The Dirges of Percival Lewand
Aaron Michael Ritchey
Doctor Davyss circled the skeletal piano and my beautiful automaton like an African lion stalking his prey. Around my basement chamber lay derelict parts of pianos and castoff brass gears. Crumbling stone walls leaked water from the street, and the ceiling’s rough-hewn wood showed the soot from my candles and lamps.
No windows. A single door. No other means of exit out into the cruel streets of East London.
I stood by my slender mattress and watched Davyss pace. Both hope and horror left me breathless.
My benefactor smiled at me then returned to scrutinize the automaton, Christine, seated on her wheeled cart, her slender, gloved fingers resting above the ivory keys, motionless.
“Surely, your cabinet player staggers the imagination, Mr. Lewand, yet as I have said before, her playing is only adequate. What she lacks is that primal passion and vitality we feel pulsing through our veins.”
“So you really do believe in …” I whispered, but could not finish the sentence.
“Blood,” Davyss murmured, a dreamy look on his face. “Christine has bones of brass and sinew of rubber, but at her core she is empty. Where do our passions lie? In our blood.”
The anxiety pressing down on my chest increased. I felt ill.
Davyss leaned forward, his clean-shaven face inches away from the porcelain mask covering Christine’s clockwork head framed by a silk-spun wig. A gown covered the rest of her brass gears and wheeled cart. I had fashioned her to have a woman’s curves, yet I made sure she retained her feminine modesty. I was proud that Christine’s clothing was every bit as fastidious as Davyss’ dress. Both were as well kempt as they could be.
“You say she sees the music as ones and zeroes,” Davyss said. “That I quite believe, but I am resolved that she be less mathematician, more musician. Did you make the modifications I requested?”
“To the letter of your instruction,” I returned, desperate to impress my benefactor.
Davyss eyed me skeptically. “Really. Including the burning of the black candle at 3 a.m. followed by the Latin incantation.”
“Yes, just as you told me.” I fought to keep my countenance blank. Such violent emotions stormed through me. Davyss’ descent into the occult had made me question his sanity … and my own. He had a patient—a denizen of the London Hospital’s mental ward—who claimed to be adept at the dark arts. This lunatic had led my benefactor down a path that had nothing to do with science, all in hopes of improving Christine’s playing.
I hurried forward, always so obsequious—driven to please by a shrinking belly and a chilly bed. With a shaking hand I motioned to the strange black candle, half-burnt, resting on the piano. I then showed him the port at the base of Christine’s neck, large enough for a single glass vial. “Through tubing, whatever liquid we add will mix with the automaton’s whale-oil lubrication system. Although I have tried to keep my mind scientifically detached, I have little hope that this will work. My cabinet player is a machine. Hence, blood should have no effect on her playing.”
“But you will humor me, yes?”
I nodded.
“Then we will give our thirsty girl a bit of your blood, Lewand.”
I gulped. Such superstitious nonsense, fit only for women and primitives. Still, my debt shackled me to Davyss. I removed my coat and pushed my shirtsleeve up above my elbow. He unpacked needles, vials, and other medical supplies from his black bag.
Davyss’ face was positively glowing. “If your cabinet player could but know the fiery passion at the heart of life, she could play to packed theatres, and your miracle could rise above the petty machinery of the Aeolios Company.”
At the mention of my competition, I paled. “But surely, Dr. Davyss, the engineering itself could be impressive enough for you to invest further. Please …” I’m so very hungry, I wanted to add. But I could not. Davyss was a man without pity. He expected results. At times I was honored to have such a unique relationship with Dr. Martin Marquavious Davyss. Other times, my connection to him felt like a morass, offering no escape save death.
Blood was what Davyss wanted, and blood he got. Moments later, he took a thick needle and without ceremony pressed it into my flesh. Icy pain churned in me as he twisted the needle to affix the vial until my own dear essence dripped out, leaving me even more lightheaded and nauseated. I had not eaten in days. All money went for parts and rent. I had even abandoned tea for the project.
Once the vial was full, Davyss pulled out the needle quickly, gave me cotton for the puncture, all the while buzzing with excitement. Odd, I had never seen him so full of what the French call, joie de vivre.
