Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Bowen was of a sort who found that impossible. Brass’ mind, like his body, had become an engine of precision. Metaphorical filing drawers slid open, disgorging tattered information as he rode. Bowen had been an archaeologist in the Forties. He’d found something in the Valley of the Kings and brought it back, founding the Church of the Starry Wisdom. That something had been confiscated by the Federal government in the wake of the Civil War after certain individuals associated with certain groups had attempted to use Bowen’s property to do something unpleasant. Bowen had slipped through the cracks during the Martian War, and in the years following the fall of the last tripod and the laying of the first rails on Mars, he had vanished, but not alone.

  The foolishness with the microbes had been Buntline’s idea, he and Fort and the other men charged with writing the war as it happened. Of sanitizing what happened after the fact. The Mi-Go had no fear of earthly germs. They had been coming to Earth for centuries, after all. But the story had been told because, as with any war, there had been prisoners; prisoners too valuable to reveal to the general public. The Mi-Go ate their prisoners, or worse. Brass touched his head instinctively, an old tic not quite shed. Sometimes he tried to remember his face, before he had become Brass. As time went on, the details faded. He shook the thought off, the way a horse shakes off a fly.

  Brass couldn’t speak for other countries, but America had eaten her prisoners as well, in a way. The Mi-Go knew things; secret histories promulgated from their crinoids skulls, shaking the foundations set by Newton and Darwin. Those histories were extracted, and alien technologies were reverse-engineered.

  When Bowen escaped Providence, in those final weeks of the war, he had sneaked one of the aliens out from under the noses of the army. The alien had accompanied Bowen in his flight, from Arkham to Charleston, to London and Bradford, and now from Baghdad to… where, and why? Brass had pursued Bowen long enough to know that the archaeologist-turned-occultist was never without a plan. Every place that Bowen had fled had held something that he, or perhaps the alien, had desired, whether it was an ancient temple buried deep in Bradford muck or certain strange machines in a math-professor’s study in Arkham.

  The camel plodded up and down over dunes, the rhythm of its tread akin to the pitch and yaw of a ship on the ocean. Brass felt neither the heat of the day, nor the chill of the night. Men had died in the Rub’ al Khali, even in distant, ancient times when it had been marked by innumerable trade roads, swallowed by the vast expanse of the desert, but Brass was no man.

  In the chill dark of the evening, strange scrawls of weird lightning struck at the distant dunes with ragged regularity. He heard jackals howl and the hum of night-insects, and every sound held a note of fear to it, and of desperation and resignation. The animals knew that something was building in the depths of the desert. Brass had been in Galveston for the Blow, and he’d seen the rats go scurrying for cover hours before the first wave had slopped over the dykes.

  Roads not seen in millennia were uncovered now, rough trails carved by long ago caravans between forgotten cities. Temples to faceless gods were lit again by the fires of sacrifice. In Baghdad, men whispered of ifrits, even as they prepared steel-sheathed war machines to war on their fellow men. The Bedouin feared this ruin, saying it was the home of devils. Brass had the sense that somewhere sand was trickling into the depths of an hourglass as he followed his quarry’s windblown trail. He felt a vibration in his workings, a tug on the wires that made him up, pulling him on.

  Bowen wasn’t alone in trying to take advantage of apocalyptic conditions. There were others, black brotherhoods, esoteric orders and golden temples, as numberless as fleas on a street-cur. Bowen had merely been among the first to throw in his lot with the invaders, and in occupied Providence, members of the Church of the Starry Wisdom had rounded up refugees for their crustacean masters like faithful hounds. When the Mi-Go had faltered and been forced into retreat, Bowen and his congregation had been abandoned. Or so it had seemed at the time, but perhaps not.

  There was a pattern to Bowen’s movements. A pattern to his flight; in his years as a Pinkerton, Brass had chased any number of desperate men, and without exception, they had not simply been running away from something. They had been running to something or somewhere. The question before Brass was whether or not the city was the final destination or merely another port of call.

