And there was only one swaddling thought in him, to find his Sonya immediately, this very second, and it forced him to his feet and led him. With the knife still in his hands, he crawled from his study to the bedroom.
The bedroom door stood ajar. The bedside lamp lit the room, and Sonya lay on the bed next to her mother, her face to the wall.
“Chicken, my little hen,” the old man whispered as he crawled toward the bed.
Sonya woke up and sat, and saw her father, curled up and bent, covered in chicken blood; in utmost dread she stretched her swan-like neck.
“Chicken, little hen,” he whispered, struggling to get to his feet.
And stood.
The swan neck, lit by the shimmering light of the lamp, stretched even more under the glinting knife. One moment more and the cherry necklace would’ve wound around the white swan. But there was no salvation for him—his last strength abandoned him, and the knife slid from his fingers along with his slimy skin.
The old man shuddered and crouched down, and everything in him—nose, mouth, ears—gathered in fat folds and with a loud pffttt! started flowing.
And flowed the thin sticky mush, cleaning the muck off the white bones.
Naked, eyeless skull, smiling so, white as a sugar lump, the skull shone in the light of the lamp.
And at that moment the flame blew the bedroom door open, pricked the sleeping mother with its red gaze, and the stupefied daughter, and the dead skull of the dead father, and licked the ceiling and rose like a red rooster over the roof.
The Borodin mansion burned.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), or W. E. B. Du Bois, was an African American writer, activist, and historian. He was a founding officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was an integral part of the progression of racial equality in the United States. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), remains a monument in American literature. Although he is most acclaimed for his scholarly work, Du Bois was also an avid fiction writer. A precursor of Afro-futurism, “The Princess Steel” is an unpublished work, but some date it back to his time at Atlanta University, roughly around 1910. The story was discovered in a box of additional stories by scholars Britt Rusert and Adrienne Brown. Somewhere between thirty and forty additional unpublished stories exist, many in a speculative vein.
The Princess Steel
W. E. B. Du Bois
“IT IS PERFECTLY CLEAR,” said my wife, pointing to the sign on the door. “It is perfectly absurd,” I answered and yet there it stood written: “Prof. Johnson, Laboratory in Sociology. Hours 9 until 3.” We were on the top story of the new Whistler building, or rather tower, on Broadway, New York, and we had come on account of a rather queer advertisement, which we had seen the night before in the Evening Post. It had said “Professor Hannibal Johnson will exhibit the results of his great experiments in Sociology by the aid of the megascope at two tomorrow. A few interested parties will be admitted.” Now my wife and I were interested in Sociology; we had studied together at Chicago, so diligently indeed that we had just married and were spending our honeymoon in New York. We had, too, certain pet theories in regard to sociological work and experiment and it certainly seemed very opportune to hear almost immediately upon our arrival of a great lecturer in Sociology albeit his name, to our chagrin, was new to us. I was disposed to regard it as rather a joke but my wife took it seriously. We started therefore early the next morning, ascended to the forty-third story or rather “sailed up” as she said, chafed each other a bit and laughed until sure enough we came to the door.
We knocked and entered and then scarcely looking at the man at the door, we uttered an exclamation of wonder. The wall was dark with velvety material shrouding its contents in a great soft gloom except where, straight before us, the whole wall had been removed leaving one vast window full 40 by 20 feet, and through that burst suddenly on us the whole panorama of New York. We rushed forward and looked down on seething Broadway. “The river and cliffs of Manhattan!” said my wife. Then with one accord, bethinking ourselves we turned to apologize to the silent professor and with surprise I saw that he was black. It never occurred to my little Southern wife that this was aught but a servant. She simply said, “Well, uncle, where is professor?” “I am he,” he said and then it was our turn to be not only surprised but rather disagreeably shocked. He was a little man in well-brushed black broadcloth with a polished old mahogany face and bushy hair; he stepped softly and had even a certain air of ancient gentility about him. His voice was like the velvet on the walls and his movements precise and formal. One would not for a moment have hesitated to call him a gentleman had it not been for his color. His voice, his manner, everything showed training and refinement. Naturally my wife stiffened and drew back and yet she felt me smiling and hated to acknowledge the failure of our expedition. I was about to suggest going when I noticed that what I had taken to be a velvet-covered wall was in reality the velvet-bound backs of innumerable tall narrow books all of about the same size. I was struck with curiosity. “You have a fine library,” I said tentatively. “It is the Great Chronicle,” he said motioning us gently to chairs; we cautiously sat down.
