by K. W. Jeter
“You would probably be better off taking a bash at it yourself.”
“Nonsense,” insisted Stonebrake. “Gather your courage, man. An hour or so before, you were about to put a bullet through your brain. I offer not only wealth to you, but your life itself. Would you refuse it?”
“If I were as intelligent as you believe me to be, I probably would. This is madness.”
“Again the admirable skeptic.” He gave an approving nod. “I did not anticipate that I would be able to cozen you into acceptance with mere words. But perhaps I can purchase—or at least rent—your interest.”
As I watched, he reached into the pouch fastened to the belt of his diving garment and extracted a leather packet. As soon as I received it in my hand, I knew from its weight and muffled clinking noises that it contained a sizable sum of money.
“There is more than enough,” said Stonebrake, “to settle your bill at the inn. And provide for comfortable transportation to London. You will find as well a card with an address inscribed upon it.”
I had managed to undo the packet’s watertight fastenings, and discovered all those things inside it, though the sliver of moonlight was too dim to read the exact words.
“Of course,” he continued, “you are free to make what use of the funds you will. You might, for instance, pay out your landlord here . . . then use the remainder to scurry off to some other cheap and wretched hiding-place, scraping out a few more weeks of cheese- paring existence.”
The thought had already occurred to me.
“And when those days have inevitably wound down to their end, you would be exactly where you were before. In a shabby room, with a gun pressed to your brow.”
To that bleak observation, I could make no reply.
“Decide as you see fit, Mr. Dower.” Reaching behind himself, Stonebrake pulled the hood of his diving garment onto his head. He then uncoiled the rubber tube of the breathing apparatus. “I hope to see you again.”
I heard but did not observe him splashing through the oncoming waves, then disappearing beneath the roiling water. I stood in silent contemplation of the small but weighty packet in my hand. And remained so, until the first reddish light of dawn tinged the cliffsides above me.
The innkeeper was already up and about when I returned to my temporary lodgings. “Thar be summat maun say yer bill—”
“Will this suffice?” Standing on the inn’s doorstep, I handed him one of the larger-denominated coins that had been bestowed on me. The man’s eyes widened at the sight of it in his grubby fingers.
I gave him another. “Hire me a carriage,” I told him. “I must go to London.”
PART TWO
OF MATTERS URBANE
CHAPTER
5
Mr. Dower Observes
Giant Serpents
in the English Countryside
AS I was jounced over country roads so rutted as to seem extended representations in scale, crafted in mud, of the distant Kashypamaran mountain ranges, my thoughts turned to foxes and proverbs.
To be mired deep in unprofitable meditations was a deep-grained failing of mine, often commented upon by my late servant, Creff, the more so as he approached the afterlife and its dreaded account books. Before his death, he had apparently come to believe that a ruthless attention to his employer’s faults might be regarded by the Recording Angel as instances of a laudable devotion to honesty, and thus entered in the credits column of his personal ledger, outweighing at least a few of the debits of his own picayune sins.
Mark my words, Mr. Dower — An unwished image entered my mind, of Creff ’s age-withered hand reaching from his death-bed, to clutch my sleeve. Leave off all yer daft brooding and scheming. If the Lord Our Maker had wanted us other than fools, He’d put clockwork brains in our skulls, rather’n these soft, spongy tripes He gave us instead.
As with all such valuable warnings in my life, this one had gone unheeded. Which left me gazing out the carriage window at a sodden rural landscape, attempting to reconstruct the exact wording of the hoary adage about a fox having more than one exit to his burrow, such foresight being considered clever on his part. At some point in my sketchy formal education, I had access to a massive leatherbound compendium of the unlettered world’s vernacular wisdom— more trite than pithy, it had seemed to me even at a young age—and a number of its ungraceful mottoes still rattled about in my head. But at this moment, the only one that came to mind, dealing with creatures of the vulpine persuasion, was one presumably bandied about by the primitive Serbs, to the effect that A foolish fox is caught by one leg, but a wise one by all four. The applicability of this to my current situation seemed remote.
