Part IV: In, Spectre
Two more shots cracked out, but the pair of Austro-Hungarian infantrymen kept advancing up the steps to the kitchen door.
“I should like you to know that when we return to London, I shall ask your lady wife to have your head checked.” Shalaby slumped against the butcher-block counter, trying to reload one-handed.
I crouched back behind the stove and continued scanning the room, squinting through the maddening fog. “Don’t you think you ought to pass me the revolver? That scratch on your shoulder is bound to stiffen up, you know.”
He squeezed off another shot, wincing at the recoil. “I most certainly do not know, and you are meant to be putting your criminal mind to some manner of fanciful Australian plan of action.”
“I know.” I grimaced. “But I’d rather hoped this kitchen would be better equipped.”
“Had you?” Shalaby scoffed. “Did you plan to fillet them to death with a particularly uncommon type of fish knife?” Three shots more. “Fecklace, I had better tell you now.”
I leaned into the hearth, upsetting a bucket and scattering fire irons over the bricks. “What’s that?” I muttered, backing out of the mess.
Shalaby’s back bumped up against mine. “I’m out of bullets.”
I picked up a fire iron. “Right.”
As if by one accord, both infantrymen now charged into the kitchen. Shalaby’s walking stick thwacked one in the knee, and I tripped the other. As he fell, I saw that the breast of his military jacket was studded with bullet holes. “What in the name of Chatterton’s ghost…” My eyes widened. “They’re invincible.” I noticed something else bizarre as I looked from one man to the other. “And they’re identical twins!”
“As they would be,” grunted Shalaby. Locked in a close brawl, he held the arm of his assailant, who was wrestling to bring a pistol into play. I brought down the fire iron across the back of the fellow’s head with a mighty clang. Sploosh.
“Sploosh?” The fire iron went slack in my hand. The man I’d hit was gone. “Where did he—”
“Look sharp.” Shalaby kicked, knocking the legs out from under the second soldier behind me. He toppled, his pistol discharging into the rafters. Shalaby scrambled to his feet. He was soaking wet.
“How—”
“Just as the spy in the Webley factory looked exactly like—but was in fact not—the foreman. I shall explain when time permits.” Shalaby broke away and I followed suit. Dashing through the swinging door into the pantry with the furious Austrian hot on my heels, I stopped just inside—waited for it—and slammed the door in his face. There was a thud and I heard the infantryman curse and hit the floor.
“This way,” hissed Shalaby. As I turned into the pantry, I discerned through the pooling fog that he’d slipped between two rows of tall cabinets. Just before the pantry door opened, he ducked into one. It seemed rather an indifferent place to hide, but it was too late to be having second thoughts. Yanking open the door of another cabinet, I wedged myself inside.
The Austrian’s strangely sponge-y footfalls padded into the pantry. I closed my eyes, sucked in my gut, and pulled the cabinet door as nearly flush as I could, wondering how the neighboring compartment could possibly accommodate Shalaby’s stocky build. The steps squished nearer, as if their owner was wearing thick socks in a mud-puddle. The cabinet door refusing to shut all the way, I could observe through a narrow sliver as the infantryman stopped to consider his next move. He paused inches from me, and I distinguished that he was indeed the exact twin of his inexplicably liquefied partner. He bent low, inspecting the cabinets beneath their blanket of mist.
Running his hand over the very one which Shalaby had chosen, he suddenly cocked his head as if he’d heard a noise. He grabbed his pistol. He banged open the cabinet door. A yell, a clamor of crashing and tussling. I was on the point of springing out and lending Shalaby a hand, when a patter of muffled boots filled the pantry. I was unarmed. I had no notion of committing suicide; I squeezed my eyes shut and curled absolutely still inside the cabinet. I wished heartily for my Gatling sword—I wished even more heartily to be having a quiet evening at the Club, and I would have given anything for a cup of tea.
After a few seconds, the soldiers ran back out of the pantry. But a pair of them stayed behind; I could them cursing and clattering about in the kitchen, probably looking for me. I crawled out of the cabinet and, groping through the fog, threw open the door of Shalaby’s hiding place.
It was empty. It seemed an eternity before I could light the candle-stub in my pocket and thrust its light inside with a shaky hand. A streak of dark red painted the far wall of the compartment. Beyond that, nothing. “Good God,” I whispered, wiping a fingertip through the sticky smear of blood. “Will.”
I shook my head and, dropping to a crouch, felt around on the bottom of the cabinet. At least I could retrieve his revolver. Then I would school those Austro-Hungarian curs.
But my hand swiped through air. The cabinet had no bottom. A rusty squeak rose from its interior, as if coming from the bowels of the manor house. I started back. Then I peered inside. A shadowy solidness rose to block the downward passage, a square drop-away floor that rose steadily until it clicked into place in the bottom of the cabinet. In the center: a teacup and saucer. I didn’t dare call out; squidgy boots still stalked the kitchen just outside the pantry door. But I picked up the cup. Fragrant steam rose from it.
