Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds

by Edited by Ian Edginton

  Smiling, I quitted the restaurant and accompanied her around the corner to an alleyway where eight ragged children with faces older than their bodies waited.

  “She promised us a dime,” one of them said. He wasn’t the tallest or the oldest, but he seemed to be the most belligerent. I liked him immediately. “A dime each, she said.”

  “And I will honour that arrangement,” I said. I produced from my pocket the napkin from the restaurant, on which during my meal I had drawn several copies of the omega symbol. I tore it up, so that each piece of cloth had a symbol on it. I handed them out. “I wish for you to search the city for anything with this design on it. Go anywhere and everywhere. Go into restaurants, hotels, shops, factories and art galleries. Look inside cabs and carriages and people’s windows. Look at big things and small things. Look at everything.” I held up the hand that had been holding the napkin, closed it into a fist and then opened it up again, fingers and thumbs close together. The urchins gaped at the eight coins now being held between them. “These are for you now, and there will be another eight when you return. Be back here at sunrise. Now go!”

  I threw the coins towards them. They snatched them out of the air and scattered.

  “Are you sure they’ll come back?” Mrs Bridges asked.

  “If they want another dime each they will. Those were dimes I gave them, I hope. What is a dime, exactly?”

  “They might just take this money and run. Or they might return with sad faces and no information.”

  “They have sad faces anyway, and I trust them to do a good job.” I turned and looked at her. She was gazing after the kids with a wistful expression on her face. “I have found, in life and in my profession,” I said, “that if you extend trust then it is usually returned with interest. And if not, then all I have lost is sixteen dimes and twelve hours.”

  She tore her gaze away from the depths of the alley, looked at me, and smiled. “One dollar and sixty cents.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Sixteen dimes is more commonly known as one dollar and sixty cents.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “Twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound is a far better system than the rather anodyne ‘decimal’ alternative here in America.”

  We stared at each other for what seemed like a very long moment, and it was as if an entire unspoken conversation flashed between us—an invitation, a polite refusal, an embarrassed apology, a reassuring comment—but now, looking back on that adventure, I am not sure which of us was on which side of the conversation.

  “Mr Bridges will be waiting,” I said eventually.

  “And you must be fatigued after your journey,” she responded. “Might I join you for breakfast?”

  “Please do.”

  After dining on a decent Dover sole and finishing most of a bottle of absinthe I retreated to my room. I slept heavily in a cloud of white sheets and pillows stuffed with goose down, awoke early, conducted my usual ablutions, and was outside in the alley just as the sun’s early light was tinting the tops of the building with gold. Seven of the eight feral kids were already there. The eight arrived a few moments after I did.

  “What have you found?” I asked.

  The answer, it transpired, was a lot, but very little of it was useful. Apparently there are more Greek taverns and shops in New York than I would have anticipated, had you asked me, and most of them had an omega letter somewhere on their frontage. The six new electrical generators installed at Edison’s Pearl Street Station also had many examples of the ohm symbol prominently displayed. I did not ask how the child responsible for getting in there actually managed, but I did marvel inwardly at his ingenuity and bravado. One street Arab had, however, taken me at my rather facetious word and inveigled her way into as many art galleries as she could manage. My initial concern that she had wasted her time was washed away when she told me of an exhibition of artwork in the Greenwich Village area, each of which was signed with that same symbol. When I asked what kind of paintings they were, she grimaced. “Strange, they was,” she said. “Some of ’em, at least. Never seen anything like ’em in all my life. Oh, make an ’orse sick, they would.”

  I thanked them, distributed their wages, and went back into the hotel for breakfast.

  Mrs Bridges joined me just as I was finishing off my plate of potted fish, ham, tongue, devilled-chicken, kidneys, eggs and bacon. I had decide to avoid the questionable flakes of what appeared to be dried and processed corn or somesuch that were also provided. One can go too far when abroad and under cover. I quickly updated her on everything that the street Arabs had found, and suggested we repaired to the art gallery.

