Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  And the others.

  For I had been unfortunate enough to see them.

  BUŞTENI—

  A letter had arrived for me in the morning. A dark baruch-landau had stopped outside the inn, a great hulking machine, steam-driven, the stoker standing behind while the driver sat in front, in between their respective positions a wide carriage for the transport of passengers or cargo.

  The driver had disembarked—I watched him from my window—and what a curious being he was!

  I had seen his like before, though seldom enough. Like the vehicle he was driving, he was huge, a mountain of a man, and a shiver of apprehension ran down my spine.

  He would have been human, once upon a time.

  “What are they?” I had asked Karl May. The play was going on above our heads, but I could not concentrate, I was filled with a terrible tension as we prepared for the summit—as May called it—down below, in the bowels of the theatre. The they I was referring to were beings of a similar size and disposition to the driver now sitting in the inn’s dining room, awaiting my pleasure.

  “Soldiers,” Karl May told me. “Of the future.”

  “What had been done to them?”

  “Have you heard of the Jekyll-Frankenstein serum?”

  I confessed I had not.

  “It is the culmination of many years of research,” he told me, with a smirk. “We had stolen the formula from the French some time back. They have Viktor von Frankenstein working for them and he, in his turn, improved upon the work done by your Englishman, Dr. Jekyll. This—” and here his hand swept theatrically, enfolding the huge hulking beings that were guarding, like mountain trolls, the dark corridors—“is the result.”

  “Can they ever…go back?” I said, whispering. May shook his head. “And their lifespan is short,” he said. “But they do make such excellent soldiers…”

  It was then that Herr Krupp appeared, an old, fragile-looking man, yet with a steely determination in his eyes that I found frightening. “You did well,” he said, curtly, and I was not sure if he was speaking to May or myself. He disappeared behind his monsters, and into the crypt.

  “Who else are we expecting?” I said.

  When, at that moment, the sound of motors sounded and a small, hunched figure came towards us in the darkness, half-human, half-machine…

  BUŞTENI—

  My landlady has been fussing over me ever since seeing the arrival of the carriage. “You must not go!” she whispered to me, fiercely, finding reason to come up to my room. “He is a devil, a monster!”

  “You know of him?” I said.

  “Who does not? They had closed the valley, Braşov had been emptied, they are doing unspeakable things there, in the shadow of the mountains.” She shivered. “But he does not reside in Braşov.”

  “Where does he reside?” I said, infected by her fear.

  “Bran Castle,” she said, whispering. “Where once Vlad Tepes made his home…”

  “Vlad Tepes?” I said. I was not familiar with the local history and the name was unfamiliar to me.

  “Vlad the Third, prince of Wallachia,” she said, impatiently. “Vlad Tepes— how you say Tepes in your English?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, quite bewildered.

  “Impaler,” she said. “Prince Vlad of the order of the Dragon, whom they called Impaler.”

  I shook my head impatiently. Local history sounded colourful indeed, but irrelevant to my journey. “The man I am going to see is an Englishman,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Englishmen do not impale.”

  “He is no man!” she said, and made a curious gesture with her fingers, which I took to be some Romanian superstition for the warding of evil. “He had ceased being human long ago.”

  At last I got rid of her, so I could return to my journal. Time is running out, and soon I shall be inside that baruch-landau, travelling towards my final destination.

  Have mercy on my soul, Mycroft!

  For I saw him, too, you see. I saw him come towards us, Karl May and me, in the subterranean depths of the Lyceum, that fateful night.

  An old, old man, in a motorised chair on wheels, a steam engine at his back, and withered hands lying on the supports, controlling brass keys. His face was a ruined shell, his body that of a corpse, yet his eyes were bright, like moons, and they looked at me, and his mouth moved and he said, “Today, Mr. Stoker, we are making history. Your part in it will not be quickly forgotten.”

  I may have stumbled upon my words. He had not been seen in public for five years. His very presence at my theatre was an honour, and yet I was terrified. When the small get entangled in the games of the great, they may easily suffer.

  “My Lord,” I said. “It is an honour.”

  He nodded that withered head, just once, acknowledging this. Then he, too, disappeared towards the crypt.

  Yes, you suspected, did you not, Mycroft? You suspected this summit, your people were there that night, in the audience, trying to sniff scent of what was happening. Yet you never did.

  For they did not meet, just the two of them, My Herr Krupp and he, my summoner, the lord of the automatons.

  Another was there.

  A monster…

  For I had gone down into the dark passages, I had gone to check all was secure, and I saw it. I saw the ancient sewer open up and something come crawling out of it, a monstrous being like a giant invertebrate, with feelers as long as a human arm, slithering towards that secret meeting…a vile, alien thing.

  Which, three months ago, when we first met, you finally gave a name to.

  The Bookman, you told me.

  So that was that shadowy assassin.

  A thing made by the lizardine race, long ago.

  Those lizardine beings which came to us from Caliban’s Island, in the Carib Sea, and yet were not of a terrestrial origin at all.

  An ancient race, of scientifically advanced beings…crash-landed with their ship of space, thousands of years ago, millions perhaps, on that island.

