The Revolutions Read online

  He leaned over the balcony again. “It’s safe,” he said. “As safe as anywhere in London these days, anyway.”

  The woman he’d called Jupiter pointed at Josephine. “You invited a ninth, without telling me?”

  “A happy coincidence. Can we squeeze her in, do you think?”

  “I think you’ve been keeping me in the dark, Mercury, and you know I dislike that. Now, come down, and stop playing the fool.”

  “Wait,” Uranus said. “How do we know she’s not one of theirs?”

  Atwood sighed, turned to Josephine, and took both of her hands in his. “Are you,” he said, “one of theirs?”

  “I hardly know who you are.”

  “Well, that’s good enough for me.”

  Atwood descended the staircase, and Josephine followed.

  The man they’d called Uranus grumbled but returned to his conversation. He was talking to a fat, pale young man in a turban; discussing the news of the campaign in Afghanistan, where the Army was encountering difficulties. Hangings all round. Crack of the whip. So on and so forth. She was both relieved and disappointed that their conversation was so utterly conventional.

  It all reminded her in an odd way of her first arrival at Cambridge. The book-lined room and the stuffy opulence. The sense of ancient ritual and a club to which one was being admitted, on sufferance; the cast of eccentrics, bores, wits, and geniuses; the looming threat of Examination.

  “Well,” said Jupiter. She was arranging cards on the table, and rearranging the lamps, while the man in the black coat—who gave Josephine a business-like nod—arranged the chairs. The man who went by Uranus and the young man in the turban were now talking about the depreciation of the rupee—or, at least, Uranus was lecturing and the younger man was nodding. The turbaned man did not look Indian; the man Atwood had identified as Indian—solid and dark and white-haired—wore a bright red tie, and no turban.

  Atwood took Jupiter’s hand, smiling, and kissed it.

  “Not now,” she snapped. “You—Venus, if you’re to join us. Has Mercury troubled himself to tell you anything? Or has he been playing his usual games?”

  “He was … intriguing.”

  “Hah,” Atwood said.

  “I’m certain he was. Are you a believer?”

  “A believer, ma’am? I don’t quite know. A believer in what?”

  Jupiter raised an eyebrow. “Hmph. That’s a fair answer to an unfair question, my dear. May the gods preserve us from believers, spoon-benders, table-rappers, psychometrists, levitators, mesmerists, tea-leaf readers! Well—all you must do is follow instruction. Please sit. There.”

  Josephine sat. Something about the woman’s voice brooked no question. In Josephine’s experience, where an occult fraternity had secret names, like Mercury or Jupiter, there were also hierarchies and titles and inner and outer circles. This was clearly the inner circle of something-or-other … except perhaps for the young man in the turban, who had the air of a novice, a supplicant, eager to please. There would usually be a circle within the circle, two or three individuals who were first among equals: they might be very quiet, or they might boom and fizz with energy, but in either case they would be the sort of person who commanded attention. Atwood and Jupiter both fit the description well enough.

  Uranus and the young man in the turban sat down on either side of Josephine, and took her hands in theirs. The old man’s hand was dry, and the young one’s hand was damp.

  Atwood sat across the table. He winked, then sat back, his face obscured by a lamp.

  Josephine counted nine lamps, each glowing a different shade: golden orange, aquamarine, damask-red, sap green, amaranthine.…

  The business-like man in the black coat set up a camera on a tripod. Then he lit incense in a little brazier and sat down between Atwood and the Indian man, placing his hands over theirs.

  “Your bloody chairs are bloody heavy, Mercury.”

  “Quiet,” Jupiter said. She walked around the table.

  The pale young man in the turban leaned in close and whispered. “I know that look. I’m new here too.”

  “Hello. You must be, ah…”

  “Saturn.”

  He had an odd, nervous laugh. She smiled politely.

  “It’s all a bit odd, isn’t it? But Lord At—that is, Mercury’s company has the most intriguing reputation. Doesn’t it? I don’t think we’ve met. Sorry. I’m rather nervous, frankly. One wants to make a good impression. Do you have any notion of what we’re supposed to do?”

