Mark Hodder - The curious case of the Clockwork Man

Screams and shouts echoed up through the fog. There was obviously a battle occurring in the Strand below.

“Good show!” the king's agent muttered.

He braced his feet against moldings in the fuselage, gripped the lip of the saddle, checked that his cane was still securely thrust through a loop in the waistband of his trousers, and unbuckled his harness.

“Are you all right?” he asked the man of brass.

He received a nodded response.

“I'm going up. Follow.”

Transferring his grasp to one of the taut chains from which the flying machine hung, he swung free and pulled himself up hand-over-hand until he reached the roof. With a sense of relief, he hauled himself onto its flat surface.

Moments later, the clockwork man joined him.

Burton saw that three of the four grapples had caught fast amid brickwork. The fourth had crashed through a skylight and jammed against its frame.

“That's our means of entry,” he said, pacing over and looking down through the broken glass into an unlit room. “It's some sort of presentation hall. Slightly too long a drop for me, but you'll make it. Get down there and drag over a table for me to land on.”

This was done, and from the large room, Burton and his clockwork companion passed through a door into a hallway.

The Venetia Royal Hotel was dark and silent, and the top floor, which consisted entirely of offices, meeting rooms, and storerooms, was entirely abandoned.

They came to a wide staircase and descended to the next floor. Burton looked up at the ceiling. There was something clinging to it. It reminded him of the thick jungle vines he'd seen in Africa, except that it was pulsing and writhing and, somehow, no matter how hard he peered at it, it evaded proper focus, as if it wasn't entirely a substance of this world.

It was ectoplasm. It exuded through the top of the double doors leading to the corridors and rooms, snaked across the ceiling, and disappeared into the stairwell.

“Is it coming up the stairs or going down, I wonder?” he murmured.

He stepped over to the doors and pushed them open. Gas lamps, in brackets on the walls, illuminated the hallway beyond.

There were eight residential rooms on each side of this particular passage. Their doors were open. Ectoplasm twisted out of each one and joined the thick limb of stuff on the ceiling.

Burton clenched his jaw nervously, crept up to the first chamber, and peered in. Its furniture had been pushed aside but for a large table. Seven chairs stood around it. Only one was occupied. The remains of a man sat in it. He was mummified, his skin shrunken and desiccated, his sharp cheekbones poking through. His head was thrown back and ectoplasm was issuing from his mouth and rising up to the ceiling.

“Bismillah!” Burton whispered, entering. “There was a seance, and it doesn't look like this fellow survived it!”

He bent and looked at the man's face, then jerked back with a cry of shock, bumping into his companion, as the mummy's eyes flicked open and rolled sightlessly.

“Alive, by God! How long has the poor devil been here?”

He turned to his valet. “I have a horrible feeling it's going to be the same story in the other rooms.”

It was. On the seventh floor of the Venetia, in every room, there was a table at which a seance had been performed, and at every table there sat one shrunken, dried-out man, with head back and ectoplasm streaming out of him up to the ceiling and out into the corridor.

When they descended to the sixth floor, they found the same, though the ectoplasm was more abundant.

On the fifth, it was even thicker and glowed slightly with a greenish-hued light. It had crawled down the walls, forming strange organic shapes reminiscent of ribs and veins and quivering organs.

The fourth floor was worse: walls, ceilings, fixtures, and fittings were so completely buried beneath the pulsating substance that it seemed to Burton as if he and his valet were making their way through the arteries of a living organism.

Cautiously, the king's agent led the way to the stairwell. The route down to the third floor resembled the gullet of a mythical beast.

“Stepping into the dragon's maw,” Burton muttered.

He took the step.

Something touched his mind.

“ You should be dead! ” a voice hissed inside his skull.

He felt the devastating force of Madam Blavatsky's presence.

“My apologies,” he said, aloud. “Alive and kicking. I thought I'd find you here.”

“ And pray tell me, malchik moi, what led you to me? ”

“I was told, some months ago, that this hotel had been fully booked by a private party. It's a big place, so the party must have been very substantial indeed; and since the Venetia is slap bang in the middle of the Strand, and the Strand is at the centre of the disturbances-well, you can see why I concluded that the Rakes were here with their elusive new leader.”

“ Not all the Rakes, but a great many, yes. Come, stand in my presence. Bring your preposterous toy with you. ”

Burton moved down the stairs. The steps were almost entirely concealed by the thick mediumistic substance, which felt spongy and unstable beneath his boots. He gingerly placed one foot after the other, struggling to maintain his balance. The clockwork man followed.

Blavatsky poked and prodded at his mind.

“ My my! You are so much stronger, lyubimiy moi!”

“Beware of the brains you invade, bitch. Do you not think I learned just as much about you as you did of me the last time?”

“ Then you know that I lack your vulnerability. ”

“You have your own flaws.”

“ Is that so? Then it's to be a duel, is it, Gaspadin Burton? ”

“If you wish.”

“ If I wish? I relish the prospect! Idi ko mne, moi miliy! You will find me in the library on this floor. ”

At the bottom of the stairs, Burton turned to the left, the direction from which Blavatsky's power was emanating, and passed through open double doors into a hallway. The ectoplasm had made the passage almost tubular, and, as he and his mechanical attendant progressed along it, it constricted to such a degree that they had to proceed on their hands and knees.

The temperature plummeted. A weird silence pressed against his ears, as if he'd suddenly become deaf, and an odd sense of timelessness muddled his senses.

The tunnel tapered. It felt fleshy and damp and it glowed a sickly green. Burton squirmed forward on his stomach, cursing under his breath.

“Do you mean to crush me, woman?”

“ No, malchik moi. Let me help you. ”

The ectoplasm started to exude a clear slimy substance.

Burton felt his companion tangling against his legs as the tunnel behind them suddenly contracted. They were both pushed forward, sliding along the clammy pipe, picking up speed, helplessly out of control. Ahead, a sphincter-like opening dilated. Burton shot through it and splatted onto the floor in a high-ceilinged room. The brass man thudded onto his back.

They lay sprawled in a heap, dripping slime.

“Damnation,” Burton grumbled. “That wasn't very dignified.”

“Dabro pazhalavat, Gaspadin Burton. What is this device you have brought with you? ”

“He's my valet,” the king's agent responded, clambering to his feet and surveying the chamber.

A liquid chuckle gurgled in his head. “ It is good that you have him. The staff here has been very unreliable of late. I cannot remember when I last saw a concierge or even a maid! ”

The library was completely buried beneath huge ribs of glowing ectoplasm. They curved down from a big tangle of material in the centre of the ceiling, over the walls, across the floor, and melded together in its middle, where they rose up to form a slender three-foot-high plinth. At its top, delicate fingers of the material held a plum-sized black diamond-the Tichborne stone. The South American Eye of Naga.