The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (11 page)

“The aristocrat’s name?”

“I have no idea, Captain. As I said, it’s the vaguest of rumours.”

“Hmm. And what of François Garnier? Why did he decide to sell his collection?”

Brundleweed snorted scornfully: “Believe it or not, he claimed that they emanate a deleterious influence. Tosh and piffle, of course!”

“Did you have any prospective buyers?”

“No, but my advertisement in the trade newspaper was only published a couple of days before the robbery. I received just a single enquiry, from a chap who came into the shop to confirm that I was putting the stones on the market, but he was one of those dandified Rake-ish sorts, and though he expressed an interest, he didn’t leave a name or address, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“I followed that up,” Detective Inspector Trounce put in, “but it’s been impossible to trace the fellow.”

Burton sipped his tea and gazed at the biscuit tin, his mind working.

He looked up. “Is there any explanation for the sound the diamonds are reputed to make?”

“Not that I know of. The sound is real, though. I heard it myself—the faintest of drones. I believe there’s a Schuyler in the British Library, if you want to consult it. Maybe the author makes mention of the phenomenon.”

“Thank you, Mr. Brundleweed. One final question. You reported a ghost?”

The diamond dealer looked embarrassed. He coughed and scratched his chin through his beard.

“Um, to be frank, Captain Burton, I think I must have nodded off and dreamed it.”

“Tell me, anyway.”

“Very well, but please bear in mind that I was strangely out of sorts that afternoon. I don’t know why. I developed a migraine and felt oddly nervous and jumpy. For some reason, I imagined that my lot in life was very unsatisfactory and I grew rather morose. I inherited this little business from my father and have never before or since considered that I might do anything else in life but run it. However, that afternoon I was suddenly filled with resentment toward it, feeling that it had prevented me from doing something more important.”

“What, precisely?”

“That’s the thing of it! I have no idea! The suggestion that I might abandon the family business is absurd in the extreme! Anyway, I was in a thoroughly bad temper and, at four o’clock—I remember the time because the clock suddenly stopped ticking and I couldn’t get it started again—I decided to pack it in for the day. The François Garnier Collection was already locked in my safe but, before leaving, I went to double check it. As I passed through into the workshop, the figure of a woman caught my eye. It made me jump out of my skin, I can tell you. She was standing in the corner, white and transparent. Then I blinked and she was gone. Believe me, after that I had a thorough case of the jitters and left the shop in a hurry, though not before locking up carefully. On the way home, the fresh air seemed to do me good and the migraine left me. I began to feel more like my old self. By the time I stepped through my front door, I was perfectly fine. I went to bed early and slept heavily. I didn’t awake until the police knocked the next morning.”

Burton looked at Trounce. “Some sort of gas?” he suggested. “Causing hallucinations?”

“That was my thought,” the detective replied. “But we checked every inch of the floors, walls, and ceilings and found no residue and no indication of how gas might have been introduced. Certainly it didn’t come up from the cellar. The tunnel from the underground river wasn’t dug until hours later.”

There was a long pause, then Burton said: “I apologise for imposing upon you, Mr. Brundleweed. Thank you for the tea and biscuits. I hope the diamonds are recovered.”

“I suppose they’ll surface eventually, Captain.”

“And when they do,” Trounce offered, “I’ll hear about it!”

The men stood, exchanged handshakes, and Burton and Trounce took their leave.

“What next?” the detective asked as they stepped out onto the street.

“Well, Trounce old chap, this has piqued my curiosity, so I think I’m going to bury my head in books for the rest of the day to see what more I can dig up about the Nāga, then on Wednesday I shall take my rotorchair out for a spin.”

“Where to?”

“Tichborne House. Much as I’d rather pursue this diamond affair, orders are orders, so I ought to have a chat with the soon-to-be-deposed baronet.”

Burton spent an uncomfortable afternoon at the British Library consulting Matthijs Schuyler’s
De Mythen van Verloren Halfedelstenen
, along with a number of other books and manuscripts.

He became increasingly ill.

