Sinister Sentiments Page 9

  Silas Obadiah is a man with a fancy for all things mechanical, a fact which hasn’t changed since the sudden removal of his eyeballs occurred last winter.

  Once upon a time, I belonged to a grand old lady from a grand old house. She had skin pale as death but a kind, withered smile and a penchant for science books and all things dark and furry. One such furry thing was me, long ago, when my coat shone like polished obsidian and my eyes were bright and brown as cocoa. Milady supped tea in the parlour of her Kensington town house. with me at her heel as she read great works by great men. But I grew tired of the stuccoed white walls and the periwinkle china in her bony old hands. When time allowed, I escaped to other parts of her grandiose home, exploring the lavish furnishings until I found my way to a simple, wooden staircase that seemed terribly out of place.

  I worked my way up, discovering that there were people in the house I had not previously known of. Milady kept me away from the servants and their quarters, lest their black-as-coal skin should startle her precious companion and send him into a wild froth of teeth and barking. Neither of these things happened when I beheld Silas. He was in the process of repairing the hand crank of a large brass sewing machine, an implement I understood not to get in the way of, lest my tail become attached to one of Milady's finest drapes. I marvelled at the deepness of his eyes, the same shade as my own. He worked with such intent and focus, his giant dark frame so gentle and precise.

  When he noticed me standing before him, he did not cower. He extended a hand that I moved towards, scratching behind my ear with his long fingers. The delicacy of his touch was astounding for hands so large. I stayed with him that afternoon until Milady came to know that I was missing, at which time her sallow butler, Robertson, found me loitering and yanked me by my collar back downstairs where I belonged. We repeated the process often after that; my visits to watch Silas at work were far more important than a few bruises and some loss of fur around my neck. But when Milady became aware of the soreness at my throat, she started coming to seek me out herself rather than let her brutish butler manhandle me away.

  So it’s my fault, really, that Silas lost his magnificent eyes.

  My misbehaviour began what was to be their lifelong friendship. Upon seeing the scientific skill that Silas possessed, Milady called upon him almost daily to improve the other aspects of her home. He installed for her a telephone, the most-sought after of society toys. After Silas’s alteration, it gave such a perfect sound when in use that Milady’s acquaintances seemed to never stop calling her upon it. When she noticed Silas’s ripped cotton trousers and his creased shirts, my mistress ordered him some hardy waist overalls directly from Strauss and Davis in the United States. Silas was proud to wear the thick blue denim as he continued his good work. He still wears the infernal things now. I resent them, not because he loves them so, but because they made him different to the other black-skinned servants. He was already hated by the white ones, but the denim made him an enemy to his own kind too.

  Caught between worlds. I suppose now I can relate better to how that feels.

  Servants and society alike were nothing short of sickened by the friendship between Silas and Milady. She looked upon him as a thoughtful son; perhaps she’d never had one of her own, for none ever came to visit. Silas was respectful and pleasant, and most of all, he loved me as dearly as Milady did. I confess I loved him more than I did my mistress. I remember that love, how it pulsed through my veins and filled me with excitement whenever he called me by name. Most of my body doesn’t react that way now, it’s not designed to, but my heart still feels like it’s swelling against the steel cage that holds it in place. Silas can’t see any of that; all he knows is that he calls and I answer.

  Resentment among humans is most hard-felt when an opportunity to act presents itself. Once again, it was my fault that such a chance occurred. I did a rather foolish thing on an outing to Hyde Park.

  I died.

  Milady liked to present me, fine specimen of the German Shepherd that I was, parading me for all the other society people to view. It was autumn when we took our usual circuit, with Silas waiting in the carriage for our return. I saw a pile of crisp, reddened leaves that had dropped from an oak at the very edge of the grounds. I ran for them, breaking away from Milady too fast for her to catch my lead. I absconded wildly and threw myself into the leaves, rolling joyously and evading her attempts to regain control of me.

