Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  The outburst cannot be feigned. Perhaps, I can approach Boisgilbert directly after all, gain his cooperation to complete my mission. But I know instantly the folly of this hope. He thinks too highly of his petty role as showman to this circus of the dead, peddling tickets to rich and famous for one last glimpse at their departed loved ones. I cannot risk that he will hurl me from his city like he is about to do to the Industrial Army agent.

  “Ah, well, Clarkson will take care of this one.”

  Mr. Boisgilbert takes my arm and guides me across the plaza to the entrance of the immense wall that encircles the great turret. The entire layout of the city—concentric rings of buildings and canals surrounding its most precious treasure—reminds me of my monastery, where only the initiated may gaze upon the esoteric wonders of the inner circles. But there the similarity ends; in Ionia, no mere material wealth can buy access to my order’s secrets.

  I sneak a look back at the court and shudder. The man named Clarkson stands directly before Mr. Meinhof. Ropey swathes of ectoplasmic matter spin from Meinhof’s raised palm and engulf the Industrial Army agent’s head.

  “Come,” Boisgilbert says, steering me toward the tower’s gate. “Let Mr. Clarkson deal with that unpleasantness.”

  I turn away from the unnerving scene, though I am still shaken as we arrive at the gate. I close my parasol and leave it with an old cloaked woman muttering quietly to herself in tongues. As we pass through the great frowning arch into the turret, coldness shivers through me.

  “An unfortunate side effect of the forge,” Boisgilbert explains, noticing my discomfort. “My spiritualists say there’s nothing to be done about it—the Odic fires burn cold.”

  No foyer greets us inside the tower. Rather, the rough granite walls of the confining corridor curve to the left. I have the impression that we gradually spiral toward the building’s heart. The air smells like damp stone.

  A luminous mist lights the way, perhaps generated by the forge itself, which is said to provide the electricity for the entire city-state. The farther we proceed, the chill only grips tighter.

  An odd feeling sweeps over me, like a childhood memory has suddenly washed up on the shores of my mind. Have I been here before? No—I spent my youth on another continent, cloistered in the halls of my Ionian monastery. Rationality fails to dispel the familiarity.

  My calves strain as we climb ever upward. The curve of the corridor is now regular, indicating that we no longer move toward the turret’s center but rather corkscrew around it. The cold now reaches deeper than flesh, cutting through my astral form like an otherworldly breeze and rattling the ungainly structure of my only recently cultivated mental body. The power beyond the wall is more potent than any energy I have encountered, be it psychic or spiritual. For the first time, I doubt my masters and the mission on which they have sent me. Can the frail mechanism of copper and brass and wood I have brought from Ionia handle the Odic current of the forge?

  But my masters have assured me it can—that the orgone siphon is not a spatial or material construct but, rather, a structural one, like the higher bodies I have spent my entire life organizing within my being. To the uninitiated, the word “energy” conjures up images of electrons swirling around atoms like hyperactive satellites. We of the order know differently. The world is only relationships and nothing else. Matter and energy are but illusions, facile metaphors for the unevolved spirit.

  At last, the corridor levels out and ends at an immense lead door. Boisgilbert produces an oversized, many-tongued key but hesitates before placing it in the lock. He turns to me.

  “Are you sure this is what you want, Miss Meteora? The price for visiting the forge is steep, and I am fully prepared to refund your payment if you change your mind now. But once we open the door, I must revoke my offer.”

  “You have my money, Mr. Boisgilbert,” I say, smiling sweetly to show him I mean no offense.

  “Yes, well, but . . .” He throws up his hands in exasperation. “Surely, we can communicate with your parents through an ordinary séance. My mediums are the best in the world. They will allow you to speak with your loved ones just as clearly as I speak with you now.”

  “But it’s simply not enough that I speak with them, Mr. Boisgilbert. I must see them with my own eyes—not some sickening simulacra spun from ectoplasm but, rather, the true forms of their spirits.” Now my tone becomes sharp. “You have assured me this is possible with the Odic forge. Have you misled me, sir?”

