Stefan Bachman - The Peculiar

Stovepipe Road, Stovepipe Road. Heavens, were there no street signs in Clerkenwell? His eyes searched the filthy bricks, the peeling shop signs, and doorposts. He did find one, cracked and rusted, clinging by a shred of wire to the head of a lamppost, but he couldn’t make out what it said. Someone had painted over it in dripping red letters: Faeryland.

He hurried up the street, saw nothing that looked like a mechanicalchemist’s, turned back when he thought no one was looking, and hurried down the street instead. He did this several times over before finally gathering the courage to ask directions from a toothless woman in scarlet petticoats. She pointed him to a dark alley that wormed into a mass of dilapidated buildings. He had passed that same alley at least five times already, and each time he had thought it far too suspicious-looking to risk entering.

He stepped into it. The air was close here, viscous like tar. He looked up at the houses tilting overhead, and a great drop of sooty water splashed down toward him. He stepped aside, and it slapped the ground, echoing among the buildings. There were no signs in this alley either, not even shop-boards or tavern banners. Just leaning night-black houses and broken windows. Halfway down the alley, he spotted a gin-soaked hobgoblin sprawled across a doorstep and asked for directions a second time.

The goblin scowled out at him from under leafy eyebrows. “Right up there,” he rasped, waving a claw in the direction of a tall, thin house near the end of the alley. The building was just as dilapidated as the others. Certainly not a place Mr. Jelliby could imagine the Lord Chancellor visiting. Him, with his extravagant costumes and perfect white skin.

Mr. Jelliby thanked the hobgoblin and approached the house uneasily. Looking up, he saw that it ended in a massive knot of chimneys and roiling fumes, like a head of wild black hair. He entered through a low door and began climbing some stairs, up and up, past leery-eyed lodgers and foul chambers until at last he came to the fifth floor. There he found a small hand-painted sign pointing to small hand-painted door on which was written quite simply Mr. Zerubbabel. No mechanical marvels.

A collection of rusty bells jangled over the door as Mr. Jelliby entered. The room beyond was dark, low-ceilinged, and cramped, its actual shape difficult to make out for all the shelves and stacks of machinery towering throughout it. The metal skeletons of half-built automata sat slouched on crates, staring at nothing with dead eyes. Wires crisscrossed the ceiling, and on them, wheeling to and fro with soft creaking noises, were dozens of little tin men on monocycles, carrying in their hands screwdrivers and hammers and spouted cans of glistening oil.

A metallic ting sounded from the far corner of the room, and Mr. Jelliby turned to see an old man hunched over a desk, adjusting the treads on a clockwork snail.

Mr. Jelliby took a step toward him. “Sir?” he said. The word fell like a furry ball to the floor. The old man looked up. Wrinkling his nose, he peered at Mr. Jelliby through half-moon spectacles.

“Yes, please?” he said, setting the snail down on the desk. It gave a contented whir and began turning circles around a mug of black grease.

“Ah-do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Zerubbabel?”

“I am Mr. Zerubbabel, though whether you derive any pleasure from addressing me is entirely up to you.” The old man’s voice was clipped, educated, completely at odds with his jumbled little shop. On his head he wore a very tiny black hat. “Xerxes Yardley Zerubbabel, at your service.”

Mr. Jelliby smiled gratefully. “I have a damaged piece of mechanics here that was constructed at your shop. It-it crashed through my attic window.” He had practiced what he was going to say all through breakfast while pretending to read the Times . It had been nothing like what he had just said. “If you would be so kind as to tell me where it was headed, I will be along right away to give it back to its owner.”

“Oh, not necessary, I assure you. Not necessary at all. I have all my customers written up. Show me the machine, please.”

Mr. Jelliby set to work extracting the bird from his pocket. A metal talon snagged on his trouser and tore off with a twang. The old man winced. While Mr. Jelliby struggled to undo the feathers from the stitchery on his waistcoat, the old man said, “Oh! The Sidhe’s bird. Thank you, I will see that it is returned to him myself.”

“Oh. .” Mr. Jelliby looked unhappy. “Well, would you tell me where it was flying anyway?”

The little man’s brow darkened. When he spoke, his voice was wary. “No. No, I don’t suppose that I would.”

Mr. Jelliby’s mouth twitched. He flicked at one of the bird’s springs. He shuffled his feet. Then he said, “All right, look here. I’m with the police, see, and the creature who bought this bird from you is a heinous criminal.”

“He is a politician,” the old man said flatly.

“But he is also a murderer! He’s been all around London and Bath killing poor innocents and leaving them hollow like dead trees, and you, as an upright Englishman, are required by honor to help me.”

Mr. Zerubbabel grunted. “Firstly, I am not an Englishman. Secondly, that’s the dottiest tale I’ve ever heard. With the police, indeed. I don’t believe a word of it. And even if I did. .” He sniffed and, eyebrows raised, set back to fiddling with the clockwork snail. “It’s none of my business.”

Mr. Jelliby threw up his hands in exasperation. “How can you-what in-have you no. .?” He dropped his hands. He opened his wallet and fished out two gleaming sovereigns, waving them under the old man’s nose. “Can I make it your business?”

The old man eyed the coins. Snatching one, he bit it. Then he looked hard at Mr. Jelliby, stood on his tiptoes to look out the window in the shop door, and said gruffly, “Let me get my records.”

Like an old rat, Mr. Zerubbabel retreated into a hole between two drooping shelves. Mr. Jelliby could see nothing inside but blackness. Some oaths issued from within, followed by a heavy crash that shook the towering house to its roots. A cascade of clockwork mosquitoes tumbled from a jar nearby. The old man popped his head out. “It has been eaten. One moment, if you please.” He disappeared back into the hole.

There was another crash, what sounded like claws tapping, and fierce whispers, and the old man emerged again, this time with a map in his hands.

“Now then!” he said, puffing. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, shall we?” He unfurled the map across a pile of debris and began poring over it, eyes darting like flies. Long lines had been drawn across it in red ink. Mr. Zerubbabel traced them with a wizened finger. “I have a captive faery-of-the-air to travel the distances and calculate safe routes, et cetera,” he explained. “It finds obstacles, measures the height from which my contraptions must launch.” He cast Mr. Jelliby a sideways glance. “So that they don’t crash through attic windows, you know.”

Mr. Jelliby nodded wisely.

Mr. Zerubbabel turned back to the map, frowning. He rapped his finger three times, in different places on the map. “Here are the points he gave me. Three birds. Each bird has its own route. Three birds for three routes. And all starting from different spots in London.” Mr. Zerubbabel looked thoughtful for a moment. “The one you picked up travels from Westminster Palace, it seems, on its way North. Yorkshire. It is launched toward the east to bypass the factory ash. The second one flies between Bath and a house on Blackfriars Bridge. And the third I never could understand. He had me calibrate it to fly in an upward line from a garret in Islington, three hundred feet into open sky. And when I sent Boniface-that’s my faery-of-the-air-up to see what was what, he found nothing. Just clouds and sky.”