“Whoever you are trespasser, you’re just in time. Look to the future, behold, it’s near.”
The infant shrieked horribly. Again compelled by the sound, she jumped to her feet and turned. The book abandoned where it had fallen, she had just two desires now, to save the tortured baby and escape. Four unsteady steps brought her to the fire, but horror followed as she went to grab the infant. The child wasn’t human. Its head an open flower of flesh, flailing white petals surrounded a hole that bulged with dark red bulbs or polyps. It was an impossible creature, something that couldn’t belong to a sane, orderly world. Confusion followed the horror: the hand she’d so selflessly shoved into the fire was gone now, sliced neatly at the wrist. There was no pain there however, just a numbness that spread as she stumbled backwards, hypnotized by the abomination on the table.
“The Treader of Stars,” Havendish said, his voice close to her ear. Too close, yes: bumping into him she felt sweaty flesh pressed against her own. A large hand gripped her shoulder as he continued. “Yours is the first flesh sacrificed to His new host. More shall follow.”
True to his word, her hand appeared upon the entity’s stomach. Alive, the digits danced between the thing’s tiny arms and legs. Then… reality shifted. The room brightened in a way she didn’t understand, the shadows and light inverting. A sudden dislocation filled her, ejecting her from her paralyzed form.
“Ah, His world meets ours.” Havendish removed her hood, her golden locks freed to fall around her face. He released her shoulder and she shuddered on leaden legs. Reality…stuttered. I have to escape. She bit her lower lip, drawing blood. Warm copper filled her mouth as the entity’s awful thoughts reached her.
WOMAN. WE ARE ONE NOW.
The entity’s cries transformed into a high-pitched giggle, joined in an instant by Havendish’s loud guffaws. The flames turned pink, then a dark soulless black.
The window. The pain returning some measure of clarity, she turned on her heels, and ran.
COME. BE WHOLE AGAIN.
She hit the window sideways. The glass, bursting into a hundred fragments, twinkled and fell as the night air cleared her head completely. Releasing herself to gravity, the ground shot up to meet her.
Better this death.
***
One year later.
First the guard came marching past the river. Light infantry, their scarlet double-breasted tunics and dark blue Shako headdresses looked out of place against the scenic country backdrop. The fifty or so men looked haggard, tired of their march. Their Snider-Enfield rifles were held high against their shoulders however, and their observer held no doubts they would spring to life at the merest sign of trouble.
Concealed beneath the river, he turned his helmet-mounted periscope, following the men’s progress until vibrations in the water returned him to his original position. The source appeared in the form of two eighteen-foot tall clockwork and spring-powered automatons, the Royal Mobile Artillery. Loping arms dangling like apes, the copper-plated behemoths had blue flags attached to their shoulders, each bearing Prince Albert’s Royal Crest. Thick limbed, barrel-chested, each whirring automaton was driven by a crippled war veteran, the shiny black swiveling 12 pounder cannons upon their hunched backs manned by artilleryman sat high between the shoulders. These men were grim-faced, as were the thick-featured, metallic visages of the automatons they rode.
Sir Jeffrey Langham’s face was filled with a bitter hatred.
After the automatons had passed, he waited a few minutes and tapped his companions’ arms. It was time to move. Raising himself from the water he removed his periscope helmet, taking advantage of the renewed field of vision to examine the landscape around the rail track flanking the river. To the left, the automatons’ hulking forms were growing smaller, to the right, far in the distance, he saw gray smoke plumes, marking The Queen’s Delight as it roared along the tracks. Distant, but growing closer by the second, they had little time to lose.
Langham turned to his companions and nodded. Doctor Vonner, his friend and childhood tutor, and Raghubir, his Sikh manservant, returned the gesture.
Stepping from the river their gray sealskin suits dripped water, as did their dome-shaped, periscope-horned helmets. Raghubir removed his, his long black hair falling around a stern, dignified, full-bearded face. As Raghubir turned and searched through an area of straggly bushes, Langham watched the doctor twist his helmet off. Pale, bespectacled, the elderly man’s white hair was plastered to his scalp with perspiration. Tearing open and digging into his sealskin, he removed a silver pocket watch.
