Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  “Not it. Her,” Dora said, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. “She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah. Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

  4.

  “Then I am dreaming,” he says, relieved, and she smiles, not unkindly. He’s holding her hand, this woman who is, by turns, Dora Bolshaw and a wispy, nervous girl named Katharine Herschel, whom he courted briefly before leaving New Haven and the comforts of Connecticut for the clamorous frontier metropolis of Cherry Creek. They stand together on some windswept aerie of steel and concrete, looking down upon the night-shrouded city. And Jeremiah holds up an index finger and traces the delicate network of avenues illumined by gas street lamps. And there, at his fingertip, are the massive hangars and the mooring masts of the Arapahoe Terminal. A dirigible is approaching from the south, parting the omnipresent pall of clouds, and the ship begins a slow, stately turn to starboard. To his eyes, it seems more like some majestic organism than any human fabrication. A heretofore unclassified order of volant Cnidaria, perhaps, titan jellyfish that has forsaken the brine and the vasty deep and adapted to a life in the clouds. Watching the dirigible, he imagines translucent, stinging tentacles half a mile long, hanging down from its gondola to snare unwary flocks of birds. The underside of the dirigible blushes yellow-orange as the lacquered cotton of its outer skin catches and reflects the molten light spilling up from all the various ironworks and the copper and silver foundries scattered throughout Cherry Creek. The bones of the world exhumed and smelted to drive the tireless progress of man. He’s filled with pride, gazing out across the city and knowing the small part he has played in birthing this civilization from a desolate wilderness fit for little more than prairie dogs, rattlesnakes and heathen savages.

  “Maybe the world don’t exactly see it that way,” Dora says. “I been thinking lately, maybe she don’t see it that way at all.”

  Jeremiah isn’t surprised when tendrils of blue lightning flick down from the coal-smoke sky, and crackling electric streams trickle across rooftops and down the rainspouts of the high buildings.

  “Maybe,” Dora continues, “the world has different plans. Maybe she’s had them all along. Maybe, Professor, we’ve finally gone and dug too deep in these old mountains.”

  But Jeremiah makes a derisive, scoffing noise and shakes his head. And then he recites scripture while the sky rains ultramarine and the shingles and cobblestones sizzle. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

  “I don’t recall it saying nothing about whatever creepeth under the earth,” Dora mutters, though now she looks a little more like Katharine Herschel, her blue eyes turning brown, and her trousers traded for a petticoat. “Besides, you’re starting to sound like that idiotic Larimer woman. Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said to you?”

  Jeremiah raises his hand still higher, as though, with only a little more effort, he might reach the lightning or the shiny belly of the approaching dirigible or even the face of the Creator, peering down at them through the smoldering haze.

  “Is it not fair wondrous?” he asks Dora. But it’s Katharine who answers him, and she only trades him one question for another, repeating Dora’s words.

  “Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said?”

  And they are no longer standing high atop the aerie, but have been grounded again, grounded now. He’s seated with Dora and Charlie McNamara in the cluttered nook that passes for Dora’s office, which is hardly more than a closet, situated at one end of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company’s primary machine shop. The room is littered with a rummage of dismembered engines – every tabletop and much of the floor concealed beneath cast-off gears, gauges, sprockets, and fly wheels, rusted-out boilers and condensers, warped piston rods and dials with bent needles and cracked faces. There’s a profusion of blueprints and schematics, some tacked to the wall and others rolled up tight and stacked one atop the other like Egyptian papyri or scrolls from the lost library of Alexandria. Everywhere are empty and half-empty oil cans, and there are any number of tools for which Jeremiah doesn’t know the names.

  “Time being, operations have been suspended,” Charlie McNamara says, and then he goes back to using the blade of his pocketknife to dig at the grime beneath his fingernails. “Well, at least that’s the company line. Between you, me and Miss Bolshaw here, I think Chicago’s having a good long think about sealing off the shaft permanently.”

