Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Hind didn’t need to ask the older man to elaborate. He had seen trouble of the type Tweed alluded to, in the past.

  A peripheral presence tugged at the tail of Hind’s eye. Turning, in the back of the small group of harvesters in their black rubber overalls he spied the factory’s Masters, Alastair and Abraham Stoke. Twins, they wore identical black overcoats and black top hats. No one seemed to know which was Alastair and which was Abraham and it didn’t seem to matter, anyway.

  In unison, apparently sensing his gaze, both brothers turned their heads to regard him. They nodded solemnly. Hind nodded back, then looked away. The brothers knew him by name, had once approached him specifically to commend him on his work. Either Alastair or Abraham had said, “Good man, Hind, good man. You get your work done and don’t waggle your tongue like most of your fellows are wont to do. It isn’t good, gossip and speculation, fretting and fear-mongering. It’s counterproductive. Not good for the Factory, nor for Society, is it?” The way they said such words demanded the use of capitals.

  “Yes, sir,” Hind had replied to whichever of them had spoken.

  The horses had come to a halt, snorting plumes of steam into the air. The wagon was aligned with the edge of the loading dock, and men were already clambering up onto both like a horde of purposeful ants, to unhook the ropes, drag away the tarps, and begin hacking the “blubber,” as it was called at this stage, into more manageable chunks to be placed upon carts and brought into the factory.

  Within, Hind and the others in his department would set to work treating the hunks of blubber in various chemical baths, subjecting them to electrical charges, and then finally slicing the blubber into smaller, neater blocks. Cubes of what was now termed “gelatin.”

  It was ironic, Hind had often reflected—or perhaps it was simply apt—that it was the very matter of which Those Above were composed that was used to suppress the dreaming of humans. For they spoke to the dreaming mind, did Those Above. That was how they had pushed through the sky initially, more than twenty years earlier. They had latched on invisibly to the collected dreaming minds of the world, to hoist themselves into this reality, presumably to envelope the globe like a pearl in the gut of an oyster. But humans, however insect-like, had risen to the threat, had used their ingenuity to stave off the entities (or was it entity?)—by utilizing the discarded matter of Those Above to insulate their vulnerable, sleeping minds.

  Still, despite this success in preventing Those Above from completing their manifestation, Hind’s sons had never seen the naked sun or moon. Further, Alec and Jude had never experienced the transporting delirium and magic of dreams. Having never known anything but the oppressive ceiling that forever ground them all down with its unfelt weight, its gravity from above, the children could not mourn lost things as their father did.

  Hind released a fatalistic sigh, ready to retreat to the sprawling brick factory and give himself over to the long shift ahead, but he first tipped back his head to once more scan the glacier-slow writhing of the living sky, knotted and coiled like the tissues of an impossibly vast brain. Whatever fragments of Those Above were close to sloughing away and falling, under the weight of the “cartilage” inside as it was nicknamed, from this great distance he couldn’t tell. Even the largest chunks when they tore free were tiny, like his own shed skin cells, in comparison to the whole.

  A commotion caused him to yank his eyes free of the mesmerizing vision.

  The harvesting team had begun applying their various blades to the mass on the wagon, in preparation for breaking it down and transporting it inside in pieces, but something within was cutting its own way out. Workers shouted and backed off, their tools now held as weapons before them, as several white spikes stabbed out of the glossy gray blubber. More of these ivory appendages, like gigantic finger bones, jabbed outward and ripped the translucent matter. An awakened skeletal form rose up inside and in one burst tore its body free of the enclosing membrane altogether—if body this chaotic shape could be called.

  “I knew it,” Tweed hissed beside him, catching hold of Hind’s sleeve as if he hadn’t noticed what was transpiring. “You see?”

  “The ganglia, boys!” one of the Stoke brothers called, thrusting out his arm to point. “Get in there and strike the ganglia! You know what to do!”

  The inner growth Tweed called cartilage, and which Hind had compared to leafless birch branches, loomed above the split cocoon of blubber like a horde of giant albino spiders fused together in such an anarchy of form that it hurt the eyes to try to sort it out. However, here and there in the lattice of interconnected twig-like limbs were thick nodes or nexus points, and these were what the Stoke brother had referred to as ganglia.

  The great figure reached out in every direction at once, and so it went nowhere, as if those multiple ganglia were numerous conflicted brains. It made no conscious attacks on the workers, though its erratic movements could easily injure or even kill a man accidentally if he wasn’t careful when he moved in close. This had happened before. But as Stoke said, the workers knew what to do. They darted in, swung axes or thrust their hooked pikes, in an effort to reach those scattered nodules.

