The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (7 page)

‘You’re always sayin’ how he’s a bloodhound an’ how he’s really good at stuff an’ all! Maybe he could just
smell
this Berwick fella and then we just follow Tatey-watey, because he’s a good little Tatey, aren’t you, yes you are, yes you
are
. . .’

‘Through the rain?’

‘Well, we’d have to wait, I suppose, ’til after. An’ we ’d need some kind of thing of this Berwick’s.’

Lyle ’s eyebrows twitched for a moment, and Tess stabbed a triumphant finger in the air. ‘Ah-ha!’

‘Ah-ha?’ he echoed, confused.

‘You just looked all pen . . . pensi . . . thinkin’, like! You reckon my idea ain’t a bucket of pure!’

‘Language!’

‘What? I was bein’ good!’

‘Polite young ladies don’t refer to buckets of pure in decent conversation,’ he said primly.

‘But ... it’s dog poo,’ she said, in the voice of one trying to get her head round an important but difficult distinction. ‘I didn’t go and say how my idea ain’t a bucket of dog poo, now did I?’

‘You know, you’re right.’

‘See!’

‘I want to see Berwick’s clothes.’

 

They found them in the scullery, which was essentially a stone sink an easy totter from the outside pump. It was filled with all the equipment of a modern laundry room, such as a metal and wood scrubbing board, a bar of soap that dissolved into acidic little flakes and hissed with an ugly chemical smell on the faintest contact with water, and a pair of rollers set in an iron frame that Tess had always associated with crushed fingertips, designed to squelch the water out of even the thickest of fabrics. Lyle went straight for the dirtiest-looking clothes he could find and held them up, sniffing deeply. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly, a snort later. ‘Tess, what do you smell?’

‘Erm . . .’ said Tess, leaning away from the clothes like a cat from off milk.

‘Come on, come on, this whole smell thing was your idea, what do you smell?’

She took a cautious sniff and turned white. ‘It’s horrid!’

‘I’d say . . .’ Lyle took another long, luxurious sniff, which made Tess turn even paler. ‘. . . copper dust, eel pie, ammonia, pure ethyl alcohol, coal and raw sewage.’

‘An’ this makes you all happy?’

He rummaged in the jacket pockets, and his face split into a grin of delight. ‘It gets better!’ His hand came out, holding a small papery stub. ‘A used single ticket, Baker Street to King’s Cross.’

‘A single ticket for what?’

‘The Metropolitan train, Teresa. Raw sewage and an Underground ticket: only one place now to look for Berwick.’

CHAPTER 4

Tess, although she had to admit she was growing less alarmed by the whole science thing, didn’t hold with these new-fangled ways of travelling. She understood big, overland trains, giant snorting things with gleaming green engines and giant wheels that gave off belches of steam, and compartments and travel in general, and she was even willing to come to terms with the iron steamers that were starting to be seen everywhere, with their big paddles churning at each side. But the new London Underground Metropolitan Line, advertised as the first of its kind in the world, running Paddington to Farringdon, unsettled her. The strange little steam engines that pulled open-air carriages through the cut-and-cover tunnels between the stations seemed insufficient for the task assigned to them, and the smoke and steam billowed through the tunnels, making them suffocating and claustrophobic, despite the tremendous cheers of first-time travellers whenever they experienced the novelty of taking the steam engine underground, and the strange sensation of rising up into the light at King’s Cross. Only in a confined space, however, did you begin to realize quite how much steam a steam train gave out.

‘Technology!’ proclaimed Lyle as they dropped down under the giant brick arches of Baker Street Station into the sooty blackness of the Underground. Along the platform, the dimness was broken up by a lamp under every other arch and above each low wooden bench. ‘The new way to travel!’

‘It ’s smelly,’ said Tess.

‘Teresa, in this city you can smell like horse manure, or you can smell like coal dust; it’s your choice.’

‘You went and said manure!’

‘Well ... yes ...’

