by Unknown
“As I said in my introduction,” Blasko addressed the crowd, “this isn’t a séance. This is a scientific exploration.”
Blasko didn’t seem particularly comfortable speaking in public. He talked in a rush, and he tended to gesticulate wildly with his hands. Taking a deep breath, he continued.
“Death is like a one-way mirror. No matter how you squirm or squint, all you can see is your own reflection, your own insecurities or vanities peering back. You can’t see who… or what… might be watching from the other side.”
Blasko gestured to his invention. “This machine pierces that veil. By placing an item in the tray, it can sense spiritual tethers between this world and the next. Anything with a strong personal connection will do.”
Blasko and his machine caught Charlotte’s attention a few months ago, and she’d accumulated a small pile of newspaper clippings detailing his itinerary and routine. Charlotte knew he came to Detroit hoping to raise funds to perfect the device. Most investors had laughed him off. He had been forced to give his demonstration in a rented dirigible hangar rather than a posh convention center, but this was still a substantial crowd.
Detroit was a logical place to hold the demonstration. The city manufactured everything from the Edsel five-speed automatic brains that kept President Lincoln alive to the “Armored Teakettle” steam tanks that patrolled the Richmond and Charleston Military Pacification Zones. Mining interests, the automaton industry, the Fortean League, and high-end gangsters all rubbed shoulders here. No city in the Union was more likely to contain a richer, more lustful fool to finance Blasko.
Yet he impressed Charlotte. She’d spent the last five years investigating the paranormal as a professional skeptic, and she’d never seen anything like Blasko’s device and the effects it produced.
“Who else would like a demonstration?” Blasko surveyed the crowd. “As you have seen, the machine can operate even on older artifacts, but anything with sufficient personal value to the deceased will do.”
The crowd murmured.
“I have something.” Charlotte stood up. She hadn’t known she was going to say anything until it was out of her mouth, but now, the entire crowd stared at her. Her face suddenly felt hot with embarrassment at her own eagerness, but this was a unique opportunity.
“Ah, Charlotte LaFitte. I thought that was you.”
Charlotte could feel her face turning redder. She’d hoped to watch the entire show undetected. Now, she was at the center of this circus. May the flaming bridges behind me light my way forward.
“This may surprise you, but I’m a fan of your work,” Blasko said. “I’ll be the first to admit that the paranormal field has more than its share of swindlers. Good riddance to them. I’m here to prove my device does what it promises. Proving it to your satisfaction would be a feather in my cap. Would you be willing to sign my copy of your book after the demonstration?”
Charlotte found her voice again. “Alright, you’ve caught me,” she laughed. “I’d be happy to sign your copy. First, I have a proposition for you. My credibility is on the line too, now that I’ve opened my big mouth.”
She reached into her bag and removed a small wooden jewelry box. Something rattled inside it.
Blasko smoothed his slicked hair into place. Even oiled like a locomotive’s brakes, a cowlick stood up on the back of his head. Charlotte had to admit, she found Prescott Blasko charming. Most stage mediums were all huff and bluster.
Blasko fidgeted nervously with his bifocals when he wasn’t speaking. He reminded Charlotte of a graduate student in mechanized medicine defending a thesis, nervous to the point of stuttering.
“I have an object inside this box,” she said, holding it up. “Only I know what it is. If your machine can work its magic on the item inside, you’ll convince me.”
“Hmm,” Blasko rubbed his chin. “I hope you won’t think ill of me if this doesn’t work. The thickness of the box may be problematic. My machine is only a prototype. It would probably just read the box, not the object inside.”
Charlotte considered. It would certainly give Blasko an easy out if the reverse transmigrator just so happened to malfunction reading her item, but his explanation wasn’t unreasonable. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
“Alright, would it help if I wrapped it in a handkerchief instead?”
“Oh, yes. That would reduce the interference considerably.”
She secreted the object out of its container and quickly wrapped a hanky around it. She stuck the box back inside her pocket.
