Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  Or rather, who.

  And Adelaide, who had died earlier this day and who no doubt owed her employer a great debt, had already been put to work repaying it from beyond the grave.

  At least, that was what she had just told him.

  When he was able to bring himself to move once again, he removed the cylinder from the machine and listened, gratified, as the loom ground to a halt. He thought about doing that for the others as well, but time was growing short, and he had no way to carry more than one. Instead, he contented himself with a visit to the factory’s offices, securing certain papers he found there and burning the rest before slipping away.

  As dawn approached, Upton hammered on Asher Perry’s factory door. After a minute, lights came on and voices sounded, and the great door creaked open to show an unkindly giant of a man in a nightshirt with a length of oak in his hand. “Go away,” he said, but Upton was already pushing past him into the factory.

  “Perry? Perry!” he called. “I’ve got what you asked for. I’ve got everything you asked for, by God, and I’ll not keep it a minute longer than necessary! Asher Perry, come out and take what’s yours!”

  A thick hand slammed onto his shoulder and spun him around. “That’s enough out of you, I think,” said the giant as he pushed him toward the door. “You want to see Mister Perry? You come back in the morning like a gentleman, you do.”

  “No, no, Hammond. It’s fine. I’ve been expecting him.” Perry’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs.

  “Go on,” Hammond growled, and he neatly reversed the direction he’d been pushing Upton. “But make it quick. Mr. Perry needs his rest.”

  “I have no intention of staying,” Upton replied and climbed the long iron stairwell, his footfalls echoing over the long rows of silent machines.

  “Not here. In my office,” Perry said when the younger man reached the top of the stairs. Dutifully, Upton followed him. “Shut the door,” Perry said, and Upton did. “Hammond’s no idea that there’s any trouble, and I’d like to keep him innocent of such things if I can. Now, what do you have for me?”

  “Everything you asked for,” Upton replied and reached into his satchel. Out came the battery, blue glass and brass, a thoroughly utilitarian design made for maximum use, not aesthetics. He placed it on the desk, though the sound of it hitting the wood was oddly muffled. Instead of a thud, it came out as almost a gasp.

  Perry leaned forward and peered at the container. Deep within, a hazy form could be seen, swirling endlessly. “What is it?”

  “The answer to how your competitors were able to up their production. Take a closer look.”

  The older man stared for a minute, fascinated, before the blood abruptly drained from his face. “Good God,” he said. “is it . . .”

  Upton nodded. “It is. Every single one of their machines is powered by one of those. Every. Single. One.”

  Perry wheeled himself back from the desk, putting some distance between himself and the battery. His eyes stayed fixed on it. “That . . . that’s demonic!”

  “It is. And it keeps their looms running twenty-four hours a day. You wanted their secret, Mister Perry. Here it is.” Upton tapped the pile of papers next to the battery. “Everything’s in here. Schematics. Notes. Timetables and cost estimates. And if you’re smart, you’ll take it all and throw it in the fire.”

  “Indeed.” Perry sounded distracted. Slowly, he wheeled himself back toward the desk.

  “You weren’t in there, Mister Perry. You didn’t see the things I saw. Dead girls, Perry, dead girls with their souls wrung into glass bottles like cheap liquor, so they could keep working forever. You want no part of that, I tell you.”

  Perry didn’t answer. Instead, he reached out tentatively with one finger, tapping it on the glass of the battery. A faint blue spark leapt from the container to the tip of his finger. A soft keening was barely audible . “Good God,” Perry whispered, and he reached out to cup it in both hands.

  “Mister Perry, you must understand—“

  “I understand perfectly, Mister Upton.” He looked up from the battery, his face haggard. “The remainder of your money is downstairs with Hammond. There’s a bonus as well. Take it with my thanks for a job well done, and never darken my door again.”

  Upton didn’t move. “You can’t do this. It’s hell you’d be building to save your little heaven. Even if it does keep the factory open, how long before they find out how you saved them? How long before they turn on you?”

