by Kim Newman
‘Is that an unwound turban floating by the bilges?’ asked Trilby.
Irene had not had time to explain fully the fate of the Persian.
Christine gasped and clutched her throat, apprehending at once that something dreadful had transpired.
Irene drew six-shooters from her leather hip-holsters, and thumb-cocked the hammers.
‘Come on, Angels,’ she drawled, ‘a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do!’
XI
THE TRIO ADVANCED through the barge’s ballroom, stepping tactfully over drunks and suicides, avoiding staff clearing away the debris, posing briefly among giant toys when it seemed they might be noticed. They came to a locked door. Irene put away her guns and picked the lock. The party was continuing, inside, in more select fashion. Christine, Trilby and Irene crept in, and sat at the back without attracting attention.
The Marriage Club was in session.
All around, on the polished wood floor, sat tiny artificial brides, cradling husbands like babies, whispering musically into their ears, caressing them intimately, giving tender orders.
The automated orchestra played a lullaby. The toy conductor swivelled on his podium, seeming to stare at the interlopers – then turned back to his musical machines.
The Countess sat on a throne, weighed down by white furs.
Irene drew a bead on the Countess’s forehead and fired.
A bullet spanged against the red mask, cracking the face of the moon – but the Countess did not flinch. None of the husbands reacted to the shot, but all the wives looked up at once, glass eyes fixed malevolently on the newcomers.
Irene sighted with her other Colt, aiming for the spot where the Countess ought to have a heart. Knowing it wouldn’t be any use, she fired again. A black smoking patch appeared on the Countess’s furs.
‘It’s just another doll,’ said Trilby.
They looked around the room, wary. So many automata, so many painted eyes.
Christine had drawn a sword, which she held up like an expert ready for attack.
In concert, the wives got to their feet, letting husbands fall or roll where they might. One or two of the men groaned, scratched their heads and tried to stand – then sprawled again.
There were at least thirty mannequins, clockwork-and-porcelain-and-wax sisters, costumed in high fashion finery. As they moved, clicks and whirrs suggested their interior workings.
‘I’ll wager they do more than dance,’ said Christine.
‘I’d not take that sucker bet,’ said Irene.
The Countess’s throne revolved. The puppet Countess’s broken head fell unnaturally. On the turntable dais were two identical thrones, back to back. The Countess had been hiding behind a mannequin in her own image. She wore a fresh mask, a rainbow-winged butterfly of silk over steel, and a suit of scarlet, lightweight armour decorated with Chinese dragon motifs. Quantities of loose dark hair fell over her shoulders and down her back.
Irene fired at once, but the Countess – with supernatural swiftness – bent one way and then the other, avoiding the bullets which smashed into her throne or the wall behind her. She struck elegant poses as Irene missed with several more shots.
In the end, in frustration, she pitched the guns at the Countess as if shying horseshoes. With mailed gauntlets, the Countess knocked them out of the air, and they skittered uselessly across the floor.
The pack of brides took a march-step towards the three girls.
‘You escaped the wax,’ said the Countess. ‘Well done. I could use ladies like you in my service.’
Irene knew that was not going to work. And so did the Countess. She shrugged, rattling the shoulder-pieces of her armour.
‘What do you think you look like, dearie?’ asked Trilby.
‘Red Jeanne, evil twin of the Maid of Orléans?’ suggested Christine.
The Countess seemed to consider the idea.
‘She dyes her hair,’ said Irene. ‘You can always tell.’
The Countess made angry, spike-knuckled fists.
‘What say we do this fair and square?’ said Trilby. ‘Just you and us. One to three. Not bad odds for a supposed immortal.’
‘That’s just how it will be,’ said the Countess. ‘I don’t count these puppets as people.’
Christine, Trilby and Irene were backed against the wall. Only Christine had a usable weapon. She extended her sword-point.
