The Lazarus Engine – Chapter 2
The Pocket Engine
The fog followed them back to London.
Thorne carried the brass engine in a leather satchel, holding it away from his body as if it might bite. Gray walked beside him, her hand resting on the truncheon at her belt. The streets were nearly empty at this hour—just milk carts and night-soil men and the occasional hansom cab rattling toward daylight.
“Where are we going?” Gray asked.
“To see a man who owes me a debt.”
“Who?”
“A clockmaker. The best in London. He’s also a drunk, a liar, and a former member of the Order.”
Gray stopped walking. “You’re taking me to a criminal.”
“I’m taking you to an expert. There’s a difference.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then resumed walking. “If he tries anything—”
“He won’t. He’s afraid of me.”
“Why?”
Thorne didn’t answer.
The clockmaker’s shop stood on a narrow alley off Fleet Street, wedged between a print shop and a tavern that had been closed for years. The sign above the door read Ezekiel Crowne, Horologist, but the letters were faded and the brass pendulum beneath them hung crooked.
Thorne knocked twice. Waited. Knocked again.
A bolt slid. The door opened a crack. A single bloodshot eye peered out.
“Thorne,” said a raspy voice. “I told you never to come back.”
“You did. But I’m here anyway. Open the door, Crowne.”
The eye flicked to Gray, then back to Thorne. “You brought a copper.”
“She’s with me. Open the door or I’ll open it myself.”
A long pause. Then the door swung inward.
Ezekiel Crowne was a small man in his sixties, with wild white hair and fingers stained black with oil. His shop was a chaos of clock parts: gears hanging from the ceiling, pendulums stacked in corners, half-finished timepieces gaping on every surface. In the center of the room, a grandfather clock stood with its face open, its guts exposed like a patient on an operating table.
“What do you want?” Crowne asked, backing away from Gray.
Thorne set the satchel on a workbench and pulled out the brass engine.
Crowne’s bloodshot eyes went wide. His hands began to tremble.
“Where did you get that?”
“From a dead man’s chest. Sir Humphrey Wells. You knew him.”
Crowne shook his head. “No. No, I don’t know anyone. I’m retired. I don’t make—”
“You made this.” Thorne placed the engine on the bench. “Your signature is all over it. The piston alignment. The boiler seam. The engraving on the flywheel. I’d recognize your work anywhere.”
Crowne stared at the engine. His face had gone pale, the color of old parchment.
“I didn’t make that,” he whispered. “I made the prototype. Twenty years ago. For the Order. They wanted a device that could keep a heart beating after death. A clockwork heart.” He swallowed. “I told them it was impossible. The materials, the fuel, the precision—it couldn’t be done.”
“And yet here it is.”
Crowne reached out a shaking hand and touched the engine. His fingers traced the tiny pistons, the miniature boiler.
“This isn’t my work,” he said. “It’s better. Smaller. More efficient. The fuel source alone—” He stopped. His eyes went wider.
“What?” Gray demanded.
“The fuel. A steam engine needs heat. Boiler needs water. This engine has no water reservoir. No coal. No fuel of any kind.” Crowne looked up at Thorne. “It’s running on nothing.”
“That’s impossible.”
“So is a locked carriage with a dead man inside. And yet here we are.”
Crowne picked up the engine and held it to his ear. His face contorted.
“The voice,” he said. “The recording. It’s not a cylinder. It’s a memory. Someone has found a way to imprint sound onto brass. To make metal remember.”
Thorne exchanged a glance with Gray.
“Who could build something like this?” Thorne asked.
Crowne set the engine down as if it were made of venom.
“There’s only one man,” he said. “Victor March. He was the Order’s theorist. A genius. Mad as a hatter. He believed death wasn’t an end—it was a design flaw. He wanted to engineer immortality.”
“Where is March now?”
Crowne laughed—a hollow, bitter sound. “He’s been dead for ten years. The Order buried him themselves. I attended the funeral.”
Thorne picked up the engine. It was still ticking.
“Then someone has raised him from the dead,” he said.
Outside, the fog pressed against the windows like a living thing.
And somewhere in London, a dead man was winding his engine for the third time.