Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Go, go, go!” Blackpool realized Hexam had found the decagonal trapezohedron in the shrine – and that he had risked his life to retrieve it. “Get back to the church ruins and take off, quickly. I’ll try to hold them here for a few minutes.”

  Cuttle grasped Finching’s hand and led her back toward the d’Amécourt Aerial Screw vehicles. Hexam, however, ignored Blackpool’s command. Instead, he took up a defensive position beside him near the top of the mound.

  “Let them reach the creek,” Hexam said. “I have an idea. Find a spot where you cannot be spotted. Signal me when they start to cross. Then, count off each one that enters the water.”

  “I hope you know what you are doing, man from another world.”

  The two men dropped a few inches below the top of the mound, giving the Deep Ones time to reach the water’s edge. Blackpool flanked the rise, positioning himself in a dense thicket of black holly. He waved an arm when the first few Deep Ones plodded into the slough…counted each that followed blindly, one, two, three…

  Hexam fired his Savannah Shredder at the noxious carven statue atop the bronze pillar, sending a searing bolt of electricity into its monstrous visage. The energy instantly traveled down the length of the support, electrifying the saturated base of the shrine and the adjoining waters. A dozen Deep Ones caught transiting the tributary quivered with ghastly anguish, blistering pain engulfing their scaly hides. A few simply dropped into the water, doubling over from the scorching agony. Those standing closest to the iron pillar fared worst: The electricity interacted with their headgear. The helmets flickered with an intense luminosity before erupting with horrid green flames.

  “Nice work,” Blackpool smiled. “That will give the rest of them pause, I would think.”

  “Enough time to get back to your flying machines, I hope.”

  “Perhaps,” Blackpool said. “What causes me greater concern is whether or not we will be able to return to Charleston.” Only then did the somber revelation occur to both men. “Time has run out.”

  ***

  Few words were spoken on the long ride back to Charleston.

  Along the coastline, skirmishes had broken out at the first trace of dusk. The full-scale invasion had not yet begun, but the Deep Ones worked meticulously to test the potency of the Atlantic Seaboard Defense Initiative. As Finching piloted the d’Amécourt Aerial Screw, Hexam witnessed one such raid as it played out far below along a sandy shore. Four leviathans crawled up the continental shelf, out of the Atlantic and onto the coastal plain. Their alabaster bodies burdened by heavy armor, these mysterious creatures of the deep boasted two pairs of antennae, seven pairs of pereiopods as well as four pairs of tentacles – one pair for each set of jaws.

  Dorso-ventrally compressed, the colossal beasts reminded Hexam in outline of a common woodlouse. Their immensity proved most alarming: Hexam judged their length at perhaps five times that of the largest seafaring vessel he had ever seen.

  Teleforce cannons positioned at watchtowers to the north and south targeted the lead leviathan, each expelling a narrow stream of energy. As the beams struck the monster, its armor plating buckled but did not fracture. With the second barrage, the beams of the two cannons converged, shattered the armor and piercing the leviathan’s segmented, calcareous exoskeleton.

  The beast swelled until it burst, its death an eruption of blue-green gore, fallow-colored pus and chunks of armor and shell.

  The next leviathan curled up into a ball as it reached the shore, hurling itself headlong at the ramparts. Because of its speed, the teleforce cannons had difficulty targeting it. With only the toughest portions of its armor exposed, the drifting beams did little damage. When the leviathan struck the defensive wall, it toppled. Its failure sent the Juggernauts into action.

  Half a dozen giant, automated soldiers surrounded the leviathan, blasting it relentlessly with plasma weapons. One deployed a telescoping pole weapon – a medieval-looking pike which the automaton used first to skewer the leviathan, then to electrocute it.

  The battle raged on as Hexam and Finching passed, legions of Deep Ones spilling ashore and racing toward the wall. Though the teleforce cannons took their toll on the advancing troops, their numbers suggested the beachhead would soon be overrun.

  “So it begins,” Finching said. Overhead, patches of twilight shone through the clouds. “There will be much suffering tonight, Mr. Hexam. I hope we are able to remove you from the unfolding nightmare.”

