The Constantine Affliction

by Tim Pratt

  “With Her Majesty’s permission, I will continue,” Oswald thundered through his loudspeaker. “I have created marvels, my friends, yes, to improve your lives and fill your days with pleasure, but I feel I must take this opportunity to warn you of certain dangers I have discerned in my recent study of the skies. Look above you, my friends, and behold the strange lights the press have dubbed the aurora anglais.” Most of the crowd obediently tilted their heads backward, and Pimm did, as well. Dusk was upon them now, and the sky was lit with the jewel-toned threads of the aurora, shifting and shimmering above. “These atmospheric anomalies may be heralds of some greater danger,” Oswald said solemnly. “I have, with my great telescope, observed strange movements upon the surface of the planet Mars. I fear the mysterious denizens of that red planet are engaged in some vast building project, much as our own nation might build a fleet during war time. Could the changes we’ve seen in our sky be some part of some alien plan? Are these lights a misguided attempt to communicate? Or some strange preparation for their arrival on our shores?”

  The crowd murmured in alarm—and some in healthy disbelief, Pimm noted, resisting the urge to shout “Balderdash!” himself.

  Oswald nodded as he paced back and forth on the stage, like a minister warming to his sermon. “Oh, yes. There is life beyond our sky, strange life. And you will be disturbed to hear… these creatures have visited us before, in isolated ones and twos, not unlike scouts for an invading force. I know. Because I have captured them.” He gestured toward the back of the stage, and a bright alchemical light shone down on a pair of men who wheeled a huge glass-walled tank toward the front of the stage.

  Many in the crowd screamed. Several ladies fainted. There was great agitation among the few government officials present in their special raised seating area. “Do not fear!” Oswald shouted, and his booming voice was so powerful that, remarkably, the crowd seemed to obey—at least that portion of the crowd that retained consciousness. “The creature is safely contained.”

  The creature was broadly similar to the one Pimm had fought at the warehouse, though rather smaller, the size of a cow instead of an elephant. It was a sickly yellowish color, and in addition to tentacles it sported bony protrusions like the beaks of raptors. The creature slapped its tentacles against the glass walls of its tank in a frenzy, trying to attack everything at once—Oswald’s huge voice must have driven it mad, seeming to come from every direction. Oswald thumped his fist on the side of the tank. “I have developed methods to kill the creatures, though they are fearfully resilient—”

  Someone in the crowd shouted something, though the only word Pimm caught was “river.” Oswald seemed to hear it too. He nodded. “Yes! Yes, the strange creatures sighted in recent months in the Thames are almost certainly further scouts from Mars, the vanguard of a force of exploration… or invasion. My colleagues urged me to keep these discoveries secret, or at most to do a private presentation for certain members of the Royal Society. But I believe—and your Queen supported my belief—that the people of our great empire deserve to understand the dangers that face us. We have the power of technology at our disposal, and we can protect our city from any threat, no matter how terrible. Most of the wonders I have to unveil tonight are weapons capable of destroying these beasts—or even controlling them, to turn the invaders into weapons for our side. If these creatures from the stars do attempt to invade our shores, they’ll find we’re more than a match for a bunch of wriggling beasts. God save the Queen, and God save England!”

  The crowd cheered, though a bit uncertainly, and who could blame them? Oswald was not a great orator, and the subject matter was disorienting in the extreme. The people had come expecting to see lightning and levitating men, and instead they were presented with a monster in a jar and wild stories of invasion from a neighboring planet. Perhaps Oswald overestimated how easily it would be to manipulate the people of London with fear—

  One of Oswald’s stagehands led out a goat on a tether. “But I do not wish to mislead you,” Oswald said. “These creatures are ferocious. They are driven into a killing frenzy by the scent of fresh blood. In order to protect yourselves, you must understand the extent of the threat before you. Allow me to demonstrate.” The stagehand offered Oswald a cane, and Pimm frowned. Did the man intend to bludgeon the goat to death and feed its corpse to the thing in the tank? That was showmanship, of a sort, Pimm supposed…

  But the stick was a sword-cane. Oswald drew the blade and tossed the scabbard aside. Before Pimm could shout “No!”—not that it would have helped—Oswald had brought the sword down cleanly across the animal’s neck, sending a jet of blood across the stage, and the goat’s head rolling into the crowd.

