I stood up.
“You keep the line open, Jacques, or you’ll have trouble from me.”
I left Nouveau’s gallery. It was coming upon the dinner hour, and yet Nouveau’s words kept scrolling through my mind. I hadn’t realized I’d been returning to Saxon’s theater until the hansom dropped me off. I honestly don’t remember giving the driver Saxon’s address, but there I was.
The door was ajar, strange for a man of solitary and secretive practices. I pulled the bell cord regardless. No one responded so I let myself in.
The lobby was unchanged from my last visit. I stood there feeling like a fool; maybe Nouveau was having a laugh and I’d got caught up in a spook story. I was about to leave when I heard a groan. It was soft, but somehow amplified by the silence of the lobby. I unsheathed my weapon, a collapsible baton issued to all of us in the Bow Street Firm. A telescoping steel rod some of my mates call “The Cobra,” though I’ve never asked why.
I crept into the theater. All was dark except for a lone spotlight centered on the stage. Dr. Saxon’s dancers were gone and replaced by a scene that will forever haunt me.
They were together on center stage, bathed in the spotlight. The doctor was laid out, limbs splayed. The automatic woman, Dr. Saxon’s Swan Princess, held his body against hers, like a mother cradling a child. He issued another low groan.
I crept closer. No one else moved, not the princess, not the doctor. Regardless, I snapped my cobra to full length, if for nothing but my own confidence. I crept onto the stage; blood pooled under the doctor and seeped into the hardwood. Thick red stains ran up the Swan Princess’ arms.
“Doc?” I called out.
He let out another low groan. The princess squeezed him tighter in her arms. The doctor’s legs kicked in convulsion. It was then that I knew she was crushing him, that Dr. Saxon’s beautiful Swan Princess was squeezing the life and blood from his body.
This was my time to shine. I may not understand automatics or gear ratios or any of that rot, but I understand violence. Violence and I are old acquaintances.
I roared like a lion and struck the Swan Princess with my cobra. Her head rotated a one-eighty; her mouth opened, showing off teeth lacquered with the old man’s blood. He kicked and squirmed and I struck again. The tip of my rod whipped across her brow, shattering a crystal eye. I whipped the cobra again across her face, cracking the ivory of her forehead. A tuft of rendered silk hair flew to the back stage. I struck her arms and her shoulders. Bits of ivory littered the stage and yet she held. She held until the old man stopped convulsing, until he was still… and then she let him go.
I yelled again, a wordless animal yell of frustration. An ancestral call, if you will. I couldn’t stop her from finishing the doctor, but I was determined to finish her.
She rose to her feet through my barrage of strikes. Plates of her came loose, revealing gears and inner springs. She tottered for a moment like she was going to fall, like she’d had enough, like my strikes were not the impotent efforts of a man who knew no better than to lash out. A Front Doors Man they call me. Jolly they call me. Helpless is not a word I’m accustomed to.
The creature lolled back like she was going to pitch over and then sprang into a ballerina’s leap. In my mind she resembled a gazelle, all lines and form. She leapt to me with open arms, striking the center of me with all the weight of her artificial body. I imagine getting struck by a rail handcart is similar. My feet left mother Gaia and we flew together for a long moment, over the lip of the stage, into the darkness of the orchestral pit. We collapsed in the darkness, together. We rolled as one, but she separated from me, retreating to an unseen corner. Luckily, I still held the cobra and whipped it around in the empty darkness. I could not see her in the blackness, but my shifting feet caught debris. I knelt down and swept my hands over cogs and severed limbs of what I assume were her back-up dancers. The pit was a graveyard. I could not step nor shift without contacting the remains of some poor dismantled automaton. Something had happened here beyond my comprehension.
Growing up in Whitechapel, my father often told me that all men and women have a place on God’s green earth. He told me that it was the job and place of royalty to fuck up and look good, just as it was the job and place of Parliament to pretend not to fuck up and look regular enough to court votes. He told me his place was to make boots, to cut leather, to polish in browns and blacks and having realized this, he needed no church or greater philosophy. He had found his place on Earth as God had intended. He lived a bootmaker’s life, and died a bootmaker’s death. I took these teachings as truth and have always held that the only worthy men are those doing what they’re supposed to. Those outside the grain are ripe for correction and often times it’s my job to do the correcting.
To retrace my original point, I think the doctor made an automaton to love him, and she did. And I think it was her, or the doctor, who destroyed all those other dancers. Was it for jealousy? Was it for passion? Was it for some sense of purpose or some greater acknowledgment of purpose? I don’t know. I’m just a bloke who likes to put mashers in their place and swing a club at a crook now and again. I don’t reckon any greater meaning from this, but I’m sure there is one.
So there I was, in the darkness of the pit surrounded by parts of destroyed machines. I heard her shuffle and swung my cobra accordingly. I spun my club through empty air. It would have been embarrassing had any live creatures stood as witness. Suddenly, a great scratch rendered the heavens, and then all things were filled with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. She must have hit the switch to start the orchestral score; it resounded in the pit as though all things were consumed by horns and strings and powerful drums.
I screamed in frustration. I was already blinded by the lack of light, and now I was deafened and muted by the music. I swung the cobra through empty air, determined to strike something, anything. I was overwhelmed in the darkness, in the crashing music, consumed and lost like an ape dropped in the ocean. The automatic woman bit my shoulder with her horrid teeth, but when I turned to confront, she was already gone. I backpedaled to the pit wall, desperately feeling for a ladder or door, anything to escape from this nightmare. The automaton bit me again, this time on the stomach. I swung and made contact, but again she vanished in the darkness. I was desperate, a creature far out of his element.
My father’s words came into my head again: all things in their place, all things conforming to their nature and doing what comes natural. For me, destruction is natural. My meaty paws gripping and tearing comes naturally. My weight and stature, these things are my nature.
I dropped the cobra and sat cross-legged. I closed my eyes, which weren’t doing me any good anyway. I cracked my knuckles and flexed my fingers. I imagine competitive fighters do this, the limbering of the hands. I stretched each finger and popped the knuckles of my thumbs and there I sat. She came upon me again as before, with a bite on my left shoulder, only this time I was prepared. I grabbed the automaton with my hands, my God given tools of destruction. I gripped under her elbows and rolled her to the floor; her teeth were lodged in my shoulder and stung fiercely. I spread my weight on top of her and prevented her from escaping. She would not strike me in another sortie; this fight would end in the grapple, under my terms.
The Swan Princess must have understood this because her arms and legs wrapped around my body, much as they’d wrapped around the poor dead Dr. Saxon. She squeezed my corpulence and I suddenly knew the strength of this beast, that it was enough to crack bones and snap a spine. I wrapped my arms and legs around her and squeezed with all my might, if for no greater purpose than to give the same treatment I was receiving.