The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

  This was done, and from the large room, Burton and his clockwork companion passed through a door into a hallway.

  The Venetia Royal Hotel was dark and silent, and the top floor, which consisted entirely of offices, meeting rooms, and storerooms, was entirely abandoned.

  They came to a wide staircase and descended to the next floor. Burton looked up at the ceiling. There was something clinging to it. It reminded him of the thick jungle vines he'd seen in Africa, except that it was pulsing and writhing and, somehow, no matter how hard he peered at it, it evaded proper focus, as if it wasn't entirely a substance of this world.

  It was ectoplasm. It exuded through the top of the double doors leading to the corridors and rooms, snaked across the ceiling, and disappeared into the stairwell.

  “Is it coming up the stairs or going down, I wonder?” he murmured.

  He stepped over to the doors and pushed them open. Gas lamps, in brackets on the walls, illuminated the hallway beyond.

  There were eight residential rooms on each side of this particular passage. Their doors were open. Ectoplasm twisted out of each one and joined the thick limb of stuff on the ceiling.

  Burton clenched his jaw nervously, crept up to the first chamber, and peered in. Its furniture had been pushed aside but for a large table. Seven chairs stood around it. Only one was occupied. The remains of a man sat in it. He was mummified, his skin shrunken and desiccated, his sharp cheekbones poking through. His head was thrown back and ectoplasm was issuing from his mouth and rising up to the ceiling.

  “Bismillah!” Burton whispered, entering. “There was a séance, and it doesn't look like this fellow survived it!”

  He bent and looked at the man's face, then jerked back with a cry of shock, bumping into his companion, as the mummy's eyes flicked open and rolled sightlessly.

  “Alive, by God! How long has the poor devil been here?”

  He turned to his valet. “I have a horrible feeling it's going to be the same story in the other rooms.”

  It was. On the seventh floor of the Venetia, in every room, there was a table at which a séance had been performed, and at every table there sat one shrunken, dried-out man, with head back and ectoplasm streaming out of him up to the ceiling and out into the corridor.

  When they descended to the sixth floor, they found the same, though the ectoplasm was more abundant.

  On the fifth, it was even thicker and glowed slightly with a greenish-hued light. It had crawled down the walls, forming strange organic shapes reminiscent of ribs and veins and quivering organs.

  The fourth floor was worse: walls, ceilings, fixtures, and fittings were so completely buried beneath the pulsating substance that it seemed to Burton as if he and his valet were making their way through the arteries of a living organism.

  Cautiously, the king's agent led the way to the stairwell. The route down to the third floor resembled the gullet of a mythical beast.

  “Stepping into the dragon's maw,” Burton muttered.

  He took the step.

  Something touched his mind.

  “You should be dead!” a voice hissed inside his skull.

  He felt the devastating force of Madam Blavatsky's presence.

  “My apologies,” he said, aloud. “Alive and kicking. I thought I'd find you here.”

  “And pray tell me, malchik moi, what led you to me?”

  “I was told, some months ago, that this hotel had been fully booked by a private party. It's a big place, so the party must have been very substantial indeed; and since the Venetia is slap bang in the middle of the Strand, and the Strand is at the centre of the disturbances—well, you can see why I concluded that the Rakes were here with their elusive new leader.”

  “Not all the Rakes, but a great many, yes. Come, stand in my presence. Bring your preposterous toy with you.”

  Burton moved down the stairs. The steps were almost entirely concealed by the thick mediumistic substance, which felt spongy and unstable beneath his boots. He gingerly placed one foot after the other, struggling to maintain his balance. The clockwork man followed.

  Blavatsky poked and prodded at his mind.

  “My my! You are so much stronger, lyubimiy moi!”

  “Beware of the brains you invade, bitch. Do you not think I learned just as much about you as you did of me the last time?”

  “Then you know that I lack your vulnerability.”

  “You have your own flaws.”

  “Is that so? Then it's to be a duel, is it, Gaspadin Burton?”

