The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (48 page)

He swung his club at Trounce’s head. The detective yelled, dodged backward, fell over the corpse he’d just downed, rolled, jumped to his feet, and threw his truncheon. It hit Lampwick square between the eyes and the man collapsed, unconscious.

“I’m sorry, son.”

Honesty, meanwhile, had scooped up a second weapon, and, with a truncheon in each hand, was ducking under clutching hands, swiping at kneecaps, and crippling his opponents. Five of his men, staying close to him, were then finishing the job by flattening heads.

It became a routine, almost rhythmic: dodge—duck—
Smack! Smack!
—pulverise. Dodge—duck—
Smack! Smack!
—pulverise.

“Winter jasmine,” Honesty declared. “Very cheerful.”

Dodge—duck—
Smack! Smack!
—pulverise.

“And maybe wisteria. A good climber for the back fence.”

Charles Altamont Doyle’s astral body drifted through the fog and mingled with Commander Krishnamurthy’s men. Some took a swing at him, which didn’t affect him at all, while others seemed to hear the voice that reverberated through what little essence he possessed. “Rebel!” it urged them. “Turn against your oppressors!” They put their hands to their heads, winced, and assaulted their fellows. Fights broke out.

The other part of Doyle was at the junction of the Strand, Aldwych, and Lancaster Place, at the end of Waterloo Bridge. Despite having a dent in his cheek where a truncheon had caught him, he still moved and he still hungered. He could not resist his appetite; others had life, and he wanted it!

A policeman charged at him and slashed at his forehead. Doyle shifted and the weapon thudded down onto his shoulder. He felt nothing, though he heard his collarbone crack. He clutched his attacker’s wrist and slammed his other hand into the man’s elbow, which snapped with a nasty crunch. The policeman let loose a scream. Doyle released the arm and wrapped his fingers around the man’s neck. He started to squeeze. The scream gurgled into silence.

“Give me your life!” Doyle moaned. “Please!”

At the edge of Trafalgar Square, Commander Krishnamurthy listened to the growing sounds of battle and made a decision. He ordered his men to advance.

From the north and south sides of the Strand, smaller police teams also responded to the intensifying conflict and moved into the fog.

Tock!

Krishnamurthy’s truncheon bounced from the back of a constable’s skull. It was the fifth of his men he’d had to personally render unconscious.

There were wraiths everywhere, and the Flying Squad man could feel them digging into his mind, trying to wheedle their way inside to take control. His headache was almost overpowering.

“Do your duty, old son!” he advised himself. “Don’t give in to these bloody spooks.”

Despite the steady loss of men, he still had a reasonably sized force at his command, and he was leading them at a steady pace toward the end of Lancaster Place.

Now Rakes, as well as wraiths, began to appear out of the miasma, and combat became rather more deadly. Five men went down before the Flying Squad commander realized that not a single pistol was functioning. The only way to beat the walking corpses was to obliterate their heads. He yelled the order, and a few moments later gore was spraying everywhere.

Krishnamurthy forgot his headache as he started to exact vengeance for Milligan’s death.

Amid the carnage, as his team penetrated deeper into the battle zone, he caught sight of Trounce, who was laying about himself like a wild man, and Honesty, who was industriously crippling the shambling monstrosities.

Krishnamurthy realised that the three main groups of policemen had made it to the rendezvous point as planned. However, unlike Honesty and Trounce, he didn’t know that the signal whistle had been sounded by mistake or that the advance had been made some considerable time ahead of schedule. Now, as the police teams merged, it dawned on him that something had gone badly wrong.

Swinburne was supposed to be here. The opposition should be on its back foot by now. The police were meant to be in control of the situation.

They weren’t.

“Hold fast,” he breathed. “Just hope the poet shows up.” He lashed out at a Rake and muttered: “A poet, by crikey! A blessed poet!”

Detective Inspector Honesty strode past, brandishing his weapons.

Krishnamurthy clearly heard his superior bark: “Petunias.”

“Did you say Tichborne, sir?” he asked.

“No, Commander. Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give them hell.”

Krishnamurthy nodded and winced. His head was filled with pain.

“Excuse me,” said a refined voice. He turned. A Rake stood beside him. “How does it work, old bean?”

