Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  “Have you seen one before?”

  Charles looked up at the source of the urbane voice.

  The businessman stood two heads above Charles and, oddly enough, wore no hat. He seemed to suck up what little light there was into his vibrant red hair, streaked with grey, and his vibrant green eyes. The businessman’s eyes seemed inconsequential at first glance, but—you must know, you must have guessed—with the wonders and horrors they had seen, they burned like coals.

  “Come, come, give fodder to my ego, if you will.”

  “Ah.” Charles was surprised how his words came. “Quite funny, quite funny. Ah, you see, I do a little repair work, and a watch crossed my path.” He pulled the remnants of Eustace’s watch from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to the man, who examined it closely. “So sorry. Very sorry.” Charles was afflicted with apologies when he was nervous.

  The businessman was not often surprised, but tonight, he was. He hid it well as he realized that Charles Oakley had managed—and easily—to open the watch, despite a protection that should have made such a thing impossible. “Is this what led you to seek me out, sir?”

  “Ah, well . . . I opened the watch, and it behaved most strangely, sorry to say, sir.”

  “Malcolm, please. Malcolm Ridley. There’s no need to apologize.”

  “Almost as if, I thought, some sort of magic had been done upon it.” Charles bit off the words before another sorry could escape.

  “Are you a man who believes in such things?” his opposite number responded as casually as if he were asking Charles Oakley to pass the butter. Charles could not find the words to respond, but he could tell that this Ridley almost looked pleased. “Wind the watch backward, my good man, and you will find the world slows. For the busy man, a means to make deadlines. For the man who cannot find time for leisure, a few spare hours. No use now, without the spring. Tell me, then. This is not your first time with a marvelous invention.”

  “I . . .” Charles spoke. “I have a sister.”

  And so was told the tragic history of Charles Oakley and how he came to live alone with but his sister’s specter. His people, save Bridget, fell devastated by scarlet fever in Charles’s eighth year—parents, siblings, grandparents, godparents, neighbors. You might well have fired all the cannons in England at his parish and wreaked less devastation. He and Bridget came to a children’s workhouse with all the hardships a thing entails: hunger, cold, work, cruel and neglectful masters. He told of his own hard work, for Charles Oakley, even as a child, could not be crushed in spirit. He had been apprentice to a toymaker and saved enough money to lodge himself and his sister comfortably, but she had taken work as a match-girl, and like so many others, the poison of the phosphorus matches rotted her jaw and then her entire body.

  Charles could not bear to let her go. So she continued to appear, held in place by his love night after night, year after year.

  “And until last night, her smiles were the same as they were in life, sir.” Charles stared into those green eyes and thought of how, at home, this very darkness held what was left of his sister. “I am a happy man, Mister Ridley. It is but a little problem, and I must believe that it has a solution—”

  At this point, the businessman said. “Sir, I may know the makings of certain peculiar things, but I am sorry to say that death’s door is not one of them.”

  He affected great sympathy, Charles thought. “I understand,”

  “I cannot refer you to any who might help you either.”

  Charles stood and offered his hand. Malcolm also stood, and under his gaze, Charles could not look away. “But in the area of specters and their ills, my good man,” Malcolm Ridley said, “there, I have some knowledge.”

  Observe now as Charles departs and the businessman withdraws. Observe, if you will, that Malcolm Ridley seems to grow more vibrant, his eyes and hair swallowing all light. Observe that he takes a small sip of something too dark and pungent to be any liquor.

  Now, observe a marvel as great or greater than those you have already seen. Malcolm Ridley steps from his warehouse, his boots sinking into mud, and he stalks along the poor footing of the docks and turns and weaves between small warehouses. And now—now, your eyes do not lie. For his body changes, slender legs to thick haunches, refined hands to rough paws, strong chin to angled muzzle, and threads of red hair appear all over his body in place of clothes.

  You’ve heard legends of this, but there is no moon peeking through the London fog—and you, if you be clever, may have already ascertained Malcolm Ridley will not be prisoner of any condition. For if there is one thing such a man craves, it is control.

