Whitechapel Gods (15 page)

If anyone were to see me like this…

What did it mean, her thoughts of this other man? Could she be plotting to betray him?

Do you think, my sweet, that you can use me and cast me aside? It is far too late, pet, for second thoughts.

And yet…she dared to spurn him.

Jealousy again, unwelcome and unbalancing. The calculations took space to function, and it would not do to have his mind so crowded with petty worries and grievances.

But…he had to know.

The bottle hissed as he opened it again, its previous agitation having pressurised the gas within. The blast of scent speared up his nostrils into the sensitive flesh behind his eyes. Gasping, he squeezed the cork back into place with hands already trembling.

I’ve taken too much.

The bottle clattered to the floor. No tickle came this time, but a scraping fire under his skin. Scared grappled at the arms of his chair. His knees cracked like dry tinder, and the floor rushed to meet him. A swift strike against the boards, and he was away into that eternal, infinite space.

He had never dared consume so much before, but as the reaches of heaven glinted and soared all about him, he never felt more regret for that decision. Even the transcendent mathematics of the clear mind were inadequate to describe the sights he saw. More information could be packed into a single mote of time than in all the depths of human history.

Lover, I will tear you apart.

The memories of the Lady came in full relief as he summoned them, playing before his eyes as if he were witnessing them again from another body. The calculations whirled, visible now, spinning about him like a flock of shining swallows, picking infinitesimal bits of data from the memories to link together and compile.

His name,
Scared demanded.

The image of Mama Engine flew apart in a ball of fire, pursued to the ends of the universe by the relentless churning of mathematics.

His heart wavered, fluctuated, collapsed. He felt an omnipresent sting haul him back towards his lonely, burned room. He fought it, letting that painful gravity rake through him as he awaited the answer.

His name!
Scared bellowed.

Mama Engine’s flayed desires came back to him, piling one on the other in his vision, each stark and plain. He waited for the answer to come, burning more for each moment he remained. Seconds passed, and his mind began to shy from the vastness of the spaces about him. Fear and uncertainty crept on his skin like living things, and his nightmares frayed the edges of his consciousness, sniffing for an entrance. There were thousands of them—the twisted wretches of long-suppressed thoughts and memories. They scraped with yellowed nails against his soft mind.

Unable to bear it any longer, Scared fled upwards, pursued in his ascent by screaming legions of his own mental horrors. He swam up as fast as his wit would carry him, sinking his fingers into his own solid flesh even as the teeth of a forgotten memory clamped on to his ankle.

He crashed back into the burned room in a spray of imagined monsters, sparkling equations, and all-too-real vomit.

Lying on the floor, the spent remnants of the drug searing in his veins and organs, Scared began to snicker, then to chuckle, and after a few seconds he burst into wild, cackling laughter. The calculations had come together at the last second, and delivered him an answer even as he escaped to the uncomfortable refuge of his body. As waves of vertigo and nausea took him, he spat the name through crooked teeth.

“Oliver Sumner.”

Aaron was happy for a time, sleeping in his new body in the pocket of this mechanical man who called him by another name. He dreamed of a dog, a little spotted terrier mutt of his youth that had chewed his toes to wake him every morning, then of a sunset witnessed from atop the chimney of his childhood home in Manchester—a moment of relaxation confounded by the dousing of the fire below.

Other dreams came to him as well, dreams of scurrying amongst garbage and dodging enormous feet, of the odd pleasantries of scratching and gnawing, and of the luscious feeling discovered once by licking up a sticky liquid spilled from a glass bottle.

He awoke wondering whether he had been a man or a rat, in the days before the void.

He uncurled himself and clambered out of the pocket. The world suddenly lit up with ambient vibration.

Aaron hooked his tail and his back legs into the fabric and leaned far out of the pocket to look down, seeing only the fuzzy reflection of the streets, now not so far below, and the ghosts that haunted them.

So very many ghosts.

He looked into them, using not his body’s senses but those strange knowings he’d had as a man. These souls had a seeming of his companion from the void, as if they were part of him, or he of them. Victims of the disease? Wanderers lost to Purgatory?

