Automatic Woman Read online

  “Any more of that seven percent solution, Doc?”

  “You took both doses at once, didn’t you?”

  “Guilty.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t die of a heart attack.”

  “I’m lucky I didn’t die of a lot of things. What does ten quid get me?”

  “That salve and five shots.”

  “That’s not a bargain.”

  “Find another physician, then.”

  I paid the man. As I was leafing through my diminishing bank roll, I noticed the cog etchings folded into the bills. I held one of the etchings up.

  “This look like anything to you, Doc?”

  “Looks like foreign script. What is it?”

  “I don’t know. You know anyone who can read it?”

  “Nope, try Oxford, there’s bound to be someone.”

  “I might not be welcome at Oxford.”

  “That’s not surprising.”

  Dr. Doyle pocketed my money and put my items in a paper bag.

  “You take care to find Mary. She’s… special to me.”

  “I get that, Doc. Don’t you worry.”

  I left Doyle’s office and went back into the quiet sunny Sunday. The question of what to do and where to go overwhelmed me. I reflected back on another of my father’s sayings.

  “When the big picture gets too big, boy, when you feel like you have too many tasks at hand, focus on the minutiae of the moment. The one little task that needs to get done right now. Finish, go to the next, then the next, then the next. The big picture is an illusion, like the ocean. You don’t ever have to consider the ocean, just the shite you’re swimming in right now.”

  My whole ocean was Darwin and Barnes and their quest for Saxon’s truth. Living in that ocean were the seas of Mary, Nouveau, the Swan Princess, Orel, Emily, Silver, Oxford, Bow Street, on and on. The minutiae was in my pocket. Etchings of cogs, an unknown factor, but one made by Saxon’s own hand. The variable of the moment was the shite I was swimming in.

  Oxford was out. If Darwin pulled the kind of influence to contend with Barnes, then he would have agents on the grounds, maybe even in Whitechapel. Without the aid of Oxford intellectuals, I would need to turn to local resources, specialists in the strange and macabre. The Hellfax Club came to mind.

  The Hellfax was a secret organization that was really not a secret to anyone. They were self-proclaimed mystic researchers and practitioners financed by bored and naive society women. There is some unwritten code or law that all women of means must be into Hinduism or Mysticism or psychics by the time they reach fifty years of age. The male equivalent to this is ornate guns. All aging women find psychics, all aging men find gun cabinets and expensive brandy. There’s your truth.

  So back to the Hellfax, social club of the strange, safe haven of tea readers and phrenologists, and astrologers and all the pursuers of said arts who didn’t care to subject themselves to the slick and nimble hands of gypsies. Respectable mumbo-jumbo. Also, the Hellfax was open on Sundays, of course.

  I walked to the club. The London air was a little less pissy, a little less sulphuric, on this fine Sunday. Yesterday’s train ride to Oxford had stoked my whimsy for country strolls and fresh air. If I survived this, I promised myself, a holiday would definitely be in order.

  The Hellfax Club occupied a two-story Tudor townhouse. The front double doors were affixed chaotically with stars, moons, and pyramids. The moons were crescent, the stars were five -pointed, and each pyramid was centered with a single eye. Very controversial.

  The interior was purposefully gloomy. Velvet drapes hung in every archway, over every window, over every raw brick wall; the interior of the house was reminiscent of a soft furry cave. Two sorts of people wandered the Hellfax. Middle-aged women in bright coats and feathered hats, marred by the plumage of society, enjoyed tea and gossip and the prospect of communing with the dead. The other sort were actual members. In contrast to the guests, they wore black silk to match the walls and drapes. What jewelry they wore was predominately silver or ruby. A butler approached me.

  “Can I be of service?” His words were drawn-in like all high society help. His tuxedo matched the decor.

  “Got anyone versed in runes or script?”

  “Why yes, sir. Please, come with me.”

