Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  EPIPHANY

  1750

  Corwin burst into the house, feeling no more solid than the water dripping off of him, yet heavy, bogged down. He slammed the door and went straight to the glass, jumping as the night exploded in the distance with light.

  “Corwin, Christ!”

  His wife touched him from behind, and he whirled around, clutching his Leyden jar to his breast.

  “The lights,” he said.

  Suddenly he was pushing past her, and blowing out the candle lanterns she had lit while waiting up.

  “Corwin, please!”

  He pushed past her one more time and knocked her over. It seemed like instantly she was on her feet and slapping him in the face.

  “Stop it!”

  He gaped at her, holding his reddened cheek.

  She looked as if she only partially regretted it. “Well,” she said, “at least something can bring the color back to your face.”

  “The light…” he said to her, and he prayed she saw his eyes, the sheer emptiness in them.

  His wife sighed and stepped aside. Corwin ran to the lamp and blew it out. He returned to the window, and she stood behind him, arms crossed.

  “What is…” she began, but then stopped as they both sensed something shifting above them. It was like their whole house had tilted to one side. Timbers groaned. The window rattled. So did their bowls and plates.

  Corwin stooped closer to the windowsill and craned his neck around, trying to see above their house.

  The thunder was so loud, so ferocious, it deafened him and threw him to the floor, bruising his hip. Parts of the roof rained down into the house, and he looked up to the burning hole in the ceiling, to the rain coming down and pooling everywhere, running down the cracks of the floor. His wife stood beneath the gaping, jagged hole, except her feet weren’t touching the ground. She was suspended by a bolt of blue, crackling light, her nightdress brightening to embers and blackening to ash, her hair sizzling off her scalp.

  Cordelia opened her eyes. Blue, bioluminescent. Large and staring. Corwin’s hair stood on end as feelers of electricity arced off of her and felt all around. Tinier vessels of static veined the air, as if the house were some organ with bright capillaries and veins.

  Scrambling back on his hands and knees, Corwin butted up against the wall. He kept closing and opening his mouth, unable to speak. He was bleating.

  “Orr’e wgah’n sgn’wahl,” Cordelia said. She spoke as one with two other voices, one spitting and guttural, the other piercing and shrill. In the background, beating against some membrane between worlds, came the muffled sound of drums.

  “Orr’e wgah’n sgn’wahl,” the three said again.

  “I…I don’t…” Corwin started scooting toward the door, his eyes fixed on his wife as her skin began to blister and crisp, and then blister again, so that red pockets burst open in the black crusts. His hand found the Leyden jar, which he hadn’t even realized he’d dropped.

  The vertical bolt of light intensified, lifting Cordelia higher, and when she spoke again it sounded as if their entire house spoke with her, every particle in every timber and square inch of air. “Orr’e wgah’n sgn’wahl!”

  “I don’t understand!” Corwin said, standing up, holding the Leyden jar by the brass knob.

  The ball lightning struck him in the shoulder and surged through him, down through his hand and foot. He felt his leg blow open, his boot fly off, and in the single bright moment where everything slowed to a stop, even the pain ringing out in every electrified nerve, he saw everything in exploded view, how all the parts interlocked, his own organs arrayed before him, the heart pumping, the lungs sucking air; and he saw the great clockwork of the stars, streaking ’round, saw the timbers of his house too, spread out, the spikes drifting out of their holes, because there was space in everything and it was expanding, to where there were no real meaningful patterns to the universe, and no real destination but the dark, and at the core of it all were shapeless gods lashing tentacles and undulating across great expanses, displacing the cosmos with their black mass and driving everything apart, faster and faster until the bonds themselves ripped and everything went scattering.

  In that one second, the eye, giant and glowing, stared into him, because he was now in the jar—for the briefest eternity, he was trapped in the jar, as if some shard of him had broken off. And now the thing was in the jar with him, staring…

  REVOLUTIONS

  1776

  “Sir, I don’t think I should drink,” Brigham said, taking the jug of triple-X alcohol from Corwin anyway.

