The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

  “Surely. With what?”

  Burton gave a lengthy explanation—during which Swinburne started whooping with delight—and finished by turning to Bhatti: “Do you think you can do it, Constable?”

  “I'll give it my best,” the young policeman answered. “It's a case of removal and replacement rather than dismantlement, so we should be able to avoid the dangers. As for the rest of it, I'm sure Mr. Gooch will spot any errors I might make.”

  “It's not exactly my field of expertise,” Gooch said, “but I'll do what I can, and Isambard can check the work over when you get to the power station.”

  “And what of the task I've set Mr. Brunel?” Burton asked. “Do you think he can supply what I need?”

  “Your request was certainly unusual, Captain—especially when communicated through a foul-mouthed parakeet—but it's not a difficult thing to design and Mr. Brunel is the best engineer in the world. He'd prefer to power it by steam, of course, but every single valve in a steam engine employs a spring, so that rules it out. Your alternative is—shall we say—eccentric? But it's feasible, and Isambard had already finished a blueprint when I left him. He has all the manufacturing power of the station at his disposal, so I assure you he'll provide what you need in good time.”

  “Excellent,” the king's agent responded. He turned to his assistant. “Algy, tonight we're making our peace with the Steam Man.”

  The poet, who'd spent the past few minutes with a huge grin on his face, now scowled. “After the way he treated me last time we met I'd rather kick the blighter right up the exhaust funnel!”

  “Quite so.” Burton smiled. “But let the past be the past. For now we have to concentrate on saving the present!” He stood and paced up and down restlessly. “We have to hurry. I want to move against Blavatsky in the small hours of the morning.”

  “Why then?” Palmerston asked.

  “Because the human mind is at its lowest ebb during that period, sir. We know the woman is at full stretch. I want her exhausted. On which point: Algy, run up to my bedroom. You'll find a vial of Saltzmann's Tincture in my bedside drawer. Bring it down. We're all dog-tired, but if you, Bhatti, and I take five drops each, it will keep us alert for another twelve hours or so.”

  “Smashing!” the poet exclaimed excitedly and scampered out of the room.

  Palmerston drummed his fingers impatiently. “I'll not sit here in the dark! What in the devil's name are you playing at, Burton?” he demanded. “Explain your intentions!”

  “There's no time, Prime Minister. As soon as Burke and Hare return, I recommend that you make a swift departure. Mr. Gooch and Constable Bhatti will be fully occupied with their project, while Mr. Swinburne and I have a great deal to arrange.”

  “In other words, I'm surplus to requirements and in your way?”

  “I wouldn't have put it quite like that, sir. I would point out, however, that you are the prime minister, the country is both at war and in the midst of a crisis, yet you are sitting in my dining room.”

  Palmerston shot to his feet with such suddenness that his chair toppled backward to the floor. He glared at Burton and said slowly, in an icy tone: “There are limits to my patience, Captain. You are developing an unfortunate habit of addressing me with a marked lack of respect. I was warned before I employed you that you're an impertinent rogue. I'll not take it!”

  Phelps, Bhatti, and Gooch glanced at each other uncomfortably.

  “You gave me a job to do,” Burton said. “I intend to do it. If you are displeased with my conduct, you can release me from my duties immediately and I'll get back to writing my books while the country becomes a republic, Germany gathers her strength, and Russia waits in the wings.”

  A tense silence filled the room.

  No one moved.

  Palmerston cleared his throat. “Get on with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door opened and Swinburne bounded in.

  “I say!” he shrilled. “I'm much more resistant to that Russian cow's emanations when I'm drunk. Do you think I should down a few brandies before we proceed?”

  Charles Altamont Doyle was extremely confused. Two—or was it three?—days ago, he'd awoken slightly before dawn in a strange house and had stumbled down the stairs and out of the front door.

  He'd walked aimlessly, enveloped by chaos. People were overturning vehicles and smashing windows, setting fire to shops and attacking one another, chanting something about the upper classes and a conspiracy of some kind.

