Legerdemain Chapter 8
Title: Legerdemain or The Enchanting of Charles East
Genre: Fantasy, Steampunk, Alternate History
Rating: PG- some swears. Ladies cover your sensitive ears.
Summary: In 1800s London-Aldwych, stage magic always comes second to the scientific and engineering advancements that are quickly becoming the new marvel of the age. But Charles East (The Enchanting East, Monday-Saturday at 1:30PM, half-price on Sundays at 4PM) stumbles upon other magic that is practiced by an altogether other sort of Londonite. And sometimes when you pull a rabbit out of a hat, there is no place to put him back.
Notes: I love that I get the opportunity to steampunk out Thomas Nelson. For confused people, the Nelson’s in London-Aldwych is the U.K Thomas Nelson, now existing as Nelson Thornes. NOT Thomas Nelson in America that is mainly religious texts. (only in America, oy…)
Big thanks to obseletevulture and my content beta/my roommate for their help with this chapter!
It was difficult getting up the next day, mostly because Charles had been an idiot and fallen half in love with the Stirling, which meant he’d stayed in the shop working on the Dicer under Henry’s dictatorial rule for the rest of the day and well into the evening.
Charles stayed in bed a moment longer and looked up at the ceiling even as the Merry George bellowed at him to ‘get his arse out of bed.’ What exactly was he going to use the Stirling for if he managed to get it fixed up? He certainly didn’t have anything that could process that kind of power into something productive. Perhaps he would have to go back to the scrap yard for more parts, which might have been part of the motive behind Thomas Finley’s suspiciously reasonable asking price. Charles banged the back of his head into his pillow and called himself three kinds of idiot before kicking off the blankets and forcing himself to get up before all the good books were taken.
Charles remembered Thomas Nelson before it had become mechanised; it had been a cosy store with a small staircase jammed into the wall and rows of bookshelves crowded together in a way that barely fit one person in between. Although he admitted the new store was much better during the rush on sale days, he missed the close familiarity of the old one and the feel of reaching out and touching books just for the sake of sliding his fingers across their spines.
The clearance books stacked outside in boxes were still the same because Nelson’s was always eager to get rid of old stock at the beginning of each month, and he poked around disinterestedly amongst them for a few minutes before going in. Inside the bookshelves were all pressed together in a solid row, and there were machine treads in the floor for the helperbots that ran from the front desk to the shelves. Charles managed to get a hold of a book directory and spent some time leafing through it for anything that looked interesting. There were some manuals that would possibly come in useful for fixing the Stirling and the newest book by Joseph Crowther. He knew he couldn’t buy it anyway- usually he waited till he could buy used copies of any books he wanted, and the Stirling had discounted the possibility of him eating anything decent for the next few months, much less buying Crowther first-editions.
But he had some time before he had to go into work, and it was quite possibly embarrassing to admit that his head jerked up every time the shop door opened. So he wrote down the serial numbers of some books that looked interesting, returned the directory at the counter, and punched the codes into one of the free helperbots, who immediately zoomed off to the shelves to retrieve his books. It click-clacked off to the scientific manuals section, rolled one of the bookcases out, and checked the serial numbers riveted in punch code onto the shelves before reaching up with its telescoping arms to take a book off a high shelf. It dropped it in the neat metal basket welded to its stomach before sliding the shelf back and hooking itself onto one of the horizontal treads to get into the new fiction section.
Charles fondly watched it work- there was a reason he preferred robots over automatons. Bots did as they were told without pretending to be human or mangling every voice command they were given. Perhaps it wasn’t so irritating that automatons tried to be human but that they behaved far too much like humans, and what was the point in replacing a human worker if customers still got the same kind of rubbish?
There was quite a lot of philosophical talk about what exactly differentiated a machine, a robot, and an automaton. Charles thought it was very simple- machines were stupid and reliable, automatons were irritating as hell, and anything else that was meant to be slightly human but had the good sense not to talk was a robot. He, Henry, and Margaret were still debating where exactly Eichmann’s sweeper stood in the classification. Charles had a theory that it was an automaton that had been so annoying that they had taken off its voicebox and arms when they had overhauled it. Henry maintained that it was the bastard child of a washing machine and an exceptionally bloody-minded tax lawyer.
And that was the other thing about automatons that slightly disturbed him now and then. With the increasingly low cost of vocoders and the current research into using mechanical parts to replace lost arms and legs, he wondered if there would come a day the difference between automatons and humans blurred. He wondered if engineers fancied themselves gods now, and the sixth day was rushing up to meet them far too soon. And perhaps Charles really was reading too much Joseph Crowther for his own good.
Henry’s joke should hadn’t been completely off the mark either- Charles remembered a newspaper article not long ago about Dr. Dietrich Mayfield, a genius in the field of humanoid automata development, who had actually married one of his long-term projects, an experimental stenography interface that he’d named Lydia. From the picture in the paper, it had been an astonishingly human-looking automaton with arms and legs and beautifully fashioned facial features with large blue glass eyes. Mayfield said Lydia’s walking mechanism was still in development, so he and a lab assistant carried her wherever she needed to be, which had made carrying her over the threshold a bit less romantic than they’d envisioned.
Lydia had been a fixture in Mayfield’s lab for two years, where she had been placed beside his chalkboard and built to take down any notes he dictated to her in beautiful Spencerian handwriting. ‘And then I suddenly realised I was content to spend all day talking to her in my lab,’ Mayfield had said in the article. ‘Lydia understood my work, and did not try to call me away or interfere as other wives would have. She was simply the only creature I could ever see myself spending the rest of my life with.’
