Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  “Prometheus can’t carry all the materials we’ve gathered here,” the Comte said. “We’ll need a bigger ship–one that can carry us across the ocean, to some quiet island in the Caribbean. Do you have money, Ned? Money enough to charter a clipper?”

  Ned laughed. “I had enough to charter a vessel from the Hermitage Stairs to Purfleet,” he said, “but not enough to take me much beyond Grays. The cabaret at Jenny Paddock’s is a great success, but the bulk of the profit is Jenny’s. Your widow...”

  “I cannot go to Jeanne,” the Comte said, flatly. “To her, I am dead, and so it must remain. If you see her again, Ned, you must not tell her that you have seen her husband. In fact, you have not seen her husband. Jeanne’s son is the Marquis de Belcamp now; until he has a son, there is no Comte de Belcamp.”

  “Sawney and I killed Tom Brown,” Ned observed, “who died with his conscience clear. Mr. Wood and I had already disposed of the phantom Percy Balcomb once and for all. So who are you now, my friend? I cannot imagine that James Davy or George Palmer is a suitable candidate for resurrection.”

  “In Purfleet,” said the ci-devant Comte Henri de Belcamp, “I am Arthur Pevensey, a Cornishman–but I can’t say that I like the name as a permanent fixture. My adversary, as you heard just now, has taken the name of Mortdieu, although I call him ungrateful Lazarus... but we have no time to waste on such fancies. If the secret police are on to us, and have Gregory Temple for their bloodhound, we must move quickly. If we cannot buy or charter a better ship, we must do what we can with the one we have.”

  “I asked you a question a little while ago,” Ned reminded him. “Are you really raising the dead?”

  This time, the ci-devant Comte condescended to reply. “Yes,” he said. “We are. Nor are we the only ones, for our monopoly was cut short far sooner than we’d planned. Of the first dozen we brought back from the dead, eleven were doltish–and most of them still are–but one was not. If only he had been as docile as the rest! He stole the secret from me... although I have to confess that it was not actually mine by right of discovery. Now he is our rival–our enemy. We’ve clashed a time or two already, but he seems to grow stronger every time, while our progress is frustratingly slow. Your friend Ross is now our most promising pupil, having overtaken John–although John had the finer mind while he was still alive, and may yet surpass him again.” He stopped suddenly. “You’re having difficulty believing this, aren’t you, Ned?”

  “A little,” Ned confessed. “Jack Hanrahan couldn’t quite believe it, even though he saw Sawney dead and resurrected. I told him that electricity must hold the key–and I suppose it must, since you have bought James Graham’s magical electric baths.”

  “Well done,” said the ci-devant Comte. “I used to attend Humphry Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution, you know, when I was Tom Brown–I called myself after him, in one of my many impostures. I could have made the discovery myself, if only I’d dedicated myself to such work... but I had to go to Australia as you know. How’s your mother, Ned?”

  “Quite well,” Ned said. “I’ve heard Mr. Davy myself, although Faraday is the man of the moment now. I don’t have your intellect, but I’m a great admirer of what the Tories call Jacobin science. You ought to be aware, Monsieur, that I’m a radical now, and a man of conscience. I’m all in favor of slaying the dragon of death, but there’s a...”

  The ci-devant Comte cut him off. “Would you like to see Monsieur Patou raise the dead with your own eyes, Ned?” the blond man asked. “Would you like to make certain of the truth of what we’re doing?”

  “Is that wise?” Patou objected, twisting his lips into a frown. The physician pulled out his watch and looked at it. “Is it even time?”

  “Yes,” said the ci-devant Comte, rising decisively to his feet. “It is wise, and it is time. Ned has been sent to us by Providence, in our hour of need, and he needs to know what we are about if he is to commit himself to our plan and bring us more recruits. As for the time, we have no leisure left to let them simmer, and we have a new batch ready to bathe. Lead the way, my friend.”

