Fiendish Schemes

by K. W. Jeter

  I was not quite sure of the exact meaning of such a comment, but the man’s sharp disappointment was evident in the hard- set tightening of his mouth.

  “I’m sorry.” There seemed nothing else appropriate for me to say. “Its importance to you was something of which I was aware—”

  “Shit happens.”

  His stoicism, however profane, impressed me. “If there were anything I could for you, to allay your feelings in this regard—”

  “Actually . . .” Scape gave a slow nod. “Now that you mention it—there is.”

  Our bizarre colloquy proceeded, as we clung to the side of the ominously vibrating lighthouse tower.

  “Yes?” I gazed with some small hope into his eyes. “And what is that?”

  “Take a hike.”

  He raised one knee, high enough to press it against my abdomen, and pushed. His unanticipated action was sufficient to break my grasp upon the ladder’s rungs. In the blink of an eye, I found myself toppling free, falling through space.

  With the breath already expelled from my lungs, I landed upon my back. Dazed, I was but vaguely aware of the sharp-toothed fragments of the Vox Universalis key beneath me. My vision cleared enough that I was able to watch as Scape swarmed the rest of the way up the ladder, pulled open the riveted hatchway door, and vanished inside the lighthouse.

  Gasping, I raised myself up onto my elbows. I ducked my head as one of the crab-like steel claws swung near, the lighthouse’s propulsive mechanisms again stirring to life. With the sounds of intermingled mechanical groaning and clattering, the Colossus began moving once more toward the fiery shape of the Iron Lady in the distance, her withering, scornful gaze fastened upon the approaching machine.

  In regaining my feet, I was assisted by Miss McThane, grasping my arm and drawing me upward. “Come on,” she hurriedly spoke. “We gotta get away from here!”

  “But—” I pointed to the Colossus lumbering away from us. Scape was but barely visible far above, yanking at the construction’s various levers and controls, seemingly at random but with sufficient effect to guide it toward its destination. “What about—”

  “There’s no stopping him now.” Miss McThane tugged again at my arm. “He’s doing his thing, so let’s do ours.”

  Swiftly glancing about, I spotted Evangeline and Captain Crowcroft, insensible to the world and all its calamitous doings, locked in desperate embrace. I shook myself free of Miss McThane’s attentions and ran toward the couple.

  “There’s no time for that—” I succeeded in raising the captain’s vision from where he had lowered his face close to that of his beloved. “That monstrosity will go off any second now.”

  The man was not so far gone in his adoring reconciliation with the young woman that he was unable to perceive the imminent threat to her person as well as his. Still tightly holding her, he turned his gaze and beheld, as I did, the Colossus picking up speed as Scape piloted it toward the fiercely anticipatory Mrs. Fletcher. Clouds of churning steam trailed behind it, in vivid presentiment of the eruptive force that would soon transform the world around us.

  “Yes—” With an arm wrapped around Evangeline’s shoulders, he urged her forward. “Let us hurry.”

  Our small group swept up Miss McThane with us, quickly heading for whatever safety could be achieved with distance. As we passed by the smouldering ruins of Featherwhite House, I hesitated for a moment, allowing the others to continue their rapid pace as I glanced back over my shoulder. Thus I viewed the climactic event of the Iron Lady lunging forward once more, the flames bursting from her various furnace doors with such fierce heat as to cast aside the last of the attendants shoveling coal within. Her searing visage seemed possessed of such madness as would consume all before it, all that stood between her and whatever apotheosis had seized upon the engines of her desires.

  That was the last I saw. One does not witness such a cataclysm as the one that followed . . .

  One awakens from it.

  I found myself face-down in the cobbled street beyond the grounds of the incinerated townhouse. A vague memory faded within my head, of waves of smoke and steam rolling above me. When before I had been explosively transported, unheedingly propelled from one spot to another, I had had the sensation of flying upon snow-white clouds, as might angels in a vaporous sky. On this occasion, I dreamt—however briefly—that I lay upon the ocean floor, all the universe’s tumultuous events passing fathoms above my head.

