Cogs in Time 2 (The Steamworks Series)

by SJ Davis

  Finally, Mortenson announced that he was complete, and ready to begin. His last act was to pull a robust looking metal table over towards the centre of the room, above a drain that Jorge had missed while distracted by all of the machinery around him. Rusty brown metal shackles had been fitted to the table, unevenly spaced and poorly bolted on. The cuffs and the surface of the table were stained with the same dried blood from the kitchen upstairs, and which was on the knife that Mortenson still had yet to put down.

  “Wait here boy, and prepare yourself. The moment is upon us.” His words were an excitable hiss, nothing more, carrying over the ambient sound of the room nonetheless. Mortenson near ran from the room, shoulders hunched over like a ghoul from some horror story.

  He returned moments later, rasping with exertion, dragging a naked body with him, cloth sack tied over its head. Its hands and feet were tied together with dirty rope, which had cut into the flesh and left it bleeding. The figure struggled and fought with a paralysed slowness. This one was alive.

  Jorge watched impassively. His mind screamed that together, the two of them would be able to overpower Mortenson and that he should cut the ropes. The stories all ended that way. The heroes defeated the evil sorcerers and villains by joining together, and escaped.

  He was too frightened to move properly. He was not a hero, from any story. At that exact moment, he felt as helpless as a little boy, hiding behind his mother's skirts. Just like when they had taken his father away.

  Mortenson managed to wrestle the figure on to the table top with a grunt. He didn't bother with the shackles. He stopped to catch his breath for a handful of seconds, breathing heavily from exertion as the hooded figure turned this way and that, sluggishly rolling side to side like a helpless fish out of water.

  Once he had composed himself, with some care Mortenson began to cut into the weave of the sack, the large blade of the knife sliding in and out. The figure’s struggles stopped immediately. At last, as the final threads were cut away, Jorge saw the man's face. He looked normal enough. Just another city dweller, his dirty blonde hair looked copper in the light, and with a matching messy beard. A grimy gag had been tied tightly across his mouth, forcing it open to restrict his speech, and his dark eyes were dull and subdued. Jorge had seen the look before on the men with heavy alcoholic breath that stumbled out of taverns at night, deep in their cups.

  “Be still.” Mortenson's hand caressed the man's head, staring down at those eyes as he leant over him. “Be still. For soon you shall be so much more than you are now. Another destiny awaits you than dying another drunken vagrant in the gutter,” The man rolled around fruitlessly, trying to escape Mortenson's touch, which became a palm pushed down over the forehead, knife held to the stranger's throat.

  “Shh... Yes, I see that you want to fight me. Why? You followed me easily enough when I offered you your poison. Now, trust me again. Together we shall usher in a new age.” Mortenson looked over to Jorge. “Now boy, operate the machine as I tell you.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why? Why this bloody deed? Because of the soul, boy. The release of the soul is needed, if we are to trap an angel this evening. I have tried without, and our investigations go unanswered. The soul is the key!”

  “An angel?” The terrible realisation hit Jorge. He followed Mortenson's stare to the steel giant at the end of the room.

  “Yes! You understand! That is the vessel!” Mortenson's maniac grin had returned, ghastly and as removed of humanity as the engines around him. “We will release the soul as a lure, and when the angel arrives, bind it to the vessel.”

  He seemed completely unaware of the absurdity of his words. Beneath his grasp, the stranger shook as he sobbed, chest heaving. The knife left a thin red trail along his vulnerable skin.

  “And all of those bodies were?”

  “Failures! Failures. Weak flesh, unsuited for the task, unable to sustain their last moments long enough for me to capture my prey. Man is soft, and his essence unfaithfully fickle. That is why I need you, to operate the great machine while I perform the sacrifice!” The knife flew up, pointing at Jorge.

  Accusing. Predatory.

  “You will not be the failure of my destiny tonight, boy. Tonight, I shall become the orchestrator of the future, of the new era!” Cold eyes, devoid of anything warm and filled with malice, stared at him. “And you shall accompany me, or join him.”

