Clockwork Chaos

by C. J. Henderson

  “Esme! Esme! Don’t go to LøveSlottet! Esme!” Goins called, his voice obviously uncomfortable pleading, but we were already out the door and crossing the street.

  We were a block away when she stopped me and, with tears in her eyes, she hugged me fiercely, holding on for dear life and breathing shallowly. She only let go after several minutes, wiping her eyes on her cuff, “Thank you for believing in me.”

  I shrugged and held up my hands, flexing them in front of my eyes, “Thanks for putting me together.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She smiled and began to walk again. I could feel her trying to shove her tears back inside. I was content to let her try as I followed. After less than a block she affected a light tone, “He was right, though, you’re pretty talky for a—”

  “For a clanker?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think of you as a clanker. You’re a lot more advanced. You’re my friend Leo.”

  “Friend?”

  She hit me playfully on the arm, and then hissed and shook her hand while she giggled at herself, “You can’t tell me that word isn’t written in your head.”

  “No, it is. But it does beg the question, why just us two?” and the question couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. The streets were becoming more broken, the abandoned businesses seedier, the streets even less swept than elsewhere.”Isn’t there anyone else we could call for help?”

  And without meaning to, I had pushed her back into her melancholia, “They’re all gone, Leo. Their parents moved on to new towns, to find new jobs.”

  The silence that was left behind had too many tears hiding in the folds to just stand alone, “You miss them?”

  She smiled, but without warmth or humor, “I miss them all, even the kids I really never liked much.”

  And we walked a few more blocks in silence, her shoes scuffing the road in counterpoint to my ringing brass feet.

  “So what’s in LøveSlottet?” I asked to fill the void.

  She pounced on the change of subject, immediately becoming more animated, “Nobody knows! VanMeek was the richest man in Ironton during the boom, and that’s saying something. He had the most mines, the best furnaces, the biggest mansion, the most beautiful wife, and an entire clockwork house for a servant.

  “He became richer and richer, but when the iron ran out the whole town hit the skids. My dad says VanMeek was trying to find a way to save the town when his wife died. He stopped going anywhere, or doing anything. For a while his fortune kept the town going, but then he died.” But as her mood improved the neighborhood continued to degrade, “No heir. There were just instructions for lawyers to set the boiler to the house running, release the safties, and seal up the house.”

  She went on as we passed a mostly empty bar, doors and windows thrown open. Someone inside was playing a sobbing harmonica, melting notes underscoringd the day’s heat. A few men loitered outside talking bitterly with one another. They all wore simple clothes made of hardy fabric, with worn work shoes or boots dusty from inactivity. They watched us with slitted eyes as we passed, and for some reason I desperately wanted Esmeralda to pitch her voice lower as we passed. Yet she continued, at full force and full speed, “He never got a chance to spend the rest of his money. So that means it has to be in there somewhere. Sacks of money. Chests full of treasure. Maybe even gold and silver ingots!”

  We passed to the side of the bar where a crude ring was constructed. Under a huge, faded banner which proclaimed ‘NIGHTLY CLANKER BATTLES! PLACE YOUR BETS!’ A few men were working on big, brutish spring automatons. I caught the eye of one out of the gearsmiths. He had a face like a rat, and teeth like a fist full of broken glass. He immediately found much more interesting things inside the chassis of the tall iron gearworker he was fussing with. He was paying so little attention to us, I wished I could have done something to keep an eye on him after we left.

  “But why not pass it out upon his death?” I asked.

  Esmeralda pursed her lips as she gave me a ‘not you, too,’ look, “Maybe he was too old and forgot. Maybe he spent it all on whatever he was working on to save the town, but no matter which one it is we can save Ironton.”

  I nodded, but inside I could not call myself convinced. The way the men had looked at us was entirely too predatory. Esmeralda had not noticed. She was trapped in visions of gold and jewels in improbable chests. It probably made coming upon what she had called the Bone Orchard all the more shocking for her.