  Patou put his watch away, and went to the door. Ned stood up and followed him, with the former Comte bringing up the rear. The candles still had not been lit on the top floor, but the corridors below were illuminated. There was a murmur of noise from most of the rooms they passed, but no one came out as they passed by, and the only other people Ned saw were servants, of every common hue but grey.

  They went down from the ground floor to the level where the kitchens were, but Ned discovered then that there was a further set of cellars even further below ground, sealed by a heavy door with a massive iron lock. Patou did not have the key, and had to let the blond man pass him by to open it.

  There was a glimmer of light within the vault, but it was rather distant, and Ned waited on the threshold until Patou had lit a lamp. When the physician had done that, he led the way again, into the bowels of the Earth.

  The cellars were damp, and had the reek of the salt-marshes that confused both shores of the estuary from Rainham to the Isle of Grain. They were not cold, however. There was a massive fireplace at one end of the chamber into which they had come, where a fire was burning behind an iron grille. It vigorous flames provided the light that Ned had glimpsed from the corridor outside the doorway, but it was only Patou’s lamp that showed him the other contents of the room.

  Forewarned by Jack Hanrahan, Ned was not entirely surprised to see six capacious bathtubs, each one equipped at one end with a fearsome mass of supplementary equipment. Ned cast his mind back to the demonstrations he had seen at the Royal Institution, but the Voltaic cells and Leyden jars he had seen there bore little enough resemblance to the lumpen masses gathered here; only the wires that sprang from their earthenware crowns assured him that they must be generating powerful electrical currents, which were being fed into the fluid in the baths.

  The fluid was not water; it was far more viscous, and far more active. It bore some slight resemblance, in its texture and transparency, to frogspawn–but instead of tiny huddled tadpoles, it held human bodies. The bodies must once have been white, or brown, or black, but they were now the same shade of grey that Ned had seen the night before, in Sawney’s exposed flesh and that of the giant.

  Ned barely noticed that there were more bodies heaped up in an unseemly fashion in the corner of the room most distant from the fire, presumably awaiting their turn in the baths. He was far more interested in the corpses floating beneath the surface of the uncanny fluid, as if suspended between Heaven and Earth, mortality and eternity.

  Patou handed the lantern to his taller companion, then rolled up his sleeves. He went to the first bath. The physician carefully pushed his right hand into the fluid, and touched the neck of the thin man who lay there, naked and seemingly asleep. “No pulse,” he reported. “No revitalization of the skin. Irrecoverable, I fear.”

  Patou moved on to the second bath. This too was a man–only one of the six vessels held a female–but one of sturdier build. The Frenchman did not seem optimistic as he began his examination, but his face brightened almost immediately. “Yes!” he said. “The fluid is flowing in his veins, and his flesh has recovered its consistency. He’ll be ready...”

  “Wake him now!” his master commanded.

  Patou pursed his lips, but he did not complain. Nor did he delay. He plunged both arms into the slimy mass, and took the floating man by the shoulders, slowly but firmly altering his attitude. After ten or twelve seconds, the man’s feet were on the floor of the bath, and Patou pulled the head free from the fluid. The stuff clung to the grey man’s face, but Patou immediately set about brushing it away, exposing the strange skin to the air.

  The man who had been lying peacefully asleep in the bath spluttered and coughed, and fluid vomited from his mouth–although Ned guessed that it was coming from his lungs rather than his stomach. Patou tried to force the man to lean slightly forward, while making sure that he could not slip and fall, bu
t he was too short to carry out the task effectively. The lantern was abruptly thrust into Ned’s hands, and the man who had once been Tom Brown lent his own height and his own hands to the work of waking the man who had been dead.

  More than a minute passed, but the grey man’s eyes eventually opened. All the color had gone from their irises; the pupil was set in a globe unreddened by the least blood vessel. Ned inferred that the resurrected dead no longer had red blood in their veins but something else–something gifted to them by the fluid that had revivified their necrotic flesh.

  While Ned struggled to hold the lantern steady, the ci-devant Comte looked the living dead man straight in the eye, and said: “What is your name? Can you remember your name?”

