He shuddered and stepped back, wanting nothing from this chamber.
He turned warily toward the dog, but it was as inactive as before. He edged past the cone of strange light, careful to stay entirely out of it, and pressed the emitter’s button. The field vanished and he picked up the box. Still, the dog made no motion, its eyes remaining dark.
He walked on, passing yards of cable burdened with electricity and fixed to the cavern wall with loops of rubber-lined brass as he went.
Around another corner he encountered a second dog. This one was the size of a great mastiff, its horrible sparking eyes as large as artillery shells and nearly on a level with his own. This one let out a bark that shook the soldier in his boots, but he thrust forward the emitter and pushed the button…
…and the dog froze as if encased in glacial ice, the light in its eyes winking out.
The soldier let out his held breath, put the emitter on the floor in front of the massive hound, and stepped around it with wary care.
The chamber beyond was much larger than that he had just come from and it was filled with great mechanisms and engines built to run on steam, all gleaming bright with polish and glistening with oil. Though not as pretty as some in the previous chamber, these far surpassed the others’ mechanical sophistication with their apparent—and not so apparent—abilities. Here a machine that cleaned, dried, and pressed clothing, beyond it another that appeared to be a self-contained and automated forge, and still another that seemed to be some kind of massive, pressurized pump covered in couplings, valves, knobs, and coiled lengths of hose. Farther on stood a conveyance like a pony trap that rolled around under its own steam power and another larger version had not wheels but an endless chain of spiked plates that dug into the ground and clawed the engine forward—no doubt meant for conveying freight over rough or muddy ground a horse and wagon could not pass. Another machine seemed to be a kind of self-propelled augur on six articulated legs—perhaps a drilling machine? Beyond that lay a large armored ball with another set of the clawed tracks running around it and a door to a passenger—or driver’s—cabinet within. The soldier had no idea what it was meant to do, for he couldn’t imagine how it moved, though it clearly was meant to….
As he wandered through the room, the mechanisms, as before, grew bleaker in their purpose. He saw great guns with valves and tanks stinking of kerosene and hoses leading to nozzles where the muzzle should have been and others that propelled themselves on legs or wheels, directed by huge empty eyes like those of the inert hound outside the door. An experimental poke at the muzzle of one gun produced a spark and a moment’s blue flame that suffocated as the dregs of its fuel burned away. Beyond that lay an iron cask that stank of gunpowder, its surface all scored to break apart once it had crept on moving belts to its destination. Still more dread mechanisms lined up beside it.
Against the wall stood a rack of cylindrical machines nearly as long as he was tall with something like a stiff metal rotating fan at the tail and the fins of a fish along the sides. The lean metal bodies led to empty heads that plainly awaited the mounting of some large, round thing. Beyond them he saw the bulbous, unpleasant shapes of land torpedoes such as the one that had claimed his horse, and he guessed these were the objects the swimming machines were meant to carry to ships. The farthest wall held racks of rolled paper plans, and he had barely the heart to open a few and see their descriptions of even worse machines of destruction before he rolled them up and shoved them back into their pigeonholes.
He turned aside, disgusted, and spied a small version of the very lightning machine he had seen at Shiloh.
“What manner of man owns this place?” he whispered.
Forsaking the plans, which he knew would be worth a small fortune to men who practiced war, he ran from the room, barely remembering in time to dodge the field that immobilized the massive mechanical dog before he bent to retrieve the emitter.
As with its smaller kin, the mechanical dog remained unmoving and unlit as the soldier walked away.
He passed through more tunnels, taking care this time to check around each corner in search of other fell guardians, but he saw only room after room of empty tables, marked with the dents and scrapes of heavy objects removed in haste. Judging by what he had seen already, he had no desire to confirm his suspicions of what those things had been.
