“So, are we a family now?” Olena asked.
“Yes, my Olenka.” Petya touched her head. “All three of us.”
“Four,” Maroushka corrected.
“Four,” Vasyl agreed with a laugh.
“Five,” said Broom.
The Hollow Hounds
by Kat Richardson
(BASED ON “THE TINDERBOX”
BY HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN)
He was still a young man, though his tall, slim body was much battered and his face no longer handsome beneath his luxuriant blond mustaches, but when the news came, his commanders were as glad to send him home: a patched and broken soldier, old at twenty-six, and no good to anyone at the front—not anymore. No good to anyone at home, either, for there was no one there, nor family remaining East, West, North, or in the war-torn South. How bitter the irony that while he stood in the hellfire of war and emerged changed but still living, his wife and child, safe at home, had died of fever and remained forever as they had been in his memory, but only there.
He had returned to bury them, and then found no reason to stay. Carrying nothing but what lay in his pockets, he returned to the station and boarded the first train heading away from all he knew—west past Kansas until the train could go no farther. He disembarked at the rural station in an unknown territory and begin walking. Just walking. Looking for…what? Something to set his heart by, perhaps. Some purpose. Or some reason to stop.
He came to a crossroads in the woodland through which he trod and paused beside the stout signpost there, the sunlight through the trees dappling his pale hair as he looked down. He checked his watch—like its owner, a battered thing but running still in spite of all it had passed through—then took a key from his pocket as if he meant to wind the mechanism up and stood staring at the key a moment. He had looked up at the fingerboards pointing from the post and down to the key again—as if the key would help him decide which road to follow—when he heard a sound all too familiar: an explosion like those made by the infernal torpedoes to which he had lost a good horse on the battlefield and taken no small injury himself.
The not-so-old soldier shoved the key back into his pocket as he ducked and scrambled under the nearest cover, expecting a hail of dirt and stones thrown up by the blast that had sounded so near at hand, but there was no such rain of debris. Instead he felt a rude and insistent shoving at his back, which he had pressed against a sheltering rock outcrop.
“Devil take it,” someone groused at his rear. “Give way!”
He jumped forward, whirling to see what and who prodded him in the backside so persistently and why they spoke in such impatient tones.
From the depths of the rock emerged a disordered man who shoved wide the camouflaged door that had been hidden in the deep shadow of the overhang. The soldier saw that the door was in fact wood, cleverly painted. The rock around it had been carved away in some fashion to create a niche just deep enough to ensure that the door would remain shaded all the year and preserve the illusion of stone, but not so deeply set in the rock that any animal would choose to make its den on the threshold.
The man, portly and balding, wearing a long leather apron covered in bulging pockets and sleeve gaiters over his clothes, closed the door in haste against a billow of smoke as acrid as that from any battlefield and stepped out into the sunshine near the signpost to stare at the soldier from behind the thick, round lenses of a pair of goggles that gave his eyes a bizarre, insectile appearance.
“What, by Jupiter, are you doing here?” the man asked, pulling the goggles off his face as if they might be causing him to hallucinate. “No one walks through these woods nowadays.”
“If they are regularly troubled with explosions beneath their feet, that would hardly be a wonder. Shall I assume that was your work,” the soldier asked, pointing to a few wisps of sulfurous smoke, “since you came from a door in the rock that clearly leads to wherever that explosion originated?”
The disheveled man peered at him, his uncovered eyes sharp with speculation. “An observant man, I see. Do I take it rightly, by your dress, sir, that you are but late returned from the battlefields of the Southeast?”
“I am not returned at all, sir,” the soldier said, taken for a moment by a perverse humor. “But I am, indeed, late from the war.”
“I don’t recognize you,” the man said, “and I’ve lived in these parts nigh on five years.”
“I am not from these parts. I find myself at loose ends and thought I’d take a walk until I tied them back up again.”
“What, no family nor friends nearby?”
“None. Not nearby nor anywhere. All dead.”
