Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  That was when Captain Albion Clemens made his move. In two long strides he emerged from behind the tool locker and fired two bursts into the shadow’s back.

  “HUWARRRRR!” roared whatever it was. It wasn’t simply a feral cry of pain but something mechanical also, rasping deep within an infernal organ. Hargreaves was ready, and she had taken a step out and fired before she registered the nightmare in the middle of the room. It was eight-limbed, like the gear that had attacked them before, but the thing in the middle of those machined the meat grinder to shame. An empty soul peered from lidless eyes trapped within a tangle of hoses and finely wrought steel. Limbless porcelain stumps glimmered from the gleaming embroidery, and teeth grinned from behind snapping pincers.

  There was a child strapped into the gear’s frame.

  “No… no!” screamed Hargreaves, emptying her gun into the abomination’s center. Great gobs of sloppy viscera fell from the holes, drifting through the moonlight to land with a splat upon the killing floor. Somehow she thought of Cezette Louissaint. And of ‘Rose Cottage,’ the nickname Nessie Drake had once called Rosa Marija. Why did she think of that? Even as the screaming, whirring monstrosity fell to the ground, Hargreaves could not help but wonder. Was this the true form of the thing in the Cook box? Was it somehow the malevolent will of those who had crafted this poor creature that had created the plague strapped to Hargreaves’ back?

  “Come on!” said Albion, stepping over the twitching legs and wresting Hargreaves’ arm forward.

  Hargreaves discovered she was not in fact held down by a great metal coffin, and she could move after all. Rosa’s skirts swirled in her periphery, following Albion to the hall. Just outside the shutters, there was a crash as another sharp armature crashed down, aiming to gouge out Albion’s innards. At the last second he rolled out of the way, and the arm struck bright sparks as it punctured one of the great drums. Even as a sickening slop rolled out of the drum, the flash illuminated a multitude of bright lacework steel and the quiet grin of teeth that had lips no longer.

  “This way!” said Albion, and they lunged down the corridor, away from the clacking of claws and the teeth in the darkness.

  “Oh, God!” came a cry, and the two of them turned to behold Rosa Marija frozen in the hallway—with one of the monstrosities descending upon her, its limbs upraised to plunge through her breast and into her heart.

  “Rosa!” screamed Albion, and through his hoarse voice Victoria barked two sharp reports. The limb shattered in a rain of bright sparks, lighting up the lions and tigers and bears hiding in the nightmare of night. Albion ran back, sliding to catch Rosa as she crumpled to the ground.

  “The church! The children! Oh, I’m so sorry!” Rosa sputtered uncontrollably.

  “Rosa! Rosa! It’s all right! It wasn’t your fault!” cried Albion.

  He lifted a hand, whether to caress or to strike, Hargreaves did not know. But whatever it was, it changed into a plunge for the inside of his coat as Albion drew his pirate’s cutlass, lashing out against the sharp limb descending upon the two of them. Even as Albion’s cutlass bit into the monstrous creature, Rosa’s grief and madness had already begun to change.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. With that Rosa leapt upon the nearest of the monstrosities, her cream skirt whirling into a cloud of death. Her hands disappeared into the depths of the cloth, and when they reappeared they were already driving a knife in each hand deep within the guts of the… creature? Machine? It screamed, anyway, and the same sickening liquid gushed from its innards. Hargreaves glimpsed Rosa as she pitched with the monstrosity, and saw a different gleam come upon her brow. Her eyes were lost deep within a furrow of fury.

  “Go!” cried Albion. He dashed the creature aside, then drove his blade deep into a different part of its anatomy. “While we have these things distracted! Find what truth is here, or all this will have been a waste. I’ll get Rosa out!”

  “You melodramatic knob!” cried Hargreaves.

  Albion was hardly paying any attention. There were at least three of the sickening spidery creatures, and now Hargreaves could see them in the flashes of light, they made her still sicker. One of them was bending low, and she thought she saw it reaching to lap up the spilled contents of the ruptured drum in the grinder room.

