Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology

by Anika Arrington

  Holding his lantern high, he picked up the case and studied it. Delicate etchings decorated the polished metal. He shook it. It responded with silence. He held the lantern closer and noticed something wedged into the bottom of the case. Using his pen, he fished out a small photograph.

  The firelight jumped across the picture. Even in the darkened room, the man immediately recognized the face of the girl who perished where he stood. Turning the picture over, he found writing.

  My dearest Pia, I pray this note finds you so you’ll know of my love for you. Whenever you see this match case, remember me and know that I will always be with you. Please keep the knowledge of my love in your heart. One day we’ll reunite and my joy will be complete. Pia, never forget that I love you more than life itself. Goodbye, my daughter, until we meet again.

  The officer pocketed the evidence and left the room. The sound of his boots against the plant floor echoed as he made his way out of the labyrinth of walls and pipes and vents and rooms filled with secrets, finally emerging into the night.

  As he stood staring at the stars, thoughts of a mother’s final wish swirled in his mind and he recalled the look of serenity on the child’s face. He hoped to God the mother’s prayer was answered. He climbed into his vehicle and made his way through the darkened streets of the sleeping city.

  Styled after Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

  The blessed silence, the reprieve from the damned ghost’s haunting presence, lasted a brief three years following the untimely and dramatic departure of the Opera’s Prima Donna, Mademoiselle Daae. But in late 1884, it became abundantly clear that Monsieur Leroux’s fantastical tale contained at least one incredible falsehood—namely, the Ghost was not dead.

  Oh, the management was in on the misdirect. They still paid his salary, obligingly kept Box Five for his exclusive use, and kowtowed to his every whim. The ballet chorus still kept on their metaphorical toes, shrieking at the occasional odd sound or strange happening—as excitable young women are wont to do. But, perhaps most importantly, the murders stopped.

  Yes, it was a quiet truce. One could argue that it bordered on comfortable. The theatre was enjoying a resurgence of popularity, now gained through the quality of its productions, rather than the sensationalism of its apparent haunting. Messrs. Armand Monchamin and Firmin Richard even begrudged little of the stipend they were forced to pay their resident spook. After all, the Opera Ghost was now earning his keep . . .

  Christine’s kindness, her kiss, had changed Erik, the man known to most only as Le Fantôme de le Palais Garnier, or simply, the Opera Ghost. Still a recluse and a figure of terror, he kept to his subterranean hermitage, making his wishes known via the ever-servile Madame Giry. The ghost now worked in the background to assist the company through his many talents.

  And by background, I mean literally. The wonders of a Palais Garnier production were a sight to behold. Audiences came expecting theatre and left talking miracles, magic. It has been expounded upon elsewhere, the natural genius that the phantom possessed for engineering, mechanics, and illusion. His myriad of secret doors and passageways, the nerve system of the already magnificent Palais Garnier; his own lake-bound dwelling-place beneath the seven stories of basement catacombs, an unsung modern marvel.

  It only followed that, in his newfound fit of goodwill, Erik should lend his talents to the prop, scenery, and stage effects department. At first the contributions were subtle, but as initial mistrust faded, the aid became more . . . outré.

  Combined with his talent for writing, original and marvelous productions soon graced the stage of the Paris Opera. Audiences soon spoke of modern effects not seen elsewhere—scenery that moved itself, props that soared over the crowd. The age of the machine was in vogue, and Paris was leading the way.

  And Messrs. Richard and Monchamin knew exactly where to invest their sizable profits.

  “How? How does this happen?” M. Monchamin, a portly and florid gentleman of the desk, threw the morning paper down on the credenza, startling his partner with his brash entrance.

  “Beg pardon—how does what happen?” M. Richard, as thin as his partner was thick, middle aged and generally the more impassive of the two, looked around wildly. They’d enjoyed their reprieve for too long, it seemed. Please let it not be a cast member, he scanned the page, feeling a headache threaten.

