Whitechapel Gods

by S. M. Peters

  Oliver glanced at the mechanical man. He stood in the same pose, still and unreacting. “He’s just over at the altar. I think he’s communing with his gods, or perhaps with the Boiler Men.”

  “Do you trust him, lad?”

  Oliver watched that still form and reread the passages of the Summa Machina in his mind. “Yes. I do.”

  “Good enough for me.” Hews reached into his pocket. “I appear to have lost my gun. Shame on me.”

  “You can have my knife.”

  Hews chuckled. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with just a knife, lad. I hesitate to ask…”

  Oliver shook his head.

  “Ah. He was a good lad. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.” Hews found Oliver’s eyes. “Don’t regret, my boy. We all came into this with our eyes open and we’ll leave it with our consciences clear.”

  Oliver nodded.

  “Consciences clear, right? And don’t mourn me.”

  Oliver felt a new knot twisting his innards. “How bad is it, Hewey?”

  “I can’t feel my legs,” Hews said. “Nor my right arm. I don’t think I’ll be moving again.”

  “Christ, Hewey…”

  “Don’t mourn, lad,” Hews said. “Barbara’s waiting for me. I’ll be in good hands.” He took a long, calm breath. “You’ve never asked about your mother, lad.”

  The knot grew tighter. “I never wanted to know.”

  “Well, I’ve been waiting twenty-odd years for you to ask me, lad.”

  “I still don’t want to know.”

  “Well, since I’m the one who’s dying I will set the topic of conversation.” Hews took another slow breath. “Do you remember her?”

  Oliver sighed. “A little. I remember I used to go out looking for her.”

  “We couldn’t keep you in the house, lad. Even at that age you would disappear for a few nights and then we’d find you sleeping on the factory floor.” Hews chuckled and his eyes glazed over with remembrance. After a few sharp coughs, he went on. “I woke up one night because I heard someone breaking a window into the factory. Barbara shoved me out there with a lantern and my pistol wearing nothing but a dressing gown.”

  Oliver didn’t need to hear this. Maybe Hews needed to tell it, and he was right: of the two of them, he was closer to dying. Damn you and your courtesies, old man.

  “Shadwell was crawling with ruffians in those days, just after the wall went up. I came in all fire and brimstone and to my surprise, the intruder was a woman. She saw me and bolted, jumped right through a back window and left you behind.”

  Hews grew serious a moment. “Her eyes glowed, lad.”

  Oliver sunk into his shoulders. “She was a crow.”

  “Aye. I thought you should know.”

  Oliver considered the implications, rejected them. “Thanks, Hewey.”

  Baron Hume stirred. With a scraping noise much like a yawn he lifted his head, then turned and approached.

  “Herbert Francis Lewis,” he said.

  Hews tried feebly to tip the crushed hat still sticking to his head. “Mr. Hume.”

  The baron looked at both of them, and at neither. “A Roman road is clear and leads to the palaces of gold and marble.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Hews. “One of your men will need to escort young Oliver there. I’m afraid I’m not fit to move.”

  “Wait,” said Oliver. “What about the Underbelly? Would you please withdraw the Boiler Men from attacking the Shadwell Underbelly?”

  The baron’s head tilted in his thoughtful pose. “A sparrow chirps for its flock, but a rooster crows to herald his own magnificence.”

  Oliver glanced at Hews. “What did that mean?”

  “He’s asking you why you’re making the request.”

  “Ah.” Oliver turned back to Hume. “They’re no threat to you or to the Boiler Men. They’re simply trying to survive.”

  The baron nodded. “The sun setting…”

  An explosion. Copper gears and springs sprayed out to clatter on the marble floors. Steam rushed into the room. All three turned to see that one of the two copper doors to the chapel had been bent inward, and sported a monstrous hole in the centre.

  A second explosion broke through the other door, bending it from its outer edge and knocking its delicate mechanisms loose. Steam rushed in through the hole, followed by white electric arcs.

  It could only be one weapon.

  “Get back,” Oliver said, searching for and finding the tiny derringer in his pocket. He fumbled some bullets out with his crippled arm and tried to load.