“A tragic tale, friend, and perhaps too common in this time of conflict.” The man shook his head in sorrow and then offered his hand. “My name is Conscience Morton and you have my sympathies.”
The soldier took his hand and shook it stiffly, but offered nothing more, for there seemed no further reply to make.
Morton continued after a moment’s clumsy silence. “Well, friend, if you have no destination, perhaps I might persuade you to do me a small favor…? Though you are wan—perhaps still suffering from your wounds?—you seem a strong man and clever. Educated, I would guess. And what I would ask of you requires no great strength, but is quite out of the question for one…encumbered by such flesh as I am.”
The soldier nodded at him to go on, or in agreement that the gentleman before him was, inarguably, rotund and unused to physical labor.
“Below,” Morton began, “lies a great maze of caverns and tunnels in which are secreted such marvels as would amaze even the most jaded collector, and gold enough to send a miser into transports of joy. Now, among this treasure lies a small music box—quite an ordinary sort of thing carved of a pretty bit of wood and bound in brass and no larger than a lady’s prayer book—that I made…for my late wife.” The man watched the soldier from the corner of his eye as he spoke and must surely have noticed the other’s unhappy expression as he added, “She died of a brain fever and nothing to be done for her, poor thing.”
The soldier bowed his head and shook it in sympathy, his eyes sparked with tears.
“So you see,” Morton continued, “how dear such a keepsake is to me.”
“I see,” the soldier replied, dashing the moisture from his face with the back of one scarred hand.
“I would give all the gold of Midas to retrieve that box. It was stolen from me by a rival, a mad inventor, a very devil of a man who has turned his hand to building vile mechanisms—but I let my emotions run away with me. Forgive me. It is only recently I’ve discovered that he keeps the music box in his secret laboratory, which lies below.”
“In these caves you say run beneath our very feet?” the soldier asked.
The weighty Mr. Morton nodded. “As you say. And I have tried to gain access to the place to reclaim what is mine, but this man—beast that he is—set traps at the door which I, unsuspecting, set off and the explosion has sealed this entry. There are other ways in, but only to this one did I hold a key. And now I cannot pass through it.”
The soldier drew himself up, frowning in thought and looking at the man before him as if he could weigh the truth of his tale in his gaze. “How do you propose to get below and reclaim your treasure?”
Morton’s face lit up and he exclaimed, “Ah, such penetration! I knew you were a clever fellow the moment I clapped eyes upon you. And you, you see, you are the very answer. There is, nearby, an air shaft disguised as a lightning-blasted tree, and a slender fellow such as yourself should find no difficulty in shimmying down it. I might assay it myself, but I fear I am not a vigorous man and should fail of the attempt. If you would go down and retrieve the box, I should be most grateful.”
The soldier frowned. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, I don’t quite perceive what reward there is in this venture for me,” he said. “Saving the satisfaction of returning your beloved wife’s trinket to you—which is a kindhearted gesture, I do
admit it—there seems no further inducement to me to take such a risk, for such an impulse no longer shivers in my breast. I have lately laid all my worldly happiness and all I possess on the altar of my country and placed my life and limbs in the hands of men who cast me aside once my usefulness was done, and my heart is no longer kind. So tell me what I am to be paid for this service.”
“My dear friend,” Morton replied, “you mistake me entirely. There is treasure in plenty below—gold, silver, and gems. Merely take what you will—be discreet in your choices, for the builder may recognize his toys if you should take one of those—but of materials, he shall miss nothing if you temper your avarice with common sense. It’s a veritable trove down there!” he added, throwing his arms upward with enthusiasm. He knocked the backs of his knuckles against the fingerboards on the signpost and winced, missing the soldier’s swift, ironic smile.
The soldier schooled his expression into one of careful thought and then nodded. “Very well. Lead on to your air shaft and I shall go below and see this dragon’s hoard for myself.”
Morton led him perhaps half a mile into the woods, his path wobbling between the boles of larger trees and the spindly growth of smaller ones, to a large, blackened stump. It stood a couple of feet taller than the soldier—who was taller than Morton—and was more than twice as big around. The remaining top of the tree was ragged and had only one branch that stuck out at a crooked angle.
