Part 2
My lungs burnt with hot dust and ached with heaven-knows-what-else I had inhaled in that great explosion. What is more I could not clear them, could not breathe at all. My face covered and my nose and mouth forced full with gritty debris, I began to choke, my body enveloped by feeble spasms, my arms and legs flailing.
My legs!
My arms!
I could move my arms! It took some concentration but I eventually twisted one arm until it was free of the constricting rubble and, still heaving for breath, began to scrabble insensibly at the grit and dust that covered my face. Then I was spitting dirt from my mouth and coughing the mud from my dry throat, wheezing for breath, snorting the soot from my nostrils and blinking through encrusted eyelids at a cloudy London sky!
I do not know how long I lay in the rubble there after that first good breath, but I sucked in the sweet air in mighty gasps, filthy faced and wide eyed, my arms held raised and twisted above me, my chest and abdomen still covered with what remained of Conel’s watch shop, and I praised all that was good that I was still alive. Oh, had I known then!
Freeing myself from the rubble, my attention turned immediately to the fate of my poor master. I looked around in the debris to ascertain the location of the cellar entrance, but there was just too much of it; far too much to have come from the collapse of our small shop. I stopped. And I gasped at the devastation surrounding me.
All of Clerkenwell lay in ruin and, for all I knew then, all of London! I could see clear along Clerkenwell Road to St John Street and from there to Smithfield Market, which still stood, mostly, twisted like the bones of some great dead beast fallen and flesh stripped in the ashes of my city. Through and beyond that only more rubble. No more St Bart’s, church and hospital both only so much crumbled brick and stone. No more the great dome of St Paul’s, although surely it lay cracked somewhere on the horizon which now stretched beyond the crushed girders of Smithfield and further beyond what once were Newgate Street and Cheapside, now just furrows in a field of devastation, as far as the northern embankments of Old Father Thames.
I must have started to wander then, dazed by my recent fortunate survival and bewildered by London’s apparent demise, for I found myself passing near the first fallen rafter of the old meat market. I believe I had it my mind to reach the river to see if it still flowed and to give myself some bearing, some perspective, some hope that not all was gone that I remembered. Certainly, the Thames must still run there, if not evaporated and turned to mud and dust itself, even if now but a tear track winding its way across the scar of my city.
But I was not to see the river at that time. As I made my way into the central thoroughfare through what remained of Smithfield market, on each side surrounded by the empty cells of the old butcheries, I thought I glimpsed movement and, perhaps, a flicker of light from within a meat locker, otherwise just darkness beyond the thick door which hung now gaping from a single hinge.
Until that point I had not thought on how utterly alone I seemed here in this ruined London. I had known men who had worked this market. Most mornings I would greet the familiar porters and packers as I made my way to work and had, whilst still apprenticed, and on at least one memorable occasion, drank beer with them at The Cow. Where were they now? Only dry bones buried beneath the devastation. And not only men were missing, not only women and children and all humankind, but life of any persuasion was gone. Neither fauna nor flora flourished here now, just dead old stones and inanimate dust.
“Ho!”
I shouted and moved closer to the locker, both afeared and hopeful of what or who might lie there.
There was the sound of movement again although I could see nothing in the blackness before me. The sound was nothing more than rubble moving against rubble it seemed, but in this still and silent wasteland it was enough to question my loneliness.
“I am here,” I exclaimed, though somewhat unsuredly and as much for my own affirmation as for any warning. Then I stepped through the doorway into the inky cell beyond.
Now, I am not a sporting man, but my senses had been sharpened by years of working with tiny movements and mechanisms, and for that I could at that moment count myself fortunate. For, no sooner had I stepped into the locker than I felt the quick movement of air behind me and without thinking I had thrown myself forward into the darkness. I landed prone and winded, but immediately twisted myself around on the floor to stare back towards the entrance to the locker. And the thing I found myself staring at was terrible indeed!
Sharp stumps of grey teeth set in the bloody gums of a lipless gorge of a mouth and eyes like ruddy slits it had! These were the sole features on the thing’s bald, dome-like head, which sat swollen like some immense boil on its broad, sloping shoulders. The rest of its bloated form was in mockery of the friendly high street butcher. You would not buy your sausages from this abomination! It was attired only in a ragged apron encrusted with the stains of its work and wielded a rust pocked cleaver, still glinting along its sharp edge, in the tumid digits of its left paw. Without doubt that was the source of the light flicker which had first attracted me here and of the movement I had sensed at my back which had made me cast myself headlong to the floor. If my senses had not been so acute I would not only be lying flat on the floor before the thing, but would already have fallen its victim, my skull cleft by that filthy chopper!
From its cavernous maw the butcher-thing uttered a keening moan. If it was once a human being I could not bring myself to think on what dreadful perversion had so stripped it of all humanity. In fact, as it began to advance towards me, raising its cleaver ever higher, gibbering and wailing, I was finding it hard to think on anything at all, save my own survival, the likelihood of which was, with every moment the thing lumbered closer, every second the cleaver raised higher, seeming increasingly unlikely.