  And awakened by Vespucci, on his ill-fated journey of exploration…

  And the Bookman, that shadowy assassin, one of their machines?I do not know, Mycroft, but I remember the fear I felt when I saw that… that thing, slither towards the crypt.

  A summit indeed.

  And now, I must leave.

  THE BORGO PASS—

  The driver says we are going through something called the Borgo Pass, though it appears on no map of the area. I am the sole passenger of this baruch-landau, the driver ahead, the stoker behind, and I in the middle, staring out over a rugged terrain.

  This is the letter I had received at the inn:

  My friend—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. I trust that you slept well. My driver has instructions to carry you in safety to my quarters and bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay. I look forward to seeing you.

  Yours—Charles Babbage.

  What awaits me beyond these mountains, is it to glory, or to death, that I ride?

  CASTLE BRAN—

  The baruch-landau, gathering speed, shot along the lone mountain road, and in the distance a great valley opened up, and within…

  But no, for we did not head directly there, to that strange shimmering city in the distance, but elsewhere, down a slope that led into a beautiful valley, and beyond it, growing gradually in my field of vision as we drew nearer—

  On top of a cliff, overlooking this pleasant place—

  A castle.

  It loomed out of the peaceful surrounding, a stout old building, painted white, so unlike our own castles. It had that Eastern influence, as though one could sense Asia and the lands of the Turks being just around the corner, as it were. Here Vlad Dracul had lived, that minor Wallachian prince the landlady at the inn had told me about, who had fought the Turks—

  He appears to have had a rather understated taste in architecture.

  As we appr
oached the castle I noticed things that had certainly not been there during those long gone days of Vlad the Impaler. Such as the armoured, steam-powered trucks moving along newly paved roads, or the two black airships rising like storm clouds over the castle, tethered to a nearby landing.

  Storm clouds…

  Far in the distance a storm was raging, and I could see the lightning strike, again and again, as if they were hitting at one particular spot, there beyond the shimmering mirage of the city I could see, which resembled no place I had ever seen before.

  The baruch-landau stopped, at last, at the foothills of the cliff, and I disembarked—

  To find a most curious individual there to greet me.

  “You are Abraham Stoker?” he said.

  His voice surprised me. It was high and somewhat reedy, yet came out of a mountainous exterior—a man completely bald, and extensively scarred, who towered over me, and smiled a smile in which no good could be deciphered.

  “I am,” I said.

  “I am Spoons,” he said. “You may call me Mr. Spoons.”

  I started at that. For, if you recall, Mycroft, that long ago production of Pirates of the Carib Sea did feature such a character, the rumoured boatswain of the notorious Captain Wyvern.

  Could that possibly be the man himself?

  I could see immediately that young Beerbohm Tree, playing him, did not do him justice. This man required no prosthesis or makeup to make him formidable.

  But how had he come into my Lord Babbage’s service?

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Seldom does a man find all the answers to the questions in this world. I followed this Mr. Spoons—who carried, I could not help but notice, a Peacemaker in a holster on his hip, and a cutlass, of all things, on its opposite side—up the winding path that led to the castle above.

  A bustle of activity welcomed us. Military personnel of the sort I had seen on the train—that is, of the Austro-Hungarian persuasion—mingled with black-clad men who had had a stylised B as their insignia.

  B-men, I knew them to be.

  The Babbage Company’s private security force.

  “Lord Babbage has instructed for suitable accommodation to be found for you in the castle,” Mr. Spoons said. His tone suggested his idea of suitable would have been the stables. “He is anxious to meet with you.”

  “As I, him,” I said, and yet unable to hide my nervousness. Mr. Spoons smiled grimly at that.

  “I am told you are to be Lord Babbage’s…biographer?” he said.

  I nodded, equally grimly, at that, and we did not pursue conversation further. Mr. Spoons accompanied me to my new living quarters, an airy room at the very top of the castle, through narrow passageways and too many flights of stairs, and left me there. I could hear a military drill taking place outside, and saw one of the airships detach from its moorings and begin to journey away, towards that mysterious city I could see in the distance, in the shadow of the mountains.

  I sat down on the bed as soon as the door had closed and clutched my head in my hands.

  What had I let myself into?

  CASTLE BRAN—

  Night settles over the castle and in the distance the lightning continues to strike at the same spot, a rising tower of metal, needle-like, out there in that city that had once been Braşov.

  It is a strange sight, from high up here, looking at the valley, and at the vast machines slowly taking shape here in secret…

  That first night was long ago. Lord Babbage had disappeared from public life, and of Krupp nothing more was heard. In eighty-eight Mrs. Beeton ascended to Prime Minister, beating Moriarty, and a new balance of power established itself, with the lizard-queen ceding some of her former power to a coalition of human, automaton and lizard: a true democracy, of sorts.

  There had been rumours in the London papers, during that time, as to the mysterious demise of the Bookman, though none could vouch as to their veracity. In any case, my life continued as before, at the Lyceum, and I had all but forgotten that terrible, night-time summit deep below my beloved theatre, when there came a knock at the door.

