The Revolutions (2 page)

Midnight! The Professor waited, as if listening for some news to erupt from the befogged city below.

“Well,” Syme said. “I dare say I know your habits after all this time. I know how you like to do things in twos. I knew there would be a second bomb. At the nave, was it, or the altar? I expect Inspector Wright’s boys found it quick enough—”

A terrible change came across the Professor’s face. All trace of civilization vanished, and savagery took its place—or, rather, not savagery, but that pure malignancy that only the refined intellect is capable of.

Howling, the Professor let go of the cross and flung himself onto Dr Syme.

Pens scratching away. Rain drumming on the glass, loudly now. A row of women industriously translating Russian into English, or English into Sanskrit, Italian into French. Arthur’s neighbour appeared to have fallen asleep.

Arm in arm, locked together in deathly struggle, the two men fell—rolling down the side of the dome—toward

Toward what, indeed!

“By God,” said Inspector Wright, hearing the terrible crash. He came running out into the street, to see, side by side, dead, upon the ground—

Arthur put down his pen, and scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

His neighbour moaned slightly, as if something were causing him pain. Concerned, Arthur poked his shoulder.

The man jumped to his feet, staring about in wild-eyed confusion; then he snatched up his briefcase and left in such a hurry that scholars all along the rows of the Reading Room looked up and tut-tutted at him.

*   *   *

Rain sluiced noisily down the glass. Lamps swayed in mid-air. Thunder reverberated under the dome as the Reading Room emptied out.

Arthur’d thought he might try to bring out his friend Heath for dinner, or possibly Waugh, but neither was likely to venture out in that weather. Bad timing and bloody awful luck.

He collected his hat, coat, and umbrella. These items were just barely up to the Reading Room’s standards of respectability, and he doubted that they were equal to the challenge of the weather outside. Certainly the manuscript of
Dr Syme’s First Case
was not—he’d left it folded into the pages of a treatise on poisons.

Outside a small band of scholars, idlers, and policemen sheltered beneath the colonnade. Beyond the colossal white columns, the courtyard was dark and the rain swirled almost sideways. In amongst it were stones, mud, leaves, tiles, newspapers, and flower-pots. Some unfortunate fellow’s sandwich-board toppled end-over-end across the yard, caught flight, and vanished in the thrashing air. Arthur’s hat went after it. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. A tropical monsoon, or whirlwind, or some such thing.

He was suddenly quite unaccountably afraid. It was what one might call an animal instinct, or an intuition. Later—much later—the members of the Company of the Spheres would tell him that he was
sensitive
, and he’d think back to the night of the Great Storm and wonder if he’d sensed, even then, what was behind it. Perhaps. On the other hand, anyone can be spooked by lightning.

He was out past the gates, into the street, and leaning forward into the wind, homewards down Great Russell Street, before he’d quite noticed that he’d left the safety of the colonnade. When he turned back to get his bearings, the rain was so thick he could hardly see a thing. The Museum was a faint haze of light under a black dome; its columns were distant white giants, lumbering off into the sea. The familiar scene was rendered utterly alien; for all he could tell, he might not have been in London any more, but whisked away to the Moon.

His umbrella tore free of his grip and took flight. He watched it follow his hat away over the rooftops, flapping like some awful black pterodactyl between craggy, suddenly lightning-lit chimneys, then off who-knows-where across London.

Chapter Two

In a quiet Mayfair drawing-room, a man and a woman sat stiffly upright, eyes closed and hands outstretched across a white table-cloth. The curtains were drawn. A single candle on a rococo mantelpiece illuminated a circle of midnight-blue wallpaper, a row of photographs, and a rather hideous painting of the Titan Saturn devouring his children. There was a faint scent of incense.

The woman was middle-aged. She wore high-collared black and silver, and an expression of fierce resolution. The man was young and handsome, fair and blue-eyed, and faintly smiling. He was the subject of most of the photographs on the mantelpiece, posing stiffly, dressed for tennis or mountaineering or camel-riding.