The article had captured quite a good picture of them right after wedding, Lydia looking beautiful in white lace and Mayfield beaming up at her and clasping her hand, the one that wasn’t shaped to hold pens and other writing implements. Of course the wedding registrar’s office had protested strongly against it, but then Mayfield had pressed Lydia’s hand and she had shed two oily black tears- the local chaplain, who’d once been a mechanic himself, had been quite moved and declared he would not make a lady cry on her wedding day. Perhaps in light of Mayfield’s widespread reputation, the registrar’s office had muttered about the harmless eccentricities of scientists and looked the other way.
Charles supposed it didn’t adversely affect Dr. Mayfield’s still brilliant work, and there were stranger things in this world, so he wished Dr. and Mrs. Mayfield the best. All Margaret had wanted to know was if Mayfield went to bed with it, which had made Charles go white and then completely red.
“M’not drunk enough for this,” Henry had mourned, looking traumatised, and had ordered another pint from the barkeep.
Charles snickered to himself, and found the other bookstore patrons looking at him curiously, possibly wondering if he really found Everyday Engine Repair so entertaining. Charles turned his laugh into a cough and flipped to the page on reciprocating heat engines. The bell above the shop door jingled again, but this time he resisted the urge to look up. Perhaps he couldn’t buy the book, but he could take a few mental notes to help him with the Stirling.
He saw a list of recommended requirements to keep the engine healthy and tried setting them to memory. “Standard level oil,” he whispered to himself. “Ten gauge rubber sealant.”
He flipped to a terribly useful page that had an index of various reciprocating heat engines with diagrams by type and model. He stared at the one he wanted for five minutes, shut his eyes, and then reopened them to check if he’d memorised it.
He blew out a breath. “Damn it.” Not even close.
He had never been very good at remembering diagrams, and that might have been one of his worst classes in university aside from that one electrical seminar that they had all failed spectacularly. Prosser had been the best at it, and the Mechanics Club had often been caught between opposing desires to recruit him and hold him down in the public fountain whenever he got back his spotless exams covered with his beautifully accurate diagrams. Prosser at least possessed enough presence of mind to say nothing about it and kept his exams folded up and out of sight the moment he got them, but privately he’d told Charles that he didn’t see what was so difficult about it. Charles had laughed and laughed and attempted to drown Prosser in his beer. Elliot from across the pub had come over to help after seeing Charles's heroic efforts.
Charles stayed at Nelson’s for another hour reading through some other cheaper books he contemplated buying later before stacking them all in the return bin and leaving. He looked up at the sky and wondered if it looked darker and foggier than the normal pea souper- he put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth before starting off for the theatre. Perhaps he and Fletcher had come in at different times and just missed each other or perhaps Fletcher had changed his mind and decided to stop by tomorrow. Charles still walked to work feeling tired and slightly disappointed.
“Er, afternoon. Is Fletcher here?”
There was a loud long cough from inside. “What?”
Charles pressed closer to the maddening little window in front of the ticket office. He didn’t know why Briggs didn’t just install a grill like Eichmann. “I said, is Fletcher here. Perceval Fletcher.”
“Fletcher? Er…” The man leaned forward and pressed his spectacles so high on his nose Charles didn’t know how he managed to keep the nosepieces out of his eyes. “He’s in the middle of a show.”
Charles felt a bead of sweat trickle into his eye and longed for that early morning at Thomas Nelson earlier in the month when the weather had been cooler. “Still? I thought it ended at-”
“We moved it two weeks ago- the show’s two thirty to four fifteen now.”
“Oh.” Charles checked the clock above the booth. “Would you give him a message for me? I’m Charles East.”
“M’not allowed to do that, sir,” the man said, although Charles knew very well that he was.
But he didn’t think arguing would help him. He sighed. “Right. Thank you.” But as he was turning away, he saw a flash of the man’s coverall through the window and stopped. “You used to work for Linton Birch?”
“Uh? Oh, yes.” He saw the man put a hand over the faded company patch on the breast pocket of his coverall. “Kept my uniform after I left- why waste it, I thought.”
Charles nodded. “Yes, I use my field jacket for when it rains.”
“Ah, you worked for them too? Field jacket- so you were upstairs.”
“I was a model designer for two years in the technical department.” That seemed so long ago back when he was fresh out of college and thought the world was his for the taking.
The man coughed again and thumped his chest irritably. “What? Young man like you?”
“Yes, they hired me out of college. Did you get out before the company collapsed?”
The man made a disgruntled noise through the gap in his teeth. “No, after. Wait a minute, will you?”
There was a moment of silence and then a bang from inside the booth. The man unhooked something behind the counter and folded back what Charles had thought was wooden panelling but was actually a kind of window shutter. The front of the booth seemed to just be an assortment of window shutters with a small door cut into the front for pass money and tickets. Charles could see old show posters plastered on the back wall of the booth and some small shelves filled with rolls of blank tickets and a few old empty bottles of what looked suspiciously like whiskey. The man pushed his chair close to the open shutter so he could look out instead of stooping down close to the window.
“Er…” Charles pointed as the man began folding back the other shutter. “Won’t you get into trouble with Briggs, Mr. er-”
“Terrence. And Briggs is in Aldwych renewing the rights to the theatre,” the man said. “It’s boring sitting here, but the missus will give me hell if I come back early.” He folded his arms. “So you think it’s true what they said about the factory illegally altering internal parts?”
