by Unknown
Immediately, Spence stopped.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Madame held up her hand. “You’re a kind girl,” she said. “This monster does not deserve your kindness. However, you should know that we have spared Mr. Spence an eternity of being ripped apart by that demon and others like it.”
"But, ma’am, he’s a thing now; a kind of robotic slave.”
“Yes, he is. He killed trying to make someone his possession, and then caused the death of my son because of that. Now, he is my possession, my thing. He is trapped in a shell of his own making.”
So, that is how it ended. Like I said, I see a little of everything in this job. In one day, I saw what true, eternal love looked like, I saw a demon, and I saw a man sent to prison—albeit a different kind of jail.
And that lot in the Crown have the nerve to tell me spiritualism is all just a show—that it’s faked. If only they knew.
Through the Darkness of the Opera House
DJ Tyrer
Camille Castaigne advanced cautiously along the narrow walkway circling around the inside of the upper reaches of the dome. Suddenly, a foot lashed out of the darkness, striking her with what felt like the force of a locomotive. She found herself flying backwards from the blow. She barely registered the motion before the momentum sent her over the low wall separating the walkway from the drop down to the empty auditorium far below. Her derringer and candle flew from her hands and disappeared into the darkness.
She began to fall.
Without even thinking, she reached out, and felt her fingers grab a section of unpainted moulding, slipping into the grooves of the twining floral pattern. She barely had a grip, but it was enough to arrest her fall. The sudden halt almost wrenched her arm from its socket and she felt the stitches in her side tear open; blood dampened her gown and, for a moment, her mind wandered to that fact. Then, the pain hit her.
Had there been an audience below her, they would’ve been shocked by the unladylike curse she screamed, but the auditorium was being used as a warehouse and, if any workers were there, they were the sort of folk from whom Camille had learnt the words.
When completed, the Academie Imperiale de Musique opera house would doubtless be beautifully lit, but—right now—she felt as if she were dangling in an endless void.
Her fingers were beginning to slip as her energy drained away. With difficulty, she managed to reach up and get a grip on another section of the moulding with her other hand. She needed to pull herself back onto the walkway. If she fell, there was no way she would survive.
And, to think, she had imagined things couldn’t get any worse than her recent trip into the catacombs...
* * *
Camille Castaigne was an Imperial agent, travelling wherever she was needed in the service of her Emperor, and, right now, he needed her here in Paris.
Ringed by the steel of the Prussian landcruisers, Paris was a city besieged. The promised ‘swift victory’ had transformed into, if not a swift defeat, certainly a swift shambles, as the much-vaunted French electro-artillery found itself outpaced, evaded, pincered, surrounded, and overrun by the unfortunately faster-than-predicted landcruisers that were not quite the lumbering artillery targets derided by the press.
Mismanaged from the outset, the French campaign had collapsed into farce and the Prussians had overrun substantial areas of north-eastern France to surround and threaten the French capital. Long columns of terrified refugees preceded the Prussian advance, sowing further chaos. With only one aer-corvette ready for service—and that preoccupied with ferrying messages, supplies, and essential personnel in and out of the beleaguered city—the French air fleet remained a paper-only asset as much-delayed production continued in the south and west of the country. Well-protected with fortifications—hastily reinforced with trenches—and artillery, both classic and electric, the city was in no danger of being as swiftly overrun as the countryside, but could not hold out forever before the might of the Prussian land fleet.
While they awaited their eventual salvation or defeat, the siege was keeping her busy. Prussian spies, communard agitators, monarchist reactionaries, republican cells and oddball cults were all thriving in the chaos, including the band of anarchists she had been despatched to investigate a week before by Durand, the gendarme officer who served as her contact amongst the city’s wartime authorities.
Her investigation had taken her to a certain backstreet drinking house regularly attended by the cell’s members. All the evidence indicated they had formed an alliance with the ghoulish inhabitants of the catacombs below the city, offering them the bodies of their enemies in exchange for the use of their secret passageways. The ghouls, despite their reputation amongst the superstitious, posed no real threat to humanity—in her opinion, it was mostly humans who were a threat.
Over the course of the last few days, Camille had discerned who her targets were and despatched the first two with ease, thanks to the benefit of surprise. The third had put up something of a fight, but had died quickly enough. But, the last one, the ringleader, had been spooked by the time she came for him and had made a run for it, heading for the nearest entrance to the catacombs.
Camille swore as she descended into the darkness, revolver in hand. She guessed the anarchist’s time with the ghouls had taught him the twists and turns of the tunnels, but if she didn’t catch him in short order, he would get away and she doubted she’d have another chance. Not that finding him was going to be easy. Indeed, without a lantern, if she ventured too far in, she risked becoming irretrievably lost, unless she stumbled upon one of those sections being used as a home by folk using the tunnels as a shelter from the Prussian shells.
She’d lost him. She paused and listened. Nothing.
Suddenly, she heard a soft sound of movement. Turning, she saw a deeper darkness within that which enveloped her. Then, she felt pain as a knife stabbed into her side.
