K Jeter - Infernal Devices

I have little patience with the Oriental maxim It is bet ter to travel hopefully than to arrive. (Who has not savoured the delicious pleasure of stepping once more on to motionless ground and feeling one's muscles and bones sweetly unlock themselves?) Rather I believe that, if a dull and cramped Hell were to be one's final punishment, it would be best achieved in a perpetually rolling carriage.

Such was the nature of my reflections, once the initial excitement of my flight from the hands of the street mob had ebbed. We passed the greater portion of the journey in an uncomfortable silence. From time to time I would open my eyes and look about the vehicle's dim interior, lit only by the moon and starlight slanting through the side windows. Across from me, Miss McThane had managed to fall asleep, her mouth open to emit a soft, ladylike snore. Beside her, Scape sat with folded arms and chin heavy on his chest; his blue spectacles made it impossible to determine if he was unconscious or merely sunk in the contemplation of further villainy. When we had first left the precincts of the city, the carriage entering the deep quiet of the Kentward road, he had spent some time bending down to inspect the mahogany cabinet on the floor; he had at last given up the attempt to fathom the mysteries of the device owing to a lack of sufficient light. Abel – the only creature inside the carriage worthy of my trust, Creff being stationed atop with the driver – rested his chin oil my leg, only closing his eyes in an ecstatic swoon whenever my hand strayed to scratch behind his ears.

My own thoughts – or fragments thereof – chased and battered themselves against my brow. I knew not where we were bound, nor what my reception would be when we arrived. Perhaps I had been inveigled thus to my own murder; one attempt towards this end had already been encountered by me; of the circumstances that had delivered me from the cold embrace of the Thames, I still awaited explanation. Certain it was that ruthless forces had arrayed themselves in the London night: the corpses of Fexton and the Brown Leather Man attested to that. (The vision of the latter overturning the ruffians' boat I was even more certain of being a delusion; the sight of the poor man's fatal wounds remained sharp in my memory.) If Scape and his employer Bendray were not in league with these desperate men, there was still little else to recommend them to my confidence. Surely, I asked myself as the back of my head jolted against the carriage's thinly padded leather, surely these people were insane? How else account for the lunatic blasphemy of their attentions upon the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe? (A blasphemy, and lunacy, that I bitterly knew was now attributed to me.) I had yet to wake from the dream that my life had. become; my sleep had been rewarded not with the dawn's returning of my old dull life, but with the continuation of awful night and chaos.

These and similarly cheerless ruminations were interrupted by the dog Abel. His ears pricked up, and he started from his doze; in a trice he had scrambled into my lap the better to unleash a volley of furious barking against the window, his front paws pattering on the glass.

"Jesus H. Christ." Scape had been apparently asleep behind his dark spectacles; they rose for a moment up on to his forehead as he rubbed his stiff face. "What the hell's all the racket about?"

Beside him, Miss McThane burrowed her shoulder deeper into the corner of the seat, in a futile attempt to escape the sudden noise. "Shut your goddamn dog up, Dower," she muttered unladylike.

"Abel… I say-" I grasped the thin collar that his former master had bestowed on him and tried to pull him back from the window. "Calm down, old boy."

A small gap at the top of the window had been left open for ventilation during the journey. With renewed determination, Abel wedged his sharp muzzle in the space and howled even more vigorously.

"You know – I think he's seen something." I positioned the side of my face against the window, the better to view behind the carriage. "Something out there."

This pronouncement brought Scape sitting bolt upright, his irritable fatigue forgotten. Miss McThane lifted her head as well, her eyes widening.

Scape leaned forward, balancing himself with one hand against the opposite seat, and joined me in my scrutiny of the night unrolling behind the carriage's progress. We had been travelling out from London for such a time that dawn was no more than one or two hours away; already the darkness had thinned sufficiently to bring a thin grey outline to the black tracery of country hedge and tree.

The shapes of cloaked riders moved against those, keeping pace with us.

"Shit," muttered Scape. He had lifted his spectacles in order to discern the silhouettes following us; the slight radiance of the stars produced a slow tear from the corner of his overly sensitive eyes. "It's that friggin' Godly bunch."

"Them again?" Miss McThane sounded peeved. "How'd they find out about us coming here?"

He adjusted his spectacles to their original position. "Beats me – must have an inside line somewhere. Maybe ol' Bendray's butler or somebody is working a double."

"Godly bunch?" I echoed. "Who are they?"

"Never you mind." Scrape lowered the window and shouted to the driver: "You wanna pick it up a bit?" The whip snapped in response and the carriage jolted harder in the ruts as Scape began rummaging through the pockets of his coat. "This'll take care of those suckers."

I saw that he had extracted a bulky cap-and-ball pistol of considerable antiquity. "Watch it with that thing, will ya?" said Miss McThane. "The last time-"

"Yeah, yeah," said Scape irritably. Part of the gun's mechanism had fallen off, and he screwed it back into place with his thumbnail. "Don't worry." To me: "Slide over."

Restraining the still-agitated dog, I moved aside. Scape took his position, bracing his arm against the sill and squinting over the top of the pistol. A dull click of metal against metal sounded when he drew the trigger.

"Shit. All this friggin' rain." He banged the pistol against the inside wall of the carriage as both Miss McThane and I cringed in the opposite corners. As soon as he pointed the pistol out the window again, it went off with a deafening report and burst of flame.

" Chinga tu madre. " Scape nursed his singed hand with his mouth. The several pieces of the gun had flown out of his grip. "Son-of-a-bitch."

The shot had seemed to cause no damage, the bullet having gone slanting into the muddy road. Its noise, however, had managed to inspire our horses to greater effort. Peering out the window, I saw that our ghostly escort had wisely fallen back as well.

Scape nodded with satisfaction when I pointed this out to him. "Chicken-shit bastards," he said as he prodded the small burn on his palm.

"Jee-zuss," said Miss McThane. "You idiot." She gave Scape a final glower before adjusting her wrap about her shoulders and resuming her interrupted slumber.

When the morning light broke over the horizon some time later, there was no longer any sign of our pursuers; they had vanished as though they had been but animate fragments of the ebbing darkness. From the carriage's window I looked out on to a passing landscape of remarkable cheerlessness and foetidity. The rising sun glinted red across weed-choked marshland. At irregular spacing though these fens, the rounded hillocks of high ground supported a few stunted, crookbranched trees and decaying hovels. Thin-shanked pigs rooted though mud distinguishable from the surrounding countryside only by intervening walls of rough stone, shaggy with ancient moss. A figure in the distance, blurred by the mists drifting up from the stagnant waters, toiled with stick along one of the muddy paths winding through the mires.