K Jeter - Infernal Devices

My eye was drawn involuntarily across the rest of the room's clutter. A mound of crumpled, grease-spotted wrappings in one corner indicated the site of his furtive dinners; a bed, no more than a thin pallet on the sagging floor, was covered with grey clothing and a thick coat acting as blankets. A crude shelf nailed to one wall supported a row of books: the titles I deciphered were all of the order of Sub-Umbra; or, Sport Amongst the She Noodles and The Spreeish Spouter; or, Flash Cove's Slap Up Reciter, and similar cheap lechery (not that I recognised them other than by reputation). The general impression of the man's quarters was of sad, solitary degeneration.

His rasping voice broke into my musing inspection: "Speak up! There's no time!"

"I'm searching for a maker of coins-" I began.

"Coins? Coins?" His tortoise-like neck stretched its tendons to the breaking point as he glared at me. "I don't know anything about any bloody coins – nothing, I tell you. Soldiers is what I make; very fine, very coveted they are – in the collections of the finest gentlemen!" His denials mounted to a shrill peak. "No, no coins – I don't know anything! You won't get me that easy!"

It was easy to surmise that past investigations into his activities had resulted in unpleasant consequences for him. "I assure you," I said in as soothing a manner as I could manage, "I make no reference to forgeries – my interest is rather in harmless curiosities, such as the one I just showed you at the door."

His eyes narrowed in suspicion. He drew the stopper from one of the flasks on the table, and tilted it to his lips; the juniper scent of cheap gin mixed with the sharper chemical odours tainting the air.

I pressed on: "The coin… bearing Saint Monkfish's profile…?"

Fexton drew the back of his hand across his lips. "Eh? What about it, then?"

"Are you the manufacturer of that item?"

"What if I am? Eh? What business is it of yours?"

His snarling manner irritated me; it was only with some effort of self-mastery that I refrained from sharper words. "I have made it my business, sir; I find the article… intriguing, shall we say. I would like to know more of its significance-"

"Huh!" Fexton's mottled skin flushed with the effect of his liquor. "As if you didn't already know enough of that! You and your kind – filthy buggers; filthy, filthy…" His voice ebbed into a mutter, drowned at last by another swig from his flask.

As with the cabbyman, he had assumed some degree of knowledge on my part that was in fact completely lacking. "I assure you," I said, "my questions are sincerely put-"

"Oh, yah!" mocked the coiner. "Sincerely – that's good! Very droll, that is!" The gin dribbled from the point of his chin.

"And of course I'd be willing to pay…"

That brought back a measure of sobriety. His eyes grew calculatingly narrow behind his spectacles. "Pay? How much?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "It would depend; upon the value of the information-"

A furious volley of barking interrupted me. The terrier skittered to the window, placed its paws upon the sill, and yapped at some event in the night's darkness invisible to us. It turned and barked at its master, as if describing the signal that had roused it.

"Damn you! Cursed hound!" The noise drove him to a fury, saliva dappling his lip. He raised his stick and brought it with a sickening crack against the dog's spine; the wretched animal crouched beneath the blow, waiting for the next. "I'll teach you-"

I caught Fexton's wrist, holding the stick aloft. The animal's misery, compounded of pain and suffering loyalty to its cruel master, angered me. "Stop that," I ordered. "Have you no decency? Abusing a poor beast in such a manner."

"Yes, yes; of course…" He cringed disgustingly, as if expecting me to turn the stick on his bowed back. "But you don't know; you don't know-" His eyes turned towards the dog as it whined in suppressed excitement, eager attention turned back to the window.

"I came here with a few simple questions, hoping to find equally, simple answers." By now I was sick of the cramped, foul-smelling room and its noxious occupant. "If you can assist me, and wish to receive the appropriate recompense, then say so; if not-"

"But there's no time! Not now!" He scrabbled about in a corner, drawing a ragged coat over his trembling limbs. "I must go – very urgent; you don't know how much so." A partially unravelled muffler was wrapped around his scrawny throat. "Come back – yes! Come back later, and I'll tell you anything you want to know. But not now!"

He darted past me towards the door, the sadly faithful dog following at his heel. From the landing I shouted down at him as he rushed down the clattering stairs: "When?"

"After – after midnight!" The dog's renewed barking mingled with his reply. "Yes – then!"

I soon heard through the window the tap of his stick on the courtyard stones. The oppressive atmosphere of the room soon drove me out, away from the building and into the cleaner night air.

The street beyond the alley entrance was deserted now, the people of remarkable aspect having hurried along to their destination. Taking careful note of the doors I passed and the turns I made, so that I would be able to retrace my steps, I quit the district. The lights of a small public house drew me towards it; I could wait there in relative comfort until the hour of my appointment with the so-far uncommunicative Fexton. When I first looked around the public house's door, I was greatly relieved to see that this had not been the point to which the residents of Wetwick had been headed; the drinkers and layabouts inside were of no more than average ugliness, wondering with a sodden surliness about the appearance of a gentleman in their midst, but at least not staring at me with the round popping eyes I had found in the district I had just left. I must admit, that as I sat at one of the more removed tables, maintaining a careful sobriety through the judicious nursing of a small ale, my heart was beating fast and high up in my throat. The great adventure on which I had launched myself was turning out to be a capital amusement: mysterious denizens of a London previously unknown to me; the colourful squalor of poverty and vice, generally reported to people of my respectable ilk only in the columns of Mayhew's excellent reportage in the Morn ing Chronicle: a rendez-vous to be kept with an actual transgressor of the law and apparent prison habitue – at that moment it seemed as if I had completely broken the shackles of my old mundane existence and stepped into some wilder, free life.

At the designated hour I hastened back to Fexton's abode. The street was still deserted, but that was to be expected, given the lateness.

Once again I mounted the precarious steps and stood on the landing outside Fexton's door. I rapped upon it and called his name, but no answer came. But, leaning close, I could hear an anxious-sounding whine from the small dog within. Perhaps its master, returned from the secretive errand on which they had embarked, had fallen asleep.

I pushed open the door and peered within. The candle on the table had burned level with the cracked dish that held it, the flame guttering in the pool of wax. By the flickering illumination I could see, not the coiner, but only the dog scratching at what I took to be an elongated bundle of old rags upon the floor. It renewed its whining, prodding with its sharp muzzle the object so much bigger than it. As I bent closer to see, the dog's efforts succeeded in rolling part of the bundle free: the blank face of its master, one eye hidden by the shattered glass of his spectacle lens, gaped up at me. The dog let loose of the grey shirt collar and nuzzled the unresponding visage.

I stood back aghast, seeing for the first time the shining wet surface of the floor beneath the stricken man. The front of his shirt was imbued with the same scarlet, still oozing from the rents in the cloth and the flesh beneath. The prints of my boots remained in the puddled blood – as the sight drove me stumbling backwards.