It was a strangely cut stone with asymmetrical facets. It glowed softly with an inner, blood-red radiance. Fleeting images shifted within it.
* * * *
He struggled to find light in a black void till all at once his (or someone’s) tattered eyelids sprang open to the sight of shadowy conspirators huddled around his sarcophagus. As the strange light of the gem known as the Heart of Ahriman fell upon him, he remembered that his ancient name, unspoken among men for millennia, was Xaltotun.
* * * *
He found himself screaming under torture in the black cyclopean citadel called Beled-el-Djinn, the City of Devils, by some and by others Karashehr, the Black City. His name was Xuthltan, and now he gathered his waning strength to curse the king who tormented him in order to secure his hellfire-red gem, the Fire of Asshurbanipal, which disclosed the secrets of future ages. Blood clouded his eyes as he saw the tentacled devil he had summoned emerging from a writhing shroud of black fog.
* * * *
He watched as Belshazzar, King of Babylon, received the blood-red gem from the hand of a diver who had dredged it up from a forgotten ruin sitting on the seabed of the Persian Gulf, where it had decorated the mossy breast of a mummified king. Time hurtled by as he saw Cyrus seize the jewel from around the fat neck of Belshazzar, from whence it passed from king to king, from thief to thief, always causing its owner to slake its evil thirst with the blood of screaming virgins.
* * * *
He beheld Apollonius of Tyana. He was Apollonius of Tyana, whom some deemed a charlatan, others a wizard, still others the son of the god Proteus. He gazed into the Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists and lifted his head filled with new secrets…
* * * *
He saw, as if descending from above, the hunched-over form of Joseph Smith, whose sweating face was buried in a cloth hat, his straining eyes fixed on the glowing Seer Stone that revealed to him the unknown histories of vanished peoples.
* * * *
The desperate search for the straying Mr. Bowen had been more thorough, more expansive, than the search for the tomb of Nephren-Ka, though, had they only known it, they were not so far from the burial place they had sought. The weary archaeologists had regathered, doubly disappointed. It took little discussion for them to decide to cut bait and return to the States. They were very nearly all packed to set off when they were profoundly shocked to behold old Bowen, much changed, walking into the encampment.
The spare figure, standing proudly erect, was burnt black by the desert sun. He was clad in deep red robes, or shreds of them, perhaps foraged from a violated tomb. Two mangy jackals accompanied the man, affectionately licking his outstretched hands. The dusky laborers bowed to him as one man. The Americans, clad in their khakis and pith helmets, knew not what to say, or to think.
A NOBLE ENDEAVOR, by Lucy A. Snyder
The linen room door slammed open, and Mariette nearly dropped the towel she was folding. She tried to be very still and didn’t turn around. The stump of her left knee ached inside the leather cup of her peg leg.
“You!” The plantation foreman Zeke sounded annoyed and worried. “Girl! Go on up to Doc Bronson’s lab.”
Her heart beat faster and her vision seemed to go dark at the edges. She focused on folding the towel just so. Told herself that it was just the sharp odor of the lye soap that was making tears rise in her eyes. There were four other girls working shoulder to shoulder with her—the Master had seven legitimate children and it took nearly that many slaves to handle all their laundry—so he could have meant any of them. Couldn’t he? But deep down she knew that since she was the only girl in the room who still had all her fingers, he had to be calling her out. Dr. Bronson only wanted helpers with good hands.
Oh, Lord, please don’t let him mean me, she prayed. Ain’t it enough I lost my leg? I got to lose my mind and my life, too?
“Girl!” Zeke’s huge, calloused hand landed on her shoulder and spun her around. The tip of her peg skidded on the polished floor and she nearly fell.
He glowered down at her, his gray eyes bloodshot from sun and smoke and rum. “You deaf, girl?”
“No sir,” she stammered. The other girls were staring at her; she could practically feel their relief like the ocean breeze upon her sweating skin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ‘spect you meant me?”
“I do mean you. Get on up to the lab.”
“He need fresh linens?” Please, Lord, let it be that he just needs sheets or a towel or a clean chamber pot.
