by Unknown
Ghosts, Gears, & Grimoires
Edited by
Rie Sheridan Rose
Mocha Memoirs Press
Charlotte, North Carolina
Table of Contents
Here, Where Our Blood Spilt - Eric Del Carlo
Death In The Witch House - John Lance
The Horrors Of War - Stephen Sanders
Last Dance With Mary Jane - Wynelda Ann Deaver
Engineered Deceit - Amy Braun
Purchase And Possess - Stephen Blake
Through The Darkness Of The Opera House - DJ Tyrer
A Few Days In Kansas, 1881 - Jim Reader
The Express - Jason Gilbert
Honeymoon In A Jar - Robert Perret
Footless - Ross Baxter
Steel And Steam - Andrew Knighton
Better Left Buried - Tc Phillips
Restless Spirit - Rie Sheridan Rose
Muzzling The Monster - Leigh Ward-Smith
The Light Over Birmingham - Mattia Ravasi
About The Authors
Copyright
Here, Where Our Blood Spilt
Eric Del Carlo
Bloody tourists. More every year, and now an increasingly curious lot.
Valentine didn’t know what to make of the youngsters with the freakishly-hued hair. That was not natural. Locks colored the orange of molten metal, the searing crimson of sunset—and blue! Blue hair, for love of all the saints. And how scruffy the rascals were, how ill-behaved. Sneering. Jeering. Obviously they had no interest in this historic beach, where General Alexander MacDougall had stood against the British in the American-English Steam War.
The youngsters called themselves “hooligans,” as if this were something of which to be proud. Valentine did his best to ignore their poor manners. He had been leading tour groups onto this beach for eighteen years. He should be grateful for his livelihood.
Today, on this windswept afternoon, he was particularly grateful of the repetition which came from those years. Words repeated so oft they were etched in his mind; he need only to nudge them into motion and they would spill from his mouth. The familiar speech, identical pauses, the same emphases and bits of tasteful ribaldry sprinkled throughout. In that sense he was like an automaton, only powered by coursing blood instead of expanding steam.
He wore American military apparel...or an approximation of it. These were not the fabrics worn by General MacDougall and his brave ilk. Valentine’s “uniform” was much lighter. It was equipped with clasp lockers rather than buttons. The clothing was a fake. So be it.
This batch of twenty-five tourists had come straightaway from the Manhattan Alighting Station. A three-day wheeze across the Atlantic from Southampton by billowship, touchdown on the island, a walk through the gauntlet of vendors aggressively hawking gimcracks, then onto the launch and over here. Little wonder most of the company—the hooligans aside—appeared glassy-eyed and dazed. But a visit to this beach was a part of the furiously-paced tourist itinerary.
Besides the young ruffians with the outlandish hair and the penchant, he noticed now, for sailors’ earrings and tattoos; besides the proper ladies and the more adventurous older ones who gazed at everything through field glasses and gasped with monotonous delight; besides the working class families enjoying Britain’s economic boom by spending half a year’s wages on this air voyage; besides the identifiable types who came on these tours...there was one other. Valentine took note of this man. He, truly, was something uncommon.
Especially these days, so many years now since the Steam War...
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” Valentine said in his strong clear voice. He drew their eyes, there on the dock. The launch knocked softly against the pilings, its pilot already dozing in his seat.
The hooligans were rolling their eyes and making snide comments to each other as Valentine started his spiel, leading the group along the quay. The salt-stung on-shore breeze blew about his dark hair and tugged on his quaint Steam War regalia. The Manhattan Alighting Station had made the region an international destination, and here people were accustomed to all sorts of pigments, accents and customs. But a few of this all-English lot eyed his skin tone with tactless curiosity. He didn’t acknowledge such stares.
But he was aware, sharply, of the whirring and sighing of that particular man’s contraption, the wheelchair into which he was fixed. It was a motivated apparatus, with its own compact boiler and tubes breathing with steam. Steam was that ubiquitous means of impulsion, the driver of so much modern machinery. In part, steam had brought about Emancipation, making redundant the costly slaves who had populated so many Southern fields. Valentine’s generation was free because of that industrial science.
Really, though, that was all on his mother’s side. His father was a white Bostonian, who had, at a very young age, served in the American-English Steam War. And who had told Valentine stories as a boy, thus instilling an interest in history.
This man, however, this ancient creature in the wheeled chair—he must have served as an adult, perhaps even in the capacity of an officer. The military decorations pinned to his jacket attested to that service.
Like the others, he too was eyeing Valentine with unseemly attention; but it was not, Valentine realized after a moment, the distinctive mix of his flesh tones which drew the sunken baleful eyes. The old British adventurer was gazing at Valentine’s uniform.
Valentine spoke of General MacDougall, providing the biographical details, just a quick sketch to humanize the man. It was important to do more than recite dry historical facts. MacDougall had come to America as a lad, from Scotland. He had been a delivery boy in New York, driving his little steam wagon.
None of this impressed the hooligans. One of the imperious proper ladies quite curtly shushed the youngsters, which only escalated their jibes. Valentine worked through the distraction. This wasn’t his first rowdy bunch of tourists.