“It’s true,” Charles said, trying not to fidget, because he had work to do and didn’t really have time to hang about entertaining bored ticket box workers. He had to go over to the theatre to get paid and then run back to Mrs. Taylor’s boarding house to make sure he got his rent in before the month was up. “I tried to fix my Linton Birch water boiler with second-hand parts and realised nothing fit, and I had to buy parts from the company if I wanted to fix anything.”
“Too many damn machines,” Terrence replied. “We just use the stove like a normal body should.” He snapped his fingers. “You said you were a model designer. So they must have taught your lot to all sign ‘Linton Birch’ the same exact way on all the project forms. Oh Ruthie,” he groaned as Charles produced a pen from his pocket, flipped over one of the show handbills from the stack beside him, and began to write.
“Write from the arm, not the wrist, gentlemen,” Charles recited tiredly, finishing with a flourish, and slid the paper over through the window. “Er, sorry to interrupt, but-”
“That’s it!” Terrence burst out, inspecting it. “I hated you buggers and your eleventh-hour design changes with the bloody little signature at the bottom.”
“We hated doing them,” Charles promised. “But you know Cragg. Anyway, shall I just come back later-”
“-You worked for the Crab?” Terrence said, looking instantly apologetic. “That man’s floor was a circle of hell. I heard he once kept a group back ten extra hours because he didn’t like the look of one of the fasteners for the motor.”
Charles gave up on leaving any time in the next hour. “That was us,” he admitted. “And actually, we had to stay behind because he overheard our math checker McKinley call him a bot-sucking bastard behind his back.”
Terrence roared with laughter and then started coughing again. “-I take it back,” he said. “That was worth all the time the mech-techs had to spend on modifications. Birch, that stingy old dog, wouldn’t even give us double pay. I went out and celebrated the day they went bankrupt. Not even a thank you or a goodbye for me- they just told me to get out.” He raised an eyebrow conspiratorially. “Did you er…make sure your farewell was a warm one?”
Charles grinned. “I stole a B-grade pressure controller, a roll of hydraulic piping, and a few of the specialised tools we weren’t supposed to take out of the office.”
Terrence whistled. “Nice. I got a few pairs of extra safety gloves and my knuckles permanently tattooed on the floor manager’s face.”
Charles snorted. Somewhere in the distance, the Merry George started booming for four o’clock. “Ah, damn,” he said in relief. “I have errands.”
“Right, er-” Terrence stopped. “Who was it you came here to see?”
“Perceval Fletcher.”
“Ah, I’ll tell him you stopped by, yeah?”
Charles was surprised. “Thank you very much.”
“Just doing my job,” Terrence said comfortably and closed down the front of the ticket booth again. He folded one of the panels back and waved at him left-handedly. “See you, East.”
“Right. Thank you, Terrence.” Charles walked back out with his hands in his pockets, finally realising why Henry always got so angry at him all the time. He didn’t even know how he’d done that.
He decided to cut through the Old City in east Aldwych because it looked like it would rain soon, and he didn’t want to get caught in it. The Old City was a strange maze-like cluster of old broken down buildings interspacing circles of ancient Roman ruins that marked the old boundaries of Londinium. The temple to Mithras, to Jupiter, the London Wall- they were all amazingly well preserved for being so old and in a place like London. The Royal Society of Archaeologists were there often with excavating crews to try and find more artefacts underground, but other than that, the Old City was one of the only truly empty places in London-Aldwych.
With all the narrow streets and perpetual shadows cast by the ruins, it might have become one of the hubs of major crime in London, but the only people there were other pedestrians passing through. It might have been the close proximity to Aldwych’s government sector or the protected areas around the ruins where no one was allowed to build. Or it might have been because people said it was haunted, that ghosts from centuries ago had a penchant for following the living.
Charles actually rather liked the Old City- the shadows and absence of factories made it a bit cooler than other parts of the city, and he knew better than to believe in ghost stories. It was actually an old superstition- stories about ghostly footsteps had been documented since the twelfth century, along with the strangely specific advice that the only way to shake off ghosts was to keep walking without turning around till clearing the boundaries, where Ruthie’s influence and protection held sway. But by no means were pedestrians to look behind them.
“I had a friend George who looked back once,” Jacob Finley liked to tell anyone who would listen. “We never saw him again.” Then Jacob would lean forward looking grave- he always did have a flair for the dramatic after a few pints. “A year later I was walking through the same part of the Old City when I heard George’s voice behind me. ‘Jake,’ he said. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Where have you been?’ I asked, keeping my eyes forward. ‘Nora’s been worried.’
‘What are you talking about?’ George asked me. ‘I’ve been right here.’”
Jacob would then sit back, and his audience would lean forward as if drawn. He enjoyed that too. “He didn’t talk to me for a while after that, but I could hear his footsteps behind me all the way through. All I could think was that I made a mistake coming through this part of the Old City rather than taking the main route through with all the other people.
‘Jake,’ George said again when I was halfway there. ‘Chum, look at what they’ve done to me.’ And he sounded so pitiful that I almost did it because Georgie and I had lived next to each other for years, and I had missed him after he’d disappeared. But then I thought of my girl Charlotte waiting for me back at home.” Jacob would always stop to wink at Charlotte, who would just roll her eyes and punch his shoulder. “So I kept looking ahead.
I started walking a bit faster after that, because friend or not, George was beginning to act strange. Shuffling his feet and muttering to himself, asking me odd things like what the weather was like and what terms Glastonbury had held the minister’s post, and that poor sod, if you remember, had been assassinated five years ago.
George talked to me one final time as I was coming near the bounds of the Old City. I was almost there, I could see the clock shop just outside. I could have made it in ten seconds if I ran, but for some reason I thought George was like a dog and if I ran, he would chase me. And somehow I knew I didn’t want that to happen.
