Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Well, there’s clearly someone here,” Wilde noted softly.

  “Must be using a back entrance to avoid footprints,” Kendrick agreed. He raised his pistols and began to edge along the corridor. “Bastards are probably downstairs in the cellar.”

  Wilde tilted his head. “Wait, Kendrick. I think it’s coming from upstairs.”

  “Then search up there if you want,” Kendrick answered, peering around a nearby corner as if he expected hordes of terrorists to be lying in wait. “I say it’s the cellar, and that’s where I’m going.”

  Wilde knew better than to argue. As Kendrick disappeared in search of the cellar door, Wilde made for the stairway. The sound of typing was clearer on the second floor, and clearer still as Wilde climbed upward toward the third. The rooms on this floor bore the only signs of habitation; for though there was no activity, they were filled to bursting with piles and piles of newspapers, broadsheets, chapbooks, and other printed materials. The heaps of paper had been neatly placed in some sort of complex order, but nothing had been done to protect them from moths and insects. Many of the papers had been partly devoured by whatever loathsome vermin infested the house.

  He exited the room. Dust was everywhere, as thickly layered as on the first-floor, but in the hallway Wilde noticed some curious trails upon the ground. Here and there the dust had been disturbed in narrow, twisting lines. Wilde knelt to study these, but he could make nothing of them. They clearly led up and down the stairs in the direction of the front door, but what they were or what they signified remained unknown. If anything, it seemed like someone had trailed the tips of feathers through the dust.

  The stairs continued upward to a single attic door. Just upon the threshold, the typewriter clacking was incredibly loud. Wilde felt a shiver descend along his back. There was no reason for fear—the typists were, no doubt, only foolish students who would be as likely to run or beg mercy as fight—but Wilde’s instinct for danger was still working full-time. Reaching for the handle, Wilde eased the door open and stepped into the room beyond. He did not immediately understand what it was that he saw.

  The room was larger than it appeared from outside, for it stretched almost the full length and breadth of the house. The peaked ceiling was exceedingly high, and from it hung a series of burning lamps that kept the attic space bright enough for typing. Piles of printed broadsheets littered the floor. A number of tables had been placed about the center of the room in a rough circular shape, and they were covered variously by stacks of blank paper, typing ribbon, and easily a dozen typewriters. There were no chairs in front of the tables, a point which at first confused Wilde. He was likewise bewildered by the room’s clear desolation: there was no one to be seen anywhere. And yet the typewriters were clicking away still, as if driven by the hands of ghosts. At first, Wilde thought the machines might be automated, but he could see no punchcard reader to direct them, nor steam lines to power them.

  As Wilde approached the typewriters, he became aware of certain peculiar details that he had not initially noticed. It seemed as if a series of silken streamers had been hung from the ceiling over each keyboard, yet if the tendrils were cloth or thread, they must have been waxed to give them that unthinkable glisten. There was a luster to them, yet at the same time they were all but translucent. They seemed more mirage than substance and were a curious iridescent color, an impossible mixture of blue, violet, turquoise, and magenta. The tendrils all seemed to drift and float through one another like trailing strings of light, yet they were somehow responsible for the movement of the typewriter keys.

  Wilde’s eyes followed the fantastically colored lines upward toward the peak of the roof, where they joined together into a layered mass of themselves. This “body,” if such a term could be applied to it, was something akin to a pile of translucent gelatin, with lines and layers too numerous for the eye to understand. In some parts of the floating mass there were strange concentrations of light. These, Wilde suddenly realized, were eyes. Each was fixed diligently upon the typewriter below it, though they were all clearly working independently of one another. As Wilde watched, a collection of tendrils paused in their typing and reached out to a pile of broadsheets. The paper drifted toward the underside of the floating mass, and the folds of the vibrantly colored dome pulled back to reveal a series of things that might have been mouths, or mandibles, or complex beaks. These began to devour the printed newspaper hungrily.

  Wilde stood rooted to the spot, gazing in fear and rapture at the floating thing. He was too good a policeman to simply dismiss the sight outright, but his mind worked double-time to find some comfortable explanation that could make sense of the combination of place, time, and creature. It was tempting to think that the creature’s presence might be some terrible coincidence—that it had happened along and eaten the house’s occupant moments before Wilde’s arrival—but the most impossible answer was also the simplest: the floating mass of tentacles and iridescence must be Mr. Salad Monday.

  As he stood and watched the creature devour its meal of decaying broadsheets, Wilde’s first realization was followed by another. It was all to do with paper. The heaps and piles of paper scattered throughout the house were not simply pieces of a decaying archive. They were both food and entertainment. There was little doubt that Salad Monday the tatter enjoyed the challenge of typewritten argument, but it seemed that Salad Monday the monster also enjoyed the pages upon which the arguments were delivered.

  In spite of himself, Wilde coughed. One cluster of lights rolled through the curious mass to fix its gaze upon the intruder. These stared at Wilde for a moment, twitching monstrously as they tried to bring him into focus. Then another set joined them, then another. Soon it seemed that all of the dreadful eyes had migrated to one section of the body and were staring at the solitary figure below. The dangling tendrils ceased their typing, and the room fell silent. Wilde licked his lips and realized that he could not seem to raise his pistol. He stared at the creature’s eyes and saw in them what might have been hunger or malice or fear.

