The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  He reached for the lever to open the door and hung from it, letting it hold his full weight while he reached up to undo the lock.

  Edwin no sooner heard the click of the fastener unlatching then the door burst open in a quick swing that knocked him off his hobbled feet. With a smarting head and bruised elbow he fought to stand again but Madeline grabbed him by the shoulder. She lifted him up as if he were as light as a doll, and she lugged him down the hallway. Her cotton shift billowed dirtily behind her, and her hair slapped Edwin in the eyes as she ran.

  Edwin squeezed at her arm, trying to hold himself out of the way of the displaced gurneys and medical trays that clogged the hall; but his airborne feet smacked the window of the nurse’s station as Madeline swiftly hauled him past it, awakening the nurse and startling her into motion.

  If Madeline noticed, she did not stop to comment.

  She reached the top of the stairs and flung herself down them, her feet battering an alternating time so fast that her descent sounded like firecrackers. Edwin banged along behind her, twisted in her grip and unable to move quickly even if she were to set him down.

  He wondered if he hadn’t made an awful mistake when she all but cast him aside. His body flopped gracelessly against a wall. But he was back on his feet in a moment and there was light in the laboratory—a flickering, uncertain light that was moving like mad.

  Dr. Smeeks was holding it; he’d found his light after all, and he’d raised the wick on the hurricane lamp. The glass-jarred lantern gleamed and flashed as he swung it back and forth, sweeping the floor for something Edwin couldn’t see.

  The doctor cried out, “Parker? Parker? Something’s here, something’s in the laboratory!”

  And Edwin answered, “I know, sir! But I’ve brought help!”

  The light shifted, the hurricane lamp swung, and Madeline was standing in front of the doctor—a blazing figure doused in gold and red, and black-edged shadows. She said nothing, but held out her hand and took the doctor’s wrist; she shoved his wrist up, forcing the lamp higher. The illumination increased accordingly and Edwin started to cry.

  The laboratory was in a disarray so complete that it might never be restored to order. Glass glimmered in piles of dust, shattered tubes and broken beakers were smeared with the shining residue of the blue-green substance that lived and glowed in the dark. It spilled and died, losing its luminescence with every passing second—and there was the doctor, his hand held aloft and his lamp bathing the chaos with revelation.

  Madeline turned away from him, standing close enough beneath the lamp so that her shadow did not temper its light. Her feet twisted on the glass-littered floor, cutting her toes and leaving smears of blood.

  She demanded, “Where are you?”

  She was answered by the tapping of marching feet, but it was a sound that came from all directions at once. And with it came a whisper, accompanied by the grinding discourse of a metal jaw.

  “Tan…gles. Tan…gles…feet. Tanglefoot.”

  “That’s your name then? Little changeling—little Tanglefoot? Come out here!” she fired the command into the corners of the room and let it echo there. “Come out here, and I’ll send you back to where you came from! Shame on you, taking a boy’s friend. Shame on you, binding his feet and tormenting his master!”

  Tanglefoot replied, “Can…op…en…er” as if it explained everything, and Edwin thought that it might—but that it was no excuse.

  “Ted, where are you?” he pleaded, tearing his eyes away from Madeline and scanning the room. Upstairs he could hear the thunder of footsteps—of orderlies and doctors, no doubt, freshly roused by the night nurse in her chamber. Edwin said with a sob, “Madeline, they’re coming for you.”

  She growled, “And I’m coming for him.”

  She spied the automaton in the same second that Edwin saw it—not on the ground, marching its little legs in bumping patterns, but overhead, on a ledge where the doctor kept books. Tanglefoot was marching, yes, but it was marching towards them both with the doctor’s enormous scissors clutched between its clamping fingers.

  “Ted!” Edwin screamed, and the machine hesitated. The boy did not know why, but there was much he did not know and there were many things he’d never understand…including how Madeline, fierce and barefoot, could move so quickly through the glass.

  The madwoman seized the doctor’s hurricane lamp by its scalding cover, and Edwin could hear the sizzle of her skin as her fingers touched, and held, and then flung the oil-filled lamp at the oncoming machine with the glittering badger eyes.

