Doktor Glass (37 page)

The image of young Edith’s soul leaving her body and flocking to the Jar Boys’ attractor reared up in Langton’s memory. He imagined
the essences of all those jars in the adjacent cavern, all those charged particles channeled along the braided cables and into the vast machine. Hundreds of souls writhing inside that glass prison. What did Sister Wright plan for them?

Langton stepped over the braided cables that disappeared into the machine’s innards. He tried another few steps; the air seemed to thicken and push him back like a hand pressing against his chest. His throat tightened as the whispering in the back of his mind grew louder, more urgent.

“What do you make of it, sir?” asked Sapper George. “Looks like some kind of engine to me.”

“It does, at that,” Langton said. An engine to drive the passage of souls? Or to use their power? And how had Sister Wright’s men brought it down here?

Then Langton realized that no component was larger than six feet in length, not even the copper coil; small enough to manhandle through doorways and down narrow corridors and shafts. Even the diverse glass vessels connected together to form one unit. He could see lengths of rough wood in the corner, pallets and frames used to transport the individual pieces. The planning and operation must have taken months. The manufacture, years. How long had Sister Wright and her accomplices worked at this machine?

Langton had to destroy this device before Sister Wright activated it. He must release those essences trapped within, even though a part of him balked at causing them more pain than they endured already. Thinking of the thousands of guests waiting above, and of Her Exalted Majesty herself, he raised the Webley and took another step forward.

The keening at the rear of his skull climbed in pitch. As if sensing his intention, the gaseous cloud inside the apparatus flocked to the side facing him; Langton swore he heard the sound of something colloidal slapping against the inside of the glass structure.

He took another step. The cloud writhed in its prison. Emotions engulfed Langton: fear, pain, sorrow, envy, hatred, love. Like the
patterns in a childhood kaleidoscope, the emotions fragmented and segmented, merged with each other at random to form new, unnameable feelings, hybrids with a greater potency than the sum of their parts.

The Webley shook. He gripped the weapon in both hands and tried to focus on the fragile glass whorl. The keening in his skull became a roaring, a pounding of almost physical intensity. And one emotion coalesced out of all the white noise: fear.

“I can’t do it.” Langton lowered the revolver and stepped back. He dragged his sleeve across his sweating face and gulped damp air. “I can’t.”

“You want me to have a shot at it, sir?” Sapper George asked. “Maybe if we moved back to the doorway?”

Langton looked at the agitated cloud and caught the echoes of the turmoil. Even though trapped and helpless, they feared release. He couldn’t harm them, but there had to be another way to disable the machine. “Where does that cable lead?”

Sapper George pointed the butane lamp at one thick wire maybe two inches across, bound in rubber and cloth. It met the far side of the machine in a great gleaming brass connector the size of a shovel and screwed down with a nut like something from a steamship. Langton followed the unfurled cable into the darkness, with Sapper George struggling behind.

Across the floor, through another great steel pressure door, down a short passage and into a confined shaft that gave off stale air. As Langton went to step inside, Sapper George pulled him back. “Careful, Inspector. Watch and listen.”

Sapper George took a fragment of brick from the tunnel floor and dropped it into the shaft. Langton counted. He gave up when he reached twenty. Then came a distant splash.

“It’s one of the Span’s test boreholes,” Sapper George said. “Deep, they go. They should have filled them in, but that costs money. Besides, who’d have business down here?”

A cold draft came from the ragged entrance. In the light of the
butane lamp, Langton saw the thick insulated cable leading up and fixed to the rough-bore sides of the shaft with fresh steel screws. “What’s above us?”

“The caisson, Inspector, and the foundations of the Span’s first tower.”

Langton stared up into the darkness beyond the reach of the butane lamp. What had Sister Wright planned? All those souls combined in the great machine, all that power concentrated and waiting. Waiting to destroy the Span.

He checked his fob watch: ten minutes after one. Far above him, in the world of daylight, the Queen’s stately procession would be threading through the Liverpool streets. Soon she would arrive at the Pier Head and take her place among the guests. In the shadow of the Span’s graceful entrance ramp and the enormous first tower.

“I need to get up there,” Langton said, already leaning into the shaft and searching for handholds.

