Fiendish Schemes (25 page)

O
NCE
more, I found myself as an observer of disturbing events, stationed as I was at an elevated vantage point. Stonebrake led me up a narrow, dilapidated stairway, the rotted wooden treads of which sagged and splintered beneath our every step. However rudely constructed, the iron stairs I had been forced to mount back at the Fex establishment had been a model of security compared to this upward passage.

The ruinous state of these stairs seemed entirely a result of the continuous billows of steam hissing through every crevice. Within seconds of initiating my ascent—to whatever destination Stonebrake, in his usual fashion, refused to divulge—every stitch of clothing on my body was as sodden as though our single-file trek were through sultry tropical climes rather than a location to be found anywhere in the more comfortably sub-tepid Britain to which I was accustomed. Finger-thick rivulets of sweat streamed down my face and under my wilting collar as I progressed higher. However deleterious the steam’s effect upon the human frame, it was obvious to my misty scrutiny that its cumulative damage to the structure’s fittings was even greater. My shoulder brushed against planks hewn from ancient oaks, now warped and split, each separating in wobbly fashion from the next, producing gaps as pronounced and ill-smelling as those in some elderly vagrant’s dentition. Patches of mould and mildew, as large and elaborate as embroidered antimacassars, adorned the walls. All of Nature’s obnoxious fecundity was on display, due in part to the soft glow of luminous fungi sprouting in every corner.

We escaped at last from the confining stairway, exiting into an only seemingly larger observation gallery of some sort. The empty benches were so deformed by the constant heat and moisture as to have corkscrewed themselves loose from their moorings. Their rotting cushions had tumbled to the slanting floor, there to be subsumed into the concaved boards’ moist rot. I feared for my own safety as each of my steps set the structure flexing in a dismaying fashion. The general neglect and decay made it a facile matter to imagine my foot plunging through the spongy wood, to be followed in short order by my entire body.

“Here’s a good spot.” Stonebrake crouched down by the front of the gallery. “We should be afforded a decent enough view.”

At first, I had thought his kneeling, hunched-over posture had been assumed merely to keep his head beneath the ceiling timbers, which were precipitously bowing toward us. However, the admonitory fingertip he held to his lips as I approached, cautiously as possible, signaled a different motive on his part. To wit, his desire to keep our presence here unobserved, presumably from whatever persons might already be in the larger chamber which our station overlooked. Accustomed by now to my companion’s stealthy tendencies, I hunkered down beside him, all the better to gaze over the gallery’s edge without alerting anyone who might have glanced up in our direction.

“What is this place?” I spoke as I gripped a handrail as moist as though it had been boiled in a soup kettle.

“For God’s sake, man, keep your voice down.” Stonebrake laid a hand on top of my head, pressing it level with his own. “These are people who prefer to keep their activities free of scrutiny.”

“Indeed?” I acquiesced in keeping my comments to a whisper. “That’s been the way it is with everyone you’ve carted me around to spy upon. We seem to be making a habit of intruding upon those who most value their privacy.”

“
Habit
implies some unseemly predilection on my behalf. When in fact it is but a requirement of those business enterprises upon which we have launched ourselves.”

“If you say so.” I peered over the gallery rail with as much stealth as I could muster.

“I do indeed.” He brought his own hushed voice close to my ear. “For as I am sure you will soon perceive, those here are engaged upon momentous matters of state. Of exactly that sort which the common rabble have no need to be aware. It’s better for all concerned if some things remain shrouded in secrecy.”

The exact meaning of his words did in fact become apparent to me. I had initially assumed that he had brought me, by way of his varied circuitous paths and attendant bribery, to gaze upon some obscure meeting-place, perhaps an adjunct to some department of Her Majesty’s government—that institution being as fully populated with ministers and their staff, many of whose existence no one outside these premises was aware, as a dog had fleas. The cynical if accurate comment upon their numbers was that the true purpose of government was to increase the number of those governing, and anything else that was accomplished thereby was a mere accident. This was a view to which I had resignedly subscribed in my earlier days as an overly taxed and regulated shop keeper.

