by Charlie Nash
Charlie Nash was born in England and holds degrees in mechanical and space engineering, medicine, and writing. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Aurealis and Ditmar awards. She lives on the eastern seaboard of Australia, and is working on two new novels, and a third Ship’s Doctor installment.
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Also by Charlie Nash:
Short Story Collections
Men and Machines I: space operas and special ops
Men and Machines II: punks and postapocalypticans
All Your Dark Faces
Charlie Nash
Published in 2019 by Flying Nun Publications, http://flyingnunpublications.com/
“The Lady with the Lantern” first published 2015 in Pseudopod episode 428
“The Ghost of Hephaestus” first published 2014 in Phantazein, FableCroft Publishing
“Jack” first published 2013 in Mysterical-E, Fall/Winter issue
“The Edge” first published 2012 in Scareship #8
“Parvaz” first published 2013 in Dreaming of Djinni, Ticonderoga Publications
“The One You Feed” first published 2014 in One Page: Brisbane #1
“The 7:40 from Paraburdoo” first published 2015 in The Never Never Land, CSFG
In all the above first publications, stories originally credited to Charlotte Nash.
Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Charlie Nash
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or people, living or dead, is coincidental.
ISBN:
978-1-925775-13-6 (paperback)
978-1-925775-14-3 (eBook)
Cover design by Richard Priestley
Contents
The Lady with the Lantern
The Ghost of Hephaestus
Jack
The Edge
Parvaz
The One You Feed
The 7:40 from Paraburdoo
Your thoughts?
More from Charlie Nash
For all those who know our dark faces and sometimes fail to check them, and who maybe enjoy that … just a little
The Lady with the Lantern
The mine called Callum in his tenth year. One morning, he was walking to school with the other boys; a pair of new shoes, a boiled sweet in his cheek. The next, he found a pick in his soft hand, and his feet followed his father’s to the cold, dark portal.
No one talked in the mine. Not in the gut-sinking lift, which clanked and shuddered as it delivered them, serried and sweating, into the earth. Not in the long drifts, where they trekked by torchbeam. Not in the side-by-side plots, where each man worked the diamond hard tunnel. Words were heavy and stuck to the rocks. They’d absorbed every story that had whispered from a miner’s dark-crazed tongue. And so, as Callum turned off his lamp and felt for his plot with his fingertips, he learnt of the Lady with the Lantern.
She was an angel on some days, a deliverer who had rescued men from a roof fall. The rocks whispered of her golden light held high, making the broken backs of men into moons that turned their phases as she passed. On other days, she was feared, a ghoul who hid in her own shadow, lurked in the passage drifts, stealing boys from their futures. But no man whose story Callum absorbed from the rocks was one who had seen her face. She was a glimpse of light, disappearing. A fleeting glow at a shaft head. An aurora, half-imagined by men who spent their lives in the dark.
And so, Callum came not to believe. He passed a year in the mine, then two. His soft hands became sore, then red, then leather, until his pick was part of his body and its motion the rhythm of his life. Two years became three, four. And then one day, as Callum put down the pick and listed along the drift, carrying the day’s handful of ore dust to the surface, he saw the light ahead. It struck the rock rib in a buttery splash, suggesting a form that was gown and waist and tapering neck. Then, it was gone. Callum froze, belief flooding him with gooseflesh. He touched the rock to leave the story behind. She was real. He had seen the Lady with the Lantern.
Then the years became five, then eight and ten. Other boys were called and Callum became a man. His plot was three feet deep now, and he climbed its dark wall each day to dig the ore. When he was not in the mine, he barely thought of it. Life was comfortable. Soon, he had a wife, then a son. But when he entered the portal, he thought nothing of them. There was only the ore, and the rock-soaked stories of the Lady with the Lantern. Sometimes, a month would pass without a sighting; sometimes, it was three. Between times, rock would fall, men would be lost. And always, at day beginning and end, Callum rode the lift to the portal.
One day, after twelve years, the rocks took Callum’s father when they fell. Callum was four feet down in his plot when he learnt through his fingertips. And then he was empty. For a week, he came and went at the portal, sold his ore, played with his son, every action echoing hollow around his chest. Until anger filled the void. The Lady with the Lantern could have saved him; should have. He wanted to know who she was, how she was. His fingers groped angrily at the plot walls, pulling out every story. And still, she was nothing but a light, and a flash of hair. Featureless, a blank face, always out of sight.
Eighteen years came and went, and one day, Callum found his son’s steps behind him. He wanted to speak, but they were through the portal and words flowed only through the rock. He sensed the boy learning the thing he had learned, and was powerless to stop it.
Time seemed to gather pace, one day interred in another. Callum climbed the six feet into his plot each morning. He had long ago ceased to bring a head lamp; every dusty surface as familiar as skin. But when the day was nearly gone, he saw his arm, and then his pick, slowly gathering light between the dust. He straightened and tipped his head. And she was standing above him.
