As the mule presses his flank into her, she will rub him between the ears and will say: “You can remember it too, can’t you?”
The mule will follow them up to the tree.
“It’s too dark to be up here,” her husband will say.
“Just a bit longer,” she will say.
“Lightning’s a logger’s worst enemy,” he will say.
“Just a bit longer,” she will say. She will not release his hand.
When they come to the massive stump, she will turn to him and take the cone from his pocket.
“What in God’s name?” he will say as the cone glows with faint blue light.
“We have to plant it,” she will say. “So that the tree can grow again. I can’t do it alone.”
This is when Marty will rush out of the forest with his axe. He will run straight at her husband.
“Marty, what’re you doing?” her husband will say.
Marty will only snarl as he charges and raises the axe. Her husband will reach for the knife at his belt as he steps between her and the foreman, and that is when Boris the mule will lash out with his two hind legs. The animal will cave in Marty’s chest. The axe will tumble to the ground beside the foreman’s limp body.
Fanny will exhale a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She will place a hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“We need to get him help,” he will say.
“He’s dead,” she will say. She will pat the mule on the head and say, “Good boy.”
Lightning will flash and thunder will roll and Fanny will know the time is near.
“Come on,” she will say. She will take her husband’s hand and she will climb up the planks driven into the stump.
“Fanny, this is madness,” her husband will say.
“We won’t have another chance,” she will say. “He’ll come back.”
He will follow her.
She will guide him to the centre of the stump. She will place the glowing cone in the hole and she will ask him to kneel beside her. Together, they will hold it in place.
“Now what?” her husband will say.
“Just hold on,” she will say.
The lightning that starts it all again will arrive. Light will leap up from the cone to meet the electricity arcing down. Energy will course through her, she will see it run through her husband. She will see his hand loosen on the glowing cone.
“Hold on,” she will scream. The lightning will last longer than any lightning can last. It will last as long as the universe exists.
And it will end. They will both fall aside, breathing, stunned. The heart of the stump will be blackened and burnt and so will their clothing.
The Japanese Chinamen will find them when they hear Boris the mule braying into the night. They will take Fanny down in a stretcher they make out of cedar-smelling bedsheets and will take her husband down on the mule’s back.
In the morning, they will wake in their small bed in their little cabin beside the roaring flume. Their clothes will be ashes, but their skin will be untouched. Her husband will be in the bed beside her. He will be warm. They will wake up together.
“We need to talk,” she will say.
They will talk as they walk up the mountain. The trees will drip from the previous night’s rain. The ravens will complain. Boris will meet them halfway and Fanny will remember to bring him an apple. They will climb the stump of the massive tree.
A green shoot will grow up from the blackened cone and will reach a pair of tiny green leaves toward the sky.
All this will happen tomorrow. Today, Fanny rinses her husband’s shirts in the flume. One of the shirts gets away from her.
She doesn’t think he will miss it.
obscured
RHONDA PARRISH
Ghosts of the city
peer out of the gloom
around him
As a child he’d loved it
when the “clouds fell down”
and cloaked his world
in mysteries
Now, though,
it was just one more thing
to hide the shamblers.
One more obstacle to
his survival.
One more enemy.
hawkwood’s folly
TIMOTHY REYNOLDS
le 17e septembre, 1889.
I write this down and lock it away. Let the world know the truth—la vérité—after I am gone.
There was a time, not so long ago, before they erected that iron monstrosity, the Eiffel Tower—before I lost my family’s entire fortune at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean—when I would have awakened to the rapturous perfume of warm crêpes, fresh strawberries and rich cream commingled with dark, African roast coffee and a petite portion of potatoes and scallions pan-fried in garlic butter and dill. In through the double doors out over the Champs Élysées I would have been serenaded by the pleasant jingle of harness, clop of hoof and clatter of carriage as all of Paris seemed to pass beneath my balcony. Not very exciting, I agree, but certainly a more delicious start to the day than a trio of pistol shots, a garbled shout in Russian, heavy metal clanging rhythmically on the cobbles beneath my window, and frantic, clumsy, human footsteps racing up two flights of stairs, ending in a life-or-death iron pounding on the cheap fabricated door of my rented room.