The commander stepped back. “What?”

The Rake, not long deceased by the look of him, said: “The thing of it is, you have life. Unfortunately, I don’t. Regrettably, that means I have to take yours. What I can’t bally well work out is where to look for it after I’ve run you through.” He showed Krishnamurthy his rapier. “Can you advise?”

The Flying Squad man eyed the sword point, which was poised about three inches from his face.

“Um—”

The Rake’s head flew apart, the rapier dropped, and the body folded.

“This isn’t a bloody debating society, Commander!” Trounce growled, standing over the prone corpse. He wheeled and stalked off into the mist, shouting orders and encouragement to his men.

Krishnamurthy watched him go. “Snooty bastard,” he muttered.

Dodge—duck—
Smack! Smack!
—nothing.

Honesty straightened and looked around. His five-strong team of head-pulverisers had been set upon by a large group of Rakes. The constables were fighting for their lives.

“Not very sporting!” exclaimed the corpse at his feet. “Hitting me in the knees like that. How am I supposed to toddle about?”

Honesty ignored the question and took a step toward his men. The fallen Rake grabbed his ankle and unbalanced him. He hit the ground face-first.

“I demand an apology!” said the Rake.

The detective sat up, twisted around, and thumped a truncheon onto the cadaver’s head.

“Ouch! Good grief, man! What sort of an apology is that?”

The weapon descended again, harder.

“You should go,” said the Rake, in a slurred voice. “I’ll just lie here for a bit.”

His head caved in under the third blow and he lay still.

“Purple flowering laburnum,” said Honesty. “Very hardy. Grows anywhere.”

He got to his feet.

An arm wrapped around his neck and yanked him backward. One of his truncheons was wrenched from his hand and thrown into the fog. He felt teeth sink into his left shoulder and tried to yell in pain but his throat was too constricted. He struggled, his vision blurring. Bells began to chime insistently in his ears.

He pitched sideways and hit the ground. His assailant’s grip broke and Honesty rolled free, lay on his back, and gulped at the dirty air.

A foot slammed down onto his hand. He cried out as his fingers broke around the grip of his remaining truncheon. A body thumped onto his chest, its knees on his shoulders. Hands seized his neck and tightened around it like a band of metal.

The ringing in his ears increased, yet, somewhere behind the cacophony, he heard an approaching rhythmic thunder, too.

The ground started to tremble beneath his back.

Through a red haze of pain, Honesty looked up and saw that his assailant was the bearded man with the dent in his cheek.

Detective Inspector Trounce was covered from head to foot in gore. His truncheon dripped brain tissue. His mouth had frozen into a ferocious snarl and his eyes were blazing. He stood on a pile of motionless Rakes and waited for the next one to come. It was not a long wait. A man lurched into view and ran toward him. He was dressed in evening attire and there was a monocle jammed into his right eye socket. He’d obviously already been in battle, for his jaw was broken and hung loosely with the tongue flapping over it. It didn’t matter to him; he was already dead.

The Rake scrambled over his fallen fellows. Trounce sprang to meet him and swept his weapon down, double-handed, onto the bare head. The skull broke with a horrible noise. Trounce hit it again and again and again.

The Rake went limp and still.

There was a moment of respite.

The Scotland Yard man wiped his sleeve over his eyes and peered around. Through the dense murk, he could see shadowy figures locked in combat. A great many constables lay dead or wounded in the road. Rakes milled about.

“How many heads have I smashed in tonight?” he rasped. “And still the bloody stiffs keep coming!”

He turned his head and saw Detective Inspector Honesty sprawled in the road, his face turning blue as a Rake, kneeling on his chest, throttled the life out of him.

Trounce took a step, lost his footing, slipped, and slid across corpses to the cobbles. He scrambled to his feet and made to run to his friend, but he’d taken no more than a single stride before two wraiths suddenly wafted into view and grabbed him by the arms.

“No!” he croaked, as, struggling furiously, he was dragged into the fog, borne away from his dying friend.

The wraiths came to a halt as Krishnamurthy emerged from the haze. The ghostly figure of a top-hatted man loomed behind the commander.

“Watch out!” Trounce cried. “And save Honesty! He’s back there being strangled to death!”