  Perry said nothing, turning the battery over and over in his hands as the ghost danced within. A frenzy of sparks flared through his fingers, but he resolutely ignored them, ignored the hammering of the hazy figure inside the blue glass on its walls.

  Upton waited for him to speak but finally turned to go.

  When Upton reached the door, Perry looked up and called to him. His voice was low, and his eyes strayed to the window and the town beyond.

  “I buy their cradles,” he said. “I buy their coffins. What else would you have me do?”

  Writer, game designer, and cad, Richard Dansky has contributed to over 40 videogames. The author of 6 novels, including the Wellman Award-nominated Vaporware, he has also worked on over 130 tabletop RPG titles and published numerous pieces of short fiction. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, their library, and an indeterminate number of bottles of single malt whisky: http://rdansky.tumblr.com.

  The Twentieth-Century Man

  Nick Mamatas

  The dinner was as cold as the room. Steam-pipe cold, as when the coal runs out. Jessop, Arkright, and Taylor shivered as they ate, though it wasn’t from the temperature but rather due to the firearms pointed at the back of their heads.

  “Not hungry, Dodgson?” the leader of the quartet asked me.

  I wasn’t shivering either. After taking a pistol-whipping from my interlocutor, I’d been placed in Carnacki’s favorite chair where he’d once snugged up after far superior dinners and told us of his encounters with the abnatural and perverse.

  “I am not,” I said. “I have trouble digesting food when nauseated.”

  “What is this all about?” Arkright snapped. Gravy dribbled down his chin, already congealing due to the frigid air. Our captors were outfitted as though for an Arctic expedition save for the fact that they wore gloves only over their left hands, all the better for the pistols in their right hands.

  “Carnacki, of course,” Taylor said.

  Jessop simply nodded and tucked back in to his roast.

  “Carnacki,” the head man said. “Carnacki, the ghost-finder.”

  “Eh? Carnacki the ghost, more like! Innit?” said the man behind Taylor, his accent and gruff tone suggesting a social origin far below that of his co-conspirator.

  “This is entirely infra dig, men!” Arkright said. He rose from his chair, and Taylor nearly joined him. I thought to leap upon the head man, but my throbbing head injury kept me planted in my chair. Arkright got pummeled for his troubles and slumped back into his chair.

  “Infra dig. Abnatural. There are so many notional spaces we create through nothing more than civilized discourse—there is a thing called dignity, there is another known as nature—and by bringing these spaces into existence with our minds, we bring into existence their shadows. The spaces that they are not.”

  Our captor was a philosophical sort. It was nearly as though he was simply musing aloud to himself, as if our presence was a matter of accident rather than design. It was universally assumed that Carnacki had passed when he failed to return from a summons up to the Borders. We, his friends, were contacted via post by a man we had presumed to be Carnacki’s solicitor and asked that we attend one final dinner where the estate of the great detective and my great friend would be settled. Instead, we were greeted by a quartet of armed men and supper that had been left out too long.

  Taylor said, “This was Carnacki’s home, and now, it is not.” Everyone turned to peer at him. Taylor rarely spoke during our intimate gathe
rings with Carnacki, and his observation was a peculiar one.

  “For your sake, sir, hope this is not the case. We are here because this is Carnacki’s home. We need it to be his home, vibrationally.”

  “You sound like Carnacki,” I told him. “Our poor friend Carnacki would not keep us waiting so or treat us so cruelly. And the meat would have been kept over a warmer.”

  “I am not your poor friend Carnacki,” the man said, an edge in his voice. He loomed over me. “But I will take his place. And all of you will be of assistance in doing so.”

  Taylor snapped, “We’ll do no such thing!”

  Arkright was still in a daze, and Jessop, his usual practical self, ate his cold vegetables.

  “We know nothing of Carnacki’s art,” I said, trying to rise to my feet, if only to save Taylor a drubbing. “Our fellowship with him was rather non-commutative. He was the detective, the adventurer, the occultist. He shared his stories with us but not his expertise. So we can be of no help to you, sir, which is rather a shame given the number of supernatural menaces that continue to plague our country.”

