Twelve Minutes to Midnight

by Christopher Edge

  In the armchair nearest the fire, a gentleman in a red velvet waistcoat shivered as though in the throes of a terrible nightmare, pages tumbling from his lap and falling into the flames. At his feet lay a discarded copy of the Pall Mall Magazine, its headline reading “Visions of the Future” hinting at the dreams that were troubling his mind.

  Barrett slowly rose to his feet, his face creased in confusion. He looked around the pub in consternation as the scratching of pens grew louder. The journalist shook his head to try and clear the fug of ale from his brain.

  He glanced towards the bar, but even there, the landlord was stooped over the counter, frantically scribbling. The entire pub was caught in a trance. Barrett turned towards Penny and Alfie as they rose from their chairs, his eyes filled with horror.

  “What’s going on here?” he cried.

  “This is your proof,” Penny replied. “I told you, the madness is spreading. Look around – see what they were reading.”

  Barrett glanced around the room again. He shuddered as he watched the silent rows of drinkers hunched over the tables, the constant movement of their hands scratching out endless messages. But scattered amongst them, he noticed for the first time the pages torn from magazines, beer-stained editions of The Strand, Longman’s Magazine and The Idler. He turned back towards Penny.

  “Make them stop,” he pleaded.

  Penelope looked up to meet his gaze, her pale green eyes filled with misery.

  “I can’t,” she replied. “Once they’ve read the stories, the madness is in them. Nothing can stop them from scribbling their nightmares across the page. Soon all of London is going to be a great Bedlam – the only people left sane will be locked inside the asylums.”

  She fell silent for a moment. The only sound they could hear was the scratching of pens and the scrape of fingernails across the wooden tables.

  “I don’t understand,” Barrett stammered. “How can a story send you insane?”

  Penny gestured around the room at the figures slumped in armchairs and sat bent over tables, their eyes glazed and unfocused.

  “The madness inside these people is just a reflection,” she told him, “a hypnotic shadow cast by the stories they’ve read. Lady Cambridge has enslaved the minds of the greatest writers in Britain. With the venom of the dream-weaver spider flowing through their veins, their words have the power to take control of every mind in the city. We need to find a way to free them from this nightmare she has trapped them in.”

  Alfie frowned.

  “But we’ve already tried that,” he said. “Apart from H. G. Wells, we couldn’t get close to any of the authors. Every magazine in London has bolted its doors. How can we get to them?”

  A cold shiver of fear crept up Penelope’s spine as the answer crawled into her mind. She remembered the darkness crowding in on all sides as the venom flowed through her veins. She knew what she had to do.

  “I need to drink the venom of the dream-weaver spider,” she told them, unable to hide the tremor in her voice. “I have to find them in their dreams.”

  “What are you talking about?” Barrett asked, scratching his head in despair.

  “When Lady Cambridge poisoned the authors, the spider venom took them into the heart of the madness,” Penelope explained. “They’ve been sleepwalking through the hurly-burly of everyday life, but their minds are somewhere else as the strange visions they dream send the city insane. The venom will help me to find them.”

  Alfie stared at her in horror.

  “But won’t it send you mad as well?”

  “I don’t know,” Penny replied, trying to hold her voice steady as she remembered the spiders scurrying inside her mind, “but it’s the only chance we have left. If I can find the authors and wake them from their dreams, then their stories will just become fantasies again. Lady Cambridge’s prophecy will crumble to dust as the city is set free from her madness.”

  She stared up at them both, her pale green eyes glinting with a grim determination.

  “I’ve got to try.”

  The journalist’s moustache twitched, his instinct for a front-page story finally taking hold, but a frown stayed fixed to Alfie’s face.

  “The last of the venom was destroyed in the fire at Lady Cambridge’s mansion,” he said. “Where are you going to find an almost extinct African spider in the middle of London?”

  Penny’s face crumpled in frustration. Without the spider venom, there was no way she could stop this. In a few hours’ time, the secrets of the new century would belong to Lady Cambridge and the whole world would be at her mercy.

