Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  Labor Costs

  Richard Dansky

  Tell me, Mister Upton, can you see the ghosts?”

  Obediently, Peter Upton craned his neck and looked out over the back of his chair to the window. “No,” he said. “Should I be able to?”

  In fact, what he saw looked moderately pleasant in a workmanlike sort of way. Rows of neat houses crouched down on rolling New England hillsides, shaded by trees just starting to think of shedding their leaves. Here and there, a church steeple heaved itself up a little nearer to heaven than its neighbors while the sluggish waters of the Housatonic flowed past in the distance.

  “Not unless you’re a prophet. But mark my words, they’ll be here soon enough.” Asher Perry coughed discreetly into his fist and wheeled himself over to the window to take in the view. The hum of his chair’s clockwork harmonized with the steady thrum of the machines on the floor below. When Asher Perry asked to see a man, it meant seeing him where he worked. And he worked in the textile mill that bore his name. “Join me.”

  Upton stood and walked over to stand next to the older man. Up close, he could see that Perry looked weary, the lines on his face deepened by worry and lack of sleep. “Do you know why I brought you here, Mr. Upton?”

  The younger man inclined his head slightly. “I solve problems. You clearly have a problem that needs solving. All that awaits are the details.”

  “Hmmmph. Don’t get too clever.” Perry sat for a moment and gestured broadly at the town below. “The thing you have to understand is that this is, for all intents and purposes, my town. I was born here. Grew to manhood here. Mustered into the Union Army with twenty-two of my closest friends on that village green, and came home with the six survivors and no legs two years later. And I built this factory up from nothing—here, when the easy thing to do would have been to pull up stakes and set up shop in Lowell. Do you know how much of this town works in this factory, Mister Upton?”

  Upton knew, of course. It was his job to know such things, to know all the pertinent things about any man who summoned him to a meeting and might have use of his particular talents. And he also knew that Asher Perry was blunt, even by the standards of New England mill owners, and had little patience for flatterers and their ilk.

  “More than half,” he said with quiet pride. “Directly, that is. If you count the shopkeepers who sell to your workers, the riverhands and drovers who move your goods, the men of God who tend to their souls and the ladies of the evening who tend to their other needs in a lovely house on Benefit Street, then nearly all.”

  Perry grunted in approval. “I love this town. It’s my mill that feeds it and pumps the blood through its veins. I put the food on the table in every house you see, and I send the doctor when any of ‘em fall ill. It’s my coin that buys their cradles and their coffins, and while a better businessman might think my sentiment unnecessary, I find it appropriate. This town made me, now I make it.”

  Perry turned his chair so that he faced Upton, staring up at him with a curious intensity. “But what happens out there if this place closes? If I’m forced to shut my doors, what happens next?”

  Upton closed his eyes for a second and imagined the scene. The great looms stilled, their steamy exhalations done forever. The confused and frightened workers outside of the great doors, chained shut. The flight of those who could afford to go, the creeping poverty and desperation of those who could not. The death of the town by inches, and the disappearance of everything Asher Perry had built.

  “I can see it,” he said softly. “So that is why you need me?”

  Instead of answering, Perry wheeled himself back over to his desk. The chair was a solid contraption of brass, inlaid with cherry wood here and there to make it less utilitarian. “Here’s the problem,” he said, and he pulled two small bolts of fabric onto the desk. To Upton, they were indistinguishable. “One of these is from my works. High quality, which means I can afford to charge through the nose for it. And the other? From a mill in Burlington. Last year, they were turning out stuff that would rub a horse’s backside bald. This year, they’re making cloth as good as mine and five times as fast.”

  “I begin to see your worry.”

  “Hmm. Do you.” Perry steepled his fingers. “I’ll be straight with you, Upton. My buyers won’t hold the line for long. I either have to adapt or shut down, and I can’t shut down.”

  Upton dropped into a chair across the massive desk. “What exactly are you asking me to do, Mister Perry?”