  The creature in the tank was in a frenzy, though not noticeably more so than it had been a moment ago. A terrible buzzing hum began, far louder than the similar noise back at the warehouse. Wind began to whip across the park, blowing Oswald’s jacket around him wildly. He raised his arms overhead and bellowed, a shout loud enough to overwhelm the screams of the people in the park, most of whom were now trying to stampede away. “Do not be afraid!” Oswald shouted. “This is the sort of atmospheric disturbance that heralds the arrival of these creatures. Perhaps they have come to seek the return of this prisoner! But no matter. We shall show them our might! We shall drive them back! We shall—”

  Pimm watched in fascinated horror as a slit appeared in the sky over the stage, as if the twilight air was a bit of cloth being rent asunder. The space beyond the tear was a ghastly sort of blackish purple… and then a pale green tentacle unfurled from the slit, wriggling down like a root questing into the Earth. Oswald didn’t see the tentacle, and the people pointing and shouting made no impression on him—he probably assumed they were still pointing at the beast in the tank beside him on the stage, which had gone strangely calm, as if awaiting rescue.

  The tentacle—which was easily fifty feet long now, thick as a tree trunk near the slit, but tapering to the diameter of a child’s arm at the end—reached down and wrapped itself around Oswald, trapping his arms against his body. The scientist dropped the device that amplified his voice when the thing seized him, but his scream as the tentacle lifted him into the air was loud enough for anyone to hear. He struggled, but he was no match for the tentacle’s strength, of course. The terrible pseudopod withdrew into the tear in the sky, taking Oswald with it, and the sound of his screams ended abruptly.

  A shower of red pattered down from the hole in the sky—a rain of blood in miniature—and spattered the false Queen, who sat watching these events with all the equanimity one would expect from a machine. Her guards attempted to get the false Queen to rise, to hurry her away to safety, but they found her immovable—the automatons had metal bones, and were far stronger and heavier than mere humans, Pimm supposed. The mechanical Queen showed no inclination to do anything but sit in her throne and watch the madness overtake the park.

  Pimm had hoped that Oswald’s death would be the end of the horror, but of course, the creatures had no intention of passing up the appeal of an open door. Whether Carrington’s claims about the goals and motivations of the creatures were true or not, they were undeniably a grave danger.

  As Pimm watched, three of the elephant-sized creatures precipitated out of the air before the stage, materializing like a vile fog. They were each different from the others: one appeared as half a dozen globular sacs, like oversized fish eggs, joined by spokes of bone, and he watched in horror as it rolled over an injured woman and somehow absorbed her into one of the translucent orbs of its body. Pimm could see the woman trapped inside the globe, pounding her fists against the membranous sac, mouth open in a scream he could not hear.

  Another was like a great black pudding made of mouths. He’d read something once about how the angels of the Mohammedan were terrifying creatures, each having seventy thousand faces, and each face with seventy thousand mouths, and each mouth with seventy thousand tongues. This creature was not quite so blessed with excess
mouths, but it had easily several hundred, lined with tiny triangular teeth, and long, narrow, tonguelike protrusions emerged from each mouth by the dozens, lashing about wildly, wrapping around any fleeing people they encountered, and dragging them toward the waiting, drooling maws.

  The third beast resembled a snail out of its shell, but where a snail had only two eyestalks, this one had dozens, and while some of the stalks were topped with eyes, others were topped with pincers, or serrated mandibles, or shapes like fleshy flowers, or oozing orifices of uncertain purpose. As it slithered along the ground, it left a smear of thick, clear ooze behind that made the grass turn black and smoke.

  Most of the crowd had rushed away from the stage before the things appeared, but those who’d been knocked down or injured in the stampede were easy prey for the creatures. And still the horrible engine at Pimm’s back hummed. How long would the portal remain open? How many more creatures would arrive? Just looking at them was enough to make Pimm’s mind reel, and he wished desperately for a drink. Ten drinks. All the drinks. But he had to act… somehow.

