Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (14 page)

“You
should
be finding him fishing,” grunted Peek. “But you won’t. Apparently he’s gone to London on some fool errand.”

Stoker sighed. “I feared so. I say, Mr. Peek, you haven’t heard of any . . . odd doings, have you?”

Peek shrugged. “My young lad had some fool tale about a frog as big as a man, terrorizing the village. Gideon was too ready to believe him. Reckoned it’d done for his dad.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve got work to do.” He nodded at them. “Sir. Ma’am.”

“Yes, yes,” said Stoker absently as Peek strolled back to his crew. He looked at Bathory. “A frog as big as a man.”

“I heard, Mr. Stoker,” she said. “Shall we?”

The sun had already dipped behind the imposing promontory on its westward descent; Stoker shivered in the cool shadows. “I do not expect you to accompany me inside,” said Bathory. “You may stand watch for innocent citizens. I would not want unnecessary bloodshed.”

Stoker blanched. “It will really be that bad?”

She looked at him. “You were not in Castle Dracula. It was a massacre. They fight like animals.” She paused. “No, animals know when to stop. They were relentless. Like engines.”

“I have not come so far to skulk in the shadows, Countess.”

Stoker had some experience of potholing, back in Ireland, but for sport and minor thrills, not on an errand to confront what he now feared was certain death. Florence had wept for a week when he had announced he was exploring the sinkholes and tunnels of Ireland; what would she say now? A large part of him wanted her to be there, forbidding him to go any further.
Think of Noel,
she would say.
Bram, think of me!

Stoker pushed away their images, as painful as even this imaginary rejection was. Perhaps he should be thinking of them, not pleasing himself with strange adventures in the company of this beautiful, enigmatic woman.

Think of Noel.

Bram, think of me!

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“You said something?” said Bathory.

He shook his head and, with his heart seemingly doubling in weight in his chest, led the way into the fissure, which opened into a seaweed-strewn chamber. His head- torch illuminated a sloping, low-ceilinged tunnel into which he could fit if he bent almost double. Bathory led the way and he followed until it opened out into a narrow but tall chamber in which they could stand upright. Stoker pointed his head- torch around and upward; he could make out a black opening some twenty feet above them. The rock wall was pitted with suitable hand- and footholds, and he began to scale the damp wall, Bathory close behind him.

The opening led to yet another tunnel, which shortly forked. Stoker allowed Bathory to join him in the narrow space, achingly conscious of the proximity of her body against his. He said, “What do you think? Should we split up?”

A little way into the left fork he made out a black domed object at odds with the glistening stones surrounding it. He inched forward and retrieved the policeman’s helmet, shining the torch on the nametag stitched into the lining. “Constable Clive Clarke.”

“We are on the right track,” said Bathory. “Turn off your torch. I will lead now. I will see adequately. It is best if we do not speak further; tug on my skirts if you need my attention.”

Stoker’s heart leaped as they were plunged into blackness. He felt Bathory move past him, lithe and muscular like a cat, and caught a whiff of her earthy scent as she began to crawl down the tunnel, which gradually became wider and taller. Sometimes he could no longer hear her breathing and, panicked, put his hand out to feel the reassuring roughness of her black cloak.

He had no idea how long they had been stumbling along the tunnel when she whispered, “Ssshh!” and he was brought short, crashing into her back. “Look,” she said.

He could make out the faintest of orange glows. Bathory whispered, “I will investigate.”

He felt his way to the floor and sat among a pile of loose, damp rocks: strangely shaped, smooth round ones and long ones slicked with what he presumed to be seaweed. Bathory seemed to have been gone a lifetime, and he feared she had been undone by the Children of Heqet. Oh, how he longed to see the sunshine again, longed to breathe fresh air. He tried to calm himself with thoughts of Florence and Noel. But even there in the blackness, Countess Bathory invaded his head, her full lips, her voluptuous figure.

“Bram.”

Stoker almost leaped to his feet at the whisper in his ear. She had moved as silently as a phantom. She had addressed him with more urgency, more familiarity, which made his breath catch in his throat. He said, “Countess. Uh, Elizabeth. What did you see?”

“The Children of Heqet. The tunnel opens to a ledge above a chamber. They have a small wood- fire burning, illuminating an area where they appear to have been digging. They have unearthed a small wooden chest.”

“How many?” asked Stoker, his blood chilling in his veins.

“A dozen, perhaps.” She paused. “Too many. I . . . should not have brought you, Bram. You must go.”

“Go?” he said.

There was silence. Stoker put out a hand but touched only cool rock. “Elizabeth?” he said more loudly.

Then there was the most horrendous racket, hisses and shrieks and the scrabbling of what sounded like claws upon stone. Horrified, Stoker fumbled for his head- torch and switched it on.

The first thing he saw was that the smooth rocks he had been sitting among were not rocks at all. They were the bones of men, picked clean of flesh. He pulled his hand away, but something was curled around it. A necklace of some description? He had no time to study it, though, as he looked up, his jaw dropping and his blood turning to iced water. He said wonderingly, “Elizabeth?”

Bathory was barely recognizable. She had transformed into a beast, somewhere between human and bat, her cloak and dress in tatters around her horribly deformed limbs, which appeared to be dusted with fine gray hairs. Her face was stretched and mangled, her fangs bared beneath a dark nub of a nose and black, shining eyes, her ears hugely expanded. And from her arms hung curtained wings of black leather. She was locked in an obscene ballet with the thing that had haunted Stoker’s nightmares. It snapped at Bathory—or the monster she had become— with cruel rows of slavering teeth, clawing at her with its elongated arms clothed in strips of dusty rags. Stoker, to his shame, felt a warm patch spreading across his trousers.

