Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  Miss Hayes and I reached the great room together, the professor a few moments later. There was no discussion, no second guessing the plan. The reporter waved at us as if she were departing, which was no idle gesture. I’ve known countless artist-addicts who have lost themselves in the aether by looking into it once too often. That Hayes understood her peril was revealed in her hands: they shook as she pulled down the goggles until they hung useless around her throat.

  No scientist yet has been able to duplicate the addict’s eyes, to show what they show of the aetheric world, just as no painting or music or poem has fully conveyed the complexity and the chaos of the addict’s visions. I cannot imagine what Miss Hayes saw, but it was clear that she saw something startling. “Oh, no,” she gasped. “I—I understand.” Arms outstretched, she ran forward to embrace the dark shape. She never reached it. Just as she got close, the intruder vanished with a soft sound like a weary, defeated sigh.

  Miss Hayes dropped to her knees in the fireplace ashes. With growing ferocity, she clawed at the air where the shape had been. Professor Thaxton rushed to her. She turned at his touch, gibbering nonsense words and meaningless sounds. The professor yanked her to her feet with one hand and tried to pull the goggles back into place with the other. I glimpsed her face then. The orbs of her eyes were roiling like a thundercloud-choked sky. Tears streamed down her cheeks. They changed colors as they fell, leaving tracks that glowed blood red.

  It took all three of us to restrain her so the goggles could be shifted back into place. When she was once again looking out at the world through the thick black lenses, she calmed. After a time, she could speak, though she was still having difficulty focusing her thoughts. “Couldn’t communicate with us,” she said, her voice a harsh rasp. “It was a warning.”

  Her words had not been directed at anyone in particular. She’d been looking from face to face as she spoke, struggling to anchor herself in the real world—or in the world she shared with us, at least. Then Miss Hayes turned to the professor and leaned in close.

  “Gone.” Hayes reached out weakly toward Thaxton’s face and faltered. As her hand fell back, it brushed the glossy black metal of his speaking box. “Burned away.”

  Thaxton and his wife ushered their friend to a chair across the room, where she again spoke to them. This time, they were far enough away that I could not hear what she said. I could, however, judge its weight by the horrified looks on the Thaxtons’ faces. Miss Hayes was still talking when the professor staggered back a step before turning and fleeing the room.

  The intruder never returned to that peculiar, marvelous house in Kew. But it also never left.

  It lingers in my portrait of Mrs. Thaxton. I have never spent more time on a work and probably never will again. There was too much to get right to hurry it. The dark shape presented the biggest challenge. It had to be there, though, lurking in the background, all but invisible to the casual eye. The portrait would not have been complete without that detail, just as it needed hints of those secret meters and hidden weapons to suggest my subject’s true strength. Her expression is bold. I like to think that I’ve captured her as she was in the days after the final visitation. She would not speak directly of the mystery or its resolution, save to quote her friend Marie Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” The Thaxtons intended the portrait to hang in the professor’s laboratory, a permanent lodgment of humanity amidst the cold technological marvels.

  Work in the lab involving the Eye was halted. Miss Hayes’s revelations about the intruder had so shaken the professor that it was set aside. Set aside, but not cancelled. After a year or so of relative quiet, the gem became a topic of public debate again last year, in the wake of the debacle with the experimental clockwork policeman Thaxton unleashed upon London. The bodies of the victims had not been interred before the papers resurrected their panicked editorials about the Eye. This time I shared their alarm. From my experience with the professor, I knew where the speculation about his likely actions overlapped with the truth. “He cannot stop moving ahead for long” was how Miss Hayes summed it up just a few weeks ago, when I ran into her outside the National Gallery. “It’s his nature.”

  It was a friendly enough visit, though she once again refused to tell me what or, more to the point, who the intruder was. I think she knows that I have figured it out and I’m only asking now to confirm my conclusion. She’s seen the portrait. It’s all right there, if you know what you’re looking for. But her loyalty to the professor prevents her from sharing the details of what she saw when she removed her goggles that day. There might be a measure of kindness in the refusal, too. With uncertainty comes the luxury of self-delusion. Only those who have stumbled across a hard, irrefutable truth understand that luxury’s value.

