Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion (29 page)

“I’m coming. No argument.”

“Miss McClure…”

“Professor.” Her voice was stern, cold. Her jaw was set, and her eyes flashed with determination in the lamplight.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and if one can fall in love in a sewer surrounded by a reeking river of faeces then I was smitten.

“Miss McClure, I must say…”

“No. I’ve spent time in the Andes, looking for lost cities. I’ve climbed mountains in Tibet, and travelled the Hindu Kush, and every time someone else has led the expedition and taken the credit for what we found, without a mention for me. That…
thing
has taken something I spent three months uncovering. I am not. Going. Back. Without it.”

The Professor stopped in mid-flow, then chuckled softly. “As you say. Well, onward we go then, and for pity’s sake, keep quiet!”

We made our way up the culvert, and I don’t think any of us stopped to think about what
exactly
it was that squished underfoot as we did so. The culvert ran uphill for a good thirty metres, then dropped away into a cistern. As we looked into the round chamber, the sound stopped. A walkway ran around the circumference of the room, around the edge of a large pool of waste which seeped slowly out of the chamber through another barred culvert on the opposite side of the pool. I climbed down out of the tunnel we were in, dropping silently down on to the walkway. A quick glance around convinced me we were alone, and I turned to the others.

“All clear…”

One hears tales of the crocodiles in Africa, lunging from beneath the surface of a river to grab their prey and drag it to a watery demise. Having seen that happen in the flesh, I can testify that the speed with which the Annis struck was much akin to the hunting stratagems employed by those tyrants of the savannah. She leapt from the stagnant effluent behind me, and only a yell from Katherine gave me the opportunity to turn in time to bring Titania to bear. The wicked claws struck a glancing blow off the weapon and lanced into my shoulder, rather than skewering my heart as I feel she intended. I yelled in pain and no small amount of fear, dropping the shotgun as her spindly body bore me to the floor. The Annis straddled my hips, cackling and screaming madly, gyrating against me in some bizarre sexual simulation that could possibly have been amusing were she not drawing back her claws for the killing blow. The lamplight glinted off those lethal appendages as she slashed down, hard, razor-sharp blades aiming to shear across my throat.

A pint-sized thunderbolt streaked out of nowhere, and the Annis shrieked in fury as a tiny body collided with her wrist. The impact was just enough to shift her claws higher, and the bottommost blade removed the top of my bowler hat (and more hair than I care to admit). Goblin-Groom had latched on to the Annis’s wrist, and was biting down hard. The woman screamed and flailed, banging my hobgoblin companion against the wall of the sewer. The Professor and Katherine, overcoming their initial shock at the ferocity of the Annis’s attack, snapped in to action. The Professor grabbed the folded net, pulling it from his belt pouch as Katherine jumped down into the culvert. She lashed at the Annis with my cane held in her good arm. The heavy silvered knob hit the Fae’s temple with a sickening thud, and she spun back against the cistern’s filth-slick side. The net came down from above, the iron-cored hemp landing squarely over the creature and tangling her well and truly.

I scrabbled to my feet, grabbing Titania from a puddle of slime as I did so. Bracing her against my uninjured shoulder I bought her to bear on the Annis and pulled both triggers. The fae convulsed as the twin lumps of cold iron slammed into her chest, and she screamed in agony as the touch of the pure metal began to burn away at the very essence of her physical form. She collapsed against the wall, thrashing about as she tried to maintain her presence in the mortal realm. Goblin-Groom struggled free and ran over to join us, stepping delicately around one of the smellier lumps of effluent our struggle had disturbed. As the Annis writhed on the floor under the net, the Professor stepped forward and removed a vial of the blessed water from his belt. Uttering a simple phrase in Latin, the Professor cast the water over the trapped creature. With a single, final and most horrifying shriek, she was gone, her body withered and crumbling to dust before our very eyes. All except for her own… the only thing that remained was her single ocular, lying in the filth and muck.

