by KW Jeter
That steam has transformed our England, and the world beyond, is undeniable – or rather I should write Steam, as one might style the name of some intimidating deity, so as to emphasize the monstrous power it has become. Mere steam we had before, a humid vapour from the spout of a teakettle on the hob, or the mist rising from the sweating flanks of draught horses resting for a moment in the yokes of heavy-laden carts. A natural phenomenon, such as lightning or the occasional tremors of the earth beneath our feet, but from which we had no more to fear than the accidental scalding of our skin. All that has changed now; Steam has become the engine that draws the hurtling train of the Future toward the Present Day, laden with freight both awesome and appalling, its iron wheels relentless upon tracks from which we cannot unbind ourselves.
I admit what had been my own ignorance in this regard; as I have written in other pages, the rural isolation to which I had fled years ago, after my first acquaintance with my father’s more fearsome creations, had sufficed to shield me from knowledge of the changes wrought in my native London. When I foolishly returned, I saw for myself the hideous great tubes and pipes mazing through the streets of the City, as though it were a nest of brass serpents. The constant heat and damp radiated thereby transformed the physical climate, as though the alleys and wider lanes were those of some forgotten empire deep in the Afric jungles.
But another climate had changed as well – the one within men’s minds. The fever swamps in which they now found themselves had a correlative effect on their thinking. If this was possible, then why not that as well? Why stay one’s hand, when tempted to grasp what had been previously thought impossible – or forbidden? Our strictures melt away in this new, enveloping heat, and monstrous things are born. And worse, they are not thought monstrous.
Such had happened with the breeding of animals; the cleverness that my father had brought to bear on constructions of brass and iron was now applied, in hidden workshops outside London, to softer and living things. Unnatural conjugations, between species that could never have coupled in the natural world, led to bizarre progeny…
I saw one before me now, as I was pelted by the rain. Through the fingers of the hand I raised in a vain attempt to shield my face, the gelatinous mass was still plainly visible. Its murkily transparent form possessed no colour other than that imparted by the thin angle of moonlight that fell upon it. Possessed of no means of locomotion other than the tendrils that spread out from the edges of the bell-shaped creature, it had still managed to travel some considerable distance, through sea and over sodden ground, and now clung to the inn by means of the suction provided by the cup-like features on the bottom of its appendages.
This much I knew, from some sensation-mongering periodical that had been left behind by one of the inn’s guests – that at least those responsible had confined their efforts to denizens of the sea, specifically the octopus and its rather more flaccid neighbour, the jellyfish or Portuguese man-o’-war. That two so dissimilar animals could produce a mingled offspring – indeed, some scientific figures there were who maintained that the jellyfish was not even a single entity, but some sort of conglomerate assembly – was an indicator of not just the mad determination of this new world’s relentlessly inventive minds, but the sweltering temperatures in which they lived and pursued their fervid enthusiasms.
Once created, a use must be found – thus the restless wheel of progress to which we are chained like whirling Ixion, whereby needs are fulfilled that we did not even know we had, so that even more urgent needs must be discovered. And thus the advent of the aqueous couriers, with one of which I was now confronted. For that part of humanity given to secrecy and plotting, the postal service so wisely instituted by Her Majesty’s government, with its penny stamps and red pillar boxes, is not sufficient; another means of communication over great distances, suited to conspiracy and stealth, is preferred. And for that, the loathsome hybrid before me was ideal; the cunning of the octopoid species, often remarked upon by fishermen and sailors, was keen enough that it could be directed to a specific location, and could be relied upon to find its way while minimizing its risk of being observed – thus its propensity for arriving at its destination in the dead of night, and if during an obscuring storm, even better. The wobbling balloon form of the creature afforded the means by which it could navigate not only the coastal reaches, but make its way along rivers and canals as well, with the least expenditure of its store of energy. When progress over dry land was required, the tentacled legacy of its octopus ancestry enabled it to do so. Delivery of messages by these damp and squamous entities might not have been accomplished at the same speed as that of the mail coaches that hurtle across our British nation, but it was seemingly performed with greater secrecy, safe from the eyes and prying fingers of those human intermediaries who might have been prompted by curiosity or hope of gain to unseal any of the missives they carried. Further protection was enabled by the eerie appearance of the couriers themselves; on the rare occasions when one was spotted late at night – silently passing along riverine waters, or through fen and forest, heaving itself forward like an animate blancmange – the effect upon the observer, whether drunk or sober, was such as to provoke feelings of dread and horror, leaving it unmolested as it continued its errand.
