pipes also providing hot water. It was designed for practicality and comfort, the latter being something that he imagined would be in short supply outside of its carriages.
Forset felt his daughter’s hands on his shoulders, and at that moment he couldn’t have been happier, surrounded by his creations.
“It’s wonderful, father,” she said. “Whatever the residents of Omaha might think.”
“It’ll soon be beyond their consideration,” he replied. “We load up immediately, and set a course for adventure!”
Father Martin, clearly the worse for a sleepless night, led a number of his brothers down the steps.
“It’s an infernal-looking thing,” remarked Brother Samuel. Nobody responded, or indeed seemed in the least surprised at this.
“It’s certainly impressive,” said Brother William and, despite his troubled head, Father Martin was pleased to note enthusiasm from the novice.
Brother William was a good boy, but the fact that he was a clear thirty years younger than the rest of the order, and had had a youth that could charitably be described as ‘chequered’ meant that he was often an outsider. Father Martin had done his best to limit that, making time for the boy and encouraging him as much as he could. “It’s a feat of science,” he agreed. “Proof that the rational and spiritual can work side by side.”
The novice nodded. “And it must have cost him a fortune.”
Father Martin sighed at the speed with which the novice’s thoughts had descended to the earthly.
“Thankfully it has been funded by the noble chaps at the National Motor Company,” Forset explained, “since my worldly standing is not quite as proud as it once was. I designed it, they built it. Should it prove successful on this, its maiden voyage, they will begin mass production, and soon this entire country will be filled with such engines!”
“Time will tell on that one,” said a young man climbing down from the engine’s cabin. “It’s been the devil’s job getting it here on schedule, that’s for sure.”
He lifted a pair of goggles up onto his head, displacing a violent shock of ginger curls so they resembled a pair of spiralling ram’s horns.
“Billy Herbert,” he said, holding out a coal-smeared hand towards Forset. “Driver, engineer and representative of the National Motor Company.”
Forset shook the lad’s hand with enthusiasm. “I’m pleased they sent someone who knows what he’s talking about,” he said. “I had terrible visions of sharing our journey with an accountant.”
“Oh, they thought about it,” Billy admitted, “but not a single one of the suits was willing to make the trip, so I got lumbered with the job.” Noticing the look of disappointment on the inventor’s face, he tried to backpedal slightly. “Not that I’m not happy to be here. Beats being stuck in the factory, for sure.”
“That it does, my lad,” said Forset. “I can promise you a wild time on the road ahead.”
“Aye, well, not too wild, I hope.” Billy looked at the monks. “Here to bless us before we head on our way?” he joked.
“This is Father Martin and the members of the Order of Ruth,” Forset explained. “They will be accompanying us on our journey and have, in point of fact, also helped finance the whole endeavour.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Billy replied. “Even better if one of you knows how to shovel coal.”
“If they don’t, I do,” said Elisabeth, stepping forward.
Billy was clearly flustered at the thought of that.
“My daughter, Elisabeth,” explained Forset. “There is nothing she won’t do when it comes to engineering, I can assure you.”
“Great,” Billy replied, unsure what else to say.
“Don’t worry,” Elisabeth said with a smile, “it always takes men a good few days to learn how to handle a woman who is their equal.” She turned to her father. “Someone should rouse Quartershaft, the only guest at the hotel who seems to have managed to sleep through Mr Herbert’s arrival.”
“By all means wake the fellow up, my dear,” said her father. “I shall oversee the loading of our cargo.”
That was the last thing Elisabeth had on her mind.
“I’ll help,” she insisted. She turned to the monks. “I’m sure Brother William would be only too happy to hunt out our erstwhile adventurer?”
The novice nodded. “I shall simply follow my nose,” he said, walking back into the hotel.
“Quartershaft?” said Billy. “He’s the famous explorer, right?”
“In his own mind, Mr Herbert,” Elisabeth replied, “but scarcely anywhere else.”
QUARTERSHAFT HAD NOT, in fact, slept through the arrival of the traction engine. He had been on his feet and considering a hiding place in the wardrobe when it had first made its noisy way down the street.
“God’s teeth,” he said, staring down at it through his window. “Someone’s built a train line in the street while I slept.”
By the time Brother William knocked on his door, the adventurer was halfway decent, needing nothing more than a pair of trousers and a cigarette to face the day in earnest.
“We’re preparing to leave,” the novice explained when Quartershaft opened the door, not bothering to disguise his disgust at the sight of Quartershaft’s bare knees.
“I am moments away from readiness,” the adventurer assured him. “Sally forth, lad, and I will meet you down there.”
“How gratifying,” Brother William replied, walking off to rejoin the rest of his order as they prepared themselves for the journey ahead.
THE MONKS GATHERED in Father Martin’s room, kneeling in whatever space they could find.
“We have been travelling for so long,” the Father began, “and yet, in many ways, our journey starts now. The road ahead will be perilous. At times, it will seem quite beyond our capabilities.”
