by Unknown
I tugged at the handle.
The door held.
“What now?” I muttered. Must be frozen shut. Or rusty. I kicked at it a few times to dislodge the ice and tried again.
The door held.
“Can’t go.”
I spun at the sound of the girl’s voice. The car was dark, the gaslight on the floor next to me. I picked it up and looked around. Nothing. I was alone.
I closed my eyes and exhaled—tried to slow my pulse. It was the cold. Had to be. It was getting to me.
My head almost jerked into the wall of the car as a flood of memories flashed into my mind, hitting me as if they’d been forced in by someone on the outside.
You’re drunk. Leave that stuff alone, Gabe!
Back off, Anna. I’m going out. Need some air.
The gaslight was broken. Leaking. I’d used it to catch myself from falling. No one knew.
Anna lit a match to start a fire in the fireplace. Explosion. Thrown from the house. Loud, hurt my ears. Anna inside.
Gone.
I shook my head, slumped back again. Anna. I hadn’t thought about her since the accident. I felt the familiar lump in my throat almost take away the pressure on my neck and shoulders.
It had been an accident. I couldn’t have stopped it. Not after drinking absinthe. That vile poison had had me.
It had killed Anna.
“It’s just booze,” Morton had said to me once. “Rest easy, Pinehurst.”
“Rest easy,” I said to myself, more to slow my racing heart than anything. Ghost girls and whispering clockwork birds. It was almost as if I’d overdosed again.
You killed someone last time. The thought was involuntary. Someone you actually loved.
“Shut up,” I said in a low voice.
Someone pounded on the door to the car.
“Pinehurst!” It was Morton. He pounded on the car again. “Open the door! Let’s go!”
“I can’t,” I called out. “I think it’s frozen. Can you see from your side?”
There was the sound of rustling outside, a few voices back and forth. Had he talked the captain into flying closer? I moved to the door and tried it again. Nothing.
“Quit yanking on the door,” Morton called out. “You’re right, it’s frozen shut. Hang on.”
I stepped back as I heard some scratching and scraping from the outside. Someone hammered on the latch a few times. The sound of breaking ice followed. I stole a quick glance around me, made sure I had everything in order. Mostly in case Morton tried to pop in and shaft me on the salvage.
“Okay, try it now!” he called out to me. “Everyone ready?”
I grabbed the handle.
“Go!” I called out.
The door moved, the sound of metal on metal loud as the door slid to the side. I let go, picked up the gas lamp, and moved to the opening, ready to stop Morton from boarding.
The outside was black as pitch. I raised the gas lamp and held it out in front of me. Nothing.
“You’ll have to jump,” Morton said from the dark. I rolled my eyes, bent my knees, and pushed off in a short hop, ready to hit the ground.
The landing was more sudden than I’d anticipated, and I staggered. The sound of my boots hitting the floor instead of snow was jolting, the impact of the landing far too quick. I looked around. Luggage was strewn about, crates and suitcases open. A small box sat on top of one of the larger crates.
Not yours.
I spun, trying to figure out how I’d gotten turned around, confused. The sliding car door was closed, the latch in place. The plate I’d shot up was on the wall off to the side, as if it were laughing at me: Salvage Claim No. 68664, Gabriel Pinehurst.
“What the hell?” I said, my voice trailing off at the end.
“Are you a bad man?”
The girl’s voice made my blood run cold. I looked past the luggage and saw her in the back corner, staring at me with her good eye, the other a dark pit with a faint blue light at the end.
“She said you were a bad man,” the girl said. “Said that’s why you forgot me. Put me away. That’s why you can’t leave. She won’t let you leave.”
“Who?” I asked, rubbing my neck as the tightness grew. My shoulders began to ache worse. The stress, being closed in, it was all starting to get to me.
The girl smiled, her charred lips splitting.
A broken gaslight. Had I done that?
The fire was pretty. Anna’s beautiful dark olive skin burning away.
Save her. Save my little girl.
