Spirits of the Charles

by Paul C. K. Spears

  She pulled away from him. “Palmer’s right. You are crazy.”

  “Yes, well, normal minds can’t plumb such depths of knowledge. Now, hush. Mr. Palmer is speaking.” He nodded at the podium, where the cherry-faced man was adjusting his microphones. Nervous wait-staff handed him notes as he stumped towards the spotlights. Reporters clustered around him; below, the mad laughter subsided to a constant, eerie giggling.

  “People of Boston,” said Palmer, “thank you for being here.” Rose tried to get Fischer’s attention, but he seemed to be in a world of his own: eyes closed, swaying as the music faded. “This city has suffered great tragedy. The devil’s drink has come to New England, and killed hundreds—including our city’s finest. Not to mention dozens of innocents, gunned down in gang battles since Prohibition came into law.”

  Laying it on a bit thick, there. The dock war had been brutal, for sure, but even the worst gang shootouts rarely killed more than a few. Palmer, however, didn’t seem in the business of facts.

  “Worse, the Bureau of Investigation has reported a cell of anarchists growing in the streets of this fair and Godly town. Even as I speak, agents of the law have uncovered a Draught distillery—below our very feet! Fear not,” he said, holding up a hand as the crowd gasped, “the situation is well in hand. But it speaks to the chaos in Boston, chaos that cannot be tamed by prayer and piety. No, sterner punishments must be used…”

  Rose ignored the rest of his speech; she heard enough pulpit-pounding on Sundays. She melded with the crowd as she saw the Cajun and his Drained man on the balcony stairs. She would have to catch Fischer after the speech—the squealing and squawking of the microphones made it hard to hear anything, anyway. Slipping through Boston Brahmins and shipping magnates, she edged towards the back of the group, where a buffet stood waiting for the speech to conclude. That was when she felt it.

  A sense of radiating heat: of deep, crimson fury. Someone here was so furious their rage permeated the entire building.

  I only know one person that crazy…

  This bright star of anger was nestled among the wait-staff, against the back wall. Rose squinted at him… no, her. The crisp black-and-white waiter’s uniform obscured her bust and the sweep of her jaw, but Rose recognized her all the same. She’d seen this woman at the docks—briefly, through the mist, but there was no mistaking the mad glint in her eyes. That’s the one. The one Ponzi called the Red Queen.

  Chills ran down her neck.

  Whatever they’re planning… it’s going to happen right here.

  CHAPTER 9

  ALEKSANDRA WAS livid. She had never seen so many filthy capitalists in one room—coal tycoons, ministers, mewling State Street bankers mixed with Temperance Society shrews. Army cadets, Boston police sergeants... They were gathered so close a single bomb could have killed them all, instantly. But a bomb wasn’t enough, for these vermin. Their deaths had to carry more significance than that.

  In her hands Aleksandra held a silver platter, just like the rest of the wait staff. She’d shorn her braid and wrapped her chest with bindings to fool the staff, and it had worked: the Atlantic gala was a hive of activity, packed with different serving teams, and the kitchen had pulled waiters from too many companies for anyone to care about one new face. The rich, likewise, were preoccupied by the glitz and glamour of their own reflections.

  Their ignorance would prove deadly. The object she carried was not the delicious profiterole she’d been given, but a long, silver canister of Noxious. As she waited and listened, Delight oozed into the lower level of the ballroom, making people bark with inappropriate laughter. Palmer had stepped down from the dias after concluding a pompous, self-righteous rant about “the sanctity of America’s white shores.” Emphasis on white.

  Another Soldier in the room, the last of Buda’s disciples, met her gaze and nodded.

  It was time.

  Aleksandra stepped out of line. The others glanced at her, confused, but did nothing.

  The great machine of capitalism has seduced you, my brothers. But not to worry… I will free you. The waiters were so afraid of losing their jobs, they wouldn’t move to stop her as she committed mass murder. None of them would sleep easily, if they survived.

  She pushed carefully past silken gloves, flawless haircuts and golden timepieces, sick with fury. Only the promise of violence kept her from strangling the nearest fussy, well-to-do rich prick and bashing his brains out on the marble floor. Her muscles ached with a singular need to kill.