‘Jake, turn around,’ George said in a strange voice as I was almost through the gates. I could feel his breath right next to my ear. It smelled like something that had died long ago. ‘Jake, I’m hungry.’”
Then Finley would reach out and grab one of the children in the audience, and the rest of them would scream. Charles laughed to himself as he remembered how Finley could scare people with that story no matter how many times he told it. He heard some people fall in a few streets behind him and wondered if it was strange that he knew they were from the theatre district, because this was the shortcut all the stage crew took to get through the Aldwych government sector, for all that they were the most superstitious people he’d ever met. He wasn’t sure if there were enough ghosts in Britain to account for all the stories they had about harrowing near misses with the Old City undead.
There was actually a popular side-business selling amulets specifically for the Old City- wards and charms for passing unseen. Charles just showed the vendors the heavy automata bolt spanner he kept in his toolbox and passed right by the stalls and the little monuments of Ruthie that were always surrounded by at least one small cup of Copenhagen cherry brandy, which was said to be her favourite.
As Charles rounded the corner, one of the pedestrians behind him stopped and hesitated for a moment, and Charles guessed they had gotten turned around, which happened easily enough in the Old City’s tiny wormlike side streets.
“Sorry, are you lost?” he asked and then froze because there was no one behind him.
Charles spun back around and could hear his heartbeat hammering somewhere near his ears. Maybe there had been a side street he hadn’t noticed or a shortcut he didn’t know about. With all the passages within the city, it made more sense than…than…
“Don’t be stupid,” Charles muttered and set off again, deliberately keeping his pace at a steady even speed like it had been before. Ghosts. Ghosts were something so unbelievably unscientific that he didn’t even know why they still existed in English vocabulary. Ghosts had no business in such a technologically advanced society. Ghosts or good luck charms or fortune tellers or-
“God,” Charles hissed suddenly and put a hand over his chest as the footsteps came back slowly behind him. He should have stopped to offer his help again but was possessed by another inexplicable compulsion not to turn around. “Sorry,” he said a bit loudly, both hoping and dreading that whoever was behind him could hear. “I’m a bit late, you see. My manager is going to murder…me.”
And with a little apologetic nod, he started walking faster, because it really was desperately important that he reach the workshop two minutes earlier than planned because then he could get a head start on practicing for the next show at the end of the week. Even something so seemingly insignificant as two minutes could-
“East,” someone called behind him, and it didn’t sound like anyone he knew. It didn’t sound like it was coming from anywhere in particular, as if the air itself were speaking.
“Right,” Charles said, surprising himself by how calm he sounded and then broke into a run.
But the footsteps got faster too. “East!”
Charles ignored it and swerved around a turn, just barely keeping his feet from sliding out from under him. Part of him wished for the bolt spanner, but the only time he carried that was when he had to go somewhere late at night, never in the broad daylight when nothing dared touch-
“East!” He could feel something right on his heels.
“East,” Fletcher said suddenly next to him and grabbed his shoulder.
Charles leapt sideways and skidded to a stop. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded with a hand over his heart and stumbled back to stare at him. “Oh Ruthie, I didn’t see you.”
Fletcher looked at him strangely. He was still wearing his stage suit, which Charles found even more perplexing upon closer inspection. It was strangely contradictory with its sleek tailored lines and mismatched buttons. The tiny flower in his breast pocket was drooping in the heat.
Fletcher shoved it back in place absently as he took out his handkerchief. “My show let out early. Terrence at the booth said you stopped by.” He frowned. “Are you alright?”
“Have you been following me?” Charles asked, still trying to catch his breath.
Fletcher nodded, wiping his forehead and the back of his neck. “Yes, I saw you cut into the Old City. You walk horrendously fast, do you know that? Especially during that last bit- I had to run to catch up with you.”
“I had…had to get to wor- just shout next time,” Charles said desperately, now feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“I did shout-”
“Earlier! An ‘oy’ would have sufficed. I thought- I thought you were…”
“I was what?” Fletcher asked, frowning.
“Never mind,” Charles said quickly. “I haven’t seen you since before the book sale, so I stopped by to see if you were free to work on the engine sometime.”
“At your convenience,” Fletcher replied. He put a hand to his forehead. “Oh, sorry did I miss you at Thomas Nelson’s? I wasn’t able to come till the afternoon.”
“Ah, I was there in the morning,” Charles said, shrugging casually. “No matter- can’t expect to run into people by chance, I suppose.”
“I suppose not,” Fletcher agreed. “Ah, about the Stirling- how is next weekend for you? Saturday?”
“I’m free Saturday afternoon,” Charles said. “A bit after lunch?”
“Alright,” Fletcher said, following him down the path to the clock shop. “Ah, you’re going back to work?”
“Yes,” Charles said, rounding the corner and staring at the clock shop in relief. “We have a show coming up soon. And then I have to go pay my rent. So I suppose I’ll see you…” Charles turned around, but the street behind him was empty. “Saturday,” he finished weakly.
Next time he would bring the bolt spanner.
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People following my Japan blog now have some insight into the thought process/inspiration I have when writing stories. Strangely like much of my writing, this chapter’s contents have somehow reached out and connected with another idea I wrote down long ago for a much later chapter. Maybe it’s not so much ‘writing’ as poking around in the dark and slowly finding things that are already there.
On a related note, I totally freaked myself out writing the Old City bit at four thirty in the morning when the crows start cawing in my neighbourhood.
And now a word from our sponsors:
Linton Birch: Write from the arm, not the wrist, gentlemen.