Observing the one which had sought me out, I experienced much the same emotions. A shiver passed over my flesh, not evoked by the cold wind and rain that battered me. I was further oppressed by the realization that its primitive organs of perception, hidden somewhere within its gelatinine bulk, had caught sight of me. Once again I heard the low hooting horn-call, more insistent this time, summoning me to take delivery of that which had been so moistly carried to me.
After a moment’s revulsed hesitation, I stepped forward into the courtyard. As I approached, the soft courier released its hold upon the building’s corner, thereby sloughing itself back into a skirted hemisphere upon the ground. The remaining moonlight glinted from a circled brass tube with flaring aperture, fastened to the leathern harness that girdled the shape. This was the source of the horn note that had thrice sounded, its mouthpiece – or so it would have been to a human player – inserted into a puckered sphincter on the courier’s rounded flank, through which air could be expressed in a manner similar to the squeezing of a bagpipes’ bladder.
“I take it…” A moment was required for me to find my voice, this being the first occasion on which I addressed a faceless mound of jelly, faintly luminous beneath the rainwater over its surface. “That you have something addressed to me?”
The courier made no response but to raise one of its slithering appendages and lift the flap of the pouch on the other side of its harness. The flexing tip prodded about inside for a moment, then re-emerged with a waxen envelope stuck to it.
I took the stiff flat item reluctantly. The envelope separated from the suckered tentacle with an audible pop, and I came close to falling backward in my haste to put distance between myself and the creature as quickly as possible.
Its interest in me having ceased, the wobbling wet bulk shifted about, the appendages at its lower edge rooting in the mud. Whatever clouded gaze had rested upon my face was now turned toward the darkness from which the creature had journeyed. My mute visitor would be at greater comfort there, returning to the secretive postmasters who had dispatched it to my door.
For my own part, I retreated back inside the inn. A widening puddle of rainwater formed about me, as I stood sodden in the middle of the unlit parlour. My hands were so stiff from damp and cold that some time was required before I could fumble open the tiny box of Swan Vestas on the shelf above the wainscoting, and light the wick of the lantern on the nearest table.
The envelope’s waxy sheath had prevented any damage to the contents; so tightly sealed was it that I needed recourse to my penknife to pry open the flap. Once done, I was able to extract a single folded sheet of paper.
Which I recognized, to some degree – in actuality, it was but a partial sheet,
having been roughly torn in half; the frayed edge was evident to both sight and touch. I had seen the like before, and quickly confirmed my memory by lifting the lid of the enigmatic box that Miss McThane had bequeathed to me, and removing from it the last of the pages that I had placed in sequence. That paper was of the same coarse texture and yellowed tint as that which had just been given me by the departed aqueous courier. By the glow of the lantern, I held both pieces beside each other; their ripped edges exactly matched.
I laid both pieces down upon the table, brooding as I tapped my finger upon them. One obvious difference I espied between the two messages, as I gazed upon them: as I had noted before, that which I had found in the box, the final one of the lot, had but the two words FOUND HIM scrawled upon one side. The one just received was inscribed in the same hand, with the same colour ink, but more densely so – the considerable verbiage flowed from one side to the other. By this evidence, the earlier one had been dispatched in some haste; very likely the subsequent message elabourated on the previous terse communication.
