Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “Let’s go pay them a visit then, shall we? The tunnel runs right to the West Side Highway,” said Albion. “We’ll find out who’s caught on to your scent, and why they decided to shoot first, talk later.”

  “I doubt these things can talk,” said Rosa. She toed the spider, which burbled a new slurry of gritty reddish gunk. “There’s no room for a person in there. Can we get this off the deck now? It smells like old death.”

  “Yes, yes. Come on; let’s be on our way before that last one gets back,” said Albion.

  “And here I forgot my calling-on dress,” said Hargreaves, grinning. Finally, it felt like they were getting somewhere. It was good to be with her pirates again.

  Arturo arrived at Five Corners, found the fenced-off tunnel entrance, and came face to face with a clacking horror that emerged bleeding and scrabbling out of a manhole.

  “Whoa, bollocks!” he said, but he kept his wits about him.

  As soon as the spider emerged, he drew a Webley British Bull Dog revolver and shot the thing in the mouth. The gun had come to him through his mother’s inheritance. It had shared the closet with the whips and the masks. It had spent the majority of his crime-solving career in the same box but after being stabbed, the Dog seemed a prudent measure. Arturo hadn’t wondered for a second why his mother had it. She was just that type of woman.

  The Dog barked harshly, sending an enormous .450 slug through the gear’s glass eyeball. It rattled around inside the head like it was a tin can full of jam. Arturo couldn’t have said why he felt menaced by the contraption until just then, because the articulated arachnid whirled upon him, its jaws dripping a dark, gritty substance. Arturo fired upon it again.

  Sparks ricocheted off the gear’s rivets. He could see it had already lost a leg, cleaved by some tremendous force. By chance, his final shot cut through a cable or a linkage. One of the other legs snapped inward as if sprung, clutching to the body as if epileptic. The gear emitted a terrible rasp, as of a thousand cicadas dying.

  “Adler! Boy!” Cid’s booming voice carried strongly from down the street. The spidery gear stopped, as if it was thinking. Surely that was impossible—there was no room for a person in there. Then it scuttled away, leaving a trail of tiny gears and oily wine-red droplets.

  “Sacré bleu! Qu’est ce que ce?!” Cezette’s voice echoed across the street. She had come much closer on her quick ballerina feet. From her vantage point it was possible to see where the spider was going. Hallow stood beside her, seemingly unfazed by the whole situation.

  “There’s no time to lose! Follow that… that abomination!” called Arturo.

  “What? What is going on?” asked Cezette, confused. Her arms flailed prettily as her knees wound to a clockworked halt.

  Arturo exhaled, watching his breath mist slightly on the brisk fall air. The Brooklyn Bridge hung sedately over his head, its bricks cast in orange gold by the fading sun. The spider was scuttling northwest, untouched by the shadow of the Bridge. Soon it disappeared, clattering into the alleys of Five Corners. But its trail was distinct against the asphaltum.

  “The game is afoot!” cried Arturo, dashing towards their rattle-can cab.

  Captain Clemens took the ship through the tunnels, and, as promised, they fed out on the West Side under the tail end of the airship moorages. Hargreaves thought it was dangerous until she realized the multitude of passenger ships served to disguise the Huckleberry. Their shapes cast huge, bulbous shadows. The Berry was a needle in a haystack so long as Rosa flew the ship like they belonged there. They took refuge under one of the larger cruise gondolas. With some convincing, Elric Blair agreed to take charge, flying circles as lookout.

  Application of Dragonwell with its hands cupped and a discrete landing in a bit of raised parkland allowed Hargreaves, Rosa, and Albion to alight onto the street. It was difficult to discern the location of Rosso’s until Hargreaves harrumphed, walked into a delicatessen, and got the address. Apparently neither pirate had the good sense to simply ask the natives.

  “Usually somebody has heard of us,” admitted Rosa. “They have wanted posters up in the bars and rope under the counter.”

  “Granted, the towns we usually stop in are prone to piracy,” added Albion. “And our faces are not well known. But America has a no-tolerance policy for us. It’s the gibbet if we’re caught.”

  “More likely shot,” said Rosa. “This is America.”

