The Constantine Affliction

by Tim Pratt

  “I have heard of such cults,” Ellie said. “Fools wearing robes, drinking blood and chanting incomprehensible syllables under bridges, all while gazing dumbly up at the stars.”

  “Call us fools if you like,” Carrington said equably. “Our gods are on the verge of arrival—I daresay I can withstand a few more days of your contempt. Oswald thinks he knows how to control the creatures, because I led him to believe that, and contrived situations where he could influence their behavior, using knowledge passed down through my family. But when Oswald opens a portal tonight to frighten the populace, he will find his techniques fail, and he will be devoured along with the rest. Consuming hundreds is just how our gods say hello. Fear not. His great dome will never be built.”

  “I confess some confusion as to why you would choose to worship such creatures,” Pimm said, remarkably calmly, Ellie thought. “The Church of England only wants me to tithe, but you willingly serve a church that requires you to be devoured?”

  “Oh, our gods will need servants, but even their servants will be as kings to the rest of humanity,” Carrington said. “The transformation of our world—our universe—into a suitable habitation for their kind will not be accomplished quickly, and they will require local assistance. Those of us so favored will be raised high, to rule among the others of our kind.”

  “To rule as head dog in a pack of pets, you mean,” Winnie said.

  “Just so,” Carrington said. “But everyone is someone’s dog. At least I shall have the most powerful masters.” He began to chew on his lower lip, drawing blood, and Ellie wondered if he’d gone suddenly mad.

  “We will accept no threat to our sovereignty!” the Queen thundered.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Your Majesty,” Pimm said. “As Miss Skyler says, these are the prattlings of known cultists and lunatics, and there is no truth or substance to them—”

  Carrington spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. “There,” he said, blood running down his chin. “It seems like magic, I know, but it’s not—the area has been primed already, this is where Oswald did his first experiments. The cages where we locked you up were used to house the first creatures that… came through. That bit of blood on the floor just serves to call their attention, just as blood in the open ocean can draw the attention of sharks.” A strange humming sound filled the air, accompanied by a smell like burning lavender, and a change in pressure, like the sudden onset of a storm, but even swifter and more profound.

  “Prepare to meet your new masters,” Carrington said. “And, shortly after, to meet your maker.” He cackled as the air around them tore itself apart.

  An Uncouth Beast

  Pimm grabbed Ellie by the hand and dragged her away. His hair was standing on end, floating about his head in a cloud, and Ellie thought her own hair must be doing the same. Ben roared and stumbled toward Carrington, then staggered back as what seemed to be a net of lightning wove itself around the man as he laughed on. Once they drew away from the chair, the air pressure seemed to return to normal, with the frenzy of sparks and strange odors seemingly confined to a circle some ten feet across, not quite centered on their captive. Even the terrible, head-filling humming noise was diminished once they stepped away from that circle. Carrington’s mad laughter, alas, was just as loud as ever. “What is happening?” Ben cried, looking about him, perhaps trying to find an enemy he could actually fight.

  “I fear exactly this is exactly what Carrington promised,” Pimm answered, one hand in his pocket, doubtless touching some weapon or another. Ellie wished fiercely for pockets of her own, and pistols to put in them. “Some beast is being summoned, or revealed, or translated to this world.”

  Winnie had leapt away from the chair as soon as Carrington spat blood on the floor, and now prowled around the edge of the disturbance, her head darting this way and that, tearing tarps off of piles of crates, prodding piles of metal with Pimm’s spent walking stick.

  “Freddy!” Pimm called. “What are you doing, and can we help?”

  “There must be machinery!” she called. “Projectors, or engines, or something, the blood may have triggered this, but all this chaos is coming from somewhere—Ah ha!” She shoved aside a few loose boards and tore away a dropcloth to reveal a surprisingly delicate contraption the approximate dimensions of a hatrack, made of curved brass metal, glass tubes, and odd crystalline protrusions—though the crystals were not purple, fortunately, only milky white. Up close, the thing buzzed like a beehive, a sound that made the small hairs on the back of Ellie’s neck seem to vibrate. “Smash it up!” she shouted, and Ben, clearly aware that such destruction was his metier, picked up a length of broken wood and proceeded to lay about the contraption, shattering crystals and warping metal, making a terrible racket. The buzzing hum first stuttered, then lowered in pitch, then ceased entirely.

