The Alloy Heart Read online

  “We’ve little information to go on so far, but what are your instincts telling you?” began Hill.

  “It’s a safe bet that someone in the guild is involved,” replied John. “But how can we figure out who?”

  “We have to start with motive, of course.”

  “I’ve given you a motive, and you’ve shot it down.”

  “Come now, Foster. You’re not still on about Tesla making himself immortal.”

  “Unless you’ve got something more likely.”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid I don’t,” replied Thomas, “but I still can’t believe something so far-fetched. We deal in the probable. How many times have I told you? The simplest scenario is usually the most likely.”

  Foster grunted. “There’s nothing simple about this case.”

  “Fair point,” Hill conceded. “Then let’s put aside the question of motive for a moment. Who would have the means to do such a thing? What would it take to pull off such a crime?”

  “Strength, that’s sure. Our man’s a big bloke,” said Foster.

  “You’re sure it’s a man?” questioned Hill.

  “Mrs. Brownin’ said she had no doubt about that. Not only was he tall, but she could tell by the way he doted over the victim, Ms. Stroud. And consider the victims themselves. No disrespect to the women ’a the night, but they’re not exactly a gentle lot. Most ‘a them know how to look after themselves. I can’t see a woman, no matter how strong she might be, draggin’ one of those gals off to god knows where.”

  “And where were the women dragged?” asked Hill.

  “Eh?”

  “Well, if our man was hacking a poor woman’s heart out in the middle of a London street, I think someone might have noticed. It would have to have been done somewhere quiet.”

  “And it would take a bit ’a room too,” said John. “Equipment and the like. You’d need a place to work and tools. Might be making somethin’ like that would cause a racket.”

  “Excellent point,” responded Thomas. “And where does that lead us?”

  “Back to the guild,” said Foster soberly. “And here comes one of the guild members now.”

  It was Zacharias’ turn to be uncomfortable as he edged his way into the pub. The Lady of the Lake was not used to hosting any mechanics, much less one that appeared as if he had taken a bath in grease before setting out for an evening drink.

  “Oy,” yelled Foster, beckoning his friend over to their table. Relief washed over Zach’s face as he scuffled over and hoisted himself up into the chair.

  “What kind of starched, stuffy, cravat-filled den of high-brow thieves have you brought me to, John?” said the mechanic as he surveyed the room. “Everyone’s staring at me.”

  “You’re staring at them,” he replied. “And they’re not staring at you. They’re looking down their noses. There’s a difference.”

  “Well, I’ll be glad to be shut of this place,” said Zach.

  “The important thing,” offered Inspector Hill, “is that no one here will recognize you. I doubt most of these men have ever even seen a mechanic so close.”

  “And more important,” interrupted John, “is that you can get a decent pint here. Not like in that circus you took me to.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Zacharias. “Both parts, but especially the anonymity. I got paid a visit by Tesla’s second in command today. It was clear he didn’t appreciate you being in the Dragon.”

  “Tesla’s second?” asked Foster. “Didn’t you say that was George Watt? The creator of the heart.”

  “The one and only. The man’s pure evil. I’d bet my tape measure that he’s the man that killed those two women.”

  Hill spoke up, a serious look on his face. “Assistant Inspector Foster informed me of your concerns Mr…”

  “Just Zacharias will be fine.”

  “Mr. Zacharias. Do you have any proof that Mr. Watt is behind these attacks?”

  “Proof?” Zach laughed. “They don’t leave papers that say ‘Tesla’s and Watt’s Evil Scheme to Take Over the World’ just lying around, now do they? And they certainly wouldn’t involve me on something like that. I’m maintenance and repair. I work on the big war machines. New designs, well, that’s way above my pay grade. Not that my inventions aren’t vastly superior to the rubbish those dunderheads crank out. They are.”

  “Have you heard anything around the guild? Have you overheard any of your colleagues say anything?”

  “Not really, but everyone zips up when Watt’s around. He’s got a terrible temper. Second only to Tesla himself.”

  “I’ll grab ya a pint, Zach,” said Foster, getting up and moving to the bar to order another drink.

  “I hate to be rude, Mr. Zacharias,” said Thom, “but why on earth have you dragged us out here? You have no proof whatsoever that anyone in the guild is involved. Why should we take anything you say seriously?”

  “Oh, wait, Mr. Inspector,” retorted Zach, his wispy white hair bobbing in all directions as he spoke. “Your man here saw with his own eyes a statute of the mechanical heart at the guild. That same heart shows up in two dead bodies, and you don’t think there’s a connection? Scotland Yard’s finest, you are.”

  “Touché, Mr. Zacharias,” said Hill. “I’ll admit there must be some connection, but I’ll need a little more to go on than a statute if I’m to get a warrant to investigate the guild. As I’m sure you might have noticed, the crown is a little protective of its war machine producer. Even with eyewitness testimony against a mechanic, I still don’t know if I could get any magistrate to issue a warrant.”