Malaria is like an earthquake; after the initial devastating attack, a series of lesser aftershocks follow, and one of them crept over the king’s agent as he studied.

It began with difficulty focusing his right eye. Then he began to perspire. By five o’clock he was trembling and feeling nauseous.

He decided to go home to sleep it off.

Sitting in a hansom, being bumped and jerked toward Montagu Place, he considered what he’d read.

According to the occult text consulted by Schuyler, a continent named Kumari Kandam once existed in the Indian Ocean. It was home to the Nāga kingdom, whose capital city spanned a great river, the Pahruli, which sprang from the spot where a black diamond had fallen from the sky.

The Nāga were reptilian, and were constantly warring with the land’s human inhabitants, enslaving them, sacrificing them, and, it was hinted, eating them.

However, the humans were growing in numbers, while the Nāga were diminishing, so there came a time when the reptilian people had little choice but to seek a peaceful coexistence.

The humans sent an emissary, a Brahmin named Kaundinya, and as a symbol of the peace accord, he was married to the Nāga monarch’s daughter.

However, Kaundinya was not just an ambassador, he was also a spy. He discovered that while the Nāga were a multitude, they were also one, for their minds were joined together through means of the black diamond.

After a year living with the reptilian race, during which time he convincingly acted the loving husband, Kaundinya was granted the right to add his own presence to the great fusion of minds.

He was taken before the gemstone, and watched without protest as a human slave was sacrificed to it. Then, with great ritual, pomp, and ceremony, he was sent into a trance and his mind was projected into the stone.

What a mind he possessed!

Trained since early childhood, Brahmin Kaundinya had achieved the absolute pinnacle of intellectual order and emotional discipline. For a year, the Nāga had been covertly projecting their thoughts into his, and for a year, despite feeling them crawling around inside his skull, he’d appeared to be nothing but a simple goodwill ambassador when, in truth, he was a living weapon—and their nemesis.

As his awareness sank into the crystalline structure of the stone, Kaundinya was able to position some aspect of himself in its every angle, every line, and every facet. He filled it until no part of it was free from his consciousness. Then he turned inward, delved into the depths of his own brain, and purposely burst a major blood vessel.

The massive haemorrhage killed him instantly, as he’d known it would, and, because he’d infiltrated the entire stone, his death caused it to shatter, tearing apart the minds of every single Nāga on the continent of Kumari Kandam.

It was genocide.

Many generations later, the land itself was destroyed when the Earth gave one of its occasional cataclysmic shrugs.

Now, in 1862, little evidence remained of the prehistoric lizard race. They were depicted in carvings in a few Cambodian temples, such as Angkor Wat, but whether these representations were accurate could never be established.

What fascinated Sir Richard Francis Burton, though, was that this myth of a lost reptilian civilisation existed not only in Cambodia but also in South America, where the lizard men—known as
Cherufe
—were also overthrown by the expanding human race. Their kingdom had been invaded, there had been mass slaughter, and just a few of them had escaped. This small group, carrying their sacred black diamond, had been pursued almost the entire length of the continent, far south to Chile, where they had vanished and were never heard of again.

In Africa, too, there were the
Chitahuri
of the Zulus, called the
Shayturày
by the tribes in the central Lake Regions.

It was, of course, surplus information that didn’t, as far as he could see, have much bearing on the unsolved theft of the François Garnier Collection, but Burton possessed a self-confessed “mania for discovery” which drove him to peel away layer after layer of whatever subject he studied. It at least enabled him to establish a wider and, to him, more interesting context.

There was one more thing.

The Cambodian fragments had been discovered in 1837, when a priest became aware of a low humming while meditating in his quarters. He’d lived in that room for forty-seven years and had never heard the low musical tone before. He traced it to the base of a wall, and a loose brick. The five diamonds were behind it.

1837.

It was to that year Edward Oxford, the man from the far future, had been thrown after his arrival in 1840, where he’d accidentally caused the assassination of Queen Victoria.

A coincidence, surely.