  “Drink,” the old man insisted.

  The boy stared at him for a while, and then took a swig from the jug. Almost instantly, he jerked the container away from his mouth, nearly spilling the firewater, spraying some of the precious liquid everywhere.

  Corwin cursed. “Give me that.” He went to pull the jug away, but Brigham took another swig. This time, the boy held his drink, grimacing as it went down, coughing into his fist.

  He looked different without the wig. Smaller, his head dwarfed by his important looking coat; like some child in a grown man’s clothes.

  Corwin snatched the booze from him and took a swallow. The burn felt good.

  They each took a few more drinks, and Corwin packed his clay pipe with Virginian tobacco. The boy stared at the mess of parts strewn across the workshop floor.

  “Why?” he said after some time.

  Corwin shook his head. “There is no why.”

  Brigham frowned at him. “Certainly they had a reason.”

  “Yes. We’re at war.”

  “But…your jar. Why take that? For what purpose?”

  Corwin stared at the boy through the smoke. He sounded like a little child, asking the endless why? But Corwin understood that, the enquiring mind. To the boy, the jar was a simple battery and nothing more. He didn’t know what was inside.

  Suddenly, the old man leaned forward through the haze, eyes dancing. “How do you generate steam?”

  “Sir?”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Boil water over coal, sir.”

  “Correct! So that is the source of the steam. But then what is the source of the water? And that of the coal?”

  “I understand the principles of primary sources.”

  “Yes, but you trace the energy back and where does it begin? We say that coal is the primary source of the steam, but what of the coal? What gives it its ability to spark?”

  “Its elements and compounds, sir. Flammable air. Dephlogisticated air. Sulfur.”

  “And the source of those?”

  “The plants—”

  “And those?”

  “The sun and the earth. The—”

  “And what of those, boy? What is the source of the source?”

  “I don’t…” Brigham looked at him quizzically as he donned his wig. “God, sir. God is the source.”

  Corwin, right in the middle of taking a drink, sprayed alcohol everywhere. He looked at the boy, then laughed again, coughing out deep belly laughter. “Hah!”

  After taking a contemplative drink, Corwin said, “Orr’e wgah’n sgn’wahl.”

  The boy frowned. “What is the meaning of that?”

  “Nothing. It’s just…something my wife once said. It’s an alien language. Heh, a language that means absolutely nothing.”

  “If it’s a language, surely it means something.”

  “Ah, yes, because everything means something.”

  The boy thought for a second. “In school we were certainly taught that. A drawing should have no unnecessary lines; a machine, no unnecessary parts. The world is much the same.”

  “Ah.” Corwin nodded, taking a small drink and staring off into space. “Heh. Have you heard of the minuteman, the one who bequeathed his uniform to his younger sibling?”

  Brigham shook his head.

  “The coat had two holes. Here…” He pointed at the left side of his gut. “And here, whe
re the bullet had come out.” He patted his back, his kidney. “The sibling went on to be shot through those same two holes. And their mother, oh, their mother. She called it Providence. Because, oh yes, I forgot, even mindless suffering is a necessary part.”

  Brigham opened his mouth to say something. After some thought, he opened it again. “I believe there’s something guiding us.”

  “Ah. You believe you, your life, has some greater purpose?”

  The boy paused, then opened his mouth again. “You were struck by lightning, the odds of which are… And after that, you became one of the most gifted inventors on the planet. How can you not believe?”

  “Believe what? That it all happened so that someone else could steal everything I’ve ever dreamt up? Simply so I could create the machinery of death?”

  The boy started to say more, but Corwin held up his hand.

  “You know what, let’s not discuss it. Just pray that there is some reason to your life, to both of our lives, that the British will now lay waste to us with our own…abomination.”

  They both brooded silently. Corwin drank. He offered the jug to Brigham, but the boy frowned and wouldn’t even look at it. So Corwin shoved it closer. Eventually the boy grabbed it, and they shared the drink but no words.

