Steam Submarine Zelf

by Robert Denethon

  * * *

  The lamp-post astonished me. It appeared that mankind had discovered the lightning element - the source of power mentioned in the ancient Hwellwellyn texts - though when I tried to think how I might have learned this fact or even what the Hwellwellyn texts were I could not for the life of me remember.

  I began to panic, my breathing coming in short, sharp gasps. My mind was unhinged - these thoughts of elvish texts were not rational - the elves, that was who had written them - elves! Not rational! But then I questioned even this, for what did I, who could remember nothing of who I was or where I had come from, know of rationality? Perversely, the thought comforted me, and I descended into a kind of interior darkness, a dark night of the soul, with no moon or stars or planets.

  Then I shivered. It was too cold and my clothes were very thin, so I began walking again to keep myself warm, keeping to dark, unlit alleyways, avoiding always the bright lamplight.

  I walked for what must have been at least three or four hours in this strange, half-mesmerised state, trying to remember who I was.

  Eventually I found myself standing next to the Thames on a bridge, looking down into dark waters that roiled and flowed in spirals and circles, gentle, insidious, hypnotic, and deep.

  A mist hung over the surface, unnaturally still, floating like the ghost of a lost soul, a whisper.

  The Thames... The river of forgetfulness and oblivion, the afterlife: the Lethe, the river of the underworld. The thought lulled me and I felt myself slipping, sliding, falling into a doom-laden melancholia that was clutching and clawing at me, trying to pull me further in, farther down.

  Then I wondered how I knew about the river Lethe and tried to remember that but I could not. An unmediated distress gripped my heart, and I gasped.

  I fought the slough of despond: I was not going to give up today. Suicide is not an option. Even though I could see no hope, I would put my hope in the things that I could not see. The things that I could not even remember, good times, good people, friendships, perhaps even a family.

  I found a tunnel nearby, clearly some sort of drainage tunnel that led into the Thames, and curled myself up inside it in the darkest corner, but it was so cold that I could not sleep for a long while.

  In the night I heard someone whimpering.

  It was me.

  Interloup Two - Secret Agents & the Electric Telegraph.

  Wolf Lady.

  She had contacted the agents by the electric telegraph several weeks before.

  Madgwint the griffin had always been ferreting out helpful gadgets for her when he had been around. She didn’t know where he had gone and she hadn’t heard from him for many months. Perhaps he’d gone home to his own realm, or perhaps he had gone to a realm where the time travelled at a different pace. He might only have been gone for what seemed like a few minutes to him, but it could be years for her, decades, even millenia.

  Madgwint had been a most helpful griffin. He had found a machine for her in one of the other worlds that could send telegraphic messages. The thing had a typewriter attached, but the almost magical thing about this contraption was that it didn’t need to be attached to the telegraph line at all. So long as you were close to the nearest telegraph line it would create vibrations in the magnetic æther that would cause an electric current to rise up and flow along the telegraph line. She didn’t understand the technical details, but the device worked on this particular day at least (it was a little temperamental and didn’t work all the time). In any case an agent of His Majesty’s government appeared on the wharves within twenty four hours of her sending the message.

  She chose the darkest, most secluded, isolated place for the meeting, on the cusp of nightfall as the last gasp of twilight died. The moon, in his own last quarter, was hiding his pale face behind greying clouds.

  She would have set the meeting on the night of the new moon, like a griffin, when she could be sure it would be dark, but that was when it affected her - the unmentionable, the shameful infirmity that she didn’t like to think about - and she did not feel safe leaving the submarine on such a night.

  She saw them coming towards her in the shadows, walking in their clumsy way, feet flopping in those ridiculous things they called shoes like the fins of a sea-leopard, or the feet of a frog.

  Humans.

  Hmph.

  If these men knew what she was, what manner of beast she was, her days of cooperating with them would be over quickly.

  She whispered so that the peculiarly wolfish quality in her voice would not be quite so obvious: “I need to get someone a message.”

  “Use the telegraph!” said the man. “You got a message to us, didn’t you? Get one to your friend that way, the same way you got your message to us. Bit of a miracle wasn’t it? We know which stations are closest to the location the message was sent from... No telegraph for bloody miles and the wires all hidden away inside five feet of concrete, yet still you managed to tap into it somehow. Miraculous, it was.”

  “Other people... are listening to your telegraphs. Someone undesirable might get a hold of it. No. I needed another way. A better way. A more hidden way.”

  In the half-light she saw the dissatisfied aspect of the man’s face. He leaned forward and his eyes gleamed at her.

  “Well, madam, the brigadier was more than halfway impressed with the last offering you brought us. He tells me he reckons that we owe you one, anyway. He said he didn’t think our new Babbage machine could have been built without those nifty little gadgets you gave us, but he didn’t want me to say much more than that about it - you know, Official Secrets Act and all that. Gives us an edge if Hister gets his campaign going - and he will. The Cambridge office in particular has identified him as a danger - he’s got his eye on Europe, mark my words; maybe even the world. And that’s not all we have to worry about either. There’re rumblings in Ultima Thule as well.”

  She shuffled nervously; he was getting off the topic.

  He cleared his throat and continued.

  “‘Yes,’ is the answer, we’ll do you a favour. And we have got a way to get messages out. Your fellow - he reads the newspaper, I hope? We can put something in there for him if you want. Just tell us what you want and we’ll get it done.”

  She scratched her muzzle, trying not to make it look too obvious that it was a muzzle, and cursed the gloves that simply did not fit her forepaws; more paws than hands even when she walked as a two-legs.

  “Well... Put it on the crossword page. I’ll tell you what to put in there....” And she told him, and he committed it to memory. He leaned forward to shake hands - such a quaint human custom - but she carefully kept her paws hidden and said primly, “Thankyou.”

  He seemed to accept that.

  He said, “Pleasure doing business with you, Ma’am,” and disappeared back into the shadows.

  Interloup Three - In The Shadow of the City.

  The Amnesiac Young Man.

  I got some sleep at last and waked soon after daybreak to see the bright white glow of dawn light brushing the tops of buildings. An unsettled breeze had sprung up and was causing clanks and rattles to sound out in the distance and nearby, from every direction, each like a dot on a map, each clatter and clink a pointed reminder that there were no walls around me, no roof above me.

  I stretched, yawned, and glimpsed the gleaming bulkheads of what I thought must be five or six very large ships, great, gargantuan, hulking metal things, looming above the taverns and warehouses to the west, on the river side. They had no sails, only vast chimneys for the smoke to belch out of. Smokestacks reaching up into the sky like long metal fingers beseeching an iron god.

  As I gazed at the giant bulkheads my empty stomach growled and I realised that I’d have to do something about bodily necessities - my three choices seemed to be to find employment, or steal, or starve - and the last two options did not appeal to me.

  I wondered whether cabin boys were still needed in this modern age.
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  Surely they were.

  These sorts of things surely never change - and after all, I must be more than eight years old, and could therefore work to make my living. And on the boat I would be given the seaman’s equivalent of a factory education, and might therefore learn something about this strange futuristic world into which I had been deposited. And it would be an excellent way to stay anonymous.

  I turned to the west and walked through dark, dank, deserted streets towards the looming bulkheads, sparkling now with the rising sun. The sounds of bustle were already beginning to ring out over the awakening city. I stayed in the shadows and the small alleyways, though, fearing I might be prey to those who haunt lonely places in the early hours; disreputable people, men of ill repute.

  Then I froze.

  I glimpsed something or someone in the shadows some twenty feet behind me, or at least I thought I did; perhaps it was merely my imagination. A cloud came over the sun and it seemed like an ill omen. Fear feeds on loneliness, hunger and isolation, as hyenas feed on corpses in the desert.

  I wondered if it was the man I had met in the streets, who had given me breakfast the day before. Perhaps he still wanted to 'help' me; in other words, put me in Bedlam, the asylum for the insane.

  Or perhaps he had set the police on me, or whatever authorities sought to bring into custody the mentally deranged and incompetent in this modern age.

  Or perhaps it was one of the three men who had pursued me when I first awoke.

  How could any of them have found me here, though? I must have walked for miles.

  More likely it actually was one of the riff-raff, those suspicious characters that hang around wharves and dark alleys - perhaps a character like Bill Sykes or Fagin. Oliver Twist - suddenly I remembered reading it - Charles Dickens was the author!

  A strange room came to mind, I saw the three of us in the mirror: three friends, two humans and a troll-cub, reading together by the light of a lamp.

  The fairytale world and the banal reality of London seemed to be completely intertwined in my mind. Perhaps I was delusional. Surely I was - how could such things be?

  A troll-cub? Who had ever heard of such a thing?

  I seemed to wait there for a very long time, and I could hear my breathing rasping out, sounding something like a small bellows. Yet to me it was loud in comparison with the distant shouts of the wharf workers and the ships' bells sounding, and I could not believe that whoever was following me could not hear it.

  Finally the sound of footsteps walking away rang through the streets.

  I waited a while then set off again through the shadows.

  When I emerged into the dockyards there was a comforting crowd of wharf workers loading and unloading cartons and boxes from the ships and I glanced behind me again - anyone who had been following me might well be more reluctant about trying something in what was already a very public place, despite the early hour.

