Infernal Devices Read online

  "Samuel, me lad-" the cabby and the butcher were evidently acquaintances of long standing. "What delicacies do you got tonight?" He poked through the uncut joints, sending aloft a few buzzing flies. "A tuppenny chop, then," he decided at last. "And the scraps for the hound." He watched with relish as the butcher hacked off the desired piece. Both men's faces turned towards me when the meat was held aloft on the knife's point; leaning back from the odour, I paid once more.

  "Very kind of you, sir," said the cabby, dangling a raw strip down to the dog's mouth. "I do appreciate it." The chop had been carried off to a farther room; a sizzling noise of fire and grease wafted out. "This here gentleman," he said, pointing to me, "wants to be taken to Wetwick. Fancy that, eh?"

  The hawking butcher, his basket up on his shoulder again, lowered the jar he had taken from its place in front of me. His wide grin was damp from the stale beer. "Does he, then? Wouldn't have thought him the type, just from looking at him. No wonder he's not hungry for this sort of meat." One blood-mottled finger tapped the side of the basket. "It's some other bit of mutton he's after." His lewd smile twisted even further as he winked at me, then turned and laboured his burden towards the door.

  The cabby signalled for his jar to be refilled. "Yes, indeed," he said, leaning across the table. His creased face exuded the conspiratorial bonhomie of one who delightedly assumes that all the world is as foul-minded as he is. He fell into smirking reminiscence: "Many's the time, all these years I've worked as a long-night man – that's what we call it, mind, six of the evenings to ten the following mornings – many's the time I've had fine gentlemen such as yourself asking to be taken to the borough of Wetwick. Fine gentlemen, indeed… and roaring boys." The phrase generated some excitement in him; his eyes widened in his flushed face. "Eh? Eh? The roaring boys – out for a lark, they were, yes." He gazed at his reflection in the renewed ale, smiling as if satisfied at what he saw. "The green girls – that's what you lordly rakes want, isn't it now? Eh?"

  I made no reply, stupefied into muteness by the closeness of the den and the alcoholic fumes it contained. The cabby's pallid face danced in front of me, a child's grinning puppet given over to wickedness and the relish it found therein.

  "Mind you, now," he went on, unstoppable, "though it be to your heart's desire-" The last word sent him into a salivating ekstasis. "Your heart's desire, says I, a greater bargain is impossible to find. And why is that? Eh?"

  I perceived that he was asking me a riddle. "I have no idea." My head had started to throb.

  "Because – ho-ho! – because all it takes to get there is a single coin. Ha!" He choked and beat his fist on the table in his mirth. "A single coin! Very clever, that! Eh?"

  "Yes…" I agreed feebly, attempting to mask my incomprehension. "Yes, quite amusing."

  He eyed me more closely. "Of course," he said slowly, "it has to be the right coin. Don't it, sir? There's only one will do for it." He drew back, waiting for my reply.

  I saw that under his smile there was an element other than jest. At the same moment, in a flash of understanding, I realised the point of his words. Keeping his gaze locked with mine, I drew the velvet bag out of my pocket, extracted the Saint Monkfish sovereign, and laid it on the table in front of him.

  The cabby picked up the coin and held it glittering in the candlelight. For a moment he studied the remarkable profile on its surface; then he handed it back to me. With an exaggeratedly servile nod, he said, "Right you are, sir. Most pleased to be of service to the cognoscenti. To Wetwick, then." He looked up when a cracked plate, shiny with grease, was laid in front of him with the blackened chop upon it.

  I watched as he sawed the redolent meat apart with his pocket knife, spearing the pieces with its point and conveying them to his mouth. "Shall we be off, then?" I said.

  He jabbed another morsel and held it down to the dog, who adroitly licked it off the blade. "There's no call for haste, sir." He took another bite. "Plenty of time, as you well know." He signalled for another round.

