The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (8 page)

‘Wait!’

She stopped dead. There was no arguing with Lyle when his voice rang out that loudly in a tight space.

‘Don’t move.’

Tess stayed absolutely still. Lyle eased past her, his back against the wall. With the tip of the match he prodded at something just beyond the half-open grate: a wire, strung at one end to the opening gate, and disappearing at the other into the wall. ‘What do you think?’ His voice was now quiet and intense.

‘Cut it,’ hissed Tess.

Lyle threw the match past the grate into the gloom of the chamber, and pulled out a flick-knife the length of his middle finger. He slid it up and through the wire, which snapped back into the wall with a deep
boing
. Overhead, something thudded in the ceiling, sending down a cloud of dust. They waited, holding their breath, for the dust to settle. When it became apparent that nothing else was going to happen, Tess dared to breathe out again. ‘Don’t want visitors, you s’pose?’

So saying, she pushed the grate all the way open.

The thing in the ceiling that had gone
thunk
suddenly started to clamour. Somewhere overhead, a bell began to ring, and from down the tunnel there came a gentle whisper, like the last breath of an elephant, heard far off.

‘Erm . . .’ began Tess.

‘Can’t be good,’ murmured Lyle. ‘Quick, inside.’

They hurried in, Lyle picking his way straight to the nearest table. ‘Right. Now.’ His voice came unnaturally fast, and in the distance the elephant’s breath grew to the sigh of a gentle breeze. ‘Think! What ’s been going on here?’

Tess took in the shattered equipment, the broken glass, the torn wire, the overturned boxes and crates. ‘Uh ... science like how it shouldn’t be done?’

‘Teresa!’ Lyle beamed at her.

‘Wha’?’

‘For a moment you actually sounded as though you had a decent grounding in laboratory procedure!’ He saw her deliberately blank expression, and sighed. ‘Never mind. All right, it ’s a laboratory, for studying . . . oh, look!’ With an expression of delight he picked up an object that to Tess looked for all the world like a glass squid. ‘I’ve been trying to get one of these for years!’

‘What’s that?’

‘You use it for the crystallization of leached potassium nitrate from . . . certain waste products.’

Tess’s eyes narrowed. ‘What . . .
waste products
?’

‘Well . . . you know . . .’ The tips of Lyle’s ears started going pink. ‘Potassium nitrate is commonly found in . . . you know ... places where waste has been allowed to settle . . . erm . . .’

Realization struck. ‘It’s poo again, ain’t it? You get it from poo!’

‘Now that is a gross oversimplification! Although I’ll admit there are other products of a similar nature involved in the process . . .’

A distant clunking, the sound of something jarring in old stone, a faint noise like the humming of a trapped hornet in a jar, getting angrier, fast. Lyle ’s eyes swerved to the door, and Tess’s followed. Quietly, he said, ‘All right, a laboratory, studying what?’

‘Uh . . .’

But Lyle ’s attention had already moved on, the strange contraption forgotten. ‘Wires, coils - all right, coils, that’s magnetic induction, what else? Chemicals? What do you smell? What chemicals have they been using? Potassium nitrate . . .’

‘Dunno.’

‘Black powder, explosives, that ’s what potassium nitrate’s all about. Things that go bang.’

A distant sound like the rattling of many wheels across a rough cobbled street ...

Tess waded in valiantly at Lyle’s pent-up silence. ‘Erm ... ash. Ash! Burnt paper, erm . . . been a fire, but ain’t much smoke, no soot, so . . .’

‘Chemical fire, good - explosion?’

‘Could be, there’s marks in the wall like as how somethin’ hit it fast . . .’

‘Explosives and wires, bombs?’

A sound like the rumbling hungry stomach of a giant, getting closer, footfall of stone ...

‘Erm . . . distillation, purification, they’ve been makin’ stuff, acid burn on the table, that means . . .’

‘Acid burn, good! Electricity and chemicals, bomb-making. They’ve been making explosives.’ Tess felt something cold slosh against her ankle and looked down to see cold, clear water rising around her feet, running quietly in from the door. A closer sound now, much, much closer, like snow falling down a mountain ...

‘Tess, get over here!’

No disobeying. She raced over to Lyle who was already looking around with the wide eyes of a man in search of a plan. ‘All right, so Berwick was here,’ he murmured, not taking his eyes off the grate through which the water was rushing. ‘And he was making explosives. That’s good, that’s worth knowing, worth getting our feet soggy for.’