  It was closed when we arrived, but the presence of a well-dressed potential customer outside the front door soon magicked-up a lackey who ushered us in and plied us with sherry while we were shown the pieces. Not very good sherry, I had to admit, but we were in America.

  All of the artworks were, we were told, by the same artist, but I was surprised by the several styles at work. Some were landscapes in bold sweeps of colour, some depictions of historical scenes, but others were more... impressionistic. I am no art critic—although I know what I like—but I would hate to be present at some of the scenes of which impressions were being conveyed. Swipes and swirls of oil paint in various hues of blue, green, indigo and grey gave the impression of vast, spined creatures mostly hidden by a peculiarly noxious and corrupt smoke—creatures so vast that what might have been the emaciated forms of men and women crawling over them were no larger than fleas would be on me. The whole enterprise caused my gorge to rise unpleasantly. I noticed that Mrs Bridges had gone pale. Well, paler than usual.

  “They are exquisite, are they not?” the lackey murmured.

  “They are certainly something,” I agreed.

  Each painting was signed in the bottom right-hand corner with a scrawled omega symbol—like an ‘O’, but with a gap at the bottom and two serif ‘feet’. And each painting had been hung in a frame that had been painted bright scarlet. The frames did nothing to set the paintings off; in point of fact, they clashed nastily.

  I pointed to one at random. “I will take that one,” I said.

  The lackey smiled obsequiously. “Of course, sir. That will be—”

  “At half whatever price you are about to mention.”

  His face twisted. “I doubt that will be acceptable to the artist.”

  “You don’t know until you ask. Send a message. I will come by later to see what the response is.” I pointed at another two paintings. “Perhaps I will take both of those as well, on the same terms.”

  Two different kinds of greed fought each other on the lackey’s face: the greed of a potential sale to some other collector for a lot of money pitted against the greed over the actuality of a real sale to me for less money. I suspect, given the nature of the paintings, that the gallery had seen precious few customers since the exhibition had started, which made the fight rather one-sided. Eventually the lackey capitulated.

  Rather than head off for lunch, Mrs Bridges and I followed the messenger sent from the gallery moments after we left with my offer.

  The man didn’t bother looking behind him—shocking tradecraft, I have to say—and we were soon at a residence in an area Mrs Bridges informed me was known as ‘Greenwich Village’. It was, I have to say, in no way reminiscent of the historic area Greenwich in London, near where I live in Blackheath.

  While the messenger rang the front doorbell, we nipped around the back.

  “Stay here,” I said to Mrs Bridges. “Keep watch. If anybody turns up, whistle My Old Man Said, ‘Follow the Van’.”

  “Do I have to?” she asked. “I despise Marie Lloyd. So much innuendo.”

  The back door was secured, but a deftly placed elbow broke the glass and gave me access to the lock. I quietly moved down a long, dark corridor. At the far end I discovered a hall tiled in black and white; shadowy and containing hints of a strange smell. A figure in a hooded robe was clos
ing the front door, presumably after having given an answer to the messenger from the art gallery. He—I assumed it was a ‘he’, because the figure moved like a man, but hesitantly somehow, as if he found mobility a problem—turned around, and I ducked back into the shadows as he moved across the hall to a doorway.

  Once he had disappeared inside the room beyond, I moved cautiously to the doorway and edged my head around the jamb, curious to see what was inside.

  A treasure-trove was the answer. Or an engineering junk shop. The room was large, going up perhaps three storeys and lit by rich, buttery sunlight shining in through massive floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor space was filled with tables on which an eclectic mixture of partially-built devices sat, but they were interspersed with easels containing more of the nightmarish paintings and plinths on which sat half-carved statues of distorted, grotesquely twisted human forms, looking something like the Venus de Milo might have done if she were being tortured. Well, tortured more than the fact that her arms were missing when the statue was rediscovered, anyway. The smell from the hall—a strange, rather rancid smell, like old, soiled bandages—was more intense there, and beneath it—or above it, or side by side with it—I could also smell something reminiscent of the lubricating oil I had tasted in Mrs Bridges’s warehouse the night before.

