Jacques the Giant Slayer A Steampunk Retelling of an Old Tale

Vanessa de Sade

Rosie

Rosie stands in the semi-dark, London fog licking at her face like a rambunctious dog who’s been out running on the fens all day and brings the cold and earthy smell of the outdoors into your warm with him. Only two more girls to go and then it would be her turn. And the girl ahead of her had the advantage of huge breasts, though Rosie has heard her trying to conceal a cough as they stand waiting to be assessed.

But the queue moves quickly and a curvaceous blonde two ahead is refused and Rosie’s buxom neighbour mounts the podium in a rustle of petticoats and unfastens her blouse, her famous bosoms like ripe tropical melons in the window of Fortnum & Mason’s, blue-white in the moonlight with nipples like blobs of black cherry conserve on perfectly turned-out milk puddings. They have to take her, Rosie thinks, but the woman in black whispers something to the doctor and shakes her head, and the voluptuary stalks angrily off, back to the streets, fastening her clothing as she goes.

And then Rosie hears her name called. Feels her feet taking her up the two steps and depositing her in front of the selection panel, her own breathing loud in her ears. Then there is the doctor, fat and moustachioed, his ample belly protruding from his open white coat, careless stethoscope around his fat neck and a bulge in his pants. Obviously a man who enjoys his work, Rosie thinks wryly to calm herself, meeting the cold blue eyes of the woman in the black rocketeer’s uniform with an unblinking stare. She is German, Rosie thinks, taking in the flaxen Aryanblonde hair, as her cold fingers fumble with buttons and she bares her small breasts for them, distracting herself by imagining the woman as Brünnhilde, complete with horned helmet and triumphant Wagnerian score.

The rocketeer nods approvingly as her eyes rake Rosie’s little nubs, the pale nipples perky with the cold. “How old are you, child?”

“Fifteen,” Rosie lies, subtracting four years.

“And you are pure? Do not lie, child, we will check!”

But Rosie nods and swallows uncomfortably. Telling the truth this time, and hoping that she possesses a commodity that they can trade in.

The woman looks quizzically at the doctor and Rosie sees him nod. “Is good,” she says crisply, meeting Rosie’s gaze with her ice-blue eyes, storybook Snow Queen and Wicked Witch all rolled into one. “Go, take your seat …”

The big sky-barnacled airship sits like a mist-enshrouded grey whale in the dock, bobbing agitatedly against its moorings as Rosie gingerly mounts the gangplank, the creaking of the ropes like the cry of a great behemoth. She has heard many tales of these mighty Prussian Zeppelins, how they sweep unseen across the night skies like silent raptors, their immense engines muted as they swoop along the Thames, skiffing the towers and turrets of bridges, until the propellers engage and they head out across the sea for France, their luxurious cabins filled with rich men in search of debauchery in the lanes of Paris.

Tonight, though, long shadows dance in the chiaroscuro tones of this great liner of the sky, and the echoing staterooms are empty save for the chatter of girls who sit in regimented rows before the low-slung onyx tables with their gold filigree fittings, the chandeliers muted and the walls with their great panels of black marble giving the whole place a charnel-house look when bereft of their customary orchestra and glittering crystal illuminations.

“Here, sit with me,” a freckled little redhead with rosy cheeks and multitudes of ringlets chirps, making room on the plush upholstered banquette for Rosie to join her. “They say we’re to be taken to Paris and will dine in a café at the very top of the Eiffel Tower, is that not thrilling!”

“Yes indeed.” Rosie nods, seating herself and giving the other’s hand a squeeze. “But I do not think that there are cafés at the top of the tower. Though I’m sure that we can climb it and see all the lights of Paris spread out at our feet,” she adds hastily, seeing the disappointment in her companion’s eyes.

“I’m Mora,” the redhead says agreeably in her soft Irish lilt, recovering swiftly. “But now that I’m here I think I’m going to be Antoinette. It’s more French, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Rosie agrees, settling down on the soft black velvet, as the big engines start to thrum and the huge ship casts its moorings and begins to rise majestically into the air.

Jacques

“Oh for God’s sake, Jacques,” Herriman laments, slapping a beefy hand to his wet, florid face, his rage making his big toad’s eyes bulge even more than usual. “The first decent case we’ve had in months and you spend the whole retainer on … on … THIS!”