  “Steal.” Perry’s voice was flat and cold. “Get yourself into the Schnurr Textile Works by whatever means you have to. Find out how they’re doing it and who’s doing it for them. And then bring that secret back to me, so I can do the same thing here.”

  “How far do you want me to go to get it? Certain things . . . cost more.”

  Perry scowled. “Whatever it takes, Mister Upton. You have carte blanche.”

  He pulled open another drawer, pulling out a small bag stuffed to nearly to bursting. “Here,” he said, tossing it on the table. “Airship fare from Bridgeport to Burlington. Half your fee, as agreed. And those other things you asked for, all provided.”

  Upton swiped the bag with an easy motion, not bothering to open it, and stood. “And from here?”

  “One of my men will drive you to the terminal in Bridgeport. He’s already picked up your things from the boarding house and is waiting downstairs. And with that, I believe our business is concluded, at least until you bring me what I asked for. Good day, Mister Upton, and godspeed.”

  “Until I return, then.” Pouch in hand, Upton headed for the door.

  The sound of the machines got louder once he left Perry’s office but not oppressively so. The factory floor spread before him, and of all the ones he’d seen, this was by far the most pleasant. Vast windows let in light while massive fans and bellows kept air circulating throughout the room. Nor could he see children working the looms. It was said Perry had strict rules against it and that he paid his people well.

  Upton frowned. Sympathy was a dangerous thing in his line of work. His task was before him. Best that he not think of it in terms of good or evil but merely payment. With that, he strode down the iron staircase toward the front door and Burlington.

  The Burlington airship station was small, crowded, and busy. Blasts of steam and compressed air pushed platforms full of passengers skyward or let them settle toward the ground as gangs of men worked to tether incoming vessels. Everywhere, placards announced new expansions that were coming soon—new services, new platforms, a new world manifesting itself in a million small ways.

  As Upton’s lift hit ground, he hoisted his bag. The disembarking crowd surged around him, but he held back until the tide had receded and the platform operator stood alone at his console.

  “Excuse me, sir. Can you direct me to the Schnurr Textile Works?”

  The lift operator, a heavyset man in a too-tight uniform, laughed. “That way,” he said, and he gestured with a meaty thumb. “Just listen for the commotion.”

  “Commotion?” Upton asked.

  But the platform operator was already hustling the next batch of passengers onto the platform, securing it for ascent. If he heard Upton, he gave no sign

  Upton shrugged and set off. Vehicles whizzed past him: larger steam-driven omnibuses with rumbling boilers and smaller clockwork devices like powered bicycles, zipping in and around the motorcars like flies. Horses were still in evidence here and there, but they were few and far between. A sign of progress, Upton told himself. Clearly, Burlington was going places in a hurry.

  And then he rounded a corner and came across a scene of pure chaos. Perhaps a hundred yards away, behind a low brick wall, was a massive building labeled Schnurr in titanic bronze letters. A dozen smokestacks belched filth, spitting black soot and thunderous cacophony skyward. No windows disrupted the grim brick exterior, but that was not what caught Upton’s attention.

  In front of the factory was a surly mob of hired tou
ghs, hard, unshaven men in grubby clothes and hastily pinned-on badges, all armed with clubs or brickbats or sawed-off lengths of pipe. A fiercely mustachioed fellow gave orders from a platform close to the building by speaking into some sort of metal cone that amplified his voice a hundredfold.

  Across from the hooligans was an equally disorganized mob, only they held placards instead of weapons. Many were women, Upton noticed, and they chanted slogans almost loud enough to drown out the mustached man’s yelling. Overhead, police ornithopters circled lazily, and a crowd had gathered to watch the incipient confrontation. The air was electric with tension. The more sensitive members of the crowd were already edging away.

