Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection

by Michael Coorlim

  I heard a crash and looked to see that the creature had rushed Bartleby, his rapier sticking uselessly out of its hip. The killer had smashed him up against the wall, slamming him into the plaster, again and again, battering my poor partner. I looked back towards the girl, who had stepped into the room.

  "Run!" I pleaded with her.

  The creature heard my cry and whirled, dropping Bartleby into a heap at its feet. It watched the girl as she ran towards me, and started after us. The girl threw her arms around me, tears pouring down her face.

  "離開他吧!" she shouted at it. "走開壞男人!"

  It faltered in its stride, the scissors in its hands lowering slightly, an unreadable expression on its monstrous face. I pulled the girl behind me and slipped in the pool of my blood as I scrambled to my knees. I held the poker in my hand, rage and a protective impulse devouring my sense of self-preservation, and bared my teeth at the devil facing me.

  "Come then!" I bellowed, barely articulate. "End this!"

  It half-moved towards us again, staring with its cold dark eyes, its face twisting and contorting. Its gnarled hands gripped the sides of its head and it threw its head back, screaming in sorrow and frustration. Moments later it was gone, back out the shattered parlour window, into the night.

  The adrenaline left my body and I half collapsed, knee skidding in blood. I checked on the girl: crying, terrified, but unharmed. I pulled her into an embrace, letting her sob into me, letting the fear leech from her body, knowing darkly that there wasn't actually anything I could do to make her safe, keep her protected. Knowing that, for now, the illusion of security was enough.

  ***

  "How exactly is it that we're not dead?" Bartleby asked upon regaining consciousness. The creature had battered him hard, but it looked like no permanent damage had been done. His shoulder had dislocated but I'd gotten the worst of the attack.

  "I'm not sure." I'd brought Bartleby to his bed while he was unconscious, and the girl was curled up alongside him, exhaustion finally defeating terror. "I know what it was, now. Galvanic Resurrection."

  "Good Lord."

  "Quite the contrary."

  "Like the Spider?" He asked, referring to the assassin we'd caught some months before.

  "Not exactly. The Spider was mostly clockwork, with a human brain and spinal column taking the place of the Babbage engine. This is different. This is the reanimation of dead tissue."

  "I'd thought such necromancy was banned?"

  "Galvanism is prohibited by the Ingolstadt Convention as a crime against humanity, but it still happens. The Royal Guild of Engineers and Artificers denounces it, but research continues in secret. This explains the N-Ray signature I'd found – obviously the Galvanisation process has some impact on the N-Radiation organic bodies give off."

  "That doesn't explain... anything, really. Why would a Galvanic Resurrection be killing families? And why would it leave us alive?"

  "I don't know. It's a forbidden technology, and not one that I've studied." Biology wasn't of much interest to me.

  "Blast." Bartleby sounded bitter. "Know of any alumnus who might know how these things act?"

  "No alum," I hesitated. "But there is a man. If you're willing to deal with the devil."

  "I think that when one is fighting devils, one cannot be too picky about one's allies."

  "You remember that you said that. We can meet with him tomorrow. The girl will be safe with Aldora."

  "Good, good." He closed his eyes momentarily, then fixed them to my gaze. "Good heavens, James, your face. Should we send for a physician?"

  "Not necessary. I'll heal. Go to sleep."

  ***

  We met with the Genevese doctor at his place of residence, the Tower of London.

  "They actually keep people here?" Bartleby marvelled. "I'd assumed it was all for tourists."

  "We do house a few very special personages." Johnson removed the ring of keys from his belt to unlock the sturdy iron door before us. He was a crude man, base and earthy, beloved of gallows humour. "Guests of the Empire, you might say."

  Bringing young Apprentices to the Tower was a RGEA tradition, a warning disguised as a field trip. The Empire kept prisoners there, prisoners too dangerous to be allowed free congress with the outside world. Some of them were anarchists and political agitators, but the ones we were shown were those whose misuse of science had put the world itself in danger. I am fairly certain that many of my fellow students took the trip not as a cautionary tale, but rather as proof that with science anything was possible... and, in some cases, should be. Many of us had arrangements with Johnson, paying him a tidy sum for access to the brilliant but twisted minds kept in the Tower. The man we were to visit was one such luminary – widely considered to be the father of modern Galvanic sciences. Widely considered to be dead.