  Ellie obviously hadn’t been able to disable an engine, either—but had she made it to safety? Was Ben protecting the Queen? And where was Freddy? Had she brought weapons? Pimm could surely use a weapon now.

  He crouched and began to hurry across the park, on a path tangential to the marauding monsters, thinking of finding his fellows, but he stopped when he glimpsed a group of figures approaching from the direction of the river. There was something familiar about the way the one in the lead moved, favoring one leg, and the man towered over the other people crowding behind him—“Adams?” Pimm said to himself. It was unmistakably the giant anatomist, with a crowd of milling figures at his back. Pimm rushed toward the man, hoping his keen mind might have some insight into how to destroy the engines, or fight the beasts. “Adams!”

  The giant looked toward him, face hidden behind his white mask, and held up a hand in greeting. The people behind him staggered to a halt, and as Pimm got closer, he slowed his approach. They were women, he thought, but bald, and dressed in rags, and their faces were animated snarls, all teeth and drool and snapping ferocity. “Adams?” Pimm said weakly.

  “Lord Pembroke,” Adams said. “What a pleasant surprise. I came here to destroy Sir Bertram’s Exposition by perpetrating acts of horrendous violence against the spectators… but I see my presence is hardly necessary. Sir Bertram certainly did make a lot of plans, didn’t he? I had no idea he planned to summon monsters such as these. They make me feel positively human myself, by comparison.”

  “Adams!” Pimm cried. “Listen to me. These monsters were part of a plot by Oswald, to frighten the city into obeying him, but he couldn’t control the beasts. Now he’s been killed, and the whole city is in danger—”

  “Yes,” Adams said. “I see that you are right. But, I am compelled to ask… what does any of that have to do with me?”

  Pimm gaped at him, and after a moment, Adams shrugged, turned, and began to trudge back toward the Serpentine, his hissing, spitting bodyguards following along after him.

  Vanquishing Swords

  “It serves him right,” Winnie said, gazing up at the torn piece of the sky where Oswald had vanished. “But what a dreadful way to go.” They were still near the iron-wrapped engine, out of the path of the general stampede, and as they watched, several recognizable men from the government leapt down from their raised seats and raced past the women as fast as their portly physiques would allow. The red-faced, sweating, terrified men looked like caricatures of themselves in Punch, Ellie thought.

  “There are more creatures, Winnie.” Ellie gestured with her rapier, careful not to depress the button that would send electricity coursing through the blade. “Two… no, three. They are ghastly.”

  “And there are many more to come, I don’t doubt it.” Winnie sighed and lashed her rapier a few times. “I hope Pimm is concentrating on how to sabotage the engines, because I can’t see how we can accomplish much. But we can do something about the beasts… if we have the courage.”

  “I think it is less courage, and more simple necessity. If we do not confront the monsters, who will?” Ellie thought of her fiancé—she could barely remember his face, anymore—of the way he’d been crushed by a machine in the shape of an elephant. Now she would face something the size of an elephant, but of a rather stranger shape. “Winnie,” Ellie began, “if we should die, I wish you first to know, in the short time we have been acquainted, you have become a great—”

  “No, no.” Winnie shook her head fiercely, blonde ringlets bouncing. “Changing from a man to a woman has largely upended all my old views about the differences between the sexes, but when facing battle, I think it’s best to go with something a bit more stirring, a bit less soppy, so let me quote a great poet who happened to be a man: ‘From this day to the ending of the world, we in it shall be remembered—we few, we happy few, we band of sisters; for she today that sheds her blood with me shall be my sister.’”

  “I don’t think that’s quite as the bard wrote it,” Ellie said.

  Winnie tightened the straps on her battery. “He used to wear a dress and pretend to be a girl on stage, didn’t he? He can cope with a certain degree of infidelity to his original pronouns. Well, sister? Shall we?”

  “Cry havoc, then,” Ellie said, “and let slip the dogs of war.”