  “There must be a way we can find the spider,” Penny murmured, reaching up to brush her fringe from her eyes. “If we could just…”

  Her voice trailed away as the hopelessness of their mission struck home. She glanced around the bar in despair as the hunched figures kept on writing, the scrape and scratch of their silent words filling her mind with misery. On the wall directly in front of her, the framed front page of a newspaper stared back. Penny’s distracted gaze slowly focused on its headline proclaiming the opening of a grand new museum. Her eyes narrowed, then her face suddenly lit up with a flash of inspiration.

  “There’s one place in London that might have that spider,” she exclaimed. “The British Museum of Natural History!”

  XXIV

  “This is most irregular, Mr Barrett.”

  Dressed in a shabby tweed suit, the grey-bearded curator selected a key from the bunch that dangled from his pocket chain. They had reached the end of a long corridor, tucked away in the bowels of the museum. Directly in front of them was a dark mahogany door, its sign almost lost under a layer of dust: DRY STOREROOM No. 2. Fitting the key to the lock, he turned the handle and then pushed the door open. The curator paused on its threshold, glancing back at them with an anxious expression fixed to his face.

  “If the museum’s board of trustees knew that I had let you in here tonight,” he said, keeping his voice low as if afraid of being overheard, “my position as curator, indeed my career as a natural historian, could be in ruins.”

  Penny and Alfie shifted uncomfortably under his gaze, but the young journalist just rested his hand on the older man’s shoulder.

  “I think that’s the least of your worries, Mr Wallace,” Barrett told him, his tone a mixture of sympathy and menace. “I think the board of trustees would be much more interested in hearing about how that shipment of missing dinosaur bones ended up being delivered to Battersea Dogs Home. I can imagine the headlines now.”

  The colour drained from the curator’s face.

  “You wouldn’t print that,” he moaned despairingly. “You promised me!”

  “Of course not,” Barrett soothed. “Anybody could make a mistake like that. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. We just need to see that spider I told you about.”

  Glancing nervously over his shoulder, Wallace slowly nodded his head. Motioning for them to follow him, he stepped into the darkened room, pulling on a light cord as he did so. With a conceited grin on his face, Barrett hurried forward to follow him, with Penny and Alfie close behind.

  The huge square room looked like a museum in miniature, its walls lined with glass display cases filled with collections of desiccated specimens. Stuffed crocodiles, the shells of giant tortoises, yellowing jars of pickled scorpions and snakes, galleries of beetles and bugs, dried and displayed on a pin. Under the glimmering lamps that hung from the ceiling, long rows of mahogany tables were covered with yet more bottles and jars filled with the eerie forms of other animals: spiders, scorpions and crabs. Stacks of wooden crates sat, unpacked, at the ends of these rows and, in the shadows, Penelope glimpsed the shapes of strange skeletons, their bones arranged into frightening poses. She shivered. A cornucopia of life preserved forever in death.

  The curator hurried towards a long workbench in the centre of the room. Amongst the jars and fume-filled bottles arranged there sat a tank of scurrying spiders. At the sight of this, a
cold shiver crawled down Penelope’s spine. She remembered the huge spidertorium hidden behind the bookshelves in Lady Cambridge’s sitting room and her courage retreated at the thought of what she had come here to do.

  As the curator delved amongst the exhibits, Alfie glanced across at Penny, his face creased in concern.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  Penny nodded. She set her own features into a determined expression, even though her mind was crawling with fear.

  “It’s the only way.”

  Wallace turned back to face them. In his hands, he held a small glass jar filled with a sickly yellow solution. Inside the jar, Penny could see the shape of a large spider. Its bulbous black abdomen hung suspended in the preservative liquid as its long legs swirled in the yellowing brine. As the curator set the jar on the bench in front of them and began to unscrew the lid, Penny glimpsed the silver crescent shape marking the spider’s back. She quickly covered her mouth as a nauseating stench rose up from the jar.

