Langton imagined the combined essences traveling up the cable from the machine below and into that bizarre device. Could the attractor, or whatever version of that strange machine it was, really cause the bridge to dance? To sway and twist and contort itself until it failed? Those heavy steel beams and solid bricks said not. Even so, Langton tried to open the massive pressure door and investigate the machine. The knurled wheel would not turn. He tried Reefer Jake’s key in the mechanism, but it made no difference.
As he returned the key to his pocket, his hand reflexively patted the Webley. The revolver had gone. Langton remembered his fall in the shaft, and the distant sound of something heavy hitting the braced planks. He wasted no time in cursing the lost weapon.
Instead, he searched the service room for something to damage the cable, since he could not reach the machine itself. Only a few short lengths of wood remained, and they made no more than a shallow dent in the heavy copper cable. The metal casing of the electric lamp did little better.
Langton dragged his sleeve across his face and checked his fob watch: only six minutes before three. The Queen would have taken her seat. No doubt the military bands filled the Pier Head with martial
airs. And thousands of people watched and waited in the Span’s shadow.
Already hauling open the floor hatch, Langton knew he must shatter the glass heart of the transfer machine in the caverns, no matter what frantic remnants of emotion sliced through his mind. The Cromwell sluices had to remain the last resort—he cared not so much for himself but for Sapper George, Fallows, and all the men who might be caught out by the Mersey’s power released into the tunnels.
A distant trembling stayed his hand. He stood at the open hatch and felt the floor vibrate under him, as did the cold metal in his grip. Like the heartbeat of a slow giant waking or the pounding of God’s own engine at the center of the earth. Langton ran to the porthole window in the pressure door and saw the petals of the strange machine shake with each cycle of the vibration; they flexed and shimmered like a thing alive.
Then Langton realized that he caught only a small fraction of the transmitted signal. Other notes and echoes oscillated behind the initial coarse pounding. At the edge of hearing writhed weird harmonics, the shapes of notes shifting in and out of synchronization. What would happen when those various waveforms washed over each other and achieved synchronicity? When they combined themselves together just as the essences in the machine down below had combined?
Langton ran to the deep borehole and jammed his body into the shaft. He hesitated, then reached up and hauled the convex hatch into place; it slammed onto its rubber flanges with a heavy thud. Langton spun the wheel and looked down, then wished he hadn’t; the foul-smelling shaft disappeared beneath his wedged, outspread feet. In the weakening light of the electric lamp, he stared straight ahead and gripped the loose furls of cable. Immediately, his head exploded with fragmented shards of memory and emotion; a hundred voices screamed inside him; white light blinded him.
He recoiled from the vibrating cable and almost fell down the shaft. Slowly now, with the voices still echoing in his head, Langton
eased his body down the trembling borehole shaft. Despite the many slips and sudden scrapes, he avoided the black cable as if it were a thing alive. By the time he reached the braced planks and the jagged entrance into Sapper George’s tunnel, blood poured from grated knuckles, elbows, and knees. As he stumbled from the shaft and collapsed onto the passage floor, he looked for the Webley but saw only crumbled brick and mud. Then the electric lamp gave out.
As darkness engulfed him, Langton held his breath. The pounding of the nearby machine obliterated all sound save Langton’s own racing heart. He stood up in the narrow passage and tried to gain his bearings. One false step and he might find another borehole shaft or the intersection of lost corridors.
The cable helped him. As his eyes forgot the electric lamp, they detected a vague white glow from the cable itself. Half-crouched, Langton followed the ephemeral line back along the passage and soon saw a greater white glow framed by the pressure door ahead. He stepped over the high doorsill of the second chamber.
Sister Wright stood close to the glass nexus of the machine. The pale white light washed over her outstretched hand and gently smiling face. She gazed into the swirling cloud as if transfixed, like a small child intent on her first rainbow.
With the hesitant, apologetic steps of an interloper, Langton moved closer. “Sister Wright. Sister?”
She turned to him and drew back her hand. Her smile faded. “Oh, Matthew. You have no idea how sad I am to see you here.”
As if justifying himself, Langton said, “I had no choice. I realized that you planned to attack the Span.”
