The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi

  “Because I know a great deal more than you do, dolt.”

  El Yezdi addressed Krishnamurthy while gesturing toward the wardrobe-like wheeled box. “Maneesh, show him.”

  Krishnamurthy stood and walked over to the odd item of furniture, which was about a foot taller than him, and dragged it out of the corner. He positioned it beside the bath chair, then twisted a catch and slid the front panel aside. Two white suits were hanging inside, both one-piece affairs that would cover a man completely but for the head, hands, and feet. The material was white and had the texture of fish scales. Each had a circular disk attached to the chest and a cloak descending from the shoulders. Two shiny black helmets rested on the floor of the box, along with two pairs of boots attached to two-foot-high stilts. The outlandish costumes differed only in that one was fire-scorched and its helmet dented, while the other was in pristine condition. Without a doubt, Trounce had seen one of those outfits hanging from a branch in Green Park back in 1840, and the Mad Marquess had also glimpsed one momentarily in the grounds of Darkening Towers three years earlier.

  Babbage jumped up from his seat. “There they are! Why? Put them back in the workshop at once! I have to finish!”

  “Settle down, Charles,” Abdu El Yezdi said. “They’ll be returned to you presently.”

  The old scientist muttered an incomprehensible protestation and sat down.

  El Yezdi returned his attention to his guests. “You are not looking at two suits. You are looking at the same suit, which is present twice.”

  “What? What? What?” Swinburne shrilled.

  The Arabian chuckled, revealing large crooked and decayed teeth.

  “And this outfit, which is here in duplicate, will not be created for another three hundred and forty-three years.”

  “More brandy!” Swinburne screeched. “At once!”

  Bhatti, smiling, passed the decanter.

  El Yezdi went on, “It is from the year 2202—an almost inconceivable date, I’m sure you’ll agree—and though there is nothing visibly mechanical about it, it is, in fact, a machine.”

  “One that enables its wearer to travel through history,” Burton said. “And that wearer was Edward Oxford, descended from the man of the same name who shot Queen Victoria.”

  “Good! The late Countess Sabina didn’t speak to you in vain, then?”

  “Of course not.”

  “She was a good, good woman, Burton. So far, she has sacrificed herself twice for me.”

  “Twice? So far? Do you intend, at any point in this conversation, to make sense?”

  El Yezdi gave a bark of amusement, coughed, then recovered himself, rubbed the heel of his right hand against the middle of his chest, winced, and continued, “Oxford travelled back to watch his ancestor at work. It went wrong. His presence caused The Assassination—which should have failed—to succeed. Worse, his forebear was killed, and in an instant there could be no descendants, which meant Oxford had no ancestors and no longer existed in the future he’d come from.” The Arabian shook his head sadly. “The situation didn’t get any better. While fleeing the scene, his suit was damaged by young Constable Trounce. When he leaped away through time, it misfired and sent him to 1837 and Darkening Towers, where Henry Beresford took him in.”

  “Your statement differs considerably from the accounts of both Trounce and Beresford,” Burton objected.

  “I know. I’ll come to that. During Oxford’s subsequent weeks on the estate, while he attempted to make repairs, he dropped many hints about the future world. The marquess communicated these to Mr. Brunel, who, with his extraordinary inventiveness, turned them into the machinery we see around us today, much of which should never have existed.”

  “Wait!” Burton exclaimed. He turned to the brass figure. “You knew Beresford, Brunel?”

  The engineer clanged, “No, I didn’t.”

  Swinburne gave a screech of confusion.

  “Then how—?” Burton said.

  “Be patient, Sir Richard,” Daniel Gooch advised.

  Abdu El Yezdi was grinning, obviously enjoying himself at Burton’s expense. He said, “May I continue?”

  Burton answered with a slight motion of his hands.

  “Beresford and Oxford concocted a plan. If Oxford could locate the woman his now-dead ancestor would have married, and if he could impregnate her, then perhaps he might become his own great-great—I don’t know how many greats—grandfather. In other words, he might re-establish the line of descent and his own eventual existence in the year 2202.”

