I, on the other hand, listened as intently and turned round as often as he.
It seemed to me that I heard a familiar noise in the distance, but I could not be sure how near we might be to some bizarre railway line or extraordinary factory, which might produce such sounds. Then, too, it sometimes seemed to me that shadows appeared at the ends of streets which bisected those pavements along which Uncle Constant rattled. Yet too I was never certain ordinary objects might not somehow have cast these shadows, and besides they were always fleeting.
Meanwhile other people and things moved all round us in the normal manner. My uncle occasionally barged into them, so oblivious was he of anything but the persecuting pursuit.
He never returned from his expeditions by the same route he had set out on, but always via a roundabout circuit. For presumably he was afraid, if the machine of torment was somewhere behind him, he might otherwise meet it head-on.
Uncle’s outings were mundane and sketchy. Sorties upon shops of food and chemists’ emporiums, and once a journey to a well-known and reputable bank. On this last foray, he emerged from the august portals amid cries and clangs, and squirreled down the steps, clutching at his left leg and muttering: “They’re near.” He was obviously in pain, and intercepting his terrified glance, I too looked back along the street.
The vista was thronged with people, and on the road were several carriages. It was apparent that no vehicle could pass unseen, if it were really there. As I gazed, it seemed to me that there was indeed something moving slowly and ponderously under the archway that opened the street. A faint greenish beam was struck from the place that might only be the morning sun upon some harness or other metallic item. My uncle distracted me with a hoarse scream. I turned and saw he had dropped to his knees. A bank-note fell from his hand, and I ran over, stopping the money before someone should snatch it, and next trying to assist him.
“Uncle—”
“Let me go, wretch!” screeched Uncle Constant, hitting me so violently in the chest that I too was flung on the ground. Before I could right myself he was up and hobbling, moaning away.
I then decided that, rather than rush after him in the usual fashion, I would wait at the roadside to see if any unusual carriage came past. I was encouraged in this idea by a repetition of the unlikely noise I had heard before—the chug and whoop of a mad engine, whistle or hooter. Then again, the street was noisy itself and I could not quite be sure.
I waited at the kerb for twenty minutes, by which time all the approaching traffic had gone by and my uncle was completely out of sight.
Irritated, I then stalked back up the road, and found an intersection. Staring down one of the opposing boulevards, I had the impression that something was trundling away there. Before I could go after it, a band of religious choristers enveloped me, and I was forced to give them cash before I could escape. By then, naturally, any hint of what might have been a strange vehicle, or only an optical-illusion generated by sympathy and hope for the unnatural, had vanished.
I returned to my uncle’s house in a bad mood, and he was already indoors, the portcullis down and all signs of life concealed.
After this jaunt he did not venture out again, though I waited for many weeks.
Unfortunately my own life was becoming complicated. I was supposed to be at work upon a new volume of tasteful obliqueness, and had neglected it sadly. Various creditors were restless, and I was already receiving fewer social invitations. My publisher advised me that, unless I took up my employment, the public would forget me, and I feared I would therefore no longer have the money to support my feckless parents, who were just then in the process of buying whole suites of unsuitable furniture, busts of Roman generals, and a black parrot.
Regretfully, I left my post at the low wall opposite to my uncle’s house. It was a fine evening, the west still flushed with dusk, and a lone light burned in an upper window. And far off without a doubt at this moment, I heard it in the stillness, chug chug chug and then its whoop on a high weird note. It was circling at a distance, like a beast of prey, the campfire of that solitary lamp.
But I could no longer stay.
I went to my home, and my novel, so much more real than Uncle’s predicament.
4: THE MACHINE
It was on the afternoon that I delivered the finished manuscript of The Fateful Kiss of Night to my publishers that the last act of Uncle Constant’s tragedy was played before me, and I was pulled irresistibly into it.
A beautiful afternoon of early summer, it had drawn the idle and the pleasure-seekers into the park. As I walked along beside the river the swans glided past like pillows with white necks, and the nurse-maids wheeled their bonneted toy babies up and down in perambulators. Young men pensively reflected in the glassy water, maidens sat reading under the statues, hoping the young men were secretly watching them, which, usually, they were not.
About two hundred yards off, over the wall of the park and its line of tall trees, an ominous sound came and went, and I had glanced that way in a consternation I did not at first fathom. But although an apparatus was out there, it was only a steam engine, resurfacing the roadway with pitch. With a sense of relief or disappointment, I returned my eyes to the picture-postcard scene of the park.
Across the flower-beds lay a lawn, at the centre of which was a coloured bandstand. Here the bandsmen were going at full blast, and on the lawn couples bumpily danced a polka.
The warm day lay limpid on the park with all its safe and proper comings and goings, a postcard view, as I say, into which an unsuitable figure abruptly burst: Uncle Constant.