  It was impossible to miss the genuine horror on the professor’s face that day in the great room. Little wonder. Barring conversion to a faith he disdained, he was being forced to acknowledge the existence of a thing with no future, its eyes turned forever to the past. The intruder could escape from the aether to the physical world for a few moments at a time, but it was too weak, too damaged to communicate. Some catastrophic mistake had ended its life and robbed it of its voice, even its mechanical one. All burned away. The truth of its identity remains, nevertheless, inescapable.

  Many men are haunted by their past. Only Professor Thaxton is haunted by his future.

  I said that I came to trust Mrs. Thaxton implicitly in almost every matter. The exception, to my despair, was an important one. She was wrong when she claimed that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood. I understand the intruder now, and I am still afraid.

  James Lowder has worked extensively on both sides of the editorial blotter. As a writer his publications include the bestselling, widely translated dark fantasy novels Prince of Lies and Knight of the Black Rose, short fiction for such anthologies as Shadows Over Baker Street and Extraordinary Renditions, and comic book scripts for Image, Moonstone, and Desperado. As an editor he’s directed novel lines or series for both large and small publishing houses and has helmed more than a dozen critically acclaimed anthologies, including Madness on the Orient Express, Hobby Games: The 100 Best, and the Books of Flesh zombie trilogy. His work has received five Origins Awards and an ENnie Award and been a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award and the Stoker Award.

  Golden Wing, Silver Eye

  Cat Hellisen

  It is winter in Pal-em-Rasha and all the roosters have been strangled. We are in mourning. The prince was born white and strange, his dead sister clinging to his heel, and since then, three weeks have passed without cock-crow.

  People work with their heads bowed and their lips pinched. In the markets—normally ringing with calls and shouts and trades—money falls from palm to palm in muffled offerings. Even the People of the Dogs wrap the hooves of their shaggy red oxen with rags when they come down to the city from their mountain homes. Peasants chase the monkeys away from the orange groves and the tamarind trees, and the leaves hang dry and limp. The little brown doves do not heed the king’s order for silence, and they line the buildings, chuckling at each other in low coos, taking turns to steal the fallen rice from between the road stones.

  Our city is divided like a lotus, each petal some stronghold of trade or class. My Bee lives in the cogworker’s district on Iron Ox road in her father’s house. She has no memory of him. Like many men, he has fallen to war. There is only her and her mother, both pretending that this house they run, that they inhabit like snails inside a shell, belongs to them. They eke out his small fortune, watching it dwindle with every passing day.

  Her mother climbs the stairs to the loft where Bee has her workshop, and I follow dutifully. I am not permitted to serve food these days. It pains me to see Old Mother struggling to carry the heavy tray up the narrow staircase and know that I am forbidden to help her. She pants as she manoeuvres the
tray into the crook of one arm so that she can swing the door open.

  Bee waves her mother away as the old woman clears a space on the clutter-strewn desk for the tea tray. “Kavi,” Bee says without looking up at me. Her voice is low. Even in our own homes we speak in whispers, scared of offending the dead. Bee is at work on one of her creatures, its innards spread out across her work table: minute shining cogs and coiled wires fine as the tongue of a butterfly. Her eyeglass is strapped in place with leather bands, flattening her dark hair against her skull, and she looks like a drowned monster hunched over an open treasure chest.

  I wait respectfully for Old Mother to leave before I answer. “What is it, my little bee?” The fragrant red sweetness of the tea lifts some of the oppressive funk of the dimly lit room. Even with all the shutters open wide, there is not enough light. The skies are weeping too, cold and bitter with dry snow.

  The queen is dead, her children monsters or ghouls.