  “Architarbi somnerus,” Wallace began, his voice suddenly loud in the dusty storeroom as though he was addressing a lecture hall rather than just the three of them gathered around the workbench. He slid the spider from the jar on to a metal tray. “The dream-weaver spider. As you can see,” the curator continued, picking up a scalpel from the bench and pointing at the spider’s body, which was oozing stickily on the tray, “it got its name from these striking moon-shaped markings. Native to a remote part of British East Africa, it was apparently prized by the natives there as a delicacy, so much so that the creature is now sadly extinct.”

  Penny frowned. If only the spider had really become extinct and prevented Lady Cambridge from making her momentous discovery.

  Glancing up, Wallace eyed them suspiciously.

  “Why do you want to look at it anyway?” he asked. “What’s so important about this spider?”

  “Just a story I’m working on,” Barrett replied guardedly. “Nothing important.”

  The curator raised a sceptical eyebrow.

  “At eleven o’clock at night on New Year’s Eve?”

  Barrett glared back at him.

  “That’s right,” he answered sharply. “Now, unless you want to read about how the stray dogs of Battersea have been feasting on dinosaur bones in the next edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, I suggest you give me some privacy to complete my research.”

  His face swiftly reddening, the chastened curator beat a hasty retreat.

  “I’ve got better things to do than stay here,” he muttered angrily. “Lock the door on your way out.”

  As the storeroom door slammed shut behind him, Penelope turned towards Alfie.

  “Go and keep an eye on him,” she said. “Make sure he stays away.”

  Alfie looked at Penny with worried eyes.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she replied. Beneath her dark fringe, Penny’s face was already pale at the thought of what was to come. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Alfie frowned. There was a heartbeat of silence and then he nodded his head. As he turned to leave, he called out to Barrett, who was tentatively poking the spider’s body with a pair of tweezers.

  “Make sure you take care of her,” he warned him. “Or else you’ll have me to answer to.”

  Alfie’s lanky figure disappeared through the door, leaving Barrett and Penelope alone in the eerie gloom of the storeroom. Penny turned back towards the workbench.

  “Right,” she said, “let’s get started.” She held out her hand for the tweezers and Barrett reluctantly placed them in her palm. He stared down at the black-and-silver spider, a widening circle of amber liquid spreading across the tray beneath it.

  “How are we going to get the venom out of this thing?”

  With the tweezers in one hand and a scalpel in the other, Penny swiftly removed the spider’s abdomen, cutting away the legs with a series of precise incisions. Using the tweezers, she carefully lifted the head that remained on to a glass slide resting beside a microscope and slid this into focus beneath the lens. As she pressed her eye to the microscope, she answered the journalist in a calm and level voice.

  “I’m going to dissect the venom glands.”

  Open-mouthed, Barrett stared at Penny in disbelief, watching as, wielding the scalpel with her right hand, she delicately inserted the tip of a glass pipette into the spider’s head with her left. Gently squeezing and then releasing the rubber bulb at the top of the pipette, tiny droplets of cloudy liquid were drawn up inside the glass tube.

  “How did you learn how to do that?” he murmured.

  Penny raised her head from the microscope as though she had just completed a classroom experiment.

  “I’ve always been interested in science,” she replied.

  Lifting the pipette to the light, she stared at the liquid collected inside. The glass tube was only half full, the pearly solution swirling with a nebulous glow. Penny glanced across at Barrett, a worried look etched on her face.

  “The preserving fluid has contaminated most of the venom glands,” she said. “I don’t know if this is enough.”

  Frowning, Barrett let out a long sigh.

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  As he spoke, Penelope felt a prickle of fear run up her spine. The memory of the venom pumping through her veins crawled back into her brain. Penny remembered the spiders scurrying inside her mind, the silken threads of their webs dragging her to the very edge of madness. She couldn’t go through it again. It was too much to ask.