Of those assembled, I was not the least startled.
How he had come there was beyond ascertaining, he seemed merely to erupt into being. And my premonition of the steam-roller was appropriate. Uncle was as usual in headlong flight. Indeed, he was in the most abject condition I had yet beheld, and through his wheezing, he faintly screamed.
As people hastened from his way, a few turned their heads anxiously to see what it was he fled from, what it was he saw as his head craned at a painful angle over one shoulder. But having turned, they shrugged and one or two made good-mannered gestures relating to insanity, while three pompous gentlemen began to shout for the police.
I also turned, more from habit than from the hope of finding anything.
And so I saw, at last, coming across the wholesome green grass on which little children played and young ladies walked with their parasols, the moving engine of my uncle’s terror.
It was unmistakable. It was tall as the second storey of a fashionable house, and it glided smoothly forward on great black runners. Its look was of a monstrous bathchair, but one which bristled like a porcupine. Pipes and nozzles protruded from it, ornamental and deadly: One glance assured me that each must be a variety of gun. And even as I stared one indeed gave off a puff of dull viridian smoke followed by a quick white flash. And over the merry noise of the park I heard my uncle howl with pain. I did not look to see if he had fallen. My eyes were fastened to the machine of his persecution.
Aloft, on a sort of balcony above the horseless, rolling carriage-front, were packed about ten persons. Perhaps they were men, they appeared to be, and yet...and yet there was something palpably wrong about them which my study unpleasingly revealed. Their dark overcoats were moulded to their bodies in the same manner that wings mould to the back of a black beetle. Their black moustaches quivered and seemed to move of their own will. And their eyes had been goggled over with curious dark green glasses that were faceted in many tiny winking panes.
Above them, and behind, a funnel rose from the top of the machine. Even as I glared at it, one of the riders touched its side with a gloved hand on which, perhaps, there were two or three extra fingers. The funnel responded with a dim glow and a gout of steam burst from the crown. Over the horrible thundering rattle and chug of the vehicle’s progress shrieked a deafening Whoop! Whoop!
Frantically, I at last gazed about, to see if the byst
anders were forced to put their bands over their ears.
But, just as they did not appear to see the machine, so they apparently could not hear it.
Even so, even so. As it trundled its inexorable and menacing way forward over the emerald grass, the children gambolled from its path, the girls increased their pace and swept aside. As if at a whim. Yes, as it advanced, the crowd parted before it, but not one of them paid it the slightest overt attention. Not one—save I. And my Uncle Constant.
He had certainly collapsed, but soon struggled up again. And now he limped and tottered on, striving to escape across the park. How desperate he looked. His face was white and blind with fear. He did not think, it was evident, he could on this occasion get to safety.
The machine went by me. It passed within three feet. I too must have taken some instinctive steps aside.
A furnace heat came from the thing, and the terrible chugging was accompanied by showers of cold green sparks from its runners.
Uncle limped over the flower-beds and rambled out on to the dancing sward. Couples bumped into him and waved him aside. He skirted the bandstand and went painfully on towards the wall.
The machine did not, or could not, improve its speed. Yet its unavoidable quality was somehow augmented by its very slowness, as in a dream.
It ploughed in among the dancers, who bounced and swung from its way, not looking at it, not hearing or seeing it. Unlike my uncle, seeming to have to move in a straight line, it came directly at the bandstand, and there, peculiar protuberances, like the rubbery legs of some enormous fly, poured out and raised the runners, and so walked the whole contraption up into the midst of the band, the top of the machine only narrowly missing knocking off the roof.
The musicians were forced to scramble to the perimeters, juggling their instruments.
And yet—even in this extremity—not one man regarded the invader, and not one lost the beat of his foolish dance.
And then the horror had marched on, and over, and was down on the lawn again, and all the band resettled, banging and tooting the jolly tune without a break.
A fierce ray flashed.
I saw my uncle sprawl headfirst.
Instantly he had pushed himself up, but now he could not rise from his knees. He began to crawl towards the wall of the park.
For a moment I stood at a loss. And then some primal spirit took hold of me. I raced.
I sprinted over the lawn, scattering and possibly felling the polkists left and right. I tore past the machine itself, and felt again its awful heat, and smelled its metals and its odour of a chemical swamp, and of some location inexplicable.
Even past my Uncle Constant I sprang, and reaching the wall, I bolted through the gate.
Outside, the steam-roller majestically moved, and its motion was very like that other one, that wallow of the machine. I flung myself upon the steam engine and wasted no time in hauling myself up its side. The driver was startled as I barged in beside him. I thrust some coins into his palm and cast him out, and he plummeted angrily on to the pitchy road, shouting.
I turned the steam engine with difficulty but with determination, and drove it back through the gates.
