Jacob Bell strode into the Pickman Club that evening as though he owned that venerable building, and something in his stride forced the august gathering therein to take heed. “At least he's wearing trousers tonight”, sneered one worthy to another as the young apothecary passed; but it was not said loudly enough that the subject might hear.
The upstart looked around, greeted a few known close allies, and stood, pharmacist's chest heavy in hand, listening politely to the end of old Cartwright’s tale with all appearance that he cared. While the applause of the gathered echoed around the room, Bell the Younger busied himself at the long table full of hors d'oeuvres. Having eaten lightly of the offerings there, he moved with purpose toward the bowl of crimson punch sat like a pool of fresh blood in a squat crystal bowl.
A servant brought a small round table draped in white to the centre of the room. Hodgson the butler, called, “Alec, Joey, see to the chairs,” and a pair of serving lads wrestled padded armchairs into near rows arranged in concentric semi-circles around the table. Bell deposited his travelling chest behind the table, and then went back to the long table and its waiting punch bowl. Encircling it with his arms, he lifted it and carried it with careful steps to the small table that was now the very epicentre of the Event. Under Hodgson's watchful and credulous eye, he set it down, like a circus strongman would set down a hefted boulder. Some of the onlookers, already in their cups , almost applauded.
Straightening his vest and tie after his exertion, the master apothecary (at such a young age!) stooped over his chest, which opened upward to sprout four compartments in floating tiers. Each held tiny glass phials, corked in coded colours and bearing powders, waxes, and liquids known only to the owner of the chest. Perhaps another expert chemist could have identified some by sight, but perhaps not.
Bell swiftly plucked one container from each, and placing them with respective flourishes upon the table, he then arranged these at the cardinal points around the punch bowl. Now, reaching to the yawning darkness of the chest's depths, below the floating compartments he grasped something else with a theatrical intake of breath, and held aloft a lump of matter so singular that mutters of speculation immediately rippled about the room.
The light of the crystal chandeliers graced its upper surface with white glintings and streaks. From below, it seemed to gather the sanguine hue of the bowl and its contents.
“There are two of these. They are precious beyond reckoning. Tonight, I share a portion of one of them with each of you!'
Retrieving a syringe of delicate silver and glass, Bell punctured the small object and withdrew some viscous humour that in the weird way it gathered light, seemed to swirl of its own accord. The object, which had looked like an over-firm grape bearing trailings of its stem, deflated a little. This was reverently returned to the depths of the burlwood chest. Onlookers closest in noted the thin trail of strange vapour that followed it down into that darkness.
As he poured first a white powder, and then a night-black one into the bowl, the apothecary spoke.
“I found this, and its twin not far from this very place, as travellings go. Close in distance, but separated by vast gulfs of privilege and propriety! Such is the lot of the scientist. We like to think our work is the staple of immaculate laboratories and the sterile halls of academia or hospital theatres; but as many of you might attest, it is hardly always so. In amazing squalor, exceeded only by the astounding circumstances therein, did I find what I shall share with you tonight so intimately, that any who refuse it should not only have their membership revoked by this august club - but they would themselves surrender it upon hearing the accounts of their fellows after this night!'”
A waxy blob from the third phial, and a coarse umber paste from the last went into the punch. Producing a whisk from inside his vest, Bell the Younger stirred the darkening fluid sternly as he gazed out upon his Pickmanite peers. He took each of them by turn in his furious gaze, prejudging something only he could know. The crowd shifted uncomfortably.
Laying down the whisk on a clean white napkin bordered in lace filigree, he held the syringe above the bowl like some mad priest about to plunge a dagger into the heart of a hapless, bare-chested girl. With slow deliberance, the youthful scientist depressed the contents into the still-swirling mixture. They fell with a strange gravity, almost floating at first as if unwilling to fall - like the held breath of the guests arrayed about the low table and the man who presided over it. Then, in some strange preservation of momentum and Newtonian requirement, they accelerated downward to smash thunderously into the red cyclone below them. Some of the the gathered looked at the windows for corroborating bolts of lightning, but there were none. The viscous stuff tore itself apart and dissolved instantly into the, quite literally, doctored punch.
Barelworth shouted, “Surely you don't expect us to drink that, do you Bell?”
Like clockwork automatons, the boys appeared once more, with tiny crystal goblets in hand, pressing one into each member's grasp. Under strict orders to acknowledge no hesitation or refusal, they boys mutely ensured every man present took one. The last went to Bell himself, who, with something like reverence, dipped it into the churning liquid.