  Time within the dingy confines of the stale beer shop seemed to congeal into an opaque substance, similar to the speckled drops of fat on the dirty plate. The jars in front of the cabby seemed to multiply, until there were half-a-dozen empty vessels strewn about the table. I had even drained one, in a vain attempt to slake the thirst imparted by the smoky air. This further impaired the normal progress of the hours; I felt as if I had been trapped in the cellar with my leering companion since the beginning of Creation.

  I made an attempt to rouse myself, as though fighting to the top of a weed-filled pond. "When," I said thickly, "do we leave? For Wetwick." Across the room I could barely make out the form of the slatternly woman, holding the baby to her flaccid breast; its small head lolled back, the eyes two sightless grey pockets.

  The cabby looked up from his own contemplations. His grin was even looser now, slack enough to reveal the gums at the bottom of his stained teeth. "Why, when it's time, sir. You know that."

  "Yes… of course. But-" My fuddled brain struggled to express what seemed a momentous concept. "But how will we know when it's time?"

  He shook his head, goggling at my self-evident stupidity. "He'll tell us, then, won't he? How else?"

  "He'll tell us?"

  "The dog." He jerked his horn-ridged thumb at the small creature at his feet.

  I leaned over the table, knocking aside the empty jars, and looked down at the small animal. It returned my stare with what seemed to be no more than average canine intelligence. I sat back heavily in my chair, perplexed as to how the indicated communication was to be made.

  No sooner had I done so than an excited yapping came from the beast. The edge of its terrier yelp was sharp enough to rouse a few of the cellar's denizens from their stupor, as the dog barked at the empty doorway and back at its master in turn.

  "Up you come," announced the cabby. He shoved his chair back and pulled himself on to his feet, seeming little the worse for the drinking bout as he adjusted his cloak and hat. For my part, I had need to accomplish the same in stages, balancing myself against the table to overcome the leaden deadweight that had been instilled in my legs.

  The dog grew more excited, skittering around the cabby's boots on its three good legs, and still yapping at the dark open air at the head of the stone steps blundered heavily into one of the other tables as the cabby led me out; the blow destroyed the precarious equilibrium of the young gentleman who had rested his elbows there, face cupped in his palms; I heard behind me his slow pitch forward and sprawling collapse on to the damp floor.

  Once outside, the night air on my sweating face revived me somewhat. I soon found myself deposited inside the dilapidated hansom cab, its seat of ancient cracked leather sagging beneath me, as I listened to the driver mounting on to his perch with the barking dog in the crook of his arm. Its claws pattered across the roof of the cab even as the horse was whipped into life. We had soon careered on wobbling axles out of the alley and into the larger street beyond.

  The racketing motions of the ill-sprung vehicle sent me sprawling across the seat. My brain, still labouring under the weight of whatever decoction the stale beer had been doctored with in order to increase its potency, struggled to make sense of the vista of lamps and mistshrouded streets reeling by outside. The horse, perhaps through fear of further abuse, was capable of greater speed than I would have imagined possible; the rush of wind tore through my hair as I gripped the window sill and craned my neck to shout at the cabby: "Is this the way to Wetwick, then?"

  My words seemed to fuel his high humour as much as the alcohol had. His grin grew even more maniacal as he snapped the whip over the head of the dog. The small creature, too, had worked itself into a frenzy, dashing back and forth on the cab's roof, barking louder as if to urge the horse on its exertions. "To Wetwick!" cried the cabby. "For one of your faith – 'tis the new Rome! All roads lead to Wetwick!"

  I fell back inside, jostled by a sudden turning that tilted the cab on to one wheel for
a moment. A few white faces shot past, pedestrians startled by the vehicle's clattering haste. Above my head, the barking and scrabbling of the small dog seemed to take on a perceptible pattern: when its claws pattered to one side of the roof, the yapping sounding in that direction, the cabby swung the vehicle around correspondingly at the first opportunity. Gaining the window once more, I looked out and recognised the district through which we were passing: the smell of the river was strong, wafting through a region of ramshackle docks and warehouses. We were not far from my own home in Clerkenwell, having apparently travelled about in a circle.

