Alice's Adventures in Steamland: The Clockwork Goddess Page 4
“I think it’s horrible,” Alice said. One of the spider’s legs was blown off by a lucky rocket, landing on top of a decidedly unlucky boarding house nearby.
Lord Busybody nodded. “Hopefully the queen will listen to me after this.”
Down in the street below, coach-and-fours full of March hare medics rolled toward the stricken district. Others came from the opposite direction, returning with the wounded and the dead.
Alice was appalled by the sheer scale of the carnage.
The war-spider was losing the conflict, clearly, but it had given the airships a respectable beating with its cannons. Three of them were aflame and spiraling across the sky. Two of these detonated in mid air, like snapshots of miniature suns. The third crashed down onto a church tower and finished burning there.
Everything in the vicinity of the war-spider glowed with orange flame, as if it were now a section of Hell.
The air force finally succeeded in disabling the mechanical spider, crippling it by separating all of its legs from its body. Like a punctuation mark closing Alice and Dudley’s comments on its destructive suitability for city warfare, the monster crashed down upon one final row of buildings, flattening them like bedbugs. Hemmed in now by its own ruins, the war machine finally ceased discharging its cannons, for fear of muzzle blockage and ricochets.
“There were maybe fifty people in those houses right there,” Lord Busybody said in total disgust. “All dead now . . .”
He turned away from the scene and began winding up Crank. Alice remained by the window, watching troops of March hare infantry hopping past in formation, off to do battle with the war-spider’s surviving crew.
Chapter 2
“Quit your job with the newspaper,” Lord Busybody urged Alice in the morning, half delirious from lack of sleep. “You can work for me – I need a secretary, and it’s not a lot of work. Besides handling my correspondence, you’ll mostly just be with me in the lab, taking notes on my research.”
They came to an easy agreement on her pay and benefits. Alice opted to take an advance on her first month’s salary.
After excusing herself to post her resignation letter to the Detroit Chronicle (and to shop for new lingerie), she took the trolley to the post office and sent off a telegram instead – informing Lady Busybody that their plan was thus far working to perfection.
Alice was in, in, IN.
On her way back to the estate, she paused outside a newsagent and read the headlines. If only because they hadn’t had time to publish news of the Texan attack yet, all of the papers still had front pages dedicated to the Ripper and the hapless streetwalker he’d gutted the previous night.
Alice stood glaring at the headlines, so angry she could taste bile on her tongue.
***
One thing Alice had been surprised to discover about Lord Busybody – how vigorous he was in bed. Although she was still faking all her orgasms for the sake of keeping things strictly business, she was nonetheless impressed by how potent his lordship was. Given other circumstances . . .
As his new live-in secretary and secret lover, Lord Busybody had insisted that she move all her things into his own personal quarters. A frog footman had been dispatched to the collect her bags from the Excelsior Hotel.
His bizarre hat continued to intrigue Alice, particularly the way it remained unwaveringly balanced on his head during sex, no matter how energetic or creative in positioning he became. She’d simply never seen a hat that never tilted sideways before, even when it was so clearly sideways in so many ways.
***
The Genesis of Alice Sin
Alice hadn’t lied to Lord Busybody about the origin of her surname. However, contrary to what she’d told him, she never actually disliked it . . .
Alice Madonna Cinnamon was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1845. Her full name was Alice Madonna Erica Ruth Iris Carmen Anastasia (her father wanted her first initials to form an acronym for AMERICA) Cinnamon. For reasons that should be apparent, she did dislike this and absolutely never used it.
Her father Jeffrey Cinnamon was a coal miner, her mother Karen a seamstress. Alice left home at the age of nineteen, after her father got sick.
There had been a tuberculosis outbreak among the miners, and Jeffrey Cinnamon had been one of its victims. The hospitals were overflowing with sick people, so his wife Karen tended him at home. Alice loved her father, so watching him waste away physically (and her mother emotionally) was just too much for her to take.
One night she’d simply packed her bags and left. Chicago was the furthest her savings would take her, so she stopped there and began relying on her wits to survive.
A succession of menial jobs had followed – one as a trainee nurse (which she quit after they began bringing in tuberculosis patients), one as a gunsmith’s clerk (where she learned how to shoot), and lastly, one as an airship ticketing agent. Finally she chanced to meet Madame Lola (who’d been buying an airship ticket to Detroit), forever changing young Alice from good girl to bad. Madame Lola, smelling like a basket of roses and dressed in a queen’s ransom of furs, had convinced Alice that there was more money to be made lying on her back and spreading her legs than slaving away at the daily nine-to-five grind.
In addition to getting a new wardrobe and a crash course in seduction out of the deal, Alice was compelled to shorten her surname to simply “Sin” – one more appropriate to the business at hand, anyway.
***
Alice found prostitution to be an easy profession. “Physical beauty is the sole preserve of women,” Madame Lola was fond of saying. “A man’s beauty is in his money; the more of it he has, the better looking he is.”
It was a point of view that Alice took to heart, devoting herself to her ‘relaxation’ duties even when the utterly repulsive Count Honas Obese (who looked more like an asymmetrical merging of six fat frogs than anything conceivably born of woman) took a fancy to her. He was the younger brother of Chicago’s own mayor, and his favorite sexual practice was having her suck him off while his penis was coated with chocolate.