  Hargreaves nodded towards Albion, turned, and fled down the hallway. As she did she glimpsed boxes behind the opened shutters. Boxes made of riveted metal, with a heavy smoke pouring from them. Boxes that were at once terribly familiar and chilling to the bone. They looked, each of them, exactly like the Cook box in Alphonse’s care.

  As she ran, Hargreaves reloaded her Tranter with shaking hands. The bullets clattered to the ground as they missed the chamber, but she had two loaded when another of the monstrosities ripped its way out of a shuttered room just before her. Hargreaves steeled herself. She looked directly into its bright teeth and shot them out in tight formation. The wall was plastered with its thoughts, whatever thoughts it might have had.

  But a second one was just behind it, so Hargreaves tore the pin off the last potato masher she had brought all the way from merry England, hi-ho jolly pip, here’s a gift from old John Bull, may you use it in ill health. It lobbed through the air like a ridiculous jester’s baton, end-over-end, and stuck in the monstrosity’s elaborate rib cage like a flower in a button hole. The mandibles clicked twice. The child inside turned to look at the sudden appearance, an expression coming over the ruined cheeks as if it hadn’t seen a toy in years. Then there was a click.

  When it exploded, the bloody thing nearly took Hargreaves’ head off.

  “Damn! Bloody Nora!” shouted Hargreaves as loud as she could, because she couldn’t rightly hear and she was afraid she’d lost it for good in her right ear.

  She had thrown herself behind the first spider thing and the shrapnel had largely missed her. The shock seemed much larger though, as if the monstrosities were packed full of black powder. It had thrown her completely off her feet and into a cart full of dirty rags.

  But she could still walk. So she picked her way through the wreckage, trying only to step on the dry bits and avoiding the wet ones gleaming in the traces of moonlight. She coughed. Then she retched, as she tasted the rubbish that had gone down her throat. It was a dry heave that tasted of bile. Hargreaves spat it out and kept going. She felt her breath returning in a reeking rush.

  But at the very least, as Hargreaves stumbled through the rooms, she had figured out two things. Firstly, whatever these abominations were, they were under orders not to harm her. She had gotten close enough and hesitated long enough to be killed outright. So they were after her, or the box, or both. Secondly, whatever they had been doing to the people in this building, it was done. Finished. The rest of the rooms were cleared out, and the pallets stood lonely. Empty. There was another exit on the other side of the corridor, and Hargreaves plunged through those double doors to find herself on another train platform,

  “What? Bugger,” said Hargreaves, casting her eyes around.

  For a moment, she was completely confused. When she had first come in, she had glimpsed the train’s engine on the other side of the building. But now, she stood on an emptied cargo platform, looking at an identical engine steaming up the place with huge clouds of steam. Close up, the engine was enormous--clods of chromed muscle, cowcatchers that could make mince of whole herds, and smokestacks that breathed fire, like dragons out of myth. The bloody wheels were the height of Hargreaves herself. There was a mirrored window just ahead, in what looked to be a station master’s office. In the reflection, she thought she saw the head of the train as an incredibly angry skull.

  Before Hargreaves could make heads or tails of it, there was an equally enormous clunk and a blast of steam vented out of the engine’s flanks, knocking the inspector over once again. Having just had a go at this merry-go-round and not liked it one bit, Hargreaves took the tumble badly. She did, however, survive, rolling over her shoulder and avoiding the sharp stays of her corsetry.


  The opposite edge of the platform arrived with alarming swiftness. Hargreaves tried desperately to stay away from it, fighting the numerous cuts and bruises that now covered her body. But that body was sliding towards the gap with the force of the steam. Mind the gap! Some insane twaddle forced itself through her mind, looking for its partner in sense.

  Hargreaves felt her hand clasp for a moment upon the leg of a bench. Fighting every burning fiber of muscle in her arms, she locked her fingers around it, praying her bones would hold. The heels of her pretty boots dangled over the precipice, and that was when Hargreaves realized she was high up over tracks suspended on a trellis over the street. Only a bit of wood and empty space stood between her and a five-story fall to the hard cobble. Unlike with a passenger platform, a fall off this station would surely kill her.

  “Mind the sodding gap indeed!” cried Hargreaves. That profanity helped force her painful arms back to the task of pulling herself back to her feet.