In a panic, I tried to scrabble back into the darkness but found only hard stone at my back, foiling any escape in that direction. So, as the thing lowered above me, as its cleaver lifted about to strike, as I covered my face with my hands, truly believing that this would be the end of me, I am ashamed to say, I did shriek.
I was still shrieking when a dull thud, the clatter of metal on stone and then a larger thud at my feet quietened me.
There was utter silence again, although the beat of my quickened heart still throbbed against every one of my senses. It seemed I remained there for an eternity, curled and braced, whimpering and a shiver, with my hands still covering my face, until I eventually peeked from between shaking fingers to see my nemesis felled!
The pernicious thing’s puffy corpse lay spread on the floor before me, with a dark pool of drool and gore spreading from beneath its shattered face. Piercing a hollow in the back of the thing’s skull was a slim metal bolt, fletched with dark flights.
“It’s enough to make one turn vegetarian.”
I looked up at my saviour or, should I say, saviouress! For standing in the doorway now, formed in silhouette, was a sight as strange perhaps as my assailant had been terrifying. There was little doubt it was a woman. She may not have worn skirts, but whatever garb she wore clung tightly to her figure, as, in her shadow, I could discern the shape of her legs, the curve of her hip and breast, as clearly as if she had been the principal boy in a Drury Lane pantomime (though without the aid of opera glasses!). In her right hand, cocked level with her head, she held a miniature crossbow – the instrument of the villain’s doom!
The woman stepped over the body of my would-be murderer, leaned to reach her hand around the bolt in the monster’s head and began to tug it loose.
In the dim light I could now make out her features and apparel more clearly. She wore a coverall of what appeared to be black patent leather, so close fitted as to be almost a second skin. Her face, heart shaped and distinctly girlish (from what I could see of it), proved her to be no older than myself, indeed younger - she could not have been more than twenty years of age. And her h
air! Not only was it cropped close to her scalp like a prisoner of old Newgate, but it was the most unlikely colour – red, not ginger nor auburn, but truly red, like a damask rose or a pillar-box, or crimson like blood.
“There’ll be time to gawp later. Now! Move!”
And with that the woman wrenched the bolt from the butcher’s skull and, without looking at me, moved quickly back through the doorway, crossbow raised and ready. I scrambled to my feet and followed close after her. I did not need to be told to ask questions later.
I followed the woman through the ruins of the market hall and back the way I had first ventured, towards what remained of old Clerkenwell. She halted in the exact spot I had first come-to, amidst the fallen walls of Conel’s shop, and cast her face to the sky. She scanned about for several moments before shrugging and returning her attention to me, rather sternly, still holding the miniature crossbow cocked in her hand.
“I was tracking a gyro-plane heading north but had some difficulty with my auto-cycle and then was distracted by your foolish misadventure.”
I stared at her in utter bewilderment. A smile flitted furtively across her lips and her gaze softened, slightly.
“It’s gone now and there’s little I can do about that,” she said, lowering her weapon. “We will be safe here in the open, until nightfall at least. Do you know this place?”
“Why, yes, Miss,” I replied, eagerly. “This was once my master’s premises. I am – I was - a watchmaker by trade. But -”
She raised an attentive eyebrow.
“Well then, you’re in the fortunate position, sir, to benefit from my continued protection. My last clockworker was stolen from me some years ago and my auto-cycle is in need of some attention. Your name?”
“Maxwell Smith,” I answered, feeling compelled to give a clumsy little bow. “Indebted, Miss.”
“And I am K. Not Miss or Miss K, or even Mrs K. But simply K. And that’s not Kay, as in K-A-Y, but K, as in the letter K. Got it?”
She thrust her hand towards me and I accepted it with a tentative nod.
“Good. Then we are allies, for now at least. Now come and take a look at my auto-cycle – it’s concealed in the ruins there.”
K led me to the crossroads with St John Street where, hidden behind a low wall, was her strangely named contraption, the auto-cycle she had mentioned was in need of my attention. My heart sank on seeing it. On first sight the auto-cycle appeared to be nothing more than a motor-cycle, and I a watchmaker not an engineer! It seemed I might be of less use to my new found protectoress than she believed and heaven knows what she would do with me then.
My fears were allayed, however, when, K having loosened a catch on the auto-cycle’s cylindrical, barber’s pole patterned fuel tank, was revealed not a receptacle for motor-spirit at all, but the casement for a clockwork engine! Its cog work was dark and oily and at first glance, to my keen eye, oversized and cumbersome. And yet, although I was accustomed to working on more delicate mechanisms, my mind had immediately started to focus on the intricacies of its movement.
K rummaged in the panniers hanging to either side of the cycle’s saddle and produced a large roll of oiled cloth. She unwound the cloth next to where I had crouched to inspect that clockwork marvel more readily, to reveal a full set of watchmaker’s tools in various grades (some larger than I had ever had need of before), as well as a number of tools I did not recognise, nor could I then discern their function. I chose a likely tool and began to probe at what I was to discover, beneath the grimy grease that so clogged its workings, was a most fantastical device indeed.
And as I worked, K told something of the strange world in which I now found myself. A world which was at once so very familiar, though in ruin, and then again so very different from the London of 1908 from which I had, although at that point I could not be sure of it, been so curiously cast.
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