Evolution Expects Read online

  But Nimrod did not stop the car there. He didn’t slow down at all. The Rolls purring along the street, past smoke-spouting omnibuses and horse-drawn carriages, past the entrance to Downing Street, official residence of new PM Devlin Valentine, on into Parliament Square – where Ulysses had finally brought the Megasaur’s frenzied charge to an end – and on past the Palace of Westminster and the gothic Clock Tower. They continued on over Westminster Bridge, the effluent stream of the Thames sliding sluggishly between the spans beneath.

  The Silver Phantom pulled up, at last, on the opposite bank of the river, in a pool of darkness between streetlights. Ulysses got out without a word, quickly crossed the pavement and, in three strides, was hurrying down the broad steps that led down to the Thames path and the County Hall building. But when he was only halfway down the steps he dodged sideways, and into the shadows surrounding the heavy door set back into the stonework of the bridge itself.

  Ulysses slipped the iron key from his pocket and into the lock. It turned more readily than the solid metalwork might have suggested.

  Ulysses opened the door, slipped through and shut it quickly behind him.

  “Good evening, sah!” came a croaky voice from the darkness.

  Ulysses jumped despite himself. He blinked, his eyes slowly becoming accustomed to the barely-lit gloom. A hunched shape detached itself from the darkness and took a step towards him.

  The wizened creature peered up at him, bent almost double as she was by her dowager’s stoop. As a representative of the female of the species, she was a far cry from the sort of women Ulysses usually liked to spend time with – such as the Queen of Hearts or those girls in her employ. She was stooped, toothless and, to complete the fairytale crone look, her nose was covered with hairy warts. She had to be seventy if she was a day. She wore layer upon layer of clothes – moth-eaten cardigans, old coats and a shawl – and her legs were hidden beneath crumpled grey surgical stockings. On her feet were a well-worn pair of sturdy hobnail boots. And she was carrying a large carpet bag.

  “Ah, good evening, Penny, and how are you?” Ulysses breathed in relief. “You surprised me there for a moment.”

  “Oh, you know ’ow it is, Mr Quicksilver, sah. Can’t complain, can’t complain. The arthritis is playing me up again and I haven’t passed a solid stool in days – it’s all watery stuff – and me pins ache something rotten, but I can’t complain.”

  Her breath came at him in noxious waves. In the close confines of the space behind the door, it was impossible to escape her peculiar aroma; a sickly mix of lavender water and stale body odour. Ulysses suspected that the old woman didn’t so much wash as douse herself in lavender water every now and again in an attempt to hide the layers of stench.

  “Right, okay. Right you are, Penny,” Ulysses said with forced joviality, feeling that she had shared more with him than he really needed to know.

  “But enough of the pleasantries. If you’d like to follow me, sah.” The old woman set off at a hobble along a grilled walkway and down an iron staircase. He let her get a few steps ahead of him before following. “Me piles have been playin’ up an’ all.”

  The aging crone led him down turn after turn into the musty darkness beneath Westminster Bridge. Penny – or, to give her her full title, Penny Dreadful – wasn’t her real name of course, but it was the one she went by now. Ulysses certainly didn’t know of any other.

  By the time they reached the bottom of the iron steps, Ulysses judged that they were now at a level well beneath the riverbed. Penny led the way onward, from the fetid stairwell, into a brick-walled tunnel that smelt of mildew. The old woman’s shuffling footsteps, and his firmer stride, were accompanied by the background drip-drip-drip of moisture leaking through the brick-arched ceiling of the tunnel.

  Every now and again a droplet would land on one of the caged electric lamps strung along the apex of the tunnel, causing it to fizzle and spit. Ulysses kept shooting anxious glances at the roof, remembering the last time he had found himself in tunnels beneath the city, hoping that this one wasn’t about to flood like those of London’s once feted Underground system.

