“I work with them, yes. We both serve the same master,” Bowen said, slipping behind the device. “He is known by a hundred names… the Faceless God, the Howler in the Dark, L’Rog’g, Camazotz and the Crawling Chaos. And his eyes are upon you, automaton.”
“I’m flattered,” Brass grated.
“Oh,” Bowen said, eyes widening. “You have a sense of humor. I always forget that.” He frowned. “You’ll need it, where you’re going.”
“And where am I going?”
Bowen’s smile was tight. “Yuggoth,” he said. As he said the word, something in Brass hummed and he touched his head, suddenly off-balance.
“You feel it, don’t you?” Bowen said, tapping his brow. The orrery was humming. It sounded like a cloud of wasps. “They made that sphere out of tok’l, you know. They mine it on Yuggoth, even as they mined other elements on Mars and on Earth. It conducts thought and need the way metal conducts heat. That’s why they put those lucky few they choose to go with them into canisters crafted from it. My friend here-” he gestured to the Mi-Go, “-told me that you were among the first in this century chosen. They would have shown you wonders, Brass, wonders and horrors undreamt of by man. Now you’ll just get the latter.”
Brass felt as if he were shaking apart at the seams. The vibration that had pulled him on, drawing him through the desert and down the dark stairs and into this place, now threatened to render him helpless. Unearthly sounds echoed through him, replacing his thoughts with strange patterns and pictures. Bowen watched him, openly grinning now. “They’re calling you home, Brass. It took them awhile to figure you out. They thought Frankenstein had destroyed your brain case when he turned on them in the tunnels under Philadelphia and collapsed the Centennial Tower. But you survived. Indeed, you became something new. You are a thing unique, not dead, but not alive. And they want to pull you apart and see what sort of thing you are.”
Brass looked at the pistol in his hand. It was shaking so much, he knew there was no way he could get a shot off. Nonetheless, he had to try.
“We pulled you to the ends of the earth, here, in this place where the aetheric vibrations were strong enough to make the call to Yuggoth, where a city of devils awaits your soul,” Bowen said, his voice rising in pitch. “We could have chosen Pnakotus, or Xinaian in the American Southwest, or lost Leng. But here was judged safest, here where the pale reptile-souls of this place’s former inhabitants can be kept at bay by the simplest preparations.” He threw out a hand, indicating the Carnackis attached to the pillars. “We’ll leave your metal carcass to lie here eternally, I think, with only the lizard-ghosts for company.”
Brass raised the pistol, trying to concentrate.
“The orrery is a door of sorts,” Bowen said. “It’s a transmitter, drawing you out of that lobster shell of metal and sending you to another sphere, on dark, distant Yuggoth. The Mi-Go are, as I said, quite good at taking the works of others and building upon it.”
The light was bleeding past Brass, as if he were being pulled along at great speed, though he wasn’t moving. Bowen leaned forward, his face demonic as the oscillating rings of the orrery cast a weird light upwards. Brass fired, his finger clenching spasmodically.
Bowen laughed, and the sound of it seemed to be echoing as if from a distance. He spoke again, but the words were drawn out past the point of unintelligibility. Brass shook, and the faint stirrings of something that might have been fear blossomed within him. Sounds burst in his head, strange scratching, like rats skittering through hollow walls, and he felt cold for the first time in decades, a deep crushing cold.
Brass fired again and again. Strange shapes swam towards him, peeling out of nothing, crab-claws reaching, and behind them, something else. A presence, as wide and as vast as a world, or the idea of something larger, and it looked at him with its three-lobed eye, at the shriveled realness of him, huddling in its sphere of alien metal, and it chuckled.
Desperate now, cool consternation giving way to brittle embers of atavistic terror, Brass fired until the pistol clicked dry. Lights flashed, scarring his vision. He staggered abruptly, and there was a stink like burning metal. Steam rose from him, seeping through his clothes. The orrery was slowing, coughing, chugging. Brass reeled, seizing his chance, staggering towards the closest knot of men, hands grasping. They hesitated, stunned. The presence clawed at him, trying to catch hold of him again and his soul shriveled.