  Jorge's limbs moved without his bidding, as he slid off of the bench, and over to the instrument which he had been told to operate. Whatever part of him was left was compliant, weak, and desperate to live. Behind him, Mortenson had dragged a huge tangle of copper wire over to the table, each a cylindrical straw that fed back to the machine somewhere. Jorge saw that the free ends were all needles, or serrated spikes. As much as he could guess what might happen next, he found he could not tear his eyes away, watching in morbid fascination as Mortenson examined the stranger with deliberation, choosing a point.

  “Boy, begin the operation. Turn the dial to the number two position.” Apparently, Mortenson was done with his selection.

  The knife raised high once, what little brightness left in it peering from under the many stains as a sparkle, before it slashed downwards with anatomical precision. It cut the man across his stomach, moving diagonally downwards across the soft skin and towards the hip. A bright spray of blood arced upwards, over Mortenson's shirt, and began to seep onto the table. Jorge cringed and turned his head to look away, turned the dial as he been told, and tried his best to ignore the stranger’s terrible screams bleeding through the gag.

  At once, the machine began to hum, low and insistent. A gentle vibration passed through the panel where Jorge's hands rested, the machine spluttered, and returned more aggressively. He turned back to Mortenson, awaiting further instruction. The old man was jabbing the copper wires from the bundle into the stranger with practised fingers, one at a time, carefully selecting veins along the arms and chest. With each puncture, a tiny bubble of blood burst free over his fingers. The pipes shuddered. The stranger didn't move, just lay there with eyes closed from the agony, gasping and trying to draw in air in short, shallow breaths.

  Jorge imagined that the tubes were sucking blood into them, slowly exsanguinating the man. There were six already that he could see, but the bundle was still full of glinting ends. As he watched, Mortenson roughly grabbed the strangers hand and inserted a long, thick needle into the palm. Even from where he was, Jorge saw the skin bulge with the shape of the needle just underneath the soft flesh. It made his skin crawl.

  “Adjust upwards, up to four!” Mortenson looked concerned as he concentrated on his grisly task.

  Jorge followed the instruction. The gauge next to the dial spiked wildly, into the red area, and returned to just around the middle of the semi-circle. From within the brass casing there was a bubbling noise, like boiling water. A valve halfway up let lose a burst of steam. The pistons around the room were all moving much faster now.

  There were upwards of twelve wires inserted into the man, invading him. His skin looked sunken, clammy, and grey. Fingers and one foot twitched, but still Mortenson kept stabbing the wires in. They trailed out of the man’s temples on either side of his head. Like the corpses in the other room, the stranger's mouth had fallen open.

  “Six! Six!”

  Jorge rushed to follow. Silent complicity had made him a willing participant somehow. The dial was greasy, oily past four, sliding looser than before. It felt altogether less well made, with none of the previous smoothness. Each nearby part of the engine jerked as he revolved his hand, and there was a dramatic increase in noise. The needle once again spiked, holding its position in the red for a few seconds longer than the last time, and only slowly returning to a resting place much higher along.

  Jorge turned to tell the old man, but Mortenson was already shouting over the noise. “Eight boy, you must push up to eight! Now!'

  The body before him, for surely no life remain
ed in the figure, was wracked by spasms, jerking around and threatening to tear the wires out of it. The old man held it down with bloodstained hands as best as he could.

  Jorge turned, narrowing his eyes, free hand covering his face as though there might be an explosion, and turned the dial to eight. It went as far as seven and a half, and met resistance. Jorge used both hands to grip it and forced with all of strength against what felt like a build-up of pressure pushing back against him. There was a moment more resistance, and then the whole dial pushed around to twelve, its highest setting. Jorge tried in vain to pull it back, but it had locked in place. The reversed pressure pushed back from the direction the dial had turned.