Jacques looks back at him irritatedly but tries to remain placid. He has worked for Herriman for two years now and is used to his histrionic tirades and, frankly, outdated methods of detection, which he now mentally lists to distract himself as his employer rants and raves. Fallacy One. The non-recognition of fingerprints as valuable evidence. Fallacy Two. The refusal to ever pay for forensic analysis at crime scenes. Fallacy Three. The fat man’s insistence that all a good detective ever needs is a magnifying glass—

“Jacques! Are you listening to me, Jacques?” Herriman demands loudly, poking him in the chest and breaking his young assistant’s train of thought. “Because, really, this time you’ve really gone too far. Five hundred credits of my money for this … THING!”

Jacques shakes his head in exasperation. “I’m telling you, Boss, this is no bag of magic beans,” he explains. “This is an investment that is going to pay dividends. We know that they’re using Zeppelins to transport the girls out of the country. And the only way we’re going to find out where they’re taking them is to follow one, way up into the sky.”

“And you’re going to go ‘way up into the sky’ on that!” Herriman snorts, almost hopping with rage as he indicates the small second-hand telecopter that Jacques has just purchased at the monthly robotics market, its two dented brass ulithium cylinders patched with scrap steel panels and missing rivets along its seams, the front propeller chipped and cracked. “In which case I hope you’ve left me a few coppers to advertise for a new bloody assistant, laddie, because I’m damned well going to need one when you nosedive straight into the Thames on that piece of scrap iron. And you can pay for your funeral out of your own damn pocket!”

He pauses momentarily for breath as behind them the chipped sign advertising “Discreet Investigations” creaks softly in a sudden breeze, and Jacques quickly shields his eyes and looks up into the night sky, trying to detect the grey hulk of a titanic sky whale against the pitch-blackness of the curfew dark. “There!” he whispers, pointing at what looks like a bank of fog creeping furtively across the starless sky above them. “There, there they go, another shipment heading for Paris or worse!”

Herriman starts to say something, but Jacques silences him by yanking on the cord of the oil-stained copper engine and the propeller coughs and then stirs sluggishly into life.

“Well, it’s now or never,” Jacques breathes, with a confidence he doesn’t feel, as he dons his goggles and prepares to strap himself on to the exposed-to-the-elements pilot’s seat.

“Nay, don’t do it, lad,” Herriman suddenly says, laying a fatherly hand on the boy’s arm. “Don’t go up into the air and out over the black, black sea in that old thing. It’s too dangerous. Just stay here and we’ll pretend that we’ve looked all over London for the girls. Tell their parents that they’re gone, let them accept it and move on with their lives.”

“We’ve talked about this, Boss,” Jacques yells over the roar of the engine, as the worn propeller blades gain momentum and the little ship tugs at its mooring like an eager terrier desperate to be let off the leash. “If we take people’s money then we have to do what they’ve asked. And, anyway, you know as well as I do that this is the big one. There’s a giant behind these abductions, you mark my words, and we’re just the men to bring him toppling down. Now cast me off, or I’ll lose him in this fog!”

“Ah, Jacques the giant slayer,” Herriman mutters, shaking his head ruefully, but the straining guy lines are already taut as wire and the whine of the labouring engine has become a scream, so, defeated, he unhooks the rope and sends Jacques speeding off into the black maw of the thickest fog of the decade.

Rosie

Mora is still chattering away excitedly about Parisian ice-cream shops and new hats with wax cherries on the brims, like a little pet chipmunk unaware that it’s about to be python food, Rosie thinks as she tries to shut her out and scan the skies through the row of brass-riveted portholes, desperately trying to find a landmark to orientate herself.

“We went straight down the Thames,” she whispers to no one in particular, consulting the tiny compass embedded in the heel of her boot. “But we’ve not crossed the Channel at the right angle for Paris. I think we’re heading for Switzerland.”

Jacques

He can barely feel his own face or his hands on the tiller, and his eyelids are frozen open even under the protection of the thick greenish bottle-glass goggles, but he holds grimly on, the image of that row of daguerreotypes spread across Herriman’s desk like a winning hand of cards burned into his memory as he brings each lost girl’s face to mind. They were all ordinary lasses, daughters of factory workers and manual labourers, not the sort of people who would have sway with the police or have the means to hire their own team, but pooling their meagre credits had led them to Herriman’s door, the cheapest – and probably worst – private detective in all of Shoreditch, oftentimes more crooked than the people he supposedly investigated but basically decent at the core of his fat and lazy heart. Jacques saw to that.

