I kept my notebook behind my back and began to brazen it out. “Rats, sir. I’m on the look out for rats,” I said.
“Rats? I have not sought the services of a ratcatcher,” bellowed the man who was very clearly Amos Chaffin. “You’re trespassing! Who are you?”
“Smith, sir—Jem Smith. I’m just doin’ my job as instructed by my guv’nor,” I lied, turning on my Cockney persona.
Chaffin squinted at me with an eye matching that of Auguste Duclois for fanatical glitter. “Governor? Who’s your governor?”
“Mr. George Nobbs, practical ratcatcher, from over Seven Dials vay. It vos the cove owning that warehouse over yonder,” I waved vaguely towards the yard beyond the building, “vot asked him to look into the matter of rats seen on his premises. ‘Go and look over the job, Jem,’ says Mr. Nobbs, as he often does. Having some notion of how many rats and where they’re nesting helps us sort out vot we needs in the vay of traps and poisons, d’you see, sir. Have you seen any rats about?”
“Of course I have,” sputtered Amos Chaffin, adjusting his false teeth again. “Rats are always everywhere in London. And I put up with them without the services of ratcatchers.”
“You’ll pardon me, sir, but that’s a mistake,” I said. “There’s talk that the cholera is spread by rats. They’re highly dangerous, sir.”
“Indeed!” growled Chaffin. “I heard there’s a theory that it’s spread by bad water.”
“All wrong, sir. It’s rats vot spread it. You have to root ’em out. Have to find their nests and destroy ’em. I couldn’t help noticin’ that there’s perfect nestin’ conditions behind all that odd stuff you have up against that vall.” I indicated the equipment associated with his experimenting.
His eyes flashed and his teeth threatened to jump out of his mouth of their own volition. “Odd stuff!” he howled. “Do you know what that equipment is? Do you know what you’re in the presence of—what epoch-making scientific advances are in the making in this very room, Smith?”
I shrugged and answered: “I’m sure I dunno, sir. I ain’t had the schoolin’ to understand science. I reckon most of it is gammon.”
“Gammon! You call scientific investigation gammon?” he exploded. “Why, man, here in this very place, miracles are about to be performed upon any objects or persons placed within the electrical field of my machine. Only this morning I concluded calculations which will have far-reaching results—results hitherto undreamed of, even by a fool of a Frog named Duclois who is the bane of my existence.”
I was beginning to think that both Duclois and Chaffin must be totally mad.
It was at this point, with Chaffin in such close proximity to me, that I dropped the notebook that I had been concealing behind my back all the time. Sod’s law decreed that it landed on the grimy floor wide open, with my rough sketches fully visible and Chaffin saw them.
He gave a howl. “Sketches, by God! You’ve been sketching my equipment! You’re no ratcatcher—you’re a damnable spy! You’re employed by Duclois, I’ll warrant!” He made a dive for the book, but I, being younger and more agile, reached it first. As I stowed it in my pocket, he grappled with me, clutching the lapels of my jacket.
“Give me that book, you scoundrel!” he snarled.
Locked together, we reeled across the room, grunting and clawing at each other. Then, near the glass containers and the lever, we fell over and smote the lever with the combined weight of our two bodies. It creaked over from the upright position as the two of us went sprawling, still struggling. It seemed to me that we fell into something like a tunnel, to the accompaniment of a thundering and rushing confusion of sound, and I was dimly aware that Chaffin was there with me, going through the same experience. Then came an abrupt stop to the falling, and I was lying on the ground in what I believed was the same warehouse building.
It was dark and, somewhere in the darkness, I heard the voice of Amos Chaffin shout something incomprehensible that was at once drowned out by more noise—such noise as I never before heard. It was a crashing and banging and thundering of loud explosions and a constant, thrumming droning sound. Then the whole warehouse shook under a dull, shuddering reverberation and there was suddenly light behind us, the blazing yellow and crimson flickering of flames. It briefly illumined the grotesque form of Chaffin in his slop coat and tall hat, running away from where I lay—presumably to escape the flames that were threatening us.
He had barely covered a few yards when a rafter came crashing down on him from the roof. I somehow got to my feet and, in a chaotic welter of swirling smoke and dust, tried to stagger towards where I last saw Chaffin, hoping to help him. I made hardly any progress because I could only blunder around, coughing and half blinded in the confusion.
Then dimly, in this hellish nightmare, I heard a man’s urgent voice shouting something like: “Here—Harry, Nobby, Jack—get the hoses over on this side—there seems to be a bloke trapped under a rafter…quick about it…alert the Rescue.…” Before I realized it, I had somehow wandered free of the building, which was no longer a building but a tumbled mass of bricks, just visible through a swirl of smoke and flames.
Holding my hands against my ears and trying to clear my throat of smoke and dust, I staggered across broken cobbles and shattered bricks, found the doorway of a building and plunged into it, seeking cover and trying to recover my breath. Out of the confusion came a man in a strange costume, though I recognized his greatcoat as something like a Peeler’s. He had an odd helmet like an upturned pudding basin and made of metal. Sure enough, though, the word Police was painted on it in white capitals. His face was smudged with black marks and, like myself, he was choking in the smoke. Coughing, he joined me, leaning against the closed door.
“Hello, mate. You all right?” he shouted over the din when he found his breath. He looked at me enquiringly in the dancing light of the flames, and grinned.
“Cor! Where’ve you come from in that get-up—out of a pantomime? That battered old topper of yours is no protection in this lot. You want to watch out for your head, and there’s a cut on your face. There’s a first-aid post a bit down the lane. Go and ask ’em to clean it up for you.”
He slipped away into the smoky, blazing chaos, leaving me more bewildered than before.
Now that my head had cleared, I remembered Amos Chaffin, trapped under a rafter in the warehouse. I had to get back to him—had to help him out. I was beginning to see that our predicament had something to do with his electrical equipment, which our grappling must have accidentally activated. I recalled what Chaffin had said—something about objects or people being affected by the electrical field of his machine.
Though I was no scientist, it seemed to me that if I was to get back to where I belonged, I had to be within the influence of that field, which lay somewhere within the warehouse.
Crouching into the smoke and flames, I scrambled over humps of rubble towards the wreckage of the warehouse on which the men in the strange costumes and metal helmets were playing jets of water onto the flames. I got within a section of shattered wall and blundered onward until I believed I was somewhere near where I last saw Chaffin. Then I heard a hoarse voice, yelling above the explosive cacophony: “Hey, come back! You can’t go in there! What’re you up to—looting? Come back, dammit—come back.…”
The agitated voice thinned, became distant then merged into that same whirling, rushing sound which had accompanied the fall through the tunnel and, indeed, I was falling through the tunnel again, being whelmed breathlessly away into darkness.
* * * *
“How are you feeling now, my good man?” asked the man in the frock coat who seemed to appear out of nowhere. “You’ve taken a bad turn, but at least it’s not the cholera.”
I