  “On the contrary, you’ll be of great assistance to me,” the man said. He took a seat on the corner of the table in the manner of a movie-house rake and tapped the surface with the barrel of his pistol. “Why do you think,” he said with his philosophical tone returning, “Carnacki would summon you and give tell of his exploits?

  “You were crucial, do you see? He made acquaintanceship with each of you and cultivated a seeming of friendship in order to harness certain… potentials. Your quaint ghost-story club charged the aetheric battery of the Electric Pentacle itself.”

  Much like Carnacki, our captor did not feel the need to cease speaking when his narrative was not yet done. When Carnacki was alive, I and the other members of our fellowship would never have thought to interrupt our friend—his tales were at once that chilling, that gripping. A pleasing terror kept us silent in our chairs. Our current situation was similar but as seen through a dark glass: the terror wasn’t pleasing, the chill was in the air, and the grips were made of solid flesh and sinew as our captor’s confederates clamped their hands upon our shoulders. If that were not enough to convince us to grant our captor an audience, there were the pistols to consider.

  “Four men and Carnacki. Five, like the five points of the pentacle. It is no coincidence that Carnacki brought you all here to hear of his exploits. It is the nature of the occult to be hidden, but it is also the nature of the occult to tantalize, to ‘hide in plain sight’ as the newspapers might say of a wanted fugitive who is found in his favorite chair down at his local. The abnatural is not the other end of the world from the natural. It is rather the void that gives it shape. Do you see, Dodgson?”

  Indeed, I did. Our captor would not kill us, I knew that much. That is why he and his henchmen had used their guns only as saps, and hadn’t simply executed us the moment we pushed in through the door. He had ambushed us for some plan.

  Arkright, who had prepared an impromptu poultice for himself by dipping a napkin into his water glass and applying the damp end to his temple, spoke up. “Not all of Carnacki’s cases had to do with occult traffic. Plenty of times, he was made a bit of a fool, such as when some criminals had taken advantage of local tales to secure a hideout for their coterie. They laughed at his Electric Pentacle.”

  “But I am not laughing, Mr. Arkright. I am deadly serious. The Electric Pentacle works, and it works due to the vibrational sympathies of you four and the relationship you had with Carnacki. I mean to recreate the Electric Pentacle.

  “I mean to mass produce it!”

  Jessop snorted at that. “Why?” he asked.

  “As your friend said,” our captor began, gesturing at me with his pistol, and I regret to report that I cringed, “there are still many supernatural menaces about.”

  “Not so many,” Jessop said. “There’s no market for it, man, do you understand?”

  “And truth be told,” Taylor said, “if you are familiar with Carnacki’s cases as you claim to be, the abnatural is rather gormless in its way. Carnacki put himself in danger by contending with the forces. On their own, left unmolested, what do ghosts and haunts and vibrational entities even do that’s so dreadful? Slam doors, tear bed-clothes from mattresses, clomp about hallways on phantom hooves. Honestly, much of this abnaturalism is an issue of real estate or heirlooms. Half the time, Carnacki defeated manifestations by putting the haunted rooms or vibrational objects to the torch! The greater fraction of the remainder, there was no ab at all but just some trickery by the cleverer segment of the criminal element.”

  “If I’m honest, I’ll tell you that I attended our club suppers primarily for the suppers and only secondarily because of an interest in Carnacki’s adventures, which I presumed to be largely a matter of confabulation,” Jessop said.

  I gritted my teeth at that.

  “And you, Arkright?” our captor asked.

  “I fail to see even a single whit of sense in this endeavor,” Arkright said plainly. “Carnacki was a great man. Were he here . . .” Arkright could not finish his statement, and he lowered his gaze, bereft.

  “Were he here,” the head man said, “I would enjoy a supper with him rather more than I would with you lot, his supposed boon companions. I had hoped that there would be some curiosity regarding the supernatural here and that we could have a nice chat, just like the old days—”

  “With you in place of Carnacki, no doubt,” I interrupted. “Of course, we’ll not cooperate. You can shoot us all dead, our faces falling flat into the pudding if you like.” I glanced at my friends, whose expressions did not betray the same stalwart hunger for sacrifice that I hoped my own face carried.