  The dog ceased its noise simultaneously – with the hansom pulling to a halt. The cabby pulled open the small hatch in the centre of the roof and leered down at me through the opening. "Your destination, sir," he said with sly insinuation.

  I stepped down from the cab and looked about. I had some vague idea of the area, if not this exact street; I at least knew I could find my way back to my shop, within a good walk's distance. Perhaps the cabby was playing me for a fool, driving about with no more idea of how to reach the perhaps-mythical Wetwick than I had. However I was glad to be free of his bone-shaker, and the area in which I had alighted was at least not deserted. Though the street were without lamps, I could discern a considerable number of figures sidling past, close to the shuttered fronts of the buildings.

  "What do I owe you?" I called up to the cabby on his perch.

  "Ah! You are a card, sir!" Both he and the dog looked down at me. "You know full well I get my whack at the other end – your fare's been paid by Mollie Maud, hasn't it, then?" He whipped the horse into a trot, and had soon vanished into the river's fog.

  My quest had seemed to lead me into more inconvenience than adventure thus far – home and bed now appeared to me as the most attractive notion. I stepped across the cobbled street to ask specific directions from one of the passers-by.

  As I approached closer, and was able to see them better through the mist that laid its damp velvet against my face, I noted that they all, men and women alike, moved in much the same fashion, a curious hunched-over, sidling motion – as though; crab-like, they moved laterally as much as forward. For a moment I thought the cabby's dog had jumped off the hansom and had run back here, as I spotted a similar animal running ahead of one of the figures; then I saw several of the scrawny terriers, each seeming to lead its shabbily dressed master in the same direction along the pavement.

  The sense of being in a dream again enveloped me. I stood a few feet away from the line of pedestrians as they scurried past me. Slowly, I reached out a hand to grab hold of a bent shoulder. The halted man lifted his head and looked round at me. I found myself gazing into the living counterpart of the face on the Saint Monkfish coin.

  5

  A Coiner's Fate

  I have need of rest; my hand trembles even as I write these words. To retrieve the past is no great effort, when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome.

  Upon completion of the previous section of these memoirs, I laid down my pen and went out of the house again, hoping to briefly expunge remembered night with the brightness of the current day. Blessedly anonymous in this district, I strolled through the crowds intent on their own business. Lost in their number, I found a moment of peace that was broken only when I thought I saw a familiar face staring at me. Turning towards it, I felt my heart leap up into my throat as I recognised the sloping, exophthalmic, and purse-jawed visage of one of the Wetwick denizens. I staggered backwards, blundering into the people nearest me, fearing that the parishioners of that region had emigrated with me from their former haunts. The appalling vision dissolved when, curious about the rising murmur behind him, a local fishmonger turned about, and I saw that the dreaded physiognomy was no more than that of an unusually large carp he was carrying on his shoulder towards his stall. With my pulse still trembling inside me, I scurried back towards the shelter of my home.

  Between that sentence and this lies a good hour of lying on my bed, soothing my fright with a tumblerful of peat-smelling Scotch whisky, a comfort to which I was introduced when marooned on the Hebridean island of Groughay with the increasingly lunatical Scape. All that time, when I had but recently escaped being murdered at the hands of the Godly Army, the brown nectar had been perhaps all that had preserved my own sanity as I had watched my fellow castaway assembling his absurd flying machine from sticks and carrion.

  Thus fortified, the warmth of the whisky dispelling both the chill of the air and that of memory, I returned to my labours.

  On that dark London street, I saw for the first time in living flesh those features that had been represented to me before only in wax and metal. Though within the possible range of variation of general humanity, they were decidedly placed at the unnerving end of the scale. What would have been described as gross ugliness in one individual was made uncanny by the familial resemblance between the man I had stopped and the others hurrying by us – I could have found myself among no more alien-seeming tribe than if I had stepped into the court of Jenghiz Khan.

