The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) Read online

  The Doomsday Machine

  CATHERINE WEBB

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - Eyes

  CHAPTER 2 - Curiosity

  CHAPTER 3 - Laundry

  CHAPTER 4 - Underground

  CHAPTER 5 - Acquaintances

  CHAPTER 6 - Strangers

  CHAPTER 7 - Choices

  CHAPTER 8 - Prison

  CHAPTER 9 - Smoke

  CHAPTER 10 - Enemies

  CHAPTER 11 - Institute

  CHAPTER 12 - Berwick

  CHAPTER 13 - Murder

  CHAPTER 14 - Beneath

  CHAPTER 15 - Tides

  CHAPTER 16 - Machine

  CHAPTER 17 - Circuitry

  CHAPTER 18 - Rising

  CHAPTER 19 - Dances

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  By Catherine Webb

  Mirror Dreams

  Mirror Wakes

  Waywalkers

  Timekeepers

  The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures

  of Horatio Lyle

  The Obsidian Dagger:

  Being the Further Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle

  The Doomsday Machine:

  Another Astounding Adventure of Horatio Lyle

  The Doomsday Machine

  CATHERINE WEBB

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2008

  Copyright © 2007 by Catherine Webb

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor

  be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a

  similar condition including this condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those

  clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 9 7807 4811 1

  This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  INTRODUCTION

  Expense

  To build the Machine, it took seven years, fifty-two scientists, nine eccentric inventors, three idiot geniuses let out of the asylum, two hundred and twenty-three labourers, forty-nine railwaymen with a grasp of steam technology, three barges of coal a day, ninety colliers to shovel it into the furnaces, several hundred thousand pounds levied from that year’s import of opium into China, one man with a will sliced from silvery steel, and a gentleman with a thing for lightning storms. And the London sewers - that part came last, five years into the project, the final breakthrough that they hadn’t even realized they needed, the moment when everyone at once sat up and thought, yes.

  Even then, they said, it still couldn’t be made to work - the scale was too big, the idea too grand, the enemy too clever, the expense too high, the forces at work too immense. Maybe in a hundred years, they said, maybe, there would be the understanding necessary or the tools available, able to chisel the two-mile construction site down to something smaller. Maybe, in a hundred years, men would understand the energy necessary to complete it. It took a risk, on the part of the man who had conceived the device, to make it come off, to find what was needed to turn the Machine into the monster it was meant to be.

  But most of all, when the expense and the smoke and the heat and the metal, so much metal, was ignored, it took an enemy. In every glistening part of the Machine, in every cog and piston and giant arm fatter than an elephant ’s waist, in every bolt and screw, thousands of them gleaming in the firelight, was written the determination to win the war. Without an enemy, there was no need for the Machine. With so much feeling and anger built into its very rivets, even the coldest of observers watching its burning sides as it belched orange flame, began to speak of it as something alive. When it was only a few days from completion, work if anything seemed to sag - completed, it had only one purpose, and when that purpose was done, there would be no enemy, and therefore there would be no need for the Machine. It could rust with the rest of the weapons of this very special war. And also in those final few days, as the last coil was spun, one man, who had poured already a large part of his soul into the device, sat up and thought the forbidden thought - Which enemy?

  This is the story of what happened next.

  CHAPTER 1

  Eyes

  London, 1865

  Somewhere in the eastern edges of Clerkenwell, a man is running. His feet splash in still, turgid puddles of oddly coloured liquid dripped from poorly dyed shirts hung out across the way, sending up droplets of thick water as he races down the street. He slips in the mud that has been loosened by the early spring showers, grabs hold of an old cart made entirely of splinters and mould left to rot in the middle of the road, swings himself round a corner and squints through the gloom for a light more than the sick orange glow from smelly tallow candles, seen under the doors of the houses. He hears footsteps behind, squelching on the mud, and above, the rattle of something fast and light on the roof, glances up and for a moment sees a shape dance across the plank between two rooftops and down through a broken ceiling into a house ahead. He spots a doorway to his right, open, dropping down and smelling of rotting straw and sewage, and turns, and runs into it.

  The running man flees down the stairwell, under a black iron lamp that hasn’t burnt for years, into a tight street whose old cobbles are faintly visible underneath a thin coating of slime. He accelerates as his shoes slap loudly on the stones, as he hears ahead the sound of voices, sees a flash of light and prays this is it, escape, not believing he was so foolish as to get into this situation in the first place. He turns a corner and almost immediately runs into a shoulder that is pressed up against another and another and another and smells roasting nuts and lamp oil and sees cheap lace and neckties and hears, ‘Hey-o, Billy, Billy get the doxy missus!’ and, ‘Two’penny, yours for two’penny, if you just got the glint . . .’ and ‘Haybag, haybag, I ain’t never done nothing ...’

