The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure)

by Mark Hodder

  “How—how much?” Burton croaked.

  “A pint should be enough to send him into a profound sleep,” Swinburne said.

  “I was addressing Mr. Toppletree. How much for the dog?”

  “You surely can’t mean to purchase the beast again,” the poet groaned.

  “Again?” Toppletree asked. “Wotcha mean again?”

  “He doesn’t mean anything,” Burton said. “Two pounds?”

  “Daylight robbery!” Swinburne objected.

  “Two pounds,” Toppletree quickly agreed, obviously surprised at the phenomenally high offer.

  Swinburne moaned and said to Joseph Robinson, “I think I require a stiff brandy.”

  The landlord obliged and was paid by Burton, who then slid a couple of pound notes across the bar to Toppletree.

  “Much obliged, sir,” the man said. “You won’t regret it. He’s a fine animal.”

  “Then why have you sold him?” Swinburne asked.

  “He’s rather too fond of nipping me wife, sir. Doesn’t like her, an’ she can’t stand the sight of ’im, the poor little fella.”

  “She’s very discerning.”

  Toppletree bent and tickled Fidget under the chin. “Bye bye, old son. Suppose now I’ll have to find another way to annoy the bloomin’ missus!” He passed the animal’s lead to Burton. “I’m off to join me mates in a game of dominoes, sirs. Been a pleasure meetin’ yer both. All the best to yer.”

  He departed, taking his pint with him.

  Robinson moved away to serve another customer.

  Burton pulled the basset hound around so his stool blocked its route to Swinburne’s ankles. He winced as his damaged elbow gave a pang.

  “The dog again, Richard? Why?”

  “You know how useful Fidget was to El Yezdi. The hound saved your life.”

  “A different history, a different beast, and a different Swinburne.”

  “Quite so, and during my visions—or whatever they were—I saw this very animal in a different Burton’s home. Perhaps we belong together.”

  “You patently do. In an asylum.”

  “Maybe so. The intricacies of time are enough to send any man loopy. Don’t you find it significant, though, that we just experienced an event that will be repeated, in another version of history, one year from now? Remember, El Yezdi purchased Fidget in 1861.”

  “Significant how?”

  “Because it has demonstrated that, as my counterpart insisted, time has echoes and patterns. A great many events are common to a great many of the histories, though they don’t always transpire in exactly the same manner or at exactly the same moment.”

  Swinburne shrugged. “What of it?”

  “It occurs to me that what I have witnessed—to wit, Babbage’s experiment in multiplicity—might be a rather unusual circumstance, for, in every case, it happened at precisely nine o’clock on Wednesday the fifteenth of February; a moment which, I remind you, the scientist himself emphasised.”

  Swinburne swigged back his brandy and followed it with a mouthful of beer. “An unusual circumstance,” he echoed. “Heaven forbid we should encounter one of those.”

  They ordered a second pint each, and Burton went through his experiences again, this time describing as many details as he could remember.

  Later, after they’d indulged in a third drink, he said, “By God, I’m wearied to the bone and hurt all over. I require the healing arms of Morpheus.”

  “But I’ve hardly touched a drop!”

  Burton gave Fidget’s lead a little more slack, and the dog edged closer to the poet’s feet.

  “Very well! Very well!” his friend cried out. “I concede!”

  They bid Joseph Robinson farewell, nodded to Ted Toppletree, stepped out of the public house, and both immediately voiced cries of astonishment.

  Initially, it appeared that a fresh layer of red snow had fallen, but they quickly recognised that, in fact, the vivid colour belonged to a dense mass of tiny shoots that had emerged from the icy layer. The little plants had taken root in every available space.

  “This is beyond the bounds!” Burton exclaimed.

  “You’re not wrong. They are growing impossibly fast,” Swinburne observed. “We were only in the pub for a couple of hours!”

  They slowly followed the road back toward the river, observing the scene with awe. As they came abreast Battersea Fields, Swinburne said, “Is it my imagination or can I actually see them growing?”

