Doktor Glass (39 page)

Langton put all his weight to the wheel handle. He felt the attractor machine’s vibration in everything around him: the wheel, the floor, the door. He thought of the power of those combined essences, all tuned to the one true note that would resonate throughout the entire Span. He pushed harder.

Something cracked and grated inside the mechanism. The wheel spun free in Langton’s hands and dropped him to his knees. The sluice gate shot upward in its runners and locked open.

On all fours, Langton looked into the open sluice and saw black silt. Compacted over two centuries until it resembled rock. Hard and solid.

Langton hung his head and felt the machine’s resonance course through him. He could do no more. No more.

“Matthew…”

Langton looked up and saw Sister Wright leaning against the side of the passageway. She splashed through the shallow channel with her left hand pressed tight against her side. The fading lamplight made her face look pale and greasy. The smile on her face became a wince as she stumbled.

Langton jumped forward and caught her as she fell. He saw her left hand fall away from her dress in a bloody red arc. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

“I deserve it,” Sister Wright said, her words barely audible over the machine’s pulse. “I killed his partner…even though…even though I—”

Langton held Sister Wright close to his chest until the wet coughing subsided. Then he picked her up in both arms, grabbed the lamp’s hook and staggered back toward the entrance shafts leading up to the Pier Head.

“Leave me here, Matthew…”

“Save your strength.”

Sister Wright looked up at him. “Please…leave me with the others.”

Langton stepped over Jake’s body in the second chamber and stumbled into the first. Here, the ranks of interconnected jars were now no more than that: earthenware containers emptied of their essences. Langton barely looked at them as he carried Sister Wright. He concentrated on trying to remember the route that Sapper George had showed him.

“Matthew…I only wanted to set them free.”

Again he remembered the empty birdcage in the Infirmary office. “I know.”

“I never meant—”

More coughing racked the body in Langton’s arms. He hesitated and then continued along an unfamiliar corridor.

Sister Wright mumbled into his chest, “As soon as I saw Redfers, I knew…He had that look about him…I shed no tears at his death…At least he helped destroy the Span.”

So Redfers’s soul had been one of those essences powering the machine. Had Langton caught an echo of the doctor’s fragmented thoughts from among the others? It didn’t matter.

And why argue with Sister Wright? She honestly believed she’d acted for the best, like all fanatics. To her the Span was evil. And now it was too late.

Langton stood at a complex interchange and acknowledged to himself that he was lost. Sister Wright lay heavy and cold in his arms. He found a ledge above the waterline, wrapped his jacket around her, and held her in his arms. “We’ll wait here awhile. There’s plenty of time.”

As the lamplight faded to a dim glow, Langton closed his eyes and rested his head back against the passageway walls. The machine’s vibration seemed muted here but still persistent. The voice from the bundle wrapped in his arms could have come from miles away; it lulled him.

“…All those poor people trapped…Even I had no idea until we found the first collection…So cruel, Matthew. So cruel…”

Langton remembered the basement room at Redfers’s house, with its shelves that had held a hundred or more jars until Sister Wright—as Doktor Glass—had removed them. Were all those spirits now freed?

Then Langton opened his eyes. “What did you say? About Sarah?”

“She’s safe, Matthew,” Sister Wright said. “I promised you she would be…I kept my word. She’s the only one left.”

Langton could see the storeroom at Sister Wright’s warehouse as clearly as if he stood there. The single jar standing on the zinc table. Sarah.

Before he could ask the questions that rushed to his lips, another sound joined the cycling pulse of the transfer machine: a deep rumbling like elephants stampeding through the lower caverns and passages. The floor and walls shook—not in time with the machine but rather to their own uneven rhythm. The roar of chaos.

Langton remembered that plug of silt and mud, all that had stopped the Mersey’s waters.

Scooping his leaden arms under Sister Wright and staggering to his feet, he splashed through the channel’s detritus, blind and confused, his only thought to get away from the rumbling destruction rising from below. He stumbled into walls, rebounded from unseen projections and lintels. The roaring intensified and a strong draft pushed Langton from behind and carried with it the smells of silt and river water.

