The Lazarus Engine – Chapter 9
The Third Victim’s Last Hour
Before they went to the mausoleum, Thorne insisted on one more stop: the railway station where Sir Humphrey Wells had spent his final hour.
“I need to see it,” he said. “Not the carriage—the platform. The witnesses. The moments before he locked himself inside.”
Gray agreed, though her hand never left her truncheon. The fog was thinning, but the night was still young. Midnight at the Royal Institute was still twenty-four hours away.
Paddington Station was nearly empty at 1:00 AM.
A few porters moved luggage carts. A night watchman dozed in a booth. The gas lamps hissed overhead, casting long shadows across the platforms. Thorne and Gray walked to the abandoned spur line where Wells’s carriage had been found.
“It was here,” Gray said, pointing to a set of rusted tracks. “The guard said Wells arrived at 10:47 PM. He boarded the carriage alone. He locked the door. At 11:00 PM, the guard passed by and saw nothing unusual. At 6:00 AM, the body was discovered.”
“Someone spoke to him between 10:47 and 11:00,” Thorne said. “Someone he trusted enough to let his guard down.”
Gray frowned. “The guard didn’t see anyone.”
“The guard wasn’t looking.” Thorne walked along the platform, studying the shadows. “There’s a blind spot here. Behind the luggage carts. If someone approached from that direction, the guard wouldn’t have seen them.”
He crouched down. On the wooden planks, barely visible in the dim light, were two sets of footprints. One large—Wells’s. One smaller, lighter, with an unusual pattern.
“The second set has a drag mark,” Thorne said. “A limp. Or a mechanical foot.”
Gray knelt beside him. “The mechanical hand. The witness mentioned a man with a mechanical hand.”
“Charlotte doesn’t have a mechanical hand. She has normal hands—scarred, but human.” Thorne traced the drag mark with his finger. “This is someone else. Someone larger. Someone who walks with a limp.”
He stood up.
“Charlotte isn’t working alone.”
They interviewed the night guard, a weary man named Albert Finch (no relation to the earlier story’s Finch). He remembered nothing unusual—until Thorne showed him a sketch of a mechanical hand.
Finch’s face went pale.
“I saw a gentleman,” he said. “Around eleven o’clock. He was walking toward the spur line. I called out to him, but he didn’t answer. He had a… a thing on his hand. Brass. Fingers that moved like real fingers.”
“Did you see his face?”
“No. He wore a top hat. Kept his head down.” Finch swallowed. “I thought he was a doctor. They sometimes come to see the bodies. But there wasn’t any body yet.”
Thorne and Gray exchanged a look.
“Thank you,” Thorne said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
As they left the station, Gray said, “If Charlotte has an accomplice—”
“Then we’re hunting two killers. Or one killer and one…” Thorne trailed off.
“One what?”
“One resurrection. Victor March. What if Charlotte succeeded? What if she wound the engine and brought back her father—but he came back wrong? A mechanical hand. A limp. A mind that remembers death.”
Gray stopped walking. “That’s not possible.”
“Neither was the locked carriage. Neither is an engine that ticks without fuel. We are beyond possible, Constable. We are in the realm of the impossible. And the only way to survive is to accept it.”
He pulled out the note from Blackwood’s townhouse: “Come find us.”
“Us,” he said. “Not ‘me.’ Us.”
Gray’s jaw tightened. “Then we go to the mausoleum. Together. And we find out what ‘us’ means.”
They hailed a hansom cab and gave the driver an address: Vane Manor, Surrey.
The cab rattled into the fog.
Behind them, on the abandoned platform, a single brass gear lay in the shadows.
It was still ticking.ally dead—and who’s merely waiting to be wound.”