  The man returned from the dead did not look around, as a man waking from an ordinary sleep would surely have done. He did not say: “Where am I?” or “Who the Devil are you?” He looked back at the man who had been Comte Henri de Belcamp and John Devil the Quaker, and he furrowed his colorless brow, trying to do as he had been told, and remember his own name.

  Time went by; the question was repeated.

  In the end, the former dead man spoke. “John,” he said, in a voice thick with the effects of the fluid still clogging his mouth. The syllable was clear enough, though.

  His interlocutor did not seem entirely pleased with the answer. “John,” He repeated, scornfully. “Can no one find a way back from the Underworld but men named John? Can all the burkers in London not find me a Theophilus or a Walter? Or is there some infection spreading from brain to brain, which fills them all with the same false identity? What surname, dolt? What is your family name?”

  The man raised from the dead made no protest at the abuse heaped upon him–quite unfairly, Ned thought–but only tried meekly to do as he was bid. Alas, it seemed that the task was too much for him, at present.

  Germain Patou reached out to take his friend’s arm. “Relax, mon ami,” he said. “Best to wash and clothe him while he’s still as tractable as a new-born. Your old friend has seen what he needs to see–he might be more use to us talking to Ross, continuing the good work he began last night. Ross has been asking incessantly for his old friends Sam and Jeanie, and that’s a healthy sign, although it’s become a trifle tiresome. If we only had time...”

  Perhaps that was tempting fate too far, Ned thought, as the footman who had taken him upstairs came hurrying through the door in great agitation.

  “You must come at once, sir–there’s trouble at the dock, aboard Prometheus. Someone’s trying to seize the ship!”

  Chapter Five

  The Battle for Prometheus

  Minutes later, Ned was bundled on to the back of a cart with a dozen other men–none of them grey–while weapons were brought from the house and handed out. Patou had been instructed to stay behind, but the footman had climbed aboard. Ned was offered a brace of pistols, but refused–pistols, he knew, made very inefficient clubs once they had been discharged. He refused a saber too, for being too unwieldy for a man of his height, but he accepted a cutlass whose blade was no longer than the length of his forearm.

  What he wanted to know, however, was against whom he might be wielding it. He asked, but only received a single word by way of an answer: Mortdieu.

  Even when the cart moved off into the gathering darkness, its two horses having been whipped to a rapid trot, there was too much confusion about him for Ned to do anything profitable–except to keep his head down, lest he take an accidental blow from a cudgel. Once the hubbub calmed, however, and a sense of purpose overcame the mob, he was able to make his way to his commander’s side.

  The streets of Purfleet were poorly lit, even by comparison with Low Lane, and the sky was cloudy, but there was no fog hereabouts and the air seemed crisp and clean.

  “This is more than I bargained for,” Ned said, candidly. “I’m a good messenger, but a terrible soldier. Stealth is my forte, not swordplay–and to be honest, I don’t know enough as yet to know what cause I’m supposed to be fighting for. Why is this Mortdieu attempting to steal your ship?”

  “I told you–he’s my ungrateful Lazarus,” said the ci-devant Comte. “Germain’s greatest triumph, and bitterest defeat. You’ve seen enough to know that the brain is not as easy to revitalize as the body. It seems that the flow of the mind is much harder to regenerate than the flow of the blood. Patou has brought 50 men and women back to life in those baths of his–more here than in Portugal, though three in every five we buy are too far gone even now. Of those 50, barely half can construct a coherent sentence, and only a dozen seem able to remember who and what they were in life. Germain is gaining in skill with every day that passes, and he has worked more miracles than you have so far seen, but there is a very great deal to be learned, and his successes have been as unpredictable as his failures. Mortdieu is the only one, so far, who was capable of understanding what we have done for him–but instead of being grateful, he tried to steal our secret for himself, to make his own grey army.”

  “I see,” Ned said. “You have stolen the fire of Heaven in order to make an army of angels, but you have spawned a rebel Satan who is amassing a demonic army of his own.”

