Grim Expectations
Page 33
“It’s all right–” He caught the look of dismay in my eyes. “Just the same as the others – didn’t you know?”
“But…” I could hear a slow ticking, and the faint whir of an unwinding mainspring. “But you’re… moving. And alive…”
“Because I could get this one started,” the boy said simply. “I could do that.” A feeble hand raised and touched the side of his head. “I could just… make it happen. But the other ones – I wouldn’t do those. No matter how the old man – the one with the white hair – no matter how he cursed me. I wouldn’t do it – not ‘less I saw you.” The hand lightly came to rest on mine. “Now I have.”
“Then what is the matter? You started up this device–” I nodded toward the machinery visible in his chest. “I know how that is done; but now – what is wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just the way it is. They told me – that it wouldn’t run forever. And it’s a little different from the rest, the ones that all the others had put in them – they told me it’s what they called the master device. So it’s like a clock – it needs to be wound up again. But that’s very hard; you have to know how to do it.”
“But you know how, do you not? After all… it is there inside you.”
“No–” A shake of the boy’s head. “Nobody ever showed me how.”
An unspoken question hung in the silence between us, like a ghost that all knew was there, but which nobody wished to acknowledge–
But you know, don’t you? That was what he wanted to ask me. Your father made this thing – so you must know all about it.
He feared to ask me, though – because what he was sure of, was what the answer would be. Just as I was sure of the same.
I gazed down at the slowing machinery in his chest; already, in just the little time we had been talking, the slight noises of its operation, the click of meshing gears and whir of uncoiling springs, had become even less perceptible to the ear. That the device was expending the last of its stored energy, even as I watched, was made apparent by the slowing of several intricately fitted pieces; a few had stopped entirely, that had been in motion when I first had parted the concealing shirt, and had glimpsed what was revealed there.
The folly of my life was similarly revealed. There is much I am rueful about, and little that I am not – but until this moment, I had not condemned myself for my lack of understanding about my father’s creations. I had thought them abominable, and worse, incomprehensible – so I had made but the slightest effort to pierce the veil in which their operations were wrapped. That study I had at last left to wits cleverer and more persistent than mine, of which there had seemed to be quite a few – for what harm was there in my disdain of these machines? Nothing depended upon my knowing how they worked…
Or so I had thought.
Now I crouched on a rocky ledge beside my son, smoke rising from the inferno which we had escaped – and I would live, and he would not. For that was the price of my ignorance.
I brought a hand down, and lightly touched the topmost brass workings, with a vain hope that some sudden inspiration might spring into my mind, and guide my fingertips to the necessary spot, where they would move of themselves on their revivifying errand…
That did not happen.
The boy took pity on me; he even smiled, or as much as he was able, with what little strength remained within him.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You came for me. That’s what… I wanted…”
His eyes closed. I stayed beside him, for what seemed a longer time than had been required to ascend here. And then for a while more, after every slightest ticking and whir had ceased.
I stood up; though I might as well have stayed where I was, for all that the world beyond offered by way of comfort. With leaden footstep, as though I were the machine now, I made my way up the sloping path; grasping the crater’s ragged edge, I pushed myself stumbling out upon the surface–
And was met a blow that almost propelled me back the way I had climbed.
An object hard and weighty, and unexpected, struck me across the side of the head; I toppled to the ground, hands instinctively clawing at the damp soil to prevent a greater fall. Blood streaming from the corner of my brow, I looked up – standing above me was the Right Reverend Jamford, his gaze as maniacal as when I had watched him ranting at the edge of my late wife’s grave.
Ranged about the man, in the blackened wastes of what had been the cemetery’s overgrown foliage, were twitching figures, toppled onto their sides. The disjointed corpses of what had never been alive, the mechanical beasts that had roamed these grounds, had exhausted their false animation, and were even now decomposing to their unriveted elements. I had but a moment to glimpse what might have been the semblance of a lion or other fanged predator, writhing as the uncoiling mainspring burst from its guts, then shuddering to stillness. Close by careened the tottering form of the decapitated giraffe, engulfed in flame, stilt-like legs shearing apart at their knees.