“I reckon he probably does, but that damn fool Bo touched something he shouldn’t and now what little brains he had are drippin’ out his ears.”
She froze again. Dr. Bronson’s laboratory had only been up on the hill for a year but already six boys had gone in as assistants and been carried out weeks later, stone dead or babbling with madness. Rumor was that Dr. Bronson’s research back in London had killed so many working-class apprentices that eventually the boys’ grieving parents revolted and burned the laboratory to the ground. Dr. Bronson escaped across the Atlantic with his life and lab books and sought refuge at his cousin’s Barbados sugar plantation.
Nobody quite knew what was going on inside the laboratory, nor would Mr. Turner speak of the arrangement he’d made with the scientist. Some folks whispered that Dr. Bronson had promised Mr. Turner tremendous riches if his research succeeded. They said that surely Dr. Bronson was trying to create a Philosopher’s stone to turn lead into gold. Others said that Mr. Turner was desperate to save his eldest son Johnny from the dissolution and vicious rages he’d flown into ever since the young man returned from a stint in the British navy. If the doctor had promised a cure, then perhaps he was driving his slave assistants mad on purpose to test remedies for Johnny. But if not…Mariette shuddered.
The foreman cuffed her on the side of her head, making her ear ring painfully. “Quit yer dawdlin’ and get up there! If I catch you lollygaggin’ I’ll take you to Johnny. You want that?”
For a moment, Mariette thought she might faint, but she forced herself to say, “No sir.”
Her mind fogged with terror, she moved like one of the clockwork men of Boston as she loaded a set of towels and a fresh set of sheets into a basket and marched out of the linen room. Whatever horrors awaited her in the laboratory, they would be far better than being a plaything for Johnny Turner.
He was the reason she’d lost her leg. After Johnny returned from the navy, his father made him foreman over the family’s sugar cane plantation, reasoning that with his military experience his eldest would maintain good order and keep the slaves productive. Mr. Turner didn’t mind if his boys satisfied their male urges on female slaves or entertained themselves by thinking up ever-more-gruesome ways of tormenting recaptured runaways. He was fond of saying, “A scared slave is a hard worker. Make them fear you more than they fear God and you’ll always have a bountiful crop.”
But Mr. Turner was first and foremost a businessman; as much as he figured slaves needed harsh discipline and that his sons needed to blow off a little steam now and then, he’d sunk good money into his slaves and didn’t want to see his property damaged without reason. Johnny started carrying a boarding axe he’d kept from his navy days and anytime a slave displeased him, he’d lop off one of their fingers, starting with the pinkie. Some slaves healed up well enough but others got infections and lost hands, arms, even their lives. And the doctoring got expensive. It was Mariette’s own crippling that finally made Mr. Turner lock Johnny in his rooms and bring Zeke down from South Carolina to work as his new foreman.
When Mariette was ten, a slave named Tom ran away and was recaptured when he tried to stow away on a ship bound for London. The slave catchers brought him back beaten half to death, but that wasn’t good enough for Johnny. He made the slaves build a gibbet in the yard and hung Tom from it by his arms. Then Johnny made the slaves pile dry brush beneath him and light it. He made all the slaves stand in a circle around the gibbet and watch as Tom screamed and slowly bur
ned to death.
Mariette stayed rooted to the spot, but when the flesh started peeling off Tom’s feet, she closed her eyes. Johnny noticed her averted gaze and flew into a rage.
“You watch as long as I tell you to watch!” He pulled his Bowie knife from his belt and stabbed the blade through her bare foot into the red dirt.
She remembered the sudden mind-breaking pain, and then everything going black. The days after that were hazy in her memory. She remembered lying on her mother’s cot in their tiny coral hut, her mother trying to get her to drink some bitter medicinal draught. Then there was the horror of waking up to find herself strapped to a board, a leather strip in her mouth to keep her from biting off her own tongue or breaking her teeth, and the physician from Bridgetown heating his bone saw in the fire while telling her mother, “Hold her down. This won’t take but a minute.”