  He crouched and gently touched a tiny, tightly bunched, and as yet unfurled bloom. “I can. Look at this. It’s visibly in motion!”

  Burton squatted—with a slight groan as his bruised body objected—and gazed intently at the tiny blossom.

  “Uncanny,” he muttered.

  “Tempus flores.”

  Burton raised a questioning eyebrow. “Time flowers?”

  “They appear to be transcending its limitations, and given the moment of their arrival, and the events you’ve experienced within the past twenty-four hours, I think the designation is suitable.” Swinburne closed his eyes and declaimed:

  One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:

  Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.

  “The significance?” Burton asked.

  Swinburne shrugged. “I don’t know. The words came to me out of the blue.”

  “In connection with these flowers?”

  “Yes.”

  Again, the diminutive poet closed his eyes and, after a long pause, continued:

  What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under:

  If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder.

  Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:

  We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?

  Burton stood and tightened his coat around himself. “It sounds like an objection to religion.”

  Swinburne also straightened. “To monotheism, perhaps. A yearning for the advent of a new paganism. How I rue the One who casts his veil of grey over us, Richard; who bids us contemplate death when all around us are the bright colours and vibrancies of glorious life. We have allowed ourselves to be crushed by a despotic deity who demands of us a lifetime of toil and service and promises in return a harsh judgement for most, and ambiguous rewards only for those who enforce His rule. I place all my hopes in Darwin. His wonderful insight can teach a far greater satisfaction and reassurance than blind faith can offer—a simple pleasure gained from the sheer exuberance and tenacity of existence. The human species should revel in a permanent state of delighted astonishment at this world, but instead we allow ourselves to be yoked to a tiresome and unyielding fear of it.”

  Fidget lunged forward and sank his teeth into Swinburne’s ankle. The poet squawked and hopped away, arms flapping wildly. His long scarf became entangled around his ankles. He tripped and fell into the snow, rolling and squealing. Burton watched him but without amusement. Though he’d become familiar with his friend’s propensity to go off at a tangent, Swinburne’s words had been peculiarly out of context, and while he’d been speaking, Burton had noticed a glazed quality to the other’s eyes, as if the poet had slipped into a trance.

  The king’s agent bent, plucked the flower out of the ground, and cautiously held it to his nose. It was discharging a pleasant but rather cloying perfume.

  “Algy,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  Swinburne leaped to his feet and shook a fist. “Furious! I shall purchase a muzzle for that little devil.”

  They trudged on. When they reached Chelsea Bridge, the poet opted to cross it on foot and walk the short distance back to his digs. Promising to deliver Burton’s penny-farthing back to Montagu Place on the morrow, he set off.

  Burton hailed a hansom and was soon rattling northward with Fidget sitting between his feet. He felt as if he’d been awake more hours than his pocket watch could attest to, and his thought processes were becoming incr
easingly sluggish. His friend’s odd outburst, the bizarre flowers, Spring Heeled Jack, the vanishing time suit, the other histories—they all blurred into a jumble of mismatched events. He could make no sense of them, and the more he tried, the more confused he felt.

  He tried to quieten his restless thoughts by looking out of the window. It didn’t help. He found himself anxiously scrutinising the city in case it had suddenly transformed into a near but not quite accurate copy of itself.

  When he arrived home, he found Mrs. Angell dusting the bannisters. She gawped as he stumbled in and cried out, “Great heavens! You went out again! You’ve hardly slept! Look at the state of you! Your clothes are ruined! And—and you have a dog!”

  “I fell off my velocipede. This is Fidget, a new addition to our household. You don’t mind, Mother?”

  The old dame clapped her hands together and beamed down at the basset hound. “Ooh no! I ain’t had a dog since I were a little girl. He’s a beauty! Just look at them big brown eyes o’ his. An’ you know how I hate wastin’ scraps, sir. I’m sure he’ll be more ‘n’ happy to swallow ’em up.”

  “Good show. Perhaps you’d put that to the test? I wouldn’t mind a little something myself. I’m famished. An early supper would be much appreciated.”