I had more urgent needs at the moment than to see what the missive contained. I was chilled to the bone, and the unlit interior of the inn was scarcely more warming than its exterior. My greater requirement was to start a fire upon the hearth, strip off my clammy garments, and thaw out my flesh. In these regions, the failure to do as much was a frequent cause of death.
But more than that, I knew, delayed the satisfaction of my curiosity. My spirits were oppressed by the discovery that had been forced upon me, as to the nature of how my wife, the late Miss McThane, had conducted her correspondence with this party, whose suspected identity was woefully, bit by advancing bit, growing more certain to me. I had been prompted before to wonder how the pages in the box had been amassed over the last few years, without my having been aware of their arrival, one after another. A functionary of the postal service making his way to this remote location would have been so rare an occurrence as to have etched itself in my mind. Nor had Miss McThane been in the habit of frequenting the village, there being little need for her to do so – thus there would have been no opportunity to have had the letter placed in her hand by some helpful intermediary. But whatever fruitless conjectures I might have previously formed were now set aside by the certainty that the aqueous couriers had been employed, their rounds completed in the deepest hours of nights such as this. While I had lain slumbering, she had been awake for at least some of those times, in her night-dress and robe at one of the inn’s upstairs windows, watching through the sombre hours for another of those jelly-ish messengers, like the one I had just encountered.
“Spare yourself,” I spoke to no other, “at least for a time.” Fear masks itself as fatigue, I was well aware – nevertheless, I decided to tend to these matters when I would have no excuse for quailing before whatever revelations were next in store for me. I gathered up both halves of the page that had been sundered in twain, and placed them separately – that one which had been the last I had read, and the other that I had yet to. The first I deposited back in the now-silent box, and closed the lid. The other just received I tucked inside my jacket pocket, to have it ready to hand in the morning. I would then be, if not refreshed in mind and body, at least better resigned in spirit to my fate.
* * *
With the coarse woollen throw about my shoulders, I awoke to the smouldering ashes on the grate.
The small fire I had lit, and left unattended as I slept, had imparted a measure of warmth to my bones. So much so that I was deluded for a few blessed minutes, that all the riotous and grim events of the last few days had only been my self-inflicted dreaming, and that I would shortly be able to rouse myself into that ordinary domestic state, with its small quotidian pleasures, that sufficed well enough as happiness for one of my experience.
But that vague illusion was not destined to last. Somebody – damn him! – was pounding upon the door.
“Oy! Dower! Be y’in?”
I winced at the sound of a voice other than my own. The hammering upon the door was suspended for a moment, so whoever was responsible could add to it with the grackling sound of his call. The constant application of strong drink had coarsened the man’s throat, a condition not unusual in this region, but the accent marked him as being other than a local; I had heard much the same tone and inflection many years ago, when I had lived in London.
“Bluidy ‘ell, Dower–” Whoever the person, he possessed little patience. “If ye be daid, then fookin’ say so! Otherwaze, open fookin’ door!”
These comments were followed by more pounding, even louder than the unseen person had previously managed. Better, I reluctantly decided, that I confront the person while still he stood upon the doorstep, than after he had battered his way in. I picked up the iron poker from beside the fireplace, and went to sort out the trouble as best I could.
“Fie-n’ly!” A pair of eyes, pink-rimmed from gin and tobacco, glared at me – or rather, up toward me, as the individual stood so hunched forward that he was rendered a good head shorter than myself. His squinting visage was shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, or the remains of one; it was as much wadded and abused as his crevassed face. “Why keep in’stution for the comfit o’ weary trav’llers such as meself, if can’t be bothurrd welcome in?”
“I am afraid you have been misdirected.” Gripping the poker in both hands, I barred his way. “We are not open for custom at this time. Please seek shelter elsewhere.”