  Boisgilbert sputters. “Of course not!” Then the man’s composure returns, and a grin splits his rotund face. “I just wish you to know what you’re getting into. The true Odic forms of the departed are in no way filtered as they are in a typical séance. The experience can be . . . overwhelming.”

  “I have read the literature you provided and gone through the proper interview process. Do you deem me unprepared now, after I have gone to the expense of traveling halfway around the world?”

  The man nods, grinning as if he has at last judged my character worthy. He jangles the key into the lock and swings wide the doors. Brilliant white light pulses over us from somewhere ahead and below. He motions for me to proceed, and I enter the vast chamber.

  I stand on the railed edge of a Brobdingnagian rotunda. The turret’s curving, rough granite wall throbs with snowy light, reflecting from a cavernous well in the chamber’s center. Twelve alcoves spaced equidistantly around the wall each cloister a single cloaked medium—the engines of the Odic forge. I peer over the rail into a sea of swirling phantasms, like those I witnessed last night in my dream excursion. A deep, sonorous sound reverberates as if a titanic heart beats somewhere below in the depths of the well.

  “The navel of the world,” I breathe, for so it is revered by many, even my Ionian masters.

  “And now, Miss Meteora, if you will.”

  I follow Mr. Boisgilbert around the rotunda’s rim and onto a platform of stone and steel that tongues out over the abyss of souls. Upon a little circle jutting from the end are two small benches of purple-veined white marble. We sit, facing one another while a chaos of phantasms eddies below to the thrum of the giant hidden heart.

  The portly man removes a timepiece from his suit’s breast pocket and dangles it before me from its golden chain. The watch begins to swing, assuming the rhythm of that vast heart in the depths as my eyes follow the motion. The literature Boisgilbert sent explained the process well enough. I am to be coaxed into a mesmeric state, so I might draw the spirits of my dead parents into the Forge from the other world. My loved ones will then appear before me in their true, unfiltered essences.

  Or they would, should I care about such foolish entanglements of flesh and emotion. But I do not, for my own essence has been forged in its own crucible of the spirit. Should I die, I know my higher bodies will carry me beyond this world of attachments and desires. No, I am here for a purpose nobler than mere selfish whim.

  I am here to save the world.

  I concentrate my essence on a point just above and between Boisgilbert’s eyes. It only takes a moment, so prepared am I for this instant. The timepiece’s swing steadily decreases as the aetherous blood of my astral body flows from my heart chakra into my companion, saturating his consciousness. Already Boisgilbert succumbs, the mesmerist himself mesmerized.

  Is it my imagination, or do the whisperings of the phantasms grow more agitated and the light of the forge harsher, brighter, colder?

  I remove from my handbag the collapsed orgone siphon and carry it past Boisgilbert’s bench, where I set it up on the lip of the platform. I unfold the mechanism’s brass joints, positioning the copper oval to leer down into the soul well.

  So far, the mediums are oblivious in their alcoves. So concentrated on maintaining the forge, they have not noticed the deviation I have caused in the ritual. Still, I must move fast.

  I flip the switch at the base of the siphon, and the fan whirs to full speed.

  At first, the merest wisp of luminosity slips up
from the well into the copper loop of the apparatus, disappearing as an adjacent reality swallows it. Another wisp—more radiant, more substantial—siphons into the eye, followed by a small glowing cloud and a continuous spray of mist. The apparatus purrs contentedly as if nurtured by its meal of soul-stuff.

  I gasp as a greenish, glowing figure appears over the stone platform’s rim: a form cast in the image of an old woman, tentacles of aetherous hair writhing from beneath a semitransparent shawl. The phantasm waves its hands in panic as the droning blades draw it toward the oval. Its face elongates inhumanly, maw stretched in a rictus of terror. Then its entire form lengthens and thins as the astral current pulls it into the oval ring where it disappears from our world as if it had never been.