“Now, give her music to play.” His voice blistered with expectation.
“Yes, but first, I must prepare the gears.” From around my neck, on a simple chain, I held the key to Christine’s heart. I took the key, found the aperture on the left side of her head, and slowly turned. Once her gears were wound, I inserted the vial into a slot at the base of her neck and snapped it into place. She was ready. “Now, what piece of music should I have her play?”
“It does not matter!” Davyss struck his hands together. A deep breath followed as if to calm himself. Then, casually, he said, “I understand that you think the stimulus of the music will affect this experiment, but I assure you, your wonderful simulacrum could play a child’s lullaby, and we would instantly know if our efforts have been in vain or not.”
So I chose Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number 5 in E-flat Major, a favorite of mine.
Gearing set, I gently pulled down the lever hidden under her hair. The cylinders inside of Christine began to turn, and through a slot in her back, I fed a thick piece of perforated paper. Machines could not read sheet music, and so I had created a language all my own, far more ingenious than my cabinet player’s metal body. Each perforation on the page represented a zero, otherwise a one. The instant the sensitive cilia covering the cylinders discovered the first perforation, her brass fingers pressed down on the keys.
Both Davyss and I listened intently.
“Yes.” Davyss hissed the word.
I had a sensitive ear, and yet I could not discern any difference. The notes came out in perfect time, but a machine could play perfect time, and each note was crisp and clear, but that too was a machine’s forte.
She finished the first page and returned to her primary position, thumbs hovering over middle C. The paper emerged from her back and drifted to the floor. I pushed the lever to stop the cylinders.
Davyss shrugged off his jacket in a single violent motion. “Lewand, you have a scientist’s blood, cold and logical. Do not think ill of that. To be so very levelheaded with such lazy passions is a gift. I would be such a man if I could. However, I am anything but.”
He did not stop undressing until, to my shock, I saw the pale skin of his chest and arms.
Adding to my discomfiture, he wrapped tubing around his arm and stabbed the needle into a tumescent vein. Thick crimson oozed into a second vial.
He pumped his fist. “Oh yes, I believe that what our girl Christine will require is the very heights of animal passion. She is a machine. Dull emotions she would ignore, but not intense, primal feelings. Our girl is bloodthirsty, oh yes she is.”
Jerking out the needle, he gave me the vial, warm to the touch. More blood gushed across his skin.
“Your wound, Doctor,” I said, having to swallow my gorge.
He ignored me. “Replace your blood with mine. Give her the same song to play.”
I rewound the key, to make sure we had the same parameters for this next experiment, then replaced the vial with Davyss’ blood. I fingered the lever down and fed the same music into Christine’s cylinders.
The same cylinders processed the same perforations. Her mechanics interpreted the same notes. Yet what a joyous difference! How can a zero not be a zero? How can a one not be a one? And yet, she was interpreting the mathematics so very differently.
My mouth dropped open. Such passion, such desire, I felt tears sting my eyes. I shamefully squeezed them shut.
Davyss had no such sensitivities. Tears stained his face and chest as he stood nearly naked in my apartment. His left arm was gloved in blood. I saw his mouth moving.
The paper once again spun out of the cabinet player’s back to float to the ground. That’s when I heard his quotation.
“… I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound …”
He caught me staring. “Do not those words capture the very essence of your creation? Next Friday evening, August 31st, you will bring Christine to my estate. She will play for all of my colleagues, the best ears in London. In the meantime, my man will bring you more blood, and I shall make arrangements on delivering Christine.” He reached into the pocket of the coat he had draped on the chair and removed a stack of pound notes. I took them, noting the bloody fingerprints.
I levered off Christine’s mechanism even as my head swam. First, I was stunned that the occult was real. How else could simple blood have such an effect on my automaton?
Next, my engineering mind filled my head with questions. Would the blood last through multiple windings? How many iterations? Most importantly, how did it all actually work, and could I find the answer to that question in the realm of science?
