The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi

  He received a saluted response.

  “Lead on,” he said to Burton.

  Following the road, they skirted the front of the factory to the corner of Vauxhall Bridge. Here a set of concrete steps led down to the riverside and the outlet of the Effra. They found another gun battle raging there—Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, crouched behind a bulwark, were exchanging shots with men in the building.

  Burton, Swinburne, and the policemen stayed low and ran to the two Indians.

  Bhatti, bleeding profusely from a furrow on the side of his head, said, “Hello, fellows! They’re stubborn blighters! How many men do you have? Enough to rush the place?”

  “They have double our number,” Burton answered. “But if we hold them in there, their plan is scuppered. Have you seen Crowley?”

  “No sign of the hound. Is he with them?”

  Burton frowned and turned to Swinburne. “You’re right, Algy. Something is badly amiss.”

  He flinched as a bullet whined past his ear. Krishnamurthy returned fire before muttering, “I’m low on ammunition.”

  Sergeant Piper addressed Constable Tamworth. “I’ll not tolerate a blessed shooting match on my beat. Run to the station, lad, and round up everyone you can. We’ll get into that building, forlorn hope or no.”

  Tamworth took to his heels. Bullets drilled into the ground behind him.

  “Modus operandi,” Swinburne murmured.

  Burton looked at him. “Pardon?”

  “Modus operandi. Crowley’s every move, right from the start—the murder of your friend Stroyan—has been undertaken in the context of your existence.”

  “He said he was scared of me.”

  “Yet he steadfastly refuses to kill you. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because by disposing of you, he’d rid himself of the cause of his fear but not of the emotion itself. It isn’t enough for him. Fear has such a power. He wants to conquer it. Take control of it. Turn it into a strength. That is why you must live. That is why he must have you at his feet. Only then can the Supreme Man feel truly supreme.”

  Burton recalled Doctor Monroe’s theory concerning Oliphant’s obsession with rats.

  “Crowley is blinkered,” Swinburne went on. “He can only think to counter his greatest fear with your greatest fear.”

  “By God!” Burton whispered. “He’s still underground.”

  “Yes.”

  Krishnamurthy shook his head. “We walked the complete length of the tunnel, Mr. Swinburne. There was no sign of the bomb or of Crowley. Wherever he is, he’s not by the Effra.”

  “There are other tunnels.”

  What had been lurking at the back of Burton’s mind suddenly blossomed into comprehension. He punched his palm, shouted, “Bismillah!” then looked at Sergeant Piper, and—acting on impulse—pointed at the whistle hanging around the policeman’s neck and barked, “Give me that!”

  “What?” the policeman asked, puzzled.

  “Your whistle, man! Now!”

  Piper pulled the chain over his head and handed it to the explorer.

  Burton took Swinburne by the arm and drew him toward the road, shouting back to the others, “Stay put! Keep them immobilised!”

  “What are you doing?” Bhatti shouted after him.

  “Saving the bloody Empire!” Burton yelled. “If it’s not too late!”

  “Frater Perdurabo.”

  (I shall endure to the end.)

  —ALEISTER CROWLEY

  Burton was enclosed twice over—first by the heavy undersea suit, and second by the claustrophobic sewer tunnel. Despite the mephitic reek rising from the thick, fast-flowing sludge in which he was immersed up to his knees and which threatened to suck him down at any moment, he’d left the faceplate of his helmet open.

  His jaw was clamped shut, his eyes moved anxiously, and his chest was rising and falling with short, sharp breaths. He waded ahead, dragging behind him the long, weighty chain attached to the suit’s harness. With every step, his fear increased. He wrapped his gloved right hand around his swordstick—secured against him by one of the harness’s straps—and pulled at the chain with his left.

  The light from the small lamps on either side of his headgear projected forward, illuminating about twenty feet of the tunnel, but beyond the radiance the brickwork plunged into absolute darkness. Burton couldn’t throw off the sensation that he was slipping down the throat of a gigantic beast.

  One foot in front of the other. Keep your balance. Don’t think about how this has to end.