  In my evasion I burst out into the road. The horse leading the carriage reacted before its driver, but the heavy beast couldn’t find my dark form beneath it enough to evade me with its hooves. One great stamp, and my neck snapped in two. I lay, barely breathing, listening to Milady’s cries, the last sound I thought my ears would ever receive.

  But I awoke.

  I knew that I was dead, that the body I now possessed was not my own, but somewhere inside I was still me. My eyes were sharper, now glowing yellow with electric lights and receptors where my cocoa irises had once been. Silas beamed down at me when they opened, but the eyes were not fully in my control. They were already taking in the colourful schematics behind him on the wall of his attic room. Something that looked like my brain was drawn inside a cage of wires and dials. A red mass in the shape of a heart donned a similar garb, though it now bore something attached beneath that resembled a battery, connected by gears and cogs that ran onto pistons and shafts where my four legs extended. I rose on them and looked back to Silas, a new understanding that I had never before experienced coursing through my structure.

  “Galileo?” he asked. “Do you hear me, boy?”

  My bark was not the bark it had once been. I clenched my steel jaws and made a sound like a knife scraping along a plate. Silas winced at it, but he laughed and patted my head all the same. It didn’t feel like it used to, his skin was warm against the metal plate where my fur had once been, but the delicacy of his touch was lost to me.

  “We shall have to work on that,” he said.

  And he did. Silas worked on me night and noon for three rotations of the sun, since the autumn day when I had left this world. On the fourth day, he presented me to Milady. She was dressed in black with a mournful look as I stepped into the room, listening to the thump of my own heavy steel paws as they padded atop her plush rugs to reach her. At first, I thought she would shun me, her eyes welled with terrified tears. But when she saw me lie down at her feet as I had for so many years before that moment, her fears became still. The bark Silas had arranged for me was pleasing to her ears. She had slowly begun to transform into a true woman of science through her friendship with Silas, and now she had proved the transition was complete.

  “One thing, my dear fellow,” she told him with a bony, pointed hand. “I don’t care for his heart being on display like that. You must cover it up.”

  Robertson, the beastly butler, saw me before Silas had had the chance to do so. He had left my chest open for Milady to see that it was still me in the mass of metal somewhere, but in doing so the resentment the other servants felt finally had cause to break loose. I was an abomination. A sin against God and life itself. Silas had done what no man had right to do in returning me from the grip of the Almighty. And he would pay for his sins.

  They came when the first snow had mixed with the grime of the London streets. A mob, some hundred strong, led by Robertson and the people of our house, many of those who had once adored me and fed me their scraps. I saw them first from my post at the window, barking to alert my mistress and her technician. She pleaded with Silas to run, but he stood tall and imposing in his denim and his dark boots. He was no man for running, not back then. The mob burst in through the doors of the fine townhouse, tearing through Milady’s elegant furnishings until they found us in the study. There Silas held up his fists, his eyes roving over their knives and sharpened implements from their gardens. My gears ground with furious, unoiled creaks as they pointed at me and him in their rage.

  Milady was wrestled aside and held back. As a woman
of society, they assumed her mind had been turned by the dark menace she called her friend. Once she had witnessed the penance for his wickedness, they were sure she would be well in her humours once more. It didn’t quite turn out like that. She watched in horror as her trusted butler stepped towards us, his sallow face alight with fear and revulsion. His hand rose to single me out, bolstered by the kin crowding behind him to try and access the room and the culprit within it.

  “By the will of God, this beast must be still.”

  “And yet it moves,” Silas said with a shrug.

  His candour was enough to incite them. A crowd moved upon him that I couldn’t penetrate; other rioters with spades and pitchforks smacked at my plating to hold me back. The heart within my mechanism swelled as I heard Silas give a sickening cry of pain. He choked out sobs and screamed an unholy howl that mastered any animal sound that I had ever made, before or after the end of my life. Milady screamed too when the crowd parted to show us its good work.