“I discovered it,” he said, “twenty-seven years ago. This is a chronicle of everyday facts, births, deaths, marriages, sickness, houses, schools, churches, organizations, the infirm, insane, blind, crimes, travel and migration, occupations, crops, things made and unmade—just the everyday facts of life but kept with surprising accuracy by a Silent Brotherhood for two hundred years. This treasure has come to me, and forms,” he said, “the basis of my great discovery. See.” We looked round the room—there were desks and papers, machines apparently for tabulating, a typewriter with a carriage full five feet long, and rolls of paper with figures; but past these he pointed to a great frame over which was stretched a thin transparent film, covered with tiny rectangular lines, and pierced with tiny holes. He pulled his chair nearer and spoke nervously and with intense preoccupation:
“A dot measured by height and breadth on a plane surface like this may measure a single human deed in two dimensions. Now place plane on plane, dot over dot and you have a history of these deeds in days and months and years; so far man has gone, though the Great Chronicle renders my work infinitely more accurate and extensive; but I go further: If now these planes be curved about one center and reflected to and fro we get a curve of infinite curvings which is—”—he paused impressively—“which is the Law of Life.” I smiled at this but my wife looked interested; she had apparently forgotten his color.
The old man rose and reached up to the gloomy ceiling—we glanced and saw a network of levers and wires and a great bright silent wheel that whirled so steadily it seemed quite still till ever and again its cogs caught a black ball and sent it whirling till it stopped in the faint tinkle of a silvery bell. The old man seized a lever and swung his weight to it—click- click- clank—it said. We heard the slow tremulous sliding of a great mass. “Look,” he said. We looked out the great window and there hanging before it we saw a vast solid crystal globe. I think I have never seen so perfect and beautiful a sphere. It was nearly fifty feet in diameter and seemed at arts like a great ball of light, a scintillating captive star glistening in the morning sunlight. “This,” he said, “is the globe on which I plot my curves of life. You know in the Middle Age they used to use spheres like this—of course smaller and far less perfect—but that was mere playing with science just as their alchemy was but the play and folly of chemistry. Now my first series of experiments covering the last twenty years has been the plotting of the curves which will give me the Great Curve but—,” and here he came nearer and almost whispered, “but when I would cast the great lines of this Curve I was continually hampered by curious counter-curves and shadows and crossings—which all my calculations could not eliminate. Then suddenly a hypothesis occurred to me.
Human life is not alone on earth—there is an Over-life—nay—nay I mean nothing metaphysical or theological—I mean a social Over-life—a life of Over-men, Super-men, not merely Captains of Industry but field marshalls of the Zeitgeist, who today are guiding the world events and dominating the lives of men. It is a Life so near ourselves that we think it is ourselves, and yet so vast that we vaguely identify it with the universe. I am now seeking these shadowing curves of the Over-life. But I go further: I will not merely know this Over-life. I will see it with my Soul. And I have seen it,” he cried triumphantly with burning eyes. Then, feverishly: “I want today to show you one of the Over-men—his deeds, his world, his life, or rather Life of lives—I can do it,” he said and drew his chair nervously toward us and looked at us intently with his dark weak eyes. “I can do more than that,” he said. “You know we can see the great that is far by means of the telescope and the small that is near by the means of the microscope. We can see the Far Great and the Near Small but not the Great Near.” “Nor,” I added, finding my voice for the first in a vain effort to break the spell, “the Far Small.” He beamed—“Yes—yes, that’s it,” he said, “and that will come later—Now the Great Near! And that problem I have solved by the microscope megascope,” and with one more swinging of the lever there swept down before the window a great tube, like a great golden trumpet with the flare toward us and the mouthpiece pointed toward the glittering sphere; laced round it ran silken cords like coiled electric wire ending in handles, globes, and collar-like appendages. “See,” he said: and lo! on the burning sphere a snakelike shadow traced itself under his rapid fingering of the machinery—“it is the Curve of Steel—the sum of all the facts and quantities and times and lives that go to make Steel, that skeleton of the Modern World. We will look through here and if all is well behold the Over-world of steel and its Over-men.”
