The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  “We all ’ave our place, don’t we, Cap’n? This ’ere is my patch.”

  “I suppose we do. Good afternoon to you, sir.”

  Though his words and thoughts had come without volition, Burton’s mind was clearing. “My world” was starting to mean something to him—and it was most certainly something different to “this world.”

  A few minutes later, he stabled Orpheus in the mews behind his house—“I’ll wait here and wind down,” the horse said grumpily—and entered Number 14 by the back door. He strode to the foot of the stairs where he found his young valet, Bram Stoker, polishing shoes and boots.

  “Hello, Bram. You’re up late. Off to bed with you.”

  The boy looked up. It wasn’t Stoker at all, but Oscar Wilde, who’d been Captain Lawless’s cabin boy during the African adventure and who’d recently been accepted by the flight officer’s training school.

  “Bram, guv’nor?” the youngster asked.

  “Sorry, I was thinking out loud.”

  “How were the toffs?”

  “Toffs?”

  “At the palace.”

  Burton struggled with confused memories. Had he been to Buckingham Palace?

  He gave a safe answer, “Tedious, as usual.”

  The Irish boy grinned. “Ye should never speak disrespectfully of Society, sir. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”

  “Then I feel at liberty. The high and the mighty don’t make me welcome at their clubs and dinner tables.”

  “It’s ’cos ye have a brain in your head, so it is. What a danger for ’em! Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

  Burton chuckled. He placed his cap on the stand, hung up his coat, and put his cane into its elephant foot holder. He glanced around the hallway. It was as it should be, except the pictures on the wall were arranged a little differently, and the grandfather clock at the far end was a different model.

  He said to Wilde, “When you’ve finished those boots, and before you go to bed, come up to my room and put this uniform away, would you?”

  “Right you are, sir. Shan’t be long.”

  Burton went up to his bedroom on the third floor. There, he divested himself of the scratchy and constricting regimentals, threw them onto the bed, and donned shirt and trousers.

  He checked his pocket watch. It was a quarter to eleven.

  His reflection watched him from the wall mirror. He gave a start, crossed to the glass, and discovered that his hair was a little shorter, a devilishly forked beard adorned his jaw, and the scar on his left cheek had become longer and was angled a little more toward the horizontal. There were marks on his skin—cuts and bruises—but they were healing, not the fresh and painful wounds he knew he’d suffered a couple of hours ago. Or was it three hours? Four? A day?

  Squaring his shoulders, he addressed his opposite. “I trust you have a good supply of brandy and cigars, Captain Burton. This is a three-Manila problem.”

  The king’s agent went down to his study. Upon entering it, he was insulted by a colourful parakeet.

  “Stench pool! Lard belly! Dribblesome jelly head!”

  He looked in surprise at the perched bird, shook his head in wonder, and began to slowly move around the room, examining every detail of it. At a glance, it looked unchanged, but on closer inspection he found his paperwork had been reorganised and items moved, including his collection of swords, which though still affixed to the chimneybreast were displayed in a different arrangement.

  He investigated his principal work desk and found that he was apparently authoring a book entitled A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise. After reading the first few paragraphs, he muttered, “A truly excellent idea. I shall write it myself.”

  He went to the bureau, poured a drink, and crossed to the old saddlebag armchair by the fireplace. When he sat, he found it as familiar and as comfortable as his own.

  “It is your own,” he said and, reaching down to a box on the hearth, took a cheroot from it, poked its end into the fire, and started to smoke.

  “Let me see now. I met Algy for a drink. Where? The Hog in the Pound? No. The Black Toad. After which we went to meet with the Cannibals at Bartolini’s. Ah! Spring Heeled Jack. That explains this wound to my arm.” He flexed his left elbow. “Except it’s not there. But anyway, one hell of a scrap, I’m certain of that. Then young Swinburne and I headed off to consult with Babbage. Am I still at Battersea?”

  “Nose-picking, mould muggling arse pot!” the parakeet cackled.

  “You may be right, my brightly feathered friend,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t explain how I’ve somehow slipped into the body of a different Burton. Have you any insight into that?”

