Alice's Adventures in Steamland: The Clockwork Goddess Page 3
First, she unlocked the connecting door between the master bedrooms. Second, she pushed the catch into the lock and tamped newspaper into the gap, forcing it to remain in place. Lastly, she removed the key from the lock and put it on her dressing table.
After verifying that she could see through the keyhole unobstructed, she opened and shut the connecting door several times to ensure that it swung silently. She prevented the door from opening on its own by sticking a wad of paper between it and the jamb. Satisfied with her preparations, she returned to her sickbed in anticipation of nightfall.
When she inevitably grew bored with waiting, she pulled out her bag and examined the little box of pills Marie Busybody had given her.
***
“First find some reason – invent a chill in the air – to shut all the lab windows. Next, drop these into an open bottle of sulfuric acid and leave the room immediately.”
Alice opened the box. The pills looked like blue aspirins.
“What are they?” Alice thought to question her new employer.
Lady Busybody smirked.
“Poison pills,” she answered. “The resulting gas affects the central nervous system, creating paralysis initially, then shutting down breathing altogether and killing the brain.”
She peered intently at Alice. “Remember what I said: leave the laboratory immediately after you drop the pills into the acid – say you need to go pee or something; just make sure you get out. You’ll have a minute at most before the acid eats through the pill’s coating and releases the gas into the room.” She thought a moment. “To remain on the safe side, assume you’ve only thirty seconds to escape.”
“How long before I go back and discover the body?”
“Wait six hours. Remain in your room till then, then return to the lab and sound the alarm. When the March hares arrive to investigate, explain you’re having your monthly curse. You suddenly felt dizzy and had to lie down for a while. No one can disprove your words, and the tablets should leave no residue in the acid . . .”
“Okay.”
“One more thing, and this is VERY important. We need to be patient here. You can’t just rush into killing him. You’ll have to work for him for a while – three weeks at least – so no one suspects you of having anything to do with his death.”
Alice nodded. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“Good. Once he’s dead. I inherit all his money and you’ll get your quarter of a million.”
Alice nodded again. She didn’t doubt her employer would pay as promised.
Lady Busybody had given Alice a thousand dollars for expenses, fake documents, and a promise to send more if she required it. After they’d first parted, Alice had returned to the brothel to make preparations for her trip to New York.
Everything was running to plan so far. Now it was just the waiting game.
***
Lord Busybody was winding up Crank when Alice entered the dining room. She curtsied to him. “How often do you need to do that?” she asked.
She realized that she’d need to poison him when Crank was wound down. It simply wouldn’t do to have the machine saving him. Marie Busybody apparently had no idea of the robot’s existence.
“Every eight hours or so.”
“Why not simply let it wind up itself?”
Lord Busybody smiled at the question. “I tried, but it has a mental block – no matter what I tell it, it just can’t wind itself up.”
They had dinner then, roast piglet stuffed with lobster. The meal was served by several frogs bustling busily about the dinner hall, communicating in deep croaking voices.
Crank sat with them, sipping a glass of oil.
After dinner, Alice complained of a sharp pain in her chest. Lord Busybody rushed to help her, whereupon she ‘accidentally’ crushed her body up against his. Of all the places to grab, she grabbed hold of his crotch to steady herself, ‘innocently’ squeezing his penis through his trousers. She pretended not to notice when it immediately stiffened.
Although his lordship longed to free himself from this intolerably embarrassing position, Alice continued to hold him tight, as if his knob were the only thing preventing her collapse. Groaning in pain, she dragged him down onto the sofa with her, almost laying across him now, her hand still on his cock, her breasts now on his legs. Each time he tried removing her from his person, she squeezed his crotch tighter and groaned in pain, until finally he gave up and stopped struggling. He felt somewhat relieved that she was apparently too ill to notice his erection (perhaps she’d confused his penis for his arm?), and so he decided to simply wait until she felt better.
Her episode ended just as suddenly as it had begun. After she released her grip on his swollen member, he carefully helped her to her feet. She apologized for inconveniencing him so, showing no sign whatsoever that she’d noticed his discomfiture (or erection).
This was the middle phase of Alice’s seduction plan (she was a prostitute, after all). Just when Lord Busybody thought she was okay, she repeated the entire charade again, this time collapsing on the sofa without him, imploring the lord to help her up to bed.
“
“Oh no, no,” Alice sighed, laying her weary head against the cushions. “I just get these giddy spells occasionally,” she continued. “I should recover in no time at all.”
“He’s right my dear,” Lord Busybody said, rather worried now. “We really should get a proper doctor over. I know a little medicine, but I’m all at sea over what’s bothering you.”
“No need,” Alice insisted. “It’s just a woman thing. I’ll be right as rain by morning, I assure you. You can call him then if I’m not.”
He agreed and assisted her up the stairs.
Alice managed to ‘slip’ as he was helping her into bed. On her way down, she grabbed Lord Busybody’s cock once again, ostensibly to stop her fall. He couldn’t help but groan as well, but luckily Alice’s groans were loud enough to muffle his own.