  The stone gateway was impressive in its austerity. It was marked only Woodland Cemetery in block letters, with rusting iron gates, doubtless taken from these very hills, hanging loose in the breeze. We passed through with the gravity of its purpose pressing on me, but amongst the thousands of ornate headstones I saw the remnants of toys and signs of disturbance.

  “Someone has been here.”

  “Someone is always here, well at least until recently. We always used to come here to play.”

  “You play in a graveyard?”

  “Nowhere else to go. It was far from the saloons and such, and there never was anything to do once the iron ran out.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure why, just as the idea of children laughing and chasing one another amongst the monuments to the dead made me uneasy, but I couldn’t say why. I jumped a little when Esmeralda grabbed my arm and pulled me along, “Come on, Let’s go visit Mom.”

  And so we did, weaving in and out of the headstones to that of a pair of weeping angels. The one on the right read:

  Shannon Kuhn,

  1878–1906

  Beloved wife and mother.

  Esmeralda screwed her eyes shut and her lips moved feverishly. I reached out to her, but stopped short when the word prayer surfaced in my mind. Instead, I looked to the next weeping angel, and was surprised to see the inscription:

  Agatha VanMeek.

  1852–1906

  In memory of my darling wife.

  The world shall never know the future

  it robbed to build an imperfect present.

  Our legacy shall only be discovered

  in the furnace of our dreams.

  And I remembered reading that in the book back in the shack where I was... Born. It was the word I wanted, but I didn’t know if it fit. But Esmeralda tugged me back over to the grave of her mother and I stopped trying to figure out why it was important.

  “This is my mom. Mom this is Leo. I put him together out of some project Dad had started a long time ago. I think you would have liked him.”

  And then we just sat there for a minute as the wind meandered through the bushes and grass. Finally, I said, “Thank you Esmeralda.”

  She flapped her hands in frustration, “Why do you insist on calling me Esmeralda?”

  “Because that’s the name written down in my head that means you.”

  She thought about that, and it sucked all the fun out of the moment, “I guess my dad wrote it that way.”

  Then she stared at the grave for just a few seconds longer before whispering, “I’ll fix it, Mom. I’ll fix it all. I have to go now.”

  She waved to the dirt at the base of the headstone, and I did the same before we were off again. I felt the need to wait until we were no longer in the graveyard before I asked, “Why is your mother buried next to Mrs. VanMeek?”

  She shrugged, “Because they are both dead?”

  The answer was so obtuse I dared not ask it again, but instead we walked in silence along gravel roads until Esmeralda decided to break for lunch. After partaking of her Coca-Cola, apple, wax paper bundle of crackers, and a slice of summer sausage, Esmeralda took out the contraption she had used on Stony and attached it to the axel I had not known protruded slightly from my back.

  When she attached it I felt a little funny, slowed even, but as she spun the pedals with her hands I felt strange new vitality replacing the fatigue I had not even known was there. In a few minutes she had worked up a lather, but I was full of energy.

  “I’m happy for you,” Sh
e said without feeling, “You get to carry the pack.”

  And so I did. It was a good thing, for while the young gearsmith knew the way in the abstract, what seems a paltry nine miles on paper becomes a never ending affair under the feet. She started chattering about the kids she used to know, her teachers in grade school, reading her father’s gearbooks as a child over and over and over. Yet as the sun continued to beat down, the pauses between sentences become longer and longer. Soon she only had breath for her steps.

  Though she wilted and drooped like a flower plucked from a field, she never complained or faltered. Even after she drank her remaining Coke and emptied her canteen, we just kept putting one foot in front of the other. We were constantly headed uphill toward the abandoned mines, the old pig iron furnaces, and LøveSlottet.

  The hills became less friendly, more rugged, a craggy kind of beauty like an Indian astride a Palomino. We started up a long gravel path from what I assumed was the main road, and the terrain glowered at us even more deeply. To either side of the cartway trees had been planted to flank travelers and cast shade from their boughs. Now many stood dry and dead, still others bore blackened fruit that stained the rock and squished with the smell of decomposition underfoot. Still others had run wild, limbs choking out the light and sky and creating rings of brown grass and bare dirt underneath. It was in the shadow of such unfortunate things that we approached the mansion called LøveSlottet.