  “I’ll need new lenses,” Bee tells me. “This one, even on its highest setting . . .” she pauses to unbuckle straps and pull the offending thing from her face. “It’s not good enough.” She takes the tea, sips, sighs. “It’s simply not up to the kind of work I want to do.”

  The city of Pal-em-Rasha is famous from the high mountains to the bay of Utt Dih for its clockwork beasts. The temple mages from the mountains may sneer and call our people toymakers, but it only shows how scared they are of what we could do. The toymakers are the little gods building horses of bone and wood and metal for princes to ride into battle and birds to take messages, beetles to watch from the walls. Not all their creatures are simple cog and gear contraptions, wound to life with a key. The very best toymakers have also graduated from the floating university.

  They are artists and metalworkers and magicians, skilled and powerful. My Bee builds creatures from shining metal and breathes life into them. She has made fine work. Not the finest, perhaps, but she did her time in the university, and her skills are much in demand. Just last month, she completed an order for a hair ornament for a prince merchant’s wife. A moth made of silver, delicate as a live creature. After she’d breathed her soul into its metal heart, I pinned it to her own hair. We stood together in front of the bronze mirror her father had brought back more than twenty years ago from some borderland skirmish. Her reflection was bronzed as the mirror. The moth stirred its grey wings softly, shimmering against the black coils of her hair. I stood at her shoulder. Already, I was too pale and unhealthy against her brightness. She’d smiled in satisfaction, and I’d carefully caught the moth and boxed and wrapped it.

  Now, she is working on something grander. My Bee is done with crawling things, small mechanical lives.

  While she leans back in her chair and sips at her tea and nibbles on her mother’s little coconut pastries, I pick up a feather from the open drawer in her beast-box. She spent many nights perfecting each one. There are flight feathers of heavy gold and thousands of down feathers no bigger than a baby’s pinkie nail, each one made of metal filaments. The one I hold is from the wing, heavier than a real feather, of course, but otherwise almost identical.

  My Bee is a master. One day, soon, I think, they will know her name in the palace tower. She will be richer than the merchant princes who buy her art now. She will teach kings the meaning of life.

  “You’ll need to go down to the Oculary and buy me something better, higher magnification,” she says. “I don’t have the time now to go myself.”

  I’m her servant, true, but I am more than that, and I frown at her in wounded annoyance.

  She catches my look and runs one hand through her hair. “Sorry, love.” Her smile is tired, these long nights eating away at her brightness. “Please,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

  It’s not always easy: love. Especially when you love someone caught in their own genius, like a child trapped in a never-ending dream. Sometimes, they forget we are out here. Sometimes, they forget everything.

  I nod. I will leave Old Mother a note telling her what Bee needs, and she can send one of the delivery boys out to collect it with the household orders. “Magnification?” I ask, carefully writing Bee’s words down. I can still do this, at least. The quill-beast responds to my touch, clattering as it reacts to the pressure of my finger, the lightest brush. Bee made this one for me, back when we first fell in love.

  We passed our hearts across doorways, secret and nervous. She, the treasured only child, burdened with talent and an expensive education, and I, a women’s maid, burdened with hairbrushes and pins and pots of shadows. I had every excuse to touch her, and I took them all. These days she has no time for preening, and I drift through the house, neither one thing nor the other.

  The rooster takes shape, day by day. First the skeleton, in gleaming bronze, its skull polished under the floating gas lamps Bee has gathered in the corners of the pitched roof. Then, as the hours pass and I watch, quiet from my cushion, the muscles and sinews of cogs and wires. At the end of every night, Bee folds her tools back into velvet, sighs and taps the creature, and sets it bobbing and pecking. The eyeless skull bowing to her.

  “Why a rooster?” I ask her. I’ve enjoyed this time without the pre-dawn shrieking of the backyard barons.

  She shrugs. “They are handsome, gold and green, crests and wattles like new-spilled blood, dragon eyes and claws. What’s not to like?”