  “What of your allies? Will they stand with you as part of the Tartarus Campaign?”

  “Their armies will join in the fray at several major metropolitan centers – New York City, Boston, Southport, Savannah, Jacksonville and Charleston,” Finching said. “But their primary contribution will play out in the depths of the Atlantic. The Deep Ones have left their own cities largely unguarded. Great chthonic fire serpents and their wyvern handlers will be unleashed upon Y’ha-nthlei, K’ouh-zctoe, Ahu-Y’hloa, R’bhr-taloun and G’ll-Hoo.” She paused, reflecting upon the cataclysm that had been contrived in desperation. “Tonight, the face of the earth will be altered.”

  In Charleston, the factories had been silenced. Above the city, the smothering black haze dispersed and long-hidden stars reappeared. None of the city’s inhabitants petitioned the glimmering orbs to grant wishes on this night: Most of them had fled, retreating west toward the Appalachian Mountains.

  Having set down near the abandoned market square, Josiah Blackpool led Noah Cuttle, Fanny Finching and Caleb Hexam down the shadowed streets beneath streetlamps aglow with the ruddiness of pallid aetheric orbs. Less than a mile to the east, three armies met at the Battery, where the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers came together to form Charleston Harbor. While still airborne, Hexam had gotten his first and only glimpse of the squid-headed under-dwellers bound by treaty to the Atlantic Seaboard Defense Initiative.

  These entities, the Gobi Death Worms of Mongolian legends, boasted eight tentacles organized in pairs as well as two conspicuously longer tentacles punctuated with razor-sharp spikes. Their luminescent bodies were worm-like segmented affairs with fleshy protrusions used for movement. Venomous bristles covered the parapodia.

  These unsightly lithotrophs joined the Juggernaut automatons defending the city against the leviathans and their masters.

  “Our audacity proved to be our downfall,” Finching said as they moved swiftly down Meeting Street. “We toyed with forces of nature as though they were the playthings of a child.”

  “The insatiable curiosity of our race is both a blessing and a curse,” Hexam said. “Instinctive inquisitiveness and lust for wisdom may have hastened this holocaust, but I think something greater is at work here.” Hexam knew this world had been corrupted by some external force working through Khunrath’s “spheres of being.” “I hope the infection does not spread to the world I call home.”

  “‘We are nothings before the least of these stars,’” Finching said, quoting a poet whose name she could not recall. “I hope the scientists on your world proceed with caution as they explore the mysteries of the cosmos – or else I hope that they simply lack the impetus to ask the questions that lead to forbidden knowledge.”

  In a secret chamber beneath the Legger’s Den, Blackpool had squirreled away Duke Silas Finching’s model of the Khunrath Contrivance.

  Hexam recognized it immediately: the hodgepodge coupling of clockwork gears and pressure gauges, metered dials and tuning forks, polished mirrors and lamps. Etched upon the floor were dozens of circles, each labeled in Latin. Multicolored lines crisscrossed the intricate diagram.

  As Blackpool discarded the gemstone at the apex of the apparatus and replaced it with the decagonal trapezohedron, Hexam positioned himself upon the same circle he had stood upon on his world, in Silas Finching’s conservatory – hoping the placement of portals was reciprocal in nature.

  “You are coming with me,” he said, beckoning Fanny Finching. “I will not allow you to refuse me.”

  “I will do as
I please,” Finching said. “I have an obligation…”

  “You should go Ms. Finching,” Blackpool said. “Charleston will be buried beneath the flood once the Tartarus Campaign begins. The continent will be transformed by morning – the coastal cities submerged and an inland sea inaccessible to the Deep Ones created. The same process will fortify the Pacific Coastline. A new country will be born, the last redoubt of humanity.”

  As Blackpool explained the imminent upheaval, the ground beneath them began rumbling. As bits of brick dislodged themselves from the ceiling, threatening to destroy the Khunrath Contrivance, Noah Cuttle acted. He grabbed Finching about her waist and dragged her onto the floor, placing her directly next to Hexam.