“You should have thought more like a husband than a policeman,” Sister Wright said as she placed her body between Langton and the machine. “I asked you to stay away. I did ask. Do you remember?”
“I remember.” Langton looked around the room but saw only shadows; the pale light from the glass vortex gave the only illumination and
it did not reach the chamber’s walls or corners. The muted pounding covered all sound of footsteps.
Moving to one side, slightly closer to the machine, Langton said, “Do you really think you can destroy the Span?”
Sister Wright nodded. “I believe so. Has the Professor explained to you about Galloping George, the American bridge that shook itself to pieces? He gave me both the inspiration and the science for this resonator.”
“I doubt that the Professor would accept that honor,” Langton said, trying to keep her talking while he sidled closer to the wooden stave on the ground next to the machine. “Would he want to carry the guilt of so many deaths? Of all those people above us?”
Sister Wright glanced away a moment. “I wish it could be otherwise, Matthew. Really I do. But I have no choice.”
That halted Langton. He had concentrated on getting close to the stave and the machine, but he really wanted to discover what drove Sister Wright to do this. “Do you hate the Boers so much that you’d damage the Span and kill hundreds, maybe thousands, just to disgrace them?”
“I detest the Boers and all they’ve done, but they are not my target in this and never have been. They provide a useful scapegoat.”
Langton stared at her.
“The Span will steal men’s souls,” Sister Wright said, her eyes gleaming. “What is it but an enormous metal aerial grounded at each tower, permanently charged by the electric railway, a magnet for the lost souls of the dying. Instead of gaining peace they will flock to this massive aerial and drain into the dead soil. Instead of freedom, imprisonment. Instead of peace, contamination. As soon as I realized the true horror of this, I knew I must destroy the Span.”
Again, Langton remembered the empty birdcage in Sister Wright’s office at the Infirmary and her story of releasing the captured animal. Now Langton looked into her intense gaze and saw madness. Sister
Wright’s experiences in South Africa might have planted the seeds of insanity, but the years since had seen them grow out of all control.
“It’s a bridge,” Langton said. “No more than that.”
She shook her head. “Are those jars simply glazed containers? No. Science has brought us to this, Matthew, and science is a wonderful servant but a dangerous master. Now is the time to regain control.”
As if responding to her words, the swirling essences inside the glass vortex spun faster. The pounding faded, almost replaced by a high keening note like a buzz saw in the back of Langton’s mind. The very air of the chamber seemed to thicken and grow heavy, so that each breath demanded concentration.
Langton wondered if Major Fallows’s warning device would be heavy enough to shatter that glass; he felt the metal cube in his jacket. And he remembered Fallows’s explanation:
sympathetic vibration
.
“Well done, Matthew,” said Sister Wright, staring at the vortex. “Harnessing the charge of all these poor victims, the resonator’s diaphragm will pulse the key frequency up the caisson chamber and through the Span itself. Every brick, every beam and cable will propagate the wave and amplify it. The Span has no choice—it must obey the laws of physics as laid down by God himself. The Professor’s cladding will dampen any harmonics. One true waveform, pristine and pure…In time, the Span will shake itself to pieces.
“I swore that I would release every trapped soul I could find, but first they must fulfill one final task.” Sister Wright leaned closer to the glass but did not touch it. Her lips moved, but her words seemed to take seconds to reach Langton. “Soon enough. You’ll have your revenge as well as your freedom. And you’ll save so many others.”
Struggling against the dead air, Langton stepped forward, reached for the stave and raised it high over his head. Before he slammed it down onto the glass powerhouse of the machine, he felt it torn from his grip. He turned and saw pale hands emerging from the shadows; pale hands like shovels. Then a face without color, without expression.
“Forgive me, Matthew,” Sister Wright said. “Jake.”
Reefer Jake broke the stave like matchwood and hurled the pieces into the darkness. Langton ducked under the closing embrace, but a hand gripped his collar and yanked him back. Jake hauled Langton up off the floor and stared with impassive eyes. He drew back his right fist with almost deliberate delay.