The box and its contents were a gift from her father when she was a little girl. He’d given it to her a few weeks before he died. She kept them with her at all times. If Blasko’s machine could manifest her father…
Despite its original purpose, the box didn’t contain any jewelry. It contained a tooth. A single five-inch long, ossified tooth from a long extinct carnosaur.
Her father had been a paleontologist. He’d been on an expedition near the Charleston Military Pacification Zone when he was kidnapped by one of the rebel militia groups that the Union occupation had never succeeded in stamping out. The LaFittes were a wealthy family from old California ranching money. They’d paid the ransom. The rebels killed her father anyway.
The tooth had been his most prized possession since he’d found it as a young man. It was a sort of talisman, part scientific curio, part lucky charm. Maybe he should have kept it with him.
Charlotte’s mother had always been a frail woman, prone to nervous fits. Her father’s death pushed her over the edge, leaving her vulnerable to the likes of Stephen Astor.
Astor was a tall, striking, bald man with enormous personal charisma and a broken moral compass. In all likelihood, Astor would have made a killing as a used auto-buggy salesman or any other job that required professional schmoozing, but he was too lazy for real work and had a fiendish morphine habit to support.
As Charlotte eventually discovered, Astor had only a single useful talent. He could crack his toes.
Of course, he didn’t market that as his skill. He said he could contact the dead. Astor would charm his intended target, get them talking, and then begin his act.
Using the information his mark had just told him, he could fabricate a fairly convincing story. He would sit at a table with his target, asking questions of the spirits and receiving loud knocks in response. One knock for yes, two knocks for no.
By keeping his hands in plain sight the entire time, it was a solid act. The noises came from seemingly nowhere and answered a few basic questions before going back to playing poker with Saint Peter or whatever the spirits did when they weren’t talking to Astor.
In reality, each knock was just Astor’s toes crackling on the floor. He’d latch onto someone like a tick, bleed them dry, and then move on.
Charlotte’s mother fell for his gig. Astor had quickly moved in with them at their California hacienda, performing nightly séances.
Astor was manipulative, wheedling, and far too free with her mother’s money. He introduced her mother to morphine. To enhance her psychic abilities, he claimed. Really, it kept her compliant to all his demands, and there were many demands.
It wasn’t hard to figure out Astor was a sham. The “spirits” answered questions incorrectly sometimes, even basic personal information. Charlotte was a teenager before she figured out the toe-cracking trick, but her mother was too far under Astor’s spell by then.
Their once-beautiful house fell into disrepair. Vast chunks of land were sold off, along with most of the herds. All of it went toward financing Astor’s elaborate, bacchanalian séances, which could involve whole crates of cognac.
She spent most of her days locked in her room, listening to the constant chaos outside. Often, she had her nose in a paleontology book, thinking about the magnificent prehistoric beasts that once roamed the earth. The tooth was constantly at her side.
More than anything, she wished her father was still around, that he would return like Odysseu
s after a long journey and strike Astor down.
One night, she was in her room when she caught a whiff of smoke. Looking out the window, she saw Astor and his cronies standing in the yard, wine bottles in hand, illuminated by the growing flames.
Charlotte saw flames building in the stairwell, so she bailed through the window. The only thing she had time to save was her box. The entire house became a raging inferno.
On the ground, she couldn’t find her mother anywhere. Astor had simply left her in a morphine stupor inside when the flames began crawling up the walls. Five grown men were required to keep her from charging back into the house. Astor was duly arrested on a variety of charges amounting to aggravated scalawaggery and spent a few years in jail.
She’d taken the insurance money, sold off the remaining scraps of land, and finished her schooling. Now, she had a successful book exposing predatory supernatural scammers and was working on another.
Despite everything, Charlotte wasn’t motivated by hatred. Certainly, she took a certain pleasure in unmasking con artists, ensuring they wouldn’t repeat Astor’s legacy.
