Merciless Reason

by Oisin McGann

  That was enough for the American. He picked himself up, grabbed his hat off the ground where it had fallen, and limped on his injured knee to the end of the alley. He disappeared from sight round the corner, and then Dempsey and another man helped Nate to his feet. Nate had his eyes closed and was taking deep breaths, his mind entirely focused on subduing the will of the serpentine engimal coiled within his gut. Slowly, ever so slowly, it settled down and Nate felt his head begin to clear.

  “Come on, you,” Dempsey muttered. “We’ve a train to catch.”

  XVIII

  TO IMPOSE ONE’S WILL

  DAISY SAT ON A STOOL in Gerald’s old laboratory, holding her breath as he unwound the bandage that held the dressing in place on her injured fingers. She let out a tiny gasp as she saw them again. The engimal wire had cut in a clean diagonal line across her index and middle fingers, slicing through the flesh to the tip of the bone. The wounds had already started to bleed again as the dressing came off.

  “Have you any sensation in the fingers?” Gerald asked.

  “Pain,” she replied shortly. “And it’s getting steadily worse.”

  “That’s better than nothing at all, believe me,” he said. “You won’t be playing the piano again for a while, but I think I can clean the wounds up a bit. Beyond that, you have a choice.”

  He gazed at her with a disturbing intensity, as if weighing her up. But his manner was gentle and he handled her injury with a professional tenderness.

  “You have been living among us long enough to know we have extraordinary powers of healing. You have no doubt about this, do you?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because with the tips of your fingers in this state,” he said, “I can do one of two things. I can trim back the ends of the bones and sew flaps of skin across the tops of the fingers. The wounds will seal up, but you will be left disfigured. Your fingers will never look normal or work properly again. And there will still be a risk of infection, and the subsequent need for amputation, if the wounds do not heal properly.”

  “I see. And the alternative?”

  “I can inject you with some of my blood,” Gerald told her. “I leave the wounds open, dress them, and let the intelligent particles in the blood do their work. You would have a chance of regaining the full use of your hand, and possibly even regrowing the ends of your fingers You know enough about us—about me—to know that this is no idle boast.”

  Daisy looked away. She believed that these intelligent particles in the Wildenstern blood could do everything Gerald claimed. She had seen the evidence. The question was whether his strange science would work on her body, and if so, what other effects it might have. A memory of a man falling to his death from the roof of Wildenstern Hall flashed into her mind—a man who had walked up there because he had listened to a lullaby.

  Gerald gestured to her to hold the hand up above her heart to slow the bleeding. The pain in her fingers felt like a mixture of sharpness and pressure, as if someone was crushing the missing ends in a vice with needles in its jaws, and she could still feel it at the end of her fingers. The fingers were stiff and useless and ugly. Something caught in her throat as she said:

  “Do it. Give me your blood.”

  It was done with little ceremony. Gerald took a clean syringe, found a vein in his arm, inserted the needle and drew out enough to fill half of the syringe. He drew the needle out. Once it was removed, his arm did not bleed any further. He changed the needle on the syringe.

  “I’ve heard that people have different kinds of blood, and that they cannot be mixed,” she said in a faltering voice. “That to give someone the wrong blood can be fatal.”

  “There is truth to that,” he said. “But this is not normal blood. You will remember how I used some from Elizabeth’s brother to save Clancy’s life years ago. He was at death’s door with a crossbow bolt through his chest, and he made a full recovery. The trick is in the mind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gerald rolled up her sleeve a little to keep it out of his way, then found a vein on the back of her injured hand and rubbed it with some alcohol. He inserted the needle and slowly pressed the plunger on the syringe, injecting the contents into her bloodstream.

  “For centuries, the Wildensterns have believed in their innate healing ability. They often associated it with gold, for they found that if they applied gold to an injury, it healed faster. You know how this family loves its gold. The same was true, to a lesser extent, with other precious metals. You will no doubt have noticed how much gold Gideon and his wife and sons wear. They think it lengthens their lives and gives them better health—and then they eat like pigs and indulge like fools in all manner of damaging habits.

