Doktor Glass (36 page)

Now sure he’d found the answer, Langton needed more information. “How? What caused it?”

“Poor design. Henry Marc Brunel could tell you all the details, obviously, but I think the prevailing winds took hold of the light bridge’s solid plate girders, which offered too tempting a profile. At a certain frequency, the oscillation became torsional.”

“Pardon me?”

The Professor flexed his hand like a sea wave. “The bridge started to twist. The oscillation increased in amplitude—became stronger—
under its own momentum, until eventually the phenomenal stresses tore the bridge apart.”

Langton looked up at the Span. “Then the same will happen here. Today.”

“In beautiful, calm weather like this? With no wind? Besides, Langton, the Brunels know what they are doing. See the latticework of open girders that line the entire length of the road and rail deck? Not only do they give the deck strength, they also break up the prevailing wind. No, the same could not happen here.”

Langton sagged with fatigue. He’d believed he’d found the answer, but the Professor must be right. Not even Doktor Glass could conjure up a wind on a calm day like this, especially a wind at just the right frequency to shake the bridge. No, it was fanciful, the stuff of yellowback fiction, something out of Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, or Rhodes James.

So were the Jar Boys. And they existed.

“There must be another way,” Langton said, rubbing his eyes. “Think, Professor; how else could someone destroy the Span?”

“Please, calm yourself, Langton.” The Professor stepped closer and looked at Langton as if evaluating a patient. “You’re obviously exhausted and overwrought, ideal conditions for a man to lose perspective and jump to the most outlandish conclusions. Fatigue drains more than our body—it affects our judgment.”

“But, the Span—”

“Rest, man, that’s what you need.” The Professor laid a hand on Langton’s shoulder and used the tone of voice he no doubt saved for his patients. “The Span is safe. The Brunels designed it to withstand earthquake, disaster, and sabotage. And I’ve seen almost as many security guards and policemen as guests. Trust me, Langton: Nothing will happen today.”

Langton went to argue, then saw the reason and logic behind the Professor’s kind words. Fatigue did sap logic, and the past week had drained Langton of everything. He looked up at the immense solidity
of the Span and had to agree that it seemed impregnable. Permanent. Immovable.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Langton said. “I should rest.”

“Absolutely. A few hours’ sleep will make all the difference. And don’t worry about the little, ah, incident at my house.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Langton shook the man’s hand and then, as he turned away, said, “If you see Sister Wright, will you not mention that you saw me? That I’ve been here today?”

The Professor seemed about to ask why, but simply nodded. “If you wish.”

Alone at the edge of the crowd, Langton leaned on the black iron railings and let the chill of the water below wash over him. Had he jeopardized Sarah’s soul by coming here today? He’d had no choice; he’d really believed Sister Wright threatened the Span. Madness upon madness upon…

He shook his head to clear the detritus of thoughts and headed back for the main gates. The crowd thinned around him as guests climbed up to their waiting seats in the tiered grandstand. The military band struck up a jaunty march, one that Langton remembered from the Transvaal; the dusty, weary musicians had played it on the way into battle in the Natal, to lift morale. And there was something in that; music did have the power to affect a man’s spirits.

Since he kept close to the edge of the Span Company concourse, near the railing separating it from the dock, Langton could see across the water to the camp and some of the sandstone bank of the Pier Head and George’s Parade. Holes, sewer outlets, and tunnel entrances punctured the massive blocks and made Langton recall Durham’s escape. Had the FCO agent suspected Professor Caldwell Chivers also? Was that why he’d exited the tunnels at Toxteth?

Less than a hundred yards away, a man’s head popped out of a dark tunnel, looked around, then disappeared again. Langton stared at the spot, sure he had imagined it. The man’s small, glistening skull appeared once again for a second, then ducked back inside the tunnel.

Langton hesitated. His hand reached for the warning device in his pocket. He could see the main gates to his right; to his left, where the dock wall met the sandstone bank of the Pier Head, lay the tunnel with its strange inhabitant. Langton turned left, ducking beneath the temporary wooden barriers and showing his lapel pin to the guards. He followed the railings at the dock’s edge until he heard a familiar thudding sound like the heartbeat of a great animal. Then, skirting a low brick storehouse, he saw the steam wagon with its air pump wheezing on the cargo bed.

