Hearts of Smoke and Steam

by Andrew P. Mayer

  Measured from end to end, Manhattan was small—three miles wide from the Hudson to the East River, and eleven miles long, as measured from the Bronx down to the Upper Bay. But the hard numbers denied a fundamental truth about the island. The lower half was packed with construction. It formed a capricious maze of tenements, mansions, feed lots, factories, warehouses, and a thousand other structures crushed together so tightly that there was nowhere to go but up. From block to block, street to street, and day to day, it rose higher and higher into the sky, packing more and more humanity onto the same few square miles of ground.

  Anubis saw this city mostly from the rooftops. As he leapt the gap from one to the next, he could be leaping from wealth to crushing poverty in a single bound. And as he flew, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground only by his strength and speed, the black-clad man reminded himself for the thousandth time that the greatest differences were often separated by the smallest distances. He had witnessed socialites gorging themselves in heated dining rooms while just on the other side of a brick wall, starving children were freezing to death. He'd stopped men beating their wives while wedding bells rang in a nearby church, and avenged murders with babies being born in apartments above and below. Good and evil lived side by side in the city, ignored by the innocent until it was their turn.

  As a man, it had been his inability to turn a blind eye to those injustices that had driven him to become Anubis in the first place. But once he had put on a costume and began travelling across the rooftops, he had discovered that no single man could end all the suffering. If he was going to change the world, he would need to figure out how, and that was what had led him to Eschaton…

  “Too much time on my hands,” he grunted to himself as he sprinted across the rooftop.

  And the fool he was tracking was making his work so easy that Anubis caught himself resisting the urge to let the man wander out of his sight just to see how long it would take to find him again.

  His target's name was Chadwick Prescott, and the fool seemed to be under the impression that his whereabouts were unknown to his enemies simply because he had spent three days hiding out in a building on the East Side. Sitting on the fringe of a poor neighborhood, it appeared from the outside to be a run-down tenement, but the inside was well-appointed, and was used by numerous young gentlemen of means as a secret meeting place where a man with a reputation could carry out his illicit activities unseen.

  Besides the manager, an old fellow who kept the place clean and locked it up, the only other visitor since Prescott's arrival had been a young woman (either a mistress or a well-paid whore—he hadn't managed to get a close enough look to find out) who brought him food and gave him companionship on a regular basis.

  The building was well protected from the front and sides, but Anubis had found it easy enough to enter from the rooftop.

  The private apartments were located on the top floor, and when Anubis had found Prescott, the man had been sleeping soundly with a large, unfinished glass of gin on the bed table nearby.

  Anubis had quietly and thoroughly searched the building while the man lay unconscious, but the particular object he was looking for had been nowhere to be found, and it wasn't something that could be easily hidden away.

  After that, it had simply become a matter of waiting the man out. To that end, Anubis had constructed a small shelter on the rooftop. The structure did a fair job of keeping out the cold and, more importantly, it kept anyone from noticing that a man clad in black leather was sitting inside of it. As he expected, it had only taken a few days before Prescott's need for stimulation had overcome his desire for safety and he had decided to venture outside.

  Anubis had tracked him patiently since then, but Prescott was proving to be far better at being dull than he was at staying hidden.

  Once free from the house, Prescott quickly established a routine—not only did he visit exactly the same locations at exactly the same time every day, he put on the same outfit, made the same mumbled greetings to the news vendor when he bought the morning paper, and ate the exact same meal— coffee, eggs, and biscuits—at the same café.

  Besides the visits from the girl, he spent the rest of his leisure time reading penny dreadfuls along with an occasional attempt at other texts that, from the locations of the bookmarks, he seemed unable to follow beyond the first chapter. Prescott revealed himself to be a man of spectacularly limited imagination and drive.

  And yet, having spent so much of his time peering into the lives of so many inhabitants of the city, Anubis could hardly fault the man for it. With a few spectacular exceptions, it seemed that the inhabitants of New York were content to while away their lives in quiet desperation, claiming they did much more, but only managing to raise their eyes upward just in time to catch a glimpse of whatever hurtling doom would end their existence. Humanity, he had come to understand, was not by and large capable of striving for greatness.

  And as a child of privilege, Prescott had the added disability of not needing to actually work to stay alive. But to his credit, and probably to his own surprise as much as anyone else's, when he had been offered an opportunity to don a costume and change the course of his life, he had decided to take it. It had been a plan based on subterfuge and lies, and yet Anubis considered Prescott's decision to embrace it an almost commendable action.

  But once it had met with its inevitable failure, the spoiled rich boy returned to form—unwilling to gracefully accept defeat and return to his old life, Prescott had tried to steal another chance.

  Anubis imagined that his target was probably very pleased with himself, believing that by managing to remain unmolested by the Children of Eschaton for a week, he had somehow managed to successfully escape altogether. But he was as blindly ignorant to the true nature of the men who were tracking him as he was to his own.

  The head of Anubis's staff whistled through the air, landing with a clank on the next rooftop as its spines extended outwards. Pulling it tight, he leapt, swinging between rooftops before climbing up the side of the building to pull himself up and over.