  His nose takes in all the smells of the docks—soot over all, and subtler shades of kerosene, urine, steel, lard. Above them all a peculiar scent, one that sticks in his nose, raises his hackles. Hope.

  For the next few nights, Bridget was a thin, wan, vanishing presence. She would appear and look at Charles, and he would ask about her sights in her travels through London, but she would not answer.

  Charles maintained hope. He had a meeting set with Mister Ridley and was assured of treatment for his case if, and only if, he could bring Bridget with him. A solution for the little problem.

  So one night, Charles fetched his hat and waited at table for Bridget.

  She was even more faded, the moon in her light hidden by the clouds. Charles smiled his long-practiced smile. “Hello, dear. Remember the meeting I told you of?”

  Do we dare look into Bridget’s mind? She has some sense that she was once human, but Charles’s words—oak tree? puppet show?—these are words less familiar. Ash, bone, darkness, shadow—those are real, and Charles’s world is a distant echo.

  “Bridget, I have found a specialist. A doctor, of sorts.” Charles said. “He can help you with your feeling of wear. Remember when I said I would find you a doctor, even at death’s door, even beyond? I kept my word.”

  See how inside Bridget’s mind, for the first time, stirs something like a memory—her brother, holding her hand as her body fails, pleading with her to stay. The warmth of his arms, the gentle touch of his cheek. It is but an echo, reverberating through darkness, but it stirs her.

  Since past, present, and future are one in her darkness, she will go, she does go, she did go.

  The wind lashed the buildings with rain that night, mixed with chips of ice, turning the roads even soupier than usual. The whole world seemed faded, shuttered behind a curtain of wet and cold. Charles looked just behind him and was pleased to see Bridget’s form, her white light catching the rapid dotted lines of raindrops. He found the address for the meeting, went to the side of the building as he had been instructed. “Here . . . ah, we are.” Charles began to wonder if Malcolm Ridley were playing an especially cruel trick. There was nothing in front of him but two brick walls and the sea of icy mud between them. An alley?

  And then a thing peculiar, prelude to the most peculiar part of this tale. Though it was cold, a heart of wintry cold, the air shimmered as if in a heat haze. Charles thought he saw a keyhole, a single black shape against the air. No, he did see it. And following it, a curve of darkness like the crescent moon, what his mother had called the dead man’s moon.

  A door.

  Like the door that had opened into the Ridley warehouse, this one, though made of the air itself, opened into stifling darkness.

  Charles’s heart rattled like a strained balance lever, but forward he went, looking behind him to see if Bridget followed. And slowly, slowly, she emerged into the darkness with him, her pale form lighting his way.

  That journey was a haze. Darkness and then great wheels of flame overhead in place of stars. Whispered words, some in growls like the language of bears and some in a high clear song-speech that made his heart weep.

  Always, he saw the thread of a road ahead, pale cobblestones glowing faintly. Always, there was Bridget just behind him, a thin finger of light. Always, there was the tick-tock of blood pulsing in his temples.

  An
d always, he came to realize, there was the soft, ragged breathing, close at hand, of some huge animal.

  The path ended among a new sight—rising towers, scaffolds, metal structures ringing in a high wind. The light of the fiery stars in this strange place reflected off steel. Charles Oakley watched as the dark shape that had accompanied them—a dog? a wolf, he decided, by its loping gait—slipped inside one of the buildings through a gaping door like a maw.

  And then Malcolm Ridley’s voice. “Come in, and see what I spoke to you of.”

  Once inside, it took Charles a moment to adjust his eyes to the low, pale light. Almost all the light in this place came from a great central orb, elevated on a lamppost, and it all bore the quality of light that Bridget represented—a pale moon caught behind the clouds.

