Fiendish Schemes Read Free

sections of its brass-clad anatomy, then making subtle adjustments with the handspanners they wielded. The eldest of the bridge crew crouched near his commander, finessing care to a brace of reciprocating rods with a microscopic screwdriver and the spout of an oil-pump flexed between his thumb and forefinger.
    “We’re off!” Lord Fusible barked his cry across the heads of the crowd.
    “Not quite yet,” noted Crowcroft mildly. “First we need to deploy our basal extremities.” He turned back and set to work on another section of levers and gauges.
    “This is a sight worth seeing! Come along!” Laying hold of my arm, Fusible dragged me over to the bridge’s windows, pushing aside those who had already positioned themselves at the most advantageous spots. “Have yourself a gander at that.”
    As my host directed, I laid my forehead against the wind-chilled glass, the better to gaze down the length of the light house tower. Around its base thronged an even larger congregation of merrymakers, comprising the residents of the local fishing villages, as well as a motlier assortment of layabouts and their disorderly wives and children, carted out at Phototrope Limited’s expense from the nearest towns. Plied with as much free beer as they could consume, down to the infants swaddled in their careless mothers’ arms, they had devolved into an army of riot, intent on flailing fisticuffs and as much public debauchery as the British in their cups could enact before falling headfirst in their own spew. The beflagged pavilion from which drink had been dispensed was already demolished, with various comatose or perhaps even deceased figures sprawled amongst the stoved-in hogsheads.
    “Will those people be gone when it’s time for us to leave?” The thought of stepping from the light house’s relative security into the midst of such a mob filled me with terror.
    “What?” The scarcely more sober Fusible glared at me. “For God’s sake, man, concentrate! There—look there!”
    Even as he spoke, Captain Crowcroft pulled a tapered wooden knob dangling from an arm of the machinery his men serviced. Gouts of steam burst from the pipe organ–like whistles that studded the lighthouse’s flanks. The discordant screeches were loud enough to draw the attention of even the most marginally conscious of the revelers on the ground. A squadron of police, too few to tamp down the rolling mayhem, set about with their truncheons, endeavouring to drive the crush away from the base of the tower.
    “Well enough,” judged Fusible after a moment. “That lot can watch out for themselves.”
    Our captain had made the same assessment. I could discern Crowcroft and his bridge crew, reflected in the window glass before me, throw a further set of levers. One such was so stiff and unwieldy that it required the efforts of two men, one pulling and the other ramming his shoulder against its length, to bring it to the desired position. The resulting increase in the transmitted vibration was enough to elicit quick screams from the female guests, as well as some of the more delicate men.
    I might have been amongst the latter, had my breath not already been taken away by the sight below, of great iron appendages unfolding from beneath the base of the lighthouse. Details of such a walking lighthouse’s perambulatory operations had been explicated to me previously, and I had even perused a set of copper engravings arrayed along the tower’s central spiraling staircase that depicted such, but nothing had yet prepared me for the actuality of the event. The reader of these lines will, I hope, pardon my ignorance about such things that have become everyday occurrences for so many. During my self-imposed exile from the bustling modern world, my tranquility had been obtained at the price of becoming a relic from a previous age, where such marvels had not yet bestridden the captivated world.
    Picture, then, if you have the patience, my wide-eyed apprehension of