Raising his glass of blood-black elixir in salute, he said, “And now, you shall see what I have seen. You see it by my labour of two years to understand what this is. Live another's life - and thereby, at the end, cherish yours all the more!”
Bell upended the glass into his gullet and swallowed languidly. His eyes fluttering, he sank into the chair placed behind him, as, spellbound, those gathered marched like church-goers to the Eucharist of Sunday Mass to receive their measure, and return to their places to sample the gift of wondrous vision it bestowed. Bell's exhortation about membership still ringing in their brains, to a man, they quaffed that ineffable brew and sank into the arms of their chairs, where they dreamed memories not their own…
The cobblestones were wet and slimy with a variety of hideous fungi, and Archie hated each of them individually, the mouldering spaces between them even more. Greenish-black hairs and filaments reached up out of those spaces, soft-looking but seeking always to pierce his bare filth-encrusted feet and inject their transmogrifying venom. He hurried along, anxious to get himself to the smoother, poured-stone curbs his nimble form could balance on, keeping him floating above the hated cobbles like an angel's feet rejected the touch of base Earth.
His parcel was nestled under his patchwork of shirts, which made him look like some sort of diminutive hunchback, scampering between pools of sulfur-yellow light. Few people went abroad in this neighbourhood after dark, and his friends whispered, not softly, that it was because of his patron. The parcel squirmed in the burlap under his motley attire. Anyone seeing this would have averted their eyes, at the least, if not emptied their gullets, at the appearance of hideous deformation. Would any have been comforted to know it was only a drugged street cur of negligible size stuffed under his tattered clothes? Archibald Noname, as the slumlord who owned the place where he slept called him, thought not, and decided he could afford to hurry on before any explanations became necessary.
His surrounds were exemplary only of the poorest and most squalid places London had to offer. If there was a karmic sewer where human filth flowed on its way to whatever damnation it deserved, this place was the clotted gutter grate where some of it collected for a while before being sluiced out into oblivion by the leaden and spasmodic rains that came too infrequently to cleanse so much detritus.
Violence between strangers was more-or-less given. The best shields were to avoid being seen, or to be so fearsome as to instantly dissuade common predators. Up ahead, the flickering orange light of a dirty, homemade candle beckoned him toward the battered boards of his employer's hovel, a street-level apartment jammed between two even older buildings. Archie suspected it had once been an alley that ran between them, and that Mr. Torvik had wrestled some blocks of stone from the crumbling church abandoned some streets over to make the place. Some of those blocks also had the look and thickness of ruined tombstones, but he had never had the nerve to look for evidence of engravings or embellishments in their surfaces. Scarred and gigantic, old Torvik had then simply laid claim to the place - and none would have gainsaid him.
Casting a quick look over his shoulder at a shadow that should not have moved, Archie rapped quickly on the broken, patched, and re-broken boards of the door, and then let himself in. None without firm business here would dare do such a thing, so he slipped in without waiting for acknowledgement, and closed the makeshift door on the grime and shadow behind him.
Within, amidst the water-stained ceiling, cracked floor of wooden patches, laid stone, and half-disintegrated remains of mismatched rolls of carpet, there was the hospital smell of Death held in abeyance. A near-shapeless mass filled one corner of the appalling room. It had been no less than four mattresses, lashed together with interpenetrating belts of leather and sailcloth. He who slept in it filled the opposite corner of the room, as vertically voluminous as the mattress was haphazardly horizontal. His breathing seemed to empty the room of its foetid air, and then push it back out into every corner and crack, moist and worsened for having given sustenance to its source. Archie stood rigid and silent until the red-rimmed eyes with their cavernous pupils raked across him, and then lowered themselves upon the odd vase held in hands the size of the boy's quivering ribcage.
“You've brought it, or you would not be here,” his master said, in a voice like shattered pottery being ground to sand at the bottom of a haunted well.
Archie nodded stiffly, once, and shuffled off his top four shirts. Perhaps together they made one complete shirt, but they'd not been complete for many long months or years. Spinning to catch it, the languidly squirming parcel dropped into his hands. He peeled back the filthy canvas to reveal a dirt-smeared dog, little more than a large rat in size and appearance. Its hair might have once been the tawny colour of port swirling in a rich man's goblet, but it was now the mottled grey and charcoal black of mildew growing in soot.
Only the eyes seemed clean and bright, though the laudanum he'd rubbed on its tattered gums had robbed it of control and volition. Mr. Torvik need not know that the remaining bit he'd not used, had bought him a decent meal of poached fish from the old monger whose only usual non-piscine topic of conversation was the torture his back and feet inflicted upon him. One could easily be forgiven for wondering if the old man thought them parasitically attached imps, that existed only to inflict anguish upon the rest of his wizened and decaying body.