  The scent of the incense filled the room. It was pungent; sweet and oily. Josephine’s head began to swim.

  “I don’t know,” Josephine said. “They’re very secretive.”

  Another nervous laugh. The camera clicked.

  Jupiter sat. “You, and you.” She was looking at the camera, but she seemed to be addressing Josephine and the anxious young man in the turban. “Decide now: stay, or go. There is risk in staying. It will not be great, if you follow instructions, but it is there. I tell you this because there must be trust.”

  Josephine said nothing. She was a little alarmed; but she’d heard that sort of dire warning before. Mrs Sedgley often warned of the great peril that the members of the Ordo V.V. 341 faced, peering too deeply into the spirit world.

  “I will stay,” said the man in the turban.

  “I did not say speak. I said stay or go. I hope you can follow instructions better than that! Now, look at the cards in front of you.”

  In front of Josephine was a white card, with three symbols on it. There was a black hexagram—somewhat off-kilter, in a way that appeared deliberate. Beneath it was a small circle, violet striated with black, and then a sort of cone made up of whirling lines. Mr Turban’s card was roughly similar.

  The camera clicked again.

  “Please,” Jupiter said, “Understand that our methods must be very precise. Everything must be done in the proper moment and in the proper way. We are engaged in a great experiment.”

  “Tonight,” Atwood said, “we swim the aether.”

  “That,” Jupiter said, “is a characteristically unhelpful way of putting it. We are engaged in a project of scientific investigation—you may consider it essentially astronomical—though we work not with telescopes and spectrographs, but with the will alone—will and perception. Do you understand what Mercury means by aether?”

  “Our new Venus is a scholar,” Atwood said, smiling. “Of course she does.”

  “Ah,” said the man in the turban, “I think I read about this; something about electricity, or, or, I think I read about a scientist chap electrocuting a frog? Or was it a cat?”

  “Nonsense,” Atwood said, happily.

  “In Aristotle,” Josephine said, “it would be the fifth element; the stars and the planets are made of it.”

  “Its properties?”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting to be examined. Well, let’s see: pure and unchanging. Airy and invisible. Eternal and perfect; not like the gross decaying matter of the earth. And whereas earthly matter rises and falls and moves in straight lines, the aether’s nature is to move of its own accord in perfect circles, for ever; so the heavenly spheres go round and around, sun and moon and stars.”

  “Now, hold on,” said the young man in the turban. “Do you—”

  “Air and fire,” Atwood said. “But we too are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are gross matter; our minds full of the chatter of newspapers and advertisements and train timetables and money and other nonsense; but our souls are made of the stuff of the heavens. And so we call across the void, each to each. If we can but pull back the veil, and take a peek behind it…”

  “Mercury is a romantic,” Jupiter said. “For tonight, all that is required of you is that you follow our instructions. And that if there is fear—and there will be fear—you do not falter. Now pay attention. Listen to the ticking of the clock. There will be a series of chimes; they will be your guide. You must not stray from the path…”