  The impression faded as I raised my muddied shirtfront from the cobblestones, over which the departed rioters had stormed, waving their rude torches. I could see no-one else, living or deceased, anywhere near me—my hope was that the others, unencumbered by my delay, had managed to reach some point safely beyond the worst of the explosion’s effects.

  A great quiet seemed to fill the empty spaces about me. For a moment, I thought I might have been deafened by the blast, my ear drums torn to tiny rags within my skull. But then I heard the soft patter of tiny metal fragments raining upon the ground, and realized that what I perceived was the comforting silence that ensues when fearsome machines are at last shut down.

  Scarcely able to place one faltering foot before the other, I staggered back to that sloping rise from which I had previously been able to gaze along the length of the river, out toward where the Houses of Parliament had once stood. In the distance, I could see neither Mrs. Fletcher nor the Colossus. As the smoke dispersed above the city’s smouldering ruins, nothing remained below of their fiery consummation.

  EPILOGUE

  I APPEND these final words from that locale where I commenced, in what seems centuries past. Adventures such as those befallen to me have the inevitable consequence of aging one; it is not our years that make us old, but our experiences.

  Through the window of the inn—that same from which I had fled in both desperate penury and greed—comes to my ear the slow, ponderous roll of the waves heaving themselves upon the rocky Cornish coast. In that time before, I had considered the sound somewhat dreary and oppressive. Such reflects the disordered state of my mind then; now it seems rather peaceful to me.

  As the pen scratches upon the paper, adding sheet after ink-marred sheet to the stack mounting beside the wobbly little table at which I sit, more tranquil thoughts—or at least resigned—slide past me as well.

  Of those monstrous events which I have described, perhaps at tedious length, none were at last sufficient to place me in the quiet of that grave which I once sought. I am confident this seems obvious to the reader. There might still be some curiosity on others’ parts as to the further details of my fate, and the fates of those entwined, however briefly, with mine. It is of those that I now write.

  Concerning London itself, so grievously wounded in both structure and populace by the various explosions, fires, riots, and whatever else through which I had passed relatively unharmed, there is little need to speak. The city’s reconstruction, complete to raising once more the ancient walls and chambers of the Palace of Westminster, is a matter of public knowledge. Perhaps the organs of government housed there, both chastened by fiery events and freed of the overbearing dominance of the late Mrs. Fletcher, will go about the affairs of state with greater wisdom than before. Experience shows that one always hopes as much, but is invariably disappointed. In this instance, however, an exception might prevail. Accounts have reached even this distant locale, of more debris than the smouldering, inanimate wreckage of the once Iron Lady being carted away from the city’s heart, to be discarded upon those rubbish-laden riverbanks where I had once woken. Many of the steam-bearing pipes that had snaked through the busy streets and up the sides of buildings, having been irremediably damaged or become the object of general loathing by the citizenry, have been torn up and removed as well. Smaller, less intimidating sources of heat and power—coal-burning hearths, straining human and animal muscle, and the like, as existed before— have seemingly replaced those great, grim enterprises that had laced the countryside like a shining spid
er’s web. The steam miners, released from the scalding dangers of their previous employment, are free to return to gentler, more agrarian pursuits. Whether these kinder arrangements will persist—who can foresee? Humanity possesses an infinite capacity to—as my late acquaintance Scape might have put it in his distasteful futuristic patois—screw up a good deal.