Looking away, he offered the shaking cur to his benefactor, who accepted it in his own massive paw. When he looked back, Mr. Torvik had, himself, turned away, as was tugging one-handed at a stone in the floor that two men could not have moved with both of their hands. The crackle of the smoky fire in the middle of the rear wall that kept the place a tolerable temperature in this London winter, seemed to grow on cue to cover the soft grinding of the moving stone concealing the rough hewn stairs sloughing down to a basement. Archie again wondered how such a thing could have been dug, or how long it would have taken. He had been here before, and down there before, though then he'd been sure it was to be the end of him. But, Mr. Torvik had proven to be good to his Word, and the boy had remained perfectly safe, if somewhat shaken by what he had seen.
The walls, like the steps, were hewn earth, strangely painted with thick white plaster and braced with leaning beams of roughly stripped wood jammed in place with a force that showed in the troughs dragged and battered into the floor and ceiling. These, too, were slathered white with slovenly smeared thick plaster, or perhaps a clay of some sort. The room had a briny smell, and Archie suspected it came from whatever Mr. Torvik had used on the walls and pillars. Perhaps it was dredged from the sea? Sausage-sized finger markings showed that the stuff had been applied and smoothed by hand.
The glass "vase" tucked under the giant's arm turned out to be one half of an artefact whose other component was a series of oddly tinted panes, each a different hue and shape, that fitted over the "vase" components like a shade might fit a lamp. These were assembled and then put aside.
“You've not yet been with a woman, I surmise,” rumbled his master. It was not a question, but a statement daring refutation. Archie was somewhat shocked at it, and the idea that for a boy his age, in this age, it could be otherwise.
“N-no, Sir,” he stammered. An answering rumble that was probably the only laughter Archie had ever heard from Mr. Torvik ricocheted off the thickly plastered walls for a moment, and then seemed to be drawn thirstily in by them.
“Good, good. Saves a lot of trouble.” Archie wasn't sure if he meant presently, or in general, if he was to judge by the moping and angst of some of the older boys and men back at the flop house.
"Use this. Don't let it touch anything else but your flesh. Three drops." Archie's eyes widened at the scar that went all the way around the man's wrist as his hand, holding a stout hatpin upright by the pearl, snaked out of the drooping sleeve of his coat. He took the pin mutely, and steeled himself, driving it into the heel of his other hand as commanded.
Mr. Torvik produced a small, shallow dish of some cloudy, polished glass. A white powder with yellow flecks in it lay in the dimple at its centre, and it was into this that Archie shed three fat drops of his blood.
Snatching the pin back from him with a speed and precision it was difficult to credit to such a behemoth, Mr. Torvik began to stir together the contents of the dish. A kind of smoke or vapour arose from the now greyish paste, and it was then that his master bellowed out three words whose volume and nature hurt Archie's ears.
“Orgth! Korumn! Odhqlonqh!'
With this, he not-ungently pressed between the back teeth of the dog to force open its mouth. Shaking the glass dish over the little thing, a dollop of paste seemed to roll against gravity, hang in space a moment, and then plunge down between the dull yellow pegs of the dog's teeth. Mr. Torvik pinched that mouth shut with two fingers, and blew into the creature's face. With an ulp, the dollop went down, and almost instantly, some life seemed to come back into the little dog’s limbs. With haste, the beast went face first into the waiting glass apparatus, which turned out to be constructed exactly to admit something this size. Mr. Torvik loaded the now progressively more agitated cur into it like a tiny, shaking cannon ball covered in matted fur and street filth. No wonder he had been so specific, Archie thought.
Already bug-eyed, as was the nature of its kind, the vermin-ridden creature's black orbs seemed to swell like ripening grapes. Likely, it was some magnifying effect of the prismatic glass it now resided behind. Still , it gave the thing the manic aspect of a jungle lizard ever vigilant for both insectile prey, and marauding predators.
It was then that Archie noticed the faintly but meticulously formed figures scratched into the walls. He couldn't read, but he knew what regular letters looked like - and these were nothing of the sort. Each twisting and self-recursive knotted line headed a column or row in a vast sort of chart that covered the central part of each wall. The floor and ceiling bore similar markings, and the giant and the hapless glass-encased terrier were now at the center of all of them, revolving slowly.