  Upton edged forward, working his way through the crowd until he was on the edge of the throng of sign-holding laborers. He could hear now what they were saying, though the words made little sense: “Tear them up, let them go! Tear them up, let them go!” The strikebreakers were too close now, their makeshift weapons terribly real across the short gap.

  Here and there, workers handed out leaflets. Most were met with hoots of derision and torn up, but the laborers kept at it doggedly. Upton worked his way over to where a painfully thin young woman with a long, angular face was resolutely shoving papers into the hands of anyone nearby. He tapped her on the shoulder and got as far as “Excuse me, miss,” before she whirled, paper first, and nearly rammed it down his throat.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, lowering her hand slightly. Her voice had a slight rasp to it, one Upton instantly recognized as an early symptom of Monday Fever. All the mill girls got it sooner or later. The dust from the looms settled murderously in their lungs. The cure was fresh air and sunshine, far from the textile mills—a cure none of them could afford to take.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said, lowering his eyes to the paper as he took it. It was the usual labor broadsheet, claiming the workers were united against unfair labor conditions and demanding humane treatment. And at the bottom, an ominous phrase: “Not even death will free us.”

  When he looked up, the woman was looking back at him. “You read it,” she said. “Most don’t.”

  “I try to be informed,” he replied. “So is this a slowdown?”

  “A strike,” she said resolutely. “Schnurr Textiles is a monstrous firm. It must be stopped.”

  Puzzled, Upton turned his head. “Wait a minute. You said it’s a strike. But the factory’s still running. And I don’t see any replacement workers—“

  “Scabs,” she interjected

  “Scabs going in and out. What’s going on in there?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “You see, it’s—“

  And then all hell broke loose.

  A brick came soaring across the line. No one saw who had thrown it: perhaps, one of Schnurr’s hired thugs or, perhaps, a bored and restless member of the crowd. It made no difference. The projectile caught one of the workers on the side of the head with a crunching sound, and she dropped to the ground. There was a moment of stunned silence and then screams and bellows of anger broke out as the two sides surged together. Metal and wood slammed against bone, fists slammed into faces. From overhead, the impotent tootling of police whistles served to remind everyone that this would not be settled by law.

  Upton found himself face to face with one of the strikebreakers, a squat man with an oft-broken nose and a derby crammed low over his eyes. The man roared, swinging a length of lead pipe. Upton ducked and brought his bag up in a vicious arc that intersected with the man’s crotch. He grunted and folded, at which point Upton hammered the back of his neck with an elbow, and the man fell senseless to the ground.

  Behind the unconscious man, the woman he’d been talking to stood, staring.

  “You should go. You’re not one of us.”

  “That seems to make no difference.”

  “Please, leave before it’s too late!”

  But it was, or so it seemed. The line of workers wavered and cracked, and the tide of strikebreakers poured through. They lay about indiscriminately, and the resolute chants turned to panicked screams.

  “Come on,” the woman said, and she grabbed Upton by the arm. “Let’s get you out of here!”

  “Get me out of here?” he said, even as a billy club whistled past his ear. She turned and threw a fistful of leaflets into the strikebreaker’s face. She pulled Upton free from the crowd.

  “This way!” she shouted, leading him down an alley to the left.

  She led him through a maze of small streets and smaller passages as the clamor of the riot faded in the distance. Eventually, they found themselves in a small courtyard of a crumbling tenement. “In here,” she said, leading him through a door and into a cramped kitchen. A pot of soup burbled lifelessly on the stove while clotheslines draped across the room to take advantage of the heat. “You can stay here until it dies down. They never come this far looking for us.”

  “I appreciate the help, Miss . . .”

  “Adelaide. Adelaide Marcus.”

  “Ah. Miss Marcus, I appreciate the help, but there’s no need for you to stick your neck out for me. I’ve handled myself in worse scraps.”

  “You’ve seen nothing worse than Schnurr,” she said flatly. “Did you not hear what we were calling for?”

  “Tear it up, let them go,” he said. “Tear up contracts? Let the workers leave?”