  There was music, as well. I say ‘music’, but it was on the edge of what I considered musical in the same way that the paintings were on the edge of what I considered art. There were pipes of some kind—bagpipes perhaps—but they skirled wildly, fighting against tom-toms pounding out a shifting time signature. The effect was tribal, primal even, and I felt my heart rate accelerate in response.

  I shifted position, trying to get a better view of the room, but a tile suddenly shifted beneath my foot, grating against the dry mortar beneath.

  “Come in, my friend,” a voice growled. “We so rarely receive visitors. The opportunity to talk—well, that would be champion.”

  I moved into the room, feeling a degree of chagrinat having been detected so easily. My feelings of embarrassment were compounded moments later when Mrs Bridges started whistling outside, and then abruptly stopped.

  The hooded man I had seen earlier stood in a cleared space in the middle of the room, flanked by something that looked like a prototype Martian heat gun the size of a cannon and what might have been a suit of armour but meant for a modern-day soldier rather than a knight of old.

  “Proof against bullets, I presume?” I said as breezily as I could muster, nodding towards a suit.

  “And Martian fire, and acid,” the man said proudly. “Made from a material of our own invention.” He reached up with large, calloused hands to push the hood back, and the words I was about to utter caught in my throat.

  He was stocky but relatively elderly, with black eyebrows and a fringe of wispy white hair around an otherwise bald and freckled head, but none of that was what had made me catch my breath. His scalp was covered in wounds—no, not wounds but holes with inflamed edges, punched through the skin and presumably through the bone beneath. From each hole a transparent tube issued, like the snakes on the head of the mythical gorgon. These tubes curled down and vanished into his robes.

  “Edison, did I hear you say ve haff a visitor?” another voice said: tinted with a middle-European accent. I turned, to see Mrs Bridges being pushed into the room by another robed man. He was younger, thinner, with a bushy black moustache, but his scalp was just as denuded as his companion’s, and just as covered in wounds and worm-like tubes. There were wires as well, thin wires winding around the transparent tubes. I was so engrossed in tracing their paths that I almost missed the fact that he held a gun of unusual design.

  “A Brit,” the man named Edison said.

  “Ah.” The newcomer nodded. “I suppose it vas only a matter of time.”

  “Before what?” I asked, with as much insouciance as I could muster. “Before the authorities discovered your bizarre little parlour of inventions?”

  “Not at all,” the man named Edison said, smiling benignly. “The authorities—both here in New York and in Washington—are perfectly aware of what we do here. Who do you think is funding our design work?”

  “I meant,” the younger man said, walking over to stand next to the older one, “before someone from your homeland came to stop us. My name, by the vay, is Nikolai Tesla.” His mouth twisted. “Perhaps, if zings had turned out differently, both Edison and I could haff justifiably said, ‘You may haff heard of us’, but not here. Not now. Not in a world twisted and warped by stolen Martian technology.”

  “You’re inventors, yes? The objects Mrs Bridges discovered, the things here—all your own work?”

  “For the good folk of America,” Edison said proudly. “For the President. After all, you Brits weren’t going to give us any of your precious Martian technology, were you? And when our agents tried to steal it, well...” He shrugged. “They never came back.”

  I could sense Mrs Bridges’s revulsion at the sight of the tubes emerging from the red-rimmed holes on their scalps. “You seem,” I said, “to have been experimenting on yourselves as well. How is that going?”

  “The Martian!” Mrs Bridges breathed. What I had sensed wasn’t revulsion; it was curiosity.

  Edison nodded. “Exactly, my dear. The Martian.”

  I glanced from them to her and back again. “Am I the only person here who doesn’t know what you are talking about?”