  The Enochian gunmen had been a subterfuge, a diversion. Crowley never intended to take the Sagittarius. When Burton realised this—thanks to Swinburne’s insight—he’d raced back to Battersea Power Station, where Montague Penniforth was waiting and wondering where everyone had gone.

  Rushing into Brunel’s office, the explorer consulted Bazalgette’s maps of subterranean London and discovered that, a few yards north of the Effra’s outlet, under Vauxhall Bridge, a small maintenance tunnel spanned the bed of the Thames. It gave access to the big west-to-east intercepting sewer, which ran parallel to the north bank of the river. Crowley need only have wheeled the bomb through it, turned left into the sewer system’s artery, and half a mile along its length he’d have come to what used to be the mouth of the Tyburn. That subterranean waterway, now enclosed by Bazalgette’s incredible brickwork and reduced to a trickle by a massive sluice gate, ran southward all the way from Hampstead.

  It passed directly beneath Green Park.

  There was no time for planning. The politicians and royal families were already gathering around the Victoria Memorial. No time, even, to speak with Abdu El Yezdi, who was, according to Nurse Nightingale, taking his final breaths.

  Burton adopted the first scheme that came to mind—it had occurred to him in an instant while he was still with Krishnamurthy, Bhatti, and Piper—and after hastily grabbing the required equipment, he, Swinburne, and Penniforth boarded one of the DOGS’ small rotorships and sped northward. There was a wide exclusion zone around the park—no flying machines permitted except the Orpheus—and they possessed no means with which to signal Captain Lawless, so they’d angled to the west, flying in a wide arc over Belgravia and Hyde Park before landing in Berkeley Square. Here, after roughly pushing protesting pedestrians out of the way, they’d lifted an iron manhole cover, revealing the rungs of a ladder. Burton, donning the undersea suit, had issued instructions then descended into the darkness of the Tyburn tunnel, where he found himself in front of the giant sluice gate. It was impeding the swollen waters and accumulated sewage from a wide swathe of northern London, but was very slightly raised, and viscous filth was spurting from its base with tremendous force. The thick liquid would have knocked the explorer flying had he not been tethered by the chain to the windlass they’d picked up from the Royal Navy Air Service Station. Penniforth was attending to the apparatus, above ground, slowly unwinding it to allow Burton’s passage through the tunnel.

  He’d walked half a mile—barely any distance at all—but it was the exact length of the chain and felt like ten times as far to Burton, who was increasingly exhausted by the weight of the links as they accumulated behind him.

  Buried alive. By God, would the nightmare never end?

  He struggled to concentrate—balance, step, move—but couldn’t. His mind kept throwing up disjointed images: Isabel, the African savannah, John Speke, the Kaaba at Mecca, and the distant Mountains of the Moon. He became confused. Had he bypassed the mountains or visited them? Was Speke dead or alive?

  He was cold. Fatigued beyond measure. Scared. He needed Saltzmann’s Tincture. Required its honeyed warmth in his veins.

  A choir of voices said, “I can hear you. Stay back if you value your life.”

  “Crowley,” he called. The word echoed into the darkness.

  “Burton! Is that you? Escaped? Bravo, man! Bravo! I certainly didn’t expect you. Come forward, by all means.”

  The explorer splash
ed on and rounded a bend. His lamps illuminated a tall, freakish figure bent over a trolley on which a large cylinder rested.

  Crowley’s weird eyes assessed him and the thin-lipped, needle-toothed mouth twisted into a mocking grin. “Look at you! I wish I’d thought of donning such an outfit. I’m calf-high in stinking effluence.”

  “And possess a cranium full of it,” Burton added.

  “Now now, Sir Richard. I would have thought you above such petty insults.”

  “Give it up. I’ll not let you explode the bomb.”

  “How do you intend to stop me? I have twice your strength and the device is on a timer. Twenty minutes from now—boom!—the new world begins.”

  “The new?” Burton sneered. “There’s nothing new about the subjugation of a population to a madman’s lust for power. Sulla did it. Caesar did it. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Bonaparte—need I go on?”

