The Bayswater incident (An exclusive Periwinkle short story)

by Paul Eccentric

The Peruke, Bayswater. October 1887

"Ah, Pinky! Come in; come in!" Aubrey wheedled, calling out to his younger brother from the far side of the club's unrepentantly pretentious, marble-hewn vestibule. His somewhat ripe and frankly insincere greeting bounced dully off the hard, flat walls, creating an echo to accompany the rhythmic click-clacking of his hand-crafted Salisbury boots, as he flounced across the expansive chequer-board floor toward his newly arrived guest. "It's alwight, Wupert," he then moved to reassure the establishment's overly officious ostiary, with a judge-baitingly fey flick of his left wrist: the man, whom at that very moment, was attempting to wither the visiting adventurer with a scathing, nay, scarifying stare, "he's with me, old chap. I've alweady signed him in. “Pinkyyy!" He then repeated, upon his arrival in the space betwixt guest and greeter; his unctuosity somehow even more sickening in the flesh than it had been at a distance.
To the recipient's mind, at least, it was a curiously delivered salutation; inferring as it did that the affiliated pair had not actually clapped eyes on one another for the longest time, which; he knew, was not the case at all. "Bwother!" He then added, for the benefit; Gordon was now forced to presume, of any potential witnesses thereabouts, as he clapped the taller man heartily on both shoulders, enquiring: "How long has it been, hmm?"
"Just shy of a fortnight," Gordon replied flatly, reaching up to remove his pith and flicking an imaginary mote from its brim in the direction of his new nemesis: the ever-impertinent porter who was by now beginning to grate on his nerves.
With the brothers finally face-to-face, Gordon was to note the distinctive odour of aniseed on the older man's breath: absinthe, unless he was very much mistaken, a scent that he both caught and identified whilst still refusing to avert his eyes from those of the censorious servant, whose attempt to wither had still yet to waiver, despite his target having been vouched for by one of the Peruke's most celebrated members. "Aunt Ramona's birthday tea," Gordon persisted, narrowing his own gaze yet further, determined not to be the first to break this evident battle of wills. "The Dorchester. Still no?"
"Why, yes; yes, of course," the other conceded with an awkward half-smile, though his reply lacked the tenor and indeed the volume of his earlier outburst, "ever the pedant, eh, Pinky?"
"I received a telegram," Gordon went on, regardless of his brother's sneer; as if such a thing had been something of a vexation for him. He ignored his brother's jibe and gently drew said paper communique from the breast pocket of his tan safari jacket, which he duly dangled provocatively beneath the hooked beak of the demeaning doorman as if proof were required. "You requested my presence forthwith. Sounded somewhat urgent," he added, pointedly, "so, who died, Aubrey?"
The two men may have been related, but it was fair to say that there was little love lost between them. Aubrey had been quite the snake during the pair's formative years, not to mention a teller of taller than tall tales. Gordon; ever having been on the receiving end of his brother's low jinx, was prepared to tolerate his closest kin ('closest' to be defined only by the shortest number of months between their births and not as a feeling of familial kinship), if simply for the sake of appearances, but he would never have been so tempted as to have trusted the man with a confidence.
"Oh, pish!" Said his brother now, forcing onto his face a smile so tight and disingenuous that it brought to mind the portrait in oils of the self-same, self-satisfied, jury-courting solicitor, that hung on the wall in the drawing room of its subject's own home. "Don't be such a bore, man: I'm celebwating! I've been offered a partnership! We're having a party, old man. This is a pivotal moment f'me, and I wanted t'share it with me favowite bwother. Are you still here, Wupert?" He asked suddenly, turning sharply to face the lurking ostiary; his tone darkening grimly as he did so. "My
bwother wequires a light libation," he insisted. "Now, wun along and see to it, man; you're overstepping your mark."
"Well," said Gordon, whose turn it now was to feel a tad awkward, though he steadfastly refused to show as much in present company, "my congratulations to you, I'm sure."
"Come, Pinky," said Aubrey, laying a staying arm around his brother's shoulder and gently steering the younger man toward a door marked 'LIBRARY'.