  By the time she did, the train had itself a head of steam, and was rolling its way out of the station. Desperately, Hargreaves aimed her Tranter and pulled the trigger, only to hear the hammer clacking furiously against six empty chambers.

  “Arghh!” screamed Hargreaves.

  The inspector took off at a run after the implacable wall of boxcars. Her breath came like fire. Tracking the adamant nut to America, for nothing. Infiltrating a notorious gunrunner’s lair in a foxy dress, for nothing. Enduring an assault by abominations in stinking sewer and reeking cannery. For nothing? The thought was frankly odious to stomach.

  “Hey! Hargreaves! Inspector!”

  “Hargreaves! Vanessa!”

  The sharp pain of Rosa’s palm across her cheeks woke Hargreaves from her raging stupor. When she came to, Hargreaves realized she had reached the end of the platform. She was standing there screaming at the passing boxcars.

  “We have to go!” said Rosa.

  Albion’s gun let off a trio of loud reports. Hargreaves turned to see two of the spidery automata leaping off the passing train, landing on the platform with the tinny clanks of their sharp feet. Victoria’s bullets clattered off of their carapaces; these weren’t half-made things like the children in the cannery.

  “It’s time to exercise the better part of valor,” said Albion. He made to run off the edge of the platform, only to be stopped by Hargreaves as he almost pitched leg-first over the edge.

  “What are you doing?” she admonished.

  “There’s a bloody ladder there!” said Albion. And there was, a long maintenance access that ran to the ground. But it was exposed to the elements, nothing more than a series of bars set in the trellis iron.

  “You think those things can’t climb?” cried Rosa. A flurry of strange hisses, pops, and sizzles accompanied her voice: her plethora of trick knives doing their best to distract their pursuers. “We’ll be sitting ducks!”

  “The train!” said Hargreaves desperately. “We board the train!” The line of cars was surely almost at an end, and with its passing went the truth. Why were they hunting and processing people wholesale? For these sinew and spring monsters? Did the Cook plague make them? For Queen and Country, she had to know!

  But the moment passed, and the grinning skull of the train’s second engine passed her by. Hargreaves straightened up from the cliff face of the platform. Something in the shadows snarled, producing an ominous hiss and a smell of burnt wire. The darkness was slowly encroaching, but it wasn’t just the coming of night. Something enormous was slowly making its way towards them. The ground shook in a strange, eight-beat rumble. This one left footprints.

  Vanessa Hargreaves took one look down the length of the tracks, slowly reloading her .22 with steady hands. She took one step forward, planting her shapely thigh firmly in a Yard shooting stance.

  There were monsters here before her. And now her way to the truth was through them.

  12

  Arachnophobia

  “Well. I suppose the inspector has found some help,” said Arturo.

  He couldn’t help but follow the path of the Huckleberry as it swooped down, pausing in the midst of the ruckus, and flew up again.

  “Look at the engineering,” said Hallow.

  “There’s my girl,” said Cid. An enormous shape blotted out the starlight of New Jersey across the river as something the size of a house lashed out at the airship. The Berry’s lights wobbled like an ornament batted by a cat. Then it righted itself, doused its lamps, and disappeared towards the west.

  “Merde,” said Cezette simply. Then, “Maman! Maman!” But the efforts were for naught.

  A moment later, the shadow presumably followed as it disappeared as well. Then the earth shook momentarily, and from that Arturo deduced the chase had gone underground. If he was feeling optimistic, he might have admitted to seeing the distinctively well-turned outline of Vanessa Hargreaves’ shapely form and her leonine mane clinging to the rails of the Huckleberry.

  “The girl always loved her dusters,” Arturo attempted to convince himself.

  After Arturo and the rest of M.A.D. saw the shadows of spiders in the tracks, they had walked through the meatpacking district, trying to discern the spiders’ destination. It was getting a little later, and more of the well-dressed people were showing up in the area. The butchers were closing and the other sort of flesh sale was happening on street corners. Cid, the protective uncle, tossed Cezette his coat to cover up. Cezette’s long raven hair, form-fitting black pinafore and dense petticoats hid her age from the casual eye. But it was hard to know what Cid was protecting more, Cezette’s honor or the perfectly formed clockwork legs under her, slotted into black leggings.