  Then, without a moment’s warning, Salad Monday’s tendrils quivered and tucked themselves up beneath the folds of its floating body. The mass of color rippled violently, and suddenly it was gone, vanishing upward into the dark rafters. As Wilde stared, he thought he could see hints of movement pass through the blackness above the lamps and toward the far end of the attic.

  A moment later the door burst open behind Wilde, and Kendrick rushed in with his revolvers raised. “You’re right, Wilde!” he cried. “Cellar’s emp—” Kendrick paused for a moment as he saw the array of now-vacant typewriters. “Bastards!” he cried. “Don’t worry, Wilde, we’ll find the buggers. They can’t have gone far.” And with that, Kendrick bolted across the room and into a back hallway, ignoring completely the floor’s lack of footprints or signs of human passage.

  “Kendrick, wait!” Wilde shouted. His words fell on disinterested ears. Kendrick’s blood was up, and he was too hot on the chase to bother with details such as who he was chasing or where they had gone.

  Kendrick searched around in the moldering dimness of the attic for a few minutes, overturning piles of paper and kicking at bits of rubbish that lay long abandoned upon the floor. Finding no students or terrorists hiding in the shadows, he flung open an exterior door on the other side of the attic and dashed outside.

  “They’ve gone for the rooftops, Wilde!” he shouted. “C’mon, we’ll catch them in no time!”

  Wilde watched in silence as Kendrick dashed off on his mad chase. Shaking his head, Wilde began to walk toward the outside door, thinking that he ought to catch Kendrick up before the other inspector ran too far afield.

  A strange rush above his head drove Wilde to glance upward, and he caught a glimpse of luminescence pass along the spine of the ceiling. Turning, he saw the strange lines and colors of Salad Monday hovering above the circle of typewriters. The creature had given the illusion of departure, then sought to backtrack toward the stairs.
r />   “Cunning devil…” Wilde murmured.

  Salad Monday’s tentacles extended downward in clusters and began to wrap around a couple of the typewriters. Wilde watched in confusion, uncertain what was being done. The typewriters were slowly raised into the air, held beneath Salad Monday’s quivering multi-colored mass with the care of a mother cradling a child.

  Not sure what to do, Wilde extended a hand and called out to the floating shape. “Stop!”

  Salad Monday shook in surprise, and its bright eyes darted through its body and clustered on the side that faced Wilde. The creature began to edge back toward the staircase, behaving less like a ravening monster and more like a frightened animal.

  “Stop!” Wilde repeated, slowly advancing to match Salad Monday’s pace. “Can you understand me?”

  Salad Monday shivered slightly, but there was some sense of comprehension in the brightness of its eyes.

  “I’m from the Legion of Peace,” Wilde continued, keeping his voice level. “Do you understand?” He motioned to himself. “Police.” He took a few more careful steps forward. “I know who you are. You’re Mr. Salad Monday, aren’t you?”

  Wilde had hoped this pronouncement would help to set Salad Monday at ease, by acknowledging the creature as something with an identity rather than some unthinking monster. Instead, as the name was uttered, Salad Monday drew itself up, eyes shining with the same terror that it had shown when Wilde first arrived. With barely a moment’s hesitation, Salad Monday rippled like a sheet in the wind and dove down the stairs with tremendous speed.

  “Oh, Hell!” Wilde swore, dashing after the receding shape.

  He scrambled down the dusty stairs to the third floor, head turning this way and that as he tried to keep sight of Salad Monday. He caught a glimpse of the creature on the way to the second floor, but it was a fleeting one. Continuing downward, Wilde’s feet struck a smooth patch on one of the steps and he lost his balance. His head struck the wooden boards with a painful smack, and he lay in a daze for a moment.

  Shaking his head, Wilde pulled himself to his feet and rushed down into the front hall, determined to make up for lost time, but at the bottom of the stairs, he was met with silence. Cursing softly, Wilde rushed through the deserted rooms of the crumbling house and the alleys outside, searching in desperation for the creature that he had come to find. He was met with desolation. Mr. Salad Monday had vanished, seemingly into the very woodwork itself.

  Wilde finally returned to the Chief Inspector’s office at the end of the day, still in a daze. He and Kendrick had searched every inch of the house—first on their own, and later with a squad of Legion soldiers from the local precinct house—but it had been of no use. They had confiscated the remaining typewriters, along with boxes of replacement keys and ribbon. There had been a limited attempt to catalogue the piles of broadsheets and books, but that had quickly been abandoned as an act of futility.

  Wilde found Cerys behind her desk, glaring at a mass of paperwork that seemed to have grown rather than diminished since Wilde’s departure. Wilde entered and softly closed the door. Cerys was busy selecting a cigarette from a battered tin case, and she did not look up as she motioned for Wilde to join her. The air was already thick with smoke and fragrances of half a dozen different blends; it went without saying that the ashtray was overflowing.