"I won't, Aubrey, if you don't mind," Gordon told him, categorically, at once applying the brakes and stopping him in his tracks. "Me boat sails on the evening tide and I'm yet to even engage a sherpa. I was on me way to The Adventurers' when I received your telegr-"
"Botswana," Aubrey interrupted, "yes, I had heard. Made quite the packet on the Timbuktu jaunt last year," he reminded him, winking and tapping the side of his nose conspiratorially, "or so I'm led to understand, anyway. Got them fighting to invest in y'latest venture, I shouldn't wonder?"
"Something like that," Gordon reluctantly admitted, finally beginning to understand precisely why his presence had been so sought.
"Look, Pinky," a slightly more contrite Aubrey ventured, lifting the pressure that his dominant arm had been exerting on his brother's shoulder, "twuth is, this afternoon's swarway is just the pweamble. I'm expected t'lay out for a pwoper spectacle on Saturday evening: cabaway included. Show 'em I've got the class t'be a part of the main act, so t'speak. Thing is," he went on, lowering his voice as Rupert the doorman returned bearing aloft a small, silver tray upon which something akin to a gin fizz was fizzing away to itself, "I find meself tempowawily embawassed in the hard pelf department. I've a few big cases coming up over the next few months and obviously me wate's about t'wise, expo', but if you could just see your way to advancing me a pony-"
"Twenty five pounds, Aubrey?" Gordon snapped, noting the expression on the ostiary's face as he did so, along with the fact that he was; almost imperceptibly, appearing to move his head from side to side as he continued to stare him down.
"Y've always been good t'me," Aubrey continued to plead, "too good, if the twuth be known, and I wouldn't ask if I wasn't certain you were cuwently good f'wit."
Rupert's unblinking glare could now be described as mesmeric. It was as if he were attempting to influence Gordon's response with but the power of his eyes. It was true; Gordon knew, that men in the porter's position were often privy to information that others were not: titbits and trivia; dealings of a private nature, overheard in the darker recesses of clubs like The Peruke, or even The Adventurers', for that matter, and the thought did cross his mind; however fleetingly, that such may have been the case with this Rupert character, though he chose to dismiss it in favour of a rebuke for his brother's presumptuousness.
"I'm 'good for it'," he said to him, turning back to face his brother, the proffered refreshment now in his hand and halfway to his lips, "for no other reason than I am about to adventure forth. I have about my person," he detailed, "only that which my financiers have gifted me: namely, precisely enough and no more to pay my travel expenses to and from the dark continent. The balance has already been spent on supplies for the journey, all of which has already been loaded aboard the Intrepid down at Tilbury docks."
"Pinky, Pinky," an apparently quite desperate Aubrey deigned to beg him, "I was not suggesting that you gave me your cash; good lord, no! A cheque would suffice, the payee to be left blank. I would, of course, be f'wever in your debt...
The Adventurers', Piccadilly. May 1897
"...which was how they were able to lay the blame at your door; yes, I do recall," Wimpy declared, throwing back his fourth consecutive bracer whilst signalling with his free hand for the barman's
return, "but Pinky, old fruit, all that was a decade past, and as diabolical as those accusations were; as heinous as the crime was th't w's perpetrated against you, y'should surely have let it go by now."
"Oh, Wimps, would that I could, old man; would that I only could!"
"Same again, ta," said Wimpy to the barman, who had arrived at their station as Gordon had been part way through his lament.
"I can only pause to wonder," he went on, as the nameless barman charged their empty glasses with generous doses of Navy strength gin, "how different my life would have been had I never had to bear the stigma of such a baseless imputation."
"Poppycock!" Insisted his friend: the man to whom he felt a kinship that easily transcended any that he had ever attempted to forge with an actual member of his family. "It's the only thing th't makes you int'resting."
"I... I beg your pardon?"
"I's true!" The aeronaut reiterated, taking an urgent sip of his refill. "Alright, it might not actually be true: the whole 'sourcing of and shelling out for' those particular... 'ladies f'r-the-use-of', and doing it with money forwarded to you from the coffers of the Bee eM, but it did wonders f'ya' reputation, old boy!"
"My repu- Wimpy, quite how did you come by such a preposterous rationalisation?"