  Empty sockets. The eyes of the unbeliever removed as penance, so that his mechanical monstrosities would come to an end. He could not weep for how his sockets bled; the sight was purely wrong, impossible for me to comprehend in my shock. But Milady wept for both of us. And then, slowly, the sight of him sank in. Something happened in my head, a surge of gears and clicks and whirs over which I had no control. I leapt for Robertson, my steel jaw catching his throat beneath that gloating smirk he was wearing. I thanked an unseen spirit that Silas had had the presence of mind to still give me teeth.

  I had killed too many of that mob to count before the rest made their escape. Fuelled by vengeance and my own newfound strength, it took me far too long to notice both my maker and my mistress on the floor. In the shock and the gore of it all, Milady had died of fright. Her heart did not beat when I rested my metal ear over it to listen for signs of life. Whether it was the sight of Silas’s punishment that had done it or my outburst in response, I did not know. All I knew was that Silas was already a pariah, and a dead mistress would only lay further blame upon him. I took him by the arm and dragged until he forced himself to his feet, shielding his empty eyes with one arm, a feeble attempt to placate his pain. I guided him to my lead and we fled into the frozen night.

  Time had not meant much to me when I was first alive, but in my new incarnation I finally saw its wonder. Silas had been irrevocably damaged by the mob, but being the progeny of slaves had certainly taught him to work with what he had remaining. Our dwelling was nowhere near as grand as it had once been, but to him it was a paradise of whirring gears and clinking cogs, the tick and the tock of the old clock tower brought him solace. We were perfectly concealed, so long as we left it only by night, which suited Silas perfectly, though he did look rather odd walking dark streets in black-lensed spectacles.

  He looks odd now as we stare into the window display of the huge department store on Oxford Street. Its owner has been boasting in the dingy local pub for weeks about its upcoming display of the latest photographic equipment, a fact that caught my master’s attention a few nights ago. Silas cannot see the lenses and lights the store is using in its window, but he knows by my sudden stop that he has come to the right place. He raises his cane, still whirring, and turns his head in my direction.

  “Anyone about?”

  I check, remaining silent. Silas nods and thrashes forward, shattering glass over both of us. Some shards collect in the upturned rims of his denim overalls, the ones now stained forever with his dark brown blood. I’ll make a point of wrestling the sharp remnants free when we get home. As my master feels around to obtain the parts he desires for his next great project, footsteps come in vibrations under my steel paws. Two sets are approaching us. I give out a bark, the one designed to signify danger, turning sharply to face the oncoming threat. Officers of the law.

  “What’s the bother, negro?” one of the Peelers asks, straightening out his uniform. His hand hovers gleefully over a baton.

  His companion sniggers. “Trying to build yourself some eyes?”

  Silas turns too with a frown. My frame seems heavier somehow as I realise that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. I have a moment before the officers as I watch them unveil their weapons, a moment just like the one back at the townhouse when Milady was still alive. Back then I hesitated, a fatal pause that changed the world. But now I lunge forth, teeth bared and razor sharp, the blind rage of my mechanics overtaking any pause for thought or feeling. I never hesitate anymore to protect what’s mine.

  It’s the one mistake I’ve learned never to repeat.

  The Bleeding Of The thief

  I’d always supposed that being a scoundrel was going to catch up with me sooner or later. I’d just rather it had been later, that’s all, because young, strong wrists didn’t suit the tight, digging manacles that were drawing out my blood. My skin was tanned a deep caramel shade from weeks of labour in the sun, but where the manacles sometimes slid a little against the broken skin, I could still see slivers of white, untainted flesh beneath each thick iron band. A slim, crimson line trailed down from the heavy shackles into each of my palms as I lay on my back in the sand, looking up at my hands. I watched the blood line form small droplets on my fingertips before the liquid became too heavy, falling to the golden grains in soundless droplets.

  By the shade of the great pyramid, the lack of sun left my wounds wet and stinging, but it soothed every other ache and ailment in my battered frame. When I was picking bar-fights back home, I thought I’d known a fair bit about pain. Now, I knew that rising by morning light on the losing end of a scuffle was far preferable to the baking, endless sands that greeted me whenever I opened my eyes. That’s why I was there, in the shadows, laid flat to gaze up at the sky. Staring into the azure depths and their streaky white clouds, I could almost believe that I was still in Texas, and that I’d never followed my feckless greed to the Arab lands in the first place.