  “I discovered some time ago that the healing effects of gold are nothing but an ignorant superstition.” Gerald did up the dressing on her fingers and tied it off with just the right degree of tightness. “What matters is the intelligent particles and the link we create between them and our conscious minds. They respond to our intentions—our thoughts. To a point, they obey orders. The particles can float there, thinly scattered through our systems, asleep for all intents and purposes. They have to be willed into action. The gold worked because the Wildensterns of the past—and others with aurea sanitas—believed it would work. They, in essence, commanded their bodies to heal, even though they didn’t know how it worked. Their belief in the gold was a crude, but effective link.

  “Now you must do the same. You now have aurea sanitas in your blood. This is not a superstition, or some kind of witchcraft, or even some hereditary gift. You do not need gold or any other mystical material. You have intelligent particles in your body—you must focus your will on healing your fingers, and they will heal. Do you understand now?”

  Daisy hesitated, and then nodded. Gerald took her uninjured hand and squeezed it. She felt great strength in his grip, but he did not use it. His gaze had the hypnotic grip of a snake’s; the pupils of his eyes looked huge.

  “You have to believe what I’m telling you, Daisy,” he insisted. “There must be no doubt in your mind. Whatever your opinions of me, you know I am in earnest about how science will change all of our lives. If there is anything that gives my life meaning, it is that. You have to believe that you can impose your will on these particles and command them to heal your body.”

  “I believe,” she said. “I do, I believe what you tell me, Gerald. I may despise you to the core and think you are on a path that could lead to your own death and the deaths of all those around you, but I believe you know more about these things than anyone else alive.” She clasped her bandaged fingers tenderly in her undamaged hand. “It’s the small matter of what, in your merciless reasoning—or your raving insanity, whichever prevails—you will ultimately do with that knowledge that chills my blood.”

  “Try to enjoy that sweet mystery, as I enjoy the challenge of keeping you in the dark,” Gerald said with a smile as he checked her dressing one more time. “The answer eludes you for now but, given time, I’ll sure you’ll put your finger on it.”

  The only way Cathal had to judge time during the day was by the shift changes of the guards, and by the meal times. Otherwise, there was just the work. The other children were all much younger than him, the oldest aged around thirteen. They had all been here for some time, though nobody was quite sure how long—weeks, certainly, probably months. Time became blurred here in the noise of the machines, the grey haze of dust from the massively heavy rollers, the smell of torn, ground metal and crushed ceramic. The children’s senses had become dulled, as had their minds. It was what happened, Cathal guessed, when you worked in a slaughterhouse. The mind closed down to protect itself.

  But it wasn’t cattle or pigs that were being killed and dismembered here; instead, the carcasses of engimals passed across Cathal’s workbench. The smaller ones were handed to Cath
al by the boy beside him. The larger ones were lifted from one bench to the next by a crane that could reach almost across the ballroom-sized cavern. There were thirty children, some working in teams of three or four, others sat or standing alone at a bench. Each bench was assigned a role—a part to be removed from each engimal carcass. Cathal had been tasked with removing the creatures’ brains.

  The children did not do the slaughtering. There was a team of three men who took care of that, working in a smaller chamber off to one side of the cavern. Killing an engimal without causing it enormous damage was not all that easy. They came in so many shapes and sizes that there was no single clean method that worked for all of them. Some could be dispatched with a hammer, others could be shot, but some had to be beheaded or worse. Every now and then, a creature was brought forth which had the executioners standing around looking at it and scratching their heads.

  Gerald’s orders were explicit. Each engimal had to be killed with as little damage as possible. Then the engimal’s body was passed across the benches, dismantled piece by piece. The parts would be separated and categorized, and Gerald would examine each bit to see what could be used and what could be discarded. Every now and then, there would be some engimal that he insisted on dissecting while it was still alive, but he did these on his own. There were others that he kept alive while he took them apart and rebuilt them for his own purposes.