  “Permanently,” Jeremiah whispers, sorry that he can no longer see the skyline or the docking dirigible. “I would imagine that’s going to mean quite a hefty loss, after all the money and work and time required to get the shaft dry and producing again.”

  “Be that as it damn may be,” Dora says brusquely. “There’s more at stake here than coal and pit quotas and quarterly profits.”

  “Yes, well,” Jeremiah says, staring at the scuffed toes of his boots now. “Then let’s get to it, yes? If I can manage to keep my blasted claustrophobia in check, I’m quite sure we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  No one laughs at the pun, because it isn’t funny, and Jeremiah rubs his aching eyes and wishes again that he were still perched high on the aerie, the night wind roaring in his ears.

  “Ain’t she told you?” the company geologist asks, glancing over at Dora. “What I need you to look at, it ain’t in the hole no more. What you need to see, well . . .” and here he trails off. “It’s locked up in a cell at St Joseph’s.”

  “Locked up?” Jeremiah asks, and the geologist nods.

  “Jail would have done her better,” Dora mutters. “You put sick folks in the hospital. Killers, you put in jails, or you put a bullet in the skull and be done with it.”

  Charlie McNamara tells Dora to please shut the hell up and try not to make things worse than they already are.

  Jeremiah shifts uneasily in his chair. “How did the men die? I mean, how exactly?”

  “Lungs plumb full up with coal dust,” Charlie says. “Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting. Doctor, he even found the shit clogging up their stomachs and intestines.”

  “Some of the men,” Dora adds, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard.”

  “Jesus in a steam wagon, Dora. Ain’t you got an off switch or something? Singing ain’t never killed no one yet, and it sure as hell wasn’t what got that poor pair of bastards.”

  And even as the geologist is speaking, the scene shifts again, another unprefaced revolution in this dreaming kaleidoscope reality, and now the halls and exhibits of the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities are spread out around him. On Jeremiah’s right, the celebrated automatic mastodon rolls glass eyes, and its gigantic tusks are garnished with a dripping, muculent snarl of vegetation. On his left, the serpentine neck of the Gove County plesiosaur rises gracefully as any swan’s, though he sees that all the fossil bones and the plaster of Paris have been transmutated through some alchemy into cast iron. The metal is marred by a very slight patina of rust, and it occurs to him that, considering the beast’s ferrous metamorphosis, he should remind his staff that they’d best keep the monstrous reptile from swimming or wandering about the rainy streets.

  “I cried the day you went away,” Katharine says, because, for the moment, it is Katharine with him again, not Dora. “I wrote a letter, but never sent it. I keep it in a dresser drawer.”

  “There was too much work to do,” he tells her, still admiring the skeleton. “And much too little of it could be done from New Haven.”

  Behind the plesiosaur, the brick and mortar of the gallery walls have dissolved utterly away, revealing the trunks of mighty scale trees and innumerable scouring rushes as tall as California redwoods. Here is a dark Carboniferous forest, the likes of which
has not taken root since the Mary Gray vein at the bottom of Shaft Seven was only slime and rotting detritus. And below these alien boughs, a menagerie of primæval beings has gathered to peer out across the eons. So, it is not merely a hole knocked in his wall, but a hole bored through the very fabric of time.

  “She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah,” Katharine says, even though the voice is plainly Dora Bolshaw’s. “Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

  “You’re beginning to put me in mind of a Greek chorus,” he replies, keeping his eyes on the scene unfolding behind the plesiosaur. Great hulking forms have begun to shift impatiently in the shadows there, the armored hide of a dozen species of Dinosauria and the tangled manes of giant ground sloths and Irish elk, the leathery wings of a whole flock of pterodactyls spreading wide.

  “Maybe they worshipped her, before there ever were men,” Dora says, but then she’s coughing again, the dry, hacking cough of someone suffering from advanced anthracosis. Katharine has to finish the thought for her. “Maybe they built temples to her, and whispered prayers in the guttural tongues of animals, and maybe they made offerings, after a fashion.”