The soldier raised his arms and jumped, aiming to catch the branch and pull himself up, but the branch hung just out of reach. He turned toward Morton, saying, “If you gave me a leg up…but perhaps not,” he added, observing the pudgy man’s physique.
“I have with me a rope,” the other replied. “If you could scramble up and tie the rope off to that branch, I should be able to climb up behind you so as to pull you back up once you’ve found the music box.”
The soldier nodded. “The height is just a bit more than I can leap and the trunk too large to shin up easily…. Perhaps I could step on your back….”
“What!” Morton objected.
“Dear fellow,” the soldier replied. “It is in a good cause, isn’t it?”
And so it was that Morton knelt on the ground at the base of the false tree and the soldier wrapped the rope around his body and stepped up, light and quick, caught the branch with ease, and swung himself up to look down into the blasted tree.
“Hollow as a hound before supper,” the soldier observed of the tree as he tied off the rope to the branch and prepared to swing his legs over into the void.
“Just a moment, friend,” Morton called, dusting himself off before struggling to ascend the tree with the help of both rope and soldier. And an arduous journey it was.
When Morton sat, panting and sweating, on the branch beside the soldier, he said, “Before you descend, you must know this: the owner of this cavern has three guardians below and they stand vigil over his most precious inventions—and no doubt the music box as well. These guardians are clockwork beasts of a horrible aspect, but they may be easily overcome with a small invention of mine own.” He took a small box from one of his pockets and a sort of round brass plate that he popped open into the shape of a cone, telescoping much in the manner of an opera hat that extends from its flattened state with a flick of the gentleman’s wrist. He screwed the cone thus made into a hole in the box and offered it to the soldier. Then he passed him his goggles as well. “But touch the button on this box and it will emit a field from the cone that will temporarily disable the mechanical beast. Wear my goggles and you shall be able to see the field and any others like it that my rival may have placed below. They aren’t terribly dangerous to men—make one a bit queasy, is all—but they play hob with mechanical things for a time. If he has used these fields for alarms, walking through one will allow the bell, or whatever diabolical engine at which it has been aimed, to begin functioning again, so these fields are to be avoided if you wish to emerge again a free man. Just remember: point the cone at the beast and press the button. You may then leave the emitter on the ground in front of the creature until you have finished your inspection. I’ve calibrated the effect to last several minutes after the generator is removed, so you may carry on out of the creature’s sight where it will not see and pursue you. They will not detect you otherwise but with their eyes.”
The soldier accepted the goggles and the device, carefully dismantling it and putting the parts of it into his jacket and pockets so he could have his hands free to climb down. “Just be ready with the rope when I come back,” was all he said before he vanished down the hollow tree.
It took several minutes for the soldier to slither down the pipe using his back and legs braced against the opposite sides, for the space was much wider than he’d at first thought and he was not so tightly tucked in as he would have liked. Morton might, in fact, have eased in, but the inventor was clearly not fit enough to climb.
When he neared the bottom, the soldier paused to don the goggles and survey his proposed landing site. A dim or distant lamp cast a poor illumination on the area and the goggles darkened it still further, but he saw no sign of mysterious fields or roving mechanical beasts of a diabolical nature, so he let himself down with care and crouched below the air shaft a moment while he assembled the emitter. He could barely hear the constant dripping of water somewhere below a low whine that filled the air much like the sound of the monstrous engine he had seen prowling in the Confederate skirmish lines at Shiloh. It had been no rail locomotive—though just as large—and it had raised lightning around its metal body that struck at the Union men and ground around them. It had seemed the hand of Zeus himself flung the bolts on General Johnston’s orders until that man was, himself, brought down and the engine silenced. In this shadowy cavern, the memory of death whispered close and the soldier shivered.