No, can’t. Can’t forgive.
Absinthe.
Absinthe?
Something wrapped around my chest from over my shoulders, made it harder to breathe. A whisper in my ear.
“Gracie,” the voice said. “Her name is Gracie.”
I shook my head, tried to remove the goggles from around my neck. They were heavy. Too heavy. Couldn’t take them off. Caught on something.
“He told you to throw it away,” the girl said. “You wrote Uncle off as a loon. Silly daddy.”
Daddy? Throw what away? Uncle?
My spine felt like it would buckle under the weight, my hand shaking as I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the compass. The needle was spinning so fast I couldn’t make out what end was what.
I’d kept it. Why’d I keep it?
“It’ll be a piece of trash once you get to the train, lad,” the captain had said. “Trust it not, lest yer soul be of little worth.”
I’d said something back. The memory came back to me. Christ.
“It’s a compass,” I said. “How the hell do I get back without a damn compass?”
“Listen to my words, boy,” the captain said, his eyes wide with warning. “Throw that compass away before ye board that hellish wreck.”
I threw the compass away now, the sound of it hitting the floor and rattling around loud in the winter silence.
I tried the lever on the door again. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge.
Where the hell was Morton? I had to have been gone too long. It was Salvage Code. A man is gone beyond the set schedule and he’s supposed to be rescued. That was the bloody rule! Where was he?!
My breaths were quick, my heart pounding. Panic was setting in. I didn’t like being closed in. The pressure on my shoulders, on my back, was too much.
Calm down. I needed to calm down. I fought to slow my breathing, slow my pulse. I could get out. I would figure it out. I could leave. I just needed to get it together. That was all.
“Silly man,” the little girl said from across the car. “Can’t leave. Can’t run. Can’t ever run.”
“Let me out of here,” I said, my voice heavy. The weight on my back. God, the weight. Too much. I went down on one knee. Hard to breathe. Neck hurt. Shoulders hurt. God, the pressure.
“Can’t leave,” the girl said again, this time closer. I looked up and saw her standing in front of me, just out of reach. “Bad daddy. Mommy says you don’t know who I am. Said you put me away.”
I stared hard at her.
She looked just above me, nodded. “Tell him,” she said.
Someone whispered in my ear.
“She’s your daughter, Gabe.”
Anna’s voice. So close. So soft, yet so full of hatred. I could almost feel her lips on my ear as she spoke. “She was asleep in the back room, you bastard. I wanted to tell you, tried to tell you. You and your damned absinthe. You always blamed that drink for what you did every time you drank it.”
She shifted on my back, squeezing my hips and stomach with her legs. I looked down and saw her dark olive legs wrapped around my middle, saw her arms wrapped around my shoulders. She hadn’t been a large woman. She’d never been heavy.
Not before.
“You forgot,” she said. “You made yourself forget. Trained your mind to never think back. You bought Gracie that clockwork bird the night you burned us.”
“It was an accident,” I said, feeling my arms straining to hold me
off the floor. The memory of the night came back, forced into my mind like a piston locked into an engine.
Gaslamp. I knocked it over. Gracie’s screams. Fire. I ran. Save my own skin. Too hot. Afraid. Coward. Anna screaming it at me. Coward. Damned drunk.
Damned drunk coward!
“One that wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed away from that drink,” Anna snarled in my ear. “Had thought of your family and not just your own skin.”
My arms gave. I hit the floor. I could hear the whirring of the clockwork bird as it flew around the car. Gracie stood over me, knelt down, and put her face close to mine.
“I love it, Daddy,” she said, smiling, her lips splitting again. “It reminds me of you. Uncle would’ve liked it.”
“Uncle” again? No. Anna had been an only child. Hadn’t she?
The air. So thin. So little of it. My ribs fighting my lungs, not wanting to expand. Anna squeezed me again.
“Been here since, Gabe,” she said. “With you. On you. Your burden. You ignored me for two years. Now you can’t.”