The amount of study I had to do was staggering, all in a week’s time before Christine’s first official performance. I had only inscribed a few lines of music. Now, I had to encode an entire piece onto a rolling scroll so Christine would not be limited to short passages. That in itself would take me most of the week. More sleepless nights lay ahead of me. This time, however, I would labor on a full belly.
“You will be a very rich man, Mr. Lewand.” Davyss beamed, and then his eyes seemed to glaze as he whispered. “I have always known that the vapors in our bodies coalesce in our blood, and thus, a frightened man’s blood would be very different from a kind man’s, or a savage man’s. So much has been proven tonight. So much more lies before us.”
His eyes met mine, and he returned to a more serene state. “You and I have started a journey, my dear Mr. Lewand. Where will it end?”
“Hopefully at a dinner table in a finer room than this hovel, my good doctor.” I smiled. For the first time, I had spoken my true mind.
“Oh, yes,” he said. The gleam was back in his eye. “We shall all eat our fill.”
Perhaps I would have found his words and demeanor unsettling, had I not been so preoccupied with more mundane appetites.
O O O
As promised, more blood appeared on my doorstep. Davyss sent his man, a whiskered, laconic brute armed with a walking stick, more cudgel than cane, which he used with abandon on street urchins and prostitutes. I watched him beat them for his own amusements as he left my door, walking through the wet streets like a rampaging mammoth.
Some vials were marked with my benefactor’s initials, MMD. Others had different initials, patients from the hospital, I assumed. He had sent along an anti-coagulant that kept the blood from thickening, though the vials were cool to the touch.
Each vial affected Christine in a different away. Most simply had little effect, like my own. Davyss’ blood, as always, made her passionate, full of bright expectation, while only one other vial, marked RDS, affected her. With the RDS, Christine’s playing became melancholy. Such a radical difference it was, I immediately sent Davyss a letter with my findings.
He responded that he would ensure I had the proper blood for Christine’s first performance.
In amazement, in victory, I spent long hours running tests. Christine’s passion, fueled by Davyss’ crimson ichor, would last approximately two hours, during which she would play with such joy that I could scarcely keep from dancing. Then slowly her musicianship would degrade until she was once more a machine, plinking through notes.
I did my work, stuffed with beef and bread. I drank tea without ceasing. What is an Englishman without tea? I daresay, an American, and I had lived as such for many months, every farthing going to the landlord and for parts. However, one positive aspect of being poor meant I could not afford gin, which was a blessing, for drink was a danger to me.
The week passed quickly. Thursday evening I worked to put the finishing touches on Christine, adjusting the joints on her three-toed foot attached to a single brass leg, hinged at the knee. When I finished, she articulated the pedals on the piano perfectly.
Davyss had arranged to move Christine to his manor for her evening performance. It was just past midnight on that Friday when I heard a knock on the door.
It could only be Davyss or his brute, for I had no other visitors, no other connections. To my surprise, it was the former. His face was streaked with sweat, his eyes wild to the whites. He pushed three vials of blood at me, all three marked with the number one. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, rushing his words, “and I wanted to stop by. More blood for our girl. Tomorrow, have her play using these vials. It will be a triumph!”
With that he was gone, as quickly as he had come. Strange, shocking.
Why would he be out delivering blood, and why mark it with numbers instead of initials? And I found it hard to believe he was in the neighborhood. One who lives on an estate in West London does not simply find himself in Whitechapel.
Oddest of all, why were the vials still warm?
O O O
In the music room of Davyss’ manor, I felt out of place. No one knew who I was. Lords, ladies, the rich and powerful, all ignored my cheap dress and balding pate as I stood nervously holding a wine glass that seemed almost magical. Whenever I looked down, it was empty, though I could have sworn moments prior, it had been full. I was becoming intoxicated, and that would not do. Christine and I had our work. Draped in a sheet, she sat expectantly at Davyss’ grand piano.
Standing next to my creation, I attempted to eavesdrop more and drink less. Two topics of conversation buzzed about the room. People spoke of the Aeolian Company and the advancements they had made in the self-playing piano. The general agreement was that such a device might be superfluous. Who could not play the piano? Why have an expensive machine for such a task?
The other piece of conversation was far more sinister. The body of a woman had been found in Whitechapel, horribly murdered.
