Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

The engine howls and grumbles. The fire in her gut is still burning, the steam still building. There’s nowhere for it to go. The safety valves are blocked, the catches bent and hammered shut. One by one, fail-safes click on, and off again, each one meticulously sabotaged by a capable hand.

In the fog, Polly Cradle can hear her lover laughing at his enemy. She can see the shadow of his coat and hat, flicking, taunting, drawing them in. She can feel the steps of his dance, the rhythm of his humour.

She hopes he is fast enough. That he isn’t having too much fun to remember the plan.

She raises her hands, gestures. From his place in the bag over her shoulder, the dog Bastion whiffles.

The wrecking crew slips away from the fight.

Joe Spork laughs in the smoke, laughs through the bandit’s handkerchief over his nose and mouth. A long metal shaft slashes towards him. He lets it pass by, then tugs on it, then scampers away. He has them now, close behind him. He takes a second, gets his bearings. Yes. Yes. So, and so, and so. Snickersnack , as one might say.

Little by little, he draws his foes back towards the train, and the groaning engine. He wonders, briefly, if he will carry this through. There are men here. Real people, for all that they are unmade and mad. They may die. Then he thinks of Polly, and her brother, and of the whole, wide, impossible world beyond, which will stop if this night goes badly. And he thinks: these are my torturers.

So fuck ’em .

He laughs again, very loud, and hears them coming after him. He clangs his feet on the engine steps, then slides on his knees across the metal floor and ducks down and out the other side, off towards Polly Cradle and the others. He counts strides: onetwothreefourfivesix… twenty… thirty…

He hears the clank of metal on metal, of men and machines by the engine housing. They are looking for him. The Lovelace moans again. Too hot. Too full. Too much.

Joe Spork wrenches his body around into a sliding turn, skids into a ditch between two low walls, and points his father’s gun at the body of the engine, the great steam tank with its pent-up rage. He pulls the trigger.

Bangbangbang. And then: bang .

The night is white and orange, and the world is made of noise.

If he thought the crash was loud, now he knows the meaning of the word. Debris zings over him, whistling and whirring. A piece of wheel embeds itself in a statue. He lies on his back and laughs, and cannot hear himself. But here, at least, all the Ruskinites are gone. He picks himself up, and looks back at the site of the explosion.

A yawning black crater steams and smokes, strewn with bodies. None of them makes a sound.

He swallows guilt, and feels a tight burst of pride instead, a battlefield satisfaction, lets it rise in his chest.

Joe slings the tommy gun across his back, gathers his troops and gives orders. The wrecking crew strip the dead machines of their robes and everyone moves forward through the grounds, into the house.

Once upon a time, no doubt, this was a fine old manse, with marble floors and columns, and those big windows were the windows of the Empire Room, the Beaverbrook Suite and the Lady Hamilton Apartments.

Not any more. Now it’s just a shell in which something else has taken up residence, like those eerie ocean worms which grow in the flesh of crabs and eventually devour them from within.

From the glass cupola of the tower on down, Sharrow House has been consumed, walls knocked through to make a space like a cathedral. Here and there, upright pillars of brick, strands of wallpaper hanging off, have been allowed to remain, bearing the weight of stark steel joists. Black cables lie like creepers along the walls across what remains of the ballroom. The hand-painted frescoes have been drilled through and the statues clubbed and cut and shunted to one side. Even with the residue of the Lovelace ’s fiery end still in his mouth, Joe can taste the broad rubber flavour of hot electrician’s tape, like a bar across the back of his tongue. In the middle of the floor, a gaping hole sinks down and down into the earth.

Of course. Everything must be as it was. The Opium Khan is living a fight from the last century, playing out his victory over Edie Banister and her lover and Abel Jasmine and Ted Sholt, over all of them. It isn’t important that they’re all dead. What’s important is that he wins, and sees himself winning.

From out of the chasm comes a sound like breathing, and in the same moment that he becomes aware of it, Joe recognises from above, somewhere in the distance, the deep, alien drone of a hundred thousand wings.

The bees are coming.

The pathway to the pit is lined with pipe and electrical gear; Shem Shem Tsien’s version of Frankie’s machinery lacks her economy, her sense of humanity. Instead of hives and metaphor, this is brute industrial technology, fit for the launching of missiles and the incineration of nations. It is all instrumentality, without heart.

They follow the trail to the inmost chambers of Sharrow House, where a gaping maw has been cut or ripped into the old stone floor, and the cellars and crypts of the castle have been opened to the rooms above. The drop to the bottom is as far, easily, as the top of the spire above them; a vertiginous two hundred feet. The way down is a makeshift staircase like a Bailey bridge, supported by a scaffold of girders and ropes. The cabling wraps around it or hangs beside it in a curtain of thick, choking vines.

Joe Spork peers. Down among the vines, he can see scarecrows. Or—no. No, of course, not scarecrows. Not for Shem Shem Tsien. No happy turnip-headed figures made from stuffed pyjamas and straw. Real people. Maintenance men and security guards and lab technicians, dead and hung out like so many rags. Newly dead; less than a day. Perhaps he intends them as messengers to God: a calling card before knocking on the door. Or possibly they were just in his way. Or for no reason at all. The Opium Khan never needed reasons, according to Edie Banister. He did what pleased him, and very often that was bloody and vicious.

Joe feels his face stretch in a rictus of anger, draws it back and holds onto it. He will need that. No sense sharing it up here.

The dog, Bastion, squirms out of Polly Cradle’s grip and scurries away, blind eyes searching for his enemy. From the gloom come flashes of electric light, like a thunderstorm in the depths of the sea.

Joe hefts his gun and leads the way down into the dark. The stair spirals, and at every turn there’s another body, gathering insects. The scaffold shakes as they go down, too many feet and too much weight, and Joe Spork reaches out to steady himself. Polly Cradle hauls his hand back and glowers at him, furious.

“Idiot!” she growls. “Use your head! Use your eyes!”

She points at the guard rail. It glistens, sparkles. He peers. Cut glass, and a smell like marzipan.

“What is it?”

“Cyanide, I expect. It ought to be, oughtn’t it?”

One of the bruisers has already cut himself. He collapses, choking, on the second landing. When his mate goes to help him, a trapdoor gives way beneath them and they fall into an electrified net.