  Springs and gears, like the pieces of enormous pocket watches, littered the floor. Scrap metal was piled in the corners. In the center of the room stood Malcolm Ridley next to a new shape. It was taller than Ridley, taller than any man, and made entirely of joined metal: orbs welded to shafts, resting on tightly coiled springs and gears, with two blank eyes like unlit lamps. Hands made of thin wire fingers. In the center of the chest, that stylized R for its manufacturer.

  Charles could not help, even in the midst of the strangeness, a smile as child-like as those he counted precious. “A mechanical man?”

  Ridley said, “Come closer.”

  Charles ran his hands along the remarkable machine. The joint-welding was perfect: the round globes of metal that made up shoulder, elbow joint, and hand seemed as smooth as skin. The head was merely a round metal ball set with those lamp-light eyes, peering down at him. “Bridget!” he called to his sister’s specter. “You must come see this!” The chest-panel was open. Charles saw gears and springs to put any mere pocket watch to shame. “Does it wind up, Mister Ridley?”

  “I’m afraid things do not work in such a way in this world,” Malcolm Ridley said. His own gaze played between Charles and the floating, thin specter of his sister. “They only move when given an inhabitant.”

  “An inhabitant?”

  “Yes, as I spoke of.” Malcolm Ridley watched Bridget float, slow as a wisp of rain on the air, toward her brother. “Help for the specter.”

  Bridget watched her own face, reflected in the metal of Ridley’s man. Her wide, dark eyes, the moon-bright bulge of her cheekbones, and the thin movements of her lips as she said, “Charles, what is this?”

  “We’ve come to solve your little problem, my darling,” Charles said. “Look! Physical form. Of a kind. Mister Ridley says that in return, I only need to come to his factory twice a week and aid him in the construction of these mechanical men.”

  “Him?” For the first time, she shifted her attention, with great effort, from Charles and from the mechanical man onto the businessman. His tall, guarded form, his green coal eyes.

  See now as the specter does. There is the twisted-together tick-tock-tick of past, present, and future, the echo of good cheer, the faint threads of hope, the calling emptiness of shadows, all the specter’s world.

  And then there are the things that frighten even the shadows. Malcolm Ridley is one of them.

  Bridget understood, though Charles did not. “He wants me, but he does not like the way you smell.”

  “What?” Charles turned to their host with a bashful smile. “Sorry, very sorry, sir, very sorry. Perhaps I’d have done better to take my time with her.”

  “No need to apologize,” Ridley said, but his nose twitched as though something indeed had gone rank. “Perhaps, we could only convince her to try it on.”

  Bridget, though, flitted away like the wind across the room. And Malcolm Ridley continued to advance.

  “So very sorry,” Charles said. “Bridget, do come back! Try, for me, won’t you dear?” He looked upon Malcolm Ridley and could only mutter endless apologies. “So very, terribly, terribly sorry, I . . . let me speak with her and bring her back upon another day.”

  “I will have a specter,” Malcolm Ridley said in a soft growl. “And I so despise the smell of hope.”

  Charles witnessed what his sister knew by instinct. Malcolm Ridley’s transformation, even as we have observed it in the shadows, is a heart-clutching thing, but in front of a man’s eyes, a man old and beaten by time as Charles Oakley was, it is the face of all devilry. Rivers of red hair ran along Ridley’s skin, and his hands twisted into claws, and a great hump rose in his back, sprouting that smoky red fur, but those awful eyes never left Charles Oakley—even when a gaping mouth of teeth savaged Charles’s arm and he stumbled backward, begging for help, crying out against the blood that flowed from his neck and chest. Even then, those twin green orbs of fury transfixed him, two suns of fire, two hells sucking him in, until—

  The eyes tore away. Charles sagged into his own bloodstained clothing in relief. His ears filled with howling and roaring, a crack like bone against metal, the limping growls of a wounded animal and then a curious sound. The sound of metal teeth engaging each other, the flex and push of a mainspring. A sound that gave him, as all gears did, great joy.