  She should know. Rosa was American, as far as Hargreaves could figure. The mocha-dark vixen had the strong brow of the American Indians, but there was an almost French cast to her nose that made her striking to look at. Hargreaves knew better than to judge a person by appearances, especially a friend she had flown with for so long. She was always cautious of that; the imperial conceit of the English was strong with Hargreaves. But culture was another matter. Rosa was certainly boisterous enough to be American, though her passions would put an Italian to shame.

  “Come on. The address is here,” said Hargreaves.

  Rosso’s was a barely marked cinder building with clockworks sprouting out the back of it. Hargreaves recognized cooling apparatus, probably for the meat storage inside. The building next door was much more imposing, a slate-gray block with a coffee shop under it. One of its large arched windows was blocked off with fresh wood planks. The pair of buildings backed up to a long pressboard fence that was starting to rot. Train tracks could be glimpsed through the holes, and Hargreaves caught the impression of some enormous locomotive gleaming a brushed silver color. Even passing by in a fleeting moment, the angled surfaces and spiraling shafts seemed ominous. She didn’t recognize the model of the engine.

  Later, resting in her little room, she would bolt upright and realize the train had been the color of meat grinders.

  But for now, Hargreaves examined Rosso’s in great detail. It was a utilitarian building that showed the marks of constant use. The floor was slick and gross with a layer of fat that could only be spilled viscera. The accumulation of years washed like a tide up to a raised loading dock. One of them was open to the train tracks on the other side of the building. They could see right through to a number of drums on the platform there.

  “It looks like they’re busy loading the train,” said Albion, who had always been the keenest of their eyes. He was right—a number of shadowed figures were loading the drums by the pallet into a box car.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything here,” said Rosa.

  Now Hargreaves knew how Arturo felt when he explained things. Hargreaves could see a thousand clues, the gritty red of something that wasn’t offal or animal blood, for example. The scrapes of the building’s doorways, signs of sharp metal that had gouged them moving in and out. A patch of softer wood flooring bore the marks of things that had been dragged into the dock scrabbling and fighting. The shapes loading the box car were not human. Their limbs seemed like large, monstrous copies of Cezette’s legs. Light winked through gaps in them.

  “This way,” the inspector said, mostly to avoid sounding trite. Or to avoid throwing up as she passed a fingernail that had been lodged into the flooring.

  They rounded Rosso’s and Hargreaves found a fresher trail of gritty, oily droplets. They led to a rusty side door. Rosa picked it with a slim pair of stilettos, one flexible, one not. It swung inward to a moist, warm corridor. The lights were off.

  “Allons-y,” muttered Hargreaves as they stepped into the darkness.

  And held her breath as a sneeze threatened to expose their position.

  “Ha… ha….” Then, as a strangled sort of squeak, “Chu!”

  “Shh!” said Rosa, mostly to take the piss.

  Hargreaves held her nose from the dust that had been kicked up by their entry. The corridor was a sort of servant’s entrance that ran between the loading dock and the strange, unmarked building that had the boarded-up café in it. On one side, Rosso’s was lit by the open train platform, though it was still dark. Apparently the workers, whatever they were, needed no lighting. />
  The building at the other end of the corridor was lit with Tesla bulbs. A gritty red trail on the floor led through a set of double doors. The whole place had a clinical feel to it, from the green wash of the walls to the tile of the flooring, and it had a feeling of disuse. Like a real spider, their quarry had left no fingerprint when it had come this way, not even disturbing the piles of boxes and canisters piled into the space. Hargreaves, careful inspector she was, had still kicked up clouds of dust. But it had surely come this way. The trail was clear and fresh.

  “Let’s not go looking for trouble,” said Rosa, nodding towards the train loading dock. How perfectly pirate of her, Albion seemed to be interested in the mechanicals, but he wasn’t fool enough to provoke the bear. They watched from the safety of the corridor as a pallet of heavy barrels lifted from the floor with little effort.

  “I should like to know how they followed me to my ship,” said Albion, “and I have a feeling getting thrown around like a rag doll wouldn’t be very informative.”