Sapper George, undressing at the side of the wagon, pulled his rubber suit up when he realized someone was approaching. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector. Thought one of the guests had found us.”

Langton looked down the open shaft nearby where a ladder descended into darkness. Two pulsing rubber hoses, one yellow, one red, slid over the brick coping. “I saw someone look out of one of the tunnels.”

“That’d be young Eric,” Sapper George said, still only half dressed. “I was just getting some decent clothes on; Major Fallows said to report anything strange, so—”

Langton stepped forward. “What did you find?”

Sapper George scratched his chin. “I don’t rightly know, sir. Deep down, close to the Span’s first tower, someone’s built a great metal machine that looks like nothing on earth.”

L
ANGTON COULDN
’
T BELIEVE
the temperature of the tunnels beneath the Pier Head. Within minutes of climbing down the ladders, the cold had drilled into his bones, and his numb hands and feet seemed to belong to someone else. He wished he’d accepted Sapper George’s offer of an insulated rubber suit; instead, impatience had driven him down the shaft dressed as he was in his thin formal clothes. As he splashed along the dank tunnels, water dripped from the curving roof, trickled down the back of his neck, and soaked his shirt and jacket.

Langton remembered looking up from the bottom of the access shaft. The square patch of sky up above had seemed so small and distant. He’d had a sudden and absolute conviction that he’d never see daylight again.

Now he could see Sapper George’s light up ahead, the butane gas lamp filling the brick-lined tunnel with a greasy yellow light. Sapper George’s distorted shadow climbed the walls and writhed as he waded through a stream of thick, foul liquid. Familiar with the cramped
tunnels, Sapper George had settled into a well-practiced half-crouch, shoulders slumped and head down, that made him resemble a shuffling ape from the penny dreadfuls. Langton still scraped his head against the low ceiling and blundered into the curving walls until his knuckles and forehead bled.

As he sank into a cold brook that reached his knees, Langton wished he’d simply waited for Fallows and the search teams to arrive. What could he have told them? He couldn’t be sure that the machine deep in the tunnels belonged to Doktor Glass.

“Careful, sir,” Sapper George said. “Mind the drop.”

In the yellow light of the gas lamp, Langton saw a perfectly round hole in the floor. The water rushed into this sluice and sent back a roaring echo from deep below. Although roped to Sapper George with stout hemp, Langton took careful steps around the shaft. His boots slipped too easily on these slimy, crumbling bricks.

“Not too far now, sir. You’ll soon be out in the dry again. Well, what passes for dry down here.”

“Where are we?”

Sapper George looked up, as if he could see through the tons of earth and sandstone and bricks. “I reckon we’re just at the edge of the bank, sir. Another few yards and we’ll be under the Mersey.”

Langton shuddered. Millions of cubic feet of cold grey water. Tons of silt and detritus. All kept at bay by a few courses of aging brickwork.

Struggling behind Sapper George, keen to distract himself, Langton asked, “Who built these tunnels?”

“Good question, sir. Smugglers built some of them, centuries back; they used to bring in tobacco and liquor, sugar, slaves too, even after the abolition act came in.” Sapper George stopped for a moment to brush a couple of cockroaches off his shoulders. “There’s older tunnels and shafts. Much older, built by the Romans, according to the records. Or more likely Roman slaves. And you can believe it when you look at the quality of the brickwork here.”

He slapped the wall in passing, sending out a spray of cold water.
“Sewers, most of the tunnels, and waste channels. But there’s others, weird passageways that don’t seem to make any sense. They go up, down, across; they meet each other and branch off. Chains in the walls, and hooks, and old bones on the floor. Some say monks built them; others say devil worshippers.”

Regretting having asked the question, Langton shuddered again. He tried to forget the Mersey River overhead. A sound stopped him a moment, made him search the darkness beyond the lamp’s gleam. “Did you hear that? Someone sobbing. There.”

Sapper George shook his head. “Sound travels strange paths down here, sir. Someone talks a mile away, you’d swear they was standing next to you. We had a young fella from the university come down to research some book he was doing, something called
acoustics
he said. Strange acoustics in these shafts, apparently. He didn’t know the half of it.”

