Steam Submarine Zelf Read online

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  I hadn’t had a clue of the straits I was in when it all began.

  It was little less than a day ago. I had waked up with the worst headache I could have ever imagined - my head was thumping as though an unseen assailant was bashing upon the side of it with a large wooden sledgehammer, or a crowbar - thump, thump, thump, upon my right temple.

  Cold, painful bricks lay beside me.

  I was looking up at a wall standing at an impossibly oblique angle of inclination.

  After a moment of complete disorientation I realised that it was I who was resting obliquely - lying on my side - looking up at the wall - I stood up unsteadily on my feet and tried to get my thoughts into order.

  I was in a dark alley. Pale light brightened the space between the walls above me. Below me was what looked like the brickwork of a London street and there were tendrils of fog reaching along the alleyway.

  The effort of trying to walk made my head swim so I leant upon the wall.

  Where was I?

  And more importantly, who was I?

  I looked up. The sky was green, the pea-soup fog of London.

  That was a place I had heard of.

  London.

  Was I in London?

  A strangely disjointed memory drifted past and I grabbed at it with my mind before it could get away. I only caught half of the phrase: “Ah, þües bij Mannisjkaes pahæ þü nikke? Mü' mü mue 'trilfamees îl'f rfœ Ing-Gland?” Someone was grasping my jacket, jerking me forwards, breathing on me with breath that stank of garlic and chives – someone who didn’t look human… More than one of them. Perhaps they were gnomes or trolls.

  Trogthen.

  Then someone saying - “You are the human? Or one of them?” Something about the Eternal. And a harsh, inhuman voice, in a strange accent, “He says that some say you killed him.”

  These thoughts contrasted so sharply with the world I saw all around me - the dull, bleak, dismal reality of a London alleyway, the swirling fog, the commonplace brickwork on the street below - that I could not help wondering if these thoughts were the product of a mind that had become unhinged. For a moment I thought that perhaps I was remembering fanciful dreams of a foreign place; but I doubted that dreams would be the first memories to return to an amnesiac.

  Then a voice cried out, “There he is!”

  Three figures in black suits pointed at me from the far end of the shadowy alleyway. They chased me.

  I sprinted down into another alley. I reached a high, whitewashed, wooden fence and climbed up onto a rubbish bin that was resting on it, then, clinging to the fence, kicked the rubbish bin away with my feet. In moments I had leaped over the fence and was sprinting into another alley.

  I discovered a low doorway in which to hide.

  I heard my pursuers calling to one another on the other side of the fence that I had jumped, “Which way did he go?” “This one’s a dead end, must’ve gone the other way.” “Let’s go,” and then the pattering of running feet and they were gone.

  The day came and went, like a passing stranger vanishing into the pea-green fog.

  I stayed hidden in the alcove for the whole time.

  Gradually the fog cleared.

  All I could see from my hiding place was the overcast sky, with dark grey clouds scurrying past below even darker clouds that set their own melancholy pace.

  The last thing I noticed before falling asleep was the dark disc of the new moon hanging on the black felt sky like a strange medallion on the chest of a duergar guard.

  Completely exhausted, I slept until the chill of early morning waked me up. A thin layer of ice had grown onto the windows beside me. From the rumbling of the city some blocks away and the position of the dim sun behind the clouds I judged it to be about nine o’clock in the morning.

  I was very hungry and ran towards the noise of the street, thinking that if my enemies were still looking for me it would be safer to move quickly to where the crowds were.

  I dashed out of the alleyway onto the rumbling street, expecting the usual spectacle of innumerable horses and wagons and carriages contending with one another that clatter along any usual London thoroughfare. Instead, an incomprehensible clamour greeted me! I saw a street full to the brim of puffing, roaring horseless carriages, inane mechanical contraptions, each self-propelled, as though it had become its own railway engine, but with smaller spoked wheels and no tracks to run on, some carrying a spare wheel on the side, some bearing a loose canopy on top, each with two strange upright lamps on the front of the smokebox like bright, unnaturally lit eyes, each contrivance pumping smoke from a single chimney beneath the rear instead of one atop the front like any normal steam engine! And there was such a great number of these peculiar conveyances, bumping along the street and jostling one another as horses and carriages do - or, rather, did! For with a start I realised that I must be in the future of London.

  I was so surprised that I almost fall straight into the path of one of these racing metal monstrosities, but happily a man’s hand grasped my shoulder from behind and stayed my fall.

  The gentleman steadied me and said, “Quick smart, lickety splat, to paraphrase what a sentimental American might say. There you are, young man, don’t go leaping into the path of the traffic. You still have your whole life ahead of you.”

  I looked at him - his suit was grey and well-tailored - those who had been following me were wearing black. He clearly wasn’t one of them.

  “Where am I?” I said.

  “Why... London, of course. Where on earth did you think you were?”

  But I couldn't think of any answer I could give to that strange question.