  I will have my vengeance. Blood for blood.

  She had waited a lifetime, for this moment. Aleksandra’s father had died of dysentery, in one of Palmer’s “detention centers.” He’d shat himself to death as she watched, too weak from hunger to even bury him, unable to clean his corpse because they had no water. He’d died like a dog, because the tyrants had called him “dangerous.” Because he was a Ukrainian Jew. Because he spoke the Mother Tongue, and thus deserved to be caged with disease. Now at last, at long last, they would suffer for it. Her family would look down and smile as the capitalists bled, and bled, and died in droves—

  A hand fell on her arm.

  She stopped, turning on her heel. It was the Host, the dark-skinned woman from the docks. How had she gotten this close without being noticed? It didn’t matter. Her part was played—this was not her time. This moment belonged to Anarchy.

  “Whatever you’re about to do,” said Rose, “don’t do it.” She didn’t know what the Queen was up to, but she felt the rage, the fury. The spite and misery. She could feel the woman planning something awful, and she couldn’t just let it happen. Criminal or not, she was a human being, and she didn’t want to see all that ugliness unleashed on this crowd.

  “Let go.” Aleksandra spoke quietly, but her limbs trembled with the desire to lash out. This issn’t how things were supposed to be. Is it a test? Did Father Buda engineer it?

  “No. I know who you are—and I’m not going to let you hurt these people.”

  Heads turned towards them, then away. The whispered exchange was beneath the notice of the attendees: all they saw was a black girl in a pretty dress, and a waiter arguing, perhaps over the catering menu. They were irrelevant. They were worthless. Aleksandra burned with a desperate need to show them the truth.

  Then her desperation began to fade.

  Her rage—which had driven her from the detention compound, to the ghettos to, Buda’s side—was seeping away. The Host was stealing it. Stealing the only thing she had left!

  “Stop it.” She needed to hate these people. Without that, she would be… empty inside. And she didn’t want to know what that felt like.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Rose said. “I know what it feels like. People are always shit, when you give them the chance. But there’s a better way than this.”

  “No. There is only my way.” She brought the image of her father to mind: pants stained, drooling in the agonies of death, eyes white and shuddering on the stone floor of a reeking cell. No one had tried to save him; no one had lifted a finger. Not the guards, not even his fellow countrymen.

  The hate bubbled up in her again: filling her, strengthening her. She would kill. She would feel powerful. This little dark slip of a woman could not stop the tide of blood, the march of the Soldiers. This was her night, the promised night of fire. No one would keep that from her.

  Rose, for her part, was struggling. She didn’t understand how she was doing it in the first place, but she was now fighting for control in the face of the Queen’s hate. Her attempts to snuff out the fury were quickly overwhelmed by a fresh flood of bile, and she pulled away. Humours sparked from underneath her skin—and now people were looking at them, staring, many of them cops and many of them with sidearms under their fine dinner jackets.

  As the drama unfolded between anarchist and thief, Fischer took the podium.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, as the Queen pushed Rose aside and shoved towards the railing, “I have but one thing
to say. The power of Humours is a test, for our species; it has always been so. Whether we endure, and survive as our test, depends on what we do with our gifts.” He smiled the genial, comforting smile of a doctor, and removed his hats. “As a scientist, I’d be remiss if I didn’t push our… societal experiment, into its next stage. And so, it is with great regret that I must help you shed your mortal forms… and live anew as gods.” He bowed. “Revel in anarchy, my friends.”

  Heads turned, at the mention of anarchy. The crowd below froze, some still giggling, as they tried to process what was happening. Cops drew their sidearms—but it was too late.

  Resting in the curve of Fischer’s palm was a heavy silver tube. He twisted the nozzle, as the Queen tossed aside the covering on her dish and did the same—hers was an identical bomb, full of Noxious Hate.

  “Praise Mithras,” they chanted together, and hurled the gas-bombs down into the packed crowd.