  By the last drop in the bottle, Corwin could feel the earth spinning faster. He was in motion, and halfway to Concord despite sitting still.

  The boy was rocking involuntarily and staring at the jug, afflicted, white wig sitting crooked on his head.

  Brigham said something Corwin could barely understand.

  “What was…?”

  “I want to smash it,” Brigham said again, although not with such crisp enunciation; it took Corwin almost a minute to decipher what he’d said.

  “Ah.” Slowly, a lopsided smile spread across the old man’s face. The jug. The boy was drunk. “Here,” he said.

  He reached under his coat for the pistol, but it was pinched in the waistband of his breeches. So he stood up, wavering, yanking on the handle.

  “Let’s have us some fun—” he began. But the hammer caught in a buttonhole on his coat as he drew, cocking back. His finger slipped off the trigger guard.

  The shot echoed flatly around the workshop, and Brigham’s wig went flying. A plume of smoke, reeking of black powder, shrouded Corwin’s face before it dissipated, like an unveiling.

  The boy sat there pointlessly, pissing himself as he sneezed out blood all down his cravat. And then he toppled over and leaked fluids into the random assortment of gears and pipes on the floor.

  WAR

  1777

  The old man sat at his desk at home, drinking and staring down at the pocket watch that wasn’t really a watch. He ignored the sounds from outside, people shouting, horses galloping, wagons trundling by on the road as citizens evacuated Philadelphia.

  Corwin turned the gold timepiece over in his old, leathered hands, the gears and springs of it scattered across the desktop. He had been tinkering with it for a year, trying to figure out how it worked, and why. But his brain didn’t function anymore. It was too clouded, too addled.

  “Mr. Carroll, sir!” someone shouted, pounding on his door.

  He didn’t get up, didn’t even look around as Thomas Paine let himself into the house.

  “Sir, Congress may be taking leave to Lancaster. I’m certain I can secure you passage with them. Sir?”

  Corwin closed his eyes, hands folded neatly on the desktop. Things were spinning so quickly now. “Are they taking the bell?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The bell. The one at the State House.”

  “It will be sent for, yes.”

  “The British will make a cannon of it.”

  “It will be sent for.”

  “Because that’s what men do. Make weapons out of liberty bells.”

  Paine waited a respectful moment before he persevered. “Sir, you must leave. General Howe—”

  “I know.”

  “Respectfully, sir, there is information you don’t yet have.”

  Corwin stood and turned on him, sneering as he saw the expression on Paine’s face change. “Enlighten me then, Mr. Paine.”

  The writer looked down at the floorboards, and when he braved Corwin’s stare, there was nothing in the deep darkness at the center of his eyes—nothing. “They have it, sir.”

  “Have what?”

  Paine didn’t say.

  But Corwin had already figured it out.

  The floor disappeared beneath him, and he reached back for his seat. It wasn’t there. So he just fell back until he hit something solid: his desk.

  He had known this was coming. The British had a far superior means of production. He had just expected it much sooner.

  “Corwin!” Thomas Paine said, running over to help him up.

  The old man shoved him off.

  “Get out.”

  “Sir—”

  “Get out!” Corwin said, standing and shoving him again. “Out, OUT!”

  Thomas Paine dug his feet in and pushed back. Corwin went stumbling, once again slumping against his desk.

  The writer straightened his wig and huffed. “Unhand me, sir. I am no Brigham. You have no right.”

  Brigham.

  The single word destroyed the dams Corwin had been building inside himself since news of the invasion, perhaps longer. Perhaps years.

  The boy.

  The lie.

  Corwin grabbed the bottle of alcohol from his desk and hurled it. The glass shattered against the wall, and this time when he screamed, it felt like the force bloodied his throat.

  “Get OUT!”

  Thomas Paine hesitated at the doorstep, then turned and hurried off down the road, glancing back only once.

  With a growl, Corwin swept the watch and all its necessary parts off his desk, so that everything went crashing to the floor.