One of the wives stepped out of formation and walked up to Christine. The sword dimpled against her chest, then slid through her torso. She stepped calmly up to Christine’s face, blade emerging from her back, sword-hilt against her copper-wire ribs. She angled her head from side to side, looking into Christine’s face – then reversed her walk, like a music box wound backwards, wrenching the sword from Christine’s grip.
The orchestra still played, but the tinkling tune was running out, as if the music box were winding down. The conductor’s baton slowed.
The Countess made a gesture, and there was a whooshing sound.
The wives’ fingernails extended by an inch, razor-edges glinting.
‘This is probably where we get cut to ribbons,’ Irene told her colleagues.
Trilby and Christine held hands. Irene took a fighting stance. In the Bowery, while casing a joint for a crack she soon thought better of, she’d taken an afternoon of boxing lessons from Owney Geoghegan, the bare-knuckle champion. He had shown her some very useful tricks for facing stronger opponents with a longer reach than hers. Before she went under, she’d break a few toys.
The music stopped. The baton was still.
‘Goodbye, Angels,’ said the Countess.
Then the automaton conductor twisted, suddenly loose-limbed, on his podium, baton falling from gloved fingers. A curtain tore away from the complex works underneath the clockwork musicians and the original conductor could be seen – faceless, broken and stowed away under the bandstand. Several barrels were wired into the workings of the grand Venetian device, marked ‘gunpowder’.
The girls just had time to realise who had taken the place of the mechanical music master.
The golden face-plate was lifted from a horror of a mouth.
The girls’ hearts leaped. The Countess whirled, enraged but still confident of victory. The mannequins attacked.
Clawnails passed Irene’s face, and she took hold of cold, unliving wrists. An implacable mask of beauty loomed close to her, chin dropped to show rows of sharp ceramic teeth. These dolls were designed for murder as much as marriage.
Erik – for it was he! – raised a tube to his mouth. It was about the size of a piccolo, but with fewer holes. He sounded three distinct notes, shrill and dissonant, unknown to music or nature. Irene had heard them once before this evening, and again her teeth were set on edge.
Christine and Trilby reacted at once to the signal. Their eyes became fixed, almost as glassy as the mannequins’. Ignoring aches and bruises, they cartwheeled into the fray, arms and legs scything through the cadre of wives, fetching off dolls’ heads and limbs, spilling clockwork innards and horse-hair stuffing.
Irene, whose head hurt from the shrilling, concentrated on wrestling the contraption which was trying to shred her. She battered its wax-and-china face with her forehead, and tried to break its wrists.
Erik had his temporary mask back in place. He threw a lever, and the clockwork orchestra began to play Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ – but with strange lapses and lacunae, filled by the crackling of electrical arcs.
The Countess looked at Erik, mask to mask.
From the podium, Erik picked up a box, which trailed wires deep into the orchestra’s innards and the barrels of explosive. Surmounting the box was a metal switch in the form of a grasshopper.
Christine danced, whirling swords taken from a toy soldier’s wooden fist and a sleeping senior officer’s scabbard, cutting through mannequins. She fought like an eight-armed Hindu goddess with a scimitar in each hand. She heard music, and the music directed her actions. Lady Ga
latea, Duchess of Omnium, hurled herself at Christine, foot-long porcupine spines sticking out of her chest and back, arms wide for a deadly, skewering hug. Christine stepped under the embrace and used her swords like scissors, snipping the Duchess in half at the waist.
Trilby fought less elegantly, with feet and fists, delivering savate kicks and powerful fist-blows. She wrenched the arms off Madame Venus de l’Isle del Gardo, and whirled them about, raking their claws across the toys. Madame del Gardo hopped comically from side to side, off balance, trailing wires from her shoulders, twitching and sparking, lubricational fluids spurting from ruptured rubber tubes like yellow blood. The armless doll, momentarily the image of a more famous Venus, collided with a toy soldier, and its head flew apart in a puff of flame, burning wig shooting across the room, metal and china shrapnel ripping through the soldier. With Venus’s arms, Trilby battered away several more of the wives.
