Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  What is lying beside me?

  I gather my thoughts as I withdraw into myself, arching and pulling back my limbs as though trying to absorb them, my anger and violation breeding and boiling as I cringe further into myself.

  I’ve heard the stories about Between.

  I reach for my jacket and matches: breath paused, eyes fixed in the darkness to my side. I strike the match and move back from the bed.

  In the room beyond, my wife stirs, an unspoken bond teasing her into alertness.

  It has a human shape, but I take a further step back as I realize it is long for a person—too long. I drop the burning match into the lantern. Her passengers begin to hiss and blister as light blossoms. My claustrophobic surroundings take on an oily slowness: the bedstead, the crib, the trunk all grow from the shadows. Our tiny second window glowers from behind inadequate curtains lurking beside a trio of paintings of stern kin long dead. The leering wardrobe cowers in the corner, and I spy the walking cane on top—images of Bolete injured after a fall, a hobbled bride. I see the cane’s brass head and stout shaft and make for it.

  The bedclothes move as something starts to slithers away, exposing wan skin. It is waxy, fluid, a concoction of me but stripped bare. Stripped beyond flesh, I sense my moods and inadequacies and fears hanging upon its flesh like clothes as it slithers across the room, its reflections tethered to the glaring echoes of the lantern in the polished surfaces of the room’s poisoned black window and glassy portraits.

  I reach the cane and strike out at the fluid thing and its reflection. I thrash out again and again, fury burning at the impotence of my efforts as I smash at the flowing form of the long-faced man. And as I strike, he becomes even more like me, a mocking echo.

  From somewhere outside, I hear a baby crying and a woman screaming.

  My anger grows, my feeling of violation seething.

  I move forward, trying to hem my foe into a corner, trying to force it out of the window. It lurches back toward the space, its revoltingly distended form brushing the curtains aside as it is caught in the lantern’s light reflecting in the window’s glass. It is trapped in the reflection. I give out a long scream and drive the cane forward through it and out into the raging rain outside. I hear and feel something slither away from me and fall.

  I drop to the floor as the rain pounds in. Is it gone? I stare around frantically for the echo, smashing the remaining glass in the portraits and window until there is nothing but ground glass fragments. No escape or entry for it.

  Then I realize I am not alone. The door behind me lies open, and Bolete stares, clutching our child deep into her chest.

  Her look is of terror.

  Don’t worry, I tell her. It is gone. The beast is gone.

  Long face is dead.

  She says she understands.

  I try to console her, to touch her and keep them safe. “It is dead,” I tell her. “We are safe.”

  As I try to touch her, she backs away. Perhaps, the baby needs to be taken away, just until everything is safe, until we know everything is safe for her.

  I agree, saying everything will be all right.

  Everything will be all right.

  The overseer tells me she has heard my wife has left me. She is sorry, she says, but it cannot affect the work, or everyone will suffer. She cannot let that happen. If one fails, all fail. She is sure I understand.

  I tell her I do. It is the first time I have heard her say that she is sorry about anything.

  The machine must work harder, she says as she hands me more elixir, stronger elixir. This will make the machine better, faster, she says.

  I ask her if the elixir will make the machine suffer more.

  “The machine is just a beast of burden,” she tells me. “It has no feelings. It is born to work, nothing more.” I am to stop referring to it as living.

  I say I shall, even though I mouth the words only to please her, use them without meaning.

  I think of the word born.

  Night. I know my eyes are open.

  There is a noise.

  A subtle noise.

  A sound behind the walls.

  “Who’s there?” I call out, fumbling for a matchbox. I find it, sulphur and balsa and damp, and strike the match. It blossoms.

  I know who is there.

  The wall judders as though a fist drives against it from outside. Yet outside is outside, and there is nothing there.

  I stare around the shadowy room. All is normal: the window, the larder, the sofa, the washstand. They are as they always have been, but they are different now. I have removed the echoes, blackened the windows, grimed the sheen—there are no reflections here. No way in.