  “Enter,” I said, preoccupied with paperwork on my desk, and heard him come in, and shut the door behind him. When I raised my head and looked, I stepped back, for there before me stood that same German con man and hack writer, the source of all my troubles—Karl May.

  “You!” I said.

  The fellow grinned at me, quite at ease. “Master Stoker,” he said, doffing his hat to me. “It has been a while.”

  “Not long enough!” I said, with feeling, and with shaking hands reached to the second drawer for the bottle I kept there—for emergencies, you see.

  May mistook my gesture. The old gun was back in his hand and he tsked at me disapprovingly, like a headmaster with an errand pupil.

  God, how much I hated him at that moment!

  “A drink?” I said, ignoring his weapon, and bringing out the bottle and two cups. At that his good humour returned, the gun disappeared, and he sat down. “By all means,” he said. “Let us drink to old friends.”

  I poured; we drank. “What do you want, May?” I said.

  “I?” he said. “I want nothing, for myself. It is Lord Babbage who has shown a renewed interest in you, my friend.”

  “Babbage?” I said.

  “I will put it simply, Stoker,” he said. “My Lord Babbage requires a… chronicler of the great work he is undertaking. And there are precious few who can be brought in. You, my friend, are already involved. And you had proved yourself reliable. It is, after all, why you are still alive.”

  “But why me?” I said, or wailed, and he smiled. “My Lord Babbage,” he said, “has got it into his head that you are a man of a literary bent.”

  At that I gaped, for it was true, that I had dabbled in writing fictions, as most men do at one point or another, yet had taken no consideration of showing them to anyone but my wife.

  “I thought so,” Karl May said.

  “But you’re a writer,” I said. “Why can’t you—”

  “My work lies elsewhere,” he said, darkly.

  I could not hold back a smirk, at that. “He does not value your fiction?” I said. At this he scowled even more. “You will make your way to Transylvania,” he said. He took out an envelope and placed it on the desk. “Money, and train tickets,” he said.

  “And if I refuse?”

  This made him smile again.

  “Oh, I wish you would,” he said, and a shiver went down my spine at the way he said it. I picked up the envelope without further protest, and he nodded, once, and left without further words.

  CASTLE BRAN—

  I must escape this place, for I will never be allowed to depart alive, I now know.

  Mycroft, you had come to me, two weeks after that meeting with Karl May. I remember you coming in, a portly man, shadows at your back. You came alone.

  Without preamble you told me of your suspicions back at that opening night, and told me of the conspiracy you were trying to unravel. An unholy alliance between Krupp and Babbage and that alien Bookman. What were they planning? You kept saying. What are they after?

  You had kept sporadic checks on me, and on the Lyceum. And your spotters had seen the return of Karl May.

  Now you confronted me. You wanted to know where my allegiance lay.

  Choose, you told me.

  Choose, which master to serve.

  For Queen and Country, you told me.

  My name is Abraham Stoker, called Abe by some, Bram by others. I am a theatrical manager, having worked for the great actor Henry Irving for many years as his personal assistant, and, on his behalf, as manager of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden.

  I am not a bad man, nor am I a traitor.

  Today I met my Lord Babbage.

  Mr. Spoons came to escort me. I am a prisoner, if kept in comfort. Wordlessly he led me down the corridor, to a metal door. At the press of a button the door opened and we entered a lift, what the Vespuc
cians call an elevator. Down it went, and down, beyond the foundations of the castle, below the ground, into the castle’s crypts. The metal doors opened, and I found myself in a dimly lit room, the air hot and humid, and orchids growing in profusion everywhere under the strange blue lights. Mr. Spoons motioned for me. I took a step forward, and another. A sound, as of bellows, working, a rhythmic mechanical sound of air being inhaled and exhaled. I took another step forward, already sweating from the high temperature and the humidity. A shape before me, in the shadows…one more step and I near cried out.

  Before me sat a…a…picture an ancient mummy, a once-human body, a dried husk of one, yet with large, wet, living eyes set in that ruined face, that awful body, blinking—looking at me. Pipes led into the body, pipes running out of it like the hairs of Medusa, and an engine working beside, and mechanical bellows pumping air in and out, keeping that aged thing alive.

  Horrified, I could only watch as those terrible eyes turned their attention on me, and that ruined, dried-out mouth moved, almost soundlessly, and an amplification of some sort took place, magnifying the dying whisper, and he said, “I am…Babbage, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Stoker, to my house.”

  “My Lord Babbage,” I said, forcing out the words. The dry smell of him hung in the air, of old rotting skin, and machine oil, and I was sweating profusely. Those ruined lips moved. I think he tried to smile.

  “We are…engaged,” he said, “on a work of the greatest magnitude. You will…record it, for prosperity.”

  The sound of his breathing machine filled the air, in, out, I could see his chest rising and falling mechanically.

  “Go,” he said. “Your work…begins.”

  “My Lord—”

  His lips moved again. Then his eyes closed. I felt Mr. Spoons’ vice-like grip on my arm, pulling me away.

  “Come,” he said.

  An airship is moored to the tower near my room. It is not used.

  Have you ever seen the moon rising, full, over the valley of Braşov?

  I must steal away from this place.