“Don’t even think of it, Inspector.”

Langton didn’t answer; he wondered if he could find handholds in the rough walls of the shaft. He could almost make out the spiral of the Span Company’s huge drill-bit auger. They might give enough purchase.

“Please, Inspector. I’ve worked down here nigh on twenty years and I wouldn’t chance it. Suicide, I tell you.”

Langton looked back at Sapper George, hesitated, and finally nodded. “You’re right. We’ll go back.”

But as they retraced their steps toward the second chamber with its humming machine, Langton said, “Will you go back and find out what’s keeping Major Fallows and his men? I’ll wait here.”

Sapper George stopped in the passageway and stared at Langton, his eyes glistening like jet in the butane light. Down here, more than ever, his sleek compact features made him resemble some strange burrowing animal. “You wouldn’t be thinking of going up that tunnel, would you sir? Tell me it isn’t so.”

“We’re wasting time, Sapper. Fallows will need your guidance.”

Sapper George laid one grimy hand on Langton’s arm. “There’s one way to destroy that machine, sir. The Cromwell sluices.”

He detoured Langton down another short passageway and up three steps. The walls here looked older, with crumbling bricks in uneven sizes. The wooden door at the end of the passage looked like something from an old man-o’-war: thick beams and rusting iron nails with heads an inch across, and all black with generations of bitumen and caulking. The bottom half of the door had a bulging iron plate held fast in vertical runners.

Sapper George held the butane lamp close to the door. “Some reckon they’re older even than Cromwell’s time. I don’t know how old they are, but I know what’s behind them: the Mersey.”

Langton looked from the door to Sapper George. “That’s all there is between us and the river?”

“Oh, she’s stout enough, sir. Look at them crossbeams, and them fixings. She’ll hold. She’s held for centuries.”

Langton knelt close to the iron plate in the door. He thought he could hear water swirling outside but put it down to imagination. “This is the sluice?”

“One of them, sir.” Sapper George knelt beside him, switching the lamp from one hand to the other so Langton didn’t get burned. “Used to be cables going up through iron pipes all the way to the Pier Head. Man up there could turn a wheel and the sluices on these deep levels would open; the Mersey would pour into every cavern, every passage. Well before the Span, this was.”

“Why would you want to flood down here?”

A scraping noise from the dark passage behind them made both men turn and stare. Sapper George kept his voice low: “Witches, sir. Satanists. They used to love these levels. Dark and secret, and closer to him that they worshipped. People heard screams and chanting from the deep shafts, and found bones and things you wouldn’t credit. Story goes that Cromwell himself got wind of the sects and had these gates
put in. ‘Let good cold water douse the fires of hell,’ they reckon he said. And maybe he did at that.”

Langton, cramped and shivering, stood up. “I’m glad we don’t have that in this age.”

Sapper George went to speak but shook his head instead.

Langton grasped the handle of the rusting metal wheel set beside the door. “You believe this still works?”

“Can’t say for sure, sir. I wouldn’t like to be the one who finds out.”

As they walked back along the passageway, Langton glanced at the sluice door. A last resort, certainly, and one with no guarantee. But if it did work, the Mersey would reduce the machine to crumpled steel. Langton might have no choice.

In the second chamber, the machine still hummed and sent out its swirling, vaporous light. Langton watched it a moment and then said, “Tell Fallows all we’ve seen, Sapper George. Warn him.”

Sapper George held out his right hand. “Good luck, sir. And be careful.”

Langton shook the man’s hand and found a small oblong of metal pressed into his own.

“You can have my backup light, Inspector. It might only last half an hour, but it’s better than nothing. Just flick that switch there to turn it on.”

“Thank you. For all your help.”

Sapper George scuttled toward the first cavern, keeping to the edges of the room close to the wall and avoiding the machine. His voice echoed: “Young Eric has probably taken the wrong turn. Good lad, he is, but got his head filled with too much nonsense, not like it was in my day…”

Langton waited until Sapper George’s voice had faded and the yellow glow of the butane lamp had disappeared into the darkness. Then he clicked on the electric light. It threw out a white globe of illumination barely a yard across. Enough light to enable Langton to select two planks of wood from the machine’s discarded pallets and carry them
back to the deep borehole. Setting the light down, he wedged the planks across the narrow shaft; they might not save him if he fell, but they at least offered some reassurance. He clipped the light to his jacket, took a deep breath of foul air, and climbed into the shaft.

