A Spider In The Eye

by Mark Hayes

  I kept silent, hoping to learn something useful. There are times discretion really is the better part of valour and my position was precarious after all. The more I could learn of my captor, the better my chances of seeing the dawn.

  “And as for looking for H.G. that makes sod all sense either, even if the old bastard survived Washington. Why would he be in India, of all bloody places? Why the hell would he be working against the Empire? Damn it why is she helping them?”

  ‘Washington? Had Wells been involved with the virus bombing? Christ, Harry, what the hell have we got ourselves into?’ I thought. Though, that would explain why Penny was so sure he was dead. No one got out of Washington alive. Everyone knew that.

  “She doesn’t have a choice, any more of a choice than I do,” I interrupted. Gathering information is one thing, survival is another. If she thought Saffron was helping The Ministry because she’d no choice, then I could use that. I could play the same card, that of the unwilling pawn, like her ‘lover’, Saffron. Play that, and I might just twist her emotions back on her, make it seem I was as much a victim as Miss Wells. It was a short step from there to convincing Penny I was willing to help them both.

  ‘Convince her of that, Harry old lad, and we may still get out of here inside our own skin…’

  I let the words hang. That’s sometimes the real secret after all. Twisting words to suit your own devices. It requires a certain amount of talent and no little cunning. If I pushed too hard, she would assume I was trying to fool her. So you have to know when to hold your tongue as well as when to run your mouth. It was slightly ironic that I was telling the truth, and doing so by employing all my skills as a practised liar. But if it worked then it worked in my view, and, well, we all have our talents after all.

  I’d had another thought as well. A brass arm shaped thought, one that said if she had access to someone who could build her an arm like that, then the same people may, in turn, be able to free me of The Ministry’s spider. Something which was high on my list of desires.

  In case I hadn’t mentioned it, I was working for The Ministry and by extension The Empire because I’d no other choice. Not, as it were, out of loyalty to the crown and old child-bearing hips in buck house. I’d mentioned it? I thought so, but just thought it worth repeating at this juncture. Just so you and I are on the same page…

  Bad Penny laughed at me. It was a bitter kind of laugh, followed, in a bitter kind of tone by her telling me the following. “Oh but I assure you, Mr Smyth, my dear Saffron always has a choice. There isn’t a way in blessed Hades they could hold that one against her will. She could vanish before their very eyes if she so chose, and be lost in the wind before they even realised she was gone.”

  I took a breath, dramatically if truth be told, as I tried to steer her into listening closely to me. Then I told her, “Not the way they are holding her. She can’t hide from them… I can’t hide from them…”

  I added the last in order to put my own position in this firmly in her mind. It still seemed the best hope of winning her over to the idea I was not her enemy. And more to the point, that as I wasn’t her enemy, it would be pointless crushing the life out of me.

  I was quite certain I didn’t want her to do that.

  “What do you mean?” she said after a moment. She was curious now I could tell. I suspect she also had a modicum of desire in her question. Though it was only the desire to discover that her dear Saffron wasn’t working for the enemy willingly. It was desire nonetheless, and you can always work with desire I have found.

  “Come, look me in the eye…” I said, with a little hint of my old wit and charm returning. A little of ‘blaze it out and let them feel your fire’ if you will. “The left one,” I added, just to make sure she understood what I was asking her to do.

  She walked over to me cautiously. Then leaned across me, in a way that would have been alluring in any other circumstances. Indeed, even in these circumstances, as her brass arm was not the only thing about her that was well made. As she leant forward, I got a remarkably good view of a pair of her other assets. Regretfully. As in doing so she also unwittingly caused an accompanying painful throb in the wounded thing between my legs, I am somewhat ashamed to admit.

  Penny peered into my eye closely. Close enough to see the bloodshot lines of red in my whites, I am sure. Close enough to see more than that as well. And what she saw, also saw her. I felt it moving over my eyeball or thought I did. There was a little star of pain, that same pain I’d felt before. I realised suddenly that I’d the distinct feeling the spider intended to defend itself.