  CHAPTER 10

  ROSE’S CAREER as a Draught runner had taught her many things. One important lesson was never to mix Draughts. The combinations were dangerous, unpredictable and maddening. Mixes like Rage and Misery, branded “Revenge,” were especially potent. Property damage was the least of your problems when the customer got tanked up. Cocktails like Revenge were taboo even among the worst of smuggling gangs, because of the sheer legal hell they created—murders, muggings, even rape. Another taboo was the Rage and Delight combo, dubbed Carnage.

  Carnage was a hybrid, designed for battlefields and boxing rings: it contained a balance of Delight and Hate that made the user gleefully violent, with all the courage of a Marine and all the self-control of a rabid dog. It was hard to distill, unless your distillery had dozens of people to drain. Aleksandra and Fischer had just dosed an entire ballroom with it.

  The canisters clattered to the ground, contents hissing out into the already-thick clouds of Delight coating the floor. Noxious Hate and Delight mixed together… and created an aerosol cloud of Carnage.

  Fortunately for people on the upper floor, Humours still obeyed the laws of physics—mostly. Draughts, being mixed with liquids, behaved like a liquid. Noxious behaved like gas, settling to the lowest level. If the B.O.I. hadn’t barred all the doors to the basement, the gas might’ve dispersed; as it was, everyone below the staircase was doused in Carnage, and the Mayor’s retinue watched in horror as their citizens charged each other with utensils and bare fists, cackling. The band and a few porters were smart enough to slip out the entrance, fleeing as the gas expanded.

  The rest were not so lucky.

  Laughter turned to shrieks of pain as husbands, red-faced and sweaty in expensive suits, were induced by Carnage to lash out against their wives. Undercover Myths, already drunk on emotions, had two fresh sensations dumped into their bodies without warning. Chaos ensued.

  The Queen cheered as police tackled her and Fischer, dragging them towards the veranda door. Panic spread across the upper balcony; Rose saw bankers and high-minded philanthropists glance towards the exit. But they stood fast, assured of their security by police and armed Pinkerton men.

  Fischer was hauled into a corner, still lecturing on the glorious mysteries of Draughts. Someone pointed at Rose—an outsider. Police rushed her. She considered taking the fear in their hearts, and twisting it—but she hesitated.

  “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t—”

  A cop’s fist crashed into her temple, knocking her flat. The marble floor, cold and unyielding, sent stars flying in her eyes.

  She didn’t resist arrest—fearful cops would happily stomp a suspect’s bones to powder, just for fighting back. Fucking assholes! This wasn’t her fault—she’d just come here for help! How could she have known Fischer was a traitor?

  Howls of pain floated around her. Mad giggling, the splash of something wet hitting the floor. Lucas, she thought as handcuffs were clapped around her wrists. I need to find Lucas.

  She might’ve escaped the gas, but he was nowhere in sight. On any other day, on any other job, she would’ve made for the exit. But she needed to know he was safe, and it was a strange and frightening need to have in the midst of this chaos.

  Couldn’t pick a worse time to grow feelings…

  Now a circle of frantic men stood around her, each one shouting, demanding someone take charge. But no one was going to: the B.O.I. was in the basement, cut off from the violence. The cavalry wasn’t coming.

  There was a bang from below, as someone’s gun went off. Her attackers turned away and Rose rolled to the side, struggling to take control of the tides of panic around her. If she could tilt the scales a little, she might be able to get away.

  But there were too many of them, too many bright and burning sources of fear and anger. She’d only ever shifted the feelings of one person at a time, and now she faced dozens. She needed something to focus on, in the raging sea of emotions around her.

  Her gaze fell on the Queen. The woman’s disguise was ruined, and she lashed out at the cops like a wild animal. One of them punched her full in the jaw, but it barely seemed to register. Rage was gushing from her, mingling with a strange, silvery sadness Rose couldn’t identify.

  That part didn’t concern her; it was the anger she needed. The woman was already full of it—what would happen if Rose dialed it up?

  As the officers hauled her upright, she focused her energy, gripping that spiral of increasing fury. She watched the humanity in Aleksandra’s eyes burn away, replaced by seething bloodlust. And then she pushed the woman further.

