Fiendish Schemes (13 page)

“Open your eyes!” The bearded figure thrust the substance in question closer to my face. “It’s bread!”

“Yes, I see that—”

“Wheat! Grain!
Agriculture!
” His imprecations became even more forceful. “That is the curse laid upon our brow.” Crumbs dispersed in the drawing-room’s scented air as his grasp tightened upon the spotted lump. “Before the introduction of this poisonous concoction, human beings roamed free upon the face of the Earth. They ate their fill of Nature’s bounty, and lived in tranquil equality, with no man the master of another.” A fervent tone heightened Carnomere’s voice; his eyes misted, as though contemplating that vanished realm of communitarian bliss. “Now a polished boot stands upon the throat of the masses, their hollow-eyed children starving for exactly that which enslaves them.”

“Bravo! Go to it!” Fusible clapped his pudgy hands together in delight. “I must confess, I greatly admire the passion with which some of my fellow oligarchs inveigh against those social arrangements that keep them comfortably elevated above the rabble. Seems deucedly sporting of them.”

“You mock me, sir.” The viscount turned his fierce and shag-browed glare upon the other. “A day will come when we are all cast down to the level we deserve.”

“Perhaps.” A passing butler had renewed the wineglass in Fusible’s hand. “I await the event with little if any trepidation.”

“But those primitive lives of which you speak—” I attempted to steer the conversation back to safer and less personal territory. “Were they not, as the philosophers state, rather on the nasty, brutish, and short side?”

“Stuff and nonsense, man.” Small creatures seemed to be evicted from Viscount Carnomere’s tangled locks as he decisively shook his head. “Rhetoric from those who would keep our species shackled to the processes of the farming combines and their masters. Who are, I would have you know, mere
parvenus
in the course of human history, recently arrived to work their iniquities. Even the most learned biblical scholars concede that post-lapsarian Mankind existed in the Earth’s nourishing plains and gardens for millennia before the Mesopotamian basin was bound up and given over to the planting and harvesting of these wicked grains.” He returned the mouldy lump of bread to his pouch, the better to focus my attention by laying a prophetic hand upon my shirtfront. “Even as we speak, men of the greatest learning are examining the bones that have been dug up from our ancestors’ stone-laden graves. And what do they find?”

“I have no idea.”

“Exactly this, Dower: that our forebears were of sturdier frame and longer lives, free of the debilitating infirmities that have reduced the representatives of our modern civilization to such a rank and puny condition. Go to the streets, man, and observe your fellow creatures!” One bare, dirt- streaked hand pointed to the townhouse’s night-filled windows. “Witness their degenerate state! Can you really credit that these bantam cockneys and their pale, fragile offspring are the zenith of human evolution? Tenacious and feisty they might very well be—and given the harsh, scrabbling conditions they endure, ’tis little wonder that they are so—but their matchstick bones can be snapped between one’s thumb and forefinger, as though they were but kindling. And of course, this febrile phenomenon is not limited to the British Empire; one might find our natives’ scrawny cousins in every land in which the demon
Agriculture
has taken root.”

I entertained no desire to debate the contention with him. “Am I correct in assuming that there is some remedy that you propose?”

“
Remedy,
you say? Rather more than that, you may rest assured. What is needed is more than some slight and ultimately ineffectual remediation.”

“You’ll love this,” noted Fusible as he plucked another glass from the silver tray passing near him.

Viscount Carnomere pressed forward, in the full vigour of those primeval virtues he embodied in himself. “It’s
Revolution
that is required.” His crusted hand thrust with greater firmness against my chest, staggering me backward a step. “Nothing less than a complete renovation and restoration of those dietary practices which once ennobled our species.”

“No more than that?” I confess to have felt a little disappointment at his pronouncement. Despite the ferocity of his primitive appearance, he seemed suddenly diminished in my regard. Were all his shouts and seething, teeth-clenched condemnations nothing more than an over-enthused variation on the fastidious sermons of those cranks pushing forward their brothy cures for Mankind’s ills? “I take it that you would have us eat no more bread. Please refrain from bringing out that example you showed before. What would you have us consume in its place?”