I recalled Davyss’ strange visit from the night before but quickly discounted my suspicions. Sad to say, the population of my East End slum was not blessed with longevity. Death was common. At times, even welcome.
Mrs. Edmund Reid spoke in whispers, for this incident seemed different. Her husband was the Detective Inspector working on the case. “Inspector Reid was very tremulous when he came home this afternoon, and that is why he could not attend this exhibition. The horrid, unimaginable details of the crime have shaken my husband to his foundations. Is Whitechapel filled only with the bestial and the wanton?”
No, Whitechapel is mostly filled with the hungry, I wanted to say, but I refrained. A huge grandfather clock chimed four, and it was time for Christine’s performance.
Davyss stepped out. “My friends and colleagues, brothers and sisters of Phoebus Apollo, today you will see a dream fulfilled. My dream, and the dream of my associate, Mr. Percival Lewand. Countless hours has Mr. Lewand worked to bring us this modern miracle. Not just an automatic piano, but an automatic piano with the sensitivities to move us as no other musician could. I present to you, Mr. Lewand and his creation, Christine.” With a flourish, he tugged the sheet off the automaton. A number one vial of blood was loaded. Her gears were set. All she needed was the music.
I moved forward, not having the courage nor sobriety to make a speech of my own. Every eye in the room fell on me. I wheeled over a tall stand with a hook holding a long continuous scroll of perforated music. I triggered Christine’s lever, then fed the first part of the scroll into her cylinders. As she played, the paper would unwind giving her an uninterrupted stream of ones and zeroes.
The music I had chosen was from the incomparable Liszt, his Piano Concerto No 1.
Sweat pinched my eyes. I had tested the blood from the number one vials briefly, and yet what if this time it did not work? If she failed to perform, I would be a laughingstock.
But Christine played, and played beautifully. So sad, so very sad, that soon no one was unmoved. Even during the more jovial movements of the piece, she played them with such a fragility and melancholy that I found myself on the verge of tears.
Once she finished, everyone stood to applause. A standing ovation! We were a success! An unbridled success!
After many minutes of shaking hands and basking in praise, Davyss pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. “Next Saturday afternoon I have a friend who owns a theatre. He wants Christine to play as a prologue to a guest symphony. Already people are asking if they can purchase a Christine.” From his pocket, he pulled out several inches of pound notes. “Mr. Lewand, this is only just the beginning.”
Smiles filled me like sunshine. “Will we be playing the number one vial again?”
Davyss leered. “Oh, no. Fresh blood. I know what Christine likes. The fresher the better, full of passion, lust, and a raw longing for life.”
O O O
I was free to continue my experiments with the number one blood. I found that every song emerged from Christine’s fingers brimming with melancholy, no matter what modifications I made. I gave Christine Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and her playing was anything but joyful. Where had Davyss procured such blood? And why had the donor been so sad?
Long hours I spent testing and encoding new pieces for Christine to play. All the while eating beef and drinking tea. I could not discern how the blood worked, but work it certainly did. I rejoiced in what I had created and what my benefactor had improved upon. I felt like a blessed Pygmalion, or a more fortunate Daedalus, destined for a seat on Mount Olympus!
Once again, Davyss pounded at my door in the very earliest of the morning hours on the Saturday of our next performance, September 8th. I had to wrestle myself out of my blankets to let him in. He had three vials of blood, all marked number two. His manner was far more subdued, almost peaceful.
“The number two should prove to have some interesting results,” he said. “Interesting indeed.”
“Since we have three vials,” I replied, “I will test them, and then find suitable music.”
He smiled. “It does not matter what piece she plays, as long as she plays with blood full of raw passion.” With that, he disappeared into the gloom. Dawn colored the horizon.
I got to work right away. The number two made Christine’s music rage. Even mellow, melodic pieces came out jagged and hateful. I chose a piece for her to play to match the furor in the blood. Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op 48, No 1.
Our next performance drew an even greater audience. The theatre owner was ecstatic. After Christine’s wrathful playing, I found myself in the foyer near Mrs. Reid. “They have found another body in Whitechapel, murdered in a similar fashion.” The woman’s face was positively colorless. “My poor husband cannot sleep. Truth be told, neither can I, with this murderous madman on the loose.”