  Most of the Children would have immediately resorted to violence in order to expedite the retrieval of the costume from Prescott, but Anubis considered patience to be one of the greatest weapons in his arsenal. And it was a skill that he had improved over time, with the breadth of his knowledge about human behavior growing with every person he tracked.

  When Prescott cut through Washington Square Park and into Greenwich Village, Anubis was tempted to try to take the shorter route, dropping to the ground, and following him through the shadows.

  If the stakes weren't so high, he might have tried it. But he had already spent far too much time waiting for Prescott to lead him to the costume, and he didn't want to scare the man away now that he finally seemed to be getting closer to his goal.

  Besides, there were other considerations; Eschaton had ordered them to retrieve the suit days ago, and Jack Knife had told Anubis that the gray man had asked for him personally. Anubis knew Jack well enough to know that he would have gutted Prescott like a fish the first chance he got. Clearly Eschaton was giving the man a second chance, but even his patience would run out eventually.

  Anubis breathed a sigh of relief under his mask when Prescott turned and walked down a small lane. If the man was intentionally walking into a dead end, he must be near his destination.

  Unlike the uptown neighborhoods that seemed to be changing day by day, Greenwich Village had remained relatively stable in the configuration of its streets. The crooked maze was familiar enough that Anubis barely had to concern himself about his route as he maneuvered himself to the other side of the block.

  He reached the rooftop across the alley from Prescott in time to see the man standing by a door to a large brick building. The man nervously looked to his left and then to his right, clearly trying to discover if anyone had followed him.

  Anubis shook his head and smiled grimly under his mask. Taller and taller buildings were bei
ng built every day, to the point where people had begun to refer to them as “skyscrapers,” and yet New Yorkers seemed to have made it a point of pride to never look up.

  From the outside, the building was utterly nondescript—a faceless storehouse—exactly the kind of place that uptown gentlemen like Mr. Prescott would never be expected to frequent.

  His target disappeared from sight, pulling the door closed behind him with a slam loud enough to be heard from Anubis's third-story perch.

  Anubis paused for a second and pulled out the jackal mask from a pouch at his waist, slipping it down over his cowl.

  Since the events with the Sleuth a few months ago, he had decided to streamline the outfit in a way that would give his head a little more mobility, enabling him to remove the animal face entirely when he needed to travel light and lean.

  That hadn't been the only lesson from that incident, of course. Ultimately his attempt to spare the old man's life had been a futile gesture—Wickham had died in the Darby house only a few days later. And even if the information he had given to the old man had managed to set back Eschaton's plans a bit, it had led to the death of the old man, the destruction of the Automaton, and had placed all the Children under greater suspicion.

  Suitably masked for confrontation, he hooked the top of his staff to the edge of the roof and lowered himself down on the spring-loaded mechanism.

  Reaching the ground, he scampered across the alley and came to the door. The sign was weather-beaten, but the words “H&R Lott Import & Export” could still be read under the chipped paint. He shook his head at the poorly hidden pun.

  Right after the war, the moneyed classes of New York had practiced their depravities almost entirely in the open, but a wave of moral temperance had descended over the city, forcing the gentry to put on a show of piety while their peccadilloes and perversions were driven underground. It was one way the masses could strike back at the powerful, and when one of them was caught by the papers, the wealthy would quickly sacrifice their closest friends to save their own skins. It kept the papers running, and the secrets of the powerful were now deeply buried.

  Shame was an emotion that ran deep, and Anubis had noticed that people often felt bitter suffering was often more deserved than outrageous success. Hubris, however, was easy to come by, and even easier to sell. Even a man who took it upon himself to protect the downtrodden might find that he was considered a villain by both the oppressor and the oppressed he tried to save.

  Anubis collapsed his staff and stored it away, unscrewing it into three equal sections before fitting it snugly into a set of leather loops on the back of his harness.

  Both hands now freed, he pulled out a skeleton key from the pocket underneath his loincloth, and slid it into the door lock.

  In sharp contrast to the rest of the door, the bolt was clearly expensive and new, intended to be the best money could buy. He studied the device for only a moment before attacking it. After determining that the imposing appearance of the brass lock was far more for the peace of mind of the purchaser than to actually vex an attacker, it took only a few jiggles of the instrument before the lock gave up its feeble attempt to deny him entrance. It fell open as smoothly and quietly as it would have for someone with a genuine key.

  Having seen the well-appointed bolt-hole where Prescott had spent his last few days, Anubis was surprised to discover that the offices of H&R Lott were, at least on the ground floor, those of a legitimate business. A secretary's desk and blotter stood next to the front door, out in front of a number of other desks. On each one was a spindle bursting with stacks of impaled papers, waiting for their accounting.

  Closing the front door quietly behind him, Anubis crossed the room quickly and silently, taking care to avoid knocking anything over.

  The door at the far end of the office had been left wide open, and Anubis walked through it into the main area of a large warehouse. Piles of wooden boxes were stacked everywhere, straw packing strewn across the floor. The boxes had been clearly labeled both “Fragile” and “China.”

  A few large pieces of art were standing out in the open, including a number of vases, some of them taller than he was. “Someone has quite a passion for curios from the Orient,” he mumbled to himself under his mask.

