There Will Be Phlogiston (29 page)

“I see,” said Ruben, at the same time thinking he
probably didn’t.

“Don’t go bobbing yourself, Ruben. He ain’t walking
no road to Damascus wif you. E’en half-dead wif the dustlung, there
ain’t no turning back for a man like that.”

“A man like what? It sounds to me that he did
dishonourable things in an honourable manner. We cannot always
choose what life makes us.”

“Oh, he chose. He knows wrong ’n’ right ’n’ the
difference betwixt ’em, same as me. And dishonourable fings is
dishonourable fings, don’t matter how you do ’em. Black Jack liked
what he did t’ folks. Kept ’em in line. Milord didn’t and did it
jus’ the same. Kept ’em in line e’en more. Y’flash?”

And suddenly Ruben remembered those cold words:
I
do what is necessary.

“Had enough, Preacher? A little
hinformation
goes a long way, don’t it?”

“Truthfully, I feel no more illuminated than I did
when I came here.”

“Mebbe it’s cos you don’t know what you’re looking
for. Mind you, neither does he. Y’make a pretty pair.”

Ruben’s hands clenched on the tabletop. “I don’t
understand how I’m supposed to help him.”

Nell shrugged. “Mebbe you ain’t.”

“I don’t believe that. I believe divine purpose
drives our actions, most particularly when events takes us down
paths we would not have previously contemplated.”

“Ruben Crowe, you’re sitting where the sun don’t
shine, talking to a woman who rules a court o’ vagabonds,
murderers, and thieves.” She stretched out one of her arms so the
candlelight twisted over her tattooed skin. “This is the story o’
my life. Written on my skin so it won’t belong to any bugger but
me. It’s everyone I’ve e’er killed. Every act o’ violence. Every
act o’ cruelty. Every hurt I’ve e’er endured. Every deed I’ve e’er
done, good or ill or in-fucking-different. I’m twenny-one last time
I reckoned it. And y’know sommat? It’s just some stuff I done.
There ain’t no purpose.”

“Someday you may look at it and feel otherwise.”

She snorted.

“It is, after all, a pattern of a kind. A rather
beautiful one.”

There was a long silence, and Ruben wondered if at
last he had gone too far.

But then she chuckled and slipped the pistol back
into her garter. “Well, give fanks for the purpose behind your
pretty glims cos I ain’t gonna cut ’em out. ’Tis a shame your
inclinations don’t favour me ’n’ mine.”

Ruben coloured a little. “I’m afraid they do
not.”

“All that fervour. I reckon you’d be a wild
ride.”

He had no idea how to answer that.

Nell smirked and brought her chair crashing back
onto its front legs. “Reckon we’re done ’ere, don’t you?”

They were letting him go? Ruben was still too wary
to feel much relief. Just bewilderment and a faint sense of
dissatisfaction. He had come here for something, and he had quite
spectacularly failed to either work out what it was or to get it.
But he’d pushed his luck enough for one day. Possibly one lifetime.
“Thank you for your time.” He rose carefully, keeping his hands
where everyone could see them, for there was no need to get shot or
knifed while he was making his escape. “One more question, if I
may?”

Nell gave him a slightly cold look. “S’pose I’ll
indulge you.”

“What . . . I mean . . . What manner of man is
he?”

“Ye what?”

“Who is he? What are his passions, his
pursuits?”

“He was the crime prince o’ Gaslight, Ruben. He
don’t have
hobbies
. Unless . . . knife work mebbe. I watched
him strip the skin from a man once. ’Twas a fucking
masterpiece.”

Ruben swallowed. “There is more to a person than
what they do.”

“Not him. I flipped his ken, y’know, after the
clappers took him. Nowt there but a bed to kip in and a chair t’
sit in.”

“That’s it? The sum of everything known about
him?”

She shrugged. “He weren’t someone you knew. Or cared
to.”

Suddenly one of the others spoke up. The man Nell
had called Jemmy Fellow. “He saw a bawd once a month. Same place,
same time, same way. Apparently used to wipe his prick off after,
like the bloke’s mouth was dirty.”

Ruben had no idea what to do with that information,
so he simply said, “Thank you.”

“And,” added Daisy Cutter, “he ne’er touched a drop
o’ liquor.”

So the man bought oral sex from a prostitute once a
month, didn’t like alcohol, and murdered people. Ruben was suddenly
consumed by the oddest desire to laugh. At what or whom, he didn’t
know.

“Oh aye.” Nell nodded thoughtfully. “He liked that
nasty smoky tea or what-ave-ye. Told you he was a queer ’un. Now,
if that’s everyfing, you was about to pike it.”

Ruben was, indeed, very ready to pike it. He bent
slowly to retrieve his sword and slipped it into its scabbard. But
just as he was reaching for the door handle, Nell’s voice made him
turn back.

“Oh, Preacher? Two more fings.”

“Yes?” This time he was probably definitely
dead.

“If you still got questions need answering, and you
will, ducks, you will, you should mebbe go see Lord Silver. And if
you come rahnd ’ere again, I’ll kill you m’self. Gottit?”