  “That’s utterly insane,” Swinburne objected. “Pure gobbledegook!”

  “Beresford always was half-loopy,” the Arabian responded, “and Oxford’s predicament sent him right over the edge, too. Nevertheless, they put the plan into action, and though the suit wasn’t properly repaired, it carried Oxford far enough into the future to do what he intended. So he started leaping through time in and around 1861—a little over a year from now—and while hunting for the right girl, he was spotted again and again, becoming known as Spring Heeled Jack. Perhaps it would have stopped there—with nothing but rumours of a mysterious stilted figure—but unfortunately Henry Beresford had learned too much, and when he told Francis Galton and Charles Darwin about the time suit, they became obsessed with using it to create their own futures, which they regarded as little more than Petri dishes such as are used in experimental biology.”

  Burton interrupted, “I’ve met Darwin. He struck me as a decent sort.”

  “A man is the sum of the opportunities he accepts and the challenges he does battle with,” El Yezdi said. “Change those, and you’ll have a different man.”

  “Personality adapting to the environment,” Burton mused.

  “Precisely. So history was sent careening off course by Oxford, and no one would have realised were it not for the investigations undertaken by Sir Richard Francis Burton and his companion, Algernon Swinburne.”

  Burton looked at Swinburne. The poet looked back.

  “In 1861?” Burton said. “In our future?”

  “After a fashion,” the Arabian answered. He turned to Nightingale. “Florence, help me to my feet.”

  “You’re not strong enough, sir. This charade is quite ridiculous.”

  “Stop quibbling and do as I say!”

  Nightingale bent and took him by the elbow.

  Krishnamurthy whispered to Burton, “He does so enjoy his dramatics.”

  El Yezdi gained his feet and stood unsteadily. He glowered at Burton as if expecting a challenge. When none came, he reached up to his mouth and pulled out a set of dentures, which he threw carelessly aside. His real teeth, exposed, were much smaller and in far better condition. Unbelting his robe, he shrugged it off and allowed it to fall to the floor, revealing padding strapped around his middle. Nightingale helped him remove it, until he was standing in trousers and shirt—a deep-chested and broad-shouldered man, whose stomach was paunchy with age but not fat.

  He yanked the false beard from his face—a neatly trimmed white Van Dyke adorned his chin—then took hold of his nose and twisted off the theatrical putty that had made it so hooked. The milky eye followed; a thin saucer of smoked glass that fitted over the pupil. He slipped the keffiyeh from his head. His hair was short and white, the oddly glittering lines of a tattoo on his scalp visible through it. Finally, he used a handkerchief to wipe his face. Makeup came off, showing him to be in his mid-sixties or thereabouts.

  Swinburne yelled.

  Burton jumped to his feet, stepped back, fell against his armchair, and thudded onto the floor. With his eyes fixed on the old man, he scrambled backward until his shoulders hit the wall. His mouth worked but no sound came out. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the long, deep scar on the man’s left cheek.

  There could be no doubt about it.

  Abdu El Yezdi was Sir Richard Francis Burton.

  “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an
intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.”

  —CHARLES DARWIN

  Burton’s thoughts refused to coalesce. He was still numb.

  After Abdu El Yezdi revealed his true identity, the meeting had ended. The old man was exhausted, Burton was paralysed by shock, and everyone else was badly in need of sleep. It was a little past four o’clock in the morning when Krishnamurthy escorted the explorer and poet to rooms prepared for them.

  “I’ll wake you at nine,” the faux-constable said.

  Burton possessed little awareness of his own actions. He undressed and got into bed. Sleep came fast—a response to trauma and fatigue—but he awoke just four hours later and lay staring at the ceiling, attempting to think coherently.

  His mind fixated on the image of his own face, aged, worn, sick, and with eyes steeped in sadness and anger.

  “Is that what I am to become?” he whispered.

  He remembered the sound of camel bells, a tent in an oasis, the desert, a far-off horizon, and the promise of what lay beyond it.