‘Mister Lyle?’ squeaked Tess. And now there was no mistaking the sound: the noise of water bouncing against brick, swirling down an ever-narrowing tunnel, rumbling closer and closer and closer and ...

‘It ’s all right,’ muttered Lyle. ‘It’s
fine
.’ He kicked over one of the large metal crates, spilling out its broken scientific equipment with an unusual disregard for the mass of breaking glass and the pooling chemicals. ‘When it hits, just don’t let go, all right?’

She nodded. A sound like the cracking of old bones dried in the sun, like the falling of every leaf off a tree all at once, like the splintering of a trunk, the feeling of wind rushing from the tunnel, pushed ahead of something that filled every inch of space and moved so fast even the air didn’t have a chance to escape. Tess clung on to Lyle ’s waist as Lyle turned the box upside-down, so the open top was now the open bottom. Then, to Tess’s astonishment, he put the entire thing over his head like a hat, so that the sides came down almost to his elbows.

Tess had just enough time to say, ‘You look real stupid, Mister Ly—’ before it hit.

 

She had never thought of water as frightening. Even when the Thames flooded in the marshes to the east of the city or lapped high up beneath the bridges so that ships had to wait for the tide to change before they could pass under them, water had just been something more or less contained, predictable as the slope of a hill.

However, when the water surged in from the tunnel, it came fast, so fast that it knocked the grate off its hinges, so fast it tore the legs off the tables: a wall of grey-greenness that battered the bricks in the wall and gleamed for just a second with a thousand diamonds of reflected light as it swallowed the broken glass and wires of the laboratory. Tess had never learnt to swim. She clung to Lyle for all she was worth and squeezed her eyes shut as the water hit, with a punch that knocked the breath out of her, lifted her feet from the floor, spun her round and round and burnt into her lungs and rumbled in her ears, so that she imagined it storming round her brain and rushing through her blood: a sickening whirlwind pulling at her skin and hair with a thousand hands, each more determined to be the one that finally ripped her apart. She felt the water spin her towards the ceiling and knew it was still rising, pushing up against the walls and carrying with it the detritus of the lab. Then she felt Lyle ’s head bounce against the ceiling and knew that her own head would follow just a second later. She took one last breath and waited for the water to roll into her nose and mouth and lungs while she held on to Lyle for dear life, however much of that was left. With her eyes tightly shut she felt Lyle ’s hand pulling at her and something metallic sliding against her shoulders. Cold water lapped at her chin.

The movement of water that had spun her subsided. She wondered if death was like this - not especially violent, just a gentle shutting down of signals, since she had no doubt that the torrent must still be raging around her. When Lyle’s hand touched her shoulder, it was such a shockingly real gesture that instinctively she inhaled, and was astonished to find some air to breathe. Tess opened her eyes and saw utter darkness, and heard the sound of her own half-suffocated whimper and Lyle ’s rushed breath. She reached up and felt a tiny world composed of Lyle’s face, and a lot of metal box, so tightly compressed around her that she couldn’t even stretch out her arms to feel around the edges. The water still came no higher than her chin, and around her shoulders her hair loosely drifted. Lyle was treading water, the crown of his skull wedged against the top of the metal box he’d put over his head only a moment before. With arms outstretched, he was pressing his hands against the metal crate within which they now paddled, heads suspended in a bubble of trapped air. Tess considered this, together with the sound of Lyle breathing, a few inches from her, and said, ‘What the bloody hell in God ’s name I mean really is goin’ on?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Lyle ’s voice was unnaturally strained, ‘if you just relax a little bit.’

Tess realized she was still clinging to Lyle’s waist and loosened her grip. Lyle let out a long wheezing breath. ‘Thank you.’

‘Same question, an’ I don’t think as how you want me to go an’ scream in a small space like this an’ all! Where’s the rushin’ water thing and why we in a
box
?’

‘Well, in order,’ said Lyle, his voice reverberating oddly in the crowded darkness, ‘no, please don’t scream, for more reasons than just the noise - the rushing water thing is all around us although I suspect the worst is over; and we are in a box because it seemed like a solid watertight surface and because I have an inherently practical grasp of the fact that air when compressed within an area of fixed volume by water rushing into a large room will have no way to escape, assuming the pressure from the water below is equal to the pressure of the air compressed inside the ...’