Losing no time—and taking care not to spill the tea; after all, one takes what one can get—I crawled into the cabinet and rapped on the wall. After a moment, the bottom began to lower slowly down.
I found myself in the under-kitchen, positively choked with fog but with a new fire popping and cracking in the hearth. Swinging my feet out over the brick floor, I swigged the last of the tea and leapt to the ground. I grinned. “That was brilliant.”
Shalaby turned. He was turning a large wall crank, despite the blood-soaked state of his coat sleeve. Seeing me, he let up and sunk onto an old wicker chair by the spitting fire. He sloughed off his greatcoat, grimacing in pain. “Yes, well I’d intended for you to jump into the dumbwaiter with me. When that Austrian arrived instead, I had rather a hard time of it, and we both went down together.”
I patted him on the back. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, old boy. But cabinets and dumbwaiters look very much the same in the dark and you could’ve at least given me a hint. Where’s that soldier?”
Shalaby nodded wearily toward a puddle in the middle of the floor. “You’re standing in him.”
I wrinkled my nose and shook what looked like water off my shoes. “In all seriousness, old boy, this requires an immediate explanation.”
“Keep your voice low,” he warned, gesturing at the door. “They—”
“You vill be unbolting ZEe door and coming out, eengleeshman.” The command interrupted Shalaby, in an accent belligerently strident and regrettably Austrian. “Our gun is aimed at your door, vich vill be being blown to pieces in vone minute. Do not play zees foolish game.”
“You see what I mean,” said Shalaby. He set his teeth, knotting his handkerchief about his injured shoulder as he spoke. “We seem to be—that is—” He let out a defeated breath. “Cornered.”
I surveyed the under-kitchen, a smirk coming over my face. “Oh, I shouldn’t be so sure, if I were you. But first, explain to me how counterfeit ladies’ hats, Austro-Hungarian twins, a Montigny mitrailleuse, and buckets of unaccountable fog can possibly square with your confounded theories. Enlighten me on that,” I plunked myself down on the scullery counter, “or I shall go no further.”
“This is no matter for levity,” huffed Shalaby, glancing with anxiety toward the double-bolted door. But when I crossed my legs and made to fish out Ned Kelly! he relented. “Very well. This house is inhabited by a Brocken spectre,” he hurried, “An apparition native to mountain fog and abandoned places—a doppelgänger. In German, ‘double-walker’. Using the reflective powers of water vapor, a
Brocken spectre absorbs the essence of a person or object and recreates it, in a manner of speaking.”
“A duplicator,” I concluded. “And the perfect counterfeiter. One might even say, the perfect spy.”
“You haf thirty seconds, eengleeshman.”
“By Jove, Fecklace, if you really have got a plan, now would be the time!”
“Quite.” An immense iron cauldron hung above the hearth. Far bigger than I could span my arms around, it was an even more suitable kettle than I’d hoped to find in the kitchen. Heaving it out on its bracket, I swiveled it to dangle in front of the door. “Right, hop in.” I clambered into the cauldron and held an arm out to help Shalaby.
“Are you deranged?” He put a tentative leg over the brim, overbalanced, and tumbled inside, struggling and scrabbling. “This is insanity. You’ll kill us both.”
I leaned over the brim and unbolted the door, revealing a squadron of identical Austro-Hungarians at the base of the stairs. They were loading the Webley-modified firing plate into the Montigny mitrailleuse, its barrel pointed straight up at us. “Don’t thank me—thank Ned Kelly! The Ironclad Australian Bushranger.” I swung us out over the stairs. Popped the bracket’s release hook.
A roaring blast of gunfire shook the basement as we thundered down the stairs. It pinged and popped and hammered against our makeshift ship of iron, just as the bullets of the Australian police had bounced off Ned Kelly’s jury-rigged iron armor in his glorious final stand.
Then there was the impact. A crash to rival the cannons of the apocalypse. Machine parts flew. Men hollered. And the iron cauldron rolled to a standstill.
We crawled out. The beautiful mitrailleuse lay in pieces. Of the Austro-Hungarians, nothing was to be seen but a series of large and telling puddles. Through the layers of fog that packed the basement wall to wall, the puddles sparkled in the light of a dozen kerosene lamps set down on tool benches cluttered with ladies’ hats.
“A workshop?” I coughed, waving a hand to clear the mist and debris.
“A counterfeiters’ den,” said Shalaby triumphantly. He stood up, wobbly on his feet and a trifle pale, but with a broad smile on his face. Poking open a door at the back of the room with his walking stick, he coughed at a renewed outpouring of mist. “This must be the source of the fog,” he guessed. “And if I’m not mistaken, of the Brocken spectre itself. The spectre is an apparition, an illusion of the mountain mist. It can’t exist outside an environment of water vapor. Someone has carried one back to England and made a home for it here. Thus, we must see if we can cut off the fog at its source.” He raised his stick and pointed the way.