  “Please don’t. I bore so very easily.”

  “The event above us—that is the birth of a new world, Crowley. It is the avoidance of war; the establishment of a permanent peace; the beginning of a stable Europe.”

  Crowley waved his hand dismissively. “You’re a fool, Burton. I was born sixteen years from now, in 1875, and saw forty-three years of history develop before I travelled back to this time. You have no conception of the scale of the conflict I lived through. It devastated nation after nation; killed whole generations; gave rise to evils beyond anything you can possibly imagine. The Germans rampaged across the globe like a plague of locusts, murdering every man, woman, and child who stood in their way, and millions who didn’t. They have to be stopped.”

  “What happened in your history will not happen in this.”

  “It will. Certain events occur, in varying forms, in all the histories—sometimes earlier, sometimes later, but they are inevitable. Perhaps we might term them evolutionary, for through them the community of mankind alters and develops, and the business of living takes on a different character. The war must come. But the British Empire has to win it.”

  “I’ll not accept that the business of living is dependent upon the business of death for its development.”

  “Life and death have always been indivisible. The one is undertaken in the shadow of the other.”

  “So you’re doing mankind a favour by blowing up innocent people?”

  “Politicians are never innocent.”

  “Perhaps not, but what of their wives and children?”

  “What is the suffering of hundreds compared to the suffering of millions?”

  “That’s the idle argument of one who entirely lacks compassion. No such should be allowed power.”

  “Allowed, Burton?” Crowley said disdainfully. “I require no permission. I am a superior human. I’m aligned with every possible version of myself. I’m attuned to the ebb and flow of time. I accept its opportunities and relish its challenges. I see all the possibilities, all the choices, and all the outcomes. You oppose me for what you believe will be the consequences of my actions, but I see those consequences, and I know them to be preferable to the alternatives, for I have seen those, too—lived through them!”

  Burton drew the rapier from his cane. “You’ll not meddle with history, Crowley. Not in this world. It is not yours. It’s—” Burton stumbled over the final word, and finished lamely, “—mine.”

  Bismillah! How could he argue against Crowley when he himself was guilty of interfering with the natural course of events? His elder self, Abdu El Yezdi, had been manipulating for two decades!

  He stood hesitantly, the sword-tip wavering.

  There was no moral high ground.

  This confrontation was suited only to the sewers.

  “I can’t begin to describe,” Crowley said, “the depth of my disappointment. You aren’t what I imagined at all. I thought you far-sighted—a man who pushes to the limits then looks beyond them—but you are blind. Worse, you can’t string together a cogent objection. You oppose me out of nothing but indignation. You are of the species Vegrandis humanus—a diminutive human, and nothing more. Bring your blade to me. I no longer require you at my feet. I shall put you out of your misery.”

  Burton snarled, splashed two steps forward, and jerked to an abrupt halt. He heaved at the chain, but it had reached its limit; he could proceed no farther.

  Crowley threw his head back and roared with laughter. His multiplicity of voices echoed up and down the tunnel. It sounded as if the whole world was mocking Burton.

  “You can’t even do that! Pathetic creature!” Crowley leaned over the bomb and examined a dial. “Ten minutes remaining, Burton. Then, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, my reign will begin. Here—” he pushed the trolley forward a little, “—a fighting chance. If you amount to anything more than a man who scrabbles around looking for river sources and fabled mountains, you’ll have defused the bomb by the time I reach an access hatch and climb out of here.”

  He turned and started to walk away.

  Burton sheathed his rapier, reversed it, and holding it by its end tried to hook the trolley with its handle. He stretched and strained but just couldn’t reach. The trolley was a mere half-inch too far from him.

  Crowley stopped and looked back. His skin was a pale purple in the lamplight. His black eyes were pitiless.

  “I thought not,” he said. “Just an explorer.”

  He continued down the tunnel.

  “No!” Burton barked. He slid his cane back into his harness. “I haven’t been an explorer since you murdered Isabel Arundell.”

