Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection (64 page)

Transporting a literal spot of tea from the cup to the separator with an eye-dropper, I wound the machine and left it to shake without pause, moving swiftly to my next task, constructing a Substance Array out of specimen dishes. This was the most technical of my craft-work, using a scalpel to carefully create minor flaws in the glass, so that when struck it would break into the shapes I needed.

What I ended up with was crude, but serviceable.

The Materials Separator shot itself apart with a rattle. It had done its job, and I found that each component substance had formed its own streak. Water. Dregs. Cream, and just a nip of brandy instead of sugar, proving it Bartleby's cup. Not much to work with, though on sight and smell I could tell the tea was not green or Earl Gray. It smelled fecund. Bitter.

My hands decided that the dregs of tea were the most pressing, and quickly spread it out flat on a sheet of glass below the clinic's electric bulb. While waiting for that to dry, I went through the medications available. Aside from the lithium and laudanum, there were specialised psychiatric drugs of a sort I'd never heard... but that didn't really matter. When I saw what the tea reacted with, I would have enough information to move forward.

The medicines ready on my makeshift Substance Array, I found myself out of tasks to perform while waiting for the tea to dry. I plummeted from the purity of raw thought to the depths of my fears with a suddenness that was physically jarring. I sagged, my hands coming to my face, my insecurities and fears washing over me in a sudden torrent.

I stayed that way, still, biting the flesh of my palms to keep the thoughts at bay. I knew all too well that if I gave in to the worries, my concerns for Bartleby, I would lose myself in a desperate melancholic rage that would not end until I had physically torn the asylum apart until I had found the killer, or until Scotland Yard themselves had been forced to put me down. I would become a monster to the first guilty party I came across, for a certain value of guilty. There is a beast in me, a terrible creature that I must not unleash without a clear target... for in the absence of clarity, any target will suffice to slake its sense of frenzied justice.

My teeth released their grip upon my calloused palms and I shifted back into efficiency, wiping the tears away and grabbing the slide with the now-dry powder upon it. With an almost mechanical precision I used a pair of tweezers to partition a small amount onto each section of my Materials Array, an artist mixing pigment on his pallet. I topped each off with a drop of cleaning fluid sufficient to act as a catalytic agent.

I put the Array down on the table, hands at my sides, eyes watching for the slightest change.

***

I hastened to Bartleby's room. Aldora was sitting by his bedside, holding his hand, watching as he thrashed and whimpered in his delirium.

"Have you forgotten something?" Aldora asked.

"I've finished."

"Already?" She looked up at me. "It's been a scarce twenty minutes."

"I'm an efficient workman," I said. "There was no foreign substance in Bartleby's tea, but the leaves from which it was brewed come from a plant with hallucinogenic properties."

She pursed her lips. "Ergot?"

"Nothing fungal. No. More of a succulent with a psychoactive alkaloid."

"In my travels I remember hearing stories about a tribe of indigenous American Indians who claimed one of their local cacti capable of bestowing powerful visions."

An icy coldness settled around my gut. "Doctor Nash mentioned that Doctor Teague's therapies involved a South American plant extract. To bring her patients to a mental state conductive to her therapies."

Aldora frowned. "If so, that might explain her disappearance."

"I sincerely hope not." I handed her a small dropper full of an amber liquid. "Here. This should help speed Bartleby's recovery."

She took it. "What is it?"

"An extract from compounds that should counteract the alkaloid in his system."

She may have assumed I didn't elaborate out of the drug's technicalities, but to be honest all I knew was that it would be effective. It was a concoction made from a number of other psychoactive chemicals; what its side effects might be I had no clear idea.

Aldora did not need to know that.

While she administered the dropper to her husband I stood and quietly left the room. There was a piece missing from this puzzle, but the only man who might be able to supply it was dead. In the past, that might have stopped me.

But not now. Not when there was so much at stake. Not when some villain had struck a blow directly at my partner's mind.

I had a good idea of who it might be.

I hoped to God that I was wrong.

***

I'd left with stealth assisted by Aldora's concern for her husband. As worried as she was, I had little doubt she would have attempted to dissuade me, if not outright forbidden the course of action I knew was the only avenue available to me. I had to be certain, you see. I had to test my theory.

It was a common lament among the first and second year students at the Academy that the great unwashed and uneducated masses did not properly understand science. Their superstitious and primitive ancestral taboos. We loudly proclaim to one another that there is no cause or morality higher than science.

By the third year we've heard the rumours. We might not believe that the Guild employs a secret agency to police its members, but there's no sense in taking chances. Our boasts are quieter, our projects somewhat more circumspect.

But we remember. We know that the boundaries of scientific advancement are artificial. Social. We remember the abject lessons taught by men like Jekyll and Frankenstein, and we toe the line, but always, we wonder and whisper to ourselves in the night, "what if." And sometimes, we are tempted.

I am, by all accounts, a good man. My standing with the Guild of Artificers and Engineers is impeccable. But I am no saint. I am just an engineer.

I rolled the director's corpse onto his machine's recliner and began attaching the electrodes to his lifeless skull.

This would work. After a few modifications to the workings and a steady galvanic current through the body.

In theory.

***

Sliding into the dead man's dreamscape was an experience entirely unlike that of riding alongside Doctor Vogle while he dreamed. I was no passive observer here. No passenger into Nod.