  ‘Is that the watcher, Harry, or the damnable spider itself?’ I wondered and realised it was a somewhat chilling thought. ‘Is the bloody thing capable of reacting to defend itself? Does it think? Or is it whoever is watching me? Watching in those damn porthole devices in Egypt. Or in London? Is someone controlling it even now? Damn Ministry, Damn Queen Lard Arse, Unamused, Iron Knickered, Brass Titted, Kraut Shagging, Bloody Victoria. Damn the whole bloody lot of them, and this blasted American Half Mechanical Bitch too.’

  A mind of its own, or controlled by a watcher. I couldn’t tell you which idea I felt was the worst…

  The American Half Mechanical Bitch in question reached out the tip of her mechanical index finger, and with terrifyingly gentle control, she pulled down my lower eyelid. I tried not to shake with the sudden feeling of dread that washed over me. I was all too aware that she could pop my eye with the smallest of mistakes on her part. Spider or no spider, I was somewhat fond of my eyes. I had no desire to lose one.

  “Oh, my,” she said, and my world became just her inquisitive face and a nose she wrinkled up in a way I would have normally considered cute, as she peered all the closer.

  “Gates or Jobs?” she asked me. At least it sounded like a question. I’d no idea who Jobs was, but I knew the first name obviously.

  “Gates,” I said, as calmly as I was able, which was not very. And then thankfully, she withdrew her face and hand. Then she took a step back, and I breathed out slowly. I had not even realised I was holding my breath at the time.

  “Hum, strange. Jobs is normally the one obsessed with eyes. It’s all eye this and eye that with him, obsessed with optics Stephen is…” she said, picking up an unbroken glass. She filled it with water from a jug on the side that had survived her temper tantrum. Then offered me a drink, or more exactly she started to pour it into my mouth. Which, all considered, I took gratefully.

  “So…” she said and lightly dabbed a little spilt water off my chin with a handkerchief, “they put one of these… things in Saffron’s eye as well, did they? I guess that explains why she is playing along with them and not off in the wind. Though she is probably just playing for time, I expect. Knowing her, and I do, she’ll be trying to find out more by being on the inside. Yes… mmm.” She lingered for a moment on a thought, then added, with a degree of certainty, “Yes. That must be the case, or she would have gouged her eye out by now.”

  “What?” I said, with genuine shock. More at the blasé way in which she made that statement than anything else. The thought hadn’t occurred to me. Though I guess it would work. If, admittedly, you were willing to do it to yourself.

  The thought of Saffron willing mutilating her own eye seemed absurd. And yet, perhaps because of the way Bad Penny sounded so sure of herself, I was suddenly certain that the American was correct. Miss Wells not only could do so, but I realised even from what little I knew of her, she would. There was something about Saffron that had steel all the way through. It was an alarming thought.

  My mind raced to that odd conclusion, while Penny walked slowly around the bed to come to my left side. Looking at me once more in a strange and predatory way. Then she tilted her head a little as if considering something and I was certain right there and then I was not going to like what was going through her mind.

  “Mathew 18:9, Mr Smyth. ‘If thy eye offends thee…’ Do you know your scripture? Yes? No?”

/>   I shook my head in reply, not liking this turn of events. Something my mother once told me came back to me at that moment. ‘When they start quoting the good book to you, Harry lad, it’s time to run for the hills.’

  I was tied to a bed, however. Running to the hills was not an option. “I know what I was taught,” I said. Which is the world’s most open ended statement ever.

  Bad Penny just smiled at me, like a shark smiles at its prey.

  “I assure you Saffron is quite capable of doing just that. I doubt she would even think twice about it in fact. If it came to it,” the Maid-From-The-Psych-Ward said.

  “Well, be that as it may, but I am sure you can see the situation I’m in, that Saffron’s in, but maybe we can help each other,” I said, with a hint of worry back in my voice. The conversation had suddenly taken a disturbing turn after all. I must admit that line of scripture had really got to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m by nature a sinner myself although not a terrible one, you understand.

  I’m actually quite good at it.