  That night, the moon turned the color of blood, casting red light across the sands, and Brass thought of Mars and the things he’d done there. He spotted the city a moment later. It bled out of the air like a half-stirred memory. He at first took it for a moon-spun mirage, but as his lenses flexed, spun and focused, he saw it for what it was. It protruded from the night wind-blown sands the way a corpse might protrude from a battlefield grave. If it had a name, it hadn’t been recorded in the books that had burned with his aeroship, and the moonlight caressed the sand-worn stone like the claws of a cat tugging at the body of a bird. The tug, the vibration, grew stronger. Brass knew he had arrived.

  Camels, a dozen or more, stood in the lee of one of the sloping, crumbled walls. A man loitered with them. He was a sentry, or perhaps simply squeamish. The things Bowen did in such places would turn even the strongest stomach. He was clad much the same as Brass. The heat and emptiness had made him lazy, though, and Brass dug his heels into his mount’s flanks and gave a buzzing hiss, urging the beast into a gallop. A gunshot would carry for miles in the emptiness of the desert. There was no reason to alert his quarry before he had to.

  The other camels groaned, startled, as his drew close and the guard stumbled away from the wall. He was a white man, despite his get-up, and he reached for a pistol holstered beneath his arm even as Brass leapt from his camel and tackled him. Bones snapped with finality as Brass’ momentum carried them back against the wall. Ancient stone crumbled, sifting down on Brass as he untangled himself from the body. The man was dead, a victim of Brass’ weight and the force of impact. Brass stepped back and retrieved his rifle from his camel, and then stalked towards a gap in the wall.

  The city beyond the wall bore only tangential resemblance to the cities he was familiar with. The age of it pressed heavily on him as he moved through the seemingly shapeless streets. There were buildings of sorts, and walls that slumped oddly, and spaces where something had once stood. Sand choked every aperture, and there were clear tracks in it despite the night-wind howling through the angles of the city.

  Brass felt neither anticipation nor apprehension as he followed the tracks. Emotion, like memory, was a dull thing in Brass. His thoughts were razor sharp, but the feelings behind those thoughts, the last traces of the man he’d been, were like the sands of the Empty Quarter, sifting through his fingers. Fear, like love, had been burned out of him.

  Under the red moon, Brass followed the tracks to a cliff, from which the squat shapes of columns and buildings sprang like buds from a branch. No guards stood watch, and there was no light. There were tracks aplenty, including the strange hoof-like half-circles that Brass associated with the Mi-Go. In the face of the cliff was an aperture that had all the signs of having been cleared of sand. Brass hefted the rifle and stepped through. As he passed through the aperture, his brass ‘skin’ trembled, and he felt a twitch in the wires that ran from his brain.

  The ceiling was low, mostly due to the sand which had filled the cavern. Strange frescoes and images decorated the walls, and the ceiling had been shaped by tools that Brass, having read enough, knew had been held by no human hands. A foul breeze, carrying the stink of standing water and old stone, emanated from an open portal. It was not a door, because a door implied human design. Brass went through it nonetheless, stopping as he saw the crude, steep stairs sloping down into the darkness. The walls were visible to Brass, whose lens-eyes stored light as well as reflected them. He examined the ornate and vivid mural which stretched down with the stairs, depicting the lizard-folk who, Brass knew, had once ruled this city in those aeons between the fall of the vegetable e
mpire of Pnakotus and the rise of Atlantis.

  A scholar like Warren, or a writer like Fort, would have stopped then, lost in the story the mural told. Brass was neither scholar nor author, and the pictograms held no interest for him. After only a moment’s pause, he started down. The darkness gave way to light, eventually. A light that grew brighter and brighter as he descended, illuminating the fine detail of the stair mural before utterly obliterating it in a visual cacophony. His eyes clicked and spun and rotated, compensating. He felt a hum, vibrating up through the stones, causing the wires and gears of his internal engines to shiver slightly in their casings. It was a deep, low moan that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere.

  Brass stalked forward, limbs clicking, into the luminous abyss. A massive portal of brass, long since turned green with age, sat open and inviting at the bottom of the stairs and the light spilled from it. From within, the sound of human voices rode the light. Brass clutched his rifle and stepped through.