Then, up ahead, lights and voices. Boots clattering against brick floors and ladders. At the head of the column, Sapper George, his face pulled taut by fear. “Inspector? God, sir, I never expected—”

Fallows pushed George aside and raised a revolver. “You’re under arrest, Langton. You and your accomplice.”

“We have minutes, if that, to get out of these tunnels,” Langton told Fallows, then turned to Sapper George: “I opened one of the Cromwell sluices.”

Sapper George’s face turned even paler. He turned and waved the column of policemen and guards back toward the ladders like a frantic shepherd. “Back! Everybody back to the surface. Run, for God’s sake.”

The men hesitated, looked at Sapper George and Fallows, then listened to the rumbling from the lower caverns. Almost as one, they turned and rushed back along the passage.

“You’ll give me an explanation,” Fallows said, still pointing the revolver at Langton.

Sapper George replied for him, saying, “The Mersey is on its way up here, sir. If you don’t believe your ears, just smell it.”

Langton pushed past Fallows and carried Sister Wright in the glow of Sapper George’s lamp. The sound seemed so close it must be just behind them; they’d never make the surface. Langton hoped that Sapper George was right about the tunnels’ strange acoustics.

As he ran, half crouched, Langton looked down at Sister Wright’s face. Quite unconscious now, she lolled in his arms with her head back, her mouth open. His exhausted body told him to drop her, to
leave her here in the tunnels; after all, Doktor Glass had killed so many, and not all of them members of Jar Boy gangs.

Langton couldn’t just leave her down here. Half of him wanted her to see justice, to see the damage she had done to the Span; half of him saw her as an injured woman who needed help. Either way, he wouldn’t drop her.

Sapper George helped Langton maneuver her body up ladders and a section of broken stairs. Then Langton saw a different kind of radiance ahead: daylight. Young Eric stood at the bottom of the access shaft ladder, his eyes wide with panic. The last of the policemen and guards clambered up the ladder; Langton saw their muddy boot heels disappearing upward.

“Up you get, Eric,” Sapper George shouted, slapping the boy on the back. “Move it, lad.”

The roaring filled the tunnel now. Langton ushered Fallows forward with a nod of the head. “Go.”

Fallows ran for the ladder and clattered up the rungs. Even before his feet were out of sight, George climbed up and then reached down for Sister Wright; he took her slack shoulders while Langton supported her weight from below. Langton’s hands slipped from the greasy rungs, and he had to force his complaining body to cooperate. He pushed Sister Wright up the ladder while the roaring grew in his ears and reverberated through his bones. He could no longer separate the transfer machine’s pulse from the Mersey’s rushing force. Surely the machine could not survive?

“I have her, sir,” Sapper George said. He sat on the edge of the access shaft coping with his arms around Sister Wright’s inert body. “Eric? Give us a hand, lad.”

Langton lifted Sister Wright to safety, then looked up and saw daylight framed by the edges of the entrance. He had only a few more rungs to climb. He could smell clean air.

From behind and below, a savage wind screamed past him and forced him from the head of the access shaft. Langton sprawled beside
Sapper George and Sister Wright, then rolled away with them as a plume of water blasted from the access shaft. The geyser erupted fifty feet into the air until gravity pulled it to earth; the grey water, fringed with dirty white foam, formed a ragged arch and then crashed down onto the pavement.

Langton covered Sister Wright’s body with his own. Falling water pounded his back like lead and cut off all sound. He tasted foul silt and Mersey water. When the noise subsided, he looked up and saw Fallows and his men scattered around the head of the access shaft like discarded toy soldiers. Rivulets of muddy grey water rolled back toward the hatch like slow rain.

Then Langton saw the Span: The bridge danced. Towers of solid brick and steel shimmied and flexed in time to the machine’s generated pulse. The road and rail deck rippled like a schoolgirl’s skipping rope or a cabdriver’s whip. Langton could see perfect oscillations racing along the contorted bed of concrete and steel. The support cables strung between the deck and the support pipes thrummed like harp strings; some of them snapped and whipped their lethal, braided strands.

People raced away from the Span, their screams drowned out by the complaining groans of steel under stress. Bricks and chunks of masonry splashed into the choppy River Mersey below. How long before the Span shook itself to pieces?

Langton had failed. He’d been too late.

Sister Wright opened her eyes and stared up at Langton. Her lips moved but he heard no words. He brushed the matted hair from her face and wondered if she knew she’d succeeded.

