The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated words—including the names of Akeley and myself—now and then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s assurances of the Outsiders’ friendliness.

  With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. Noyes’s tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.

  I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.

  (THE SPEECH-MACHINE)

  “…brought it on myself…sent back the letters and the record…end on it…taken in…seeing and hearing…damn you…impersonal force, after all…fresh, shiny cylinder…great God.…”

  (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

  “…time we stopped…small and human…Akeley…brain…saying…”

  (SECOND BUZZING VOICE)

  “…Nyarlathotep…Wilmarth…records and letters…cheap imposture.…”

  (NOYES)

  “…(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N’gah-Kthun)…harmless…peace…couple of weeks…theatrical…told you that before.…”

  (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

  “…no reason…original plan…effects…Noyes can watch…Round Hill…fresh cylinder…Noyes’s car.…”

  (NOYES)

  “…well…all yours…down here…rest…place.…”

  (SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)

  (MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR CLATTERING)

  (A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)

  (THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE STARTING AND RECEDING)

  (SILENCE)

  That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills—lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.

  Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After all, what had I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something which my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.

  Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused—had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage at Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed—the door being left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed past—and I believed there was a good chance of its being ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the evening’s conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could not stay in this place till morning as matters stood.

  At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight’s aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant of the house.

  As I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left—the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper’s face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

  Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favourite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and with a speech-machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech-machine and see what it would say.

  It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.

  From the table I turned my flashlight
to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.

  Would to heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain—that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.

  It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

  As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in which I half accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and delusion.

  The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly hope—that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider…that hideous repressed buzzing…and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf…poor devil…“prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill”…

  For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

  THE BRASS GOGGLE FACTORY WORKER, by John Leavitt

  A man sits in a tiny room on a stool at a table. In his hand is piece of stiff paper. His windows are shuttered along with all the windows on the block. The air-siren had dispersed the crowd hours ago but no one was going to be the first person to risk another Molotov or spanner to the face. Didn’t people know riots moved like thunderstorms? he thought, they’re probably miles away by now. He carefully adjusts the light level on his autocandle. It can’t be that bad if the Illuminated Air lines worked. Those always got cut first. He picks up a needle and lays the paper flat on the desk. He takes the needle and begins to create a perfectly perforated grid, a much quieter form of dissent.

  * * * *

  He was born Westside, but he lives in the River. Not the waterway, which had moved further east, but the reclaimed land where the river that bordered Eastside used to be. The first of the Greater New York land-grabs, The River district forms a concrete valley connecting Manhattan and Long Island. The plan was to create a agrarian buffer between the rapidly enveloping towers of New York and Brooklyn. It didn’t work out. As soon as the land was gridded off it became clear that the surrounding cities cast long shadows over the land and with every new bridge reaching across it, The River District earned its’ more familiar name, The Pit.

  Cheap land and healthy rail links made it easy pickings for the warty factories erupting across Greater New York. The stubby smokestacks combined with the shadow and new automatic light kept The River in a perpetual pink fog, a twilight forest of iron and masonry where clustered and improvised dwellings wrapped around the legs of bridges forming multi-storied alleyways and elevated streets prone to collapse and alteration with alarming frequency. Even rats got lost in The Pit

  His name was Donner, no one knew why. His mother was something of a local celebrity, a tall slender woman who wore actual ruby pins in her hair and wore a stylish, if increasing out of date, series of petticoats and gowns dyed in Monarchist purple. Sometimes she sang on street corners. Street gossip held that the ballad “Rose Of The River” was written about her and some of this minuscule glamor rubbed off on Donner. He was rarely beaten up by the other boys and didn’t have to enter Employment until he was almost eight. She was coy with her history and Donner thought she was a Princess like in the stories and she was just in hiding until her evil brother was defeated and they could go live in some far away castle forever. She told him his father had died in the Mutiny and it grieved her too much to marry again. While she never did say what side he was on she kept up the appearance of Monarchism with a tiny tin unicorn pin and an aluminum crown nailed to the door. They lived in a one room apartment with plaster walls, wooden floors, and the impossible luxury of a window that overlooked the street. It was fitted for Company water and illumination, but these were seldom-used. Forgetting to a turn off an autocandle overnight could dock you a month or more in pay.

  * * * *

  He finishes the lines of holes and then, with some ceremony, he begins to tear the paper along the perforated grid. He keeps time with a nursery rhyme, something simple and easy to measure:

  A Is For Automatic, like machines who always work

  B is for Business, a big place full of clerks

  C is for Company, where everyone goes in the day

  D is for Divine, a spark too small to weigh

  E is for Engine, the wheel that runs it all

  F is for Factory, the place for Peter and for Paul

  Donner remembers the day he auditioned for the factory. He gave his Company Card to the procurer who jammed it into a press which made fresh holes in a quick pop! pop! along the side. He’d get it back when he terminated employment or for census. Outside, a road crew was busy pulling out the cobblestone brick and replacing it with a single long smooth stone. The asphaltum poured from a vicious-looking metal drum and padded into place by men with rakes and yellow outfits. They looked like gardeners tending a peat fire. A nearby poster proclaimed the project was funded by the Franklin Town Gas Company, “to better facilitate the speed and ease of commerce”, but if you listened to the other men it was more about the Village Blockade. People can’t very well throw cobblestones that don’t exist can they? Besides everyone knows the Commune was hiding in the Pit and they’d uproot stones for the fun of it. It’s better this way. The smell of the cooling ashphaltum was a mixture of tar and burning rat, so the moist body sweat stink of the factory was almost perfume.

  The factory was part of a larger factory, which in turn was part of even larger complex devoted to the manufacturing of objects and the expulsion of the great gusts of massing fumes that made the Pit dwellers so dependent on Illuminated Air. Donner made equipment for wielder
s. Specifically he made the brass goggles that welders used to protect themselves from sparks. More specifically he assembled the brass fittings that connected the frame to the leather straps. He worked shoulder to shoulder with 50 others on the Line doing the same thing for 60 hours a week for about a dime a day, men and women both. This particular Company was very proud of its’ progressive outlook.

  There isn’t much to say about the Line. it was like any other line in the Pit, save that this Company employed more adults then usual. The noise of the Line became his internal ryrhmn, the hum and click of the belts delivering fresh brass fittings to be screwed and fitted and then released and then fitted again. Days could go by. You’d wake up and it’d be Christmas. New Year. Easter. How could something take so long and go by so fast? It was a drunkard’s sleep, fitful and dreamless. Donner could feel himself becoming stiff. Hunched. His teeth felt loose.

  Still, he had a Company Card. He had enough for oatmeal and bread and pig fat on holidays. He had a room and devoted mother who sang songs and drew a widow’s pension from something called the Michigan Club and didn’t drink too much. Few people did better,and many more did worse. Plus everyday he went to work was another chance to listen to Maggie.

  * * * *

  He takes one of the perforated sheets and puts a wooden pen with a fat shiny crow quill nib to the page and begins to inscribe a series of lines. The lines make up a phototype of a round faced young woman in a sensible hat and blouse. He holds his breath while stroking the pen across the page. It’s not easy to mimic Engine Printing. You can’t wobble for a second. A blast went off in the distance, another bomb or bombardment. There was a slow boil of celebration after, the familiar Commune chant “Bread is not enough!” The sound faded away north by northwest, toward the shipyards. He pauses long enough to insert his wax earplugs.