“Ten minutes past twelve, yes?” Vonner said in a softly accented voice. “The train will be late.”
“All to our advantage.” Both turned at Raghubir’s words. His voice, unlike Vonner’s, was deep and resonant. In his arms he held the narrow steel box they’d stashed earlier, holding explosives powerful enough to destroy the approaching train.
“Let’s get this on the tracks,” Langham said. Depositing his helmet to the grass he took the box from Raghubir. “And send Victoria’s monster back to hell.”
***
Corporal Haines leant from the cabin and felt the wind invigorate his tired senses. An hour away from the Taunton Concentration Camp, he couldn’t wait to stretch his legs. He hated this duty, hated being in the foul, noisy train guarding the driver in case of mutiny. But, it wasn’t unheard of. Apparently a driver up in Newcastle had forcefully crashed his train as a show of rebellion against the new regime. Haines turned to Owen the driver, a soot-faced old man dressed in grimy blue overalls, and couldn’t imagine dissent within that lined elderly face. There wouldn’t be much Haines could do about it anyway. With the sixty-ton train going at fifty miles per hour, he had no idea how to halt the chugging monstrosity. Thankfully, the engine drowned the cries from the carriages behind them. And the thing in the fourth carriage? He’d rather not think about that.
Dirty, hot, unrewarding work, at least the fireman Tom, stood staring out the doorway to Haines’s left, was enjoying the view.
“Hey, hey,” the young man shouted, “Come see this.” Owen glanced to Haines and rolled his eyes.
“Please corporal,” Tom continued, and was that a note of fear in his voice? Haines stepped unsteadily across the cabin.
“There’s three men there between the river and the tracks,” Tom explained. Haines moved him aside and looked for himself.
He was right. Three men stood there, dressed in the most ludicrous of outfits, like gray leather long johns. One, the tallest, was bearded and brown, his black hair long like a woman’s. Beside him stood a short, elderly man, and beside him a thin fellow with short brown hair and a van dyke. Accompanying their ludicrous costumes, each wore a sword at his waist.
Cold fear filled Haines’s gut. “Sound the whistle! Emergency!” he cried. Close enough to see the young man’s expression, he perceived something very ugly there. Their eyes met, and the young man bowed before all three turned and ran for the river.
“Sound the whistle!” Haines repeated, and looked to Owen. The driver stood at the other side of the cabin now, leant outside. As white as a sheet beneath the collected grime, he turned to Haines and said, “there’s something on the—”
The following explosion rocked the earth.
***
The boom shook Langham, almost sent him underwater as the trio crouched in the river with their hands over their ears. The doctor did fall, caught from going under by Raghubir’s swift hand. After ensuring the doctor was all right, Langham turned to see the aftermath of the explosion. He was not disappointed. In its life, The Queen’s Delight, a jet-black engine pulling five Royal Blue windowless carriages, had been death on wheels. The engine lay on its side now. Thirty feet from where it had exploded, it pumped oily black clouds into the air. Wheels and other parts dotted the grass around it, some on fire. A little way behind the crater in the tracks, the carriages were derailed but still upright. Scarlet clad soldiers fled the final carriage in
droves, running from the wreckage with their guns abandoned.
Langham took account of the situation and waded from the water, followed by his companions.
“What first eh?” asked Vonner, surveying the destruction.
“The Spawn,” Langham replied, “before the guards grow their balls back. Then we free the prisoners.”
Everything had gone according to Vonner’s plans. The eccentric old occultist stroke inventor was the ideal ally in the fall of an empire, as was Raghubir. The Sikh’s long strides quickly took him past the first three carriages and towards their goal.
Langham, increasing his gait, experienced guilt at the cries issuing from the carriages. This, we need to do this. His body grew sweaty beneath his sealskin suit.
Raghubir halted at the end of the fourth cabin. Stopping beside him Langham turned to where Raghubir stared. The door to the cabin stood ajar. Had the thing escaped? He looked around. No, it can’t move that fast.