But a part of her wanted to believe. Her mother had taken a great deal of comfort in Astor’s false skills. If Charlotte found the real deal, maybe it would vindicate some of her mother’s choices.
So far, she’d found nothing to prove her mother right. The people she’d exposed ranged from harmless attention seekers to a supposedly prophetic robot to schizophrenic cult leaders. None of them could deliver on their promises.
Blasko intrigued her, though. She’d never seen anything half as spectacular.
As Blasko took the handkerchief from her, their fingers touched for a second. Placing the cloth in the slot, he closed and dogged the hatch. A green light blinked, indicating the chamber was hermetically sealed.
Blasko flashed a nervous smile. “Well, here goes nothing,” he said to the audience. All watched in anticipation.
Yanking a lever, Blasko activated the machine. The reverse transmigrator hummed, the sound growing louder. The lights dimmed and wavered.
Something was wrong. The hair on the back of Charlotte’s neck stood at attention as arcs of current lanced between the boilers. Blasko took a step back from his creation as it began to rattle and shake.
“This isn’t right,” he shouted to one of the guards. The machine’s hum built into a howl. “We’re drawing too much power. Vent the steam!”
A haze began to form in front of the machine. Crackles of electricity rippled through the mist. There was a lot of vapor, far more than the machine had produced to manifest the Roman soldier. Charlotte backed away from the stage as the cloud towered higher and higher.
The Pinkerton guard placed his hand on a valve. A spark as bright as the sun shot between the metal surface and his fingertips. He screamed, his body going spastic. His lips peeled back, and his jaw clenched so tight Charlotte could see his teeth fracture. A split second later, his hair ignited, and the skin started to bubble off his bones. Shouts of horror rippled through the audience.
A roar answered the screams. At first Charlotte thought it was the machine straining, perhaps breaking down.
She looked up. The billowing mist had a distinctive shape, twenty feet tall and forty feet long. Huge, clawed feet made from gauzy fog stood on the stage.
At one end of the mist, a tail swished back and forth. At the other end, a pair of glowing eyes, like cracked red marbles, stared down at the audience.
The beast’s teeth were longer than Charlotte’s fingers. Ectoplasmic drool dangled from the curved fangs.
People sometimes reported sensing smells with hauntings, perhaps a hint of rose perfume in the bedroom of a murdered woman. A horrible charnel house odor assaulted Charlotte’s nostrils now: the smell of blood and rotting meat and virulent musk, the smell of a predator.
That tooth had been precious to her father, his most cherished possession. But something else had a personal connection with it, a very personal connection that she hadn’t considered.
A triumphant roar filled the aerodrome. The reverse transmigrator had just peeled back the distant eons and summoned forth something primordial and savage. Sixty-five million years’ worth of primal, unfulfilled hunger stood amongst them.
Blasko darted toward a thick cord running out of the machine. The dinosaur reached down and clamped its scrap shearer jaws down over his torso. Picking Blasko’s writhing form off the ground, the monster shook its head back and forth like a dog killing a snake.
Bones snapped and cracked in a rapid-fire salvo. The dinosaur tossed its head back, and the shape, no longer recognizable as Prescott Blasko, tumbled down its throat. Charlotte could see the kicking, twitching form slide down the prehistoric monster’s gullet and then just… fade away.
At another time, Charlotte might have wondered what became of something swallowed by a ghost. Did it digest your soul?
The crowd fled toward the exits, knocking over chairs. Blasko’s remaining guard emptied his carbine at the prehistoric phantom. The bullets passed straight through, leaving vapor trails in their wake. Compared to the size of the monster, the weapon was little more than a pop-gun. Even against a flesh and bone dinosaur, the carbine wouldn’t have done much good.
Turning, the dinosaur lifted a massive foot and brought it down on the man with a crunch. The Pinkerton squirted against the wall.
