Infernal Devices (14 page)

  "Screw that." He shook me off, then knelt down for a closer look. His hands had already found the small panel at the back and had pried it open. "I've been itching to get a hold of one of these."

  "Please… I beg of you." Dreadful memories urged my anxiety. "Desist–"

  "Forget it," said Miss McThane to me. "There's no stopping him when he's got a new toy." She gazed with an expression of disgust as Scape explored further into the choristers' alcove.

  "All
right
." His voice came muffled from the depths, beyond the row of mannikins. A flaring safety match threw his shadow back towards me. "I think I found the master controls."

  So he had; I recognised the assemblage of levers and gears from the last time. No doubt the apparatus was still in the state of erroneous adjustment in which I had left it; I could see that the great coil of the central driving spring was still wound tight.

  I left off wringing my hands and grasped the back of Scape's vestments to pull him away from the machinery. "You mustn't," I cried. "The devices are misaligned and malfunctioning–"

  He shook me off with considerable violence, sending me sprawling upon the floor. His brow furrowed in anger above the blue lenses. "I've been studying your old man's gizmos for years," he said sharply. "There ain't anything I don't know about them."

  I made another attempt to ward off tragedy, grasping him about his robed knees. He toppled backwards and, flailing about for balance, grabbed hold of the centremost lever. "Watch out!"

  Scraping through a layer of rust, the lever swung in an arc under Scape's weight. For a moment there was silence, then a soft, unmistakable tick. Our combat ceased, with Scape supine on the alcove's floor and I halfway above him; we both arched our necks to see the machinery beyond us.

  Another
tick
, and a groan of metal shifting from its long-confined position. The noises began to rattle and clatter faster, as the escapements and ratchets of the apparatus woke into their spurious life.

  "Christ Almighty–" I scrambled across my opponent's form and yanked the lever. It resisted all my efforts; I might as well have been tugging at the balustraded stones of the church in a Samson-like attempt to bring the entire edifice down upon our heads. The row of mechanical choristers shifted, the jointed limbs beneath the robes creaking, the porcelain faces swivelling above the ruffled collars. In the manner of an owl, the head of the lead chorister swung all the way round, its glass eyes beatifically regarding us. The rosined wheels that my father had installed in the device's throat engaged; "
Glo –
ri –
a
," it sang in a piercing treble.

  Scape got to his feet and joined me in tugging at the lever. "We gotta get this thing shut off before those creeps out in the church hear it." Our efforts were to no avail as the lever remained in its position.

  A creaking noise sounded from the other alcoves around the perimeter of the vestry, as the remainder of my father's devices stirred into life from their rusting sleep. Looking behind me, I saw a white-haired priest emerge into the room's open space; the figure was entirely lifelike except for the maniacally rolling glass eyes and the hand repeating its blessing over the pump-organ. "And with thy spirit," it pronounced, or rather, the wheels inside its throat did.

  "Nice going," said Miss McThane. Her sarcasm was cut short as she was forced to duck away from the benediction of the clockwork priest, now spinning about rapidly enough to lift the hem of its vestment as though it were a dervish. Light flooded into the room as the door, also connected to the machinery, flew open. A number of the Wetwick residents gaped at this sudden apparition revealed to them. The choristers rocked back and forth along the metal track, and then began filing towards the onlookers; an off-tune Latin chant sounded from the porcelain throats.

  "Stop those little shits." Scape pushed past me and grabbed the robe of the last chorister in the procession. The rotten fabric tore away, showing the clicking armatures and spinning gears of the device as it marched on. He grasped one brass strut, but succeeded only in dislodging the cherub head askew so that it hung sideways and groaned in basso profundo. The priest ceased its gyrations and followed after the choir.