‘An’ you go an’ are all . . .
adult
when I say pure,’ she scowled. ‘Typical.’

‘Yes,’ said Lyle in a strained voice, ‘but when
I
talk about manure I use it in its scientific sense, to guide and direct the mind in a precise direction that more delicate language might not permit. When
you
say manure, you say it because it makes you giggle.’

Tess beamed. ‘Yep!’

‘Teresa, do you smell that?’

‘I smell lotsa things, and it ain’t good.’

‘All right, let me rephrase. Teresa, can you please coax Tate out from underneath that bench?’

Tate was indeed hiding under a bench, eyes watering in distress, head tucked so far into his belly that he looked like a pair of paws surrounded by ears, with no other attached limbs to speak of. It took Tess less than a second to notice what was causing Tate so much dismay. The overwhelming stench of sewage rose up from a grate set in the floor at the end of the platform. It didn’t even bother with the nose but went straight through the throat and settled on the lungs, making every breath oppressive; it seeped into the skin so that she could feel her own sweat crawling with the odour of it, as if the smell was static that snapped and rippled with her every movement, or a gauze veil draped in the air, that had to be physically pushed aside.

‘Raw sewage and the Underground,’ said Lyle, though even his customary brightness in the face of New and Interesting Revelations had diminished a little in the presence of the stench. ‘All good so far.’

‘
How?
’

‘Teresa,’ declared Lyle firmly, ‘a
Good
brush with death and adventure is a . . .’

‘. . . is a
Safe
brush with death and adventure, Mister Lyle,’ chanted Tess dutifully. ‘What we gonna do now?’

‘Follow the smell.’

‘Where?’

‘Down there.’

His toe, being the only part of him sufficiently insensitive to move much closer to the smell, pointed straight at the grate, and downwards. In Tess’s arms, Tate started to struggle and whimper. Tess stood rooted to the spot. ‘You have got to be takin’ the ... I mean . . . got to be havin’ a laugh, with all undue respect an’ that.’

‘I’ll buy you a new pair of shoes?’ hazarded Lyle, seeing that Tess was not about to be moved.

‘What’s that s’posed to do?’

‘I’m told it’s something you’re supposed to say to young ladies of a certain age as an incentive,’ he mumbled, the tips of his ears starting to turn a little pink. ‘You say that you’ll buy them shoes or ... or a ribbon for their hair or ... or a new set of lock picks or the latest efficiency of hydraulic piston or something . . .’ Lyle’s voice trailed off into silence, withered out of the air by the heat of Tess’s glare. ‘It was just a thought.’

‘A ribbon for my hair?’

‘It did seem like a silly idea at the time.’

‘
Shoes?
’

‘How about a new set of lock picks?’

‘Mine work fine! Although . . . you never know when that acid stuff ...’

‘Hydrochloric acid?’

‘That’s the ducky! Never know when that might come in handy.’

Lyle patted her on the shoulder, a gesture that over the last few months had become a distracted habit. ‘Maybe for Christmas, Teresa. In the mean time, I’m going down that grate and you are more than welcome to stay here, all by yourself, getting bored and impatient while I dance with death and clash with criminality, all by myself. Don’t you worry your head about it; you just stay here.’

Tess let out a frustrated little sigh. She had a feeling that she was being used, again, but in the end what was she going to do that was any better? So, with a stamp of her foot she hissed through her teeth, ‘An’ whose goin’ to cook me breakfast if you get all dead?’

‘That’s my girl,’ said Lyle, leaning down to lift up the grate.