  “This. This!” Armand jabbed a finger at a small article below the fold. It read:

  LONDON OPERA HOUSE FITTED WITH NEW ELECTRIC LIGHT, AUDIENCES IN DELIGHT

  “Audiences are in delight, dear Firmin,” the manager sputtered. “In delight!”

  “Hmm . . .” Firmin was mostly unmoved, wheeling as he was from relief that the headline heralded no disaster. “I suppose we’d better look into this ourselves.”

  “Look into it? Goodness, I’ve already told Mme. Giry to handle it.”

  As if on cue, Madame Giry appeared in the doorway, her wiry frame doing little to block the light, but somehow dimming the small office with her presence.

  “Ah! Madame Giry,” Armand motioned her in, eyeing her nervously. “We were just discussing—”

  “He won’t do it.” She wasted no time, delivering her message curtly, with a tone as flat and colorless as her austere attire.

  “Oh, but surely he must—” Firmin began, calm as ever.

  “Must what?” Giry cut in. “Must be your houseboy? Must waste his time with your projects—all so you can turn another tidy profit?”

  “We meant no disrespect, Mme. Giry,” Armand soothed, “but with his talents, we thought surely that—”

  “You thought wrong,” she looked from one man to the other. “The Ghost does not wish to have his opera bathed in the garish and vulgar light of Mr. Swan’s infernal invention.” She bid them good day and swept out of the room.

  “Well!” Armand put the full effrontery he felt into that one word. Firmin was already scribbling furiously on a piece of stationary, one finger held up to request silence.

  “There,” he put the final flourish on the note then passed it over, “I suppose we’d both better sign it.” At Armand’s puzzled look he explained, “We’ll send it today—M. Garnier surely must know someone who can aid us in this endeavor.”

  “But the ghost—”

  “Hang the ghost! If all he’s willing to contribute is clockwork trickery and cheap smoke and mirror illusions—we’re looking at the future here, and I’ll be damned if we get left in the dark.”

  The lights flickered and grew dim. Shrieks filled the brief space of time that it took the gas to right itself and return the room to steady illumination.

  “O-oh! The ghost! The ghost!” A dozen fear-filled girls surrounded Meg, who winced and shushed the skittish dancers.

  “Ladies, ladies,” she called for order. Though not the principal ballerina (not yet anyway!), Meg Giry commanded special attention in the corps. The last of the original chorus to perform alongside the famous Prima Donna Daae, and daughter of Mme. Giry, the Opera Ghost’s own messenger, the girls looked to the tall, dark-eyed beauty for answers.

  “It’s just an air bubble in the pipes caused by the workmen,” she sighed, giving the explanation for the eighth time in a week. Flickering lights, tools gone missing, small accidents amongst the electrical crew—such things had become regular occurrences during the opera house’s fitful upgrade to the new electric light. However, having lived through the horrors of three years prior, Meg was ready to believe these small hiccups for what they were: natural delays in a complicated process. That she’d once in a while seen a pensive, worried look flit across her mother’s face never bothered her—Mother was always worried.

  An urgent knocking on the door nearly brought the room to chaos again. Cracking it open to see who summoned, one of the young ladies—a back row girl by the name of Brigitte—nodded rapidly at the unknown visitor then turned to Meg, eyes bright with apprehension, “Meg? It’s your mother—”

  With a frown, the young lady w
ove her way to the door, her grace making even the short, utilitarian journey a lovely sight to behold. I really don’t need an interruption right now, she glowered inwardly as the girls lapsed into one more round of ghost-induced tittering.

  Meg stopped short. The man at the door was clearly not her mother. With a puzzled glance and growing unease in her chest, she thanked Mademoiselle Brigitte who obligingly left Meg to her conversation with the stagehand, a ruddy fellow who nervously fingered the grey shapeless cap he held in his hands.

  “Mam’selle Giry? Your mother’s had a small accident. If you could please come with me.” The words were gruff, but not untinged with kindness. Meg followed the roughhewn stagehand down the hallway with alacrity, leaving her corps to gossip and invent reasons for her swift and sudden departure.

