Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  Under Mr. Stefan’s tutelage, we were told never to go into a chimney without a rope to hold us up. Going in like that was asking to fall, to plunge through the darkness and die or be crippled. But sometimes, when we were in a hurry, we’d forego the rope so we could do the job faster, so that no one had to stand at the top of the chimney and pay it out. Creeping down into the darkness, I was keenly aware of the rope’s absence around my waist. I dug my elbows and knees into the sides of the chimney, and worked my way down slowly, pausing every few feet to listen. I heard only ghostly echoes from the factory floor, sounds divorced from words or sense.

  When I had crawled down for what felt like forever, my foot touched something in the darkness below me, something that gave softly under my weight. I froze, holding my breath until it ached in my chest, expecting at any moment to feel those long, sucking fingers wrap around my ankle. But nothing happened. After an interminable span, I let out my breath in one huge gust, sucked in another greedy lungful, held it, exhaled more gently, and finally lowered myself down.

  In the darkness, I felt what I had touched, and found that it was what must have been Samuel’s body. My fingertips touched his face, and found that his mouth was open, his bottom jaw hanging slack, dislocated. I shuddered and considered going back up, but the only thing harder than climbing the rest of the way down through the darkness would be going back up the chimney, and even if I did, I’d be trapped on the rim, waiting for someone to come find me. And what happened if night fell before they did? I had the sense that the sunlight had been all that kept the creature at bay.

  So I continued down, squeezing myself past Samuel’s body, even though the touch of his skin sent shivers through every part of me. In the distance, I heard a sound that might have been thunder. I prayed that it wasn’t, because when I got out of the chimney I desperately needed the sun to still be shining and not obscured by clouds. I crept through the darkness, expecting at every turn to see that blue glow seeping up, but instead it was a different light I saw, the filtered light of the factory floor that came in through the door of the furnace. My feet touched the bottom, sunk deep into piled soot, and I dropped to my hands and knees to crawl out and into the open air again.

  The factory floor was not light enough to truly call it light, and the huge machines cast vast pools of shadow. Even so, I saw enough to see that something terrible had happened. As I stepped out of the furnace, I slipped in blood that had pooled there, next to where Devon’s body lay ravaged, his mouth formed into a broken scream. In the dim light, the blood looked like a shadow on the floor.

  The sounds I had heard as I crept down the chimney were silent now, and I started to move forward, ready to run toward the door of the factory and the sunlight that I saw through the high-set green glass windows. I hadn’t taken two steps when the creature came around the edge of the machine and stood in front of me.

  It was shaped like a bat, but was as big as me, and it moved like a bat on the ground, though I got the impression that it had never flown and that it never could. Like a malevolent parasol creeping toward me through the gloom. Even here it was so black it was almost invisible, the only light the blue glow that streamed out of its mouth and the sightless sockets of its eyes.

  And then there was another one, and then another. From the way they held their heads, I imagined they were scenting for terror or despair. I heard a sound behind me, and for a moment I feared that another creature had rounded the furnace at my back, but then I realized that the sound was familiar. CLANK-step, and then Mr. Stefan was standing beside me. He was carrying a hurricane lantern, which cast a cone of buttery light that seemed woefully dim and small in the gloom of the factory, but was enough to push the creatures back to its edge. In his other hand he held a pistol that he raised and fired, making the sound of thunder I had heard from inside the chimney.

  He handed the lantern to me, and motioned me toward the door. As we walked, Mr. Stefan’s CLANK-step keeping time behind me, we passed the savaged bodies of the boys, their mouths all bent into yawning circles. The creatures teemed on the edges of the light, but they wouldn’t pierce its rim. Then there was a sound from somewhere deeper in the factory, a voice, one of the boys calling out, and Mr. Stefan stopped just one step sooner than I did. A pair of jaws darted out of the darkness and fastened on his wood and metal leg, pulled him down. As he fell his arm flew out and struck the lantern, sent it tumbling from my hands to crash on the floor in a bloom of flame. The fire sent the creatures scuttling back, but the one that had grabbed Mr. Stefan kept its hold, pulled him with it into the shadows. “Go,” he barked at me as he vanished. “Run.”

