Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.) Page 15

  Burton’s only reply was the washboard scrape of his breathing.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’ll say what I must say. Our marriage, sir, is not a success. Can you deny it? I want for us to come to an arrangement, sir. It will not cost you overmuch.’

  Shush, said the river behind her. Sshh, sshh, sshh.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ she went on, becoming more eager. She was spurred on by his stupefied silence, by the impossibility of his interrupting or contradicting her. ‘I’ll tell you, husband, my mother was speaking today of her grandchildren. Do you find that notion as absurd as I do myself, sir?’ There was a sort of triumph in her body now, in her posture, in the fire in her heart. She could not contain herself. She hopped off the desk, and began pacing up and down. ‘The idea of us having children, of you and I. Of my carrying your child in my belly, sir - for that is where I would carry it. I’d sooner,’ she said, with a little spurt of anger, ‘sooner eat one of your Lilliputian workmen whole than endure such a thing. But she would talk of it, she would prattle on, you know my mother sir.’

  She stopped, smoothed her face with the flat of her hand.

  ‘I do not mean to lose my composure, Jonathan,’ she said, more quietly. ‘Let me tell you of something I read lately. I read it in a book you yourself purchased for me-I may, I can add truthfully, thank you for your gifts of books. They at any rate have been much appreciated. There is, you know, a species of hymenoptera of which I read, and saw colour illustrations, in a volume by Fabre. A species of wasp, sir, called the burrowing wasp. In order to provide a ready supply of fresh food, of fresh meat, for her offspring after her own decease, this creature utilises her knowledge of the subject of anatomy. She gathers other insects and spiders by paralysing them, and the touch of her abdominal sting is so precise, sir, that she can pierce with it exactly the line of insectile nerves upon which the power of locomotion depends - but none of the other vital functions. The captured prey is paralysed, sir, but otherwise wholly alive and sensible. The wasp may then lay her eggs upon this living creature, such that the larvae, when hatched, have before them a docile and inoffensive quarry incapable of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder.’

  She stopped. ‘Fresh,’ she said again, and now the sibilance of the river’s noise through the open window seemed to echo her. Fresh.

  Fresh.

  ‘I fear,’ she said, subdued now, ‘that I am not quite making myself plain to you.’

  She made her way to the desk again and sat upon it. On an impulse she picked up the glass and took a swig of the fluid inside; it scorched down her throat, and revived her a little. But a slump followed on. It was late, a long way past midnight, and she realised belatedly that she was very tired. Perhaps this interview was nothing but an absurdity, nothing but empty noise. Burton was surely taking nothing of it in. And, besides, was she even certain herself what her words signified? It was hard to put into words, and doubly hard to explain to a man such as Burton.

  ‘Are you hearing me,’ she asked. ‘Husband?’

  And there did seem to be a dreamy, distant sort of consciousness in Burton’s eyes. One of his slack arms twitched, and his head lolled back the other way.

  Eleanor yawned. It was one of those yawns that possess the whole head, like a malign spirit, and cannot be turned away. Her mouth stretched so wide the hinges of her jaw hurt. She finished with a shudder, and closed her mouth. Perhaps she should call a cab, should return home.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘we should talk tomorrow.’

  She stopped. The door to the office was yawning, the dumb objects of the world mimicking her own actions. It swung slowly open until it gaped completely open. Nobody came through. The action had, it seemed, been effected by a ghost, by a mere ghost. A perturbation in the fabric of things. Eleanor sat very still, sat frozen, very very still. The German word, she knew, was Poltergeist. Geist, she assumed, was a variant of ghost. She did not know, and could not guess, Polter.

  A frisson hurried up Eleanor’s backbone. Fear bristled in her chest. She was, sharply, vividly awake again.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Who’s there?’

  But the door stayed open, and nobody visible came through. Her husband snorted, the noise as startling as a whipcrack. He began receding. Her eyes were surely playing tricks with her: he was diminishing, shrinking in front of her, still sitting motionless in his chair, his eyes still staring at her.

  She looked down towards the floor. A dozen - more - of the little people were at the base of the wheeled chair. They were pushing, pausing, pushing, in silent unison. With each heave chair and passenger moved backwards, over the floor, through the doorway. Eleanor could not move. She stared, mesmerised. The chair rattled over the rim of the door, and disappeared.

  She was alone.

  For long moments she sat. Her husband, stupefied with alcohol, had been taken by his own workers. They could not intend him good. Surely, they intended him harm. How could it be otherwise? She ought to rouse herself, ought to do something. And yet: the most tenacious lethargy had taken her body, had sunk its teeth into her very bones. She could barely lift her hand to wipe away the curls from her forehead. What could she do? She had herself released the Lilliputians from their night-time cages. But she had not anticipated that they might act in this manner. Surely the few she had released had now released all the little people. What business did they have with Burton? Why were they drawing him away?

  A series of sharp knocks was audible outside, as of somebody stomping rapidly down the wooden stairs.