My uncle was crawling steadfastly on, but thank God he had the sense to pull himself from my road. I cranked my colossus onward, until I beheld the persecution machine exactly in my path.
It did not veer; perhaps it could not. No expression crossed the faces—if such they were—of its malefic crew. Only the moustaches wrinkled and the goggles glittered, and from the stack of the funnel went up another gout of white and another fiendish whistle.
I sent the steam-roller headlong. With a grinding of gears and a furious hissing, it pounded forward into battle.
Until I could see every beaded decoration on the nozzles of the ray guns, I held to my post. Then I jumped away. I landed in a rhododendron bush. And at that moment the two leviathans came together.
There was an explosion like the Trump of Doom. And then a tumult only like that of some apocalyptic train crash.
A light like an incendiary burst, and out of it huge pieces of things were hurled into the air and dashed all about, boiling and gushing, and black metal rods, wheels, plates, cogs, screws, all types of mechanical and peculiar debris smashed down over the park.
Not a single cry or scream attended this.
But looking up from my bush, I saw the monstrous crew of the machine also, hurtling through space, and they were broken in a way human creatures do not break. Black blood or slime rained all around. It smelled medicinal and acid.
Presently the hurricane ceased, and a great stillness should have settled, but did not, for the park had gone on at its music and its chat uninterrupted.
I stared. Swans swam peacefully among black irregular objects in the river. Young ladies, blood-splattered, danced brightly with their bloodied gentlemen between rivets and black smoking shafts stuck down in the earth like flaming bones. Craters had appeared. And these the dancers carelessly circled. While the band played on, despite the green-goggled heads which had fallen on the bandstand roof, the instruments streaked with blood and coiled with what were, conceivably, alien entrails.
Of the machine nothing but a sort of heaving slag remained. There was little either of the noble steam-roller.
I went to my uncle and helped him up.
“It is over,” I said.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Outside the wall, the driver of the steam engine had left off his complaints. He sat smoking at the roadside, as if that was his only purpose, and touched his cap to me.
I assisted my uncle to his house.
Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance
Daniel Abraham
Daniel Abraham is the author of the Long Price Quartet, over two dozen short stories, and the collected works of M. L. N. Hanover. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and won the International Horror Guild Award. He can be found at www.danielabraham.com. Of the following story, he writes, “It began as a collision between a lecture I heard on the Napoleonic roots of Egyptology, a fondness for the adventure stories of the late nineteenth century, an essay on the pulp master plot by Lester Dent, and the Book of Exodus. It was only as I came to the end of the first draft that I understood what it was really about....”
AS I SIT at my ease, the lights and sounds of my native London wrapped about me like an old jacket, I cannot but marvel at the changes encompassed by my small span of years. The home of my nativity was lit by gaslight. My coming senescence shall be spent in the created daylight of the electrical filament. As a youth, I rode in a carriage pulled by brute animal force. As an old man, I move from club to apartment in machines of steel and vulcanized rubber. I have seen the Great War amplify our worst instincts into a horror that will, by the mercy of Christ, end our warlike impulses forever.
My generation has been privileged to witness the birth of this new age of mankind. Only a handful know the occult roots of this transformation, and that in truth this is not the first age of mechanism, but the second...
—From the Notebook of Aloysius Camden Meriwether, 1919
CHAPTER ONE: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR
Balfour and Meriwether were at their apartments in King Street that evening in November of 187—. The weak autumn sun had fallen not long before, and a chill fog grayed the front windows so that only the sound of the carriage marked their visitor’s arrival. Balfour frowned, his thick brows knitting, and stroked his wide moustache. Meriwether put down his silver flute and closed the pages of the Bach concerti that had occupied his attention. Each man knew what the clatter of those hooves and the rattle of those particular carriage wheels announced.
Balfour rose, took up his brace of knives, and prepared three glasses of brandy while Meriwether exchanged musical accoutrements for his paired service revolvers and signature black greatcoat. By the time Mrs. Long came to announce Lord Carmichael, Her Majesty’s special agent
s were prepared to receive him.
“That coat’s a terrible affectation,” Lord Carmichael said in lieu of civil greeting.
“I’m told the ladies find it charming,” Meriwether replied.
Balfour grunted, bear-like, and thrust the brandy into Lord Carmichael’s hand. His Lordship frowned, sighed, and drank the liquor off. Meriwether’s pale eyebrows rose a degree. This was not to be the gentlemen’s chat which usually began their services to the Crown. Both agents put their glasses down un-sampled as His Lordship nodded to the door.
Moments later, they were in the black carriage, the driver urging his horses to a greater speed than either Balfour or Meriwether considered safe in the present darkness. A cut crystal lamp gave the only light, its flame dancing and shuddering with the violence of their passage. Balfour noted a paleness in Lord Carmichael’s face and the down-turned cast of his eyes.
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