  I have imagined this moment a hundred—no, a thousand—times, but a tremor rattles through me at seeing the reality. My stomach turns, and my teeth clench, visceral reactions betraying my lifetime of training. I turn my thoughts from the specter I have hurled from our plane of existence to the image of those destined to die in the coming war should I falter in executing my masters’ plan. Why should I feel guilt and doubt now? Only despair and anguish laces the lingering souls of the dead. Draining their corrupted energies from this plane and restoring the balance of positive and negative forces is the only chance for peace on this world.

  Calling upon all my will, I return some semblance of calm to my body, though my spirit yet quakes beneath the burden of the awesome task.

  Another phantasm appears over the lip of stone, borne on the astral current. Then, it too is siphoned into the mechanism’s copper eye, banished to a parallel plane. A third succumbs, a fourth, and then, before I can exhale, a dozen more funnel through the oval.

  I step back as a ghastly cloud—green-yellow shot through with veins of crimson—forms around the siphon in response to the furious tow of spirits. As I back up, my right knee gives out to a violent blow from behind. My hands flail as they try to stop my fall, but all sense leaves me.

  I return to awareness in a haze. The back of my head pounds, and I cannot breathe. I reach for my neck where I find strange thick hands about my throat. A foggy visage hovers over me: Boisgilbert’s flushed and sweating face. I dig my fingers beneath his hands, trying to pry my way out of his death grip, but I am too weak. I scrape my nails into the backs of his hands. “The war,” I manage to gasp. “To stop the war.”

  Boisgilbert bellows in response as he lifts me up several inches and slams my head down against my stony pillow.

  “It won’t work, won’t work!” The cry comes from somewhere behind my prostrate body. “Don’t you understand what we do here? The purpose of the forge?”

  I try to rise, but something has changed inside me. Though my coherence—the unity of my higher bodies—remains, it is as if the thread connecting them to my body lies on the verge of breaking. My awareness floats somewhere above flesh and blood and bone. I am not dead, yet neither am I fully alive.

  I hear a muffled curse, and then look down on Boisgilbert from my astral vantage as he drags my physical form back from the encroaching cloud. My spirit follows sluggishly behind my body, like a balloon pulled along on a slackened string.

  “We’re bringing the spirits together, helping them move on,” I hear Boisgilbert mutter in heated anger. “We are the ones holding back the war! To expel these lost souls is only to doom them to eternal torment, to hasten that which you seek to prevent!”

  Wordlessly, my spirit moans with the truth of the man’s words. My masters’—no, solely my own—hubris has led me astray.

  With all that is left of my unity, I will my body to rise, pulling up by ethereal strings as if dancing a marionette puppet. Below, my body staggers to collapse beside the apparatus. The effort of moving my physical form has strained the connection to my higher bodies to the breaking point. In my last mortal act, I thrust out my hand and hurl the apparatus over the platform’s edge and into the mouth of the Odic forge.

  A sharp snap resounds through all that I am. I break free of my corporeal shell, pulled along by the astral current that follows in the wake of the plummeting apparatus.

  The well of screaming souls consumes me.

  I drift in the City of Spirits, borne aloft on currents of soul-stuff and dreams. Soft moonlight gleams through my shimmering, translucent form, reflecting up from canals ringing a massive turret toward which I am inexplicably drawn.

  Through force of will, I pull myself from the maelstrom of phantasms swirling about me. Gently, I drift back over the city and sink down into my body, eager to awake and begin my day—for this morning I intend to hire a gondola to carry me to the tower.

  As I switch off the fan that has lulled me into my aetherous sleep, a strange thought rises above all others, unbidden and unexplained.

  Perhaps this time things will be different.

  Christopher Paul Carey coauthored the novel The Song of Kwasin with Hugo Award-winning author Philip José Farmer and has continued Farmer’s Khokarsa series with Exiles of Kho and Hadon, King of Opar. His short fiction may be found in anthologies such as The Many Tortures of Anthony Cardno, Tales of the Shadowmen, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer, Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, and The Avenger: The Justice, Inc. Files. He is a senior editor at Paizo on the award-winning Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and has edited numerous collections, anthologies, and novels. He holds a master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Chris and his wife Laura live in Western Washington. Find him online at www.cpcarey.com.