  With an heroic effort she shook her limbs free of their tiredness - paralysis - and slid from the desk. She stood for a moment, and then drifted forward. It was all dreamlike. Had she fallen asleep? Perhaps this was all a dream. Indeed, it lacked the tang of reality.

  Through the door, from the bright lit room into the darkness beyond, she almost stumbled over the chair. It sat, empty, on the little landing at the top of the wooden stair. She shoved it, so that it rolled back into Bates’s room, and turned to look down upon the factory floor.

  A fire had been lit. She could see its flame, masked by some containing metal structure, in the centre of the manufactory space. Looking again, she could see little people hurrying up and down miniature stairways and ladders, evidently designed for their use, urgently pursuing some mysterious business of their own. It was not clear what this might be.

  The whole was a phantasmagoria. The littleness of the Lilliputian workers gave a feeling of forced perspective, as if she were watching the operations of some gigantic forge manned by full-sized men from a great, great distance away. As if she were floating in the clouds.

  Ratlike motion at the foot of the stairs attracted her notice. There was the body of her husband on its back, slumped like a discarded sack of grain. Lilliputians hurried around it, clambering up onto its arms and chest.

  There was a gleam in the centre of the room. Eleanor saw a great wooden lid, ten foot broad, swinging free from a mighty cauldron: the little people must be moving it in some mechanically assisted manner, for it was so large that even a full-sized man would have found it difficult. A bright disc, flattened to an oval by the angle of her point of view, was visible beneath the lid. It shone, like the retina of a cat caught in a beam of light - the back of a cat’s eye being provided, as Eleanor knew, with a reflective layer called tapetum lucidum, ‘bright carpet’. Six Lilliputians, wearing strange headgear, appeared on the lip of the cauldron, and pulled together on a lever; again, evidently provided for their use, for it operated a pole via a series of levers, and the pole stirred the silver gleaming material in the cauldron with easy strokes. Something similar must have facilitated the removal of the cauldron’s lid.

  Even from her distance Eleanor could sense the heat now emanating from this shining fluid; and she understood that this must be molten metal, that the device must be some manner of crucible. She knew that Burton’s establishment produced a variety of fine-engineered metal device
s, and so (she supposed) there must be equipment for firing and moulding metal. This, it seemed, was what the workers had activated.

  A boom, long as a ship’s mast, swung slowly through the space below her, supported on wires from the shadow-obscured ceiling. Lilliputians were hauling on wires, she could see, manoeuvring the long spar into position. One end of it fell and slotted into a notch beside the cauldron. Its far end moved slowly, and then stopped. It stopped directly above the supine body of her husband, on the floor at the foot of the stairs.

  The lid of the cauldron swung, slowly, back into position. The silvery gleam of liquid metal was eclipsed. The room became darker; yet there was still enough light for Eleanor to watch two Lilliputians who were sitting astride the pole that had been positioned above Burton’s head. They scrambled along it, pulling themselves forward hand-over-hand, and fitted some snake-like appendage to the end of the pole; it fell in chiming links onto Burton’s head, draping itself over his forehead and past his ear. Other Lilliputians pulled it up, and positioned it carefully at Burton’s open mouth. Burton shuddered, but did not move, as the little people forced the end of this tube between his lips.

  Why did he not move? He must be tied. The Lilliputians had tied him.

  There was a strange sense of burning anticipation in Eleanor’s stomach; a sensation indistinguishable from heartburn, or the butterflies-in-the-midriff that young girls often experience. She understood, now, what was happening; or she thought she did.

  The little people were pushing hard on the tube, forcing it into Burton’s throat. His body twitched, shuddered, but did not move. He was clearly tied.

  Eleanor’s hands were gripping the rail at the top of the stairs.

  She said to herself, the words forming themselves distinctly in her head: I must do something. I am a woman, and could not combat these little folk; but I could call the nightwatchman from the front door. Surely I could make my way through the body of the manufactory, and alert the nightwatchman. He could rescue Burton; or perhaps fetch police or militia. This could all be stopped. I must do something, to stop this, or they will kill my husband.

  But the weird, half-lit phantasmagoria continued. Eleanor did not move. Her fingers gripped the rail at the top of the stairs.

  There was a splash of light from the cauldron in the middle of the room, like a lightning’s flash. But it was enough, somehow, for Eleanor to see Burton beneath her in etched detail. The strands of the hair from his head pinned into the wooden boards of the floor, strands of wire tethering his wrists and ankles. Little people swarming over him.

  Her glance travelled up the length of the pole to the central mass of machinery. The molten metal would slide down that pole, and into her husband. This would kill him. This would surely kill him. She had to do something.

  And yet she did not move. She should fight them. Wrench Burton free. But could she combat a whole population of them? They were small, but legion; and she a woman. What could she do?

  Then, nipping at her mind, came the thought: with Burton dead the factory would be mine. With my husband dead, his wealth would be mine. And, accompanying this thought - the image so vivid upon her inner eye that it almost seemed as if the spirit of the man had suggested it to her - came a memory of the handsome face of Count Baron Idigon von Leloffel.