  It was not the ghost that’d brought Mme. Giry to the attentions of the prop master’s ministrations, but something rather more ominous: sickness. Laid up on a small and ridiculously over-decorated settee, Madame Giry awaited the doctor’s arrival with customary sharpness. This alone helped put Meg at ease as she arrived on the heels of her obliging messenger. If her mother had the strength to be impatient, then it couldn’t be all that serious.

  Still, the concierge had fainted, and, at her admittedly advanced age, any illness could become serious. Meg knelt by her mother’s side.

  “Do not let the doctor treat me,” Mme. Giry clawed at Meg’s arm, her voice husky and whispered. There was a feverish tinge to her lips, a brightness in the eyes that recalled Meg to her earlier alarm. Not call the doctor? Nonsense. He was already on the way.

  Meg informed her mother of this and was promptly shushed. Drawing near, the old woman hissed, “In my room. A small bottle with a dropper. Fetch it, my darling.”

  Eighteen years of knowing better than to argue, Meg complied with the strange request, returning from her errand to find her mother having regained her feet, albeit with the aid of her cane. Madame’s eyes positively glowed as she espied the stoppered brown bottle in Meg’s hand. “Come, come,” she toddled away to a small dressing room in spite of there being no one about, the crowd having dispersed now that Meg had been fetched. It wasn’t that the old woman was disliked, rather the consensus was that nobody necessarily wanted to deal with the shifty old crone and only tolerated her because . . . well, because of past events.

  One small drop. Three minutes time. And Madame Giry was very much herself once more. Perhaps paler, perhaps frailer than other days, but it was hard to tell. Meg watched her mother’s satisfied sigh as she re-stoppered and pocketed the rather miraculous cure with reticence.

  “Mother, what was—?”

  “My medicine,” Mme. Giry snapped then softened, “Thank you, my dear, for fetching it for me.” There was a loud bang, a rushing noise, then the lights went dark—this time for good.

  “That was some excellent quick thinking on the part of your foreman,” M. Monchamin mopped his sweating brow with already damp handkerchief. It had been an exciting half-hour since their narrow avoidance of a true crisis—nay, disaster.

  The accounts were different from half-a-dozen of the workers, but consensus was that a sudden shower of sparks from a worker’s tool had come dangerously close to one of the opera house’s multitude of exposed gas lines. One of the men had leapt to action, closing off the valves—which led to the flushing of the system, and the subsequent plunge into darkness that the entire opera house had suffered.

  “Someone get this damned thing out of the way.” Firmin was taking the crisis with much less calm than his florid partner. Taking an ill-tempered swipe with his cane at the heavy fire curtain now blocking his entrance onto the stage, the frustrated manager paced the apron, ignoring the explanations from his prop master that the very thing that made such a safety feature work was its hard-to-remove nature after deployment.

  “Cut the ropes if you have to, I want it down!” Firmin re-asserted, frowning with satisfaction as a muffled “Stand clear!” sounded from the other side and the curtain descended into a heavy heap upon the stage.

  “Monsieur Richard!” a white-faced Meg Giry stood center stage, a gaggle of slack-jawed stagehands and flighty ballerinas surrounding her. She held out a plain envelope to the theatre’s owners in hands that trembled slightly. “We found it when the lights came back on,” she offered tremulously, “along with these.” Firmin now noted that not all the figures he’d at first taken to be members of the dance corps were indeed human. Eight full-sized mannequins, dressed in the taffeta trappings of a ballet troupe, stood arrayed in fifth position, the stage workers pointedly leaving them alone.

  Firmin snatched the letter from Meg’s slack fingers, raising his eyebrows at M. Armand as he sliced the seal and began to read the letter within:

  Dearest Messers. Richard and Monchamin,

  Please accept my sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding under which we currently seem to be operating. It would appear that my initial message as regards how I wish my theatre to be illuminated was misinterpreted. I presume that, if you are reading this letter, the gas jets have been re-ignited with no great harm and you’ll have noted my peace offering—to be implemented in conjunction with the enclosed new opera.