  The lamp shattered and the room was flooded with brilliance and burning.

  Dr. Smeeks shrieked as splatters of flame sprinkled his hair and his nightshirt, but Edwin was there—shuffling fast into the doctor’s sleeping nook. The boy grabbed the top blanket and threw it at the doctor, then he joined the blanket and covered the old man, patting him down. When the last spark had been extinguished he left the doctor covered and held him in the corner, hugging the frail, quivering shape against himself while Madeline went to war.

  Flames were licking along the books and Madeline’s hair was singed. Her shift was pocked with black-edged holes, and she had grabbed the gloves Dr. Smeeks used when he held his crucibles. They were made of asbestos, and they would help her hands.

  Tanglefoot was spinning in place, howling above their heads from his fiery perch on the book ledge. It was the loudest sound Edwin had ever heard his improvised friend create, and it horrified him down to his bones.

  Someone in a uniform reached the bottom of the stairs and was repulsed, repelled by the blast of fire. He shouted about it, hollering for water. He demanded it as he retreated, and Madeline didn’t pay him a fragment of attention.

  Tanglefoot’s scissors fell to the ground, flung from its distracted hands. The smoldering handles were melting on the floor, making a black, sticky puddle where they settled.

  With her gloved hands she scooped them up and stabbed, shoving the blades down into the body of the mobile inferno once named Ted. She withdrew the blades and shoved them down again because the clockwork boy still kicked, and the third time she jammed the scissors into the little body she jerked Ted down off the ledge and flung it to the floor.

  The sound of breaking gears and splitting seams joined the popping gasp of the fire as it ate the books and gnawed at the ends of the tables.

  “A blanket!” Madeline yelled. “Bring me a blanket!”

  Reluctantly, Edwin uncovered the shrouded doctor and wadded the blanket between his hands. He threw the blanket to Madeline.

  She caught it, and unwrapped it enough to flap it down atop the hissing machine, and she beat it again and again, smothering the fire as she struck the mechanical boy. Something broke beneath the sheet, and the chewing tongues of flame devoured the cloth that covered Tanglefoot’s joints—leaving only a tragic frame beneath the smoldering covers.

  Suddenly and harshly, a bucket of water doused Madeline from behind.

  Seconds later she was seized.

  Edwin tried to intervene. He divided his attention between the doctor, who cowered against the wall, and the madwoman with the bleeding feet and hair that reeked like cooking trash.

  He held up his hands and said, “Don’t! No, you can’t! No, she was only trying to help!” And he tripped over his own feet, and the pile of steaming clockwork parts on the floor. “No,” he cried, because he couldn’t speak without choking. “No, you can’t take her away. Don’t hurt her, please. It’s my fault.”

  Dr. Williams was there, and Edwin didn’t know when he’d arrived. The smoke was stinging his eyes and the whimpers of Dr. Smeeks were distracting his ears, but there was Dr. Williams, preparing to administer a washcloth soaked in ether to Madeline’s face.

  Dr. Williams said to his colleague, a burly man who held Madeline’s arms behind her back, “I don’t know how she escaped this time.”

  Edwin insisted, “I did it!”

  But Madeline gave him a glare
and said, “The boy’s as daft as his mother. The clockwork boy, it called me, and I destroyed it. I let myself out, like the witch I am and the fiend you think I must be—”

  And she might’ve said more, but the drug slipped up her nostrils and down her chest, and she sagged as she was dragged away.

  “No,” Edwin gulped. “It isn’t fair. Don’t hurt her.”

  No one was listening to him. Not Dr. Smeeks, huddled in a corner. Not Madeline, unconscious and leaving. And not the bundle of burned and smashed parts in a pile beneath the book ledge, under a woolen covering. Edwin tried to lift the burned-up blanket but pieces of Ted came with it, fused to the charred fabric.

  Nothing moved, and nothing grumbled with malice in the disassembled stack of ash-smeared plates, gears, and screws.

  Edwin returned to the doctor and climbed up against him, shuddering and moaning until Dr. Smeeks wrapped his arms around the boy to say, “There, there. Parker it’s only a little fire. I must’ve let the crucible heat too long, but look. They’re putting it out now. We’ll be fine.”

