Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

“Well, you were little. I was a tiddler, too, but, you know…” Fisher contrives to make it sound as if this means that Mathew considered him Joe’s elder brother, the crook he never had.

“And now?”

“Now it’s different, isn’t it? There’s no one like Mathew, but there’s a lot more coppers.”

“So they’re careful.”

Fisher shrugs yes. “But they don’t ask nicely and they don’t ask twice. Cold and surgical, and not like an aspirin and a lie down, like ice in the bathtub and selling your kidneys for cash. They’ve got a hospital somewhere, or a hospice. It’s a bloody pit. People go in, they don’t come out.”

“Who are they? Where do they come from?”

“For all I know they’re God’s own thugs, straight from the Holy City. I met one once, he come in a place I was thinking of renting, told me to piss off. And do you know what else he said? He said: If I have the mind of Napoleon and the body of Wellington, who am I? Mad as a fucking box of frogs.”

“Fisher—”

“All right! All right. Thirty seconds of wisdom. Then you go. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Fine. The way I hear, once upon a time, they were into good works. I mean, they’re monks, yes? Elevate the soul, cherish the meek. Then the world got less amenable to the consolations of the Mother Church and they went a bit funny. Out with the old, in with the new, and the new is some silver-tongued bastard and his own personal heavy mob. Orphans, is the way I hear it, schooled by him for him at some old private house, so that’s all they know and they don’t care to learn more. Now it’s conversion by fire and sword and let God sort it out.”

“What do they want?”

“Whatever they feel like. And antiques. They’ve got a thing for antiques.”

“Why? Fisher, this is important, they—”

Fisher cuts him off, one hand coming down sideways like a blade. “I don’t want to know! All right? You’ve got something they want, give it to them. You’re not Mathew, and that’s your choice, but Honest Joe can’t take them on. It’s that simple. They’re bloody scary. And that’s all I’m saying and, old friend or not, you can piss off!”

Fisher throws open the back door and bundles Joe out into the yard, then slams the door and brings down the shutter.

Outside and now truly unsettled, Joe Spork ducks his head down and shoves his hands into his pockets like a man who has been given the Spanish Archer by his girl. He walks purposefully but not hurriedly, and very shortly slips back down into the Tosher’s Beat.

At lunchtime on the day after the conversation at the greasy spoon, a bored courier rings on Joe Spork’s doorbell and hands over a box containing a familiar piece of kinetic smut and a brown-paper parcel which promises to be Billy Friend’s notorious doodah. The alternative being the quarterly VAT accounts, Joe hastens to open the parcel.

Item: all right, yes, it’s a diary or a journal, no question about that. He sniffs at it; old books have a pleasing smell to them. This one is unusual. There’s a sharp tang of brine and a whiff of chemicals, and beneath it a rich resiny note of old, old leather. Has it been under water? Wrapped in oilcloth? Hm. The cover is flexible, almost rubbery, and the leather is cross-hatched with wandering lines. Stamped into what he takes to be the front—the technical term is “debossed,” like “embossed,” but in reverse—is a curious figure like an inside-out umbrella or a funny sort of key.

Joe opens the book cautiously, and yes, again, it’s an odd duck: along each page at the edge opposite the spine there is a half inch of perforated paper. The whole thing has been bound from individual sheets of stiff paper, and each edge—so far as he can tell—is different. The matrix is a four-by-four square or—if each page is taken as a single block of Information—a four-by-sixteen column separated into groups of letters four holes deep. A hundred or more pages; not an insignificant amount of information, then, but hardly a vast trove, either. A longish piece of music for a pianolo, perhaps.

The spine itself has a dowel—no, it’s metal—a rod running through it, protruding slightly at either end. Not a spine, then: an axle? The endpapers are marbled in rose and turquoise, and sketched over the pattern in pen is a brisk, clear diagram or schematic—electrical, and beyond his ken, but apparently for some sort of brewing or distilling apparatus which is oddly familiar. Where has he seen that?

A certain kind of mind—his grandfather was like this to an extent—is always trying in a spiritual sense to make the perfect mousetrap. Joe has the impression that it is an impromptu sketch, that this volume was not originally intended to have anything written in it at all, but at some point its owner was trapped without an alternative source of paper and defaced it. A long train journey, perhaps—there are periods of comparatively clear text and sudden jolts which could be points. Something which might be a teapot segues into a design for a fishtank sort of item and then dissolves into what he takes to be rather highfalutin mathematics. Quote: “Do something for the elephant.” Quote: “I have written it all in my book.” Quote: “The coffee is ghastly.” Fine. So what’s this then, if not a book? Well, a notepad, obviously; a jotter. A doodah.

Item: or rather, items , plural. A mixed bag of gears and sprockets, ratchets and cogs, bevelled and conventional, large to (very, very) small. The part of Joe which solves puzzles twitches and rolls its shoulders. That piece would go with that one, and that one would…

Jumping the gun, boy. Sure, put it together all higgledy-piggledy, and what will you have? Junk! A pile of nothing. I taught you better .

His grandfather’s voice, husky with time and distance.

“I miss you, you know.”

Don’t be daft, boy. I was old before you were young .

“Still.”

And another thing: don’t talk to the dead. People will get the wrong idea .

“How about if I claim you’re my imaginary friend?”

… You need a girl .

“Probably.”

A helpmeet .

“A what?”

“A help meet for him.” As in a person suitable to share his life .

“I really do.”

He’s lost the thread of the conversation. Daniel Spork never gave him advice about girls. Perhaps his own disastrous love life prevented it. Joe’s imagination baulks at putting words in his mouth on that score.

Move on.

Item: a clamp or fitting, with armature, of a size to embrace the doodah and turn the pages. He touches the end of the armature curiously, and finds it briefly sticky with static. Curious, he taps it lightly against a page from the book. Yes, the page turns, and yes, the static is gone when he goes to lift the armature away again. He taps the next page, and it clings. Moves it, puts it down, and the charge is gone. Clever. He has no idea how it works. Something in the arm, perhaps, rubbing along the metal interior. Smart: clockwork doesn’t take harm from static the way electronics does. A little clean occasionally and it barely notices. It’s almost a credo: the right tool in the right place.

Item: a strange little ovoid box or ball, engraved rather splendidly on the outside, and by hand, no less. A spiral pattern, like a galaxy or a conch shell. The Golden Ratio, but don’t believe all that muck you read about it. Very heavy for its size. Unless the ball is made of gold, there must be a weight or flywheel within. No indication of how it opens, though there is a seam. He turns it in his hand. Something inside goes clish-tink , which his trained ear recognises as a bad noise. Not a disastrous noise, but definitely a broken noise.