K Jeter: Infernal Devices

(Torturing memories! I sit at the prison of my desk, gnashing my teeth and grinding my pen-nib into the mocking white expanse of the paper under my hand. The coaxing words of a very Delilah! Had I but known what lay beyond them!)

"My buddy – I mean, Mr Scape – he gets a little excited sometimes. You know?" Miss McThane's hand strayed to the top of my cravat, one slender finger teasing a loop of silk free from the knot. "Like when he's talking about something he's really hot on. Know what I mean?"

"Yes…" The word was no more than a squeaking gasp. The loosening of the constriction around my throat did nothing to aid my breath past the stone that had formed inside it. I felt my spine come up against the wall at the end of the counter; my legs, as though acting as the reservoir of all the moral steadfastness that had drained from the rest of my body, had effected my retreat from the woman's continuing onslaught.

"Like… violins…"

The back of my head struck the silver case of one of my father's more elaborate clocks. The force of the blow triggered the delicate mechanisms inside; dimly, I was aware of small doors opening above me, and a circle of uniformed mannikins tinkling a theme from Handel's Jephtha as they paraded in and out of the encircled numbers. Behind my own brow, other small doors were opening, emitting darker figures shrilling melodies more dizzying, as I watched the sinuous grace of Miss McThane's finger rise to lay its point upon my chin.

"Violins" I choked.

"Yeah There's just… something about 'em. Drives him… wild."

I strove to speak, but could not. A scent of lilacs, borne across the dwindling distance between us by the warmth of her bosom, enveloped my head. She seemed suddenly of greater stature, looking down at me from a height. Faintly, I realised that whatever virtue normally resident in my limbs had fled from them as well, and I was sliding slowly down the wall.

Her smile grew wider, her eyes even more shaded. "Violins…" she whispered.

(Temptress! With a start, the dog looks up from his doze by the grate, hearing the snap of the pen in my fist. I blot the spilled ink from my desk, draw forth a fresh sheet, and begin again.)

Suddenly, as though from a great distance, I heard a clatter and a hubbub of voices. The chain that held my eyes fast upon Miss McThane's was broken, as she jerked her face about towards the source of the noise. I heard my own name being shouted.

"Mr Dower!" It was Creff, in full cry, his harsh accents, echoing down the hallway behind the shop. "Thieves! Murdering thieves!"

The excitement in his voice roused me from my unwitting haze. I pulled myself upright and brushed past Miss McThane, shaking away the restraining hand she placed upon my sleeve.

At the end of the hallway the workroom door stood open. In the circle of light cast from the bench's lamp, Creff and Scape could be seen, wrestling over the mahogany cabinet held between them. Catching sight of me, Creff shouted, "It's the Ethiope's accomplices! He's sent 'em here to cosh and rob us!"

I ran towards the struggling pair, unmindful of any danger. The prospect of alteration to the odds against him spurred Scape to greater effort: he wrenched the device left behind by the Brown Leather Man away from Creff, and bulled head-downward at me. I fell from the impact of his shoulder into my chest; he charged past me, but I managed to snare his legs within my grasp, bringing us both sprawling on to the floor of the shop. Scape's hands splayed open, and the mahogany casket slid a few inches further, impelled by momentum.

Miss McThane bent down to pick up the casket, but was unable to lift it owing to its great weight. Creff, brandishing a broom handle as a truncheon, vaulted over the prostrate forms of Scape and myself, and menaced her away from the object of the pair's felonious desire. With unladylike facility, she raised the hem of her dress and forcefully placed the point of one reversed-calf boot in a sensitive portion of my servant's anatomy. Thus crippled, Creff fell in a knot upon the casket.

"Get offa me, for Christ's sake," said Scape. He struggled to his knees, breaking free of my grip. My flailing hands sought what purchase they could on him; my fingers hooked behind the blue lenses of his spectacles, and pulled them from his face. The nature of the struggle changed dramatically thereby.

"Shit!" He staggered to his feet, bent double and pressing his hands against his eye sockets. The dim glow of the shop's gas brackets, turned low for economy's sake, wrought obvious pain in him, as though he were some earth-burrowing animal rudely scooped to the surface by a rustic's hoe. Tears streamed from under his palms. "You sonuvabitch," he shouted blindly in my direction. The lenses splintered under his unguided boot. The sight unfolded Creff from his immediate personal concerns. He gaped at the stricken man as Miss McThane, abandoning her pursuit of the casket, rushed to aid her companion.

Emboldened by this turn of events, the wine of excitement drowning any remaining dregs of caution, I picked up the broom handle Creff had dropped, and laid it smartly across Scape's back. "Out you go, sir!" I cried. "Your custom's not wanted here."

"You turkey-" the agonised man spat the words in the direction of my voice.

"Come on. Later for this crap." Miss McThane dragged him to the doorway. A hansom cab waited in the dark outside; she soon had the hunched-over figure deposited inside; with no instructions given, the driver whipped the horse to speed, carrying the two away in extreme haste.

Creff, maintaining gingerly balance, peered out the window at the cab vanishing into evening mist. "The Ethiope," he said, turning towards me. "Those were his henchmen, no doubt about it." He gestured at the cabinet sitting in the middle of the floor. "Sent 'em here to steal that ruddy thing."

A tremor had replaced the strength in my arms. I laid the broom handle on the counter before it dropped from my hands. "There would be little reason," I said, "for the gentleman to whom you refer, to hire others to steal that which he himself brought here. If he wished to have it, why would he not merely keep it in his possession to begin with?"

Creff scowled, turning this argument over in his mind, looking for its flaws.

"No," I went on. "I believe our last visitors to have some conception of this as an article of value. They apparently felt it easier to take it from our custody rather than the rightful owner's."

Unconvinced, yet unable to say why, Creff nodded. "Here," he said, looking up. "What was all that palaver about fiddles?"

"I have no idea," I said wearily. He had apparently been listening from some post upon the stairs. Fortunately so; from such a vantage point he had likely seen Scape's furtive actions.

These events had taxed me sorely. I directed Creff to carry the casket back to the workroom. I briefly considered notifying the constabulary of this foiled robbery, but thought better of it. The article over which we had struggled – and which I could identify as to neither purpose nor value – might well have been impounded for examination, and I would thus lose a valuable commission.

Some time after my first arrival at the shop, Creff had directed my attention to a secret repository well hidden under the floor of the workroom. Upon examination, it had revealed nothing but a few of my father's mechanical sketches and a flask of antimony. In this hole, the Brown Leather Man's property was entrusted for safekeeping, the concealing cover placing it beyond an outsider's easy discovery.

As the reader might well imagine, my mind was greatly preoccupied with the perplexing nature of the day's events. From the appearance of the Brown Leather Man in my shop, and the puzzling spillage of sea water in the workroom – a detail dream-like in its apparent insignificance and nagging incongruity – to the blue-lensed Scape of jerkily animated mien and strange words, his companion of yet more frightening demeanour, and the pitched battle that had ensued over the mahogany casket, the hours had been spanned from one baffling occurrence to another. As though some great unseen Clock, ticking out with regular monotony the passage of my life, had reached a zenith and set its bells into previously unheard clangour and alarm – so we mistake Peace, and describe it as Eternal, when the hand is already poised to strike the hour of dreadful change.