He remained acutely aware of the man in the wheelchair. It wasn’t just age which had confined him to it, evidently. His upper body appeared mostly paralyzed. He seemed to be operating the wheeled contrivance by selectively straining his neck muscles. This action apparently set the chair in motion or stopped or turned it. Really, it was something of a mechanical wonder. The man had no nurse in attendance, which Valentine found surprising.
The dock gave onto a planked walkway, one which curved out, following the crescent of the beach. By now Valentine was describing the eve of battle, the preparations of the American forces, the desperate need for fresh military intelligence. The British were expected to arrive in battle suits, those formidable ensembles of armor and armaments, worn like the mail of knights of yore. The American army was equipped with no such equivalent.
Valentine painted the picture with his scripted words, refined over the years for best effect. He told his listeners of MacDougall’s troops, clad only in their cloth uniforms, awaiting the armored landing of the enemy. He quoted MacDougall’s own wartime diary: “We are as naked in this night.”
Amazingly, his group of travelers were listening now, even the ones with the scandalous hair colorings. Valentine led them on, weaving the tale, bringing them up to the battle itself.
At this point, they were at the furthest outward bend of the walkway, which eventually terminated at a gift shop, where these beleaguered wayfarers would be hawked still more semi-useless goods. Although, Valentine conceded, there was an item or two of genuine value at the store, including a handsome volume explicating this very battle, to which he himself had contributed a few words.
A monument was erected here, a bronze life-sized statue of MacDougall. The plaque was inscribed with a soaring tribute. None could fail to recognize the valor of this man, who had
stood against withering odds.
Valentine posed beside this likeness, subtly adopting the general’s stance, just as he always did. So long he had imparted this account it had started to feel like his own story, when it much more rightly belonged to his departed father, who had served. And to this ancient erstwhile soldier in the wheelchair.
He drew a long breath, prepared to speak to the meat of the matter. Even though these were automatic words, seared into memory, he still felt a hint of genuine terror for those brave fighters of long ago.
But before he could introduce this segment of the talk, there came the rising of a voice—low, rusty, but conveying strength.
“The suit was hot,” said the man. “Like a sarcophagus set upon coals....”
Valentine, his own words still held on his lips, peered into the group bunched on the walkway, although some part of him knew who had spoken.
“I was dumped into the water, along with the rest. Over the sides of a vessel which snuck us as close as it dared to shore. The tide would take us in. It was timed.”
Steam wheezed and gears clicked, and the crowd parted neatly as the man came forward in his chair, deliberately straining muscles on one side of his neck to guide the clever apparatus. He halted before Valentine. The soldier was quite elderly, likely in his nineties. Again Valentine was amazed he wasn’t attended by a nurse. Wisps of colorless hair blew about on his mostly bare skull. His stubbly face was rutted with lines, his skin like parchment. But his eyes still shone with a fierce spirit, and his voice did carry.
But he was interrupting the official tour. Valentine had a job to do.
“Yes, sir,” he said in an accommodating manner. “While I am certain that is quite interesting—”
“Oy! Let ‘im speak.”
Valentine had bent toward the man in the chair. He straightened now, blinking about.
One of the hooligans—replete with tattoos, earrings and hair of a truly bilious green—stepped forward and said, “Let the geeze ‘ave ‘is say.”
Valentine thought this just more rude behavior, but the entire group was staring gravely at him. He bit his lip. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. He felt uneasy at the break in routine. But he couldn’t see what he could do to stop the old wheelchair-bound soldier.
“Predawn light turned the water gray,” the man went on, “as we bobbed out there in the surf. The battle suit was all-encompassing, a sealed vessel unto itself. Or it was supposed to be. But some leaked. I remember looking out through my helmet’s porthole, seeing the man on my left struggling. His face went white behind the glass of his own helmet. Eyes so big. He was taking on water. And there was nothing he could do. Nothing I could do. He couldn’t even get out of the suit. We were riveted in, you see. As the tide started to pull, I saw him go under, the water’s weight dragging him down.”
Valentine shivered involuntarily. And it suddenly struck him. This crippled soldier wasn’t talking about some random landing during the Steam War. He was speaking of this battle, against General MacDougall’s forces—here on this very New Jersey beach. This man was a living witness to the same fight Valentine had recreated endlessly for his tour groups!
“We moved with the tide, inland, toward the sand. I was basted with sweat. My arms and legs ached. I felt exhausted, and we hadn’t even engaged in battle yet. But I knew my duty. The sky continued to lighten behind us, and now I saw the enemy. They were arrayed on the beach. Riflemen, at least two artillery pieces. I recall a vast sense of helplessness. The implacable push of the water would deliver us onto the beach, and we would be slaughtered. The Americans would be upon us before we could stagger onto dry land. I didn’t know how many of us remained, how many had drowned out there in the surf. There was no means of communicating with each other. But by then, none of that mattered. We were coming ashore.”