I glanced up to see Davyss listening intently, a little smile playing on his face.
I could not wrest my gaze from my benefactor’s self-satisfied visage. Suddenly I had an explanation for his strange visitations and the warm vials. The blood, number one and number two, it had come from the women killed in Whitechapel. And Davyss had murdered them.
Cold horror drowned me until my heart froze solid in my chest.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Lewand?” Davyss asked.
I shook my head, glanced away. Futile were my attempts to swallow all of the shock and loathing I was feeling. I could scarcely breathe.
O O O
For the next few weeks, gin rode on my back like a devil with a switch. Every time I thought to call the police or contact Inspector Reid, the devil would strike me. No escape. I would drown with Davyss in a swamp of blood. And still, whenever my Christine would play, I found myself moved because we had captured the lightning and sorrow and emotion of life. To experience such passion was only the turn of a key away.
Rarely sober, my mind began to play tricks on me. I would awake to hear Christine playing a piece, but no, that was impossible. She sat empty of music, no ones or zeroes for her cylinders to interpret, bathed in the blood of Whitechapel women.
One night I woke in the pitch black of my basement, a horrible notion filling me that something was very amiss. I lit a candle only to find the space in front of my piano empty. My first thought made me utter a syllable of despair. Someone had crept in and stolen Christine.
No. I found her in the corner, her three-toed foot soaking in the perpetual puddle that covered that side of my room. I wheeled her back to the piano, wondering why in my drunken stupor I had moved her. I dried her foot carefully.
Another night, I woke to the sound of her gears moving. This time, she was in front of the door, fingers reaching, toes pressing, playing at a piano that wasn’t there until her gearing unwound completely. The music in her back was Chopin’s Funeral March. I tightened the lever at her neck and adjusted her leg again. A malfunction in the knee hinge must have inadvertently pushed her to the door.
Our next performance was on Sunday, September 30th, and again, in a far larger venue.
I looked in the newspapers for another murder, but none came. I knew the reason. Davyss would wait until the evening before our concert to give Christine fresh blood. With my silence, I may as well have been murdering the women myself.
I still had some of the sad blood, filled with death’s lamentation. Listening to Christine playing the number one, it was as if I were dying. Gin took care of that. Days of inebriation, two week’ worth, and on September 29th, I paced through my basement apartment, splashing through the rainwater there, beating dilapidated pianos with the leg of a bench, furious over my own avarice and cowardice. And still the gin beat me into submission with a switch of fire.
I waited for Davyss to come. I did not have long to wait. At midnight, the knock came on my door.
I flung it open, revealing the villain in his coat. This time, he had a small case filled with six vials, three marked as number three, three as number four. Two women had been butchered, all because I wanted to eat. Because I had vainglorious dreams of wealth and fame.
Our eyes locked.
Like the last time, he was mellow, his whole manner one of passive relaxation.
“May I come in?” he asked.
Wordless, I acquiesced.
Once inside, Davyss’ voice came out even. “Mr. Lewand, you think that I am murdering women in Whitechapel so that Christine’s playing will move the hearts of her listeners. Is that correct?”
I nodded, stifled a belch, though I knew he could ascertain my level of intoxication by smell alone.
Davyss smiled. “Oh, Mr. Lewand, that is not the case, I can assure you. At the hospital I have access to all types of blood. Do not let your imagination get the better of you.” He paused. “And do not let alcohol become your master. You have worked too hard and too long to be locked up as mentally incompetent due to excessive intemperance.”
“Is that a threat?” I asked, hardly breathing.
“Oh, no,” he said, still grinning. “I would be doing it for your own good. As I have done for others who so desperately needed help with their drinking. Do you understand my meaning, sir?”
“I understand,” I whispered. His lies did not fool me. The truth of his crimes whispered to me through the tormented notes Christine played.
He left me with the blood of the two Whitechapel women. I read about them in the newspaper later that day. They were killed just down the street from my basement apartment. The newspaper had a name for the murderer, a horrible name, part fairly-tale everyman, and part description of how he killed the women. He ripped them open. He was a ripper. A monster. And I knew his identity.