  “You don’t need to investigate the guild, just Watt. Like I said, he invented the damned device. If anyone is involved, it’s him. Look, all of the important people have a special entrance, on the eastern side of the building. It leads directly to their fancy offices. They are too important to be seen coming and going through the front of the warehouse with the common rabble. Just follow him one day. You’ll see. He’s up to no good.”

  “Why are you so convinced?” Hill asked. “There’s something more between you and Watt. I can hear it in your voice.”

  Foster returned then and placed a full pint in front of the little mechanic. He took a long draught and heaved a sigh before speaking. “Because, Mr. Hill, that bastard raped my daughter.”

  Two women stood outside of the Fox and Hound, a pub on the corner of Finchley Road and West End Lane With their bodices tightened and rouge coloring their cheeks, they shivered slightly. A cool, heavy fog had descended at some point in the evening, but the women needed to show as much skin as possible if they wanted to make their quota before morning. The crowd inside the drinking house was reaching its peak raucousness rather early in the evening, perhaps in a subconscious attempt at defiance against the weather’s encroachment on their frivolity. Mary, the taller and fairer of the two women, had already plied her trade behind the building twice and had stepped outside for a bit of fresh air before attempting to seduce another of the inebriated patrons out of his hard-earned coin. Ruth, not as comely as her friend Mary, but having an established reputation of being somewhat exuberant at her craft, had so far secured a shilling from three paying customers and was currently enjoying a well-earned cigarette.

  “Look at the tall drink of water coming this way, Mary. He’s got his eye on you, methinks,” said Ruth, taking a long draw on her cigarette before tossing it, unstamped, into the cobblestone street.

  “Top hat, frock coat, and polished boots. A proper gentlemen this one is. Won’t take very long. The stuffy ones never last long. Hey Mister—”

  The man never slowed his pace. He approached them from their left, his head down and arm held out, allowing Mary to entwine her own arm in his. They walked, arm and arm, into the alley next to the pub that Ruth and Mary had long ago staked out as their territory, a move that was not without a great many physical confrontations, both by the women’s protectors and the women themselves. A gas lamp on the corner hissed, adding its vo
ice to the muted noises coming from the inside of the nearby pub. The light, though unwelcome to the slender man, only illuminated a couple of yards into the shadowy alleyway. It would soon pose no problem. This was one of the many advantages to taking the prostitutes. They weren’t nervous about being alone in the dark with a strange man.

  The darkness deepened as the pair walked, Mary already deftly placing her hand on the front of the man’s trousers, intending to speed along the process. A second wasted in her business could mean a customer lost later in the evening. Once out of the reach of the lamplight, Mary halted, pulling the man in close.

  “What’s your pleasure, tall, dark, and handsome?”

  “Only this,” the man responded in a smooth voice. He put his gloved hand in his pocket and drew out a white handkerchief. The man struck, quick as a snake, grabbing the back of Mary’s head and ramming the cloth into Mary’s face. She tried to cry out, fighting against the taller, more powerful man. When she opened her mouth to scream, he only crammed the rag in further, cutting off all sound. A sweet chemical smell assaulted her senses, which were quickly becoming dull. She continued to struggle for a moment then went slack in the man’s arms.

  “Wait, wait, don’t collapse on me now. Wake up, dear child. I didn’t give you that much. We’ve a bit of a walk to the cab. You are only a slip of a thing, but I still don’t believe I’m able to carry you the whole way.”

  “Hmph.” Mary regained a tenuous state of conscious. Unable to lift her limbs or cry out, and not understanding why she would need to, she leaned upon the man and groggily allowed herself to be escorted to the other end of the alley where a driverless carriage waited. The man held her up with one arm and pulled the cab’s door open with the other. He helped her inside, where she plopped down onto one of the benches and slumped against the inside wall. Here she mercifully allowed sleep to finally take her.

  Chapter Ten

  Friday, 6th May 1887

  Sometime around 7:00 a.m.

  The slender man held his breath as he hunched over his workstation. His feet touched flat on the ground, despite the height of his stool, and he had to lean over almost double to see the tiny crystals he had embedded into the outer walls of the mechanical heart. He was trying garnet today, thulite and mica having already let him down during his two previous experiments. The mechanized organ was almost complete. He’d decided to go back to most of the settings on his first attempt, only tweaking a few of the pressure settings on the pulmonary artery and pulmonary vein, and also enlarging the left atrium slightly. The first test subject had done better, so much better, than the second, the latter only able to take a few steps before she collapsed, not having the slightest clue where she was after he removed her from his cab.