  She hated this thought, for it meant that her inaction was no longer merely a strange dream-trance, a leaden lethargy in her bones. It was also carried by the base motivation of self-interest. Now the action of saving her husband’s life would also be the action of depriving herself of wealth and comfort. If she did nothing, then the Lilliputians would lift from her life the great weight of her husband’s corporeality. Each of the swarming little people would be metamorphosed into a golden coin, and all the coins would hurry into her purse.

  All she needed to do was to stand, motionless.

  She couldn’t simply stand there and watch her husband murdered. And yet, she did not seem to be able to move. Frozen, statuesque. The baseness of this motive, revealed to her then - of this motive of personal gain - corroded her thoughts. Base, vulgar: money could not be allowed to overcome her breeding, the proper thing to do.

  Still she could not move.

  But she was asleep, surely. That must be it. Her whole body as soundly asleep as a child; and yet she was awake in her mind, in her eyes. ‘No,’ she croaked, trying to break the malign charm that held her solid. Lot’s wife. ‘No.’ But her voice was far too small to carry.

  There was a pause. Eleanor could see that the little people were waiting now for the metal to heat to a properly fluid state. Every now and again the body of Burton shuddered a little, as if he were straining against his bonds; but he was well fastened, and besides which he was very drunk. Drunk and incapacitated.

  The great lid swung away from the cauldron, and a breath of heat reached Eleanor’s face. The Lilliputians moved the great ladle, by some complex of levers and pulleys, stirring the ingredients. The lid swung back into place.

  She could pull her hand free. She was surely capable of that. She could, if she were to try, take her hand from the balustrade. From there she could move other portions of her body. She could take the steps, one after the other, down the stairs and over the floor to the door. The nightwatchman was waiting there. He, surely, could fight through and free his master - kicking and slapping at the Lilliputians and pulling Burton free from his restraints. It would take a minute, at most. She would do it.

  She would do it.

  She did not move.

  And, with a guttering slurp, a trickle of metal flashed in the tube. It slid further and further along the pole - Eleanor could see now that this pole was actually an open-topped narrow duct of some kind. The gleaming grew and grew, like an angel’s spear of light, longer and longer, and finally it reached the end and ducked down. Burton’s body heaved, his fat stomach bucking up and down; once, twice, and then he was still. Metal appeared at the corner of his mouth, and spilled scaldingly down the sides of his face. Cries, stifled, high-pitched and small but nonetheless audible, sounded across the factory. There was a pause; some barrier must have been inserted in the tube to prevent the flow of the metal, although Eleanor did not see where this blockage had been effected. The little figures on Burton’s body were pushing at something, pushing (she could see now) to force the tube deeper down her husband’s throat all the way down, practically into his very stomach. More cries, and the metal flowed again.

  Eleanor’s knuckles were hurting.

  She released her grip on the wood of the balustrade.

  Then, with the uncanny swiftness that often characterised their motions, the Lilliputians were finished. They hauled the tube upwards, and its remaining metal drained back into the cauldron. The spar swung away into the shadows, and little people hurried to and fro. With a loud plock, like a door latch clicking home, the fire underneath the cauldron was extinguished. Eleanor took a deep breath. The air tasted strange; a metallic scent, and the distinct odour of roasted pork, the sort of smell one notices when one passes a chophouse.

  There was a scraping sound, and Eleanor looked down. Burton’s body, released from its ties, was moving. Her heart thumped; was he still alive? Crawling over the floor? But, no, his motion was being imparted to him by teams of Lilliputians.

  Where were they moving him?

  Eleanor realised that her legs were unsteady beneath her. She stepped, precariously, to the top of the stairway. She could, of course, hurl herself down - an act of suttee, of sorts, to complement her husband’s death. Perhaps the Lilliputians would even clear her corpse away, as they seemed to be doing with Burton.

  But instead she sat, as heavily as a toddler falling onto its behind, on the top step. Her head felt waverly. The dream, if that was what it was, had taken an unpleasant turn. Burton’s corpse continued inching, like a slug, towards the wall. Lilliputians hurried hither and thither over the floor, in some commotion like a nest of spiders disturbed by a farmer’s spade and turn
ed into the light. Hands, Eleanor thought. They were called hands, the workers in a factory. And this was part of the uncanny unpleasantness of the Lilliputians themselves. It was as though various portions of a full-size human body had broken off and assumed independent life. They were like hands and feet, like noses and ears, given independent life by a sorcerer, scurrying about on their mysterious errands.

  With a start, Eleanor stood and hurried down the stairs, but at the bottom she stopped. All the Lilliputians had frozen in their places, scattered about the half-lit floor, and all were looking up at her. Only those tugging her husband’s body carried on, heaving together in little pulses. She stared at the body. From where she was now, she could see the destination: a sort of trap opened in the floor at the back of the room leading down into the river. They were going to dump Burton’s body into the Thames. His belly was filled with metal; he would sink to the bottom. He would be swallowed by the mud at the bottom of the river.

  It would be as if he had never been.