Fiendish Schemes (11 page)

“But what are these things?” I turned my head to enquire of Stonebrake. “That they were created by my father is indisputable— but what is their function?”

“Ah; there you have me at a loss.” He stepped forward and to my side. “Those of your father’s devices that are in the hands of the Royal Society, that were previously in your possession—those have been exhaustively studied by the finest scientific minds in Britain. Some have yielded a few of their technical secrets, yet others remain completely mysterious. These—” He gestured toward the clanking, hissing machines before us. “My backers and I have but recently acquired them, and it took some doing, I might tell you. We scoured the countryside for them, searched through rural estates and abandoned vicarages, followed every clen no matter how faint, spent untold sums—that is, I didn’t personally, but my associates had their cash at the ready. But while our efforts met with considerable success in regard to acquisition, I cannot say we have been equally fortunate when it comes to the understanding of our prizes.”

“My understanding is amiss as well,” I said. “I had been led to believe that the Royal Society had already procured for its own studies all the remaining examples of my father’s creations. It scarcely seems credible that they could have overlooked instances as massive as these.”

“There are limits to even the Royal Society’s resources,” noted Stonebrake. “If not financial, then in regard to the space in which its acquisitions can be housed, and the time that its learned members can devote to them. The result being that the Society, in fact, took to its collective bosom certain of the devices created by your father, and spurned others, leaving those to moulder and rust out in the wild, as it were.” He pointed again to the clanking and hammering machines. “Your father, it would seem, was even more prescient than anyone had conceived before of him. The clever devices by which his reputation was established, amongst those privileged to know anything of him at all, were contrived to operate by that which we term
clockwork,
the unwinding of coiled mainsprings providing the motive force required for the mechanisms to go through their various functions. To be sure, some of those mainsprings were of intimidating dimensions, requiring several men with levers, or even teams of drayhorses, to wind to their tightest constrictions. And of course, little imagination is required to envision the dangers involved with workings built to such scale. When the mainspring of a pocket watch snaps, the broken end of metal might be sharp enough to draw blood from one’s fingertip; the same event, involving a coil of steel vaster than many of this great house’s drawing-rooms, is fully capable of slaying a dozen workmen, the unleashed metal bifurcating them in the blink of an eye. This is not an hypothetical occurrence; indeed, some of the labourers employed here still shudder at the recollection of the deaths of their colleagues.”

Following the direction of his hand, I now observed in the space’s shadows those others, of similar garb to the ill-natured one to whom Stonebrake had addressed his previous requests and orders. The fellow Royston was apparently the foreman of a team of subordinate workers, all busily engaged in maintaining the operations of the devices towering beyond their cloth-capped heads. So intent were they upon their labours that they barely allowed themselves a glance in our direction.

“Such a fate,” I spoke, “would hardly seem to weigh upon their minds now. For these machines are all apparently driven by steam.”

“Exactly so.” Stonebrake nodded in concurrence. “And therein lies the proof of your father’s astonishing prescience. For when he built such devices as these, a source of power adequate for their operations did not yet exist. But build them he did, as though he knew that at some future date that power would come to exist, and in such abundance as to set whirring the entire arsenal of his imagination. In that regard, your father was a greater and more far-seeing intellect than all the members of the Royal Society. For when they went scavenging about the nation, snapping up your father’s creations and freighting them to their headquarters here in London, they did not anticipate, as your father had, how our world was about to be transformed. Any devices they found, large or small, that did not in some manner operate on the clockwork principles of mainsprings and escapement, was considered by them to be merely so much useless ironwork, follies on their creator’s part, inert and incapable of motion—and thus were left behind by them, to moulder and rust away, in sheds and ware houses and lumber-rooms.”

“How many were there?”

Another voice answered. “A damned lot of the bastards; that’s for certain.” The foreman Royston’s glaring visage had come up alongside us. “These’re just the ones the lads call the big ’uns; there’re any number of others, scattered all ’bout this place.”

I turned toward him. “And you’ve restored all of them to operating condition?”