When she finally awoke from the fever, her leg was gone from a few inches below her knee and she was so weak that all she could do was polish silverware in the manor. Her weakness lasted close to a year; Mr. Turner seemed regretful and had his own family physician check on her to make sure her wound healed as well as possible. Mariette was light-skinned enough to be a presentable house slave, but the frowns that Mrs. Turner cast in her direction made her begin to suspect that the man who put her in her mother might have been Mr. Turner himself. Even though Johnny was seldom allowed outside, the mere mention of his name caused an unparalleled terror amongst the slaves throughout the whole parish.
I’ll survive this, Mariette vowed to herself as she marched up the hill to the laboratory. She could hear the chug of the steam-powered generator behind the building. It ran day and night and reminded her of a cabless locomotive with no track or cars. Heat from the engine made the air above the laboratory shimmer like a mirage. Her peg leg was sticking in the muddy road and pulling it free over and over hurt her knee and hip and made the leather straps around her thigh chafe. I don’t know how I’ll survive, but I will.
* * * *
“Come in!” Dr. Bronson called in response to her knock. “The door’s not locked.”
Mariette went inside. Her breath fogged in the frigid air. How could it possibly be so cold inside when it was so hot outdoors? She shivered in her thin cotton shift.
The layout of the laboratory seemed similar to the first floor of the plantation manor— Mr. Turner had hired the same architect for both. But whereas the Turners had made their entry hall into a light, airy parlor with comfortable seats, Dr. Bronson had blocked off all the windows with heavy oak bookshelves whose boards bowed under the weight of leather-bound tomes and wooden shipping boxes filled with manuscripts and correspondence. The only chair in the room sat behind a candle-lit writing desk piled with more books and papers. Deprived of sunlight and only dimly illuminated by the desk candles and gaslamps guttering in sconces, the room seemed as oppressive as a mortuary. The strange chemical stink in the air added to her goose-fleshed feeling that she’d stepped into a house of death.
“Hm.” A tall, thin man of about fifty stepped from a shadow and approached her, leaning heavily on a silver-filigreed cane. He looked her up and down, disappointment clear on his gaunt, clean-shaven face. “I told the foreman to send me a boy.”
Mariette set the linen basket down, mind racing to pick the words least likely to anger the scientist. “I reckon Zeke couldn’t find any to send. All the men are needed for the cane harvest.”
“Hm.” His eyes fell on her peg. “Did you lose your leg in the fields? I’m told that a cane knife can cut a grown man nearly in two.”
She shook her head. “I disobeyed Master Johnny.”
“Ah. Of course. Well, I hope you intend to be more obedient here, because you’ll be handling lethal substances and a failure to follow my instructions will have dire consequences.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll have you know that I do not approve of this peculiar institution of African slavery,” he remarked. “The Empire should have abolished it when I was just a lad. But alas, the House of Commons rejected the Slavery Abolition Act and no one has resurrected it. I expect that it has not seemed an urgent matter ever since Charles da Vinci began producing his wondrous clockwork men.”
Dr. Bronson sighed wistfully. “The best plantations have already replaced their black chattel with gleaming automatons. I keep telling my dear cousin that he should modernize his operation and replace the lot of you, but he insists that he needs your wits as well as your backs. I have my doubts as to what kind of wits are necessary to cut cane, but I do concede that the mechanical men are rather dear, and of course cannot produce more of their kind. One cannot deny the fertility of negro women.”
He grimaced. “In the meantime, whites are forced to share their civilization with Africans, which inevitably leads to…miscegenation.”
The simultaneously leering and disdainful look he gave her made her flush with anger, and she could not stay silent. “I was born here in Barbados. So was my mama, and her mama. We’re Bajan. I don’t know anything about Africa.”
Fortunately, Dr. Bronson seemed to take her words as a statement of ignorance rather than a rebuttal to his declarations.
“I have visited that Dark Continent on several occasions, and it is a wonder.” He smiled down at her. “So much gold, ivory, and diamonds! The wildlife and landscape…amazing. Truly Africa is wasted on Africans. The best thing for the place will be for European nations to colonize the whole continent and take charge of its natural resources.”