My vision blurred. Couldn’t breathe. So tired.
So tired.
* * *
Morton gazed over the railing of the airship in the direction Gabe had gone. It’d been a while, but it wasn’t important. It wasn’t as if the Salvage Union even knew that they were there.
“It’s cruel, even for that one,” the captain said from behind him. “Sendin’ a man into that horrid place alone. Cursed, it is. A suffering no man deserves, be he bastard or otherwise.”
“I’m just surprised you actually believed in the legend.” Morton said.
The captain looked out over the dark trees, glad he couldn’t see the train from this distance.
“A train that makes ye face yer sin,” he said in a low voice. “Makes ye pay the price for it. Owns you. Nothin’ outside of yer own Hell is yours. I live in the air, Mr. Morton. The skies are ruled by tales and superstition. Why wouldn’t I know about such a thing?”
Morton turned to him and smiled.
“You wanted your brother-in-law to suffer, I made it happen,” he said. “It’s what you paid me for.”
The captain sighed. He’d never met Gabriel Pinehurst before tonight, hadn’t seen his sister in years or spoken to her, other than in telegrams. The life of an airship captain didn’t always allow for such things. But the news of his sister’s death hadn’t escaped his ears, nor did the details of how she and his poor niece had perished. Gabriel Pinehurst got what he deserved.
The captain had enough demons of his own to stay far away from that evil Express. Pinehurst was just one more to add to the list. No regrets, though running him through would’ve been easier.
“He be dead by now,” the captain said, turning away. “And our souls be darker for it.”
“Then let’s be off,” said Morton. “Get the dirigible ready and move quickly. I’ll need time to wipe his records. Too many questions might lead back to us. Wouldn’t want that, now would we?”
Honeymoon in a Jar
Robert Perret
The sun warming Bernard’s face felt much the same as Madeline’s hand, entwined in his. Her hair still seemed to smell of the countryside—wild flowers and fresh air—despite the clattering of cobblestones beneath the carriage’s wheels. Her cheeks were flushed, and she had not stopped smiling since he had produced the ring from the picnic basket and proposed.
She had dropped the wine bottle, red tracing out through the threads of the blanket beneath them. Neither had cared. In that moment, the universe had spun solely around them.
She pressed close against him in the carriage now, her lips grazing against his neck as she whispered in his ear. She had been waiting for this day. She had plans, for how to tell her parents, her friends. Where to hold the wedding, what she would wear. Where they would live, how she would decorate. Her life had been pent up for years under the strict rule of her father, but now that she was to be married, all of her hopes and dreams came gushing from her lips, and she poured them in his ear.
He liked the feel of her body, pressed up against his arm, the caress of her breath raising the little hairs all along his side. He turned towards her to steal a kiss, when—with a great crash—the whole carriage was tossed over.
The scent of the countryside was gone now. For a moment he smelled the wet filth of the pavement, and then he felt his nose fill with the thick syrup of blood. He opened his mouth to gasp for air and tasted blood as well as slow rivulets dripped down his face. He shoved himself to his knees, his shoulder buckling twice and his head throbbing, feeling as if everything was moving a second too slow. He looked about him and saw a crowd gathered, pointing, jostling, their mouths moving but, Bernard realized, he could hear no sound. Just a watery pulse obscuring everything else.
“Madeline!” he cried, wrenching himself up to stand on unsteady legs. Two men moved forward from the crowd and gently attempted to ease Bernard back down again. He shrugged them away, and began to stagger around the wreck. The men now seized his arms and pulled back hard.
Bernard strained against them, finally slipping his coat to break free. The ground seemed to heave beneath him like great waves as he passed the rear wheels of the carriage, now pointed uselessly up at the sky. A tight knot of people gathered around something on the cobblestones on this side of the carriage, crouching down in a huddle.
Bernard saw Madeline's shoe lying on its side in the street. His eyes traveled up to find her foot, ankle, and calf stretched out on the street between the gawkers. He staggered towards the group, shouting “Let me see!”
