Whitechapel Gods (2 page)

They first came to me before I was old enough to speak. She was a red heat from beneath my crib; He, a scratching from the shadow beneath my windowsill. They spoke to me not in words, but in intentions and desires that my terrified infant mind could not comprehend. I cried out and hid from Them beneath my blankets. My mother rocked me and soothed me and told me They were imaginary. How could she have known, I wonder, when I was not old enough to tell her what I saw?

—I. xi

Bailey was not surprised when the doctor’s first incision drew up something darker than blood.

The patient writhed and struggled in the bed, fighting a pain that distorted his features into something less than human. He was a comrade named Tor Kyrre, though Bailey could barely recognise him. Spikes of iron had sprouted from his bald pate and his bare chest was riddled with gears and bulbs of all types of metals, the tips of much larger growths festering beneath the skin. As the doctor made his second cut, lateral and shallow, across the base of the rib cage, black oil welled up, slipping down Tor’s flanks and staining the sheets and blankets.

The doctors called the disease the
morbus imperceptus incrementum
. Other folk called it the “clacks.”

Tor spasmed and groaned, the pain of whatever was eating him inside proving too much for even the powerful whiskey the doctor had fed him.

Bailey sucked on his cigar, inhaling the smoke right down to the base of his lungs, where it burned in tiny bursts of heat. It was wrong that a man should die this way, that he should be so robbed of his dignity in his final hours.

Bailey bit back an impulse to ask Dr. Chestle to cease the surgery and let his patient pass on.

No more! Not one more life will I surrender to this horrid city.
Chestle, though he looked frail and of weak nerves, was as skilled as any two of his peers, and Tor had the fortitude of a bear. If this blasted machine-disease insisted on taking him it would have a fight on its hands.

He was about to slip away into the hall when Chestle cried out. The doctor jumped back from his patient, wildly flailing his left hand. Something black toppled to the floor, flinging oil and bits of foulness all across the floorboards.

Chestle backed into the corner, holding his scalpel in front of him like a weapon.

The object twisted and gyrated, slashing at the floor with shapeless, pointed appendages. Bailey took three steps towards it, swept up a stool, and crushed the object under the stool’s foot, bearing down on it with the weight of his knee. A screech and a crunch followed, and the thing went still.

Bailey lifted the stool to reveal a twisted mass of metal gears and articulated fingers.

“Was this the source?”

Paler than his patient, the doctor nodded.

“Then you’re finished. Sew him up.”

The look of blank terror lingered on Chestle’s face as he again bent over Tor and went to work. Fifteen minutes later, with Tor’s chest sealed and covered in gauze and bandages, Chestle nodded at the door. Bailey opened it, admitting Tor’s wife, who went directly to her husband’s side and conferred with the doctor in her broken English. Bailey extinguished his cigar now that a lady was present.

Chestle mopped the oil off his hands with a towel and tried without success to look encouraging. “Please keep the bandages fresh, Mrs. Kyrre. He should be given only thin soup for now. I shall call tomorrow to see how he is doing.”

“Thank, thank,” she said.

Bailey took out his handkerchief and gathered the remains of the foul object on the floor before Mrs. Kyrre had a chance to see it.

The housekeeper brought in a bowl of heated water and soap. The doctor washed the gore and oil from his hands and surgical instruments, the sweat from his thin moustache, and packed his tools into a leather handbag. Bailey snatched up a candlestick and led him out into the hall.

Bailey shut the door quietly behind them. He unwrapped the crushed object and laid it in the palm of his open hand, bringing the candle close to examine it.

“What is it?”

Chestle shook his head slowly, facing away from it, as if unwilling to even speculate. His voice shook with repressed fright as he spoke. “I’m afraid I don’t have an answer, Winfred.”

“But you have seen it before.”

The doctor smoothed his small moustache and faltered over a few words before speaking further. His slim figure looked skeletal in the candlelight, his close-cut hair thin and loose. “This is the fourth such case I have treated since Sunday. I had one young woman die of it.” He straightened with obvious effort. “The growths have always been common, particularly in the poorer towers, but up until now they have not been…harmful.”

Bailey pocketed the object and they headed towards the stair at the hall’s far end. Seeing the hesitation on Chestle’s face, Bailey motioned for him to continue.