  Winnie grinned savagely at Carrington. “There, you see? It’s far more difficult to build things than it is to destroy them.”

  Carrington chuckled. His hair still stood on end, giving him the appearance of a demented dandelion. “Well done. You closed the door. Of course, you also destroyed the magnetic containment field. Not all cages are made of iron bars, you see—after certain ugly incidents following the initial summonings, Sir Bertram invented a sort of magnetic pentacle to hold the beasts in place, better than iron can. Anyway, you were too late. I am reminded of a certain proverb about closing a barn door after the horse has already—”

  Something lashed out from the darkness, a slick shadow that moved with the blurring speed of a hummingbird’s wings, and Carrington’s head vanished in a burst of red, like a tomato struck by a bullet. They all stared as the headless body slumped to one side in the chair, but remained held upright by the ropes. Off in the dark, something moved across the floor, making a sound like fish flopping in the bottom of a boat, and the squelch of boots in mud, and the patter of rain on a roof, and the mewl of a gravely-injured kitten—and other sounds beside.

  Pimm edged behind a stack of crates, beyond the limits of the pool of light, and gestured for the others to join him. They did, though the Queen came slowly, and with exaggerated dignity. “I think—” Pimm began, and the shadow lashed out again, smashing one of the crates into flying splinters. They all hunched and huddled, behind what remained of the barrier of crates, waiting silently, but the thing did not attack again.

  “I don’t know if it sees us,” Ellie whispered. “But it seems to hear us.”

  “Can we kill it?” Ben asked, his own voice hoarse and low.

  “The things in the Thames have been killed,” Ellie said. “By guns and bludgeons and axes. My paper ran an engraving of one, or part of one—the creature came apart in the water like a rotten cabbage when the boatmen tried to pull it out, and all that remained was a bit of ragged tentacle. If they are truly the same sort of creatures, then yes, this one is mortal.”

  “Hunting it would be easier if we could see,” Pimm whispered.

  “It’s a shame you didn’t bring the monocle I made you,” Winnie said.

  Pimm looked at her blankly, then closed his eyes for a moment. He patted his vest pocket. “Ah. I do. I have it here.”

  Winnie rolled her eyes. “It might have done you some good earlier, don’t you think?”

  “You are right, as always, dear wife.” He screwed the lens—tinted strangely green, Ellie noted—over his right eye, closed his left eye, and peered around the edge of the crates. He drew his head back, face pale. “It’s… bigger than the things in the Thames. The size of an elephant, easily.”

  “What does that lens do?” Ellie asked.

  “Lets me see in the dark,” Pimm said. “One of Freddy’s inventions, some chemical trapped between two pieces of glass. Remarkable, really. Though it makes everything a sort of ghastly green color.”

  “Our fighting men could make great use of such a device,” the Queen said.

  “I suppose I have to hunt the beast, don’t I?” Pimm said. “Heavens. I hunt criminals, of cou
rse, but in practice, that usually means I just point out their whereabouts to the police.”

  “I will assist you,” Ben said. “I can distract the thing, at least.”

  “You may all assist me—excepting of course Your Majesty,” Pimm said. He reached into his pocket and removed a handkerchief, unwrapping it to reveal a pair of rounded, off-white objects that might have been bird’s eggs. “Freddy, would you mind showing Ellie and Ben how these work?”

  “Oh, how lovely,” Winnie said. “You brought my favorite things.” She held up one of the eggs. “This, my friends, is a pocket distraction. The alchemical fluids that light our lamps are quite stable, but with a few…. alterations… they can be made more volatile. I’ve sealed a bit of the altered fluid inside these hollow clay balls. Simply throw them against a hard surface with sufficient force to smash them apart—it takes a bit of effort, I didn’t want them breaking in Pimm’s pockets so they’re fairly thick—and you will be rewarded by a most unpleasant burst of noise and light.” She grinned. “I call them ‘bangers and flash.’”