“I’ve got it.”

He didn’t run. That really would have been fatal.
But he felt like it. And the feeling didn’t abate until he was
standing in Lord Iron’s mansion, sealed behind its high metal
gates.

SNEAK PEEK: SQUAMOUS WITH A CHANCE OF RAIN

Dear Dr. Howard,

The enclosed comprises the complete personal
correspondence of Patient #137 prior to her admittance to Bethlem
Royal Hospital.

It is my hope that these documents will provide
valuable insight into the events immediately preceding her current
episode and may, therefore, usefully inform your treatment of
her.

Since arrival, her behaviour has been characterised
by long periods of docility, punctuated by outbursts of hysteria,
in the grip of which she has seduced into deviant behaviour a
nurse, a Quaker, and two representatives of the Fallen Women’s
Society.

She has also spoken in unknown, inhuman languages,
inscribed the floor with malignant, ever-shifting runes, and
revealed to the other inmates an infinite sky of alien
constellations, much to the distress of the staff.

I trust you will have greater success with her than
we have.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. L. Phillips

Ebook: ISBN: 978-1-62649-227-1

riptidepublishing.com/titles/squamous

My dearest Miriam,

I write to congratulate you on your wedding and to
send you all my very best hopes and wishes for your future
happiness. From the portrait you so kindly enclosed with your last
letter, I can certainly agree that Lord Bodgeringham possesses
several qualities valuable in a husband: to wit, extensive facial
hair, and a slightly confused expression. I am sure you will do
very well with him and still better with his thirty thousand a
year.

I do, however, wonder if you will sometimes have
occasion to recall that final summer we spent together at Miss
Githers’s Finishing School. I confess I miss our walks, and I think
of them often, particularly when the hour has grown late and I find
myself awake, alone, and idle. I think most particularly of the
delightful countryside in that part of the world, and the innocent
pleasures it afforded, for as you know, I am ravishingly fond of
landscapes. My thoughts dwell most especially upon that secret
place, in those days known only to myself I’ll warrant, where two
velvet-soft hills rose sweetly to enchant the viewer’s eye, and
below them, a tender valley with a hidden cleft where I oftentimes
did linger, plucking meadow flowers and other such girlish
fancies.

Unfortunately now is not a time for fancies, girlish
or otherwise, for misfortune has come upon me in something of a
deluge, and I find myself caught without an umbrella. In swift
succession then, I have lost both my position and an uncle—though I
confess I am rather more concerned about the former than the
latter, for Uncle Ridgewell was something of an eccentric who lived
much of his life abroad. You may recall that Miss Githers was
always chastising me for my unfeeling, unfeminine ways, but I
simply do not see how I can grieve someone I never met and who,
moreover, was so inconsiderate as to die a pauper.

I am honestly a little cross with him. In every
novel I have ever read, the untimely demise of a mysterious
relative has always led to the heroine inheriting a substantial
fortune, and all I have received for my trouble is a battered,
iron-banded travelling trunk full of papers, and a frankly
exorbitant bill for funeral expenses. I can only presume he was not
the right sort of uncle and that, perhaps, I am not the right sort
of heroine. I blame my hair, you know. If only it had been golden
instead of this dreary brown, and curly instead of straight, I
might have been a duchess by now.

Nor were the circumstances of my uncle’s death
propitious—although, then again, I imagine few are, at least for
the deceased. Accounts are somewhat equivocal, but from what I
understand, he lately returned from an expedition to the Dark
Continent in possession of a peculiar idol he had, shall we say,
obtained without consent from the native people of that region. I
understand that it has since been dispatched to the British Museum
for study, but I did find several sketches of it amongst his
papers. They depict a corpulent, somewhat anthropoid, bat-winged
creature, excessively festooned in tentacles. Even rendered ineptly
by my uncle’s pencil, it seems to radiate a profound and
all-consuming malevolence and an otherness that is itself a kind of
monstrousness. He depicted the entity sitting upon a pedestal
scrawled with indecipherable characters, which were also infused
with the same alien malignancy. It seemed as though Uncle Ridgewell
had made some attempt to translate them, but as my linguistic
abilities extend no further than conversational French (voulez-vous
coucher & etc., I’m sure you recall) I could decipher very
little. And, truthfully, I saw no reason to try, for the symbols
distressed me. They seemed so distant in both conception and
execution from anything we might understand as language, or even,
perhaps, thought: a way of being vastly and coldly beyond anything
human reason could encompass.

Forgive me, dear Miriam, I grow quite macabre, and I
have not yet come to the darkest part of this peculiar tale. My
uncle died no natural death. He was murdered by a group of
miscellaneous ruffians armed with shotguns, who burst into his
rooms late one night. Inspector Jarvis of Scotland Yard informed me
yesterday that they have taken the priest into custody, but the
dilettante has fled the country, and they have yet to catch the
accountant. What am I to make of this? What on earth could Uncle
Ridgewell have done to earn the ire of such disparate
individuals?