Dr Feelgood had managed to wheedle his way into hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, from all walks of society, and Ulysses suspected that his influence would be felt for a good few years to come.
“So what of the PM?” Ulysses asked as he thought of those warped by the modified Galapagos serum. “How is he?”
“The Prime Minister will be taking early retirement.”
“But is he all right?”
“He had been through a lot recently and is going to be taking things easy from now on.”
Ulysses was about to ask again, but from the steely look in the other man’s eyes he knew he would be wasting his time. “So what happens now?”
“Now? Now, it is time for every man to do his duty. To step up to the breach, and all that.”
“And what will you do?”
“What needs to be done.”
THOMAS SANCTUARY PUT down the welding torch and lifted his visor. The new headpiece was ready. He only needed to attach the gas re-breather and then he could make a start on the rest of the suit.
He looked from his handiwork to the plans pinned to the easel next to the work table, and from them to the original suit, now adorning its tailor’s dummy. He wanted to make the armour integral to the suit in this new, improved version. And having thoroughly field-tested his father’s creation, he knew that he needed it to be more flexible. By embedding the armoured plates in smaller sections within the layers of the suit itself he should be able to solve both problems in one.
Then there were the gauntlets. He wanted to incorporate both grappling claws and a bolt-launcher mounting them on the wrists. And then he needed to re-stock his utility belt. He needed more tracking devices and magnet-mines too, and he had thought of adding some gas-bombs also.
He looked at the original, and already obsolete, scuffed and torn costume hanging from the dummy. About the only parts that he wouldn’t change, at least not yet, were the jetpack and the cape. He had been very pleased with how they had operated in the field.
But the suit itself had changed almost beyond recognition. And it wasn’t only the suit. The destitute man who had arrived at the door to Sanctuary House, two months before – who wanted nothing more than to be revenged upon those who had stood by while he went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and who smiled while his father died, a recluse, mocked and derided – that man was gone too.
He would still strive to see those responsible brought to account for their crimes in time, and it would still give him a sense of purpose, but the Jupiter disaster had seen him change from being a simple, narrow-minded vigilante to become something more. He had become a hero.
He glanced again at the front page of The Times, casually discarded on the corner of the new schematics, lying beside a barely touched plate of ham and cheese sandwiches. The banner headline read:
SALVATION FROM THE SKIES
Beneath it was a clear picture of him, fully suited up, soaring over Waterloo Bridge as he came to Quicksilver’s rescue atop the sinking Jupiter Station. It seemed that, for the time being at least, the press had decided that he was a dangerous vigilante no more. He was the hero of the hour and right now the Empire needed heroes like never before.
He looked out of the conservatory windows at the Smog-stained sky to the east. For all Prime Minister Valentine’s promises of improving things for all, the launch of the Jupiter Station hadn’t made things better for anyone. In fact, it had only made things worse – significantly worse.
The sun was setting and soon the swarms would rise again to hunt.
As if on cue, the mournful wail of the curfew siren sounded over the city, hastening people to their homes.
Uriah Wormwood had spoken of wanting to see Magna Britannia evolve and its capital, Londinium Maximum, most certainly had. It had changed from being a self-satisfied, corpulent monster into a paranoid, bristling beast, which considered the best form of defence to be attack.
Oh yes, Wormwood had changed things all right.
Thomas lifted the steel-plate mask from the table in front of him, looking from the eyeless mask now surmounting the tailor’s dummy to the glass of its sinister red eyes. But all he saw was his own face reflected back at him from the ruby-red lenses.
He had a feeling that London would have need of Spring-Heeled Jack again. And, when it did, Spring-Heeled Jack would be ready.
THE BLACK-CLAD RAT-FACED man dropped to his knees on the rough planks of the warehouse, dark blood welling from the neat hole in his forehead. His yellow eyes rolled up into his head. His body remained where it was for several seconds, as if the wretch didn’t know he was dead, and then it toppled forwards, exposing the back of the exploded skull.
White smoke curled from the muzzle of the pistol which was now pointing directly at the wizened old man. The sudden retort of the pistol had silenced his half-Chinese half-pidgin English tirade of curses, and he now sat cowering within his dragon-carved throne atop the raised dais at the end of the converted warehouse.
“Would anyone else like to challenge our authority?” came a voice as cold and hard as diamonds, carrying from the persistent shadows.
None of the rat-men said anything, and some took a few nervous shuffling steps backwards, away from the sinister party that had infiltrated Lao Shen’s new base of operations.
The magician dared not take his eyes off the lethal markswoman. She wore tight-fitting practical clothes, favouring breeches and a jerkin over a more lady-like outfit, and her hair cascaded over her shoulders, a tumble of auburn tresses.
To top it all, the young woman’s left eye was covered by an eye patch embroidered with a set of crosshairs. And still she had made the shot.
