Grim Expectations Read online

  “Or so it is maintained by the accounts I have read.” Weebsome nodded slowly, as though savouring each word. “Imagine the consternation that must have been aroused, when our own English dead began swelling up, then rising bodily into the air. Tongues must have been wagging a great deal.”

  “This is the first I have heard of any such thing.” Shifting about, I had succeeded in peering between the close-pressed bodies and catching a glimpse of the casket, for the moment still secure in its position. “Perhaps this was not a true history that you came across, but a fiction of the sort scribbled out at a penny per word or less, by those wretches whose disordered imaginations are their sole way of wresting a living from their fellow men.”

  “No one could make up such fantasies, Mr Dower – for they are not fantasies, but have the ring of veracity about them. And here you have the proof before your very eyes!” Without releasing his grip upon my arm, with his free hand he jabbed a finger toward the ceiling – or rather, to the bobbing cherubim who were now several pink layers deep, obscuring the ancient, bowed rafters. “For you behold the point where entrepreneurial minds ally themselves with modern science. The mystery of those levitating corpses was dispelled by research, which indicated that the unstoppable engines of global commerce had brought this upon us.”

  “Perhaps…” I essayed a weak jest, as I futilely attempted to escape from him. “Perhaps then, it would have been better for us to have stayed at home, and tended our own familiar gardens.”

  “Too late for that!” His formerly mild demeanour was now completely extinct, replaced by that furious enthusiasm for all things new, which I had observed so many times before in those besotted with what they term the Future. “Those microbes and other tiny organisms, too small to be seen with the naked eye, which feasted on British corpses before – they were but puny things compared to those who have now arrived amongst us. All those legends and travellers’ tales brought back from India, of Hindoo mystics levitating at the topmost end of a vertical rope, while all the marketplace stands amazed – easily explained once it is grasped that the airborne form was not that of a living man, but a dead one tethered to prevent its escape upon the winds.”

  The clergyman’s words made me consider, not for the first time, of how great a mercy it was to live on this beleaguered island, rather than some even more Godforsaken region. For indeed I had heard those scarcely credible stories, predating the Venetian wanderer Marco Polo, of auto-inflated corpses rising from funeral pyres before the torches could be set to the dry tinder beneath, or the discovery in mausoleums set in verdant jungles, of recently deceased royalty bobbing about the stone ceilings like Montgolfier balloons – now those tales seemed to have come true for us as well. That such things were now happening here, whether we wished them to or not, seemed but one more instance of the world imposing its hulking, unlovely self upon us.

  “I anticipate what more you wish to tell me.” I spoke, rising from my own dark meditations. “Some person – a man of business, possessed of more cleverness than forbearance – perceived what use could be made of these newly elevating corpses – or at least those of the deceased infants.”

  “Exactly so. From the accounts that have come to my notice, it seems that the general public had a less than enthusiastic response to the spectacle of adults whose souls had passed over to the other side – as some politely describe the transformation that awaits us all – however artfully done up as angels, complete with beating wings. Apparently, many regarded the effect as being somewhat – shall we say? – macabre.”

  “Shall we say, indeed.” Over the mounting hubbub of the crowd inside the church, I expressed my assent with this reported opinion – remarkable for being one of the rare instances in which I had ever agreed with anyone about anything. “You evoke a ghastly vision, Reverend – I have seen more than a few of my fellow human beings who had been deprived of animation, and I cannot think of any of them whose appearance would have been greatly improved with a tin halo dangling over their heads, and mechanical wings ratcheting at their backs, careening above like a flock of bloodied albatrosses.”

  “Just so,” allowed Weebsome. “I personally consider myself fortunate not to have witnessed the sight. But these transfigured infants–” With his index finger, he directed my attention once more to the clumsily bobbing forms above us. “They do seem to possess some eerie charm. I imagine that the great mass of humanity has an innate sympathy for the faces of innocent children, especially those of such tender age as these.”

  “If so, then such is another difference between myself and others. Thus I have remained childless throughout my unfortunate existence, as much from preference as circumstance.”

  “A pity, Mr Dower; perhaps the bleakness of your lot would have been lightened by the opportunity of paternal solicitude.”

  I made no reply, other than the contempt manifested by my narrowing gaze settling upon the man’s young and preternaturally foolish visage. The chances of his ever achieving fatherhood, I was confident, were negligible – not so much due to his priestly vocation as to his membership in that brotherhood whispered about since Grecian times, whose communion with the fairer sex was limited to spoken discourse.

  “But I digress,” continued Weebsome. “Pray forgive any impertinence, while you are in the midst of your sorrows – my remarks were not so intended. My only thought was to perhaps distract you for a moment from the contemplation of your loss.”

  “I think not.” So clamorous had become the jabbering of the voices about us, the villagers stoking each other’s excitement to an ever greater pitch, that I was forced to raise my own voice to be heard by the person sitting next to me. “You merely seized an opportunity to carry on about your own obsessive interests, believing that I would be too polite to check you in that pursuit. Very well; perhaps I have failed to do so. But it is not from any tender regard for your feelings, but rather my disdain for humanity in general. You wish to prattle about dead infants transformed to mechanical angels? Oh, by all means, do.” My study of the man turned virtually murderous. “No doubt this seems wondrous to one with limited experience of the clanking, grinding world into which mankind has been thrust, but I assure you – I have seen, and grappled with, contrivances of such size and lethal ingenuity as to diminish all these trite marvels that so astonish you, to motes and flyspecks barely worth the notice.”