  One day, he would be physically incapable of exploration and discovery.

  A momentary flicker in infinity, then we are gone.

  Time is implacable. Time is cruel.

  He got up and was washed and dressed by the time Krishnamurthy knocked at the door. The Indian led him to a dining room where he breakfasted with Swinburne, Daniel Gooch, and Florence Nightingale. The latter reported that El Yezdi was still sleeping and would be left undisturbed until he woke of his own accord.

  “He’s very frail, Sir Richard,” she said, “and last night’s performance was ill-advised.”

  “How long has he got?”

  “His heart is damaged. It could be a matter of hours.”

  “Bismillah! Am I to witness my own death?”

  “Is he really you, though?” Swinburne asked. “He’s from a different version of our world, and as he said, change the opportunities and challenges that a man encounters and you’ll change the man.”

  Gooch said, “I recommend we postpone the philosophical pondering. Finish eating, gentlemen; Mr. Brunel has more to tell you.”

  Half an hour later, he accompanied them to the famous engineer’s office, where Krishnamurthy and Bhatti were waiting.

  As he entered, Burton noticed that Brunel had a large canister affixed to his back.

  “It’s a battery,” the mechanical man explained. “Unlike the common clockwork servants, my body is powered by electricity. It has internal batteries but they require recharging every forty-eight hours, and this—” he jerked a metal thumb over his shoulder at the cylinder, “—does the job.”

  Brunel gestured toward the armchairs. They settled, and he took the middle of the floor, facing them. In his clanging voice, he said, “You have met yourself, Sir Richard, but that other you was formed amid a tangle of particular circumstances that will occur in the near future—but in a world we do not inhabit. In the past of that world, a different Isambard Kingdom Brunel knew Henry Beresford, the Mad Marquess. Here, I never met the man. This idea—that there are multiple variants of our history and we are present in all of them—is difficult to comprehend, yet we must accept it as true if we are to understand our enemy.”

  Burton murmured, “I’m hardly in a position to oppose the notion.”

  “Indeed not. So, allow me to tell you a little more about the world the other you came from—”

  “Please refer to him as Abdu El Yezdi,” Burton interrupted. “It will be less confusing.”

  “Very well. In 1861, he killed the future Oxford, out of whose meddling these multiple histories were born. The following year, another man from the future tried to influence events. He was a Russian named Rasputin, who sent his spirit body back from 1914 in order to reshape the events that were leading to a war. El Yezdi killed him, too.”

  “He appears to be rather violent,” Swinburne noted, with a glance at Burton.

  “He’s had to be,” Brunel said. “And it’s taken its toll.”

  Burton shifted uneasily in his chair. He lit a cheroot and raised it to his mouth with a trembling hand.

  “In ’sixty-three,” Brunel continued, “El Yezdi himself became what you might call a chrononaut. He was thrown into the future, into 1918, where a world war had decimated the British Empire, which was making its last stand in a city called—”

  “Tabora,” Burton croaked. “I witnessed its destruction last night.”

  Brunel chimed, “How?”

  “In a vision, forced upon me by an entity that calls itself Perdurabo.”

  “Ah. Aleister Crowley.”

  “Who?”

  “In the war that threatens, there will be three great powers, all mediums of startling potency. In Germany, a man named Friedrich Nietzsche; in Russia, the aforementioned Rasputin; and for the British Empire, Aleister Crowley, who calls himself Perdurabo. He is a traitor and a madman. He has come among us to undo all the good work Abdu El Yezdi has done.”

  “The manipulation of history,” Swinburne said. “To avoid the war?”

  “Yes. After witnessing the conflict in 1918, El Yezdi attempted to repair the damage that Oxford had done to the mechanism of time. He traveled back through history to 1840, to the scene of Victoria’s assassination. When Oxford arrived from 2202, El Yezdi killed him—again. As it turned out, he also found himself responsible for Queen Victoria’s death.”

  “The killing shot came from the rifle,” Burton whispered, remembering Trounce’s observation that the bullet had hit the monarch in the back of the head.