  More of that odd figure in a bit. I first consider it necessary to assure those with an interest in the affairs of young romantics— as who is not?—that Lord Fusible’s daughter, Evangeline, did indeed become the bride of a greatly reformed Captain Crowcroft. Her father’s wealth had been greatly diminished in the wreckage of his own gambling schemes, the fraudulent wagers put forth by himself and his associates being confiscated by the Sea & Light Book upon exposure of their manifest chicaneries. Those gentlemen had all been unwitting pawns in the larger conspiracies swirling about them—as had been as well Evangeline’s husband, Crowcroft’s remunerative fame erased by the revelation of the walking lights as a vast concocted fiction. These lovers scarce considered that much of a loss, however, sustaining themselves on their renewed affection for each other and the honest labour that Crowcroft expends helming a fishing trawler out in the North Sea. Whatever dangers he faces there, they must seem light with comparison with those hideous vices to which he had once been addicted, and of which Evangeline has graciously forgiven him. I doubt that either has occasion to remark openly upon the conniving Stonebrake’s death caused by that maddened blow from Crowcroft’s fist, all evidence of what the world might ordinarily consider a crime having been consumed in the fiery destruction of Featherwhite House. They are wise in letting such an incident fade from memory. Join with me in wishing that once storm-tossed couple well, in whatever more tranquil harbor they have found.

  My occasional nemesis Scape arrived at such a place as well, though not in this world, but the next. He schemes no more; the examination that his companion, Miss McThane, made of the scene at which the Colossus of Blackpool had exploded, annihilating both itself and the closely embracing Prime Minister, convinced us that no atom of he who had steered the lighthouse there remained connected to another. Scape was mercifully vaporized in an instant, suffering little in his translation to the afterlife—or at least I attempted to assure Miss McThane of as much, her grief at his loss being apparent to me then. I had believed the two of them to be more conspiratorially than emotionally bound to each other; at that moment I realized I had been in error about this.

  Perhaps in eulogy to the vanished Scape, over the next few days Miss McThane explicated much that had previously baffled me—to wit, why such an individual, so committed to nothing but his own welfare, had sacrificed his very life in bringing about the Iron Lady’s destruction. As we had made our own way from the still-smouldering city, she had revealed that his actions in doing so had not greatly taken her by surprise. There had been some alteration in his character, unsuspected by me, of which she been aware.

  In this regard, it is with some satisfaction that I am able to relate that the late Mrs. Fletcher, the secretive, hidden initiator of so many schemes, had yet been cozened by one who she had believed was but a cat’s-paw in her own devisings. It had been not to fool me, but to fool her, that Scape had maintained his former predatory bearing. When in actuality, other and nobler purposes had prompted his every move, including the operation of the establishment Fex, by which he had gained not only access to the Iron Lady, but her confidence as well.

  That which had so thoroughly transformed a rogue to something rather more altruistic, Miss McThane informed me, had been occasioned by Scape’s renewed application to himself of that device created by my father, which had enabled him not only to see the Future, but become a creature of those days to come. His doing so had been prompted by nothing grander than the desire to concoct more potentially lucrative schemes, all of his earlier ones having come to naught.

  “He got the idea,” Miss McThane said to me, “that if he could see even further into the future, he’d know what was really coming down the turnpike, and he’d be able to figure out some way of making a profit from all that. At least that was what he thought.”

  In the event, however, he glimpsed something else ahead of our kind—and that vision altered him irrevocably. As his companion related to me, through the mechanism of my father’s device, Scape had seen a world yet to come, that proceeded not on the powers of either steam or coal, but on some hideous dark substance leaking out of the very bowels of the earth, blackening the oceans, leaving the sea-creatures and birds mired in tarry waste on the sulphurous beaches. Of whatever this diabolical material might consist, in those days of the Future, something occurred that somehow allowed it to continue emerging, like black blood from a black wound. And no- one in that time to come could halt it. Nor did they even desire to.

  Understandably, this appalling vision had deeply affected Scape. At first, Miss McThane had thought this glimpse of the Future was really nothing more than a nightmare, a figment of her partner’s imagination, than some approaching reality.

  “Is such,” I had enquired of her, “what you believe now?”