  As he trudged along the passageway, he ducked every now and again, so as not to brain himself on the suspended lights. He did his best to ignore Penny’s continued complaints about all her various ailments – dropping the occasional “Ah”, “Oh” and “I see” into breaks in the old woman’s monologue – and distracted himself by considering what he already knew about the man who had summoned him. His new ‘employer’ Lord Octavius De Wynter.

  He knew that De Wynter was one of the Establishment, the old guard, but that he was also a new broom, brought in to sweep the department clean of any of Wormwood’s lackeys. His remit appeared to have been to shake things up a little, and shake things up he had.

  There were rumours of certain high-ranking officials, who had achieved promotion during Uriah Wormwood’s tenure, begin demoted, or forced to take retirement, or even carted off to prison following an internal investigation carried out by De Wynter himself. There was even talk of mind-wiping technology being employed, with variable results. Apparently the lucky ones died. The unlucky ones had to be lobotomised and were sent to live out the rest of their days at a nice, quiet, maximum security sanatorium in the country.

  And according to Nimrod, Ulysses’ father Hercules Quicksilver had had something to do with De Wynter in the dim and distant past, but his faithful manservant couldn’t be sure how well they had known each other, or what circumstances had brought them together.

  So all he really had to go on so far was what he could deduce from De Wynter’s actions. He did not even know whether he was a supporter of the Whigs or the Tories, only that he was a die-hard dyed in the wool monarchist of the old school.

  But this was different for a start; his former ministry acquaintance, Uriah Wormwood, had always preferred to meet at the Inferno Club, the favoured place for spies and agents of the throne to liase with their governmental contacts. Not that Wormwood had ever really liked having to get his hands dirty, meeting with Ulysses. But then, look what had happened to him.

  And now here was De Wynter summoning him to the heart of the department’s operations under Whitehall.

  Having traversed their way back across the river, beneath the Thames, Penny opened an iron pressure door and invited Ulysses through, before pushing it shut again, its rusting hinges complaining – the old woman’s strength never ceased to amaze him – and locking it again with a turn of a heavy wheel.

  Ulysses had expected to find himself in some underground office complex, but instead he was surprised to find himself standing on a station platform – an Underground station platform. The Underground network was clearly not as flooded nor as inaccessible as the populace had been led to believe.

  As if on cue, with a whoo-whoo, gouts of smoke and sooty steam filled the tunnel, heralding the arrival of a locomotive.

  Ulysses marvelled at the train.

  It wasn’t particularly long – it was only an engine pulling two carriages – but it had been painted with the red, white and blue livery of the British crown, and very impressive it looked too.

  With a loud hiss of steam the train screeched to a halt alongside the platform.

  “Grand, isn’t it?” the old woman said, looking up at Ulysses with a twinkle in her eye.

  “What was that?” Ulysses turned to the old woman, realising that he was gawping at the train like an idiot, as if he’d never seen such a thing before, and quickly shut his mouth.

  “All aboard!” Penny said, opening the door of the first carriage and, still stupefied, Ulysses obediently climbed inside.

  The interior of the carriage was a far cry from the passenger trains of the Overground network, not that Ulysses ever travelled by public transport if he could help it, although he remembered how excited he had been to ride on the Piccadilly Line with Nanny McKenzie when he was still in short trousers. It was like they were travelling first class – the seats u
pholstered in the finest damask, the Royal crest worked into every gold-plated fixture and fitting, or so it seemed.

  It made the presence of Penny Dreadful appear all the more incongruous, although she seemed quite comfortable seated next to him, legs swinging, her feet not quite touching the floor, an inane, toothless grin on her face.

  The train set off into the darkness. Ulysses tried to peer through the tinted glass in the front of the carriage, intrigued to know who was driving, but couldn’t see anything.

  “Automated, you know. The whole thing,” Penny explained, guessing what was on his mind. “It’s like this train’s one big automaton.”

  “So, where are we going, Penny?”

  “To the Department, sah,” the old woman chuckled to herself.

