Mark Hodder - The curious case of the Clockwork Man

“ Nyet! Nyet! ”

“Where these stones are concerned, I believe only equivalence can lead to destruction. Let us see if that's the case. Proceed, please, Herbert.”

The clockwork philosopher didn't move, but the glow from the room's ectoplasmic walls, floor, and ceiling suddenly dimmed, seeming to concentrate itself around the diamond held in his metal hand, and the bolts of energy that had been playing across the walls now arced inward and danced over the stone's facets. Simultaneously, the diamond's soft humming increased in volume and deepened in tone until it passed below the range of human hearing. To Burton, it felt as if invisible hands were pushing hard against his ears.

Rasputin's voice hammered furiously against the inside of his cranium: “Nyet! Do not do this thing! Let me go! Let me go, tovarishch! I vill return to my time! ”

“Too late. But look on the bright side, Grigori, you've achieved your aim-you've avoided your assassins. It will not be water that kills you.”

Tiny fractures zigzagged across the Eye, and, as each appeared with a faint tink, it seemed to Burton that a small entity was expelled, yet as hard as he might look, he couldn't quite bring the things into focus. At the very periphery of his vision, he could see that the library was rapidly filling with them, but when he turned his head, he saw nothing.

“Vot are these lizards? Get them avay from me! Get them avay! They put their claws into me! Nyet! Nyet!”

Etheric energy banged and clapped around the gem, increasing in intensity, whipping out and sizzling up the walls and across the ceiling and floor.

“Most people see them as fairies,” Burton told the dying Russian. “They're remnants of an ancient race-nothing but preserved memories. Rather too difficult in nature for us humans to comprehend, so we tend to impose a more palatable myth on top of them. But, of course, you don't have any fairy stories in Russia, do you? They aren't a part of your folklore.”

Rasputin screamed. “ They are tearing me apart! ”

“Really? I suggest you fight back. If there's one thing I've learned from you, it's that damaging memories can be overcome. After all, Grigori, it's all in the past, isn't it?”

“ Nyet! Nyet! ”

Rasputin let loose an appalling howl of agony. It pierced Burton's head like a spear. The explorer staggered and gritted his teeth. Blood spurted from his nose.

Spencer turned his brass head.

“No!” Burton managed to gasp. “Don't stop!”

A jagged line of bright blue fire lashed out from a splintering facet of the Eye and enveloped him. It yanked him into the air and held him there. He convulsed helplessly. Capillaries haemorrhaged beneath his skin. The etheric lightning jerked and he was thrown up and slammed into the ceiling then dropped to the floor, where he lay in the grip of a seizure as the fizzling energy snapped away from him.

Pushed beyond the threshold of endurance, his mind seemed to disassociate, and awareness of his physical pain left him. It was no relief. His consciousness was rent by a mortal shriek of anguish-the Mad Monk's death throes as the fracturing diamond tore him to pieces.

It was too much for the king's agent. The world overturned, slid away, grew dark, and was gone.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was dead.

He knew it because he could feel nothing.

There was no world, there were no sensations, there was nothing required, there was nothing desired, there was no past, there was no future.

There was only peace.

A metal finger poked him in the ribs.

He opened his eyes expecting to see, as ever, orange light flickering over a canvas roof.

He saw snow.

He sat up.

No, not snow-flakes of dead ectoplasm falling from the library ceiling, vanishing before they touched the floor.

He pushed himself to his feet, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the blood from his face.

With a loud crack, Madam Blavatsky's corpse dropped. It crashed onto the plinth, which disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Burton turned away from the sight of her crushed skull and horribly folded carcass and found that Herbert Spencer was standing at his side. The brass man held out his cupped hands. The king's agent looked into them and counted.

“Seven fragments. Is that all of them?”

Spencer nodded.

“Good. Hold on to them, will you? The bloody things give me a headache. Let's get out of here. And Herbert-”

The brass head regarded him.

“Thank you.”

Burton recovered a chair from a crumbling and fast-disappearing mound of ectoplasm and used it to smash his way through the calcifying substance blocking the door and corridor beyond. The mediumistic material was fading from existence with increasing rapidity, and by the time he and his mechanical companion had descended to the Venetia's ground floor, nothing of it remained to be seen.

They stepped out into the fogbound Strand. It was strangely silent.

Burton swayed, struck by a wave of dizziness, and clutched at his companion's arm for support.

“Give me a moment,” he muttered.

The next thing he knew, he was looking up at the anxious faces of Algernon Swinburne and Detective Inspector Trounce.

“Did I pass out?”

“Pillock!” screeched Pox from the poet's shoulder.

“Evidently,” Trounce said. “Lord Nelson carried you out of the fog. How's our enemy?”

“Dead. The show is over. And he's not Lord Nelson. Give me a hand, would you?”

Looking perplexed, Trounce reached down and hauled Burton to his feet.

“Not Nelson? Is it a different device?”

Pox hopped from Swinburne to the clockwork man's head and whistled: “Beautiful sweetheart!”

“No,” Burton said. “It's our mutual friend Mr. Herbert Spencer.”

Trounce frowned. “What?”

“There's no time to explain, old man. Suffice it to say that Sir Charles Babbage was a genius.”

“No time? I thought you said Blavatsky is dead?”

“She is, and so is Rasputin. I have to go. There's someone I need to see before I collapse onto my bed to sleep for a week.”

“Shall I come with you, Richard?” Swinburne asked, with a trace of anxiety in his voice.

“No, Algy. I have to do this alone.”

He turned to the brass philosopher. “Hand me a couple of the diamonds, would you?”

Spencer dropped two stones into the explorer's waiting palm.

Burton slipped them into his waistcoat pocket, turned, and staggered off into the fog.

“Hey!” called Trounce after the fading figure. “Who the dickens is Rasputin?”

“Give Herbert a pen and paper,” came the receding reply. “He'll write you an explanation!”

Trounce scratched his head and mumbled: “By Jove! If he's just defeated the Blavatsky woman and brought all this nonsense to an end, you'd think he'd look a mite happier about it!”

The fog thickened.

Burton picked his way through corpses and debris, gave a curt greeting to the constables he encountered, left the Strand, made his way along Haymarket, and passed through Piccadilly Square.

It was maybe five or six in the morning-he was waiting for Big Ben to chime-and there was a faint glow overhead as dawn struggled to penetrate the murk. The city was absolutely silent.

He walked along Regent Street, passing broken windows and gutted shops. He couldn't shake the feeling that the world was crumbling around him.

The riot was over. Blavatsky was dead. Rasputin's mind had been shredded and the present was free of his sinister influence.

Yet something was deeply, deeply wrong.

The vapour swirled around him, muffling his footsteps, as he entered Oxford Circus and turned left.

A weighty despondency was settling over him, exactly like that he'd experienced in Aden after returning from Africa's Lake Regions. It was the notion that, despite his every effort, a job had not been completed.