The Falling Machine

by Andrew P. Mayer

  Alexander let out a slight guffaw when he realized that points on the top of the man's helmet were actually supposed to make it appear as if a crown had been attached to the top of his head. In front of King Jupiter's face was a solid metal plate that had a blank visage except for the eyeholes, and a beard of stylized curls that turned into fine golden chain mail that covered his neck, making sure that his features were completely hidden.

  The chain mail was another point against him. “I hope for his sake that his skin really is made of stone,” he mumbled to himself. He had seen men try to dress in that kind of armor before, with unpredictable results.

  Years ago, when he was just getting started, Alexander had spent some time fighting crime with a young hero who had called himself “Pendragon.” The man's heart had certainly been in the right place, and he had carried an electrified sword that had managed to put a quick end to more than one dangerous situation.

  But Pendragon's career as a Paragon had come to a sudden end when he went face-to-face against a maniac calling himself the Steel Woodsman. Failing to dodge in time, he had taken a nasty blow from the villain's axe. His armor had protected him from losing a limb, but the blade had driven the metal links of his chain mail deep into his skin. He had managed to use his sword to permanently chop down the Woodsman, but the “Arthurian Avenger” had limped away from the combat badly wounded, and was never seen again.

  Half a decade later, Alexander had run into a man on lower Broadway who claimed that he had once been Pendragon. By this time the identity of the Industrialist was no longer a secret, and Stanton had put up with a number of people who tried to claim that they knew him as one masked hero or another.

  The man's skin was flushed and red, his teeth yellow and crooked, and he was well out of shape—except for round. The strange fellow was a far cry from the lithe young swordsman who he had once partnered with. The only way he could prove that he had really once been the hero he claimed to be was by showing Alexander the rings of metal that were still lodged in his flesh. Alexander had warned anyone off of chain mail since that day.

  Shaking away the cloud of nostalgia, he returned to the application on his desk. King Jupiter was claiming to be a genuine “Miracle Man,” with powers that were more mystical than mechanical. As a Paragon Stanton had seen his fair share of unexplainable events, but discovering a person who had true superhuman abilities was very rare indeed.

  Most heroes were simply people with one or two skills that, with training and focus, could undeniably put them in a better class than the average man.

  But true superhuman abilities—whether they came from machines, chemicals, or even the supernatural—were no guarantee of survival. After all the wars, riots, and villains that Alexander had battled against, he had learned that what gave you the best odds of survival were a desire to fight for what you believed in, the ability to rely on the men who fought beside you, and a lot of damned good luck. “And sooner or later, luck always runs out,” he heard himself say in a dark tone.

  The idea that both the White Knight and King Jupiter would prove to be what they claimed was impossible. One of them had to be a fraud. He'd need to see them in action and find out which one it was before he'd take either seriously as a possible Paragon.

  But why was he being so negative? He had wanted to be the leader of the Paragons, and now he was. If Alexander was upset by the responsibility of finding new heroes, he had no one to blame but himself.

  Grabbing a pen, he wrote “to be considered” across the top of King Jupiter's application and stuffed it back into the envelope. After all, if you were going to judge the measure of a hero simply by the cut of his costume, then the Industrialist would be the first to go.

  Having finished his review, his eyes turned back to the gas lamp. Maybe he could sneak out after all, just for a little while. It wasn't like Sarah wouldn't be around when he got back—this was her home But there was something else that was bothering him—something was missing….

  “Mr. Stanton.”

  “What?” Caught off guard he snapped his head back to see that Jenny Farrows was standing just outside the open door, the deceptively sweet features of his daughter peering in just over her shoulder. “I'm here, Father,” she said to him.

  “Yes, all right. Come in then, Sarah.” Adventuring and the solving of mysteries, would, it seemed, have to wait for another day.

  Stuffed into a tiny little room, trapped in utter blackness, and flat on her back, every breath Sarah took sounded like the rumble of thunder in her ears.

  She had been in pitch blackness before, but that didn't make this time any better. It wasn't so much the dark that scared her—it was the consequences of being discovered trapped in her father's most secret place.

  But if she was going to escape her predicament without alerting anyone, the first thing that she would need to do is take stock of her situation: Currently, she was wedged into a small patch of wooden floor, crushed in between the lip of the wall, where the panel had dropped down, and the square wooden pillar that held up the central display table. Her shoulders fit in with only an inch to spare.

  Testing how dark it actually was, Sarah held up her hand in front of her face. She wiggled her fingers to try to see something in the blackness, hoping that there might be some stray ray of light that would become perceptible as her eyes adjusted. But her vision played tricks on her instead, showing her streaks of white in some nonexistent distance, or making it seem as if she could see her fingers, only to be disappointed when the motions she made completely failed to match up with the luminous mirage.