  The workers were using lofty cranes of a size and complexity unknown in the eighteen fifties, and there were horseless carriages with large carts attached to them; they were like railway trains without tracks, chugging to and fro.

  The eighteen fifties - there it is again - the time I knew, the time I was from.

  Looking at the scene before me I tried to make some sense out of it, so that I might know who to talk to about procuring employment.

  In earlier days on the wharves it had been easier to tell who the figures of authority were.

  The captain would almost certainly be supervising the loading and unloading of the ship.

  I had no clue as to how I knew this, but the fact was that on this wharf, the wharf of this future age, I had no idea who the figures of authority were, or who might be the right person to talk to about employment on one of the ships.

  And even worse, most of the workers seemed like grown men.

  I could not see a single child, not a single cabin boy, message boy, or newspaper boy anywhere.

  I stood there for a while, my courage waning, and then my stomach grumbled again. There was a terrible, gaping, empty space inside me. I had to do something to earn money so that I could eat or I was certain I would fade away or starve.

  I selected the wharf worker with the friendliest face, but it took me some minutes to work up the courage to approach him. He had just picked up a box and was hauling it towards a crate when I came up to him and said, "Um... Excuse me..."

  He put the box down and straightened up a little.

  "Well - what have we here?” he said, “A boy, is it, about twelve years old, maybe even a little older? What’s up young master?"

  I said, "Sir, if it please you I would like to earn my keep - I need a job so as I can eat, and I don't want to be a burden on society, sir, I really don’t."

  "He doesn't seem to know that children don't ‘ave to work - must be neglected - no parents - no family? Run away from home did you, boy? Poor lad. Things can be bad in this modern age - and you’re all alone ain’t you?" I must have shown my nerves by flinching, for he moved forwards towards me, reaching his hand out in a conciliatory gesture. His voice became lower, like the growl of a hungry dog. “All alone in the world. Need a friend - that’s it, it is - you need a friend!” Suddenly, in one swift movement he grabbed my arm in a vise-like grip and all at once I knew that I had made a terrible mistake.

  He leered in my face with breath that smelled like rotten fish, and his expression went ugly all of a sudden, with something like greed showing in his eyes. "I know a... little job that you could do, boy. I know some men that would be right pleased to have you... er... workin' for 'em. Why they would just love a fresh young - "

  "Allo, allo," said a voice. "What have we here? Bill Henry Mullins, what ave you found - a stray lad again? Tut tut - what is it about you, Bill, that brings these vagrant children to you? Can’t they see what a kind of man you are? Or is it just that you pretend you aint?"

  I looked up. Two constables stood there in navy blue uniforms and hats that bore the shield of the Royal Marine Police, an official body I had never heard of. The one who had been talking tapped Bill ever-so-gently on the arm with his truncheon.

  Bill Henry Mullins immediately let go of my arm and stepped back, growling softly through his teeth like a rabid dog, and the constable grabbed me and pulled me away from him rather roughly.

  I didn't mind his roughness at all. I felt completely safe in the company of these dockyard authorities, no matter that they had wrenched my arm half out of its socket.

  The constable eyed Bill Henry Mullins and said to me, "Lucky escape you had, lad. He's not a very nice person, that Bill, not the sort any young men ought to be associatin' with. Come on, you're comin’ down to the station - we've got to find your parents or guardians, or whoever it is that's supposed to be lookin' after you. And you should be in school anyhow... Bill, just you keep in mind that we're watchin' you. You just keep that in mind."

  "It's an abuse of my rights to freedom of association," growled Bill Henry Mullins as the policemen dragged their completely willing captive away, that is, me.

  We were at the police station in less than ten minutes.

  They sat me down and one of the bobbies gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit. They let me eat the biscuit before they asked me any questions.

  Seeing how quickly and hungrily I ate, the other said, "You ‘ad any breakfast, lad?" I said, "no," so he popped out for a minute and came back with a bag of roasted chestnuts.

  I wolfed them down gratefully.

  "Now," said the first one, "We need to find out where you really belong. Where do you live?"

  I had to think fast. I couldn't remember any address - but strangely enough I did have a memory of visiting a piano manufacturer in Robert street. He had shown us the pianos and given us morning tea, and he showed us how we could see the top of the Crystal Palace from his window, on the upper floor of the shop. It was only a fragment, like a single tiny piece of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, b
ut that was the best I could do.

  That would have to do.

  If I couldn't tell them any address, I was sure they would send me to the madhouse, or some sort of reformatory for boys.

  "Robert Street," I said. "My father makes pianos. Ummm... Thirty Robert Street."

  They looked at each other. "I don't think I know Robert Street. Where is it then? Is it in London?"

  "Near Hyde Park," I said. "You can see the roof of the Crystal Palace from... father's drawing room window."

  They looked at each other again. "You could, could you? Tall building, is it? Very old?"

  "No, it's not very tall." I was starting to get a bad feeling about their reactions. The conversation was not proceeding quite how I had expected.

  "So you can see all the way to South London and it's not very tall?"

  "Oh, no," I said, "Only to Hyde Park, where the Crystal Palace is."

  "Oh," said the other constable. "So they moved the Crystal Palace to Hyde Park did they? Funny thing I didn't notice them doing that. And my grandpappy lives just up the road from Anerley."

  "Oh no, it's still in Hyde Park where it always was."

  They looked at each other again, and the nice one, the one who had brought me the chestnuts and the cup of tea said in a kindly, rather condescending tone of voice, "Yes, of course it is, lad. Hmmph. Well it was there once, in Hyde Park, weren't it? In the year of the Royal Exhibition? The Crystal Palace. Been reading some old books have we, boy?" He tousled my hair, as though I was some sort of street scamp telling tall tales.

  The other one shook his head and said, "There ain't no Robert Street anywhere near Hyde Park. I was on the Westminster beat for three years, mark you, I know those streets better than the back of my hand. There ain't no Robert Street. Try again lad, and the truth this time. Don't take us for fools, now - we've ‘ad to get information out of hardened criminals before and I ‘ardly think you could qualify as one o' them just yet."

  I looked at them warily and decided not to say anything. The more that I revealed my ignorance of this modern age, the more likely they were to take me to the place I did not want to go to.

  Bedlam.

  The madhouse loomed in my thoughts; once incarcerated, how could I ever hope to prove myself sane?

  They waited for me to speak, but I said nothing, so the nice one said, "Come on, lad - after we've given you breakfast and been so good to you as to give you a cuppa tea, don't clam up on us - the truth will do as well as anything else you might think to come up with."

  But the truth wouldn’t do; it really wouldn't do.

  “What do you think?” said the nasty one. “Has ‘e committed some dreadful crime? Has ‘e taken a knife to a feller or strangled someone?”

  “Doesn’t look the sort,” said the nice one. “Mind you, they often don’t, do they?”

  Thinking this line of questioning had gone far enough, I confessed, “I can’t remember where I’m from,” which was true enough. “Everything seems different and wrong, and whatever memories I come up with don’t seem to fit.” I thought that was vague enough to avoid them carting me off like a madman, but that proved to be an erroneous belief.

  “Might need a doctor’s opinion on this one,” said the nice one, raising his eyebrows.

  “I know what sort of doctor you mean. Might have to cart him off to Bedlam, you mean,” said the nastier of the two constables, chuckling and flicking his fingers past his temple as if to imply loose hinges or something of the sort. That was how I knew that I had completely failed to avoid what I feared.

  I leapt up to sprint away but they were too quick for me. I found myself held securely by the arm by the nice policeman, with the other standing over me and staring at me as though I was a puzzle to be worked out, rather than a living person.

  “Well - trying to do a runner! Maybe you were right - he certainly seems to know what’s in for ‘im. We’ll put him in one of the cells until the clinical workers can get here.”

  They hauled me up a narrow set of stairs, through a barred gate and into a chilly bricked cell with iron bars. The door clanged shut. The place stank of urine and vomit and there were faeces floating at the top of the toilet bowl in the corner.

  I lay there on the hard, cold bunk-bed, trying not to breathe too hard, fearing the unhealthy fumes from the toilet bowl.

  I decided to work out what I might have done differently in case I ever had another chance to escape, but I could think of nothing that I would have changed about what I did. Every step of my first escape and subsequent capture was as inevitable and logical as the fact that day follows night.

  The cell was a dark and depressing place and I had begun to think that I had reached a dead end. I was doomed to spend the rest of my life in a mental asylum, for I could never imagine my memories returning. I found myself saying, “Üdvé, help me,” and I dimly knew that these names were the names by which I knew the Creator, the Highest King who had made all of the universes. But I also knew, somehow, that those names did not belong to Him in this world.

  The hours passed incredibly slowly. The slowness of time in that place seemed to be maliciously designed to torment me. Gradually darkness began to close in on me, like a trapdoor slowly being shut, and at some point I wept.

  In the midst of these melancholy thoughts I heard footsteps and an efficient female voice saying, “Ja, it could well be Amnesia.”

  “That’s wonderful, Doctor, I just knew we did the right thing by calling you in.”

  The nice constable appeared, accompanied by a woman wearing a suit, a man’s suit. What a travesty! This female Doctor looked just as efficient as her voice sounded, with grey hair tied up into a tight bun, horn-rimmed glasses, wearing the type of grey and white suit that a man would wear, complete with a drab grey and white striped tie!