  Some of the engimal parts could be reshaped to perform new functions, and this was done in the furnace, or using one of the steam presses. Anything that could not be used was emptied into the grinder, with its three sets of massive iron rollers. Anything that went in one end of the grinder came out as powder or liquid at the other end. A near-constant cloud of dust rose out of its workings. This was the noisiest, most overwhelming part of this macabre factory.

  Cathal was still new enough to the Engimal Works to feel thoroughly sick every time he thought about what they were doing. He supposed that this was how meat ended up on his dinner table every night, rendered from the corpses of animals; but distasteful as this was, he could accept that human beings would always eat meat, and it had to be got somehow. Farm animals lived a protected life and bore their young before being slaughtered. He could not accept what was being done to these engimals.

  Engimals did not breed. There was a finite number of them, and that number was dwindling over time. Cathal did not believe, as some did, that each one was a unique and immortal creation of God. Charles Darwin’s (and Gerald’s) theory was the creatures had been created thousands of years ago, by some unknown civilization. There were no new engimals being born, or being made. Each one that died meant a permanent loss to the world. This was why they were so valuable.

  Each engimal was a beautiful, strange, unique mystery—and Gerald was slaughtering them on an industrial scale. Cathal could only guess at what kind of money it must be costing. According to some of the older children, thousands of engimals had passed through the works. Cathal had heard once that there were estimated to be just a few million on the entire planet, and most of those were in captivity. How many did Gerald intend to destroy?

  One of these creatures had saved Cathal’s life, years ago. An old woman had come to him when he was dying of tuberculosis and laid a serpentine on his chest. The snakelike engimal had injected something into him … and then sang to him. Cathal had not merely recovered; he had become healthier than before—stronger, more agile. Gerald later told him that it had injected a high concentration of the intelligent particles into his bloodstream and the song had been some form of instruction to them. Nathaniel had taken the creature before he left, but Cathal suspected that Gerald had a piece of the thing hidden somewhere. Gerald was convinced that something about that serpentine could unlock untold secrets, if only someone could find a way to communicate with it.

  Cathal stared at the self-propelling wheelbarrow that sat on his workbench. It was hard to tell where the brain was in some of these creatures. The wheelbarrow was roughly cube-shaped, but with rounded corners. Unlike ordinary wheelbarrows, it had a lid and four wheels. The two large wheels on the front and the smaller wheels that steered at the back had already been removed. The eyes were on the corners at the front, just under the slightly domed lid, but as Cathal had learned, the brain was not always to be found near the eyes—unlike most of Mother Nature’s creations. He had decided to obey Gerald’s commands for now—at least for as long as it took him to figure this place out and how to escape from it, and hopefully bring all these poor urchins with him.

  He jammed a chisel into a seam between the edge of the barrow and the front and hammered it in, trying to prise out the front panel and see what was behind it. Whoever had built these things, they had built them well. They were devilishly difficult to take apart.

  Probably because they’re not meant to be, Cathal thought miserably.

  “Sometimes dere’s a wire coming out of deh back of dee eye,” a boy’s voice said. “If yeh take out dee eye and follow deh wire, it can lead yeh to deh brain.”

  The boy’s name was Pip, or at least that was what everyone called him, and he was standing at the bench beside Cathal. Pip was responsible for removing the eyes from the bodies. He was a worn-out, thin-looking boy with pale skin and shadows under his own large blue eyes. He had a nervous, twitchy energy and a smile that kept coming and going, as if there was a happy thought in his head, but he only got a view of it from time to time.

  “Thanks,” Cathal replied. “Here, Pip; you were workin’ on the brains when I got here, weren’t you?”