  “I’ll go this way,” Pimm said, pointing left, “and you lot go that way, and fling the bangers at the wall, get the beastie’s attention.”

  “And what will you do?” Ellie asked.

  “Shoot it,” Pimm said. “And if that fails, Ben can beat it to death with that length of wood he found. Seems straightforward enough, eh?”

  Ellie put a hand on his arm. “Pimm. Do be careful.”

  “Oh, well,” Pimm said. “If you insist.” He reached over to squeeze her hand, then slipped off into the dark, Ben following.

  “Shall we?” Winnie said, and passed over one of the bangers.

  “I am supposed to report the news,” Ellie said. “Not become it.”

  “Ah, but there’s no better vantage point than the thick of things,” Winnie said.

  Ellie had once shared that perspective, but she was reconsidering now. Give her a high place with an unobstructed view rather than a spot at the center of a melee any time. But Pimm was going to face a monster, so the least she could do was make some noise. At least she couldn’t see the thing. Hearing it was bad enough.

  Hearing it was bad enough, Pimm thought, but seeing the monster was even worse, especially with it rendered in the horror-show green tint the monocle lent all things that passed before it. He’d told the others the beast was as big as an elephant, and that was true, but it didn’t look much like an elephant. It looked like a quivering mass of chicken fat shot through with dark structures like the branches of a tree—some sort of skeleton, perhaps, or nerves, or blood vessels, or something without analogue in the animal kingdom. The monster had no discernible eyes—or even a head, for that matter. Tentacles, or things that looked enough like tentacles to justify the name, sprouted from the mass at irregular intervals, waving like reeds whipped by inconstant winds. Worst of all was the fact that the monster looked blurry—Pimm could not focus on the beast, and continually had the sense that it possessed more limbs, more mass, tucked somewhere just out of sight, hidden around a corner that didn’t actually exist. The thing moved with a ghastly sort of undulation, leaving grotesque smears across the floor. Oddly enough, the beast had no discernible odor. Pimm supposed there must be some scientific explanation for that. Oswald could probably explain it. Pimm would be sure to ask him just before the man was hung for treason. Or perhaps Oswald would be beheaded. That was traditional, and if it was good enough for Carrington….

  Pimm heard the crack of breaking porcelain and shut his eyes just before a blindingly bright flash of light burned the world orange even through his squeezed-tight eyelids. Ben, who hadn’t been prepared for that level of brightness, cried out in the dark behind Pimm. Even more disorienting than the light was the noise, the sound of a thundercrack resounding in the confined space. The beast made no sound—a scream would have been nice, some indication that it had been discomforted—but when Pimm opened his eye, he saw the creature lashing its tentacles wildly and smashing its bulk repeatedly into a pillar, clearly frenzied or disoriented by the noise. Pimm raised his pistol and fired, but he may as well have shot at a muddy embankment for all the impact it made. The beast paid no attention to the assault at all.

  Pimm began to wonder if the men who’d “killed” this creature’s smaller cousins in the Thames had actually killed them at all, or merely hacked off pieces, leaving the rest of the beasts to submerge, still alive. Perhaps losing a tentacle for one of these creatures was no more traumatic than a man losing a fingernail or a lock of hair.

  “What do we do?” Ben said, or at least, Pimm thought that was what he said—the ringing in his ears made it difficult to be sure.

  “I don’t know,” he tried to say, and then the beast turned on him, lashing out with its pseudopods. The only reason Pimm and Ben weren’t struck down was because the beast’s limbs smashed into one of the warehouse’s support pillars first. They stumbled backward, ducking behind another contraption of metal and crystals and brass. Pimm cast around desperately for something he could use as a weapon. Fire? He had his flask, and while it would be a shame to waste its inflammable, intoxicating contents on an assault, perhaps he could improvise some sort of incendiary bomb—

  Something flashed in his vision, on the far side of the creature—a long streak that looked like a spear, piercing the creature’s side. The beast stiffened, went entirely still—tentacles sticking up at strange angles—and then shuddered, its flesh rippling like the windblown surface of a lake, until it slumped. Its body began to collapse into itself like a melting snowman, and now there was a smell, of burnt meat and acidic chemicals.