‘You’re scared, ain’t you, Mister Lyle?’

‘Now what on earth gives you that impression?’

‘Way as how when you get scared an’ all you talk science in that really squeaky voice, an’ how you don’t breathe an’ stuff.’

‘In this case, not breathing is a very apt response to our situation, Teresa.’

‘You had to go an’ say it, right?’

‘I think we might have enough time left for me to finish my explanation of pressure and hydrodynamics . . .’

‘Must you?’

‘There is an alternative . . . but you aren’t going to like it.’

‘More than I like bein’ trapped in a little bubble of running-out air made of, not to be too prissy about it, a big metal box on your head, sir? I dunno as how that may be the case, Mister Lyle.’

‘Now, Teresa,’ said Lyle, ‘we have to swim.’

 

The difficult part, Tess discovered, was getting the bubble of air from the top of the ceiling, where it had drifted along with her and Lyle, to the mouth of the tunnel without letting it escape. If the box overturned while they struggled to drag the bubble downwards, as Lyle pointed out, then their conversation about whose fault the rush of gas from the box into the water above would be, of necessity, one of the shortest arguments they’d ever had.

It was surprisingly heavy work, and Tess was made no happier by Lyle’s assurance that it wasn’t actually going to get lighter the more they worked at it, because even though they were breathing in, dammit, they were also breathing out too. Eventually Lyle had to take a gulp of air and turn upside-down in the water to drag the crate and its bubble downwards. Even that operation caused bubbles to ripple out from the base of their air pocket, pulling at the crate which Tess clung on to with dear life to preserve those precious breaths, while the water rose closer towards her mouth and nose.

When they reached the tunnel, it was easier: the bubble simply bumped along the ceiling, with Lyle paddling along. They had no idea where they were, so every few yards Lyle would swim outside the bubble, feeling his way along the walls. The darkness inside the bubble destroyed all sense of direction, all awareness of time, so that after a while Tess began to wonder if they were in the tunnel at all, or simply swimming round and round inside the room, unable to find a way out, until they finally used up all the air and sank down, lost in the dark.

After a while, it wasn’t just her imagination playing tricks: she could feel the difficulty in every breath, and the rising temperature inside the bubble, until finally Lyle said, ‘It ’ll be all right, Tess.’

‘Oh, that’s bad, that’s bad, that means you’re scared!’ cried Tess.

‘We ’re nearly there.’

‘How d’you know? There’s nothin’ but dark!’

‘I promise, we ’ll be safe. Just keep breathing, all right? I’ll be back in a moment.’

Before she could swear as only an East End orphanage could teach a girl to unburden herself, there was a sound of splashing as Lyle ducked out from under the box. Tess kept paddling along; without sound or sight, time became measured only by small, fast breaths. She thought,
It’d be stupid to cry it’d be so stupid to cry I ain’t goin’ to cry I ain’t I ain’t I ain’t so there!

Something moved by her ankle and she exclaimed. Something else bumped against her middle, and a moment later, she heard another breath under the box, dragging down a gulp of tight, hot air. ‘Found something,’ wheezed Lyle. ‘It’s just a few yards away, but you’re going to have to come with me, do you understand?’

‘No! Mister Lyle, no, I don’t wanna, please . . .’

‘The ladder’s just there, we can swim up it, you simply need to take a deep breath. Do you understand? Tess?’

She nodded mutely, and then realized how pointless a gesture that was in the dark. ‘All right.’

‘We just need to go under the box. Are you ready?’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

‘Take my hand.’

She felt his hand, cold from the water, slip into hers.

‘Take a deep breath.’

She drew the deepest she could, her muscles aching from the strain of trying to find something, anything, breathable in the tiny bubble of their world, and ducked out from under the crate. Cold water crawled up her nose, and burnt in her eyes. She almost shouted at sensing it, nearly let out the breath she’d just taken. Then Lyle started swimming, and she followed, clinging on to his wrist with both hands, half-paddling, half-walking along the bottom of the flooded tunnel. She felt her shoulder bang against something hard and metallic, and suddenly up seemed the place to go, blissful up. Lyle was already pushing her, and there was light somewhere up there, criss-crossed by a grate, and distorted by the faintest shimmering of the water’s surface. She climbed the ladder with her arms and kicked with her feet, not knowing what she was doing but drawn by that light, letting her own natural buoyancy propel her forward.