  It might have been a temple, once. Or perhaps it was something more, or less, sacred. It was a shore and beyond it, a sunless sea, lit by creeping phosphorescence. The light came from the water and the smooth rocks and the strange, alien structures which spread out from beyond the portal. Brass did not breathe, but there were devices in him that could taste the raw odor of the place. It was not the same foulness as before, but something wholly alien. It reminded Brass of the acrid air of Mars.

  Columns of unnatural proportion rose towards the roof of the cavern. Most had been broken in some long distant geological shift. The harsh glow threw oddly angled shadows between them, and Brass’ eyes fought to compensate. There were colors in the glow that had no word in an earthly language, and things swam through the light, shapeless and obscene. One drew close to a pillar and abruptly squirmed away. Brass saw a small generator-box with a vacuum tube extending from it set into a crack in the pillar. A Carnacki Sigsand Generator, one of a dozen. If there were demons here, as the Bedouin feared, they would not pass the Carnackis. Someone was taking precautions.

  The voices he’d heard grew louder and then softer as he stepped in between the columns. Everything was distorted, every biological sense his design replicated was under stress. How Bowen and his crew had made their way here, he had no idea. Brass’ fingers dug into the porous stone of one of the columns and he hauled himself up like a mechanical spider. When in doubt, go for the high ground.

  He leapt from one column to the next, internal gyroscopes compensating for the damp and the weaknesses in the rock. As he neared the shore, he slowed. The ruins of the temple gave way, tumbling into oddly-shaped piles. There were men on the shore, and one thing that wasn’t.

  Enoch Bowen stood in the waters of the sea, stripped to the waist, his white hair shining in the weird light. He and his followers wore black lens goggles that made them resemble insects, and the latter were arrayed around a strange oscillating device that was all hoops, gears and spheres, like some sort of orrery. The cultists, dressed much as Brass, carried rifles and pistols. No man went into the Rub’ al Khali unarmed. There were a dozen of them, and they were of all nations. Bristling moustached Turks stood alongside pale New Englanders or tropic-tanned sons of the British Empire.

  Brass sank to a crouch on the top of the shattered pillar, watching as Bowen returned to shore, bright water glistening on his frame. Bowen was old, but he had the body of a man in his thirties. As with Brass, time brushed lightly on Bowen, though for different reasons. Something clad in a loose, ragged robe hop-waddled towards Bowen, and Brass caught a horrid whistling. He recognized the obscene shape of one of the crustaceans.

  It waddled and chattered at Bowen as he stepped past it, raising a hand as if in dismissal. He gazed at the device and rubbed his hands together as if warming them before a fire. Several of his men were seeing to it, fiddling with its workings. Others consulted ancient papyri or watched the glowing sea, as if expecting something to surge from the water at any moment.

  Why had they come here? A moment later, Brass quashed the thought as he recalled the great organic cages in Prospect Terrace Park where men and women and children had been crammed until the Mi-Go could drain them of their fluids and leave them mewling husks. Cages tended by the fanatics below. ‘Why’ didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had them, at long last. Brass took aim with the rifle, and fired. He jerked the bolt automatically, ejecting the spent cartridge. One of the figures staggered, and cried out. Brass reloaded and fired again, causing a second adherent to pitch soundlessly backwards. Two down, ten to go.

  He should have tried to arrest them. He fired again, remembering the cages. Remembering the librarian at Miskatonic, his body ripped apart by alien claws.

  Bowen had spun around at the crack of the first shot. Brass fired again, as the cultists went to ground, hunting for safety among the rocks. Bowen stood before the phosphorescent sea with its chromatic fluctuations, seeking out Brass on his perch. He flung up a hand, and rifles spoke, chewing the pillar. Brass ignored the bits of stone as they pelted his face and hands and made to fire again.

  Something boomed, shaking the cavern with its echo. Brass pitched forward, scooped from his perch by a giant’s fist, the rifle flying from his grip. He hit the ground and skidded, trailing sparks from the rock. As he rolled to a stop, men hurried towards him. Brass rose to his feet awkwardly, his gyroscopic systems out of synch, and drew his pistol, his eyes clicking, trying to compensate for his fall and the light.

