Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [46]
"Stop those little shits." Scape pushed past me and grabbed the robe of the last chorister in the procession. The rotten fabric tore away, showing the clicking armatures and spinning gears of the device as it marched on. He grasped one brass strut, but succeeded only in dislodging the cherub head askew so that it hung sideways and groaned in basso profundo. The priest ceased its gyrations and followed after the choir.
The Wetwick residents were now entirely alerted by the noise and commotion. They ceased their roundeyed goggling at the copies of The Compleat Angler and watched in amazement the erratic progress of the automata into the church; the machinery, having fallen into such a state of decay, now jerked about with appalling violence. The actions of the choristers were further deranged by the fact that Scape's billowing vestments had become entangled in the exposed workings of the one figure with which he had attempted to interfere; flailing about, his face reddening with his shouted curses, he was being dragged on his back behind the choir as they made their way. The terrified onlookers scrambled away, trampling each other in their haste to avoid this apparition. Miss McThane, her long hair in wild disarray, tugged at her companion in a futile attempt at rescue.
From a position of relative safety at the vestry door, I watched as Bendray, with raised hands and quavering voice, first tried to restore order to the panic-stricken assemblage. He soon abandoned the effort and, wisely fearing for his own skin, slipped out the church door, moments before the great mass of the Wetwick residents jammed the egress, tearing at one another's backs and limbs in desperate flight, the crazed energy of their numbers resulting in virtually none of them winning through to the darkness outside.
Inside the stone walls, echoing with cries of terror and grating mechanical noises, the carnage had become even more nightmarish than on that long past occasion when I had first attempted to put my father's devices into their appointed motions. With the furiously struggling Scape in tow, the choir had reached their positions, but had split into various factions, as if arguing amongst themselves on the proper course of their further ritual. One group of the mannikins seemed bent on another procession, and to that end had turned about, battering against the others as the deranged machinery drove them along the metal rails. Scape's imprecations mingled with the cacophony of hymns sung simultaneously, the artificial voices shrilling ever higher as the rosined wheels wore down to the bare metal beneath. Two of the porcelain heads butted together as though in the combat of rams, cracking and spraying throughout the church bits of the smiling cherub faces and the springs and gears beneath. The headless choristers went on battering into each other's robed chests as one of the church windows dissolved into glittering fragments from the impact of one such missile.
Simultaneously, the priest, in carrying out the cycle of duties that my father had built into its workings, had become entangled in the fishing gear that had been draped across the altar. Dragging the lines and barbed hooks along, it seized upon one poor creature who had been frozen in his steps from sheer fright. The ugly Wetwick face was even more contorted as the mechanical priest dragged him to the baptismal font and immersed him therein. A great surge of water splashed upward from the struggling man's arms and into the gently smiling countenance of the clockwork priest, as it recited an appeal for donations to the bell rehanging fund.
These sights assured the Wetwick residents that they had been lured into the church as