  The walls pound again. I lean against them, sobbing. “What do you want?” I ask it. “What do you want?”

  I hear a whisper from the other side of the wall and press my ear against it to hear closer.

  From somewhere beyond, I hear a figure do the same, sense as something presses against the other side and listens.

  It is something weeping. “I only want what you have,” it says in my own voice.

  What you have.

  I tell the voice it cannot have what it wants.

  As I lean there in vigil, I vow to put this to an end, to face my enemy from the mirror—to draw him out and snare him.

  The day after, I speak to the man that procures things and ask him to find me a mirror. He seems surprised. Mirrors are bad luck, he says and begins to tell me the stories.

  “I know the stories,” I tell him. “I’m in one.”

  He demands a high price.

  A day later, I clutch the package tightly, careful not to expose the glass that will draw my enemy out of his hiding place and into my clutches. Soon, the mirror hangs as the old one did, but this time, I am ready for my echo, the would-be cuckoo in my nest.

  I fumble like a blind man in the stairwell. The clock glowers above me, but her angles are changed.

  Maybe, I am only dreaming that I’m returning from work. The day has been long. The journey up the stairs is interminable. The reach and stretch above and before me are like a nightmare, their form fluid somehow. I must stop working so hard.

  I reach the little door in the bleached and bare corridor and walk in, my movements automatic. There is no one home.

  I wander into the functional living room, the horsehair couch and the larder and the washstand are waiting for me. Above the washstand is the mirror.

  I walk up to it and peer through.

  Outside, in the other place, I see the three figures I always see, living warm and safe in the mundane world I once shared with them.

  I wander the space of Between now, sometimes shouting, sometimes weeping, sometimes delirious. The chambers so like my own yet nightmarish, crooked. I share my world with no one else. Even the machine lies still and silent: not dead, simply ceased. When I cannot stop myself, I go to the mirror shard and gaze through. As often as I try to leave it alone, I am drawn back, madness embracing me perhaps.

  The scene is always the same, through a glass darkly: unreachable.

  Bolete, happy to see me, smiles. I smile back, and we leave the room: my cuckoo and my wife and child. Sometimes, he stares back at me as he leaves the room, this duplicate—stares back and smiles.

  Inside the mirror, I am trapped forever.

  Richard Pett got the idea for “Cuckoo” from watching Eraserhead too many times while sitting alone in a cellar at his remote Derbyshire farmhouse and drinking strong cider. He thinks the machine is very sad and hopes you agree. A veteran of the gaming industry with over 100 titles to his credit, he’s appeared before for Broken Eye Books, who published his novel Crooked—also set in the sweaty, tar-drowned, fleshgine-city of Brine. Amongst several gaming books, including the mammoth half-million word The Blight, he’s working on a collection of unpleasant short stories set in Brine and its crooked sister Between, which he happily describes as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets Frankenstein.
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br />   The Shadow and the Eye

  James Lowder

  Professor Thaxton ignored all the warnings he received about the Eye of Kafiristan, and there were many of them. Once word got out that he had acquired the infamous gem, the London dailies all published editorials proclaiming its dangers. So, too, the major scientific journals, with rhetoric a little more learned but no less steeped in panic. The House of Lords debated the military and economic implications of Thaxton’s plans to exploit the Eye—or what they could piece together of those plans from speculation and secondhand report, since he refused all direct inquiries on the matter. The archbishop herself called upon the professor’s home in Kew. She hoped to implore him to abandon all uses of the Eye and carried with her letters to the same effect penned by the mahdi, the pope, and several other eminent religious leaders. She returned to Canterbury frustrated, her good counsel undelivered. Thaxton wouldn’t even open his front door for Her Grace, though in deference to her great age he kept the clockwork mastiffs penned until she had retreated most of the way to the main gate.