  Mrs Bridges moved up to a position by my side. “I read some classified papers,” she said, “back in England. Reports from autopsies carried out on the Martian invaders. More particularly, on their brains. There was evidence of lesions, tumours and swellings, but also there was evidence of a series of biological tubes that could shunt liquid back and forth within the brain, causing areas of high pressure. Those lesions and tumours were deliberate.”

  “Exactly!” Edison said animatedly. “When we managed to obtain a Martian body, on this side of the Atlantic, we found the same thing: a biological system designed to cause specific areas of the Martian brain to be deliberately squeezed.”

  “That must be the one whose skin was obtained by P. T. Barnum for his American Museum,” Mrs Bridges pointed out.

  “You are wondering vy,” Tesla said. “Vy vould a creature choose to inflict insult and injury on its own brain?”

  “Actually,” I said, only half in jest, “I was wondering if this is all a hallucinatory dream caused by too much absinthe last night.”

  “They say that absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,” Mrs Bridges said, moving closer to me. I could smell her distinct perfume. Her bustle pressed rather distractingly against my hip. “But then, I’ve normally found that whisky has the same effect.” She pressed harder as she said the word “whisky”, and I suddenly remembered the hip-flask that she had said she kept in her bustle. That, I thought, could prove useful—and not just for helping me cope with the stress of immediate events.

  “You should look at ze work of Jean-Martin Charcot, in France,” Tesla went on. “He has found that ze presence of swellings, scar tissue or injury in particular areas of the cerebellum can be linked to unusual creativity: sometimes artistic unt sometimes to do vith being able to come up with completely new mathematical formulations, unt innovative engineering solutions to problems.”

  “According to the report,” Mrs Bridges said thoughtfully, “it is believed that the Martians, either naturally or through experimentation, could take advantage of this. They could actually induce genius in themselves by shifting fluids around in their brains.”

  Edison raised a hand towards his head. “And if you Brits weren’t going to give us any of your precious Martian technology, well, we had to come up with a way of kickstarting our own genius.” He moved his hand down again, pulling at his robes so that they gaped open. On his chest was fastened a device like a small accordion, with keys and buttons and a set of bellows. The tubes all ended up there, like train lines converging on their terminu
s. “We can literally make ourselves more creative, more innovative, more—”

  “Insane,” I said flatly.

  My gaze met that of Tesla. He smiled sadly. “Unt vhat choice did you leaf us?” he asked.

  “If we didn’t want to become a second class nation in thrall to the English Empire,” Edison queried, “then we had to take matters into our own hands. Or brains.”

  I looked around. “And the paintings? The music?”

  Edison shrugged. “Sometimes the pressure inside our skulls pushes in more than one direction. With me, it comes out in the form of musical compositions. With Tesla here it’s paintings and sculptures. We’ve been—” he waved a hand, “—quite prolific, to the point where we’re having to ship some of his artworks out to galleries in New York. I’m organising a concert of my works.”

  “Zey are a touch too unusual for contemporary tastes,” Tesla said, waving his gun slightly, “but I am sure zey vill be accepted eventually.”

  Mrs Bridges stepped forward and, as if accidentally, slightly towards me, so that my left hand was hidden behind the bustle of her dress. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “You cannot imagine,” Edison said, his face suddenly taking on a haunted look, “but it’s worth it. My friend, we’re pioneers for the American dream.”

  “Unt you,” Tesla said, raising his weapon and pointing it at us, “are standing in ze vay of zat dream. You cannot be allowed to leave zis room.”

  Edison shook his large head sadly. The tubes waved in a bizarre manner, like undersea plants. “Not alive, at any rate.”

  It was time for action. I grabbed a handful of the silk covering Mrs Bridges’s bustle in my left hand and pulled. The material ripped. Before either scientist could react I reached inside the framework of whalebone. My fingers touched the metal of the promised hip-flask, hanging there in a pocket of silk. As I yanked it out and sent it spinning towards Edison I felt her twisting away from me, feeling for something on her other side.