  Brunel’s brass face turned so that he appeared to be looking straight at the explorer. “You will quickly learn to appreciate, Sir Richard, that where time is concerned, paradoxes proliferate and are impossibly baffling to any mind—with the exception, perhaps, of Charles Babbage’s. El Yezdi’s multiple murder of Oxford is far from being the most difficult of them to comprehend. The oddest is that, because El Yezdi prevented Oxford from being thrown back to 1837, three years of history suddenly vanished.”

  “The Great Amnesia,” Burton said. “The Mad Marquess must have written about his encounter with Oxford at the precise moment history changed. His diary entry is an anomaly.”

  “Oxford being thrown into ’thirty-seven, then not being thrown in ’thirty-seven, caused yet another branch to split from the original history—it is the one we inhabit—and El Yezdi was trapped in it. He’d already lived forty-two years in his own time, he spent four years in the future, and now he was back in 1840, aged forty-six, with his nineteen-year-old counterpart already there.”

  “Me,” Burton said. “I always put it down to the effects of fever, but I think I felt his presence.”

  “There is a resonance between versions of anything that possesses a multiple existence,” Brunel said. He rapped the side of his metal head. “The diamonds in which my consciousness resides, for example, are present many times over. Their resonation accentuates—even bestows—mediumistic abilities. It is how El Yezdi contacted Countess Sabina and through her began to shape a British Empire that would never go to war against Germany.”

  The engineer said to Burton, “You have, quite literally, made history.”

  Burton muttered, “And Perdurabo—Crowley—wants to destroy it.”

  “He doesn’t believe the war can be avoided, so intends to ignite it earlier, before Germany can prepare. Once the conflict is won, he’ll make himself ruler.”

  “Of Germany?” Swinburne asked.

  “No, Mr. Swinburne, of the world. He has to be stopped.”

  Burton suddenly jumped to his feet. “Do you have a map of London, Mr. Brunel?”

  The electric man nodded and looked at Gooch, who crossed to a cabinet and returned with a rolled map. He unfurled it on Brunel’s desk, weighting the corners with a book, inkpot, spanner, and magnifying glass.

  Everyone gathered around it.

  Burton looke
d at the grandfather clock. It was eleven. He tapped a finger on the map. “Green Park. In exactly twenty-four hours, it will host a gathering of dignitaries from Britain and the Germanic states. The Central German Confederation will be formalised and our Alliance with it signed. Undoubtedly, Perdurabo will strike at the ceremony.”

  “He’ll never get past the security,” Brunel said.

  “He might intend to overpower the police and King’s Guard by force of numbers.”

  “Has he an army?” Krishnamurthy asked.

  “He has the Cauldron. Aleister Crowley currently exists only as parasitical willpower—a nosferatu. His victims become un-dead and are proliferating throughout the East End. He has power over them, and is using them to whip up fear and anti-German sentiment in the local population.”

  A gruff voice came from the doorway. “Willpower, you say?”

  They turned. Nurse Nightingale was guiding Abdu El Yezdi’s bath chair in through the door.

  “My associate, the French occultist Eliphas Levi, calls it volonté,” Burton said.

  His older self grunted an acknowledgment. “If Crowley is here only in such a form, we can be certain that his plans involve more than just a strike against the fledgling German Empire.”

  “You refer to his need for a body?”

  “I do. He is obsessed with the idea that medical and scientific intervention might hasten a man toward a state of godhood. He will attempt to achieve that.”

  “A Supreme Man,” Burton muttered.

  “Or as Nietzsche will have it, an Übermensch.”

  “Artificially constructed?”

  “I imagine so. I understand Galton escaped from Bedlam. Whatever he may have been in the original history, I’ve already seen him demonstrate just how thin is the line between genius and insanity. I have no doubt he’s been recruited by Crowley to create a physical structure in which our enemy’s volonté can be permanently housed.”

  Burton nodded. “He also has Darwin and a talented surgeon named Joseph Lister, though they’re almost certainly being held against their will. And—” He hesitated.

  “And what?” his other snapped.