For a few minutes we stood in silence, the only sound in the chamber the slow gurgle of the sewage beside us. All four of us were weary, and my shoulder burned with a pain I hadn’t felt before. Groom looked up at me, and before I knew it he was tugging at my trouser leg, climbing up to his usual perch on my good shoulder. I gave him a grateful glance, and nodded in appreciation.

“Thank you, Groom. I thought she had me there for a minute.”

He gave me a big, childlike smile, and sat himself down next to my collar.

“Um… what is that?” Katherine stood beside us, looking at Groom in bewilderment.

“Ah, Miss Katherine McClure, meet my stalwart friend and companion, Goblin-Groom.”

Groom gave her a low bow, and she stared at him incredulously.

“I think we need to go back up to the surface. And then we both need to go and see a doctor. And then, Mr. Dalton, I think you need to explain a few things to me, possibly over a drink.”

A few weeks later, as I was once again sat in the drawing room at Greendale, Abraham arrived with a letter. He handed it to me and I opened it with interest. It was from Katherine, and I smiled as I read the contents. Walking through to the Professor’s study, I woke him from his habitual mid-afternoon doze in the big leather armchair. “We’ve been invited to accompany Miss McClure to Wookey next Monday.” I smiled, showing him the letter. “Seems she has some unfinished business there.”

When we met her outside the King’s Head in Wells, Katherine was dressed in rugged men’s walking attire, hair hidden under a flat cap. A satchel hung at her hip, and she smiled as the Professor and I got out of the aethercarriage. “Hello, gentlemen!” She grinned broadly, and motioned to the vehicle. “Drink, or should we get going?”

“Let’s go and get the work part over with, and then I’m sure we can find time for some recreation.” The Professor smiled, and I swear I saw something pass between them. A glimmer of understanding, a shared purpose.

As quickly as we had arrived, we were back in the aethercarriage and following Katherine’s directions to a secluded spot just outside the city. We dismounted, and the archaeologist led us through a thicket to a small cave in an otherwise unremarkable hillside. She lit a lamp, and beckoned us to follow her in. We allowed her to lead the way as we descended into the tunnel under the hillside.

After an hour of climbing through the rocky tunnels of the Wookey Hole system, we finally hit upon a huge cavern, and I could barely restrain my amazement as we stepped in to it. On the far side, a large stalagmite rose up from the rocky floor, craggy and bulbous. Katherine led us over to it, and smiled softly as she looked at it.

“This is where I found it. Old charts of the system call this stalagmite the Witch, after the old legend. They say that this is the petrified form of the Witch of Wookey, that here is where she was turned to stone.”

She reached in to her satchel, and drew out a linen-wrapped object. She undid the bundle, revealing the Annis’s eye. She stared at it for a while, her expression distant.

“Seems only right that we put it back where it belongs.” With that, she pulled out an archaeologist’s hammer and a small trowel and began to dig away at the base of the stalagmite. After twenty minutes, she had a hollow large enough to fit the eye in to. Then she piled sediment and chippings on top of it, leaving the eye completely hidden. Her task complete, she stood and smiled at us.

“There. I’m sorry to have dragged you boys into this…” Her eyes met mine and we looked at each other in the lamplight. “… but I’m very, very glad to have met you. Both. Both of you.”

We were back in Wells three hours later, and as we stood outside the King’s Head the Professor turned to me. “I have business with a few associates here. Be a good chap and wait inside the pub for me, will you, my boy?”

He looked at Katherine and smiled a knowing smile, the one he normally reserved for when he was concocting one of his less-than-sane schemes. Her eyes sparkled with mischief and her mouth creased upwards, and I felt a light touch on my arm as she slipped hers into the crook of my elbow. The Professor raised an eyebrow and chuckled heartily

“Besides, if my memory serves me correctly, you still owe Miss McClure a drink. Have fun!” He turned and strolled off down the street, whistling some nameless tune. I turned to Katherine, and suddenly found myself lost for words.

