by K. W. Jeter
I turned toward him. “And you’ve restored all of them to operating condition?”
“Most.” He shrugged. “Some of the lot were so rubbished, there were naught to do but scrap ’em for parts.”
“Indeed.” I directed a raised eyebrow at Stonebrake. “And have you and your workmen found amongst all these that great Vox Universalis, upon which your schemes depend?”
“No—” A frown replaced the man’s usual and casual smile. “Not yet.”
“Perhaps it no longer exists. If it ever did.”
“We’ll unearth it.” Stonebrake’s face set hard with determination. “Even as we speak, agents hired by my backers are turning over every stone, rummaging through every cupboard, in pursuit of the device. There are some quite promising leads that we are following up, I can assure you.”
Before I could comment upon this resolve of his, a commotion broke out in the farther reaches of Featherwhite House. I could hear voices shouting in alarm, and the rapidly multiplying impact of running feet.
“It’s broken loose!” A workman, out of breath and face flushed with panic, bolted through an adjacent doorway and grasped Royston by the arm. “It’s headed this way!”
“You dolt!” The foreman’s anger was apparent in his starkly widened eyes. “Didn’t I tell the lot of you to keep the thing strapped down? What happened to its chains?”
“Snapped them, it did! As though they were bloody bits o’ string! We did our best, but—”
As though they were a crested tide, bearing down upon us where we stood, the noises increased in volume and implied threat.
“We’d best remove to safer ground.” Stonebrake appeared to know the exact import of the clamour and the frightened workman’s statement. He tugged me by one arm toward the doorway through which we had first entered. “This way—”
His attempted retreat came too late, at least for myself. I needed little encouragement to vacate the spot—I was in actuality already moving toward a prudent exit—but my resulting efforts were of no avail to me. Between one accelerating heartbeat and the next, I found myself rising in the air, a constricting encumbrance circling my chest, pinning my arms to the side. I vainly kicked and writhed in an attempt to free myself, but managed only to twist about in the grasp of whatever had seized upon me, sufficiently to catch a glimpse of its exact nature.
Equal quantities of fear and bafflement surged within me, as I viewed a hideously grinning visage, symmetrical rows of teeth leaking steam through the equidistant gaps between them, and fiery sparks emitted from the perfectly circular eye-sockets. Jointed iron arms, swathed in matted and tangled orange fur, pressed me close to the barrel chest of the animate device. For a machine it appeared to be: caught between partial disassembly and re-assembly, enough of its exterior was absent to reveal the furious reciprocating pistons and meshing cogwheels typical of my father’s design, all encased in a bolted rib cage surmounting a gimbaled base. The contracting and flexing armatures of a pair of mechanical legs, curved and bandied as an elderly sailor’s in form but possessing the exorbitant strength necessary to lurch the entire construction through one spring- loaded pace after another, showed through more rents in the same tatty fur that brushed against my own face.
My apprehension of being crushed to death by the bear-like squeeze of the device’s arms was only partially abated by a relaxing of its grasp about me. Before I could fathom what intent, if any, the mechanism harboured toward me, I was thrown forward, landing upon my chest. Scarcely had I managed to gain a position upon my hands and knees, when I felt the pincer grip of the hand-like extrusion at the end of one of the device’s arms, seizing upon the back of my neck and thrusting with force sufficient to bounce my forehead against the floor. Confounded by the blow, I was scarcely able to direct my swimming gaze back upon the nightmarish vision of the device, red sparks yet flying from the sockets above its fixed ivory grimace.
On many occasions before, I had dolefully thought to myself, This is the worst day of my life, come at last. But at no point did that observation seem more appropriate than now, as I felt the device’s other hand at the small of my back, gripping the waistband of my trousers and pulling them downward. In the same moment, I glimpsed through its tangled orange fur, another aspect of its construction that I had not ascertained before. At the juncture of the mechanism’s legs, a third iron appendage thrust forward, of lesser dimension than the others, but still possessed of a dismaying length and girth. A scalding jet of steam hissed from the nozzle-like aperture at its prow. . . .
