Pax Britannia: Unnatural History

by Jonathan Green

  So it was that Ulysses and his trusty manservant now found themselves on a dilapidated street in Southwark, the Overground line that ran above its length holding it in almost perpetual shadow.

  Both of the men were attired in dark, practical clothes, a world away from the sort of flamboyant attire Ulysses usually favoured. With their black roll-neck jumpers, and woollen hats - Ulysses lacking his trademark bloodstone cane - the two of them looked like a pair of cat burglars.

  "Not much to look at is it, Nimrod?" Ulysses said.

  "No, sir."

  "Are we sure this is the right place?" Ulysses had managed to wheedle Professor Galapagos' address from a rather staid secretary at the Museum who at first had been wholly unhelpful, until Ulysses had confronted her with his irresistible charm.

  "Quite sure, sir."

  "Then we had better get on with it, hadn't we?"

  "If I might be so bold sir?"

  "Why of course, Nimrod. Be as bold as you like."

  "Why didn't Miss Galapagos mention this place, sir?"

  "I don't know, Nimrod. I don't know."

  "How do you suggest we gain access, sir?"

  "I thought I would leave you to solve that problem, Nimrod," Ulysses said, flashing his flunkey a devilish grin, "what with it being your area of expertise and all."

  "Then follow me, sir," Nimrod said, his plummy accent never slipping for a second.

  There did not seem to be anyone about at this time of the morning to see what they were about as the two of them strolled nonchalantly across the road, passed the front of the house without showing anything other than a passing awareness of it, and then ducked sharply down the narrow alley next to it.

  It was dark and cold in the alleyway, the narrow space between the terraces being out of reach of the sun for all but about fifteen minutes a day. The only ones to observe their dubious actions, as Nimrod forced open a grimy window, was a pair of rats that were more interested in devouring the distinctly inedible-looking detritus of the alley. With no little amount of grunting and groaning, the two of them eventually managed to scramble through the window and into the near total darkness of the house.

  Inside, Professor Galapagos' home festered under a pall of perpetual gloom. Every shutter and blind or curtain in the place must have been closed. What was it that Galapagos had been wanting to hide? What atrocities had been committed here in the name of evolutionary biology and scientific advancement?

  The only sound was the slow, dull ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall.

  Ulysses' skin crawled. The house felt empty, hollow - dead. What had gone on here? It was certainly not the sort of place he would have expected the delicate Genevieve to have had anything to do with. But then she had confessed that she had not seen her father for some time. Ulysses wondered how long 'some time' really meant.

  "I don't mind telling you, Nimrod old chap," Ulysses hissed in barely more than a whisper, "that this place gives me the willies."

  "I know what you mean sir," Nimrod replied, smacking the hooked end of a crowbar into the palm of his glove. "Where now?"

  "I'll check this floor. You check upstairs," Ulysses instructed, and the two of them went their separate ways. Creeping like cats they tried not to make a sound as they moved over the creaking floorboards.

  Ulysses found a drawing room darkened by heavy velvet drapes. It looked like any other drawing room, with a potted aspidistra on a plant stand and portraits of the professor's family above the fireplace. All of the pictures seemed to be of the older branches of the Galapagos family tree. The room had the air of a chamber that was never used, except on the most rare and formal of occasions.

  Next he came across a dining room, similarly formal in its layout and similarly infrequently used. Everything was in order, if a somewhat clinical, dispassionate order. The only thing that gave the rooms any reflection of their owner's character were sinister stuffed birds and animals, masterpieces of the taxidermist's art. Hawks glared down from the tops of bookcases - which in turn contained the usual classics, most showing no signs of having been read at all - foxes snarled from beneath occasional tables and an owl, with wings outstretched menacingly, looked as if it might launch itself from the top of the grandfather clock at any moment.

  When was the last time anyone had even been here? The house felt like it had been unlived in for some time, possibly even before the Professor's disappearance. When was the last time Genevieve had visited her father?

