“We need one more favor, Sam. Detective Blenkinsop lives close by, on Anglesey Street. We need you to deliver this note and then fetch him here. Do you think you could find the address?”
“Anglesey Street?” The veteran scratched his stubbly chin. “Wot’s the number?”
“Forty-two.”
“However shall he read the house number?” Wilde asked.
But the veteran didn’t need to see, he had his own way of navigating the city.
“Number forty-two? The lady wot lives in the bottom flat has a yappy little dog called Bonzo. I usually tosses it a biscuit when it comes sniffing about me feet. Don’t you worry, I can find it, no bother.”
The veteran turned and began tapping his way toward Anglesey Street. He had gone barely ten feet when he vanished from sight.
Conan Doyle turned to Wilde. “I noticed from your walk you seem a little stiff.”
Wilde grunted a laugh. “Stiff? After our adventure on the Thames the other night, a corpse in full rigor is more flexible.”
The Scottish doctor unshouldered his satchel and opened it. He drew out a smoked glass medicine bottle and handed it to Wilde.
“Medicine, Arthur?”
“The laudanum you once asked for. Mixed with gin and cocaine.”
“Sounds playful. But won’t it make us somewhat… sedated?”
“Not with all the amphetamines I added. Go on, take a good swig, you will soon feel better. Probably better than you have ever felt in your life.”
“Arthur, you dog!” Wilde smirked. “Am I at last being a bad influence upon you? You once said you didn’t dispense dangerous drugs.”
“Only in an emergency. And this qualifies. After all we’ve been through and have yet to endure, we both need a restorative. Now go on, take your medicine as the doctor orders.”
Wilde uncapped the bottle and took a long, Adam’s-apple-bobbing swig. He handed the bottle back to Conan Doyle, who did likewise. After a moment, Wilde commented, “Interesting, my face appears to have gone completely numb.”
“It does have that side effect. Still, let us get on with the task at hand.” The two friends studied the darkened shop front. Wilde thumbed the door latch experimentally, but to no avail. “Locked,” he said, “and we have no key.”
Conan Doyle reached into his satchel and drew out his Webley revolver. “Fortunately I brought a skeleton key with me.”
“Good Lord! Won’t that fetch the police?”
“A good thing if it did.” Conan Doyle dropped into a wide-legged stance, aiming the muzzle an inch from the lock. Anticipating shrapnel, he turned his face away and squeezed the trigger. BANG! Up close the shot was a thunderclap that ricocheted from the doorway, fell into the arms of the fog, and was quickly smothered.
The bullet had neatly blown the lock out of the door. The shop bell tinkled as Conan Doyle shouldered his way inside. Wilde followed after, remarking, “I should think it’s pointless announcing our entrance after that.”
“Keep your wits about you,” Conan Doyle warned. “Our resurrected friend might be lurking.”
“Heavens, I wish you hadn’t said that.”
The two men split up and crept about the shop. Looking. Listening. The space between shelves was unfathomably dark. Wilde struck a match only to yelp as a wild-eyed, toothy visage loomed from the darkness — the painted face of a rocking horse. Both circuited the shop and met up at the far wall where a sliver of yellow light gleamed beneath the parlor door. They paused on the threshold, listening.
From within came a faint but steady click-click… click-click… click-click…
Conan Doyle threw Wilde a baffled look and the Irishman volleyed it back. The Scottish author stood back and raised his pistol, then nodded to Wilde, who twisted the doorknob and flung the door wide. They expected an armed assailant, or Wilde’s kidnapped son and Miss Leckie tied to chairs. Instead, they found a domestic scene.
The blond-haired boy sat in his bath chair, a blanket draped across his lap. As before, his head turned to follow the movement of the toy train. However, the toy locomotive had toppled from its track and lay on its side, a puddle of water seeping from the tiny boiler. In the nearby rocking chair, the lady in the coal-scuttle bonnet furiously knitted away, needles mechanically working: click-click… click-click… click-click… The scarf she was knitting spilled in folds at her feet, perhaps ten feet long and steadily growing.
“I–I—I’m terribly sorry,” Conan Doyle started to say, but then his words shriveled in his throat. He and Wilde exchanged a mystified look and stepped closer. He touched the woman’s bonnet and it fell back to reveal an armature of wire forming a rough approximation of a human head. He lifted the blanket from the boy’s lap and found no legs: only a clockwork mechanism where the lower half of a body should have been.
Both figures were lifelike automatons, robotically repeating the same action over and over again.
“Good Lord,” Wilde breathed. “They are mere mechanisms, after all.”
Conan Doyle picked up a framed photograph from an end table and showed it to Wilde. It was the photograph he had seen on their earlier visit: a pretty blond woman posed in front of a lake with her hand on the shoulder of a fair-haired young boy of perhaps four years old who stood clutching a windup battleship.
“I believe these were the real models,” Conan Doyle said.
Wilde raised his bushy eyebrows. “And what became of the originals?”
“What indeed?” Conan Doyle shook his head grimly. “I suspect they are no longer with us. I believe these simulacrums are Jedidiah’s attempt at a replacement.”
“How grotesque.”
“I fear we are only just beginning to understand how twisted the mind of Jedidiah is.”
At his words, realization flashed in Wilde’s eyes.
“What is it, Oscar?”
The Irish writer sighed and shook his head. “I am a complete fool!” He fixed Conan Doyle with a solemn look. “What was the name of Ozymandius’s estranged brother?”
Conan Doyle thought a moment. “Solomon?”
“Precisely. As a student of the classics, I am mortified that I failed to tumble to it sooner.”
“Tumble to what?”
“In the Book of Kings, Jedidiah is another name for Solomon.”
“Ahhhhh! So after the accident with the torpedo, where his wife and son were killed—”
“He changed his name and seemingly his identity, from Solomon to Jedidiah.”
A floorboard creaked behind them. Conan Doyle spun and aimed the revolver, finger tensed on the trigger.
“Don’t shoot!” Detective Blenkinsop stood in the parlor doorway, the old veteran lurking behind.
“Detective Blenkinsop!” Conan Doyle exclaimed. “Thank goodness. You’d better come look at this.”
“What is it, sir?” Blenkinsop asked. He had obviously dressed in a hurry, for the front of his coat was misbuttoned. “What have you found?”
Conan Doyle nodded and the young detective stepped forward and peered at the two automatons. “Strewth!” he exclaimed raising his homburg and scratching his head. “Proper lifelike, ain’t they?”
“I believe Jedidiah is involved in a revolutionary plot that is unraveling at this very moment. I fear he is behind the kidnapping of Mister Wilde’s son and my friend, Miss Jean Leckie. Moreover, I believe he is behind the dead men who are coming to life and assassinating key members of the government.”
Blenkinsop let out a whistle. “All pretty serious charges. I mean, them big dolls is proper queer all right, but they ain’t against the law. I can’t go to Commissioner Burke unless we got something more substantial. Some proper kind of proof.”
Conan Doyle sagged visibly. “You are correct, Tom. We shall just have to keep searching the premises until we find it.” He thought a moment and said, “I believe a thorough probe of the cellar workshop should be next.”