by Cat Rambo
Elspeth teetered on the suddenly slick stairs, leaning sideways. With horror, he saw a panel slide open to catch her flailing figure, then shut again.
He was down the stairs in an instant, hammering on the panel. Wood splintered, but behind it lay an iron surface.
“Elpseth!” he shouted, and listened, but no answer came, only fresh laughter from the second floor.
He struck the iron once with all his strength, which sounded like a gong throughout the cavernous house.
A bird swooped close and his hand flashed out. It hadn’t understood the speed he was capable of; it tried to dodge but his hand closed around it, imprisoning it. Its beak flashed out, striking at his fingers, leaving fine lines where it had scored the metal skin, but it could not escape.
He looked down at it. His fingers started to tighten, to crush it, but he relented.
It was like himself, something made and yet alive.
He opened his hand and it flickered away, to where two other birds hung in the air, out of reach. They watched him as they hovered, but made no other move.
All he could do was go on.
The source of the laughter could not be found on the second floor, no matter how he searched. It echoed through the vents, bouncing and re-bouncing until there was no way to figure out where it was coming from.
He searched meticulously, disarming trap after trap, and the thought came to him that he was moving faster now than he could have if he had had his partner in tow. But the advantage of speed was not something he would have sacrificed her for.
There was only one staircase leading to the third floor, its narrow confines showing that it was reserved for servants and storage. He hesitated at its foot. He did not have a sense of smell in the way that humans did, but he was capable of analyzing impure air. Something up there was long dead.
Surely that smell would have kept his quarry from going that way. But he went upstairs nonetheless, cautiously skirting anything that might behave as the post had.
He discovered the servants remained.
There were five of them, not an unusual number for a house the size. They had been killed in their beds, killed with a blade that had stabbed downward with inhuman ferocity. The bodies lay in pieces, scattered like a macabre puzzle.
Thoughts bubbled in his metal brain. Had Elspeth already met such a fate? The notion made him feel very strange. She had trusted him. She had trusted him to take care of her. She had trusted him so much and so often, and he had failed her once already. He could not do that again.
He hadn’t known what was going on when it first started. They had been traveling together for several months at that point. He liked her better than the first partner he’d had, who had treated him always like a machine. She acted as though he was a person and it wasn’t a pretense. She really did think of him as a person.
Too much so, it turned out.
He hadn’t understood the language of glances and sighs. He’d seen her watching him, but he hadn’t known what lay underneath that stare.
And when she’d confessed her love, stammering and red-faced, as aware as he that this was not supposed to happen, that was when he had failed her. Human hearts were delicate; he hadn’t known how to reject her without breaking hers.
How could he love her? His brain wasn’t constructed for such things.
She’d never spoken of it again since that night.
Neither had he. He wanted to. He wanted very badly to talk about it. Time and time again, he’d thought of somehow raising it once more. But after that, her eyes were closed to him and while they spoke as partners, it was different than how they’d spoken before.
Now she was helpless, and even possibly dead. They’d give him a new partner and he’d go back to being a machine rather than a person.
He examined the bodies but did not touch them other than to close the upward staring sockets. He moved through the rooms, wondering what had happened. Then something nudged at his thoughts. He flickered through his mind, examining what he’d seen of the house so far, constructing a model of it within his brain.
There. There was a hidden room on the third floor.
He thought he’d have to smash through the walls, and worried that again he would find obdurate iron. But once he looked, the secret catch was easy enough to find.
Birds clustered, watching him.
Would he find the fugitive inside?
Then the door swung open fully, and he realized he had found an Eisenmacher, but not Richard. Rather, his mother.
She sat in a wicker chair by the window staring out, wrapped in blankets, so mounded that the fine silvery white hair on her head was barely visible.
The rest of the room was a sprawl of papers and tools and cogs and gears, cluttering the two long tables. Bookshelves lined the walls, more books crammed in them than they could gracefully hold.
Angeline Eisenmacher did not move as he walked over to her. As he approached, he realized why.
She was dead.
The patch of sunlight her chair sat in had come and gone, come and gone, over the decade, baking her dry and withered. He reached out to touch her shoulder.
At that slight contact, she crumbled away, falling into dry brown dust and a scattering of hair. The blankets slumped. At the same time, there came a vast windy noise, an anguished sound so loud it drove him to his knees, trying to cover his ears.
It died away slowly, ebbing with slight resurgences, a sound like human sobbing.
“Noooooooooooooo!” A force crashed into him from behind and sent him sprawling still dazed from the sound.
Eisenmacher. The man was striking him with doubled fists, blows bouncing off Artemus’ chest. Tears streaked the man’s cheeks, and Artemus tried to be gentle as they grappled, catching the man’s wrists in his unbreakable grip.
“Where’s my partner?” he demanded. But Eisenmacher seemed not to hear him, only sobbing and trying to pull away, pulling in the direction of the crumpled blankets, the drift of bones and dust. Artemus let go. The man posed no threat.