  I followed Jeeves down one of the halls, past the scornful look of society ladies and their ridiculous feathered hats. Past the curtains and veils and kilometers of velvet, Jeeves and I entered a stately room, something a bit more normal to social clubs. Men sat in circles around wood tables with cards laid out. Some drank brandy, some smoked cigars, some did both. Jeeves directed me to a massive greasy foreigner. He was a younger man whose face was absolutely dominated by a black beard, the kind that could house birds, ferrets, maybe a revolver. The foreigner did not get up.

  “Mr. Grigori Rasputin of the Russian Empire. Visiting scholar of Cyrillic mysticism,” Jeeves announced. I presented my hand; the Russian looked at it like spoiled pork. He said something to a nearby associate in his bastard dog language.

  “Mr. Rasputin would like to know what you want,” The man said in a thick Russian accent.

  I unfurled the cog papers. “I need to know what these mean. Can he translate?”

  The man spoke to Rasputin in their mother tongue. Rasputin answered again through his translator.

  “He says he can tell you the meaning of these symbols if you have enough money for a fresh bottle of Hine Cognac.”

  The men at Rasputin’s table all got a chuckle out of this. I slapped down five pounds of hard currency, the kind that shuts mouths and ends questions.

  “Alright, Mr. British. Have a seat.” The translator said something and one of the seated men rose and left the circle. I took his place. Rasputin slurred something which got his compatriots laughing again.

  “Before he begins he wants to know how it is you are so fat. He says men in his home country are not as fat as any of the English he’s encountered. Why is that?”

  “Regular meals. Also, we don’t shag our sisters, so our breeding stock is better.”

  The translator put this in their language and the table roared with laughter, including his beardship. He barked more words.

  “Well, you don’t know what you’re missing,” the translator said with tears running down his eyes. I smiled at the Russian; at least he was clever.

  “Time is money, Ivan. What do I have?”

  Rasputin took a hold of my etchings and gave them a good stare. He yipped an order and one of his contemporaries produced a monocle. Rasputin fixed the lens to his eye and gave the papers another look. He laid into a monologue that sounded like a bulldog’s love song. I waited for the translation.

  “He says that these symbols are Mongol. That they tell the story of a horseman who loved a girl. The girl was high born and the horseman was a bandit. He asked her father for her hand, but he, a wealthy merchant, refused unless the horseman could double the merchant’s wealth.”

  Rasputin went on. So did his translator.

  “The merchant’s offer stood as a challenge. The horseman accepted. He went into the desert and prayed to the gods for an answer. In response, the gods caused a massive tree to sprout from the desert, a lone tree in a place of sand and snakes. The horseman dug the tree out of the sand with his hands and carved from its trunk a bow and a club. He used the blessed weapons to rob the first merchant caravan to cross his path.

  The lead guard attacked the horseman, but was felled by his mighty club. The second guard approached. Then the third. All were defeated by the horseman’s magic wood. Finally, the owner of the caravan exited his coach to beg the horseman for his life. By the gods, by the stars, by coincidence, the merchant of the caravan was the same man who had refused the horseman his daughter.

  The merchant was amazed, relieved even. ‘Take my daughter.’ the merchant said. ‘A man with your fighting prowess is welcome in my family.’ The horseman laughed at this. ‘I don’t need your daughter, I
have your money and your caravan and all your horses!’”

  The Russians roared in laughter. I expected more to the story, but Rasputin kept laughing, his entourage kept laughing, everyone was laughing but me. I turned to the translator.

  “What’s so funny?”

  The translator was wiping tears from his eyes. It took him a moment to gain enough composure to speak.

  “It’s funny, because Mongols fuck their horses!”

  My face went red.

  “Oy, are you taking a piss!?”

  The translator said something and the table’s laughter renewed. I was not amused. Not in the slightest. I was reaching for one of the ashtrays, heavy fuck-all bludgeoning types, when a man tapped my shoulder.

  “Don’t listen to these frauds. That’s the third time I’ve heard that Mongol story today.”