“The people I have seen with this condition…,” the doctor said, “they were, the prior week, free from any trouble. The onset is sudden, the damage at once rapid and extensive. If this were to happen to all those who were infected…My God, Winfred, the loss of life…”

Bailey nodded that he understood, to save the man the expression of his horror. Chestle’s fingers absently rubbed the brass bulbs on the back of his own hand.

“What is the cause of it?” Bailey asked.

“Something in the air? Something in the food?” The doctor swallowed hard. “If it were any but you, my friend, I would not even speculate, but…since the gods…since the changes that…”

“Out with it, George.”

“I think that it is Whitechapel,” Chestle said. “Not the air or the food or the conditions, but the city itself.”

They descended the stairs, passing into a foyer and to the front door of the dwelling before Chestle spoke again, and when he did it was with great care.

“And it is not my opinion that it can be cured.”

“It can be.”

“Winfred, with all honesty, I—”

“It
will
be,” said Bailey. “Once we cast down Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine—once the baron and all the rest of their servants lie burning in hell and Whitechapel belongs to England once more—
then
you will have your cure.”

Chestle nodded and donned his felt bowler hat.

He moved to leave, and Bailey stopped him with a polite hand on the arm.

“Be ready. The battle may begin anytime now.”

“You need merely call on me. I…believe I will pray tonight.”

They shook hands firmly, and the doctor departed.

Bailey stood a long minute with the door open, staring out. His gaze was drawn upwards, past the rotting rooftops of the neighbourhood, past the gleaming Cathedral Tower, where those most loyal to the baron lived with the luxuries of health and security. He felt his jaw tighten as his eyes came to rest on the top of the looming iron mountain barely visible through the blackened air: the Stack, home to the gods and to the man who had betrayed his country and his kin to serve them.

Yes, things would happen quickly, one way or the other. If all went well, the means to reclaim Whitechapel might be in Bailey’s hands by dawn. If all did not go well, he and all the agents of the crown might soon be lying in oily graves.

Aaron had gone tonight to steal a weapon.

He was two hours overdue.

“You know what the real problem is, Ollie?”

Fighting his irritation, Oliver pulled his eyes off the street and glanced over his shoulder. Tommy crouched behind him in the filthy alley, a madcap grin flowering on his rectangular face.

Then Tommy stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. “People don’t properly die in this town,” he said with a smirk. Oil welled up around the blade, staining his shirt.

Oliver scowled. “We’re on mission, Tom.”

“I never tire of the look on your face, Chief,” Tom said, and yanked the knife out with a flourish. He licked it clean. “Tastes like honey and brown sugar.”

“Vile,” Oliver said, turning back to the street. “Absolutely vile.”

“I swear it isn’t so. You want a taste?”

“I need your attention on the mission, Tom,” Oliver said, eyes darting about the street.

“Always the responsible leader, eh?” said Tommy. “A regular John Bull, if you’re a cove.”

Oliver couldn’t help but smirk. “And yet I still thump you at Heckler’s card game.”

“Ah, but you do it so
seriously
…”

“Quiet.”

A crowd poured out of the pub three buildings down towards Aldgate Common: a group of middle-aged men fancied up in bowler hats and suits, carrying canes they couldn’t possibly need and all of them three sheets to the wind. Traitors. Collaborators. The baron’s business partners and secular employees, selling out their fellows for a few shillings and the privileges of good food and running water.

Oliver’s eyes jumped from face to face, until they settled on a handlebar moustache to rival the worst American aristocrat.

Oliver stiffened. “That’s him. Get ready.”

With a grunt and no small manner of squealing from his joints, Tommy lifted himself to his full height. He always seemed to be fighting his weight; he lurched like a rhinoceros trying to stand on its hind legs.

Tom took a few clanking steps forward. Oliver glanced back, teeth clenched and a grimace on his face.

“I doubt anyone will notice the difference,” said Tommy. He gestured vaguely upward at the ceiling, where, beyond the steel crossbeams and braces that supported the next floor, some unseen factory or mechanism chunked and chugged away. The noise echoed everywhere through the concourse.

Oliver grunted, but couldn’t argue.

Tommy noisily hunkered down behind him, peering over Oliver’s shoulder at their comrade across the street.