  “In Carnacki’s place? A clever supposition, but no. Carnacki’s interdisciplinary skills were a marvel, but he lacked my . . . vision. If I’m immodest, so be it. I am a twentieth-century man. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if the abnatural is limited to midnight cantrips, now. It’s the implications that are the meat of the matter. If magic is so, then science as we know it is fatally flawed. How would we integrate the notion of vibrational essence into Mr. Planck’s quantum hypothesis? It resists logic, denies it. These supernatural manifestations are like termites chewing away at the load-bearing beams of the cosmos . . .”

  “And now that Carnacki’s dead, the termites can feast . . .” Arkright began.

  “Perhaps, even his efforts were in vain. Imagine a man trying to rid his library of an infestation of firebrats or other vermin with a pair of tweezers and a looking-glass instead of fumigation!” Taylor exclaimed.

  “Ah, thus mass production,” Jessop said. “I must say that it would be rather difficult to earn a profit selling spectral security. You can’t convince a man to repair the commons out of his own pocketbook, even if the commons is the terra firma, and astra firmament, he is used to being rather more solid than you contend it is.”

  “Are you entertaining this madman’s suppositions?” I demanded. “He has us held captive! Show some courage, men. What would Carnacki do in such a circumstance? Think it through rationally, and then, only at the limits of the rational, appeal to the supernatural. The world has done very well so far and isn’t about to fall into ruin if we fail to acquiesce to a gunman and his troupe of ruffians.”

  Our head captor grunted to demand the return of our undivided attention. “Ah, that is the subject I had hoped to discuss, Dodgson,” he said to my friend. Then he turned to meet all our eyes. “What would Carnacki do? He would think through the situation rationally, and then, only at the limits of the rational, appeal to the supernatural. I would do the same, and indeed, I have. Which is why I summoned you here to Chelsea and have told you my concerns. I have reformed the supper club and will use its vibrational power to deal with the supernatural, just as Carnacki did but with finality. The five shall eliminate the supernatural from the universe. The five!”

  “Aha, so you do plan to take Carnacki’s place,” I
said, incredulous and aghast at the pluck of this man. “You’re no Carnacki, sir.”

  “Not yet,” the captor said, and he did something so horrific and so brave that it chills me to this day to detail it. He lifted his pistol, and I cringed. Arkright gasped and made to leap from his chair, but the ruffians held him down. I swore to myself that I would keep my eyes open and take the bullet like a man even as my nervous system impelled my eyelids to squeeze shut.

  Thunder filled my ears, and burning powder singed the hairs of my mustache. My breath froze in my throat, then burned. I opened my eyes, steadying myself for the bloom of blood I was convinced I would see upon my jacket, but the blood was on the floor, a halo of red around his head and a coin-sized hole in his temple. His crew sprang into action, leaving their stations behind Arkright, Taylor, and Jessop to attend to the body. They withdrew unusual instruments from the pockets of their heavy coats. They tore at the gunman’s jacket and shirt and opened his mouth to insert a sort of spoon attached to a coil that in turn led to a small crank-battery. Though the ruffians worked with the mien and precision of a team of Army medics, the apparatus used was more reminiscent of radio equipment. The man with the harsh accent muttered to himself as he worked the crank, as the others treated their leader’s fatal wound.

  I exchanged glances with my cohort. Though no longer directly threatened by the ruffians, we were paralyzed by the scene and could only watch them work on the corpse on Carnacki’s floor. One ruffian stormed atop the table, a length of copper wire in his gloved fist, and punched up at the light fixture, shattering the bulb and plunging the room into a momentary darkness as he shoved the wire into the light socket. A great spark traveled down the wire like a snake and excited the body into a spasmodic twitching. The air smelled alive, and a low buzzing filled the room. The hair on my arms stood on end, and as the drone subsided, footsteps clomped about in the dark. A door swung open and shut.