Despite his looks, Count Honas wasn’t a brute. He was simply disfiguringly ugly – and he paid very well. Alice’s single biggest problem servicing him was extracting his penis from amidst the rolls of fat forming his groin, so she could coat it with the prerequisite chocolate syrup.
Alice had discovered that most men liked the ‘chocolate treatment’.
“Remember, we women love chocolate,” Madame Lola explained. “Hence your clients simply cannot resist the implied suggestion that you find them equally irresistible, once they’ve been coated with it.”
***
Despite her new profession, Alice Cinnamon never forgot where she came from. She sent money for her father’s treatment on a monthly basis, and when he finally succumbed to his disease, then for her mother’s, after she contracted the same illness.
In her letters home, she told her parents that she worked in ‘entertainment’.
***
Alice Sin found that prostitution paid well, but not well enough, since Madame Lola took half her earnings for lodging and management services.
It was also a dead-end profession. Being employed as a prostitute generally rendered most practitioners unemployable for any respectable job in the future. Even retiring to get married was problematic – not because there was any shortage of men who’d mind their checkered past (Chicago abounded with gangsters, after all), but because the girls themselves had grown so used to avoiding all responsibility besides spreading their legs and faking orgasm. Transitioning into the role of loving wife was simply a bridge too far for most.
Then there were the drugs – morphine, cocaine, and opium – which the girls took to alleviate boredom, but which had the downside of taking more from them than they gave in return, particularly when it came to their looks. As a case in point, there was Maryse Ciconne, whom Alice had always regarded with horror. She was only thirty-five, but looked at least sixty due to her heroin abus
e.
Then there was Janice Du Play, a runaway Canadian émigré who smoked so much opium that her pupils were perpetual pinpoints. It didn’t take long around her to realize she had little understanding of exactly who or where she was. Since she looked like European royalty and had a sexy French accent, she became a huge hit among men desiring sex with a sleazy pseudo-aristocrat.
Alice considered her own future sometimes. Whenever she did, she invariably became depressed at her lack of career advancement prospects, since she had no desire to start up her own establishment. Her depression never lasted long, however, and she’d bounce back like a sexual ball, perking up the spirits of the brothel workers with her revived gusto and belief in the utter necessity of Earth’s second-oldest profession.
It was during one of Alice’s periods of doubt that Marie Busybody had come calling, and showed her a way to ensure her future was bright.
Madame Lola believed that Alice had returned home to St. Louis Missouri, supposedly to visit her dying mother.
Chapter 3
As Lord Busybody had assured her, Alice’s new job as secretary was the picture of ease itself. Both of them understood that it was really just a means of enjoying each other’s company without unpleasant questions being asked.
***
The Alien Caterpillar and How it Fell to Earth (and Left)
The caterpillar was in Lord Busybody’s hat.
Alice saw it that evening in the lab. Lord Busybody was searching high and low for a particular spanner.
“
Lord Busybody then rummaged through his hat’s various drawers. Alice was surprised by the sheer profusion and diversity of the hat’s contents. In addition to a pile of scientific equipment that made no sense to her untrained eyes, the hat held books, shoes, clothes, watches, spectacles, and even a chicken, all of which Lord Busybody pulled out in handfuls and dumped on a table, until it was piled high with stuff.
And still he couldn’t locate the spanner he wanted!
The caterpillar was the last thing he pulled out before abandoning his search, which Alice imagined might go on forever – the hat’s capacity seemingly that inexhaustible.
“What’s that?” Alice asked, pointing at the odd object.
Lord Busybody glanced dismissively at the caterpillar. “I'm not sure. I found it in a crater, out in the Arizona desert two years ago. Marie insisted that I take her to see the Grand Canyon on our anniversary. We slept out under the stars with the bay of coyotes all around us.”
Lord Busybody would never forget that night; Marie made him give her head while she bayed along with the coyotes (a teenage fantasy of hers). All the while he ate her pussy, he’d been scared to death her racket would attract the beasts to attack them, or attempt screwing Marie, at least. She’d probably had something similar in mind . . .
Marie came violently that night, peeing in his mouth to cap things off.
“It looks very odd,” Alice said. It did. The caterpillar was a six-inch flexible sculpture, which seemed to be made from India rubber and felt like a pencil eraser. It was depicted as wearing a lime-green waistcoat, tailored to permit its upper legs to poke through.
“Later that night,” Lord Busybody continued, “I walked off to relieve myself. Next thing I knew, the sky was as bright as day. It was a shooting star – crashed off in the distance. Marie saw it too, or felt it anyway, the impact on the ground waking her. By morning we’d worked up the nerve to check out the still-smoking crater. We found this.”
“Just this?” Alice asked. “That’s odd.”
“More so than you think.” He motioned Crank to begin helping him re-stuff the objects on the table back into his hat. “The crater created by its fall was almost a hundred meters square.”
“This little thing?” She bent the rubber caterpillar almost in two.