“You meddling bastard, Dower!” One side of Jamford’s garb was dark with crusted blood, and that arm hung uselessly – but with his other, he brandished what was evidently one of the rifles with which the More Loving Embrace’s agents had pursued me. Its wooden stock was cracked, and its barrel bent useless, likely having been caught in the midst of the rocks and collapsing machinery far below. “Think you’re so clever now?”
Surrounded by the dead and dying mechanisms closer by, he seemed the very image of some dark prophet of ruin, as he swung the improvised bludgeon at me again. The blow might well have rendered me senseless, but I evaded its impact by dodging onto my shoulder. Wiping the blood from my face with a forearm, I could discern him more clearly by the fiery glow of the pit only a few feet away. If his wild-eyed appearance, snowy hair disordered and expression twisted into a snarling grimace, had then been a mere pretence of madness, now it was without doubt genuine. He had still possessed enough cunning, however, to have lain in wait for me – in the process of making his own escape from the flame-engulfed factory, he must have spotted us labouring along the narrow path below him.
“And where’s your son? Eh?” Grip tightened upon the rifle’s twisted barrel, he raised the weapon above his head. “I had a bargain with that little bastard – and he turned out to be as much a conniver as his father.”
I had recovered sufficiently from the blow that had so taken me by surprise, that I was capable of scrambling to my feet and launching myself at the shouting figure before he could attempt another – and more than self-defence prompted this action on my part; Jamford’s sneering infamy about the dead child evoked my own angered fury. My hands seized about his throat, as the force of my charge staggered him backward.
Having brought my chest against his, any bludgeoning from the broken rifle was rendered ineffectual; he dropped the object at my back, electing to batter his fist against the side of my head and neck.
“But he’s dead – isn’t he?” Throttled by my grip, his face livid, he still managed to gasp out a few more words. “You never – could have saved him–” His face writhed even more demonic. “Or – anything else–”
A fragmented torso, the jointed spine and hindquarters of one of the mechanical beasts, dangling the flayed tatters of its pelt, still held enough spring-driven force to suddenly lurch upward from the ground. The angled shape struck hard against me, the impact partially breaking my hold upon Jamford – that reprieve allowed him to grapple as tightly onto me as I clenched him. Like wrestlers who had chosen to battle in a charnel house of smouldering iron, we swayed and stumbled, each intent on the other’s demise.
Our entwined forms staggered toward the pit; I felt its welling heat at my back, the convulsive inferno turning the other’s face into a reddened mask above me.
“You haven’t – stopped – anything–” The strength of the demented surged within him, so that he was able to thrust me onto the crumbling edge. “The boy – he doesn’t matter – there are other ways–�
� Jamford’s voice was a strangled cry. “You’ll see–”
In that, he was in error; I would not – nor would he.
From the man’s whitened lips, I heard nothing more. Nor from anything else in this roaring, clattering world, from which for so great a time – perhaps from the beginning – I had longed to depart. With mingled shame and anger, I realized it had been but cowardice that had kept my hand from plunging a knife into the breast that most deserved it.
But where there is not courage, then desperate loss will suffice.
I ceased my straining resistance, that had kept the other from overwhelming me – but I tightened my hold, drawing him closer to myself. That small motion displaced his balance, and we fell together, into the pit and its leaping flames. To that certain death which had evaded me for so long, and which now – tumbling into the scouring fire and blinding light – I welcomed with all my silenced heart.
About the Author
K W Jeter attended college at California State University, Fullerton where he became friends with James P Blaylock and Tim Powers, and through them, Philip K Dick. K W Jeter’s debut novel, Dr Adder, was praised by Dick as “A masterpiece… a truly wonderful novel”. Jeter was also the first to coin the term “steampunk,” in a letter to Locus magazine in April 1987. He currently lives in the US with his wife, Geri.
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Wheels and cogs
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An Angry Robot paperback original 2017
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Copyright © K W Jeter 2017
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