The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (30 page)

What the realm of the dead might be, or where it might be located, the chevalier had no idea—-but he supposed that its fabric must be delicate and that the souls of the dead must be electrical phenomena of a far gentler kind than the lighting of Atlantic storms.

Thomas Edison had presumably been correct to dispute William Randolph Hearst’s claim the Edison’s machine might only enable the
Titan
’s passengers to hear the screams of the damned in Hell— but if the souls of dead humankind had not been in Hell when Edison closed his master-switch, they obtained a taste of it now.

And they screamed.

They screamed inaudibly, for the most part, because the pipes of Edison’s machines had melted and their connections had been dissolved—but there was one exception to this rule.

The brothers Tenebre and Count Lugard’s party were not the only individuals on board the
Titan
who might have been classified as “undead.” The fragment of the creature that had washed up on the beach at Nettlestone Point, having earlier been found by a fishing-vessel off Madeira and lost again from the
Dunwich
, also had an exotic kind of life left in it. Like many supposedly primitive invertebrates, the part was capable of reproducing the whole, under the right existential conditions and with the appropriate energy intake.

When this seemingly-dead creature screamed, its scream had only to wait for a few microseconds before it was translated back from the fragile realm of the dead into the robust land of the living.

It as a strange scream, more sibilant than strident, and it was a strangely powerful scream.

As Edison’s machine had briefly demonstrated—confounding all the skeptics who had refused for centuries to believe in spiritualists and necromancers, ghostly visitations and revelatory dreams— the boundary between the human and astral planes was not unbreachable. When the unnamable creature, whose close kin had died by lightning in the Mitumba mountains, was resurrected by lightning, its scream tore a breach in that boundary, opening a way between the worlds—and through that breach, the newly-agonized souls of the human dead poured in an unimaginable and irresistible cataract.

The breach, Jean Tenebre subsequently decided, could only have lasted for a few microseconds more than it took to make the scream audible in the first place—but while it lasted, the souls of the dead had a chance to assert themselves in the world of the living, of a kind they had never had before—not, at any rate, in such quantities.

The souls of the dead vied with one another to dispossess the souls of the living: to claim the bodies of the
Titan
’s three thousand passengers for their own use and purposes.

The competition was understandably fierce.

There were eight people aboard the
Titan
whose souls could not, as it turned out, be dispossessed. The two brothers Tenebre, the count who had inverted his name, and his three lovely brides were six of them. The seventh was Edward Rocambole, whose opinion of his own heroism was so unshakable that he simply could not be persuaded to vacate his mortal habitation. The eighth was an eleven-year-old girl in steerage by the name of Myra, who was just lucky.

As the thirty-first of December 1900 whiled away, Jean Tenebre made some slight attempt to figure out who might now be inhabiting the bodies of his fellow passengers and the
Titan
’s crew. He spoke seven languages himself, so he made a little more progress than another man might have, but it was still an impossible task. The dead turned out to be very discreet, and they clung to their assumed identities as stubbornly as the chevalier had ever clung to any of his multitudinous pseudonyms.

By the time he had to dress for dinner, Jean Tenebre had found some reason to suspect that Captain John Rowland might once have been a Dutchman named Vanderdecken; that Mr. Hodgson might once have been an American gentleman named Edgar Poe; that Mr. Black might once have been Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard; that William Randolph Heart might once have been Judas Iscariot; that John D. Rockefeller might once have been Nebuchadnezzar; that Andrew Carnegie might once have been Cyrus the Great; that the Duke of Buccleuch might once have been Wat Tyler; that Edison might once have been Daedalus; and that the former Lillie Langtry might now be the former Catherine de Medici; but he could not be sure.

The one thing of which he
was
sure was that, in the struggle for repossession of the Earth, the meek had, in general, not prevailed.

That night, however, dinner was served as usual, although the only meat left aboard was chicken, all the remaining pork and beef having mysteriously vanished into one of the storage-lockers adjoining the refrigeration hold.

At the writers’ table, the conversation ran along lines that were a trifle unusual, but nevertheless perfectly civilized.

“Are you going to stay in the writing game?” Mr. Robertson asked Mr. Twain.

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Twain. “Not unless Edison hurries the development of moving pictures. That’s where writers will make money in future—that and broadcasting, Marconi-style. How about you, Chambers?”

“I’m heading for Texas,” Mr. Chambers said. “Going into the oil business, I think. The twentieth century is going to need power, and there’s an ocean of black gold lying around just waiting to be sucked out. Are you with me, Huneker?”

“All the way,” Mr. Huneker agreed. “But I might just get into automobiles. They’re not much to look at just now, but I have a feeling there’s scope in them—and a market for your oil, Chambers.”

“You’re staying with the
Mail
, I suppose?” said the man from the
Telegraph
to his friend.

“Just for a while,” his colleague agreed. “Provided I make editor within two years. It shouldn’t be difficult. Within five I’ll have middle England eating out of my hand. You?”