“I would forbid you not just bread—that filthy stuff!—but all grains of any sort; in truth, any product of human cultivation.” To my concern, Carnomere reached again into the crudely fashioned pouch and extracted a darker and seemingly more fibrous object. He raised it to his mouth, his impressively white and sturdy teeth sinking into its mass, and I recognized it as some sort of dried animal flesh, such as the tribes of distant lands render for their sustenance. Chewing with evident relish, he offered the gobbet to me. I declined with a politely raised hand. “You do yourself a disservice,” he said as he took another bite for himself. “This is what you need, to restore yourself to the full flush of radiant health. Meat! That’s the prescription for all Mankind—meat, I say!”

“Very well—”

“It is what our forefathers ate, and upon which they flourished!” His eyes widened with fervour. “Even now, there are tribes in farflung corners of the globe, who have not fallen under those delusions that compel their civilized brethren to grub rows and trenches in the hard, stubborn soil, all for compelling grasses to spring up and be ground between our molars, as though we were cows rather than free and heroic human beings. And we are informed by our own adventurers and travelers, when they come upon such peoples, either in the frozen north or the more temperate lands about the Equator, that they are not only possessed of more robust health than ourselves, but of more innate happiness as well. For the economic strictures required by agricultural practices have not forced them to divide into masters and peasants—pharaohs with whips and flails in their hands, sneering at the masses toiling in the riparian muck, all to fill the granaries upon which so much self-glorifying magnificence is based. Rather, our so-called primitive cousins have no call to lord it over one another, being content as they are to catch one of the running beasts of the wild, rend its flesh from the bones, and share it amongst themselves.”

He stopped for breath, creating a hiatus enduring long enough for me to hazard an enquiry. “And these wild tribespeople of which you speak—are they entirely carnivorous, by nature or inclining habit?”

“For the most part.” Carnomere shrugged. “They might throw in the odd bit of fruit on occasion, and whatever other vegetation is capable of being consumed in its raw state, with no necessity of cooking or otherwise moderating the toxins that make so many other plants unfit for the human digestion. But the blood that courses through the veins of such fortunate people is infused with the strength that comes from animate creatures. Of all forms and sizes, you must bear in mind; a wren is hardly the smallest fluttering bit to make its way into their grateful stomachs. There is a good deal of nutrition to be found in insects and those other creatures that we ignorantly describe as worthless vermin.”

“I will try to remember that.”

“You should.” Carnomere’s temper had ebbed to a more affable state. “For if you do, you will be in excellent company. The enthusiasm for a healthily primitive mode of existence is sweeping through all levels of society; it is hardly limited to those such as myself, with the financial wherewithal to indulge in practices that the unenlightened might regard as dangerously perverse, rather than merely eccentric.”

A singular vision appeared in my mind’s eye. “Do they all . . .” I searched for a polite manner of framing my enquiry. “Garb themselves as you do? That is . . . the furs and such-like.”

“Much depends upon the weather,” allowed Carnomere. “Our ancestors were a sturdier breed, and could turn their faces toward degrees of inclement weather at which we, their weaker progeny, would quail. I confess that as comfortable as these rugged furs might be while standing in a well-heated drawing-room, during the winter months I have been known to supplement them with a full overcoat and a pair of waterproof Indian rubber boots, at least when out of doors.”

“Very wise, I’m sure.”

“Yes, given my age,” conceded the viscount, “and the late stage in life in which I discovered the manifest virtues of primitive manners and a carnivorous diet. But I have hopes for the generations to come. Especially those of the lower classes, as we characterize their position in the social order. Accustomed as they are, both male and female, to hardships of which we the elite generally know little, the return to ancestral ways is more easily accomplished by them, and with a deal less grumbling and whining every time the sky clouds over. I am greatly heartened by the advent of these
meatpunks,
as they are sometimes described.”

“Pardon me? ‘Meatpunks’—did I hear that aright?”

“Amusing, isn’t it?” From behind his effulgent beard, Carnomere bestowed upon me a smile more suited to an Afric savage. “The coinage might be ill-educated—I would have preferred something derived from one of the classical tongues—but evidences a certain rude cleverness. As did the person from whom I first heard it, who assured me similar formulations will soon be an essential element of the Queen’s English—combining as they do an obvious prefix with the syllable I have been given to understand connotes a somewhat raucous enthusiasm for that upon which the greater society still looks askance.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “there are reasons for such a negative regard.”