  “Don’t mock me, Ned,” whispered the ci-devant Comte de Belcamp, with a quality of menace in his tone that Ned had savored before. “You must fight for me now, if you’re with me still–but if you prefer to cut and run, I’ll understand. I should have come to you earlier if I wanted time enough to explain my cause and my plan. There is no time now, alas–but I’d dearly like your help, if you’re willing to offer it. Not as a fighting-man, for you don’t have the stature for that kind of work, but as a trusted aide.”

  “I have a good life now, Monsieur,” Ned murmured, after a moment’s thought. “I’m as curious as a cat, it’s true, and not without ambition–but I need to know what your purpose is, mon ami. To free Bonaparte from St. Helena and build an empire in the Indies, that I understood... but I’m a radical now–a red republican in my heart of hearts–and I’m no longer prepared to sell my conscience as easily as I once was.”

  “This is no mere matter of empire-building,” said the former John Devil, his voice so slight now that Ned was sure that none but he could hear it. “This is greater still, and will change the world forever, if it is not nipped in the bud by foul treachery. It’s immortality, Ned, if we only have time to master its evolution. It’s the end of the empire of death and the empire of fear. Tell Gregory Temple that, if and when he questions you again. Tell him that I’m the least of his enemies now, and can save him from the worst if I can only win the necessary time and he can put the past behind him. Tell him that I can help him live forever, if only I can overcome my nemesis, and he can overcome his bitter heart. Tell him that Mortdieu’s the one who needs to be stopped, if he can do it...”

  The man who had been John Devil the Quaker–and still kept up the pose, on occasion–allowed his voice to trail off. The cart was already drawing to a halt on the quay, which was only slightly better lit than the streets.

  Ordinarily the docks would still have been at work at this hour, but Prometheus was the only sizeable ship at the dock tonight. If she had the same reputation here as she had among the watermen of the city, that was not at all surprising.

  The living men jumped down one by one, lifting up their weapons. The ci-devant Comte de Belcamp leapt over the side of the cart and landed like a predatory cat, ready to lead them. There was little or no time to evaluate the situation. Ned stood up, and craned his neck in order to see what he could of the brawl that was taking place on the deck of the Prometheus. It was mostly a play of shadows, but there were lanterns attached to each mast. He could not tell whether the white, brown and black faces on deck were outnumbered by grey ones, but there was a considerable struggle going on. Having counted heads, though, Ned concluded that the recently-arrived reinforcements would be more than enough to win the fight in a mater of minutes. It seemed that Mortdieu’s raiders had been held at bay long enou
gh.

  The reinforcements in question did not hesitate in their charge. They were met on the gangplank, and had to fight their way aboard, but Ned could see that the resistance was weak, and that the would-be pirates knew that they cold not win. The erstwhile attackers were retreating now, scattering as best they could. One or two contrived to leap ashore, and Ned heard a sequence of splashes as others tumbled into the water–perhaps including some of the ship’s defenders as well as its attackers. He squinted into the gloom, trying to identify grey faces among those of more vivid color, but the light was too poor.

  Ned wondered how hard it might be to kill the resurrected dead for a second time, given that they no longer had red blood to bleed–but he deduced that it could not be as hard as all that, given that they still had beating hearts to stop, and throats to cut. The might be grey, but they breathed air, and must take in sustenance. They could not be immortal.

  Could they, he wondered, produce children of their own? Could they produce grey children of their own? That question might, in the long run, be the key to their potential relationship with humankind.

  Ned dropped his cutlass, and jumped down from the cart in his turn. He poised himself on his toes to run off into the streets of Purfleet, asking himself how much it would cost him to hire a fiacre to take him all the way to Covent Garden–but he could not hold that thought. Instead, he climbed back on to the cart and craned his neck again, anxious to know how the fight was going.

  He picked up the cutlass absent-mindedly, simply because it was there–but he was glad that he had when he felt the cart lurch as someone stepped up behind him.