by Felix Gilman
He wore his gun in a leather sling over his back. It was long, ornate, handsome, and sinister.
Back then there no books about him, no songs. He had no legend yet. If you could bring yourself to look him in the eye you could see that he was still young— maybe no older than I was. He was new to the service of the Guns. I do not know what cave or solitary shack they found him in. I think they chose him to be a tracker, a hunter. He spoke only with difficulty, like it was a newly acquired skill. He was halfway between animal and man. He was a thing of darkness.
Creedmoor leaned over the roof of the Hotel of the Opals and shot him in the left shoulder.
The giant took a step back and bared his black teeth and snorted with contempt. He lumbered slowly through the snow to the Hotel’s front door and kicked it open and squeezed his way inside. Another one of Creedmoor’s caches of blasting-powder went off on the floor upstairs and the roof fell in on Knoll’s head, as Creedmoor limped off down Main Street, shooting any beast that came too close to him, most likely shooting some of the townsfolk too if they tried to stop him or slow him, dropping his precious bullets in the snow and not stopping to pick them up because his hip hurt too bad to bend.
The second explosion started some fires here and there on Main Street. From where I was, down by the lake, the glow of those fires was just barely visible through the trees, and greatly outshone by the Apparatus, whose energies continued to grow and cycle and feed on themselves unabated. The glass hummed with the strain of containing it all and the air crackled. The light had mostly settled into something golden in color. The Apparatus was warm and getting warmer and Carver and I were in the middle of a slowly expanding circle of thawing snow and glistening wet trees and patchy grass.
Miss Elizabeth Harper emerged from the trees. Her shirt was torn and there was blood on it that did not seem to be hers. She held a small silvery pistol in her hand.
“Harry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But we have no choice.”
The collapse of the Hotel of the Opals did not slow the giant for long. He shoved the rubble aside and walked out of it. He was scorched and bruised and bad-tempered but the demon in him rose up in the saddle and whipped him on, screaming in his head until his eyes went bloody.
Creedmoor was at the far end of the street. He turned, saw the giant standing in the ruins, and took a shot which maybe hit and maybe didn’t, I do not know and will not guess, it made no particular difference either way. The giant lowered his head and for the first time broke into a run and Creedmoor had time to do no more than turn his back and take a single step before the giant was on him. He felt the back of the giant’s hand cuff his ear and he was lifted off his feet and landed sprawling in the snow on his back.
The giant stood over him. He put his foot on Creedmoor’s leg, where his knee was twisted, and pressed down.
“The other one. The woman. Where?”
“I won’t help you. I don’t serve your masters anymore. I won’t go back. I’m free and bigger than all of you. You’re nobody. I was doing terrible things before you were born. I am John Creedmoor, I killed a hundred men at Devil’s Spine, you’re nobody. Who do you think you are? I will not serve. They’ll remember me forever, the man who defied you.”
That is what I imagine him saying.
“Who asked you to serve? The woman. Where?”
“Go to hell. You’re nobody.”
“Knoll.”
“What?”
“I’m Knoll.”
Knoll lifted Creedmoor out of the snow. Creedmoor drew his knife and Knoll slapped it aside, breaking the blade and two of Creedmoor’s fingers.
When Elizabeth Harper walked back into the town it was in flames here and there, and parts of it were in ruins. The townsfolk were reduced to a state of panic in which they were scarcely more human or less dangerous than the wolves. The town doctor and his assistant tried to seize her and she was forced to wave her pistol at them until they retreated.
The giant Knoll had taken up residence at the Bank of the Opals. The remaining wolves lay at his feet or prowled around, and sometimes he kicked them out of spite and impatience. He had torn open the vault and scattered its contents in the snow, along with all the unsent letters. He kept Creedmoor on his knees and would not let him stand. He had tracked down the Mayor of White Rock and the Nun and nailed them both by their hands and feet to the fence out front with nails from the general store. The Nun survived the night but the Mayor did not. Every few minutes he bellowed out his demand that the woman be brought to him.