“Mere prejudice; that is all.” Carnomere thumped the less lethal end of his spear upon the floor. “And an unthinking faith in the over- vaunted Future, which continually entices us with its promises, then cruelly disappoints as it shambles into reality as the dull, threadbare Present we must endure. The meatpunks, by contrast, hurl themselves headlong into a glorious, blood-reddened Past. If, in their ragged fancies, they get a few details wrong . . .” He shrugged. “Such seems an error easily overlooked.”

Another vision rolled through my inward perception, as though the curve of bone behind my brow were the fluttering panel upon which a magic lantern show was displayed. For a moment, I did not see the glittering, affable assemblage in a fashionable room all about me, but instead the dark London streets, the night barely interrupted by feebly guttering lamps. The shadows that wavered across the locked and boarded storefronts were cast by the flaring torches held aloft by a gleeful laughing mob, all clad as Carnomere was, in ragged furs and tribal paraphernalia, their tangled, matted locks streaming behind them as they ran; their faces shone with the bright grease of recent feasting, the bloodied heads of the aristocracy’s lapdogs and housecats swaying as pendants, gnawed rib bones strung and clattering upon these new savages’ bared chests. The shrieks and cries of the resurgent ages swept over me, ocean-like, until I could hear nothing else. . . .

“Come along, Dower.” A familiar voice succeeded in piercing the deep fog by which my thoughts had been engulfed. “Let’s leave Carnomere to bend some other poor bastard’s ear.”

I blinked my vision clear and found myself being dragged by the arm toward some other part of the townhouse, away from the drawing-room and the guests assembled there.

“He’s a harmless enough old duffer,” continued Lord Fusible, “but of course, completely mad, with all that carnivorous chatter of his.” Gesturing with a redolent cigar, Fusible drew me on through a dimly lit hallway, more functional than decorative in appearance. “I trust you found him amusing.”

“Not in the slightest—” Keeping up with the other’s vigorous pace rendered me somewhat breathless. “I wasn’t certain whether to judge him pathetic or terrifying.”

“Eh? Is that a fact?” Fusible exhaled a great plume of grey smoke from his cigar. “No matter, then. I am sure that you will find that which I am about to display to you to be far more diverting. But of course, anything to do with making great piles of money is
always
so.”

He pushed open a door festooned with iron rivets and shoved me through before him. For a moment, I gazed about in utter darkness, then Fusible ignited a glass-chimneyed lantern and carried it farther into the space.

“There!” The lantern’s glow was sufficient to reveal an object somewhat taller than the man himself. “What do you think of
that
! Bloody marvelous, isn’t it?”

A moment longer was required for me to discern the exact lineaments of the thing, whatever it might be. At last I realized that it had all the appearances of a lighthouse—the tapering cylindrical form, the windows circling about the top level—though in greatly miniaturized stature. Specifically, it represented one of the so-called
walking light
variety, complete to the articulated crab-like legs extending from its base.

“That one we just launched out there in Cornwall—rubbish!” Fusible’s disdain was evident in the manner in which he flicked the cigar’s ashes away from himself. “This is the ruddy great bastard with which we’ll absolutely make our fortunes.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” The object, though of an impressive size and detail for a model, did not seem much different from all the other lighthouses I had glimpsed in my lifetime. “It’s very . . .
nice
and all, but—”

“By God, you’re slow in the uptake.” Fusible pityingly shook his head. “This will completely revolutionize our business’ operations.”

I was still somewhat baffled by his assertions. The possibility arose in my mind that I had misunderstood his presen tation of the object before us, and what I had taken to be a model was in reality the thing itself. Conceivably, a human being of adult stature might have fitted himself inside it, though the structure would have fitted tight about a man’s shoulders. Perhaps this was some essential alteration in Phototrope Limited’s future inventory of devices, and henceforth all its lighthouses would be of such relatively abbreviated dimensions. A vision came to me of swarms of such little towers clambering over the sea-coast’s wave-dashed rocks, very like the crustaceans they resembled, each holding its cramped operative and setting up
en masse
to blink their tiny lights toward the mercantile ships sailing past.