On the table there was a large white card with a red sphere painted on it; they rested their fingers on its corners.

They sat all evening in silence, hardly even breathing, until at the same moment they each opened their eyes in alarm, jerking back their hands so violently that they sent the card spinning off the table into the dark.

The man swore, got to his feet, and went in search of it.

The woman clutched her necklace. “Mercury—what happened?”

He went by the name Mercury when they met. She went by Jupiter.

“A rude interruption.”

“
Rudeness!
I call it an assault. They struck us.”

“I suppose they did. Yes. Where did it go, do you suppose?”

“We were further than ever before. I saw the gate open before me—the ring turning—did you see it too?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then a terrible discord. And shaking, as if the spheres themselves halted in their motions—how?” She took a deep breath, collected herself, and stood.

He crouched. “Aha. It slid under the wardrobe—and that hasn’t moved since my father’s day. Bloody nuisance.”

“They
struck
at us, though we were far out.”

“They did, didn’t they? Troubling. I thought we had more time.”

She glared at him. “Your father’s friends, Atwood?”

Martin Atwood was his real name, and this was his house. He stood. “Well, don’t blame
me
.”

“No? Then who should I blame?”

“I expect we’ll find out soon enough. I wonder how they did it? I wonder what they did? Something dreadful, no doubt. Wouldn’t that be just like them?”

He lit a lamp, and snuffed the candle.

“If only we knew who they were,” he said.

There was the sound of rain at the window, first a whisper, then a clattering, thrashing din.

“Aha,” he said. “See? Something dreadful.”

Over the noise of the storm there was the shrill insistent ring of the telephone across the hall. Atwood poured himself a drink before answering.

*   *   *

The storm smashed a fortune in window glass. It uprooted century-old trees. It sank boats and toppled cranes. It washed up things from the bottom of the river, rusted and rotten stuff, yesterday’s rubbish and artifacts older than the Romans. It vandalised the docks at St. Katharine’s. It flooded streets and houses and cellars and the Underground. It deposited chimneys on unfamiliar roofs, laundry in other peoples’ gardens, dead dogs where they weren’t wanted. It cracked the dome of the Reading Room and let in the rain. It coated the fine marble facades of Whitehall with river muck. Lightning struck Nelson’s Column, scattering the few dozen unfortunate souls who slept at its foot like so many wet leaves. The lights along the Embankment whipped free and floated downriver. The London Electric Supply Corporation’s central station at Deptford flooded and went dark. Barometers everywhere were caught unawares. Omnibuses slewed like storm-tossed ships, trams derailed, horses broke their legs. Men died venturing out after stalls, carts, pigeons, and other items of vanishing property.

Arthur Archibald Shaw staggered and slid from shelter to shelter. An abandoned bus in the middle of Southampton Row gave him protection from the wind. God only knew what had become of the horses. An advertisement on the side for something called
KOKO FOR HAIR
took on a fearful pagan quality. What dreadful god of the storm was
Koko?
He stumbled on, clutching at lampposts, and turned the street corner (by now quite lost) just as lightning flashed and snapped a tree in two. He stopped in a doorway and watched leaves and roof tiles whip past. Someone’s house. A light in the window. He could expect no Christian charity on a night like this. A horse ran down the street before him, wide-eyed and panicking.

He shivered, wrapped his arms around himself, stamped his feet. He was young, and he was big—running to fat, his friend Waugh liked to say. Well, thank God for every pound and ounce. Skinny little Waugh would have been airborne half a mile ago.

The storm appeared to have engulfed all of London. Lightning overhead flashed signals, directing coal-black hurrying clouds to their business in all quarters of the city.

His fear was mostly gone; what had taken its place was excitement, accompanied by a nagging anxiety over the cost of replacing his hat and umbrella. He wondered if he might defray the expense by selling an account of the storm to the
Mammoth—
he was already thinking of it as
The Storm of ’93—
or, better yet, the New York periodicals:
Our correspondent in London
.
Monsoon in Bloomsbury. Typhoon on the Thames.
An
Odyssey
, across the city, or at least across the mile between the Museum and home. They’d like the panicked horse—it would make a good picture.