She looked so pale laying there . . . Her breasts rose and fell like a set of bellows and her face was set in a rictus of emotion. Her grip on him was painful, but he’d already learned that it was best to simply wait till she let go – which she didn’t, of course, until she’d fallen fast asleep.
Lord Busybody left the room with a painfully throbbing erection. Damn all this he thought to himself. He didn’t care what this girl said. First thing in the morning he would summon Old Jonesy, but for now he needed to do something about this boner . . . It was bad enough Marie not being there, and now this?
***
Immediately after Lord Busybody left the room, Alice leapt out of bed, ran to the door, and listened. He hadn’t gone back downstairs. She heard the distinct sound of his bedroom door opening and closing down the hall.
Alice quickly stripped off her clothes, let down her hair, and sat in front of the dressing table mirror. Rifling through Lady Busybody’s makeup case, she found the desired cosmetic, then rouged her breasts till they were a fierce red. After putting on her nightgown, she knelt to peer through the keyhole she’d prepared earlier.
Lord Busybody was taking off his own clothes as well. Alice giggled when she saw how hard his cock still was. The one thing he didn’t take off was his hat. He reached up into it for a small jar of cream, which he opened and applied to his penis. Biting his lips and closing his eyes, he then began to masturbate as if his very life depended on it.
Cue Alice’s entrance.
She swung the door open silently and slowly padded across the soft, carpeted floor, until she stood directly in front of the furiously wanking man.
“My lord,” she whispered.
Lord Busybody’s tightly shut eyes instantly shot open, wide with panic.
Alice immediately opened her gown, so he got a good look.
“Don’t be afraid my lord,”
she said. “I want you too! I’m ashamed to admit it, but I overheard you and the robot discussing me before.”
Lord Busybody gasped when he saw Alice’s rouged breasts. “Oh God, yesssss!” he moaned, continuing to abuse himself before her. “The twin apples of Newton’s gravity!”
He was clearly about to cum. So as to keep the advantage, Alice leaned over and finished jacking him off. She then lay down beside him on the bed, kissed him and told him how wonderful he was, and how she’d never leave him.
Later, after he’d recovered, they had sex twice while Goodyear blimps beamed fluorescent adverts over nighttime New York.
Chapter 5
They had breakfast together the following morning. Alice was studying the paper over toast and jam.
“This murderer fellow,” she began, “how could someone gut women like that, as if they were cattle?”
“Let me see that,” Lord Busybody said. Alice handed over the New York Times.
He was certainly in excellent spirits today. Alice had been fantastic in bed. He wouldn’t have expected it, seeing how demure she was, but she’d turned out to be just what he’d needed since Marie left.
Marie . . . Alice Sin looked so much like Marie – a younger Marie – just without the nastiness that accompanied Marie.
Sin. A very odd surname, he’d thought, until she took it upon herself to explain.
“Someone might take you for a prostitute from merely hearing your name,” he said, half jokingly.
“It’s short for Cinnamon, actually, which is still an even odder surname yours,” Alice replied with a smile. “I simply cannot wait to get married, so I can ditch them both!”
Ah yes, marriage. Marie. Dudley Busybody’s primary worry now was how to keep Marie from finding out about Alice. He knew that if she did find out, with her malicious streak, she’d definitely plot to kill them both.
“They’re calling him ‘The Ripper’,” Lord Busybody said, taking his turn to study the paper. “Wordplay on ‘reaper’, I’d imagine, since he appears to kill his victims with a sickle. He primarily targets prostitutes, however, which comes as something of a relief . . .”
“Relief?”
“Would you rather he targeted housewives? Noblewomen? Respectable churchgoing girls?”
“How can you say that, darling? The fact that a woman has few moral scruples of her own doesn’t give someone the right to slice her up like she’s to be served for dinner. Who could possibly hate women that much?”
“A good question. This is definitely the oddest case of misogyny I’ve ever come across to date . . .”
“How do you mean, ‘odd’?”
“The degree of violence employed by this ‘Ripper’ is excessive, to put it mildly,” Lord Busybody said. “So much so that it indicates a personal psychosis transposed onto women as an accessible substitute, rather than a hatred of women in general. A hatred of something, rather than someone.”
“How does that work out? Why would you hate yourself or something and kill someone else? Wouldn’t suicide be a simpler option? Just rid the world of your own miserable self?”
“Madmen tend not to think as reasonably as you, darling.” He passed the paper back to her, poured himself another cup of tea. “What’s interesting is that all of the victims had the contents of their torsos removed, yet none of them were sexually molested.”
“I’m sure they’d have preferred to be molested, and left alive,” Alice said, a quaver in her voice.
Lord Busybody saw that she was weeping. He pulled a napkin out of his hat and dabbed at her tears. “Now now dear, you need to be strong.” Returning the napkin to its drawer, he absentmindedly stashed the tea implements along with it.
Only Alice’s tears didn’t stop. The thought of this latest young victim out in the rain – her innards on the cobblestones, being trampled by horses – forced the tears to her eyes. That could just as easily have been her out there . . .