“Ooh – custum, is it?” A skewing grin spread across the man’s face. “Very posh, indeed! Frae looks place, had no idee be so grand. But if can’t ‘ford bed, a swodge o’ floor’ll do me, pref’bly nigh kitchen.” Hands so begrimed and hairy-backed as to resemble diseased badgers pawed at the greasy vest he wore. “And nae fear, me fine Mr Dower – can pay!” He held up a coin of indeterminate denomination. “See?”
“We have no beds available, nor floor.” I spoke in as stern a voice as I could summon. “The day is still early; if you continue by the Penworth road, you will come to another establishment by dark – one that will show you more hospitality than I can at this moment.” I was struck by a further thought as I faced the man. “Just a moment – how do you know my name?”
“Why bluidy ‘ell should’n’ know yer name? Name be Dower, innit?”
“Whether it is or not, that is no concern of yours.” I regarded him with mounting suspicion. “To my knowledge, you have never come this way before, and if I had made your acquaintance at some earlier time and place, I am sure I have no recall of it.”
“Hold yer kettle, mate; no need git all bolshie with honest man as meself.” With a sooty-nailed index finger, he pointed over his shoulder. “Folk in village ga’e me yer name. Be a figure of much d’scussion among ‘em.”
The proffered explanation scarcely relieved my doubts concerning this individual. And indeed, having had greater opportunity to study his appearance, I became even more convinced of his innate rascality. The upraised gesture made toward the distant village had allowed the ragged cuff of his dirt-embedded coat to fall to his equally grimy elbow, thus revealing a forearm emblazoned with tattoos, of the blurry and amateurish sort inscribed to the flesh with lamp-black and push-pin, a decorative craft much practiced by those serving at Her Majesty’s pleasure in various houses of detention – I could just discern on this person’s skin a dagger and ribbon memorializing his blessed mother, a piratical skull-and-crossbones, and various obscure prisoners’ curses. The elabourateness of these markings indicated that he’d had ample leisure to devote to their tedious creation, there being little other diversion while behind bars and stone walls.
My days of London residency were sufficiently behind me that the connection was slowly formed in my mind between this person and others of his breed that I had encountered then. Not a tribe in the sense of the wandering Romany, much excoriated as gypsies, to whom a great many misdeeds were commonly and falsely attributed – but rather that motley and incorrigible assortment of Englan
ders who were no doubt native here before Caesar’s legions came and went. It is difficult to keep a shop in Clerkenwell or any other of the city’s parishes, without having to continually chase one or more of their ilk back out onto the street. Ever given to sticky-fingered theft and more elabourate swindles, they were a familiar urban plague – or so I had thought them; to encounter one here in the Cornish wastes afforded some surprise to me.
“So then, me foin Mr Dower – if take no offence at callin’ by own damned name – is munny good enow for ye? Moyt come in?”
His voice broke into my dark reminiscences, and I discovered that he was no longer before me, but rather alongside, his small but determined form already insinuated between myself and the door frame, in the manner of those terrier dogs who will brook no obstruction between them and a place by the hearth, or whatever dish of scraps might await them in the kitchen.
“Cease at once.” Some hasty action was required on my part to prevent his entry. The poker was caught between his chest and mine as I pushed him back; so close were we that the ripe pong of tramp sweat and undergarments long unwashed rose and filled my nostrils. “Quit these premises, or I will not account for what might happen next.”
“Dicky inhosputtable sort, an’t ye? Bluidy scandal on yer trade, I’d say.” His scowl, peering up at me, softened into a gappy smile that was scarcely more pleasant. “Have it yer way then, Mister Dower – bin beaten nigh death in foiner places than yer poxy crib. But if ye please…” A cringing tone informed his words. “Gie jest smalles’ peek inside, will ye? I’m shurre yer furnushings be magnufficent indeed.” Ducking his head, the smaller man attempted to peer around me to the inn’s rooms beyond. “Be a great kindniss, it wud, as be able to tell all me mates as to whut fookin’ palace have here.”