He heard a sound and turned back, to see the second dog drag itself slowly past and into the room where the electricity generator hummed. Following it, the soldier saw the dog stop beside the generator and lie still. In a moment, the dog seemed to glow and arcs of blue lightning grew from the end of the generator to stroke the dog, which sat up, its eyes igniting again with their eerie blue light.
The soldier withdrew quickly, lest he be spotted by the dog, and hurried back to his search, wondering what had become of the first dog and if the second had awakened sooner than the first. Was it possible the emitter was weakening, its charge lingering for less time with each use?
Ahead, the light gleamed brighter and more yellow, like a hot welcoming fire, and he quickened his steps toward it without thinking.
Perhaps he made too much noise, or cast a shadow, but whatever the cause, he had only a moment’s notice of the beast’s proximity before it pounced and bowled him to the ground with a roar that shook dust from the ceiling.
Blindly, the soldier waved the emitter in front of himself, holding down the button with his thumb. When he was not killed, he put the emitter down to rub his eyes clear of dust and then looked around.
A mechanical dog whose shoulders were as tall as a door and its body almost as wide loomed over him, its head lowered and jaws poised to snap the soldier in two. The man’s breath caught in his throat, but it was obvious the dog was as immobile as its brothers had been before, its gaze as banked and dark.
Beyond the dog, the chamber gleamed, but this time not in shades of copper and brass, but the bright hardness of electric light glittering on gold, silver, and gems. He stepped past the mechanical beast, awed by the beauty of the light that reflected from such a pile of wealth, his breath trapped in his throat.
With such engines of destruction at his call, the soldier supposed it was no difficulty for the inventor who kept these caves to amass such a treasure and yet it was thrust and piled and spilled into the chamber as carelessly as if it were so much trash. This, indeed, was a dragon’s hoard and nothing in this chamber—much smaller than the ones before it, but guarded by such a monster—was ordinary, nor of base materials. Except the one box of brass-bound wood lying as if discarded near the feet of the huge dog.
The soldier was loath to reach into the beam to retrieve the box and he wasn’t sure that the dog could be held in its sleeping state for long if, as he guessed, the emitter was truly burning out. He looked about the room until he came across a life-sized figure of a man. The gilded figure was something like a giant doll with arms and legs articulated at each natural joint. Excusing himself, the soldier twisted and pulled until one of the arms came away at the shoulder socket with a pop. He carried the heavy arm as close to the strange light of the emitter as he could and laid it on the floor, pushing and rolling it until the cupped hand curled around the music box. Then he pulled the arm back and picked up the box.
Stuffing the music box into his jacket, the soldier carried the arm back to its owner. Then he turned to the glittering trove and picked out a fortune for himself in silver and gold coins and gold nuggets with which he filled his pockets.
At last he picked up Morton’s device and returned to the room where the shaft had first deposited him. He saw no sign of the dogs on his way, but he could hear the generator in the far room humming and a clanking sound that reminded him that at least one fell guardian was back up and feeling its mechanical oats.
“Morton,” he called up. “Throw down the rope.”
“Do you have the music box?” Morton demanded, peering over the edge from his perch on the branch.
“Of course I
do,” he replied. “Lower the rope and I’ll give it to you.”
“Toss up the music box first.”
The soldier had no intention of doing so, but before he could say so, he heard the clanking and sparking of a great machine coming toward him. Looking back, he saw the two smaller dogs racing toward him. In the distance, he thought he could hear the grinding of the larger one making its way through the tunnels as well.
“We’ve no time for these games,” the soldier shouted back. “The hounds are coming and I doubt I’ll hold them off for long!”
“Throw me the music box and I’ll let you up.”
There was no time to reply, for the first of the mechanical beasts was upon him. The soldier kicked at it, sending the smallest of the beasts skittering across the stone floor, but it righted itself and turned to come back. The soldier slammed his finger onto the button of the emitter, but this time it only gave a squeal and a click and the dog faltered, but the fire in its eyes remained alight.