 

London’s sewers were almost as new as London’s Underground. But unlike the Metropolitan Line, which had been built to last, the tunnel that Lyle and Tess dropped into had not aged gracefully. Tate had refused to go within a foot of the grate, and Tess didn’t blame him, trusting in his highly developed survival instinct, and increasingly regretting that she hadn’t stayed above ground and cowered with him under the nearest bench. Thin, stagnant water, mixed with something else that Tess didn’t want to contemplate, barely rippled around their feet. Where the tunnel curved up and away from the dark liquid with its oily, rotting sheen, Tess slid her fingers down a wall encrusted with a mixture of hard, rough, crystalline ridges and strangely warm, organic areas of total smoothness, where odd lichens seemed to have forced their way through the darkness out of the brickwork, their surfaces bubbling and fuming with strange bacterial explosions. Tess felt through the darkness for something less sinister and found Lyle ’s waist. ‘I don’t like it here!’ she whimpered.

In the gloom, there was a faint
whu-phumph
sound, followed by a billowing of dull, smoky yellow light as Lyle struck a match almost as long as his upper arm. The match dripped shards of loose yellow phosphorus that hissed and faded under the surface of the almost-black-traced-with-yellow sludge beneath their feet.

‘This isn’t right,’ muttered Lyle, holding up the light. ‘Look at the brickwork - it ’s at least ten years old.’

‘So?’

‘Bazalgette’s sewer opened more recently than that. Come on, Teresa.’

Tess picked her unhappy way after Lyle as he moved on down the tunnel. The light from the match held out in front of him turned his shape into a black silhouette, picked out against its faint yellow glow. Overhead, Tess heard the clattering as it slowed and the long
whheeeeee
sound of an engine letting off steam in the station, and the long piping of the stationmaster’s whistle. She felt the brickwork hum as the wheels rattled overhead, a gentle
gu-dunk, gu-dunk, gu-dunk
as the train picked up speed, until she felt as if her brain was being shaken inside her skull.

They didn’t have to walk very far. After five minutes the tunnel began to narrow, until Lyle was walking almost doubled over, and the walls were little more than a shoulder’s-width apart. Every ten minutes or so Tess felt the world shake as a train thudded overhead. When Lyle’s match guttered out, Tess was surprised to see that there was light in the tunnel anyway, a spot of greyness far ahead. The ground became more solid, finally condensing to produce a dull crunch underfoot. In the light that Lyle struck again Tess could clearly see the dull ochre-red of the walls, and the black of the filth-encrusted floor, trampled down by a tide of what were just distinguishable as footprints.

In silence they walked up the tunnel. As it got smaller, the heat became worse, although the smell didn’t; it was as if the body could cope with only one overwhelming sensation at a time and had chosen to concentrate on the dry burning of the skin rather than the distress of the nose. The heat was too great to allow for sweat; it just burnt dry in an instant, dragged the life out of every breath and suffocated even smell. Eventually the tunnel stopped at a grate, which had a shiny new chain drawn across it and through a hook in the wall.

Beyond, by the thin grey daylight filtering down through a thousand seeming pinpricks set into the ceiling, was a room, all by itself in the middle of nowhere. It was high and domed, made of the same red brick as the rest of the passage, but its floor was clean, except for the odd dirty footprint, and covered over with grey stone slabs. On the far side, shadows lurked beneath a low arch, half-obscuring some long wooden tables and a number of chairs.

But the chairs had been violently overturned: indeed, the whole room had been smashed. Tess saw retort stands thrown down, the broken glass of test tubes and flasks, open burners, wrenched pipes and a forest of twisted wire scattered across the floor like a shrubbery of copper and steel, whose deadly torn points stood here and there at knee height.

Lyle muttered, ‘We need to get into there.’

‘Professional at work,’ sang out Tess with false cheerfulness.

She rummaged in her pocket for the little bundle of tools and hooks that were her only possession treated with real love; oiled and polished, they were always kept ready for who knew what circumstance. The lock was not the worst she had come up against - it too was new and relatively well oiled, making the little pieces inside it click more easily into place. She searched with one tool for the points of weakness, where the catches wanted to slide back, and with another eased them gently upwards, pinning them in place and twisting. The lock snapped open, and she pulled the chain free, triumphantly pushing at the gate.