  There was a silver fountain pen in her pocket and she wore no jewellery.

  My first thought when I saw her was that her dress and demeanour was most uncharacteristic of this realm - but then I suddenly wondered what the thought meant - what realm? What could that thought possibly mean? To what was I comparing it?

  The woman said, “So this is... ze patient?” She spoke with a slight German accent that wasn’t terribly noticeable after a while.

  “Yes, Doctor,” said the constable. “He remembers nothing about where ‘e’s come from, who ‘e is. And he’s extremely confused about the... pattern of streets in London, Ma’am - he seems to have the places where things are, completely confused in his mind.”

  “He does not remember; retrograde Amnesia!” She reached through the bars and placed a hand that felt like a cold, limp fish on my forehead - I flinched away.

  Then she brought a small lamp out from her briefcase. I had never seen such a thing - it was a cylindrical object, made of shiny silver metal, with a bright light that shone out from the end of it when she pressed a button on top of the thing, like a magic wand. She waved the lamplight in my eyes. “Hmmm. No sign of concussion. Tell me, pup, did you receive a knock on the head?”

  I was insulted by the impersonal tone she used when she was talking to me, and I certainly didn’t like being called ‘pup’ by someone I didn’t know. I said, “I have a name, you know.”

  “And that name is?...”

  For the life of me I couldn’t remember, so I stayed sullenly silent and stared at her, waiting for her to do or say something.

  She waved the torch in my eyes again and then turned to the constable and whispered, soft enough that I think she thought I wouldn’t be able to hear them talking, “Yes, officer, it certainly resembles amnesia - but the great question is, what caused this ailment? Is it physical - a brain injury - but there are no signs - there should be an injury to the head or a fever or some sort of outward symptom - or is it psychological - a disease of the mind - an illness of the psyche - the soul of the boy? Yes, that appears to be ze case. It seems to be a disease of the mind. But zere is one problem - we don’t have any spa
re beds in the hospital.”

  The constable looked worried. “Well, what are we going to do with ‘im? ‘E can’t stay ‘ere, can ‘e?”

  “I have space at my consulting rooms - a spare room, with a bed - he can stay there for a few days, officer, until we have a spare bed at Bedlam.”

  “He’ll do a runner, Miss - ah - Doctor - first chance ‘e gets. He’ll abscond. He needs to be locked up, I’m tellin’ you, ‘e’s a crafty little feller...” I felt very let down. The nice constable wasn’t really so nice after all.

  “It’s secure, officer - don’t be concerned - the windows have bars on them, locks on the doors. And I have a butler - you see, my consulting rooms are attached to my house - he can cook meals for the patient. I will, however, need your assistance in taking him to my house, if you would be so kind.”

  So my life was arranged for me.

  I was bundled into the police wagon unceremoniously.

  The driver headed north.

  I didn’t recognise most of the streets, but I did recognise that we were on Marylebone road. We were going north again, a short way, and we were outside a small, neat house, with a modest garden and a plaque at the front. “Doctor Melanie...” something or other. I didn’t have a chance to read any more before I was bundled through the front door.

  I screamed and shouted, I struggled and kicked and put every ounce of effort I had into escaping, but the two constables were too strong. Each of them held an arm and a leg; I could barely move. They forced me to walk into the house and threw me into a small room. I somersaulted on the floor and turned around swiftly to face the door, only to see it being locked from the outside.

  The nice constable’s voice sounded muffled through the door.

  “Blimey, these mad ones is strong aint they?”

  And that was it.

  I found that I was in a small room with no fixtures apart from the bed and the bedsheets. There was a lamp in the ceiling, too high for me to reach even if I stood on the bed. I tried banging the window but the glass seemed terribly strong, and would not break, not that it would have helped anyhow, for there were bars on the outside of the window.

  There were no curtains, no bedside table or desk, just bare walls with no adornments.

  I saw the constables leaving and I despaired even more than I had in the gaol cell.

  There was nothing to do in there, it was an utterly hopeless place.

  I was at my lowest ebb.

  They thought me insane, and I could hardly think but that they might be right.

  My thoughts began to whirl - if you have ever been in such a situation, though I doubt that you have - but if you have ever been in such a situation you will know exactly what I mean.

  Fear took hold of me and I felt as though my mind, my soul, my very self, was disintegrating, falling into pieces. I sat on the floor, too shocked even to weep, and strange sounds were coming out of my mouth. Sounds in another language. A made-up language, a language that sounded like no language anyone had ever heard of in the whole world.

  I believed I was saying, “What has happened to me? What has happened to me? What am I going to do?”

  But the sound coming out of my mouth was, “Ïag hvað bij fkrkemnæ to mir hvað pahæmnæ ïag? Ïag hvað bij fkrkemnæ to mir hvað pahæmnæ ïag?”

  Meaningless sounds, strange words in an unknown tongue.

  This shocked me more than anything and I wondered if they were right to think me insane.

  Suddenly the door opened and the Doctor rushed in, accompanied by a man that I assumed was her butler. Before I could even think of running away the butler had closed the door.

  She lifted her fist as though she was an athlete who had just won the race, and I flinched away, but she cried out, “Ah! Verbalisation - glossolalié - expressing an internal emotional turmoil - tell me now, pup, what it is that you are thinking about? What is going through your head? Free association - this is what we need now!”

  The butler leaned down and grabbed my arm in a grip at once so forceful and sudden that I gasped, and stuck a hypodermic needle into it - at that time I had no idea what such a thing was, nor what it might be called - I only knew that a sharp pain had hurt my arm and I cried out in a loud voice. Suddenly I began to feel different - drowsy, calmer - yet strangely unsettled. In some small corner of my mind I knew that I was drugged and it terrified me. Yet I no longer wished to run - I felt as though I had to put my energy elsewhere - I didn’t know where.

  The Doctor unlocked the door.

  “Bring him into my office.”

  The butler hauled me up onto my feet and then dragged me out of the door, a short way along the hallway and into another room. My feet were not working properly. I was deposited onto her couch like a sack of potatoes, and the Doctor sat at her desk.

  “You think I wish to harm you. But I am going to help you your memories to once more to find. I am here to heal you.”

  “Really?” I did not believe her. She did not seem to be a kind, compassionate person - how could someone like her heal me?

  “You think I will not be able to help you. But I am a Doctor and I know what is good for you. A game we will play. You will think of anything and just say it - this play - it is just a game. You do not have to be afraid.”

  “Why? What will you do?”

  “I will respond and say what I think.”

  “I can say anything? Why would I anyhow? Why would I want to? But I feel very relaxed somehow, though, except that I have an urgent feeling that I have to... as though the words just want to... come out, blurt out, burble everywhere. That’s what it is. That’s what I felt like I had to do - just babble on. Bibble bubble babble babble. What have you done to me? What is this? Did you put something in my arm? Something that makes me... want to talk too much. Ah, it’s so frustrating. Talk about... Talk about what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Do you think my memories might come back then?”

  “Let us not place too many demands. We will worry about your memories later. For now, we play this game. Later, your memories.”

  And I told her the first thing that came to my mind. A story, about a boy and a girl, a brother and sister, who found themselves alone in the year of 1851, after their parents died in a house fire. I told her about the funeral of their parents and their bad luck, finding themselves in the house of a grim, strange man, Mister Ravencaw.

  And the lady Doctor said proudly, “Freud was wrong - just as I have always said - children can free-associate.” And she wrote copious notes in a notebook that she had.

  And I told her about a mind-reading wyvern flying away from a burning house with Mister Ravencaw in its claws, but now the two children were sad. They were in a small lighthouse or tower, with a man called Thew-stone, only he wasn’t a man, he was a gnome, or perhaps a duergar. And strange documents. Documents made by a man called Da Vinci, with pictures of griffins and elves and his mirror-written Italian writing.

  And the Doctor shook her head as she scribbled in her pad and said, “It is a variegated and finely articulated free-association. It reminds me of the angels and demons of Blake - surely the expression of this infant’s base instincts - it has even more detail than the life everyday. There is a tremendous structure to your phantasy. Ah! The delights of children!”

  Then I told her there had been griffins upon the houses of Parliament. And a trip in a dirigible, to Italy, and then to Germany upon the back of a griffin, and then a drunken griffin flying around a weathervane at a tavern.

  And an evil Elf, and another mind-reading wyvern.

  And the Doctor said, “Wait until I write this up - this will get Melinna’s goat up! Mein Gott, this is marvellous material.”

  I said, “Who is Melinna?”

  “My daughter. Pah - don’t talk about her. She is stuck in the infantile paranoid-schizoid position. She blames me for the death of Jan, her brother.”

  And at that I felt strangely flat
tered, and I told the Doctor about the other worlds. Worlds of strange mushrooms, splyders. Trogthen. More evil elves, this time carrying swords and wearing armour. Soldier elves.

  And then in my mind’s eye I saw the two children, sitting at table with their parents. Jonathan and Amelia. And I told her about them, their names, that they were human.

  And another child with them, only he wasn’t human.

  He was one of the Trogthen. A troll child.

  “A fascinating phantasy,” said the Doctor. “Completely original. If he was an author he would win the congratulations of the critics for this, if anyone ever took the time to read such a bizarre story, which of course they wouldn’t. A. Completely. Fascinating. Phantasy.”