  “Buttocks!” the bird responded.

  There came a tap at the door.

  “Enter!”

  Mrs. Iris Angell, his housekeeper, stepped in. A basset hound padded beside her.

  “Will you require any supper before I go to bed?” She hesitated then gave an awkward bob. “Should I address you as Sir Richard, now?”

  “No, Mother Angell, no formalities and no supper. I haven’t any appetite.”

  He looked down at the dog as it walked across to the hearthrug, sat, and gazed back at him with an eager thump of its tail on the floor.

  “Fidget wants a walk,” Mrs. Angell observed. “The greedy little mite. He doesn’t care about the hour, nor that he’s already been exercised twice today by Quips.”

  “Quips?”

  “Master Wilde. Are you all right? You look a little flustered, if you’ll forgive me a-sayin’ so.”

  “It’s been an odd sort of day. The dog will have to wait. I have to go out again in a moment.”

  “So late? I do wish you’d take a rest for once in your life.”

  Burton watched his housekeeper depart. He smiled. There was a peculiar sort of satisfaction in knowing his other self enjoyed the same comforts of home.

  He took a gulp of brandy and noticed a puckered scar across the back of his left hand. He recognised it at once. It was common in men who favoured the blade as a weapon—a mark of their earliest days of training when in attempting to sheathe their weapon they missed the scabbard and sliced the flesh, cutting it to the bone. A painful mistake, but one that Burton had never made. This was not his scar.

  “And this is not my place,” he said decisively.

  He stood, put his drink aside, lifted a jacket from the back of a chair, and slipped it on.

  “Crapulous ninny!” the parakeet squawked.

  “And up your pipe,” he replied.

  He left the study and descended the stairs.

  “I’m all done here,” Oscar Wilde said. “I’ll go and fold your uniform, guv’nor.”

  “Thank you, lad.”

  After shrugging into his coat and taking up his top hat and cane, Burton passed through the house, went out into the yard, and crossed to the mews. He entered them with the instinctive expectation that he’d see his two rotorchairs, two velocipedes, and single steam sphere, even though he knew they weren’t there.

  “Again?” Orpheus said. “Can’t I enjoy a moment’s peace?”

  “Earlier you complained you’d wind down,” Burton noted.

  “Where do you want to go?” the contraption asked.

  “To visit my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had one. You never tell me anything. Where does he live?”

  “At the Royal Venetia Hotel on the Strand. He’s the minister of chronological affairs.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “You’re a horse.”

  The contraption jerked its head toward the street-facing doors. “Stop dithering and open up.”

  Burton crossed to the portal and slid it open. He waited while Orpheus walked out, then secured the stable, mounted the vehicle, and said, “Trot, please.”

  They set off.

  Again, Burton was surprised by how subdued the city felt. There was none o
f the hustle and bustle he was accustomed to. Vague memories—not his own—nudged at the periphery of his conscious mind. Nietzsche. Berserkers. Death. Destruction.

  Please, no! I lost Isabel in this life, too! Isabel! Isabel!

  Forty minutes later, Orpheus stopped outside the hotel.

  Burton jumped to the pavement and crossed it. People moved past him like wraiths, quickly and silently, as if in the grip of some nameless dread.

  He tipped his hat to the doorman, entered, walked across the opulent black-and-white chequer-floored reception area toward the staircase, then suddenly hesitated and changed course. He approached the front desk.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Edward Burton,” he said. “The minister. Suite five, fifth floor.”

  The night clerk pursed his lips, causing the ends of his waxed moustache to stick out like little horns, checked the guest register, and shook his head. “We don’t have anyone by that name, sir.”

  “He’s a permanent resident.”

  “I’m afraid not. Suite five, you say? Those rooms have been empty for the past three days. The last occupant was the Spanish ambassador, Signor Delgado. He was killed during the troubles. Perhaps you have the wrong hotel.”

  Burton said thank you and departed. He remounted his steed. “Take me to Cheyne Walk.”

  “Mr. Swinburne’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to get drunk?”

  “Mind your own damned business.”