  “Yes sir, Mister Dempsey. Mister Gordon says I’ve got a bit of a knack. But since you got here, tings’ve been chang-in’, I hears you’re a sort of a doctor like him, so’s there’s no point me doin’ brains while you’re here.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Cathal said, rubbing his hand through his ginger hair and over his tired face. “And you don’t have to call me Mister Dempsey. I’m not a whole lot older than you. How old are you?”

  “Dunno.” Pip shrugged. “Eleven? Twelve, maybe? I was only in dee orphanage a few years before Mister Gordon moved us here. And dey didn’t know what age I was when I got dere. Now we’re here, and we don’t even know when it’s day or night. We could be here years for all we know.”

  “Pip, has anyone tried to get out o’ here?” Cathal asked, lowering his voice.

  “’Course, Mister Dempsey,” Pip replied, turning his eyes away, suddenly intent on his own work again. “First ting a bunch of us did when we got here and saw what we was to do. Queg and me an’ a few others made a break for it, but dere was no gettin’ past Moby.”

  Cathal had heard this name mentioned before, but still didn’t know who Moby was.

  “Who’s Moby? One of the guards?”

  “No.” Pip shook his head, surprised at Cathal’s ignorance. “Moby’s deh door to deh mine.”

  “The door has a name?”

  “Dat’s wha’ Red and Mister Gordon call it. It’s not your normal hang-on-a-frame door. Didn’t you not see it comin’ in?”

  “No, I was unconscious.”

  “Well, it’s like, I dunno … like a big mout’ fillin’ up deh tunnel and dere’s dese pipes or snakey tings attached to it, but we don’t know what dey do. Queg says he reckons it’s a bit from some huge sea engimal. Like deh jaws of it or sometin’ like dat. Anyway, we couldn’t get tru when we made a break for it, and Queg caught the sharp end. Red said ’e was goin’ to make an example of ’im and broke Queg’s arm over his knee, jus’ like dat. Mister Gordon wasn’t happy about dat—it meant Queg couldn’t work so good.”

  Cathal looked over at Red, who stood watching the children on the far side of the room. Apart from the slaughterers, there were never less than six armed guards in the cavern at any time. Red supervised them and he didn’t take chances. Nor did he tolerate any slacking off. Any child caught working too slowly was threatened or punished with
a beating. The orphans lived in a constant state of fear. Time and again, Cathal had wondered why Gerald was using children for this work.

  Pip had spotted one of the guards looking over at them, and concentrated on his work again. The dream-catcher on his bench was a battered specimen. Shaped like a large dark metallic blue spider, it was missing three of its foot-long legs. Several of its dead clustered eyes were milky yellow and blind, instead of the usual turquoise. Cathal recognized it as one of the creatures that had come from the Wildensterns’ zoological gardens. These things could put humans into a trance-like state; they triggered visions in the person’s mind and somehow fed on the brain activity that these visions caused. It was normally a pleasurable sensation for the dreamer, and people had been known to become addicted to them. But Cathal remembered that this one had been damaged, and could only induce nightmares.

  Cathal wondered if it could ever have contrived the nightmarish scene around him. Pip grunted as he pulled out a cluster of the dream-catcher’s eyes, cut the cord attached to the back of them with a pair of pliers, and set them aside. Cathal looked at the expressions of the other children around him. They were numbed, insensitive. The fear of the guards and the brutality of the work had deadened their emotions.

  “Pip,” Cathal called over in a low voice. “How do Gerald and Red get Moby to open up?”

  Pip glanced anxiously up at the nearest guard, to see if they were being observed. With the noise of the machines, there was no real danger of being heard.

  “Red’s got a ting like a whistle—only it doesn’t make any noise when he blows it. Makes no sense, but dat’s what they use to get out. I don’t tink Gerald needs it to pass through, but for deh rest of us, dere’s no gettin’ past Moby widout dat whistle.”

  Red was speaking to one of the guards; he pointed over at Cathal. Pip pressed his lips tightly together and stared hard at his work. The guard, a heavy-set brute with a head of stubble and a knobbly face, made his way over to Cathal, and then past him to Pip.