The monster turned its attention on the writhing, panicked smorgasbord of the fleeing crowd. Behind it, the reverse transmigrator rattled and spewed blasts of blue lightning like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
Almost directly under the behemoth, Charlotte was out of the monster’s immediate sight. A huge foot swept out and stepped off the stage, barely missing her. She was transfixed and horrified at the same time, too shocked to move.
Oh, God. This is your fault, all your fault. You gave Blasko the tooth. You should have known. You should have seen this, a shrill little voice screamed in her head, paralyzing her.
Charlotte shoved the voice out of her thoughts. She needed to do something.
She was the closest person to the reverse transmigrator. If she shut it down, the carnosaur would disappear just like the Roman soldier, right? She had to try.
Clambering up onto the stage, she scanned the array of switches, valves, and lights. A maze of cords and pipes crisscrossed the floor.
Charlotte didn’t want to touch any of it. Bolts of electricity shot between the two boiler towers. The corpse of the electrocuted Pinkerton guard was still stuck to the valve on the opposite side of the machine, little more than sizzling meat.
She had to find some way to deactivate the machine without touching it. She looked around for something, anything. The first Pinkerton’s revolver carbine lay on the stage, a few feet from his twitching corpse.
An idea came to Charlotte. A terrible idea but the only one she had. She snatched up the carbine, feeling its deadly weight in her hands. Shooting the apparition was pointless. She’d seen that.
But the reverse transmigrator’s boilers were operating under such high pressure, a single hole would destabilize the entire machine and probably cause a full-scale blowout.
The resulting explosion would send a boiling wave of shrapnel and steam cascading outward. Without more distance, she’d be roasted like a suckling pig.
Behind her, the crowd struggled to fit through the exits.
The dinosaur waded toward them, moving leisurely. There was no way so much prey could escape in time. It would be a bloodbath if the monstrous specter tore into the crowd.
“Hey, hey!” She waved her arms and shouted, trying to draw the creature’s attention away, to at least distract it for a few seconds.
There was no way it could hear her over the cries of terror from the mob. Cursing, Charlotte lifted the carbine and fired a shot into the ceiling. The noise cracked through the confined space.
Lifting its head, the mammoth beast turned. Two glowing eyes gazed at her from across the room, across ti
me, across death. She felt something deep inside herself go loose.
Taking the loud noise as the call of a challenger, the predator took a step toward Charlotte, its feet booming on the ground.
Oh, balls.
She wanted to distract the creature, not attract it. Charlotte took off running, her heart thundering in her chest like a timpani drum.
A roar like the crack of the apocalypse, only louder, sounded behind her. She needed to get away from the reverse transmigrator right now. Scampering off the stage, Charlotte pounded toward the hangar wall.
Behind her, footsteps grew closer and closer and closer. The ground shook with each new impact. The entire world felt like it was shuddering apart.
With luck, she’d be out of the blast radius if she made it to the wall, one hundred feet away. The footsteps grew closer. Fifty feet away. She could hear the floor breaking with each crushing impact. Ten feet away. Hot, fetid breath tickled the back of her neck.
Charlotte spun and raised the carbine to her shoulder at the same time. The dinosaur was on top of her, its gaping mouth filling her vision. Shimmering teeth confronted her.
But she could see through the phantom beast to the sparking outline of Blasko’s machine. She pulled the trigger once, twice, three times, barely aiming.
Dragon tongues of steam shot out of holes in the boilers. The huge mouth flickered for an instant, and the entire world flashed a brilliant white as the boilers ruptured. Flanged metal and a hellstorm of pressurized steam blew outward like an artillery burst.
Charlotte was lifted off the ground and thrown backward. Whether she was caught at the outer edge of the blast envelope or ensnared on the monster’s fangs, she had no idea. She felt no pain, only white heat.
Slowly, the blinding light faded. Charlotte blinked, trying to force the cobwebs from her vision. There was no roaring, no horrible pounding footsteps. In fact, she didn’t hear anything at all.
She’d… she’d done it! The monster was dead, really and truly dead. Destroying the machine forced it to dematerialize. Relief flooded through her.