"Old bean, you're too straight without it! You spend half your life abroad," he reminded him, as Gordon took a languid swig from his own glass, before replacing it on the bar in front of him, "out of sight: out of mind. People are quick to forget, y'know, moving on t'the next great Imperial hero t'rock up in the entrance hall of th' Great Fence with a trunk load of purloigned tat and an unlikely tale of derring-do to impart. Those've your trade are ten-a-penny these days," he told him, ignoring the indignant glare of his old school chum, "sho, if you want t'shtay a part of the collected public zeitgiesht whilst you're out'n about, robbing the poor t'shell t'the rich, then you've got to have a rep': shhomething th't keeps people talking about you after you've gone. A little bit of shcandal does you a favour," he insisted: Wimpole, the Great Barstool Sage; the Gin-Fuelled Philosopher of old Piccadilly: two fitting epitaphs, neither of which Gordon suspected that his friend would even be able to say, this far into an evening on the sauce, let alone remember having 'shed'. "Well..." he went on, a relevant, but secondary thought having occurred to him: "unless you're a back-office royal or a member of the cabinet, anyway. Ish like having a sh- a sh- a shcar in just the right place," he added, to ram home his point, "not bad enough to dishfigure you, but jush enough t'set you apart from the ordinaries."
"That's as maybe," said Gordon, in defence of his own negativity; neither sanctifying his friend's romanticised theory nor actually going so far as to condemn it, "but it's not what I want to leave chiselled onto my grave stone after I'm gon-"
"And behold," said the aeronaut, with an expansive and downright dangerous sweep of his arm, a louche smile curling the edges of his too relaxed lips. "the truth... will ultimately out. This d'shn' have anything t'do with y'current inability t'con a wealthy shponsor into paying for your extended 'holiday'," he reasoned; accurately, as it happened, "thish ish about your need t'make your mark, ish'n it? Oh, 'The Bayswater Inshident'; 'The Bayswater Inshident'," he mugged, flatly failing; to Gordon's mind, to adequately capture his essence. "You're letting it define you, Gordon, when it should shimply be refining you. You got off with a fine and a light reprimand, due t'the fact th't y'father'sh a bally peer, and shertain members of your family; of whom you were none too fond of in the firsht plashe, think you're a dish- dish- dishpicable perv'. The 'Lost Shity' ashide," he plucked from the past as an example, as he often did at this juncture, mid-drunken rant, "and I always shed you allowed y'shelf t'peak too early there," he reprimanded with a wagging finger, "the world hash largely been dishcovered. Ish unlikely th't you're ever going to tread anywhere that hash'n already been trodden, sho maybe... maybe ish time to consh idder a change of direction? You want t'make a
mark, Pinky," he announced, "well, I appreesh- appreesh- I apreesheate that. I'd be happy t'do the shame thing meshelf. I; however, don't have your balls; your drive, or your deter... mination. Ish jush not in me, old bean, mush ash I'd like it t'be. Jush look..." he faltered, pausing to belch and to pass wind, "jush look," he reiterated, "at the way y've shpent all theesh yearsh mooning over a gal' who y've no charnsh on Earth of ever sh- sh- wooing! Sho, I shaved you thish. Took it fr'm the BOB this after- after- after-" and with this, he was gone: slumped, fast asleep against the bar, his empty glass, though, still clamped firmly within his fist...
Lombard Street, Shoreditch. Two hours later...
Having discharged his duties: namely escorting his friend up to the Comfort Suite (the club's attic apartment, which; for a small fee, was available to rent on an ad hoc basis to members who; for whatever reason, found themselves unable to secure a bed for the night in the immediate vicinity, or; as in Wimpy's case, had become too incapacitated and therefore too vulnerable to be considered safe wandering the capital's streets after dark), Gordon had paid their tab; collected his hat and coat, and taken his leave of The Adventurers'. Wimpy had indeed spent the afternoon at the Beast of Burden: the sherpa's retreat, over on the other side of the river; hence his skin full on top of a skin full, where he had attended the annual general meeting of the Aeronaut's Guild: a piss up quite close to a brewery, by any other name. Gordon was able to verify as much for it had been he who had been charged with collecting his friend and ferrying him back across the water to the more respectable locale of Piccadilly, when Mr Grey; the establishment's esteemed landlord, had explained to him how his friend's life was very much in danger.
Gordon had hoped that a slap-up nosh and a change of company might have been all that would be required to sober him up and thus return him to a state where he might be deemed fit to pilot, but on that account, he had obviously been mistaken.