Somehow, she managed to bring her pistol up and fired, the flash illuminating the man’s features for one ghastly second. She fired again, and heard him fall. He was dead. She dropped her weapon and it vanished into the darkness.
Camille slumped against the wall of the tunnel. She had been hurt more than once, and knew this wound was bad. If she misjudged her route back to the surface, she wasn’t likely to have another chance.
She managed to stagger back to the stairs, letting out a grateful gasp as she felt them beneath her fingers. Pressing her hand into her side in an effort to staunch the blood flow, she pulled herself up the stairs and out into the street.
The sound of the Prussian bombardment and the French counter-battery fire had been muffled almost to silence beneath the street, but out here was quite jarring. The electrical flashes accompanying the firing of the magnetic projectors and aether dischargers coruscated across the smoky clouds that overhung the city like lightning, and the rumble of traditional artillery sounded much like thunder.
With a force of will denied to most, she stumbled through the deserted, snow-frosted streets in search of help. She felt an odd sense of detachment as she went. The thought uppermost in her mind was the hope that her dress could be salvaged—frocks were becoming ever more difficult to replace as the length of the siege continued.
She spotted a gendarme and called out for help as she collapsed to the cobblestones.
He ran over to her, and she managed to gasp out who she was and what had happened. “Colonel Durand will vouch for me. I need a surgeon.”
That was how she came to find herself in the makeshift hospital occupying one wing of the Academie Imperiale de Musique, waiting for her liaison officer.
“I’m grateful to be alive,” she told him when he finally arrived. Unfortunately, as much as her body felt like lead, Durand had no intention of letting her rest.
* * *
Dressed in a gray, washed-out gown supplied by a nurse, and a shawl across her shoulders to protect her from the chill, Camille crept through the wards. All the other patients were asleep, an
d there was only a skeleton staff in place. A derringer was concealed in the small clutch-purse she carried in one hand; in the other, she held a candle.
“While you’re here,” Durand had said, “perhaps you could investigate a little mystery for me.”
She had sighed, but nodded and asked what it was.
“Soldiers—five, so far—have been declared dead after being admitted here, but their bodies have disappeared.”
“They were definitely dead?”
“They were declared so. It’s possible the doctors were mistaken, or that they’re collaborating with them or someone else to fake their deaths. But, according to the records, and the sworn testimony of the doctors, their cadavers were transported to the morgue. However, they were never autopsied and, when a curious surgeon checked, their bodies were nowhere to be found.”
She agreed to investigate, secretly fascinated.
Durand probably imagined it was ghouls. He blamed them for anything out of the usual. Of course, it wasn’t unknown for bodies to go missing amidst the chaos of war, perhaps obliterated by a shell-burst or abandoned during a retreat, but it was not usual for them to disappear from the morgue after being registered in, even one as makeshift as the one here.
The mortician in charge of the morgue had been brusque and unhelpful. She briefly wondered if he were involved—she had no love for the species of man—but decided he was merely unwilling to admit that anything untoward had happened on his watch. She supposed she couldn’t entirely blame him, even if the lack of cooperation made her job more difficult.
Although removing a body through the entrance hardly seemed a challenge, she decided it was a little too obvious. After the first couple of bodies had gone, surely people would have been more observant, making the thief’s task more difficult.
Instead, she decided to search for concealed entrances. She had heard rumours the building was honeycombed with them, some intended for behind-the-scenes work, and others part of the necessary drainage for the waterlogged site.
Camille examined every inch of ice-cold stonework in the empty morgue—she could see why the chamber had been chosen for the purpose—until she let out a gasp of success. Finding where the mortician kept the tools of his trade, she fetched a scalpel, and worked it into the gap between two of the large stones.
All the other blocks fit tightly together. She ran her hands over the nearby stones until she heard the distinct sound of a click, and one of the blocks moved out a fraction from the wall.
Only two inches thick, and clearly counterbalanced, it was easy for her to swing the block out, revealing a passageway just large enough to wheel a trolley with a body through.
She slipped the knife into her purse and withdrew the derringer, then stepped into the passageway, the flickering light of the candle serving less to illuminate than to cast ghastly shadows about. It reminded her a great deal of the catacombs. Camille hoped she wasn’t developing an irrational fear of enclosed spaces.
The passageway sloped downward, a trickle of water running beside her. Ahead of her, she could see the glow of electric light.
Camille slowed her pace, approaching cautiously. She stopped where the passage opened out into a chamber with two other exits that had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory. There was a surgeon’s operating table and various pieces of mechanical equipment she could only guess at stacked in three of the corners. In a fourth, were the butchered remains of several men.
It seemed she had located the stolen bodies.
From one of the other archways stepped the mortician she’d spoken to earlier. It seemed she’d been right to suspect him, after all.
Camille stepped out of the passageway, and pointed the derringer at him, dropping her bag to better aim it. She said firmly, “I am placing you under arrest.”
The man let out a squawk of surprise. “I—I—” he stuttered, stunned for a moment. Then, he grabbed for a knife from the nearby operating table.