A full measure of alarm thus entered my thoughts when I finally perceived the exact place to which Stonebrake had led me. The upper regions of the ill-kept chamber were so wrapped in shadow that our precautions were sufficient to mask our presence. Once confident that no one below had noticed our scrutiny of them, my companion voiced no objection to my raising my head sufficiently to gain a clear view of the area below.

However great the depredations of encroaching Steam had been upon the close stairway and other passages through which we had traveled, its damage was even more pronounced upon this larger chamber. The damp rot that had seeped into the floor’s timbers was so advanced that great sections of it, befurred with grey mould, had buckled bowl-like toward the cavernous stone cellars beneath. A musty exhalation of long-pent, ancient vapours visibly clotted the air, like transparent green snakes spiraling on a slowly vertical course. Their stench came so sulphurous to one’s nostrils that the sodden nature of the wood fittings now seemed like a fortuitous condition, preventing as it did the conflagration that might have been kindled by a single spark into the chamber’s mingled gases.

Through the cloying fumes, I discerned at last the human figures confined within the chamber. At first apprehension of them, I failed to see aspects sufficient to have evoked the extraordinary caution displayed by Stonebrake at having come anywhere near their presence. Indeed, the men I spied below me appeared to have dwindled and shrunk in form, as though the heat of the all-encompassing Steam had rendered not just the flesh from their rickety bones, but the pluck and spirit from their hearts as well. Though garbed in respectable black, they seemed grey of cast, frail and timorous creatures scuttling about on obscure errands, with sheaves of trembling parchment trembling in their withered hands. Others huddled together with the permanently bent spines of domesticated animals inured to beatings so frequent that they dumbly considered them to be no more than their customary lot in life. A few glanced over their shoulders with fear-widened eyes, not directed upward to my and Stonebrake’s hiding-place, but rather toward the massive iron doors that had been crudely forced into the far end of the chamber, much as the timbers of a centuries-old tithe-barn might have been sawn through to allow conversion to a grimly modern manufactory.

As I both watched and attempted to surmise exactly what it was that I beheld, a rumbling noise sounded from beyond those iron doors, not only loud enough to drown out the other wheezing and gasping mechanical emissions that were the constant audible backdrop of the building into which we had entered, but also of sufficient force to set the precarious overhang shuddering about us where we perched. I involuntarily looked behind myself, more than expecting to see the rear of this empty observation gallery wrenching free from whatever decayed anchor had secured it thus far to the highest point of the chamber walls. My fists tightened upon the sagging rail, as one apprehensively grips the rope of that variety of simple sledge upon which heedless children hurtle themselves down snowcovered inclines in winter. At any moment, I expected to make more intimate acquaintance with those others milling about the floor of the chamber, as the overhang tore free of its mooring and crashed upon their heads.

If a similar anxiety filled their thoughts, none of them exhibited it by turning their sight up toward us. The palpable fear that flooded the space, pervasive as the gaseous fumes and clouds of vapour, was instead entirely directed toward the iron doors as they began to ponderously swing open. The unadorned cylinders of their hinges groaned with the tonnage of the bolted metal. From the space revealed beyond, a more forceful gout of steam rolled outward, churning as those great thunderheads in a darkening sky which promise storms so violent and cataclysmic as to wrench oaks from the stony ground and transform placidly meandering rivers into torrents tumbling ancient bridges into their foaming waters.

The timid figures scrambled toward the sides of the chamber. Their doing so made a crucial revelation to me, by which I was at last able to hazard a guess as to the exact designation of the place to which I had been so dangerously guided.

“Why, this is Parliament—” I could hear the notes of both wonder and dismay in my own voice. “The House of Commons, to be precise—”

“How astute of you.” Stonebrake’s rejoinder was the only thing that retained a measure of dryness in my environs. “My confidence regarding your inductive abilities appears to have been well-founded.”