  The boy’s chest seized up tight, and he bit his lips, and he sobbed.

  Hide and Horns

  by Joe R. Lansdale

  I was recovering from some knife wounds, and was mostly healed up and hoping I wasn’t gonna come up on anything that might get me all het up and cause me to tear open my cuts. I was chewin’ on some jerky, riding a pretty good horse on the plains of Texas, when I seen something in the distance. I pulled my mount up and got out my long glasses and took me a look.

  There was a colored fella like myself lying out there under a horse, had one leg jammed under it, and the horse was deader than a rock. The colored fella was wearing a big sombrero and a red shirt and he wasn’t movin’. I figured he was dead like the horse, cause there was some buzzards circlin’, and one lit down near the man and the horse and had the manner of a miner waiting for someone to ring the dinner bell. There was a little black cloud above the fella I took to be flies that was excited about soon crawling up the old boy’s nose holes.

  I rode on over there, and when I got near, the colored fella rolled on his side and showed me the business end of an old Sharp’s fifty rifle, the hole in the barrel looked to me to be as big as a mining tunnel.

  “Hold up,” I said, “I ain’t got nothin’ agin ya.”

  “Yeah,” he said in a voice dry as the day, “but there’s them that do.” He rolled over on his side again and lay the rifle across his chest. He said, “You give me any cause, I’ll blow your head off.”

  I got down off my horse and led it over to where the fella and his dead cayuse lay. I said, “So, just restin’?”

  “Me and my horse here thought we’d stop in the middle of the goddamn prairie, under the goddamn sun, and take a goddamn nap.”

  “Good a place as any,” I said, squatting down to look the man over, “cause I don’t see one spread of shade nowhere.”

  “And you won’t for some miles.”

  “Course, that sombrero could cover an acre in shade.”

  “It does me good from time to time,” he said.

  I could see that the horse had a couple of bullet holes in its side, and the fella had one too, in his right shoulder. He had stuffed a rag in the hole and the rag was red, and the red shirt looked to have been a lighter color before it had sucked up all that blood.

  “I ain’t feelin’ so good,” he said.

  “That would be because you got a bullet hole in you and a big old dead horse lyin’ on your leg.”

  “And I thought he was just nappin’. I didn’t want to disturb him.” I bent down and looked at where the leg was trapped. The fella said, “You know, I don’t know how much blood I got left in me.”

  “Way you look,” I said, “not much. There’s a town not too far from here I’ve heard of. Might be someone there that can do some fixin’s on ya.”

  “That’d be right good,” the fella said. “My name is Cramp, or that’s what people call me anyway. I don’t remember how I got the name. Something back in slave days. I think the man got my mama’s belly full of me was called that, so I became Cramp too. Never knowed him. But, I got to tell you, I ain’t up to a whole lot of history.”

  I got hold of his leg and tried to ease it out from under the horse, but that wasn’t workin’.

  I went back to my horse, got a little camp shovel I had when I was in the Buffalo Soldiers, and dug around Cramp’s leg, said, “They call me Nat.”

  He said, “That diggin’ is loosin’ me up, but I don’t know it’s gonna matter. I’m startin’ to feel cold.”

  “You’ve quit loosin’ blood for now,” I said, “otherwise, you’d already be scratchin’ on heaven’s door.”

  “Or hell’s back door.”

  “One ta other.”

  I got hold of his leg and pulled, and it come free, and he made a barking sound, and I looked at him. His face was popped with sweat, and it was an older face than I’d realized, fifty or so, and it looked like an old dark withered potato. I got him under the shoulders and pulled him away and lay him down, went back to his horse and cut one of the saddlebags off with my knife, and put it under his noggin’ for a pillow. His sombrero had come off, and I went and got that and brought it over to him, and was about to lean it on his head, when I looked up and seen four riders comin’ in the distance.

  Cramp must have seen the look on my face, cause he said, “Did I mention that there’s some fellas after me?”

  “That didn’t come up. Just said there was folks had somethin’ agin you.”

  “That would be them. They’re mad at me.”