  And so I ran, without looking back to see the flashes of Mr. Stefan’s pistol in the darkness, chased by the sound of thunder until even that sound stopped and I stood, panting in the sunlight while behind me the fire kindled by the lantern continued to grow.

  That was my last day as an apprentice chimneysweep, for on that day I gained something which no chimneysweep can possess: a fear of the dark. I walked home as night fell around me, and I found my Gram dead in her chair by the hearth, “carried off,” as they say, by her cough. But I also heard a rattling coming from up the chimney, and so I left to fetch the doctor to come round for her body, and it was the last time I ever set foot in our rooms.

  The Cannon Factory burned to the ground that night, and I jumped on a steamer ship bound for the Americas, one where oil lamps burned belowdecks at all hours.

  I’ve thought long and hard about all that I saw and heard that day, and I think I know where the creatures came from, what they were: Nicolas’ “shadders,” Gram’s ghosts, whatever was left when the fire claimed the log. Not the spirit, not all of it anyway, but the terror and despair that devoured the spirit in the moment of death. The agony of the worker who died in the cogs, guilt of the father hanging from the beam, the horror of Conner trapped in the darkness alone. Not content with the first spark that gave them life, they reproduced in the darkness by sowing more terror and death.

  Were they, as Devon had it, the wages of our own folly and sin? Perhaps, but I think that if it hadn’t been the war effort, it would have been something else. There are always people with no other choices, who must labor in the dark places and who sometimes perish there. Progress is an enormous wheel upon which the best and the brightest of us balance, and which is bound to plow the rest of us under. Industry a dazzling light, and those creatures its inevitable shadows.

  One day, they tell me we’ll have electric lights in every home, on every street. But there will always be places where the light doesn’t reach, places where “shadders” can gather, and they will haunt me as long as I live.

  Author’s Notes: I originally wrote this for a steampunk ghost anthology that ultimately passed on it for not being steampunk enough. They were probably right. It’s really more about the nature of ghosts, and the cost of industrialization. I polished it up a few times over the years, but it never found another home. Still, I always rather liked my descriptions of the glowing-eyed, bat-like “shadders,” so I kept it around, and I think maybe it finally found the place where it fits.

  This is its first time in print.

  The Blue Light

  The Soldier walks toward the City. With every step, his boots kick up little clouds of dust and grit, and sink down past their soles. If a wind were ever to blow here, it would raise a layer of topsoil who-knows-how-deep, but the wind hasn’t blown here in a long time. The dust settles on everything, coating it layer-upon-layer. The people have taken to sleeping covered in a thin sheet, and when they wake they shake off a measure of dust before they rise. Those who forget, or throw their sheet aside in the night, wake with the dust thick in their mouths.

  It has been this way for as long as the Soldier can remember, but it is getting worse. When he left the City, the dust was a nuisance. He remembers his mother sweeping it from tables and counters, from the mantel, out the front door; and he remembers when she gave it up.

 
When he walked out of the City—marched, really, alongside countless other men dressed in the same uniforms, carrying the same weapons—the walls were surrounded by graves. There was no room left for burial within the City, and so the boneyards had spilled out into the surrounding countryside. He remembers tall, narrow stones carved with names and dates; now only their rounded tops jut up from the dusty soil, which has risen nearly a pace while he was away.

  The City looks shorter than he remembers, not because the towers haven’t grown, or because he has, but because the walls are silted in, the dust collected in drifts against the rusting metal. High above him, fans turn slowly, ever-so-slowly, so as not to disturb too much of the dust, pulling in just enough air to ventilate the City and prevent its inhabitants from choking to death.