  It wasn’t always possible to separate the predators and the prey, but Arturo’s eye for detail caught the subtly expensive shoes and the more conservative cut of the gold diggers’ bodice. Possibly to sort out the chaff, the nondescript doors of secret clubs deployed large burly men in waistcoats and rolled-up shirtsleeves. Hallow whistled as they passed one.

  “Lay off,” said Arturo, but he didn’t like the look he got back. “We haven’t time for treats. There’s the inspector’s life at stake.”

  “You think so?” replied Hallow, at the same time as Cid’s empathic harrumph.

  “Absolutely,” Arturo said. “Our mystery benefactor, ‘I,’ wanted us to follow. They clearly thought these arachnid villains up to no good. I would bet you thirty pounds Vanessa Hargreaves and the Cook box were hiding in Five Corners.”

  Arturo’s hunch had borne out rightly, for as they came upon Rosso’s and the adjacent building, all the lights suddenly went dark in them.

  “Oh, no!” Arturo had cried, and they ran towards it even as shots rang out and flashes of light escaped its windows. With his eye for detail, Arturo had noted the subtle mismatch in elevation, and that the building concealed the deep pit of the rail yard behind it. He couldn’t shake the image of the enormous shadow M.A.D. had glimpsed just before.

  That was when the Huckleberry had come into view, its lights setting the club goers in the district to whooping and hollering. It had rescued Vanessa Hargreaves, or so Arturo dearly hoped. He looked down a long avenue as the rumbling passed them by, traveling along unseen channels in the bowels of the city.

  “I suppose New York’s subway system could use the odd cleaning,” said Hallow.

  A manhole popped a long ways away, and a couple of cars sank into the street.

  On the streets of Manhattan, Grant Sullivan was walking widdershins around First Avenue when the ground dropped out from under his feet.

  He wasn’t drunk in the middle of the afternoon, nor had he been to an opium den. He was loaded down with shopping bags, mulling over how to inform his girlfriend Maddie he had no way of paying for these things on his overdrawn line of credit. The transactions went through the telegraph, of course, but the charges wouldn’t add up until the next business day. One day was not enough for a man of Sullivan’s means to escape the collection agents.r />
  He would have been glad to know the fall wouldn’t kill him, but it would be enough to mount a lawsuit on the City of New York and throw off the loan agents in the interim. The resulting settlement would be enough to pay off his debt several times over. It was just as well. There was no way Maddie would continue to see a man with one leg, anyhow. She liked a man who could stand up for her in a pinch.

  In a teashop on a corner of Alphabet City, Thompson Wong had just sat down for a rare treat. He hadn’t expected to find such a rare tea in a western teashop, let alone in a tiny basement shop like this one. The aroma of cliff-grown oolong wafted into his nostrils, filling the newly arrived immigrant with reminiscence and nostalgia.

  It was a shame about the clientele, though. The woman at the counter was raising hell, and all about nothing. One look told Thompson everything he needed to know: the expensive clothes, the thick mask of makeup, the reek of perfume barely covering an unwashed, rude smell. Thompson knew entitlement when he saw it.

  “What do you mean I can’t use your bathroom? Where am I supposed to go?”

  Thompson was considering telling her to find a jar, when the bottom of the shop fell out and took the screeching banshee with it. It was a strange thing, to see the clean tiles of the place suddenly give way to a neat, square pit. The smell of tea was suddenly replaced by the rank odor of sewage. The shopkeeper looked on in horror, until her fine aquiline face scrunched up with the smell of it.

  “Ah. Well, I guess she can go down there,” Thompson remarked blithely in Mandarin, and took his teapot out into the shop’s garden.

  Two blocks over, a Jewish family of four had just sat down in their sunny front parlor for a simple lunch of lox and bagels. Little Nathan Wiseman had just put his fork to the plate when the plate, knife, and table simply vanished down a hole in the middle of the parlor. The last things he saw were the tips of the unlit candles as they sank into the hole.