Behind her a bald-headed man hung from the ceiling via a grappling hook attached to the metal rig that enclosed his body and provided him with two more pairs of limbs, which twitched and flexed with a mind of their own. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of telescoping lenses. A number of camera-eyed spider-bots scampered and crawled over his inverted body, looking like newborn hatchlings crawling over the bloated body of their mother.
Over the gunwoman’s other shoulder was an abomination worse than anything Lao Shen had encountered in the aftermath of the apocalyptic rainstorm. It looked like two unfortunate wretches had somehow been fused together during the devastating deluge, but the old man knew that this freak of nature had been created long ago, within some accursed womb.
The creature had two arms, two legs and two heads. The twins were joined from shoulder to groin but where one was a thickset, muscled brute, his sibling was a shrivelled, hairless thing. Both were ugly as sin and the black tie get-up they were squeezed into – which fitted neither half well – only made them appear even more ridiculous, as did the two top hats the heads wore.
The conjoined twins stood poised, ready to commit some debased act of violence by the look of it, the heavy, ham-sized right-hand fist punching the wasted, long-fingered left hand repeatedly, a grim expression on the bigger brute, while his brother looked like some slack-jawed zombie.
“Thank you, my dear,” the last member of the party said, emerging from the shadows at the end of the warehouse.
“My pleasure,” Kitty Hawke said, smiling darkly.
“I know you!” Lao Shen shouted, almost hysterical. “B-But it can’t be!”
“I can assure you, Mr Shen, that you do not know me,” the young man said, combing a hand through his hair. “But I know you. Oh yes, I know you all right. And I’m here to tell you that there’s a new Kingpin in town. Limehouse is no longer yours.”
“OKAY,” THE PATHOLOGIST began, speaking into the microphone hanging from the ceiling of the white-tiled autopsy room. “Subject is male, approximately seventy years of age. Suspected cause of death drowning. Making my first incision now.”
Watched by his colleague, the green-frocked pathologist placed the tip of the scalpel against the soft grey flesh of the corpse’s sternum and pressed down, pulling the blade back firmly to expos
e the breastbone beneath.
“Good lord!” the pathologist exclaimed as the blade parted the flesh.
“What is it?” his colleague asked, taking a step closer to the dissection table. And then he saw for himself. “What is that?”
“If I didn’t know better I’d say it was some type of fungus.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, as the implication of what they had discovered sank in.
The two men looked at each other anxiously, the colour draining from their cheeks.
The pathologist performing the dissection, was the first to speak. “Now, are you going to tell the boss, or am I?”
ELSEWHERE, BEHIND CLOSED shutters and heavy drapes, in an inconspicuous room in an equally inconspicuous building, within the comforting anonymity of shadowy gloom, a meeting began.
“I call this meeting of the Star Chamber to order,” came the commanding baritone, breaking into the warm peace and quiet of the secret chamber that, moments before, had only been permeated by the gentle ticking of a clock.
“So, Wormwood has succeeded after all,” said a second voice, as rich as claret.
“After a fashion,” the first replied.
“It will take some time for London to recover,” came a third, crisp voice, its tone reminiscent of a snapping terrier, “and in the meantime the empire will be vulnerable to attack from outside.”
“It is only by facing adversity and overcoming it that the empire can survive. Wormwood understood that.”
“And what of him now? Has he been disposed of? Is he dead?”
The first cleared his throat, as if momentarily embarrassed. “No. He is missing.”
“But not presumed dead.”
“No. Presumed very much alive, I’m afraid to say.”
“Then he remains a threat to our enterprise,” said a fourth, his aristocratic tone as sharp and to the point as a rapier’s blade. “Does Quicksilver know that Wormwood escaped?”
“No,” the first said. “As far as he is concerned, his nemesis is dead. And that is how it is to remain.” The baritone bore all the barely suppressed ferocity of a tiger’s roar as the speaker addressed the only person left in the room who had not yet spoken. “Do you understand, Venus?”
“I understand,” came a gentle feminine voice.
“But without you he would not have made the Bedlam connection.”
“I thought it expedient,” the woman’s voice replied calmly.
“It is not your place to make such decisions,” the first growled.
“But I felt he needed a helping hand to see who was behind the Jupiter scheme. Without Quicksilver’s intervention who knows how far things might have gone.”
“The matter was in hand.”
“Then accept my profound apologies, my lord Saturn. I understand the need to test and challenge the strength of the Empire, but I did not think the intention was to destroy her utterly.”
“And what of the nation’s great champion?” asked the claret rich voice, the jangle of a crucifix chain underlying his words. “What of Devlin Valentine?”
“An unfortunate casualty of the Jupiter disaster.”
“As I see it, it is a significant set-back.”
“His condition was an unfortunate side effect of the operation.”
“Unfortunate?” That one word was pregnant with implied meaning.
“Collateral damage, nothing more. We are fighting a war, after all. Both within and without.”
