Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  In the tunnel, I ran, not caring in what direction. Voices followed us, screams and maniacal laughter. Before us was nothing but darkness, for I had left our lantern behind.

  “Wait,” Alice said, tugging at my arm. I stopped and heard her rummaging in her leather bag. A second later I heard the strike of a match and the tunnel filled with light from a device in her hand, a sort of miniature lantern, made of brass and blazing with a bright white flame. “Did you see my father?”

  I shook my head and raised my hood, reasoning that the gas had not followed us. “We’ll have to go back!”

  Laughter echoed in the tunnel to our left, and I once again reached into my pocket, finding a few of the percussion caps I had placed there, and fitted them in place at the back of my revolver’s cylinder. Pulling my hood down, I retraced my steps, pistol at the ready, until we came to the passage that led to the Confederate lair.

  “Edward!” I shouted as loud as I could. The flimsy door stood open, and Alice thrust her little light inside, the beam illuminating the remnants of yellow gas. Not a soul was in sight. The room was empty.

  I dashed for the door on the other side of the room and tried to open it. It swung inward. I had expected to see stairs, perhaps leading to the lower floor of a house, but instead I found another chamber, another cellar, outfitted with rough tables and a few dirty cots. In the far wall was the entrance to still another arched tunnel.

  “Through here,” I said to Alice.

  She held her lantern aloft and we went ahead slowly, carefully. Laughter and shouting still echoed around us, but I could not pinpoint the direction from which it was coming. My hand on the grip of my pistol was becoming slick with sweat, and I could barely see through the lenses of my hood. My heart was racing. I had lost Edward and I had lost Dorian, and the best thing to do, the only sensible thing, was to get Alice to safety, but I also wanted to find Butler, find him and take him into custody. That is, if he had survived the gas.

  A scream close by sent a shock through my spine, and a figure rushed toward me from out of the darkness. I recognized the handsome young sentry, his face twisted and his skin a horrible yellow. I raised my pistol and fired. The poor fellow dropped at my feet and lay still.

  I pulled off my hood and bade Alice do the same.

  “There’s no gas here,” I said. “Do you know these tunnels? How do we get back to the surface?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t recognize where we are, but they all lead to houses and public buildings.”

  “I don’t fancy popping up in some chap’s parlour,” I said, “though I suppose it can’t be helped.”

  We carried on, past the body of the dead lad, and after a few yards came to a flight of steps, unfortunately leading down. Laughter sounded from just ahead, and I saw a glimmer of light, so we carried on, emerging into the largest underground chamber I had yet seen, too large to be an ordinary cellar, and illuminated by a lantern resting on the floor. Racks of muskets, old 1842 smoothbores and rifles of the Brunswick pattern, lined the lower walls, and crates and boxes were stacked in the corners, while a wooden platform or gallery ran along the upper level.

  Edward and Butler were on the gallery, locked in a fierce struggle. It was Edward who was laughing as he attempted to throttle his opponent.

  Alice and I rushed forward, and I nearly tripped on a dark shape on the floor. Looking down, I saw Dorian lying with his back to a stack of barrels.

  “Mister Dorian!” Alice cried, kneeling at his side. Dorian was not wearing his gas hood and was clutching his arm. There were two pistols in the dirt next to him.

  “Miss Alice,” he grunted, and I was pleased to see that the gas had not harmed him. “I have a bullet in my arm, but I’m alright. You have to help your father.”

  As he spoke, there was a shriek from above, and Edward came tumbling back, down the flight of steps that led to the gallery.

  “Butler!” I shouted, aiming my pistol and thumbing back the hammer.

  Butler saw me and reached into an inner pocket of his coat. Reflexively, I squeezed my revolver’s trigger, but the percussion cap misfired. Cursing, I dashed for the staircase, stepping over Edward’s sprawled and sputtering form, and gained the gallery in three bounds.

  Butler had produced a large knife, which he held in front of him like a sword.

  “You tried to poison me,” he said. “Now I’ll finish you, sir!”

  I did not bother to reply to this threat, but made my attack, quickly getting inside his guard, grasping his arm and twisting it around while propelling him toward the gallery railing. The old wood split, and with a cry, Butler plunged to the floor below, where he landed with a crash on top of one of the crates.