Langton rained blows on Jake’s chest and face, to no effect. His collar dug into his throat and cut off the air. Even as he kicked and punched and struggled, Langton couldn’t take his eyes off Jake’s fist pulling back like the piston of a steam locomotive.
Langton focused his one last thought. Sarah.
Jake’s fist reached its farthest point. As Langton raised his arms to try to deflect the mammoth blow, he finally saw a change in the expression of Jake’s face: surprise. The man’s eyes opened wide; his mouth hung slack. Then, with Langton still clutched hard in his left hand, Jake toppled forward.
Langton tried to scramble out of the way before Jake’s weight pinned him to the floor. As Langton clawed at the viselike fingers around his twisted collar, he saw the haft of a knife sunk up to its hilt in Jake’s neck. Another man stepped out of the shadows. Durham.
The past two days had treated the agent badly. His torn clothes dripped mud and foul water; bloody cuts framed his filthy face. He limped to Jake’s body, grasped the knife, and levered it out. He ignored Langton and made for Sister Wright.
“The machine,” Langton said, still struggling to free himself. “For God’s sake, Durham. The machine!”
Fallows’s man did not turn or even register the words. He limped through the thickening air with the knife held down ready at his right side. He glared at Sister Wright as his left hand retrieved something from his pocket. “You left me a little keepsake on my pillow. I’m here to repay the kindness.”
Sister Wright backed away from Durham but kept her body in front of the machine. “A true Brother Boer, I see.”
Langton recoiled when he saw the object in Durham’s outstretched
hand: leathery, tanned, surgically removed from Kepler only days before.
“You should have heeded the warning,” said Sister Wright, still backing away. Then, glancing between Langton, the machine, and Durham, she turned and fled down the passageway that led to the borehole and the caisson shaft. Durham went after her, his limp magnified by haste into an almost comical gait. There was nothing comical about the expression on his face or about the knife he carried.
As both quarry and pursuer disappeared into the passageway, Langton tore his clothes from Jake’s grip. Stumbling to his feet, Langton dragged in mouthfuls of colloidal air and grabbed a section of wood. The ground shifted beneath his feet like the deck of an ocean liner. The keening in his mind threatened to sever all thought. Before it did, Langton raised the wooden club above his head and slammed it down in a savage arc.
Time seemed to slow. He felt the rough splintered wood in his hands. He saw the jagged corner slam into the glass. Fracture lines sped along the vortex like frost along a bough. Then it blew.
The explosion threw Langton back against the walls of the chamber. Pain lanced through him. He collapsed to the floor and curled into a ball even as waves of noise washed over him. Numb and battered, he waited for the screams and laughter and fractured words to fade. When they did, swallowed by the dark passages and chambers, Langton stumbled to his feet.
The ground still trembled. The keening in his skull seemed a little weaker, but not fading. When Langton touched the cable leading up to the strange apparatus in the caisson, he felt the power within. The machine still worked.
Langton had acted too late. The souls within the glass vortex must have already given up their power. In the light of Sister Wright’s discarded lamp, he saw masonry dust drifting from the roof of the chamber. If the destructive resonance appeared so deep underground, what effect did it have on the Span above?
Langton snatched up the lamp and ran into the passageway. He tried to remember Sapper George’s route back to the Cromwell sluices, but every turning looked the same, every passage seemed like the last. Panic reinforced the beat of the machine and activated some deep part of Langton’s psyche, something atavistic and primeval; it made him want to flee, to run as far and as fast as he could. He fought the terror and concentrated on searching the tunnels.
There: that oval passageway with ankle-deep muddy water. At the end, a stout wooden door with a rusted metal hatch and a pulley wheel set into the frame.
Langton splashed down the channel and set the lamp on a ledge. He grasped the iron pulley wheel in both hands, took a breath, and turned. Nothing happened. He tried again. The mechanism defied him. He kicked and punched the metal sluice door, yelled at it, screamed and cursed. It ignored him.
Then he saw the locking pin in the wheel. He kicked the rusted pin loose from its hole and tried the wheel; this time it moved. Creaking and whining with reluctance, the wheel turned a quarter of a revolution, then half. Cogs meshed and the metal sluice gate set into the door lifted perhaps half an inch.