  “You mean bitches, surely.” Winnie grinned, and together, they went striding toward the nearest of the beasts, swords crackling and sparking in their hands.

  Winnie looped to the right, and Ellie to the left, as the great snail-thing extended its hideous stalks toward her. Ellie brought her rapier down in a looping arc, severing the nearest stalk, and the creature drew in all its questing stalks, like a turtle withdrawing its limbs into a shell. She danced forward, extending her arm, and jabbed the tip of the rapier into the thing’s slick gray side, then depressed the switch in the sword’s handle. The sword vibrated in her hand, making her flesh tingle, and the creature’s stalks burst forth again, smoke issuing from the ends, as its whole hideous body quivered like a bowl of jelly.

  Ellie turned off her sword and, glancing down, saw one human leg sticking out from underneath the monster, its foot clad in a ragged boot. The stink of sizzling, rotten meat assailed her nostrils. She considered whether or not to vomit—doing so might make her stomach feel better, at least briefly—but in the end had no time. The great globular monster was lurching in their direction, heaving itself forward on its grotesque arrangement of sacs, and Winnie was already darting toward it, slashing at the egglike globes. Great torrents of clear fluid poured out of the holes she made, and the people the thing had consumed slid out of the openings, too, some coughing wetly and trembling, most already dead.

  Ellie joined her, trying to free those who’d been absorbed, until finally the beast was a limping mass of broken spheres, and then she electrified it, and sent it to sizzling death.

  Winnie whooped and joined her, hair matted with sweat, eyes bright and alive, cheeks hectic and red. “They don’t stand a chance!” she shouted. “At least, until the batteries run out!”

  But as they paused to catch their breath, two more creatures appeared, seeming to emerge from shadows—but there were no shadows. One was a mass of twisting tubes, or perhaps a nest of living red snakes, its body in constant squirming motion, while the other was like an immense yellow jellyfish, ringed by tentacles that branched and bifurcated into flailing lashes like a score of cat-o-nine-tails. More shapes shimmered in the air, monsters about to achieve immanence.

  “Pimm had better kill the engines soon,” Winnie said grimly, and before Ellie could respond, she moved to fight these new monsters.

  “You must help me!” Pimm cried, pursuing Adams. “If not for me, then for England!”

  “I am not an Englishman,” Adams replied.

  “For the sake of human decency, then!”

  “I am not human,” Adams said.

  That took Pi
mm aback, but he soldiered on. “Then, damn it, Adams, help me for love!”

  Adams paused in his journey toward the river, tilting his head, then turned and regarded Pimm. “Love? You speak to me of love?”

  “Yes, damn you! The woman I love is back there in that melee, somewhere, Adams. You told me that love was the only thing you cared about, so I ask you, as one man to another—and I don’t care if you’re human or a troll or a god from Olympus, you are still a man—will you help me save the woman I love?”

  Adams stared at him for a moment. “I would have to be Hephaestus, I suppose,” he said at length. “Of all the gods of Olympus, I mean. I have the limp, and I’m fairly good at working metal. And Hephaestus was married to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. But you, Lord Pembroke, do not love the woman to whom you are married, and do not try to tell me otherwise—”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Pimm said. “My wife is really my oldest and dearest friend, Freddy. He was transformed into a woman by the Constantine Affliction, so he changed his name to Winifred and I married her so she wouldn’t be cast out on the street, friendless and alone. I thought you knew, Abel Value was blackmailing me on the subject, you’re the one who did the tests proving Winnie and Freddy were one and the same—”

  Adams nodded slowly. “The hair samples? Ah. No, I was merely asked to do the test. I was not told why, nor given the identity of the subject. Value did not share his plans with me—we were not intimates. Who, then, is this woman you profess to love, Lord Pembroke?”

  The conversation was maddening, and surreal, with the screams and sounds of violence Pimm could hear not so far behind them. “Her name is Ellie,” Pimm said. “Ellie Skye. She is a journalist. She is brave. She is… she is… dash it, she’s the writer, not me. I do not have her eloquence—which is one of the reasons I love her.”