“Doncaster.”
“Good boy.”
Edie Banister waits until he sits in the chair and turns it round, and then she goes back into her bedroom and collects her flight bag (like the gun, maintained once a month to be sure it’s all ready to go at any time) and Bastion’s travel kit. She collects the dog, steps over Mr. Biglandry and George, and closes the door on James. In the hallway she wrestles briefly with her collapsible umbrella. Edie considers the name to be strictly truthful: the umbrella collapses well, but has issues with opening. Normally she wouldn’t bother, but today it looks like rain, and having sent two men to their graves to preserve her own life, she has no intention of dying of pneumonia before seeing this business through. Death is a reality for Edie Banister, and has been since she was young. All the same, no reason to invite it. Bastion would be devastated.
The umbrella conquered, she glowers up at the grumbling sky, and leaves Rallhurst Court for ever.
The same London sky, grey with a touch of orange from the street lights, unburdens itself of sheets of blinding rain as Joe Spork hurries through the streets of Soho. He has given up on the telephone and decided to make his representations to Billy Friend in person. Since he is here, and since he is very quickly getting soaked through, he is also visiting a stringy, irritating man called Fisher, a former burglar, present fence, and a full-time member of the Mathew Spork nostalgia club. Fisher, not even a member of Mathew’s outer circle, is one of the few people he can turn to on the subject of the unlawful and strange without incurring painful social obligations. Even so, Joe is troubled by a powerful sense of self-inflicted injury, and his grandfather’s voice, now doleful, is telling him I told you so. He hunches his shoulders and buries his chin in the collar of his coat: a big man trying to become a turtle.
A bus—last of the much-despised bendy variety, as doomed as the clockwork business and equally clever and impractical—sprays him with road water and he yells and waves furiously, then catches his reflection in a shop window and wonders, not for the first time of recent days, who this person is who has taken up residence in what ought to be his life.
Fisher’s shop is a merry little place with wind chimes and an aura of shabby hippy mercantilism, squeezed between a tailor and a mysterious bead-curtained place which conducts business entirely in Hungarian. Fisher has a lot of space because his family have lived here since before it was expensive. Customers can sit in an enclosed courtyard for a hookah and a cup of Turkish coffee. Fisher makes it himself, boiling the coffee and the sugar with his secret ingredient, which he allows particularly favoured customers—which is all of them—to learn, and which varies depending on what he’s got in the fridge. Joe has known it to be lemon peel, cocoa powder, pepper, paprika, and on one occasion even a half-spoonful of fish soup. Fisher claims that each of these represents a different member of his Turkish family on his mother’s side, but since his mother was and is from Billingsgate it probably doesn’t matter that this is a lie: no wrathful Stambul cousin is going to show up and demand to know what the Hell crap he is putting in that perfectly good coffee, to the ruination of their shared good name.
“W-hoo is a-that?” Fisher cries out as the chimes go, all Turkic gravitas, but when he pokes his weasel head around the door frame from the back, his face breaks into a wide smile. “It’s Joe! Big Joe! King of the Clockmen! The man in person and himself! ’Ullo, Maestro, what can I do you for?”
“I’m out of the loop, Fisher—” And then, holding up a forestalling finger, because Fisher’s mouth opens to issue an enthusiast’s reproach, “Yes, I know, that’s what I wanted. But now I’ve got a question and there’s only one place I can go, isn’t there? Because you know everything.”
“I do. It’s true,” Fisher preens. And in terms of the life of London’s post-legals, he really does.
“I had a visit,” Joe says, “from two men from a museum which doesn’t exist. One fat, the other thin. Cultured. My heart said police. Titwhistle and Cummerbund.”
Fisher shakes his head. “Nowt.”
“Nothing?”
“Never heard of ’em, never bribed ’em, never even forgotten ’em. Sorry.”
“What about witches?”
“Married one.”