  But still, as I mentioned, according to the wisdom of Old Mother Smith, which when not in her gin was fairly wise, when they start quoting scripture at you… Well, let’s just say in my experience nine times for ten they’re about to burn you at the stake, and I am not talking entirely figuratively here. There was this one time in… sorry, but I digress once more and that’s a story for another day.

  Suffice to say the turn in the conversation was making me a little nervous. As was the way she stalked around the bed and leaned over me once more.

  “Help each other, why, Mr Smyth, you’re being so very helpful right now. More so than you can possibly imagine, I am sure. But as you’re helping me, perhaps I should return the favour and help you. Fair’s fair, after all. Don’t you think?”

  Oh, the mercy of light at the end of a conversational tunnel…

  “Oh, that would be very, yes indeed, if you could start by letting me up that would be a fine…” I started, but didn’t get to finish. Mainly due to her clamping her right hand over my mouth.

  And the light at the end of the tunnel, well it turns out to be attached to a locomotive. Of course it does…

  She raised her left hand, the mechanical one if you remember and something about the brass articulations of her index finger seemed to twist in an unnatural way. Rotating slowly anti-clockwise. I watched it turning, with, it has to be said, no little awe and a high degree of trepidation. Then as it turned some more, the steel-edged fingernail of that finger seemed to grow.

  And it kept growing, until three inches of very sharp looking steel blade extended out of it. Scalpel-sharp steel. That moved towards my eye, in which I could feel the spider starting to move once more. Squirm is perhaps a better word. With little prickles of pain inflicted upon me as it did.

  Bad Penny turned to look me directly in that eye, as if watching the spider moving over it. All the while bringing that overly sharp fingernail down slowly closer me. A look which in other circumstances I would have attributed to glee crossing her face as she smiled at me.

  “Yes, you have been a great help to me, to us. I’m sure Saffron appreciated it too. So, in turn, I should help you,” she said, whatever she meant by that.

  All the while the razor finger moved ever so slowly closer, as steady as it would have been guided by a surgeon. Then, with the blade no more than an inch from my watering eye, with its unwelcome passenger wreathing about frantically, she asked me the most horrifying question of the evening.

  “So how about it, Mr Smyth? Shall we, as Mathew says, ‘pluck it out’?”

  CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

  Jonah’s Lament

  I’ve certainly seen many better airships than the Jonah’s Lament. Sleeker ones, more impressive ones, ones which are better armed, and ones which were newer certainly. But I must admit it was a pleasure to lay both my eyes upon the Jonah the following morning.

  I know, I jumped ahead, but it is important in its way to say this. The Jonah, with its inauspicious name, was a second-rate, second hand, ex-Royal Air Navy gunship that should’ve been decommissioned twenty years ago. Instead, it was sent to India to see service beyond its intended lifespan as a patrol craft for the East India Company.

  And it looked like it…

  In almost any other circumstances it would have been a deflating craft, if you will pardon the pun, to find as my berth for the next six months, or however long it managed to stay in the air. Looking at the multiple patches on the flanks of her air sack that might not be long.

  Mostly it was small patches and some fairly new by the look of them. Patched which spoke of bullets being fired, presumably by those intent on bringing the Jonah down and unlike the modern ships I was used to flying in, there was a distinct lack of armour on the flanks. Worse, whatever had past for the minimal flank armour she’d once enjoyed had long been stripped away. Presumably, so the craft could gain the altitudes necessary for India’s mountainous northern regions.

  So, as I was saying, in most other circumstances it would be dispiriting to set both my eyes upon her. But, as it was, being able to set both eyes on her was a bonus after the previous night. So my relief at still having both my peepers helped cushion the blow a little. Not much, however, for in truth she was a truly awful looking ship.

  Anyway, since you’re no doubt wondering, it was moments after she spoke those inauspicious words from Mathew 18:9, with her scalpel-like fingernail poised by my eyeball, that the door to the room came crashing in.