With this rude awakening, gone were the crêpes, the dark roast, the dill, and the balcony overlooking the Champs Élysées. I stumbled from the lopsided cot, lit the lamp and tore open the door, fully prepared to give a sound beating to the offender, only to be met by Grigori. A tall, lanky, boy of twenty, he was soaking wet in a torn waistcoat and stinking foully of la rivière Seine. He sported a bleeding wound to his left temple and was holding a smoking pistol up to pound its butt on my portal once again.
Gone, too, was Grigori, meek bo’s’n’s mate who never looked comfortable amongst his social betters, a group I once proudly counted myself a member of. Scruffy and bearded, he tripped past me and into my squalid room. His wide-eyed, terrified gaze searched the nine-yard-square space for any threat greater than the empty bottle of cheap Bordeaux and the chamber pot much in need of emptying. There was no threat here. I, Georges DeBlois, surgeon, entrepreneur and multiple patent-holder, was not at my best.
“Bolt the door! Quick! Do you have a pistol, docteur?!” Grigori had been a rough-edged Russian peasant at the best of times so I was only slightly put off by his brusque entrance and complete lack of civil greeting. “A pistol? Do you have one? I have only one bullet remaining!”
“A pistol?” The loud crash of the destruction of the front door of the building froze us both where we stood, but Grigori recovered soonest.
“Too late!” He shoved a small, surprisingly heavy, burlap sac into my hands and grabbed my old walking stick leaning against the bed. With the pistol in one hand and the stick in the other, he backed toward the open window. “Flee with me or die my brother mariner! We are betrayed!”
“But I cannot simply—” A high-pitched hiss of steam whistled from the stairwell followed by the grinding of small mechanical gears and pistons, whining and struggling. I knew those sounds only too well. “An automaton, boy? You flee an automaton?! Impossible!” I knew only too well that this was not just any man-mocking, mechanical, sideshow puppet, but one of Lord Mordecai Hawkwood’s custom designed, steam-driven men of metal. Terror twisted my intestines and inspiration struck—I glanced in the sac. I wanted so badly to be wrong but fear I was not. The sac contained the head of another such mechanical man. “Mon dieu! You stupid boy!! What have you done?!”
Slower on foot than a man of flesh and bone, the contraption ascending toward us possessed the strength of five men and through wireless signals could communicate with others of its ilk. If a living, breathing man were at the other end of the transmission doing the thinking and decision-making then it would be an unstoppable force.
I clutched the burlapped mechanical skull and followed the terrified Grigori over the sill an
d onto the fire escape. Having fallen so far from grace I no longer had a carriage at my disposal nor the funds with which to hire one so this would be a footrace. As I backed myself out into the cool, damp air, the papier-thin barricade masquerading as a door erupted inward. Shards of cheap board and veneer flew every which way as one of Hawkwood’s humanistic contraptions crashed through. I saw my money belt on the night stand at the same moment the metal menace sighted me. That belt contained all I had left in the world and so I hesitated. That moment of indecision was all that the automaton needed. Despite the poor light I saw the dart leave the end of the index finger of its right hand a moment before I felt its sting. I slumped forward over the sill, wondering with my last conscious thought how it had come to pass that the dart was used against myself rather than a denizen of the deep.
When consciousness tracked me down I was back in my own bed, which is to say that I lay between fine Egyptian cotton sheets under a goose-down duvet a hundred yards beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. I was once again in Hawkwood’s Haven, which meant that I was dreaming with great lucidity or that the explosion of the volcanic hydrothermal vent and the resultant collapse of the supporting rock face didn’t do nearly the degrees of damage to the Haven as I had assumed when I was retreating back to the surface in the self-contained escape pod six months before.
