Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  Dr Smeeks didn’t answer, and Edwin left him alone – only for a few minutes, only long enough to return the tray with its plates and cutlery.

  It was long enough to return to strangeness.

  Back in the laboratory Edwin found the doctor backed into a corner, holding a screwdriver and a large pair of scissors. Ted was seated on the edge of the laboratory table, its legs dangling over the side, unmoving, unmarching. The doctor looked alert and lucid – more so than usual – and he did not quite look afraid. Shadows from the burners and beakers with their tiny glowing creatures made Dr Smeeks look sinister and defensive, for the flickering bits of flame winked reflections off the edge of his scissors.

  “Doctor?”

  “I was only going to fix him, like you said.”

  “Doctor, it’s all right.”

  The doctor said, “No, I don’t believe it’s all right, not at all. That nasty little thing, Parker, I don’t like it.” He shook his head, and the lenses across his eyes rattled in their frames.

  “But he’s my friend.”

  “He’s no friend of mine.”

  Edwin held his hands up, like he was trying to calm a startled horse. “Dr Smeeks, I’ll take him. I’ll fix him, you don’t have to do it. He’s only a machine, you know. Just an invention. He can’t hurt you.”

  “He tried.”

  “Sir, I really don’t think—”

  “He tried to bite me. Could’ve taken my fingers off, if I’d caught them in that bear-trap of a face. You keep it away from me, Edwin. Keep it away or I’ll pull it apart, and turn it into a can opener.”

  Before Edwin’s very own eyes, Ted’s head turned with a series of clicks, until the machine fully faced the doctor. And if its eyes had been more than glass bits that were once assigned to a badger, then they might have narrowed or gleamed; but they were only glass bits, and they only cast back the fragments of light from the bright things in the laboratory.

  “Ted, come here. Ted, come with me,” Edwin said, gently pulling the automaton down from the table. “Ted, no one’s going to turn you into a can opener. Maybe you got wound funny, or wound too tight,” he added, mostly for the doctor’s benefit. “I’ll open you up and tinker, and you’ll be just fine.”

  Back in the corner the doctor relaxed, and dropped the scissors. He set the screwdriver down beside a row of test tubes and placed both hands on the table’s corner. “Edwin?” he said, so softly that Edwin almost didn’t hear him. “Edwin, did we finish breakfast? I don’t see my plate.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy swore. He clutched Ted closely, and held the automaton away from the doctor, out of the man’s line of sight should he turn around.

  “Oh. I suppose that’s right,” he said, and again Ted had been spared by the doctor’s dementia.

  Edwin stuck Ted down firmly between the wall and his cot, and for one daft moment he considered binding the machine’s feet with twine or wire to keep it from wandering. But the thought drifted out of his head, chased away by the unresponsive lump against the wall. He whispered, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you need to stop. I don’t want the doctor to turn you into a can opener.”

  Then, as a compromise to his thoughts about hobbling the automaton, he dropped his blanket over the thing’s head.

  Bedtime was awkward that night.

  When he reached for the clockwork boy he remembered the slow, calculated turn of the machine’s head, and he recalled the blinking bright flashes of firelight in the glass badger eyes.

  The doctor had settled in his nook and was sleeping, and Edwin was still awake. He reclaimed his blanket and settled down on his side, facing the wall and facing Ted until he dozed, or he must have dozed. He assumed it was only sleep that made the steel jaw lower and clack; and it was only a dream that made the gears twist and lock into syllables.

  “Ted?” Edwin breathed, hearing himself but not recognizing the sound of his own word.

  And the clockwork face breathed back, not its own name but something else – something that even in the sleepy state of midnight and calm, Edwin could not understand.

  The boy asked in the tiniest whisper he could muster, “Ted?”

  Ted’s steel jaw worked, and the air in its mouth made the shape of a “no”. It said, more distinctly this time, and with greater volume, “Tan . . . gle . . . foot.”

  Edwin closed his eyes, and was surprised to learn that they had not been closed already. He tugged his blanket up under his chin and could not understand why the rustle of the fabric seemed so loud, but not so loud as the clockwork voice.

  I must be asleep, he believed.

  And then, eventually, he was.

  Though not for long.

  His sleep was not good. He was too warm, and then too cold, and then something was missing. Through the halls of his nightmares mechanical feet marched to their own tune; in the confined and cluttered space of the laboratory there was movement too large to come from rats, and too deliberate to be the random flipping of a switch.

  Edwin awakened and sat upright in the same moment, with the same fluid fear propelling both events.

  There was no reason for it, or so he told himself; and this was ridiculous, it was only the old Dr Smeeks and his slipping mind, infecting the boy with strange stories, turning the child against his only true friend. Edwin shot his fingers over to the wall where Ted ought to be jammed, waiting for its winding and for the sliding of the button on its back.

  And he felt only the smooth, faintly damp texture of the painted stone.

  His hands flapped and flailed, slapping at the emptiness and the flat, blank wall. “Ted?” he said, too loudly. “Ted?” he cried with even more volume, and he was answered by the short, swift footsteps that couldn’t have belonged to the doctor.

  From his bed in the nook at the other end of the laboratory, the doctor answered with a groggy groan. “Parker?”

  “Yes, sir!” Edwin said, because it was close enough. “Sir, there’s . . .” and what could he say? That he feared his friend had become unhinged, and that Ted was fully wound, and roaming?