And tonight they were going to crack open the case of the century, the trafficking of girls across Europe by Zeppelin for heaven knew what purpose other than the obvious. Though it was funny that none of them ever came back, alive or dead …

But the fog banks were diminishing now and the air was thin, almost too thin. Jacques was finding it difficult to breathe as red blood-spots began to appear before his eyes, and, no trained rocketeer, he would probably have fallen from his seat and tumbled head first into the abyss had he not been well strapped in and his hands frozen to the controls as the huge ship ahead of him nosed its way cautiously into a giant loading bay in the side of a mountain, the dull gunmetal of the doors bereft of any identification save for two words that spoke greater volumes to the young sleuth than any sizable treatise or tome:

Moriarty Corporation

Rosie

They were all clustered like indigo-blue limpets around the portholes by now, a chattering, giggling gaggle of humanity, like schoolgirls on a trip to the seaside. And they’re all so young, Rosie mused, watching her companions carefully as the big airship manoeuvred itself into the dock below a turreted gothic hotel, which sat like a lone sentinel atop a snow-capped peak, sheer rock faces leading to glacial ravines on all the sides, the only way up or down a rickety funicular that clung perilously to the side of the mountain like a seaside automation.

The woman in black had appeared again, as if by magic or some stage wizardry whereupon the Queen of the Night would be hoisted through trapdoors to a fanfare of magnesium flares and emerge triumphant to confront an amazed Tamino. Her hair was dishevelled and she wore aviator’s goggles carelessly around her neck. Her face seemed flushed with little red spots on her otherwise pallid cheeks, her ice eyes sparkling with their own private aurora, as she segregated the chattering girls into two groups, little Mora being led off at the head of a large and noisy bunch all twittering about baked ice-cream desserts and boxes of bonbons dusted with gold.

“Mora, no,” Rosie tried to cry out as her new friend was led away by quiet men in agonisingly familiar grey uniforms, but the black rocketeer silenced her with a frozen stare which would have planted ice splinters into the hearts of lesser mortals and even momentarily subdued our heroine. She watched powerlessly as the girls were led chattering into a subterranean chamber cut deep in the rock below the soft and welcoming lights of the Swiss hotel above.

Jacques

He was still frozen, but the heat from the Zeppelin’s enormous turbine engines blasted him like a hot-air drying machine, and he began to gradually feel his numb limbs become sensate, as he dragged the little telecopter into a shady inglenook and watched aghast as a group of about twenty girls were led out by men in the familiar slate-grey uniforms of the Moriarty Corporation militia, the most savage mercenaries in all of Europe. And, though he tried to follow, a heavy copper-reinforced contagion barrier slid up noiselessly from within a high archway hewn from the rock and then slammed shut again as the last of the girls, like some Hamelin brood, vanished from sight and into the depths of the unassailable mountain.

Unsure of how to proceed, he paused, only to hear voices and see a second group emerge from the big grey airship, a blonde rocketeer he recognised as Hilda Braun of the Prussian Luftwaffe leading a party of four quieter young women up some steep stone stairs and into the bowels of the luxurious hotel above.

And at the front of the group walked Rosie!

Rosie. With her indomitable spirit and quick mind, her soft grey eyes flashing with rage at Herriman when she had burst into their office demanding their assistance with the disappearance of her father. Her long grey dress neat but with discreet darns at the cuffs and a patch at the hem, a thick band of mourner’s crêpe knotted at her coat sleeve like a man would wear. And Herriman had given her short shrift. Spotted an illegitimate daughter with scant income, living on handouts from some toff now bored with paying for the results of an eighteen-year-old indiscretion and conveniently vanishing. He’d seen the same story a hundred times before, he’d later told Jacques. The man disappeared and left the mistress and her brat bereft. Plus, he added with a knowing man-to-man wink to his assistant, no money to pay for the almost-sure-to-be-fruitless investigation that they wanted him to carry out.

“My heart bleeds for you, my dear,” he had said to Rosie with an obsequious smile that grey February morning when the soft mist floated down the river like a funeral cortège. “But, in my experience, when a man such as your father disappears then the likelihood of him ever being found is practically nil, and who’s then to pay my fee, little Rosie, or ensure that my poor children see a meagre chop of mutton for their evening meal.”

And, though Jacques had run after her and tried to call her back, she had tossed her curls dismissively at him, tarring him with Herriman’s brush, and haughtily announced that, as they were unwilling to assist, she would find her father herself and “make a damn sight better job of it than you two buffoons!”

