Infernal Devices (28 page)

 

At the, appointed hour, when all the ship was asleep save for the single watch stationed at the prow, I slipped from my cabin and made my stealthy way to the deck. My passage went undetected in the night's darkness, and soon enough I was crouched down among the coils of rope and other nautical gear, hidden from all but the most thorough search.

  I waited in nervous anticipation for the Brown Leather Man's arrival, The slap of waves and the answering creak of the ship's timbers were all that I could hear; the cloudless heavens scattered points of lights upon the troughs and crests of the ocean's expanse.

  His journey to the spot was even more surreptitious than my own, though it included – as I was shortly to learn – his clambering up the side of the ship and over the rail, I was unaware of his presence until a hand touched my shoulder from behind and his voice whispered my name. Thus startled, I whirled about; his hand clapped over my mouth before any outcry could reveal our meeting. "Yet be quiet," he commanded softly.

  "Where – where have you been hiding?" I asked when his stifling hand had been drawn away. "You've been aboard all this time?"

  He gestured for me to lower my voice further. The moon and stars glinted from his dark face and shoulders, still wet from the sea. "To me listen," he said. "There is little time, and much to tell."

  Thereupon followed, as I knelt close to his soft voice, the exposition I herewith summarize. Even if I succeeded in reproducing his exact words (minus my own exclamations of surprise, which rather lengthened the discourse), I would still fail to convey the eerie wonderment evoked by his narration.

  He told me his real name, but the human voice lacks the facility to properly pronounce so strange a cognomen; I continued to identify him in my mind as I had done when he had first entered my London shop. He claimed and it was soon enough proven to me, banishing any residual scepticism I might have harboured – to be the last surviving member of an amphibious race, at home in the depths of the seas rather more than upon dry land. His people were the basis for the various tales and legends of "selkies" common to the Scottish islands. In support of this point, he demonstrated to me that what I had taken to be his brownish skin, was in fact a thin, pliable covering – a species of leather indeed, though marine in origin constructed to hold a layer of salt-water, essential to his survival, around his body; the marks that I had taken to be scars in the manner of African tribesmen were the finely worked stitches holding this garment together.

  The Brown Leather Man continued from the singular to the general, his discourse forming a natural history of his race. Never very numerous and always secretive, the selkies – to use the most convenient term – maintained through the long years a few friendly contacts with human beings; the various sailors' yarns of miraculous rescues from ships lost at sea had this basis in reality. As befit their piscine physiology, the selkies' reproductive processes were external, fertilization and growth of the resultant embryos taking place in large beds of seaweed; these sites, the only ones suitable, were located in the waters off the island of Groughay. Unfortunately, the activities of mankind had a disastrous effect upon the situation. Readers of sufficient age may recall that, towards the end of the previous century, a lucrative boom in the trade of seaweed occurred. It was gathered in large quantities from the shores of the distant Scottish islands, charred into a soft black substance, and distributed throughout Britain for use as a fertilizer. (Readers familiar with contemporary agricultural practices will be aware that other, more productive substances have supplanted the seaweed for this purpose; there is virtually no trade in it at the present time.) One of those who had profited from the market for seaweed had been the young head of the clan based upon Groughay, Lord Bendray. He had sought to accelerate the process of turning seaweed into money by commissioning a device from a clever London inventor – my own father. The device that resulted from this commission was a set of wooden booms that, once installed under my father's personal supervision on Groughay, extended into the ocean, and were kept submerged by heavy chains. When directed underneath the offshore seaweed beds, the booms would be released from the chains, thus rising to the surface and tangling into the marine vegetation. The seaweed could then be drawn towards the shore by winches, at a rate many times greater than the tides previously had brought it, and thus harvested. My father's device worked well, securely establishing the Bendray family fortune before the collapse in the seaweed market came.