  And finally on her list of current problems was her throbbing hip. With nothing to distract her from the pain but desperation, the sensation of it began to bloom, growing in size and shape. For a moment it felt as if a monstrous creature had attached itself to her by its teeth and was breathing along with her. The sucking beast contracted slightly with each inhalation, then grew larger and hotter with every exhale, as if it were expanding like a balloon.

  Trying to ignore the pain, Sarah now went through her options. The easiest way out was, as usually seemed to be the case, the one that she dreaded the most: a few short raps of her hand against the wall would alert her father to the fact that there was something more than simply his costume hiding behind the plaster wall.

  And while giving up might quickly get her back into the daylight, she had already gone to so much trouble to stay hidden from him that it made no sense to alert him to her presence without at least trying to figure her way out of the trap. If he caught her it would hardly matter whether she had been captured on purpose or by accident—either way, she would receive equal amounts of both punishment and blame.

  So if she wasn't giving up, her next option was to start exploring the possibilities. She had some idea of the layout of the costume closet, along with the knowledge of just how small the space was that she was trapped in. Sarah slowly lifted her hand. A few feet above her head her fingers reached the bottom of the table. She slid her palm against the rough wood until she found the polished edge.

  She kept her hand moving through the air, slowly and steadily, until it touched the back of the secret panel. The distance between the end of the table and the front wall was twice the span of her hand, and when she spread out her fingers she was able to bridge the gap entirely. Even if she had been thin enough to pull herself through, and with some squeezing she might have been, there was no way that Sarah could hope to do it silently while she was wearing her bustle and corsetry.

  If her adventures so far had taught her a single lesson, it was that the reason no woman had ever kept up with the Paragons was that they were all hobbled by their garments. Next time she went sneaking around perhaps she'd dress as a man….The thought of her pulling on a shirt and pants put a smile on her face, although the sensation was cut short by another twinge of pain in her hip.

  Given that there was no means of escape from where she was, she would need to move to somewhere else
. And to do that she would have to get off her back.

  Sarah used her right elbow to prop herself up and began to wiggle her hips in order to flip herself over. As she did so she could feel her bustle beginning to wrap itself tightly around her waist. She almost let out a curse, but along with whatever small sense of propriety her mother had given her before she died, a mental shout of “Quiet!” in her mother's voice kept the word on her tongue before she could open her mouth.

  Sarah lay back down and then tried to bend down to reach her feet. Her head smacked against the immovable wooden table above her before her arms could assess the situation down by her ankles, and the pain forced her to stifle another very unladylike word.

  Failing to reach down, she attempted to drag her legs up toward the rest of her. Even though the bustle resisted, this seemed to be a far more effective strategy. She could clearly feel a tugging of the hem.

  She frowned in the darkness as she realized what had happened—the edge of her dress had become trapped underneath the panel when it had closed.

  Sarah tried not to think about the logical conclusion, but it was obvious: if part of her dress was caught inside the room, then the other part was trapped outside. It was the second time today that she was praying that her father would be oblivious to the obvious.

  As she lifted up her legs one more time to reach down for her skirts she felt the boning in her corsets digging deep into her skin. Grabbing a handful of the bustle, she gave it a tug, but the trapped hem refused to budge.

  With a sheen of perspiration already gathering on her brow, and her knickers literally in a twist, Sarah was feeling more unladylike by the second. And it wasn't just the exertion that was causing her distress—the air was definitely much warmer in the closet than it had been just a few minutes before.

  Lifting up her legs again, she pulled harder on the hem. She could feel the framing of the bustle twist as she slowly increased the pressure. Something would have to break, and in a few moments the fabric gave way, pulling free with a distinctive ripping sound.

  This time she did curse out loud: “Damn!” The word had slipped free, although she had managed to catch herself before she could curse at herself for cursing. Even though she had limited it to a single slip, she doubted that her mother would have been very proud of her.

  Freed from the wall, Sarah flipped herself over. Her hip let out a shout of pain as it made contact with the floor. It would be bruised; there was no doubt about that. But she seemed to have found the outer limits of the pain from the injury. It didn't feel any worse than it had a few minutes before, and there was no wet or sticky sensation that she would have associated with blood.

  Dragging herself forward, she ignored the sound of the rest of the fabric pulling away. It was something that would demand her eventual attention, because no matter how often her father ignored the obvious, there was no way he would miss a two-foot strip of black taffeta on the floor of his secret wardrobe.

  With a rustle of skirts and badly misaligned support clothing, Sarah grabbed the edge of the table and pulled herself over to the side of it. There was at least three feet between the table and the wall, and she stood up into it.

  The moment she got to her feet, she unhooked her bustle and placed it on the table, on top of her father's costume.

  Sarah felt somewhat pleased with her progress in spite of the fact that she was still lost in pitch blackness. She had managed to free her dress, stand up, and remove one item of constricting clothing, all in the dark.

  Although, if her father raised the panel now, he would find that his daughter had descended halfway to savagery after simply having faced the challenge of getting up off the floor.