  Edward, apparently uninjured from his fall, leapt upon Butler and encircled his neck with his hands.

  “Edward, stop!” I shouted. I ran back down the stairs.

  He turned to face me, but I saw at once that he was no longer my old friend. His face was a ghastly yellow, his eyes those of a lunatic. He had been unable to don his gas hood in time. Letting go of Butler, he began walking toward me with shuffling steps, all the while laughing.

  A shot rang out, thunderous in the enclosed space of the underground store room. Edward pitched backwards to fall across Butler’s prone form. I turned to see Alice, a pistol in her hand and powder smoke wreathing her head.

  “There’s no antidote,” she wailed. “No cure for the poison flower! I had to save him from a terrible death!”

  I knelt at Edward’s side, but he was already gone from this world. So was Butler, killed, I believe, by the fall. I let out a deep sigh. In the war in the Crimea and in India, I had developed the ability to detach myself from moments of sudden tragedy. I had retained that ability, and so remained calm in the face of what had just happened to my friend. However, I knew that I would feel the full force of it later.

  “He paid the price,” Alice continued, choking out the words, not suppressing her horror and sorrow. “My father paid the price for his terrible weapon.”

  “They are all terrible,” I said, going to her and gently taking the pistol from her fingers. “Every one of them.”

  * * *

  Having stopped the flow of blood from his wound with a strip of cloth torn from his fine silk shirt, Dorian was able to lead us out of the tunnels. We emerged into the coolness of the evening, finding ourselves on a cobble beach. The harbour lay before us. A large steamer with a full ship rig, sails furled, was chugging its way past, perhaps a Royal Navy frigate or the U.S.S. Castine. It was difficult to say in the twilight.

  LET SLIP THE SLUICEGATES OF WAR, HYDRO-GIRL

  TERRI FAVRO

  Audience with Lady Laura Filomena De Marco, Patroness of the Royal Niagara Hydraulic Fusiliers and Defendress of the Realm, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Victory Day. At the personal request of H.R.H. Edward VIII, Lady Laura graciously agreed to provide her first-hand account of the deciding battle to restore the United States of America to the Crown, with a transcription of her words to be entered into the royal archives.

  In attendance was His Excellency the Right Honourable Bruce Duncan Campbell, Governor General of the Kingdom of the United States, accompanied by Vice-Regal Transcriptionist James Hansom.

  All statements attributable to Governor General Campbell have been redacted at his request, in compliance with the Privacy of Dignitaries Statute 45X224(a).

  Lady Laura waived all rights and requirements under the Statute and is quoted here in full and without prejudice.

  * * *

  I heard you coming up the stairs. Tramp tramp tramp, like you was dragging a goddamn hydraulic cannon. Hope you never need to sneak up on an enemy, Excellency. I’m an old woman and even I could do a better job in the stealth department.

  You armed? No? You’re a fool then. I never go out no more without a sizzler in my apron pocket. See here? I call this little beauty Lola.

  Hands up!

  Just joking, Excellency. I can’t h
it the side of a turbine barn no more ’cause of the glaucoma. Price you pay for overstaying your welcome on earth. Let me plug Lola back in her charge-stand. Named her after a lady friend I met in the Diggings. Got to flush the valves and give her a rubdown, or she seizes up in the cold. Kinda like me. ( Laughter.)

  Yes, I know why you and your scribe are here, Excellency. Same reason as every so-called dignitary who pays their respects on Vic-Day. To swarm me with quizzicals about how the revolutionaries was punished for their insolence to the Crown. They call me the Ultimate Heroine of that battle, the Defendress of the Royal Hydroelectric Commission. The one brung a conclusion to a war that started in 1812 and seemed set to carry on long after Father Time had turned his wheel from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Thank the Lord, we adapted the Alternating Current instead of the inferior Direct Current the Staters preferred. Not to mention, we had the bigger Falls, the great Horseshoe.

  Still, it took more’n eight decades of skirmishes and bombardments to capture the peace. Poor Isaac never lived to see the treaty signed with those filthy buggers in Buffalo, excuse my French.