Released, Eisenmacher lurched over to the chair, falling in front of it on his knees to bury his head where his mother’s lap might once have been.
“My partner,” Artemus repeated.
Eisenmacher raised his head, looked at him with glassy eyes. “What?”
“The woman who was with me. Where is she? Where did you take her?”
“I didn’t take her,” Eisenmacher said.
Artemus frowned. “One of your mother’s automatons?”
“Her what?”
“Did she make guards?”
Eisenmacher gazed at him until realization began to dawn. He threw his head and brayed out a surge of jagged laughter that collapsed into gasps. “Her automatons? Do you think she would have spent the last years of her life on something as petty as that?” He gestured around himself. “Don’t you understand by now?”
Artemus took a step forward, raised a fist in threat. “Tell me!”
“The house,” Eisenmacher said. “The house has taken her.”
The shutters over the window slammed shut, plunging them into darkness.
“It’s taken all of us,” Eisenmacher’s voice said.
Artemus felt his way along the wall till he reached the secret door, but when he pulled at it, it didn’t open. He groped through his pockets for the supplies he carried purely for Elspeth’s benefit: a tin of Congreve matches.
He struck it alight and it sizzled ablaze.
He was alone in the room.
He sat down at a table and began to sort through Angeline Eisenmacher’s notes.
They were scattered, disorganized, but he could see from them how brilliant she’d been, how ideas had come to her, too many to imagine, most of them entirely unrealized. This knowledge would be worth a fortune.
If he could find Elspeth and escape with it.
He’d hoped for a schematic of the house, but Angeline must have stored that elsewhere. Still, from her scattered
notes, he gleaned that the house was a prototype, a brain much like his own, also powered by phlogiston, but on a vaster scale. She’d planned even grander things, vast mechanical behemoths that could stride across the battlefield, crushing everything in their path.
He found mention of the birds as well. An abandoned experiment in splitting the brain among a hundred components. Together, the birds were supposed to have the equivalent of his own intelligence, and like himself, be capable of learning from experience over time. But Angeline had been forced by the War Ministry to put them aside, in favor of the larger project. Letters back and forth revealed the War Ministry’s fading enthusiasm, though. Finally, a letter signed “regretfully” terminated her association.
Her death had prevented the delivery of the project that would have vindicated her.
Setting the papers aside, he considered what to do next. He knew where Eisenmacher had gone, for the plans for this room, at least, were included in the papers. They had also revealed where the brain was located. As far away from him as possible right now, deep in the cellar. He could try to fight his way back down the stairs, or he could follow Eisenmacher through the secret chute.
It only took a few seconds to find the latch. The panel slid open, and he looked down the dark passageway. Surely it had been intended as an escape route, rather than some more ordinary use, like a laundry chute. He could only see a few feet down, but it slanted, rather than plunging.
What choice did he have? He climbed in.
He was able to control his descent. Though the metal walls were slick and provided no handhold, the confines were narrow enough that he could brace himself against the sides. But then, about the time he calculated he had reached the level of the first floor, the floor gave way under him and he found himself plummeting.
He landed on gritty stone floor, in a narrow circular room. A feeble illumination came from the outline of the only door. He moved quickly to it, testing it. Barred from the outside, and again made of iron too thick for him to break through.
“What are you?”
The voice seemed to come from nowhere at first, but then he glimpsed a small hole near the ceiling, only a few inches wide. A speaking tube of some sort.
“I’m a Pinkerton agent.”
“No. What are you?”
“I’m something someone made. Like you.”
“Did I make you?”
Did the house somehow think it was Angeline Eisenmacher? “No. Patrick Lovelace made me.”
“What do you want here?”
“I’m here to apprehend the fugitive Richard Eisenmacher. He’s wanted for murder.”
The reply deafened him, a blast of sound that seemed impossibly loud coming from the tiny hole. “Nooooooooooo!”
He tried to recover. “Just let the woman and I leave.” They could come back later. It was clear Eisenmacher wouldn’t be leaving.
“She will stay. She will marry my son, and we will be a family again. There will be children. There will be children, and I will serve them and make more of myself to serve them.”
He battled for some way to reply, and it quickly came to him. “She’s more than just a breeding machine. I would think you would understand her struggle. There are very few women among the Pinkertons.” Had the house absorbed enough of Angeline’s personality to share her suffragist leanings?
No reply, only a cold implacable silence.
He explored his surroundings, and consulted the representation of the house in his mind. But here there were no secret doors.
The sound of scraping from the tube caught his attention. As he stared up at it, he could see movement.
A clockwork bird emerged, followed by another, then another and another. When there were a dozen or so, they hung in a cloud before him, there wings whining.
Were they trying to communicate somehow? Perhaps they were afraid if they came too close they might be caught. He lowered his hands to his sides, trying to look harmless.
The birds swooped closer, surrounded his head in a whirl of movement.