The carriage vaulted into an even deeper crevass, of such vertical extent that the driver was obliged to colourfully encourage the horses to greater effort, accompanied by a paroxysm of lashing with the whip. Above me, I could hear the one small trunk that held my diminished worldly possessions, bouncing about in the baggage rack. I imagined that if it were to fly across the hedge and into the nearest boggy field, the driver would feel little urgency to go and fetch it, but would instead merely continue urging our rickety transport toward its destination.
Thus my thoughts seemed to trudge forward on their own accord as well. The proverb about foxes—that which I could recall only hazily, not the Serbian one—was self-evidently an admonition in regard to avoiding those circumstances best termed blind alleys, without more than a single way of extricating oneself. Such was sage advice, the consequences of my own repeated failures to heed it being proof enough of its wisdom. The bleak vista upon which my gaze rested, my plodding thoughts as measured as the carriage’s passage through the same, seemed consistent with the assessment I had made of my current situation. Through no great forethought on my part, I did indeed have as much a second exit from my burrow as the crafty fox possessed. I could take comfort in the knowledge that if things did not uncoil as hoped with the schemes in which I had been convinced by my new acquaintance Stonebrake to enlist, my situation would be scarcely worse than it had been before our dampish meeting. And the escape from it would similarly be no worse than that upon which I had taken the first tentative steps. Even now, the second egress from my burrow nestled its considerable weight close to my heart, as though it were one of those great iron keys that required both hands of some medieval gaol-keeper to turn, to free the prisoner held in some dank stone cell. As though I had been expecting the worst of the carriage driver’s dismissive handling of my admittedly less-than-prepossessing trunk, I had stowed upon my own person the single most valuable object still remaining to me. My father’s intricate clockwork pistol would yield its fiery mysteries the next time I laid its cold muzzle upon the corner of my brow; of this much I was darkly confident. How much cleverer a creature Man is than a Fox, I mused, that he could devise and carry with him such a convenient and portable exit to whatever circumstances in which he might find himself encumbered.
A hard, violent shock traveled the length of my spine as the carriage’s wheels found the bottom of another ravine. My eyes sprang open, and for a moment I conjectured futilely as to my location and to the nature of this cramped, double-benched cabinet that confined my stiffening limbs. I realized that I had fallen asleep, lulled by the prospective comforts that would attend my own self-annihilation. Bit by bit, as children assemble puzzles upon the carpet-decked floors of their nurseries, the nature of my journeying returned to memory. Returning to London, upon the behest of some shabby confidence trickster—there to find my fortune, without even the benefit of Bow Bells to advise me. If God adores fools, as I had once been instructed by the village priest, then I was apparently en route to salvation as well.
Rain had commenced, of the sort more mistily annoying than torrential, to further blur and haze the uninhabited landscape revealed through the carriage’s window. Another few seconds passed before I realized that the surrounding countryside was not quite so monotonous as I had first assumed, but that my hired conve
yance had in fact ceased its forward progress. Investigation was called for; I pushed open the door beside me and stepped down to the ground, my boots instantly mired to the ankles in mud.
Slogging to the front of the carriage, I discovered that the driver had released the horses from the yoke and limbers, leading them by their harnesses to the roadside trough in which the thirsting beasts now thrust their muzzles.
“Best to gie thum a brayther and a drink, sir.” The driver tugged the brim of his cap. “Yon hill’s a steep ’un.” He pointed ahead, to where the road slanted toward a crest ringed with bare-branched trees, more skeletal than vernal. “We’ll mek good speed on t’arterside, though.”
“I expect we shall.” Reminding him not to leave the spot without me, I availed myself of the opportunity to stretch my own legs and take care of the other needs that a long journey impresses upon one’s body.