And that had been nine long months ago, and yet he still could not get the vision of her out of his head, and now here she was, being herded with a gaggle of trafficked girls in a mountain retreat run by the Moriarty Corporation right bang in the middle of nowhere and without recourse to any form of assistance whatsoever.

Except him, of course.

Rosie

The black-clad rocketeer led them up a series of shabby staircases and concealed servants’ passageways, the metal segs of their leather boots clattering like horseshoes on the worn stone slabs, before they emerged into a darkened hallway on the upper floor of the hotel where the carpets were so thick underfoot that they were all suddenly muted, as if they had never existed.

A golden harp stood by the door, its faded frame reverberating to an old Rhineland melody, though no player plucked at its strings, and the high red-flock-covered walls, hung with rich impasto oils of naked girls, gleamed voluptuously in the soft light of pink-glass-shaded electric lamps.

Oh hell, it’s a robot bar, Rosie whispered to herself, looking at the neat row of white-jacketed waiters behind the rich ox-blood and black lacquered counter, their waxen faces locked in a rictus grin of servility as hidden hydraulics powered the shiny alloy arms beneath their jackets in an obscene parody of human movement, the silver cocktail shakers in their hands gyrating like burlesque dancers in the mellow ruby-coloured light.

This means that whatever takes place in here will not be witnessed by the waiting staff, Rosie thought quickly, as the woman in black closed the room doors behind them. But we’ve been permitted to enter, so does that mean we’re not expected to leave?

Jacques

He had scaled the winding stairways silently behind the girls, creeping into the warm womb-like glow of the plush robot saloon before the rocketeer barred the tall double doors and encased everyone inside the hermetically sealed chamber with an embalmer’s fluid grace. And, unlike the outer halls with their clattering black marble floors, the cavernous dimly lit room was carpeted with soft Aubusson rugs that muffled his movements, giving him a welcome stealth, as he hugged the wall and stood like a statueperformer in a dark niche opposite a wall of panoramic windows, which gazed out at the splendour of a frozen Alpine night.

There were four men ostensibly lounging in leather armchairs in the room, though Jacques could detect a keen coiled-spring tension to their spines. The air around them was redolent with the scent of their ignored Cuban cigars, which even now smouldered in the chromium ashtrays, lazy trails of scented smoke spiralling loosely into the warm shadows above them. Three he did not recognise, erect and moustachioed military types identified by their uniforms as high-ranking Prussians, but the fourth was a face he knew only too well from the stacks of dog-eared daguerreotypes in Herriman’s many filing cabinets back in Shoreditch.

Moriarty.

Rosie

She was aware of his presence, his spoor, even before she saw him across that dimly lit room and her blood ran cold. Though she had long suspected that he was the brains behind this operation, it was still a jolt to finally see him here, in the flesh, as it were, and not in the grainy line engravings she had saved so laboriously from the pages of the Police Gazette. And yet his cruel eyes seemed oddly fascinating under the heavy cadaverous brows, his face a death mask in alabaster, as he surveyed the girls brought before him as a tame hawk surveys the mice it will decimate for its master’s amusement.

Jacques

And yet it doesn’t fit at all, Jacques thought to himself, as he watched the haughty rocketeer parade the four girls for the men’s inspection. Pimping is a small-time racket, even when performed on a national scale. Why would the Napoleon of Crime even bother with it, let alone personally inspect the merchandise? And why just semipubescent girls from the East End? And why did none of them ever surface in the frequent police raids on the brothels of Paris or Berlin?

And, as if in answer, the Professor began to speak in a low measured voice, as though he addressed an audience of imbeciles who required every nuance of his meaning explained.

“Gentlemen,” he began, ignoring the girls and the blackbooted rocketeer. “Gentlemen, may I demonstrate my ultimate fighting machines, who will be ready to obtain the European victory you so hunger for in but two short months’ time. No patriotism-driven country lads easily scattered by a machine gun’s fury or money-driven mercenaries easily bought by a rival’s superior gold, these highly advanced soldiers of the future are undefeatable and completely incorruptible—”

“But, Professor, these are mere girls!” one of the generals interrupted with a derisive laugh, and would have said more had not Moriarty silenced him with a look that spoke volumes.