  “Now,” Cuttle shouted, and a flash of brilliant light filled the room.

  8.

  Dwight Hexam and Fanny Finching arrived in Charleston, South Carolina on August 31, 1886, 9:50 p.m.

  Within seconds, they felt the ground pitch violently beneath their feet. For a moment, they feared that the apparatus had failed to transport them across the threshold of parallel worlds. Scanning their surroundings, they realized that they no longer stood in the chamber beneath the Legger’s Den. Instead, they found themselves in an open courtyard encircled by a garden. Falling tiles from a nearby rooftop startled them, and Hexam quickly escorted Finching to the center of the yard where they waited out the earthquake.

  The ground continued shaking for nearly a minute.

  “Is it over?” Finching had thrown her arms about Hexam involuntarily. “Is that the end of it?”

  “I think so,” Hexam said. Church bells tolled and terrified residents streamed out of their damaged homes, some venting screams, others voicing prayers. “An echo, perhaps – a ripple scattered across countless parallel worlds.”

  “I should have been there. I should have died with Noah and Josiah.”

  “Too many sacrificed themselves,” Hexam said. “Besides, your friends may have used the Khunrath Contrivance to travel to other worlds. We may even see them some day.”

  “And what will I do in your world? I have no acquaintances here except you.”

  “You will do as you please, I suspect,” Hexam said. “For now, I thought you might wish to go see Silas Finching. You may not be his own, but I know him well enough to know he will treat you as such.”

  “I do not think his daughter will welcome me so enthusiastically,” she said. “I would not take kindly to a doppelganger showing up on my doorstep.”

  “His daughter,” Hexam said, wavering as he looked into her eyes. “His Fanny died five years ago, a victim of a cholera outbreak. She was my wife.”

  The Promised Messiah

  By DJ Tyrer

  Ihad, of course, heard of Gerald Glasby; everyone in the Society for Psychical Research had, Glasby being a prominent exponent of belief in the afterlife. Thus it was that I was a little surprised to find his name linked with a much more prosaic, if that is not an oxymoron, avenue of scientific endeavor: the creation of a mechanical poet. According to the article, he had invented a machine capable of selecting words and putting them together to form poems of surprising exquisiteness. The device, described as a box-like construction with dials upon it that, with the slit through which the poems were released, gave the impression of a crude face, was causing quite a stir. As a novelty, this poetic wonder had, of course, excited the imagination of the people who would queue for an hour and pay sixpence to see it, pull a lever and receive a poem. But, there were other, deeper, questions that the machine raised. Unless it were but a hoax, vomiting forth previously written pieces, or a limited arrangement of words on wheels, without real meaning, one was forced to ask if it represented reason in some form.

  Such was the discussion at the Club when I dined there the following day. I had not attended in a while, my finances being distressingly limited, my father having chosen to live just long enough to see Death Duties introduced before dying and leaving me with a tiny inheritance that could not cope with my favored lifestyle. I was seriously considering leaving London and starting a new life in Rhodesia. As it was, I was behaving rather unsociably. But, Randolph St. Leger had issued an invitation—I think he had been acting unsociably in his own right, only for entirely different reasons, and this was his opportunity to test the waters. Randolph had become reclusive during Wilde’s trial and had not been seen since his friend’s conviction several weeks before. Of course, we all knew about his predilections, as we had with Oscar, so there was little surprise that he should choose to lie low.

  Besides his illegal interests, Randolph was also fascinated by psychic phenomena and was another avid member of the SPR and of the Ghost Club that overlapped membership with it. Probably that was what had drawn him out from his solitude. It was that shared interest that had brought us together, he and I moving in different circles much of the time.

  Randolph had already ordered when I arrived, but I didn’t mind as he had impeccable taste. Conan Doyle was there, as was Doctor Govan, both of them, likewise, members of the SPR and Ghost Club. The three of them were in earnest discussion, with Glasby’s poetry machine the topic of conversation. Govan was convinced that it was a fraud, just the random turning of cogwheels; that the poems it produced were in that peculiarly brief form recently adapted from the Japanese form known as the Hokku did little to enhance the alternate view, as held by Randolph, who seemed certain that the machine could think. Conan Doyle was uncommitted, certain that it was mere trick, but unwilling to commit himself as to how much of a marvel the machine might actually be.