“Are we quite sure silver will do this?” he asked as Vonner, puffing from exertion, reached the pair.
“Yes, yes it will,” he replied, “The purity of the metal works well against these abominations.”
Langham touched his sword hilt. “Well then,” he said and stepped forward, “let’s go kill a god.”
Raghubir grunted his approval. Langham climbed onto the cabin and flung the door wide, bringing some measure of light to the dark interior. A smell assailed him as he entered, like sour milk and ammonia, Langham noticing with distaste the ugly stone bas-reliefs on the walls—décor plundered from some ancient forbidden tomb.
The darkness shuddered before him, scores of unseen members rapping the wooden floor. In the shadows he discerned pale, twisted limbs, the twinkle of myriad soulless eyes.
Something touched his mind, a buzz of flies swarming around carrion.
SHE SUFFERS, the buzzing said.
“You bastard,” Langham replied.
He unsheathed his sword. The glint of silver paused the thing’s movement. The buzzing dissipated.
“You don’t like this?” he asked, a sneer forming on his lips. “I thought things like you were supposed to be fearless, omnipotent. Godlike. Isn’t that what your twisted Cardinals preach?”
“Sahib.” Raghubir entered the cabin behind him.
“My friend,” Langham said, “let’s put silver to the test.”
***
Colonel Peabody was distraught. Dressed in black tailcoat and trousers, he’d flung his cape at Raghubir after bursting into Lang-ham’s library. His bow tie sagged, as did the flabby cheeks on his worried, ruddy face. Gray hair combed over a shiny, bald scalp, some hairs stuck upwards, friction from the top hat he’d no doubt tossed at another servant. The offending hairs bobbed as he moved, for Colonel Peabody would not cease his pacing.
“The Deity’s distress. Oh sir you would not believe His distress. He only buds once a fortnight so the loss of this facet has caused Him considerable pain.”
Langham nodded with false commiseration.
Peabody paced, and ranted.
“I was at a dinner engagement at the time. Had to order a carriage and two Bullyboys to the Hampton’s. Security you know. And the damned machines trampled a peacock of all things! But the attack on the railway…The Great Western Railway at that! The tracks blown to smithereens and all those sacrifices gone, escaped into the wilds.”
“I am sure their families will be devastated.”
Peabody paused. Turning on him, his watery blue eyes glared. “You, you think that is funny?” He veritably spat the words across Langham’s desk. “A train filled with undesirables, not only criminals but the sick, mental inferior and ill, and immigrants of all people? They should be so lucky as to find their filthy bodies harvested for the greater good. Your greater good. This Empire’s greater good!”
Have I gone too far with this tedious little man? Perhaps. Langham thought.
“Well I—”
“The Indian Revolt, He saved us if you recall. His keen mind inventing machines of war and—”
It was Langham’s turn to interrupt, and he did so with anger in his voice.
“He summoned blasphemies from the sky. Yes I remember the carnage, the loss of innocents.”
Peabody’s face fell. “You were there with your wife, I am sorry. She fell during the chaos yes?” He didn’t wait for Langham’s reply. “This is only a formality of course. The event happened close to your estate and with the wedding so close… Well as I explained, the Deity is most perturbed. He has made many sacrifices to remain in this sphere and help keep the Empire great.”
“I know sacrifice,” Langham said. “And you can rest assured that I will do anything in my power to save this Empire.”
“Good show man, and if you learn anything concerning what happened yesterday, I’ll be at the Bridgewater Barracks till the morrow. Oh.” Peabody looked around quizzically. “Where the devil did I leave my hat and cloak?”
***
“Idiot,” Langham said seconds after Peabody had left. Though his library stood at the rear of the manor, the Bullyboy automatons huge footsteps echoed through the room.
“They’ll have wrecked the lawn,” he sighed, and the door facing him opened. Raghubir entered, his hair held impeccably now behind a scarlet turban. “The fool has left and taken his metal monsters with him,” he said, his face as impassive as always. “You Sahib look displeased. Does the colonel suspect?”