He is the rot eating at the roots of the flower.

He clicked away the thought. What a very strange notion. A human one, perhaps.

The mechanical man dug his iron fingers into a beam and swung to the platform below with the grace of an orang-utan.

The impact sent a vibration up the man’s legs and through his torso. The noise flashed like fireworks in the strange eyes of Aaron’s new body. He spun his rounded snout to face his bearer’s chest and drank in the vibrations there. Each manifested as a pulse of white across the screen of his mind, outlining skin, bones, pumps, gears, pistons, and the other features of the man’s anatomy. There, too, Aaron perceived the taint of the void dweller.

The void dweller had showed him this infection, had showed him how it ended.

Or perhaps showed me its purpose.

A human thought again. Stuffy. Complicated. The rat wanted to run and climb.

He scuttled out of the pocket, hooking on to the long coat, and looked about.

“Up and about are we, Jeremy?”

The mechanical man stroked him on the snout with his fleshy hand. The skidding of the hand’s rough calluses played a music of lights across Aaron’s vision. When the mechanical man spoke, his voice appeared as a boxed and rough image not unlike the man’s face.

“He’s got quite the lead on us. Probably your comment about the vagrant, eh?”

“Pride is the folly of all men,” said the old man, with an audible grinding of teeth. “Particularly the young.” With a grunt, he swung himself over the same beam and dropped gingerly to the platform. Aaron scuttled all around the rough wool of the coat, snapping at the lapels and nibbling the buttons.

“Right-oh, Mr. Philosopher,” the mechanical man said. “Still, he shouldn’t be
so
far ahead of us. You…well, you don’t suppose he took a plunge, do you?”

“Unlikely, though he might have fell.”

“Now you’re playing with me, you codger.”

“No, I’m proving my superior wit. Move that two-ton cauldron you call an arse out of my way.”

The mechanical man chuckled, though it was a forced sound, betraying worry. His face creased perceptibly and he cast a halfhearted search around him.

Suddenly eager to help, Aaron opened his jaws and emitted a click. The sound bounced back and the area jumped to life as if lit with an electric torch. In a nest of twisting pipes some six or seven leaps distant crouched the third of their party, struggling to right himself and moving with obvious pain. Ghosts had gathered all around him, and floated in a rough sphere. The man pointed his rifle at one.

He should not be afraid of them,
Aaron thought. He leapt from the coat to a nearby beam, clipping on to one edge with his six limbs.

Follow me,
Aaron cried, surprised to find nothing more than a click and a whirr escape his throat.

“Your pet’s escaping again,” the old man called.

“His Majesty is merely flexing his legs. Exercise serves even the greatest of men,” said the mechanical man, “and rats.”

Aaron found himself clinging upside down as he approached the nest and the ring of ghosts. He had never realised before that they were solid—after a fashion. Air currents shaped through them, defining their features in layers of continually shifting ash and smoke.

He clicked at them. Two turned to look.

The sudden movement startled the besieged man, who swung his rifle about and let fly. Aaron’s senses exploded for an instant, as if the atmosphere had turned solid. For a moment he stumbled, swaying above the drop.

“You unsporting bastards,” the mechanical man bellowed, “hiding out there like foxes on the moor! Have the decency to shoot me to my face.”

Another blast rang out, followed by three more. Each obliterated Aaron’s senses, until he teetered on three limbs, tail flailing and jaws gnashing for purchase.

The beam glittered into being.

“Christ—Tommy, it’s me!”

Another shot. Another blinding field of white.

The body shuddered and gave out. Aaron dropped from his perch.

The air splayed rivers of light across his vision, rippling and gorgeous, flowing from nose to tail.

Will I die when I land?
he wondered.
Will the rat live? Will the man?

The rat screamed with rat terror and went limp at the behest of its instincts. The man turned his eyes downward and despaired.

I do not want to die. There is still so much left undone.

Memories came to him, then: images of other men like himself who were his friends; of a vast city of wasted human life; and overshadowing all, two towering creatures—one of brass, one of iron; one a hammer to crush the soul, the other a mouth to devour it.