  “Lavender?” Wilde asked, noting the smell of the smoking herbs. He set a bundle of fresh evening broadsheets down on the chair next to him. He had bought them before dinner, but in his agitation he had been unable to read them.

  “I’m celebrating my funeral early,” Cerys replied. “What’s the word on Salad Monday? Is he a terrorist?”

  “Chief, you won’t believe what happened.”

  Cerys—who had her nose buried in a bundle of forms—looked up at him and took on one of her very particular expressions. “Max, stop. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Chief?”

  Cerys took out her pocket fire and lit a fresh cigarette, releasing a cloud of lavender-scented smoke. “I know that look on your face, and it tells me I sure as taxes don’t want to know what just happened to you. All I want. . . no, all I need to know is whether Salad Monday is going to be a problem. Is he a terrorist?”

  “Um. . . no.”

  Cerys flicked her pocket fire on and off as she continued her questioning. “Is he working for Slater?”

  “No.”

  “Is he a threat to the city?”

  “Well, I don’t think so. But, Chief, he’s not even—”

  Cerys pointed a handful of papers at Wilde in a most menacing fashion. “Max, I’ve done this job long enough to know that when someone comes to me and says ‘Chief, you’ll never believe what I saw,’ they’re either lying or telling the truth. Either way, I don’t want to know unnecessary details that will one day drive me to drink.”

  “You already drink.”

  “I’m just getting into the swing of it,” Cerys replied. Then she gave him a sympathetic look. “Max, I’ve seen my share of unbelievable things in this blasted city. Take my advice: don’t think about it too hard. It’ll hurt less that way.”

  Wilde slowly unrolled one of the broadsheets and tried to relax. “It’s that easy, is it?”

  “Drinking helps.”

  “Mmm.”

  Wilde was doubtful about his ability to put such an experience out of his mind, so he turned to the best source of distraction he could think of. The pointless arguments and self-important tirades of the tit-tat broadsheets began to soothe his shaken nerves, and soon Wilde was on his way to easing the strain of his recent discovery. Then he turned to a second printed page. His eye caught a name that was new, but unmistakably familiar.

  “Ahh!” he cried, leaping from his chair.

  Cerys looked up from her paperwork again, flicking her pocket fire on and off in nervous habit. “What?”

  Wilde thrust the broadsheet toward Cerys and pointed at a small section of print located just beneath the main articles. It read very clearly: “Though circumstance demands brevity, let me say simply that Mr. Jervais Mutton is, as ever, a dunce hardly worthy of consideration. Anyone doubting this fact should turn to his latest comment regarding the need for a citizen militia to protect us against the danger of unwed mothers. Additionally, while the police provide a useful service to society, their violation of the homes of private citizens does not do their reputations credit. Discuss. Yours sincerely, Mr. Herring Tuesday.”

  “It’s him!” Wilde cried. “It has to be him! He can’t have written this more than an hour after I found him...it...him. . . . It’s still out there!” Wilde tried desperately to convey to his superior the gravity of the situation. The result was less than profound. “Tentacles, Chief!”

  Cerys was very familiar with the look on Wilde’s face. She had seen it on her own reflection in the mirror more times than she could count. It was the look of someone who had witnessed the unthinkable and was trying desperately to make sense of it.

  “That’s it, Max, early night for you. Go tell Marguerite you’re taking her to the cinema.”

  “But—” Wilde protested, pointing to the broadsheet.

  “Out!” Cerys glanced at her chronometer, then rummaged around for an amusements circular on her desk. “If you two can catch an omnibus in the next ten minutes, you’ll be at the Palace in time for the newsreel and cartoon. And look at that...tonight they’ve got another adventure of Minnie the Mouser. Won’t that be fun?”

  “Chief—” Wilde tried again.

  Cerys glanced at her chronometer again. “Nine minutes.”

  Wilde sighed. “OK, Chief, OK.”

  “There’s a good fellow.” Cerys pushed the young man toward the door. “Go have fun. Oh, and Max…”

  “Yes, Chief?”

  Cerys gave Wilde’s shoulders a purposeful squeeze. “If you get her into trouble, I’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, come on, Chief, it’s me!”

  “That’s the idea.”
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br />   When Wilde had gone, Cerys returned to her desk. She stared for a long while at the mountains of paperwork, her eyes slowly and consistently drifting back to the stack of broadsheets Wilde had left. Then, with a sudden rush of purpose—or perhaps procrastination—she snatched up a pen and began to compose a letter. She addressed it to the printing house responsible for the comment by “Mr. Tuesday” and then began writing, in the most grandiose language she could imagine. “To Messrs. Monday and Tuesday, with assorted foodstuffs. Dear sirs, our humblest apologies for intrusions, etc. Necessities of the work, etc. In future, please refrain from frightening respectable policemen in pursuit of their duty, etc. Humbly, etc., the lady on the Broad Street omnibus, Mrs.”

  Chuckling to herself, Cerys set the note aside, intending to dispatch it when she left for the night. There was no telling whether it would ever been seen by Salad Monday, but at least the thought of it amused her.

  A nagging thought tugged at the fringes of her imagination, and for a moment Cerys found herself contemplating the implications of what Wilde might have seen.