  “There’s a pot of lamb curry on the stove,” she said, taking Fidget’s lead. “It’ll be ready in half an hour.”

  “Just the ticket.”

  His housekeeper gave his clothes a further disapproving inspection then, with the hound waddling behind her, descended to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, Burton was slouching in his armchair. He’d wrapped himself in his jubbah—the loose outer garment he’d worn during his pilgrimage to Mecca—and had wound a colourful turban around his head. A cheroot dangled from his lips. He glanced cautiously around the room.

  There was no parakeet. Everything was in its proper place.

  He moved his feet closer to the fire, feeling its heat penetrate the soles of his pointed Arabian slippers, and thought first of Abdu El Yezdi, then of the Burton who’d ridden the clockwork horse, and finally of the one who’d steered a giant woodlouse.

  Multiple Richard Francis Burtons.

  “There is no other me but I!” he told the room, though he knew the statement was erroneous.

  At half seven, Mrs. Angell sent Bram Stoker up to summon him to the dining room. She’d cooked with her usual expertise, but as hungry as he was, the king’s agent ate slowly and dazedly, hardly tasting the food. His muscles had stiffened so much that every movement pained him.

  After the meal, he returned to the study for a postprandial drink. He stood before a small wall mirror. He saw two stitches in the gash in his chin. His old scars, on his cheek and scalp, were where they should be.

  He stared into his own dark eyes.

  The room was quiet but for the steady and persistent ticking of the mantel clock.

  Traffic chugged past outside. Footsteps. Muffled snippets of conversation. A newsboy hawking the evening edition: “Terror in Leicester Square! Read all about it! Stilted ghost haunts the city!” Very faintly, Mr. Grub’s singsong cry countered the headlines with: “Roasted corn! Come an’ get it! On the cob! Nice ’n ’ot!”

  In the hallway, the grandfather clock wheezed and chimed nine.

  Time.

  It flowed through Sir Richard Francis Burton and around him.

  It emanated from him and was infused into him.

  He saw its presence in the depth of his eyes, the past mocking, the present conspiring, and the inexorable future waiting with an icy and pitiless patience.

  Burton awoke in his bed, though he couldn’t remember having moved to it.

  Daylight slanted through the crack in his curtains. He pushed back the sheets and swung his feet to the floor, crossed to the window, and yanked the drapes open. Outside, the yard and the mews beyond it were thick with vermillion flowers.

  He turned back to the room and went to the washbasin to shave and sponge himself down. He was still sore all over, but his remarkable constitution had responded well to Sadhvi Raghavendra’s ointments. His cuts were hard with puckering scabs, his bruises were already yellowed, and the swelling on the back of his skull had gone.

  He wrapped his jubbah about himself with some difficulty—his left elbow, in particular, was very tight—and was descending the stairs when the doorbell jangled. Bram Stoker answered the summons just as Burton reached the landing outside his study. Maneesh Krishnamurthy and Shyamji Bhatti greeted the lad from the doorstep.

  “Come on up, fellows,” Burton called, and to Bram, “Would you bring us a pot of coffee, young ’un?”

  The boy offered a snappy salute and scurried off as Krishnamurthy and Bhatti entered. Assistants to the minister of chronological affairs, they were both handsome young men, though currently grim-faced. Burton said no further word until he’d ushered them into chairs in his study.

  “From your expressions, I fear you bring bad tidings.”

  Krishnamurthy nodded. “We do. Between nine and eleven last night, Spring Heeled Jacks caused havoc around the city.”

  “Jacks?”

  “Four simultaneous manifestations—at the Royal Geographical Society, at the Athenaeum Club, at Oxford University, and again in Leicester Square.”

  “All places I frequent.”

  “Yes. And he was shouting for you at every location.”

  “Yet when he found me on Wednesday, he had nothing coherent to say.” Burton frowned, and added, “We’re referring to it as he now, Maneesh?”