  “I am aware, Mr Dower, of your – shall we say? – unseemly personal history.” The reverend’s smile was unsuited to but typical of his clerical profession. “You are a character of some distinction in this remote provincial nook to which you have fled, no doubt to escape the notoriety that would otherwise pursue you like Tisiphone and her chthonic sisters. But in fact you have not eluded the Furies of local gossip; your village neighbours are a tight-lipped breed, not given to conversation with those they consider strangers–”

  “Which is something I admire about them.” All this learned cant, with its laboured references to ancient myth, told me nothing of which I was not already aware. “They keep to themselves and their immemorial tribe; would that all men did. If while doing so, they also choose to whisper about me behind my back – what concern is that of mine?”

  “Seemingly little,” answered Weebsome, “by your account. But among my sinful propensities, I freely confess, is that of inordinate curiosity. In that regard, I have made you the subject of my research, aided to the degree that village folk are willing to confide their suspicions and gossip to their local priest – perhaps they seek a fellow conspirator in one who is enjoined, as I am, to forgive as well as listen. I frankly doubt if you are capable of either one of those.”

  “How utterly insightful of you. You read me like a book, Reverend.”

  “Be that as it may. But for myself, I brought with me, upon assuming the responsibilities of this parish, some general knowledge of that life and career which you understandably would prefer to have kept hidden. The name of George Dower is connected with some momento
us events – wreckage and plunder, devastation on a colossal scale! Great swathes of London reduced to rubble; certainly an impressive achievement, I am certain you would agree.”

  “Scarcely any of my doing–” Only the passion of my defence allowed my words to be discerned above the clamour of the jabbering, gesticulating mob pressing so closely about us as to rock the pew upon its worn wooden feet. “Your knowledge is sadly deficient, if it fails to disclose that whatever part I played in those notorious happenings, my efforts were directed more to preventing rather than inciting them.”

  “True; I allow you that, Mr Dower.” Once more, he prodded away one of the clacketing winged angels that had bobbed close by his head. “To paraphrase the poet, the good that men do is oft interred, but before that it is somehow transmuted to slander. Just as though we were all some sort of misguided alchemists, who had stumbled upon the knack of turning gold to lead, rather than the reverse. Ah, well; human nature is a pit of infamy, is it not?” He spoke blithely, as one might describe a rose bush’s spotted leaves. “We are all sinners – if it were otherwise, I would very likely be unemployed.”

  “Always have I found it to be so.” That much I had in agreement with him. “On many–”

  I was prevented from completing the sentence. Once more, as so often in my life, incendiary chaos erupted.

  The screams of hysterical women had the salutary effect of interrupting my increasingly irritated conversation with Reverend Weebsome. Equally panicked shouts from male throats, coarsened by pipe and tankard, set the church’s close-pent air trembling at my ears. My startled gaze swung around from the clergyman’s face; after a mere second or two of eye-widened confusion, I perceived what had happened, and its unravelling consequences.

  Weebsome’s brushing away of the mechanical cherub nuzzling his brow had been but a simple reflexive action, with no other intent behind it – but by doing so, he had unleashed a good deal more, as one might innocently unlatch a barn door, unaware that maddened stallions, muzzles flecked with foam, pressed behind.

  Something had malfunctioned with the clockwork wings attached behind the naked shoulder blades of the particular cherub – I recognized it by the unnaturally prominent blush upon its rounded cheeks. Perhaps the reverend’s insignificant blow had triggered an already existing flaw in the aerial machinery; whatever the cause, the result was that of the cherub veering at an unprecedented velocity down toward the church’s altar, past the coffin laid upon its wooden trestles.

  “‘S truth! Bluidy thing be p’ssessed!” That had been the cry of one of the onlookers, falling backward from both inebriation and a more sensible desire to put as much distance between himself and this new apparition. “Day-mons ‘n’ sich!”

  No doubt the New Testament account of the Gadarene swine and their careening rush toward the cliff’s edge was uppermost in the minds of at least a few of the closely assembled onlookers. The rosy pinkness of the cherubs’ ceramic shells, encasing the slowly decaying flesh within and the levitating gasses thereby produced, was indeed similar in hue to that of those familiar barnyard animals. The completely understandable desire to not be trampled by demonic pigs was perhaps triggered by the sight of this singular cherub crashing into one of the brass candlesticks upon the altar, with enough force not only to topple the light, but crack itself open like an egg upon the upturned edge of the candlestick’s base. Further disaster might not have ensued, had the candle-flame not come into direct proximity with the cherub’s ruptured form; however, that being the case, it quickly became apparent that the gasses generated within not only had sufficient levity to bring this small weight aloft, but were flammable as well.