Lord Busybody nodded. “There’s more. There was no sign of rock or metal either – none of the usual residue shooting stars leave behind.”
He regarded the caterpillar with great respect. “It’s a silly theory, but I’d go so far as to suggest it’s from another world . . .”
Alice put the caterpillar back with the other things on the table, which Crank was busily stuffing back into Lord Busybody’s hat as directed.
“Leave it,” he said, as the robot picked it up. “I want to run some new tests. Alice here can help me.”
Crank left it and dashed after the chicken, which was attempting to flee the lab.
***
They never got round to performing any tests on the plastic caterpillar.
“I’ll just cut off a little bit, so we can test it,” Lord Busybody told Alice and Crank.
“Be easier to twist off one of its legs,” Alice suggested.
“Oh no you won’t!” the caterpillar said, opening its eyes.
While the three of them backed off and stared in surprise, the caterpillar reared up on its legs and reached into one of its pockets, pulling out a large Cuban cigar and a box of matches. It bit off the tip, stuck the other end in its mouth, and then lit up, taking a long drag on the fat stogie.
“Ah yes, that’s better . . .” he said, exhaling. “Been ages since I had a good smoke.”
“Who are you?” Lord Busybody asked.
“Yes, who are you?” Alice felt compelled to add.
Crank said nothing. The robot was calculating how much force would be required to kill the caterpillar with a single blow if it turned out to be dangerous.
“My name is Baker,” the caterpillar replied. “I’m a baker. You may have heard of Baker’s Cakes in Dallas.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Last thing I remember is trying out a new recipe for devil’s food cake one night and BOOM – I was airborne. Must have used too much gunpowder . . .”
Lord Busybody nodded; that explained its falling from the sky. But the caterpillar was from Dallas – a Texan.
“Why would you want to put gunpowder in a cake?” Alice asked, surprised that anyone would think of such a thing.
Baker the caterpillar laughed. “That much should be obvious: It’s a military prototype cake, requested by our glorious majesty Queen Mech-Anna – a surprise she’s preparing for those stupid New Yorkers. Edible explosives; now that’s a delicious thought if I ever heard one!”
“And just how much success did you have?” Lord Busybody asked, inserting a slight drawl into his voice, careful not to alert the caterpillar that it was in the wrong town, the wrong queendom. “It’s about time someone gave those New Yorkers what for.”
“Not much, unfortunately. The gelatin we added to the cake mix – to ensure its bond with the gunpowder – makes the cakes too volatile to even transport. But with maybe a month or two’s further research . . .”
“Why’d you just refer to the queen as ‘Mech-Anna’?” Alice asked. “I thought she went by just ‘Anna’?”
Baker sighed. “It’s a sad story. She had an accident several years ago, hasn’t been the same woman since. So sad, so sad.” He puffed his cigar solemnly, looking as if he might start to cry.
“What kind of accident?” Lord Busybody pried further, wondering what had happened to his eldest sister.
Baker didn’t reply; he just stared through the laboratory window. When he saw the Hudson River, not to mention the fleet of airships bearing the emblem of the Queen of Hearts – airlifting the Texan war-spider from the rubble it had made of half the neighborhood – the caterpillar finally realized that it wasn’t amidst friends. For the first time he took proper cognizance of Lord Busybody’s immense hat and realized he was looking at the Mad Hatter himself.
“Say, what town is this?” he asked, stalling for time. “I don’t recall Dallas having this river.”
“
Baker had anticipated the danger, however. He swerved around the blow, and when they attempted to stop
him again, he blew a massive puff of cigar smoke in their faces.
The resulting smokescreen fogged up the room as if it were on fire, so badly that none of them could see a thing.
“Open the windows before we all choke to death!” Lord Busybody shouted.
They all rushed to do so. By the time the room had cleared of smoke, there was no sign of Baker.
“Those damned Texans,” Lord Busybody said, coughing. “I can’t stand the idiots. First ship-sized spiders, now gunpowder-filled cake-bombs! What the hell will they think of next?”
Alice’s thoughts were much different from his. The caterpillar’s words had reminded her that a war was on, reinforcing in her mind the fact that New York City was the Texan’s primary target. Playing the waiting game with Lord Busybody’s life suddenly seemed much less appealing than it had, originally.
But for fate’s intervention in the metal spider’s trajectory, as it emerged from the Hudson River just a short distance downstream, Alice realized how easily she could’ve been one of those people flattened out there, smeared into bloody gore on the pavement.
Chapter 4
After a night of energetic sex, Alice was left wondering how long she could continue faking her orgasms. It took all her self-control not to float away on the currents of pleasure Lord Busybody roused in her loins.
So little did they sleep, she had a hard time waking in the morning. They decided to have breakfast in bed. News of the Texan attack dominated the paper’s front page:
TEXAN SPIDER-MECH DECIMATES RIVERSIDE,
QUEEN VOWS REVENGE
“Couldn’t you attempt calming things down between them darling, seeing as they’re both your sisters?”
Lord Busybody sighed. “More than once I have . . . Anna, however, stubbornly refuses to see reason.”
Alice had by now understood that while Lord Busybody doted on the Queen of Hearts, his emotions were much colder towards the Texan Queen.