by Jack Dann
Here too the mechanism was failing. The generators no longer gave off their deep hum, and the silence was eerie, the echoes cavernous. From the next room along I could hear the click-click-click of cooling metal and the drip of falling water—but the clanging, pounding rhythm of the engines had stopped.
The only sound was the whispering and muttering of hidden voices. They were in the machinery of this room too. I stood stock-still and clamped my hands over my ears.
I expected someone to come searching for me from the room I had left behind. Instead, a figure entered from the room ahead. I recognised him at once—Norris, the Scottish engineer. He appeared in a further archway, backing away from the engines and boilers. I lowered my hands. He continued backing away for a dozen paces before he caught sight of me.
“What’s happenin’, lad?” he demanded. His face was white, and he looked shaken.
“The mechanism has stopped,” I answered. Guilt or honesty made me add, “I stopped it.”
“I can see it’s stopped.” He hadn’t registered my last sentence. “But what’s this other thing that’s started?”
For a moment, I imagined he was hearing the same voices that I heard. “You hear them too?”
“Them?”
“Voices in the metal.”
He shook his head at me as if I were crack-brained. “What I hear is the metal itself. Stress and strain. What’s makin’ it so?”
Even as he spoke, a bolt that held one of the generators to its mounting snapped off suddenly. The bolthead flew up in the air, then fell back with a clatter.
“It shouldna happen,” Norris said, more to himself than to me. “Not when everything’s stopped.”
A wire that ran across the ceiling broke off and lashed about in front of our faces. It was like someone wielding a whip. Then a cable on the floor started to jump and jerk. Norris took to his heels and fled into the room with the apparatus.
I followed, returning the way I had come. The voices in the metal were no louder, but increasingly urgent and excited. At the same time, I could also hear what Norris heard, a creaking and straining of the metal itself. It was a different sound, but related, surely related.
Mother, Father, and Dr. Kessel still stood beside the box; the attendants surrounded the fallen cabinet; Norris hovered further back, half in and half out of the open partition. They were all motionless yet focused, as in a tableau. At first I couldn’t grasp the object of their attention—or objects, for they stared in several directions.
Then, with a sudden movement, a whole mass of apparatus slid from its shelf. Glass tubes smashed on the floor, metallic coils and plates scattered far and wide. I looked again and saw that the frame supporting the shelf had warped away from the vertical—indeed, was continuing to warp. And not only that one frame, but every frame in the room. It was as though some tremendous force were twisting and bending the struts from within.
There was another crash as another shelf tilted and discharged its contents. Then an even louder crash as a whole cabinet went over. And at every crash, I heard—with my other hearing, attuned to those other sounds—I heard a surge of excitement and an evil thrill. Through wires and cables, through struts and rods, those horrible, hidden voices came hurrying towards the wreckage—whispering, muttering, exulting. Like rats they were, converging upon a victim.
On the floor, the metallic fragments continued to twist and bend as if writhing. To my eyes, the process conveyed an impression of indescribable agony.
I broke the spell of horror and shouted at the top of my voice. “I know what it is! It’s the bad thoughts! Inside the metal! I can hear them!”
Mr. Jamieson turned. “What can he hear?”
“Your bad thoughts!” I shouted again. “The mechanism is having nightmares! It’s living your hallucinations!”
Father frowned. “It’s only a machine, Anthony.”
At that moment, a sound came from the frame I was standing beside: a shriek of tormented metal. The whole structure contorted and buckled slowly sideways. There were similar sounds from other parts of the room, and the machinery in the rooms beyond.
“Out of here!” cried Mr. Hungerford. “Everybody, move!”
I think Mother tugged me by the arm—it was all a blur. We fled through the open partition into Dr. Kessel’s study. I looked back and saw Mr. Hungerford and another attendant sliding the wooden wings closed. Dr. Kessel came through just in time before the partition slammed shut. Mr. Hungerford and the other attendant pushed home bolts to lock it at the top and bottom.