“Stop him, damn it! Stop him!” Bowen shrieked, firing his pistol. His shots went wild, striking Brass, but also striking the men around him. Brass’ hand shot out, seizing a hairy throat and he tore the Brain-erd-Edison from its owner’s hands. The orrery made a noise like a steam engine.
Brass turned even as a shadow fell over him. The Mi-Go had flung off its robes and now it swooped awkwardly towards him on fleshy wings. Crab pincers clashed against him as he depressed the trigger of the BEM-gun. The Mi-Go was made of other matter, but bullets chewed it the same as any earthly being. It shrilled in panic as the fusillade punched it backwards. Brass swung the BEM down, the trigger held tight. The orrery shrieked as it was blown to pieces. The tug on Brass weakened, going slack as the connection was cut.
He felt tired, something he hadn’t felt in years. He felt as if his mind had been wrung dry of all its life. Men advanced on him, and the BEM was running low on ammunition. “Bastard,” Bowen snarled. “You ruined everything, you automatic bastard!” He aimed his pistol. “Do you know what they would have given me for you?”
“I don’t care,” Brass said, turning and bringing the gun up. He fired, stitching the last of the BEM’s ammunition across the pillars where the Carnackis sat. He couldn’t get them all, but even one would do. It was like ruining a salt circle in the old folktales.
Bowen gaped, not understanding. The Mi-Go squealed and flopped, trying to crawl away. Men looked around as a deep, low moaning, as of some distant crowd, suddenly rolled over them, as if the Carnackis had been muffling it. It swept on, stirring the waters of the sea, and the lights there flickered strangely. The sound grew louder and louder, pounding at the ears of those present. Men sank to their knees, crying out in fear as they clutched their heads.
Then, abruptly, silence.
But only for a moment.
Brass reached the shelter of a pillar even as a nightmare horde of shapeless things raced into the cavern like a subway train. Bodiless and featureless, they nonetheless swept up Bowen’s men and smashed and tore them like some sort of malevolent whirlwind. The Mi-Go’s shrieks spiraled up into a mad whine as the demonic things descended on it, ripping great gobbets of puffy alien flesh free. Bowen alone stood untouched. Perhaps his tattoos protected him, or maybe he had other, secret defenses. He ran for the steps, arms outthrust to blunt the force of the monstrous wind.
Brass followed after him, ignoring the screams and cries behind him. Ethereal talons scraped him, but compared to the hideous pull of Yuggoth, they were easy enough to shake off. He stalked after Bowen, tossing aside the empty BEM, pausing only long enough to pull a pistol from a ragged red mess of a man as he started up the stairs.
Bowen was breathing heavily as he scrambled out of the cavern, and into the heat of the new day. Brass followed him, not running, just walking. Behind him, he heard a sound that could only be the bronze portal crashing closed. The sound reverberated through the nameless city, and the sand stirred in what might have been satisfaction.
“Bowen,” Brass said, raising his bloody pistol.
Bowen spun and snarled, “That is not dead-” even as he fired the pistol he held. Brass felt the bullet punch into his chest and he fired, his finger tightening on the trigger instinctively. Bowen staggered back, his bare chest drenched in crimson. Brass lowered the pistol, feeling no satisfaction. No regret. Even the fear he’d felt earlier was gone, burned out like a too-fierce flame. He doubted he’d ever feel anything like it again. “C-can e-eternal lie…” Bowen croaked, even as he toppled onto his face.
“Let it,” Brass said,
after a moment. And then he left Enoch Bowen’s body to the sand and the silence.
The Source
By D.L. Snell
EPIPHANY
1750
Corwin Wilhelm Carroll looked up from his studies on the Newcomen steam engine, having heard a distant rumble, of war he presumed. His reflection stared back at him from the window, cast there by the flickering candlelight like a man in a jar.
He concentrated on the darkness beyond himself, to the greater world beyond the crackle of the fireplace and his wife’s gentle snoring. As usual when he projected himself out into the universe, he felt a vast, echoing emptiness, impossible to traverse. And that was just Philadelphia.