  “What is it, son?”

  The doctor’s voice came from miles away, at the bottom of a well – or that’s how it sounded to Edwin, who untangled himself from the sheets and toppled to the floor. He stopped his fall with his hands, and stood, but then could scarcely walk.

  As a matter of necessity he dropped his bottom on the edge of the cot and felt for his feet, where something tight was cinched around his ankles.

  There, he found a length of wire bent into a loop and secured.

  It hobbled his legs together, cutting his stride in half.

  “Parker?” the doctor asked, awakening further but confused. “Boy?”

  Edwin forced his voice to project a calm he wasn’t feeling. “Sir, stay where you are, unless you have a light. My friend, Ted. He’s gotten loose again. I don’t want . . . I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “I can’t find my candle.”

  “I can’t find mine either,” Edwin admitted. “You stay there. I’ll come to you.”

  But across the floor the marching feet were treading steadily, and the boy had no idea where his automaton had gone. Every sound bounced off glass or wood, or banged around the room from wall to wall; and even the blue-gold shadows cast by the shimmering solutions could not reveal the clockwork boy.

  Edwin struggled with the bizarre bind on his legs and stumbled forward regardless of it. No matter how hard his fingers twisted and pulled the wires only dug into his skin and cut it when he yanked too sharply. He gave up and stepped as wide as he could and found that, if he was careful, he could still walk and even, in half-hops and uneven staggers, he could run.

  His light was nowhere to be found, and he gave up on that, too.

  “Sir, I’m coming!” he cried out again, since the doctor was awake already and he wanted Ted to think he was aware, and acting. But what could Ted think? Ted was only a collection of cogs and springs.

>   Edwin remembered the red-haired Madeline with the strap marks on her wrists. She’d said Ted had no soul, but she’d implied that one might come along.

  The darkness baffled him, even in the laboratory he knew by heart. Hobbled as he was, and terrified by the pattering of unnatural feet, the basement’s windowless night worked against him and he panicked.

  He needed help, but where could it come from?

  The orderlies upstairs frightened him in a vague way, as harbingers of physical authority; and the doctors and nurses might think he was as crazy as the other children, wild and loud – or as mad as his mother.

  Like Madeline.

  Her name tinkled at the edge of his ears, or through the nightmare confusion that moved him in jilting circles. Maybe Madeline knew something he didn’t, maybe she could help. She wouldn’t make fun of him, at any rate. She wouldn’t tell him he was frightened for nothing, and to go back to sleep.

  He knew where her room was located; at least he knew of its wing, and he could gather its direction.

  The stairs jabbed up sharp and hard against his exploring fingers, and his hands were more free than his feet so he used them to climb – knocking his knees against each angle and bruising his shins with every yard. Along the wall above him there was a handrail someplace, but he couldn’t find it so he made do without it.

  He crawled so fast that his ascent might have been called a scramble.

  He hated to leave the doctor alone down there with Ted, but then again, the doctor had taken up the screwdriver and the scissors once before. Perhaps he could be trusted to defend himself again.

  At the top of the stairs, Edwin found more light and his eyes were relieved. He stood up, seized the handrail, and fell forward because he’d already forgotten about the wire wrapped around his ankles. His hands stung from the landing, slapping hard against the tile floor, but he picked himself up and began a shuffling run, in tiny skips and dragging leaps down the corridor.

  A gurney loomed skeletal and shining in the ambient light from the windows and the moon outside. Edwin fell past it and clipped it with his shoulder. The rattling of its wheels haunted him down the hallway, past the nurse’s station where an elderly woman was asleep with the most recent issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine lying across her breasts.

  She didn’t budge, not even when the gurney rolled creakily into the center of the hallway, following in Edwin’s wake.

  When he reached the right wing, he whispered, “Madeline? Madeline, can you hear me?”

  All the windows in the doors to the inmate rooms were well off the ground and Edwin wasn’t tall enough to reach, so he couldn’t see inside. He hissed her name from door to door, and eventually she came forward. Her hands wrapped around the bars at the top, coiling around them like small white snakes. She held her face up to the small window and said, “Boy?”

  He dashed to the door and pushed himself against it. “Madeline? It’s me.”

  “The boy.” Her mouth was held up to the window; she must have been standing on her tiptoes to reach it.

  Edwin stood on his tiptoes also, but he couldn’t touch the window, high above his head. He said, “I need your help. Something’s wrong with Ted.”

  For a moment he heard only her breathing, rushed and hot above him. Then she said, “Not your Ted any longer. I warned you.”

  “I know you did!” he said, almost crying. “I need your help! He tied my feet together, all tangled up – and I think he’s trying to hurt Dr Smeeks!”

  “Tangled, did he? Oh, that vicious little changeling,” she said, almost wheezing with exertion. She let go of whatever was holding her up, and Edwin heard her feet land back on the floor with a thump. She said through the door’s frame, beside its hinges, “You must let me out, little boy. If you let me out, I’ll come and help your doctor. I know what to do with changelings.”

  It was a bad thought, and a bad plan. It was a bad thing to consider and Edwin knew it all too well; but when he looked back over his shoulder at the nurse’s station with the old lady snoring within, and when he thought of the clattering automaton roaming the laboratory darkness with his dear Dr Smeeks, he leaped at the prospect of aid.

  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.”
<
br />   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.