Another figure in priest's garments turned towards us as we approached down the nave. To my further astonishment, I recognised the person as Scape's companion, Miss McThane. She had pulled and pinned her hair back for the masquerade, but had neglected to scrub off her face paints, thus producing a rather brazen and disturbing appearance. Her eyes widened when she saw me. "Where'd he come from?"
"Can it, will ya?" Scape, still gripping my arm, propelled me faster. "Bendray's filled him in on the whole deal." His agile mind, ever impatient with mere fact, had embroidered the erroneous assumption into a complete picture. "He sent you here to help us out on this thing, right?" He glanced at me for confirmation.
"I-"
"Right." He thrust me forward. "Come on, we gotta get going; those funny-looking fuckers'll be here any minute now. There's some more of these highbutton nightgowns in the what-d'ya-call-it – yeah, the vestry – get him decked out, will ya? I'll get the rest of the stuff." He turned and strode quickly down the nave.
Smiling, Miss McThane folded her arm into mine. "Sure thing," she said. "Jeez, you're all wet. Don't worry; I'll take care of you."
I was still too weak to resist as she guided me towards a side door beyond the altar. Within moments I found myself in a dimly lit room, the air thick with that peculiar mustiness that comes with spaces too long shuttered. Miss McThane closed the door and leaned back against it, surveying my forlornly dripping figure before her.
"Here." She took a long priest's robe from a wall hook, raising a cloud of grey dust from the fabric, and draped it over the back of a sagging chair. Stepping close to me, she deftly undid the buttons of my waistcoat, then those of the sodden shirt underneath. My breath caught in my throat as she laid her pale hand upon the bare skin of my chest. "You're just about frozen," she whispered. I remembered the smile she gave me from the incident in my shop. "We better get you thawed out…"
I backed away, toppling a candle-stand and a stack of mouldy breviaries behind me. "That's… that's not necessary," I said feebly. "I assure you – I can manage quite nicely, thank you-"
My avenues of escape – were blocked by the debris cluttering the small room. Miss McThane, advancing dauntless, soon had me cornered between a small pump-organ and an upended pew bench. The eyes of my pursuer glittered with a disturbing avidity; the organ gave a despairing wheeze as I leaned back, my hand braced against its yellowed keyboard. Her voice was a lewd pianissimo counterpoint: "Come on, you sonuvabitch…"
What! I had thought was a curtained wall behind me parted, allowing me to fall back on to the floor of a small alcove. Above me, when I looked up, was a face that trembled my heart even more than had that of Miss McThane: the smooth, porcelain and wax visage of a clockwork choirboy, one blue eye staring open at me, the other sealed by a rusty spring as though· winking at my undignified circumstances.
Miss McThane loomed over her prey, but I was scarcely aware of her. With rapidly mounting horror, I realised where I was and why the small church had seemed so oddly familiar to me. Though I had been here only once before, the terror engendered on that occasion had impressed the building's aspect permanently on my memory. I had been led from the river straight to the portals of Saint Mary Alderhythe, the site of the disastrous, even blasphemous resurrection of Dower's Patented Clerical Automata. That which I had taken to be a curtain was in fact the robe of the chorister whose mock-cherubic face now leered at me; rising up on my elbow and twisting about, I could see a whole row of the mechanical creatures, lined up in the alcove like soldiers on parade; beneath me was the brass track set into the church's floor to guide the singing mannikins on their appointed circuit through the church; A mocking fate had led me to the precincts where my meddling ignorance had unleashed those scenes of clattering, spring-driven chaos. Not just painful to my recollection, but the source of angry loathing from such as the crippled pastor (his injury the direct result of that dread evening) who had chased me from his desk only a day previously.
"Good God." I gazed up, stricken. "All I feared has come upon me."
"For Christ's sake," Miss McThane knelt down and grasped my shirt in her small fists. "It's not gonna be that bad. Sheesh-"
At that moment, the the vestry's door flew open; the church's light fell across us. "Not now;" said Scape, seeing us. "Goddamn it; you can do that later. We gotta get this friggin' church ready." He dumped on the floor an awkwardly shaped bag, which immediately split, spewing its contents. "Come on," he ordered as he strode back out the door.
Miss McThane stood up, tucking a few disordered strands of her auburn hair behind her ears. "Next time," she assured me, straightening out her vestments. She picked up the other garments and tossed them to me.
When she had gone to join her larcenous companion, I quickly completed the undressing she had commenced and scrambled into the musty-smelling robes – the damp and chill of my own clothes had seeped into my bones. Any escape from this ill-favoured place would be as easily accomplished rigged out as a peripatetic priest, as it would be for a dripping, sneezing near-corpse traversing the night streets.
For escape was now even more firmly centred in my mind. As I fastened a dust-grey reversed collar about my neck, I took stock of my predicament. That Scape was using the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe for some criminal purpose – if not technically sacrilegious, the building having been hastily de-consecrated after my own ignominious experiences there – of this I had no doubt. (I had already perceived, at this early stage of acquaintanceship, that none of Scape's activities were free of illicit intent.) They were "getting the church ready" – for whom? What ritual was planned? It did not seem to have anything to do with the Clerical Automata my father had built and installed here; I investigated further into the room's various niches, and found all the figures, some with cobwebs filling the angles of their mechanical limbs, undisturbed since the aftermath of my own botched attentions upon them.
I stumbled across the bag Scape had deposited in the middle of the floor. Bending down, I saw that the spilled contents were books, the bindings tattered with use: they were the church's breviaries and hymnals gathered up as though by a purloining bibliophile and cached here. I began to wonder if Scape's actions were perhaps governed more by insanity than dishonesty.
As I peered round the vestry door, hoping to see a clear path to the front of the church and the freedom of the darkness beyond, I was instead spotted by Scape, as he hurriedly lugged another bag down the nave. He signalled me over to him.
"You look sharp, man; really." He pulled the bag up against the hem of my vestment. "Start putting these out, okay?"
"Pardon?" I said. I wished him to go on believing that I had somehow been recruited into this conspiracy by another the better to lull any suspicions and thus make an unhindered exit when the opportunity came – but his rapid speech skittered past before I could comprehend it.
"The pews, man-" He shouted over his shoulder, already bolting towards the church door. "Stick 'em in the pews!"
I opened the bag and found more books inside. But not of a religious nature; instead, in such varying editions and states of wear as to indicate they had been salvaged from every penny bookstall in London, copies of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. For a moment, I did not doubt Scape's sanity as much as my own. The dream-like nature of my adventures again impressed itself upon me; events had gone from puzzling to ludicrous, as they are wont to do when our sleeping visions course to a confusing end, all resemblance to waking nature abandoned. Surely I was about to raise my head from my pillow, blinking at the morning light, eventually (and with relief) to find no evidence of strange visitors and disastrous excursions? My thin breakfast and placid life restored to me? The notion gave comfort.