Genre: Fantasy, Steampunk, Alternate History
Rating: PG- some swears. Ladies cover your sensitive ears.
Summary: In 1800s London-Aldwych, stage magic always comes second to the scientific and engineering advancements that are quickly becoming the new marvel of the age. But Charles East (The Enchanting East, Monday-Saturday at 1:30PM, half-price on Sundays at 4PM) stumbles upon other magic that is practiced by an altogether other sort of Londonite. And sometimes when you pull a rabbit out of a hat, there is no place to put him back.
Notes: I love that I get the opportunity to steampunk out Thomas Nelson. For confused people, the Nelson’s in London-Aldwych is the U.K Thomas Nelson, now existing as Nelson Thornes. NOT Thomas Nelson in America that is mainly religious texts. (only in America, oy…)
Big thanks to obseletevulture and my content beta/my roommate for their help with this chapter!
It was difficult getting up the next day, mostly because Charles had been an idiot and fallen half in love with the Stirling, which meant he’d stayed in the shop working on the Dicer under Henry’s dictatorial rule for the rest of the day and well into the evening.
Charles stayed in bed a moment longer and looked up at the ceiling even as the Merry George bellowed at him to ‘get his arse out of bed.’ What exactly was he going to use the Stirling for if he managed to get it fixed up? He certainly didn’t have anything that could process that kind of power into something productive. Perhaps he would have to go back to the scrap yard for more parts, which might have been part of the motive behind Thomas Finley’s suspiciously reasonable asking price. Charles banged the back of his head into his pillow and called himself three kinds of idiot before kicking off the blankets and forcing himself to get up before all the good books were taken.
Charles remembered Thomas Nelson before it had become mechanised; it had been a cosy store with a small staircase jammed into the wall and rows of bookshelves crowded together in a way that barely fit one person in between. Although he admitted the new store was much better during the rush on sale days, he missed the close familiarity of the old one and the feel of reaching out and touching books just for the sake of sliding his fingers across their spines.
The clearance books stacked outside in boxes were still the same because Nelson’s was always eager to get rid of old stock at the beginning of each month, and he poked around disinterestedly amongst them for a few minutes before going in. Inside the bookshelves were all pressed together in a solid row, and there were machine treads in the floor for the helperbots that ran from the front desk to the shelves. Charles managed to get a hold of a book directory and spent some time leafing through it for anything that looked interesting. There were some manuals that would possibly come in useful for fixing the Stirling and the newest book by Joseph Crowther. He knew he couldn’t buy it anyway- usually he waited till he could buy used copies of any books he wanted, and the Stirling had discounted the possibility of him eating anything decent for the next few months, much less buying Crowther first-editions.
But he had some time before he had to go into work, and it was quite possibly embarrassing to admit that his head jerked up every time the shop door opened. So he wrote down the serial numbers of some books that looked interesting, returned the directory at the counter, and punched the codes into one of the free helperbots, who immediately zoomed off to the shelves to retrieve his books. It click-clacked off to the scientific manuals section, rolled one of the bookcases out, and checked the serial numbers riveted in punch code onto the shelves before reaching up with its telescoping arms to take a book off a high shelf. It dropped it in the neat metal basket welded to its stomach before sliding the shelf back and hooking itself onto one of the horizontal treads to get into the new fiction section.
Charles fondly watched it work- there was a reason he preferred robots over automatons. Bots did as they were told without pretending to be human or mangling every voice command they were given. Perhaps it wasn’t so irritating that automatons tried to be human but that they behaved far too much like humans, and what was the point in replacing a human worker if customers still got the same kind of rubbish?
There was quite a lot of philosophical talk about what exactly differentiated a machine, a robot, and an automaton. Charles thought it was very simple- machines were stupid and reliable, automatons were irritating as hell, and anything else that was meant to be slightly human but had the good sense not to talk was a robot. He, Henry, and Margaret were still debating where exactly Eichmann’s sweeper stood in the classification. Charles had a theory that it was an automaton that had been so annoying that they had taken off its voicebox and arms when they had overhauled it. Henry maintained that it was the bastard child of a washing machine and an exceptionally bloody-minded tax lawyer.
And that was the other thing about automatons that slightly disturbed him now and then. With the increasingly low cost of vocoders and the current research into using mechanical parts to replace lost arms and legs, he wondered if there would come a day the difference between automatons and humans blurred. He wondered if engineers fancied themselves gods now, and the sixth day was rushing up to meet them far too soon. And perhaps Charles really was reading too much Joseph Crowther for his own good.
Henry’s joke should hadn’t been completely off the mark either- Charles remembered a newspaper article not long ago about Dr. Dietrich Mayfield, a genius in the field of humanoid automata development, who had actually married one of his long-term projects, an experimental stenography interface that he’d named Lydia. From the picture in the paper, it had been an astonishingly human-looking automaton with arms and legs and beautifully fashioned facial features with large blue glass eyes. Mayfield said Lydia’s walking mechanism was still in development, so he and a lab assistant carried her wherever she needed to be, which had made carrying her over the threshold a bit less romantic than they’d envisioned.
Lydia had been a fixture in Mayfield’s lab for two years, where she had been placed beside his chalkboard and built to take down any notes he dictated to her in beautiful Spencerian handwriting. ‘And then I suddenly realised I was content to spend all day talking to her in my lab,’ Mayfield had said in the article. ‘Lydia understood my work, and did not try to call me away or interfere as other wives would have. She was simply the only creature I could ever see myself spending the rest of my life with.’