  He found himself looking into lamp-lit eyes, soft as the moon coming from behind a cloud. Two arms—steel and rivets and beams—enfolded and lifted him. “Bridget,” he whispered through the blood in his mouth. “You took the body?”

  Bridget, if she could be called that, cradled his bloody form to a metal chest. Ridley, beaten and bloody, slunk away. She could no longer speak, but her thoughts to her brother spoke of holding on, of courage as they made their long trip back.

  Observe now as ash and bone are forgotten in the engagement of escape wheel and pinion, in the steady heartbeat of the impulse pin, and in the tightly coiled life of the mainspring. Observe as gears strain and steam roars, as a gleaming figure runs through a dark place to find safety.

  Ridley sought to wind the spring on fear and to grease gears with threats, but now, it tenses and releases, tenses and releases, because once Charles held her, and begged her not to leave, and now she holds him, and she will not let him go until she knows he will remain with her.

  Spencer Ellsworth wrote his first novel at seven years old and never recovered. Since then, he’s worked in wilderness survival, special education, publishing, and now teaches and administrates at a small college. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, and Tor.com. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and three children. You can find him at spencerellsworth.com.

  The Lady in the Ghastlight

  Liane Merciel

  The lady in the glass transfixed him.

  She whirled around the lantern’s glowing wick, hair a comet of blue flame, tiny limbs of light perfect in every detail. Abernathy could make out fingers stretched in the joy of her dance. Fingers! Each one slender as an eyelash, graceful as laughter. They beckoned to him. He was sure of it.

  He stepped away, wiping the astonishment from his face. Uneasily, he looked around, but none of the roughnecks in the audience had seen him gawking. They were too caught up in their own amazement.

  Abernathy couldn’t fault them. He’d been as astounded as any of them.

  This was a carnival, not even a proper exhibition. There wasn’t a scientific innovation or legitimate man of learning among them. It was just a bunch of dusty tents filled with freaks and frauds who gulled farmhands with crooked games and tawdry peepshows until their marks had enough and drove them away like a flock of patch-winged crows. Abernathy had only come because he’d heard that Li Chan, a celebrated inventor from the East, would be displaying her creations at the carnival. It was said that Madame Li hoped showing the wonders of modern science to the uneducated might open their minds to the possibilities in steam and might even persuade some of them to pursue the technologic arts themselves or allow their children to indulge in such fancies.

  Personally, Abernathy believed that to be foolishness—these rustics would never be able t
o distinguish Madame Li’s masterpieces from mere carnival trickery—but he’d been willing to subdue his distaste for the chance to see her achievements in person. Tales of her inventions had galvanized his circle for months. At the last World’s Fair, Madame Li had exhibited a peacock whose tail feathers were organ pipes, each one blowing a plume of colored steam tuned to a different note so that the bird produced a symphony of rainbow and song. She’d shown a steam-powered monkey so cleverly articulated that it could leap from branch to branch just like the real animal. Most intriguing of all, she’d discovered a new chemical compound that vaporized at a lower temperature and into greater volume than water. The implications for steam-powered mechanics were potentially incredible. When Abernathy had heard about that, he’d been determined to brave any number of carnival crowds to see it.

  Yet upon arrival, he’d been told that Madame Li had left the carnival three weeks ago, accepting an invitation to lecture on the university circuit instead. Her tent had been given over to another exhibition, and it was there that Abernathy now stood.

  He’d expected disappointment, of course. No carnival show could possibly compare to Madame Li’s whistling peacock or capering monkey, and nothing about the garish paintings outside this tent promised that its entertainments would be any less crude than the rest. “See the lady in the ghastlight,” they’d blared. “A spirit of fairy fire!”

  He’d thought that might be a trick of electricity. Perhaps, at most, a tube filled with that odd red gas the British chemists had distilled from air some years back.

  What he found, instead, was magic.

  He knew no other word for it. No painting or projection could create that fiery nymph spinning in her cage. No pyrotechnic chemical could draw those shapely limbs from air, nor drape them in veils of fluid flame.