  What Ironton was, so was LøveSlottet. It lay broken and battered like the victim of a crazed mob. Where the solid blocks of stone and planks of Ohio ash had fallen, perhaps they had not fallen as far as in town. Where they had been stained, however, they were nearly black. The windows were opaque with filth, all covered by bars but one. That one had a shutter of iron down over it, and a swath of black leading from the window away from the building. Grand carvings of lions rearing, roaring, and prancing had been broken or degraded to lumps of vaguely feline stone. It was as if it possessed a cancer of pure evil, eating the place from the inside out, and my metal guts fluttered to think about what we might find inside.

  Esmeralda walked up to the front door without fear, and perhaps without noticing the sinister stains on the wooden porch. Even from where I was I could see no keyhole on the door, only an ornate doorbell to the left.

  “Esmeralda—” I said as she brazenly twisted a knob held between the lips of a bronze lion’s face, setting a bell inside ringing.

  Instantly the face split along the jaw line, gaining a demonic appearance as it exposed seven intertwined gears spinning like mad with the sound of giant insects feasting on flesh. She stared at it in shock and I watched two of the pillars, a section of ceiling, the floor behind her... more and more places began to iris open like the petals of deadly flowers, exposing blades and spikes, mallets and deadfalls. There was a gong that sounded extremely judgmental.

  “Esmeralda?” I called, and then nothing more. I felt my system hiccup, then again harder. My hands snapped into fists with a musical tone. Hidden doors were nearly open, traps showing hungry teeth. She looked around, saw the coming doom, and then produced her toolkit from off her belt and flipped it out like a long brown tongue. The gong sounded twice.

  She brandished a chisel from her kit as doom descended on all sides. The gong rang once as she pressed each gear, mumbling frantically. I desperately tried to shake my paralysis as the second gong sounded and she wedged the metal lever under a cog—seemingly at random. But the gear was still turning, traps on all sides still opening, somewhere in the wall there was a striker cocking back to signal the end of her life.

  There was a shriek, and a toothed circle of metal cart-wheeled in the air. Without the drive gear, the rest of the cogs reversed course, giving up their kinetic energy as the traps slammed shut like nightmares faced with the morning. Esmeralda reached into the hollow left by the drive gear and pulled a lever, unlocking the front door and causing it to swing in with a long, squeaking sigh.

  She turned, a witty quip forming on lips that twisted, and then parted in surprise. I spun on a brass heel but the club was already moving.

  The wooden bat connected with my midsection, sending me sprawling. Inside me the Edison tubes skipped and scratched, recoding events as white splashes of panic and corrupting unrelated lines of memory. They reset to their proper alignment in time to record Esmeralda shout “NO!”

  Three men were approaching Esmeralda. I recognized them as loiterers from the bar. I pulled myself to my feet. The one talking was the rat-faced man. He had his hands spread in mock helplessness, saying something in a calming tone, but my recorders did not note it. Next to him another roughian, whip thin with cruel eyes, was fondling his baseball bat, rubbing a splintered crack in the end with ill humor. I did not waste time with any more detail. Instead I captured every line of Esmeralda’s stricken face, her defensive posture, and the meaty hand of the largest of the thugs grabbing her by the arm.

  All four of them jumped and turned as a hellish noise exploded from me. Her words, the tone, the voice tripped complex decision switches inside my head, pulling me forward faster and faster as augmented springs engaged internal flywheels and cogs geared up to provide strength and speed. I wasn’t just running, my inside was accelerating, faster and faster. Gears wailed like an army of swords creating a tunnel of wind that flapped my cape like a pair of wings, stirring dirt from around my feet and rippling the grass like a summer squall. The men just had time to turn, only time to turn, as I leapt. With a mind of its own, the sword sprang from its sheath.