The article had captured quite a good picture of them right after wedding, Lydia looking beautiful in white lace and Mayfield beaming up at her and clasping her hand, the one that wasn’t shaped to hold pens and other writing implements. Of course the wedding registrar’s office had protested strongly against it, but then Mayfield had pressed Lydia’s hand and she had shed two oily black tears- the local chaplain, who’d once been a mechanic himself, had been quite moved and declared he would not make a lady cry on her wedding day. Perhaps in light of Mayfield’s widespread reputation, the registrar’s office had muttered about the harmless eccentricities of scientists and looked the other way.
Charles supposed it didn’t adversely affect Dr. Mayfield’s still brilliant work, and there were stranger things in this world, so he wished Dr. and Mrs. Mayfield the best. All Margaret had wanted to know was if Mayfield went to bed with it, which had made Charles go white and then completely red.
“M’not drunk enough for this,” Henry had mourned, looking traumatised, and had ordered another pint from the barkeep.
Charles snickered to himself, and found the other bookstore patrons looking at him curiously, possibly wondering if he really found Everyday Engine Repair so entertaining. Charles turned his laugh into a cough and flipped to the page on reciprocating heat engines. The bell above the shop door jingled again, but this time he resisted the urge to look up. Perhaps he couldn’t buy the book, but he could take a few mental notes to help him with the Stirling.
He saw a list of recommended requirements to keep the engine healthy and tried setting them to memory. “Standard level oil,” he whispered to himself. “Ten gauge rubber sealant.”
He flipped to a terribly useful page that had an index of various reciprocating heat engines with diagrams by type and model. He stared at the one he wanted for five minutes, shut his eyes, and then reopened them to check if he’d memorised it.
He blew out a breath. “Damn it.” Not even close.
He had never been very good at remembering diagrams, and that might have been one of his worst classes in university aside from that one electrical seminar that they had all failed spectacularly. Prosser had been the best at it, and the Mechanics Club had often been caught between opposing desires to recruit him and hold him down in the public fountain whenever he got back his spotless exams covered with his beautifully accurate diagrams. Prosser at least possessed enough presence of mind to say nothing about it and kept his exams folded up and out of sight the moment he got them, but privately he’d told Charles that he didn’t see what was so difficult about it. Charles had laughed and laughed and attempted to drown Prosser in his beer. Elliot from across the pub had come over to help after seeing Charles's heroic efforts.
Charles stayed at Nelson’s for another hour reading through some other cheaper books he contemplated buying later before stacking them all in the return bin and leaving. He looked up at the sky and wondered if it looked darker and foggier than the normal pea souper- he put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth before starting off for the theatre. Perhaps he and Fletcher had come in at different times and just missed each other or perhaps Fletcher had changed his mind and decided to stop by tomorrow. Charles still walked to work feeling tired and slightly disappointed.
“Er, afternoon. Is Fletcher here?”
There was a loud long cough from inside. “What?”
Charles pressed closer to the maddening little window in front of the ticket office. He didn’t know why Briggs didn’t just install a grill like Eichmann. “I said, is Fletcher here. Perceval Fletcher.”
“Fletcher? Er…” The man leaned forward and pressed his spectacles so high on his nose Charles didn’t know how he managed to keep the nosepieces out of his eyes. “He’s in the middle of a show.”
Charles felt a bead of sweat trickle into his eye and longed for that early morning at Thomas Nelson earlier in the month when the weather had been cooler. “Still? I thought it ended at-”
“We moved it two weeks ago- the show’s two thirty to four fifteen now.”
“Oh.” Charles checked the clock above the booth. “Would you give him a message for me? I’m Charles East.”
“M’not allowed to do that, sir,” the man said, although Charles knew very well that he was.
But he didn’t think arguing would help him. He sighed. “Right. Thank you.” But as he was turning away, he saw a flash of the man’s coverall through the window and stopped. “You used to work for Linton Birch?”
“Uh? Oh, yes.” He saw the man put a hand over the faded company patch on the breast pocket of his coverall. “Kept my uniform after I left- why waste it, I thought.”
Charles nodded. “Yes, I use my field jacket for when it rains.”
“Ah, you worked for them too? Field jacket- so you were upstairs.”
“I was a model designer for two years in the technical department.” That seemed so long ago back when he was fresh out of college and thought the world was his for the taking.
The man coughed again and thumped his chest irritably. “What? Young man like you?”
“Yes, they hired me out of college. Did you get out before the company collapsed?”
The man made a disgruntled noise through the gap in his teeth. “No, after. Wait a minute, will you?”
There was a moment of silence and then a bang from inside the booth. The man unhooked something behind the counter and folded back what Charles had thought was wooden panelling but was actually a kind of window shutter. The front of the booth seemed to just be an assortment of window shutters with a small door cut into the front for pass money and tickets. Charles could see old show posters plastered on the back wall of the booth and some small shelves filled with rolls of blank tickets and a few old empty bottles of what looked suspiciously like whiskey. The man pushed his chair close to the open shutter so he could look out instead of stooping down close to the window.
“Er…” Charles pointed as the man began folding back the other shutter. “Won’t you get into trouble with Briggs, Mr. er-”
“Terrence. And Briggs is in Aldwych renewing the rights to the theatre,” the man said. “It’s boring sitting here, but the missus will give me hell if I come back early.” He folded his arms. “So you think it’s true what they said about the factory illegally altering internal parts?”