  And in that moment my whole being rose up in rebellion against her, against her attitude, her arrogance, her pride, her obnoxious, insidious coldness.

  I realised in that moment that she was completely wrong about everything.

  I stood up and grabbed the desk and shouted at her.

  “This is no fantasy - it was real, I tell you! Real! Real! Real!”

  Her arm twitched beneath the desk.

  I heard a strange, distant buzzing sound and thought there was something wrong with my hearing - I had heard of tinnitus before - so I banged the side of my head with my hand, but the sound was still there.

  The Doctor whispered to herself, “He tries to dislodge the violent thoughts! Quickly, quickly, guards!”

  And I thought of Jonathan and Amelia again, and realised that I was losing concentration for some reason.

  I shouted even louder, perhaps to keep my mind from losing the point: “My story is real!”

  She shook her head with tight lips and peered out at me through suspicious, narrowed eyes, then her face suddenly became a terrible mask, and she smiled calmly at me and opened her eyes wider.

  An act - I knew it was an act.

  “Calm down. Calm down. Everything is alright. Do not worry - yes - your story is real. Indeed, pup - it is very real to you. It is your reality - I know this. It is the expression of your primary reality - your Weltenschauung. This phant - this reality - of yours.”

  She was lying, she was just telling me this to reassure me, to shut me up. It made me doubt myself again.

  “How do I know it was real? How do I know it wasn’t a dream? And if it was a dream, if it wasn’t real, then how do I know what is real? How can I trust any of my memories?”

  “It is your reality. That is what is important. You must find the reality of the will to life - Eros - deep inside yourself, and then you will know what is real.”

  I put my head in my hands and gave a strange, strangled cry, and at that moment the butler came in.

  “Thank God,” said the Doctor. “Thank goodness you are here. He was gesturing violently, and then expressing some sort of physical tic with his head, a meaningless twitch, banging his ear with his hand. It was terribly disturbing. This one has many problems, I tell you. Many problems - he will not get better until he learns to control his manic impulses.”

  The butler grabbed my arm and pricked it with another needle. I felt the world receding into a peculiar rotating haze, and then everything went blank.

  I don’t know how much later it was that I woke up in the room again, but it seemed as though it was only moments later. My right wrist had been tied to the bed with some sort of flexible material, rubber perhaps. A warm plate of food was sitting on the floor, and it was dark outside the window.

  The ceiling lamp was on.

  I looked at the plate. Upon it was a piece of chicken pie, some potatoes, and a small pile of peas.

  I could just reach the plate with my left hand. There was a spoon on it.

  I ate the meal hungrily, and it tasted amazingly good.

  Not long afterwards the door opened again and the Doctor came in. Her butler came in after her with a chair. She sat down by the bed and the butler retired.

  The Doctor pierced my will with her intense gaze, and I looked away.

  “Nothing is to be gained by struggling against this,” she said, and grabbed my arm. Her fingers felt bony and cold, like the hands of a skeleton, the hands of death, free from all emotion.

  She said in a low, threatening tone, “Tell me about the elves. This is the key, I believe.”

  And for some reason, a crowd of facts chose that moment to tumble into my mind, as though some sort of mental wall had fallen down on the other side of which they had been waiting to fall in.

  The elves come from another world, a world they had ruined. Long ago they chopped down all the trees and poured a sulphurous fume into the air, poisonous smoke, that had darkened the sun, and now they must live on fungii and lichen and insects and crawling things that grow in dark places.

  The only forest in that world exists in a country ruled by a strange despot, a god outcast from our world and theirs, who is known in our world as the Trickster. This forest alone in their world exists still, but the rest of their world is ruined, and they must live in it.

  They wanted this world - the world of Ing-Gland and London and Germanischia and Afrique- they desired this whole realm - so that they might have a beautiful place to live again, trees and plants and animals and oceans and birds and fish.

  This is why they were seeking a way to cross the branches of the World-Tree.

  That is why they were trying to come to this world.

  But the common people in that world did not desire this war.

  And now there a new ruler in the elf-world - an evil Necromancer - a wizard, who would make all the minds talk to one another, and he had swindled them all into following him.

  The Doctor leaned forward, so close to my face that I could smell tobacco on her breath.

  “You want to kill the elves - do you not? You feel aggressive towards them... A dark impulse stirs within you of hatred, aggression, and envy. But conflicting with this you have an instinct towards life - towards love.”

  For some reason I was beginning to get caught up in her strange rationalisations.

  “Yes,” I cried out, “That’s it! I can feel the two halves fighting inside me. It makes me feel ill.”

  The Doctor pursed her lips and tapped the index fingers of both hands together beneath her chin and said, “This instinct towards love is what brought you out of the other world, into the real world. This instinct towards life - towards the acceptance of the conflicting realities and the wholeness of life. All are a mixture of threat and support to your existence, your id. Your ego must come to this understanding. No one is wholly evil, no one is wholly good. No thing in this world is wholly evil, no thing is wholly good.”

  I cried out, “The gnomes and the elves. No one is completely evil - you’re right. There are good gnomes, good elves. And evil ones. Some are both good and evil. There are even good trolls - Trogthen... Although they do like to eat people. But that can’t be true, can it? Or can it?” I was grabbing her lapels - she shook me off as though I was a troublesome insect.

  Then she grabbed my arm with her skeletal hand and fixed me with her gaze and I could not help but believe every word she was saying. “Indeed - you are applying this wisdom to the projections of your phantasy. Now all that remains is for you to bring this wisdom - the knowledge of the ambivalence and ambiguity of life - out of the world only you experience and into the real world - I mean the world we all inhabit and experience. This world that we share - not the world that exists only in your phantasies.”

  The door opened and the butler came in. “Doctor - the policemen are here.”

  “Who?”

  “The policemen who brought him here. The two Constables.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They wish to speak to you.”

  “Tell them I am in the middle of an important consultation and cannot be disturbed. I am making great progress, and this is a tremendously interesting case! Indeed, this case is vital - this infant’s psyche pro
ves everything I have been positing in my writings! Tell them to make an appointment.”

  He went away.

  “Now tell me about these trolls - these Trogthen.”

  I was about to begin talking about them when the butler returned.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. The policemen won’t go away. They say it’s urgent.”

  “Damn.”

  She got up and left, but the door was left ajar.

  I heard them talking - I couldn’t hear everything - just a few words.

  “- no room in Bedlam -”

  “-orders from above, Miss-”

  “-what do you mean, Orders?-”

  “-Ten Downing Street- unique - some sort of reality-”

  “I will not allow this child to be taken unless I know the reason... I have a duty to treat him.”

  “It’s above our level, Miss. Most Secret. We aren’t allowed to know the reason. If you wish to know you must take it up with-”

  At this moment I noticed that the piece of rubber tied to my arm was somewhat loose - I pulled on it as hard as I could and it broke away! I leapt up and off the bed, tearing my bonds away, and ran as quickly as I could, out through the door and down through the corridor.

  The back door of the house was open! I leapt through it and fell down the stairs. The policemen were crying aloud through the house, “Oy! Hi! Oh! Stop there! Hi! Stop it! Get back here!”

  I ran to the wall of the backyard and began frantically trying to climb, but it was too smooth and high. I found a vine and pulled on it, and pulled myself upwards. It held! I hauled myself to the top and my chest and both of my arms were over it. I leaned upwards and pulled myself up, but then I felt a very strong grip on my ankle.

  I shook my ankle and kicked, and felt a crunch. I looked down - I had kicked the nasty Constable in the nose. Another hand gripped my ankle and the nice Constable’s voice said, “Not so fast, laddy.”

  He dragged me down from the wall, still kicking and struggling, and I found myself lying on the ground, being handcuffed.

  I am ashamed to say that I sobbed as they took me back into the house.

  “Please, please, don’t make me go back into the room. Don’t make me go back there.”

  The nasty Constable said, in a surprisingly kind tone of voice, “Don’t worry. You’re comin’ back to your cell.”

  “Thankyou, thankyou.” I wept again, with relief.

  I saw the look they gave each other.

  Soon enough I was back in the gaol cell, looking at the dark walls, wondering if this was any better, and knowing that it was.

  At the very moment when I had almost given up on any help, when my courage was at its lowest ebb, the gate to the second floor at the top of the stairs opened and the two policemen brought a man through. He stood in the shadows so that I could not see his face.

  “So is this your nephew, sir?”

  “Yes indeed. I am afraid Richard is slightly mentally deficient in his faculties - indeed, he suffers from a slight medical condition that affects his memory somewhat. It was a birth deformity of the brain, you see.”

  I was about to protest, but I suddenly realised that I did not know if anything he was saying was true. How would I know, if it was?

  Or perhaps the Doctor was right. Perhaps I was insane. Perhaps all of this was happening in my imagination.

  The man continued, “He is as fine as fiddlesticks most of the time, but when he has one of his turns he’s like a duck out of the nest; he gets up and forgets who he is and where he is and wanders away. I’ve given you the koinophone number of his doctor - if you doubt my word he will confirm it. Never mind about the late hour - Doctor Weiss is prepared to receive calls at any time of day or night if the boy goes missing. This isn’t the first time this has happened I’m afraid. He is quite a crafty little scamp, at that, a veritable imp.”