The second dog now dashed at him, its dreadful jaws agape. He threw the emitter at it. The hound snapped it up like a biscuit and ground it between its metal teeth, staggering a moment as the box crushed in its mouth, spewing out a final, dying pulse of light. The soldier tore off the goggles and leaped up, using the stunned dog as a stepping-stone, and scrambled upward to grab at a rubber loop that hung from the bottom of the air shaft. The dog shook itself awake again and snapped at the dangling soldier, who swung his legs up into the shaft, but couldn’t find enough purchase at such an angle to wedge himself into the pipe. Thus his legs swung back down.
Now the first dog returned to the fight, making mighty jumps the larger dog could not assay and snapping at the soldier’s dangling boot heels. It bit into one and ripped the boot from his foot as it fell back to earth, growling and savaging the leather as it would, no doubt, savage his body if the soldier fell.
The soldier pulled the music box from his pocket and waved it in the light of the air shaft for Morton to see. “Pull me up, damn it, man, or I’ll throw this to them next!”
Wide-eyed, Morton finally tossed down the knotted end of the stout rope. The soldier, breathing hard, shoved the music box back into his pocket and swarmed up as the chamber below him shuddered and rang with the sound of the third dog breaking past the narrow doorway.
As he pulled himself out of the false tree stump, a gout of dust and a frustrated roar from the throat of the third dog rushed upward behind him. He tumbled over the edge and barely caught the branch to stop himself falling to the ground.
Morton, still perched on the branch, stared at him and put out his hand for the music box. “Now, the box, my friend, or I’ll shove you back in.”
The soldier hauled himself up onto the branch and locked his legs around its girth. “To the devil with you, you miserable, lying swine! You never meant to let me up, but to leave me to die below.” And he grabbed the inventor and heaved him, headfirst, into the air shaft.
Morton screamed and plummeted down the pipe, lodging for a moment head-down before his screeching was cut short. The soldier looked away, not caring to see what work the hellish hounds would make of him, but the sound alone was gruesome enough to raise the soldier’s stomach into his throat.
He let himself down to the ground while the scrambling sounds faded below. Limping along with but one boot, he returned to the crossroads and took the road to the nearest town.
The place was called Stone Crossing, and even at a distance he could hear the sound of rail workers at their toil, laying the iron road across the vast grassland to the west. The town was busy with railroad men, farmers, cattlemen, and merchants offering every sort of goods and services to the caravans of settlers passing through as they escaped the strife of the war to make their way into the empty territories beyond, hunting a fortune or simply a new start. The soldier took a room in a boardinghouse run by a careful, plain-faced woman named Sarah—the widow of a railroad man who’d been blown to smithereens by a misplaced dynamite charge—and set to spending his fortune in merry pursuits that lightened his mood only temporarily.
He was accounted by most as a generous and pleasant enough companion, if one wasn’t bothered by his silence, his scars, and his ever-present expression of sorrow. Such was his discretion in all things from his person to his rare speech that his acquaintances took to confiding their own troubles to him. Even the widow Sarah spoke more easily to her taciturn boarder than to anyone else in the house. Thus it came to his ears in the rising heat of a blistering summer that the town of Stone Crossing was in dire straits.
Over dinner one Sunday evening at the boardinghouse, another guest—one of the railroad men passing through—complained, “I thought the land problem was going to be the worst of it here, but if this heat doesn’t break soon, we’ll have to halt work. The workers are dropping like flies and we’ve near run out of water as it is.”
“And you won’t find any for miles,” Sarah replied. “The creeks have all shriveled up or gone underground. My own well’s nearly dried out and I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to take your baths at the barbershop from now on, or there’ll be no water to cook with or clean the pans. I’ve already stopped mopping the floors as it is. I swear our situation wasn’t much better when Morton was still around, but at least you could usually get him to arguing with Halprin and stand a chance of getting something for your trouble when one or the other won out. I’ve almost developed a soft spot for Conscience Morton now that he’s gone—a less well-named man there never was.”