He saw the lantern first, its lead-light faces breaking the light into bars. Then, the edge of her skirt, dusty and worn. His heart thundered and he reached for the rock, ready to speak her face into the stories of the mine. Instead, she shifted the lantern, and he could speak no more. She had no nose, no mouth, and her eyes were pits, empty, pale and lashless. She pointed her finger at his chest, and he saw it was bones as white as her flesh.
She spoke through her nothing mouth. The debt is paid.
Callum let down his pick. His voice came from the rock, hollow and wrong within the narrow plot. What debt?
Your father’s.
Callum thought a long time. About the ore he had mined, that his father had before. That his son did even now. All the men … the mine … and the darkness. Her light made his skin heavy; he was tired. His life only now made sense. And mine? he asked.
She swung the light forward. That is for your son.
And so, Callum laid down on the floor of his plot, as long as he was, and deep enough. He reached for the wall, but there was no time to tell of the Lady’s face. The mine shuddered, the roof came down, and the lantern was lost behind the rock.
The Ghost of Hephaestus
Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story
Shortlisted for the Ditmar Award for Best Novella or Novelette
The knock comes at midnight.
He draws himself from his crumbling books, his limbs coiled to run, his stockinged feet silent on th
e boards. The candles have burned to stubs, captive flames glittering within the hundred glass jars, trapped behind the pitch sheet in the window. He edges to the shop door, lace quivering at his wrist, his eyes falling on the false panel behind the apothecary’s mortar. Will he have time to throw the latch if it is Kelvin’s men?
But the gas-lit spy glass mirror reflects a cascade of golden hair upon the threshold.
No! It is her.
Heat from a phantom furnace flushes upon his face. He fumbles with the locks and throws the door into the frosty night. A moan catches in his chest. She slumps against the frame, her garment barely a night-slip, a soft linen cascade, ineffectual against the thick cold. She turns her eyes up, their orbits sunken, her lips blue and cracked.
Her voice is a ragged wisp of fog. “Physician. I am dying.”
He knows not who she is. She has come to him before, but always in the daylight, her hair caught under a hat, her clothes and face both fine and foreign. She has asked of him strange things. Did he stock a rendered fat for greasing cogs? Her accent had whispered around his other customers, tendrils that had made a memory of her amongst dozens. He’d pointed her to the machinists, but she had told him their stock was unclean. Purity was what she craved; every time the same. He thought her vain at first, a high lady seeking to stall the turn of the clock with potions.
But he noted how she moved. In the bend of her arm and the tilt of her head, she was smooth as grace. More keenly he watched, each time she came to move amongst his shelves. Something inhuman. Something … beautiful.
So, while the sane part of him knew she must be nothing more than an exotic woman, unfamiliar, he imagined her the embodiment of the statements that had struck him from the Society, that had made him the target of Kelvin’s men. And one day, after her gloved hand brushed his in the exchange of coins, he dreamed of her—her insides driven on gears and coils, stoked with blue fire, driven on closed circuit steam. He woke sweating, as if the steam were beside him in his bed.
As if his madness were real.
And now, she is here on his doorstep.
Trouble etches in his thoughts as he draws her inside, but he shoves the dream-maddened picture of her from his mind. He stokes the fire with her laid on the threadbare chaise. Her skin is chilled. He feels for her pulse and finds it curious: surging then shuddering with tiny thrills. Perhaps her heart? Then his eyes fall upon the yellowish bruise, a stain spreading from her gracious throat into the scooped neck of her garment. Lord, had she been struck? Is she bleeding inside?
“Lady,” he prompts, his hands on her slender shoulders, his mind searching his stocks for curative powders. “Have you fallen?” No response. “Beaten?” Nothing. “What has done this to you?”
Her lips lift then, sad, a ghost of loss. Her hands move, fluid, one final act. He moves to stop her, thinking she means to uncover herself, but the reality is a greater shock. She taps atop her collarbone, and the panel of her chest unfolds.
He falls to the floor in shock, and sees his dream incarnate.
Inside, she is not a woman of bones and blood. Her chest is caged in the dull glint of forged silver. A pump turns beneath, feeding a tangle of pipes, finger-thick to hair fine, each peristalsing in the rhythm of her pulse. Where muscle should have lain are cables of telescoping steel. His hand creeps across his mouth, as if the sight of her has not already rendered him speechless. He rests there, in dull unmoving thought, reality absorbing as slowly as water into oiled cloth.
It takes him a long time to notice the imperfections, but then come many. That there is rust, that one of the telescopes contracted and seized. Another has been removed, its neat cable replaced with a cumbersome, worn sprocket and chain. And one of the pipes is split, weeping straw-colored fluid; a leak surges with each beat of the pump. His other senses return. He sniffs, recognizing the delicate oil he has sold her before. Oil in her steel veins. The whirr and click of the pump against its silver cage. A gurgle growing louder. The struggling sound of danger.
Physician, I am dying.