“Most.” He shrugged. “Some of the lot were so rubbished, there were naught to do but scrap ’em for parts.”

“Indeed.” I directed a raised eyebrow at Stonebrake. “And have you and your workmen found amongst all these that great
Vox Universalis,
upon which your schemes depend?”

“No—” A frown replaced the man’s usual and casual smile. “Not yet.”

“Perhaps it no longer exists. If it ever did.”

“We’ll unearth it.” Stonebrake’s face set hard with determination. “Even as we speak, agents hired by my backers are turning over every stone, rummaging through every cupboard, in pursuit of the device. There are some quite promising leads that we are following up, I can assure you.”

Before I could comment upon this resolve of his, a commotion broke out in the farther reaches of Featherwhite House. I could hear voices shouting in alarm, and the rapidly multiplying impact of running feet.

“It’s broken loose!” A workman, out of breath and face flushed with panic, bolted through an adjacent doorway and grasped Royston by the arm. “It’s headed this way!”

“You dolt!” The foreman’s anger was apparent in his starkly widened eyes. “Didn’t I tell the lot of you to keep the thing strapped down? What happened to its chains?”

“Snapped them, it did! As though they were bloody bits o’ string! We did our best, but—”

As though they were a crested tide, bearing down upon us where we stood, the noises increased in volume and implied threat.

“We’d best remove to safer ground.” Stonebrake appeared to know the exact import of the clamour and the frightened workman’s statement. He tugged me by one arm toward the doorway through which we had first entered. “This way—”

His attempted retreat came too late, at least for myself. I needed little encouragement to vacate the spot—I was in actuality already moving toward a prudent exit—but my resulting efforts were of no avail to me. Between one accelerating heartbeat and the next, I found myself rising in the air, a constricting encumbrance circling my chest, pinning my arms to the side. I vainly kicked and writhed in an attempt to free myself, but managed only to twist about in the grasp of whatever had seized upon me, sufficiently to catch a glimpse of its exact nature.

Equal quantities of fear and bafflement surged within me, as I viewed a hideously grinning visage, symmetrical rows of teeth leaking steam through the equidistant gaps between them, and fiery sparks emitted from the perfectly circular eye-sockets. Jointed iron arms, swathed in matted and tangled orange fur, pressed me close to the barrel chest of the animate device. For a machine it appeared to be: caught between partial disassembly and re-assembly, enough of its exterior was absent to reveal the furious reciprocating pistons and meshing cogwheels typical of my father’s design, all encased in a bolted rib cage surmounting a gimbaled base. The contracting and flexing armatures of a pair of mechanical legs, curved and bandied as an elderly sailor’s in form but possessing the exorbitant strength necessary to lurch the entire construction through one spring- loaded pace after another, showed through more rents in the same tatty fur that brushed against my own face.

My apprehension of being crushed to death by the bear-like squeeze of the device’s arms was only partially abated by a relaxing of its grasp about me. Before I could fathom what intent, if any, the mechanism harboured toward me, I was thrown forward, landing upon my chest. Scarcely had I managed to gain a position upon my hands and knees, when I felt the pincer grip of the hand-like extrusion at the end of one of the device’s arms, seizing upon the back of my neck and thrusting with force sufficient to bounce my forehead against the floor. Confounded by the blow, I was scarcely able to direct my swimming gaze back upon the nightmarish vision of the device, red sparks yet flying from the sockets above its fixed ivory grimace.

On many occasions before, I had dolefully thought to myself,
This is the worst day of my life, come at last
. But at no point did that observation seem more appropriate than now, as I felt the device’s other hand at the small of my back, gripping the waistband of my trousers and pulling them downward. In the same moment, I glimpsed through its tangled orange fur, another aspect of its construction that I had not ascertained before. At the juncture of the mechanism’s legs, a third iron appendage thrust forward, of lesser dimension than the others, but still possessed of a dismaying length and girth. A scalding jet of steam hissed from the nozzle-like aperture at its prow. . . .