  She laughed, a bitter, angry sound that devolved into a rasping cough. “You have no idea. Look, have you ever worked in a factory? Lived in a factory town?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then you don’t know. Don’t know they bring you in with a promise of good pay and clean clothes and a nice place to live. They don’t tell you they charge for all of that, and they keep charging, and you never ever ever make enough working for them to pay it off because they always find new things to charge you for.”

  “So run.”

  “Try it, and you’ll get clapped into debtor’s prison. There’s no way out. Once they get a grip on you, you’re theirs.”

  “For life?”

  She turned and stared at him. “Life? What do you think happens when you die and you still owe them?”

  Upton ducked under a clothesline, stepped around a child’s makeshift toy on the floor. “The debt gets passed along, I assume. That’s the usual way of things.”

  Again, a bark of angry laughter. “Not anymore. They’ve made things more efficient, you see. Now, when you die—”

  And with a crash, the door flew into the room. Shouts of “There she is!” filled the air, matched by a clamor from the front of the building. A dozen burly strikebreakers poured in, clubs in hand. One swung at Upton, who dodged as the man’s arm was caught by a clothesline. He sent the man sprawling with an uppercut, just in time to take a belt across the ribs from the next thug. Behind him, he heard a scream and a hiss as Adelaide flung the pot of hot soup at another assailant. There was the thump of another man going down. And a gunshot. And another.

  A spray of bright red across the clothes, the clang of a pot against the floor—Adelaide was screaming, and more shots were fired until she went horribly, abruptly silent. Upton tried to go to her, but a sharp blow caught him across the back of the head, and he saw darkness.

  Hours later, he awoke. The kitchen was empty, and he was on the floor. His cheek rested in a cold, sticky puddle that smelled like old copper pennies. Blood, he told himself as he sat up. Adelaide’s. With the name came the memory and the sure knowledge that she was dead. Her body was gone, he saw, though the rest of the evidence of the battle remained: the dropped pot, the bloodstained clothes. Even his bag was unmolested in the corner.

  All they’d wanted, it seemed, was her.

  Well, Upton decided, they weren’t going to keep her. It was that simple.

  The factory was easy enough to infiltrate. The afternoon’s excitement had died down, and the crowds had dissipated. Under cover of darkness, it was easy to get close to the building. Even at nig
ht, the factory was still running full blast, and the thunderous clatter of the machinery covered the sound of his steps. Upton tailed an unobservant guard on his rounds and slipped into the building behind him. It was easy enough to disable the man, who went about his rounds like he could not possibly conceive of an intruder. Upton then stashed the guard’s unconscious body in a closet, borrowed his keys and gear, and stepped onto the factory floor.

  It was vast, bigger than Perry’s factory by far, and far more crowded. Looms and hoppers filled every available space, churning endlessly as they devoured raw materials and spat out cloth. Carts ran back and forth between the machines in corridors barely wide enough for a man, running full and empty in turn.

  And there were no people.

  No workers feeding fiber to the great machines. No one checking product as it came off the loom. No one adjusting feeds or tying knots or doing any of the million and one tasks that Upton knew were part and parcel of this sort of operation.

  In the entire juddering building, he was alone. It was just him and the machines.

  Each of which, he now saw, had one thing in common from cart to loom to carder. Every single mechanism held a singular canister or light of some sort, a brass bracket holding a bluish glass capsule, with a dated placard underneath. They served no obvious purpose, yet their omnipresence spoke to an underlying necessity. Frowning, he scanned the room checking the posted dates; none were over a year old and one marked the very day. Upton walked over to that one and hoisted himself up to where the canister had been inserted securely into the works. Steadying himself, he reached up and grasped it in hopes of better understanding. His fingers brushed the surface of the glass, and a sudden shock dropped him to his knees.

  Not the electric current the device provided, though that was considerable. Instead, it was the shock of recognition, of understanding what was in those blue capsules.