  Overhead, there’s a cacophonous, rolling sound that Jeremiah Ogilvy first mistakes for thunder. But then he realizes that it’s merely the hungry blue lightning at last locating the flammable guncotton epidermis of the airship.

  “Some of the men,” Katharine whispers, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Singing like church hymns, they said. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard. We come so late to this procession, and yet we presume to know so much.”

  From behind the iron plesiosaur, that anachronistic menagerie gathers itself like a breathing wave of sinew and bone and fur, cresting, racing towards the shingle.

  Jeremiah Ogilvy turns away, no longer wanting to see.

  “Maybe, in their own way, they prayed,” Dora whispers, breathlessly.

  And the tall, thin man standing before him, the collier in his overalls and hard hat who wasn’t there just a moment before, hefts his pick and brings it down smartly against the floorboards, which, in the instant steel strikes wood, become the black stone floor of a mine. All light has been extinguished from the gallery now, save that shining dimly from the collier’s carbide lantern. The head of the pick strikes rock, and there’s a spark, and then the ancient shale begins to bleed. And soon thereafter, the dream comes apart, and the Professor lies awake and sweating, waiting for sunrise and trying desperately to think about anything but what he’s been told has happened at the bottom of Shaft Seven.

  5.

  After his usual modest breakfast of black coffee with blueberry preserves and biscuits, and after he’s given his staff their instructions for the day and cancelled a lecture that he was scheduled to deliver to a league of amateur mineralogists, Jeremiah Ogilvy leaves the museum. He walks north along Kipling to the intersection with West 20th Avenue, where he’s arranged to meet Dora Bolshaw. He says good morning, and that he hopes she’s feeling well. But Dora’s far more taciturn than usual, and few obligatory pleasantries are exchanged. Together, they take one of the clanking, kidney-jarring public omnibuses south and east to St Joseph’s Hospital for the Bodily and Mentally Infirm, established only two decades earlier by a group of the Sisters of Charity sent to Cherry Creek from Leavenworth.

  Charlie McNamara is waiting for them in the lobby, his long canvas duster so stained with mud and soot that it’s hard to imagine it was ever anything but this variegated riot of black and grey. He’s a small mountain of a man, all beard and muscle, just starting to go soft about the middle. Jeremiah has thought, on more than one occasion, that this is what men would look like had they’d descended not from apes, but from grizzly bears.

  “Thank you for coming,” Charlie says. “I know that you’re a busy man.” But Jeremiah tells him to think nothing of it, that’s he’s glad to be of whatever service he can – if, indeed, he can be of service. Charlie and Dora nod to one another, then, and swap nervous salutations. Jeremiah sees, or only thinks he sees, something wordless pass between them, as well, something anxious and wary, spoken with the eyes and not the lips.

  “You told him?” Charlie asks, and Dora shrugs.

  “I told him the most of it. I told him what murdered them two men.”

  “Mulawski and Backstrom,” Charlie says.

  Dora shrugs again. “I didn’t recollect their names. But I don’t suppose that much matters.”

  Charlie McNamara frowns and tugs at a corner of his mustache. “No.” He nods. “I don’t suppose it does.”

  “I hope you’ll understand my skepticism,” Jeremiah says, looking up, speaking to Charlie, but watching Dora. “What’s been related to me, regarding the deaths of these two men, and what you’ve brought me here to see, I’d be generous if I were to say it strikes me as a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, something from the dime novels. It was Hume – David Hume – who said, ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’”

  Dora glares back at him. “You always did have such a goddamn pretty way of calling a girl a liar,” she says.

