Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“And kill us all,” said Quilp without animation. “Yes, we’re quite familiar with how it all plays out, old boy. Have you anything new to add that doesn’t include placing your notebooks before us and asking us to glean meaning from all the numbers and mathematical formulæ scribbled in them?”

“Yet there is meaning. A great deal of meaning,” expostulated the professor. “Newman, do you not believe me? Have even you become so inured to my — my—?”

“Ravings?” offered Bolo, still reclined upon the floor in a lounging aspect.

“That is what I do?”

“Most certainly,” said Quilp. “We stopt listening long ago. Because we know that you’re mad — generally speaking — except for the stray moment of pure and clear perspicuity, which we now know generally comes after a very restless night, such as the one you just had.”

“Is it forenoon? It feels like afternoon.”

“Does it matter what time it is, Professor Chivery?” asked Bolo. “When every hour feels like every other hour in this perpetually candle-lighted warren?”

“What do all the numbers mean, Professor?” asked Newman. “Tell us now whilst it could possibly make a little sense to our dull minds.”

“Do you really wish to know?” asked the professor with an excited lift to his voice. “For I have been most eager to tell you since I completed my calculations roughly two days ago.”

George laughed. “Is that why you’ve stopt writing in your notebooks, Chivery?”

“I had thought it was because he had finally run out of room,” injected the comical Mr. Bolo.

“No, no, no! I would have celebrated it at that moment, had my communicative faculties been sharper.”

“Then what is Stage One?” asked George. “You have mentioned a ‘stage one’ and then a ‘stage two’ quite often in your ravings. Tell us now whilst you are lucid. We’ll listen.”

“Of course we’ll listen,” added Bolo. “For what else is there to do in this rat-nest but talk and listen?”

“And lose all of your toothpicks to me in every game of backgammon we play,” jeered Newman in warm jest.

“Of course. For every man here wishes to see at least one amongst us keep all of his choppers, and why should it not be you , my boy?” Bolo grinned with a large mouth to shew himself bereft of several of his own teeth (and the ones that remained being quite brown and rotted through.)

Chivery leafed to the back of one of his many notebooks. Free to adorn the walls of his cellar cell, the professor was not permitted here to cover the walls of this room with his chalk, for a vote was taken early on and it was determined that it should not be desirable to have to look at mathematical equations all the livelong day.

“Stage one, gentlemen: we send men down to dynamite the Belgrave Dam. We probably won’t have time to take out the whole dam, but if we are able to make an opening of these dimensions…” pointing to figures in his notebook, “…it will nonetheless produce an additional outlet for the floodwaters to escape, sufficient to reduce the waters valley-wide by this volume here…” pointing again. “The smaller structures will be unavoidably washed downstream by the force of the cataract entering the Dell at the Tewkesbury Cut, regardless of what is done in the way of expanding egress for the waters in the south, because by my earliest calculations I’ve concluded that the gorge will be opened by the force of the influx to such extent as to create an initial assault upon the valley of this magnitude.” Chivery pointed a third time to calculations within his notebook.

“What is he talking about?” cried Bolo, rolling his eyes. “He’s gone back to blithering again.”

“No, he hasn’t,” said Newman. “He’s telling us how strong the flood will be and he’s telling us how to — how to—”

Newman could not find the right words to finish his sentence. George Muntle finished it for him. “How to reduce its impact upon the valley.”

Chivery nodded.

“But then, what buildings do you think will withstand the onslaught of that vanguard wave?” asked Muntle, as he sat himself down on the other side of the professor, intrigued by the academician’s findings.

“My calculations on hydraulic surface forces tell me that only two structures within Dingley Dell are of such size and have been constructed with sufficient integrity to withstand the swell with some degree of certainty. If we are successful in lowering the water level prior to natural recession, the campanile tower and roof of the All Souls Church, as well as the roof of this very building, should remain above-water and keep us high and dry, as the phrase goes. And that , sirs, is Stage Two. Holding ourselves to the top floors of the campanile and to the roofs of the church and the asylum to keep out of reach of those treacherous rushing waters.”

“Nothing else in the valley will hold?” asked Quilp, becoming more interested himself and drawing nearer to the professor and his book.

“Perhaps a lucky house here, a lucky factory there, but nothing in the Dell is better constructed that the two buildings of earlier mention, and so I would put all of my money on these two structures alone. And of course, I must reiterate that all is for naught if we cannot breach the Belgrave Dam. If that isn’t done, everything in the valley will be drowned.”

“Stage Three then being the final receding of the waters,” said George.

“And all of us climbing down from that tower and those roofs and going for a bathe!” chuckled Newman.

Chivery nodded. “The boy is right. But standing floodwater isn’t the best place to have a—”

“Quiet! Silence!” interrupted Quilp, signing with his hand that conversation in the room should come to a stop. “Do you hear that? Off in the distance?”

George nodded. “I hear something. Is it thunder?”

Quilp shook his head. “That isn’t thunder. That is the sound of guns. Someone is firing guns — a great number of them there in the northern part of the valley.”

“’Tisn’t in the valley,” said the professor, cupping his hands round his ears. “The gunfire emanates from high upon the Northern Ridge.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Bolo, rising from his lounging place upon the floor.

“Because sound travels differently above the valley than it does across the crowded valley floor. Its texture is clearer with less reverberation. Can you not hear a sharp clarity in the blasts of those guns? Listen.”

Newman and the men listened carefully. After a few seconds more, the sound died down to a pop here and a crackling there, and then was succeeded by silence.

“It most assuredly came from the Summit,” concluded Professor Chivery.

“That is where Miss Wolf gave me an injection to put me to sleep,” said Newman.

“It is as the woman said — the one who wrote the letter I gave to your Miss Wolf. She mentioned something that carried the name ‘Phase Seven.’ Phase Seven — whatever it is — has apparently commenced.”

“Stages. Phases. What does it all mean?” asked one of the other men, all of them now crowding close to the professor to listen even more attentively to what he had to say.

“That a terrible slaughter has just taken place on the Northern Ridge. As we do not possess guns, I suspect that Dinglians were its recipients. And as it is not one of the Mondays when our brokers go there to trade with the Outland tradesmen, I would say that there is another party that has been made the target of such a deadly attack. I cannot calculate how much time should pass before the floodwaters be released, but I would not think that it should be very long to do that which would finish us off. Gentlemen, we should get ourselves up to the roof of this building with all expedition. But we must also warn the others. Men must be found who are skilled and willing to go down to the Southern Coal Ridge to put a hole in the Belgrave Dam or every hope is lost. Someone go and pound upon that door. Appeal to anyone who will listen. Our very lives depend on getting ourselves out of this deathtrap of a room and having our voices heard.”