When the void melted away it was replaced by a darker blackness, and I stood among it in my own form, as James Wainwright.

That was comforting. I was afraid I'd have been the corpse of Director Paddock instead.

I was in what remained of his cooling mind, active only by means of the steady current I was running through it. It was not much. Certainly not enough to reanimate him. Just enough to keep the brain idling so that I could have a poke about. The most benign of all possible necromancies.

Everything was dark, monochromatic, and fading. I could see it happen as his grey matter decayed beyond the capability of his machine to interpret the information it stored, a return of that void within the very structure of his dying reality. I had little time, perceptually, to investigate his memories before they were gone. I wasn't sure what would happen to me, to my mind if I was here when that last spark was extinguished, but I knew from my experiences with Doctor Vogle that the connection between us was two way.

I did not dwell on what I might be bringing back with me.

All around me Bedford Mental Hospital was slipping into decay. I wandered its halls in search of memories.

I found Paddock.

He was a poor representation of what the man had been in life, a fading ego and a dying self-image. Callow and sunken, he walked along the halls in a robe-like doctor's coat, the very picture of Charon looking for lost souls. He found them.

In each cell there was a patient, and as they spoke in a language meaningless to the ears of the living, I could see images appear over their heads. Memories of Paddock's interpretations of their psychological trauma. Abusive parents. Unfaithful spouses. Accidents and violence and tragedy.

But always this, always some form of the
Butzefrau
, some form of the creature that had haunted Doctor Vogle, and always in the context of the hospital.

"Who is it, Paddock? What is it?" I asked.

He turned from his patient, the silent giant Dunstan, and looked at me for the first time. The void had reached his eyes, black cataracts a sign that his ego would not persist much longer.

"September 18th, 1911," he spoke, the words appearing on diary pages over his head. "Someone is abusing the patients. This is no longer a matter I can ignore, not something I can continue to pretend is not happening. Already I have determined that the culprit is not one of the patients bug wo af eye on saf mol eke nf az..."

His words trailed off into meaningless babble, the diary pages melting, their words abyssal. His flesh too seemed to melt from his bones, and I looked around in shock to see that the walls had lost almost all their definition.

I could not afford to tarry. I was afraid that I no longer had need to.

***

My return to the world of the living was a shock of light and colour and sound. Despite the muted nature of Paddock's office I found myself almost overwhelmed after my foray into death. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, rolling from the machine onto the carpet, waiting until the overwhelming vertigo had passed.

"Oh, Loni," I whispered, standing and brushing myself off before returning to Aldora and Bartleby.

In Which Alton Cracks the Case

"Shortly after you'd attached yourself to Vogle the good Doctor provided us with a tea service," Alton said, smiling at James when he returned.

His wife had joined him half on the bed, one foot demurely on the ground. To be honest, while she'd done an excellent job of concealing herself from him, he wasn't surprised to see her there. Truthfully he wouldn't have minded her assistance, but there was no correct way to request it. While his partner, James, would have dismissed such a concern as meaningless – and God bless the man for it – the Bartlebys were too well acquainted with the games of society to ever permit themselves to stop playing.

While in London, at the very least.

"Beastly stuff," he said. "Bitter as Turkish coffee."

"It was made from a South American cactus," James said.

"Disgusting."

"More to the point, psychoactive," Aldora said.

"Whatever it was, ghastly. The brandy barely made it tolerable. Now that I think it, I don't remember seeing her having drunk any."

"I'm surprised it affected you so quickly," James said. "Botanical drugs and poisons normally take some time to be effective."

"Quickly?" Alton said. "James, you were hooked up to that machine for hours."

James blinked, then looked towards the door. "Fascinating. It didn't seem thus."

"It did not actually begin to affect me until an hour had passed. Doctor Teague and I had been passing the time discussing trivial matters--"

"Such as?" Aldora asked.

Bartleby chuckled. He'd have seen jealousy in her interruption if he didn't know her better. "Politics, weather, suffrage, that sort of thing. I'd rather think James had gotten to know her better during their time together."

"How so?" James asked.

"Our conversation was superficial. Window-dressing. The sort of drivel that makes the firmament of my world, but that which you do not abide."

"We spoke of our pasts," James said. "How we got to be who we are."

"See? And we spoke of tensions in Europe and the rattling of German sabres. Meaningless fluff."

"For hours?"

"Not entirely," Bartleby said, his tone dropping. "For the first hour, yes, it was conversation and horrid tea. Much like an evening with Aldora's parents."

He could feel the face she wasn't making at him.

"But after an hour or so, my vision began to skew. I started seeing these... clouds of phosphorescent blue and green. I mentioned them to the Doctor, but she seemed neither surprised nor concerned."

"That woman," Aldora said in a voice so soft that Bartleby wasn't entirely sure he'd heard it.

"After that, well. My legs turned into serpents and my arms into a tree. It was a barmy all-around muddle from there on."

"How dreadful!" Aldora covered her mouth.

Alton found himself unable to maintain eye contact as his thoughts drifted back to what the drugs had shown him. Reality had become supplanted by metaphor, and he had found himself an unwilling audience to a stage play about his life. Scenes blended into one another, but the emotional resonance they carried was all too distinct. He was a child in the vast but draughty corridors of the opulent poverty he'd grown up in, watching workmen scrape the brass filigree from the stairwell, watching his father's debtors take away the family legacy piece by piece and replace it with ever more wine.