  Pimm rose, looked at Ben, shrugged, and made his way around the deliquescing mass of the great beast. Ellie and Freddy stood near the alchemical lamp and the remains of Carrington, chatting as amiably as if they were at a dinner party. “What did you do?” Pimm asked, his voice probably entirely too loud due to the ringing that continued in his ears.

  “It was Ellie’s idea,” Freddy said.

  “Oh, no,” Ellie said, blushing. “I only said I wished you had not discharged your cane—I wondered if an electric jolt might have an effect against such a creature. I know electricity can cause muscles to contract, to jerk, to spasm—and this thing seems nothing but a muscle.”

  “But I did discharge my cane,” Pimm said.

  Freddy nodded, then beckoned and led him to a third engine like the one Ben had destroyed. “Yes, but there’s other electricity in the world, darling. These things are rigged to run on batteries—more sophisticated batteries than any I’ve ever seen, I must say.” Pimm squinted, noting what looked like a metal urn, remarkably similar to the vessels he’d seen lining shelves in Adams’s workshop. “With a little tinkering, a great expanse of wire, and a bit of effort, I turned a length of broken metal into a harpoon. We attached the wire to the metal, let Ellie fling the spear, and once our weapon was firmly seated in the creature’s side—like sticking a finger in a pudding—I threw the switch.” She gestured, and Pimm saw the twisted filaments extending from the engine toward the monster’s corpse. “I expended the battery’s entire charge and ruined the engine, but I can’t say I mind.”

  “Lucky thing he had more than one of these engines around,” Pimm said, thumping the side of the device.

  “Oh, he needs at least three,” Freddy said. “The engines connect with one another, you see. One engine is nothing, just a point in space. Two engines connected, well, what good is that? With two points all you can make is a line. How are terrible otherworldly monsters supposed to enter our universe through a line? But with three points, you can make a triangle, and while that is not the traditional shape for a door, it proves sufficient to create a field these things can pass through. Assuming the engines are strong enough, you could move them farther and farther away from one another, and make a very large triangle… and, thus, let through very large beasts.”

  “Carrington said these apparatus were smaller than the ones Oswald pla
nned to use tonight,” Ellie said.

  “We have to get to the Exposition,” Pimm said.

  “We do,” Freddy said. “I think I saw one of these engines, you know, being set up for the event. I had no idea what it was—something magnetic, I would have guessed, some new technology Oswald had created to show off to his admirers. But Pimm… the device was far larger than this one. I don’t know where the other engines at the Exposition are positioned, what the dimensions of his portal are going to be… but it wouldn’t surprise me if he intends to turn all of Hyde Park into a door for these creatures to pass through.”

  An Orderly Departure

  “You threw the spear, eh?” Pimm said, falling into stride with Ellie as they walked out of the warehouse. The Queen, of course, led their procession, with Ben at her right hand—she’d apparently decided to adopt him as bodyguard, to the man’s obvious discomfort. He had his hands full lugging two of the batteries salvaged from the other arcane engines, too. Winnie had plans for them, apparently. She came along behind, seemingly lost in her own thoughts, probably mentally crafting devices of electric mayhem. “Well done,” Pimm said. “I suspected you had marvelously dangerous qualities from the first moment I met you.”

  Ellie thought, not for the first time, how unfair it was that one could not suppress a blush. “Winnie insisted her aim was horrible, so I agreed to give it a try. It was no great challenge—the creature was as broad as a barn, and it had blundered close enough to the light for me to see its shape looming there.”

  “I shall resist the urge to call you Queequeg,” he said.

  Winnie laughed behind them. “You certainly know how to flatter a girl, Pimm!”

  But Ellie brightened at the remark. “You’ve read Mr. Melville’s The Whale, then?”