I shook my head in vague assent and looked out of the corner of my eye at my wife for I saw that we [were] dealing with a crank, not with a scientist, and I was wondering just how far we should let it go. He, however, was working feverishly. He had placed three luxurious chairs before the shining trumpet and arranged the pieces and the silken cords.
“Now,” he said in a whisper almost fierce, “my first experiment will begin. We shall behold the Spirit of the wonderful metal which is the center of our modern life, and the inner life of the Over-life that dominates this vast industry—the great grim forces of men—in fact,” and he lowered his voice, “We shall see the Over-men.”
I smiled. The thin dark curve blazed on the flaming globe. With a sweeping bow he conducted us to the great tube which was now pointed on this light. Carefully he adjusted it. Then he raised the silken cords with what I now saw were head and eye and ear and hand pieces and placed them on my wife. She did not hesitate but eagerly stared into the tube. I did hesitate but at last followed suit. The things I touched seemed tremulous, alive, pulsing. “Now,” said his hollow voice, “the experiment begins—Look—feel—see!”
A little tremor of half fear came over me. I put my foot out to touch my wife’s toe but she seemed reconciled. We were hidden as it were from the outer-world in these tubes and earpieces, looking at the sphere which faced Broadway. At first I could see nothing—all was darkness. Then at last far, far away yet painfully distinct I saw Broadway—“the river and cliffs of Manhattan,” as my wife had called it. I watched it idly, dreamily as it faded darker, and yet strangely more intense, and then suddenly lashed into murmuring darkness—then to black silence. The silence grew intense. Then came a vague quickening as of wandering winds beating and whirring over rock-ribbed moors. I could hear the lonely chirp of a cricket. The wind rose higher, the crickets chirped louder and lonelier; then I heard waters rushing on, nearer and nearer, swelling and roaring. Lights began to appear and I saw great crags beetling above the rushing waters. It seemed a narrow stream that struggled and foamed as it came down its broad straight way. The crags that soared above were crowned with great castles and up through the castles and under and over the crags ran ever threads—little silver threads that went out through the broad empty countryside, out far, far away until they seemed all to meet on a great misty hill to westward. “Those are the hills of Pittsburg,” cried the hollow voice of the old man. I laughed. The idea of seeing Pittsburg from Broadway, and yet I strained my eyes. In the pale but glowing light that waxed more and more brilliant I could see distinctly, above the hills, the forming of a vast bluish radiance of silver hair, a pale blue face crowned with silver light, radiant like the rising of the moon. On went the rolling waters, the land around seemed to quiver, even the great crags. And the castles were not castles they were mills—Mills of the Gods, I whispered. Everywhere were moving things, first I thought them men, women and children—I even caught the babel of voices—but no—they were I came to feel but the things of this New World, the World of Steel; they came down the waters, they rolled along the land, they followed the silvery threads and came on and on until all seemed to choke through a great crag-like narrowing in the river, above which beetled the tallest and most sinister of the castles that seemed, with its great whirling wheel, a mighty Mill for some new meal. As yet I had seen nothing really alive, only the moving of Things until looking narrowly I saw below the castle just at the portcullis, where the great drawbridge stretched across the narrow throat of the gorge, the form of a huge armored knight. His visor was down and he sat on a horse, vast and silent, watching the ever moving mass of things that rolled past him down the gorge, through the great hopper of his mill where they left their Souls—while their Bodies went whirling drunkenly on. Sometimes the things choked in the grinding, and the water roared and foamed on the rocks, but then he would strike his spear angrily on the great Wheel and with frightened roar it whirled the faster as the stream moved on and the pile of ground and bolted Souls grew higher.