  They trundled on through utter blackness, picking up speed. Every now and then Ulysses felt the rocking motion of the train shift as it took a bend in the tunnel, both descending and ascending as if it was one of those seaside peer rides that the lower orders seemed to enjoy so much.

  The overall effect of this swaying journey was that by the time the train stopped again, probably only a matter of minutes later, Ulysses had no idea where they were beneath the capital. They could have been right back under Whitehall or under the British Museum for all he knew.

  “This is our stop,” the old woman said, as the train screeched to a halt in a cloud of steam beside another unremarkable platform. She opened the carriage door and Ulysses followed, fascinated to know how this journey would end.

  “This way please, sah.”

  Another pressure door led into another brick-lined tunnel and, from here, Ulysses and Penny entered the sub-basement he had been expecting to find under Westminster Bridge.

  “Welcome to Department Q,” the old woman coughed.

  It looked like the Department had taken over the sub-basement of a larger building. Large iron pipes ran the length of the roof. Sturdy doors led off from the broad corridor and everything was lit by the dull glow of wall-mounted electric lights, that bathed the gloomy corridor in a hellish half-light.

  A constant cacophony of background noise filled the place, echoing from the walls and ceiling; the clanking of machinery, a high-pitched drilling, the occasional crack of a pistol being fired somewhere nearby, and what sounded like distant animal cries. Ulysses noticed that as well as red-brick, part of the structure of the basement was made up of older building foundations – large blocks of rough-cut stone and what looked like walls of Roman construction. How far down were they? And what lay above them?

  A little further on the corridor opened out into a large cellar-like space with two further wings of brick tunnels, medieval cellars and Roman ruins extending to both left and right. Ulysses caught glimpses of lab-coated figures and what appeared, at first glance, to be homeless vagabonds moving about in the shadows, going about their business in conspiratorial huddles armed with clipboards and other curious pieces of apparatus.

  Penny Dreadful ignored all of this activity and, instead, headed straight for a grand-looking walnut-panelled door set into the wall opposite the corridor from which they had just emerged.

  Glancing back the way they had just come, Ulysses saw a painted wooden sign hanging above the arch of the tunnel that led back to the platform bearing the name ‘Department Q’ painted inside the symbol of the now abandoned Underground system.

  Penny rapped on the door.

  After what felt like a painfully long pause, a buzzer sounded and a red light mounted above the door, that Ulysses had barely noticed before, turned green. Penny pushed open the door and ushered Ulysses into the chamber beyond.

  From the shape of it, it looked like the office had been built into the void of a railway arch, or something like it. Glass-fronted bookcases and display cabinets lined the walls, filled with all manner of intriguing items – from big cat skulls to a model of the starship Regina – but the room was dominated by the large mahogany desk that stood at its centre, beneath an extravagant crystal chandelier.

  Squeezed into the leather-upholstered swivel chair behind the desk was a huge man. Everything about him was big. He was thickset, with a rugged, darkly handsome face that looked like it had been hewn from marble. Despite having obviously entered middle-age some years ago, the man still had a luxuriant head of nut-brown hair, which was swept back from a high forehead. Only his elongated sideburns showed any obvious signs of aging. He looked like he would be more at home on a country estate, with a hunting dog at his side and a shotgun broken over his arm. But here he was ensconced within the Department, at the heart of this operation, with the air of a man around whom everything else circled, like the planets around the Sun.

  This was Lord Octavius De Wynter.

  On the wall behind him were a host of clocks, each set to a different time, matching time zones around the world, and beyond. As well as London, Paris and St Petersburg, there were also such far flung places as New York, Hong Kong, Atlantic City, Pacifica, Tranquillity and New Sidonia.

  As well as the obligatory Babbage unit, the desk also had a number of interesting objects lined up on top of it, from a Decade Diary, to models of Martian war machines that could only be described as six-legged tanks.

  As Ulysses and Penny entered his office, the man looked up, fixing Ulysses with sparkling eyes, regarding him from beneath bushy eyebrows.