  In the kitchen Ulysses found a mess of unwashed plates and mouldering food. The room was thick with flies. They congregated in a black mass against the grimy panes of a window that looked out over a featureless back yard. Although this room was clearly the most lived in, no one had been here for a while either.

  Ulysses and his manservant met again in the hall at the foot of the stairs. "Anything?" Ulysses asked.

  "Nothing of note, sir, apart from one attic room that appears to have been used for the practice of taxidermy. The rest are just bedrooms. Most have dated décor and have probably not been used in years. The master bedroom shows no sign of having been used recently."

  "As I suspected," Ulysses confided.

  "So where do we go from here, sir?"

  Ulysses nodded towards the door to the basement. "The only way we can go, down."

  Ulysses led the way, cautiously. Neither of them had any idea what they might find in the stygian depths below.

  What they found was what had evidently been Galapagos' workroom. Ulysses boldly flicked a switch and electric lamps around the walls crackled into life, casting jaundiced pools of light around the room. A little natural light crept uncomfortably into the long room from grime-obscured windows positioned at pavement level, adding its own insipid grey haze to the room.

  There was a sharp intake of breath from Ulysses. "This could be the missing piece of the puzzle."

  The basement ran the length of the house and had been divided into clearly defined sections. First there was the professor's workspace. This part of the room had been fitted in the style of a gentleman's study. There was a desk, bulging bookshelves and a small grate, set into one wall. Walnut-framed lithograph studies of animals had been tacked up, along with an authentic nineteenth century map of the Galapagos Islands and a watercolour of Darwin's exploratory vessel The Beagle. A pair of stuffed finches, frozen in the moment of taking wing from a branch, sat on the narrow mantelpiece above the cast iron hearth.

  Curiously, the desk and tables were clear of papers. It looked like someone had gone to some deal of trouble to clear up thoroughly before leaving. As he looked with more care Ulysses also saw that there were gaps, distinct gaps, within the bookshelves. He moved to the grate. The charred, fire-eaten remains of leather-bound notebooks and other papers lay in the cold hearth. He picked a few scraps of blackened paper out of the fireplace but was unable to read anything more than the odd word. Disparate snatches of scientific jargon, written in a well-formed copperplate, that made little or no sense to him anyway and were certainly nothing more than nonsense, their context destroyed by the illiterate flames.

  "He was here," Ulysses thought out loud.

  "I'm sorry, sir. By 'he' do you mean Professor Galapagos?"

  "Indeed I do, Nimrod. These notes, they've been burnt. And there are no signs of anyone having been here before us. I think Galapagos burnt his notes himself and then left here to return to the museum."

  "You think he was trying to wipe out any traces of his work?"

  "Do I think he was trying to reverse what he had done? Yes, I do."

  "But what has been done cannot be undone, sir."

  "Yes, I know. However, it would appear that Professor Galapagos chose to ignore that particular metaphysical fact, in a moment of irrational desperation no doubt. And inventions cannot be uninvented, discoveries cannot be undiscovered again. And now it would appear that he fell foul of whatever he had been developing himself."

  Ulysses had moved into the next part of the room. A
series of scrubbed oak tables were covered with pieces of glass and brass apparatus - including crucibles, condensers and various Bunsen burners connected to the house gas supply - which formed a complex chemical still. A little liquid remained in some of the blown glass vessels and a furry grey coating of dust covered everything. Again, this equipment hadn't been touched for some time. Cruelly large syringes lay on the table, as well as neatly arranged scalpels and other operating tools.

  Ulysses sniffed. There was the faintest trace of a lingering odour amidst the acrid aftertaste of burning that had been trapped in the airless basement. It spoke to his subconscious. It was said that the human sense of smell was the strongest trigger for memory, but Ulysses couldn't quite recollect where or when he had last come across the bittersweet aroma.

  "And what have we here?"

  Beyond the Heath Robinson laboratory were several rows of shelving racks. Filling the shelves, held suspended in glass jars of various shapes and sizes, was Professor Galapagos's private collection of biological specimens.