“Monks, then. All in black and—” But Fisher is on his feet and locking the door, closing the shop, and in his eyes is a feverish alarm Joe has never seen before, didn’t think existed in Fisher, who is always chirpy or pompous by turns, and never, ever ruffled.
“Jesus!” Fisher says. “Those fuckers! Brother Sheamus and his bloody ghosts! Christ on a bike, boy! They’re not here, are they?”
“No, of course not.”
“But you’ve seen them? They came to you?”
“Yes, they—”
“Fuck, Joe, but you put a strain on friendship, you do—what do they want?”
“A book.”
“A book? A book? Fucking give it to them, you daft streak of piss! Give it to them and thank them for being so kind as to take it off your hands rather than their preferred option which would be taking your fucking hands off, and then fucking run away and get a proper job in a far-off land. All right? Fuck! And fuck off, as well!”
“Who are they?”
“The sodding Recorded Man, is who they are,” Fisher snarls.
Joe stares. “The what?”
“You don’t remember? I told you when you were a nipper, your mother was so angry she nearly popped.”
Indeed he does remember; it had given him nightmares for weeks. A London ghost story, whispered by the children of the Night Market.
Picture a man, the tale went, in a bed of silk sheets. And picture all around him wires and cameras and men taking notes. Everything about him is written down. They are making a record of him: his breaths, his words, his pulse, his diet, his scent, his chemistry—even the fluctuations of electricity in his skin. As he grows weaker—for he is very old now, and injured, and sick—they press filaments of metal through holes in his skull and into the fabric of the brain itself, and record the chasing flashes of thoughts running from fold to fold of the grey stuff inside his head.
And through all this, he is conscious, and aware. Is he a prisoner? A millionaire? Does he feel pain or horror at his own predicament? Does he have any idea why this is happening? It’s so bizarre. And yet somewhere, somewhere, it is real, and he is lying there. Perhaps, when he is gone, they will need someone else. Perhaps they will need you.
Joe left the lights on for nine days the first time he heard it, and when he finally slept each night, he saw only the eyes of the Recorded Man, glaring at him from his prison of wires. Perhaps they will need you.
Fisher nods jerkily, still angry and afraid. “Right, so Sheamus’s lot are the original. They’re all about machinery and they sit and watch recordings of the bloke who founded their outfit. It’s what they have instead of church. Revered relics of every thought he ever had, or something. I don’t know because I don’t ask because I don’t want to end up in a fucking jar! It’s all a bit Dear Leader, but one way and another it makes them scary as typhus, all right? They’re a power in the world.”
“Since when?”
“Since for ever. Your dad had a run-in with them way back. He got everyone together and showed them the exit. Even then it was touch and go.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, you were little. I was a tiddler, too, but, you know …” Fisher contrives to make it sound as if this means that Mathew considered him Joe’s elder brother, the crook he never had.
“And now?”
“Now it’s different, isn’t it? There’s no one like Mathew, but there’s a lot more coppers.”
“So they’re careful.”
Fisher shrugs yes. “But they don’t ask nicely and they don’t ask twice. Cold and surgical, and not like an aspirin and a lie down, like ice in the bathtub and selling your kidneys for cash. They’ve got a hospital somewhere, or a hospice. It’s a bloody pit. People
go in, they don’t come out.”
“Who are they? Where do they come from?”
“For all I know they’re God’s own thugs, straight from the Holy City. I met one once, he come in a place I was thinking of renting, told me to piss off. And do you know what else he said? He said: If I have the mind of Napoleon and the body of Wellington, who am I? Mad as a fucking box of frogs.”
“Fisher—”
“All right! All right. Thirty seconds of wisdom. Then you go. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Fine. The way I hear, once upon a time, they were into good works. I mean, they’re monks, yes? Elevate the soul, cherish the meek. Then the world got less amenable to the consolations of the Mother Church and they went a bit funny. Out with the old, in with the new, and the new is some silver-tongued bastard and his own personal heavy mob. Orphans, is the way I hear it, schooled by him for him at some old private house, so that’s all they know and they don’t care to learn more. Now it’s conversion by fire and sword and let God sort it out.”