As soon as she stepped onto Main Street he scented her. She saw his head loom from the Bank’s window, and then she started running.
Knoll stopped to nail Creedmoor to the floor by his left hand, for safe-keeping. Then he followed after Miss Harper. He took his time. He had her scent now and was in no hurry.
She burst out of the trees and into the clearing by the lake, into the light and warmth of the Apparatus. I think it had never before worked quite so well as it did that night. It was twice as bright and twice as beautiful as it had been when she last saw it. It was warm enough that the ice on the lake was melting. I like to think the beauty of it stopped her short for a moment.
She was panting and sweating and her clothes and skin had been torn by branches. She stumbled across the clearing to the Apparatus, where Carver waited. They made urgent signs at each other. I stood in the trees on the far side of the clearing and watched her approach.
Seconds later the giant appeared. I caught glimpses of him shoving through the trees and I just about disgraced myself with fear. His heavy shoulders, his heavy head turning this way and that, like he was sniffing.
I think until I saw him I had imagined I might talk my way out of this predicament, as I had so many others, as I had talked my way into it. That would not happen. The thing that came through the trees could not be reasoned with, could not be joked with or cajoled. He belonged to another world, one that I had no business in.
Knoll shielded his eyes as he stepped out into the clearing. The light of the Apparatus seemed to offend him and he let out a deep angry growl. He looked around, blinking, and caught sight of Carver.
Carver spat and raised his ax in both hands.
“No,” Knoll said. And he drew and fired. The bullet took off the top of my friend’s head before he could speak. Red blood slapped across the Apparatus’s innards. What was left of Mr. Carver fell to its knees, then over on its side. The ax fell from the dead hand.
Knoll came over and stood over the corpse. He kicked it with his boot as if to see what would happen. Then he raised his head and grinned hugely, showing broken and yellow teeth, and he turned his gun on Miss Harper.
It was at that moment that I perceived that what had to be done, had to be done by me. It was maybe not unlike the sensation Mr. Alfred Baxter describes in his Autobiography as seizing the moment or perceiving the Spirit of the Age, like the time he bet his whole fortune on Steel, or the time when he determined it was necessary to buy out and destroy the First Bank of Jasper City. It was not unlike the moment when as a boy I first glimpsed the mathematics behind the Process, and woke and hunted for pencil and paper. I am not a violent man or a political man and I never wanted any part in the Great War, but I saw that events had left me with no choice. I knew what plan Mr. Carver and Miss Harper had hatched that afternoon, and I saw that there was no alternative. In fact I was so overcome with selflessness that I forgave them then and there for planning behind my back.
None of this took more than a moment. I ran out from the trees and toward the Apparatus. Knoll turned and fired at me but missed, and since the Agents of the Gun never miss I think it must be that the light of the Apparatus pulsed at that moment and distracted him. I picked up the ax from where it lay at poor Mr. Carver’s side and I put it into the heart of the Apparatus, smashing through the glass dome and chopping through the magnets’ axle and into the coiled wires beneath. Then I threw myself off the rock and into the water and began swi
mming away as quickly as I could. Fortunately I am a quick learner. I found that it was mostly a matter of kicking wildly and hoping for the best. I heard the bright sound of the all the glass bulbs hung in the trees shattering. I did not see but I did feel the unleashed energies of the Apparatus expand into the air, surge and recoil and snap and twist around themselves, as the Process which was barely predictable at the best of times went wild and grew and grew and became something utterly new.
The giant Knoll grunted once then went silent. There was a huge weight and pressure at my back like the sky itself had turned to stone and fallen right on me. It forced me down suddenly so that I swallowed water. The lake was cold at first and then suddenly it was warm.
Afterwards there was nothing left of Knoll or of Mr. Carver, not even dust.. Parts of the Apparatus could be found embedded in trees for hundreds of yards around, or lying on the streets of White Rock. The trees themselves in the immediate vicinity were gone. At the perimeter of the devastation the trees still stood were stripped bare of bark and leaves down to their green-white bone. The banner that read the harry ransom white rock illuminations floated out into the middle of the lake until I could no longer make it out. I asked Miss Harper if she had seen what it looked like when the Process went wild and she said that she had caught a glimpse before she turned away to hide behind a tree, but she could not describe it.