  He pushes his way into the crowd, turning sideways into it and ramming his shoulder through, stepping on shoes and moving even as voices shout, ‘I was here first!’ and one or two, more sympathetic, cry, ‘Make way for the toff,’ and are answered by hoots of laughter, and one or two more knowing say, ‘It’s a bobby!’ and immediately open up space to let him through. The man is an odd sight in this crowd, and not just because of the way he moves, constantly turning his shoulder and feet to find the fastest way into the depth of the crowd, eyes forward and down. His coat is long and black, well cut but obviously neglected, with patches sewn on using the wrong colour thread; his pockets bulge; his shoes are practical but battered, turned pale brown from the mud spattered halfway up to his knees; his sandy-ginger hair is half-hidden by an old-fashioned broad-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes; he wears no waistcoat but looks as if he should; nor does he have any gloves. He has long fingers stained with odd, faded colours, though not fro
m tobacco. As he moves, he starts pulling off his coat, not diverting his eyes from where he steps, but working steadily towards the object of the crowd’s attention: a set of double doors pulled wide open to let them into the heart of the nearby buzz. He elbows his way forward, slips a penny into the hand of the waiting doorman, a boy of no more than seven years of age with his cap out and an expression suggesting that if you didn’t pay this doorman, your kneecaps would never see another day, and enters the heat of the hall.

  He can hear distantly the sound of two voices straining above the babble of slang within the theatre ’s thin walls, muddling their way through a sketch that will soon lead to a rousing chorus of ‘The Nutting Girl’ - a tribute to London’s best-loved ladies of repute - and other light classics. The heat is worse than the noise; it hits him full in the face and makes every capillary dilate in distress; it falls on him like a wave, making each moment more intensely hot than the last. Everywhere there are people, elbow to elbow: girls draped on the arm of their chosen lad, boys in groups shouting random abuse at another group across the hall, old men dragging their daughter off a rival’s son while glowering within the fringe of their overgrown whiskers. Few actually pay attention to the man and woman on stage, in huge ginger wigs and quantities of cheap lace, who are desperately trying to muddle their way through a chorus of, ‘Ah-hey-ho the haybale!’ Those who are listening join in, each in their own key and with their own special version of the tune, determined to drown out any rivals who might believe they know better.

  The fleeing man glances over his shoulder, and for a second thinks he sees a flash of green, and a black silk top hat horribly out of place, that even as he looks is knocked off by someone in the crowd with a cry of ‘Toff, toff!’ He ducks down into the crowd, bending forward so that his head is lower than the average shoulder and the world smells of armpit, and starts butting his way further into the mêlée, following the nearest flow of people past the downward staircase that leads into the pit in front of the stage, and on to the upper balcony, which creaks and heaves under the weight of bodies who have piled in there for the evening. Something white and sticky falls on his shoulder: hot wax dripping from the foul-smelling, smoky candles intermixed with the battered lamps hung round the edge of the hall.

  As he moves forward, he methodically turns his coat, pulling the sleeves back in on themselves and out the other side, revealing underneath a pale grey fabric, sewn just like the black, and looking just as much like the outside of a coat as its lining, complete with bulging pockets. He starts pushing his arms back into the sleeves, almost kneeling down among the crowd to hide his actions, then straightens up, scrunching his hat down to a handful and ramming it inside his coat pocket in a further effort at disguise. He peers over the heads of the crowd, then looks down the short distance to the pit, where a fight, over what he couldn’t guess, has broken out in one corner near the old man with his three-stringed fiddle. A hint of black coat somewhere on the edge of the crowd, really too finely cut to be in this hall? Perhaps - it is hard to tell in the dim light.

  He edges to the far corner of the hall, where the shadows are deepest, and muscles his way into a patch of wall between an old soldier missing an ear, and his drinking companion, who is clinging on to the wall to stop it swaying around him. He shuffles down to keep his head low, folds his arms across his chest, tucks in his chin and prepares to wait out the evening amid the sweat of the hall. He claps when the audience claps, boos when they boo, swears fluently when they swear, roars with laughter when they laugh and somehow, by a strange twisting of his face and lilt of his voice, isn’t the same toff who walked in a few minutes ago, but shrinks down into himself while throwing his voice out across the hall with every cry of ‘Get off!’ or lets a tear well in his eye with the sadness of a true war veteran when the man in the big waistcoat and huge moustache raises his hand and calls for a moment to remember the lost of the Crimea and Britain’s noble undertaking. Only when he thinks no one is watching does the openness of his face cloud for a moment, as he scans the crowd in search of something out of place, and shrinks further into the darkness at some half-imagined shimmer of movement by the doors.

