K Jeter: Morlock Night

"Let us find a hansom outside," said Ambrose, rising from the table. "He's here in the very city of London itself."

Stepping outside of Dr. Ambrose's lodgings gave me my first sight of London since those nightmarish scenes of destruction and despair. My heart leaped to see the familiar outlines, whole and unbroken, silhouetted against the setting sun. Lamps were being lit all over the city to show the glowing pulse of a great metropolis in the full stretch of its powerful life. But if Ambrose's words were true, were there not even now dark things moving in the undispelled shadows? The very ground beneath our feet was being eaten away…

Soon Dr. Ambrose had hailed a hansom and, after giving directions to the river, assisted Tafe and myself inside. "I shall meet you at your destination," he said, standing on the curb. "Circumstances dictate that I follow a more circuitous route." He closed the hansom's door and signalled the driver on his topside ledge into motion.

How easily Tafe seemed to be taking this all in her stride! Child of a time more than one generation hence, she sat in the hansom's slightly tattered elegance, looking for all the world like some young Continental buck with no greater business to follow than seeing England on a grand tour organised by rich parents. Through the hansom's window she watched the passing cityscape and evening pedestrians with avid curiosity but no signs of being startled or amazed by any of it. Those responses had been denied her at birth by the swift and violent tenor of her own times.

"I say, Tafe," I addressed her. "What do you think of this Ambrose fellow? How much of what he's been telling us do you suppose is true?"

She turned to face me, her dark, intelligent eyes flashing from her mannish disguise like a young George Sand. There was clearly a keen wit in addition to the fighting spirit I had already had the chance to observe. "Ambrose?" she said. "Might be lying through his teeth for all we know. But what choice do we have except to follow along with him for now? If he's telling the truth about all these Morlocks and stuff then we've got to help him in whatever he's planning. And if he's lying, using us for something evil – aiding the Morlocks, maybe? – we'll have a better chance of fighting him if he thinks we trust him."

Her calm, unemotional analysis preoccupied my thoughts. I lapsed into silence, mulling over her words to the rhythm of the cabhorse's hooves, while she went back to watching the passing London scene.

Soon enough the hansom halted and we alighted. The driver, already paid his fare by Dr. Ambrose, rattled off. Looking about us, I recognised the building in front of us. I had observed it several times before on my various peregrinations about the city. Prompted by idle curiosity, I had even inquired in some nearby shops as to the building's nature, for it was a quite imposing modern edifice, set behind a high iron fence and well-groomed lawns. Yet seemingly it was inhabited only by an aged caretaker who saw that no street urchins or burglars penetrated its shuttered windows and thus gained access to its unlit interior. The local shopkeepers rumoured it to be a private clinic established by some wealthy foreign physician who had yet to make his appearance and begin his practice.

Things had apparently changed since last I had seen the building, for now the windows were all brightly lit up. As Tafe and watched from the street, the silhouetted figure of a nurse in her starched cap passed across one of the lower windows.

"I wonder what he sent us here for," said Tafe. "And where is he?"

Indeed, the mysterious Dr. Ambrose was nowhere to be seen. "Perhaps he has been delayed," I conjectured. "By whatever it was that necessitated his travelling separately."

"Well, we can't just stand around here." Tafe started walking along the high iron fence that surrounded the clinic's grounds. I followed her and within a few paces we found ourselves in darkness beyond the reach of the street lamps that graced the street in front of the building.

"Pssst! Hocker, Tafe – over here!" I turned and saw Ambrose's form separate from the deepest shadows along the fence. He beckoned us toward him. "Cheerful business, what?" he said when the three of us had formed a little conspiratorial knot against the iron railings.

"Why have you brought us here?" I asked, keeping my voice low. "What's our business got to do with some private clinic?"

"You'll see." Ambrose drew a cylindrical object from beneath his cloak.. It was a ship captain's brass-bound telescope which he quickly extended to its full length. "Take a sight on that large window there," he said, handing the telescope to me.

I obliged, and soon had focused the glass upon the window Ambrose had pointed out. The lenses were of excellent – or magical? – quality, revealing the room beyond the window pane in full detail.

"Well?" demanded Ambrose. "What do you see?"

"Hmm… I see a rather nicely appointed room, more like a drawing room of someone's home than a clinical facility. Books, fire on the grate, all that sort of thing. And an elderly man sitting in a wing chair, reading from a book." I passed the telescope to Tafe, who in turn focused it upon the window in question. "Is any of that important?" I asked.

"The man you see up there," said Ambrose coolly, "is none other than the reincarnated King Arthur, defender of Britain."

"But… but that's an old man in there!" I exclaimed. "Quite silver-haired!"

"Arthur has been born and grown old in many lives," said Ambrose. "Except those lives when he was cut down in the prime of his youth while performing his duty to England and all Christendom."

"But he's an old man now," I said. "What hope do we have of defeating the Morlocks with a champion like that?"

"Spoken like a snotty youngster," said Ambrose. "Old age is a great warrior's best time, when his military abilities are tempered with the truest wisdom. No, it's not Arthur's advanced years in this life that have weakened him and thus prevent him from leading the battle against the Morlocks. There are other factors at work here."

"Such as?"

"My dear Hocker, we are in the process of unravelling this mystery together. You and Tafe are my allies in piecing together a truth of which I possess only a few fragments. I know that Arthur is disastrously enfeebled at the present time, and I know who is responsible. But how it has been done and what we are to do about it are matters we are to discover jointly."

"I take it then," said I, "that Arthur is being held prisoner in this place? By whom?"

"Someone else just came into the room," said Tafe with her eye to the telescope. She peered intently at the lighted window for several more seconds, then murmured, "This is incredible. It looks like-"

"Let me see." I took the telescope from her willing hand and focused on the room's interior. "By God!" I exclaimed. "It- it is you!" I lowered the telescope and whirled upon Ambrose. "The man talking to Arthur is the exact twin of you! What's going on here?"

Without a word of explanation, Ambrose took the telescope from me and gazed at the two figures revealed through the window, the grey but still noble-looking old man and the unnervingly exact double of Ambrose himself. "Yes," he murmured, taking the telescope from his eye and collapsing it to its smallest form. "You've seen him. An old nemesis of mine, of all humanity to be exact; roused to activity again by this fiendish Time-juggling of the Morlocks."

"But who – or what – is he?"

"He is now going under the name of Dr. Merdenne, of Paris, the founder and head surgeon of his private clinic here in London. But I have known him in other times and places far removed from this. Perhaps the high point of his many previous careers was when he was known as Ibrahim, high counsellor to the Great Suleiman, back in the days when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith and a constant menace to Christian Europe. Arthur and I both struggled with him then, and narrowly averted the defeat and extinction of all Christendom."