  The result was indeed impressive, and much remarked upon by the assembled crowd, their previous marvelling clamour now changed to utter hysteria. For the damaged cherub had not exploded, as likely would have resulted if the break in its ceramic casing had been a bit wider; instead, the gas leaking from within had been ignited into a jet of flame nearly a foot in length, searing blue in colour where it was not tinged with yellow at its farther edge. The gas’s combustion seemed to have a considerable propulsive force to it, sending the broken cherub on a rapid vertical course, at a rate of speed sufficient to tear the tiny mechanical wings from off its back. The violence of its doing so evoked screams of terror from the village women and a few of the smaller children who had not yet been trampled by the press of their elders; the shouts of the menfolk were considerably coarser in nature, laced with apparent profanities in an otherwise impenetrable Cornish dialect.

  If the ascent of the artificial angel had been sufficient to provoke such reaction from the throng of onlookers, little wonder that the quickly subsequent events roused an even stronger response. As I have described before, the low and roughly timbered ceiling of the church was crowded now with a pink armada of the cherubim’s naked forms, bobbing against each other, their wings interminably clacking and fluttering, the idiot smiles on their rosily painted faces remaining unaltered.

  “God save us,” spoke the Reverend Weebsome beside me, the blood draining from his already pale features. “This is–”

  Whatever his assessment might have been, I was spared it. I too had craned my head back, spine pressed against the pew’s boards behind me, so that with all the rest of humanity’s rough specimens close about, I witnessed the impact of the fire-spouting, rocket-like infant, possessed of a greater vitality in this manner than likely it had ever possessed in its brief and sickly mortal life. The gentle bumping and jostling about of the other cherubim had not been of enough force to damage their naked carapaces, but all that changed with the sudden arrival of this one in their midst. Vaulting upward from the altar below, it collided with a few of its mechanical brethren, cracking open the thin shells that had been pasted upon the softer decaying flesh inside. Jagged fragments, as though from shattered tea cups, rained down upon the onlookers’ upturned faces – but that was the least of the escalating calamities.

  “Flee!” My undesired companion well anticipated what was to come. “Save yourself!” Weebsome leapt to his feet, but was unable to exit the pew, prevented from doing so by the close press of villagers in the church aisle.

  His foresight proved accurate. With my gaze angled toward the equally crowded ceiling, I could see that the blue flame still jetted from the aperture in the cherub’s form, thus thrusting it with undiminished velocity against the others like it. But their innate gasses, released by the cracks in their brittle abdomens and rounded buttocks, proved to be equally volatile. A few of the cherubim exploded like bombs, with deafening burst and pyrotechnic display; the others were transformed into arcing missiles like the first, fiery tongues of varying dimensions and strength propelling them into the ones beyond.

  Those in turn suffered the concussive impact that their predecessors had, and were similarly converted to razoring shards with brilliant fire and billowing smoke at their centres, or shooting infantile figures, striking others of their sort farther on, with predictable impact and transfiguration. A horizontal cascade, ever louder and more glaring in its violence, spread across the ceiling, as though the onlookers were witnessing some apocalyptic battle in the heavens, foretold in the Book of Revelations.

  As above, so below; while the villagers had previously been caught in place by their own numbers within the church’s narrow confines, and rendered gape-mouthed and stupefied by all that they saw happening above their heads, now they sought escape from what they considered, with some justification, to be their own imminent deaths. The heated debris from the overhead conflagration rained down upon their heads; the flames and continuing explosions were close enough to singe hair and skin. From a number of the cherubs which had been completely vaporized, the fluttering mechanical wings remained relatively intact and went clacking through the smoke-filled air like the giant moths of some Amazonian jungle.

  What had been dreadsome apprehension on their part, now turned to mindless panic. The church’s doors, barely wide enough
to admit one broad-shouldered man at a time, were instantly blocked by and made impassable by those fighting for exit. Thus trapped within, the people were further terrorized by the disintegrating rockets of the cherubim, hurtling down upon them with fire but no swords, the idiot simpering faces aglow with apparent delight at the havoc provoked.

  Not for the first time, I witnessed the degree to which individual specimens of humanity can be converted to a conglomerate, witless mass. Rebounding from the blocked doors, the villagers were an ocean wave, comparable to those that capsize ships and send them hurtling to the depths. The pew in which I was trapped now toppled backward; I lost sight of the Reverend Weebsome, as he made an ill-advised attempt to remain standing against the surge of shouting, weeping bodies. I gave no mind to the chances of his surviving their trampling boots, preoccupied as I was with my own safety. Desperation alone drove my clinging to the seat and back of the pew, fingernails dug into the smooth-worn wood; for a few seconds at least, the rude structure served as a barricade against the terrified mob. Then it became rather more of a canoe, as the simple boats of the primitive Americans are termed, being wrenched from its moorings upon the church floor and lifted a considerable distance higher, bearing me with it. From this vantage point I glimpsed the church entire; of Weebsome there was no trace, but I caught sight of the undertaker, trapped in the alcove from which he had sent aloft his mechanical cherubim. The expression upon his elongated face was that of a man horror-struck, his funereal solemnity riven less by the spectacle of the embattled people before him, than by contemplating the loss of the devices upon which he had spent so much, and which he had set aloft from his own hands.