  The round, protruding eyes gave the man whose shoulder I still grasped a deceptive appearance of stupidity. Certainly, he was in fuller possession of his faculties than I was at the moment. He scowled – or gave as close an approximation of that expression as his slope-browed, chinless face could provide – and twisted his shoulder free, then hurried away on his nocturnal errands.

  I stepped back from the pavement to let the others pass by. Though they were all possessed of the same goggling features, the variation among them was as of a parade of human society and its constituents: I saw, in quick order, the young mechanic and tradesman, cloth-capped and with knotted neckerchief, the distinctive sidling gait marked with quick vigour; the elderly, both of rotund corpulence and skeletal wasting, assisted in their sideways progress with walking sticks; women clutching their head-shawls fast beneath their chins, of every age from grannyhood to ingenue, the latter blushing modestly under a stranger's gaze and hurrying close to their families' protection; and children, both wellscrubbed and ragged. These young ones, not yet instructed in their elders' ways, gaped at me openly as their parents dragged them along, their wide mouths falling open like latchless coin purses. In more than one little girl's arm was clutched a simple plaything, a doll with similar features.

  One child, momentarily separated from her parents and blinded by her small fists knuckling the tears from her protuberant eyes, blundered into my leg. Moved to pity, I extracted the ugly doll from my own coat pocket and placed it in the child's hands. She gulped down her sobbing long enough to blink in amazement at the unexpected gift; when she looked up at her benefactor, her mouth rounded in a startled O at my face, and she quickly scuttled off in terror.

  For a moment I had thought that the cabby's terrier had abandoned him and returned to this spot, as I sighted what seemed to be the exact same creature frisking about one of the pedestrians barking with the same highpitched yap and darting a few feet ahead and returning as though guiding its new master in the desired direction. Then I noted the creature's double, and yet more like it, all darting in amongst the sidling steps, barking in ragged unison and dashing back and forth in a sheepherder's manner. In total there must have been over a dozen of the small dogs along just the short stretch of pavement that I could see, varying only in the colours and spots of their coats.

  The novelty of the situation in which I had found myself abated after a few minutes. While the individuals passing by were not of comely appearance, neither were they the most repulsive I had ever seen; indeed, there was more disorientation aroused by their resemblance to each other than any other factor, akin to the odd confusion brought on by the sight of identical twins or triplets, where the eye itself seems to be somehow stuttering as it passes from one face to its exact match. Perhaps having encountered that distinctly ichthyoid shaping of the skull
in the form of the ugly doll and the Saint Monkfish coin had prepared me somewhat for its appearance in vivo. At any rate it was with only small and easily suppressed shudders that I stepped up to one of them again, intent on renewing my inquiries.

  "I beg your pardon – but is this the borough of Wetwick?"

  The figure I addressed made his face even uglier with a scowl, and brushed rudely by me without returning so much as a word. I repeated the question to the next behind, and received the same brusque silence. These seemed a very peculiar breed of Londoner: most of the city's residents expressed their ill manners through the coarseness of their volubility, seizing any chance to fill an unfortunate stranger's ear with their unsolicited philosophies on any subject possible. Even if money were required to free their tongues and produce the information required; the transaction was forthrightly indicated with the sign of an open palm; the faces of the most shabbily dressed of these folk had glared at me with outright hostility and distrust.

  The thought of money sparked a notion in my brain. I heard again the cabby's words: a single coin… of course, it has to be the right coin… I drew the Saint Monkfish sovereign from my waistcoat pocket and contemplated it. The odd coin had produced a surprising measure of service from the cabby; perhaps it was the key here as well. I could not see what I had to lose by the venture.

  "My good man." I held out the coin, gripped at its edge by finger and thumb; the glint of bright metal was sufficient under the thin starlight to catch the attention of the next passer-by. "I wonder if you could give me some assistance."

  The experiment met with success. At the sight of the coin, the eyes of the young man widened beyond their already extraordinary circularity. He pulled his cap off, holding it against his shirt front with his work-roughened hands as he respectfully awaited my query. The servile response seemed more suited to a village rustic than a denizen of the city.