At around six o’clock, Burton got home and was hanging up his hat and coat when Mrs. Angell came down the stairs, looked at him askance, and said: “There’s a nasty sheen on your brow, Sir Richard. A relapse?”

“It seems so,” he replied. “I just need to sleep it off. I’ll take a dose of quinine and work on my books awhile.”

“You’ll take a dose of quinine and go straight to bed!” she corrected.

He didn’t have the strength to argue.

Ten minutes later, she brought him up a jug of water and a cup of tea.

He was already asleep.

His afternoon of study invaded his dreams.

He became aware of a fierce light, which burned through his eyelids. He opened them expecting to see firelight flickering on a canvas roof. Instead, he squinted up at a blazing blue desert sky.

Turning his head, he found that he was on his back, with limbs spread out, and wrists and ankles bound with cord to wooden stakes, which were driven deeply into the ground.

Dunes rose up on either side of him. From beyond them came the sound of voices, arguing in one of the languages of the Arabian Peninsula. He couldn’t make out the words but one of the voices belonged to a woman.

He opened his mouth to shout for help but only a croak came out. His throat was dry and his skin was burning. The sun had sucked every particle of moisture from the air.

Grains of sand, riding a hot, slow breeze, blew against the side of his face.

He couldn’t move.

Something nudged his left hand. He looked. There was a fairy standing by his wrist; a tiny female figure with transparent butterfly wings fluttering from her shoulder blades. She had a colourful mark painted on her forehead—like a
bindi
, though designed to more resemble an actual third eye.

Burton blinked rapidly. He had the sense that he wasn’t bringing the little creature into full focus, despite being able to see her clearly. She seemed only partially present, as if imposed onto something else by his own mind, and he struggled, but failed, to pierce the illusion.

The strange being regarded him with golden-coloured eyes, then turned, bared her tiny pointed teeth, and started to chew at his bonds.

A second fairy appeared, also female, and clamped her jaws around the cord binding his right arm.

Movement at his ankles told him there were fairies at work there, too.

A fifth fluttered onto his stomach and ran up onto his chest. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at his face.

Burton felt his mind manipulated until words emerged from it, and he heard, in his own voice: “The long slow cycle of the ages turns, turns, and turns, O human. Thou art one of the few who knowest how an individual of thy strange kind didst spring from the next level of the spiral into that which thou currently inhabits, into that which thou callest thine own time. This action marked a dividing. Yet the path thou treadst echoes the one that is lost, and upon both a transition begins—a melting of one great cycle into another. Be warned!—tumultuous the change that comes! The storm shall wipe many of thy soft-skinned kinsfolk from the Earth, and thou shall be present when the thunder sounds, for the time allotted to thee is filled with paradox. There is a role assigned to thee, and thou must play the part out to its end. Thy kind infest a world in which there is only dark because there is light, there is only death because there is life, there is only evil because there is good. Be thou aware that a world conceived in opposites only creates cycles and ceaseless recurrence. Only equivalence can lead to destruction or a final transcendence. Remember that, Richard Francis Burton. Do not forget it. Only equivalence can lead to destruction.”

Or a final transcendence
, he wanted to add.

The bonds fell from his ankles and wrists.

The five fairies backed away from him, floated into the air, landed on the sand, fell onto all fours, scampered like lizards, and burrowed into it. They vanished from sight.

He lifted his arms and rubbed his wrists.

A figure strode into view and looked down at him from the top of a dune. It was Isabel Arundell, dressed in flowing white robes and looking radiantly beautiful.

She opened her mouth to speak.

He sat up.

Light was filtering through his bedroom curtains.

It was late on Tuesday morning.

He stretched, reached for the bell cord that hung beside his bed, and gave it a tug. Moments later, the door opened and his valet stepped in.

“The usual, please, Nelson.”

The clockwork man saluted and departed.

Only equivalence can lead to destruction.

Meaningless nonsense. As for the rest of it, obviously Countess Sabina’s words had become jumbled with his research, populating his nocturnal imaginings with little people and gobbledygook about vast cycles of time.