It was a dazzling performance. Within moments, the floor was strewn with spasming, broken things. Springs and cogs scattered underfoot. Pools of yellow liquid formed, and electrical sparks set light to them. Flames ran quickly, spreading from doll to doll, melting wax prettiness away from metal skulls, crumpling lacework and human hair wiggery in instants, taking hold on torn and oily dresses. Some of the husbands sat up, awake, patting at scorching patches on their evening clothes, yelping in pain at the rude disturbance to their dreams.
Irene still wrestled with her single opponent, Madame Gérard, née Francis-Pierre.
Trilby stepped up, and wrenched off Poupée’s head. Her body went limp.
Irene looked at Trilby, holding the head up like Perseus with Medusa. Its eyes still rolled and it tried several sweet smiles before its internal mechanisms wound down and the lids fell shut.
The last of the wives had fallen back to the throne, to protect the Countess, who was trying to make herself heard above the racket. The orchestra broke down, and the Tartini shut off. The wives were assembling themselves into a many-legged war machine, directed by the Countess.
The trio stood before the throne. Trilby and Christine opened their mouths and ululated, a high, clear, pure, penetrating sound that rose. Irene clapped her hands over her ears, but couldn’t completely shut out the sound.
The Countess halted her work on the machine, a trickle of blood leaking from one of her eyeholes.
The voices soared, a wordless sound, two tones entwined. Edison bulbs burst. Champagne flutes flew to splinters. The faceplates of the last brides shattered, showing the intricate works beneath. Even their glass eyes burst.
Irene jammed her fingers into her ears, trying to shut out the pain.
Trilby and Christine, unaffected, seeming to be able to do this without breath, took the sound up to a peak. Somewhere on the barge, something major broke.
Another shrill note came, from Erik’s flute, cutting through his protégées’ voices, shutting them off.
And Christine and Trilby were fully awake, bleeding and puzzled.
‘What happened?’ Trilby asked Irene.
‘You went away for a while,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine now.’
Trilby realised she was holding a broken head, had a moment of disgust, and dropped the thing.
‘Zut alors,’ said Christine. ‘What a shambles!’
The Countess was gone, her throne descended into a trapdoor, a smear of thick blood marking her trail. Erik was vanished too. During the mêlée, he had fixed his detonator box to a clockwork percussionist, wiring its hand to the grasshopper switch and setting an hourglass timer which was already close to running out.
‘We’d best tell everyone to abandon ship,’ ordered Irene.
* * *
Most of the company were in the main ballroom when Erik’s explosives went off. There was a great grinding sound as the greater works of the barge misaligned and tore themselves to pieces, wrecking whatever purpose they might have had. More explosions followed.
Christine, Trilby and Irene were in a corridor, which ought to lead up to the deck and safety. They found the doorway barred and bolted. The Countess evidently took the ruin of her schemes personally. The incandescent lamps wavered, and they were ankle-deep in cold water. Then the floor listed, and the water flowed away. The girls found things to hang onto.
‘I think our music master might have planned this phase of the evening rather better,’ observed Irene. ‘We’re quite likely to drown.’
‘Have more faith, Irène,’ said Christine, cheerfully. ‘Something will turn up.’
They were looking at a foaming torrent advancing up the corridor. Something broke the surface angrily – one of the toy soldiers, or at least the top half of one. It thumped against a wall, turned over, and sank.
‘How sad,’ said Christine. ‘I love a man in uniform.’
One of the porthole windows broke inwards, and a rope ladder descended.
A familiar face loomed through the aperture, a beckoning arm extended.
It was the Persian! Alive!
‘Ladies, time to leave this playroom.’
He did not have to say it twice.