Langham broke eye contact and stared at his desk. The oak surface was bare but for an unused blotter pad and a gilded framed photo of his wife. Her sepia tinted, youthful face increased his sadness.
“Too many innocents died in that train wreck.”
“A sacrifice, for the greater good Sahib.”
Langham looked to his servant and shook his head. “I might have stopped all this. I am—”
“Unable to turn back time yes?” Doctor Vonner bustled into the library, his arms laden.
“Yes.”
Langham, an occultist like his tutor, had known The Book would be trouble the moment it went up for auction, suspected worse when the disreputable Lord Havendish purchased it. The lady thief he hired to retrieve it had disappeared without a trace… Then Havendish had gained his audience with the Queen, the evil he’d summoned and the promises it made…fulfilled. A great empire, tainted by a monster, riddled with rot and ruled by horror.
Vonner emptied his charge onto Langham’s desk. A vest of brown leather straps and thick silver cylinders, it symbolized destiny, and revenge.
“I have still to attach the explosives,” Vonner’s bespectacled face frowned, “I just wanted to make my point again, that there will be no going back, for either of you.”
“I am fully committed,” Raghubir said, and stepped forward to stand beside the doctor.
“You both are?” Vonner asked, examining Langham’s face for, what? Fear? Second thoughts?
Langham stood and picked up the vest. It felt heavy in his hands, would feel so much heavier with the conductors and nitroglycerin attached.
He stared at Vonner. “We go to London tomorrow, assassinate the Queen, and send her monster back to whatever hell it came from.”
The doctor smiled. To Langham’s surprise, the stern faced Raghubir did too.
“I shall finish up the belt then,” Vonner said. “I also have some final calibrations to make on the long range rifle.”
Langham handed Vonner the vest before returning to his seat. “Raghubir, please send for my newspapers. I want to read of the Deity’s continuing distress.”
***
Langham awoke in a cold sweat. A coin toss had decided things. A grubby copper farthing and heads or tails. The phrase ‘Victoria by the Grace of God,’ had surrounded the Queen’s profile. The Britannia on tails held ‘Queen of Britains, Defender of the Faith,’ around it. Both in Latin, the phrases made a mockery of the world he lived in.
Raghubir, his loyal manservant, had chosen, and received, tails. He
would wear the suicide vest and destroy the monster at its wedding. The thing would die, followed by all its budded facets across an empire of evil unbound.
Langham had chosen heads. Quite apt really, heads to remove Victoria’s. Rolling over, he stared at the empty space beside him, at the pillow once used by his wife.
“Revenge, my dear,” he said, “and redemption,” and closed his eyes to sleep.
***
The next day the three of them bumped and jostled their way to Taunton in Langham’s Hampton-Cooper steam carriage. Raghubir was at the wheel while Langham and Dr. Vonner were in the back. The trip was so long that the trio left hours before sunup and Vonner had to occasionally check on the boiler to read pressure gauges, turn valves to vent or build steam, or toss more coal into the burner.
Langham was deep in thought and lost in his own world. He had slept badly the night before, but it was more than exhaustion that now kept him mum. On the seat next to him was the case holding the pieces of Vonner’s amazing long range rifle. Langham had practiced with the firearm for weeks, taught himself to assemble it with his eyes closed, and knew even its most technical workings by heart. Still, he did not have complete faith in the weapon. He knew that the more advanced a thing, the more things could go wrong, and everything about their daring and insane plan had to be perfect in order for it to succeed. They would not get a second chance and no less than the fate of the world hung in the balance. Was it any wonder that his stomach was sour and there were bags under his eyes?
Their steam carriage followed the road that ran parallel to the Great Western Line, and when they passed the still smoking remains of their efforts from the previous day, all three men could not help but gawk. There were no less than four tromping Bullyboys on the scene and an entire company of scarlet clad soldiers. It was an overwhelming show of force to deter anyone else from undertaking similar attacks. And as it was more of a message than a mission, none of the three rebels were completely surprised when keen eyed Raghubir pointed out the right side of the steamer and said, “There, it’s another spawn of the Enemy.”
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 24