  If she was going to escape she'd need to do more than disrobe—she'd need to find a way out.

  Sarah closed her eyes and tried to conjure up a more detailed image of the room from her brief survey of it a few minutes before. She could see the table and the walls, but details eluded her, overshadowed by the image of her father's Industrialist costume.

  She furrowed her brow, sternly telling herself that her future well-being, and her relationship with her father, was dependent on her escape, but her mind's eye offered up nothing new.

  Out of ideas, Sarah leaned back against the side wall to give herself a moment to think. As she did so, something small and hard dug itself into her shoulder blades.

  When she reached around behind herself, Sarah's hand grasped the familiar shape of one of Darby's gas lamp igniters. She was sure there had been no light at all inside the tiny room when she had explored it as a child. This was part of Darby's redesign.

  She turned the dial and was rewarded with a soft hiss from somewhere nearby as the gas began to flow. Then there was a sharp snap as the gas ignited. A few seconds later a flickering light banished the darkness, turning everything a soft yellow color.

  As Sarah hopped up from the wall with a renewed sense of purpose, she knocked her bustle to the floor. It landed with a thump. Even though she was no longer wearing it, the damnable thing had still betrayed her!

  She stared at spitefully. It had been created to hobble and undermine women for the benefit of men, and it was managing to do its job admirably.

  Her blood went cold as she heard her father's footsteps coming closer to the wall, and she realized he must have heard her. In a few seconds all her planning would be undone. But realizing that there was nothing she could do, her rising sense of panic was overwhelmed by a sense of calm—she could finally escape this nonsensical adventure and free herself from the stifling closet.

  Closing her eyes, she waited to hear the inevitable sound of the mechanism starting up. Sarah tried to compose her face in an expression of innocent repentance that might somehow lessen her father's anger, even if just for a moment.

  But instead of the telltale noise, she heard her father yelling out the name of the old butler. She had, once again, managed to escape detection. There would be no easy way out.

  Sarah was most definitely perspiring now, and she felt a trickle of sweat break free and roll down the back of her neck. Darby had once told her that the skin leaked water in order to cool itself, which had led to a long conversation about how a wise creator might choose to implement more practical and efficient methods. At the end of it, though, Darby had assured her that God's choice was quite sufficient and that even if they could manage to come up with something better, it was far beyond his abilities to modify an actual human to use it, although he had outfitted Tom with a number of unique ways to vent excess heat.

  Her feeling of suffocation was still with her, and the air inside the closet felt warmer and thicker with every passing minute. Sarah wondered if she was going to suffocate soon, and for a moment she could feel tightness in her throat as she wondered if the air was already running out. But one look at the healthy flame on the wall made her realize that there was a steady flow of—if not fresh air, then at least a waft of something breathable. And, she realized, it had to be coming from somewhere.

  All the Paragons had a predilection for secret doors and panels, and she was seized with a certainty that her father's own obsession would mean that he would not have passed on the chance to have a secret exit to the outside, although she hadn't found it the last time she was in here.

  And now that she thought more about it, there were many evenings that her father never seemed to leave his study, and yet somehow the Industrialist had still managed to find trouble and adventure.

  Sarah took another look around the dimly lit room, trying to pay more attention to where such an escape route might be hidden. She walked around the desk to the back of the table and opened the top drawer in one of the cabinets that lined the right half of the back wall.

  It contained two copies of the Industrialist's signature gun. She considered picking one up, just to hold it. The weapon needed fortified steam to fire, so there was no danger of it accidentally going off. Still, with her luck so far today, she was probably better off leaving them
alone, and she closed the drawer.

  In the drawers beneath it were incidentals, including some of the pieces to her father's earlier costumes. She picked up a pair of gloves. Embroidered into the top of the thick black leather was a pair of golden cogs.

  The Industrialist had mostly abandoned the cog imagery except for his shield, but the sight of the old gloves threw her back to a forgotten moment in childhood, clinging tightly to her father's gigantic hands, tears in her eyes, as he explained to her that her mother had died.

  Without even trying to come up with an excuse for doing so, Sarah slipped her hands into them.

  They were large, but not too large. Did her father have ladylike fingers, or were her hands as mannish as Nathaniel had always claimed they were?

  She made a fist and could feel strips of metal hidden underneath the leather pressing into her skin. She took a few jabs at the air, imagining what it might be like to smack her hand into the jaw of a villain.

  She rolled open the top drawer and picked up one of the guns.

  Taking up the other half of the back wall was a large mirror firmly set into an oaken frame. Sarah took a pose in front of it, with the gun in her hand. “The Industri-lass!” she said to herself with a whisper.

  She suddenly felt quite foolish, and she turned to put the gun back into the drawer. As she rolled the cabinet closed she saw a sheet of paper sitting on top of the cabinet, a straight pin still stuck through it from where it had been attached to some other object. A note was scrawled across the front of it: “Section 106 removed and reordered as requested.”