“The pipe, man; the pipe!” From somewhere beyond my dizzied comprehension, I heard Royston’s voice gruffly shouting. “Take an axe to the bloody pipe!”
To my ear came the sound of the prescribed blow, but I did not witness it. I was set free as the articulated metal hands went limp, their motivating force extinguished. Hurriedly scrambling from the spot at which I had been pinned, I halted only when my shoulder struck the farthest wall. Pressing my spine against the crumbling plaster, I saw one of the narrower steam pipes clanking and thrashing about as though it were a beheaded serpent, white vapours gusting forth from its parted end. A similar pipe, wetly dripping, dangled from the back of the now lifeless device that had seized upon me. As though it were a creation of flesh and blood rather than brass and iron, it slumped upon its haunches, befurred head lolling forward, its sparking eye-sockets now dead and hollow. Behind it, slowly regaining his own breath, one of the workmen leaned upon the handle of the axe with which he had deprived the device of its ability to carry out its wicked intents.
“I trust you’re all right?” Stonebrake reached a hand down toward me. “Bit shaken, I suppose.”
“Do you? Do you indeed?” I brushed away his offer of help and shakily managed to stand, balancing myself against the wall behind me. I could not restrain my shouting: “Why should you assume that? I would have assumed that in this new, wondrous steampowered London of yours, being sodomized by something out of an ironmonger’s shed is an everyday occurrence, enjoyed by all.”
“Calm yourself,” advised Stonebrake. “I can understand your degree of agitation—”
“I’m sure you’re able to.” I stalked away from him and stood glaring at the machine which had assaulted me. “What is this damnable thing? And that fur in which it is wrapped—was that supposed to serve some decorative purpose?”
From across the space, Royston barked out a laugh. “Makes it all the uglier, you ask me.”
“You need to remember,” said Stonebrake, “that your father served a clientele possessed of both wealth and those jaded enthusiasms that wealth engenders. The device whose embrace you have just endured is in fact a mechanical simulacrum of that beast known as an Orang-Utan, the so-called Wild Man of far-off Borneo. Thus the distinctive orange pelt, by which such a creature is distinguished in its native habitat. One of your father’s clients apparently had the fancy of setting up a hunting preserve in Yorkshire, in which he and his titled friends might amuse themselves by bagging one or two, out on the moors. In pursuit of that objective, they had a number of the animals captured and shipped to some point north of Brimley.”
“You must excuse my disbelief.” I set about dusting off and straightening the clothes that had become disarranged during the machine’s attack upon my person. “This seems a daft notion.”
“Actually . . . it rather was. Two impediments arose rather quickly: First, the northern climate disagreed severely with the apes, despite their shaggy coats, with croup and consumption eliminating most before anyone could take so much as a shot at them. And secondly, those that did survive the perpetual drizzle were not as impressively threatening as your father’s client had conceived them to be. In fact, they seemed to be by nature on the shy and retiring side, with not much more sport in killing them than would be gotten by putting a rifle’s muzzle to the head of an elderly lapdog. Consequently, your father was engaged to devise a more satisfying trophy, an Orang-Utan with a sufficiently violent demeano
ur, so that the pride of a British nobleman might be sufficiently engaged by firing off both barrels of a Purdey over-and-under into its mechanical chest.”
“Violent, you say?” I pointed to the silent device, still huddled where it had come to rest. “It seemed to have something else on its mind just now.”
“Yes, well, your father was an accommodating craftsman—that much is undeniable. No request was beyond him, it would seem. In this instance, his client was the product of one of those schools, to which the nobility have sent their children for generations, at which the affections between the young scholars and their instructors is expressed in the manner of the ancient Grecians. Nothing remarkable about that, of course; however, a simultaneous enthusiasm for exotic beasts had somehow become muddled up in the gentleman’s thoughts with his other carnal interests. Sadly for him, the timorous Orang-Utans brought over from their tropic home were apparently even less given to the seductive arts than they had been suited for bounding over the moors with a pack of hounds baying after them. Thus the device you see here, effectively filling two desperate needs with the same contrivance.”