Having now returned home, Gordon had been attempting to pick up from where he had left off earlier that evening, before having been rudely interrupted by Mr Grey's telegram, urgently requiring that; once again, he collect his inebriated friend, before someone were to throw him into the river: a sticky end that he had now saved his friend from more often than he cared to acknowledge.
The project in hand had been a red squirrel, whose innards he had already removed and whose skin he had both dried and cured, and for whom he had spent his morning crafting a thin, wire frame for the purposes of afterlife display. It was a hobby, one that he felt he truly excelled in, regardless of the constant critiques from his family, each of whom had been gifted a personalised piece at some point or other, in recognition of a birthday or an anniversary or for the marking of a holy day.
This particular piece, however, had been proving somewhat troublesome, marring the state of mental repose, along with the general degree of artistic satisfaction that he usually gained from his indulgence in such a soporific activity. He had, therefore, huffily downed tools once again and returned to the kitchen in order to avail himself of another pot of Oolong. It was whilst there, waiting for the kettle to boil; his unconscious mind alternating between his anger at the maquette's refusal to take on the essence of a squirrel, and his annoyance with his brother; even all this time later, for saddling him with an unearned and socially unacceptable reputation, that he was suddenly reminded of the flyer that Wimpy had passed him before finally losing consciousness. Fishing the crumpled sheet from his jacket pocket, he pulled down the hornbeam spectacles that had been resting on his forehead and leant back against the windowsill to read.
'VOLUNTEER REQUIRED' it read, in an emboldened, Garamond style font, with: 'THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME!' printed below this in letters slightly smaller than the headline, in order that they might also cover but a single line of type. 'To all budding aeronauts:' followed this, reverting to lower case, and he paused at this point, having spied steam rising from the spout of his
battered brass kettle. Having loaded the pot, he then returned to the page to read: 'how would you like to become the first man to set foot on the Moon?'
It seemed a preposterous suggestion, but the leaflet's authors had obviously not intended their work to be considered an amusement. It was signed by Admiral Spatchcock of the British Space Agency, a division of the Royal Navy, no less!
Members of The Aeronauts' Guild, it would transpire; a latter-day offshoot of The Adventurers' Guild, were being invited to submit their names for registration, to be considered for the daring post of 'The World's First Astronaut'. The closing date for entries was less than a week away, with interviews due to take place a mere ten days after that.
Aeronauts were a rare breed indeed, he knew: courageous, to be sure, as any man who was happy to risk his life by jumping off Tower Bridge wearing nought but a leather coat; a skull cap; goggles, and a pair of balsa wood wings was a braver man than he, but would even one of their peculiar number be so desperate for attention as to agree to such a stupendous stunt? The Americans were currently threatening to raid the ape house of New York State Zoo; to thrust said terrified specimens into a tin can and to catapult them skyward. Their German counterparts had announced a similar experiment using stray dogs and cats. Trust Victoria, Gordon thought, to skip straight to the mentally unstable!
Having brewed his tea, Gordon returned to his squirrel, the poor creature sadly looking even less likely now than it had done five desperate minutes earlier. Was this his answer, he wondered now, as he turned the badly proportioned skeleton over in his hands, his mind now fully engrossed by the mad, mad idea that had displaced his previous woes. He faced this same battle every year, regardless; it seemed, of how successful that season's expedition had been, and, notwithstanding the quality or indeed the quantity of booty that he had been able to procure for the museum, or the 'introductions' that he had been able to make on behalf of his sponsors. Despite all that, every year was the same: a shoddy journalistic rehashing of the same tired tale, intended; as ever, to ward off any potential investors to his cause. The story of The Bayswater Incident: of how he had supposedly used the museum's money to secure a pack of high-class fille de joie, to 'entertain' his brother's guests at a dinner to celebrate his professional ascension, all whilst he had been in Botswana, and able to prove as much!
But what if his next adventure did not require a sponsor nor even a blemish-free reputation? What if his next adventure was to be Man's ultimate adventure: an untoppable feat that would put him up above every other jobbing adventurer- no, hang it: everybody ever in the whole history of the planet! Even his trio of over-achieving siblings! Was that not mark enough for him? Was that not worth dying for?
Gordon finished his tea and returned his cup to its saucer, sighing as he released a breath.