There was a distant flash and then another rumble, seconds removed. Corwin’s chair chirped as it scooted backward across the wooden floor.
“What’s that?” his wife said from the jack bed, sitting up and sounding congested with sleep.
Their house consisted of a single room, and he was making quite the commotion, rummaging through stacks and stacks of books and papers, scattering sheets to the floor: diagrams of various flying machines, engines, and other inventions he could never get to work.
“Ah!” he finally said, pulling out a leaf of grade-one paper, made of linen pulp. He instantly recognized his own self-taught handwriting, in the narrower Italianate form reserved for women.
His wife kept asking him questions from the bed.
“Leyden jar,” he said, “yes!”
Corwin ran to the other end of their saltbox and opened one of his third-hand Oakley wardrobes, crammed full of, not clothes, but wooden buckets full of loose spindles and gears and other assorted parts of what his wife had once called his “dreams soon to rust.”
Corwin dug through one of the top buckets. “Where…?” he began, but then stepped over to another Oakley and opened the doors, one of which promptly fell off. “Ah, yes!”
He dug out the Leyden jar and then rushed to his bedside for another part.
From the drawer of his commode, he pulled out a huge ring of keys. He flipped through them, then flipped back and pulled off one in particular, a most suitable symbol of experimentation: the skeleton key to the American Philosophical Society, entrusted to Corwin for his labor as doorkeeper there.
He ran back to his table and bent over the paper again. After a few moments, he realized his wife was standing behind him, arms crossed.
“We need to build you a proper work—”
“Shhh!” Corwin said, cocking his ear toward yet a third rumble, which sounded fainter and farther away.
Tapping a diagram on his paper, he said, “Silk.”
“What?” his wife said as their eyes met.
But then suddenly he was pushing past her and throwing open the doors to her own personal Oakley, which wasn’t as rotted and beaten up as his. Certainly the doors weren’t falling off.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?!”
“I need silk,” he said, pulling out a handkerchief.
“I think not!” She yanked it out of his hand.
“Please. I need it.”
“For what?”
Corwin shoved the paper into her hand. She frowned as she read it, clutching her handkerchief close to her breast.
“Don’t you see?” Corwin said. “If I can be the first one to prove that he’s right…”
He paused, expecting to hear another rumble, which never came. “Please. I haven’t much time.”
His wife read to the end of the document, then gave it a once-over and handed it back. His eyes went to her precious silk, still held against her bosom.
After a very loud sigh, she said, “Absolutely not.”
Corwin frowned, but only for a second. Suddenly his eyes lit up, and he pointed a finger at the sky, as if to thank the gods. “Ah hah!” He started digging through a pile of wash.
“Oh, Corwin—bloody hell!”
He barely heard her protestation, happily dredging up the bottommost pair of his underthings and proceeding to rend it into a square. When the garment failed to tear with any degree of precision, he went for a knife.
“No!” His wife stopped him. “What are you, a child?! Most unsanitary!”
“Dear, please…” Corwin looked at her then, and she must have seen the distress in his eyes, the abject emptiness, because she handed her handkerchief to him, but not without treating him to another considerable sigh.
“Thank you!” He pecked her on the cheek, and no sooner than his lips were parting, so was he.
He reached atop a dusty old shelf and pulled down his kite frame, just two cedar cross-sticks bound at the intersection with string.
“Corwin, honestly,” she said, as he went giggling out the door in nothing but a duroy coat and his undergarments, two skinny legs pale as the moon. He hadn’t even tied his boots.
“You’re not Benjamin Franklin!” she called from the house.
She was still standing there at the threshold, arms crossed, when he came back, smiling sheepishly. He had forgotten the Leyden jar. And she was standing there still when he returned for the string. He gave her a quick kiss goodbye.
“Honestly, Corwin, do you even know where you’re going?”
“Yes!” he called back as he straightened the wire on top of his kite. “To catch the lightning in a jar!”
REVOLUTIONS
1776
The boy stared at the burst and singed boot framed high up on the workshop wall. He was dressed like some uncomfortable-looking miniature of a gentleman in a wig and black coat, with dark breeches over white silk leggings.