  “Hell,” Charlie sighs, still tugging at his mustache. “I’d be concerned, Dora, if he weren’t dubious. I’ve always thought myself a rational man. That’s been a source of pride to me, out here among the barbarians and them that’s just plain ignorant and don’t know no better. But now, after this business—”

  “Yeah, well, so how about we stop the clucking and get to it,” Dora cuts in, and Charlie McNamara frowns at her. But then he stops fussing with his whiskers and nods again.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Guess I’m just stalling. Doesn’t precisely fill me with joy, the thought of seeing her again. If you’ll just follow me, Jeremiah, they got her stashed away up on the second floor.” He points to the stairs. “The Sisters ain’t none too pleased about her being here. I think they’re of the general notion that there’s more proper places than hospitals for demons.”

  “Demons,” Jeremiah says, and Dora Bolshaw laughs a dry, humorless laugh.

  “That’s what they’re calling her,” Dora tells him. “The nuns, I mean. You might as well know that. Got a priest from Annunciation sitting vigil outside the cell, reading Latin and whatnot. There’s talk of an exorcism.”

  At this pronouncement, Charlie McNamara makes a gruff dismissive noise and motions more forcefully towards the stairwell. He mutters something rude about popery and superstition and lady engine jockeys who can’t keep their damn pie holes shut.

  “Charlie, you know I’m not saying anything that isn’t true,” Dora protests, but Jeremiah Ogilvy thinks he’s already heard far too much and seen far too little. He steps past them, walking quickly and with purpose to the stairs, and the geologist and the mechanic follow close on his heels.

  6.

  “I would like to speak with her,” he says. “I would like to speak with her alone.” And Jeremiah takes his face away from the tiny barred window set into the door of the cell where they’ve confined the woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven. For a moment, he stares at the company geologist, and then his eyes drift towards Dora.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me right,” Charlie McNamara says and furrows his shaggy eyebrows. “She don’t talk. Least ways, not near as anyone can tell.”

  “You’re wasting your breath arguing with him,” Dora mumbles and glances at the priest, who’s standing not far away, eyeing the locked door and clutching his Bible. “Might as well try to tell the good Father here that the Queen of Heaven got herself knocked up by a stable hand.”

  Jeremiah turns back to the window, his face gone indignant and bordering now on choleric. “Charlie, I’m neither a physician nor an alienist, but you’ve brought me here to see this woman. Having looked upon her, the reason why continues to escape me. However, that said, if I am to examine her, I canno
t possibly hope do so properly from behind a locked door.”

  “It’s not safe,” the priest says very softly. “You must know that, Professor Ogilvy. It isn’t safe at all.”

  Peering in past the steel bars, Jeremiah shakes his head and sighs. “She’s naked, Father. She’s naked, and can’t weigh more than eighty pounds. What possible threat might she pose to me? And, while we’re at it, why, precisely, is she naked?”

  “Oh, they gave her clothes,” Dora chimes in. “Well, what passes for clothes in a place like this. But she tears them off. Won’t have none of it, them white gowns and what have you.”

  “She is brazen,” the priest all but whispers.

  “Has anyone even tried to bathe her?” Jeremiah asks, and Charlie coughs.

  “That ain’t coal dust and mud you’re seeing,” he says. “Near as anyone can tell, that there’s her skin.”

  “This is ludicrous, all of it,” Jeremiah grumbles. “This is not the Middle Ages, and you do not have some infernal siren or succubus locked up in there. Whatever else you may believe, she’s a woman, Charlie, and, having sacrificed my very busy day to come all the way out here, I would like, now, to speak with her.”

  “I was only explaining, Jeremiah, how I ain’t of the notion it’s such a good idea, that’s all,” Charlie says, then looks at the priest. “You got the keys, Father?”

  The priest nods, reluctantly, and then he produces a single tarnished brass key from his cassock. Jeremiah steps aside while he unlocks the door.

  “I’m going in with you,” Dora says.

  “No, you’re not,” Jeremiah tells her. “I need to speak with this woman alone.”

  “But she don’t talk,” Dora says again, beginning to sound exasperated, forcing the words out between clenched teeth.