Sapper George came to a three-way junction: One shaft went straight on; one dropped down; another curved right. He chose the right-hand tunnel and continued, “Different world down here, sir, isn’t it?”

As the butane lamp sent a herd of glistening cockroaches swarming up the walls, Langton wondered how anyone could work down here. Not just work, but obviously
enjoy
being here. When Sapper George smiled at Langton, with the yellow light reflecting from his eyes and his small, sharp teeth, he looked like he belonged in this underworld.

For a moment, Langton wondered if Sister Wright was behind this. Did she control Sapper George too? Would he simply cut the rope and leave Langton down here in the scurrying dark? Langton’s right hand patted the Webley.

Sapper George climbed a short flight of rough-hewn steps and shone the light through a skewed doorway. “Here we are, sir. Don’t know if you can make anything of it…”

Langton had expected no more than a room, but the cavern stretched beyond the limit of the gas lamp. Even when Sapper George
turned up the pressure, the hissing light barely reached the tall, barrel-vaulted ceiling and distant corners. Langton could just make out neat, regular brickwork. Complicated chains and rusting pulleys hung from the ceiling; the atmosphere made them resemble instruments of torture instead of the light fittings or cargo hooks they had probably been. Probably.

And on the dry, swept floor of the chamber, row after row of earthenware jars. All exactly the same size and exactly the same design. Laid out like glazed seeds waiting for a sun that would never reach this deep.

“I swear these weren’t here two days back, sir,” Sapper George said. He pointed back to the doorway they had come in through, and the neat pile of new bricks beside it. “The Span Company blocked up this room, but someone came along afterward and knocked it through. Can’t make out why, though.”

With careful steps, Langton walked between the rows of jars. On each one, green wax sealed the gap between the jar’s lip and the lid. And from each lid emerged a pair of braided, cloth-covered electrical wires, one wire to each copper connector. The braided connectors lay on the dusty floor in neat lines, all heading in the same direction, toward another door in the far wall. After each row of jars, more cables joined the common braid until it looked as thick as Langton’s thigh. Whoever had laid the cables had done a neat job, tying them together with waxed twine. But some of the outer wires lay clean and copper-bare where rats’ teeth had recently gnawed.

Langton followed the bunched, braided cables across the floor. Up ahead, a new metal frame and doorway, the door itself like something from one of Levallier’s submarine ships: heavy with rivets and cross-bracing steel bars operated by a central wheel.

“That’s one of the new hatches the Span people put in, sir. Supposed to be watertight and closed at all times.”

The door couldn’t close, not with the braided cables climbing over its rubber-flanged threshold. Langton saw the mouth of a lock and tried
the complex key he’d found on Reefer Jake; the lock mechanism turned and eight radiating brass bolts emerged gleaming with oil from the door’s edges. Langton clicked them back into place and pocketed the key again before he opened the massive door fully.

A flickering white glow and the smells of damp earth and white flowers drifted from the second room, overlaid with a slightly acrid smell like burning rubber. Something else deterred Langton from crossing the threshold: a sensation at the back of his mind, an almost audible whisper conjuring dread. He turned to see if Sapper George felt the same effect; the tunnelman rubbed at his temples as if wishing away a headache.

Before he stepped inside, Langton took out his revolver, motioned Sapper George into the shelter of the wall, and then thrust the man’s butane light into the second room. A score of rats’ eyes gleamed black before the animals swarmed into the shadows. No human life appeared. Only the massive apparatus in the center of the room showed how recently people had worked down here.

Langton could remember the attractor machine he’d found in Redfers’s house, and the more recent version the Jar Boys had used in Plimsoll Street: portable though heavy, and small enough to sit on a table.

The great apparatus now before him stood taller than his head. Gleaming cylinders of copper and steel. Convoluted pipes as stout as his arm. Irving and Long’s wound copper coil hummed and shimmered slightly as if a great current passed through it. But the glowing center of the machine drew Langton’s eye: fantastic whorls and spheres of clear glass linked by slender tubes, fluted pipes, curving arteries. The pulsing essences within that glass vortex never halted; every particle seemed in constant, silent motion. They swirled through the chambers like agile white mist, and their luminescence filled the cavern with a flickering pale glow.