The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (17 page)

Lyle lay on the bed of his cell for cattle-rustlers in Pentonville Prison, and tried to work out what it was about the place that unsettled him so. There was, of course, the fact that he was
inside
and, more to the point, inside
not looking out
. True, he was reasonably sure that no prison could hold him without an armed guard on his door every hour of the day. If that wasn’t comfort enough, there absolutely wasn’t a prison which could hold Tess. And Tess was... well... she was Tess. She’d get him out sooner or later, if everything went wrong, because if she didn’t there’d be no one to pay her pocket money (
although she could just steal it from his desk
. . .), or make her breakfast (
which she could just buy with the money
. . .), or warm her bath (
the biggest source of argument between the two of them
. . .) or just . . . generally ...
be there.
Lyle contemplated all of this and found it only a little comforting.

What else was wrong?

He closed his eyes and listened. And he heard . . . nothing. Could fog make a sound? Or was the gentle hissing in his ears like the sound you heard with a conch pressed to your ear: just the effect of the air itself moving in and out, disturbed minutely by every breath you took, the illusion of hearing the sea far off, no more than the buzzing of blood moving near the eardrum? Nothing.

Nothing, after a while, had a texture all of its own. The mind played tricks, moved nothing backward and forward like the swish of the waves, in time to the pumping of the heart, nothing becoming nothing more than the circulation of blood around the skull, each breath getting louder and louder as he tried to silence it - or perhaps getting quieter and quieter and the ears simply getting more acute in their awareness of nothing, the mind filling in the blanks. The cell itself was a bit too tall and too long for him alone; he’d seen prisons where there would have been twenty people pressed into a space like this. The ceiling was just high enough to conceal where the darkness began or ended; the wall was a little too cold against his back; the door was too far away - although, stretched out on the floor, he would have been able to touch it with his fingertips while his toes pressed against the opposite wall.

All Her Majesty’s other prisons had far too much character. They stank of various levels in hell, burnt in summer and freezing in winter, and men went there to die from every imaginable disease. This one killed in a different way: not through the obvious, painful explosions of sickness and decay promised by traditional places - the Fleet, Newgate and the hulks - but a quiet, tactful death, a smothering with non-sense, with non-life, with non-anything; perfect physical well-being while everything else became as white and pale as the walls around it.

And though Horatio Lyle knew,
knew
as rationally as he
knew
that there couldn’t be angel-demon people who could control others’ minds, as he
knew
that magic wasn’t real and that gravity would
always
make the apple fall, though he knew that he would get out and wouldn’t be there for long, there was no keeping out the little, irrational, terrifying thought that perhaps he’d made a mistake, and there would be no carriage waiting just outside the gates and no rope ladder and no distraction while he could sneak down, and no sliding the bar back across the door, and that would be it: he’d be stuck there, dying that quiet death each day all the days of his life.

He curled up tighter into the blanket and half-closed his eyes, and tried to think happy thoughts, from his new cell inside the Model Prison.

CHAPTER 9

This was what Teresa Hatch was
good
at.

Thomas had wanted to use a grappling hook and rope. But to Teresa that was messy; it smacked of sloppy practice and, the worst of all things in a life of crime, reckless adventurism.

‘Bigwig,’ she announced in tones no less reproving for their voices being hushed, so close to the prison walls.

‘Yes, Miss Teresa?’

‘I don’t know as how anyone’s never told you before, but a
Good
brush with death an’ adventurin’ type things is a
Safe
brush with death an’ adventurin’, right?’

‘Yes, Miss Teresa.’

‘It means bein’ all properly kitted up, makin’ sure you got your fence in the clear, your mark well greased, your team all in the know and the bobbies off the scent; it involves plannin’ an’ consideration an’ above all, steerin’ clear of anythin’ a stupid pad what thinks he’s the sharpest thing in the rookery can play with ’cos of how it’s got the glint, right?’

‘I think so, Miss Teresa.’ Thomas was sweating with the effort of simultaneous translation.

‘Oh, an’ never, ever press the thing marked “Bang”.’

‘What thing marked “Bang”, Miss Teresa?’

‘Well, that’s what I thought, but were I tactless enough to say it? No, ’cos I’m a well-bred young lady person. But who, I mean really, labels anything “Bang”?’

‘Perhaps it’s a metaphor?’

‘Oi - no big words while I’m at work, Teresa’s rule of ... workin’. Got the gear?’

‘If you can call it gear . . .’

‘Who’s the professional here?’

‘I’m not sure if this is an area of employment in which you can seek such respectability, Miss Teresa.’

Teresa gave the martyred sigh of all uniquely skilled people being thwarted by amateurs, and looked over her stash of essential supplies for the night’s work. Three large boxes, the fuse wires just visible over the edge, which Lin was setting neatly in the middle of the street, some distance from the carriage; a crossbow, all cogs and gears and springs, which Mister Lyle had proudly informed her could be loaded by ‘a one-armed gnome with the muscular integrity of a banking clerk’, the sack of goodies and a lot of rope for Mister Lyle, and of course, the thing that brought such disapproval from Thomas - the ladder. As far as Thomas was concerned, if you had to commit crime at all, you should at least do it in style.

Tess beamed. It was a very, very good ladder. She was even thinking of giving it a name. They set to work.

 

A sound in the night?

Perhaps. It’s hard to tell, so hard. The mind plays tricks in the darkness; no sense can be trusted in silence as thick as this. Even mountains have more noises and support more evidence of life: the movement of insects or the pressure of an owl’s wings. But inside, tonight, it’s so difficult to know, while the fog below smothers even the meowing of the prison’s rat-hunting cat, with its one and a half twitching ears.

Perhaps . ..