  There is it seems an upside to having The Ministry’s spider in your eye. At least, if you’re somewhere like Calcutta where The Ministry has one of its little hidey-holes. And of course if someone is watching you at the time. Gladly, in this case, there had been and they had watched the whole drama in my bedroom unfold. Luckily with a certain degree of haste, they’d also sent the cavalry.

  I am, as I’m sure you will remember, less than enamoured of Sleep Men. With good reason, I’m sure you will agree. They give me the creeps like nothing and no one else on this earth.

  On this one occasion, however, I was suddenly very, very pleased as the door to my room came crashing down and I saw two of them stomp into my room.

  They burst in complete with those weird clouds of smoke I remembered from London, billowing out from under them. The same nightmarish visage, the blank gasmasks, the dark eyepieces, the tubes from strange devices, and the hulking size that made them seem inhuman. So while they were there to save me from optical surgery by a woman I suspect had never been granted a medical license, they still scared the crap out of me.

  It’s a profoundly ambivalent experience to be rescued by creatures that haunted your nightmares. Joy and terror combined. It’s a heady mix.

  My American friend, She-Whom-Was-Not-Now-Nor-Ever-Was-The-Maid, reacted to the threat instantly rather than completing the task at hand. Which was lucky in my self-preservation centric opinion. Not least because it would have taken her less than a moment to poke out my eye, a fact about which I remain uncomfortably aware. Perhaps she realised she didn’t have one to spare. Or perhaps it had been a bluff to scare me in the first place, though I never doubted her intent at the time, it has to be said. If it had been a bluff, it was a damn convincing one.

  Unlike me, whatever was in the smoke didn’t seem to affect her. She just ignored it completely and leapt to her feet, before flinging herself into that fear-inducing poison. She moved quicker than I would’ve thought possible. I may have still been drunk, the shock of the door bursting in, the billows of smoke already clouding my judgment, but no one normal can move that fast. She stepped, with the speed of a sprinter, across the room from a standing start, hammering into the foremost Sleep Man and slashed at his mask.

  Somehow in the intervening space between my bed and her target that single scalpel-edged digit of hers had been joined by three others. All as sharp, they appeared like the talons of a cat. And all in that fraction of a moment that it took her to reach him.
>
  Four long slashes appeared down the left side of the Sleep Man’s mask and gushed out what could have been blood. He, it, railed back from her. As his head came back up I could see tattered fragments of his mask hanging loose, and more blood. It must have been blood, what else could it have been? Despite the fact I had never before seen blood that was a sickly lime green colour.

  I caught half a glimpse at what lay beyond the mask and wished to all that was holy that I’d not. Skin is not supposed to glisten that way, nor be that pallid. It was skin I have seen before. But only on corpses. And the mouth… Mouths are supposed to have lips, not be bared back to the teeth.

  It was the gas, the Sleep Man’s nightmare inducing gas, it had to be. As I have told myself so many times since. Else Sleep Men are walking corpses, enslaved to The Ministry by strange dark arcane acts, or the science of the insane.

  It was the gas, I am almost sure of it.

  The blow Bad Penny had inflicted bought her less than a second, no more than that. But that was enough for her to hot tail it across the room while the Sleep Men tried to follow, the first stricken one getting in the way of the second, who in turn blocked the doorway for the others that came behind.

  Leaping, while still three yards way, a leap no one had any right to attempt, she dived through the window, which had been open due to the Calcutta night’s heat. Luckily for her.

  Not so lucky was the fact we were three floors up. She should, therefore, have been a nasty stain on the pavement by the time the Sleep Men crossed the room, clouds of smoke still issuing out from beneath their long heavy black coats.

  The smoke took its effect, and I passed out for the second time in as many hours, which, I am sure you would agree, was definitely becoming an annoying habit.

  When I came to the following morning, feeling none of the refreshment of sleep I may add, the door to the room had already been repaired. Nor was I any longer tied to the bed. Indeed the room was much as it had been when I first arrived at the hotel. Once I had blacked out, not only had the Sleep Men left, but others had come and repaired the damage. Untied me, and tucked me into the sheets.