  The gauge soared into the red, hit the far side, and sat unmoving, a loud shrieking noise sounding from the casing. Steam shot out into the air, scalding hot and forcing Jorge back. Other displays read the same deep red warning or flat-lined. Clockwork arms wildly spun around their faces in both directions, and the pistons pummelled in and out of the innards of the machine with immense, ear shattering noise. Somewhere, an explosion of cogs and springs burst free, scattering all over the floor. One rolled to a stop next to Jorge's shoe.

  Mortenson had given up the unequal task of holding the body down and joined him.

  “Look, boy, look!” He pointed a clawed finger at a row of cables, faintly glowing orange and running to the steel giant. “It's working!” Jorge could see that somewhere inside the figure the cogs had begun turning slowly, their teeth making tiny clinking sounds lost in the turmoil around them. The cables glowed brighter with each passing second, as if they were metal heated over a blacksmiths forge.

  Another concussive blast, louder this time, and the sound of metal buckling under strain came from somewhere behind them. Smoke leaked into the room, but Mortenson didn't seem to notice in the slightest as he stared before him in rapt awe.

  Jorge turned and took in the utter disarray. The body had slid off one side of the table, sprawled face down on the floor, free at last of its convulsions. Several of the tubes had come loose, and they whipped wildly around, lashing through the air. Where they hit the dead flesh of the body, they left deep lacerations, surreal from lack of blood, and gouged bright scratches across the tarnished metal materials of the machinery. One sprayed bright blood from the end of it, confirming Jorge's earlier fears.

  Glass lay on the floor from gauges that had burst, showered over cogs and rivets torn from their housing. The whole room vibrated, and parts of the engine were breaking off. It was out of control. A series of small detonations burst through the machine again, pieces of glass raining down and adding to the destruction already wrought. Small fires had taken root on some surfaces and equipment, where the few organic materials burned. Jorge returned his glance back to Mortenson and the steel giant, about to raise his voice and shout warning.

  It died in his throat.

  The glow from the cables was blinding, drawing in all of the light around them. A heavy piston had swung down from a place somewhere above, pushing a glass cylinder into a socket on the chest. Inside were the shards of crystal that had fascinated Jorge so, glowing a bright cerulean blue. The chaos and danger forgotten, Jorge edged closer, led by a wonder that he could not explain, some unnatural instinct. The cogs were running smoothly inside, and the tubing shook with small tremors as something unknown passed through them.

  Mortenson stepped alongside him, shouting frantically. Jorge could barely make any of it out, until the old man leaned in and bellowed in his ear. “The accumulator is working! The accumulator—”

  Behind the thick glass of the eye pieces, two lights blinked and flickered into life, burning a deep, hateful red. Jorge had time to shudder at that unwholesome and primordial stare.

  Threatening.

  Hostile.

  In a the final explosion, a great fiery conflagration of light, heat and sound, tore through the room, blasting him through the air backwards and away from the steel giant. Jorge crashed bodily into something hard, and all was dark.

  V

  Jorge's eyelids slowly slid back, as he drifted vaguely, and then floated back into consciousness. His eyes refused to focus. He closed them, and saw a bright kaleidoscope of orange, red and blue searing through the blackness in hazy edged streaks and shapes. He became aware of sharp pain in one of his legs, and a dull, aching sensation from numerous other parts of him. He guessed that he was cut up pretty badly. His ears rang, sound obliterated by a sharp perpetual noise like a smith’s hammer hitting the anvil. He tried his eyes once more, opening them slowly.

  One cheek pressed into the ground, the dirt and stains of the stone floor suddenly much closer than he had ever seen before. His eyes struggled to right themselves, blurry areas of light beginning to form sharper images as he blinked, not moving his head until his vision was restored in full. Jorge could feel a weight pushing down on him over his hips and legs, where the sharp, excruciating pain was.

  Several more blinks and he could see that he lay on his side, underneath the table that Mortenson had used for the sacrifice and had been pinned in place by its weight. His right leg was at an unnatural angle, dislocated at the knee, already obviously swollen. A few feet away from him, the stranger's corpse stared back at him, eyes milky and its mouth open, accusing.

  You did this. To us both.