Valentine saw how rapt the group was. They were focused wholly on the soldier, absorbing each word. It was far more interest than Valentine ever received during his discourses. But, of course, he hadn’t actually been here. The details of the battle were engrossing as the old man continued. Valentine, despite his genuine fascination with history, had never really considered MacDougall’s engagement from the British perspective. The fight was remembered as a valiant struggle against daunting odds. The battle-suited British surely had had the upper hand. They had waded arrogantly out of the ocean, expecting to destroy the upstart mutineers, only to encounter the grit and tenacity of the American spirit.
But it hadn’t quite been that way, had it? At least, this onetime English soldier had experienced it differently. He spoke of the fight—the concussive boom of the cannons, the tireless pings of the rifle shots. He had used his own weapon, had even made some progress up the beach, but the Americans were disciplined, taking their commander’s cunning orders, dividing the landing force. He detailed the carnage, and several of the ladies with the tour silently gasped.
It was a brief battle. The soldier’s battle suit had been furnished with a time piece, and he claimed that the entire skirmish, from first shot to final, lasted nine minutes. Nine. Yet this fight was famous. MacDougall stood here immortalized in bronze.
Despite those armored suits, despite the weaponry which the Brits brought to bear, the American troops overwhelmed them. The old man recounted being literally overrun by enemy soldiers, who physically toppled him halfway up the beach, then fired at him point blank. Their bullets were unable to penetrate the suit’s dense metal skin. They stabbed at him with bayonets, but to no better effect.
He lay there, disarmed, truly helpless now.
And he watched MacDougall’s men revel in their unexpected victory. They had greater luck in dispatching the other British survivors. They managed to get one’s helmet porthole open and drove knives repeatedly through the opening. Another they held across the maw of a cannon as the piece was fired, raining shrapnel and gore over the sand.
“The American commander intervened at last,” said the ancient soldier, eyes squinting up at the statue beside Valentine. “He strode up to where I lay. Two of his men were deciding what to do with me. They had smashed my suit’s boiler, which was affixed to the back, so that, without the steam-driven motivators, I could not even lift my arms any longer. One of the men suggested building a fire pit and throwing me into it. The commander gazed down on me, a grim little smile quirking his lips, and he said, ‘We’ve caught enough fish. Let this one float back to England.’”
Everyone in the tour group gasped, aloud this time. Valentine felt numb. A great quiet horror had taken him.
The wheelchaired soldier finished, “So they dragged me into the water, and pushed me outward, and away I went. A current caught me. Somehow, though, I stayed buoyant, and my suit, despite the abuse done to it, didn’t leak. I did indeed float. But not back to England. An American destroyer found me and took me aboard, and its captain was a decent type. His engineers got me out of the battle suit, and I was sent to prison in Tennessee for the balance of the war.”
That was it. He was done. Without even a last look at anyone he powered up his chair, and it took him off along the planked walkway, away from the group. Away from this beach, of which he had such vivid and terrible memories of blood spilt.
Valentine mumbled through the rest of the guided tour, hurriedly abandoning his temporary charges at the gift shop and fleeing. A fog was coming in.
* * *
The haze seemed to be spilling out of his head now, as he staggered, awash in fumes of rum. The fog had thickened with the night. Valentine was still stunned by the tale of the old soldier. He wanted to doubt its authenticity. But the grim details had been too vibrantly drawn to be anything but the truth.
In the hazy night, the statue of Alexander MacDougall loomed. Valentine had been out here awhile, trying to find it. He had nearly emptied his bottle of West Indies rum. He paused now before the noble figure in bronze.
How he had admired this general, how he had thought him a hero....
&nb
sp; Now, he could see the twist of the man’s lips, hear the nasty little damnation he had spoken on this very beach: We’ve caught enough fish. Let this one float back to England.
But it had been war, Valentine told himself. A desperate fight, a clash of cultures.
The justification did no good. MacDougall was forever tainted for him now. He pushed off from the statue, its surface slick with the fog. He stumbled toward the sound of the waves, raising the rum to his mouth. He realized only now that tears marked his cheeks. Savagely he swiped at his eyes.
“Damn,” he swore. “Damn, damn...”
Sand crunched under his soles. So many years of leading tours. He could have stood to do this for the rest of his days. He hadn’t really minded the bored and dazed Brits, hadn’t even especially cared about the hooligans. Let them have their damned colored hair! He could have carried on indefinitely with his silly little work, wearing his silly little faux uniform.
But how hollow his words would ring from now on, as he described the American heroics on this shore nearly seventy years ago.
The waves crashed in the foggy, briny night.
He tipped the bottle up to his lips once more, barely able to coordinate, and swallowed the final trickle of rum. With a cry he flung the bottle into the water. He was alone on the beach.
The bottle didn’t land with a splash; instead...he heard it shatter. The foamy lip of a wave broke over his toes. He was dangerously close to the surf.
But there was a new sound now, something atop the tumult of the waves, louder even than the rum-induced buzzing in his ears. It was a noise of wheezing, of clanking—something mechanical. Disoriented, he looked about, but the nighttime was whirling. A deep dread touched him, seizing him at the roots of his being. He should have simply stayed in his room and gotten drunk. Coming out here to mourn his own historical idealism had been a mistake.
The clang of metal parts, the ratcheting of gears. He heard these clearly now, coming closer. The old man in the steam-powered wheelchair...?