CHAPTER 10
THE END OF THE FIRST PART
I said that I would write about the three times I changed history. You might say that was the first— I mean the time when I saved the lives of John Creedmoor and the woman who I still cannot think of as anything other than Miss Elizabeth Harper. Or you might say it was what happened next.
We walked up to the town together. She was supporting me rather more than I was supporting her. I was crying and also laughing and I kept saying, “Think nothing of it.” She said that she was sorry about Mr. Carver and I said, “There’s a lot you don’t know, Miss Harper.”
The wolves by the way fled in confusion and panic as soon as Knoll died.
Snow had started to fall again and the fires had gone out. I do not know exactly what hour of the night it was.
Miss Harper was sun-burned on the left side of her face, and her hair on that side was somewhat charred. I think that her eyes were less blue and more violet than they had been before the Apparatus exploded. I said nothing to her about either of these things.
The street was blocked by the rubble of the Grand Hotel. The big red grand sign stuck up from the heap of bricks and timbers and beneath it were the remains of the wagon and of Mariette, the horse. I said my farewells as we circled the rubble.
We found John Creedmoor at the Bank, lying on the floor in his own blood and a mess of scattered notes and deeds and titles and scattered letters. I saw my own undelivered letter to my sister Jess under his boot. We prized loose his swollen hand from the floor and Miss Harper helped him to his feet. He was bloody and shaking and he could not stand without help.
The two of them had one of their whispered conversations, of which I heard only parts. Creedmoor did not answer any of my questions.
I should confess that most of what I have written here about his conversations with Knoll was guesswork.
The remaining townsfolk gathered around us. They took down the Nun from the fence and were able to save her. The Nun was too weak to do anything but babble and then sleep, and so, with the Mayor dead, the townsfolk had no clear leader. They might have fled like the wolves if they had anywhere to go. It broke my heart to see them, but I was also very much aware that the wagon was gone, and the horses were gone, and the Apparatus was gone, and it was winter and I was ruined.
I looked at the people of White Rock and I felt a surge of hope inside me. It caused me to open my mouth.
“People of White Rock,” I said. “You should know the truth.”
“Harry,” Miss Harper said, and John Creedmoor said, “Shut him up.” I smiled at them both and made a gesture with my hand, by which I meant, Don’t worry, I have a plan, you will thank me later.
“People of White Rock,” I said, “listen.”
John Creedmoor looked for his gun, but finding himself unarmed was unable to stop me.
The truth is I do not remember exactly what I said, but I do remember what the newspapers said that I said, afterwards. It was something like this.
The Juniper City Morning Herald, —— 1891 STRANGE NEWS FROM THE OPALS— THE “MIRACLE” AT WHITE ROCK
There is strange news from the Opals, where last winter the little town of White Rock, home to the White Rock Lumber Company, suffered the tragic loss of Mayor R. Binion, Mr. and Mrs. William F. Davy, Esq., Mr. Sam Sattel of the Bank of the Opals, and a number of other locally prominent citizens, in the course of a bank-robbery conducted by persons unknown. Witnesses to the tragedy now report that the massacre was the work of one man, most likely an Agent of that power that we shall not name here. The perpetrator’s name is unknown, though the fellow is said to have been ten feet tall and, in the words of Mr. James F. Walsh, formerly of No. 19 Main Street, “hairy all over, like he was a —— —— bear.” Moreover, the perpetrator is deceased, and not at the hands of any man of White Rock. Rather, the Agent fell victim to what Miss Phelps, formerly of the Bank of the Opals, described as “some kind of —— —— awful weapon like nothin’ I ever seen before.” The weapon is said to be the property of a Mr. John Creedmoor— perhaps the notorious Creedmoor, whose exploits were well known to this newspaper ten years ago— and of a Miss Elizabeth Allerson, and a Professor Harry Ransom.