  The burly man who had trapped Esmeralda threw a meaty back-hand toward me, a clumsy attack devoid of much power until focused upon my sword. I placed the needle tip in the path of the blow, and blood blossomed messily as he impaled himself. The important thing, the only important thing, was that he let go of Esmeralda, but she was shouting and pointing behind me. The burly thug started to howl as the thin man came from behind, readying his bat for another swing. I kicked the burly thug in the knee, messily toppling him off of the porch.

  The thin man drew far back with the hickory club, aiming for the back of my head as he had once before. He closed his eyes with the effort of putting every tendon behind the strike, but to me he might as well have been swimming in molasses. To him, I spun in a blur and his swing stopped midway, ringing off of a buckler that came from nowhere. He pushed off and swung at head height, but I had already ducked and then jumped back from him. Only then did he realize I had put my sword through the top of his left foot, and he started screaming. I smashed his nose with the buckler, sending him over the banister and out onto the lawn.

  The rat-faced man retreated, hands empty and pleading, mouth working to no avail. I could not hear him talk, I could not hear him beg, all I could hear was the constant shriek of my gears turning at the speed of sound. He bounced off a pillar on the porch, but as he came off of it I had his shirt balled up in my hand, my right arm pulled back, clicking offset teeth in the gears until it could trip the spring and shoot forward with the force—

  “LEO!NO!” Her final word was snatched by the doorway of the abandoned mansion and set free to echo through the rooms within. It was not overcome by the screeching of my body, because my body had stopped.

  At her command, over gears had slipped from position, clockworks had reengaged spring limiters, and safety catches had turned themselves on. I held the talking thug upright against the pillar with my shield hand, and the bronze sword point had entered his mouth, the tip well past his ramshackle teeth but just barely pricking the top of his mouth.

  “Let... let him go.” Esmeralda said.

  My sword tried to disappear into my forearm but the last few inches stuck, but nonetheless I set him down gently. He immediately fell over and crabbed away, leaving a trail of urine behind as he joined his injured mates down on the overgrown front lawn. They stared at me as if I were the ghost of VanMeek.

  “It would be best if I did not see you again.” I said. Reflexively, I tried to retract
my sword again, but it was still stuck. The effect of the sound of metal on metal was immediate, however. The Burly thug, ruined arm cradled, and Rat-face, still dribbling a yellow tail, picked up the thin one, who had a hole through the top one foot, and beat a hasty retreat toward town.

  Only then did I understand the concept of weary.

  I wavered on my feet a bit as my body went from spring to spring and found no kinetic energy left in the store. I put a hand out and grabbed a pillar as my internal gyro stuttered for a moment. Instantly, Esmeralda was there. She hooked up the winding contraption to my chest and began working the mechanism fiercely. I felt new power flood through me and into my storage coils.

  “Thank you.” I said.

  She frowned, shook her head, frowned more deeply, and pedaled faster. I was unsure if I should pry, or simply let be, but the silence became a weight between us. The more it pressed upon her, the more she was determined to ignore it until finally she erupted, “You were going to kill him!”

  “If necessary.” I barely had to calculate the answer, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “They were a danger to you.”

  “But you can’t just go around killing people!”

  I felt several Edison tubes grind in error as those words were recorded, “I do not go around killing people. We have met or passed dozens of people I have not tried to hurt or kill. I attacked those men because they were going to hurt you.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “By the time I found out for certain it would be too late to stop them.”

  “But they just wanted the treasure like everybody else in Ironton. They are poor, and hungry.”

  I nodded, “You are poor. Soon you very well may be hungry. Would you attack someone in order to get food?”

  But even though every point was calmly spoken, gently phrased, and logically sound, it only made her more and more angry. “You are not allowed to kill people, Leo. Promise me you won’t kill people.”

  I considered her words deeply, needles going crazy across drums in my head. I looked from the bent end of my bronze sword to the gleaming gears and metal tendons of my hand, to her exercise flushed face and pleading eyes.