Bathory and the Child of Heqet were frozen in a grotesque tableau for a moment seeming to last an eternity, then she turned her transfigured, nightmarish face at him and hissed through her fangs, “Go, Stoker! Go!”

Behind her he saw movement as more of the bulbous- headed shapes swarmed into the tunnel. He sat, transfixed in terror, until Bathory roared, “
Go!
”

Then all Stoker could think of was escape. He began to crawl along the passage, ignoring the sharp stones cutting his hands and knees, and the low ridge into which he crashed his head, feeling blood tricking into his eyes. He could hear the sounds of pursuit behind him and he redoubled his efforts, whimpering and blinking back tears, the light from his torch spinning crazily around the confined, suddenly airless tunnel as he forced himself onward. He tumbled over a ledge, landing awkwardly with the wind knocked out of him, and abruptly felt he could go no farther. The game was up. Elizabeth was lost and he was now going to suffer the same fate as those fishermen: torn limb from limb by the Children of Heqet, eaten alive to sate their unholy appetites. At least he would look death in the face.

The beam from his head- torch picked out a sudden flurry of movement and he steeled himself, just as Bathory, still hideously transformed, burst out of the tunnel, held aloft on her leather wings. She was naked now, save for the gray fur covering her body, and her clawed feet plunged toward him, digging painfully into his chest as she hauled him upward. She soared through the fissure, strenuously flapping her wings, and into the dusk. The beach and sea wheeled alarmingly, then Stoker got an eyeful of tumbling, azure sky, before his mind, stretched to its breaking point, embraced black unconsciousness.

9
Bent of the
Argus

Aloysius Bent writhed and moaned in the tangled pit of gray bedsheets, surfacing from the black void of unconsciousness with much farting and belching. A steam- hammer was banging like a two-shilling tart, the sound of a woodpecker ferreting for grubs, offering a fainter, yet no less annoying, counterpoint. He rearranged his morning erection in his sagging underwear and tried to separate the two sounds. The steam-hammer was the thudding hell of a hangover, evidenced by the stale gin sweat clinging to his tongue. The woodpecker was the ceaseless rapping on the door.

“Hold on a minute!” Bent yelled, his own voice driving into his head like a gravedigger’s spade. He clutched his temples with both meaty fists and sank back into his pillow, murmuring, “Oh, sweet Jesus, fuck me sideways in a barrow of tripe.”

Bent threw his bulk over the side of his bed, landing heavily on the bare floorboards with a thump, which prompted a volley of bangs with a broom handle from the spiteful old shrew below. Bent put his oily lips to a dusty knothole in the floor and shouted, “Fuck off!”

Bent prepared himself for the abject misery of standing upright. His room was a damp and airless box with peeling wallpaper on the third floor of the Fulwood Rents; he was surrounded on all sides by the villainous scum and victims of tragic hard-luck stories that were dried kindling to the misanthropic furnace that powered him. He felt an urge to piss, accompanied by a burning sensation that told him he’d probably picked up the clap again.

Finally upright, Bent stared at his reflection in the cracked, mottled mirror. A head as big as a rugby ball, pitted and pockmarked; a bulbous nose tipped with a spreading purple patch the shape of Australia. Teeth like fallen tombstones and a tongue as hairy as a Persian rug. His black hair—such as it was—was plastered to his scurvy pate. Some tart had once described his face as a stocking full of porridge. He frowned. One day he’d be rich, and everybody knew when you were rich it didn’t matter how fat and ugly you were. But the blemish on his nose made him think of Big Henry, and the money he owed him. Big Henry was a crook, and they’d tried to transport him to Australia three times. He kept coming back— like a fucking boomerang, Bent thought, and chuckled to himself—and every time he did Bent got more and more in debt to him.

The knocking at the door continued. He hoped it wasn’t one of Big Henry’s thugs. Maybe
he
should bugger off to Australia; it might be full of crooks, snakes, and spiders, but at least the sun shone. Ah, who was he kidding? He was London through and through.

“All fucking right!” yelled Bent, the effort bringing up a dash of warm vomit into his mouth. He clamped his hand over his lips and forced it back down. Breakfast. Still in his grimy underthings, he wrenched open the door to a snot-nosed brat in rags and bare feet.

“God, mister, I thought you were dead.”

“I feel it,” mumbled Bent, staring at him through one yellow eye. He vaguely recognized the kid as one of the Fleet Street Irregulars, the army of urchins and strays who turned in decent tip-offs when they weren’t hanging around with that bum-bandit private detective up near Marylebone. “What do you want?”

The boy held up a folded piece of paper, which Bent saw immediately had been torn from a policeman’s notebook. “Rozzer told me to give you this. Said to tell you there’d been another one.”

The hangover melted away as Bent opened up the note, which simply said
Lomas Street
. He looked at the brat and said, “Don’t suppose he sent a cab as well, did he?”

The boy snorted. “It’s only four streets away, mister. Take you five minutes to walk.” He cocked his head to one side, appraising the folds of fat spilling out of Bent’s undershirt and over his shorts. “Fifteen, maybe.”

Bent aimed a cuff at his dirty little head but missed. “Cheeky shite,” he said. He gave the paper back to the boy. “You know Flash Harry, on Mount Street?”

“The snapper man?”

“That’s the one. Take this to him, will you, and tell him Bent sent it. Hang on.” Bent felt around in the trousers pooled by the sink and found a ha’penny, returning to the door and flipping it at the boy.