  The Wetwick residents were now entirely alerted by the noise and commotion. They ceased their roundeyed goggling at the copies of The Compleat Angler and watched in amazement the erratic progress of the automata into the church; the machinery, having fallen into such a state of decay, now jerked about with appalling violence. The actions of the choristers were further deranged by the fact that Scape's billowing vestments had become entangled in the exposed workings of the one figure with which he had attempted to interfere; flailing about, his face reddening with his shouted curses, he was being dragged on his back behind the choir as they made their way. The terrified onlookers scrambled away, trampling each other in their haste to avoid this apparition. Miss McThane, her long hair in wild disarray, tugged at her companion in a futile attempt at rescue.

  From a position of relative safety at the vestry door, I watched as Bendray, with raised hands and quavering voice, first tried to restore order to the panic-stricken assemblage. He soon abandoned the effort and, wisely fearing for his own skin, slipped out the church door, moments before the great mass of the Wetwick residents jammed the egress, tearing at one another's backs and limbs in desperate flight, the crazed energy of their numbers resulting in virtually none of them winning through to the darkness outside.

  Inside the stone walls, echoing with cries of terror and grating mechanical noises, the carnage had become even more nightmarish than on that long past occasion when I had first attempted to put my father's devices into their appointed motions. With the furiously struggling Scape in tow, the choir had reached their positions, but had split into various factions, as if arguing amongst themselves on the proper course of their further ritual. One group of the mannikins seemed bent on another procession, and to that end had turned about, battering against the others as the deranged machinery drove them along the metal rails. Scape's imprecations mingled with the cacophony of hymns sung simultaneously, the artificial voices shrilling ever higher as the rosined wheels wore down to the bare metal beneath. Two of the porcelain heads butted together as though in the combat of rams, cracking and spraying throughout the church bits of the smiling cherub faces and the springs and gears beneath. The headless choristers went on battering into each other's robed chests as one of the church windows dissolved into glittering fragments from the impact of one such missile.

  Simultaneously, the priest, in carrying out the cycle of duties that my father had built into its workings, had become entangled in the fishing gear that had been draped across the altar. Dragging the lines and barbed hooks along, it seized upon one poor creature who had been frozen in his steps from sheer fright. The ugly Wetwick face was even more contorted as the mechanical priest dragged him to the baptismal font and immersed him therein. A great surge of water splashed upward from the struggling man's arms and into the gently smiling countenance of the clockwork priest, as it recited an appeal for donations to the bell rehanging fund.

  These sights assured the Wetwick residents that they had been lured into the church as the objects of may hem. They redoubled their efforts at forcing their way past their fellows, and out the door. Their gargling cries grew louder as well, as though they were already being murdered en masse.

  No one's attention was directed towards me. The wisdom of leaving such a site was even more apparent now. I sidled past the empty pews to the window shattered by the fragment of porcelain cherub's-head. The voluminous folds of my clerical costume protected my hands as I scrambled up on to the thick stone sill and vaulted out, landing on the thickly overgrown grass outside. I quickly gathered up the skirt of the vestment and plunged into the darkness, away from the church's clattering and shrieking chaos.

  Running with no thought but to put distance between myself and the awful scene, I soon collided with the iron fence around the churchyard. I found a side gate that creaked partly open when I pushed against it; the freedom and concealing safety of the dark streets was just beyond; I squeezed through the narrow gap and was grasped by strong pairs of hands on either of my arms.

  "Here, what's this?" The lamp was lifted above me, and by its glow I saw two constables· sternly examining my face. "You're a rum-looking sort of priest."

  I realised I very likely did look suspicious, flushed and out of breath, and my clothing torn and disordered. I gasped out a few syllables without managing to link them into any words of explanation.

  "What's going on up there, anyways?" the one constable lifted his lamp to indicate the church. Over my shoulder I could see its windows lit up. "Come along, you – let's just have us a look."

  "No!" I shouted. I vainly tried to pull free from my captors. "Don't go up there–"

  "Oh, don't, is it? Something going on there you'd like us not to see, eh? Hop it, then; let's go see what you and your mates have been up to." The two of them lifted my feet nearly clear of the ground as they dragged me back towards the church.