“The pipe, man; the pipe!” From somewhere beyond my dizzied comprehension, I heard Royston’s voice gruffly shouting. “Take an axe to the bloody pipe!”

To my ear came the sound of the prescribed blow, but I did not witness it. I was set free as the articulated metal hands went limp, their motivating force extinguished. Hurriedly scrambling from the spot at which I had been pinned, I halted only when my shoulder struck the farthest wall. Pressing my spine against the crumbling plaster, I saw one of the narrower steam pipes clanking and thrashing about as though it were a beheaded serpent, white vapours gusting forth from its parted end. A similar pipe, wetly dripping, dangled from the back of the now lifeless device that had seized upon me. As though it were a creation of flesh and blood rather than brass and iron, it slumped upon its haunches, befurred head lolling forward, its sparking eye-sockets now dead and hollow. Behind it, slowly regaining his own breath, one of the workmen leaned upon the handle of the axe with which he had deprived the device of its ability to carry out its wicked intents.

“I trust you’re all right?” Stonebrake reached a hand down toward me. “Bit shaken, I suppose.”

“Do you? Do you indeed?” I brushed away his offer of help and shakily managed to stand, balancing myself against the wall behind me. I could not restrain my shouting: “Why should you assume that? I would have assumed that in this new, wondrous steampowered London of yours, being sodomized by something out of an ironmonger’s shed is an everyday occurrence, enjoyed by all.”

“Calm yourself,” advised Stonebrake. “I can understand your degree of agitation—”

“I’m sure you’re able to.” I stalked away from him and stood glaring at the machine which had assaulted me. “What
is
this damnable thing? And that fur in which it is wrapped—was that supposed to serve some decorative purpose?”

From across the space, Royston barked out a laugh. “Makes it all the uglier, you ask me.”

“You need to remember,” said Stonebrake, “that your father served a clientele possessed of both wealth and those jaded enthusiasms that wealth engenders. The device whose embrace you have just endured is in fact a mechanical simulacrum of that beast known as an
Orang-Utan,
the so-called Wild Man of far-off Borneo. Thus the distinctive orange pelt, by which such a creature is distinguished in its native habitat. One of your father’s clients apparently had the fancy of setting up a hunting preserve in Yorkshire, in which he and his titled friends might amuse themselves by bagging one or two, out on the moors. In pursuit of that objective, they had a number of the animals captured and shipped to some point north of Brimley.”

“You must excuse my disbelief.” I set about dusting off and straightening the clothes that had become disarranged during the machine’s attack upon my person. “This seems a daft notion.”

“Actually . . . it rather
was
. Two impediments arose rather quickly: First, the northern climate disagreed severely with the apes, despite their shaggy coats, with croup and consumption eliminating most before anyone could take so much as a shot at them. And secondly, those that did survive the perpetual drizzle were not as impressively threatening as your father’s client had conceived them to be. In fact, they seemed to be by nature on the shy and retiring side, with not much more sport in killing them than would be gotten by putting a rifle’s muzzle to the head of an elderly lapdog. Consequently, your father was engaged to devise a more satisfying trophy, an Orang-Utan with a sufficiently violent demeanour, so that the pride of a British nobleman might be sufficiently engaged by firing off both barrels of a Purdey over-and-under into its mechanical chest.”

“
Violent,
you say?” I pointed to the silent device, still huddled where it had come to rest. “It seemed to have something else on its mind just now.”

“Yes, well, your father was an accommodating craftsman—that much is undeniable. No request was beyond him, it would seem. In this instance, his client was the product of one of those schools, to which the nobility have sent their children for generations, at which the affections between the young scholars and their instructors is expressed in the manner of the ancient Grecians. Nothing remarkable about that, of course; however, a simultaneous enthusiasm for exotic beasts had somehow become muddled up in the gentleman’s thoughts with his other carnal interests. Sadly for him, the timorous Orang-Utans brought over from their tropic home were apparently even less given to the seductive arts than they had been suited for bounding over the moors with a pack of hounds baying after them. Thus the device you see here, effectively filling two desperate needs with the same contrivance.”