  The cell door opened resentfully, perhaps trying to protect the world from the wretch living within. The thought of what he'd done – of the sorrow his research had unleashed upon the world, and for such petty, selfish reasons – I decided to let Bartleby do the talking, fairly certain that I'd be telegraphic in my contempt.

  The wretch we were to visit was kept manacled to his bed by short chains. The cell contained little else beyond a simple stool, beyond the reach the chains allowed, provided for the convenience of the prisoner's infrequent visitors. Some of the Tower's guests were permitted reading materials or even paper to work out theories with, but not this one. Not this man.

  "Don't get to close," Johnson grinned, motioning us in past him. "This one's a biter. Just pound on the door when you're ready to leave."

  Bartleby sat on the stool that was the room's only other furnishing, regarding our host silently while I remained, leaning, against the door. The doctor was wizened, ancient, shrunken into his simple prisoner's linens. Rheumy eyes slowly opened, acknowledgement that we were there, but he didn't speak.

  "They said that you were dead," Bartleby stated.

  The doctor spoke in a voice soft yet strong, rusty with disuse. "They lied."

  His eyes opened a little wider, and he craned his neck in our direction. "They always lie. Walton lied. Shelly lied. Made a better story if I died of pneumonia. More mortal. More moral."

  "You laugh. Morality amuses you?"

  "At my age everything amuses me, boy. They've kept me in this tower for... what year is it?"

  "Nineteen-Hundred and Seven."

  "That so?" His face soured. "I so wish death would hurry on and come collect me. There's not much left for me but waiting, now. I keep trying to call him, but the hurensohn won't let me die."

  "We have something that might make you useful..."

  The doctor frowned. "Getting to the point? Good. I only get a few visitors each year, but they always hem and haw and waste time making small talk. I don't care. They think they're doing me a favour, poor poor Victor locked up all alone. Arschlochen. Like I want your pithy words. I don't want to be useful. I just want to die."

  "Someone's built a Galvanic Resurrection."

  The revelation didn't seem to surprise the doctor. "Of course they have. Why else would anyone come to see Victor?"

  Bartleby's composure slipped. "This... happens often?"

  "Often?" Victor considered. "Often enough. They come to ask me for help several times a year. Like I have some special insight into the things."

  "Well, you were the first."

  "Would that I was the last. Let me tell you a secret, boy. I have learnt more about the Resurrected from people like you coming to beg for my help than I ever did in my experiments. So. Enlighten me, and I will enlighten you."

  Disquieted by the apparent prevalence of the Galvanic, Bartleby related what we'd discovered of the Scissorman. His murderous habits. His behaviour when he came for us. Victor listened to it all quietly, and remained silent for some time after. I had to restrain him from giving the old man a nudge, bearing in mind Johnson's warnings of the old man's mastication habits.

  The old m
an finally opened his eyes, fixing Bartleby with a steely gaze. "I will tell you three truths, and in exchange you will kill me."

  "I'm not going to kill you," Bartleby scoffed.

  "You are like the Great Detective," Victor said. "I can see it in your eyes. You put things together. The third thing I will tell you. I told him, and he revealed that if was not a better man he would have killed me. You? You are not as good a man."

  "I am not going to kill you."

  "We will see. The first thing I tell you is that the Resurrectionist who created this Scissorman is not done yet. This is why he kills. He is bringing parts to his creator. His creator has discovered what I had discovered – that he has failed. The stench you described is indeed formaldehyde, but it is not the Resurrected's flesh. His creator thinks that with fresher, better preserved body parts he will succeed. He is wrong. So, the first truth is that the Scissorman has been tasked with the collection of body-parts.