  The man stepped into the light.

  I gasped.

  It was the very fellow who had rescued me from being run over by the motorcars and given me breakfast the previous day! (Or was it the day before that? My sense of time was by now completely unsettled.)

  “You’re happy to go with your uncle, are you? He’s your guardian; nothin’ untoward?” asked the nice policeman. I knew very well that he was not my uncle, whatever else I might not remember, for he had said nothing of the fact the day before.

  “So it’s alright, you’ll go with him?” repeated the policeman, so gently that I regretted that I was about to lie to him.

  I said, “Yes, it’s fine. He’s my uncle.” What else could I say?

  Interloup Four - Finding Food.

  Wolf Lady.

  Finding food had been her worst problem.

  Alright, a Welfing can eat fish for a week or two - and that is alright for a time - but she had been eating fish for more than three months now. She was starting to smell like a fish. Or a lot of fish, really.

  For someone with a sense of smell like hers that was a grievous problem indeed.

  For her, the sense of smell was a positively symphonic experience. She could distinguish individually all twelve species of fish that she had been eating. She could smell cod on her breath, salmon oozing from her pores, haddock in her clothes, the smell of sardines on her paws, and the scent of mackeral on things that she touched with her left forepaw.

  At least twelve species in all.

  And not only that - she had been starting to feel ill. Whether it was merely the disgusting smell, or a real health problem she wasn’t sure - she knew Mercury contamination could be a problem with seafood in this terrible realm - whatever it was, she only knew that she had to have red meat, fruit and vegetables.

  She simply couldn’t continue on like this.

  Once or twice she had made foraying expeditions to the greengrocer and the butcher in the markets in the town, but the problem was that she didn’t have much money. Or any money, now. She had spent every last penny she had, from the gold she had brought from the Trogthen Realm - she had taken it to a pawnshop in a seedier part of the town, late at night.

  She didn’t want to steal - but a wolf had to eat, didn’t she?

  It was then that she began to wonder where the meat came from that the butcher was selling. It would be one thing to rob the butcher, who was right in the middle of town - to find a farm where the meat came from, or an abatoir - that would be better! Where there was so much meat, who would miss one lamb? One single sheep that showed signs of having been killed by a wolf?

  She had hidden in a dark alley watching the back of the butcher’s shop, waiting for the deliveries for three whole days. The boredom of it cannot be imagined by anyone who has not endured such a wait.

  The delivery truck eventually arrived. She marvelled - when the back of the truck opened, the hiss of pressurised air being released sounded followed by the release of a cold fog. The meat had been refrigerated. They might be savage, these humans, but they were smart with it, she had to admit that.

  She folded her clothes neatly and hid them down at the end of the alleyway then went four-legs after the truck; she could run much faster like that. After making another delivery the truck followed almost the same route that she had taken to reach the butcher - back to the docks - and bumped along to the place where the meat was loaded onto the truck.

  She watched from the shadows. The truck was backing up a roadway, but she couldn’t see what was at the end of it.

  She moved forwards a little, and it came into view. A wonderful thing.

  It seemed like a gift, really. The Alpha of Alphas really was watching over her, after all. She had almost doubted it - that was the effect of this strange world.

  A five-story high steam-ship stood there, and the whole thing was chock full of refrigerated meat.

  At last, now, there was a place where she could get some proper protein!

  The crew of the ship would surely eat from their own stocks - and they were stupid humans - they wouldn�
�t miss the small amount she would be taking, she was certain of that...

  Interloup Five - A Ride in a Taxi-Cab.

  The Amnesiac Young Man.

  And so it was that I found myself bumping along on the leather-covered rear seat of a horseless London taxi-cab in a moonless night, seated next to the man from whom I had fled the day before, without gleaning a glimpse of either his hidden motives or overt reasons for wanting me to come with him.

  My heart was beating harder the drums in a military pipe band and I felt nervous, but I forced myself to calm down. I had to think rationally.

  We were travelling alongside the dockyards and in no time at all we were crossing over the Tower Bridge. There were lights everywhere, just like the streetlights I had seen before. London now had many tall buildings.

  Soon we were heading along a narrow street with tall brick buildings in either side that I presumed were shops and taverns, although it was hard to tell in the dark.

  We passed a church.

  I looked up at the man.

  He was young looking, but his hair was greying at the temples. He had pleasant features and wore an expression that betokened good will - but I reflected on the fact that Mr. Ravencaw's features had resembled a skull and his habitual expression had indicated a character as evil and irredeemable as the lowest criminal, and yet he had actually been a very kind person - could someone with a pleasant, inviting face like this young man be the reverse?

  The man at the docks with the pleasant face had certainly proven untrustworthy.

  It wasn't worth taking any chances. At the moment I was in his power - but that situation must change, I said to myself.

  I steeled my resolve and conceived a plan.

  The cab at the moment was bouncing along at a fair pace through the narrow streets, so I could not imagine leaping out now. All my bones would be broken as I was flung into the front of a shop or the brick wall of a tavern like a bag of rotten tomatoes being chucked at the rubbish pile.

  Staring out through the front window of the cab over the shoulder of the driver I could see a very busy intersection in the road ahead with bright, unnatural lights, signals to tell the drivers to stop or go according to the colour of the light that was currently illuminated. The red light apparently carried the meaning, 'stop,' and the green light, 'go.' When the taxi-cab put on its brakes for these lights I would leap out and run away!

  The taxi-cab weaved in and out of the other carriages, and slowly the intersection approached.

  Illuminated by the streetlamps was a large, well-lit tavern looming over the traffic lights, its upper windows, lamp-like eyes looking down, like a brick giant obsessed with the strange behaviour of the busy ants below.

  What is strange, is the fact that when you are waiting for something, time seems to go slower.

  I was waiting for the opportunity to escape.

  The journey seemed exaggeratedly slow, and getting slower.

  Time was dragging his feet.

  I became aware of every bump and jiggle of the taxi-cab as though I had suddenly been struck with sympathy for the inanimate machine's tribulations as it carried us onwards stoically over the pitted roadway.

  I saw every solitary person walking through the darkness, with the life experience writ in shadows on the face, trial and tribulation or ease and insouciance, though surely it was a fraction of a second, a moment.

  I reflected that in the terrible wait for an opportunity to escape my subjective experience of time had been stretched, elongated, like a rope being pulled at both ends.

  Then suddenly my chance came. The taxi-cab pulled to a screeching halt as though an anchor had been thrown down and had pierced the very road-metal. Trying my best not to make my actions too obvious, I reached over to the door knob and turned it, but nothing happened.

  I tried it again; still with no effect. I gripped the doorknob with both hands and twisted it with all my might but the stubborn thing would not turn!

  I twisted my head and saw the man watching me with a single raised eyebrow.

  I said, "I was just testing the door mechanism... In case we need to get out quickly. After all, with these newfangled mechanisms, spewing out smoke from their steam engines, I expect that there is the danger of fire."

  His eyebrow left its moorings and lurched upwards of its own volition, and he said, "Indeed - though it happens far less often than you might suppose. And the engine is indeed a steam engine - it is what is known as a steam-motivated internal oxidation engine - an Austin 12/4 engine, I believe. Essentially this vehicle runs on a series of tiny boiler explosions - each one propelling the wheels forward a tiny amount - there are thousands of such explosions every second - as though a tiny rocket explodes forwards and pushes the driveshaft forward every subsequent moment. But the condensation and evaporation cycle is powered by diesel and not by the burning of wood."

  "Oh," I said, suddenly speechless. I hadn’t understood a single word he said.

  The traffic lights changed and we bumped off again, soon reaching a terrific pace. We were heading south.

  "But I strongly suspect your safety perturbations were centred around me rather than this vehicle. Look," he said, reaching over my shoulder and flicking a tiny lever on the door, "That is the lock. You will find that the door handle will work now, however I would not be leaping out at this speed if I were you. It may seem slow, but we are traveling at fifteen miles per hour at least, and you may find that you end up with more than a few ruptured bones if you leap out while we’re at this speed."

  "What if I jump out when we stop at the next of those red light signals?"

  "I will not attempt to stop you. But I will tell you this: an adventure awaits you, and if you leap out of the taxi you will never know, indeed, you will wonder for the rest of your life, what that adventure might have been."

  I thought to myself that Mr. Ravencaw would surely think less of someone who was not brave enough to stay, even if only out of curiosity to see what type of adventure this man might be talking about. And then I made the mistake of wondering how I was able to remember this Mr. Ravencaw when the rest of my memories had fled, and suddenly the entire recollection was gone. All my thoughts even remotely associated with that remembrance descended into gibberish worthy of the treatment the Doctor might have given me.

  If I was not mistaken we were in Southwark, and the tavern I had seen was the Elephant and Castles. The Bedlam asylum was north of that intersection. A sense of relief filled me. He was not taking me to Bedlam.

  I decided to trust the young man, at least for now.

  Within five minutes we were completely out of South London and still heading south, and the crowded buildings had turned to what I presumed were trees and open fields. The roads were clearer and the journey through the darkness continued unobstructed. The bumping of the taxi on the road seemed to lull me, great weariness covered me and despite my best efforts to remain conscious, I fell asleep.

  I woke up again with the flickering light of the car’s headlamps shining irritatingly. I forced myself awake.