  At the gates, a man in a hat like a stovepipe stares down at him through filmed goggles. With one thumb, the guard reaches up and smudges the dirt around on each of his blue-tinted lenses. “Who goes?” he asks, and the Soldier replies with a name taken from a fallen comrade, on the off chance that his own name has arrived here ahead of him. “Don’t mean nothing to me,” the gatekeeper replies. “You look like a soldier, though. Did we win?”

  The Soldier considers this for a moment, and then shouts back up, “Do we ever?” The guard laughs, but this seems adequate to placate him, and he steps to the side and laboriously turns a crank. Within the wall there is the sound of gears slipping and grinding, slowly turning in some dark, close space. Bits of metal break loose and come tinkling down within the wall, and the Soldier wonders how long it will be before the mechanisms are gone completely, and if the gates will be open or closed when they go.

  Finally, at the end of a cacophonous series of mechanical noises, a symphony for stripped gears and rusted chains, a tiny aperture opens in the foot of the wall, allowing a small avalanche of dust to come tumbling inside. It’s an underwhelming result, after so much noise, and as the Soldier steps beyond the threshold, he hears the guard shout from above, “Kick the dirt aside, so the door’ll go shut!”

  The Soldier stands in the shadow of the City and looks down at his boots. The dust behind him is higher than in front, and so he kicks the dust from the doorway into the City, and he walks on as he hears the rumbling, grinding sound of the gate closing behind him.

  Inside the City, it is dark everywhere. Lanterns burn in darkened corners, powered by thin filaments that were bright once but are now the orange of banked embers. The people he passes walk hunched forward, even the young, and wear masks of paper and fabric over their mouths. Most were white, but have turned to gray over time. The Soldier pulls up his own bandana to cover the bottom of his face, for while the dust outside the City lay dead on the ground, here it drifts everywhere in the air, stirred by even the ghosts of breezes conjured by the City’s enormous fans.

  Where people step, the dust rises and swirls, forms miniature clouds before settling once more to the earth. The streets here are all dirt, and they have risen while he was gone, deeper yet than the dust outside the City walls. The lowest level of shops and houses lie buried completely, the tops of their windows and doorways barely showing above the road, creating small sinkholes of dust that seep slowly into their vacant innards. Now and then he sees glittering eyes peering at him from the darkened apertures, and he shivers, partly with revulsion, and partly with memory.

  The house that he once shared with his mother sits higher than the others. The last time he was here, he walked down ten steps from the front door to the street. Now he climbs only three. He finds the metal door ajar, and inside the house the dust has gathered in thick hills and hummocks on tables and chairs. His mother sits by the fireplace, which is long extinguished, a mound of dirt lying where the coals would once have burned. Dust has gathered in her lap, in her eyes, in her mouth.

  The Soldier turns away. His pockets are heavy, but there is nothing in them that will do him any good here. Still, he reaches into one, and pulls out the Blue Light. He holds it in his hand, his thumb poised upon its switch. He stands there long enough that the dust begins to settle on his arm. Then he pushes the button.

  War was hell, and when the Soldier had reached his fill of killing and dying, the heat of the filament gun in his hands, the sour sizzle of cooking flesh, he walked away from battle just as he had walked away from the City so long before. One day, he simply found himself alone, the last man near him—either friend or foe—lay dead in the trench, and all he could see in every direction was smoke. So he turned his feet away from the noise of battle, and he walked until he could breathe fresh air again, until he could see the sky.

  Not knowing where else to go, he walked home, back to the City. He knew the way, all he had to do was retrace his steps, though he worried, with every step homeward, that perhaps his desertion would be discovered and there would be a gallows waiting for him when he arrived back at the City. Still, he would choose a gallows over another day in the trench, and so on he walked.