  “If you wish.”

  “If I wish? I relish the prospect! Idi ko mne, moi miliy! You will find me in the library on this floor.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Burton turned to the left, the direction from which Blavatsky's power was emanating, and passed through open double doors into a hallway. The ectoplasm had made the passage almost tubular, and, as he and his mechanical attendant progressed along it, it constricted to such a degree that they had to proceed on their hands and knees.

  The temperature plummeted. A weird silence pressed against his ears, as if he'd suddenly become deaf, and an odd sense of timelessness muddled his senses.

  The tunnel tapered. It felt fleshy and damp and it glowed a sickly green. Burton squirmed forward on his stomach, cursing under his breath.

  “Do you mean to crush me, woman?”

  “No, malchik moi. Let me help you.”

  The ectoplasm started to exude a clear slimy substance.

  Burton felt his companion tangling against his legs as the tunnel behind them suddenly contracted. They were both pushed forward, sliding along the clammy pipe, picking up speed, helplessly out of control. Ahead, a sphincter-like opening dilated. Burton shot through it and splatted onto the floor in a high-ceilinged room. The brass man thudded onto his back.

  They lay sprawled in a heap, dripping slime.

  “Damnation,” Burton grumbled. “That wasn't very dignified.”

  “Dabro pazhalavat, Gaspadin Burton. What is this device you have brought with you?”

  “He's my valet,” the king's agent responded, clambering to his feet and surveying the chamber.

  A liquid chuckle gurgled in his head. “It is good that you have him. The staff here has been very unreliable of late. I cannot remember when I last saw a concierge or even a maid!”

  The library was completely buried beneath huge ribs of glowing ectoplasm. They curved down from a big tangle of material in the centre of the ceiling, over the walls, across the floor, and melded together in its middle, where they rose up to form a slender three-foot-high plinth. At its top, delicate fingers of the material held a plum-sized black diamond—the Tichborne stone. The South American Eye of Nāga.

  It hummed faintly.

  “You realise, of course, that I have allowed your companion to approach merely to satisfy my curiosity.”

  “I was counting on it.”

  “Mechanisms of that sort do not normally function in my presence.”

  “You are far too confident in your abilities.”

  “I am?”

  The king's agent turned to his valet and snapped: “Get the diamond!”

  The brass man bounded across to the plinth, reached for the stone, and stopped dead.

  A peal of laughter sounded from the ceiling.

  Burton looked up.

  “Fool!” Madam Blavatsky crowed, her voice deep and resonant. “You think you can defy me with clockwork?”

  She was enmeshed in a snarled knot of ectoplasmic tubes, naked; a middle-aged thick-bodied woman, suspended upside down above the plinth, with her arms stretched out horizontally. Her skull had cracked and broken open like an eggshell pushed apart from the inside, and bits of it hung loose. Her swollen brain bulged horribly out of the fissures. Thin ribbons of grey wrinkled tissue dangled down, entwining with her long brown hair and brushing against the diamond below.

  Her fathomless black eyes seemed to suck at Burton's very soul, so dreadfully intense were they; they
stabbed him like pins transfixing a captured moth.

  “You are defeated, Gaspadin Burton. Soon the king will fall, the poor will flood out of your East End, and London will belong to the working classes. The disorder will spread from the capital like a disease. It will infect the entire country! Think of all those downtrodden, exploited, destitute workers in Britain's great manufacturing cities—Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds—where civilised man is lured from his peaceful labours in the countryside and turned back almost into an animal! What barbarous indifference they have suffered! How passionate shall be their revolt!”

  Burton snorted in disdain. “Don't try to hide your agenda behind false philanthropy, madam! You care naught for Britain's workers. You regard them as a means to a nefarious end, and nothing more. You've made your intentions quite clear!”

  “I do it to save Mother Russia.”

  The king's agent took three long strides and reached for the Eye of Nāga.