  I turned to find a bearded and disheveled Irishman.

  “You mind if I have a look?”

  “Go to it, man.”

  The Irishman snatched the rubbings out of Rasputin’s grasp and gave them a good look. The Russian rumbled but made no move to retrieve the documents.

  “Come on with me, mate. Leave these buffoons to their carousing.” I got up and left the Russian drinking party. The Irishman wasn’t done with them.

  “Mark my words, Grigori. You keep on with your stories you’re going to come to a horrible, bloody end!”

  The Russian answered with a finger gesture. I’m not sure what it meant, but I could guess.

  “Where did you get these?” The Irishman asked.

  “Long story. The short version is… cogs.”

  “Someone wrote these on machine cogs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Tell me what you know, mate. Maybe I can make sense of it.”

  The Irishman shook his head.

  “I don’t think you can. This is Sumerian cuneiform.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m a writer. I research this sort of thing.” He presented a hand. “Abraham Stoker. My friends call me Bram.” I shook his hand.

  “Jacob Fellows.”

  “Good to know. This isn’t just regular cuneiform, mate. This is some pretty common stuff.”

  “Common Sumerian?”

  “Sure, pal. Look, this one says, ‘If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.’”

  “Eye for an eye?”

  “Right. And this one says, ‘If a slave denies ownership of his master, the master shall gain the right to cut off the slave’s ear.’ These are laws. Specifically, these are the laws of King Hammurabi of Babylonia.”

  “I’m not familiar.”

  “You should be. King Hammurabi was the sixth king of Babylon and one of the first true rulers of man. He presented the first written laws of man, two-hundred and eighty two statutes covering crime, marriage, contracts, ownership. You could say he was the father of civilization. You mind stepping out with me?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I don’t like the prospect of curious ears.”

  I followed Stoker out of the Hellfax, and thankfully so. The stench of dishonest Russian was too much to bear and I was tempted to get my five pounds back by force.

  We absconded to a café across the street and sat for a kettle of Royal Blend.

  “You mind handing those back.”

  I slid Stoker the etchings. He gave them a bit more scrutiny.

  “You’ve got two laws of two-hundred eighty two. At least, two-eighty-two are assumed. The original carvings are numbered, but sixty-six through ninety-nine are missing.”

  “What does it mean? Why etch it into metal work?”

  “Why not? Cuneiform was an etched writing used primarily in stone, clay, and wood. If the Babylonians had a better mastery of metalwork, I’m sure they would have etched their words on disks.”

  I sipped my tea. Stoker sipped his. Something wasn’t right about the situation, about my chance meeting with an informative stranger.

  “Why would a modern engineer take the time to etch these in his cogs?” I asked.

  “I can think of two reasons. One, he was a mad man and the etchings bore some irrational meaning, personal to him but unfathomable to the sane world. Such is the nature of insanity in that it is deeply personal, and intensely lonesome.”

  “You sound like a man who speaks from experience.”

  “I’ve made a study of the insane for one of my books. I once met a man who eats spiders. He would bait them by catching flies and leaving them on thewindow sill. When I asked him why he ate spiders, he told me that he had yet to figure out how to catch rats, but when he did, he would drink their blood. There was a logic that made sense to him: flies, spiders, rats. But it was a personal, subjective logic, not meant for the world outside his mind.”

  Stoker took another sip of his tea.

  “But I’m moving away from the topic at hand. The second explanation is that the maker of these cogs attached some kind of greater meaning to his machinery and was leaving a note to the world. Do you believe in God, Mr. Fellows?”

  I leaned forward in my chair. The Irishman regarded me with intense unblinking eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you know the relationship between the Christian God and the Babylonians? You know about the Tower of Babel?”

  “Just Sunday school stuff. Big tower, big crash, something of that sort.”

