Shutting the Door: Part One

This morning's post brought me a letter from Bella, bearing a Steelhead postmark. I have sat in my garret above the Museum's gallery, reading it over and over again, trying to imagine the response I will compose later. In the letter, Bella stated her desire to immediately resign her position in the League, and also that I please finish my account of the recent and terrible events here in New Babbage. I do not welcome either request, though I have decided, with considerable reluctance, to grant both. We will certainly be weaker in Bella's absence, but her order has agreed to take her back, on the condition that she immediately end her affiliation with the League. Under such pressing conditions, I could not possibly consider trying to persuade her to do otherwise and so remain among us.

In some ways, though, her second request seems the more daunting of the pair. Much horror and tumult has transpired since my entry of September 5th, and I am quite certain I am unequal to the task of setting those events to paper. Indeed, before I received Bella's letter, I had already placed the typescript, the wax cylinders, and all associated documents into a locked tin box and planned to hide them away at the Abney Park laboratory this evening or tomorrow. As I have said before, I am not the woman who began this journal. And if that statement held any veracity prior to Saturday, it holds a hundred times that now, to the degree I almost feel I will be concluding a tale begun by another person entirely. Perhaps, even, a tale written in several hands, spoken in several voices, as it seems "I" have been in a constant state of physical and mental flux since my arrival in New Babbage back in June. At times, I hardly can discern the threads of continuity linking these successive incarnations.

But I shall do my best, because I remain ever in Miss Bracken's debt, and she has asked. For my part, I would say that the Eliot device has been damaged beyond all hope of repair, and that the murderer and lycanthrope Jason Moriarty is gone from our midsts, and that would suffice. In the end, that is all that matters. But Bella would have the gory details, and so I will endeavor to set them down, what I can recall. Here in Babbage, I find there is considerable confusion over precisely what did occur, and in the streets I have heard no end of outlandish conjecture and supposition. Even those who witnessed the phenomenon cannot seem to agree precisely what it was they saw, and I believe that is likely for the best. The sooner the particulars of these foul days are forgotten, the better, and so I am acting against my best judgement in recording them here.

On Thursday, I learnt that one of the orphans, one of only two girl children among that ragged company, had left a letter in a sealed envelope inside the hidden room, the killer's lair, which Miss Paine and I discovered Tuesday last. Though I was unsuccessful in retrieving the letter before Moriarty, I was able to learn from its author, Myrtil Igaly, that she hoped to exchange a forgery of one third of the Eliot device for Victor Wunderlich, presumably still held captive by the werewolf. Though Miss Paine and I both begged her not to meet with the monster, assuring her that she could not possibly hope to trust him, there are few things more absolute than the will of a thirteen-year-old girl.

And so, on Saturday afternoon, Moriarty returned to Babbage and answered her request for an audience, and, accompanied by another orphan, young master Mckay Beck, she met him in the auditorium of the old Imperial Theatre. And, as it turned out, what she had to offer him was far more than a counterfeit component, but a genuine piece of the device, previously in the possession of Victor Wunderlich (but entrusted to Mckay prior to Wunderlich's kidnapping).

The sun is setting over the sea, painting the water red, and I find this new flesh is tired and hungry. So I shall set my quill aside for now, and return to the account as soon as I may. But, again, Bella, I say that only two things matter here — the nightmare begun by Professor Alexander Eliot has been ended, and the murderous campaign of his monstrous prodigy, Jason Moriarty, has been thwarted.