  A string of masculine grunts sounded in the hall, then the damaged doors caved under the weight of a steel battering ram.

  “Who is it?” Hews asked.

  Oliver slipped the second bullet in and clicked his weapon shut. “Scared.”

  The doors burst at the second hit and eight men stormed in, clad in workers’ soot-laden clothing. They dropped the ram and began winding flashers that hung on their belts.

  Hume turned to face them. Oliver watched in horror as all eight men suddenly clutched at their eyes, toppled on their faces, and slid to a stop on the marble floor. There had been no impact, no arcs of fire or projectiles leaping from the baron to these men, and yet pools of blood had already begun to seep out from under their bodies.

  Then a third shot, and Baron Hume’s head parted into ribbons of iron. Steam rushed along the path of the bullet, carrying deadly lightning that lanced into the baron’s chest, scorching the white shirt and tailcoat. The empty husk fell to the ground with a clang.

  Oliver leveled his gun at the door and stayed silent.

  A man strode through, barrel-chested and built like an ox, with a broom moustache of brown wires that nearly covered his face. On his shoulder rode the brass-hued weapon Oliver had last seen in von Herder’s workshop.

  “That’s far enough, thank you,” Oliver called.

  Faster than lightning, the man drew his army revolver and shot Oliver twice in the chest. Oliver found the impacts no more jarring than swift jabs with a broom handle. He returned fire.

  The steam rifle fell to the floor and cracked the marble. The man faded to his knees, eyes wide with surprise, then keeled forward and ceased to breathe.

  The derringer fell between Oliver’s feet. He coughed and choked, as sharp convulsions distorted his chest and fluid rushed into the two bullet holes. Oliver gasped as the bullets spat out onto the floor, splatters of white paste following.

  “We’re alive,” he said, to Hews or to himself or to the dead people littering the room. “Isn’t that just a lark?”

  The space swallowed his words. Not even breath disturbed the settling air, aside from his own.

  Hews had expired sometime during the fight.

  “Did I ever thank you, Hewey?” Oliver asked. “If I didn’t, I meant to. I’m a proud bugger, but I guess you knew that.”

  He wished his new vision would allow him to see Hews one last time before he went off to heaven.

  It isn’t right, you dying like this after all you’ve done for me and for your homeland.

  He wiped tears from his eyes. The pus and grime transferred from his hands simply made them water more. “I hope to see you at the Gates, Hewey.”

  And it isn’t right, me still being alive.

  Nothing could be right in Whitechapel until the day was done.

  With agonising slowness of the joints, Oliver tipped forward until he landed on his belly, then crawled. It took him perhaps ten minutes to drag himself to the altar. There, he stood, using the marble block for support, and grasped the baron’s cane.

  It was mahogany wood, polished darkly and oiled. The handle and foot were sheathed in silver, both completely without style or scrollwork. Oliver examined Hume’s top hat a moment, then set it back down.

  A good hat for a good man, right, Hewey?

  He tested the cane, finding he had to hunch like an old man to make use of it, but it let him hobble. The white fluid that ran now l
ike blood in his body had already begun healing his bones and straightening his muscles.

  He started walking, past Hume’s inert body, past the remains of assailants and friends. He hobbled out into the Long Hall, and there, stopped to look from the windows.

  He did not know which tower he saw far away to his right, but it was in flames. He saw the antlike shadows of people running, and the occasional flash of gunfire. No doubt the cloaks had gone mad all over the city, and perhaps the Boiler Men as well, deprived of their director. Without the constant light of the Stack illuminating the underside of the clouds, nothing more of Whitechapel could be seen. He watched a burning tenement break from its supports and plunge into the downstreets.

  At the other end of the hallway, he found another set of broken doors, these ones not shattered but scored by flasher hits—a crude but fast way to open certain types of locks. Beyond, a lift shaft plunged far down into the heart of the Stack. Oliver stared down it and saw the lift itself clacking its way up out of the dark. It reached the level and halted, spitting steam from mechanisms beneath it.

  Metal fingers an inch and a half in diameter hauled the gate aside. Two Boiler Men waited for him to board. Oliver stepped between them and turned to face the door.

