Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion (18 page)

Three windows.

A secret room. That was what the girl had been staring at night after night, the window of her prison.

Del turns towards her body.

She has to tell Pickering and Lord Ancrum. She needs a new warrant, Ancrum must give her one; she will storm the house alone if she has to.

There is a secret room in the Earl’s attic and in it is the girl with red hair.

I have seen the light, she is glorious and she is here.

- Peter Sutton -

Its hand lay upon the trembling bird. It combed the feathers back to reveal the net of thin golden wires that covered the bird’s body. A map of the pigeon’s nervous system led circuitously to the golden cap covering its head. Another bird flew past and Its head followed, jerking in small increments, like a second hand on a clock. The roofspace was cramped and dark and smelled of pigeon but the space suited It. It found It could work in peace. It had started with insects, moved onto using pigeons and rats, and recently It had taken to dogs.

John Loughborough Pearson stood surveying Bristol Cathedral on a blustery day, his assistant, George Merryweather, hunched over a notebook marking down the gnomic utterances of his master. Pearson’s long beard was whipped to the side and his hat was in danger of being blown away. He was unaware of the wind however, all his concentration fixed on his task.

“Merryweather, are you paying attention?”

“Yes, Mr Pearson.”

“Then why do you keep looking at the roof?”

“I thought I saw someone up there, Mr Pearson.”

“On a day such as today? Inconceivable.”

“Yes, Mr Pearson.”

It opened Its hand and the bird flapped away, tossed upon the wind like a discarded piece of paper. Below It, the two men briefly caught Its attention before Its awareness jumped into that of the bird in flight.

Merryweather looked at the cathedral, its buttresses, its gaping windows, and suppressed a shudder. He didn’t like it, it seemed to watch him, brooding. His master, the architect, had made a declaration when he first saw it.

“It has yet to be balanced, Merryweather. The lines are all wrong. Badly, dangerously wrong.”

Dangerously?
he had thought at the time,
really?
And yet now when he looked at its looming bulk, its imp and skull carvings gurning from the walls and the soft lascivious stone it had been carved from, he was unsure. It might well be dangerous. When he looked at it he found himself staring, his eyes straining across its face, looking for movement, and he didn’t know why. Maybe it was because every time he looked away the hairs at the back of his neck seemed to twitch and he couldn’t shake the feeling that some inimical presence was staring back.

Later in the Hatchet, whilst his master was in his lodgings, Merryweather spent the evening sharing drinks and stories with some locals.

“It’s proper queer, the cathedral,” said the first, an old sailor, when Merryweather said that he was in town to work upon that building. The sailor had just finished a long, rambling tale about a wreck in the Bristol Channel some years past of a French steam ship piloted by ‘automatons and sorcerer’s fancies’ and insisted that ‘odd tracks were seen upon the mud.’

“Something crawled from that wreckage before any man set eyes upon it. Something that were never found. It was a rum occurrence too, a ship like that foundering in the channel, on a clear night. Look here, I kept the newspaper cutting.”

Merryweather read the short article about the ship being found already wrecked. No-one seemed to know why it had gone aground and there were no eyewitnesses until fishermen found the vessel. The fishermen told the tale of seeing tracks ‘Like as unto a man, but smaller, like a child, yet deep, as though whatever made them were heavy as lead.’ As he was reading, a younger man, a labourer with teeth gone to rot from too much sour rum, chipped in.

“Strange things, in the darkness, I seen strange things.”

“What sort of strange things?” asked Merryweather.

“‘Tis said that a hunched-over creature lives in the belfries,” the labourer said. “I seen it, on the roof catching birds, when we was working on the nave.”

“Hunched over? A man with a deformity?” asked Merryweather.

“Tain’t a man that climbs those walls,” the dentally challenged one muttered.

The old sailor spat, and got up to leave. “You’d best leave well alone,” he said, before walking out into the stormy night.

The next day Merryweather tried to raise the issue with his master. “Utter poppycock,” was Pearson’s opinion.

The pair were surveying the cathedral in order to finish it off. Pearson planned to create two towers on the principles of sacred geometry. They had been in Bristol for a few days now and Pearson was almost finished taking his measurements and drawing the building. Merryweather was glad they were returning to London; the cathedral was giving him the creeps. Today the windows seemed to wink manically at him as the late October sun glinted from them, going dark when small clouds covered the sun, like an Indian with a blanket making smoke signals. When the building was in gloom he thought he spied a small figure bobbing about on the roof, but when the sunlight returned there was nothing. His sense of being watched increased, and the wind whistling past the building sounded like an indrawn breath, followed inevitably by a small sigh, like a child’s dying gasp.

He knew they’d have to come back to recruit the labourers and craftsmen required for the building work. Tomorrow was the last day of this visit and they were to climb to the roof. He wasn’t looking forward to that at all. What if there was actually something that lived there? Pearson dismissed such fears as superstitious nothings, but Merryweather couldn’t help feeling that the lurking presence was real, especially when the cathedral was wreathed in darkness. His minds-eye had conjured images straight from Bedlam to his sleeping brain last night so that he’d woken several times, heart racing, sweating, straining to hear what it was that woke him and hearing nothing but the pigeons cooing and the rats scuttling below his window, looking for scraps. Yet every time he drifted off he saw hypnagogic dwarves leering and rubbing their child’s hands over his body. Once during the night he woke feeling stifled, and threw open the window, disturbing a rat which reared up onto its hind legs and bared its teeth at him. He swiftly closed the window again with an atavistic expression of disgust.

When he finally drifted off again he dreamt that the moment just before the rat leaped away, it had been bruxing and boggling, its small liquid eyes like over-ripe berries bulging in and out, a strange golden gleam barely noticeable behind them. Today, shaken and hollow from lack of sleep, he swore off Bristol rum forever. His night terrors seemed just that, a product of drink and sleeping in a strange house.

The next day over breakfast Merryweather made the mistake of saying that he was nervous about working on the roof.

The rat stood very still, nose twitching, its brain telling it to run and hide, but the small golden cap it wore over-rode this instinct. Its eyes looked out of the rat’s eyes, Its ears heard what the rat heard.

“You’ve never been afraid of heights before.”

“No, Mr Pearson. I’m not afraid now, I just have this uncanny sense that something’s going to happen, something’s going to go wrong.”

The rat moved on at some unseen signal. It had heard enough, It had a few scant hours to get ready for visitors.

“Stuff and nonsense, Merryweather. There is no such thing as premonition. You are merely trying to get out of an honest day’s work. No, I won’t hear any more of this superstitious twaddle. We will complete the job we are here to do, and return to London tomorrow.”

When they arrived at the cathedral they were startled by a small scruffy dog that latched onto them and followed as they approached the building. Merryweather attempted to shoo it away. He knew Pearson disliked small dogs. Their yapping annoyed him and, fastidious about his appearance, he didn’t wish muddy paw prints or hairs on his clothing.

“Careful, Merryweather,” Pearson cautioned. “I strongly suspect that this mutt is a street dog and probably crawling with vermin and disease.”

It seemed to watch Merryweather with an intelligence beyond its small size. It was beginning to make him nervous. A well-aimed kick got it to run off but then he heard it coughing around the corner, vomiting maybe. When he rounded the corner to investigate there was a small pile of tiny cogs and wheels and other clockwork parts, but, curiously, no dog. Merryweather carefully wrapped the machine parts in his handkerchief and placed them in his pocket, intending to show Pearson, but something in Pearson’s expression stopped him when he returned round the corner.