Automatic Woman (3 page)

I crept into the theater. All was dark except for a lone spotlight centered on the stage. Dr. Saxon’s dancers were gone and replaced by a scene that will forever haunt me.

They were together on center stage, bathed in the spotlight. The doctor was laid out, limbs splayed. The automatic woman, Dr. Saxon’s Swan Princess, held his body against hers, like a mother cradling a child. He issued another low groan.

I crept closer. No one else moved, not the princess, not the doctor. Regardless, I snapped my cobra to full length, if for nothing but my own confidence. I crept onto the stage; blood pooled under the doctor and seeped into the hardwood. Thick red stains ran up the Swan Princess’ arms.

“Doc?” I called out.

He let out another low groan. The princess squeezed him tighter in her arms. The doctor’s legs kicked in convulsion. It was then that I knew she was crushing him, that Dr. Saxon’s beautiful Swan Princess was squeezing the life and blood from his body.

This was my time to shine. I may not understand automatics or gear ratios or any of that rot, but I understand violence. Violence and I are old acquaintances.

I roared like a lion and struck the Swan Princess with my cobra. Her head rotated a one-eighty; her mouth opened, showing off teeth lacquered with the old man’s blood. He kicked and squirmed and I struck again. The tip of my rod whipped across her brow, shattering a crystal eye. I whipped the cobra again across her face, cracking the ivory of her forehead. A tuft of rendered silk hair flew to the back stage. I struck her arms and her shoulders. Bits of ivory littered the stage and yet she held. She held until the old man stopped convulsing, until he was still… and then she let him go.

I yelled again, a wordless animal yell of frustration. An ancestral call, if you will. I couldn’t stop her from finishing the doctor, but I was determined to finish her.

She rose to her feet through my barrage of strikes. Plates of her came loose, revealing gears and inner springs. She tottered for a moment like she was going to fall, like she’d had enough, like my strikes were not the impotent efforts of a man who knew no better than to lash out. A Front Doors Man they call me. Jolly they call me. Helpless is not a word I’m accustomed to.

The creature lolled back like she was going to pitch over and then sprang into a ballerina’s leap. In my mind she resembled a gazelle, all lines and form. She leapt to me with open arms, striking the center of me with all the weight of her artificial body. I imagine getting struck by a rail handcart is similar. My feet left mother Gaia and we flew together for a long moment, over the lip of the stage, into the darkness of the orchestral pit. We collapsed in the darkness, together. We rolled as one, but she separated from me, retreating to an unseen corner. Luckily, I still held the cobra and whipped it around in the empty darkness. I could not see her in the blackness, but my shifting feet caught debris. I knelt down and swept my hands over cogs and severed limbs of what I assume were her back-up dancers. The pit was a graveyard. I could not step nor shift without contacting the remains of some poor dismantled automaton. Something had happened here beyond my comprehension.

Growing up in Whitechapel, my father often told me that all men and women have a place on God’s green earth. He told me that it was the job and place of royalty to fuck up and look good, just as it was the job and place of Parliament to pretend not to fuck up and look regular enough to court votes. He told me his place was to make boots, to cut leather, to polish in browns and blacks and having realized this, he needed no church or greater philosophy. He had found his place on Earth as God had intended. He lived a bootmaker’s life, and died a bootmaker’s death. I took these teachings as truth and have always held that the only worthy men are those doing what they’re supposed to. Those outside the grain are ripe for correction and often times it’s my job to do the correcting.

To retrace my original point, I think the doctor made an automaton to love him, and she did. And I think it was her, or the doctor, who destroyed all those other dancers. Was it for jealousy? Was it for passion? Was it for some sense of purpose or some greater acknowledgment of purpose? I don’t know. I’m just a bloke who likes to put mashers in their place and swing a club at a crook now and again. I don’t reckon any greater meaning from this, but I’m sure there is one.

So there I was, in the darkness of the pit surrounded by parts of destroyed machines. I heard her shuffle and swung my cobra accordingly. I spun my club through empty air. It would have been embarrassing had any live creatures stood as witness. Suddenly, a great scratch rendered the heavens, and then all things were filled with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. She must have hit the switch to start the orchestral score; it resounded in the pit as though all things were consumed by horns and strings and powerful drums.

I screamed in frustration. I was already blinded by the lack of light, and now I was deafened and muted by the music. I swung the cobra through empty air, determined to strike something, anything. I was overwhelmed in the darkness, in the crashing music, consumed and lost like an ape dropped in the ocean. The automatic woman bit my shoulder with her horrid teeth, but when I turned to confront, she was already gone. I backpedaled to the pit wall, desperately feeling for a ladder or door, anything to escape from this nightmare. The automaton bit me again, this time on the stomach. I swung and made contact, but again she vanished in the darkness. I was desperate, a creature far out of his element.

My father’s words came into my head again: all things in their place, all things conforming to their nature and doing what comes natural. For me, destruction is natural. My meaty paws gripping and tearing comes naturally. My weight and stature, these things are my nature.

I dropped the cobra and sat cross-legged. I closed my eyes, which weren’t doing me any good anyway. I cracked my knuckles and flexed my fingers. I imagine competitive fighters do this, the limbering of the hands. I stretched each finger and popped the knuckles of my thumbs and there I sat. She came upon me again as before, with a bite on my left shoulder, only this time I was prepared. I grabbed the automaton with my hands, my God given tools of destruction. I gripped under her elbows and rolled her to the floor; her teeth were lodged in my shoulder and stung fiercely. I spread my weight on top of her and prevented her from escaping. She would not strike me in another sortie; this fight would end in the grapple, under my terms.