He crept across the floor to the nearest wall and inched along its length toward the sound until he came upon the thing, crouching beside a buried stream of water on a bed of steel and rubber. In the low light made dimmer by his goggles, he inspected it, for it seemed unlikely to attack him, fettered as it was to the ground. It took only a minute to recognize it for what it was—an electricity generator, driven by the spinning of a handful of propellers sunk from the machine into the buried stream of water below it like some cockeyed metal water mill. Thick cables clad in rubber and guided by hoops of rubber-lined brass carried the electricity away into the cavern to power the dim lights hanging in cages pegged to the walls. Here there were no gas flames or sputtering torches, only the lowered, chilly light of the heavens’ rage tamed by man. Nearby, a regiment of switches marched along a metal panel, carefully labeled, but in no ways helpful, for the soldier couldn’t imagine what they truly did and had no desire to call unwanted attention to himself in this place.
He prowled onward, taking care to avoid anything that looked like the field Morton had warned of. It was in avoiding one of these that he came suddenly around a corner and face-to-face with a dog. It was about the size of a big hunting hound, but it gleamed metallic gold and red in the low light and its eyes, as large as doorknobs, glowed with the pale blue of electricity. The soldier jerked to a standstill and stared at the beast, his own eyes nearly as wide as the dog’s.
The mechanical beast scratched one iron forefoot upon the floor, sending sparks flying from the stone as it growled like a freight car rolling slowly over gravel. The soldier leaped backward and the metal dog crouched as if to spring, but the soldier held Morton’s emitter between them and, praying more from habit than hope, pressed the button. The box made a click and a squeal, and then what looked like a hash of black and white lines shot from the cone and enveloped the dog, who stopped stock-still, half-crouched, the cold fire in its gleaming eyes extinguished in an instant.
The soldier put the box on the ground in front of the mechanical beast and walked toward it, curious. But as he stepped into the beam, a wrenching pain tore through his chest and he reeled, stumbling aside
and falling against the wall, his sight dim and his ears filled with an unnatural silence. He lay still against the wall for a minute or two, as still as death, until at last he heaved a mighty breath into his lungs and dragged himself back to his feet.
“‘Makes one a bit queasy,’” he mocked. “Ha!” He turned to regard the dog, but it was as motionless as before, unmoved and unmoving, its eyes still dark. “But it does work a treat on you, old boy,” he added, and forbore to pat the brass-bound hound on the head. He stepped with care past the dog and into the chamber it guarded.
Shelf upon shelf groaned under the weight of brass, copper, and steel parts and boxes filled with the tiny sapphires and rubies watchmakers used in their art, of which he poured a few into his hand and put them carelessly into his breast pocket. Spools of wire, coils, cylinders, and sheets of metal rolled thin enough to bend and shape were stacked beside bins full of screws, pins, gears, springs, valves, grommets, pistons, chain…and things so foreign he had no word for them. Ranks of tools waited in racks on the walls. Upon the tables set across the room, quiet under a thin blanket of dust and cobweb, sat dozens of mechanical creations. Seeing only the glitter of jewels and no spark of electricity in their eyes, the soldier walked up to the first table and found himself in the midst of a wonderful menagerie of automata: birds, beetles, snakes, rabbits, puppies, squirrels, chickens…all such small, familiar animals rendered in shining metal and each with a key protruding from its back. The second table was filled with more sophisticated and bejeweled miniature human figures poised to demonstrate various clever tasks: a tumbler dressed in jester’s motley of set gemstones, a lady with face and arms of carved ivory and hair of silk thread seated at a tiny piano, even a soldier dressed in British red enamel with a small ebony and brass musket in his hands, and so many others it was hard to count them, each more gloriously adorned than the last and all left to gather dust. The final table was much cleaner and held more frightening models: a tiny guillotine that raised and lowered its own blade and diligently disposed of the severed bits of its wax victims into a box below, all at the flick of a lever; a sort of reverse torture rack that screwed itself down to crush the dolly victim within; a metal box that seemed capable of opening by itself to spew out its unpleasant secrets; balls covered in the sturdy spines of detonation triggers; and cylinders with valves and timers that whispered in his memory of deadly gases creeping across the Georgia ground like killing fog.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 7