As curiously divine as the flea-free bedding was, it was the scent of strawberries, cream and dark roast which brought me to full, though confused, wakefulness. I sat bolt upright and paid the price with a rush of nausea my own patients regularly complained of on the other side of a heavy dose of sodium bromide. I leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited what little my stomach contained. It was only then, in that less-than-flattering position, that I took notice of the lack of a rug of any sort and, despite the domed ceiling and rounded walls, was now quite certain that I was not in my former suite at all but a former storage closet.
With my stomach emptied of its pitiful contents I laid my throbbing head back on the stately pillow and immediately succumbed to sleep, the breakfast forgotten.
When at last I awoke with a steady head, the food, the vomi and the throbbing were gone. In their places were a jug of water, a crystal water goblet, a clear head, and a handwritten note in a choppy, unsure version of Hawkwood’s own hand. My own hand was now much steadier as I retrieved the note and read it aloud, to no one in particular.
“Georges—my friend—please excuse the rough handling which brought you back here to the Haven. I have answers to all of your questions but one I will answer here and now. You are here because I am alive. Please come to the infirmary as soon as you are able. Your fellow submariner and friend, Hawkwood.” And so I drank a goodly amount of water, splashed a dab more on my face to bring a bit of wakefulness and left the closet behind. Once in the corridor I was met by one of the cursed automatons. Yes, cursed. Though I once believed them mechanical marvels, since being darted, drugged and abducted, I was less enthused of Hawkwood’s brilliance.
But I had returned to the Haven and there were questions I needed answered so I set forth for the infirmary as requested, with the metal menace two steps behind me. There was no sign of Grigori about so I suspect that his boyish reflexes had aided his escape where mine had failed.
It took a moment to get myself reoriented, especially since the floor canted somewhat to the left. An arrow accompanied by a red cross painted on the wall told me exactly where I was in the complex and with one hand on the downhill wall for support I stumbled on. I may have soured on the presence of the automatons, but as I made my way through the complex I was still quite proud of our little project. Between Hawkwood’s structural engineering genius and my respirator design modified to scrub and revitalize our air, we had done the impossible and established a ten-edifice complex on the ocean floor! We had powered it off the hydrothermal vents and, judging by the flickering electric light illuminating our way and the clean crispness of the cool air, the generators worked still. More and more I marvelled at how much had survived the sub-marine landslide.
We came to a junction and I turned left, following the arrow and the red cross, but the way was blocked by a wall of collapsed rock. Closer inspection showed fresh repairs and a petite puddle of seawater at the base of the rubble-cum-wall so I turned and followed the corridor the long way around. My silent companion—Delta by the insignia on his scratched and dented chest plate—clanked and whirred along behind me.
Two turns later I was reminded why I fell in love with Hawkwood’s proposal in that salon in Marseille three years before. The corridor lighting was greatly reduced, but that was by design, so that the view through the massive bubbled window was as clear as could be. I stopped, as I had every other time I passed this look-out, this sub-oceanic observatory.
The hydrothermic vents powering our little habitat provided heat and chemistry unavailable elsewhere and despite the rift in the vent which had caused the structural collapse behind us, life continued in abundance there, on the other side of the glass. A lethargic, white zoarcid fish snapped at an orange tube worm but missed, and the yard-long worm retracted at lightning speed back into its hard, protective chitin tube. I saw a modest tentacle reach out from behind a mass of tubes and our petite, resident octopus plucked a white Galatheid crab from his own meal on the mussel bed. Life went on here and not one of them cared that I watched in wonder.
Delta waited patiently whilst I let myself be lulled by the gentle waving to-and-fro of the two-foot-long sea worms in the current. I regarded my escort, wondering.