The partition was solid, heavy wood, two inches thick. No one stood close, but no one ran out of the study either. We listened to the appalling cacophony building up on the other side. Shrieks and screeches—it might have been the sufferings of the damned, but it was the metal itself. We didn’t need to see it to know that in every room the machinery was slowly, inexorably tearing apart.
Then Mr. Jamieson prodded me in the back.
“What did you say just now?” he demanded.
“It’s your bad thoughts that got inside the metal,” I told him.
“My bad thoughts?”
“And all the other patients.”
“Our bad thoughts?” Mr. Jamieson looked incredulous.
“Oh, I feared this,” said another voice. It was Dr. Kessel, wide-eyed and teetering on the edge of hysteria. “Bad thoughts infected my mechanism.”
“So ye knew all along,” Norris chimed in. “Ye knew it was haunted.”
“Suspected. Only suspected.”
“I told ye the design was wrong.”
“No.” Dr. Kessel had never been an impressive figure, but now he seemed pathetically cowed and shrunken. “There was no other way to build it. As long as the electricity was running . . . I was saving people.”
“You never saved anyone,” Mr. Hungerford bluntly. “It did.”
He nodded towards the machinery on the other side of the partition. The cacophony had now reached a crescendo. I don’t think any of us will ever forget those unbearable, piercing sounds of tortured metal.
“It’s hurting!” cried Dr. Kessel suddenly. “I have to help . . .”
He ran for the partition and reached for the bolts to unlock it. Norris and Mr. Hungerford were on top of him in an instant. Mr. Hungerford dragged his arms away and pinned them behind his back.
“No one can help anything now,” the American said.
When Dr. Kessel tried to struggle, Norris simply cuffed him over the head and knocked him to the ground. Then the two of them hauled him over the floor away from the partition.
He lay there blubbering and snivelling for a while. Then he turned his attention on me. “It is the boy’s fault. He caused it to happen.”
“Let him be.” Mr. Hungerford spoke up on my behalf. “It was bound to happen in the end.”
The sounds on the other side of the partition continued unabated for ten minutes, then began to die down. It was another half hour before they ceased altogether.
MY ACCOUNT IS almost finished. Only one last thing remains to tell—and now I know I can tell it calmly. I have maintained my equilibrium, have I not? All these dark experiences suppressed for years in my mind—I could not risk reliving them. No one ever had to struggle so hard for their sanity. But finally I have written it out: the nightmares, the box, the crown of wires, the hidden voices, the agony of the metal, and my own guilt.
Oh yes, I accept the guilt. Even if the electricity must have failed eventually, yet I was the one who made it fail then. Dr. Kessel and I were both responsible in our different ways. My role was to be the immediate agent and cause. Now that I write it out, the sequence of events seems strangely inevitable—including the one last twist in the story. Make of it what you will.
We waited a long while after the sounds had ceased. Outside, the sun had risen above the buildings of the institute, and Dr. Kessel’s study grew bright with morning light. Then Mr. Hungerford and Mr. Jamieson took the lead in unfastening the bol
ts. They peeped through the partition and opened the wings a little wider. All was silent. I can’t explain the impression, but it was a good silence.
We trooped through in single file and stared at the wreckage in awe and amazement. It was like some twisted, tangled forest. Fragments of glass littered the floor, and wires hung down from the ceiling. The metal frames were still generally upright, but distorted into the most fantastical shapes . . . shapes of pain, it seemed to me. Many of the cabinets had been ripped open as if disembowelled.
I strained my ears as we moved cautiously forward. Faint creaks accompanied the disturbance of our footsteps, but the whispering and muttering voices had gone.
Mr. Jamieson turned to me. “Is it over?” he asked.
I nodded.
I can’t describe the sense of peace, the deep solemnity. I saw tears on Mr. Jamieson’s face and realised that I was crying too. Tears of relief or tears of sadness—I don’t know which. Daylight entering from the high-set windows filtered through the gaunt, racked metal; motes of dust, the residue of so much violence, drifted in the sunbeams.