“How fortunate for the parties involved.”
“Perhaps.” Stonebrake nodded musingly. “At least for a time. Alas, human flesh is not as sturdy as your father’s creations. From the hushed reports I’ve heard, his client apparently succumbed to his passions, his heart giving out while he was preoccupied, so to speak, with this very machine. His heirs kept a wise discretion about the matter, storing your father’s handiwork in the stonewalled outbuilding where our agents located it.”
“Piece o’ shite, it is.” The sullen Royston gave the device a kick. “Deprived me of one of my best workmen.”
“Surely you jest.” I stared aghast at him. “It murdered the poor fellow? Or worse?”
“Put your mind at ease,” said Stonebrake. “The man was not of such a robust mentality as you have displayed. He is presently a resident of the asylum at Colney Hatch, his reason having been unhinged by an ordeal that, admittedly, went a bit further than the one which you endured.”
“Jackie’s perfectly fine,” insisted Royston. “Bleeding doctors won’t let him go, is all.”
“Of course they won’t.” The foreman’s comment appeared to exasperate Stonebrake. “You’re not likely to be discharged from a lunatic asylum, are you, if you keep insisting you’ve been buggered by a steam engine with flaming eyes and shaggy orange hair. For most people, this is simply not a credible account.”
Perhaps because of its humid atmosphere, the room seemed to swim about me for a moment. “Is there a place where I might lie down for a moment? I confess myself a bit wearied by all that’s happened.”
“Buck up, man.” Stonebrake clapped me on the shoulder. “Time is hurtling past us, and we must make haste if we are to catch up with the fortunes we seek.”
“Haste? To do what?”
“There are personages of note awaiting us. Royston, have the carriage brought about. Come along, Dower.” He headed toward the townhouse’s door. “We have a party to go to.”
CHAPTER
8
An Elegant Soirée,
with Revelations
AT the best of times, a man of my nature finds sociability to be a trial. Humanity is a commodity I have enjoyed, to the degree that I can at all, in the abstract; if personal circumstances did not dictate a desperate pursuit of my own interest, I could easily have been one of those early notables of the Christian faith, who found living alone in a cave and subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey more congenial than the yammering, ceaseless chatter of their own unenlightened kind.
Even so, there is something to be said for loitering about in an elegant drawing-room with a glass of a fine vintage in one’s hand and the expectation of a dinner of equal quality in the offing. The singular advantage of being in as wearied a condition as I was, from the effects of my long traveling, was that it required but a little alcohol to set me in an elevated frame of mind.
“Ah, Dower!” Lord Fusible, in his portly and similarly inebriated exuberance—for it was to his fashionable townhouse that my co-conspirator, Stonebrake, had transported me—wrapped an arm around me and exhaled brandy fumes into my face. “So good to see you again. Stonebrake here had promised your reappearance upon the scene, and he has performed admirably in that regard.”
“I’m glad your lordship thinks so.” Stonebrake lowered his own half-drained glass. “It is a pleasure to accommodate your wishes.”
That sort of obsequious truckling to the upper classes always nettled me, but on this occasion I said nothing about it. Instead, I gave a single nod and told Fusible, “Nothing could have kept me away, I assure you.”
A few feet away from where we stood, the drawing-room was crowded with various sycophants and well-dressed dignitaries; Lady Fusible held court at the space’s farthest reach, surrounded by the wives of Phototrope Limited’s executive officers, most of whom I recognized from the recent launch of their company’s latest perambulating lighthouse.
“I expect not.” Fusible leered at me with a crêpe-lidded wink and an elbow to my ribs. “About to do some grand business together, aren’t we? The keepers of the Sea & Light Book will soon rue the day they accepted our wagers!”