  I’m going to do something I never done before in one of these bullshit Vic-Day audiences. Since the King compels me to tell the unvarnished truth, I’ll compel you to hear it, Excellency, and your scribe Mr. Hansom to write down every word just as I say it.

  One thing though. His Majesty might not like what I got to say. You, neither, Excellency.

  * * *

  I met Isaac a few months after Destiny Day, May 24th, 1899. The day we girls officially turned sixteen and learned our futures. Boys, too, maybe; I don’t know much about the rites and passages for Her Majesty’s Loyal Sons. (We worshipped a Queen then, you’ll recall.) I had a brother, but he took off for the canal boats before they could press-gang him to the municipal turbine station crew. You can’t blame him for wanting something better than digging and drilling and pumping ’til his heart burst and his arms give out. Most of those boys didn’t live past thirty, thirty-five at the outside. Old men in young bodies. All of them deaf as posts from the din of the turbines. Smart ones learned to fingerspell, so’s they could talk to one another, trimming sentences to a letter or two – W for What the hell? and the like. I’m glad I never had to comfort a pumper. It would have felt like screwing a dead man, pardon my French.

  Where was I now? Oh yes: Destiny Day.

  I was marshalled with the rest of Her Majesty’s Sweet Sixteens in an abandoned tunnel behind the Falls. When the examiner barked out your name, you went through the white curtains, lay on the slab, put your feet up, spread your legs and tried to breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. That way you hardly felt nothing.

  The examiner said, That’s a good girl, as if I didn’t know already.

  While he did his job, I listened to the pumps inside the walls, whoosh, crunk, whoosh, crunk, to keep the lamps going. Sometimes you’d hear a voice yelling for more light, then the thunder of sluices opening in the turbine room. It were the brightest, loudest room I ever been in.

  I heard the examiner make a clicking noise with his tongue – chuk, chuk, chuk – like he didn’t like what he seen. Tipped womb, he said. You’re only good for one thing, sweetheart.

  He handed me a card with CF on it, for Camp Follower. I expected. Momma was one, though she started off a Respectable Wife And Mother. ’Course by 1899 there warn’t no camps left to follow. The troops was put up at Fort George but most of us younger CFs comforted the workers digging the longest tunnel in history, the one that would amp up the voltage of hydroelectric weaponry high enough to fry those miserable bastards on the other side of the gorge, no offence.

  When the exam was done, I met up with the other girls, weeping in the mist. Turned out all of them had CF cards, too. Boo hoo hoo.

  Over the river, all we could see was the great big black hot air balloons, bumping against one another to block our view of the enemy. The sniper posts near the rapids on Goat Island were probably manned that day but they got no aim at that distance.

  On our side, a few troops in their red serge uniforms were lined up at the Table Rock canteen for coffee and doughnuts. They sniggered and stared at us, knowing full well what the cards in our hands meant.

  SMOS, one of them fingerspelled, meaning: Suck me off, sluts.

  YSYS, I fingerspelled back. Short for: You shame yourself, sir.

  * * *

  I got to admit, it was strange that all us girls who got CF cards that day come from Voltagetown, home to Wops, Frogs, Wogs, Chinks, Polacks, Bohunks, Darks and other outsiders who clung to the edge of the British Empire by their dirty fingernails. We didn’t count for much, so the Hydro Commission made us the first to suck surplus power from the Falls’ mighty teat. After they wired up our shacks, some of us just got shocks or burns; others were flat-out electrocuted. The electricians said the Voltagetown deaths warn’t in vain, ’cause they helped them understand the dangers of over-amping and made things safe for the better sorts of folks.

  * * *

  When I got home, the place were quiet except for creaky bedspring sounds from Momma’s room. By then, she warn’t working much. She was old, thirty-five or so, and losing her looks. She only had one regular client left, an old vet of the Battle of Peachtree Lane, who’d come by with a bottle of sparkly wine. He got his bits blasted off, so the infantry medics give him a prosthetic cock. Momma was the only CF who’d put up with him. Because of the wine, I guess.