  The taxi was slowing down. The headlamps were shining onto the back of a large wagon, being pulled extremely slowly by an even larger dray-horse. I looked at the door handle and thought about jumping out, but I didn't.

  Soon we were speeding along again so quickly that the light of the headlamps on trees at the side of the road became a blur.

  I said, "Where are we going?"

  "I was wondering when you would ask that. We are on our way to Bedlam, the hospital for the insane, believe it not or do believe, it’s up to you."

  The shock of this information silenced me completely.

  "What's wrong, lad?" the man asked me.

  I said, "Bedlam is in Southwark."

  "Oh, they moved it a few years ago to Monks Orchard near Eden Park. The one at St George's got rather full, you see - London is a large place these days. The number of insane seems to be a certain proportion of the populat
ion, so I suppose it's not surprising that they need a larger asylum when the population increases..."

  Interloup Six - Finding Fuel For the Steam Submarine.

  Wolf Lady.

  She wished Madgwint was still here - she hadn’t appreciated the ways that the griffin had made her life easier when he had still been around. He had gone hunting from time to time - well, Madgwint had called it hunting, but for all she knew he was simply stealing sheep from farms - but it had made things easier for her.

  She had solved the problem of food for now, by stealing the refrigerated meat - well she preferred to think of it as borrowing, albeit slightly permanently - but she also had other problems.

  One of those problems was fuel. The submarine used a lot of it - and not just for the engines, either - simply keeping the ventilation and the refrigerated storage systems going used an awful amount of fuel, and she had no choice - she had to keep those parts of the engine going.

  The fuel reserves really were getting dangerously low.

  Originally the submarine engine had been designed for wood fuel, for it was a steam engine, but she had had the boilers adapted for diesel, petrol, anything combustible at hand, really. But if she couldn’t find any fuel in the next few days, things would be looking very bleak.

  Oh, things were so bleak - if she could only get the Ætheric Detector she could go home - but even for that she would need fuel.

  She had to find fuel - well, really, let’s face it, she had to steal it. “Alpha of Alphas, you understand, don’t you? It’s not as if I could get a job in this world, is it?” She didn’t like stealing, but what could one do? It’s not as though she had any alternative.

  It was still wrong though.

  Still, they weren’t Welfing, so it wasn’t as though she was stealing from a person.

  She kept her eyes open for fuel every time she went out to get more food, and her efforts were finally rewarded on one dark, overcast night, early in the morning when the moon, a thin sliver in the heavens, peeped out once between the clouds on the horizon then seemed to have disappeared completely.

  She had been on the way along the dock to the refrigerated ship to get another carcass when she had noticed a refueling bowser for small boats. It was in a relatively quiet place - there seemed to be few humans nearby, at least, not at this time of night.

  It was ideal!

  The following night, in the darkness sometime after midnight when the crescent moon not yet risen, she navigated the steam submarine under the waters of the docks, between the other ships, and emerged in the water as close as she could get to the refueling station.

  She dragged the hose from the bowser over to her ship - and it reached, only just, but then there was another problem - the nozzle didn’t quite fit.

  The type of fuel didn’t matter for the steam submarine - she could use diesel, petroleum, any kind of oil, really - anything that would burn. But what a nuisance! This nozzle had a larger diameter than the hole on her hull. Clearly the bowser was an old one - it predated the current, rather recent, standards for fuel nozzles in this backward place.

  This stupid world - everything went wrong here all the time. These humans, they just weren’t logical. You would think, considering the current prevalence of diesel and petroleum as fuels that they would create and maintain nozzle standards right from the start - it would have made life easier for everyone - but they just hadn’t done it, had they? Typical! Typical of these stupid humans. Typical of this broken, bent world, where things just didn’t work, and everything went wrong, whenever and wherever it could.

  Incompetent, stupid humans.

  She got out her toolbox and removed the panel on the outside of the submarine where the fuel tank was. She disconnected the panel from the fuel tank, and found that the nozzle would just fit into the actual hole in the fuel tank where the fuel was supposed to go.

  Then she noticed there wasn’t even a button on the nozzle - it was necessary to pump from the bowser - and if she did that she couldn’t hold the nozzle! Auughhh! Stupid, stupid humans! She quickly found a clamp in the toolbox and clamped the nozzle onto the fuel tank. She went over and started pumping the tank.

  And that was the next problem. It really was very, very, very noisy. It made a huge clattering, clunking sound as it pumped, like a train rattling atop the train-tracks on a metal bridge; it was made doubly worse by the silence of the docks and the echoes caused by all the buildings with their hard brick walls, facing one another over an expanse of concrete and asphalt.

  She looked around nervously. This was taking much, much longer than she would like.

  The dark shadows around her would have disconcerted her too, had she not been a wolf, had she been a weak-eyed human. But she could see that there was no one there, not yet, no one had heard, yet.

  But did that help? Of course it didn’t. That was the way of things here. There were so many buildings, windows, so many places a human could watch her from, places that they could hide where she couldn’t see them watching her.

  But so far nothing had happened - nobody had jumped out of a doorway or shouted ‘stop, thief,’ or any of the other inanities she had had to endure from them when they had caught her thieving in the past.

  She felt furtive - hoped the Alpha of Alphas understood. He is forgiving.

  She finished putting the last few drops of diesel into the fuel tank, undid the clamp holding the nozzle, refit the fuel tank panel on the side of the submarine, and replaced the nozzle in the bowser.

  Suddenly she jumped, startled - she had heard a sound, coming from the shadows of one of the dockyard buildings, a low groan or moan. Leave it, don’t check it, you don’t want to get involved, she told herself, but curiosity got the better of her.

  She crept over to where the sound appeared to have come from, the shadow of a brick archway.

  A human was lying on the ground, injured.

  Leave him be, it’s none of your business! She turned around to go, but some inner sense of decency wouldn’t let her.

  She examined the victim. There was a lot of blood. His eyes were closed. She could get him into the submarine and treat his wounds, but beyond that...

  She lifted him and carried him over the dock to the submarine. She clawed her way down the Conning Tower, struggling to hold onto him. She was strong, stronger than any human man, but this fellow was very, very heavy.

  She managed to get him down to the corridor and laid him out on the floor. Quickly she went and got her medical kit, a bucket of warm water, a knife and a blanket. She rolled him onto the blanket and took the knife, cut away his clothes where the wounds were, and washed the wounds then bound them in bandages.

  They appeared to be knife wounds.

  Once she was certain she had done all she could, she went up to the radio room and tapped a message into the telegraph wires. “FOUND INJURED MAN AT CANNING DOCK NEAR CUSTOMS HOUSE - SEND HELP”

  The reply came soon. “SENDING AMBULANCE. WHO IS THIS?”

  She sent her reply, “THEY WILL FIND HIM IN THE THIRD ARCHWAY, BENEATH THE WINDOWS ON THE WESTERN SIDE.” Of course she would not say who it was sending the message - they didn’t need to know.

  She picked him up and clambered back up the Conning Tower ladder with the man slung over her shoulder. He still hadn’t opened his eyes, but he groaned again, and she climbed quicker. Puffing with the effort by now, she carried him over the jetty to the other dock and carefully laid him down on the blanket, underneath the third archway where she had told the authorities he would be.

  She sprinted back and quickly leapt back down into the bowels of the submarine, started the engine and navigated away and under the moored ships and the docks and back to the berth to which she had previously been moored, thinking to herself that she hoped she didn’t have to do that too often.

  After eating her dinner she went to bed early, exhausted.

  It had been such a tiring, stressful day.

  That nig
ht she dreamt that while she was treating the man’s wounds, he waked up and sat up, and looked Zelf in the eye. Suddenly he was stronger and younger, his wounds had disappeared, his beard had turned red as a fox’s pelt, and he bore a short-handled hammer in his right hand.

  He spoke, in trogthen, the language of Ultima Thule.

  “Iag bij trethehønd îl'f 'ülees Thorsdag - ïag bij hamrønd - góðurfafinðanþü. 'E dagurþü mz'e mir uiöleyr 'ümthne 'mne molth'kne ator gen.”

  “I am Thursday, servant of the Alpha of Alphas - you are found worthy. On the day you meet me on the second island, trust my word, believe my word on the strength of the Alpha of Alphas, and to the other realm you shall go.”

  Then she woke up.

  She wondered what the dream could possibly mean.

  Had it come from the Alpha of Alphas?

  Was it a prophetic dream?

  Interloup Seven - A Surprise in Bedlam Hospital.

  The Amnesiac Young Man.

  The taxi-cab entered the grounds of Bedlam hospital through a large wrought iron gate, which had already opened to let us through before we had reached the place. It closed behind us with a clank - I assumed that some sort of mechanism caused this.

  We were driven right up to the main doors.

  A gravely solemn brick and stone monstrosity loomed over us in the darkness, a building with too many chimneys and vacant windows peering outwards suspiciously, as though it saw the world as a hostile, savage place.

  "I don't want to go in there!" I said, wedging myself between the front seat and the dashboard so that he couldn’t drag me out of the car. “I’m not going in!”

  "Alright," he said, apparently not noticing my distress. "Understandable. It's not a nice place. You can stay in the taxi if you want."

  I was completely taken aback by this. It seemed as though I really was free to go if I wanted to.