  "The second truth is the nature of the Resurrected. They are childlike, but they are not children. They are not men. They are not aware in the same way that we are aware. They exist in a dreamlike state of impulse, instinct, and emotion. Strong is the impulse to obey their creators, but there are others. Other impulses that may prove stronger. That was the hard lesson I learnt. That is half the reason I am here."

  "And the third thing?" Bartleby asked. "The thing that will make me kill you?"

  Victor had gotten visibly agitated as he spoke, shifting on his mattress, rubbing his fingertips together. "Oh. Oh my yes. So long I have waited."

  "Let's go, Bartleby," I said.

  "No. No, I want to hear this."

  "The other reason I am here. The reason they keep me alive. Why your government locks me up and did not let me die. Firstly, it was not to provide my wisdom to seekers like yourself."

  "Then what--" Bartleby began.

  "Secondly, it is done. They don't need me for it anymore. I completed the task they needed me for eight years ago."

  "Eight years--" Bartleby stopped, his face suddenly blank, his eyes wide. His cogitating look. He sat silent and still for almost an entire minute, running through the permutations of what he'd been told, making connections, eliminating possibilities. Alton Bartleby is a subtle man and I am not the greatest diviner of human expression, but live and work with anyone for long enough and you pick up on their tells. His face cycled through small changes indicating confusion, surprise, terror, disgust, and finally settling on rage.

  "No!" he roared, leaping up from his stool, knocking it back over.

  He leapt up onto Victor before I could stop him, kicking his heel into the man's face and chest.

  "No!" he repeated in desperate denial, a sorrow and frustration I'd never heard in his voice before. "No! No! No! No! No!"

  Each denial was punctuated by a wet crunch as my partner beat the aged Victor Von Frankenstein halfway to death. I reacted as quickly as I could, pulling Bartleby off of the old man, holding him at bay while he struggled to relaunch himself. Whatever it was that he had figured out was so wrong, so obscene that it had turned my cool and collected partner into a raving madman.

  "Finish me!" the old man begged. "End me!"

  Bartleby slipped free from my grasp enough to point an accusatory finger at the doctor. "No! No! No, you monster! You live! You live with what you've done!"

  I let go, and Bartleby straightened his waistcoat, a snarl on his lips.

  "You live and you know that you've done it, what you've done, and what it means. You live every day while your jailers keep you alive, trotting you out like a museum exhibit when they need you, bringing you back and letting you stay in this dark dreary room."

  "You know!" Victor begged, struggling to get back up. "You know why I have to die! You know what I did!"

  "I know," Bartleby's voice was low and full of icy venom. "And I know that when you do die, when your old black heart finally gives up, when your wretched lungs draw their last breath – I know that they'll do it to you, too."

  "Please!"

  "And that's why I'm going to let you live."

  With that, Bartleby knocked on the door and Johnson returned to let us out, Victor crying in his bed all the while. The sound of his wailing followed us all the way to the base of the Tower, and I fancied I could hear it even as we reached the street. When we'd reached our coach, Bartleby stopped and spoke. Not to me, but to the air, as if addressing the world.

  "Don't ask me. Don't ask me what he did or by God I'll tell you and you'll hate yourself forever for not letting me beat the poor old bastard to death."

  I nodded. I trusted Bartleby. God help me.

  ***

  We rode back to the townhouse in silence, Bartleby lost in thought on his side of the carriage. I knew better than to disturb him – whatever Victor Von Frankenstein had shared with him was weighing heavily on his mind. As we neared home, he sat up a bit more attentively, staring out the window, gloved hands moving on his walking stick, tapping a staccato rhythm. His lips moved silently, and the causal map that his mind was constructing out of the case's data was almost visible in the air before him. We were but halfway home before Bartleby suddenly called for the driver to stop.

  "I've got something to see to," was all the explanation he would offer me. "See you tonight."

  I sat back in frustration, watching him disappear into the afternoon. I contemplated returning home when a better idea struck me. "Driver. St. John's Wood."

  Aldora met me in the drawing room of her family's estate, a neutral expression on her face. "Where's Alton?"

  "Wandered off. Working."