“What do they want?”
“Whatever they feel like. And antiques. They’ve got a thing for antiques.”
“Why? Fisher, this is important, they—”
Fisher cuts him off, one hand coming down sideways like a blade. “I don’t want to know! All right? You’ve got something they want, give it to them. You’re not Mathew, and that’s your choice, but Honest Joe can’t take them on. It’s that simple. They’re bloody scary. And that’s all I’m saying and, old friend or not, you can piss off!”
Fisher throws open the back door and bundles Joe out into the yard, then slams the door and brings down the shutter.
Outside and now truly unsettled, Joe Spork ducks his head down and shoves his hands into his pockets like a man who has been given the Spanish Archer by his girl. He walks purposefully but not hurriedly, and very shortly slips back down into the Tosher’s Beat.
At lunchtime on the day after the conversation at the greasy spoon, a bored courier rings on Joe Spork’s doorbell and hands over a box containing a familiar piece of kinetic smut and a brown-paper parcel which promises to be Billy Friend’s notorious doodah. The alternative being the quarterly VAT accounts, Joe hastens to open the parcel.
Item: all right, yes, it’s a diary or a journal, no question about that. He sniffs at it; old books have a pleasing smell to them. This one is unusual. There’s a sharp tang of brine and a whiff of chemicals, and beneath it a rich resiny note of old, old leather. Has it been under water? Wrapped in oilcloth? Hm. The cover is flexible, almost rubbery, and the leather is cross-hatched with wandering lines. Stamped into what he takes to be the front—the technical term is “debossed,” like “embossed,” but in reverse—is a curious figure like an inside-out umbrella or a funny sort of key.
Joe opens the book cautiously, and yes, again, it’s an odd duck: along each page at the edge opposite the spine there is a half inch of perforated paper. The whole thing has been bound from individual sheets of stiff paper, and each edge—so far as he can tell—is different. The matrix is a four-by-four square or—if each page is taken as a single block of Information—a four-by-sixteen column separated into groups of letters four holes deep. A hundred or more pages; not an insignificant amount of information, then, but hardly a vast trove, either. A longish piece of music for a pianolo, perhaps.
The spine itself has a dowel—no, it’s metal—a rod running through it, protruding slightly at either end. Not a spine, then: an axle? The endpapers are marbled in rose and turquoise, and sketched over the pattern in pen is a brisk, clear diagram or schematic—electrical, and beyond his ken, but apparently for some sort of brewing or distilling apparatus which is oddly familiar. Where has he seen that?
A certain kind of mind—his grandfather was like this to an extent—is always trying in a spiritual sense to make the perfect mousetrap. Joe has the impression that it is an impromptu sketch, that this volume was not originally intended to have anything written in it at all, but at some point its owner was trapped without an alternative source of paper and defaced it. A long train journey, perhaps—there are periods of comparatively clear text and sudden jolts which could be points. Something which might be a teapot segues into a design for a fishtank sort of item and then dissolves into what he takes to be rather highfalutin mathematics. Quote: “Do something for the elephant.” Quote: “I have written it all in my book.” Quote: “The coffee is ghastly.” Fine. So what’s this then, if not a book? Well, a notepad, obviously; a jotter. A doodah.
Item: or rather, items, plural. A mixed bag of gears and sprockets, ratchets and cogs, bevelled and conventional, large to (very, very) small. The part of Joe which solves puzzles twitches and rolls its shoulders. That piece would go with that one, and that one would …
Jumping the gun, boy. Sure, put it together all higgledy-piggledy, and what will you have? Junk! A pile of nothing. I taught you better.
His grandfather’s voice, husky with time and distance.
“I miss you, you know.”
Don’t be daft, boy. I was old before you were young.
“Still.”
And another thing: don’t talk to the dead. People will get the wrong idea.
“How about if I claim you’re my imaginary friend?”