An instant before, Missy had been another invisible passerby, clad in drab grey and camouflaged against the soot-stained streets and thick air, but her pale skin popped to life as she stepped into the lamplight. With one subtle manipulation of her arms, her short coat fell open at the shoulders, revealing a blouse slightly too large for her frame. It hung just low enough to reveal a scintillating hint of neck, while looking for all the world like an innocent mistake of the wardrobe; a fault of the shirt, somehow.

Tommy whistled behind him. “Good Lord, she is a peach.”

Her lips came together, pursed in a perfect, pinched look of utter disdain, a shock of red in a world of greys and gaslight.

She’s a professional.

Missy cast one glance towards their hiding place, her lips cracking into the barest hint of a smile. She adjusted the silk ribbons on her hat and smoothed her skirt, fingered her sandy hair where wisps of it crept down over her ears. Then the distant look returned and she whirled pointedly towards her quarry.

She’s even working us,
Oliver marveled.

“Get ready,” he whispered over his shoulder.

Tommy shifted uncomfortably. “But I want to watch.”

“Do your moving before they get here,” Oliver snapped.

“Fine.” Tommy creaked as he rose, then clanked with every step as he retreated to a doorjamb that barely contained his shoulders.

Oliver’s eyes followed Missy’s approach to the crowd. She walked as if she had somewhere very important to be. The men all halted and doffed their hats to her as she passed. She gave them each the barest nod of acknowledgement, fixing each, Oliver knew, though he couldn’t see it, with her lingering gaze, punctuated by a twitch of the eyebrow, an ever-subtle quickening of the breath. Some stepped forward to introduce themselves even as she dismissed them with a blink and shifted to the next. This left a gaggle of befuddled men in her wake, all looking terribly unmanned.

Oliver held his breath.

Missy slowed as she passed the man with the handlebar moustache, a falter in her step, then a pause, the same interested look.

The target stepped up like a dog to a strip of bacon.

The noise of the factory above prevented any eavesdropping from this distance, but Oliver knew how it went. The man was extending his hand, offering to walk her home because it was frightfully improper for a lovely lady like herself to be wandering these streets without a gentleman escort; not the kind of place a lady would be safe, no sir. And yes, she would quite fancy an escort. Oh! Did she use the word fancy? Quite improper. A slip of the tongue.

Inside a minute she had the gentleman hanging on her arm. The rest strode off, engaging in excited conversation over the grand fortune of their comrade and puffing themselves all around as if they’d had some hand in it.

“Next time, I want to be the lookout,” Tommy said. Oliver could almost picture him stamping his foot like a boy of five.

Oliver glanced back. “When you put some grease on those joints of yours, I may consider it.”

Tommy’s face contorted in a deep frown. “A right miser, you are. A hoarder.”

“The lion’s share, Tommy. Perks of being a regular John Bull.” He turned back to the street.

To find it empty.

He cast his eyes back and forth. The street was entirely vacant but for the remainder of the pub goers vanishing into the smog, and the wanderings of one stray dog.

“Something up, mate?” Tommy asked.

The fizzling of the gaslight and the constant smog obscured most of the street. Oliver stuck his head around the corner, risking detection, and peered into those shadows along the near side of the street, where Missy was supposed to bring the fox. Nothing. Her white neck, at least, should be visible.

“We’ve lost her, then?” Tommy said.

“She’s run off.” He squinted hard to see into the alleys she would have passed walking that way.

“Maybe she wants a quick peck before we do our thing,” Tommy suggested.

Oliver felt himself flash angry. “Not when we’re on business, surely.”

“She might do it just to get your goat, Chief,” said Tommy.

“At the least, she would signal us before getting out of sight,” Oliver said.

“One would think.”

Oliver scanned the buildings lining the street, apartments stretching the entire five storeys to the roof of the concourse. Some even went higher, tangling themselves in the braces of the next level: five storeys of twinkling lights and their attendant residents, any one of which could bring the cloaks crashing down on them.

There was nowhere to hide once they left the alley. The lampposts shed dim and inconsistent light, but such was their frequency and the genius of their placement that there was no route down the sidewalk that would not risk detection. They could not pass for locals anyway, with Oliver’s shabby clothes and Tommy’s angular bulk sure to arouse suspicion.