“Indeed. So what now, for Magna Britannia? Who will lead it into its bright new future now that Valentine is gone?” challenged the fourth.
“Now?” the first repeated as if surprised that anyone would feel the need to even ask. “Now, it is time for every man to do his duty, to step up to the breach.”
“But what will you do?” the fourth asked, suspiciously.
“What needs to be done.”
THE ROYAL BETHLEHEM Hospital.
Bedlam.
Well it deserved that name. Eternal prison for a thousand broken minds. And incarcerated within the dungeons beneath, more ‘unfortunates’, their broken minds trapped within twisted bodies.
And there, locked within its deepest cell, hidden furthest from the light of day, Bedlam’s newest guest waited.
Squatting in the filth and squalor of a dank cell, walls running with moisture and thick with moss, sitting upon a bed of mouldering straw, altered limbs restrained by the straitjacket he was forced to wear, was something that was neither man nor insect; something that should not exist in any sane world. Which was why it had been placed here, with those other unfortunates ‘changed’ by Dr Feelgood’s patent panacea.
Stiff hairs, as sharp as spines, poked through the material of the straight-jacket. The feet of a fly – but a fly the size of a man – emerged from the left trouser leg of the confining suit, other such alterations visible through the tightly-bound straitjacket, all the way up the left side of his body, until they reached his malformed head, rudimentary mandibles forcing his mouth open, much of the left side of the skull reformed into the compound eye of a bluebottle.
Over the chittering voices of the other ‘unfortunates’ confined to Professor Brundle’s ‘special’ wing, his voice rang out loud and clear as he screamed his frustrations to the uncaring darkness.
“You can’t keep me locked up down here!” he shouted, his words distorted by the mandibles forcing open his mouth. “Don’t you know who I am?”
The only reply was the buzzing of cockroach wings and the crunching sound of the mantis devouring the half a pig that had been left in its cell.
“I’m the hero of the hour! I’m this nation’s last great hope. I’m the Prime Minister, you know! You can’t keep me locked up like this, I won’t have it!”
His furious ranting suddenly dissolved into hysterical laughter, which rang from the dank stone walls of the dungeon. “You hear me? I’m Devlin Valentine! The nation needs me, if it is to evolve and live on into the next century, and not stagnate and die! England expects every man to do his duty! Evolution expects! Evolution! Do you hear me? Evolution expects Devlin Valentine to do his duty! Devlin Valentine, Lord of the Flies! Evolution expects!
“Evolution expects!
“Evolution expects!
“EVOLUTION EXPECTS!”
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the water became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
Revelation 8:10
The End
CONQUEROR WORM
John Lambton went a-fishing once, a-fishing in the Wear,
He caught a fish upon his hook he thought looked mighty queer,
Now what the kind of fish it was John Lambton couldn’t tell,
But he didn’t like the look of it, so he threw it down a well.
Now the worm got fat and growed, and growed an awful size,
With great big teeth and a great big mouth and great big goggle eyes,
And when at night it crawled about all looking for some booze,
If it fell dry upon the road, it milked a dozen cows.
This fearful worm would often feed on cows and lamb and sheep,
And swallow little babes alive when they lay down to sleep,
So John set out and got the beast and cut it into halves,
And that soon stopped it eating babes and sheep and lambs and calves.
So now you know how all the folks on both sides of the Wear,
Lost lots of sheep and lots of sleep and lived in mortal fear,
So drink the health of brave Sir John, who kept the babes from harm,
Saved cows and calves by making halves of that famous Lambton Worm!
Traditional
I
Stand and Deliver!
~ November 1797 ~
THE
CARRIAGE RACED on through the driving rain, into the gathering dusk, as though the very hounds of hell were after it. Iron-banded wheels rattled and bounced through ruts in the road, splashing filthy water from the overflowing hollows. The horses snorted with effort as they strained to keep the carriage moving through the sucking quagmire the road was rapidly becoming, foam flying from their flapping lips.
“Hi-Yaah!” the driver shouted, lashing the reins, leaning forward in his seat, glad of his high-collared coat in the face of this freezing November rain.
November in the north of England was as miserable a month as you were likely to find anywhere within the King’s realm. But no matter what the weather, the coach’s passengers had a pressing engagement to attend. Time was, as always, of the essence.
Although it was only just past sunset, it was already as dark a night as you would wish to avoid out in the wilds of County Durham, an area renowned for its brigands and highwaymen.
The driver peered at the road immediately ahead, keeping an eye out for pot-holes or fallen branches that could send them careering off the road – hazards possibly placed there by enterprising bandits – but saw little by the swaying light of the jolting coach-lamps.
And then another bobbing light appeared from out of the darkness, like some treacherous will-o’-the-wisp, its sour yellow glow approaching through the gloom. Fear took hold of the driver’s stomach and twisted. This second light could mean only one thing.
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