  The man was convinced the failure was due, for the most part, to the dramatically enlarged ventricles of the second design. Hoping to allow more blood flow throughout the heart, he had inadvertently altered the surface area ratios such that the tiny crystals could not power the organ effectively. The first heart, on the other hand, powered by thulite, had responded much better. Upon release, the test subject, though terribly confused, had immediately known she was a prostitute, that she lived in Cheapside, and that one her clients had asked her to marry her. Unfortunately, she had very little control over her limbs and began flailing them wildly as she attempted to run through the alleyway, shouting that she could never marry a chimney sweep; she’d be better off on her own. The poor woman looked like a baby giraffe on ice as her arms and legs refused to follow the commands her brain was giving them. She tripped and staggered, eventually becoming entangled in a clothesline full of unmentionables. The subject continued to try and get back to … wherever she was headed. The slender man could not be sure of the woman’s destination; she hadn’t bothered to inform him before she bolted away. She crawled on all fours, dragging behind her a pair of long underwear which was entwined in her high-heeled boot. This posture seemed to suit her a bit better than walking upright, as she was able to traverse about thirty feet before she stopped. Perhaps this was because the strain of standing and running required more energy than the thulite crystals could produce. Or perhaps the crystals produced enough energy, but the design of the heart did not allow the power to properly transfer of enough oxygenated blood to the various extremities. This was a puzzle that would need to be solved quickly.

  The results from neither experiment were ideal, to be sure. But the worst part of the whole ordeal was the catastrophic failure of the organs in question. In the end, both hearts overheated. The energy of the crystals, even cut as finely as they were, generated too much power to be contained by such a frail object as the human body. The first subject, crawling on hands and knees, stopped suddenly, lurched violently, then threw up on the ground in front of her. Then, with a sound like the crackle of lightning, though somewhat muted, the girl’s chest cavity exploded outward, and she collapsed. Amazingly, the metal stayed attached at the brachiocephalic artery and the inferior vena cava, a testament to the strength of the titanium wire with which he’d used to connect the pieces.

  The results were the same in the second subject. As this one had been laying on her back, the slender man had been treated to an impressive display as a fountain of blood, bits of sternum, and pieces of rib had showered the immediate area around the subject. Luckily, he’d been watching from a distance. Fascinating to be sure, but extremely frustrating, as it meant he was looking at another failure. But he thought he knew the solution, or, at least a path to the solution. He simply needed to find a crystal that generated a large amount of power, but not a large amount of heat—something akin to containing a thunderstorm in a glass jar. Not impossible, but the circumstances would have to be just right.

  Now he had a new subject, and he was eager to perform the next test. But he certainly couldn’t afford to be hasty. It was only a matter of time before the Yard devoted some serious policing power to the murders. A missing prostitute or two might go unnoticed. But when they kept turning up in public with strange clockwork contraptions embedded in their chests, well, that was another matter entirely.

  The subject in question was sleeping soundly on the exam table opposite him in his basement. She was tied, of course. He couldn’t have her flopping into the floor if she suddenly had a bad dream. The woman would remain asleep until he’d implanted her new heart and chosen a suitable spot to release her. Hyde Park was now out of the question, given the grisly display he’d left for the authorities a couple of nights ago. The chemicals necessary to keep her sedated were plentiful. The crystals he needed to run his machinery were in short supply. He had only a small amount of garnet left. If this didn’t work, he couldn’t fathom what he would do. He kept the precious stones in a small, ornate lockbox above his workbench. The area was littered with tiny metal tools, a microscope, a couple oil lamps, and several medical books, most open to black-and-white sketched diagrams of a human heart.

  In one corner of the room sat a small forge and anvil. This is where the man produced the many delicate parts and pieces that it took to conduct his experiments, probably the most time-consuming part of his job. It was gentle work, and he could trust no one else to the task.

  Bookshelves lined the remaining wall of the laboratory. Many thick volumes rested on the shelves, but there was also a multitude of vials containing exotic liquids, used both to heal and to hurt. The shelves also contained large glass jars filled with formaldehyde, which housed a collection of body parts, both human and animal.

  The man breathed a heavy sigh as he reached up and subconsciously rubbed the scar on the right-hand side of his face, a nervous habit he’d recently developed. He was currently wrestling with how much garnet to embed in the inner walls of the mechanical heart. He’d already seen the devastating results from including too many crystals. Too much power and … boom. If he didn’t install enough of the power-generating crystal, then the young girl might not even wake up. She certainly wouldn’t respond the way he needed he
r to.

  Finally, the man settled on the exact amount he needed—twelve grams. The slender man recorded the amount in his notebook and set it aside. Next, he gently closed the outside of the contraption and secured the metal cover with a small screw. He took a moment to reflect on his latest invention, comparing it to a sketch in one of the open books sitting on the desk. He’d certainly gotten the proportions correct. It should be a perfect fit, assuming, of course, that the young girl sleeping on his exam table didn’t have any strange heart abnormalities. He wouldn’t know that until he opened her up, which would be very soon.

  The brass bell above the front door to Scotland Yard police station #2, located on Coventry Street, chimed as a young woman stepped timidly through the door. Though Ruth had plenty of dealings with police in her line of work, lord knows they were some of her best customers, she’d never voluntarily sought one out on her own before. Glancing all around her, the woman approached a wooden counter behind which sat an elderly, broad constable reading a copy of the Daily Courant. The man glanced up from his paper then back down without a word. Normally a rather raucous and sometimes even bawdy woman, Ruth now stood quite still, nervously scanning the room. This went on for a few awkward moments before she finally drummed up the nerve to clear her throat, hoping to get the officer’s attention.