  “Ah, Quicksilver, there you are,” De Wynter said in his booming rich baritone.

  “Hello, sir.”

  “Right, now listen up. I want you to get yourself over to the East End. To Limehouse.”

  “Limehouse?” Ulysses said, startled, at both the brusque way in which De Wynter had dispensed with all social pleasantries and then at his mention of that particular district of London. The last time he had been in that part of town, he had battled a host of automata drudges in the employ of former PM Uriah Wormwood and the Darwinian Dawn. Ulysses had seen an entire wharf and warehouse complex razed to the ground.

  “So that’s where the wretch was taken. But why?”

  “Where who was taken? What are you talking about, man?” De Wynter blustered, looking annoyed. He was obviously a man not known for his placid temperament.

  “The cockroach, sir. From the Daedalus Clinic.”

  “Oh that. Forget about that,” De Wynter said, sternly. “This is a more pressing matter altogether. I want you to go to Limehouse to look into a series of attacks that have been taking place there recently. The ones perpetrated by this so-called Limehouse Golem, as the press have christened it. The latest attack was on the Palace Theatre, where that Chinese cove Lao Shen had his Oriental magic show. Place burnt to the ground before the fire could be brought under control.”

  “I’ve not heard about that,” Ulysses said, feeling suddenly out of the loop.

  “No, you won’t read about it in the papers until tomorrow either. Which is why I want you there now, sorting it out. Do whatever it is you do and get me some answers. Ideally find this Golem and put an end to it, by whatever means necessary.”

  Ulysses’ mind was reeling. He had come here, thinking that he would be given another angle on the incident at the Clinic. But this was something else entirely.

  “So what did happen to the cockroach?” he asked, unable to completely let go of the mystery he had been set on solving. “Why not send Penny? Sounds like just the sort of place she could get some answers, Limehouse.”

  “Look, forgot about the damned cockroach, that’s not why you’re here.”

  “So the Department did have something to do with its disappearance?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that. You have your orders, now go.”

  “What? You mean that information’s on a need to know basis?”

  “And you don’t need to know. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Culpable deniability. Let the matter rest, and get yourself over to the East End, there’s a good man. Tempus fugit, and all that.”

  And with that, almost as soon as it had begun, hi
s audience with the Department chief was over.

  Ulysses found himself gawping dumbly, opening and closing his mouth like some brain-addled goldfish, speechless in the face of De Wynter’s approach to man-management.

  “This way, sah, if you would be so kind,” Penny said, opening the door and ushering him back out of the office.

  “Quicksilver,” De Wynter suddenly called after him with a bellow like a foghorn.

  “Yes, sir?” Ulysses paused at the threshold.

  “Get me a good result on this one. The Jupiter launches in a matter of days and I don’t want anything buggering it up like that shambles at the jubilee. Shut the door on your way out, will you?”

  And with that, Ulysses was dismissed.

  “Righty-ho,” he said, giving Penny Dreadful, a forced smile. He felt strangely belittled after his brief encounter with Octavius De Wynter. “Best get going. After all, the game is afoot.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Spring-Heeled Jack

  WINCING IN PAIN, Thomas Sanctuary pulled on the suit once again. His body was a mass of pulled muscles and skinned joints, the green and purple bruises and abrasions covering it a map of the trials he had endured when he had taken his father’s final creation out on its test-flight. The injuries were also an annotated document of the trauma he had suffered during his encounter with what the press were calling the Limehouse Golem.

  That had been the reason for the first improvement he had made: the body armour rig he was now pulling on over the leather and rubber bodyglove of the original suit.

  He had constructed it from what he had to hand in his father’s workroom. It inevitably added weight to the suit, and was bound to restrict his movement to some extent, but on his first outing, he hadn’t proved to be the most agile creature in the air anyway. And besides, he didn’t really see the encumbrance making much difference, except in helping to protect his already battered body.