The Japanese Devil Fish Girl (44 page)

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Authors: Robert Rankin

BOOK: The Japanese Devil Fish Girl
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Gentlemen of the West London Fire Brigade stoked up the fireboxes of their steam-driven tenders. It was likely to be a very long night.
 
Firemen offered up their prayers and donned their great big helmets.
 
 
The dome of St Paul’s, a helmet of faith perhaps, was now being lit sporadically by flashes of flame. Explosions on high and roaring fires below. The chaos of war was drawing nearer to the great cathedral. Beyond the stained-glass windows, sheets of artificial lightning, hurled from Mr Tesla’s guns, fragmented the sky and challenged the light of the moon.
 
Within the inner temple, Professor Coffin, all alone, was very hard at work. He had removed the canvas awning that covered this blasphemous showman’s booth and he was high on a gantry dismantling the scaffolding, cursing as he did so to himself.
 
‘Damned fools!’ he cried, and loudly too. ‘All of them, stupid damn fools. Fear not, my lovely,’ he called to the statue. ‘I will save you from harm. We’ll make away from here in haste and head to safer parts.’
 
‘No,’ came the voice of George Fox, firmly. ‘That you will never do.’
 
Professor Coffin turned to view the young man on the gantry.
 
‘George,’ he said. ‘Well, this is some surprise.’
 
‘Yes.’ George nodded. ‘It must be, as you sent my wife and I to our deaths.’
 
‘There must be some misunderstanding, my boy.’ Professor Coffin danced a little. ‘I merely wished for those fellows to lock you away for a couple of days. Where are they, by the by?’
 
‘Both dead,’ said George. A-smiling as he said it.
 
‘Ah.’ Professor Coffin nodded. ‘That is most unfortunate. ’
 
‘For you certainly,’ said George. ‘London is under attack. People are dying and it is your fault. I will offer you a choice that you do not deserve. Leave the cathedral now, alone, walk away and I will make no attempt to stop you.’
 
‘Or?’ asked the professor. ‘I am intrigued.’
 
‘You have committed a crime so heinous,’ said George, ‘that there can only be one just punishment for you. Resist me and attempt to steal the statue once more and I swear that I will kill you where you stand.’
 
‘Kill me!’ Professor Coffin made flamboyant gestures. ‘Such bluff and bluster, young man. You have not the stomach for such gruesome stuff. You are but a boastful boy.’
 
George Fox glared at the professor. ‘The enormity of what you have done still seems to evade you,’ he said. ‘And I can understand that you might harbour doubts as to my sincerity. So we will put it to the test. Descend the ladder now and depart the cathedral by the time that I have counted to ten, or I will fling you from the gantry to the tiled floor beneath.’
 
Professor Coffin shook his head. ‘George, George, George,’ he said to George, ‘what has become of us both? Such travelling companions were we. Such adventures we had.’
 
‘One . . . two . . . three . . .’ went George, and, ‘Four-five-six . . .’
 
‘Is there nothing for it, my boy? Must it come to this?’
 
‘Seven,’ went George. ‘Eight,’ went George. ‘Nine,’ went George.
 
And—
 
Professor Coffin yanked a pistol from his pocket.
 
‘Ten, I suppose it is,’ he said. And fired it point-blank into George.
 
44
 
R
ackwards staggered George, a look of horror on his face, a smoking hole in the breast of his wedding suit jacket. He tried to utter words, but none would come. His knees gave beneath him and he sank to the boards of the gantry.
 
‘No!’ Ada screamed.
 
The professor turned quickly, for she’d been sneaking up behind him.
 
‘You too?’ said he, but then he said no more. Ada high-kicked the gun from the showman’s hand, swung about once more with her foot and swept the legs from under him. Professor Coffin lost his balance, clawed at the air, then with a scream that sounded scarcely human, fell to the cold tiled floor beneath. He struck with a sickening, bone-breaking thud and lay very still indeed.
 
‘George,’ cried Ada, springing forwards to her love and flinging herself to her knees. She lifted George’s limp-necked head and cradled it in her lap. ‘My darling George,’ she wept. ‘My darling, do not die.’
 
George could manage whispered words. ‘Give them the statue,’ said he.
 
‘The Venusians?’ asked Ada, tears streaming down her face.
 
‘Bring down the airship,’ George managed. ‘Crash it through the windows, haul the statue out and let whoever cares to take it do so.’
 
‘George, don’t die. You can’t die.’
 
‘Please,’ said George. ‘Just do it. If you can.’
 
Beyond the stained-glass window, Magonian cloud-ships drifted upon high. Twinkling spheres of light sparkled down from them. Parts of inner London now took fire.
 
‘I will not fail, George,’ said Ada. ‘But please do not die.’
 
‘I will try my best,’ said George in reply and with that fainted away.
 
Ada Fox gently eased George’s head back to the gantry planking. Rose, made a face of terrible determination and gave forth an atavistic scream. Then she tore away the encumbrances of her petticoats and bustled skirts, shed her jacket, ripped free her bodice and stood for a moment, a Valkyrie in corset and bloomers. A girl adventurer. Gorgeously tousled.
 
Ada climbed onto the scaffolding, shinned higher. Balanced on its highest cross-beam and then, upon no more than a wing and a prayer, flung herself towards the rail of the Whispering Gallery. Onto this fearlessly she climbed, then from there to a tiny door that led to the outside of the dome.
 