  “You do it because you're a demented meddler and you have no control over yourself!” he barked.

  “Keep back!”

  Blue lightning crackled from Blavatsky's hands, hit Burton in the chest, and knocked him off his feet. He thumped down onto his back. For a second, it felt as if the flesh was boiling off his bones, but the torment passed in an instant, and, with an involuntary groan, he pushed himself up and faced his opponent again.

  Her voice echoed in his skull: “Pah! There is no satisfaction in wounding your body, but your mind, malchik moi—ah!—what great value you place upon it, and how fragile it is!”

  She drove a pitiless spike of shame into that part of his memory where regrets and disappointments dwelt, expecting to cripple him as she had in their previous encounter.

  Burton reeled and groaned, but then steadied himself and turned his awareness inward. His Dervish meditation had fortified and strengthened his mind to such a degree that her assault did no damage, but rather gave him a route through which to respond. He thrust mortification along the mediumistic channel that linked them, stabbing it deeply into her preening arrogance.

  She recoiled and cried out, shocked at the power of his riposte.

  “Oh bozhe! You bite back!”

  “Stay out of my head!”

  “I will do as I please, rebenok. And conceit?” She laughed. “You think that is my weakness? Nyet! Eto vlast! It is strength!”

  The king's agent shook his head. “No, madam. The love of one's own excellence serves only to obscure one's own mistakes.”

  “I have made no mistakes!”

  Burton looked into the woman's eyes and treated her to one of his characteristically savage smiles.

  “Haven't you?”

  She attacked again, digging fear into his insecurities, but his qualms had been modified by the conception that weaknesses are, in fact, the seeds of future strength. She was easily repelled, and his response—doubt driven into her confidence—was devastatingly effective.

  She moaned and twisted in her web of ectoplasm.

  “This self-assurance of yours was not there before!” she gasped, and there was a hint of anxiety in her tone.

  He felt her poking around his mind, preparing for another thrust. He pounced, locked her into position, and pierced her with a sharp edge of fear.

  She screamed.

  “That was breaking time followed by a prise de fer,” he said. “I learned it from an expert.”

  Blavatsky hung silently and he saw that she was trembling.

  “Good,” he said. “Perhaps now we can talk?”

  “Speak,” she whispered.

  “Your plan, madam, is defective for two reasons. The first is that you regard Russia's future as predestined; something fixed in time; a fate it is sure to suffer unless you interfere.”

  “I watched it happen.”

  “You watched a possibility, but there are many, many possible futures.”

  “You are wrong! I have seen what I have seen.”

  “Does your certainty not seem a little peculiar to you? Destiny is far more malleable than you think!”

  “You cannot know this!”

  “But I do—and I shall show you how!”

  He guided the writhing, invasive tendrils of her consciousness to a seemingly insignificant path in his own mind and pushed them along it into his recollections of Spring Heeled Jack.

  Blavatsky absorbed the memories, and he felt her astonishment.

  “Oh bozhe! A man who jumped through time! How can this be possible?”

  “The point is this, madam: the time we are living in is not the time that was meant to be. Maybe, before Edward Oxford came back to change his past, Russia's prospects were far less tragic. We shall never know. His actions altered the course of future history for the entire world, and now you are seeking to do the same. If he can do it, and you can do it, then surely it's entirely possible that someone else will do it, too. In fact, I contend not only that anyone can do it, but that we all do! Destiny is not fixed. It is the ever-changing consequence of uncountable actions—actions undertaken by every single person on the face of the planet, each with a unique understanding of reality and of how to deal with it. Even the most obscure, uneducated, unimaginative nobody can, and does, make a difference.”

  “Burton,” came a faint hiss from above, “I have to save Mother Russia.”

  He looked at the suspended woman and shrugged. “Then you have to use your clairvoyance to predict every single action taken by every single person every minute of every day from now until whatever future date you decide that her fate has been fulfilled to your satisfaction. If you don't, then someone, somewhere, will do something that will modify the results you seek. It is inevitable. No single person can make future history entirely what he or she wishes.”

