K Jeter - Infernal Devices

"Leave off your be-damned snuffling and croaking." The other ruffian gave me a kick from where he sat at the prow of the tiny craft. "Save your breath; you'll be swimming soon enough." The slap of the oars against the dark water provided a dismal counterpoint to his ill-tempered growl, as his companion rowed farther into a deserted stretch of the Thames.

"This'll do," came the pronouncement. "Likely no deeper than hereabouts."

"Shouldn't we have weighted them?" The second brought the oars inside. "They'll come up again, now won't they?"

A grisly consideration: "The tide's running. If they come bobbing up, it'll be miles downriver."

As I view my hobbled actions with the grace of hindsight, I realise now I would have been better occupied with prayer and silent contemplation of eternity than with attempting to mouth words past the cloth in my mouth. I entreated the men; offered fabulous sums for my release; threatened them with legions of the constabulary – the rag reduced all to a choking mumble.

The deadweight on my chest was more than halved, as the men lifted Brown Leather's corpse from on top – "Come along, you great ugly bastard," said one, between grunts of effort – and, swinging it by the feet and under the arms, threw it clear of the tottering boat. The impact of the body on the water threw a spray across my own face.

"And you now-" The ruffians were in a quite jocular mood as they picked up Fexton's lighter weight. "Faugh! Couldn't be bothered with a bath when you was alive, from the smell of you – well, you'll have a long one, if a cold one, now, me boy. Count of three, now – one – two in you go!" Another splash followed the first.

"Mubble, mubble, mubble," mocked one of the men, as he brought his grinning face close to mine. "Wordy sod, aren't you just?"

"He can tell it all to his mates," joined the other, indicating the river's dark water with a thumb over his shoulder.

"Now, let's not be hasty." The two of them crouched at my head and feet, the first tapping my forehead with one broad finger. "Seems a very likeable sort of fellow – very likeable, indeed."

"Here, what are you on about?" Lifting my head, I could just see the other's scowl.

"Well, I just thinks a likeable sort of gentleman such as this 'un – prosperous, too, from the looks of that watch we took off him – seems a shame to just pitch him into the drink without so much as giving him a chance to express a proper sort of gratitude to us, if you know what I'm getting at."

I nodded my head vigorously, striking the still-aching back of my head against the boat's bottom, and attempted to signal with my eyes that I was in complete accord with these sentiments.

"Bugger that." The hinted proposition was rudely greeted. "Worth our flaming heads, it is – he said pitch this one in, too, so in he goes, I says."

No! I shouted – or tried to. Listen to your friend!

"Keep your braces on. I was just toying with the poor devil. See how big his eyes are! – he thought I wanted to let him go."

"Leave off – bleeding cold it is out here."

My tormentor grasped me under the arms. "Right enough. Sorry, me fine gent – it's us for the gin-shop, but we won't be seeing you there."

I felt myself raised up between them into the air, with the first swing to impart the distance necessary for clearing the side of the boat. My brain seemed to rock in identical motion inside its confines as the pin-point stars above streaked, held, then reversed their direction.

Water erupted around me, yet I oddly felt myself rising a bit higher in the chill air. I realised that the two ruffians, shouting in terror and releasing their grip on my limbs, were falling with me as the boat lifted on a sudden upwelling from beneath, tipping all of its occupants out into the river.

I struck the water, parting the thin layer of mist cloaking it, and felt the chill darkness flood upward over my face. The cloth was fortuitously dislodged from my mouth; gasping for breath, I bobbed to the surface, still bound at wrist and ankle. In the thin, spectral light I saw the overturned boat, its keel now a shattered, gaping hole.

A few feet away from me, the river murk was lashed into foam by the struggling figures of the two ruffians. Their faces were contorted with fright as a third form, a man, rose behind them. Gripping each one's shoulder, disdainful of the flailing arms, the dark shape thrust them churning under the dark water, as though they were but two stanchions by which he could thrust himself bodily clear of the river.

A moment's glimpse was all that was afforded to me. In the panic and shock that the sudden immersion had induced in me, I thought I saw the face of the Brown Leather Man, grimly terrible as the stars glinted off the wet-shining visage. his scarred grimace rigid as he drowned his murderers.

I slid under the water again. My breath burned in my lungs – briefly; then the water became yet darker, and, just before my consciousness dissolved entire, the cold drained away my own blood..

Slowly, as a dreamer recognizes the contours of his pillow, I became aware that my face was pressed against a gravelly muck. At first, I believed this to be the river bottom, and that I had come to rest upon it; my thoughts were but a last flicker before the final extinguishing, or else the beginning of that new, incorporeal nature promised to us in the teachings of the Church. I would, I hoped dimly, be shortly ascending to a higher abode.

My theological musings were interrupted by a gagging fit that disgorged a considerable amount of river water on to the damp field on which I lay. Lifting my head, I found myself shivering in the chill night air, my sodden clothes clinging about my frame; I took this to mean I was not yet dead. By some means I had been restored from what had been meant to be my watery grave, to a place of comparative safety.

Safety, if not comfort: the taste of the water was foul in my mouth; and I felt distinctly nauseated from whatever amount I had swallowed while immersed in it. Drenched to the marrow, and in the teeth of the wind that scudded the dark clouds overhead, I would soon have my trembling limbs palsied with a severe ague if I did not find some warmth soon. I pushed myself upright, and realised that my wrists were no longer bound together. My ankles were likewise free; feeling the cords dangling from me, I found them snapped in twain, rather than unknotted or cut. I quickly disentangled the pieces from me and tossed them away. I heard the bits of cord splash into water; kneeling on the wet muck, I saw now that it sloped down to the river's edge. My eyes had become adjusted to the dark, simultaneously with the sorting out of my disordered thoughts; I looked about to assess my situation.

I appeared to be quite alone; neither my captors, nor the silent forms of my fellow victims, had washed up on this strand with me. (The matter of the Brown Leather Man's murdered status was without doubt, as I had seen the stiffening corpse myself in Fexton's rooms; the apparition that had accompanied the overturning of the ruffians' boat I ascribed to the temporary collapse of my reason, my senses having been overwhelmed by the fearsome circumstances I had endured.) Dark forms, the straight edges and squared corners of unlit buildings, overlapped their silhouettes against the night sky, some distance from my dismal station. These were the warehouses, chandlers' offices, and other such furnishings to the river trade; various ships could be discerned, moored to the wharves and extending from the banks. All were seemly uninhabited at this late hour, the sailors and docksmen given over to sleep or carouse at the appointed establishments farther into the city. Whatever notion I entertained of calling out to these sources of aid and shelter was quickly dispelled by another consideration: the raising of my voice might also signal my location to either or both of the two ruffians, the tide having possibly drifted them ashore some distance beyond my immediate perception.