As Mr. Torvik's brobdingnagian feet shuffled in circles, he raised, lowered, and inclined the wretched thing. It yapped madly all the while, but the frenzy of its cantata definitely varied as it was pointed about. Their master seemed to nod and incline his own head as if listening to the changes in pitch as they moved, using the dog-prism apparatus almost like a water witch would use a dowsing rod. Now and then, the pin in his other hand flashed out, and made a mark in one of the columns or rows, his unreasonably long arms putting him in reach of all four walls and the ceiling without causing him to leave the diagram on the floor.
As they moved and the marks multiplied, Archie saw that the space in which they could operate was being steadily constricted and somehow defined by the pattern of marks, as if each became the limit of a new border that could never be re-crossed. Yet the noise from the high-pitched yips of the captive dog seemed to be traversing some cavernous space he could not see. Something about the prism focused and filtered not only light, but also sound; and the sounds were so markedly energetic now, that flashes of lumescence seemed to accompany them within the pulsing, shuddering glass of the strange artefact.
With a whoop of final inhalation, and an exhaled stream of barking yips so fraught with panic that Mr. Torvik stopped, the glass shattered as the nose of both dog and apparatus came to rest at one particular spot in the northwest corner of the room, at the very limit of that wall's eldritch diagram. Excepting its swollen eyes, the little beast seemed to fold inward upon itself, as most of the glass exploded outward in a shining cloud. But the giant was past noticing. With an animal grunt, he reached into the wall at that precise place, made a monstrous fist, and pulled back on something that wasn't there. Archie cried out as part of the world came away, pivoting like some stone block in a secret temple, to open upon…somewhere, wholly, else.
“What is that? What IS that?!” he heard himself shrieking. The voice was distorted, and he was unaware of consciously forming the words or willing them to be released into the shuddering air. His lungs burned with the effort of forcing words through air too thick to be gaseous, and cold too dire to be Earthly.
Shedding the heavy coat and threadbare shirt beneath to reveal a massive, and massively scarred torso that seemed composed more of sutures than plain flesh, Mr. Torvik shook the blood from his stovepipe forearm, grinned raggedly and said, through the gale from another world, “Cykranosh? Umnahquah? It matters not. A place where neither my nature nor my provenance have meaning to anyone else.”
Heaving a great sigh at the motionless boy, the formidable architect of this fantastical tableau growled, “Are you coming?”
Archie looked back up the earthen staircase. He could feel London's cold breath sighing into the room, closing its fist around the little fire. He thought of his empty belly, empty prospects, and the bruises around his ribs and shoulders, earned defending the stump of discarded roast that was to have been his first dinner in days. The lamp device lay at his feet. Two quivering orbs that had absorbed all the wild thoughts and events of the evening clung to a few shards of the shattered panes, gluing them together and seeming to fix him with horrid accusation. With a shiver, he followed the Monster into the hole they'd made in the world, into the searing cold that burned his skin in the transition to a place with a red sky and silver mountains like perfect pyramids that savaged the bloody heavens…
It was nearly thirty minutes between the ending of the vision and when the first of the Pickmanites stirred in his dream throne. Perhaps inured by previous experience, or simply owing to his youthful constitution, Bell roused first. Hodgson and his squadron of lads stood guardian over them all, at a respectful distance. Their discipline was astounding, given the fact that they were all likely one-time urchins no better than the boy of the vision.
There was no languor or other stupefaction associated with wakening from some surfeit of wine or laudanum. They came alert within moments of each other, and their limbs obeyed their commands almost as soon as their eyes finally focused on the recessed alabaster ceiling tiles above. Immediately they fell to amazed and urgent conversation. Each a luminary of fields of various sciences, they agreed quickly that somehow they had all experienced the same life-fragment of another soul. Bell gazed out over them like some chirurgeon watching a crippled patient rise and walk for the first time. He was silent, but the suppressed smirk that thinned his lips even further, told any who glanced at him that the chemist prodigy was extremely well-pleased with himself.
No one spoke directly to Bell. By his order, the crystal bowl was set before him by the butler, and later he was brought a series of metallic camp decanters in which to pour the contents. A particularly brave boy approached at one point as asked if he might remove the bowl and its residue, but Bell half-playfully, half-sternly slapped him away, jealous of even those precious drops, which he then sopped up with his napkin. Perhaps he feared what would happen to an unsupervised administration of even the smallest amount of his arcane elixir. Perhaps he was afraid some rival would use it to his own advantage and fame. We do not know, as he spoke no further word that evening, but only smiled when Mr. Pickman rose suddenly from his chair at one point, slapped his thigh, and shouted in revelation. “That's what happened to that devil! I knew our good Captain Walton should have been sure it went into the ice!”