Alone stood Ada under troubled skies. Above swam Jovian spacecraft like horrid copper carp. Crackles of electricity leapt towards them from the Tesla guns. The stolen Lemurian airship hung close at hand, mere feet above the great dome’s peak. Moored by a heavy cable, but not an impossible climb for such a lady as she.
 
A wind was whipping up now and nesting pigeons all about Ada took to sudden flight.
 
The adventuress in the corset and bloomers wiped away tears from her eyes. A fierce determination electrified her body. Ada took to climbing up the dome.
 
It was vast and there was little purchase. A safe enough place to moor a stolen airship. Ada scrabbled higher. Great booms beneath announced that the Mark 5 Juggernauts were aiming their cannons aloft. Shells exploded over her head as some lethal firework display.
 
Ada noted with some satisfaction that the attacking sky-craft were giving St Paul’s Cathedral a very wide berth. Neither the ecclesiastics of Venus nor the burghers of Jupiter wished to harm the holy statue. In this at least she was offered some safety to go about her task.
 
With fingernails broken and fingers bloodied and torn, Ada gained the very summit of the dome. Wind lashed about her now, threatening to fling this frail form of a girl away into the sky. But Ada took a mighty breath and climbed up to the airship.
 
 
‘Airships?’ queried Winston Churchill. ‘Fleets of Martian airships?’
 
‘Seen over New York five minutes ago,’ said Mr Nikola Tesla, ‘the message transmitted to my personal receiver—’ he held up same, a slim, flat box of brass with many buttons, ‘—via trans-Atlantic wireless telecommunication. I have installed communicating devices in Ten Downing Street, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and the apartment of a lady named Lou, whom I met at the music hall.’
 
‘Impressive,’ said Mr Winston Churchill.
 
General Darwin cast covetous eyes towards the brass contraption.
 
‘How many Martian airships?’ asked Mr Churchill.
 
‘My contact counted fifty, maybe more.’ Nikola Tesla shook his head. ‘We may not win this war.’
 
‘We will win it,’ quoth Mr Churchill. ‘We will fight them on the beaches, in the parlours and up the back passages. We will never surrender. Some chicken, some neck. Some giblets.’
 
‘Still needs a bit of work,’ said Mr Tesla. ‘I am thinking to make my departure now, if you have no objection. I have been working for some months past upon a time machine. I think now might be the moment to test its capabilities.’
 
‘You do that,’ said Mr Churchill. ‘And if you get it working, come back yesterday and tell me about it.’
 
Mr Tesla carelessly thrust his personal telephonic communicator into what he thought was
his
trouser pocket, saluted Mr Churchill and left.
 
Mr Churchill chuckled to General Darwin. ‘An impressive feat of sleight of trouser,’ he complimented the ape. ‘Kindly lend the thing to me – I have to speak with the Queen.’
 
General Darwin offered Mr Churchill one of those old-fashioned looks.
 
‘Yes, all right,’ said Winston. ‘Perhaps after I have spoken with the lady known as Lou.’
 
The whistles on the speaking tubes now shrieked in ill harmony.
 
Winston Churchill shook his head and lit another cigar.
 
 
In the eye of a smoking hurricane, on the flight deck of the airship, Ada Fox acquainted herself once more with the on-board controls. Flying the craft would be easy, for the Martian pilot had unknowingly shown her how. First, release the cable that moored the airship. Ada flung the lever, shot the bolt.
 
The craft lifted rapidly. Ada Fox applied herself to steering the ship down. She felt that perhaps she might have but a single attempt at this. Crashing the airship through the stained-glass window might well rupture the gas bag. Hooking up the statue and hauling it out into the night was something that would have to be done speedily. There were perhaps terrible flaws to this plan. Insurmountable flaws.
 
The actual act of desecration, of destroying the beautiful window, meant very little to Ada. Windows, any windows, could be replaced. Balanced against all of the rest of London, the window seemed a tiny sacrifice.
 
But hauling out the statue was another matter entirely.
 
What if it was to be damaged?
 
What if she accidentally destroyed it?
 
And then a sudden thought came unto Ada. On the face of it, a terrible thought. A mad and desperate thought. An iconoclastic thought. What if she was to purposely destroy the statue?
 
Blow it up?
 
Smash it utterly to pieces?
 
Destroy it beyond all repair?
 
Surely then there would be nothing left to fight over.
 
Surely then the alien craft would simply fly away.
 
As Ada brought the airship low and backed it away from St Paul’s, preparatory to taking a great rush forward at the window, she mused upon just what might happen if the statue simply ceased to be.
 
It was, if one thought about it dispassionately,
only
a statue. As the stained-glass window was really
only
a window.
 
A religious faith that was sincere and devout did not depend upon the existence of some manufactured object. True, the claim was that the statue had never been created. That it had always existed. But it
was
only a statue. Wasn’t it? Ada Fox took very deep breaths and clung to the controls. Haul it out, or smash it up?
 
A terrible dilemma.
 
But then, of course, Ada had seen the statue. Had witnessed its mind-rending beauty. Its absolute perfection. Its aura of the divine. Could she, Ada, really destroy such a thing? Did she have the right?
 
‘One way or the other,’ said Ada, ‘something is going to happen.’
 
She disengaged the air brakes, jammed her foot down onto the accelerator pedal and clung for the dearness of life as the airship thundered forwards.
 
Again there came a moment. Of silence and of peace. When everything happened in the slowness of slow motion. Serenely, with queer dignity.
 
The nose cone of the airship ploughed into the cathedral window.
 

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