My observation had been triggered by the sight of the black-clad creatures taking a trembling refuge amongst the damp-warped benches at the chamber’s opposite walls. The resulting arrangement seemed guided less by what might have once been a desire to exhibit party allegiance than by the evident fear on the part of the members of Parliament toward whatever intimidating shape was even now lumbering past the iron doors, flung fully open with an echoing impact upon the splintering wood panels framing them. Whatever pride of position such men might have exuded in earlier, more properly historical days, had now evaporated. Literally, it seemed, as though the draconian jets of Steam had been sufficient to scour their hands from those levers of government they had once been given to manipulate. My gazing upon them seemed less like a vision granted of the workings of Empire’s deliberative machinery than it was upon a pack of terrified children, cowering away from the approach of the school bully—

Which seemed, when at last exposed to a full apprehension of its hideous construct and design, to be an elder and immensely larger sibling of that appalling human and mechanical conjunction I had witnessed at the Fex emporium. Both grinding, hissing creations might have emerged from the same monstrous womb, hammered together more upon forge and anvil than by the slow, tender knitting of merely maternal privacies.

The daunting impression upon my thoughts and spirits was inevitably magnified by this apparition’s greater size. With those amorous behemoths, whose steam-wreathed coupling I had been forced to witness, there had been a roughly centaur-like ratio between the iron-bound locomotive component and what remained of softer flesh and bone. In the present case, however, the seemingly human lineaments were dwarfed by the engulfing mechanical parts, so that the face and upper torso appeared as no more than those figureheads adorning the prows of the Royal Navy’s greatest warships. Underneath such a bulk, the timbers of the chamber’s floors creaked and swayed, the parallel iron tracks kept from buckling and collapsing entire only by the bridge-like girders which had been rigged in place beneath, visible through the broken gaps revealing the underlying cellars.

As appalling as the construction’s size might have been, as though a railway engine had burst through the wall of some minuscule village shop, and the dismaying proportion of metal to the whole, the perceptible transformation of the human fragment was even more repellent. Through the enveloping clouds emitted by the valves and connectors riveted to the gargantuan boiler, at its front was a visage barely recognizable as what might once have been a woman’s, its square-cut jaws rendered even more cruelly androgyne by the surrounding steely cast. The features seemed more chiseled into place by some diabolical ironmonger than by Nature’s hand. Its eyes were but slits, the spark of feminine wiles visible through them as sharply focused as those of an infantry sniper taking aim from a fortified position.

“Take me from here—” I turned toward my companion and guide, my doubled grasp seizing upon his arm as though it afforded the only security from toppling into the abyss on the edge of which I trembled. “I can endure no more.”

I would not previously have thought it possible, but my fears had vaulted past their previous boundaries, impelled by the apparition below. Even so, as that which terrifies us the most still forces our scrutiny, I found myself compelled to direct my stricken gaze toward the monstrosity. Legions of uniformed attendants swarmed across its flanks with swan-necked oil cans and grease-blackened rags, much as smaller fish are described by ichthyologists as grooming the toothily smiling bulk of a shark capable of devouring scores of such devotees with a single sweeping gulp.

And then it spoke.

It took a moment for me to realize that such was happening. At first, I believed that one of the intimidating construction’s gleaming brass whistles had burst forth, emitting an ear-piercing shriek as well as a jetting plume of vapour. I snatched my hands away from Stonebrake’s arms, clapping them futilely to my ears. Through my quivering palms, I was able to discern actual words, both grinding and scalding, as though a Moloch-like boiler at a factory’s deepest core had been granted voice.

“For God’s sake, man—” I brought my gaze again to my companion, unable as I was to bear the sight of the House’s members cringing from the lash of the construction’s steam-impelled taunts and imprecations. “If you cannot bear me away from this place, at least tell me this much: What is that thing below?”

Stonebrake smiled as he spoke his answer. It mattered little that I could barely hear him through the stifling din, as I had been told once before that name by which the appalling creature was known. Its designation had been spoken to me, mysteriously at that time, by the far more feminine daughter of Lord Fusible.