  Let me make absolutely clear that I in no way wish the garish and harsh electrical light to make a permanent home within my opera house. You can see from my ballet corps that I am not a man opposed to progress or ingenuity—quite the opposite, in fact. However, I will assert that, if this outfitting of electrical illumination continues, you must be prepared for, shall I say, consequences of an unfortunate sort.

  Please again understand that I desire nothing but the best for our theatre and appreciate your efforts to improve relations of late. I am, as ever, cordially yours—

  The Opera Ghost

  P.S. Future communication may be relayed through Mlle. Giry—I wish her mother the speediest of recoveries.

  This postscript immediately turned scrutiny from the ghost’s corps de ballet to poor Meg herself.

  “It just appeared. Right outside the room where my mother was recovering. I—”

  “Goodness, my dear girl. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.” Not yet anyway, Armand harrumphed. He moved, not to comfort the poor ballerina, but rather to M. Richard’s elbow to peer critically at the note. It was genuine O.G., at any rate.

  The familiar spidery script made his skin crawl. Still, nobody had died—at least not as far as he knew. And it appeared they’d a new opera—always a good thing. And those life-sized dolls—if they worked—would likely merit a larger headline font from the press than any electrical light ever would. These last two observations he said aloud for the benefit of his wan-faced audience, drawing an impromptu burst of applause and a hearty “Bravo!” from Firmin.

  Out of safety precautions, the work crew was dismissed for the rest of the week. They still couldn’t come to a consensus on whose work had caused the shower of sparks that had led to the gas shut-off. The chorus of dancers had their suspicions—“The ghost!”—and for their part, Mm. Firmin and Armand, and Madame Giry, couldn’t disagree.

  And so, until a better working solution was hit upon, work on the electrical upgrade was halted. Besides, rehearsals on the new opera had begun almost immediately. Construction would only get in the way as the company attempted to work with the Opera Ghost’s newest “members” of the dance corps.

  While at first the new mechanical marvels mingling amongst his very human dance corps excited M. Munier, the reality of dealing with mindless automated actors began to wear upon the dance master. He had taken an immediate shine to the mechanized mam’selles. Their precision was a dream come true, they weren’t prone to fits of hysteria and gossip, and were (almost) always ready to rehearse. However, M. Munier was a man used to being obeyed, and the first time one of the clockwork corps was found out of place nearly threw the man into a fit.

  A missing ballerina one could bark at and bring running. A missing machine, one that required thre
e stage hands to move if not wound properly, was a touch more difficult to call into line.

  It was odd, really, how these mindless machines managed to wander off—but then again, nobody, save the Phantom, really knew how they worked. And these random occurrences would have likely inspired more suspicion than exasperation had the roving set pieces been found in more compromising circumstances. Instead, such eccentricities as finding a clockwork ballerina pacing the dim corner of a room, the fire from its electrical circuits glowing out of the dark, were simply marked off as glitches.

  Unfortunately, with the added efforts required to keep the clockwork coryphée in line, Dance Master Munier could not rehearse certain scenes to his heart’s content. The entire performance had to be run from start to finish. Curtains had to be incorporated into rehearsals, and the entire company was made to schedule more dress rehearsals than normal.

  One benefit of this: they were becoming an extremely polished and cohesive company. The only problem: a complete halt on the electrical retrofit.

  But for the most part, everyone was too busy to notice, most especially Meg, who now pulled triple duty as senior dancer, opera ghost intermediary and, perhaps most importantly, nurse to her increasingly ailing mother.

  The aged concierge, always mobile but never sprightly, had now taken to resting whenever and wherever possible, limiting trips from the front of house to back. Obstinate as always, she refused to relinquish her position, and neither M. Monchamin nor M. Richard asked that she do. After all, her work was not physically demanding. Most of it was deskwork, and they didn’t dare risk the Opera Ghost’s wrath with such a dramatic personnel change.

  It was a shame, though, that someone so headstrong and vocal be robbed of her vitality through lungs that simply no longer worked the way they ought. Unnamed and unexplored, Mme. Giry’s ailment progressed so that she could no longer be without her little brown bottle of elixir, a steady supply of which was now being delivered to Box Five alongside the Ghost’s communications.