  There were the usual subjects anyone might have expected to find in the lab of an obsessively driven evolutionary biologist such as deep sea angler fish, octopi, an aborted elephant foetus, a calf's head. But then there were other things as well, less identifiable things, all preserved in the same urine-coloured formaldehyde.

  They were amorphous with barely recognisable protrusions of pallid malformed anatomy here and there; a vestigial limb, a lidless staring eye, half a dozen teeth where there was no mouth, flippers, fish-like tails. Whichever way Ulysses looked at it they were grotesque abominations that were an affront to God and Nature, half-evolved, or perhaps de-evolved, foetal things that should never have been brought into existence and that could never have naturally been given life. All were dead, floating in their preserving jars like the corpses of fish in a polluted river. Some looked like they had been partially dissected and then returned to their containers. What had the eminent professor been up to in this house of the macabre?

  Beyond the shelves of abominations, at the other end of the basement room was a heavy iron door, set into a sturdy frame in the bare stone of the unlimed wall. There was a key in the lock.

  "Shall we go on, sir?" Nimrod asked.

  "Well we've come this far, haven't we," Ulysses said, smiling grimly. "And after this morbid museum I have to confess that I am curious as to what could possibly lie beyond an iron door in an evolutionary biologist's house."

  "Very good, sir. Shall I do the honours?"

  "Why, thank you, Nimrod."

  "Not at all, sir." The manservant turned the key and held the door open so that Ulysses could pass through.

  A flight of stone steps had been cut into the foundations of the Southwark house descending to a narrow sub-basement corridor. Light filtered through another pavement-level slit, enough for Ulysses to see where he was going. The walls ran with moisture and there were patches of moss growing between the joins. There was a strong earthy smell, mixed with the tang of ammonia and damp straw.

  The corridor ran off from the foot of the slime-slick steps and soon led to a T-junction. To the left was another iron door. To the right the stygian passageway opened out into a larger subterranean chamber.

  "Flashlights on, I think," Ulysses said, taking out his own torch.

  The door to the left had been locked from the outside and the key left in the lock. Ulysses turned the key and opened the door. Only then did his uncanny sixth sense alert him to danger. Instinctively he leapt backwards, away from the open door, the stink of ordure assaulting his senses in a potent wave, whilst the spot-beam of his torch pierced the lightless cell beyond.

  "Careful now, old chap," Ulysses warned. "We're not alone."

  There was a shuffling movement, the sound of straw rustling underfoot as something moved out of the way of the light. Nimrod and Ulysses both stood before the cell, flashlights penetrating the darkness. There was a whimper from inside and both men were rendered speechless by what they saw before them.

  Pressed into the corner of the tiny stone walled cell was a hulking brute of a creature. It might well have been a good head taller than Ulysses but it held that head low, its posture that of an ape. It was naked apart from a loincloth. Its skin was pallid, its body heavily muscled, its head covered with lank hair that hung down to its shoulders. It had flung its hands in front of its face, blinded by the sudden invasion of torchlight. The heavy line of its brow and the blunt shape of its snout suggested that this creature was closer to Man's ape ancestors than Homo sapiens.

  "Get down, sir!" Nimrod shouted, pushing Ulysses out of the way. The manservant barged into the cell, crowbar in hand. The creature flinched. Raising the improvised weapon above his head, Nimrod stared into the face of the half-human creature in front of him. Wholly human eyes looked back into his, welling with a deep sadness.

  Nimrod hesitated. It was all the time Ulysses needed. He had seen the look in the cowering creature's eyes as well.

  "Nimrod, old chap, thanks for your concern for my well-being, but I don't think you'll be needing to use that crowbar."

  "But it's the apeman, sir."

  Keeping his manservant at bay with one hand, Ulysses slowly but deliberately moved between Nimrod and the creature. Despite such an action of disarming trust his body remained tensed, ready to fight if he had to.

  "Correction, old chap. It's an apeman, not the apeman, not Professor Galapagos." Boldly Ulysses took another step, his nose inadvertently wrinkling against the smell. He had seen its like before. "In fact I rather think it's an Homo neanderthalensis."

  "A what, sir?"