  Several men sidled through the pillars, one carrying a heavy Brain-erd-Edison Mortar Rifle. They had been waiting for him. It was a trap. Bullets from rifles clipped him, leaving scratches in his face and hands. The man carrying the BEM hefted it, arms straining. It roared again, and Brass was knocked backwards into a half-collapsed column. The stone cracked and something in him went ‘sproing’ and he raised his pistol, snapping off a shot. A cultist spun, trailing red.

  Brass blinked and stroked the revolver’s hammer, driving three more men to the ground. His automatic targeting system was cracked, the steel cross-hairs snapped off and rattling inside his skull. More shouts. Bedouin rushed him. Steel-shod clubs struck him, battering him sideways. He grabbed a club, letting it slap into his palm. Metal and wood crumpled in his grip as he jerked it from its wielder’s grasp. He snapped off another shot and laid about him with the club, driving his attackers back. Things made noises within him.

  Something screeched and the Bedouin and Bowen’s men drew back, retreating to a safe distance as the Mi-Go stepped forward. Brass dropped the club and clumsily began to reload his revolver, some of his fingers crooking oddly. He felt the vibration again, as he had on the stairs. As if something were building deep in the stones. It clawed at him.

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange eons, even death may die,” Bowen said, stepping past the Mi-Go. “It’s the credo of our church, you know. It means that we are eternal, though only in the metaphysical sense. It’s appropriate in this instance, I think, given your status, automaton.”

  Brass didn’t reply. Bowen grunted. “You’re immortal, I’ve heard. Human ingenuity has a lot to answer for,” Bowen said, his voice carrying with the precision of a preacher or an academic. He was still bare-chested. Tattoos covered his scrawny form, not images but words. Bowen had made himself his own holy testament, with entire passages from various damned texts inked into his flesh. He extracted a cigarette from an ivory case, which he tossed to one of his men and set it between his lips. He struck a match on the orrery and lit the coffin nail, watching Brass through the smoke. “They made quite the monster out of you, didn’t they, Frankenstein and Nikola and that Persian fellow?”

  Brass said nothing. He slapped the cylinder back into place and raised it, aiming at Bowen.

  Bowen flinched slightly. “I’d wager that’s a yes.”

  “Enoch Bowen, you are under arrest, pursuant to strictures of the Reichenbach Convention of 1889. You are charged with high treason, murder-”
/>   Bowen laughed as Brass rattled off the charges. Then, “Aren’t you supposed to read the charges before you begin shooting?”

  “I wanted to get your attention,” Brass rasped.

  “You’ve had that for the longest time, automaton.” Bowen, puffing on his cigarette, pulled a pistol from a dead man’s holster. “Almost a decade, in fact,” he added, glancing at Brass. “In fact, you’ve become quite the annoyance.”

  Brass swung the pistol slightly, as the Mi-Go slumped forward, its robes shifting as its wings vibrated beneath them. Its crab-claws flexed almost eagerly. It made a sound and Bowen nodded, as if he’d understood. “But a fascinating one, we must admit.”

  Brass cocked his revolver. The sound was loud in the quiet. But it wasn’t alone. There was a soft susurrus coming from the strange device. It blended with the vibration, and he felt a tremble in his legs.

  “Not curious at all, are you?” Bowen said a trifle desperately.

  “I don’t get curious,” Brass said, trying to ignore the vibration.

  “No. No, but you do get angry, don’t you?” Bowen said, kicking one of the bodies. “And you’re determined. Dogged, even, I’d say.” The Mi-Go chattered. “Yes, fascinating,” Bowen said, almost irritably. “This was all for you, you know. This last hunt was all to pull you here, to this place.”

  Brass twitched. The vibration plucked at his strings. He looked past Bowen at the orrery and saw that it had sped up. Bowen’s eyes narrowed. He caressed the orrery. “It’s Yithian. The Mi-Go warred with them, back before we were even gleams in the polyps of the Elder Races. They were masters of sixth dimensional movement and organic mathematics. The Mi-Go, on the other hand, are masters of appropriation. They are thieves on a cosmic scale.”

  “And you serve them,” Brass said, trying to focus. The vibration had insinuated invisible talons into his brain-sphere. Was that a voice he heard, or footsteps? Neither?