The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (26 page)

“Sea serpents, you man?” said the man from the
Mail
.

“Not likely,” said the man from the
Telegraph
. “I heard a rumor about that ship that went down in the channel last week—the
Dunlin
, I think it was, or maybe the
Sandwich
. There was talk of that being sunk by a monster that should have been dead but wasn’t.”

“There can’t be any sea serpents in the Solent,” Mr. Henley put in. “they’d never get away unobserved in Cowes week.”

“That’s just the point,” said the man from the
Telegraph
. “This was something tinged with a far more sinister superstition than any mere sea serpent.”

“Like vampire mummies, you mean?” asked Mr. Chambers. “Something of the same order, I suppose,” the man from the
Telegraph
admitted, “but there was talk of Madeira....”

“Rowland’s favorite tipple seems to be Scotch,” M. Jarry put in. “Mine’s absinthe,” M. Apollinaire added.

“I heard a rumor that these sarcophagi in the hold don’t actually have mummies in them at all,” the man from the
Mail
told his colleague, competitively. “They’re actually stuffed full of gems, bullion and bonds. All shady, of course—but that’s how these millionaires stay ahead of the pack, isn’t it?”

“Let’s hope it’s all still there when we reach New York,” said the
Telegraph
man. “I’d hate to think of those French bandits who robbed Asprey’s and the palace making off with it, wouldn’t you?”

* * * *

Meanwhile, Allan Quatermain was responding to a query from the Duke of Buccleuch as to whether he’d ever encountered a mummy.”

“Several,” Quatermain answered. “But only one that was given to wandering around.”

“And was it a vampire, too?” inquired Hearst, sarcastically.

“Not at all. He was a rather plaintive chap, actually, animated by the desire to be reunited with his long-lost love, Queen Nefertiti. He choked a few people to death, but only because they got in his way. I had to do something about it, though—the business was getting out of hand.”

“Blew him away with your elephant-gun, I suppose,” Carnegie observed.

“I did try that,” Quatermain admitted, “but the bullets went clean through him, and the dust they blew out simply spiraled around for a few minutes before getting sucked back into his body. I could have been in a sticky situation myself then, but he wasn’t much of a runner.”

“How fortunate,” murmured Mrs. de Bathe.

“I had to set a trap for him instead,” Quatermain went on. “Happily, he was none too bright—the ancient Egyptians used to take a mummy’s brain out through the nostrils with a kind of hook, you know, and put it in its own canopic jar—so he fell right in. I’d filled the pit with oil, and laid a gunpowder fuse, so it seemed like a mere matter of striking a match and retiring to a safe distance.” “Seemed?” said Rockefeller. “You mean that it didn’t work?” “Oh, he went up like a Roman candle. The resin Egyptian mummifiers use to stick the bandages together is very flammable, and what was left of his body was as dry as a stick. If anything, the operation was a little too successful. It turned him into a cloud of thick black smoke in a matter of seconds. The trouble was that the trick he had of sucking back his dust after bullets went through him worked just as well on smoke. One minute there was nothing but a cloud settling slowly to ground-level, the next he was reformulating, a little larger than before and in a far darker mood.”

“How terrible, my dear fellow!” said the count. “What on Earth did you do next?”

“Ran like hell, old man. He was a little nippier on his pins now, but I still had the legs of him. I needed to rethink the whole problem, but once I’d figured out what was what, it wasn’t too hard to come up with a new plan. Given that fire hadn’t worked, the logical thing to try seemed to be water, for which he seemed to have something of an aversion—but transporting water from the Nile is a tricky business, and he wasn’t about to be lured into the stream.”

“So you buried him, did you?” Hearst suggested. “Got him back into his pyramid and slammed the door behind him.”

“That might have worked, I suppose,” Quatermain said, judiciously, “but it didn’t seem to me to qualify as a final solution. Besides which, I already knew that he was a sucker for pitfall traps— so it was just a matter of figuring out what kind of filling might work better than oil.” He paused for dramatic effect “What did you use?” Rowland asked, impatiently.

“Molasses,” Quatermain said. “Nice, thick, sticky molasses. After a couple of days of impotent struggling, he’d virtually dissolved in the stuff. After two days more it had set rock hard. We broke up the mass and sold the pieces in the souk as dark candy. I didn’t eat any myself, but those who did said it was delicious. I think I’ve got a few pieces left in my cabin, if anyone wants to try some.”

“Doesn’t that qualify as cannibalism?” Edison asked.

“No more so than enjoying this delightful repast,” Quatermain said, indicating the lamb shoulder on his plate. “Or, for that matter, breathing. Where do you think the carbon in our bodies goes when it’s recycled? Julius Caesar’s atoms have been redistributed so widely by now that there’s one in every mouthful we eat, another in every breath we take. And Attila the Hun’s too, of course, not to mention Cain and Solomon, Herod and Apollonius of Tyana. There’s a little of everything human in every one of us, gentlemen— and a little of everything unhuman too. Cats and bats, mice and elephants, snakes and dragons. Everything circulates—except wealth, of course. Wealth always flows uphill, from the pockets of the poor to the coffers of the rich. Isn’t that so, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Carnegie?”

Hearst burst out laughing. “I concede, Mr. Quatermain,” he said. “You’re a cleverer storyteller than I thought. Except, of course, that you’re contradicting yourself. The story you told last night, about the infamous brothers Tenebre, suggests that wealth sometimes vanishes into the maws of sharks.”