  “You should be working.”

  His voice was a grunt, the English marred by a rolling tongue and an accent as heavy as lead. I slowly rose with manacles creaking, rubbing my sweat-soaked brow as I faced the Moor. His cocoa skin was enveloped by soft laundered robes of orange and beige, with a thick, bearded scowl and pinhole eyes peeking out of the folds. I didn’t need to see his covered brow to know it was furrowed in anger. I raised my hands, bloody palms showing as I bowed my head.

  “I stopped to rest,” I pleaded in a dry, cracking tone. “The shackles are too tight.”

  “You should be working,” the Moor said again.

  He didn’t know much English, and even less American, which was just as well, considering all the names I called him whilst I was at work. I picked up my sledgehammer with a weary groan, feeling every sinew in my shoulders pull at its heft. The pile of unbroken stone lay at the foot of the pyramid’s wall, where a slit of agonising sun crept around its corner. I walked into the light, cursing the instant burn on my skin, and began to smash the stones once more. They would be reshaped into bricks for the Moor’s new dwelling; he fancied himself a great Desert Lord, and needed a palace to prove it.

  A tiny squeak of leather caught my attention, and I barely had time to prick my ears up before the lash of the whip swiftly followed it to my back. White-hot pain seared through the newly-healed flesh, reopening tender wounds as easily as a hot knife slides through butter. Tears stung my eyes, but I didn’t fall or cry out. I didn’t even drop my hammer.

  The Moor was already walking away, his wordless punishment serving as our prime method of communication. The message was clear enough. Don’t be caught slacking again.

  The horizon beyond the Moor’s domain was nothing but Egyptian desert. A clear line divided the cerulean sky and golden sand with nothing to break it, save for the odd dead tree or a line of shackled workers passing by. I had come to this place on the promise of an Arab I had met back in Mercy, a rich man who told me that a young buck like myself could make a fortune robbing the huge pyramid-tombs of dead kings.


  In all my wisdom, I had chosen this pyramid to make my first attempt: a two-hundred foot structure belonging to Abdul Kader, the Moor who now owned my life. Another of his prisoners once told me that his name translated as ‘Servant of the Powerful’. I thought it was a title that fit his slaves better than their master.

  That’s what I was now, a slave to my own stupid greed. I had travelled alone to a distant land without sparing a word to anyone as to where I was going, for fear that they might want to tag along and share in my spoils. If they had, at least I’d have had someone else to bemoan the manacles with now.

  I hated the sand more than anything, especially when the wind whipped it up and it dug deep into my bloodied wrists, leaving me safe in the knowledge that I would be painfully extracting the grains from my wounds later at the oasis. Worse still, the sand kept travellers at bay, and every day passed by with the Moor’s criminal cruelty hidden from the civilised world.

  Until today.

  Later, when I had broken nearly all of the rock assigned to me, I saw a shape emerge on the horizon. At first, I couldn’t be certain that I was really seeing it. The silhouette wavered in the lines of rising heat, flapping like birds’ wings one moment, and glinting like steel the next. Thinking it was nothing more than a mirage, I went back to work for a while, but hope made me turn my eyes to the horizon time and again. Whatever it was, it was real, and it was growing larger by the minute.

  “You there!”

  A female voice called out as the shape took proper form. There was steel in the craft, brass too, and several other metals that I didn’t recognise. The whole frame of the contraption blinded me with reflected sunlight, so much so that I had to retreat into the pyramid’s shade before I could really see what I was looking at. It seemed to be a bicycle frame, though its wheels were thick like railroad chains, and it had a pair of seats on its bough, one behind the other. Behind the second empty seat, a huge pair of sails rose up like the white wings of an angel, swinging into a vertical position that blocked the last remnants of the sun.