  I listened with interest, but, not having seen the machine myself, could offer no hard opinion upon it. To me, it seemed impossible that a machine might think as a man might think, yet what is a man but an organic machine? And, if we allow for some numinous quality that animates said fleshy machine, a spirit or soul, can we say for certain that it cannot find habitation in other forms? Was it possible that Glasby had, somehow, achieved the miracle of marrying matter and spirit without recourse to human flesh? It would, indeed, be amazing if true.

  “You really must see it,” Randolph kept telling me, “you really must, it is amazing.”

  Although I had only been mildly enthused by the newspaper coverage, his excitement and the strength of feeling it aroused in debate —others not actually part of our conversation, overhearing what was being discussed, were inspired to offer their own impressions and opinions on the curious contraption—served to encourage within me a definite urge to see it for myself.

  Thus it was, late in the afternoon, that I made my way to the house that Glasby had rented to display the machine. A long queue stretched along the pavement and around the corner and I dutifully took my place at its end and slowly shuffled forwards with it towards that which we all desired to see.

  At last, I presented my sixpence to a doorman clad in a rather worn brown overcoat and battered bowler, and was allowed inside, being directed into a rear room by a harassed-seeming maid whom I suspected had been on her feet all day just repeating the words “through here” ad nauseum. The doors did not close till eight, but there was obviously a lull at this time of day, there being only a handful of people behind me rather than the earlier lengthy queue. I was rather glad of that fact; having an impatient line behind me would make the whole experiment rushed and I wanted to have at least a few moments to study the machine.

  The description that I had read in the newspaper was quite accurate. The machine was like a box or cabinet, about five feet in height, made of dark mahogany with trimmings in shining brass. A pair of dials sat above and either side of a short lever, below which was a brass-bordered slit, forming the distinct impression of a face, like the crude sketches children produce. A card sign atop it instructed users not to turn the dials.

  As I looked it over, I saw that there was a symbol picked out in yellow atop it, like a swastika, partially concealed by the sign. I seemed to recall Glasby wearing a symbol like it on a ring, so I presumed it was
intended as an owner’s mark, although I may have been mistaken.

  Obeying, albeit a little reluctantly, the sign, I reached out and pulled the lever downwards. It moved smoothly and there was a soft whirl of unseen wheels from within the case, before a rectangle of thin card slipped out from between the brass lips of the slit for me to take. I plucked it and, stepping aside so that the next person might access it, looked at it:

  ‘Yellow leaves falling,’ I read,

  ‘Autumn beside the cloud sea,

  ‘Silence is golden.’

  It had a certain quality, I supposed, not having much familiarity with the novel verse form. Succinct, certainly. Yet it seemed thrown together, artificial. I could accept it was the product, merely, of rotating cogs, meaningless. But, those few Hokku I had seen had a similar artificiality, as if the translation from orient to occident had not quite succeeded in crossing from one language to another. Still, if it was all but illusion, Glasby had achieved a fine one, for it was no garbled nonsense.

  “So, what do you think of it?” A sudden voice in my ear startled me, making me jump.

  Turning, I found Glasby standing there, short and a little overweight, his hairline receding, his eyes reminiscent of poached eggs. He had always had a jovial sort of personality, but I had always found him a little unnerving—all the more so when he popped up like this, seemingly from out of nowhere.

  “Well, James?” he prompted as I stared at him, momentarily slack-jawed.

  “Um, well, it is interesting,” I said. “I am not exactly a connoisseur of poetry, but it seems to scan to me. If it is more than the mere turning of cogs, then it opens whole new vistas of possibility.”

  Glasby seemed pleased at my response—if I had to guess, I would have said that the response from the erudite people he hoped to impress, as opposed to the credulous crowds, had largely been negative in tone. He seemed to preen a little.