The Span Company’s auger had been slightly wider than Langton’s shoulders. He found he could wedge his back against the shaft and find footholds in the rising spiral cut into the sandstone. As he climbed, he tried not to think of the drop beneath him, nor of the water above and around. At least a steady draft swept down the shaft and cooled his body as he sweated with the exertion.

He settled into a routine: left foot braced, then right, push and slide his back up another few inches. Then repeat. And again. Soon the muscles in his thighs burned. The rough serrations dug into his spine. He concentrated on the smooth cable screwed to the sides of the shaft like a sleek black snake climbing beside him.

Left foot, right foot, push and slide. How far did this shaft go? He must have been in it for an hour. The electric light still burned bright. Left foot, right foot, push and slide, with his hoarse breath echoing in the shaft.

Then his left foot found a weakened ridge: The rock crumbled. As he fell he spun to the left, where his head cracked into the wall and sent jagged white pain through his skull. His hands tore at the shaft, trying to grip the damp rock. Like a bucket in a well, he plummeted.

The cable saved him. His right hand clutched at a distended loop standing proud of the shaft. Langton hung there, exhausted, his right arm almost wrenched from its socket. The electric lamp swung on its short clip and sent distorted shadows climbing. From below Langton came an echoing thud and then a distant splash. He grasped the cable with his left hand and hung on, gasping in air. Then, slowly, he twisted his body and braced his legs against the other side of the shaft. He didn’t let go of the cable.

How far had he fallen? How much time had he wasted? He looked down, saw nothing but darkness. The same darkness as that above.

As he began to climb again, slow and careful, he couldn’t escape the certainty that he dreamed all this. The shaft, the pathetic sphere of light, the darkness and the smells: all imagined. Soon he would wake in his own bed. But the exertion was real; the pain was real. His bleeding knuckles, the throbbing in his left temple, his jaw, and burning muscles. They all proved it wasn’t a dream. When he looked up, he began to see reflected light. At first a pinpoint, it grew to a dim metallic moon above him. A thought froze him for a moment: What if the Span Company had barred the head of the shaft?

Left foot, right foot, push and slide. Almost there. Almost.

No bars blocked the head of the shaft. Instead, a circular, convex metal hatch with a wheel at its center, again like something from a submarine. Langton could smell the fresh grease used in the mechanism. The black cable snaked up from below and through a fresh hole drilled through the arching brickwork surrounding the hatch. Langton braced his body, spun the wheel, and thrust the hatch open.

A small room awaited him, clean save for the upturned bodies of mummified cockroaches. Fresh brick dust ringed the cable jutting up from the borehole shaft, and more brick dust, red and fine, showed where that same cable continued and bored through the bricks surrounding the massive steel pressure door set in the far wall. Langton hauled his body over the hatch rim and looked through the pressure door’s thick porthole quartz. Beyond the door lay darkness. Langton held Sapper George’s fading backup light up high and saw a bank of switches on the opposite wall. He flicked them all.

The caged electric bulbs blinded him. He saw the confines of the small service room he stood in, a brick chamber built like an airlock. More light came through the door’s porthole window, and this time when Langton looked through he saw the inside of the caisson shaft itself.

As beautiful and perfect as a cathedral nave, in alternating bands of red and yellow brick, the hexagonal core of the caisson thrust up from the Mersey’s bedrock and converged at some invisible point far
above Langton’s craning neck. At least twenty yards across and crossbraced with interlacing steel joists a foot square and painted with red lead. Langton wondered how many men had seen this finished paean to Victorian engineering, intended like the rooftop statues on medieval cathedrals—invisible from the ground—for the eyes of God alone.

Somebody more mundane had visited the shaft, and recently. A strange device filled most of the caisson’s white tiled floor like a vast metallic flower: Unfurled blue petals of thin sheet steel surrounded a central core of wound copper wire. Langton could see where the thick cable, after boring through the wall, terminated at the base of the device. He could even see the delicate petals tremble in some unseen draft.