  He looked out one of the hall’s windows until one of the Boiler Men shut the gate, knowing he might never see Whitechapel again.

  The mechanisms beneath the lift churned, and his descent began.

  The echoes of gunfire faded from the vast space between the Underbelly and the Shadwell Concourse. Bergen waited, Gasser in hand, steam rifle close by. It had been the fire of Atlas rifles—unmistakable.

  He turned to the sailor.

  Phineas’s eyes gleamed glassy and bloodshot from the small gap between his collar and hat brim. “I can’t hear the cloaks anymore,” he said. The sailor’s trembling flapped the folds of his ulster coat.

  “It is quiet,” Bergen said. Even the ordinary bustle of the Concourse, usually all too audible from beneath, had softened to an ambient hum. “What do you hear in the Underbelly, Macrae?”

  The old man withdrew further. “Women talking. Babies crying. All your men fiddling with their guns.”

  Bergen held still a moment, listening for that subtle absence of sound—like the stilling of birds and insects and leaves—that signaled the presence of a predator.

  “Where is Heckler?” Bergen asked.

  Phineas answered without hesitation. “Moving up the Parade with two men.”

  Bergen nodded. “There is someone else afoot in the city, sailor. He is a young man who walks without sound, but he would be badly wounded, perhaps breathing heavily, and he will be carrying a knife.”

  Bergen surveyed the street. Bergen and Phineas sat in the shadow of the last wagon, now pulled from the centre of the Parade and lodged against the wall of one of the two buildings closest to the lift. From that point, Bergen commanded a good view of the Parade, except where it dipped beneath itself and wound around the thick beams that cut the Underbelly to hold up Shadwell Tower. Nothing moved.

  “Find me this man.”

  They sat in silence a few minutes.

  “I can’t hear shit,” said Phineas.

  Bergen had made certain the street was empty. The men had been crowded into the single building to the lift’s left, along with the wounded and that fussy but capable doctor that Oliver had fished up. A concentrated resistance would deter the prudent predator, but one man, alone and without support, was an inviting target.

  So where are you, boy?

  Phineas’ presence was an unfortunate necessity. Bergen told himself he had no intention of protecting the old man if Penny showed.

  “The Ironboys are moving,” Phineas said. “They’re gathering somewhere near the old square.”

  “Where is that?” Bergen asked.

  “About above the Parade three or four streets up from Coll’s,” said the sailor.

  “What are they doing?”

  Phineas snorted. “Damned if I know, Kraut. It’s not like they bloody talk to each other, is it?”

  Bergen stilled the impulse to chastise the man for his tone. He knew too well that bluster was a coward’s only courage.

  Heckler and his two escorts appeared from an alley mouth three streets down. An easy shot from this range, if Penny followed them. But no, he would never be so careless.

  Heckler approached, white-faced and drawn. His moustache had thinned pitifully as sweat stuck the hairs together. He and the two men with him stank of fear.

  Bergen kept his eyes roving: alleys, rooftops, lift, bends of the Parade.

  “What have you found?” he asked.

  Heckler squatted behind the wagon and swallowed before speaking.

  “It’s the Wordsworths, suh. The mister’s got his throat cut and the missus’s been stabbed.”

  “He is trying to draw me away.” Bergen looked at the young man with narrowed eyes. “Have the tunnels been breached?”

  “No, suh,” Heckler said. “The Bemets hid in their cellar. Someone broke off the lock and kicked through the trapdoor.”

  “Why were they not in the tunnels?”

  Heckler shrugged, looked away. “Some folk wouldn’t go, didn’t want to leave their homes. It ain’t like we can force ’em to.”

  “You can. You should have. This is not a time to have the city spotted with stray civilians. Why didn’t you tell me about this attack, Macrae?”

  “Because I didn’t bloody hear it, Kraut. The noise from those God-cursed guns almost broke my skull.”

  Bergen grunted in response, and let his eyes wander again, let his instincts guide them, point to point, shadow to shadow.

  After a few minutes of silence, with Heckler and his men shifting like admonished schoolboys, the American spoke. “Suh, should we be here? What Ah mean is, shouldn’t we be guarding the tunnel doors?”