He could hear words inside his head. Were they somehow interacting with the magnetics of his brain to produce them?
Too long too long too long here, they sang inside his head.
“Can you help me escape?” he whispered, afraid that the house would hear him.
Too thick the door, too heavy. Will you help us nonetheless?
“Help you how?”
Too long too long too long here, will you set us free, will you set her free?
Now he understood what they were asking
He didn’t know how long it took him to think it through. The house would build others like itself it had said. He thought of the war behemoths, thought of them marching towards Seattle.
He thought of Elspeth, captive. Thought about her smile. Thought about the words that had engraved themselves on his brain, “I know it’s crazy and impossible, but I love you.”
Thought about her, held captive to produce children.
I know it’s crazy and impossible, but I love you.
He had never opened the compartment in his chest before. It surprised him how small the strand was.
He said to the birds, holding it out, “Put it in her brain and you will be free.”
If that hidden brain was powered by the amount of phlogiston he thought it was, the explosion would take out the entire house.
He sat back down, and thought about Elspeth, and waited to die.
The door opened. Elspeth stood there. He gaped at her.
“Hurry,” she said.” We’ve got to escape before she realizes the mistake she made.”
They fled up a narrow, iron-runged stair, which rang like a gong beneath their steps. There was no sign of the birds. How long did they have?
Emerging in the kitchen, they battered themselves against the shutters, to no avail.
Then a cloud of birds, a rush of birds, hundreds of tiny bodies flinging themselves against the window, splintering and falling as they shattered, and the window crashed open.
Artemus flung Elspeth out first, followed after her, grabbed her hand, and said, “Run!”
They ran. There was a great thundering roar behind them as the house exploded, and a hand of heated air pushing them forward even faster.
And then the sound of the house falling in on itself, and the crackle of flames.
When they finally turned to watch it, Artemus said, “How?”
The distant flames tinted her skin pink and red. “She thought I was accepting my fate. I told her if I was to be mistress of the house, I needed the keys to the pantry and all the rooms, like a proper housewife.”
Perhaps the house had wanted so badly to think that its desires would be realized, that it had accepted her words. No matter what, it had underestimated Elspeth in a way that Artemus thought the original Angeline might not have.
The horses were gone, frightened away by the explosion. It would be a long journey across the mountains to Seattle, but they’d endured worse before, and surely they would encounter some help along the way.
As they turned their back on the house, Artemus didn’t see the several small fluttering forms, exiting from the ashes and debris.
As he walked, he reached out and took Elspeth’s hand. She hesitated, then twined her fingers through his.
They went on, the birds following after them.
Afternotes:
This story came from a fondness for a particular episode of the television show, Wild West West, called “The Night of the House.”
Web of Blood
and Iron
The hotel put manservants and maids up in their own rooms, one attic below the hotel staff: housekeepers, valets, clerks, kitchen staff. The manager lived on-site as well, his family taking up half the floor below that, and I’d heard his children, happily shrieking, more than once in the pool or playing tag in the stairwells.
I wouldn’t have minded a room to myself, but instead I was sleeping on a cot in his Lordshi
p’s suite, down on the third floor. I was lying there enjoying the Cannes sounds of birds and street bustle and funeral rumble of the trains and reading when I heard the door fumbled open and his lordship lurching in.
Alive for another day.
I was up cat-quick, and went in to help him off with his tuxedo, ripe with boozy sweat and cigar smoke and the hyacinth scent the siren whores wear. He was so drunk I was surprised he’d made it home at all, that none of the vampire gamblers had decided to take him home for a nightcap instead of selecting a whore.
He chattered away to me as I sponged his forehead. He always slept nude. Every lycanthrope I’d served – and I’ve served six so far of his Lordship’s family, the deVulfs – has shared that trait.
“Made enough to keep us here another week,” he said with a grin.
I doubted that, given the size of his weekly liquor tab. I took care of his bills as well, so his ideas of money were usually far off the mark. But his father would supplement that well enough that we could stay.
His cleaning bill was as large as my wages, and I’m better paid than most. The Yorkshire coal mines made the De Vulffs a lot of money.
The question was not how long he could stay. Rather, it was how much longer till one of the vampires discovered his ruse?
I decided to save that for a later argument, when he would be soberer, though.
Stubble sprouted on his chin a mere hour after each time I’d shaved him with the bone and steel razor so I didn’t bother now to do more than wipe his face. He could go to sleep shaggy and untroubled, smelling only of wolf.
We gnomes have senses almost as acute as theirs. It’s one way we read the earth: metal tang and mineral salts, loam and chalk and bland sandy stone.
He fingered his wrist, where the silver charm was soldered to an iron band.
“You still want to leave, don’t you?” he asked me, voice harsh.
“I think it would be wisest, sir,” I said without looking at him. “We could drive up along the coast, swing through Paris, then Calais, be at your club for dinner and some good mutton.”