“It’s true,” Charles said, trying not to fidget, because he had work to do and didn’t really have time to hang about entertaining bored ticket box workers. He had to go over to the theatre to get paid and then run back to Mrs. Taylor’s boarding house to make sure he got his rent in before the month was up. “I tried to fix my Linton Birch water boiler with second-hand parts and realised nothing fit, and I had to buy parts from the company if I wanted to fix anything.”
“Too many damn machines,” Terrence replied. “We just use the stove like a normal body should.” He snapped his fingers. “You said you were a model designer. So they must have taught your lot to all sign ‘Linton Birch’ the same exact way on all the project forms. Oh Ruthie,” he groaned as Charles produced a pen from his pocket, flipped over one of the show handbills from the stack beside him, and began to write.
“Write from the arm, not the wrist, gentlemen,” Charles recited tiredly, finishing with a flourish, and slid the paper over through the window. “Er, sorry to interrupt, but-”
“That’s it!” Terrence burst out, inspecting it. “I hated you buggers and your eleventh-hour design changes with the bloody little signature at the bottom.”
“We hated doing them,” Charles promised. “But you know Cragg. Anyway, shall I just come back later-”
“-You worked for the Crab?” Terrence said, looking instantly apologetic. “That man’s floor was a circle of hell. I heard he once kept a group back ten extra hours because he didn’t like the look of one of the fasteners for the motor.”
Charles gave up on leaving any time in the next hour. “That was us,” he admitted. “And actually, we had to stay behind because he overheard our math checker McKinley call him a bot-sucking bastard behind his back.”
Terrence roared with laughter and then started coughing again. “-I take it back,” he said. “That was worth all the time the mech-techs had to spend on modifications. Birch, that stingy old dog, wouldn’t even give us double pay. I went out and celebrated the day they went bankrupt. Not even a thank you or a goodbye for me- they just told me to get out.” He raised an eyebrow conspiratorially. “Did you er…make sure your farewell was a warm one?”
Charles grinned. “I stole a B-grade pressure controller, a roll of hydraulic piping, and a few of the specialised tools we weren’t supposed to take out of the office.”
Terrence whistled. “Nice. I got a few pairs of extra safety gloves and my knuckles permanently tattooed on the floor manager’s face.”
Charles snorted. Somewhere in the distance, the Merry George started booming for four o’clock. “Ah, damn,” he said in relief. “I have errands.”
“Right, er-” Terrence stopped. “Who was it you came here to see?”
“Perceval Fletcher.”
“Ah, I’ll tell him you stopped by, yeah?”
Charles was surprised. “Thank you very much.”
“Just doing my job,” Terrence said comfortably and closed down the front of the ticket booth again. He folded one of the panels back and waved at him left-handedly. “See you, East.”
“Right. Thank you, Terrence.” Charles walked back out with his hands in his pockets, finally realising why Henry always got so angry at him all the time. He didn’t even know how he’d done that.
He decided to cut through the Old City in east Aldwych because it looked like it would rain soon, and he didn’t want to get caught in it. The Old City was a strange maze-like cluster of old broken down buildings interspacing circles of ancient Roman ruins that marked the old boundaries of Londinium. The temple to Mithras, to Jupiter, the London Wall- they were all amazingly well preserved for being so old and in a place like London. The Royal Society of Archaeologists were there often with excavating crews to try and find more artefacts underground, but other than that, the Old City was one of the only truly empty places in London-Aldwych.
With all the narrow streets and perpetual shadows cast by the ruins, it might have become one of the hubs of major crime in London, but the only people there were other pedestrians passing through. It might have been the close proximity to Aldwych’s government sector or the protected areas around the ruins where no one was allowed to build. Or it might have been because people said it was haunted, that ghosts from centuries ago had a penchant for following the living.
Charles actually rather liked the Old City- the shadows and absence of factories made it a bit cooler than other parts of the city, and he knew better than to believe in ghost stories. It was actually an old superstition- stories about ghostly footsteps had been documented since the twelfth century, along with the strangely specific advice that the only way to shake off ghosts was to keep walking without turning around till clearing the boundaries, where Ruthie’s influence and protection held sway. But by no means were pedestrians to look behind them.
“I had a friend George who looked back once,” Jacob Finley liked to tell anyone who would listen. “We never saw him again.” Then Jacob would lean forward looking grave- he always did have a flair for the dramatic after a few pints. “A year later I was walking through the same part of the Old City when I heard George’s voice behind me. ‘Jake,’ he said. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Where have you been?’ I asked, keeping my eyes forward. ‘Nora’s been worried.’
‘What are you talking about?’ George asked me. ‘I’ve been right here.’”
Jacob would then sit back, and his audience would lean forward as if drawn. He enjoyed that too. “He didn’t talk to me for a while after that, but I could hear his footsteps behind me all the way through. All I could think was that I made a mistake coming through this part of the Old City rather than taking the main route through with all the other people.
‘Jake,’ George said again when I was halfway there. ‘Chum, look at what they’ve done to me.’ And he sounded so pitiful that I almost did it because Georgie and I had lived next to each other for years, and I had missed him after he’d disappeared. But then I thought of my girl Charlotte waiting for me back at home.” Jacob would always stop to wink at Charlotte, who would just roll her eyes and punch his shoulder. “So I kept looking ahead.
I started walking a bit faster after that, because friend or not, George was beginning to act strange. Shuffling his feet and muttering to himself, asking me odd things like what the weather was like and what terms Glastonbury had held the minister’s post, and that poor sod, if you remember, had been assassinated five years ago.
George talked to me one final time as I was coming near the bounds of the Old City. I was almost there, I could see the clock shop just outside. I could have made it in ten seconds if I ran, but for some reason I thought George was like a dog and if I ran, he would chase me. And somehow I knew I didn’t want that to happen.