XII
ONLY TWO OR three of the Marriage Club were drowned, and they weren’t among those who’d be most missed. The hero of the hour, feted as such in the popular press, was the aged Étienne Gérard. Shocked to his senses by cold water, the one-time Brigadier laboured fearlessly at great risk to his own life to aid his fellow guests in their escapes from the fast-sinking barge. Some wondered why such a noted gallant managed only to rescue wealthy, famous, male members of the party from the depths, leaving scores of poor, obscure, young wives to the Seine. No corpses were ever recovered, though broken mannequin parts washed up on the mudbanks for months. It was another of the mysteries of Paris, and soon everyone had other scandals, sensations and strangenesses to cluck over.
The Persian reported that he had been fished out of the river by his old friend, Erik – who effected emergency medical assistance, before taking the unusual step of venturing himself onto the field of battle.
Back at the Opéra, quantities of brandy were consumed, and repairs were made to the persons of the lovely ladies who had done so much for a world which would never know services had been rendered. As dawn broke, baskets of fruit and pastries were delivered, with a note of thanks from Madame Sabatier, who also enclosed a satisfactory banker’s draft.
After hauling cardinals and bankers out of the cold water, the newly-widowed Grand Marshal Gérard – if one could be widowed after marriage not to a human woman but a long-case clock with a prettily painted face – repaired to the Salon Sabatier, paid in advance for the exclusive company of three of la Présidente’s most alluring filles de joie, and promptly fell into a deep sleep that might last for days. That certainly counted as a happy outcome.
The only pall cast over celebrations came when Irene announced that she felt it was time she quit the Opera Ghost Agency to venture out on her own. Christine and Trilby wept to hear the news, and bestowed many embraces on their friend, not noticing that she was unable to control a shudder when they touched her. Irene could not look at their active, lovely, characterful faces without recalling the expressionless, bloodied masks of skin that took their place when three shrill notes sounded. Not to mention the proficiencies in arts devastating and deadly they exhibited under the influence. Either of them could have had Owney Geoghegan’s title away from him with one arm tucked into the back of their skirt.
The Persian understood and conveyed Monsieur Erik’s good wishes.
‘He suggests, however, that you limit your field of operations.’
‘I should stay out of Paris?’
‘He thinks… France.’
‘Very well. There’s Ruritania, and Poland, and London. All a-swim with opportunities.’
Irene left the building.
Behind his mirror, Erik knew regret. But he understood the American was not like his other girls. There was steel in her core, which made her unsuitable for ‘music lessons’, t
he specialised training he deemed necessary for his most useful Agents. That steel would never be bent entirely to his purpose, and might eventually bring them into conflict… as he had been brought into conflict with Joséphine Balsamo.
The Countess Cagliostro was, of course, still at large, and liable to be unforgiving now her carefully contrived plan of world domination was sunk at the bottom of the Seine. She would probably be suffering from a splitting headache, too, and be unhappy at the loss of her marvellous barge and so many toys. This was no time for the Agency to be under-strength.
The feuilleton was not over.
XIII
FOR DAYS, CHRISTINE and Trilby moped and were inconsolable. Every little thing was a reminder of something sweet or amusing Irene had said or done, and would set them off in further floods of tears. Other ladies of the chorus assumed their hearts had been ordinarily broken, and dispensed wisdoms about the untrustworthiness of the perfidious male sex.
Then, the bell sounded. Not for ‘music lessons’, not for an exploit, but a simple summons.
As they walked down the corridor to Dressing Room 313, they came upon a familiar, shambling, bent-over figure. Christine, acting on instinct, took him by the throat and shoved him rudely against the wall.
‘No more, please,’ said Cochenille, squirming.
Temporary repairs had been made to the mannequin, but he was still not in peak condition. As Christine pinned him, Trilby rolled up her sleeves, intent on smashing his face to bits again.
‘Ladies, let him be,’ said the Persian, looking out of the dressing room. He had been in a conference with Spallanzani and Coppélius. ‘These gentlemen have made a break from their former employer.’
Christine dropped the gasping Cochenille. His hand came off, and he picked it up and stuck it into his pocket. Trilby gave him a kick and he scurried away, followed by the doll-makers, who gave the girls a wide berth as they passed out of sight. Trilby gave their backs the Evil Eye Stare.