'You know?' He thought. 'It probably was...'

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'Skaro By Gaslight'

by Paul Eccentric
As a scientist, he was perhaps better placed than most to understand how conflict begat innovation. He ought; therefore, to consider himself 'lucky' to have suffered this appalling fate now rather than during a period of peace and prosperity for the planet, as he was constantly being reminded by those of his team who had worked so diligently to put him back together. For, this was a time of great war: the war to end all wars, as it was constantly being hailed, though quite naively in his opinion: a Skaro-wide dissension that pitted empire against empire; nation against nation; sector against sector, with each murderous faction vying for supremacy over what tattered scraps of land remained of their
once bountiful world. Kaled ingenuity, like that of the Thals and of every other innovator to find themselves hunkered in a bunker the planet over, was currently being stretched to its very capacity in order to provide new and yet more terrible weapons with which to defeat their opponents. However, with this; of course, came advances in other areas too, often quite by chance, such as medical care, communications, and transport; hence what they were insisting was the basis for his... 'luck'.
The war had been raging now for decades; almost a century, in fact: so long that no-one alive could remember a time when things had been any different. Neither, it transpired, could they be called upon to explain quite what it had been that had sparked such universal hostility to begin with, setting them along this untrodden path toward their inevitable, mutual extinction. It had; according to the philosophers of the day, become a war for war's sake: a way of life for all Skarosians; a cultural conviction that grew harder to shake with each passing generation's loss.
When it had begun, the planet had been on the cusp of a bright new era of social and industrial revolution, with the arrival of the first rudimentary engines capable of self-propelled transport, and a veritable slew of inspirational labour-saving machines and devices; the likes of which had only ever been dreamt of previously. Such all-encompassing animus, however, had thrust their world forward into the current age of cogwheel and steam, forcing it to evolve at a rate far greater than was generally deemed natural. And now here they were: a time when coal-driven, armoured behemoths roamed the mud and corpse-hewn battlefields, spitting plumes of white-hot fire from their top and side-mounted cannon, whilst in the poisoned skies above them droned pod upon pod of steel-ribbed, helium-tanked, bomb-laden airships, ready to drop their chemically enhanced payloads atop any combatants who might have managed to survive the initial wave...
Dafydd was 'lucky', they would continue to insist, that he had been called up when he had, for; had his papers have arrived even six months earlier, then he would have been forced to endure the same fate as so many of his fellow recruits: those few who had survived their first hour on the line in any capacity worthy of celebration. Lucky? Ha! Could they not see what he had become: how his very survival as this... this parody of life had entirely overwritten the man whom he had once been? And not for the better, either! Now, was that truly an outcome worth commemorating? He thought not.
There was something else, though; something that he had forgotten until but a moment ago, not that that ought surprise him at all; certainly not in light of all that he had weathered over the past few weeks. It had come back to him now, though, quite suddenly, in fact: a stirred memory as he had caught sight of his own image reflected in the glass panel that separated the laboratory from the testing room. Shortly before his enlistment, he had made the brief, but enigmatic acquaintance of a self-proclaimed 'inter-dimensional tourist'. This... traveller, as he had qualified himself: a man whose
countenance and bearing had a certain indefinable familiarity about it; who had appeared as if from nowhere and; in short order, disappeared in much the same bewildering manner, had sought to enlighten him as to the existence of 'Multiple Concurrent Universes', as if, he had scoffed at the time, the idea was unlikely to have ever occurred to him before. During their fleeting encounter, that which it was now worth noting had come on the very eve of his receipt of his 'invitation to war', his visitor had explained to him how an individual's ultimate fate was sealed; how it was locked from hatch to dispatch, as it were, with each iteration of their being walking a similar, if not identical path, simultaneously, across the ethereal divide. If this were indeed true, he had considered, in the wake of the fellow's rather thaumaturgical exit (and he had to admit, he did make a rather convincing argument for his incredible acervations; far better, he had decided, than he had heard up until that point), then perhaps they were right after all: the physicians and the engineers who had rebuilt his shattered body upon his return.