  Team 17

  T. Mike McCurley

  The emptiness of London waits below us in silence as we slowly descend. The gears above us turn, and the massive chain drives make rhythmic clanking as our truck is slowly lowered. The air is cool and clammy, and wisps of morning fog roll back across the crew with whom I’ve been allowed to ride.

  There’s a general silence in the vehicle. I can see Ryan, the red-haired catcher, crossing himself and murmuring prayers. A canvas pack full of collection plates sits at his feet in the truckbed. Lars and Kat, the twin Swedes, sit with their foreheads pressed to one another as if sharing some secret conversation that none of the rest of us need be privy to. Their cannons are clamped in quick-release brackets beside them. Extra belts of ammunition shed a wan green luminescence that lights them from below. Even the ammunition for their weapons is made from rarefied aether. Beside me on the bench, Anna Purevoy is deep in a meditative state, preparing for what is to come. Miranda, the unit’s second catcher, is studying maps in the passenger seat of the cab next to Hans Bruder, the angry-looking driver who is hunched over the steering wheel. He’s the team’s sniffer—the psychic in charge of locating the spirits. The last of the Collectors is Seamus Slade, the team medic, who leans against the tailgate of the truck, oblivious to the long fall should that gate open. He’s got what I’ve been told is his usual devil-may-care grin and a hand-rolled cigarette that he sparked as soon as we were free of the drop bay.

  “Landfall in twenty,” Hans announces. He ignites the truck’s boiler, so it’s hot when we touch down. I look up and see the USS Grantville overhead, her searchlights knifing through the fog to illuminate the empty streets below. There is one other crew in a truck swinging from chains like ours. Team 9 will go south while we move north. Other crews will be deployed farther into the city.

  Wordlessly, Lars and Kat stand and grab their cannon. Each of the enormous gunners takes a side of the truck, aiming down and sweeping their weapons back and forth. They have their goggles down and locked.

  The echo of a single shot comes from the Team 9 crew. Their overwatch has fired on a target below us, and I hear an exasperated grunt from Lars.

  “That git from nine just cost Lars a bottle of gin,” Slade explains, flicking the butt of his smoke over the side. It tumbles slowly toward the ground, a glowing dot that dares you not to watch it all the way down. I take the bait and stare.

  “If they actually saw anything,” Anna says. She is loo
king at me as if she has never seen me. Before today that was true.

  “In five!” Hans calls back. He pulls on the brim of his hat, tugging the black leather down tighter across his brow.

  Miranda tucks the map into her vest and drops her goggles into place. I look around as they all go through their last-second rituals. Ryan puts his medallions under his shirt and flips the pack up onto his shoulders before turning to give me a V-for-victory sign. Anna is chanting under her breath, and I can feel my hair stand up as aetheric energy builds around her. In the back of the truck, Slade hops up into a squatting position, slipping another of his cigarettes—unlit this time—into his mouth.

  The wheels touch the ground, and a moment later we hear the undercarriage bars hit the pavement. Before the sound has fully registered, Hans has dropped the truck into gear, and the tires chirp as we accelerate away from the drop spot.

  Buildings rush by as we chug through the street. Hans knows how to coax all the power from the boiler, and he doesn’t hold to a straight route. With the exception of Anna, who does not need them with her ability, we’re all wearing the goggles now. Luminifirous aether trapped in the lenses paints the streets a pale green.

  It seems sad to see all the empty buildings. Streetlights stand like soldiers awaiting orders, their lamps dark and silent. There is no hiss of gas, no blaze of blue-white light. Nothing illuminates the roadways but our headlamps and the overhead glare from the Grantville.

  “When it comes, it comes without warning, news boy, so look sharp,” Slade says. He’s smiling, so I can’t really think that was too harsh.

  “The spirits here are all angry,” Anna says. When she looks at me, her eyes glow blue with channeled energy. “If they get half a chance they’ll eat you before you can scream. If one of them touches you, you’ll know what fear truly is.”

  “Contact left!” I hear as the tires squeal in protest. Hans is jerking us through a turn so tight my eyes hurt.