Camille shot him in the shoulder. The shot cracked like thunder in the small room. The mortician stumbled backwards, slumping against the wall. Given the small calibre of the pistol, the shot probably wouldn’t kill him. He lay there groaning.
Movement caught her attention and she saw something large disappearing into the shadows of the remaining exit. Quickly turning, and hoping the mortician would take time to recover, she ran after the shape.
The chase took her through a maze of passageways. The candle flame barely remained alight as she ran and she could hardly see where she was going, let alone what she was pursuing through the darkness of the opera house. All she could say for certain was that it was large, and seemed more mechanical than biological. What perversion of nature had the man created?
Then, it burst through a hidden door into a wider, more public corridor where lanterns were hung in lieu of gaslight and she saw it clearly as it paused and glanced back at her. It crouched on all-fours like a beast, but appeared to be composed of metal, with twin smokestacks rising from its back—yet the head that glared back towards her was that of a man, pallid-faced and waxy.
Camille felt a wave of nausea rise through her as she guessed something of what the mortician had been seeking to achieve.
She raised her derringer to fire, but the creature was already bounding away with an alacrity belied by its size. She fired, but it had disappeared into a stairwell.
Pausing only to reload, she ran after it. The creature was heading upwards. What was it thinking? Was it even capable of thinking?
Camille lost sight of it, but there was nowhere for it to have gone but up. She reached the top of the stairs and stepped through a doorway onto the narrow catwalk that circled the upper reaches of the dome. She began to advance cautiously along it, but that was when the great iron foot of the creature lashed out from the shadows and sent her flying to dangle precariously above the auditorium.
Somehow, she managed to clamber back onto the walkway. She was starting to feel faint and could only hope that not too many stitches had broken.
She had no idea where the monster had gone—there were several exits from the walkway. She went through the nearest, imagining she could smell the stink of smoke. This archway led into the ceiling space of the opera house.
She felt very vulnerable. She was weakened by loss of blood, she had no weapon, and no light. All she could do was pick her way carefully along the support beams and not misstep onto the thin plaster in-between.
Suddenly, she heard movement ahead of her. She moved faster. There was a dim circle of light ahead, a window through which she could see the aurora borealis discharge of the city’s defences. Perhaps the entity intended to escape that way, or perhaps there was some other exit it was headed for. Perhaps it had no plan at all, for she doubted its brain lived in any human sense.
She pursued it, not knowing what she would do if she actually caught it.
It stopped, partially blocking the circle of wavering green-blue coronae. It turned toward her. She stopped as well.
For a moment, they were both still, the slight wheeze of steam escaping from somewhere being the only sound. Then, it sprang—
Camille threw herself sideways, praying she’d not misjudged the space between the support beams. The beast crashed down upon a beam, its weight too great for the wood to bear and plunged downwards in a shower of wood and plaster.
She crawled over to the hole and looked down to see the creature lying on the floor of an unfinished box below. As she watched, it stumbled back onto its feet. One of its forelimbs was limp, obviously having borne the brunt of the fall. To her surprise, it contorted itself so that it stood upright on two legs. It was like observing some sort of mechanical werewolf.
It staggered from the box into the neighboring corridor. She wished she could just let it go, but focused herself and jumped down into the box below. The jolt sent a wave of pain through her body and she vomited.
She couldn’t keep this up much longer.
Camille ran o
ut after it. There was only one thing she could think to do—she screamed for help.
There should be guards and, when they heard a woman shriek for help, they were certain to come running. The chauvinistic attitude of the average Frenchman could be annoying, but right now, she could use it to her advantage.
They did come running, although the sight of the bizarre clanking, smoking monstrosity stunned them, and the first two were tossed aside before they could react. The next two opened fire with their rifles, but were forced to leap aside as it stormed towards them.
Camille grabbed the gun from one of them, halted, and took aim. The average soldier, trained to fire a volley with his fellows at an enemy regiment, was seldom much of a marksman, but she had spent time training and could hit a centime at fifty metres.
She fired, and the bullet struck one of the leg pistons. There was a sudden, explosive hiss and the leg sagged, causing it to stumble. She aimed again, hitting the other leg. It turned and roared in inhuman anger at her.
Camille winced at the tortured expression on its face, then aimed the rifle and put a bullet straight between its eyes, then a second for good measure.
The beast spasmed, then collapsed.
Camille approached it cautiously, uncertain whether it could so easily be killed. As she neared it, it suddenly lunged towards her, forcing her to leap back.
More guards had arrived now, and they opened fire at the sudden movement, but—while the panicked fusillade doubtless did some damage—most of the bullets, she knew, would miss anything vital.
As it gave another spasm and tried to crawl towards her, she breathed deeply to bring her panic and wooziness under control and took aim one final time. The bullet tore through the flesh of its neck, ripping away several connecting tubes in a spray of bile and steam.
The creature collapsed.
She stepped cautiously towards it. It remained still. She took another step and nudged it with her toe—nothing.