A few yards away from the road, yellow thickets of bracken screened me above the waist, affording me sufficient privacy in which to unfasten the front of my trousers. Winter had so recently lain upon the ground that ice crystals still glittered in the mire at my feet. These dissolved into hissing steam as I expressed the nature of my urgent business upon them. Re-doing my garments with coldnumbed fingers, I was bemused to note that the hissing sounds continued even as the small puddle I had created now chilled and seeped into the weedy soil. More intriguingly, the hiss seemed to come from some more distant point, on the opposite side of the low earthen rise before me. To my concern, through the inclement weather’s mist I perceived white clouds roiling upward, as though an otherwise silent army had just completed en masse the same corporeal duties with which I had tasked myself.
In my previous modes of existence, caution had been my watchword. The alley behind my watchmaker’s shop in the district of Clerkenwell, the business premises being an inheritance from my father, had been infested with that breed of lean and feral cat native to London’s squalid dens and nooks. Having the opportunity to observe the species at close range, due to Creff’s incorrigible habit of scraping the breakfast and dinner plates into their yowling mouths, I had noted that the creatures exhibiting the most courage, the first to investigate every rubbish bin and splintered crate, flourished for a time but were ultimately outlived by their more timid brethren. If so in untutored Nature, I had reasoned, how much more so in the crueler and less caring drawing-rooms of Civilization? As with those felines who survived the few more years that constituted old age amongst their kind, I placed a higher value on my skin than on my curiosity.
Or so, as I have indicated, I had before. Little I had experienced in this life had served to alter my attitude in this regard; indeed, the majority of my supposed adventures, if not the entirety, had reinforced my tremulous predispositions. At least until now. Perhaps enlistment in my recent acquaintance Stonebrake’s hare-brained schemes had rent the veil of discretion through which I had previously viewed the world, and left me a subscriber to that decrepit maxim—In for a penny, in for a pound—by which so many of my own species had come to ruin. In any event, I found myself climbing up the low rise, in order to discover the source of the cumulus-like phenomenon mounting into the grey skies.
At first, as I planted my boots upon the highest ground I could conveniently reach, I thought that I was dreaming, yet asleep in the carriage. A monstrous vision lay before me—literally monstrous, in the sense of loathsome creatures having taken possession of the Earth. The scaly, elongated bosoms of great serpents pressed upon the sodden fields, their vermiform bodies of such lengthy dimension that both their tails and heads were hidden beyond the horizons to the north and south of where I stood. The dull, crepuscular sunlight of an English noon glinted from the reptiles’ metallic hides. So possessed of venom and general ill temper were they, that billowing vapours seethed from every crook and curve of their forms, the noise of hissing that came to my ears now as loud as though I had been standing underneath a Mancunian factory whistle. Even more disgusting to my perception was the evidence that I had stumbled upon the immense snakes as they had been engaged in that unseemly act of coitus by which rudely fertile Nature multiplies all its creeping, crawling progeny; as I gazed forward at the scene, unable to tear my appalled sight away, I discerned that several of the immense serpents were not merely intertwined with or lying across each other, but actually connected at various points, the junctures leaking a presumably poisonous steam with even greater ferocity.
“Ay, ’tis a contemp’ble slew, ain’ it? Ye’ve ne’er seen it before?”
Startled by the unanticipated words, I turned and saw the driver standing next to me. Across the distance I had traversed, I spied the carriage, its brace of horses harnessed in position once more. The man had evidently come to fetch his passenger, in order to resume our journey.
“No—” I gave a shake of my head. “I have not.” It had been a comfort to believe that the oppressing vision had been but a nightmare shaken by my conveyance’s violent motions into the daytime hours. My heart crawled downward through my viscera, as though it were some woodland vermin seeking desperate refuge from the hunt’s baying hounds, at the prospect that I had encountered one more aspect of Reality with which I could gratefully have gone unacquainted to my dying day. “What manner of beast,” I enquired of the coachman, “are these?”
“ ‘Beast’? No bluidy beast’re they.” His laugh rattled congenital phlegm in his neckerchiefed throat. “ ’Tis but pipes ye see.”
I stared at him in noncomprehension. “What do you mean, pipes? Are they not snakes? Giant serpents?”
“Get a bluidy clew, man.” He pointed toward the fields. “D’ye see them movin’ about?”