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nbsp; * * *

  Josephine stared at her card. She felt the turbaned neophyte’s—Saturn’s—palm sweat rather horribly into hers. She struggled to remember Jupiter’s instructions. Thank God that she and Saturn were excused from joining in the chant. Everyone else, eyes closed, hands entwined, chanted nonsense syllables. Over and over and over. If not for the perfect interweaving of their voices, she might have thought they were all improvising. Jupiter’s sharp clipped voice set the pace rather like a metronome, intertwining with Atwood’s drawl. One man at the table had a thick Yorkshire accent. The Indian fellow’s accent was equally thick, and a woman whose face was obscured by a round and greenish electrical lamp sounded French. Jupiter’s pencil scratched at the paper. Josephine couldn’t see what she was drawing. The camera clicked at regular intervals. The incense was sweet, oily, dizzying. She wondered if it was drugged. The thought was a little frightening; not unpleasantly so. She listened intently to the grandfather clock that loomed behind her, just as Jupiter had instructed, awaiting the chimes. It clack-clacked in a somewhat irregular way, as if it was following several different cycles at once, some of which were faster than others. She kept expecting it to chime at any moment. She told herself to be patient, and to keep her breathing steady, her hands still. Saturn’s hand really was very unpleasant to the touch. Uranus’ hand trembled. She tried to ignore both of them. Jupiter had been quite particular in her instructions: they must concentrate on the chime, on the chant, on the images on the cards before them. Very well; Josephine could do as instructed. But what was it all for? She’d heard of certain talented mediums who could project their astral selves among the stars, or to the moon, or at least who said that they could. Was that all this was? Would the lights come on soon and they would all stand around telling themselves that of course we had felt the most extraordinary sensation of departing from the body.… Or was this one of the more refined sort of fraternities, where it was understood that when one spoke of travel to the stars, it was of course not meant to be taken literally, nothing so vulgar; rather, one meant a spiritual awakening, a discovery of the recesses of one’s own soul? Perhaps. Most likely. Atwood was no fool. How had he talked her into this, precisely, and distracted her from the reason she’d come here? The camera clicked. She realised that she’d drifted off for a moment, and sat up straight. There was now a low musical tone in the room, coming from no clearly identifiable corner; it sounded rather like a cello. There might be a cellist hidden somewhere, or perhaps a phonograph. The camera clicked again. The odd thing about the cello was that its tone was always descending, down and down for ever, yet never changing. The camera clicked. Jupiter’s pencil scratched. The clock chimed and, as instructed, she shifted her attention to the orange sphere and closed her eyes. There was darkness for a moment, then a ray of violet light rose up from the infinite darkness below her into the infinite light above, and into it slowly descended the shadows of Mercury and Jupiter and Uranus and the others, and she felt herself opening up to lend them her strength, and they revolved together as they descended—or perhaps they rose; she could not tell if those words had any meaning any more. De profundis, Atwood whispered, as if in her ear, ad lucem, while behind her the clock chimed again and again as if time itself poured brightly into the void like quicksilver.

  * * *

  When she opened her eyes it was pitch dark, and there was screaming and shouting in English and French and what was presumably Hindustani. There was broken glass in her lap. Something flopped on the table in front of her, scattering what was left of the lamps. She had a sense of having fallen so powerful that she was afraid to move for fear that she would find that her bones were broken. The thing on the table in front of her made a keening, fluttering sound. It was like nothing she’d ever heard before.

  “Bastards,” someone shouted. “Bloody buggering bastards, they—”

  “No,” Atwood said. “We did this.”

  “Novices.” That was the Frenchwoman’s voice. “Idiot novices.”

  “No.” Atwood’s voice. “No, no, no. What is that infernal noise? Who is that? Everyone stand away from the table, and stop shout—”

  “Bloody Gracewell,” shouted Uranus. “Another bloody error!”

  “What,” said Jupiter. Her voice was tight to the point of snapping. “What—is—that?”

  Somebody swore. It sounded like they’d stumbled over the camera.

  “What did we bring back?”

  “Impossible!”

  “Oh God—oh God, it’s real.”

  “I have matches,” Mr Turban said. “I have matches!”

  The thing on the table lurched. Josephine felt something soft and lace-like brush her face. She screamed and jumped out of her chair.

  “Light. Light!”

  “All right, all right—wait—oh, bloody hell—there!”

  A match flared red.

  The chimerical apparition that lay on the table, flopping in broken glass, was … She didn’t know what it was. It appeared shapeless at first—or perhaps she simply couldn’t make any sense of its shape. Parts of it were a bright cobalt blue and parts of it were mottled indigo or pink—Josephine couldn’t tell if she was looking at shimmering vari-coloured scales, or tattoos, or bruises, or blood, or clothing. In places it had the shine of scale, or enamel, or silk. Sharp ribs in a narrow chest heaved for air. It had a tangle of limbs, long, flailing, jointed in an irregular way—or perhaps they were broken. It lay in a heap of purple matter—folds of diaphanous silk and lace, a peacock’s tail, petals, the leaves of fern, the fronds of a jellyfish—bathed in shadow and flickering matchlight. She couldn’t make sense of it. The face—oh God, there was a face!—had what she thought of as rather Chinese-looking eyes, except they were pupil-less, silvery, nacreous, blinking in what might be panic. It was screaming.