He no longer knows whether he is waking or sleeping. Perhaps his head has fallen on his work desk and soon he will stir. But until that moment, he rummages in his instruments and jars. He stems the leak with sticky gum of a plum tree, then binds the break with gauze soaked in paraffin. Then gently, in the terror of unchartered territory, he cleans the internals of the slippery fluid. When he is done, she has still not woken, so his eyes fall on the worn replacement sprocket. In a fit, he dashes the internals of his mantle clock and finds a cog to match. He cuts his finger in replacing it, red blood against gold and silver. Then finally, when her pulse has not improved, he digs in a dusty drawer for his transfusion kit. He hesitates. He knows that physicians have transfused before, but it is often death. And this is not blood.
He shakes himself and sinks his needle through the chain-mail of her pipework, finer links than what his eye can see, and hangs his last bottle of oil. And his own waking never comes, as if he is not dreaming after all.
He hears the pre-dawn birds before she wakes. She draws her knees up, her chest panel closed now, the fading bruise the only sign of what has transpired. She is a woman again, but more beautiful to him now than before. A face a sculptor would render in stone, like the Elgin marbles he’s stood before in the London museum. The delicate smell of the oil hangs in the air, like the discomfort between them now. He breathes as little as possible, hoping to prolong the dream.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“As before,” she says, her fingers opening and closing. “Tired. Stiff. Failing.” The last is a whisper.
He closes his eyes, imagining it is the time to awake now, but the world persists. “I’ve dreamed of you,” he says, stupidly, as if he is courting her. “Are you real?”
Alarm flies into her face. Her eyes dart to the blackened window, as if she hears boot steps. “What did you see?”
He shakes his head. “Just … what you are.”
She swings her feet down. Her gaze falls fearfully on the door. “I must leave.”
“My lady, did someone hurt you?” he asks, a protective fire lighting in his chest. He knows what it is like to have enemies.
She levels her stare on him. “I don’t want to die.”
“But, my lady, you are machine. How will you ever die?” The words echo in his skull. He has said words like them once, to the Royal Society. To Lord Kelvin. Of marriage of man and machines. They are the words that have made him an outcast, in fear of his life. And if they knew of her … he can only wonder what she faces.
He drops his voice. “Is it Kelvin’s men after you, also?”
She springs towards the door. At the last moment, she stops. “I thank you, Physician.”
And then she is gone. He turns to his shop, upended, jars open, the air thick with oil and spice. The cog he removed rests in a slick puddle. Ponderously, he cleans it, until the surface is bright. Until he sees the marks on the metal. He pulls the pitch sheet from the window and throws the disc into the sunlight. Letters. Frantic, as though they will fade, he rummages his desk for a lens. Astonishingly small, he scans them, his mouth moving over familiar script. Greek, he is sure of it. Alpha, omega, eta. But he cannot translate it.
He stares at the mess in his shop, marks the cleaning before he can open, aware how this everyday has paled against thoughts of what wonders are being done in Greece.
A week passes, full of customers, of tinctures, of remedies and advices sought. Twice, thick men in bowler hats take turns about the shop, inspecting the jars and buying nothing. He affects an air of aloofness, watches them while explaining the administration of cod liver oil to a lady’s maid, or frowning into his mortar, but his thoughts stutter with his heart. These men smell of the docks, of dirty taverns and greasy money for intimidation. The second time such men thump their boots around his floor, a pressure reaches a limit within him. He is not a man of inaction. He throws the bolt to closed, collects his hat, and strikes out for L
ondon’s heart. He can think of only one place to go, and it is a long time since he dared.
Around carriages, beneath gas lamps, over cobbles and tortuous lanes, he strides with the small package in his fist. Melting from the evening crowds, he enters the seminary’s peace and seeks the chapel, avoiding the next door building with its hulking facade and unpleasant history. And there, in the chapel pew, as expected, he finds Terrance on his knees before God.
He waits in the back pew until Terrance rises and smiles, his hair already gray, his face soft with reverence and betraying no surprise. They fall into silent step towards the library.
“John, my friend,” says Terrance, as if they have not had many years separated by their ideals and differing views. “What have you brought me?”
John fumbles in his pocket for the packet and lens, and a moment later, Terrance is regarding the script in a manuscript light.
“It’s Greek, yes?” he asks Terrance. “Can you tell me what it says?”
Terrance frowns. “Greek, yes. I’ll need to consult my notes. Where did you get this, from some scrap?”
John frowns and avoids the question, and makes his excuses. Terrance copies the text and John escapes into the London night, the cog safe in his fingers, the secret safe in his chest.
For three days, he expects Terrance to send word, and none comes. Each day, he opens and closes the apothecary, feeling his memories of her dusting over, like abandoned furniture in a stately house. But after the fourth day’s sunset blush, when he has closed and retreated behind the pitch, a knock finally comes.
Terrance.
But, no.
He finds her on the doorstep again, dressed this time, her lip in her teeth. He holds the door open, his heart thudding in a lover’s rhythm. She drifts to the chaise, then shies as if dodging its memory. Stretches her hands to the fire. Nervous.