  "But... but... but I thought you... Didn't you bring me here to have me put in there? Am I not insane?"

  His eyes widened with surprise and a chuckle escaped his lips - he laughed in the most friendly, comforting, innocent way possible and said, "Goodness grievous, no! We are here to pick up somebody, to get him released; one of the inmates, a good man, a man who oughtn't have been incarcerated in the first place - he has long been a friend of mine! We are here not to incarcerate anybody, but to free someone. Lord, no, where on earth did you get that idea? Goodness, no wonder you’ve been clinging to the seat like a monkey. We’re not here to put you into Bedlam. Goodness, grievous, no!" His laugh was so friendly that I laughed as well.

  "Really?" I could scarcely believe my ears.

  "Come," he said, "Make up your mind. Either stay here in the taxi while I go in and get him, or trust me and come in with me and we’ll get him together. We don't have much time. We have to jump the pistol. Even now our enemies may be on our scent trail and I don't want to give them even the slightest advantage over us." He opened his door and hopped out onto the gravel.

  I turned the door handle - it opened freely. Reasoning that I would rather not be confined to the cab of the taxi, all things being equal, I got out and followed him along the pathway and up the white stone stairs that led into the building. I followed him quite willingly, for at last I had a glimmer of hope - at least one person in this world had been kind to me now.

  Perhaps London really was my home.

  The taxi driver still had the engine running.

  The young man grabbed my arm as we went in. "Don't speak," he said. "Don't say anything. Stay with me."

  The first thing I saw on going in was a man with the hunted expression of a wild beast, and hair sprouting from his face and an ape-like knitted brow, being led into a room by three attendants.

  The young man led me up to the main desk, where a uniformed nurse sat in front of a large book next to several mechanical contraptions covered in buttons and levers whose purpose I could not fathom. He was still holding my arm in a strong, sinewy grip.

  He said to the nurse, "I am here to pick up Zev Solomon."

  She frowned and said, "You’re Mr. Evans? You will have to wait until morning, I’m afraid. None of the doctors are here right now. Doctor Haas will be in quite early - there are some patients who do not like to be out of their rooms after dawn, so he psychoanalyses them before that.”

  So we sat there in the waiting room for some time.

  A different nurse was on duty at the main desk when I waked up, and the young man was talking to her. The red glow of dawn was upon the sky outside

  “I did not know he was due for release today. I will have to check with Doctor Haas - he’s the doctor on duty this morning, until nine o’clock."

  A door slammed shut and I turned around. The attendants had withdrawn and were going back down the corridor. The nurse hurried over to the same door and knocked. It opened several moments later.

  A sharp, efficient male voice said, "Ja?" The German word for yes.

  "Zev Solomon - was he due for release today, Doctor?"

  In a German accent the Doctor replied, "Tomorrow. Why?" I couldn’t see the Doctor - he was hidden behind the door.

  The nurse said, "The man is here to pick him up now."

  "I haven't done the paperwork. Tell him to wait. I'll finish this one and then get into it."

  The nurse turned back to us.

  "Please take a seat over there. Doctor Haas will arrange everything forthwith."

  The nurse went back to her seat but she had accidentally left the door to the Doctor's office slightly ajar. Voices were wafting out - neither the young man beside me nor the nurse seemed to notice but I could hear them quite clearly.

  The efficient voice of the Doctor spoke first: "You fear the sound of singing - that is what you are to me telling. Cantophobia. An indication that a strong neurosis has a grip on your psyche. Your subconscious expresses your dread of the condemnation of polite, bourgeois society through this aberrant emotion."

  The man’s voice was deep and strangely thick, as though the sound had gotten tangled in his facial hair. "And children. I fear children. And I want to eat... People! I think about it all the time. I used to, you know."

  "Eat people? Really? Not in this world, did you? You are speaking about the other place. The phantasy. The world that doesn't exist."

  "You call it a phantasm. It doesn't exist here, that is what I said. But it is a real place. The Other Place. That is where I ate people." And he gave a sort of snicker that was quite chilling.

  The Doctor snorted as if he didn't believe a word of it. "You must try to remember your real past, your childhood. A memory that you have suppressed because it is too unacceptable for your conscious mind to face up to - that is what has caused this retreat of your consciousness into the phantasy."

  The young man beside me sniffed then said under his breath, "Not likely." I looked up at him. I had not imagined that he had been listening - he had hidden it very well.

  The Doctor’s voice continued, "Yonis, I must leave you for a moment to fill the paperwork for the release of another patient. Will you please excuse me?"

  The patient muttered in a fury, “Ïag eta ånfash ffatråth bfakihønd rovane!” Words in a different tongue, but I was surprised, and strangely pleased, for I realised that I understood this language - it was a sort of curse, a deprecation.

  He had said, “I have eaten people for less!”

  I knew what he had said!

  How on earth could this be?

  The door opened, and the Doctor turned back inside just as he was about to step out and rebuked the patient, saying, “Now, Yonis, I am very disappointed. This is a childish habit - the other languages making - only infants in the gobbledy-gook have such speaking. I had thought that you had put this habit behind you but I find it is just as bad as it always was. Disappointing.”

  But I had understood Yonis’ words. I knew what they meant. Was I therefore as insane as he was?

  The young man beside m
e said, “Trogthen.”

  I looked up at him - he was looking down at me with a queer, sour expression, almost one of distaste. I recognised the word from the same language but I did not know the English equivalent. It seemed so very familiar, though...

  The Doctor stepped out into the corridor and walked over to the nurse. He looked young, but his hair was greying slightly.

  “Here are the release documents, Doctor,” said the nurse.

  “Thankyou,” he said, and quickly scrawled his signature on the pages indicated, returned to his office and closed the door.

  The nurse pressed a button on the desk and a strange buzz sounded somewhere far away in the labyrinthine corridors. An orderly arrived in a minute and the nurse gave him the release documents. He scuttled down the corridor.

  The nurse said, “You may need to give him a little time to get dressed and get his things together.”

  It was not until half an hour later that the orderly returned, and another orderly with him, and, loping along the corridor between them, the patient: a solid, muscular man with dark hair, a rough-bearded, sunburnt looking complexion and bright, keen eyes, dressed in an old, ragged patched-up suit that seemed ill-suited for him, for I doubted that he could be past forty.

  On seeing Evans and I waiting at the desk the patient visibly straightened up and cast a hand through his hair, as though he had suddenly discovered that he cared about his own appearance.

  “Hello Zev,” said Evans. “It was a devil of a job finding you.”

  “Evans,” said the patient. “So you found me out here, did you?” It was more of a statement than a question.

  “I did. Like looking for a needle in a smokestack. Come along, the taxi is waiting, and I know they’ve been on my trail. We’re all in stuck the same dirigible, here.”

  I said, “Are we going in a dirigible?”

  Evans said, “It’s an expression, boy, a figure of speech.”

  We walked out through the entrance hall.

  Pointing to me, Zev said, “Who is this lad?”

  “He nearly got away scot expensive, if you’ll forgive the expression - about to leap in front of the traffic and get squashed to smithereens when I found him in the streets of London - can’t remember his own name or anything about himself. But... I think he knows Trogthen, and he was under the misapprehension that Queen Victoria was still in charge when I first found him.”

  Zev said, “Do you think he comes from...?”

  “Might be. Or he’s been there, anyway - got all the signs of it. Missing time, other languages... But let’s keep our thoughts about all that to ourselves, for the moment. Our enemies are off our trail for now, Zev, but they could be right behind us. We don’t even have time for meaningful chit-chat.”

  Zev sat in the front of the taxi beside the driver. The wheels immediately scraped up dirt and dust and we were flying along and out through the gates in no time.

  As we drove I reflected on the fact that I had understood the language that the man in the Doctor’s office had been speaking - Trogthen - whatever that meant. A foreign tongue of some sort - something that might reveal to me my own past. And it seemed that Evans and Zev knew more about it.

  What a coincidence - that I should have been saved by Evans from being run over - or had he been watching me before that? Had he already some inkling that I did not belong here in this London, in this time, this world? The thought was not a comforting one. But now at least I knew that I had to stay with them, for they were the ones who - perhaps - just perhaps - held the key to my own past.

  Evans looked out of the back of the taxi. “Someone is behounding us. George! I thought so, back on the main road. We’d better grab a detour.” I looked out. A black car was on the road behind us.

  Suddenly the window of the black car opened, and a hand bearing a revolver appeared.

  “Get down!” Evans cried.

  We all ducked, and I could see George, his head down, still trying to peer over the dashboard to drive. (Dashboard, being a word I didn’t know at the time, of course, but I have since familiarized myself with the names for the parts of a car, and it seems more economical at this point to use the actual word.)

  The gun shot three times but none of the bullets hit the car.

  Evans said, “Lose them, George.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” said George, twisting the steering-wheel. The taxi screeched around, and I was thrown across the seat into Mr. Evans’ side. He shoved me back. The taxi’s engine roared and in moments we were racing down the road, straight into the path of the black car that had been following us! The person in the black car fired three more shots at us. One of them hit the front window and it shattered, with splinters and shards of glass spraying through the car. I braced myself for a collision; I had no doubt that in a vehicle as fast and heavy as these modern monstrosities an accident would be even more distressing than a collision involving carriages and horses had been - and I had seen one once, in the past - it was not a pretty sight.