  Something snapped, some barrier Rose hadn’t realized was there: a fragile wall separating the Queen from becoming something else. Now the emotions were out of her control—expanding, mutating. Escaping.

  Hate filled the Queen’s body and burst out of her, horns ripping from the woman’s forehead, fangs jutting from her mouth. Her left hand hardened into a hammer-like club of bone, and the right sharpened and twisted into a crude sickle. Her eyes went red, weeping blood. The men holding her down were hurled away, and Rose wriggled behind a pillar, shocked at what she’d done.

  A Myth. I just made a Myth.

  The Queen stood, muscles swelling inside her crumpled uniform, as the city’s elite recoiled. Mayor Nichols was pressed against the podium, mouth wide. The monster Rose had created locked eyes with her, jaws dripping.

  “Thank… you.”

  It lifted a sickle of bone over the nearest man.

  The killing that followed would haunt her nightmares forever.

  CHAPTER 11

  LUCAS WAS in the men’s room washing his hands when the attack started. He’d seen Rose safely to the highest level of Boston society, and as far as he was concerned, that was a job well done. He liked her, if he was honest with himself, and he rarely was. He liked her intensity, and the way she did her hair, and the way she looked tonight. But his part here was finished. Done with.

  The reigning pastor of the Mithras’ Hope and Light Congregation did not think like ordinary folk. He followed a different axis: everything in his world aligned with a plan he was not privy to, unfolding on a strange and twisting Ladder defined by Scripture. All a simple preacher could do was climb that Ladder, and hope. If he’d been able to meet Mario Buda—before the man’s head had been turned into paste, downstairs—he would have found a strange kinship with him. Buda saw the future by using Draughts; Lucas simply sensed it, through a lifetime of careful and patient understanding of Mithran mysteries. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped. Sometimes.

  None of it had warned him about what was happening outside.

  When he heard the screams, he stood watching his own reaction in the gilded bathroom mirror. Then he saw the pink-red gas seeping under the door, and the trance of panic lifted. He remembered his duty, his holy obligation. Like the good Samaritan, he needed to do something about that mess—though he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “These people,” he sighed. “Every damn time.”

  He drew a handkerchief from his pocket. Soaking it in
water from the sink, he tied it off over his nose and mouth, covering them. The attendant at the door was backing away from the smoke; he snatched one of the man’s towels and soaked that too, handing it back to him.

  “Stand on a high toilet, son,” he instructed the man. “This gonna be a long night.”

  The attendant wasn’t stupid—he saw the Noxious creeping in. He rushed to a stall and shut the door. Lucas slipped out of the bathroom… into a scene of utter madness.

  People were struggling and weeping in the gas around him, battering each other and cackling with good Humour. Nearby, a flapper with a vicious grin had grown claws, and was ripping up another woman’s expensive dress, slashing at her skin. “Who’s prettier now?” she giggled, eyes bloodshot. “How about now, eh?”

  The victim was fumbling for a revolver someone had dropped on the floor, her white-gloved fingers scrabbling. Beyond in the mist, others thrashed and fumbled, shrieking. It was a masquerade of the damned.

  Lucas didn’t know how long he had, before the gas seeped through his makeshift mask. Stepping forward, he snatched the revolver and clubbed the clawed woman in the temple with it. She went down. The woman on the floor pounded his knees with her fists, weeping, and he nudged her aside. He had important work to do here, and these people were an obstacle… though he’d be sure to pray for them later.

  He pitied them, of course. But he had a hard time feeling for them, when they abused Mithras’ gifts like this. God was just: He gave everyone an equal chance. An equal shot at greatness, through the Humours. And look how they’d squandered it, by buying and selling His blessings, killing each other with them. Really, nothing had changed in this world since the first caveman summoned the first Humour. And that was a damn shame.

  The hankerchief grew soggy as the Noxious seeped into it, and Lucas sprinted for the balcony stairs. He passed the band-stand, which was abandoned. One maddened guest was hacking at the piano, with an ice pick. He dodged around sailor whose face had turned into a mass of grasping hands. Finally, he arrived at the marble steps, and hit a new problem—a herd of well-dressed refugees was fleeing down the stairs. A stream of them poured towards him, running blind.