  The building was silent as the constables pulled me up to the door. Neither carriage was positioned outside. The constables pushed open the door, and we gazed upon an empty space inside.

  Empty, that is, of human habitation. Scape, Miss McThane, and the denizens of Wetwick had all departed, having made their various escapes into the night at last. All that was left, to my own appalled eyes, and to the amazement of the constables, was the wreckage of my father's Clerical Automata. In the midst of the fishing tackle strewn about, and the copies of Izaak Walton that had been flung from the hands of the panicking Wetwick residents, the choristers lay tangled as though in the aftermath of some juvenile battlefield. Their shrill piping voices were silent now; the porcelain faces, those that were still intact gazed with rosy-cheeked serenity at the ceiling.

  The mechanical priest creaked about in its position by the altar; enough force was left in the master driving spring to force through a last few fragments of its liturgy. One stiff hand raised, knocking its white hair to the side of its benignly smiling face. "
Pax vobiscum
," it wheezed. "Jumble sale." It then toppled over.

  I looked up at the constables as they slowly turned their gaze on me. They were silent, awe-struck by the enormity of my blasphemous crimes.

 
 

 

Of the details of my incarceration I have scant memory. Perhaps the ignominious shock of being placed in the charge of the constabulary had combined with the cumulative fatigue wrought in my constitution, to temporarily overthrow the balance of my reason. I recall a voice faintly like my own answering the various questions. put to me, though at a distance, as if overhearing some street conversation of only mild interest. The censorious, scowling faces of the Law's guardians passed in front of me, yet they too were far removed; from an angle somehow slightly above, I listened to them reciting the impressively long list of misdeeds attributed to my person – desecration of a holy place and criminal blasphemy chief among them – and heard their gruff comments on my vacant inattention, as though they were Smithfield porters describing a particularly unattractive carcass of beef. Only when I was at last placed in a cell, entirely alone upon a cold stone shelf jutting from a damp wall, did some realization sink upon me that the dream-like nature of my experiences had eroded through to reveal a grim reality. The dark cell was actual, my presence therein equally so; something with bright eyes and soft pattering feet regarded me from a drain-hole in the centre of the floor before scurrying away. I could hear someone close by singing with drunken, inarticulate glee, the voice echoing from the walls until the thump of a wooden truncheon upon flesh produced a cry of pain and subsequent silence. By various follies I had reached this nadir; I wrapped my arms about myself to ward off the chill of the gaol's foetid air, and, with chin heavy upon my breast, contemplated my misery.

  At some point, though I knew not how many hours of imprisonment had passed, the heavy door creaked open and a gaoler with keys jangling upon a ring entered; he tossed a bundle upon the bench beside me and withdrew without speaking. I roused myself to investigate, and found it to be a set of my clothing. The explanation of its arrival hither was provided by the appearance of the faithful Creff's face at the small barred grille set into the door; he strained to look inside the cell, as if forced to stand on tip-toe in the corridor outside. "Mr Dower, sir," he called. "They told me–" The comfort of his familiar visage disappeared, and I heard the gaoler ordering him to move away. "Here, you–" His voice faded as further prodding was applied. "Watch what you're doing with that stick – ruddy blackguard…"

  I exchanged the tattered vestment for my own garments, the accustomed attire of my second-best suit restoring my appearance, if not my spirits. There was some comfort in the thought that I could at least await whatever fate was in store for me garbed as a gentleman, and no longer masquerading as a bogus cleric.

  I had not long to wait. The door presently opened again, sending a wash of light across the dank confines of the cell. I looked round and saw not the gaoler's stolid figure, but rather that of Scape. His clerical costume had likewise been discarded; I saw him restored to the over-rich finery in which I had first seen him at my shop. In the cell's gloom his blue-glass spectacles seemed two dark, unreflecting holes in his pallid face.