  His memory failed him. The past few hours were nothing but an alcohol-fueled blur.

  He wandered through the mayhem and the rioters left him alone.

  The fairies, however, did not.

  They danced at the periphery of his vision, whispered in his ear, and followed him wherever he went. He cried and screamed for them to stop hounding him. He reasoned and demanded and begged.

  They ignored his pleas.

  He staggered into the Bricklayer's Arms on Bedford Street, intent on imbibing his tormentors into oblivion. Drink, when taken in copious quantities, always worked. Fairies, he'd discovered, were particularly allergic to burgundy.

  The pub was heaving with all manner of lowly types but that didn't matter because in recent weeks the working classes had looked with great favour upon the Rakes. As one man had said to him: “You hoity-toity types need teachin’ a blimmin’ lesson, mate, but since you be one o’ them Rake geezers, the only fing what I'm gonna teach yer is ‘ow ter git legless!”

  Glass after glass was purchased for him. Doyle emptied them assiduously, and the next thing he knew he was waking up in a doorway halfway down a dark, mist-swathed alley.

  How much time had passed? He didn't know. He could hear shouts and screams and violence in the near distance.

  He went back to sleep.

  The fairies came skipping into his dreams.

  “It is in thy blood to see us,” they told him. “It was in thy father's and it is in thy sons’.”

  He awoke again. Hauled himself upright. Staggered onward.

  “God in heaven,” he slurred. “Are they going to plague my boys, too?”

  Young Innes already showed signs of levelheadedness. Perhaps he would resist his tormentors, but little Arthur—dear little imaginative Arthur!—how would he cope?

  The memory of his children and his wife and his inability to keep them brought the tears to his eyes. He began to weep and couldn't stop.

  Time, chopped and jumbled, went by. Streets tumbled past. Smoke. Steam. Turmoil.

  Doyle found himself in another grubby backstreet and another filthy tavern. As before, a boisterous crowd willingly financed his raging alcoholism.

  Despite the wine, the fairies started to skip around his feet again. Either they were getting stronger or he was getting weaker.

  He drank and walked and drank and cried and drank and ranted and, quite suddenly, Big Ben was chiming midnight and he was aware of his surroundings.

  Clarity!

  There was something he had to do, a place he had to be, an urge he couldn't defy.

  Doyle found himself on the outskirts of the Strand. It was closed off and secured by a police cordon. Access and egress were impossible from Trafalgar Square in the west all the way to Fleet Street in the east.

  He had no idea why he wanted to get onto the famous thoroughfare but the determination to do so was all-consuming.

  Kingsway and Aldwych were blocked, as were the various roads abutting the main street from the north and those leading up to it from the Thames, to the south. Only Bridewell Alley had been overlooked, due, perhaps, to its extreme narrowness and the fact that it was clogged with rubbish.

  Doyle slipped into it, tottered along its length, and lurched out into the wide street beyond. The Strand had once been among London's most glamorous playgrounds but now broken glass crunched underfoot and many of its buildings were gutted, blackened, and windowless.

  It was teeming with thousands of Rakes and wraiths. The latte
r, Doyle was used to. He himself had ventured out in spirit form on countless occasions in recent months. The corporeal bodies, though, unnerved him. Their milky eyes, bluish-grey skin, and dragging walk spoke of the grave. Indeed, the air was heavy with the cloying odour of putrefying flesh.

  He kept his eyes downcast and shoved his way past them until he reached a grand old edifice, undamaged by the rioting. Only vaguely aware of what he was doing, he stumbled into the opulent structure and ascended five flights of stairs. He banged on a door and entered.

  Fairies darted between and around his ankles.

  He sat at a table.

  His hands were gripped.

  Someone said, in a dry, husky voice, something about the greater good of mankind.

  “The greater good of mankind,” he chanted, like an automaton. Then: “Freedom! Liberation! Anarchy! No God!”

  “Thy shackles are unbreakable, soft skin,” a fairy whispered.

