Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion (26 page)

Those parts of the Barrage already built were demolished with haste. Altogether more dynamite than might have seemed necessary was used. Mr. Guppy even went as far as to obtain some of the newly invented blasting gelatine from Mr. Nobel in Sweden. A considerable number of fish were killed by the explosions, but no unusual corpses were washed up.

I reported the events of the evening to Taharqa who was unsurprised by the appearance of the creatures, and approved wholeheartedly of our intention to destroy them.

“There is one thing I am still unsure about, great king. If Cartwright made that stone, why was it found in the estuary? Surely he would not have been so careless with it.”

“He did not make it, woman. That is clear from the inscription.”

Damn him! He rarely gave me a full answer.

“Then who did?”

“That I cannot say, but the inscription is of the form of a summoning. It praises the god, Dagon, and calls his children to your shores with promises of plentiful food. The inscription speaks of having encountered them in the river you call Niger.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Foolish woman. Thousands upon thousands of Africans have been taken on ships through your port of Bristol to their deaths in your colonies west over the ocean. Did you not think that one or two amongst them might have the means to extract revenge?”

I cannot say if Taharqa spoke the truth. He is a vengeful spirit, much consumed with a desire to see our Empire cast out of Africa and his own land of Kush mighty once more. All I can say is that, since the demolition of the Barrage, I have heard no stories of people of Bristol being taken mysteriously near the waters. I cannot, however, speak for the simple folk who live along the Somerset coast. Coward that I am, I have not attempted to find out how they fare.

I am sealing this document, and depositing it with my lawyers with instructions that it be given to any corporation undertaking major engineering works in that region of the Severn Estuary where the ill-fated Barrage was to have been built.

Sirs,

According to historical record, Constables Palmer and Rimes did indeed join the army. Both died at the hands of the Zulus at the Battle of Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. Inspector Bartram died of a heart attack that same year. Thomas Guppy died in Italy in 1882, having been in ill health for many years. There are no historical records concerning Miss Edwards’ supposed manservant, Jenkins.

Miss Edwards herself, while a noted Egyptologist, was also a successful writer of fantastical fiction of the populist kind. Her ghost story, “The Phantom Coach”, was well thought of and anthologised several times. There being no evidence of the existence of the creatures that she mentions, and no corroboration of her story from any of the other witnesses, it is my belief that everything she has written here is fanciful.

Thus, while it was entirely right and proper for Messrs Plympton and Naismith to have brought the matter to your attention, I can see no risk whatsoever attached to the Central Electricity Generating Board, or the project to construct a nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

Barnabas M. Olmstead, Consultant

Story Notes

Amelia Edwards was a real person, and a co-founder of what is now the Egypt Exploration Society. She was also, at one point, vice-president of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage. She really did have a mummy in her house, but it is not known whether it talked. Mrs. Brayshaw was her “companion”. The pair lived together in Bristol for 30 years.

Thomas Guppy was also a real person. His mother, Sarah, was a noted engineer and inventor. The species of fish known as the guppy was named after Thomas’s nephew, Robert, who first discovered it in Trinidad in 1866. It seemed appropriate that someone from the family be involved with the Deep Ones at some point.

Kenneth Mackenzie was a real person and was later a co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Taharqa was the fourth pharaoh of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt, a family that originated in the Nubian kingdom of Kush. He was noted for his wars against the Assyrian king, Sennacherib.

There really were plans to build a Severn Barrage in Victorian times, though it never actually got started. The original plans would have located it further upstream, where the Severn bridges have since been built.

Dagon really was a sea god of the Philistines, who were probably the same people that Egyptian sources call the People of the Sea. He is often pictured as half-man, half-fish.

H.P. Lovecraft seems to have had a thing about fish. Events in this story bear some relation to those in his story, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

- Scott Lewis -

From the Memoirs of Doctor William Nathaniel Dalton, Esq., 23rd July 1913.

The Asiatic Cholera epidemic of 1866 swept through Bristol like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Throughout the city men and women were falling sick at an alarming rate, and the poorhouses in particular were awash with reeking, vomiting, disease-ridden specimens. Living as I did at my employer’s country home in Somerset, I initially thought myself lucky enough to be unaffected by the malady, but as is so often the case my fortune in avoiding one peril simply served as a prelude to something far more dangerous.