“I fancy that I might found a tabloid of my own.
The
Daily Mirror
, say—or
The Sun
, if I could be sure that swine Hearst wouldn’t sue me. I’ll not be in competition with you, mind. Wouldn’t want to confuse the poor lambs with debates or the truth, would we?”

“Europe,” Jarry said to Apollinaire, “is ripe for looting. England and Germany will be at one another’s throats even if we don’t stir the pot, with France caught between them. Given that the sun never sets on their various imperial adventures, that puts the whole world up for grabs or very nearly.”

“There’s going to be big money in armaments,” opined M. Feval. “Bigger and better guns, tougher and thicker armor. Civilians won’t be able to stay out of twentieth century wars, with fleets of airships raining down bombs on cities.”

“And big money in medicine too,” M. Lorrain put in. “It always pays to have both sides covered in a major conflict—killing and healing always go hand in hand. There’ll be fortunes to be made out of any method of combating infection and syphilis. Armies are wonderful instruments for spreading the plague—all that camaraderie and rape.”

“High explosives are passe,” Apollinaire mused. “Poison gas is the way forward. Atom bombs, maybe a little further down the line. Germ warfare too, if your medicines can provide the means to protect the folks at home.”

“The long-term future’s in morphine and human trafficking,” Ms. Lee opined. “Even if populations aren’t displaced
en masse
by wars, there’s bound to be migration on a scale that beggars the imagination, and even the people who aren’t physically wounded in your universal wars will be in dire need of pain relief.”

“We shall be judged by our actions,” Mr. Vane asserted, cheerfully. “Let’s make sure that we make better use of our second chances than we ever did with our first.”

* * * *

The following morning, shortly after dawn, the
Titan
steamed past Sandy Hook and soon came within sight of the Statue of Liberty.

“It’s going to shake things up when this lot get ashore,”, said Ange Tenebre, still playing the role of Ayesha, as he/she drank in his/her first sight of the home of the brave and the land of the free. “You now, if I weren’t so incorrigible, I might have thought twice about stealing the bullion and the bonds, let alone Hearst’s antique gemstones.”

“They’re too busy making future plans to care overmuch about minor inconveniences,” his brother said. “As for shaking things up, I doubt that America will notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s always been a land of opportunity.”

“Aren’t you forgetting the thing in the storage-locker? The people from the New York Museum of Natural History are going to get a shock when they open it up.”

“I expect it’ll slip over the side and head for Innsmouth,” Jean Tenebre said. “One shoggoth more or less isn’t going to disrupt the flow of history any more than adding an extra ounce of rapacity to the characters of men like Hearst and Rockefeller.”

They were joined then by Count Lugard and his three delectable brides.

“Did you dine well last night, Monsieur Ange?” the count asked, politely.

“Yes indeed,” said Ange. “Poor girl seemed a trifle disconcerted, not having expected her second term on Earth to be terminated quite so rapidly, but her blood hadn’t curdled at all. You?” “Likewise—and my three lovelies had a good time also. Irma was a trifle reckless, descending no further than the second class cabins, but she says that it was worth it, just to see the expression on Monsieur Rocambole’s face when he realized that there was, after all, no gang of technicians aboard covertly collecting donations for medical research.”

“The world is full of such misconceptions,” Ange lamented. “The only things in life that are dependable are lust and avarice.”

“Do you not mean death and taxes?” The count asked, laughing to emphasize that he was joking. They were, after all, surrounded by evidence of the evitability of death, and they both knew perfectly well that only little people paid taxes.

“Aren’t you afraid that the sunlight will shrivel you up and make you burst into flames?” Ange riposted, laughing just as merrily.

The count looked up into the brightening sky, then down at the sunlight reflected in the myriad windows of a host of skyscrapers. “I shall love it here,” he said. “And my brides will have the time of their unlife. We’ll soon make ourselves felt in Manhattan. Things will never be the same again.”

“Not according to Jean,” Ange told him. “He doesn’t think the arrival of the
Titan
will change anything.”

“That’s not what I meant, Brother,” the chevalier corrected him. “I meant that no one will understand why things have changed. They’ll be expecting change regardless, and our contribution to it— not to mention that of the three thousand reanimates—will seem to be nothing more than the mundane surge of history. This is a new century, Brother Ange; even if the
Titan
had hit an iceberg and gone straight to the bottom, you and I would still be living in interesting times.”

“Always assuming that we could still come back again, if our graves were lying on the ocean floor,” Ange said.

“For the likes of us,” said Jean, “fate will always find a way.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science fiction and fantasy novels, including:
The Empire of Fear
,
The Werewolves of London
,
Year Zero
,
The Curse of the Coral Bride
, and
The Stones of Camelot
. Collections of his short stories include:
Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution
,
Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution
, and
Sheena and Other Gothic Tales
. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including
Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950
,
Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence
, and
Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia
. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical entries to reference books, including both editions of
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
and several editions of the library guide,
Anatomy of Wonder
. He has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including several by the feuilletonist Paul Feval.