  “Someone sent the spider automata,” said Hargreaves. “Look. There’s dust on these shelves. And those loaders are well practiced. And that train! I’ve never seen its like. Whoever they are, they’ve been in this city a long time, and they are well established. They were sent not for you, but for me.” It was a tenuous connection, but Hargreaves the detective was falling silent to Hargreaves the paranoid. She felt quite sure the latter had her favor.

  “How have we never seen hide or hair of them?” said Rosa.

  Albion began looking through some of the debris. It was innocuous, and when they opened a box they found more of the canisters, which turned out to be Rosso’s Tin Pork. There was a variety of flavors. Hargreaves gestured, and they slowly made their way through the double doors, to find a set of stairs leading up to a sort of storage warehouse hallway. Shuttered spaces lined cinder walls. They followed the trail deeper into the building.

  “We’re the seedy underbelly of the city,” Rosa whispered as they passed the quiet shutters. “How come we’ve never heard of these spider things before?”

  “We have,” said Albion now, indicating the plain walls. “What do you notice?”

  “What does it matter?” said Rosa, clearly annoyed.

  “They’re clean,” said Hargreaves, who had noticed from the start. She had felt it as keenly as she felt the oppression in the Bowery. “No grafitti. No gang signs, no scratches. There are signs on every other building but nothing on these two.”

  They continued past two more shutters, each large enough to drive a steamer through. By some arbitrary sign Hargreaves did not see, Albion paused near one of them and bent low. There was a low scratching sound in the deserted hallway. Albion finished picking the lock and raised the shutter quietly on oiled pulleys. It was a room mostly taken up with a large, cold machine and a small pyramid of sealed drums. There was a large canvas hopper suspended over it.

  “I’ve heard stories,” said Albion as he held out his hand. Rosa slipped a knife out of her bustier and put it into his hand. “Of people being snatched off the streets, disappearing into the night. Of the Strangers in the Alleyways. Don’t go talking to Strangers. They eat the wicked.”

  Albion drew the blade across the canvas. The steel was sharp, the blade flexible. It opened a slit in the fabric, and what was in the canvas came tumbling out. They came easy, sliding out of the wet inside of the canvas as if the hopper were a stomach that had been cut.

  Hargreaves covered her mouth. Rosa looked away.

  The floor was covered in grubby, dirty bodies. None of them would have stood taller than Hargreaves’ chest. And that was when the clacking sounds in the hallway reached their ears, accompanied by a dreadful moan that spiraled down to the pit of Hargreaves’ stomach.

  “Lots of urban legends in New York,” said Albion as he drew Victoria, his black Colt pistol. “Who knew this one was true?”

  “C’est insupportable!” cried Cezette. She leaned out the cab window and threw a ball of wadded-up papers at Arturo. The ball disintegrated as it flew, swallowing the detective in a cloud of old parking tickets and handwritten receipts. “We are crawling like ants while Maman may be in danger! Allez! On y va maintenant!” Cezette’s accent grew thicker and higher pitched as she spoke. She found herself constantly flailing her neck about, looking for the garnet drops of the trail Arturo picked out where Cezette saw only a busy metropolis.

  “Well, you shall just have to bear it. Detection is as much art as science,” said Arturo, sweeping the papers aside with the same hand that held his magnifying monocle out. Scraps caught on the art deco of Manhattan, swirling in the updraft to drape amongst the glitz of the tall buildings. “Besides, this is not Hargreaves’ blood. This is not even blood… not just blood, anyway.” Arturo paused, then abruptly darted into an alleyway.

  “Arturo! Merde! J’en ai ral le cul! Merde, merde, merde!”

  “Language, Cezzy,” said Jean Hallow from the backseat, and Cezette poked her head back in to glare at the pinstriped tutor. How could he be so calm? But Hallow had his eyes closed and his hands folded, proving such an example of calm reserve that Cezette stopped cursing.

  Cid, who was driving the borrowed cab, waited until the detective’s spiky coif appeared on a fire escape. Other engines honked their displeasure, expelling steam through grubby tubes in the sides of their vehicles. But Cid paid them no mind, and the rest of M.A.D. followed slowly as the figure of Arturo traversed a few blocks of city, before dropping down into the lower neighborhoods in the west. Various signs advertised active butchers and the slick, dark loading docks of meat purveyors. Strangely, those spots were interspersed with the shadowy chic of nightclubs just opening for business. As the cab clacked onto rough cobbles and old wood roads, Jean opened his eyes.