  Then she thought of Monty and Mr Wigram, H. G. Wells and the long rows of silent authors, all entranced by Lady Cambridge. Penny recalled the alarming sights she had seen that day as they had wandered the city. Graffiti daubed on abandoned carriages and along the sides of empty houses, strange cryptic messages that made no sense at all. The passers-by sleepwalking through their lives, eyes glazed as they stared at a world that shouldn’t exist. Not yet.

  If she couldn’t do this, then Lady Cambridge would win. She would control them all and the future would be hers. This was their only chance to fight back. She had to plunge into the heart of the madness and wake the authors from their nightmares. With her heart thudding in her chest, Penny nodded.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Carefully handing the pipette to Barrett, Penelope seated herself on a chair beside the workbench. Clearing a space on the desk, she pulled out a pen and sheaf of paper from her handbag and placed these in front of her.

  “We need to do this properly.”

  Inside her mind, she was screaming, but Penny fought to keep the emotion from her face. With the pipette held between his fingers, Barrett stood over her. He looked down, his eyes darting anxiously from Penny to the shimmering liquid captured in the pipette’s glass tube.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Penny’s fingers whitened as she gripped the arms of the chair. Taking a deep breath, she could only bring herself to whisper a single word in reply.

  “Yes.”

  Tilting her head back, Penelope’s long black hair fell from her face. She slowly opened her mouth, fighting against every instinct in her body that wanted to keep her lips firmly closed. Leaning over her, Barrett squeezed the pipette. The venom fell on to Penny’s tongue like tiny teardrops, the acrid liquid burning as it slipped down her throat.

  Stepping back, Barrett watched aghast as Penny gagged, her slender body racked with fierce shudders as the venom worked its way through her veins. Her fingers clawed at her throat, desperately trying to free herself from the onrushing darkness. Then Penny’s hands suddenly dropped to her side, her green eyes frozen into an unsettling blank stare.

  “Penny!” Barrett reached towards her in alarm. “Are you all right?”

  But no answer came in reply as Penny stared sightlessly ahead. Her gaze seemed fixed on the glass tank at the end of the workbench. Behind the glass, countless spiders scurried and crawled, their intricate
silken webs echoing those spinning inside Penelope’s own mind.

  XXV

  As the spiders’ frenzied spinning reached a crescendo, Penny felt herself falling into the heart of the darkness that filled her mind. And then the dreams began.

  A blizzard of images flashed before her eyes like a speeded-up stereoscope, almost too swiftly at first for her to make sense of. A towering airship exploding in a ball of fire … mechanical beasts rampaging across a battlefield … a sleek arrow of steel darting across the sky … smokeless factories run by machines … babies born from test tubes…

  Penny sobbed as black silken threads wrapped themselves more tightly around her, dragging her down; her reason crumbling under the weight of the history to come. The past, present and future didn’t exist any more – everything was now. She saw great cities of glass and steel soaring into the sky and then exploding into ruins as bombs rained down before slowly rising again … a roaring procession of automobiles racing down an endless highway … her own face staring out from a mirror, impossibly old…

  Penny felt herself falling again, tumbling through the darkness. A deafening cacophony of voices echoed around her, their frenzied shouts and screams filling her ears. Millions of minds caught in a huge spiderweb of black silken threads that stretched across the city.

  As the dream-weaver spiders crawled inside her mind, Penny could see the glittering darkness at the heart of their web. She felt herself dragged towards it, the sticky threads wrapping themselves around her limbs. Waiting for her there, she glimpsed the shadowy shapes of shrouded figures, each and every one writhing in torment.

  As she fell, a dizzying kaleidoscope of images burned through her brain. Fireworks exploding across the sky … tiny machines filled with the sounds of a thousand symphonies … a sinister man with a toothbrush moustache facing a vast crowd of people, their arms held aloft in salute … great walls of ice collapsing into the sea … earthquakes and tsunamis … gleaming shops … mechanical hearts … the crying face of a starving child…