“I’m sorry!” the Flying Squad man gasped. “I—I can’t—can’t—” Lifting his truncheon high, he approached his superior. “Tichborne is—is innocent!”

“Krishnamurthy!” Trounce yelled. “Pull yourself together, man!”

“The op-oppressors must—must die!”

He swung his weapon back, ready to sweep it down onto Trounce’s head.

Thunder sounded:
Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!

The ground vibrated.

A police whistle shrieked repeatedly.

A powerful gust of wind suddenly swept over Trounce, and the two wraiths lost hold of him. They were ripped apart and blown away. Behind Krishnamurthy, the top-hatted apparition disintegrated.

The commander looked over Trounce’s shoulder, his eyes wide with astonishment, his mouth gaping.

The detective turned.

“Bloody hell!” he gasped. “I’m seeing things!”

It came pounding across Waterloo Bridge, and when it entered the Strand, the cobbles cracked and powdered beneath its hammering hooves.

Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!

It was a colossal horse, a mega-dray, and on its back, looking as tiny as a child’s doll, sat Algernon Swinburne, a Pre-Raphaelite knight, his fiery red hair streaming behind his head, a tremendously long, thin lance gripped in his right hand.

He was blowing enthusiastic blasts on a police whistle, and, perched on his shoulder, a little blue and yellow parakeet was gaily screeching insults at the top of its voice.

As the enormous steed came charging out of the fog, the base of a pantechnicon, to which it was harnessed, followed. The wagon presented the incredulous spectators with an even more fantastic vision, for mounted vertically upon it was a huge spinning wheel. It was similar to a waterwheel in construction, though built from lightweight materials, and it was revolving at a tremendous speed on well-oiled bearings, driven by the twenty greyhounds that raced flat out on its inner surface. Miss Isabella Mayson stood beside the contraption and encouraged the runners with claps and whoops and morsels of food.

From the wheel, a series of simple but extremely well-designed gears and crankshafts drove a mammoth pair of bellows up and down, and snaking away from the nozzle, a tube ran up to the top of a tower at the rear of the wagon and into the back of a cannon-shaped barrel. This was mounted on a swivel and was being aimed at wraiths by Constable Bhatti.

The whole contrivance was a masterpiece of engineering, for it depended upon neither springs nor complex machinery, and was so simple in design that Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been able to build it in a matter of hours.

As the mega-dray pulled the wagon onto the wide thoroughfare, Bhatti directed the jets of air hither and thither, and, though his range was extremely limited, the wraiths caught by the strong blasts were ripped out of existence.

A great cheer went up from constables as they scattered out of the horse’s path.

Detective Inspector Trounce and Commander Krishnamurthy looked on in amazement as Algernon Swinburne lowered his lance and aimed its tip at the back of a Rake’s head.

Charles Altamont Doyle pressed his dead fingers into Detective Inspector Honesty’s neck.

“Squeeze!” he said. “Squeeze the life out of you and into me!”

A fairy pranced at the periphery of his consciousness.

“Recurrence comes!” it sang.

“No! Life comes!” Doyle whispered. “Start again. Get it right. Mend my mistakes.”

He felt something touch the back of his neck. From the perspective of his astral body, which drifted through the fog nearby, he could see that it was a long lance held by a small man on a big horse.

His head burst into flames.

“Now!” said the fairy.

The fire ate into his face and scalp, clawed hungrily into the bone and tissue beneath.

He rolled off the police officer and collapsed onto the ground, thrashing wildly as the flames gouged deeper and deeper into his dead flesh.

The lance touched him again, on the chest, and his entire body ignited.

He felt himself being consumed, found that he could struggle no more, lay still, and allowed the conflagration to suck him into oblivion.

Nearby, swirling through the fog, he watched and felt himself burn.

“No!” he thought. “What about all the things I still have to do?”

A powerful gust of air tore into him and ripped him apart.

Charles Altamont Doyle dispersed into the atmosphere and ceased to exist.

Trounce and Krishnamurthy saw the Rake erupt into flames and roll off Honesty. Their friend crawled weakly away from the blazing corpse.

They hurried forward and dragged him to safety.

Trounce looked up and noticed that four cylinders were slung over the mega-dray’s haunches. From them, tubes ran up into the hilt of the lance.