  (This history related by the Brown Leather Man brought back to mind Lord Bendray's rambling words in his cellar laboratory beneath Bendray Hall. I had then dismissed his talks of seaweed as nothing more than the wild ravings of a disordered mind; but I did recall that he had made passing reference to his first commission to my father having something to do with the substance.)

  It was while on Groughay (so the Brown Leather Man's exposition continued), while my father was installing this seaweed gathering device, that he came into contact with the aquatic race of selkies. Perhaps there was some attraction between minds of similar brilliance: the selkies, being of a philosophical and inquiring breed, possessed much advanced theoretical knowledge pertaining to matters little investigated by human scientists. It was from them that my father learned those arcane principles of sympathetic vibrations in rarefied media, that he subsequently employed in his later inventions such as the Paganinicon. The Brown Leather Man related that my father made several journeys to the island of Groughay, long after the price of seaweed fertilizer had plummeted in 1811, the gathering device been abandoned, and the island depopulated, for the express purpose of consulting with the learned selkie elders on scientific issues.

  Or, at least, my father had done so while the selkies still survived as a race. He had, all unwittingly, unleashed the machinery of their doom upon them. The seaweed gathering device so disrupted the cycles of their lives and breeding, that the race began to die out. This fatal process accelerated at a geometric progression, the lifespan of those already born being shortened as well, perhaps through a collective grief. No rancour had ever entered into the relationship with my father; even now, only forgiveness existed in the heart of the Brown Leather Man, the last of his people. Their gentle wisdom had seen that such an outcome had never been intended.

  The Brown Leather Man, however, had determined that there was yet some hope. The seaweed beds of the coast of Groughay, unmolested for so long a time, had re-established themselves to their original extent. Even more heartening was his discovery that a number of selkie embryos, in a spore-like state, had survived the process of converting the seaweed to fertilizer. In one spot where the fertilizer had been used, the fens around the village of Dampford, the embryos had matured, come of age, and even managed to mate with the inbred and somewhat devolved natives of that sorry region. The Brown Leather Man was not the first to discover this: Lord Bendray himself had made his decision to buy up the district and establish his residence there, prompted by his recognition of the Dampford villagers for what they were – a cross between humans and the selkies he had been aware of from his youth on the island of Groughay. Being remarkably dull-witted, the cross-bred Dampford villagers were easily victimised by another of Lord Bendray's moneymaking schemes, in which the village girls – their unlovely visages matched by corresponding alterations to their anatomies (I did not press him for elaboration on the subject) were lured into Mollie Maud's service in London to satisfy the jaded passions of her wealthy and bored clientele. So successful had this trade been – as trades dealing in the seemingly endless lusts of men usually are – that eventually a whole subculture of Dampford villagers, male and female, had been established in London, forming the amorphous borough of Wetwick that I had stumbled upon. To increase these innocents' isolation and thus reduce the chance of their escaping from Lord Bendray's and Mollie Maud's domination, Lord Bendray had created a mock religion for them, centred upon the fictional Saint Monkfish. To avoid detection, the Church of Saint Monkfish has no set place of worship, but rather floats from place to place in the city. The denizens of Wetwick – for so their supposed benefactors Lord Bendray, had named them – are summoned to services by a bell that Lord Bendray had especially cast for the purpose, with a note pitched too high for ordinary humans to hear; the selkie crossbreeds, with their seaborne origins, have a range of hearing different from that of ordinary human beings. The elderly of the tribe (as with humans long in tooth), having lost the highest-pitched portion of their hearing, have dogs trained to listen for the striking of their church bell and to guide them to the location of the services. Just such a "bell-dog" was the eponymous Abel, sleeping below-deck in my cabin. The dogs served another, even more sinister purpose: they were useful for various cabbies catering to depraved tastes, in order to deliver their passengers to the district where their pleasures could be catered to by the wretched employees of Mollie Maud. The coiner Fexton, as a convert to the worship of Saint Monkfish, had need of such an animal as well. Lord Bendray, with his thorough scientific mind, had even created an alternative economy for the Wetwick residents; its coinage, with the portrait of the mythical Saint Monkfish upon it, also served as an identifying emblem for those humans who had been initiated into the secrets of the borough's clandestine existence.