  “Leave me alone,” he hissed, then aloud: “Rules must be broken! Propriety must be challenged! The status quo must be unbalanced! True liberty!”

  “Slave to oppositions!” the fairy mocked. “There are but two eyes in thy head! Will the third not open for thee?”

  The Russian woman materialised, just as she'd done many times before.

  “Go forth, apostles,” she said. “Liberate the downtrodden and the oppressed.”

  She reached out to touch him.

  He knew what would happen, and he knew it had happened too many times before. This time would be the last. After so many separations, he was too exhausted for the rejoining.

  He tried to say no.

  He failed.

  Her nebulous finger brushed his forehead.

  Time distorted and space warped out of shape.

  Somehow, impossibly, he was in two places at once.

  He shuffled along the Strand, feeling heavy and sodden and empty and lonely and mindless and lost.

  He also drifted, amorphously, elsewhere on the thoroughfare, and the Russian woman's force of will resonated like a church bell through what little substance this aspect of him possessed.

  A fairy floated before his two sets of eyes—the corporeal ones and the formless ones.

  “Thou hast fulfilled the role assigned to thee. Recurrence, not transcendence, shall come,” it tinkled.

  “Leave me alone, you bloody lizard!” he snarled.

  He wondered at his own words.

  Lizard?

  At the Trafalgar Square end of the Strand, Commander Krishnamurthy, his entire face mottled with bruises after his ordeal at Tichborne House, squinted through the dense atmosphere and addressed a gathering of constables.

  “Now then, lads,” he said, “who's got a headache?”

  More than half the men raised their hands.

  “Me too. And let me tell you, I've had quite enough of it. So tonight we're going to sort it out. However, I'm afraid that, for some of you, the headache is going to get worse before it gets better. We're close to the source of the public disorder that's been disrupting the city these days past, and, whatever it is, it's going to wheedle its way into your brains to try to make a defector of you. You all know fellow constables who've gone absent without leave to join the rioters—”

  The men muttered an acknowledgment, and one of them growled: “Bloody deserters!”

  “No,” Krishnamurthy objected. “Their minds are being controlled—and, as I say, over the next few hours, it's likely that the same thing will happen to some of us.”

  “No, sir!” the men protested.

  “We have to be prepared for it. We don't want to be adding ourselves to the enemy forces, hey? So here are my orders, lads, and I pray I never have to tell you to do anything like this ever again: in the event that you notice one of your fellows supporting, or beginning to support, the opposition, take out your truncheon and clock him over the head with it!”

  The constables looked at each other, perplexed.

  “I mean it!” Krishnamurthy said. “If needs must, render your colleague unconscious. Knock him out! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” came the hesitant responses.

  Krishnamurthy knew that not far away, at the top of Kingsway, Detective Inspector Honesty was giving the same speech to another gathering of constables, though probably in a rather more concise fashion, while in Fleet Street, Detective Inspector Trounce was doing the same.

  The three groups of policemen were each about a hundred and fifty men strong. Much smaller teams were guarding the various minor routes into the Strand.

  Krishnamurthy estimated that a force of a little over six hundred constables had congregated around the area. From what he'd seen so far, he suspected that at least four times that number of Rakes lurked inside the police cordon.

  “Is this really all we can muster?” he muttered to himself. “I knew the force was haemorrhaging men but I'd no idea it was this bad!”

  He peered into the rolling ground-level cloud. There was a full moon somewhere above, and its light gave the mist a weird and deceptively bright silvery glow. However, the shadows were dense, and, with most of the street's gas lamps destroyed, visibility was far worse than it seemed.

  Sergeant Slaughter approached, stood beside him, and noted: “If it's not one thing, it's another, Commander.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This murk, sir. There's been a lot fewer vehicles on the streets what with the rioting, so where's the bally steam coming from?”

  “Hmm, that's a very good question!”

  “Then, of course, the steam got mixed up with the smoke from the fires, so we got this dirty grey soup. But most of the fires in this area burned themselves out a good while ago. So, again, Commander: where's it coming from?”