  A pair of those clanking, hissing beasts still prowled the estate’s front lawn when I arrived later that same day for my appointment with Olivia Thaxton, the professor’s wife. At first blush, I took her for a rather plain woman of middle age, self-assured, dressed neatly and for comfort rather than show. When she welcomed me, she did so with genuine good humor. “The hounds won’t bother you,” she said as she shepherded me briskly along the walkway to the house. She looked back over her shoulder at me and smiled. “Truth be told, they’re more sound and fury than actual threat.”

  If it had been even a few days later, I would have taken her at her word, no matter how absurd the claim might seem. I came to trust that remarkable woman implicitly in almost everything. At that moment, though, my host’s apparent desire to be clear of the watchdogs as quickly as possible, coupled with the hounds’ bear-trap jaws and generously taloned paws, made too strong a counterargument. I clutched my small suitcase in front of me like a shield and hurried to stay hard on her heels.

  Mrs. Thaxton led me through the foyer and past a wide central staircase to the den. It was the perfect place for a sitting, cozy and book-lined, with several large windows for natural light and more than one nice spot for seating my subject. As I admired the room, I realized that the house was not at all what I had expected. No automatons rolled through the halls, busy with domestic tasks. No crazy contraptions buzzed and sparked from the alcoves. The tables held vases of peonies, not unruly stacks of lab notes or newspaper clippings, fragmentary clues to some larger mystery begging to be solved. The shelves were free of strange artifacts. Nothing at all commemorated the professor’s adventures and misadventures—his 1897 expedition to locate the Wandering City of Patagonia, his descent into the erupting Mount Rainier a few years earlier. There wasn’t even a trophy to celebrate his victorious race across the Gobi on the aether-powered mechanical elephant he’d designed. Nothing.

  I was, I must admit, a little disappointed.

  Then Thaxton himself arrived.

  His abrupt appearance startled me. One moment the doorway was empty, the next he filled it. He stood with arms akimbo and feet planted shoulder width apart, barrel chest puffed out and bald head bowed just a little, as if bracing for impact. Charles Augustus Thaxton wasn’t the immovable object, daring anyone in the room to try to push past; he was the irresistible force readying for a charge. Everything he did or said came across that way—a promise of relentless action and tireless progress. As I looked at him, I found myself backing up a step. Before I’d even understood that there was a game on, I’d ceded him the field.

  Mrs. Thaxton was suddenly at my side. Her gentle hand on my shoulder stopped my retreat. “This is Bhagesh Chatterjee,” she told her husband. “He’s here to paint my portrait.”

  “Oh. The artist,” the professor said through the speaking box clutching his throat. It was a gorgeous, insectile thing wrought of glossy black metal, beautiful in the way some mechanical devices can be. It clicked and whirred as it worked and gave his voice an inhuman edge. Without it, he could only grunt like a beast. “Those imbeciles milling at the front gate didn’t cause you any grief, did they?”

  “Not a bit,” I replied. “No one even asked why I was here.”

  My invitation from the Thaxtons had been quite clear: I wasn’t to speak to anyone at the gate about my visit, just arrive on time and wait for Mrs. Thaxton to grant me entrance. The crowd there had been comprised mostly of reporters, with a scattering of policemen and political functionaries. You could tell the latter by their bowlers and Savile Row suits, and by the way they segregated themselves into little knots, presumably based on party affiliation, given how the groups glowered resentfully at each other.

  “Those cowards would like to rush in here and demand to know what I’m doing,” Thaxton said. “They can’t. Fear rules the lot of them. All they can do is huddle in the street, mooing like beeves in the slaughteryard.”

  “It’s a wise bovine that knows when to be alarmed,” Mrs. Thaxton countered.

  The professor uttered a surprisingly foul obscenity, but his wife continued unfazed. “People have read that the Eye destroyed fifty square miles of the Hindu Kush, Charles. The press accounts may have gotten it all wrong on what triggered the devastation. Their descriptions of the aftermath, on the other hand, were quite accurate.”