He had thought often since his resurrection, of those sorry souls of his former regiment: good men and women; ordinary folk; people just like himself: true patriots to the last, several of whose remains sat in gently bubbling jars on the bench before him now, distilling; awaiting last minute modification and transplantation into one of his newly unveiled, steam-driven, track-mounted, armoured travel machines, ahead of their eventual redeployment to the line that they had so recently left. Were their fates really predetermined? Had they been destined from their very conception to become the mutant creatures that would control his machines? Were there Daleks also on these parallel worlds, and if so, what had they become?
‘Oh, but for impeccable timing on my part’, he mused to himself, somewhat cynically and self-indulgently, he felt, 'then I too would have been one of the first of the new 'Dalek' regiment, that which is about to make its explosive debut at the front...
They had been dispatched bearing little more than slingshots and bows, for that was all the ordnance that could be spared them by the time their turn had come around. It had not been enough; they had known as much at the time, as had their superiors, not that their opponents had been any better prepared than they. They had therefore killed each other hand-to-hand: an eye, quite literally, for an eye, merely clearing the way for subsequent waves of equally suicidal offerings, with no gains having been made by their heroic sacrifice; land neither won, nor reclaimed. By rights, he knew, he should have died there with them. Of course, he had initially been pronounced as such, but he had been 'lucky'. He had been given a second chance when the field doctor had discovered a pulse; faint, but persistent, and had bagged him up and sent him back to the bunker, to the very department; ironically, that he had been the lead scientist of only a week earlier!
Hideously scarred, missing an arm and both eyes, and now paralysed from the waist down, he could; his peers had agreed, be saved, though to what end, he had wondered, as they had filled him up with pain relief: to what end?
He was lucky, they had told him, for he alone had been spared, though in truth, he should never have been sent to the front at all. A simple 'clerical error', they had explained to him, which was why they had expended such resources on his reclamation. Those of his superior intellect had been exempt from the call up, as they were needed in the back rooms, working on the next generation of weaponry, in the hope of finally bringing this terrible war to a satisfying close.
Perhaps he should have spoken up at the time; it was not as if he had not known how important the project was to the war effort. He had, however, he duly contemplated, felt conflicted. The day that his papers had arrived had been the day following his prototype's long-awaited unveiling. As he had watched the test from the observation booth; the top brass beside and behind him, he had felt a small, but vital part of himself die, when for the first time since the project's inception, he was to realise his creation's ultimate potential. Before that, he had seen it merely as a way of helping
seasoned, but battle-robbed veterans, to gain their revenge on those who had shattered their lives, as from within his new iron-sided travel machines, they could withstand anything that the enemy had left to throw at them. They might finally gain a foothold; conquer no-man's land; possibly even reach the enemy's base of operations, exterminating all in their path! He had, therefore, accepted his papers, hoping; perhaps, that his pointless sacrifice might assuage the guilt that he felt for that which he had given form to...
He was, however, no longer conflicted; the pain had seen to that: the pain of the grafts; the integration of bone and steel; of nerve; sinew and wire, that had seen him gain a replacement arm and a pair of clockwork-enhanced lenses, finished in backlit cobalt blue, similar to those in the stalks of his machines, to replace his melted eyes. All this without mention of his two brass-plated, gear-sprung legs which; along with his arm, had been wired directly into his brain. A pair of alcohol-fuelled, rechargeable power cells protruded from each of his thighs, above the complex array of steam-assisted hydraulics and intricate cog-work that made up both his knees and his ankle joints. He made a truly monstrous sight as he clanked around his laboratory, multi-lensed goggles resting against his scuffed and stained topper; his olive green military great coat with its fox-fur collar, displaying his rank and his medals of commendation, open to reveal his scientific corp. regulation weskit, a remarkably similar sight, he was forced to acknowledge, as the mysterious 'traveller' who had visited him not so long ago...
"We are ready for you on the observation deck now, Dr Rosicrucious," said Nyder, the general in charge of his creation's battlefield test; "Initial Dalek deployment in ten rels and counting,"
"Excellent," said the doctor, reaching down with his new biotronic arm to collect his Sonic Mutator from the workbench beside him; reclaiming it, and slotting it into its black leather holster on his belt; "lead on. Oh, and by the way, Nyder," he added, as the mismatched pair ducked beneath the concrete frame of the subterranean laboratory's door.
"Yes, Sir?" Nyder, enquired.
"From this moment forward, I wish to be referred to only... as Davros...
 

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