The British are coming, indeed, Corwin thought.
He watched from some dark corner of his shop, hidden behind a huge metal appendage and the various contrivances of pipes, turbines, and gears in between. Steam-powered things constantly hissed and sighed, and metal things groaned all about.
The boy turned his attention from the framed boot to a stack of Corwin’s schematics.
“Who are you?” the old man shouted as he came out of hiding.
The boy jumped, and a piece of linen paper flapped in his hand. “Apologies! I was only…” He pointed at the boot in the frame. “I have heard of the legend, sir, but is that—”
“Who are you?” Corwin asked again as he picked his way through the worktables; he leaned on the wooden edges here and there for support, his left foot clopping on the floor in sync with a piston somewhere in the background.
“My name is Brigham, sir. Brigham Attwood—”
“What are you doing in my shop?”
“Apologies. I was sent—”
Corwin, hobbling up on his hydraulic leg, snatched the paper from the boy. He pushed back a few strands of long gray hair and looked down his nose through his stronger pair of lenses, wired to the front of his frames.
“Ah,” he said, reading the fancy copperplate. “Cambridge. Impressive. And you’re all of, what, seventeen?”
“Sixteen, sir. Rather sixteen and one half.”
“Ah. An Aquarius as well as a veritable wunderkind.”
Brigham blushed and lowered his head. He glanced once, and then twice at Corwin’s hydraulic leg, scanning the brass scrollwork and heraldry. It was a technology people had never seen, unless they knew Corwin.
The old man handed the paper back to Brigham and narrowed his eyes. “Tell me, boy, why aren’t you fighting alongside your countrymen? Why join the losing side?”
Brigham’s posture became strictly erect, and he puffed out his chest as if he were some proud bird with plumage instead of a silly boy wearing a cravat. “I have no penchant for war, sir. I came here, not for the frontlines, but for the frontier. There are so many paths to be forged in the New World, I would only hope for one of them to be mine.”
“Ah,” Corwin said. Then he gathered up his schematics and started moving off.
The boy tagged along.
“Absolutely brilliant!” he said as he took in the workshop. “Is that part of
a steamship? And what is that?! Some sort of flying—whoa!” The boy jumped back from a set of tracks. He barely got out of the way as Corwin’s miniature steamhorse came huffing and puffing along, tugging several carts of valves and pulleys and spare parts.
The boy watched it practically ratchet itself down the tracks, then he hurried to catch up. “How do you keep everything in perpetual motion, sir? I can’t imagine you burn much coal. The air in the Colonies is just so fresh!”
With a heavy sigh, Corwin stopped and turned on the young man, who took a step backward and smiled hesitantly, glancing down at the hand-drawn schematics for a second more than Corwin preferred.
“Beckham, is it?”
“Brigham, sir.”
“Well, Burntham, if Mr. Franklin sent you here as my apprentice…” Corwin cast a quick glance around the shop. “Then your first task shall be to return those books to the American Philosophical Society.”
Brigham looked, and his cheeks turned red. “Sir, there has to be twenty volumes.”
“Ah! Then you had better make several trips.”
Corwin left the boy staring at the mountain of texts and snuck away to some quiet back corner of his shop. At a pile of loose metal, he stopped and glanced back.
Quickly, quietly, Corwin uncovered a tacked-hide trunk. He popped the latch and lock as discreetly as possible, but still the lid opened with a hollow groan.
He grimaced, then jumped when the boy said, “Apologies, sir, but…”
Corwin shut the lid on his schematics and turned around. “What do you want?”
“It’s just…this jar.”
All of the blood drained from Corwin’s face when he saw what the boy had brought with him.
“It’s strange,” Brigham began.
Corwin grabbed it from him, almost dropping it. “How dare you rifle through my things!”
“Apologies—”
“Quit saying that!”
“But, sir, I found it with the books. I meant no offense.”
Corwin calmed, but only marginally. The thing did have a tendency to move itself.
Brigham stood transfixed by the glass. “It reeks of some…maleficium,” he said.
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 29