  Mr Turban started sobbing like a baby. Jupiter slapped him.

  Struggling on the table as if pinned there like a butterfly. Were those things on its back wings? Just as she thought she was about to make sense of what she was seeing, the match went out.

  Someone took her hand and pulled her away—he lit a match and she saw that it was Atwood, pointing to the stairs and mouthing up, up. She was too stunned to argue. When she turned to look back the—the apparition had rolled in its agony off the table and onto the floor, where the experimenters all crowded around it, obscuring her view, holding up matches—with the exception of the man in the turban, who’d fainted, and the man in the black coat, who’d gone to fetch the rifle from the corner of the room. Over the noise of the experimenters’ astonished jabbering, she could still hear the creature screaming. She thought that she might never stop hearing it.

  Atwood pulled her out into the corridor.

  “What—”

  “I don’t know. Impossible. Unprecedented! More than I dared imagine. Is it dangerous? Most certainly. I have to think…” He laughed, running his hands through his hair. “Ha!—I was right to add you to our circle…”

  Was it somehow her doing? She didn’t know. She recalled nothing clearly. She remembered colours, darkness, motion; a great turning ring of light, and another, and another. She remembered straining, yearning, a homesick longing for the stars.

  “Go home. Say nothing. Do you understand? Nothing.”

  Atwood put his fingers to her mouth. He’d cut them on the broken glass, and they smeared blood on her lips.

  “Nothing,” he said, in a tone of command.

  He led her to the door.

  She said, “I…”

  “For your own sake, Josephine: say nothing. This is no game. Now go, before Jupiter decides to lock you up in the pantry.”

  He smiled suddenly. “You were splendid, though. Ha! At last!”

  Then he practically shoved her out into the street and shut the door in her face.

  Her lips were warm. She wiped blood from them. Outside it was evening, and the rain had stopped. A man across the street was selling newspapers. A couple of cabs rolled briskly by.
Two gentlemen strolled past in the other direction, talking business. One glanced at her and tut-tutted.

  * * *

  When she returned, Mr Borel’s daughter Sophia, who was sweeping the steps, gave her a disapproving look. Josephine patted at her hair and found it a dreadful mess. Well, there was nothing she could do about that now. She said good night to Sophia and babbled a few words of explanation, not quite knowing what she said.

  She went up to her room, and sat on the bed, shaking. She felt terrible, as if she’d been drinking to excess or had swallowed poison.

  She desperately wanted to tell someone. She wanted to never speak of it again.

  It had been no sham.

  Madness. Stranger than any vision her mother had suffered. But Atwood and the rest had seen it too.

  That beautiful, terrible, wounded creature.

  She was still awake hours later, pacing up and down, when someone started banging on the door below. She threw open the window to see a large tramp in the street, reeling away from the door, bellowing her name. It took her a moment to realise that it was Arthur. He appeared to have been in a fire.

  Chapter Nine

  That night Arthur had stayed late in Room 13, explaining to Mr Dimmick at chucking-out time that he thought there were certain errors in the Work he’d done that afternoon, and it was a bloody nuisance but he simply had to fix them. Dimmick thought this was improbable but since Gracewell wasn’t there to appeal to, and Dimmick certainly didn’t understand the Work, he’d grudgingly permitted it. In fact, Arthur was hoping to snoop on the night-time operations of the Engine. Mr Vaz had remained for the same purpose. Two other workers—Harriot, and a clerk named Malone—had insisted on staying, apparently out of a determination that nobody in the room should show themselves more diligent or ambitious than they. Arthur was waiting for them to go away.