By Gaslight Chapter 1 Mesmerist

Machu Picchu, Peru, January, 1869

 

D

rood stood, bent from his burdens, in the shadow of his larger accomplice, Timothy the Irish Blackguard.  Drood was just a deserter, who had been bullied into this expedition by Her Majesty’s Own Pompous Braggart Agent, out of fear of being turned in to receive the D brand under his arm to match the BC brand for bad character on his chest—and a flogging to boot.  Drood placed more confidence in his criminal accomplice than he ever did himself, not alone because the hulking fellow was twice his size, but for his quick wit in a bad spot—and this would be it.

Something unnatural was about to transpire and Drood felt it shiver his bent and crooked bones under his weathered skin.

They stood, above the godforsaken jungles they had trudged through hauling this man’s scientific equipment, among the hideous ruins of some long lost city, overgrown and tangled as if choked to death by the creepers and weeds and trees of the mountains—and still higher towered those other mountains behind which the sun would fall in another half of the day.  And as the sky soared above the distant western mountains and those mountains soared above these, and these mountains looked down giant-like below them…it was not geography that made him feel so impotently wee.    

Towering above him, looking eye-to-eye with Big Timothy and continuing his litany of demands, was Captain Burton, the Queen’s own goddamned secret agent.  Burton stood before them in his black frock coat and held his spy glass to one eye as he declared, as the sun rose above them and he checked for shadows on the various mountain sides, “Yaas, my men, we stand before the very Hitching Post of the Sun.  Thanks in no small part to your stupendous labors and gallant conduct on the pampas, the Royal Geographic Society has found the Lost City of Zed!”

Burton then turned to him and commanded, “Drood, begin setting out my table and book and take particular care with the Hindoo charm, arrange it just so, between the pages of the open book, those pages being 362 and 363.”

“Aye, Captain,” he grumbled as he broke open the goddamned heavy teakwood chest he had lugged all the way from Argentina for this unbearable brain on legs, who stood there devil-may-care with his two savage witchdoctors, chattering with them in their jabber-jaw squawk.

There was no stopping this man.  When Drood had complained, about his book wrangling assignment—and what a book, all ten stone of it—that he could not read or follow the numbers, the man had taught him like a school master.  His brain still hurt from the burden.  He could not wait to find a cantina, a jug and a señorita and erase this misery.  

Could not he simply enjoy the day?  Must there always be something over the horizon, some secret yet to be found, something, anything to bore to tears this poor fool who just ached for a roll with a wee whore?  

The Captain droned on, “Big Timothy, clear all of this brushy vinery away with your machete from this wondrous altar to the sun!  Snap to it, now with an Irish jaunt, as if you had ever toiled honestly in all of your grifting days.  We have a mere two hours and fifteen minutes before the sun is directly overhead!”

Then came the voice of Ehrin!  Rumbling in his nasal brogue, Big Timothy Kern, an M for malefactor tattooed on both of his big rugged hands snarled, “I don’ thin’ so, Cap’n.  I’m done bein’ ye boy.  Just ova dose high mountains pass the sunset—ye said it yeself—is the road down ta the sea.  I’m done wi’ dis circus a’ ye hocus pocus!”

The Captain glowered in a rage, “You refuse your duty, you fulminating rascal!  We have a compact—my word at the embassy and you are off to America and on your way.  Now to your task, or I shall thrash you, boy.”

“I’m don fer ye boy!”

With that outburst Big Timothy Kern drew out that machete.  He did not take it to the vinery, but instead menaced their high and mighty leader.

“Ye wi’ me, Drood!” demanded the big man and Drood, with a sinking feeling in his guts, drew out his fish knife what he had gutted the Gaucho with down on the pampas over that fireside disagreement the Captain had had with their cattle-ranging clan.  He did feel somewhat terrible, turning on a man he had served in battle—but he was such a high and mighty bastard and Big Tim was the only friend he had ever had.

He felt even worse when the Captain threw back his coat and drew that American Confederate saber he had gotten God knows where but always carried it bold since he emptied his pistol into those gauchos down on the pampas.

The saber rasped harshly and the two little copper colored men stepped back and cringed and the Captain roared, “You litigious, low Irish negro!  No man has crossed blades with Richard Burton and boasted of victory!  And you, you lick-spittle, slow-English beast of a man.  I give you a three count to surrender your weapons and do your duty.”

“Arr!” snarled Big Tim as he stepped in with a mighty swing of the machete and Drood slid up beside them and—Oh God, I’m done!

Drood sat on his ass looking at his ruined right hand dangling from the remaining bone and tendon, squirting good clean blood and looked over at big Tim, holding his barrel chest right under the breast bone where the Captain’s sword had passed through and run out his back.

“’orry, Lille Droo,” slurred the big man, and Drood wanted to cry.

The Captain was in a rage about them staining his perfect record of never killing a white man on safari and was commanding the witchdoctors to attend them.  As Drood was losing consciousness he was having his hand wrapped and pressed and could hear the Captain declare, “There is hope yet, for your ghastly souls at least, if not for your misbegotten bodies.  I am a world-renowned mesmerist, a sufi, a dervish… a Hindoo priest of sorts . You may be of service to me yet, you poor, beggared fools!”

Big Timothy looked at him with far away and glassy eyes.

*   *   *

Drood came to his senses sitting on a stone altar with a pillar in the middle, the clear-shining sun beaming directly down.  Across from him sat Timothy in a daze, his belly bloody red and caulked like a busted ship’s plank.

The Captain stood before them to Drood’s right holding his black disc of Hindoo mesmerist stone on its brazen chain, chanting in some unknown language that only madmen must speak.

As Drood wondered about all of this, the witchdoctor attending him placed his left hand kindly on Drood’s back, even as he saw the witchdoctor attending Big Tim do the same, and they each, in a cadence, mumbled their own incantations, and with their free, steady brown hands tilted a hollow wooden drinking tub into the mouths of Drood and Tim.  The Captain drank of a similar frothy red potion, drank deep as did they all, then looked at both of them at the same time—one eye dedicated to each as his head seemed to expand into a giant face and his mouth, under that devilish, mustached and scarred face, split ever wider as he drawled in his characteristic affirmative, “Yaaas!”