“Was that really the moral of my story?” Quatermain said. “Well, perhaps—I’m just a humble white hunter. If you know anything at all about the brothers Tenebre, though, you’ll know that they’re infinitely more skilled at self-reconstitution than any mere mummy. They always come back, and they always have another robbery to execute—but they’re just fleas on an elephant’s back when it comes to questions of serious wealth. I’ll wager that they could clear out the hold of this ship—and the first-class cabins too— without putting any one of you gentlemen to any serious inconvenience, even though your luggage would seem a fabulous fortune to any of those poor folk down in steerage. They’ll have little chance in life but to be vampires’ victims, I fear, even if they reach New York with the blood still coursing in their veins.”

“Not so,” said Edison. “Were your immortal bandits to make off with my machine for communicating with the dead, I’d be the loser and so would the world. It’s irreplaceable. Light-bulbs, phonographs and electric chairs can be mass-produced; once you have the trick of their making, it can’t ever be unlearned, but the machine for communicating with the dead is a different thing altogether—a radically new departure. Its operation isn’t based on the laws of physics, but the principles of pataphysics.”

“What on earth is pataphysics?” demanded the Duke of Buccleuch.

“It’s the scientific discipline that deals with exceptions rather than rules.”

“It sounds more like scientific indiscipline to me,” said Carnegie.

“In a manner of speaking, it is,” Edison admitted. “It’s a tricky basis on which to build a technology. Every fugitive principle of pataphysics is good for one unique machine, but mass production is awkward. The factory principle doesn’t apply, you see—every one would have to be hand-crafted.”

“Sounds un-American to me,” Rockefeller observed.

“Is it really unique?” Quatermain asked. “I had not imagined that we might have anything so rare and priceless aboard. What about you, my dear? Had you any inkling of this?”

“No,” said Ayesha. “I had not. And yet, we are to be privileged to witness the machine’s debut tomorrow night, are we not?”

“I’m afraid it won’t be tomorrow, ma’am,” Edison said, sorrowfully. “The crewmen Captain Rowland lent me are doing their best, and the ship’s stabilizers are working wonders, but the storm is making things difficult even so. It’ll be the thirtieth now, I fear.”

“What a pity!” said the count.

“I have no doubt that it will be worth the wait,” said the former Lillie Langtry, “And the pleasures of anticipation will be all the more piquant.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Rowland.

“We shall all look forward to it immensely,” Ayesha assured the inventor.

* * * *

Later that night, when the last of the first-class passengers had retired to their cabins, Ayesha came into Allan Quatermain’s cabin. Once through the door she changed her stance slightly, and when she spoke her voice seemed a good deal deeper than it had in the dining-room.

“You can steal Edison’s machine if you want to,” she said, “but we have to take the rest too. I’m not going without the gems from Hearst’s treasure-trove, Carnegie’s bullion, or Rockefeller’s bonds just so you can tinker with some idiot machine. What would we want with a machine for communicating with the dead, anyway? It’s not as if we haven’t been dead often enough ourselves—if our peers had wanted a chat, they could have dropped in on our graves then.” “It would all depend on which dead people we’d be able to talk to,” Quatermain told his companion, stretching himself out on the bed as he spoke. His Africa-tinged British accent had vanished; one might almost have taken him for a Frenchman by the timbre of his voice. “Some dead people—the aristocracy of the astral plane, you might say—must know many interesting and valuable secrets.”

“You want us to go hunting buried treasure under the advice of ancient pirates and plunderers?”

“The more recently-dead have their secrets too. I’ve always thought that blackmail is a more civilized crime than burglary—and so much more modern. We ought to move with the times, Brother Ange, lest we make strangers of ourselves in a world we no longer comprehend.”

“I comprehend Carnegie’s bullion as well as he does, Brother Jean,” the false Ayesha said. “Nor have I the slightest difficult in comprehending Rockefeller’s bonds. No matter how the world changes, there’ll always be money, and where there’s money, there’ll always be thieves. We are timeless, brother; that is the very essence of our nature. We are the shadows of the love of money that is the root of all evil, and we shall never lose touch with the world, no matter how many times we are banished from it, only to return.” “The love of money is not the only kind we shadow,” the false Quatermain observed. “You might consider leaving your grosser appetite unslaked tonight. Exsanguinated corpses are a trifle conspicuous on a ship, even one of this gargantuan size.”

“Have you mentioned that to the count and his harem?” the cross-dressing brother retorted. “They’ve been starved too long to be moderate in circumstances like these. And I’ve been hunting alone for far too long not to enjoy the company. You should come with us tonight, you know—you’re supposed to be a great white hunter, aren’t you? Stalking Irish colleens is so much more fun than stalking elephants, and one can take so much more pleasure from them, even before one drains them dry.”

“
Chacun
à
son gout
,” said the false Quatermain. “I am the Chevalier Tenebre; I treat courtship in a very different fashion.”

“More fool you. Given that the count’s ladies are spoken for and Lillie Langtry’s past it, there’s nothing in first class worth making your kind of effort for, but the lower decks are full of girls who fondly imagine that there’s something better awaiting in New York but whoredom. Think of the disillusionment I’m saving them! Anyway, it’s the swordplay that attracts you to the knightly life, not chaste courtly love. You must be aching for a good fight. You might try picking one with one of those frightful writers—the world could do with a few less of their kind.”

“Once we’re in Manhattan,” the pretended Quatermain said, “you can gorge yourself to your heart’s content. It won’t do you any harm to go easy for a couple of nights.”

“It’s a couple now, is it? And I expect you want me to talk to the count and his brides, vampire to vampire?”

“If you wouldn’t mind. If we stir up a hornet’s nest here, it’ll be that much more difficult to lay our hands on the loot, and I’m sure that the count would rather not advertise his arrival in New York too loudly. I know that we’re not much given to virtues, but a little patience might help our cause here. If you explain it to the count, he’ll keep his brides in line. He doesn’t tolerate disobedience.”