  However, even as dull-witted as the Wetwick crossbreeds were, they had come to suspect that things were not as their patron Lord Bendray had told them. In addition to creating their own religion for them, he had blasphemously told them that the Christianity practised by the ordinary population surrounding them, was a faith all the sacraments of which dealt with fishing, a practice that the piscine Wetwick denizens would naturally view with horror. The bedecking of the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe in London with fishing tackle and copies of Izaak Walton was a scheme concocted by Lord Bendray to confirm in the minds of his deluded parishioners the belief in the basic hostility of the human race towards them.

  All this, the Brown Leather Man had learned from his own investigations. Some call in his blood had motivated his leaving his sea home by Groughay, and finding these lost cousins of his tribe. Thus, he had found how cruelly they had been exploited to service the lusts and greed of land-bound man. Another reason prompted this pilgrimage: he had wished to determine what knowledge of the potentially dangerous principles of sympathetic vibrations taught to Dower's father still remained in the possession of the land-dwellers. This had been the reason for his visit to my shop, bearing one of my father's Regulators that had been left by him on the island of Groughay. In his haste caused by the broken watch-spring tearing his leather "skin", the Brown Leather Man had mistakenly given me the Saint Monkfish crown, collected by him on a visit to the borough of Wetwick.

  His overriding goal, however, was the re-establishment of his own race. Having discovered the fate of the spores that had been carried in the seaweed fertilizer, he first had gone to London in hopes of obtaining ova to be quickened with his own seed; these he had hoped to carry back to the ancestral seaweed beds near Groughay, and thus breed back to the original line. His normally forgiving nature had been outraged by the servile and deluded state of the Wetwick denizens; he had tracked down the coin forger Fexton in order to determine precisely who was behind the cruel deception. Fexton, the Brown Leather Man had discovered, by reason of the general deterioration of his reason, had come to believe that the religion concocted by his employer Lord Bendray was in fact true; he had joined in the observances of the blasphemy that his criminal talents had helped sustain. While the Brown Leather Man had been speaking to Fexton, members of the Godly Army – ever vigilant against blasphemy, they had learned of the Saint Monkfish religion through their spying on Lord Bendray – broke into the room and attacked them. In the ensuing scuffle, Fexton was killed and the Brown Leather Man received a wound that triggered a state of reduced respiration and heartbeat, a normal process in his amphibian race. I was taken to be one of their fellow blasphemers when the two soldiers of the Godly Army returned to Fexton's rooms and discovered me there. Fortunately, being dumped into the chill waters of the Thames revived the Brown Leather Man, and he had overturned the boat, then bore me to the safety of the riverbank.

  Our paths parted then, only to be entwined again in the village of Dampford. His efforts to obtain the necessary ova from the female Wetwick crossbreeds had been a failure, so he had gone to their native village. There – just prior to witnessing the contretemps into which I had managed to land myself, and extricating me from it – he had met with more success.

  The first glimmer of dawn was tracing the sea's horizon by this time; the hours of the night had flown while I listened near-mesmerised by the strange account. Little time was left before this mysterious yet familiar figure would have to return to the ocean to avoid detection by my captors. He grasped my arm as he spoke: "Dower you must take from me something. And safely hide it." He reached behind himself, then handed me an object, a cylinder of brass glinting in the faint light. As I turned it about in my grasp, I saw that a section of thick glass was set into it; clear water sloshed inside, slightly clouded by a heavier milky liquid.

  "This," said the Brown Leather Man, tapping the cylinder in my hands, "is what I journeyed for. This is the seed of my blood, and that of those lost descendants of my blood. All the children of my race – you hold them now."

  It was the ova collected from the Dampford villagers, fertilized with his own seed. My hands trembled as I gazed at the contents. "What am I supposed to do with it?"