  I lay down on the daybed and turned on the Marconi wireless. It could take twenty minutes or better to bring in the scratchy voices of someone singing an aria or reciting a poem. Though Disloyal, I liked Stater stations best. You could get a notion of what their heathen rebel cities were like, the houses always burning to the ground at night, Buffalo especially.

  While I waited for the Marconi to warm up, the door of Momma’s room opened and her old soldier boy, Guy, shuffled out with his pants off, one hand cupped over the hole in his groin, the other holding his prosthesis. He went to the sink and stuck it under the pump. A little door at the tip flipped open so he could fill it.

  Water’s tainted, less you boil it, I told him. You don’t want to be dribbling dirty water into Momma.

  He smiled at me all toothless and said, It’s okay, it’s a closed system, turns into cool steam when I ’jaculate.

  Guy sat down on the couch next to me. The wireless had gone to static. Off in the distance we could hear the zinging of the cannons sending electric charges over the gorge. Guy put his hand on my knee.

  If my father was alive he’d slit your throat, I warned, and Guy took his hand away.

  Vince should have stayed safe in Dago Land ’stead of joining a fight that warn’t his own, observed Guy.

  He didn’t mean to join no fight. He was a chef, I said, which Guy already knew full well. My father, Vincenzo De Marco, came to the colonies on a cook’s contract but got pressed into battle when the troops was shorthanded. He got shot off the side of the gorge in the Third Battle of Lundy’s Lane. They never found his body. Not that they looked so hard. After a few months, soldiers started turning up at our door with food and condolences. Pretty clear what they expected. Momma become a Camp Follower before she were a widow for one year.

  * * *

  My marching orders come by post. Report to the Diggings of the new tunnel, they said. A red and purple dress come too, marking me as belonging to the Tesla Brigade, Digger Division. I shed a few tears over that! Not a few Camp Followers at the new tunnel didn’t live much longer than the Diggers themselves. I’d even heard stories of girls who threw themselves over the Falls in despair ’cause they’d fallen in love with some dirt-faced boy who’d died in a rock fall.

  On my first shift I had to see Sir Manager for jus primae noctis. His private secretary, Miss Lola, showed me into his office, her sad eyes looking me up and down. I got scared by the ragged scar running down one check. Like someone had taken a fish knife to her. Soon as I went through the door, Mi
ss Lola closed it behind me, fast.

  Inside, I saw Sir Manager waiting for me in a big leather desk chair: a fat, old man with his pants off, legs spread wide to expose his bits. Right off, he says, Remove your frock and underthings. After I done that, he pats his lap and says, Sit here, Laura. I had to straddle his puddingy thighs ’til he was stiff as a post, then he hoisted me up by the hips and pulled me down, hard, ’til I wailed with pain.

  ( Pause.)

  Pardon me, but that’s what jus primae noctis means in English, Excellency – a man’s right to have a girl on her first shift. Wouldn’t want to cheat the King by leaving anything out that were done to me in the name of the Crown.

  Satisfied by the sight of blood on my thighs, he ordered me to clean myself up in his washbasin. Then he showed me what the boys would expect me to do for them in the Diggings, none of it pleasant.

  He said he made it a rule never to be gentle with girls on jus primae noctis, as it only raised false hopes. Best to break us in rough, he said, as we would continue to be handled in that vein. He said the Diggers were not gentlemen and I would get no caresses or loving kindness from them, nor would their deaf ears hear my cries for mercy. When I said I could fingerspell at them, he laughed. Just try to make yourself understood when you got two boys holding you down while another stuffs his filthy bits in your mouth. Sir Manager smiled as he said this. He enjoyed filling my brain with such nightmares. Yet, he never sent me down to the Diggings. He said I was something special and kept me to himself.

  Truth be told, I was a pretty thing in those days – what they called fetching: long black hair, full mouth, slim, but full in the bosoms. In the Camp Followers’ tight-bodice dress, I’d catch anyone’s eye, so no wonder the boss took me as his pet, though it was clear enough that he liked to cause me pain, pummelling and penetrating me every which way he could think of. The only mercy was that he let me go back home to Momma twice a week to have my bruises soothed and wounds staunched. Wouldn’t want you to die too fast, girl, he liked to joke.