  Orpheus trotted westward following the Thames upstream back toward Chelsea Bridge. Foghorns sent their mournful blasts into the pall. Big Ben chimed midnight.

  “By God! Where am I?” Burton cried out, for St. Stephen’s Tower had been blown to smithereens last November, and, even before that, its bell had cracked and stopped working. Suddenly, he felt horribly lost, terribly alone.

  A sense of urgency—near panic—overtook him. Why was he in this familiar yet alien London? What had thrown him here? How could he return to his own world?

  “Go as fast as you can,” he commanded.

  “Hold on tight,” the clockwork horse advised. “I might have to stop abruptly.”

  With metal hooves clacking, the steed set off at a gallop.

  A breeze had got up, and the blanket of fog was shredding. It parted just ahead, revealing the back of a slow-moving hansom cab. Burton had to quickly jerk the reins to steer his armadillidium around it.

  He looked down.

  Armadillidium?

  “From what yer might call a filler-soffickle standpoint,” Herbert Spencer declared, “I ain’t averse to the idea what that time can divide into separate ’istories. An’ I must admit, I quite likes the possibility that there’s more ’n one o’ me, an’ that some o’ the others might ’ave ’ad better hopportunities than what I’ve ’ad. It’s a rum do—hey?—to fink there might be an ’Erbert Spencer somewhere what’s a bloomin’ toff with an heducation n’ all!”

  Spencer was sitting behind Lieutenant Richard Francis Burton on a saddle-like seat mounted on the back of a massive woodlouse—of the genus armadillidium giganticus. Burton was steering the crustacean along Nine Elms Lane toward Battersea Castle. There were many more of the creatures on the road, some with as many as five passengers upon their plated backs.

  “In your case, Herbert,” the explorer responded, “I suspect the profundity of your intelligence is probably the same in every version of the world. If, in a parallel existence, you are better educated, then perhaps it allows you to express yourself in a rather more erudite manner, with the consequence of greater attention and respect from the intelligentsia, but you’ve never struck me as a man who particularly desires to be feted.”

  “Nah,” Spencer agreed. “All that attention? It ain’t fer the likes o’ me. The appeal of bein’ a toff is a full stomach, that’s all.”

  Burton was suddenly hit by a vertiginous sense of falling. He tugged at the armadillidium’s reins, as if trying to avoid something that wasn’t there, and gave a cry of alarm. From behind him a voice said, “Cor blimey! Steady on! You nearly ’ad us off the bloomin’ road!”

  Twisting around, he saw a bearded vagabond sitting behind him.

  “Watch out!” the man said, pointing ahead.

  Burton returned his attention to the woodlouse and steered it back onto the left side of the thoroughfare.

  He gasped. Though low snow-bearing clouds obscured the night sky, the cold air was so incredibly crisp and clear that every street lamp blazed like a star, and, to his right, the River Thames glittered as if filled with phosphorescence. He looked down again at the thing beneath him.

  “Um.”

  “Somethin’ wrong, Boss?”

  “No,” Burton lied.

  He struggled to recall the man’s name. Wells? No. Speke? Spencer. Yes. Herbert Spencer. How did he know that?

  The accounts left by Abdu El Yezdi. Herbert Spencer was a vagrant philosopher. He was killed while holding shards of one of the Nāga diamonds. Due to his proximity to them, the dying emanation of his brain was imprinted into the gems. They were later transferred into a clockwork man’s babbage device, giving Spencer’s still-conscious mind a means through which to express itself and, after a fashion, live again.

  This memory suddenly felt profoundly significant to Burton, though he couldn’t fathom why.

  A huge dragonfly hummed by overhead, with a man saddled upon its thorax and glowing paper lanterns trailing on ribbons behind it.

  Burton watched it pass and was startled when a lock of hair fell over his eyes. He reached up and found himself possessed of a shoulder-length mane. For some strange reason, he imagined he’d always worn it short. He pushed his fingertips into its roots and along his scalp. No scars.

  What is wrong with me?

  He must have been daydreaming. He’d imagined something about a mechanical horse. His thoughts were jumbled and erratic. Fantasies were intruding into them. Berserkers. Spring Heeled Jack. Lord Palmerston.

