Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Zephaniah shook his head. “It ain’t possible. Ain’t nobody but yourself would band with a Scadger. We’re on our own. Always have been, always will be — right to the bloody end.”

As Zephaniah had predicted, we found Harry and Matilda and their five children beneath the Westminster Bridge, settled uneasily amongst the People-Under-the-Bridge. We gathered them up and conducted them to the empty apartments above Antonia’s stationery shop. She was waiting for my brother and his family with boiling water for the washtub and clean linens and open arms.

I related to Harry and Antonia what I had learnt from Harry’s brother Zephaniah. A dark, foreboding silence supervened — the sort of quiet that only intensified the fear of what was being carefully and diabolically arranged for all of us, Scadger and non-Scadger alike. And what was to become of us in the end.

uth Wolf stood beneath the strange tree-like steel tower that the Dinglian metals-sculptor Waldengarver had erected upon the grounds of Bedlam asylum two years earlier. It bore a strong resemblance to four other Dinglian towers whose construction offended the eye of most who viewed them, but would never be removed without plenary Parliamentary approval. Waldengarver had been commissioned by his brother Lord Mayor Feenix to put up all five of the “steel trees”—one of which stood atop the Northern Ridge near the Summit of Exchange and another of which was erected upon an outcropping of the Southern Coal Ridge, where coaldusty collier boys and girls climbed and begrimed it to adorn its metallic branches with Christmas ornaments and garland of their own impoverished construction, giving at least this one tower amongst the five a look of near-festivity during the happy holiday season.

Ruth Wolf stood beneath the oddly welded Bedlam tower for good reason. This was the best place to engage the secretly-purposed tower to transmit the signal emanating from her portable wireless telephone — to direct it to the ear of her colleague in the underground rescuing league, Phillips the jeweller. The tower did the equally serviceable job of returning Phillips’ reciprocating signal back to her, bouncing it from one tower to the next like invisible saltatory voltaic arcs. The magic in the transaction allowed the two to speak as if they were standing within natural earshot of one another. “Hello,” said Ruth Wolf into the tiny rectangular telephone. “Thank God you called, Ruth. I was starting to get worried.” It wasn’t a tiny rectangular pencil-case of a telephone into which Phillips was speaking, but the voice-amplifying mouthpiece of a much larger tethered variety of telephonic device. The apparatus sat upon Phillips’ desk in the cluttered back office of his jewellry store.

“Things have been crazy,” Ruth replied. “They’ve summoned me to to-night’s hospital board meeting. I have every reason to believe that I’m about to get canned. I have to get out of here, Phillips. I went to talk to Chivery up in the attic room just a few minutes ago. He didn’t make much sense, but he gave me something. It sent a chill down my spine. It’s a memo from Michelena Martin to Patty Kreis. Does the name Martin ring a bell?”

“I know that she works pretty high up in the New York office. Corporate Command, inside Flatiron, right?”

“Co-director of Victorian Research, actually. But she doesn’t do that anymore. She resigned in late May. Guess what she’s doing now, Phillips?

“Drinking Mai Tais at some Club Med?”

“Think: dust. Think: biting it.”

“I don’t get it. Why would they kill her?”

“She’d obviously become a risk to them in her retirement. So she had to be taken out. But here’s a nice little fun fact for you, Phillips: they didn’t take as much care at all in how they disposed of her body. She and her briefcase, which must have been latch-chained to her wrist, washed right up on the bank of the Thames, deep in the heart of Dingley Dell. That’s where one of the Scadger kids and Professor Chivery found her. Chivery got the printed copy of a fairly damning exchange of memos she’d been carrying around with her, and put it right into my hand — how it’s all going down. They’re going to blow up Tiadaghton Dam, Phillips, and flood the valley.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Hey, look, it’s time for me to grab Bevan and the two of us get the hell out of here. Otherwise they’re going to kill me, Phillips. They’re going to fire me and then they’re going to kill me to keep me quiet, to keep from mucking up their final act. And who knows where in bloody hell my body turns up.”

“All right, now. Calm down. Let’s think this through.”

“First me. Then everybody else in this Godforsaken place. Look, I should go. I can’t — someone’s going to find me here. I’ll call you again when I get to a more secure location — I’m guessing the top of the Southern Coal Ridge, before Bevan and I make our descent. Phillips, I’m rethinking what we talked about the night we brought Newman back here. If my days are numbered then I’m not going out without making a little noise. I’ve gathered more than enough evidence to make a rock solid case against them, against their whole operation.”

“And I’ve also given this some more thought myself, Ruthie, and I’m not so sure anymore. Spilling the beans on the Tiadaghton Project — that whole shit-load of beans, honey—”

“But if we can get to the right people fast enough — if we can get some protection for ourselves—”

“And just who are the right people? This thing goes all the way up to the White House, Ruthie. The Pentagon’s had a place at the Tiadaghton table for the last sixty years. This isn’t us with the slingshot facing off with Goliath. It’s David and holy frickin’ Godzilla. I’m not a young man, Ruthie. I’ve lived my three score and ten and then some. But I still have no great desire to throw myself upon a live grenade, especially if there’s a chance that we don’t end up saving a single life at the end of the day. You know how hard it’s going to be to get this evidence to somebody who isn’t already compromised by the Project.”

“Not everybody’s in on it, Phillips. Congress has always been kept deliberately in the dark. You get it to the right Congressman—”

“It doesn’t matter, Ruthie. You’ve still got a global conspiracy here over a century in the making — run by some of the richest men in the world and with the tacit approval of nearly every occupant of the White House since Taft. And history records what happened to those who didn’t want to play ball. They poisoned Harding, took shots at FDR and Ford to bring them in line, and as for that Boy Scout from Massachusetts — the one man with balls enough to try to put Tiadaghton out of business — well, history tells us exactly what happened to him in gory, Technicolor detail. Look, let’s take this thing a step at a time. First, let’s work on getting you someplace where nobody will find you. F.Y.I., honey: I’ve called a meeting of the Rescuers for Monday. I’ve been wanting to tell you: we’re going to disband. Our job is done. Don’t come to that meeting. It’s too dangerous. Get yourself lost, baby. I mean it.”

“Phillips?”

“Yeah?”

“I think they’re getting sloppy. Or else they’ve maybe got a couple of inside subversives who’ve taken to monkeying around with the machine.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that the Project never should have allowed a dead body to go floating down the Double Pine like that. I mean that I’m seeing other examples of how they’ve started to drop the ball. I think the Project is starting to unravel — not in a big way — just little threads being teazed out here and there — people who might have found out that Tiadaghton’s about to be shut down, and they’ve decided to engage in a little light sabotage while they’re still able. Or it could just be plain Project burnout: folks who’ve simply stopt giving a shit about their jobs.”