What history appears to have expunged from the popular record is that at around the same time a series of rather grisly murders were reported in the Park Street district of the city. The circumstances surrounding the deaths were most strange indeed, and appeared to have baffled the local constabulary, not that this was necessarily difficult given the rudimentary levels of training and discipline possessed by the majority of the city’s officers. The gossip factories have since focused on the vile deeds of such miscreants as Spring Heeled Jack, Doctor Crippen and Jack the Ripper, but for a few weeks at least the story of Alleyway Agnes was the talk of the streets and drinking dens of most of the major cities.

The story of my own involvement in the tale begins on the morning of the 14th May. I was sat in the drawing room at Greendale, happily reading my copy of the
Mercury
when my employer walked in. He was dressed in a tweed sporting suit and had already put on his boots. He was motioning at me with his cane.

“William! Are you not ready yet? Come on, my boy, time is of the essence!”

Despite being a man of twenty-two he still referred to me as ‘my boy’, but this concerned me less than the fact that either I had missed an instruction or (a more likely case) he had forgotten to give me one. I remain convinced to this day that, for all his genius, Professor Cornelius J. Montague suffered from some hitherto-unclassified mental complication that made more trivial matters - like asking his associate to do an errand or prepare for a journey- simply evaporate from his mental task list.

For one of the smartest men I have ever known, the Professor still remains something of an enigma. Scientist, adventurer, philanthropist, scholar and friend, he employed me for many years as his assistant, aiding him with his research into the Faeries and other denizens of the Aether, that spirit world which exists alongside our own. From our first venture together — an attempt to create an enclosure to observe the Fae, which ended as something of a catastrophe — through travels to the depths of Africa, the furthest northern reaches of the Arctic circle, and down to the Colonies in Australia, he always seemed to me more of a somewhat eccentric and more-than-slightly insane favourite uncle than an employer. Though many of the great scientific minds of the day pooh-poohed him and mocked his theories, it is thanks largely to his works that we have half the understanding of the spirit realm that we do today.

I glanced up from my paper with a frown of annoyance, having been reading a particularly interesting article about an archaeologist from the Institute who had uncovered a hoard of Saxon treasure in an underground cavern near Wells. “It is? Well, where are we going?”

“Bristol!” The Professor exhorted, as he struggled into his overcoat. “Grab your bag, my boy. You may also want to bring Titania. I fear there may be some hefty work in our foreseeable future!” Apparently overnight he had added clairvoyance to his list of talents. I rolled my eyes and set my newspaper down on the side table.

“I see. May I ask — I mean, could you please
remind
me as to why we’re making such a sudden journey?”

He gave me a level stare from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and irritably tweaked one end of his waxed, white moustache.

“The letter. From Superintendent Chalmers. That arrived this morning. You know, the one I gave you at breakfast?”

He hadn’t given me a letter at breakfast. I sighed internally, before asking, “Can’t say I’m familiar with the contents. Do you have it with you?”

“Not now. I put it in the briefcase I asked you to load in to the carriage.”

He hadn’t given me a briefcase, nor had he asked me to load the carriage.

Half an hour later, and it was time to leave. My overnight bag was packed with the usual — an extra set of clothes, my nightshirt, a copy of the latest popular novel, in this instance
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
— and the tools of mine and the Professor’s trade. My pair of his patented meta-spectral optical augmentators (the last word in aether-based supernatural detection and creative etymology), a large collapsible butterfly net (steel, the netting iron-cored) and Titania — a custom double-barrelled twelve-bore fowling-piece, designed to the Professor’s specifications by the famous gunsmith William Scott. The latter was a beautiful creation, etched with a depiction of the briar scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and subtly machined to be just a tad more accurate than most weapons of the sort. I also packed a box of solid iron slugs… just in case. In our many dealings with the denizens of the Aether the Professor and I often had recourse to apply the belief that when all else fails, two large lumps of twelve-gauge cold iron are an effective final solution to most Fae-related problems.