  When the general and the entire Continental Congress had questioned him about the death and the theft, Corwin had felt as if he’d had no choice. No one would have believed his story, how it was an accident. The buttonhole, the truth. So of course the boy he’d shot had been a spy. And that was how he was remembered; a loyalist to the Crown was no longer a Tory but a Brigham.

  The old man looked out his window, out over the junkyard behind his house. Blue skies. And the fields where lightning had once struck were now golden in the August sun.

  Something in the piles caught the old man’s eye, some rusted dream. A wing.

  Corwin grabbed his cape and hobbled out the door.

  ***

  The steam engine coughed, and the flying machine dipped as the bat wings stopped beating air. Corwin grabbed the crank and manually operated the pine and silk appendages until the engine kicked in.

  Through his goggles and long gray hair whipping about, he could see the ocean, and, closer in, Chesapeake Bay. Several columns of Continental soldiers, a total of eleven thousand men, spread out on one of the green peninsulas like shreds of the flag, red, white, and blue. Legions of British ships loomed on the horizon, sails upon sails, but yet no boats had been sent to shore, no soldiers.

  And then Corwin saw it, a huge wake, miles long, as something cut the brine just below the surface of the sea. As he watched, the thing surfaced and climbed onto dry land, great rivers of water pouring off of it, like some sea monster, some leviathan, only metal, its articulated tentacles wriggling about, barnacles stuck to its underside. Big pillars of steam poured off of it wherever there was an exhaust, and its crab-like legs scrambled forward across the peninsula.

  Corwin had designed it to resemble the thing in the lightning, that terrible thing, but somehow the machine’s utilitarianism was worse.

  The Continental Army fell back, small as aphids before the beast. The thing stopped with metallic groaning, and the soldiers stopped as well.

  Two massive tentacles rose above the impenetrable hull. From an insulated opening on each metal tip, bolts of electricity arced, strikin
g in the center of the gap with a flash of light, blindingly bright. Even over his steam engine, Corwin could hear the blast.

  At the center, where the two bolts clashed, an eye opened, crackling and looking about. It zeroed in on the closest band of Americans. And then the machine brought its hundreds of tentacles to bear.

  Corwin couldn’t hear his countrymen over the sound of his flying machine, but he could see the soldiers kneeling and taking aim, could see the plumes of gun smoke billowing up from their rifles. He screamed at them to run—bloody hell, run!—but they couldn’t hear him either.

  The giant eye closed, and the first stream of electricity poured out of one of the thicker tentacles, searing through men, leaving just smoking black parts in burning uniforms behind. All along the top of its hull, hatches opened and automatic steam guns came out, firing too, riddling whole companies of men, cutting them down at the legs, at the gut, at the neck.

  More of the tentacles began to spray electricity, and the soldiers tried to run, scattering everywhere, only to be shot in the back, obliterated.

  Tears streamed from Corwin’s eyes as he watched. None of it made sense; men with incinerated arms and legs lying on the ground, screaming nothing up at the sun; other things scorched and twitching in the wild bay grass. It was worse that he couldn’t hear any of it, as if he were simply looking in on the real world from some detached beyond.

  A few cannons went off below him, and that sound snapped him back. The artillerymen had formed a defensive line. One of them fell away without much left of his skull, his face punched in by lead, leaving just flaps of skin and shattered bone dangling from a ragged, spurting stump.

  Corwin slammed his fist against the side of the flying machine and roared. The thing could go no faster.

  He glanced into the back seat, to where he had stored the skysail, a pyramid of wood and gummed linen; a heavy thing, but a man could float on it from any great height without getting hurt.

  Looking forward again, Corwin blinked to clear his sight. He scanned the body of the war machine, searching for the hatch. In the schematics, he had placed an insulated shaft down the Y axis of the thing. From there the shaft branched off into a cockpit, manned, no doubt, by some Brit, and there were several maintenance tunnels, all insulated, with access to the boiler and tank, and at the center of it all, the Leyden jar, the source of the lightning.