  Blavatsky hung silently. Her black eyes flicked nervously from Burton, to the motionless clockwork man, to the quietly singing diamond, and back to Burton.

  “All this for nothing?” she mouthed.

  “As I said, your plan is defective for two reasons.”

  “What is the second?”

  Burton sighed and braced himself. “The second fault, Madam Blavatsky, is that it's not even your plan.”

  “What?”

  “No one—not even a lunatic like you—could possibly believe themselves exclusively capable of shaping future history. Not unless, that is, the history they're trying to manipulate is actually their own past.”

  Bolts of etheric energy started to crackle around the woman's body. The library filled with the tang of ozone.

  “I do not understand,” she whispered.

  The king's agent paused, severed his mediumistic connection to her, and said: “I mean simply this. You consider yourself the puppeteer. The truth is: you're the puppet.”

  Blavatsky suddenly arched her back and shrieked. Etheric energy crackled over her entire body. Blood sprang from her eyes, ears, and nose. It oozed out from her brain tissue and dribbled down onto the Eye of Nāga.

  She twisted and struggled and her scream rose in pitch then died to a bubbling gasp.

  She hung limply, and for a moment, there was complete silence.

  Her mouth opened.

  A man's voice, deep and gurgling, heavily accented, and saturated with evil, came from it: “Very clever, tovarishch. You are correct. Man from future know history and can change history to make new future. Kukolnyi—you say puppet, da?—very useful!”

  The king's agent gave a grim smile. “About time,” he said. “I was beginning to think you'd never stop hiding behind the woman, Grigori. She didn't even know you were there, did she?”

  “Nyet.”

  “All this while, thinking she was acting under her own volition, she's been doing your bidding. Tell me, how does it feel to have foreseen so clearly the manner of your own death?”

  “I see assassination. See death. I think it … disappointing.”

  “How soon? From your perspective, I mean.”

  “Two years from
now.”

  “Then you are speaking from the year 1914?”

  “Da. But I must tell you: I am to make different—umm—schedule for us both. My death, I vill delay; yours vill be much more soon, nyet?”

  “Nyet,” Burton replied.

  Grigori Rasputin chuckled maliciously.

  The rivulets of blood that had been trickling from Madam Blavatsky slowed to irregular drips. Burton could see that the woman was close to death.

  “So let me venture a guess,” he said. “Your clairvoyance revealed to you the circumstances of your future betrayal and demise, and the subsequent fate of your country. You could have saved yourself by simply avoiding the assassins, but still there would be Germany, still Nietzsche, and, in all probability, still more assassins. So you traced the history of the war back to its origins, seeking a way to alter its course, intending to prevent your own murder and the disaster that would befall Russia afterward.”

  “Entirely correct, tovarishch.”

  “It just so happened that while you were looking back through time, Madam Blavatsky was peering forward.”

  “Da. We touch.”

  “And you projected your astral body into her mind.”

  “Da. It vas easy for such as Rasputin. In future, I have Eye of Nāga. I use it to transfer into woman.”

  “And to your good fortune, it just so happened that she existed at exactly the point in history where the seeds of the war were planted, if you'll forgive the unintentional pun.”

  “Pun? Vot is that?”

  “I refer to Richard Spruce's eugenically altered plant life, the devastation of Ireland, and his and the Eugenicists’ subsequent defection to Germany.”

  “Ah. So.”

  “And the Nāga diamonds, Grigori—you say you have one?”

  “Cambodian and African stones are, in war, used to—povyshenia?”

  “Enhance.”

  “—minds. I have African. Germany has others. Of South American diamond, nyet, it is not found in my time. I make Blavatsky find it in yours.”

  “Leading her to the Tichbornes. So, the African Eye will be found, will it? Interesting.”

  “Found by you.”

  “What?”

  “No matter. I change that. You die today.”

  “I think not.”