  She nodded, understanding her fiancé's ways. "Are you here to see Xin?"

  "Who?"

  "The little girl. Xin Yan."

  "That's her name?" Xin Yan. I liked how it sounded.

  "Yes, Mr. Wainwright."

  "Then, yes."

  She lead me to a playroom where Xin Yan was playing with a set of building blocks and talking to herself in melodic Chinese. When she noticed me in the doorway she rushed over and hugged my legs. "你還活著, 你還活著, 你還活著, 你不能死!"

  "She's happy to see you." Aldora translated, though I could certainly infer that on my own. "Happy that you're okay."

  "Tell her that I'm happy to see her, too."

  "他很高興看到你."

  Xin Yan didn't respond, burying her face into my side.

  "She seems quite attached."

  I picked her up, carrying her over to her blocks. "Can you ask her what she's building here?"

  "什麼是你?"

  "我們房子住!" Xin Yan cheerfully replied. She pointed at one part of it. "老房子壞了!"

  "She's making a house for the two of you to live in. Because your old home was destroyed?"

  I chuckled. We continued like that for a while, Xin Yan showing me different parts of the playroom, asking me questions, Aldora translating the answers, until I noticed that it had grown dark.

  "Are you going to be staying for supper?" Aldora asked. It was, perhaps, the first time she'd extended an invitation to me that wasn't entirely out of courtesy.

  "No." I put Xin down. "I need to rejoin Bartleby. We need to put this business to an end."

  The little girl stopped me as I turned towards the door. "你要來找我?"

  "She..." Aldora seemed, I noticed for the first time, sad. Aldora's moods are as subtle as Bartleby's and I'm far less adept at picking them up. "She wants to know if you're going to come back for her."

  "Tell her," I paused, not sure of the answer myself. "Tell her I'll see her again soon."

  "I hope you know what you're doing, Mr. Wainwright."

  "We can handle the killer, now that I know what I'm facing."

  "I'm not talking about your case."

  Not knowing how to answer her, I simply tipped my hat, grabbed my jacket, and left.

  ***

  When I returned I found Bartleby in his study. He'd been busy – stacks of police doc
uments were affixed hither and yon, and a large map of the city had been stretched across the back wall. Colourful pins had been inserted, representing the sites of the murders, and providing a general overview of the killer's range. Bartleby swung from the railed ladder spanning his bookshelves, cackling, as he examined first one book and then another. Those he deemed useful he dropped onto the floor, while those he didn't need were re-shelved.

  Noticing me he dropped from his ladder and sprinted over, almost tripping over a pile of map folios. He grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me slightly. "Ask me how it's going. Go ahead, James. Ask."

  "How's it going?"

  "Smashingly! Look!" He strode proudly to the map stretched across the wall. "See? Here's the range of the killer's actions. The households he's been targeting."

  I glanced at the map. Somewhere in Whitechapel, some Spitalfields, some Southwark, some Paddington. "I don't see a pattern."

  "Neither did I, at first. I took a circuit of the murder sites again, talking to the neighbours, talking to the children. Do you know what I found?"

  "I cannot begin to imagine."

  "The surviving children. They'd been beaten. Abused. Neighbours do gossip, and almost universally they spoke of fathers and mothers with terrible tempers."

  "Your joy at this news is unseemly."

  Bartleby waved a hand in irritation. "No, see, that's the pattern. The killer was targeting abusers of children."

  "Do you mean that Xin Yan was an abused child?"

  "Who?"

  "The girl. The Chinese girl."

  "Probably!" He caught my expression. "That is to say, statistically speaking. I'm sorry to say. Sorry."

  I simply nodded. The poor girl.

  "Afterwards I went back to Scotland Yard and started digging through their files, looking for similar cases. I found a number of unsolved slayings – single men and women, travellers and vagrants, found dismembered. Pieces missing. The very poor and destitute, mostly, so there were no real investigations performed."

  He turned and practically leapt across the room to his map. "See the green pins? Individuals slain. All previous to the first reported family killing in Spitalfields. So...?"