… You need a girl.
“Probably.”
A helpmeet.
“A what?”
“A help meet for him.” As in a person suitable to share his life.
“I really do.”
He’s lost the thread of the conversation. Daniel Spork never gave him advice about girls. Perhaps his own disastrous love life prevented it. Joe’s imagination baulks at putting words in his mouth on that score.
Move on.
Item: a clamp or fitting, with armature, of a size to embrace the doodah and turn the pages. He touches the end of the armature curiously, and finds it briefly sticky with static. Curious, he taps it lightly against a page from the book. Yes, the page turns, and yes, the static is gone when he goes to lift the armature away again. He taps the next page, and it clings. Moves it, puts it down, and the charge is gone. Clever. He has no idea how it works. Something in the arm, perhaps, rubbing along the metal interior. Smart: clockwork doesn’t take harm from static the way electronics does. A little clean occasionally and it barely notices. It’s almost a credo: the right tool in the right place.
Item: a strange little ovoid box or ball, engraved rather splendidly on the outside, and by hand, no less. A spiral pattern, like a galaxy or a conch shell. The Golden Ratio, but don’t believe all that muck you read about it. Very heavy for its size. Unless the ball is made of gold, there must be a weight or flywheel within. No indication of how it opens, though there is a seam. He turns it in his hand. Something inside goes clish-tink, which his trained ear recognises as a bad noise. Not a disastrous noise, but definitely a broken noise.
He puts the ball in a smooth hollow on the bench. Any number of things in his world are spherical or nearly so, and many of those should not be allowed to roll around. For a while, the company which supplied him with a particularly ferocious acid for cleaning and etching supplied it in round-bottomed containers so that you would have to use their rather expensive clamps and retorts along with the acid. Poison, 1d; cure, a guinea. Well, anyway—the ball settles snugly into the hollow. Joe stretches, hearing things pop in his back and arms, then leans back over the bench. Must get a proper chair. Must get a proper chair. Yes, and half a dozen other things I can’t afford.
Item: the whojimmy, precise function unknown. A tool, for the unscrewing of magic bolts and the opening of locks whose existence we do not presently apprehend. A thing made for a specific purpose. An object of destiny. A funny-looking gadget with a handle at one end and a strange twisting loop which winds around it, almost like the basket hilt on an old duelling sword. Joe waves the whojimmy dramatically, then stops. Like the ball, it’s surprisingly dense.
And finally, a square of white card wi
th words written on it in felt tip: a reminder from Billy that the said object is to be treated with respect and could he please have the bawdy gamekeeper in a hurry because his lady client is getting pressing.
So then: to the Batcave! Or at least, to work. He closes the door and puts the sign in the window saying “please ring.”
The erotomaton (he glances at it guiltily, the fruit and milk he is ignoring in favour of cake) shouldn’t be too hard to fix. It probably won’t be all that interesting, either. It can wait until tomorrow. He ponders the figures slumped in their first positions—the most orderly ménage à trois Joe Spork has ever heard of. He knows a few experimenters in polyamory, has observed from the outside the curious triangular relationships and sexual flat-shares, and come to the conclusion that in most cases there’s rather more poly than amory, for all the protestations to the contrary. It’s not that it can’t be done, just that the odds of finding one person to share your days are bad enough, without looking for two who can also share their lives with each other and remain content with the situation whatever perturbations may arise along life’s curious road.
Hard to find just one person, indeed. The big warehouse is very empty today, and the sloosh of the Thames is sorrowful. He makes tea, temporarily replacing the missing foot of his kettle with a pink reminder notice from the gas company, folded three times. He is reasonably certain he has paid it. Sort that out tomorrow.
At the workbench, tea in hand (the approved commencement of a difficult task, the stricture of patience to be borne strongly in mind, lest one be hasty and make an irretrievable error early in the proceedings) he contemplates the fragments before him. All right, well, simple enough: copy and photograph it all. Easy, in these digital days. Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology—he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.