The gentle thump of a wooden ladder being laid carefully against a wall, some way below?

Perhaps . . . soft-soled shoes on an uneven surface, perhaps . . . the tiniest movement of something light, no bigger than a child, perhaps . . . the thump of something coming to land in the courtyard below, the flop of rope, perhaps . . . no way to judge, nothing against which to compare the volume of sound except the beating of the heart.

When the distant church struck two a.m., it seemed so loud that Lyle nearly fell out of his bed. On the floor, he reassembled himself, gathered up a little dignity for the invisible audience that could so easily be waiting in that unloving darkness, and lifted one foot. He had, naturally, been searched, but what he was looking for was easy enough to hide. The small bundle of matches were tucked away just inside his shoe. He pulled one out, struck it easily off the wall and held it up to the high window. He repeated this three times over five-minute intervals, and sat back to wait.

A sound? Perhaps . . .

Something mechanical. Many cogs and springs greased tightly together, bending, turning, so efficient that a one-armed gnome with the muscular integrity of a banking clerk could operate them, perhaps? So hard, imagination knows what ’s coming, difficult to place it.

And a definite sound, so close and so loud Lyle thinks that the entire prison must hear it, must wake to it, but then once it’s come and gone in a second, he’s not so sure, perhaps he imagined it, the strange half-dislocation of thought and imagination as if he’d just woken up and spoke, not entirely confident if this was a dream or not.

The church bell struck two thirty, somewhere in the distance. A goods train from the north rattled by. An empty goods train from the south clattered northwards. The fog made whatever no-noise the fog made; the church bell struck a quarter to three. Lyle began considering plan B, and contemplated the effect of temperature on volume at a fixed pressure, and pressure on volume at a fixed temperature and all variations around a theme, to keep himself distracted from thoughts of doom.

When the knock came, he hadn’t heard anything approaching and at first thought it was the warden come to demand what in God’s name was going on now, or else. When it came again, it was, however, accompanied by a little voice from the small window set in the upper part of Lyle’s cell. ‘Oi! Is this the right evil criminal person?’

Lyle hastened to the window, jumping up on tiptoes to try and get the tip of his nose at the approximate height of the speaker. ‘Tess!’

A shadow, darker than the darkness outside, dangled outside his window and exclaimed brightly, ‘Hello, Mister Lyle!’

‘Shush, shush!’

‘Sorry.’ Tess’s voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘Hello, Mister Lyle!’

‘Are you all right there?’

‘You mean, apart from how I’m attached to a rope what’s attached to, all due respect, a bloody ballista bolt from your really-nasty-should-never-be-fired-playin’-around-with-too-many-cogs-an’-frankly-, if I might say so, not-gettin’-out-enough machine, embedded in a bloody crumbly-looking wall, attached to a
prison
at height?’

‘Language!’

‘
Please
.’

‘All right otherwise?’

‘Fine.’

‘Is Thomas down there?’

‘Bigwig’s scared of heights,’ sang out Teresa, bouncing on the rope outside Lyle’s window with an abandon that made even Lyle a little green. ‘You’ll be wantin’ equipment for escapin’ an’ all then, Mister Lyle?’

‘If it wouldn’t inconvenience you.’

‘You just sit tight an’ let Teresa, as usual, save the day, don’t you worry about nothin’, Mister Lyle.’

There was a rustling sound outside the small pane of glass and bars, and a little tight squeaking. Over the squeaking came Tess’s conversational voice. ‘You know, that machine of yours what you said as how anyone could fire it an’ it’d be secure an’ everythin’ ...’

‘Yes?’

‘I was thinkin’ - isn’t someone goin’ to go an’ notice as to how there’s a bolt with . . . with . . .’

‘Explosive expanding hooking implements?’ suggested Lyle hopefully.

‘I was thinkin’ really big pointy bits, but if you want . . . stuck in the prison wall?’

‘
Well,
ideally it’d crumble in sunlight . . .’ began Lyle with forced brightness as the squeaking sound went on at the glass.

‘It
crumbles
?’ Tess’s voice was a shrill, bat-killing squeak.

‘No, no, I said
ideally
!’

‘Oh. Right.’ The squeaking continued at a nonchalant pace.

‘But since it doesn’t, and since it should be embedded at least a foot and a half into solid stone considering the explosive force of the stored tension in the gears and taking into account deceleration due to gravity of around tenish metres per second per se—’

‘Since it don’t?’ sang out Tess, quick to sense any kind of information heading her way and cut it off before it could get the wrong idea.

‘Oh. Well, yes, since it don’t . . . uh, doesn’t . . . don’t . . . look, it’s just going to have to stay there and confuse a lot of people, all right?’

‘You don’t think as how that might be inc . . . incrim . . . risky an’ traceable evidence an’ all? Should anyone start askin’ questions? ’

‘Teresa, would you say I was the kind of man wilfully to break criminals out of prison?’

‘No!’

‘Then why should anyone ask?’

‘Oh. All right, fair enough. Hold on, stand back, I think I’m done here.’

Lyle hastened back, away from the window. With a final little tortured squeak, a circle of glass slightly larger than the spread area of Tess’s hand popped out of the pane and tipped forward. Lyle grabbed at it before it could smash, with an inelegant cry of, ‘Whoops!’, and looked up to see Tess’s face peering in through the small hole above. She waved, rocking back and forth on the rope to which she was attached, suspended several floors above the ground and some yards below the bolt that had embedded itself in the building like a needle in a pincushion. ‘Hello!’ she hissed in another overdramatic whisper.

‘Hello. Have you got everything?’

‘Oh - no, I think I left it.’

‘You
what
?’

‘Don’t be such a mark, Mister Lyle, ’course I got it. You think I’d come all the way up here an’ all without it?’