  She had replied that she no longer made so confident a dismissal— the change in Scape’s every aspect had been so profound. All of his most recent scheming, the whole masquerade of himself and Miss McThane as the Fex establishment’s Duncan MacDuff and Valvienne, their conspiracies with Lord Fusible and the other directors of Phototrope Limited, even their deceptions practiced upon Mrs. Fletcher, had been but to lay hold somehow of all the necessary pieces of the Vox Universalis device created by my father. Scape had not been certain whether or not the whales could be communicated with, but on the remote chance that it was indeed possible, an overwhelming desire had been formed within him to accomplish exactly that. He had even achieved some initial success, Miss McThane informed me, using the pipe organ aboard the Mission’s ship upon which the order’s founder, Father Jonah, had been wont to sermonize to the long-suffering aquatic mammals. What results Scape achieved had been sufficient to spur him on to even greater exertions to bring the Vox Universalis into operation, in pursuit of complete and accurate communication with the immense sea-creatures.

  These revelations explicated one minor mystery that remained from my disagreeable adventures. Miss McThane assured me that it was very likely one of the whales with which Scape had conversed that had capsized the boat in the Thames by which I had been rescued from drowning by Evangeline and her father’s servants. The whale, having formed a desire for further discourse with Scape, had swum up the Thames to find him, fortuitously encountering our small vessel instead. On the recurring principle that stranger things had happened, this explanation sufficed for me. But one other item in this regard still puzzled me.

  “What was it,” I had enquired of Miss McThane, “of which

  Scape had desired to speak to the whales?”

  “Don’t know,” she had somberly replied. “Maybe it was to warn them. Of all the bad stuff that’s going to happen to them someday.

  All that black gunk leaking into the ocean, whatever the hell it is. Or maybe . . .”

  Her voice had dwindled away as she spoke to me. “Yes?” I had prompted.

  “Maybe . . .” Miss McThane had turned a melancholy little smile toward me. “Maybe he just wanted to apologize to them. Who knows?” Indeed. Of that singular individual, whose machinations had so disrupted my life, nothing is left to impart.

  In his absence, my fate and that of his companion became entwined. Fearing the worst, Miss McThane had diverted a portion of the Fex establishment’s revenues to a personal cache, all in pounds sterling. Our last errand in the devastated London was to retrieve that money. Having done so, however, she had no further destination in mind. But having also formed some slender affection for me—motivated perhaps more from pity than any stronger emotion— she threw her lot in with mine.

  Upon making a return to the Cornish coast, that being a locale both remote from London yet still somew
hat familiar to me, we discovered that my former host, the proprietor of the shabby seaside inn where I had once attempted to press forward my own self-destructive resolution, had died from an excess of spleen and alcohol. The deceased innkeeper’s heirs were open to the offer of purchase made by myself and Miss McThane. Thus I find myself here, nominally the proprietor of that facility from which I had once anticipated being carried out feet first and lifeless.

  Having launched upon this partnership, which provides a modest sustenance to us, other relations between Miss McThane and myself were eventually initiated, sufficient for the nearby villagers to speak of her as Mrs. Dower. We do not disabuse them of this domestic notion. Whether she ever thinks of Scape, or dreams of him when I raise my own head from the pillow and gaze upon her sleeping beside me—I do not know. She does not speak of him, or of that world to come. Her silence on those matters is more than acceptable to me. At this moment, as I reach the bottom of the final sheet of paper upon which I intend to write, she is downstairs in the scullery and kitchen, going about some house hold task before extinguishing the lanterns and coming up to bed.

  I turn my head and gaze out the window at the sea, its presence revealed more by the sounds of its unrelenting motion than anything caught by the eye. I cannot hear them, but I know the whales are deep in those dark waters. And I wonder what they say to each other.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  K. W. JETER is the author of Morlock Night, the cyberpunk novels Dr. Adder and The Glass Hammer, the noir sequels of Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human, Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night, Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon, dark fantasy, and other visionary science fiction.

  In 1987, when discussing Infernal Devices to which Fiendish Schemes is the direct sequel, he coined the term steampunk. Jeter has been nominated for various awards, including the Prometheus Award, Philip K. Dick Award, John W. Campbell Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Noir Nebula Award.