  “The ancient precursors to the Babylonians, the Shinar, spoke a language understood by all mankind. Their words were the language of the universe. They were not burdened with mis-communications and the chaos of misunderstanding. It was impossible for them to misunderstand, such was the clarity of their words. The Shinar were ordered, industrious, mechanical. They learned fast, built fast, and they gathered the secrets of the earth and disseminated the knowledge among their people like bees in a hive. It was the Shinar who decided to build a tower. A tower to speak with God, with their creator.”

  “How’d a people so knowledgeable get it in their heads that God lived in the clouds?” I asked.

  “That very question baffled biblical scholars for centuries. Of course, we live in an advanced society. A society of Boschon cards and difference computation machines. We’re devising a new universal language based in numbers. But I digress. Not all towers are meant to reach God by proximity. Have you ever heard of radio waves?”

  “No.”

  “A Serbian in America, Nicola Tesla, has built a tower of metal in the hills of Colorado. His tower fires invisible energy that can transmit words to other towers of similar make, like a telegraph with no wires. Words can cover kilometers in fractions of a second. Tesla claims that with enough power he can talk to men on the other side of the Earth. For hundreds of years, we thought of towers as just objects of physical stature, but now we know better. Maybe it is Tesla who is shortsighted. Maybe with enough energy he can speak to other worlds, other universes, to God himself. Maybe this was the nature of the Shinar’s tower.”

  I sipped my tea. “So you suppose the Shinar figured out these radios waves?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll never know. God smote them. He deemed them too advanced, to arrogant in their attempt to connect with him. He took away their words, their language, the very strength of their society. They became the Babblers, the men who could not talk.

  “Unable to understand each other, their fine-tuned order turned to chaos, to fighting, to destruction and violence. They destroyed their beautiful tower, their cosmopolitan city, all their riches and advances and wondrous things. They became again like the animals that hoot and point and scream and gnash their teeth. Every man was foreign to every man. And following the tradition of foreign nations they fought and fought and fought. For years the Shinar waged war upon themselves. The survivors eventually left and became wanderers of the earth. Tribes of families. The Babbling tribes of man. Humanity entered their third Dark Age.

  “The Babblers
wondered for untold hundreds of years, living no better than the apes and jackals of the world. Some of the Babblers came west and embraced the trees and became my Gaelicforefathers. Some traveled north and became the fierce animal Norse, never truly tamed. Others traveled south and embraced the rich Nile flood lands, where they prayed to new gods. One group, the focus of my story, wandered in circles around the ashes of Shinar, never venturing far from the land of their fathers, though the earth consumed all traces of what had once been. The leader of one of these circling tribes, a man named Ka-Igi, found himself separated from his tribesmen in the confusion of a sandstorm, a storm that lasted forty days and forty nights. Ka-Igi, lost and alone, took shelter in a mountain cave. The walls of this cave were smooth and carved and not like the caves of animals. In his shelter Ka-Igi found thin sheets of material not rock nor metal nor wood. The sheets held symbols and even though Ka-Igi and his people had no written words, had no knowledge of reading, even though he was a Babbler, Ka-Igi could read the sheets. They were written in the universal language of the Shinar. The tablets had survived the great destruction and the ages of darkness. When the storm cleared, Ka-Igi found his people. He collected them up and showed them his tablets and they were amazed, for they could read them as well as he.

  “Ka-Igi now knew the history of his people, for it was revealed in the tablets. He knew that their society had once been wondrous and powerful. The tablets revealed to him many secrets.

  “Ka-Igi gathered his sons, strong robust Babblers. He gave them each a sheet, each a treasure of knowledge, and set them to gather again the men and women of the world, to share their knowledge and convince all of mankind to return their home country.

  “And so his sons went off.

  “To the west, Ka-Igi’s first son, Ka-Gal, met with the Gaelics and gave them the names of all the stars and the means to build astrological calendars of stone, so they might know their place in the universe.

  “To the north, Ka-Igi’s second eldest son, Ka-Orun, traveled and met with the Norse. He taught them the tides and the use of iron and the construction of mighty ships so they might become masters of the sea.