Mark Hodder - The curious case of the Clockwork Man

It hummed faintly.

“ You realise, of course, that I have allowed your companion to approach merely to satisfy my curiosity. ”

“I was counting on it.”

“ Mechanisms of that sort do not normally function in my presence. ”

“You are far too confident in your abilities.”

“ I am? ”

The king's agent turned to his valet and snapped: “Get the diamond!”

The brass man bounded across to the plinth, reached for the stone, and stopped dead.

A peal of laughter sounded from the ceiling.

Burton looked up.

“Fool!” Madam Blavatsky crowed, her voice deep and resonant. “You think you can defy me with clockwork?”

She was enmeshed in a snarled knot of ectoplasmic tubes, naked; a middle-aged thick-bodied woman, suspended upside down above the plinth, with her arms stretched out horizontally. Her skull had cracked and broken open like an eggshell pushed apart from the inside, and bits of it hung loose. Her swollen brain bulged horribly out of the fissures. Thin ribbons of grey wrinkled tissue dangled down, entwining with her long brown hair and brushing against the diamond below.

Her fathomless black eyes seemed to suck at Burton's very soul, so dreadfully intense were they; they stabbed him like pins transfixing a captured moth.

“You are defeated, Gaspadin Burton. Soon the king will fall, the poor will flood out of your East End, and London will belong to the working classes. The disorder will spread from the capital like a disease. It will infect the entire country! Think of all those downtrodden, exploited, destitute workers in Britain's great manufacturing cities-Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds-where civilised man is lured from his peaceful labours in the countryside and turned back almost into an animal! What barbarous indifference they have suffered! How passionate shall be their revolt!”

Burton snorted in disdain. “Don't try to hide your agenda behind false philanthropy, madam! You care naught for Britain's workers. You regard them as a means to a nefarious end, and nothing more. You've made your intentions quite clear!”

“I do it to save Mother Russia.”

The king's agent took three long strides and reached for the Eye of Naga.

“You do it because you're a demented meddler and you have no control over yourself!” he barked.

“Keep back!”

Blue lightning crackled from Blavatsky's hands, hit Burton in the chest, and knocked him off his feet. He thumped down onto his back. For a second, it felt as if the flesh was boiling off his bones, but the torment passed in an instant, and, with an involuntary groan, he pushed himself up and faced his opponent again.

Her voice echoed in his skull: “ Pah! There is no satisfaction in wounding your body, but your mind, malchik moi- ah!-what great value you place upon it, and how fragile it is! ”

She drove a pitiless spike of shame into that part of his memory where regrets and disappointments dwelt, expecting to cripple him as she had in their previous encounter.

Burton reeled and groaned, but then steadied himself and turned his awareness inward. His Dervish meditation had fortified and strengthened his mind to such a degree that her assault did no damage, but rather gave him a route through which to respond. He thrust mortification along the mediumistic channel that linked them, stabbing it deeply into her preening arrogance.

She recoiled and cried out, shocked at the power of his riposte.

“ Oh bozhe! You bite back! ”

“Stay out of my head!”

“I will do as I please, rebenok. And conceit?” She laughed. “You think that is my weakness? Nyet! Eto vlast! It is strength!”

The king's agent shook his head. “No, madam. The love of one's own excellence serves only to obscure one's own mistakes.”

“I have made no mistakes!”

Burton looked into the woman's eyes and treated her to one of his characteristically savage smiles.

“Haven't you?”

She attacked again, digging fear into his insecurities, but his qualms had been modified by the conception that weaknesses are, in fact, the seeds of future strength. She was easily repelled, and his response-doubt driven into her confidence-was devastatingly effective.

She moaned and twisted in her web of ectoplasm.

“This self-assurance of yours was not there before!” she gasped, and there was a hint of anxiety in her tone.

He felt her poking around his mind, preparing for another thrust. He pounced, locked her into position, and pierced her with a sharp edge of fear.

She screamed.

“That was breaking time followed by a prise de fer,” he said. “I learned it from an expert.”

Blavatsky hung silently and he saw that she was trembling.

“Good,” he said. “Perhaps now we can talk?”

“Speak,” she whispered.

“Your plan, madam, is defective for two reasons. The first is that you regard Russia's future as predestined; something fixed in time; a fate it is sure to suffer unless you interfere.”

“I watched it happen.”

“You watched a possibility, but there are many, many possible futures.”

“You are wrong! I have seen what I have seen.”

“Does your certainty not seem a little peculiar to you? Destiny is far more malleable than you think!”

“You cannot know this!”

“But I do-and I shall show you how!”

He guided the writhing, invasive tendrils of her consciousness to a seemingly insignificant path in his own mind and pushed them along it into his recollections of Spring Heeled Jack.

Blavatsky absorbed the memories, and he felt her astonishment.

“ Oh bozhe! A man who jumped through time! How can this be possible? ”

“The point is this, madam: the time we are living in is not the time that was meant to be. Maybe, before Edward Oxford came back to change his past, Russia's prospects were far less tragic. We shall never know. His actions altered the course of future history for the entire world, and now you are seeking to do the same. If he can do it, and you can do it, then surely it's entirely possible that someone else will do it, too. In fact, I contend not only that anyone can do it, but that we all do! Destiny is not fixed. It is the ever-changing consequence of uncountable actions-actions undertaken by every single person on the face of the planet, each with a unique understanding of reality and of how to deal with it. Even the most obscure, uneducated, unimaginative nobody can, and does, make a difference.”

“Burton,” came a faint hiss from above, “I have to save Mother Russia.”

He looked at the suspended woman and shrugged. “Then you have to use your clairvoyance to predict every single action taken by every single person every minute of every day from now until whatever future date you decide that her fate has been fulfilled to your satisfaction. If you don't, then someone, somewhere, will do something that will modify the results you seek. It is inevitable. No single person can make future history entirely what he or she wishes.”

Blavatsky hung silently. Her black eyes flicked nervously from Burton, to the motionless clockwork man, to the quietly singing diamond, and back to Burton.

“All this for nothing?” she mouthed.

“As I said, your plan is defective for two reasons.”

“What is the second?”

Burton sighed and braced himself. “The second fault, Madam Blavatsky, is that it's not even your plan.”

“What?”

“No one-not even a lunatic like you-could possibly believe themselves exclusively capable of shaping future history. Not unless, that is, the history they're trying to manipulate is actually their own past.”

Bolts of etheric energy started to crackle around the woman's body. The library filled with the tang of ozone.