“Who is he?” I asked. “An Over-man—Immortal—All Powerful,” came from a disembodied Voice. “Rhythmic with youth and age just as earth is with night and day, and yet never dying.” “Look,” I said, “See!” Across the plain beyond came tripping four armored knights. Their visors were down, their spears couched, their horses careering madly and their bannerets lying. The first knight threw a shrewd look over his shoulder, turned and gathered his arms. His eyes flashed darkly beneath his helmet. The clash was coming—there was fury in the air, when suddenly I heard the Voice: “Listen! You cannot understand this conflict until you hear of the story that goes before. His man here is the Lord of the Golden Way and what he has done and how he came to be here, commanding the silver threads and keeping toll over the Great River of Things, I know not, but I ween and so I have constructed in my own way a tale of his past which my little viewing and measuring of his life makes plausible. Listen. Once upon a time there lived an Over-man, Sir Guess of Londonton. He was a man of thought and study and ever his eager brains were pounding at the riddles of the world. As he wondered and wandered he found and captured the black Witch Knowal. Fearful she groveled before him. ‘My husband is the Ogre, Evilhood, and if thou dost me no harm and bringest me to his cave I will make him tell thee a secret, a marvellous secret of a captive maid whom thou mayest loose and have.’ So Sir Guess of Londonton took her to the Ogre and the Ogre said in thanks: ‘To westward lie hills, and in the hills the Pit of Pittsburg, and in the pit dwelleth captive the dark Queen of the Iron Isles—she that of old came out of Africa. But she hath,’ said the Ogre, ‘a secret of which men have not dreamed. One of the greatest of the world’s great secrets but not the greatest. When the Queen was captured she was heavy with child by the Sun-God; and when that daughter was born, fearing lest daughter like mother should be slaves to men, she hid the child, enchanting it, in her arm; but if thou goest, and callest her up from hell and strikest her right arm with the Golden Sword, then the enchanted daughter may be yours, she and her Treasure. More, too: if she be burned then and there, in the fires of Hell, she will become immortal and
be the most wonderful princess of the princesses of the world, the Princess Steel!’ ‘She and her Treasure,’ but she said not what the Treasure was. ‘Where is the Golden Sword?’ cried Sir Guess of Londonton, but Evilgood and Knowal were gone.
“So Sir Guess hastened away westward toward the Pit, seeking as he went word of the Golden Sword where-with he might strike the right arm of the queen. Now the Golden Sword belongs to the Lord of the Golden Way and the Lord warding the way of his winding river (a pitiful dwindling river in those poor days) saw the young wanderer and wormed his secret; he was amazed and interested and spoke sweetly to the young man and said, ‘I will follow and help you, and when we have gained the Princess Steel, she shall work for us.’ ‘Nay, nay,’ said Sir Guess, ‘the princess herself shall be mine, but her Treasure I will give you’; and the Lord of the Golden Way gladly consented. So he unlocked the Golden Sword (now the Story of the Golden Sword has not been told as yet) and they traveled over great waters and wild lands, hills and vales and faced westward ever westward, until one twilight time they came to the Pit of Pittsburg. Great clouds hung over it, dashed with the red of the dying sun, strange murmurs rose from the earth, black smoke and yellow fire. They felt the very ground beneath them tremble and groan; almost they were afraid to enter, yet Sir Guess never doubted and followed by the Lord of the Golden Way at midnight they climbed the hill and crawling, climbing, squirming, dropped into the bottom of the Pit. Or ever they touched earth, with thundering scream, the great dark form of Queen Iron rose all about them and above, and bent over them and enveloped them. ‘Who art thou that bravest me, here in my prison walls?’ she said. ‘I am Sir Guess of Londonton,’ answered the knight bravely, ‘and I have come to free the daughter whom thou hidest,’ and with the word there came a wail upon the night that thrilled all earth and heaven, the wild and curdling cry of mother panting for child. She swept her hands across the black and lurid heavens, and grasped for the bold knight, clutched his fingers and as she clutched, the Iron gripped his soul. Almost he died with the pain of that fierce grasp. His head whirred and his heartstrings hardened. Yet he gathered himself and left-handed raised the Golden Sword, while his companion crawled and whimpered to the dark,—twice he whirled the sword and it sang in the air, twice again it circled about the great dark head of the queen, and then the fifth time hissing it gripped and bit the flesh, gnawed and craunched the bone; it drank the dark oozing stream of her blood, till the swollen right arm burst, and out rolled and fell a dull, leaden, imagelike thing, inert, dead, heavy. Down shot the wounded woman with a great gasping cry that set the ocean twanging and hill a-trembling; up flew the fires of Hell. The two men rushed forward and seizing the gray image, rolled it in the soft cold clay, and straining and sweating, swung it above the fires that were bursting from below. It seethed and hissed and burned—it glowed and screamed and shivered; black fiends rose covered and beat back the flames. Off shot the leaden lid: a gleaming hissing scintillating brilliance flooded the cave; a great mist curtained the Incarnation and then when it fell away, the two knights staggered backward and sunk face forward to the dust.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 88