  And while the man hides in the music hall, and watches, without any connection or awareness of circumstance, the thoughts of another are about to turn in his direction, and they go something like this ...

  ‘Xiansheng?’

  ‘Berwick has gone. Run. They found his bed empty in the night.’

  ‘I find it hard to see how.’

  ‘Nevertheless. They helped him.’

  ‘How could they know?’

  ‘They have friends in high places; you know this. They were watching him for some months before the calamity at St Paul’s.’

  ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘I don’t yet know.’ A sigh, a letting out of long breath, that just happens to have casual words tangled up in it. ‘He took the regulator.’

  A moment ’s silence, while the full implication settles in. Then an overly contained, ‘I will send my men.’

  ‘They won’t find him.’

  ‘You underestimate our will, xiansheng. What are you thinking? ’

  ‘If Berwick felt himself to be in danger, where would he run?’

  ‘The city is a good place to hide.’

  ‘Who would he run to?’

  A silence while the speakers in the room contemplate this question. Then, very quietly, one man says, ‘Oh. I see what you might be thinking. Is it going to be a problem?’

  ‘Maybe. Not yet. We ’ll see what he does first, we ’ll see if Berwick contacts him. There’s still time.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, xiansheng.’

  Some miles away from both the hiding man and those who contemplate him, a hand stained black with coal dust reaches out for a lever the height of a ten-year-old child and the thickness of a woman’s wrist, and presses the brake off. Its owner looks up, awaiting a command.

  ‘Well?’ says a voice like the snap of a silk flag in a strong breeze.

  ‘Without the regulator . . .’ stumbles the owner of the blackened hand.

  ‘The regulator is only needed for discharge, and by his own mathematics that is three days of pumping away! Do not concern yourself with the regulator.’

  The man with the black-dusted hand, who is smarter than the owner of the commanding voice gives him credit for, thinks about this, then shrugs to himself and pushes all his weight against the lever, rocking it heavily forward. Somewhere a long way below the gantry on which he stands, something goes thunk. Something else gives off a long, painful hiss, something tall and metal screeches inside stiff gears, a furnace door slams, a shovel digs into coal, a fat coil of tightly wrapped cables, each one thicker than an arm, turns on an axis and locks into place between two metal points that gleam in dull orange light from the banks of burning coal a long way below, and, as slow and irresistible as an iceberg, the Machine starts to move.

  It is bigger than the deck of the largest man o’war; it fills the space of an average cathedral; it burns more coal than twenty trains rushing from London to Edinburgh; it contains more metal than Brunel’s greatest construction; it is hotter than the hottest music hall on a summer’s night; it needs a hundred men to throw coal into its furnaces just to keep it powered up. Even to the man who created it, whose monster it is, it can have no other name than the Machine.

  Although he didn’t know it at the time, to the man hiding in the music hall, all these things were, in fact, related. If he had known that then, he might have been tempted to argue that by the same reasoning, everything in the universe was related, an endless pattern of inter-connectedness and general shared being, and so on and so forth, but frankly his attention was occupied with more practical matters. The fight in the corner of the pit was resolved by the fiddler smashing a small sandbag over the head of the nearest combatant. This in turn led to a general acceptance that nothing more in the show would be as impressive, and so the two singers, looking relieved
, started winding it down. This was followed by a huge burst of rousing applause and a spontaneous chorus of five different versions of ‘God Save the Queen’, three of which weren’t even that profane, and which led the hiding man to think that maybe this was a comparatively civilized hall after all and that perhaps when circumstances were different, he might come back again for a nice night out, maybe bring the children as an educational experience or nostalgia trip, depending on which child was watching.

  As the crowd started to move, he took hold of an arm belonging to the drunk old soldier, who seemed too far gone even to notice the stepping of his own feet, and with a muttered, ‘Evenin’, pops,’ started walking him towards the door, keeping his chin tucked down towards the old man’s face as if at any moment the man might speak words of wisdom that he had to hear. ‘Come on, grandpa, ain’t your night, where ’s the patch, huh?’

  With the old man supported firmly under the arm, he made it out into the night air on a tidal wave of heat, the darkness shockingly cold after the hall, and followed the main flow of the crowd along the street. The walk took him west, towards Smithfield, and he was almost on the edge of the market there before the crowd started to thin out to just a few stragglers. He found an inn, the door half-open and the shutters drawn, and led the old man in, depositing him by the scarcely burning fire. The drunken man, oblivious, let his head loll and, within an instant of being settled, gave out a sound that was half a belch and half a snore.