  “They have a reason?”

  “They don’t like me.”

  “Are you normally likeable?”

  “I’m startin’ to pass out, son.”

  “Hang in there.”

  “Can’t… Don’t let me be buried in no lonesome ground.”

  He closed his eyes and lay still.

  I got my long glasses and gave them a look. It was four white fellas, and one of them looked to be damn near as big as the horse he was ridin’. They all had the look of folks that would like to hang someone so they could get in the mood to do somethin’ really bad. They was looking right at me, the big cracker with his hand over his eyes, studying me there in the distance.

  I got hold of Cramp and dragged his big ass on the other side of the horse and stretched him out so that his head was against the saddle and his feet was stretched out toward the north, which was the direction I wanted to go. Actually, I kind of wanted to go any direction right then, and it crossed my mind that I could get on my horse and just ride off, fast as I could go, leave Cramp to the buzzards, the flies, and the ants, but havin’ been partly ruint by too much good raisin’, and being of too much character, it just wasn’t in me. But I didn’t have so much character I didn’t think about it.

  I went around and picked up the Sharps and looked in the saddlebag I had cut off, and found some loads in there, a whole batch of handmade shells. I studied the situation awhile, decided that when things was over there’d either be me and Cramp dead, or there would be some spare horses, so I led my nag over near where the other horse lay, grabbed his nose and pulled him down, way I had been taught in the cavalry, pulled out my pistol and shot him through the head. He kicked once and was still, and now I had me a V-shaped horse fort. It was an old trick I’d learned fightin’ Indians. The other thing I’d learned was not to get too sentimental about a horse, you never knew when you might have to eat one or make a fort out of him. The one horse I’d really liked, me and a woman I cared about had eaten him, but I don’t want to get side-tracked and off on that. It’s a sad story and doesn’t end well for any of the three of us involved.

  Lying down on my belly beside Cramp, I laid out the rifle across his horse and took me a bead. A Sharps fifty, which is what Cramp’s rifle was, can cover some real ground, but it takes some fine shootin’ to know how to get the windage and judge the way the bullet will fall
from a distance. I was a fine shooter, but that didn’t stop me from worrying, especially now that they were ridin’ toward me fast.

  I beaded down on the big man, but another rider moved in front of him, so he became my target. I had him good in my sights, but I stopped and sucked my finger wet, stuck it up in the air and got me the pull of the wind, then I beaded again. I took a deep breath and let it out slow as I pulled the trigger. The rifle popped. I knew that from where they were, it wouldn’t sound like much, and if they didn’t know their business, it would seem to them I’d missed, cause it was a long damn ways.

  The man I shot at was riding right along and it seemed that a lot of time passed before he threw out his hands and I seen a stream of blood leap out of his chest and he fell off his horse.

  I thought: What if ole Cramp here deserves what he’s gonna get? That went through my head for a moment, but then I thought, even if he does, he ought not to get it when he’s about dead, least not like this by a bunch of angry peckerwoods.

  They started firing at me with Winchesters, like the one on my dead horse, and the bullets fell well short. They had stopped, but they hadn’t shot their horses. They had dismounted and were standing by their horses firing away, the bullets plopping well in front of me. I knew right then, them not shooting their horses, they weren’t as committed as I was.

  I said to myself, “You boys hold that position.”

  I loaded another round in the Sharps and laid it back across the dead horse and took a deep breath and cracked my neck the way I can by moving my head a little sharply, and took aim. I was feelin’ frisky, so even though I should have aimed for my target’s chest, I sighted a little high of his forehead and fired. The shot knocked him off his feet, causin’ a puff of dust to throw up, and I figured I’d gotten him right between the peepers, though that was guess work, because all I saw were the soles of his boots comin’ up.

  The other two mounted up, and with the big man leading, they went back in the other direction. I popped a load after them, knocking the big man’s horse out from under him, throwing the bastard for a few loops. He was on his feet quick and he got down behind the dead horse, and the other fella kept on ridin’, like someone had stuck a lighted corn shuck up his horse’s ass. I took a shot at him, but he kept ridin’, leaning low over his horse like he was tryin’ to mix himself into it.