I became aware of an encircling constellation of knowing glances and self- satisfied smiles, all turned in my direction from the others listening to our conversation. It became clear to me that the bulk of my affairs was an open secret to the dinner party’s attendees. A certain degree of discomfiture was attached to that realization, given my own doubts as to the legality of the enterprise to which I had become a central figure. The other doubts I found myself entertaining revolved around the eagerness to defend or rescue my person, that any of the assorted toffs might display were our collective plans to go amiss. The sly signs of greed and calculation marked their features; it seemed hardly likely to me that any of them had reached their current state of wealth by being overly concerned of their fellow creatures’ well-being.
Liquor and fatigue had loosened my tongue, though. I offered a few words of advice, unmindful of their impertinence: “Perhaps your lordship might consider it wise to display a bit more discretion, concerning these matters.”
My admonition scarcely seemed to bother him. “Don’t worry yourself about it, old man. You’re amongst friends here. There’s no need to keep confidences from each other—indeed, you would be hard-pressed to accomplish that, given the manner in which this lot relishes gossiping about one another. There’s not the slightest amusing gaffe or scrape that doesn’t get circulated amongst them, as quickly as their tongues can wag of it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“You’ll know the truth of it soon enough,” insisted Lord Fusible. “I was just back in the house’s kitchen a moment or so ago, securing a morsel to tide me over until the dinner gong is struck, and I overheard the footmen and maids having a fine old laugh with that sourly amusing devil Royston, as to some wicked goings-on of which you yourself were the center. Who knew that a mechanical ape could be driven by such amorous longings? The fellow made it sound as if its interests were rather reciprocated on your part as well. To each his own, eh?” Fusible bestowed another wink and nudge upon me. “If the gentlefolk you see assembled in the room are not already aware of the incident, they will be by the time they head to home, and they exchange a few words with their servants as the bedcovers are turned down.”
Such information filled me with a degree of dismay, though not surprise. Years before this, scurrilous rumours had circulated through every stratum of London society, concerning other carnal indulgences to which I was supposedly given. At that time, the stories had been in regard to the ill-famed procuress Mollie Maud’s stable of green girls, the piscine jades servicing the city’s most debauched appetites. Reputation is a fragile commodity, determined by others’ whims more than by one’s own behaviour. My attempts to lead a discreet if not spotless life had
not met with great success before; why should they now? Particularly in light of the fact that I had embarked upon enterprises of dubious morality, let alone legality. Upon further reflection, any subsequent besmirchment of my public character might be no more than my due.
“Don’t fret about it, my dear fellow.” Seeing the play of emotions across my face, Lord Fusible proffered further advice. “It’s not really the sort of thing that people will hold against you. At least not in London’s fashionable society.”
“That’s good news,” I said. “I have had enough unpleasant things held against me, as it is. Literally.”
As it had at the lighthouse launch party, alcohol made Fusible expansive and voluble. “Indeed,” he said, gesturing with his empty glass, “an eccentricity such as that only serves to render you more interesting, to people of gentility and education. As word gets out, I can assure you, a great many invitations to elegant functions will be offered to you.”
“If they involve either apes or buggery, or both, I’m afraid I will have to decline them.”
“Suit yourself.” Lord Fusible’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “De gustibus non est disputandum, as those waggish Greeks would have put it—”
“The Romans, actually. And not the more respectable ones.”
“Regardless. But consider this. Our mutual friend Stonebrake informs me that you are desirous of becoming wealthy. A laudable ambition, indeed, and so much so that the means necessary to achieve that state are of little consequence, as long as they are successful. Such has been the guiding principle of my own endeavours, and I rather fancy that it would be the same for most of the people here tonight. A fortune in one’s purse has its advantages, I can tell you that.” Fusible’s barrel chest swelled to even greater dimensions, as though inflated by his lofty thoughts. “The common morality? The binding confines of those notions that others, those without money to jingle in their pockets, consider so important? All those become as trifles, without weight or mass, as easily blown away by a puff of one’s breath as though they were but dust wafting in the air. A man may cut his morals as he pleases, provided he is a rich man.”