  Krishnamurthy suddenly became aware that his breath was clouding in front of his face.

  “By jingo!” he exclaimed. “I hadn't realised! The weather's on the turn!”

  “Crept up on us, didn't it!” Slaughter said. “The end of the heatwave, and about time, too. Except, it looks like the change has brought on a London particular.”

  “Fog!” Krishnamurthy spat. “Curse it! That's exactly what we don't need!”

  He heard the chopping of an approaching rotorchair.

  “One of your squad, Commander?” Slaughter asked. “He's taking a risk, isn't he?”

  “He'll be all right as long as he stays this side of the cordon. We're at the edge of the danger zone. If he flies past us and over the Strand—” He made a gesture with his hand, indicating something plunging downward.

  “Hallo! He's landing!” Slaughter cried.

  The miasma parted and men ran out of the way as the rotorchair descended, dropping like a stone and only slowing at the very last moment before lightly touching the cobbles and coming to rest. A man, wearing the Flying Squad uniform and with goggles covering his eyes, clambered out of the contraption and ran over to Krishnamurthy.

  “Hello, sir!” he said, with a salute.

  “Hallo, Milligan. What's the news?”

  “Not good, I'm afraid. The rioting is most intense to the east of here, especially around the Bank of England, which is up in flames. As if that's not bad enough, the circle of disorder is fast approaching the East End.”

  “Blast it!” Krishnamurthy whispered. He removed his peaked cap and massaged his temples. Once the madness touched the overcrowded Cauldron, all hell would break loose. If the East Enders began rioting, London would be lost.

  “Milligan, gather together the patrols in the north and west and have them join you in the east. If it becomes necessary, fly low and use your pistols to fire warning shots at the rioters. Shoot a few men in the leg if you have to! Anything that might hold them at bay for a while.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Milligan ran back to his machine, strapped himself in, and, with a roar of the engine, rose on a cone of steam and vanished into the fog. Seconds later, the chopping of the rotorchair's wings suddenly stopped,
there was an instant of absolute silence, then the machine dropped straight back down out of the cloud and smashed into the road.

  Krishnamurthy clutched Sergeant Slaughter's arm and looked at him with an expression of shock.

  They ran to the wreckage. Constables joined them. The flying machine had turned upside down before hitting the ground. Milligan lay beneath it, mangled and dead.

  Wordlessly, Krishnamurthy squatted and closed the man's eyes.

  “What happened?” Slaughter asked.

  “It seems our enemy has expanded the no-flying zone.”

  “By the Lord Harry,” the sergeant muttered. “They must realise we're here.”

  Krishnamurthy glanced back toward the Strand. “Damnation!” he said under his breath. “Come on, Swinburne! Hurry up!”

  Charles Doyle was dead and he knew it.

  Only the Russian bitch's force of will was keeping his carcass moving, his spirit self-aware.

  Her words vibrated and throbbed in his mind: “Break free! Cast off your chains! Rise up and overthrow!”

  They cut into him, were magnified through him as if he were a lens, then radiated outward, receding into the far distance, where they touched other astral bodies and were bounced farther on.

  If only he could press his hands over his ears, block out that voice!

  A tiny man with moth wings fluttered in front of his face and sang: “Prepare thyself!”

  He tried to bat the fairy away but his hands were either without substance or too heavy and slow, it wasn't clear to him which.

  A part of him coiled and writhed through the atmosphere near the Fleet Street end of the Strand, while the other part dragged itself along the pavement of Kingsway.

  He was overwhelmed by a voracious hunger. It was not for food, nor even for alcohol. No. This rapacious craving was for the fulfillment of life!

  For how long had he been tormented by this lack? His entire existence, it seemed. The opportunities he'd missed or wasted! He'd been so cautious, so afraid of making a mistake, that he hadn't done anything—instead, he'd escaped into the bottle, and now it was too late!

  “I had life but I didn't live it!” he wept. “I want it back! Please, don't let me die like this!”