“No—” In this, the carriage driver was correct. Other than the hissing emissions from their flanks, no animate sign was visible. “I do not.”
“Hardly be bluidy snakes, then, would they?” Gleeful scorn brightened his visage, of the variety relished by the unlettered, when they catch their educated betters in some apparent foolishness. “Snakes be writhin’ about, all wriggly like. ’Less they be daid, of course.” His self-congratulatory logic continued to its conclusion. “So these be pipes, ye maun admit.”
“Pipes.” I mused over the baffling possibilities. The landscape being so marshy, as though our route had brought us to the edge of the infamously dismal Chat Moss, it hardly seemed likely that there was any need to convey water from one point to another across it. “Pipes bearing what?”
“Aye, steam, of course.” His black-nailed index finger pointed again. “D’ye not see it?”
Understanding broke behind my brow, as dams are riven by burrowing sappers’ sudden gunpowder charges. My habitation of the last few years had been so rural that I had read and heard gossip of these engineering marvels—so termed by their enthusiastic adherents—that had gripped the English countryside, but I had not witnessed them. Until now.
This was my understanding, previously unconfirmed by observation: The country’s journals and broadsheets had been lavish in their printed adoration of that coterie of British entrepreneurs, men of wealth and influence who wished to become even wealthier and more influential by bringing the alleged benefits of steam power to society at large. The heat of the vast fires churning at the Earth’s core, conjectured by the more advanced thinkers in the scientific community, evidenced by the molten rock spewed forth by the Italian peninsula’s Mount Aetna and other, more distant volcanic apertures, would warm our hearths and furnish propulsive force to our factories. The slight disadvantage of there being few if any volcanoes and vaulting geysers in the British Isles would be addressed by the simple if arduous expedient of digging straight down to where these seething thermal channels were believed to run. Once tapped, the same red-hot, sluggish magma from which the overly excitable Romans had fled, would just as readily fire the boilers of our own newly created steam mines, as their inventors called them.
More than mere heat being required to generate steam, though, the precise loc
ation of the steam mines was a pressing issue. While much of the English countryside was as perennially damp as the fields on the edge of which stood myself and my carriage driver, even greater and more easily channeled quantities of water were required to service this grand scheme. Thus the locating of the mines in what had previously been known as the Lake District. The idyllic, romantic shores of Windermere and Buttermere and Ullswater, and all the rest extolled by the enraptured poets, were transformed to muddy bogs as their liquid contents were funneled to the grim, grey power houses erected in the surrounding fells and valleys. That sable night, once lit by only the slowly wheeling constellations and the moon’s mensural caravanserai, was now reddened to a furious near-day by the lava-fed furnaces, their glow reflected by the now perpetual clouds pressing heavily from above. Gouts of fire, the inevitable accidents of industry, scorched the hillsides bare of trees and foliage, leaving only blackened rock where poetical daffodils had once nodded.
“Aye, this be naught, compared.” The carriage driver was able to discern my thoughts. “Ye still see a bit o’ green, here’bouts, when springtime comes. And the birds be nesting, where they can. Up north, all’s baked hard as the bricks o’ a farrier’s furnace.”
“But not everywhere.” I amended his observation, based upon the accounts I had read, of the transformations wrought by the steam entrepreneurs. “I have heard tell, that those towns and cities, whose factories had been driven by coal, are now abandoned for such usage. Pleasure excursions to idyllic Birmingham and Newcastle are now in vogue; such is my understanding.”
“Mebbe,” admitted the driver. “I’d ken but a mickle of sech grand doin’s. Them places might be veritable Gardens of Eden these days. All’s knowed by me is that they’ve made a right dog’s breakfast frae these parts.”
I could scarcely gainsay his comment. Whatever heaps of grey ash and clinkers that had been produced by our previous stoves and manufactures, the coal that fired them had the advantage of being relatively portable. A lump dug up in the north of England could be carried by canal boats to London and set alight, there to emit its pent-up heat. To convey the force of steam to its desirous recipients required the construction across the nation of a vast web of pipes, the very ones that I had mistaken for giant serpents.