The soldier pricked up his ears. “Who’re those fellas—Morton and Halprin?” he asked.
“Well, they used to own pretty much the whole town between the two of them and most of the property beyond until Morton up and disappeared a few months ago,” Sarah replied. “Utterly mad for inventing things, the pair of them, and small-minded with it. Such a rivalry you never saw—as if making a better spinning wheel were the be-all and end-all. If I had to guess, I’d say Halprin finally found some way to drive Morton off—or kill him and hide the body. The Lord knows they tried to get rid of one another often enough, though I’d have lief it were Halprin who vanished—he’s a vile man who kills sheep for his own amusement with his terrible inventions. And greedy beyond imagining, though he’s very rich from selling his murderous inventions to anyone as will pay—Union or Confederate. He and Morton fought for a whole year about where the rail right-of-way was going to pass, and the town was a mess because of it. Halprin only half won that argument.”
“And now the railroad may have to make a jog around Morton’s property,” the railroad man added, “since he ran off without leaving a clear deed to the land to anyone. We’ve tried to apply eminent domain on the abandoned property, but Halprin is fighting us in court—ironically to ‘protect Morton from being taken advantage of while he’s missing.’ I suspect he’s just doing it to gain time until he can find a way to get the property for himself.”
“I wouldn’t put such a thing past him. He’s a cruel creature, is Mr. Halprin,” Sarah added.
The soldier looked back to Sarah. “What business is it that you’re wanting Halprin to do?”
“I’m wanting him to let us drill for a deeper well. We all know there’s an aquifer below the town—just look at how the cottonwood trees are still green even in the heat and dry: they must be getting water from below the topsoil. But Mr. Halprin won’t allow it. I’ve asked the council and I’ve asked him, and the answer is the same—which isn’t surprising considering the council is no more than Halprin’s puppets these days. And I wouldn’t countenance what Mr. Halprin suggested.”
The soldier raised his eyebrows, but it was the railroad man who asked, “Surely he didn’t impose himself…that way?”
“I’ll content myself with saying Mr. Halprin is no more a gentleman in that respect than one could suppose from his other dealings,” Sarah replied. “And he did not get what he wanted, though I very nearly had to run from the room to make it so.”
> The soldier frowned and asked, “Why can’t you dig your own well?”
“I don’t own the land and Mr. Halprin has made it very clear none of us are to go around digging holes on his property without his permission—which he won’t give. So I tried to convince him we should drill for a public well, since that benefits everyone and we could use a bit of Morton’s property on the south side of the main road—since Mr. Morton can’t be found to say no to it. But Halprin refuses to consider it—same argument as he’s giving to the railroad, but really, it’s because he’d like some of Morton’s tenants to up and leave. Without water, it’s certain that some of them will. And soon.”
“Won’t he lose some of his own tenants?”
Sarah gave a wry smile. “Of course, but that makes no never mind. Once the railroad is through, there’ll be plenty of people lining up to buy every scrap of land, built on or no.”
The soldier looked thoughtful and made a sound in his throat, nodded, but didn’t say any more.
After dinner, he retired to his bedroom, pacing and wondering if he could do anything to help, for he’d taken a liking to the widow Sarah and hated to see her and her neighbors so abused by both nature and a single, greedy man. He also regretted having killed Morton—though not much. His thoughts ran in circles and eventually he sat down on his bed, wishing he had some distraction such as music or cards, but as it was Sunday, the saloon was closed and he didn’t dare disrupt the house by going down to the parlor to play Sarah’s piano—badly. His eye fell on the music box he had brought out of the caverns, sitting where he had put it down months ago on his chest of drawers. He picked it up, but it had no key. He tried the key he always carried in his pocket. The fit wasn’t perfect, but he was able to wind the mechanism one turn before the cylinder began to revolve with a sudden chord that gave way to a strange tune.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 8