He remembered his own name. He remembered his mission.

Joseph! Help is coming!

His buzzing rang from the beams as he fell.

Bullets sparked off the beams all around.

Oliver squashed himself farther into the tangle of piping and clamped his hand down over his hat.

The last ricochet bounced into oblivion and the pipes hummed with dissipating vibration. It would be a minute before Tommy’s clumsy hands could reload.

“Are you quite finished?” Oliver yelled.

The answer came back meek and wavering. “Ollie?”

“Yes, it’s me, you sot. Didn’t you hear me the first two times?”

“Well…there was a good deal of noise.”

“What, were you itching to mount me on the parlour wall?”

“You shot me first.”

“I didn’t know you were there. I was shooting at…”
Ghosts?
He slumped back against an irregular bend in the pipes, wondering if he really was losing his sanity. Maybe it was the height, and the thought of all those seconds of empty air before impact with a beam or a quick end on the streets below.

Something Tommy had said tingled his mental bell.

“Did you say that I shot you?”

“Clean through the chest,” Tommy called back. “I will, of course, be charging you for the clothing.”

“Are you all right?”

“Aside from the hole? The picture of health. I might mention, as well, that these express rifles were a fine choice—hit like rhinoceroses.”

Oliver shook his head in disbelief. “Can you see any way across, Tom?”

“Can’t say I see much at all. Only way’s a thin couple of pipes that a monkey would balk at.”

Oliver squinted, but could make out little against the grey air. The dull glow of Tom and Phin’s lanterns bobbed in the distance like a two-headed will-o’-the-wisp. He retrieved the matchbox from his sack and lit his own lantern, which had blown out during the fall. The light revealed only the immediate nest of pipes and the two Tommy had mentioned, which zigged and twisted and looked thin and frail besides.

“Looks as if there’s no way across, gents,” Oliver called. “I’ll descend from here and try to meet up.”

“Aye, Captain. Last one to the ground buys the round!”

Oliver felt certain Tom was saluting.

The will-o’-the-wisp moved on downward. Oliver leaned the express rifle against two close pipes and began to reload. He might have told them about his twisted ankle, he supposed, but that would have only worried them enough to attempt a foolhardy rescue. What sort of leader required a rescue? And he’d been embarrassed quite enough today, thank you very much.

In fact, it seemed all he could manage lately was to make a mess of things.

Well, I have two uninjured limbs, at least. That’s enough to affect a climb.

He made to rise, then retreated back to his uncomfortable nook as the pain flared in his ankle. He clipped the lantern to his belt and began to massage his throbbing muscles.

After a few minutes’ rest, he tried the ankle again, finding it sturdy enough to bear weight. He rose, buckled his sack and rifle to his back once more, and fished around for a possible route of descent.

Eventually he settled for an angular assortment of pipes and wires that resembled a ladder as one may have looked in an opium dream. The descent proved no more or less troublesome than previous ones had, and before long he had set foot on wide, solid beams.

He stopped to rest, sipped at his canteen, and polished his goggles to clear his vision. The human-seeming wisps of smoke had gone, but the burning in his mind remained, dulled, as if fallen into a light slumber.

Dark and heat and height had begun to take their toll: he felt exhausted. He downed another sip of grainy water and thought of Missy—Michelle. She never let anyone else call her that. Why hadn’t he noticed before?

Because it was just another of the woman’s damnable mysteries, that’s why. She liked her secrets, that one. She had a look, he reflected, a queer expression that crept onto her face in certain instances of Oliver’s kindness, which she hid behind a quickly crafted smile. Perhaps it was to keep him guessing, perhaps for other reasons—he might never know.

His train of thought breached the point at which it became more uncomfortable than continuing the descent, so Oliver stowed his water, checked his straps, and shuffled to the platform’s edge.

No more yellow paint.
Nothing below but a mass of near-vertical pipes slick with condensation; nothing to the sides but silent ashfall; the only way onward, a treacherous slide down the pipes with no peripheral means to reduce speed. His injured hand stung just looking at it; his guts clenched and squeezed like kneaded bread. He spoke just to get away from his own thoughts.