Lord Busybody decided there was only one way to stop his young mistress’s tears. He gently pulled Alice to her feet and carried her upstairs to their shared bedroom for some more lovemaking.
He realized that his work had been suffering since Alice Sin had arrived in his house, but he didn’t care. It had been years since he’d last had such a pleasant holiday.
The sex wasn’t bad, either.
***
Okay, Alice thought with satisfaction, after another faked orgasm, now that THAT’s been taken care of, I am now his idealized dream wife. All I have to do now is bide my time, kill the old goat, and get paid!
Book One: Oldwoman Girl in New York
Part Two: Attack on New York
Chapter 1
Alice and Lord Busybody were startled out of bed by a cacophony of odd clanking mixed with steam whistles and whooshing noises.
The bedroom looked out over the Hudson River. Peering through the window, they both started in shock at what they saw – A mere five hundred meters downstream, a massive mechanical spider was pulling itself up out of the river, trampling people and buildings into the riverbank as it crawled forth upon the city.
“A Texan war robot . . .” Lord Busybody gasped, recognizing the cow-skull emblem painted on its side.
A war robot? Alice said nothing; all she could do was gape. The war had caught up with her in New York after all.
The metal spider must’ve been the size of a battleship. It was black in color with six flashing yellow eyes arranged around its body. River water flowed from its hulking form in great torrents.
As it cranked its way up out of the water, huge clouds of steam blew from the pipes along its sides. Heavy, black smoke billowed from the three chimneys on its dorsal surface.
The war-spider had been modeled on a battleship. A bank of high-caliber cannons rained death in every direction from a large central turret, firing indiscriminately at the riverside homes, destroying everything they hit. These particular cannonballs were super destructive – packed full of explosives that detonated on contact with the masonry.
Lord Busybody was up and dressed in a flash.
“Cheshire!” he yelled.
Cheshire Cat appeared immediately – only its head, as though it had been in too much of a hurry to bring its entire body along.
“Inform my sister Victoria that the Texans are attacking New York.”
“Yes, milord.” It then vanished.
Alice overcame her horror at the invasion long enough to ask a question. “The Cheshires – They’re not all just one cat, then?”
“No,” Lord Busybody replied, pulling on his jacket. “Though I can see why you might assume as much. Cheshire cats form a continuum of some sort. They’re all interconnected in some arcane way that science can’t yet understand, which allows them to communicate over such long distances. You’re correct in one sense, though – they don’t think of themselves as being distinct from one and other, either.”
Alice nodded sagely.
Cheshire Cat reappeared just then. “Her majesty has been informed, your lordship. She says to tell you that the army and air force will arrive here shortly.”
“Order the servants to take refuge in the cellars,” Lord Busybody instructed Cheshire Cat. It nodded, disappearing once again.
“Get dressed,” Lord Busybody told Alice. “We’ll observe the battle from my lab. It has reinforced walls and windows. I doubt those cannonballs pose much danger to us, this far upriver.”
Alice quickly wrapped her gown around her. “I’m dressed enough, let’s go.”
***
In the lab, Crank lay motionless on his table. Lord Busybody rolled up the window shutters, so that he and Alice could watch the war-spider trudge a path of destruction through the houses along the banks of the river.
By now, most of the buildings near the behemoth’s point of emergence resembled ancient ruins. Residents fled screaming through the streets in all directions, as if the spider were Mt. Vesuvius, and New York was Pompeii.
His lord
ship sighed angrily. “I’d been expecting a direct attack like this for ages now. The writing has long been on the wall, only Vicky never listens to me, keeps patronizing me because I’m the youngest of we three. Now, see the result.”
“It’s quite slow,” Alice said. “It walks like it’s drunk.”
“It’s extremely heavy, carrying huge stocks of coal and water. The coal is stored all around its hull, serving as additional protection against bombardment.”
The war-spider continued to stomp through the roofs of every house in its path, its long metal legs crushing them with horrendous ease. Each time it lifted a leg from a house to take another step, the rest of the house burst apart in an explosion of brick and mortar.
Alice shivered. “Where is the army? At this rate, the damn thing will demolish this entire quarter.”
Lord Busybody pointed up to the sky. “Here comes the air force now.”
A squadron of military dirigibles floated into view as fast as their propellers would carry them. Each of them proudly displayed the Queen of Heart’s crest – a red playing card –on their sides.
The airships were armed with cannons and rocket tubes. As they descended upon the war-spider, they unleashed a blitzkrieg of blazing bombardment. Large chunks of armor were sundered loose from the machine, causing further damage to the riverfront.
“They’re doing almost as much damage as the spider!” Alice cried.
Lord Busybody winced. “It can’t be helped, I’m afraid . . .” he said after a moment’s thought. “I initially thought it odd, this turning up in the city – war-spiders were originally designed to protect the coalfields, refueling themselves from the land they walk upon. But it makes sense now – used within the confines of a town, destroying the spiders is certain to cause just as much destruction as they themselves make.”