A change in the note of the twisting steel made Langton look up. Like a bow drawn across a violin’s strings, the stressed steel’s reverberations began to fade. The towers’ motion gradually slowed until they sat back on their foundations like a photographer’s subjects settling into focus. The road and rail deck’s motion grew fainter; the
waveforms weakened as their amplitude bled away. Like dying ripples on a pond, the oscillation faded.

Still a few chunks of masonry hit the water below, and the Span’s deck swayed from side to side under its momentum. But it had survived. The silence left behind seemed deafening.

All around Langton, men sat up and stared at the Span. From the distance came the ringing bells of fire engines and ambulances. From the nearby grandstand, now canted to one side like a drunken thing, came weeping and cursing. People climbed to their feet and brushed the brick dust and debris from their clothes. Even the stampeding horses stopped in their tracks.

Langton reached down and gently closed the lids of Sister Wright’s blank eyes. Before he hid her face beneath his jacket, he crossed her arms over her stomach; as he reached for her left hand, something metallic fell to the floor. A key. Langton pocketed the key and then drew his jacket up over Sister Wright’s vacant, tranquil face.

L
ANGTON ESCAPED FROM
the Pier Head and Fallows’s questions at six the next morning. Exhausted and wearing borrowed, mismatched clothes, he hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to head along the Dock Road. He looked back for a moment at the men swarming over the Span; the gas arc lights picked out the engineers, navvies, cablemen, and hordes of Span company officials. Henry Marc Brunel swore that the Span would be open within weeks. The thousands of people waiting to emigrate seemed to believe him.

Langton settled back into the cab’s worn cushions. Every muscle hurt; every part of him cried out for rest, but he knew he had so much yet to do. McBride still waited in the Infirmary with Elsie at his side. Fallows and Purcell had demanded his full report, although Langton doubted that Purcell would welcome what he had to say. Langton still had to officially close the case of Kepler and the missing—presumed lost—Durham. And Queen Victoria herself had asked to see Langton, to thank him in person.

All that must wait.

At Langton’s shout, the cab stopped outside the entrance to Gladstone Dock. Langton walked down the empty steps to the dockside and the tall sides of dark warehouses. He could hear the Mersey slapping the wooden pilings and sandstone quays beneath him. How soft and pleasant that sound seemed now. How deceptive.

Sister Wright’s warehouse reared up at his right. He found the rough wooden door standing ajar. The interior lay dark and apparently empty. Langton clicked on the electric lamp he’d borrowed from Sapper George’s wagon; the beam of white light showed dancing dust motes, an empty hallway, and the darker outlines of open doorways. In the first side room, Langton found the bunks empty and the chairs overturned. A mosaic of bright playing cards spilled from the table and onto the floor.

Deeper inside the building, Langton found the bizarre sitting room quiet and cold. No embers glowed in the hearth. Only the ticking clock broke the silence. The lamp’s beam picked out polished wood, chintz couches, a sparkling decanter. The room waited for an owner who would never return.

Langton stood outside the storeroom door and took deep breaths. He retrieved the key he’d found clutched in Sister Wright’s hand and turned it in the lock. The massive door swung open without a sound. Langton found the light switch inside the entrance and flicked it on.

Caged bulbs filled the room with light and showed shelf after empty shelf. Every jar that Sister Wright had collected, bought, or “rescued” from other gangs had gone into the maw of the machine buried deep in the cavern beneath the Span. Every jar save one.

Sarah’s jar stood in the center of the zinc table. The copper ring and green wax seal glinted. Dwarfed by that cavernous room, it seemed lost and out of place. Alone. Vulnerable. Langton circled the table and ran his hand over its cold metal surface. Then he reached out and picked up the jar in both hands. A ripple of recognition drifted up his arms and made him blink back tears.

Like a priest with a chalice, Langton carried his wife’s jar through
the warehouse and along the wharf to the water’s edge. He set it down on the cold stone surface and knelt beside it. He worked the green wax loose with his pocketknife until the gleaming copper seal lay exposed. He gripped the seal, then hesitated. Would Sister Wright have kept her word? Despite her death in the tunnels, would she have ensured Sarah’s resurrection?