“Do you see what I see, metal man?” I placed my palm affectionately on the glass, still surprised at the warmth this far below the surface. “Do you understand the marvel that we created here or do you simply follow your wireless commands and complete your tasks? Does the tableau magnifique before us stir you in any way? Does it make your clockworks speed up at all, or even slow, as it matches the marine rhythm?” It turned its head toward me but remained silent.
“You and your three fellows were the brawn to our brain and did the heavy, tedious work we were incapable of at this depth, but did you understand then or even now what was being constructed? What a marvel this was—is?” It blinked twice at me, but whether it was programming or a sign of understanding I know not. I returned to watching our maritime neighbours, observing features and behaviours no man had seen before, certainly no man of science.
After a moment Delta did acknowledge my presence by gently taking my elbow in its steel grip and turning me firmly back on track. We were expected in the Infirmary and I suspect he just received a command to see that we arrived post haste. With a last look out at the magnificent sea bed within arm’s reach, I shook free of the hand and marched on.
Three more piles of rubble in collapsed and blocked passages told me that the sea cliff’s collapse had indeed destroyed much of our mariners’ residence, including the dormitories carved out of the cliff itself. We continued on, once or twice taking a longer route to avoid what I guessed were impassable areas. I could see that Hawkwood’s three remaining automatons had been busy, with pathways cleared through rubble and in some cases the rubble cleaned up entirely and probably taken elsewhere to shore up a failing dam to the sea water yearning to burst through.
A quiescent bilge pump sat next to one such dam and I realized then how truly precarious the situation was. When the domed buildings were intact and firmly seated on the sea floor, the habitat was safe and secure, but now, with the breaches so evident and the automatons struggling to keep the sea at bay, we were in danger and the novelty of it all left me cold and un peu claustrophobic. Even the biologist in me wanted no more of it. Exploration by bathysphere would be more than sufficient.
I hurried my step and with little further guidance from Delta, soon found myself sitting at the bedside of the man I had, until recently, presumed dead.
“Do I terrify you, Georges?”
“I am a man of medicine—there is
nothing of the human condition which terrifies me.” I had seen leprosy, pox, syphilis, but nothing like this. Rien. Nothing.
“Yes, you’ve seen much, ol’ chap, but I would wager that this is new.”
I looked at a mechanical eye, a skull more metal plate and bolt than bone. The left arm above the sheet was mechanical contrivance from the elbow down to a steel-cable and lubricated-piston hand whilst beneath the sheet the right was machine from the shoulder down. The angry violet redness of an infection radiated from the shoulder socket across his once strong pectoral toward his heart. I suspected he had little time remaining.
“Nouveau? Bien sûr. Certainly.”
“Also both inner ears, one lung and both legs below the knee.”
“How . . . ?”
“They found me after the cave-in, trapped in an air pocket inside the Refectory.” He took a long, rasping breath and coughed sputum into that mechanized hand. Very human bloody spittle flecked his full Victorian whiskers and I saw sadness in his still human eye.
“The Refectory. We were three men and four automatons—what did we need with a full-sized refectory. A simple dining room would have sufficed.”
“Maybe in the beginning, but our plans were to expand.” I reassured him. “To bring selected men and women here to live and work. Your mining operation and my marine-farm.”
“Were we out of our minds? Did we throw good money after bad and dream beyond reality?”
I rested my hand on his good shoulder and squeezed gently. “Greatness is only achieved when honest men take risks, mon ami.” But silently, to myself, I now agree that we had over-reached here.
“Were we honest, Georges? To ourselves? To each other?” He coughed and I went to a small cabinet behind what had once been my desk. There I found a small satchel of personal “elixirs of medicinal nature,” as my grandmama was wont to call such things.
“Honest? I would suppose that we were as honest as business partners can be, although our motives may have differed somewhat when we built our misguided sub-maritime paradise.” I administered to him a good-sized dose of my narcotic blend and Mordecai, Lord Hawkwood, smiled lopsidedly.
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