  “The Jacks were disoriented, disturbed, panicked and violent, as was Edward Oxford shortly before Abdu El Yezdi killed him. This, together with their repeated references to Queen Victoria and obvious obsession with you, has led the minister to suggest that the insane intelligence Babbage attempted to drive out of the damaged suit has somehow found its way into these stilted mechanisms.”

  “Which in form clearly resemble it,” Bhatti added.

  “So yes, Sir Richard,” Krishnamurthy continued. “We think they are he, as in Oxford.”

  Burton rubbed his chin thoughtfully, feeling the roughness of the stitched laceration beneath his fingertips. “Hmm. One might advance the theory that Babbage’s experiment somehow enabled the insane intelligence to flee back to the future it came from, there to advance and automate the time suit and send it to torment me. However, the proposition stumbles on the fact that the intelligence in the suit is synthetic and could not have instigated any such action. As Babbage observed, it has no capacity for independence. It can only respond to instructions.”

  Burton stood, turned away from his visitors, and stepped to one of the two windows. He gazed out at Montagu Place. The rooftops of the buildings on the other side of the road, the windowsills, the inner edge of the pavements, the gutters—every surface that hadn’t been trodden down or driven over—every inch was densely crowded with flowers, all now the size of crocuses.

  “But,” he said, “the theory might be valid if we add to it a mind other than Oxford’s, one that ordered the suit to escape our time the moment Babbage activated the Field Preserver.”

  “You suggest that someone took control of it?” Bhatti asked.

  “And plucked it from right beneath our noses. It leaves us with three questions: who, from when, and why?”

  They fell silent as Bram entered and quietly served them coffee. After he’d departed, Bhatti said, “It may be that Babbage holds the key to this mystery. Apparently the electrical pattern held within the damaged suit was imprinted into his Field Preserver at the instant the suit vanished. He’s working on a means to analyse it. If there was some kind of communication from the future—an order—it might have been recorded.”

  “The power station is our next stop,” Krishnamurthy said. He gulped his coffee and clattered the cup back onto its saucer. “We’d better push on. Will you accompany us?”

  “No. I’m sick of the sight of the place. Besides, I have anoth
er line of inquiry to pursue.”

  “There’s another?”

  “The flora.”

  “The flowers? Because they and our hopping maniac arrived in unison?”

  “Yes,” Burton replied, “and Swinburne responded oddly to them. You know how I’ve come to trust his instincts.”

  “Phew!” Krishnamurthy exclaimed. “What extraordinary times we inhabit!”

  Burton saw them out of the house then rang for Stoker. “Will you tell Mrs. Angell I’m ready for breakfast? Then I want you to get a message to Mr. Swinburne. Ask him to get here by noon.”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  The boy headed down to the kitchen while Burton entered the dining room. After a short wait, his housekeeper entered bearing a tray and served him bacon, sausages, eggs, grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, and buttered toast. He ate with uncharacteristic gusto, yelled his thanks from the hallway, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, there to dress.

  He was frustrated by his aches and pains and had to remind himself that only thirty-six hours or so had passed since he’d been thrown through a plate glass window. Sadhvi’s lotions did nothing to soothe his impatience. Tiredness, weakness—there was no place for them in Burton’s philosophy.

  With his lip curled in self-disdain, he tugged open a bedside drawer and pulled from it a bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture.

  “Blast you, Algy,” he muttered. “I’ll not spend the day hobbling about like a confounded invalid.”

  He twisted out the cork and drank.

  “And to hell with all objections!”

  He sat on the bed, leaned forward with his head hanging, and waited for the tincture to enter his circulation.

  It hit him like an exploding sun.

  He gave a quavering cry and toppled to the floor, holding himself up with his hands and knees.

  He felt a cold gun barrel press into the back of his neck.

  He heard Isabel Arundell’s voice.

  “If you move, I swear to God I’ll put a bullet through your brain.”

  Dick Burton, spy, traitor to his native country, and Otto von Bismarck’s strongest piece in the deadly chess game currently being played across Europe, was defeated.