  He had traveled for three days and nights when he met the Wizard. The Soldier didn’t know what else to call the man, who stood by the side of the road wearing a strange conical hat and a pair of goggles so thick they made him look like a frog. On his back was a series of bulbs and tubes that glowed and flickered in an array of colors, some of which the Soldier had never seen before. Attached to this strange array with a coiled length of wire was a long metal wand, which the Wizard was waving in the air above a hole in the ground as the Soldier approached.

  “What’s in the hole?” the Soldier asked, and the Wizard glanced up from his arcane calculations, blinking at him from behind lenses as thick and green as the bottles in the apothecary shop.

  “Treasure,” he said, his voice high and thin. “Treasure the like of which, I’d wager, a poor soldier like yourself has never seen. Treasure enough to make you a king.”

  “Why would it make me a king?” the Soldier asked. “Looks to me like you’re the one staking the claim.”

  The Wizard shook his head. “I’m an old man,” he said, reaching down one bony hand to knock on his own knee, as if to illustrate the point. “Far too old for treasures and thrones. No, there’s only one thing down there I want, the missing piece that I need to complete my invention. Once that’s done, I can die in peace.”

  “So why don’t you go down there and get it?” the Soldier asked.

  “I’m an old man,” the Wizard repeated. “It’s a long climb down, and I fear that I would never make it. What if I were to slip and fall? Then what? I’d lie down there at the bottom of the ladder, just a stone’s throw from the completion of my life’s ambitions, and starve. No, better to wait up here, wait until some strong young man like yourself comes by. A man who could benefit by what lies beyond, and help me out as well.”

  The Soldier paced around the hole in the ground. It was as round as a lens, ringed in metal, and the Soldier could just see the top few rungs of a metal ladder reaching down. Alongside it was a metal cover that had been painstakingly pulled aside, bit by bit, and a place where the dust—not as thick here as nearer the City, but thick enough—had been brushed aside. The cover bore writing on it, but not anything that the Soldier could read.

  “So what you’re proposing,” he said, “is that I go down into that hole and bring you back whatever it is you’re looking for, and in exchange…”

  “You can keep anything else you find,” the Wizard said. “Just bring me back the Blue Light.”

  The Soldier, in his short stint in the army, had grown wise enough to know when he was being taken for a ride, but he was intrigued by the hole, and the Wizard’s claims as to its contents, and besides it was better than what he had left behind, and so he agreed. Leaving the old man standing above, he turned on the dim bulbs on the shoulders of his uniform and climbed down into the darkness.

  The ladder seemed to extend down forever, and he found himself thinking that the Wizard had probably been wise not to attempt the descent himself. Deeper into the hole, the rungs gr
ew clammy and damp, dampness not being a condition that the Soldier had very frequently encountered in his life. Water was a precious resource in the City, pumped up from wells that burrowed deep beneath the earth, and the moisture that gathered on the rungs of the ladder made the Soldier wonder how far down he had come. The circle of light through which he had entered was just a pinprick above his head when his boot finally stepped off the bottom rung and onto a solid floor.

  Looking around, the Soldier saw that he was in a long tunnel made of rough-hewn stone, not metal. At one end, the tunnel had been sealed up, but at the other it branched into three separate chambers. Everything here was damp, and the stones of the floor shone slickly in the feeble light from his shoulder lamps.

  Above, the Wizard had warned him of what to expect, at least somewhat. “There are three chambers, each filled with treasure. They are yours for the taking. But at the bottom of the ladder, you will find the Blue Light. So long as it is burning, you will be safe from harm below. Take all that you wish, but bring the Light to me.”

  The Soldier looked around, and found the Blue Light in a metal niche set in the wall. It looked like it had once been protected by a barrier of glass, though now only jagged shards hung like fangs in a maw. Words were printed on the metal that surrounded the opening, but as on the metal lid above, they were nothing the Soldier could read. Breaking off the remaining bits of glass and stacking them carefully in the palm of his left hand—something told him that he wanted to make as little sound as possible until the Blue Light was burning—he picked up the Wizard’s prize in his right glove.