  Bergen tolerated the question. “If we gather there, the attack will come there. We gather here because this location is of no value to us, and will yield no power to our enemies should they take it.”

  “But with that killer out in the streets…”

  “He has not the strength to break the tunnel doors, nor the voice to convince the women to open them. And in any case, they are not his quarry.”

  Without warning, Phineas jumped in place and slammed his palms over his ears.

  Bergen shot to his feet, followed instants later by Heckler, already shouldering his Winchester. The two nameless militiamen struggled to their feet with more trepidation than haste.

  Thunder broke out in the vast space.

  Bergen localised the sound, pinpointing it to the upper Concourse, a spot some six blocks away. As he watched, bits of concrete from the roads above chipped off and fell. Larger pieces followed them, crashing onto the tenements below, and then an entire segment some twenty feet across tore away, braces and supports and all, and crushed the building beneath it.

  “Gather the men,” Bergen ordered, not turning away to see who obeyed.

  Soft gaslight shone through the hole in the upper concourse onto the rising cloud of dust. Then the light grew dark, and exactly two dozen shapes dropped through the hole in perfect unison, shapes too tall and round to be men. Bergen watched them smash through the roof of their landing spot, and watched the whole building come down in a splash of debris.

  They would have to extricate themselves. Perhaps two or three minutes.

  He turned to his army, his ragtag group of labourers, bakers, wheel menders, and plebeians—old, feeble, bowed with years of work or with rickets.

  “Do as I say and you may live,” Bergen said. “Run from them. Shoot them from windows and dark alleys. Lead them astray from the tunnels. If you are swift they will not catch you. Any man who stands his ground deserves his death.”

  He holstered his pistol, reached down, and hauled the steam rifle onto his shoulder.

  “I will do the hunting.”

  He rapidly divided them into tea
ms. Some he assigned to run, others to shoot from rooftops and windows and keep out of sight as much as possible.

  “Do not stay in one location,” Bergen said. “Spread them out as much as you can and if caught in a motion, always retreat. If you get a shot from safety, aim for their weapons and their mechanisms.” He pointed to three teams and told them to run past the bystreet and closer to the Blink. He ordered three more to run into the tenements on the east side, where the streets curved and connected without any order. The rest dispersed as they saw fit, with one team remaining to guard the wounded.

  “Heckler, you are with me.”

  The American nodded and stepped up. Bergen was not surprised to find that Phineas had vanished.

  As the men ran off down the Parade, Bergen looked Heckler over. The lad stood ready and expectant, capable and confident. He was how Ellingsly should have been.

  “Your task is to cover me, boy,” Bergen said. “With this weapon I am not mobile, and you may need to draw fire away from me.”

  Heckler nodded without hesitation. “Yes, suh.”

  “Good.”

  The rumble of Atlas rifles drew their attention. Bergen simultaneously felt fear building in his gut and a smile growing on his face.

  “This time Bergen Keuper will win the day,” he said aloud.

  They began the hunt.

  Scared’s mind manifested as a field of ice, bordered on each horizon with savage, unscalable crags, and torn across by a savage wind. The sky was dark and without stars, though strings of sparkling fluid crisscrossed it. Aaron struggled for each step, casting about with his unique vision for Scared’s trapped other self.

  Beneath his feet lay images frozen in the ice. These were the memories and nightmares of the creature that called itself Scared, locked away where they could not hamper him. Aaron glanced at them only a moment, for he found he couldn’t stand to watch the atrocities that played themselves out over and over under the surface: things done to women, to children, done with chemicals and knives and bare hands. They were monstrous. Still, Aaron could not help but marvel at the mental discipline required to erect such a place, and at the strength of the personality that had done so.

  The images told him a story, a story of a once-good man, corrupted by sinful thoughts, by guilt and shame and lusts he could not control. The man had done terrible things. Though he longed to be caught and imprisoned, the police did not connect him to any of his crimes; he was a respectable man, beyond suspicion. Finally, unable to bear the weight of his shame, he had withdrawn deep within, and abandoned his life to the monster that called itself John Scared.