  Jorge might have stayed there indefinitely, crushed by that accusation. He blinked back tears of guilt, wiping them away with a dirty hand that was scratched all over and bloody. The tears stung as they ran into the cuts.

  Around him, the destruction wrought by the infernal machine had ruined the laboratory. Jorge turned his head this way and that, peering through the murk at the broken benches, bent pipes and shattered glass. All but one of the pistons had ground to a halt or broken free of their fixings and sat flaccid. The one that did move bobbed up and down with apparent disregard for its surroundings, at the same pace as it had been throughout. In spite of himself, Jorge grinned. He was sure that there was a message hiding there.

  He moved his head too much, the world went blurry, and he had to wait for his vision to clear once again. The ringing in his ears became church bells, chiming over the top of each other, no longer a single sharp pitch.

  The huge hearth had nearly burned itself out, the room only lit by the incidental fires that burned still, lower now as they consumed the sparse flammables. The largest by far was a spill of oily black liquid over by the steel giant, lighting it from beneath with a warm glow and slowly spreading under the figures nearest foot.

  The foot.

  The foot was no longer metal one, instead a fleshly contusion that looked to have grown out of the metal and into a blackened bone hoof. In spite to the temperature of the room, a chill passed through Jorge as he followed the path of the growth upwards along the leg, slick red ropes of blood splashed along the metal and arteries intertwined with the tubes and cogs. Disgustingly, they twisted, pulsed, and shifted back and forth as the engine parts of the giant moved. Higher, and the steel appeared to have grown, spread and then warped into a leathery dark flesh, stretching across the thigh. Underneath the skin Jorge could see clockwork pieces moving around, unnatural and sickening. Unable to resist, his eyes trailed higher still, shifting his body to allow a better angle.

  Previously an elaborate series of gears, the torso had become something else entirely. The teeth of the individual pieces had elongated, turned into fingers with sharp nails at their ends, flailing madly about, swiping through the air. Two of the gears looked to have been forced from their mountings by a misshapen maw, which bit and snapped at the air. Somewhere behind the chest piece above, immense organs that were a farce of those found in man throbbed, gargled. A rich crimson ran out of the joints and seams in trails, staining the bright metal a gory hue.

  The changes were still occurring. As Jorge looked on, frozen in place by terror, the giant's immense right hand shook violently, the metal buckling, bending, and then with a burst of a snapped leather belt
and little copper wheels left trailing along the floor, writhing tentacles crawled out of the broken joint. Covered in sticky mucus, they slid over each other in their rush to reach the outside. Impossibly, they kept running, moving around too rapidly for Jorge to guess at the number, each several feet long. At their tips, some grew tiny fanged mouths or serpentine eyes. Along their trunks protruded tusks, the same blackened bone as that of the hoof below.

  The other hand had split in two at the wrist, a rapidly growing and brutal looking claw akin to that of a crustacean forcing the original hand up into the air. The ringing in his ears had begun to fade, and Jorge could hear a clacking sound as the claw snapped together, and a horrible cracking sound emanating from within the steel giant.

  The face was thankfully unchanged. Jorge had feared something else entirely. The eyes, unholy and baleful, still stared forward, burning through the darkness. A terrible intelligence lived behind them. He knew it, the sense somehow permeating into his mind, despite the lack of stimulus beyond the lit optics. He managed to summon enough willpower to tear his vision away from the creature, the only name he could think of for the figure now.

  His eyes settled back on the stranger's corpse.

  What have you done? This is the end. It will destroy the world.

  Earlier, Jorge had thought the great engine the abomination. He saw now how wrong he had truly been.

  “What...what is this?” It was Mortenson, his voice faint.

  Jorge tried to turn his head in the direction of the sound, and his vision swam once again. Dizziness spiked through him, making him grit his teeth.

  “What is this?” The voice was stronger now.

  Gears began to grind together, and the cog wheels set into the giant’s shoulders whirred into motion. One of them was stained red, and with each revolution there was a glimpse of something organic reaching upwards. The inhuman head turned with a metallic screech, in the direction of the old man.