Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [47]
No one's attention was directed towards me. The wisdom of leaving such a site was even more apparent now. I sidled past the empty pews to the window shattered by the fragment of porcelain cherub's-head. The voluminous folds of my clerical costume protected my hands as I scrambled up on to the thick stone sill and vaulted out, landing on the thickly overgrown grass outside. I quickly gathered up the skirt of the vestment and plunged into the darkness, away from the church's clattering and shrieking chaos.
Running with no thought but to put distance between myself and the awful scene, I soon collided with the iron fence around the churchyard. I found a side gate that creaked partly open when I pushed against it; the freedom and concealing safety of the dark streets was just beyond; I squeezed through the narrow gap and was grasped by strong pairs of hands on either of my arms.
"Here, what's this?" The lamp was lifted above me, and by its glow I saw two constables· sternly examining my face. "You're a rum-looking sort of priest."
I realised I very likely did look suspicious, flushed and out of breath, and my clothing torn and disordered. I gasped out a few syllables without managing to link them into any words of explanation.
"What's going on up there, anyways?" the one constable lifted his lamp to indicate the church. Over my shoulder I could see its windows lit up. "Come along, you – let's just have us a look."
"No!" I shouted. I vainly tried to pull free from my captors. "Don't go up there–"
"Oh, don't, is it? Something going on there you'd like us not to see, eh? Hop it, then; let's go see what you and your mates have been up to." The two of them lifted my feet nearly clear of the ground as they dragged me back towards the church.
The building was silent as the constables pulled me up to the door. Neither carriage was positioned outside. The constables pushed open the door, and we gazed upon an empty space inside.
Empty, that is, of human habitation. Scape, Miss McThane, and the denizens of Wetwick had all departed, having made their various escapes into the night at last. All that was left, to my own appalled eyes, and to the amazement of the constables, was the wreckage of my father's Clerical Automata. In the midst of the fishing tackle strewn about, and the copies of Izaak Walton that had been flung from the hands of the panicking Wetwick residents, the choristers lay tangled as though in the aftermath of some juvenile battlefield. Their shrill piping voices were silent now; the porcelain faces, those that were still intact gazed with rosy-cheeked serenity at the ceiling.
The mechanical priest creaked about in its position by the altar; enough force was left in the master driving spring to force through a last few fragments of its liturgy. One stiff hand raised, knocking its white hair to the side of its benignly smiling face. "Pax vobiscum," it wheezed. "Jumble sale." It then toppled over.
I looked up at the constables as they slowly turned their gaze on me. They were silent, awe-struck by the enormity of my blasphemous crimes.
7
Mr Dower Leaves the Capital
Of the details of my incarceration I have scant memory. Perhaps the ignominious shock of being placed in the charge of the constabulary had combined with the cumulative fatigue wrought in my constitution, to temporarily overthrow the balance of my reason. I recall a voice faintly like my own answering the various questions. put to me, though at a distance, as if overhearing some street conversation of only mild interest. The censorious, scowling faces of the Law's guardians passed in front of me, yet they too were far removed; from an angle somehow slightly above, I listened to them reciting the impressively long list of misdeeds attributed to my person – desecration of a holy place and criminal blasphemy chief among