“What about the Africans who live there?” She struggled to keep her tone neutral.
“Indeed! I do have a plan I intend to propose when the time is right; I admit that my reputation has become somewhat tarnished, but I fully expect that the success of my endeavors here will result in considerable acclaim. My ship shall rise on a very high tide indeed, and royals from all countries should rightly seek my advice on intellectual matters.
“But I digress. Aside from the problem of Africans, England and Europe face the problem of the underclass. Mostly people of corrupted Irish, Gyptian, and Spanish blood, you know. Those in poverty breed disease, commit crimes and foster wretchedness. Some of my colleagues think we should let the poor starve. Natural selection! But tenderhearted women and religious sorts are forever running soup kitchens and charities and the human corruption keeps spreading.
“What I propose is that we offer a low-cost, nutritionally-sound potted food to the English and European poor. The food would be spiced with silphium and asafoetida to induce infertility in the women who eat it. Thus, the poor will stay healthy enough to serve as useful workers or soldiers, but they’ll stop breeding like confounded rabbits. The poor shall only exist as needed to turn the wheels of commerce. Civilization will prosper like never before!”
Mariette blinked. “That seems like a well-turned plan, sir. But what has it got to do with Africans?”
“Ah! I thought that bit was implied. Africans will serve as the meat component of the canned food. I have extensively plotted the logistics, and they’re entirely economical. By the time our canneries run out of Negroes, I expect the underclass breeding problem will have been splendidly remedied.”
Mariette’s heart pounded and her vision was starting to go edge-dark again. In her mind, she carefully removed her peg leg and with both hands drove it straight through Bronson’s loathsome chest, mud and all.
Instead, she took a deep breath, bent and picked up the linen basket, keeping her head down for fear that her eyes might show her rage. She knew she needed a few moments alone to calm herself down. Because if she was not very, very calm, she would die in this house, and Bronson would move on to the next hapless girl.
She’d spent her whole life hearing people, even other slaves, say that the world would be a better place without Negroes in it. It was common sport for the plantation owners to gather at a fish fry or around a card table to complain bitterly about the blacks who were responsible for their livelihoods. If she
had a penny for every well-heeled planter who’d declared his slaves were lazy, worthless good-for-nothings who should be fed to the hogs simply because they needed to rest once in a while, she’d have been able to buy her own freedom.
Bronson’s vile sentiments were common as scuttle crabs, but usually just the idle spouts of spoiled old men. The scientist clearly had ambitions and a twisted moral conviction driving him. Might his monstrous plans reach the ears of equally monstrous people who could make them real?
If there was any chance he might succeed, he had to be stopped. Even if it meant she died under Johnny’s hatchet. In her mind, she saw herself creeping up to the laboratory house, blocking the doors shut with timber, and dousing it with lamp oil. It was easy and terrible to imagine Bronson screaming as he burned inside with all his notes.
But perhaps there was a better way that didn’t end in fire? She wouldn’t know until she found out what he was trying to do. Mr. Turner had surely not brought Bronson here to refine his plans to turn Africans into potted meat. The laboratory work must have something to do with curing Johnny’s madness…or anyhow the doctor had convinced Mr. Turner that it did.
“Would you like me to change your bedclothes, sir?”
“Certainly, but be quick about it; I’ll need you in the lab shortly.”
* * * *
Mariette followed Bronson into a short hallway that was even colder than the foyer study, and she could more clearly hear the chug of the steam engine along with the electrical hum of some other kind of apparatus. Twin gaslights brightly illuminated the hall, which only had room for a narrow table along one wall and a rail of wooden coat hooks along the other. A couple of long, padded canvas coats and brass goggles hung from the rack.
“Remove anything you might have in your pockets and leave it on the table.” Bronson frowned at her peg leg. “Is that secured with iron or steel nails?”
She shook her head. “It has bronze buckles and such, but the rest is leather and wood.”
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 2