  Because, I say inside my head, because then the spell will be broken, and I will have to go. I’m not the only one to have enjoyed this brief reprieve. We pass on the streets and nod to each other in unspoken acknowledgement. We watch the city hens with their trains of new-hatched chicks and wait for these little suns to grow feathers instead of fluff and brash voices instead of peeps. Some of them will grow spurs and proud tails, will crow the day awake.

  And then we will leave.

  The rooster’s eyes lie on a work cloth darkened with metal dust. They look like beads strung on black wires. Bee has made them silver grey to stand out against the golden feathers. I watch them, and they watch me in return.

  “Make something else.” At her elbow is a glass bowl of leg scales made of electrum. I stir them with one finger as I talk, not looking at her face. “There are jungle crows in the south that have feathers of gold—you would only have to make a few small changes.”

  “The queen’s standard was a rooster,” she snaps.

  “You think he will care?”

  Bee stands in a huff, throwing a fallen loop of her silk wrap back over her shoulder. “Jealous, Kavi, because you have no art? Or scared that success will ruin what we have?” She dashes one hand across her eyes as though flicking away a lazy fly. “I’m doing this for us—if I can get a royal patronage, we can buy our own home, go anywhere we like. We can pay for the finest doctors and do as we will.”

  She’s bitter because she’s tired. She forgets because it’s easier that way.

  I say nothing. The rooster grins at me with its metal beak.

  “Sorry,” Bee says. “I don’t mean to be so sharp. It’s been a long day.” She holds her arms open to embrace me. Her apologies always were as quick and raw as her attacks.

  I step out of reach and slip past her.

  Old Mother is waiting for me on the stairs.

  We stop across from each other. Her wrinkled face, cross-hatched with sadness and fear for her daughter, peers up at me. I try to keep my own face a mask to hide my guilt. Guilt? What have I to be guilty for, I ask myself as I wait for Old Mother to speak.

  “You should go,” she says.

  My answer catches in my throat, rust and broken edges.

  “The longer you stay, the worse she gets,” Bee’s mother says, and the tears wash through the tiny valleys that map her cheeks. “You are driving her mad. You are hurting Bijri, and I do not think you want that.”

  I know, I want to say. But it’s not me who chose to kill every rooster in the city. Perhaps, even now, the king sits in his high tower, in the Pistil of Pal-em-Rasha,
holding his queen’s cold hand and praying for miracles. I nod at her instead. I have heard, I have understood.

  I wander into the little room that used to be mine when I was still just a servant. It’s unoccupied, and I lie down on the narrow bed. It is colder and harder and meaner than Bee’s, but it doesn’t feel right to go lie there now.

  Through the wooden walls, the voices drift. Old Mother, coaxing Bee to come with her to a friend, to take in some fresh air and clear her head. Bee argues, but eventually, she gives in, and their feet patter away, down hallways and staircases.

  Alone in the house, except for the maid and cook who avoid me anyway, I take the opportunity to go into Bee’s loft. The gas lamps are dead, but thin winter light still bathes the room enough that I can see. Bee must have been tired—she bowed to her mother’s wishes. Far more telling: she left her tools out on the work bench, not rolled up in their velvet and put gently to bed like fragile children. She was working on the eyes again. Near them lies the clockwork heart, a bright ticker waiting for winding.

  Childish temper, fear, anger. I don’t know what it is that drives me, but I flick those watching eyes from the bench, and they rattle and bounce, lost to the wooden floorboards and the dark corners. I press one finger through the mechanics of the heart, upsetting the delicate balance of cog and wheel.

  This will hurt her more, I realise. Not because I’ve broken a trinket, but because it will only make the leaving harder. I search the floorboards until my skirt and hands are streaked with dust. When I find the eyes, I put them back carefully next to the broken heart. That at least, I know Bee can fix. I leave the destruction and go hide in my old room. It is familiar-strange, a place I only came back to when I hurt, when I didn’t want to distract Bee with my pain. It’s hard to cry, but I find myself dampening the sun-bleached bedding with my faint tears.