  But at the last moment the driver of the black vehicle flinched, it careened off the road into a grassy ditch and bounced into a tree. There was smoke billowing from the front of the car, but as we left it behind in the distance I could see the car reversing back ungainfully onto the road. It jounced around as they crossed the raised grassy edge of the asphalt, turned about and followed us with steam pouring out from the front of the engine, albeit somewhat hampered by the damage wrought when it hit the tree.

  Evans said, “They’re still bothering.”

  George said, “Stubborn so-and-so’s.” Of course, ‘so-and-so’ wasn’t the actual word that he used, but I do not believe the actual word to be permissible in polite company.

  After turning a few more corners I could see that we were approaching a small town.

  “Bromley,” said George.

  Just after we had crossed a small bridge George put on the brakes.

  There was a crowd of every age group, old people, children, men and women, watching a parade of some sort. They gathered around the car as we turned the corner into the town, parting for our entrance like the waters of the Red Sea for Moses then gathering about us again. We soon saw what they were watching - there was a group of about twelve men dressed in colourful costumes carrying deer antlers and dancing to and fro in two lines to music played by a small band of musicians, a Tuba, an accordian, a cornet and a fife.

  Our car was surrounded on every side by the townsfolk and the folk dance was being carried on right in front of us, so that we couldn’t move an inch. The dance took a fearfully long time and seemed to involve as many variations and steps as anyone might imagine. I heard someone saying, “They’re disturbin’ our rehearsal! Curse them!” and a few other choice words I won’t mention.

  Above the roofs and turrets of the town wall to the East we could see the inky black smoke from the other car’s broken engine ascending and getting closer with every verse of the jig or reel that the town musicians were playing. I began to sweat and I looked at George. His knuckles were white where he held the steering wheel, absolutely white, as though he was grasping on to the round, wooden thing for dear life.

  Evans and Solomon were both barely breathing - they seemed to be as fearful as I was - and I realised at that moment that adults are no different from children in this particular way - they have fears, they lack courage, sometimes, just like children.

  The thought was not comforting.

  Evans said, “If this damnable folk-dance takes any longer we shall be forced to leave the car and make a sprint for it on foot.”

  The dance continued and I watched the puffs of black smoke behind us from the other car as it came across the bridge and into town, which I knew it had, for the foul, putrid fume was now ascending in front of the turrets on the buildings at the edge of the town.

  Finally, even as the black car coughed and spluttered its way round the bend and became visible to us, the folkdance fi
nished. George fired up the engine of the taxi and the people in front of us scattered like chaff in the wind. We sped through the streets of the town, the onlookers shaking their fists at us and cursing us with profanities as we passed.

  The black car was still stuck in the crowd and could not move without running down a goodly number of the townsfolk, so we managed to get several streets away, enough that our pursuer was out of sight again. Evans said, “Hmmm. Life is a folk-dance.”

  In several minutes we were out of Bromley entirely and George said, “We’re lucky Bromley Road is quite a winding road - and there are many places here where we might get off it - they’ll never know which way we’ve gone. Once we’re a few miles along then they won’t have a chance of following us, even if they manage to get that engine of theirs working properly. I suppose we’re away from them sir.”

  “Nice work, George,” said Evans. “Quick and clean. I do hope you’ve still got that meter running. You’ve earned every shilling of it today.”

  Cold wind and rain was roaring into the car through the open place where the windshield had been and Evans saw me shivering. He reached beneath the seat in front of him and pulled out a blanket and gave it to me. I wondered how he knew that the taxi had a blanket in that place. And with that thought my eyelids began to close of their accord and a terrible exhaustion overcame me and I fell asleep once more.

  Interloup Eight - Refrigerated.

  Wolf Lady.

  “Look, I’m doing the numbers again, Harry. There’s something goin’ on here - every month or so there’s a carcass missing and I don’t know where it’s gone.”

  “It’s just your adding up, Bob. You mighta passed grade nine, but your brain never got past grade one, did it, ‘ey? What’s one plus one again?”

  “You’re bloody rude, aint ya, Harry? I’ll get you, I will. Just you wait. When you least expect it, I’ll whack you on the head with a spanner. Look - everything’s fine here. Let’s go round and check the other side.”

  That was where she was.

  She had one of the carcasses with her. She dragged it right down to the end of the refrigerator, behind all the other frozen carcasses and hid there quietly.

  The second one, Harry, spoke. His voice was a whisper: “Look, Bob. Maybe you’re right.”

  Bob replied with a laugh, “The bleedin door’s open. You left it open, didn’t you, Harry? To give me a rise, you bastard!”

  “I swear as I didn’t, on me muvver’s grave!”

  “Your bleedin’ muvver’s still alive, Harry.”

  “Well what do you want me to swear by? Me buttocks? They’re alive too, you know. Bob, I didn’t do it. Now look at that - you can see where they dragged the carcass. Didn’t even clean up after ‘emselves.”

  Bob’s voice went very quiet and grave. “They always cleaned up after ‘emselves every uvver time. I reckon our thief is still in there.”

  That’s when the realisation hit her that she might really be in trouble this time.

  It was her own fault.

  She had thought she was smarter than them - El knows, in every other way they were stupid. They were like trolls, the stupid humans - but as soon as there was gold or money involved they suddenly became smarter - checked things properly - did things systematically.

  How humiliating - to be outsmarted by a human. For it to happen to her of all people.

  “What should we do?” said Harry.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Bob, his voice taking on a bleak, funereal tone. “Shut the bloody door. Can’t open it from inside, can you?”

  She could hear their footsteps approaching.

  Bob continued, “Then we come back in a day or two. Nobody could survive in there for longer than a day, I reckon, even if he had warm weather gear. And I would wager the thieves don’t. If we leave it for a couple of days we’ll find a frozen thief and that’ll be the end of it. Call the police then. Oh, sorry officer, we found em like that - must have accidentally shut the door on themselves while they was filching stuff from the fridge - oh what a shame. Stop, Harry! Don’t touch it without yer gloves on, yer bloody fool! Don’t want your fingerprints bein’ the last ones on there, do we? Do it like this.”

  The door began creaking.

  She panicked.

  She dropped the carcass and leapt into action, threw off her coat and sprinted across the floor, but she was at least thirty feet from the entrance.

  She was running full pelt, four-footed, wolf-speed, and every single step seemed too slow, everything was happening so very slowly, time had been stretched out, as though she was trying to wade through a pile of snowy slush, and she could hear the crunch of every footstep on the icy floor of the refrigerator, the whoosh of icy condensate left behind as she thrust herself forwards.

  As she approached she could see the door was still open a tiny crack, enough to get through. She redoubled her efforts, pushing herself to the limit of her strength. She could see it - it was still open enough that she could force it further, she knew it, even as she leaped across the last few feet.

  But in that very last moment, even as the fur on her front right-hand paw brushed the huge metal door it shut with a loud clang and she slid the last inch and careened into it, making an extremely loud bump, shaking the door so much that it almost seemed about to rattle off its hinges.

  She picked herself up and shook the ice off. No broken bones, but she would be surprised if she didn’t have a few bruises tomorrow.

  If there was a tomorrow.

  She tried shoving and pushing and sliding the door, but it was shut fast. There was no handle. There was no way to open it from this side.

  They had trapped her.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had been so stupid. How could she have let them outsmart her? She knelt down.

  Alpha of Alphas, help me. Ellulianæ aiohiCwa.

  A stream of muffled profanities sounded from the other side of the huge door, then one of the two saying, “What the ---- was that? Must be a bleedin’ big guy. Sounded like a bloody ox hit the door.”

  “Just leave it. We’ll tidy it all up afterwards if we ‘ave to. Just leave it.”

  And then nothing.

  Interloup Nine - In the Steam Submarine

  The Amnesiac Young Man.

  I remember stopping and having some lunch somewhere with a cup of tea, and that reviving me somewhat for a short while. After that I knew that we were heading north, but every part of that journey is a blur. I suppose I spent most of it sleeping, I suppose. Perhaps I felt safe, there, with Evans and George and Solomon, for the worst fears of the day before, that Evans might put me into Bedlam Asylum, had been unfounded.

  Suddenly I woke up to hear Evans saying, “I really haven’t a clue.” We were in South London now, parked by the side of the road.

  I looked up. The windshield of the car had been repaired, and I realised that it must have been done while I was asleep, or perhaps I had gotten out of the car but hadn’t remembered it. I wasn’t sure.

  “Look, I just have to forget about this puzzle for a little while. I can’t get it, so I have to leave it. Come on, boy, lets get you some new clothes.” Evans opened the door for me, and we went shopping. The first thing he bought me was a large suitcase, and as we looked at clothes, he explained all the new inventions of the twentieth century - cars, radios, dirigibles, and the like.

  I told him I knew about dirigibles, but then when he asked me how, I couldn’t remember.

  When we returned to the car it was overcast and drizzling again.

  London weather.

  Zev and George were still in the car waiting for us to return.

  Moments after Evans had seated himself in the car he already had the same newspaper page in front of him that he had been puzzling over on the day that I had met him - the only difference was that I could see that he had solved the crossword now.

  “Oh, wait a millisecond,” he said, “Eaglets is in there twice.
I hadn’t noticed that before...”