  Seeing no sign of where Prescott had gone, he crouched down and sat quietly for a second, gathering his concentration. The silence was broken by a loud, regular creaking reverberating from the ceiling high above.

  Looking for a way up, Anubis saw a steep wooden staircase at the end of the dock. He began to climb it, carefully placing a single foot on the first step. As he slowly transferred his weight onto it, the wood groaned in response. Anubis stepped onto the next highest stair and tried again. This one seemed less alarmed by his presence, and he was able to put his full weight onto it.

  Testing each step, and skipping those that wanted to betray his presence, he managed to slowly make his way to the second floor.

  As he crept upward, he heard even more thumps and creaks coming from upstairs. The commotion made him wonder what exactly Prescott was planning to do in this place, and if it had anything to do with the object Anubis was looking for. Either way, he was running out of time—he would have to confront the man directly, and if he proved unwilling to succumb to verbal coercion, he'd need to resort to less pleasant methods of getting what he wanted. He was sure that Jack would be pleased.

  He poked his head up through the floor and took a look around in the gloom. Anubis had expected the upstairs to resemble the room that Prescott had been hiding in. The reality was far more breathtaking, both in form and scope.

  The attic was indeed a secret den, but instead of being a set of living quarters, it resembled a museum. Along all the walls were rows and rows of books and manuscripts. The spaces in between were regularly punctuated by large canvases. Laid out across the floor were sculptures and other objects d'art, ranging in size from tiny ivory carvings on carved wooden pedestals to a massive stone sculpture so large that it had been placed on long beams to distribute its weight. It rose up tall and curved, heading up almost fifteen feet until it stood just below the ceiling, where it expanded at the top like a large mushroom.

  At first he couldn't make out exactly what it was he was looking at, as it clearly couldn't be the obvious organ the shape suggested. “Could it?” he muttered to himself. And the more he stared at the erect object, the more it became clear that it was not a metaphor for anything, but simply a massive ode to male sexuality.

  Loud footsteps came from the other side of the room, and he could see Prescott sit down onto the edge of a large four-poster bed. It was surrounded by gaslights that glowed in the darkness and made the bed appear to be an oasis in the gloom.

  Clinging to the shadows, Anubis pulled his staff off of his back and slowly reassembled it. Once it was completed, he began to walk towards the bed, taking a moment to take a closer look at a tiny ivory statue that stood on a pedestal on the floor. His eyes widened, struck by the act that a well-endowed demon was committing on a tiny, yet startlingly accurate, depiction of a naked young Asian woman. While it seemed like it should be painful, the look on her little face clearly showed that she was enjoying it.

  Anubis shook his head and kept moving, ignoring a similarly graphic act being carried out on a canvas on the wall. Seeing that Prescott was busily removing something from a wooden box, he slid out a random volume from the shelf.

  The title was startlingly erotic in nature, crudely concerned with methods by which a man might dramatically increase both his own pleasure and that of his partner in performing acts of lust.

  After erotic materials had been outlawed by the federal government, there had been no shortage of speculation amongst the more sensationalist newspapers that the wealthiest members of society secretly kept their most perverted documents in hidden libraries. It always seemed to be more of a popular myth than a genuine truth, and yet here was exactly the secret treasure trove that he had dismissed as nonsen
se. Perhaps he had underestimated the state of modern journalism…

  He heard a few loud grunts from Prescott's direction, and he was a bit hesitant about what he might see as he turned to the man. When he did look, he realized that not only had Prescott retrieved his Hydraulic-man costume, he had, with some difficulty, almost completed putting it on.

  Anubis had been too distracted by the room, and now he was about to face a man fully armed with acid and flame. He shouted as ran toward his quarry. “Prescott!” The man looked up, startled, just as he had finished hooking a hose to one of the snake heads on his shoulder.

  “What? Who is it? What are you doing here?”

  Prescott was appropriately alarmed, but Anubis was surprised when he stepped into the gaslight and his target seemed to actually relax. “Is that you, Davies?” Prescott said with a laugh. “I always knew that your predilection for leather would get the better of you someday, but isn't the mask a bit over the top?”

  Anubis, annoyed at being mistaken for a wealthy deviant, slammed his staff down on the floor, trying to ignore just how phallic that act might appear to be in the context of his location. “I am Anubis!” he said, using the echoing acoustics of the room to his advantage. “I am here to retrieve from you what you have stolen from Lord Eschaton.”

  At the mention of Eschaton's name, the look on Prescott's face shifted instantly, his smile melting into wide-eyed fright. “Eschaton? No…How did you find me?”

  Anubis leaned forward, letting the black jackal mask do its work. “I didn't ‘find' you, I followed you.” He waited for a beat, and then continued. “If you remove the suit now and hand it back to me, I may let you live.”

  Prescott looked angry and whined like a petulant child. “No! I won't…It's mine!” Reaching down to his wrist on the Hydraulic-man's suit, Chadwick pulled a lever, sending a stream of liquid squirting from one of the snake heads. It was heading directly for Anubis's chest, and he jumped away, realizing that he had reacted too slowly even as he moved.