  Like everyone who had read a newspaper in the past twenty years, I was familiar with Professor Thaxton’s temper. He’d been at the heart of brawls at scientific conferences on six of the seven continents; only Australia has, so far, been spared. Typically, the skirmishes were sparked by a colleague or close friend challenging one of his offhand remarks, like Mrs. Thaxton had just done with his characterization of the crowd outside the gate. So I expected the worst, and Thaxton seemed ready to deliver just that. His face was florid, his fists clenched, as he rumbled, “This is what frightens them—” Angrily he plunged a hand into the pocket of his black-brown tweed jacket. It emerged clutching a gem that filled his palm. “This. A flattened oval of corundum. Cut and polished mineral crystal.”

  Mrs. Thaxton neither backed down nor softened her tone. “That oval of corundum could be used to create a blast that would encompass much of London,” she said. “The doomsayers can be excused their premature panic, if only until their knowledge of the Eye is made more complete.”

  The professor cursed again and tossed the Eye across the den. Astounded, I could merely watch as it tumbled through the air. My artist’s eye noted the change in color as the gem left the professor’s grasp, the way it glowed as it moved through the sunlight-infused room, but no other reflexes goaded me to more constructive action. Fortunately, Mrs. Thaxton was prepared, whether from long experience with her husband’s volatility or by her natural disposition, I cannot say. But she caught the Eye as if it were nothing more startling than a tennis ball flipped to her on a practice court.

  Noting my astonishment, Mrs. Thaxton held out the Eye and said simply, “No worries, Mr. Chatterjee. The gem itself is inert.”

  “So is our artist friend, from the way he reacted just now—or, rather, failed to react,” the professor said.

  I am not, on the whole, quick witted. I’m no dullard, mind you. I just need time to mull over new ideas and situations. So it was only in retrospect, in the months since my stay in Kew, that I hit upon no fewer than a dozen brilliant replies I might have uttered that afternoon to turn aside Thaxton’s scorn. As the professor glowered at me, though, all I could do was shift my feet uncomfortably and stammer something incomprehensible, even to me.

  It was the intruder that saved me from further embarrassment.

  Cold presaged its arrival. Thin ropes of bitter air exploded out from a point near the center of the den. They made no sound, but wherever they came in contact with flesh, they left a slash of reddening frostbite welts. Then the room—I was going to say dimmed, but that’s wrong. The afternoon sun still filled the de
n with light. What happened was the colors lost their vibrancy. They bled from the peonies and the curtains and the people, leaving us and everything around us looking like the subjects in a badly faded tintype. Only then did the figure appear.

  None of us knew what it was that first time, and even now, some of us who lived through the events of that troubling time in 1902 can only guess at its true nature. Darkness comprised its entirety, a shifting murk that coalesced into something vaguely shaped like a man. It lacked features, so whatever meaning we assigned to its presence was derived from its gestures and the noise it made. That awful wailing left the most lasting impression on me. It was not a human cry but something more savage, more chilling. I couldn’t accurately describe it until only recently, after I attended a party at which a friend was showing off his new and outrageously expensive American Graphophone. As he arranged the device for demonstration, he carelessly shifted the cylinder backward beneath the stylus. The burst of noise from the horn was horrible—and the closest thing I ever hope to hear to the intruder’s voice. The sound it made was not a scream, but rather a scream reversed. The mournful wail flowed into it rather than from it.

  The Thaxtons reacted to the intruder swiftly and calmly, as if they’d had much practice with these sorts of strange visitations. The professor snatched up a statue of Ourania from a nearby end table. The muse of astronomy stood upon a heavy base, so when Thaxton upended the bronze and gripped it like a club, he had a formidable weapon. Thus armed, he took a threatening step forward. Eyes fixed on the shape, he bellowed out an order to an unseen ally elsewhere in the house: “Hayes! Activate the damping field! Full power!”

  Mrs. Thaxton was on the move, as well. She slipped the Eye of Khafiristan into a pocket even as she interposed herself between me and the thing. Unlike her husband, she had no need for a makeshift weapon. She reached down, brushed aside the hem of her long skirt, and produced a derringer from a holster attached to one of her high, lace-up boots. Her hand was steady as she trained the pistol on the intruder.