“Look!” cried Mother, and flung out an arm.
At first I couldn’t see what she was pointing at—though I recognised the spot, where the steel rails terminated. The padded box was there, almost buried under a pile of fallen apparatus.
“Yes!” cried Mr. Jamieson, pointing too.
Then I saw: it was the metal frame behind the box. It had lost most of its struts so that only two remained, warped out of their proper positions in such a way as to form a perfect vertical and a perfect horizontal. In effect, the shape of a cross.
Mr. Jamieson dropped to his knees and put his hands together. He began gabbling a prayer that I’m sure never featured in any prayer book. Norris also knelt and bowed his head; then Mother; then everyone except Father. Mr. Hungerford pushed Dr. Kessel forcibly to his knees.
“Suffered for us,” Mr. Jamieson gabbled on. “Pure and innocent . . . bore our sins . . . defiled by human thoughts.”
Of course, Mr. Jamieson was an ex-seminarian, so you can understand where his thinking came from. Father remained sceptical and repeated that it was “only a machine” many times on our journey back to London. As for me . . . well, I had panicked before the mechanism ever had the chance to draw off my bad thoughts. Yet, from that time on, my nightmares disappeared as if they had never existed. So what does that show? I wonder.
Afterword to “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism”
I know some people have memories that go back to babyhood, but not me. The first memory that I’m sure is my own real memory—and not re-created from what adults told me—comes from a holiday in the seaside town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire, England. I must have been about four or five, and what I remember is Fleetwood pier, which had been recently destroyed by fire. It stuck far out into the sea, a wreckage of tangled, twisted girders, and not just tangled, not just twisted, but racked and contorted like an expression of agony, a frozen shriek of pain. There you have the whole germ and genesis of “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.”
I’d now count “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” as a “steampunk” story. Ten years ago, I’d hardly heard of “steampunk”—I mean, I’d heard of the word, but I’d never thought it had anything to do with me. But I was wrong—I’d been blindly blundering my way towards steampunk from a long time before then. The fascination with nineteenth-century culture and Dickensian atmospheres was already there in The Black Crusade and The Vicar of Morbing Vyle (the latter my first novel, published in 1993). And the fascination with old-fashioned steam-age machinery was there in the industrial scenery of the Humen Camp in the three Ferren books and in the fabulous contraptions of (again) The Black Crusade. When I completed Worldshaker and it was instantly categorized as “steampunk,” I realised I’d discovered my own true home. Or as the poet said, it was like coming home and knowing the place for the first time.
“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” was an amazingly difficult story to write, because I couldn’t get the voice I needed. I started to write in first person, rewrote in third person, tried again with a different-sounding first person, another go at third person, and finally—phew! gasp!—hit upon a first-person voice that sounded just right. I guess the problem was the contradiction between using formal vocabulary and long sentences, as necessary for a nineteenth-century feel, but also conveying intense emotion and an underlying thrill of horror. My lifeline was Edgar Allan Poe—I confess, I actually read a Poe short story every morning before starting work on “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.” I’ve never put myself under an influence in that way before! Yet that too was like coming home, because Poe was the first great love of my adult reading life, which began when a German teacher at school decided to forget about teaching German and instead spent a whole period reading us “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But that’s another story . . .
—RICHARD HARLAND
Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans is the author of seven books that include novels, a volume of poetry, and two young adult fantasies. Her novel The Wolf Pit was short-listed for the Southern Book Award of the Southern Book Critics Circle and won the Michael Shaara Award. Forthcoming are two collections of poetry, The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press) and The Foliate Head (Stanza Press); and three novels, Glimmerglass (PS Publishing), Maze of Blood (PS Publishing), and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (winner of the Ferrol Sams Award, Mercer University Press).