‘Jake, turn around,’ George said in a strange voice as I was almost through the gates. I could feel his breath right next to my ear. It smelled like something that had died long ago. ‘Jake, I’m hungry.’”
Then Finley would reach out and grab one of the children in the audience, and the rest of them would scream. Charles laughed to himself as he remembered how Finley could scare people with that story no matter how many times he told it. He heard some people fall in a few streets behind him and wondered if it was strange that he knew they were from the theatre district, because this was the shortcut all the stage crew took to get through the Aldwych government sector, for all that they were the most superstitious people he’d ever met. He wasn’t sure if there were enough ghosts in Britain to account for all the stories they had about harrowing near misses with the Old City undead.
There was actually a popular side-business selling amulets specifically for the Old City- wards and charms for passing unseen. Charles just showed the vendors the heavy automata bolt spanner he kept in his toolbox and passed right by the stalls and the little monuments of Ruthie that were always surrounded by at least one small cup of Copenhagen cherry brandy, which was said to be her favourite.
As Charles rounded the corner, one of the pedestrians behind him stopped and hesitated for a moment, and Charles guessed they had gotten turned around, which happened easily enough in the Old City’s tiny wormlike side streets.
“Sorry, are you lost?” he asked and then froze because there was no one behind him.
Charles spun back around and could hear his heartbeat hammering somewhere near his ears. Maybe there had been a side street he hadn’t noticed or a shortcut he didn’t know about. With all the passages within the city, it made more sense than…than…
“Don’t be stupid,” Charles muttered and set off again, deliberately keeping his pace at a steady even speed like it had been before. Ghosts. Ghosts were something so unbelievably unscientific that he didn’t even know why they still existed in English vocabulary. Ghosts had no business in such a technologically advanced society. Ghosts or good luck charms or fortune tellers or-
“God,” Charles hissed suddenly and put a hand over his chest as the footsteps came back slowly behind him. He should have stopped to offer his help again but was possessed by another inexplicable compulsion not to turn around. “Sorry,” he said a bit loudly, both hoping and dreading that whoever was behind him could hear. “I’m a bit late, you see. My manager is going to murder…me.”
And with a little apologetic nod, he started walking faster, because it really was desperately important that he reach the workshop two minutes earlier than planned because then he could get a head start on practicing for the next show at the end of the week. Even something so seemingly insignificant as two minutes could-
“East,” someone called behind him, and it didn’t sound like anyone he knew. It didn’t sound like it was coming from anywhere in particular, as if the air itself were speaking.
“Right,” Charles said, surprising himself by how calm he sounded and then broke into a run.
But the footsteps got faster too. “East!”
Charles ignored it and swerved around a turn, just barely keeping his feet from sliding out from under him. Part of him wished for the bolt spanner, but the only time he carried that was when he had to go somewhere late at night, never in the broad daylight when nothing dared touch-
“East!” He could feel something right on his heels.
“East,” Fletcher said suddenly next to him and grabbed his shoulder.
Charles leapt sideways and skidded to a stop. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded with a hand over his heart and stumbled back to stare at him. “Oh Ruthie, I didn’t see you.”
Fletcher looked at him strangely. He was still wearing his stage suit, which Charles found even more perplexing upon closer inspection. It was strangely contradictory with its sleek tailored lines and mismatched buttons. The tiny flower in his breast pocket was drooping in the heat.
Fletcher shoved it back in place absently as he took out his handkerchief. “My show let out early. Terrence at the booth said you stopped by.” He frowned. “Are you alright?”
“Have you been following me?” Charles asked, still trying to catch his breath.
Fletcher nodded, wiping his forehead and the back of his neck. “Yes, I saw you cut into the Old City. You walk horrendously fast, do you know that? Especially during that last bit- I had to run to catch up with you.”
“I had…had to get to wor- just shout next time,” Charles said desperately, now feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“I did shout-”
“Earlier! An ‘oy’ would have sufficed. I thought- I thought you were…”
“I was what?” Fletcher asked, frowning.
“Never mind,” Charles said quickly. “I haven’t seen you since before the book sale, so I stopped by to see if you were free to work on the engine sometime.”
“At your convenience,” Fletcher replied. He put a hand to his forehead. “Oh, sorry did I miss you at Thomas Nelson’s? I wasn’t able to come till the afternoon.”
“Ah, I was there in the morning,” Charles said, shrugging casually. “No matter- can’t expect to run into people by chance, I suppose.”
“I suppose not,” Fletcher agreed. “Ah, about the Stirling- how is next weekend for you? Saturday?”
“I’m free Saturday afternoon,” Charles said. “A bit after lunch?”
“Alright,” Fletcher said, following him down the path to the clock shop. “Ah, you’re going back to work?”
“Yes,” Charles said, rounding the corner and staring at the clock shop in relief. “We have a show coming up soon. And then I have to go pay my rent. So I suppose I’ll see you…” Charles turned around, but the street behind him was empty. “Saturday,” he finished weakly.
Next time he would bring the bolt spanner.
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People following my Japan blog now have some insight into the thought process/inspiration I have when writing stories. Strangely like much of my writing, this chapter’s contents have somehow reached out and connected with another idea I wrote down long ago for a much later chapter. Maybe it’s not so much ‘writing’ as poking around in the dark and slowly finding things that are already there.
On a related note, I totally freaked myself out writing the Old City bit at four thirty in the morning when the crows start cawing in my neighbourhood.
And now a word from our sponsors:
Linton Birch: Write from the arm, not the wrist, gentlemen.