The ladies covered their faces, the men would not meet his gaze. He pried the group apart and looked down…
With a start Bernard awoke to an insistent buzzing. Madeline, his fiancée, was calling for him. He sat up on his cot and rubbed his head, wondering again why his subconscious mind played such a cruel trick on him every night.
Somehow, he was blindsided anew by the tragedy each time. He pulled himself up with his cane, propped by his bedside, and shuffled over to her, quickly checking the gauges and eyeballing the fluid in the jar, for both volume and clarity. Seeing all was as it should be, he gently stroked the glass tank in which her brain was suspended and spoke soothingly to her.
“All is well, my love. I am here, and today is—at last—the day we have been waiting for.”
A sequence of buzzing noises emitted from the base of the jar. Bernard had contrived a magnetic device that responded to the electrical impulses of her brain. He often wished they had prearranged a code for just such a happenstance, but who could have predicted this horrible eventuality?
As it was, Bernard relied on his intuition and his loving knowledge of his fiancée to interpret the binary sound. This morning she expressed a quiet excitement, a reflection of his own emotions.
He turned to admire the product of his labor over these many months. A great brass figure loomed across the room. Bernard had used every ounce of his ingenuity to create an automaton for Madeline, so that she might move and speak once again. In the full sweep of her riveted skirts hid the mechanics of the body, which would be able to move freely across flat surfaces and even minor inclines. Above her waist, her chest splayed open, like an autopsy, or—more aptly, Bernard thought—a vivisection. At the center of a great tangle of rubberized tubing and conductive wiring was nestled a glass box. The metal frame holding the glass panels together crackled with arcane energy, for Bernard had imbued the device with a mystical power to create a magical vortex within which her heart was still beating. He watched it there, through the glass.
It was a symbolic gesture, of course. The love Madeline felt for him was stored chemically, in her brain, not in this dumb muscle, but Bernard had become a driven student of the occult over the previous months.
If anything, he had learned the power of symbolism in magic. Dark, forbidden magic, the kind that allows a man to wrest back his soulmate from a cruel God. Having tied the mystical matrix
to his own soul, her heart would continue to beat for as long as Bernard lived.
Above this tableau rested a lovely, serene face. Sadly, even the most gifted of warlocks had no spell for the animation of a face—each expression needing a thousand miniscule shifts in motion. For that, he would have to fall back onto his engineering skills. But such a complicated mechanism would take a lifetime to create, and he wanted Madeline back to him as soon as possible, so, for the time being, he had crafted a kind of masquerade mask that captured her most serene expression. The one he remembered seeing when she gazed out over the waves, or when they listened to the crickets on a warm summer night.
It was how he imagined her now, could her face be seen as she floated in her jar, free of all worldly concerns and contemplating their reunion.
Madeline buzzed at his back.
“We will speak again, soon, my dear.”
Those who communed with the dead had long known ways of making spirits talk—through mirrors, scrying bowls, mediums and the like. It had been a simple matter to magically imbue the serene mask of the faceplate with the power to conduct Madeline’s speech.
He levered the mask free by pushing gently against the jawline, to reveal a small jar within. He gently kissed the brass lips and set the face aside.
Originally Bernard had placed her in what amounted to an aquarium, as if her brain would be able to swim about. In the automaton, her brain would rest in a jar only slightly larger than the natural skull he had removed it from. The whole contraption was camouflaged by a casing he had artfully crafted to resemble her hair swept up as he had always preferred it.
He turned back to the larger jar. “Everything, both mechanical and magical, is fully charged. The moment for our reunion is at hand, my love.”
He took a pair of great forceps from his workbench and sterilized them in the flame of a Bunsen burner. He then unbolted the top of her jar and reached in carefully with the instrument to pluck her out. Then, quickly, as the precious conductive fluid dripped from her brain, he turned and attempted to fit it through the smaller opening of the automaton’s glass skull.