  "A Neanderthal, Nimrod. An evolutionary dead-end but an ancestor of the human race nonetheless. I rather think that this is our missing link, so to speak."

  "But it could still be dangerous, sir."

  Ulysses took another step, lowering his torch and holding out a hand towards the creature. Slowly the Neanderthal lowered its hands from its face and reciprocated the gesture, reaching towards Ulysses with one meaty paw.

  "It doesn't look like it so far, does it? Besides, have you not noticed the manacle around its ankle chaining it to the wall? I know it's a cliché - and this fellow here could probably snap both our necks like twigs - but I think he's more scared of us than we are of him."

  For a moment their fingertips touched and Ulysses sensed a common ancestry - a shared humanity with the captive Neanderthal. At the back of his mind he wondered how someone who had sired such a magnanimous wonder as Genevieve Galapagos could have been so cruel to this creature. The Neanderthal was not so much the Professor's pet as the result of some inhuman and immoral experiment.

  "Nimrod, pick the lock on that manacle."

  "Are you sure, sir?"

  "Trust me."

  His sense of duty overcoming the persuasive voice of doubt in his mind, Nimrod approached the creature. It jerked away from him, Nimrod's immediate reaction being to do the same. But slowly, with ever such cautious movements, the creature allowed Nimrod to free it from its chains.

  A terrible reptilian roar rang through the echoing darkness of the cellar space, a crocodilian bellow of defiance and savage prehistoric fury. It was a roar redolent with the promise of a cruel death.

  The Neanderthal howled in abject fear. Ulysses' blood ran cold.

  "Now what was that?"

  In the black hole of the basement chamber opposite the cell, stabbing their torch beams into the stygian gloom as if trying to drive it back into the bowels of the underworld, they found a single cast iron manhole cover.

  The reptilian roar echoed through the chamber, emanating from beneath them through the slits in the iron plate. Was it the cry of some rogue saurian, still loose after the break out from London Zoo, or did it belong to something infinitely worse?

  As the echoes died away the sound of running water could be heard coming up from below and a gust of foul air rose with it. Whatever had given voice to that terrible sound was lurking somewhere below,
in the noxious labyrinth of the city's sewer system. So that was where Ulysses Quicksilver would have to go too. Destiny called. Whether the creature realised it or not, it was waiting for him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Going Underground

  The winding, low-roofed tunnels stank, which was unsurprising considering Ulysses and Nimrod now found themselves exploring one of the largest sewer systems in the world. The stench of human waste filled the sewers with its miasmic stink, as foetid brown water swirled around their ankles, and sometimes up to their knees, soaking through their trousers and boots as they trudged through the filth. Ulysses breathed in through his nose as much as he could, so as to avoid tasting the foul stench, concentrating hard on not letting his gorge rise. Nimrod simply advanced through the tunnels with a permanent, nose-wrinkled scowl distorting his aquiline features. They could feel solid lumps of waste swirling around their legs with every step; every time they placed a sodden boot down they felt the filth shift and ooze underfoot.

  From the shaft leading down into the sewers the two explorers had found themselves in a cramped, brick-lined tunnel that ran away ahead and behind. Their torch beams illuminated about twenty yards of the tunnel in any one direction and revealed walls coated with glistening slime whilst unspeakable things slipped past them in the insistent current of the waste channel.

  They trudged on, any efforts at stealth thwarted. Every dredging step they took sloshed in the filthy current, every word spoken - even whispered - was amplified into uncomfortable clarity by the cavern-like acoustics of the place. Ulysses found himself wondering whether any of Professor Galapagos' aborted experiments had ended up down here. Although it looked like he had kept everything he had ever created in his unholy laboratory, perhaps other degenerate things had survived and escaped into the sewers beneath the city. There were certainly all manner of urban myths regarding what was living, hidden and undisturbed in the sewers of the Empire's largest city, from giant albino salamanders and ancient crocodiles to more far-fetched rumours of a tribe of cannibalistic troglodytes. It was not so far-fetched to believe that there could be other things living down there too, things like the offspring of an obsessive scientist's experiments.