“Miss McClure… Umm… Ah…I…shall we?”

Against all propriety, she raised a finger to my lips to hush me. “First, call me Kitty. Second…” there was that mischievous smile again “there’s plenty of time to talk later, because I think you and I are going to be spending quite a bit of time together.”

I blushed, and she laughed.

“But for now, let’s go get that drink.”

PART III

Travelling Light

- Jonathan L. Howard -

We have spoken of Blakes before, and it seems we shall speak of it again. Blakes, then, is a gentlemen’s club to be found in one of the less lugubrious of London’s West End districts, which is to say, where the locals are only strongly scented with money rather than stinking with it. Blakes, by contrast, as a product of annual dues, bequeathals, donations, and investments, reeked of lucre to those with the properly attuned senses. To the casual observer, however, it seemed cosily run-down and underwhelming. This was the impression it laboured hard to project, and spent a small fortune in maintaining.

The truth of the matter was that simple exclusivity was not enough for Blakes. Indeed, it went out of its way to appear positively unappealing. Few outsiders thought to seek entrance to the strangers’ room, never mind actual membership, and this was good and proper, just as it ought to be. Instead, the members identified potential new blood and took these names to the committee — heavens forfend that the subjects of such scrutiny should be approached at this stage — and if, after an exhaustive investigation, the man of interest was found to fall within the club’s very specific boundaries of personality, profession and experience, then they would be quietly taken to one side and told they’d joined Blake’s, and that was all there was to do about it. Nobody ever declined, and that was because only Blake’s men were ever selected to join Blake’s. Such was the precision of the vetting process that the new faces mingled with the old as if they’d been there since the club’s inception.

This, then, is the setting for our tale, which begins — as do most tales in Blakes — in the library after dinner. Dinner on this occasion had consisted of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with vegetables for the more adventurous. This was followed by a form of suet pudding known as a “drowned baby.” The chef had taken this theme perhaps a little too much to heart, and it passed several plates unsampled until McGrath — who was rumoured to have eaten a colleague on an ill-starred journey up the Limpopo — tucked in with gusto. When a slice was cut, raisins were discovered within, which re-engaged the appetites of those present. Except, that is, for McGrath, who seemed strangely downcast.

Subsequently, the club members adjourned to the library to indulge in their usual pastime of despoiling the books with clouds of tobacco smoke, books that had otherwise gone unmolested by human hand since the day they were shelved (with the exceptions of the volumes of
Wisden
and Quiller-Couch’s
Oxford Book of English Verse
, these latter being subjected to much thumbing throughout the year; cricket and poetry were the whole of the mental stimulation that the club members sought). When the air was of just sufficient toxicity to kill insects, the members would move to their second favourite pastime: the telling of tales.

These tales were not of the usual stripe to be found muttered in the fug of a dozen smoking rooms across the metropolis. They were not of how Tom bagged the notorious man-eating tiger of Pithoragarh, of how Dick escaped a band of outlaws in Arizona, or of Harry’s lucrative if dubious exploits in the Square Mile. No, Blakes’ library had instead heard tales of Molyneux’s bagging of the unsuspected man-eating great centipede of Standedge Canal Tunnel, Enright’s encounter with Katamenian bandits and the ancient evil they awoke, and Reynold’s memorable encounter with the brilliant financial manipulator, Mr Cheddar, who also happened to be a pug.

These were remarkable stories in any light, all the more so because — although no member would be so ill-mannered as to research them to prove or deny their veracity — it was inevitable that evidence would be stumbled upon accidentally, and this evidence always served to prove the truth of the narratives. There had indeed been a rash of mysterious disappearances in the Standedge Canal Tunnel, the longest such tunnel in Britain. There had indeed been an outrage committed upon the person of the Archbishop of Parila on a night also marked by blue lightning. There had indeed been curious perturbations within the stock market that served to do little else but enrich Battersea Dogs’ Home.