MARLY YOUMANS
The Grave Reflection
Some years after my father’s decease, I discovered an envelope labeled “Saxton” in his handwriting, tucked inside a chest of papers left in my possession. On reading the first line on the enclosed sheets, I guessed what the anecdote enclosed would contain, for its queer, secret events were long a matter of private wonder and curiosity to our family. I believe that my father would have liked to publish the account had it not been for his affection for the “younger Mr. Saxton,” who remained a fast friend and steady correspondent until my father passed to the next world, wherein all such mysteries as these will surely be revealed.
This account, released for public inspection now that the principal parties involved in its uncanny transactions have flown, will, I trust, be of some interest to my father’s many admirers among a new generation of readers.
—R.H.L., 1890
ALTHOUGH I AM by nature a homebody who prefers to immure himself in the nest of family, rejoicing in the little circle of lives that Divine Intelligence has seen fit to bestow upon me, I could not ignore the message that came to me from a village in a remote corner of our district, home to my boyhood friend Theron Saxton. He had been a spirited fellow with always a prank and a jest to enliven the table or hearth, so much so that he earned the enmity of many sagacious, dour souls who could not bear that the often heavy dough of life should be leavened by the yeast and spice of his merriment. The message handed to me at the door was urgent:
If you love me, come to me at once, my dear Hawthorne, for I am plagued as no man has ever been, and I feel my mind like a mere chip of a boat whirling in a gale, close to capsizing from the storm within and without me.
I knew very well what sort of sorrows had recently accompanied my friend, enveloping him in a sable blackness. Not six months before, a beloved brother, Mr. Edward Saxton, his elder by some twenty minutes and twin to himself in every minute particular, had succumbed to the ravages of consumption. The unfortunate man had borne up under the weight of disease for many months, an example of patience and manly fortitude, before taking to his bed and declining and dying in the space of a fortnight. My wife and I arrived too late for anything but the burial and stood among the other mourners, our cloaks whipping in the autumn gusts. I had not seen my friend since and now regretted my lack of spirit and ambition in correspondence, which might have comforted him and kept me snug at home on a brisk winter’s night.
Having tenderly parted from my wife and children, I hurried to town and set ou
t by a clattering mail coach at twilight. The bitterness of the evening seeped into my bones, and I was glad to share some moth-eaten buffalo robes with a stranger. I dozed off and was dreaming an absurd but uneasy dream—struggling with a gigantic warrior in rattling and clanking armor and, as if that were not enough to occupy and challenge my dream self, battling with my Goliath-sized knight in the midst of an earthquake—when I was awakened by a prodigious thumping on the side of the coach. The driver wrenched open the door and informed me that we had gained the foot of the lane leading to Saxton’s Folly, as my friend’s ancestral house was known to citizens of the nearby town. Although no doubt longing to finish his run, the fellow was good enough to proffer a pull of spirits from his pocket flask and to warn me against the thick pack of ice on the roadway, furnishing me with a sturdy metal-tipped staff that I promised to guard and remit to his care on my homeward journey.
To a man shocked suddenly awake, the gloom and cold of the lane was unwelcome. But the clouds that had recently brought a few pristine feet of snow were scattering from the moon, and patches of mingled moonshine and starlight shone here and there on the uneven surface of ice. The hooves of the horses and the iron-clad wheels of the coach made a racket as the coach proceeded apace without me, and I was left alone with the glitter of the stars.
Wrapping my cloak closely about me, I stepped into the fir-lined lane. Soon I was longing for a wandering 2:00 a.m. dram seller with Jamaica, cognac, strong beer, or a cup of mulled wine. I would have paid a good deal better than the going rate for another small drop of flame to warm my insides. But there was no help for it, so I scudded along with a will in the deep groove of wagon tracks, gazing around me at the black silhouette trees and the dazzle of stars and the faint twisting lights of the aurora borealis, barely visible so far from their native home. Although the shadows of the firs oppressed me with a sense of density—as if they might detach themselves from the ice-fringed trees and pour after me, plucking my sleeve and peering into my face with faces cut from crisp sheets of blackest night—I had a heartening fancy that the bright constellations had shed the snow that crested the tops of my boots and spilled inside, so that the world was knee-deep in tumbled stars.