Mr. Tom Phelan, formerly the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, describes the incident thus:
“They come to town and I thought as how they was running from somethin’, but every body comes to town these days is running from somethin’ what with the War an’ all. I minded my own business, until that —— —— monster come into town after ’em and starts shootin’ and beatin’ on the Mayor and carryin’ on— all confusion an’ consternation— all blood an’ thunder an’ —— —— wolves— an’ used ta keep a gun behind o’ the bar but there ain’t no man in White Rock can stand agin’ an Agent o’ the you-know-what. An’ then jus’ when I thought as how we was all as good as dead anyhow there was this great —— light an’ the monster was gone. It was that Ransom fellow. He had a machine with ’im an’ it was all glass and wire an’ I don’t know what-all an’ it burned that big son of a bitch right up.”
Witnesses say that there was a pillar of white light, which the pious Miss Phelps describes as “like a door openin’ onto the Silver City its own self.” This may be the idle talk of simple rustics, but it is a matter on which many voices agree. Travelers from up and down the Opals and whoever was awake that night as far away as Birnam in the western foothills and Troche in the east say that they saw a pillar of white light flaring over the mountains. This vision has passed already into local folklore as the “Miracle” of White Rock. It is also said that for days after the incident White Rock experienced an unseasonable warmth and an inexplicable absence of shadows and wind, that the survivors of the tragedy glimpsed strange and foreign vistas through windows or half-open doorways, and that small rocks and twigs were seen to levitate and spin of their own accord, and that strangers were seen around town, silent and remote and “ghost-like.” What remains of the town is now under the authority of the Line and no further word of these peculiarities emerges. After the incident Professor Harry Ransom delivered a speech, which Miss Phelps recalled thus:
“He said who he was an’ who the rest of ’em was. There was old John Creedmoor, who was a gun-hand lookin’ to do good with ’is declinin’ years, an’ there was Miss Liz Allerson, who was a doctor from the old country. An’ he made a speech about the you-know-what an’ the Line an’ how they was the enemies of all good people. An’ he said he was sorry about the Mayor an’ all the rest and about all that’d burnt to the ground but that was just how the War was, and how it was goin’ to g
o on forever unless somebody stopped it, because the Powers that make the world the way it is are mad. An’ he said that him and the woman an’ that bad-lookin’ old man had had enough, an’ it was time to do somethin’, an’ that was how come they’d gone out West and brought back this secret weapon that was so damn good it could, never mind jus’ killin’ an Agent o’ the you-know-what, it could do for the demon what rode ’im, and it could knock an Engine o’ the Line isself off its tracks. An’ they was gonna, too.”
“He said they was goin’ east,” recalls Mr. Phelan. “On account of a bigger ’n’ better somethin’s hidden out east— under the World’s Walls, he said— and he spoke all about Folk magic an’ magic signs and words that could do who-knows-what an’ about that ol’ Red Republic from back when I was a boy and about how in the future there’d be peace and plenty and a whole lot of other stuff. He talked about the G—— and about the Engines and all that kind of thing but my ears was ringin’ from all the bullets and blood and smoke an’ that light so I don’t know what-all he said. He was a strange fellow, that’s all I know.”
“He said they had to make it where they were goin’,” Mr. Walsh recalls. “Or it was all for nothin’. An’ they’d never make it without we helped ’em, meaning we had to give ’em horses and water and food and a new wagon and guns and new clothes and money for the road and incidental expenses and so on. He said it was a great cause an’ a miracle and our shot at greatness an’ so on. An’ maybe he was tellin’ the truth or somethin’ like the truth an’ maybe he wasn’t but either way we’d had one —— —— of a night. We took a vote and those as wanted to help ’em was square outnumbered by those as wanted to stone ’em out of town and never speak of it agin. So we did. An’ me, I packed up what wasn’t burnt and got out mysel’ three day later, and that’s how come I weren’t there when the Linesmen shown up.”