  “Ugh,” he murmured as a clutch of women trooped past on the cobblestones. “My dear, that is far too much.”

  Even in the brisk cool of the docks on the west, they were dressed in thigh-length skirts, their petticoats on display. A couple had bodices with a large window cut in the front. All of them had the stork-like gait of high heels on cobbles. Cezette was familiar with the concept of ladies of the evening. But she was perceptive enough to see they paid little mind to the well-dressed men passing them. Those ladies were here to buy, not to sell. Apparently more than one kind of meat was available, here in the meatpacking district.

  The cab jerked to a halt and Cezette almost cursed again. Then she saw Arturo standing there in the cobbles, looking down the street to their right. He was motionless, peering, and his monocle dangled to one side. Cezette opened the cab door and rushed towards him. Her heels clicked, but in a couple of steps the fabulous mechanical legs had adjusted to the uneven cobbles. She was about to clobber the silly toff on the head, only to pause herself as a chill swept down her back, shuddering her hips in their lacquered harnesses. Memories she had kept pushed deep down arose unbidden, threatening to upend her. Memories of closed spaces, of stone crumbling to dust in her fingers, of being a terrible titan amongst insects. But her legs were iron, and they held.

  A long stretch of railroad yard separated them from the water. Just behind the fence of the yards clustered terrible arachnid shapes backlit by the dying sunset. Each of the clacking eight-legged forms seemed like sewing spindles comes to life, or four of the high-heeled women glued together and submitted to a perverse stretching. There had to be a dozen of them whirring and snapping with the sounds of tensed cables. But what terrified Cezette most of all was the hulking shape they surrounded, which appeared for a second as a rounded hillock, then disappeared into the earth. It appeared once again, and that was when Cezette realized there was a deep putain ditch in the freaking ground, and that there was a huge something walking around inside it.

  “Here we are,” said Arturo. “They’re going to check their webs, and dear Vanessa Hargreaves is caught on a thread.”

  “What a lovely danse macabre,” said Jean Hallow as he strode up. They watched a
s the long, needle-like shadows touched down, casting a curtain of patterns in the orange-purple of twilight.

  “And by the looks of things, the party’s going to start any minute,” finished Cezette. She took off at a run, her own shapely legs joining the regular ballet of shapes blocking the sun.

  The moans reached their ears almost as soon as Albion’s words dropped into the quiet room, and the lights went out at the same instant. Hargreaves heard the clickety-clack of spidery metal limbs striking tile. Shuffling ghouls these were not. Neither were the sounds a pure twang and whirr of steam-powered automata. What monstrous creatures had caught their scent? Then came the scrape of sharp things against metal shutters. They were right outside the room!

  “Quickly!” hissed Rosa, and ducked behind the pile of canisters.

  Albion slipped behind a tall cabinet, which seemed to be a tool locker of some kind. Hargreaves slid behind the huge machine in the center of the room, and almost retched. From this angle it was very clearly a steam-powered grinder. Chrome gleamed on its surface, and the worm screw looked freshly cleaned, but the smell so close to the hopper was still overpowering. It was also cold enough to make her gasp as her side pressed into the bare metal of the hopper’s frame. She covered her mouth.

  “Shh!” said Albion.

  Hargreaves shot him a dark look. Why, oh, why hadn’t she insisted on Dragonwell’s presence?

  There was a moment of quiet in the room as the sounds of movement ceased, be it from the hunters or the hunted. Moonlight slanted in as a white knife from the eastern window, cutting the room in half. Hargreaves could see motes of dust in it. She held her breath, expecting the tiny dust particles to swarm and betray her. The smell was unbearable. The moment lingered longer than it was welcome. Shadows crept across the room. Hargreaves could see the thing come closer, a daddy-long-legs shadow that was far too thin to be human. She tightened her grip on her .22 Tranter, its tiny rimfire cartridges not as comforting as she’d hoped. Something dribbled upon the floor with wet splashes, and the umber shape took another step into the room.