  Crowley halted and swung around. “Then what?”

  Burton straightened. “I am Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king’s agent.” He lifted the police whistle hanging from the cord around his neck, put it to his lips, and blew it as hard as he could. Its high-pitched shriek reverberated deafeningly in the confined space. He dropped it, slammed shut his helmet’s faceplate, and quickly turned the butterfly screws that locked it tight.

  From far behind him, a loud clank sounded, followed by a deep, reverberating boom.

  Crowley frowned. His mouth moved but Burton couldn’t hear what he said.

  The sewage flowing around Burton’s legs suddenly rose to his waist, causing him to stagger. A rumbling turned into a roar. Unable to resist, Burton turned and looked back. A wall of brown sludge, moving at breathtaking speed, shot down the tunnel and slammed into him. It knocked him off his feet, enveloped him, and whirled him up into the middle of the channel. The harness pushed into his ribs harder and harder as the great weight of accumulated water, urine, excrement, animal waste, and filth of every imaginable description pressed against him and thundered over and around him. The noise was deafening, the pressure agonizing, the terror unendurable. He was battered up and down and from side to side, physically anchored by the chain but mentally swept away, feeling himself drowning in the depths of madness.

  Hold on.

  I can’t.

  If I can, you can. Death has come for me, but it isn’t your time. I’ll stay with you until the crisis has passed.

  Abdu El Yezdi?

  I am you.

  Help me.

  Endure this. It is but a few minutes in eternity. Your role in the narrative is not done.

  What?

  The future beckons. It depends on you.

  I don’t understand.

  Soon you will embark on a new expedition.

  Burton screamed as the harness cut into him. His ribs creaked. He couldn’t breathe. The surging liquid banged him against the ceiling. He was petrified that the helmet might break like an eggshell.

  Listen to Swinburne. I have left you many resources, but none is more valuable than the poet. Trust his instincts above even your own. He has a vital role to play.

  Please. Make it stop.

  Know this: Edward Oxford is waking from his slumber.

  Oxford is dead.

  No. Spring Heeled Jack will return. But our brother is in a position of
influence. You must become his Abdu El Yezdi. Through him, you can keep this world safe from the stilt-man. Play the card well.

  No. No. No.

  There is so much more I want to tell you. I’m sorry.

  Sorry?

  For so much. I pray you don’t suffer as I have. But peace will come to me now.

  I’m dying. Bismillah! I’m dying.

  No, you are not. But I am. Blessed release! I can see it. I can see it.

  What? Tell me!

  The roof of the tent. The dawn light upon the canvas. It’s beautiful. So beautiful. I’m going to step out.

  No! Don’t leave me!

  I have to. I want to look across the desert. I want to see the horizon again.

  Please.

  I hear the camel bells…

  Burton’s back bumped into something solid. He felt himself drawn sideways. He realised that his left hand was pressed so hard against his swordstick—still secured by the harness—that it had cramped and he couldn’t move his fingers. The heels of his boots scraped across a corner. He was rising.

  Foul gunk drained from his faceplate. Light shone through. Gravity tugged at him. Brickwork slid past, sinking downward.

  He saw the round edge of a manhole, felt hands slide under his armpits, was hauled up, and was suddenly lying on his back looking up at a grey sky.

  Fingers moved over him. The helmet turned. It was pulled away. He gulped in a huge breath of air.

  “Wotcha!” Montague Penniforth said. “Cripes, I think me arms are goin’ to fall off! I ’ad the very devil of a time windin’ you in.”

  “You stink worse than the Thames!” Swinburne exclaimed.

  Burton didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. He was paralysed.

  “Richard? Richard? My hat! What’s wrong with him?”

  “Oof!” Penniforth grunted. “Sorry about this, guv’nor.” He leaned down and slapped Burton’s face, hard. He did it again.

  The world crashed back into place.

  “Stop,” Burton croaked. “Help me up.”

  Careless of the muck that covered the king’s agent, Penniforth heaved him to his feet and set about undoing the undersea suit’s fastenings.