Yet, because of the qualities in the blood Davyss brought me, our Sunday concert went perfectly, absolutely perfectly. In an effort to keep our Christine novel, Davyss declared we would not have another performance until November. Let six weeks pass so that word of mouth could make Christine’s next appearance the biggest, the best, and the most profitable.
Already, other pioneers of the self-playing piano, men such as Misters Wilcox and White, were asking Davyss to see Christine, but of course he refused them. As he also refused the Aeolian Company despite their offer of lucre. Christine was ours, his and mine, along with his deranged secret, which I could not tell a soul on penalty of incarceration in the London Hospital’s insane asylum.
Six weeks until another murder. Six weeks until our next performance, on Friday, November 9th.
What could I do? Nothing. I drank gin. I listened to Christine play, not remembering what pieces I had given her. Impossible, that she could play without the perforated music, and yet, it seemed I would find scrolls of music in piles on the floor and her fingers still moved over the keys—her face only a porcelain mask, unmoving, unmoved, with the same blank expression I had painted on it.
I moved my cabinet player about nonsensically in my inebriation. How else could she travel to the door, to the wall, to the corner? One morning I woke with a start to find her looming over me, hands hooked into claws. I admonished myself as I moved her back to her place in front of the piano, thumbs above middle C.
Randomly, Davyss would come to listen to Christine play from the numbered vials. He would sit on a cast-off bench, eyes closed, and sometimes he would murmur from that poem, strange lines:
“What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
’Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.”
Christine would begin a new piece, and he would pace, then stop, as if remembering some fine evening of love, then he would cry such anguished tears, then laugh. In my gin-soaked fog, I would watch him in loathing, wishing him out of my sight. Even so, he would bring me bundles of money, which I stuffed into a suitcase next to my bed.
Blood money. In every sense of the word.
O O O
Thursday, November 8th, the day before the performance, I was determined to stop him. I had kept myself away from gin in the morning so that I might be sober, so that I might go to the police and tell them the Ripper would strike again, that Dr. Martin Marquavious Davyss would strike again.
Every time I went to the door, I would turn back. I was shaking, delirium tremens a storm in my body. Would the police listen to me? Or would they have me sent to the insane asylum?
All day long, all night long, I suffered in my paroxysm. Christine would play, her fingers striking keys in a fury, but it was not music, it was madness. I would go to the door, she would stop. I would open the door, close it, and go back to pacing. And her playing would continue. Had I wound her gears? I must have. Did she have music to play? Of course.
One of Davyss’ acquaintances had given me an unpublished piece of music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Le Carnaval des Animaux, or, The Carnival of the Animals. I had encoded it for Christine, and she would play it, ferociously, filled with the blood of the innocent slain.
Thursday night passed into Friday morning. I clung to sobriety, thinking maybe Davyss had lost his desire for blood and murder. No knock had come on my door. Had he given up his wicked ways?
At noon on that Friday, scarcely an hour before Christine was due to be brought to her evening performance, a knock sounded on my door.
Davyss. Carrying a satchel. He shouldered off his overcoat to reveal hands half-washed, still stained a pinkish hue. Dried blood flecked his entire suit of dress. Words gushed out of his mouth in a torrent. “Lewand, oh, Lewand, I cannot wait to see how Christine interprets number five, for she was, well, I had time. I could take all the time I wanted with number five.”
He saw the ill abhorrence on my face.
“Oh, you had six weeks to come to peace with our arrangement. In that time, you never went to the police, so I think you can live with what I do for us. I am sure the gin helps. Do you want to hear the number five? Do you want to know what agony sounds like? What the desire to live sounds like? For I have it in these vials. That and the innards. Perhaps if we gave Christine this heart, oh, I know, nonsense, but the blood worked, and if the blood worked, so could the heart, could it not, Lewand?” He laughed, loudly, not waiting for my reply. “And that Robert Stephenson, that buffoon from the hospital, he is suspicious of me, but he is so addled, he has mistaken my name. He thinks Morgan Davies is the Ripper, not Martin Davyss. Ha, the fools, all scurrying around at my feet. I could go on with this project for years, Lewand, for years, free to delve like an explorer into the darkest regions of my own psyche.”