He peered back south in the direction the horse had fled. Behind the rooftops and out over the river there was something like a black pillar of cloud. It resembled a gigantic screw bolting London to the heavens, turning tighter and tighter, bringing the sky down. Behind it there was an unpleasant reddish light.

*   *   *

The Isle of Dogs and the West India Docks suffered the worst of it. For years afterwards, those who’d seen the Storm, and those who hadn’t, but remembered it as if they had, spoke of crashing waves; the lights of troubled boats swinging crazily in the dark, and then, dreadfully, going out; and bells ringing, and thunder, and timbers creaking, and chains snapping, and cranes falling, and men screaming as the waves swept them off the docks and downriver, perhaps all the way to the sea.

What wasn’t much remarked on was that the Storm also flooded Norman Gracewell’s Engine—for the simple reason that few people who didn’t have business with the Engine knew it was there. Mr Dimmick kept away sneaks and snoops—he was better than a guard-dog, Gracewell liked to say. But there was nothing Dimmick could do to keep out the flood waters. The Engine was mostly underground, which had seemed, when the Company built the thing, like a good way to ensure secrecy, but now ensured that the flood quickly filled all the Engine’s rooms. Most of the workers fled before the flooding got too severe, abandoning their desks and their ledgers; but Gracewell himself remained until the last minute, pacing back and forth in his office, shouting into a telephone, demanding an explanation, demanding more time and more money, demanding an accounting for this outrage, long after the flood had severed the wires and the line had gone dead.

*   *   *

Arthur lived in a small flat on the end of Rugby Street. Under ordinary circumstances it was a short walk from the Museum, but that night it took an hour, and by the time he approached home he’d had more than enough weather to last him a lifetime.

Through the rain he saw Mr Borel’s stationery shop on the corner. He knew the shop well—he often bought ink and tobacco and newspapers there. In fact, he owed Borel a moderate sum of money. The place was in a sorry state: the sign was askew, the windows had shattered in two or three places, and the door swung open. There was usually a bright blue-and-yellow sign over a basement office that read
J.E. BRADMAN, STENOGRAPHY, TYPEWRITING & TRANSLATIONS,
but that was gone, too, ripped off its hinges and blown God knows where. Poor old Borel and poor old Mr Bradman whoever he was.

Someone inside—a girl—screamed.

Arthur abandoned caution and ran headlong across the street, sliding and stumbling in the wind, and in through the door. Lightning flashed behind him. When his vision cleared he saw Mr Borel’s daughter, Sophia, standing behind the counter, screaming. Her father stood in a puddle, holding a broom. An eel flopped at his feet. Sophia stared at it in horror, as if were a vampire that had broken into her bedroom. It was, no denying it, hideous.

A young woman Arthur had never seen before held a candle, inspecting the eel with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. Her hair was tangled and her dress dishevelled, as if she’d dressed in a hurry. She looked up at Arthur in surprise.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. As well as can be expected. There was—I heard screaming.”

“It was a very heroic entrance. I’m sorry—it was! Sophia cried out—well, you can hardly blame her—it’s a frightful-looking monster, poor thing.”

Strikingly green eyes, he noticed; emerald-like by candlelight. A quick, pleasing face.

He straightened his coat, wiped twigs and leaves from his hair.

“So I see,” he said.

“Are you hurt?”

There was blood on the hand that had wiped his hair, but not a great deal. His head stung a little, now that he noticed it.

“Not at all,” he said. “Could be worse, anyway.”

She looked out the open door behind him and shuddered.

Arthur shrugged off his overcoat. In its current state it would hardly be gallant to offer it to her. She’d be better off without it.

“Mr Shaw,” Borel said. The eel snapped at his broom.

Borel’s shop was a long way from the river or any fish-market that Arthur knew of, and the eel’s presence was a small mystery. He’d heard of hurricanes blowing things all over the place in the sort of places that had hurricanes, but one didn’t expect it in London. No doubt it was even more puzzling to the eel.