The Swan Princess must have understood this because her arms and legs wrapped around my body, much as they’d wrapped around the poor dead Dr. Saxon. She squeezed my corpulence and I suddenly knew the strength of this beast, that it was enough to crack bones and snap a spine. I wrapped my arms and legs around her and squeezed with all my might, if for no greater purpose than to give the same treatment I was receiving.

And there we lay, locked like a serpent and mongoose; she tried to squeeze the life out of me, but found me no weak candidate. Not like the poor doctor. I squeezed with all the strength in my arms and legs, but heard no crack over the orchestral consonance, the beautiful and at this time dreadful conclusion of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. We must have spent a minute locked in embrace, though it stretched into an eternity. My thumb found a space on her back, a crack. I changed the strategy of our grapple, for if she’d found a crack in me, I’m sure she would have exploited it all the same. I wedged my hand into her innards and felt all those working parts, all those cogs and belts and pendulums, whirling about and giving life to this aberration. I made a fist, and let my meaty fingers pull apart what they contacted. Belts dislodged, gears flung themselves loose and fell into her inner sanctum. I gripped again and this time pulled from her back a fist full of vital shiny trinkets, all those solid pieces of brass that accounted for her life’s blood.

The creature’s teeth loosened from my shoulder. She slumped and shuddered, much like the poor dead Doctor had shuddered in his last moment. My eyes had grown accustomed to darkness, and in the haze of what I remember, I swear she gave me an accusatory glare with her one remaining eye. I dripped blood on her face from my wound, and yet, there it was…her eye shown angry and then the light faded, or rather, I passed out.

So you see officers, it was not I who took the life of poor Dr. Saxon, rather it was his creation. I cannot explain the why, but I have provided the how. Contact my office, the Bow Street Firm. There you’ll find I have an impeccable reputation. You must believe me. I have nothing to hide.

Jolly Gets a Second Chance

Blood stains on brick tell a tale as good as any Arthurian jaunt. This stain in particular, vertical, shaped like an oriental fan; it’s no different. The first thing I know is that this splatter came out of some bloke’s mouth. The stain is two meters up the wall and slightly off center of the piss bucket. I imagine the dispute had something to do with waste disposal, a priority to drunk and sober men alike. This assumption may be false, but given the proximity of blood-to-pisser, I’d say it’s a fair starting point.

The strikee was shoved flush against the wall. That perfect blood fan was not a spray of any distance. That bloke was pressed up, knob in hand, against the wall and given a crushing right haymaker. Blood goes to mouth, mouth goes to holler, blood paints the walls.

I don’t have to look in the pisser to know there’s probably a tooth bobbing in that filth, maybe more than one.

Bloody driblets on the floor showed the trajectory of the man. He crawled. A standing man would have left a wider trail. A fighting man would have speckled the floors and walls and chairs and Lord knows what else in a wet struggle. Not this one. First he spit the fan on the wall, then the he dribbled a tight trail to the cell door. He probably mewled for the jailor. He probably begged. By the looks of the congealing pool by the cell door, his wait was long and his release was in the not too distant past. Not a fighter this one. Weakness in men makes my skin crawl. A man who begs and cries is like a dog in
coolot
trousers. My dad used to say that. I get chicken skin up my arms thinking about this bloke begging through a busted gob, wailing away, waiting for an exodus to safer accommodations, which in this place meant another cell; same type of cell, same type of blokes, same type of pissers. That might be a metaphor for life. I don’t know. I’ve never been called a literate man.

I know about the blood and the man because it is my profession to know. Doctors stop seeing patients. They only see symptoms and remedies. Mashers stop seeing girls; they only see ankles and legs and tits and arses. Thief catchers don’t see rooms. They see clues, hints, causes to be linked like puzzle pieces into a great, rational, and hopefully honest story.

That’s the reality of my work. I’m paid to complete incomplete stories. Usually of the “where are my beautiful possessions” or the “who caved in my husband’s skull” variety.

I am a thief catcher. I was a thief catcher. I’m not sure the proper tense of verb given that I may or may not be sacked by the firm. The infamous Bow Street Firm in all its wisdom and prestige is going to have to decide if I’m one to keep.

I am a prisoner awaiting trial for the murder of Dr. James Saxon. Specifically, the grisly, crushing death of Dr. James Saxon.

As far as I can tell, the prosecutor, Mr. Thomas Agrian, Esq.’s theory of the case is that I had some work-related breakdown and crushed Dr. Saxon with my arms and legs like a human boa constrictor. To the prosecutor’s credit, Dr. Saxon was found with broken arms and organs ground to stew. The prosecutor also believes that after I dispatched the kind doctor, I redirected my madness to the doctor’s creations, his automatic dancers. I apparently ran amok and broke to bits every dancing automaton, saving the Swan Princess, Dr. Saxon’s crown jewel, for my finale. The broken remains of Dr. Saxon’s fine creations were recovered from the orchestral pit of his theater. That is also where they found me, arms and legs wrapped around the inert body of the Swan Princess. If it hadn’t been a murder scene, I’m sure the laughter would have been uproarious instead of just a single snigger from some cold-blooded Met.

I know this has come up before, but I am a fat man. This was not overlooked in Mr. Agrian, Esq.’s assessment nor the supervising inspector’s investigative report. The inspector considered this reasonable causation, but I consider it a shite presumption against the portly. Really, how many fat-man-crushing-deaths can there be in London for them to follow this logic honestly? My ear is pressed firmly to the underbelly of this city and I’ve never heard of a fat man crushing another man with arms and legs. Sure there’s the occasional beating fatality, but that is a thing common to all weights of men and even some women.

A laughable theory is not the worst part of their case. The worst part is this: I have no motive. Dr. Saxon was my client, my record with the Bow Street Firm holds no past suspicions of homicide or fratricide or regicide or any other ‘cide. The lack of motive makes considerable sense when you factor in that I had nothing, or at least very little to do with the death of Dr. Saxon.