  He muttered, “I must be going barmy.”

  The four copper towers of Battersea Castle were just ahead. He felt it to be his destination, so guided the woodlouse off the road and into the edifice’s decorative gardens. Frost had whitened the grass, hedgerows, and skeletal trees. The flowerbeds to either side of the path were barren.

  “Pull yourself together,” he whispered as he drew his steed to a halt outside the castle’s gates.

  “Beg pardon?” Spencer asked.

  “Sorry. Nothing.”

  As they climbed to the ground, Burton reeled to one side and would have fallen had Spencer not caught him by the wrist.

  “Flamin’ heck, Boss! What’s got into yer?”

  “Too many late nights.” Burton steadied himself. He put a hand to his ribs, to his left arm, to his chin. Ghostly pain inhabited them but didn’t hurt him.

  Spencer said to the armadillidium, “Wait.”

  It rolled itself into a ball. The king’s agent marvelled at the way the creature made of itself such a perfect sphere, completely protected by its armour, with the saddle balanced on top. It was astonishing. The achievements of the geneticists never ceased to amaze him. Sir Francis Galton certainly deserved all the honours he’d received.

  Geneticists? Galton? Galton the lunatic? The father of that illegal science?

  “Why are we riskin’ this visit?” Spencer asked. “The Master Guild of Engineers is defeated, an’ if Gladstone finds out we’re consortin’ wiv the enemy, ’e’ll likely ’ave us ’ung, drawn an’ quartered.”

  “Gladstone is an ass,” Burton replied involuntarily. He looked up at the building, noting that, in contrast to its well-tended gardens, it appeared shabby and neglected. Many of its windowpanes were cracked. It didn’t feel right. Not at all.

  He knocked on the door. A motor-driven mechanical guard opened it and ushered them through. Like so many of the devices created by the Master Guild, it was a rickety thing that wobbled on its wheels and coughed black smoke from a clanking oil-powe
red engine. It led the king’s agent and his companion to the tall inner gates and opened them. Burton and Spencer entered.

  Wending their way past the machinery, they arrived at the central work area, where they found Algernon Swinburne waiting with Charlie Babbage.

  “Hey ho, fellow rabble-rousers!” the diminutive poet cried out. “Welcome to the dark heart of the insurgency. My hat, it’s like the jolly old Gunpowder Plot. What! What! What!”

  Babbage said, “We’ve been waiting. Why are you late?”

  “I don’t know,” Burton replied truthfully.

  “We was at the Penfold Private Sanatorium,” Spencer put in. “Sister Raghavendra says they can’t save Monty Penniforth’s arm an’ will ’ave to remove it an’ grow ’im a new ’un.”

  Babbage waved a hand dismissively. “Immaterial. Immaterial.”

  “Not to Monty,” Swinburne observed. “That’s his drinking arm.” He quivered and spasmed in his usual over-excitable manner.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel trundled into view. One of his wheels squeaked annoyingly. His brain was plainly visible, floating in a dome-shaped glass container, and his many thin metal tentacles were in constant motion, writhing and curling restlessly.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Burton,” he said. His voice sounded like bubbling liquid. “Mr. Spencer.”

  Burton nodded a greeting then looked at the ruined attire spread out on one of the workbenches.

  “Edward Oxford’s time suit,” he observed.

  A recurrent dream. Or nightmare.

  “Yes,” Brunel replied. “Charlie will explain. He feels he might have a solution to our problem.”

  Babbage hissed impatiently. “Feels? Feels? Don’t impose the imprecision of emotions upon me, Brunel. My theories, premises, hypotheses—call them what you will—originate in logical thought. There is no room for doubt in science. Either something is, or it isn’t, or it’s unknown. If I say I have a solution, it’s because I do. My feelings don’t enter into it.”

  “The terminology I employ has no influence upon the facts,” Brunel countered.

  Babbage rasped, “Just the attitude that has weakened the Master Guild of Engineers to the point of extinction. Accuracy! Accuracy! I’ll have exactitude, if you please!”