“Indeed,” he replied, his hawk’s eyes like steel ball bearings. “But observe tonight the miracle that is even now being performed upon hundreds upon hundreds of new infantrymen in our robotics workshops here in the catacombs so far below us. Commander?”

The rocketeer nodded, clicked her heels and pulled one of the girls roughly to the front of the assembled males. She ripped open the girl’s bodice in a shower of black buttons like some Grand Guignol lecher, the girl’s little breasts white and vulnerable in this strangely inhospitable room, with its row of grinning robots mixing drinks for non-existent guests and a pale bloodless moon illuminating the snow-capped peaks of the mountain ranges beyond the thick plate glass of the tall windows on the north face of the bar.

“Convert her,” Moriarty said quietly, and, before Jacques’ horrified eyes, the rocketeer swiftly produced a small rapier-like piece of platinum with a tropical scarab of iridescent electrodes at its head and plunged it straight into the heart of the girl, who immediately fell limp at her feet like a marionette whose strings have been unexpectedly and maliciously cut.

Again the generals protested, called out that this was mere murder, not warfare, until the Professor clapped his hands and the “dead” girl arose, her eyes now as white as Iona pebbles, her face expressionless.

“Now, gentlemen,” he said in his same emotionless tone, though now finally permitting something resembling a satisfied smile to transform the lower half his austere features, though his steely eyes remained cold. “Allow me to demonstrate. Commander. Open a window if you please. Soldier, advance, to the window, excellent, at ease. Now … jump!”

And, without hesitation, the girl plunged out and was lost in the blackness of the frozen ravine below.

Rosie

“Our robotics scientists have carried out endless experiments on paupers of all ages and sexes, and have found that girls at the peak of adolescent desire but yet still physically pure respond best to the chemicals we coat our control stakes with,” Moriarty was explaining to the dumbfounded generals who stood gaping like fish in a fairground hawker’s array of coloured bowls, their minds already reeling with the possibilities of an army of expendables who would obey their every command without question and walk unhesitatingly through hails of bullets to achieve their appointed prize.

And, as if watching the scene in the jerking staccato motion of a promenade mutoscope machine, she saw herself rise suddenly like a meteor and send the rocketeer flying to the floor with a resounding blow. Saw, to her amazement, the earnest boy who had partnered that awful Shoreditch detective jump out of the shadows like a fairground apparition and grab the brass handles that operated the room’s fire-break shields, an iron- and asbestoscurtain thundering down from the roof and isolating them from the moustachioed soldiers and the recumbent rocketeer.

Jacques

And he had thought that she would fall to the floor in relief, but instead she looked desperately all about her like a mad thing, her whole body shaking with fury like a cat who had pounced on the acid-yellow family canary but has had its prey rescued at the last moment by some interfering human and now howls its displeasure.

And, then, suddenly, her demeanour completely changed and she became wild-eyed and almost delirious, jumping the upturned armchairs like an Olympic hurdler and making a grab for a supine figure that even now was trying to slide like some dark thing and seek the shelter of the shadows and safety.

“Oh no, not so easily, my man,” he heard her shout. Saw something like a glint of blue-hued metal flash in her hand as she palmed the cosh so carefully concealed up her sleeve and struck the figure, quickly grabbing it by the scruff of its thin neck and dragging it over to the open window.

“Rosie, no!” he shouted, recognising the Professor, as she dumped him unceremoniously on the open window frame, the bitter mountain wind ruffling the man’s elegant frock coat and making him look like a bedraggled crow as he teetered between life and death on the narrow precipice that was the windowsill.

And, even as he rushed to try and intercede, he heard a low rumble and realised that Moriarty, like one of his automaton soldiers, had no fear and smiled unrepentantly at the girl as she towered over him, blood from the gash in his forehead trickling lazily down his sallow cheek.

“So, so, young miss.” He almost smiled. “Who of yours have I so wronged that you slay me with such vehemence. What sainted mother have I corrupted, what virtuous sister defiled?”

And Rosie shook her head slowly, as her neat little hand stretched out and began to apply pressure, pushing his scarecrow’s body slowly out over the abyss with a steely deliberation that knew her prey would eventually find its fulcrum point and topple headlong into the glacier far below.

“Neither, sir,” she says now with a steady voice though her whole body shakes with emotion. “I slay you for my father, Sherlock Holmes. “This is for Reichenbach, Moriarty!”

And, to this day, Jacques is still sure that he heard the Professor laugh hysterically as he tumbled flailing into the dark gorge of that freezing night …