He handed me the satchel, leather stained, seams dripping. Inside, lay the heart and entrails of a woman. And five vials of blood.
I went to my knees, sickened. I vomited onto my floor. Christine’s thumb fell on middle C. A simple sound.
“What was that?” Davyss asked suddenly. “She has no sheet music to play.”
He went over to her and touched Christine’s porcelain mask. “What have I made you into, my dear? For now, truly, you are more than your gears. Do you have my same tastes? My same passions? What are you now?”
The automaton made no reply of course. She lifted her hands and returned, motionless, to her resting position.
“Lewand, the number five. I want to hear it.”
“No.” Trembling, on my knees, I finally rebelled.
He walked over to me, knelt, and from his nightmare satchel, withdrew a vial of blood. “Lewand, your squeamishness is unmanly. You and I are gods. And what of the harlots I kill? Hardly human, they are mere chattel for greater minds to use as we please.”
Back at Christine, he inserted the vial. The roller stand stood behind her, loaded with The Carnival of the Animals, apt for what we were doing. Yet we were worse than animals—far from gods.
He touched the lever and my Christine came alive.
Impossible, impossible—
She whirled herself about, the wheels on her cart squeaking, and she latched onto Davyss with her left arm and pulled him off his feet and onto the piano’s keyboard.
Her right hand rose and came down on Davyss’ middle, ripping through his clothes, his skin, into his stomach. Blood geysered out of the man as he howled like swine in the slaughterhouse. His flailing arm knocked Christine’s wig off her head; a punch struck her mask askew. With her right hand pinning him to the piano by his stomach, she lifted her left hand and ripped down through his shoulder, popping out the white ball from the joint. Her right hand moved further and fell between his legs. Her fingers clutched to rip his genitals from his body before falling again to transfix him to the piano while the left hand rose. Davyss gibbered nonsensically, squealing in a high-pitched whine until Christine clawed through his voice box.
Strangely, my horrified mind remembered the poem he had been quoting, the first line and the last.
“Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast …
… Why am I not at Peace?”
I had to close my eyes. Still I would never forget the sight of Christine’s hooked brass hands, trailing strings of bowel, her gloves torn to shreds, rising and falling in showers of offal and gore.
Then, music. She had chopped through Davyss’ flesh until her fingers struck the keys, and I heard her play The Carnival of the Animals, muted by the blood, flesh and sinew. It was joyful. It was terrible. It was a song of vengeance now, and I dry heaved until she finished playing the final note.
I heard the wheels on her cart squeak. She turned on me with unseeing eyes, and yet I knew she saw me.
With a great sweep of arms, she rolled herself away from the blood-splashed piano, the three-toed foot clicking on the floor, pushing herself toward me. Her brass claws reached out, her mask, her gown, everything drenched in crimson.
I ran and reached the door ahead of her—slammed it shut in her face.
Still, the whisper of her hands, scratching at the door. Right on the other side. Brass fingers caressing wood. When had I last wound her gears? I could not recall. But she was beyond that now. Davyss had been right. She was now far more than her brass gears and clockwork mind.
All of my money, stuffed into the suitcase, lay on the other side of the door. I had to go back in. But I could not. The bloody number five had awakened an angel of vengeance inside Christine, something not of this earth.
Suddenly, such a clarity of mind struck me that I felt more lucid than I had for weeks and weeks. I had a plan. If I were quick, I could avoid Davyss’ fate. If Christine had a distraction, I could dart in, grab the suitcase stuffed with money, and escape her punishment, one I deserved, and yet might avoid. With my fortune secured, I could change my name, maybe to Theodore Brown, a nice, common name. I could begin my work on the automatic piano anew, without the aid of the occult and the blood of Whitechapel women.
I waited. It began to rain. When Davyss’ brute came to collect the automaton for that evening’s performance, I forced a smile onto my face and gestured to the door.
“Inside, Christine is waiting for you. She is more than ready for her next performance.”