  “Not sentient,” Tweed jabbered beside Hind. “Just like a small bit of nerves jumping about…chicken with its head lopped off. No, they aren’t sentient like Those Above.”

  “And just how sentient do you think they are?” Hind asked before he could stop himself, as together they watched a worker trip and fall onto his back after lunging in with a hatchet. Fortunately, another man grabbed hold of him and dragged him a safe distance away before he could be trampled by the thing’s unthinking, convulsive dance. Sections of it had already become immobile, however, owing to successful attacks upon the ganglia.

  Tweed turned to Hind with a face gone slack, apparently shocked or horrified that Hind would openly ask such a question about Those Above. But then, as if he too couldn’t restrain himself, Tweed stepped very close to Hind and in a low voice said, “Their sentience is so far-reaching, so complex, so unfathomable, that it is as though we are without sentience by comparison.”

  “You know things about them, being a Chief Engineer,” Hind stated. “Things the rest of us don’t.”

  “I can’t speak of such things, my dear boy,” Tweed said. “Not here, anyway. But…I’ve been watching you. You have a quick mind, Mr. Hind, and I see an inquisitive nature. Perhaps you’re ready for promotion. I could use an extra pair of hands…if the Masters Stoke consent, of course. Look here—tomorrow afternoon before your shift begins, join me in my office for a cup of tea. We’ll talk.”

  A promotion? Hind had not been thinking of promotions. He had been thinking of the sun, the moon, and dreams. But he stared into Tweed’s wet eyes for several moments and at last said, “Yes sir…I’ll do that, sir. Thank you.”

  The uproar had settled down; Hind saw Tweed looking past him toward the wagon and loading dock, and so he turned around to gaze that way himself. And indeed, the monstrosity woven of branches had been stilled. It too would be broken to pieces, but the factory had no use for its material and it would simply be incinerated.

  Yet it wasn’t the configuration of cartilage Tweed had been staring at over his shoulder, Hind realized. Both Stoke brothers were looking their way, as if even from this remove they had been listening in on their conversation. As before, the twins nodded to Hind in unison. Once more, he nodded back to them—as if some secret had passed unspoken between them.

  ***

  “Poor old fool,” Hind muttered, standing at his bedroom window, peering down into the narrow flagstone street below. Two constables had the arms of a disheveled old man with long white hair and beard. The constables themselves wore leather masks with brass-rimmed goggles, and iron breastplates under their flowing leather coats, which were as black as their tall felt-covered helmets. In their free hands they both carried a metal truncheon, hollow and with a powerful spring inside to drive a bolt from the tip if circumstances required.

&nb
sp; “They’re coming!” the old man cried, struggling ineffectually as the constables walked him toward their horse-drawn iron wagon. “Slow…slow-like…but they’re still coming!”

  “What is it, darling?” Netty asked absentmindedly as she collected up their partially collapsed gelatin blocks, to be disposed of in the trash bin.

  “That old man we hear screaming sometimes at night, in the lodging house on the corner.”

  “Oh! Poor man. But he really should have known better. What do you think they’ll do with him?”

  “I have no idea,” Hind said, partially obscured behind one of the gauzy curtains as if afraid the constables might suddenly lift their gaze and catch sight of him there. “But you know how they say people who make too much noise about Those Above just disappear. To keep from agitating others. Who knows…into prisons? Mad houses?”

  Netty looked up at him, smiling prettily, her curly dark hair pinned up in an unruly bun. “Oh, but don’t you think those are just stories to frighten children into behaving, darling?”

  “I think in that regard,” Hind said, “they see us all as children.”

  ***

  Hind was not troubled by the taunts of other workers who suggested he had become Tweed’s new pet. Though the tall, slender Hind was reserved in disposition, these coworkers knew he was strong in every sense and hence kept their comments joking rather than accusatory. Anyway, even if their accusations had been real, Hind couldn’t have turned down the additional money that enabled him to buy new clothing for his family, more and better food to stock their cupboards. He and Netty had even discussed the possibility of moving to a larger, warmer apartment in another neighborhood. And then there was the fact that Hind now worked in the day, rather than on the second shift, and therefore had more time to spend with his family. All in all, he felt very fortunate for this unforeseen turn of events.

  “Engineer is but an easy title to encompass all we do here, Mr. Hind,” said another of Tweed’s small crew, a man named Quince, as he poured a powdered chemical into a solution bubbling in a large copper vat over a gas jet. Hind stood at his side, observing. Quince went on, “Yes, we ensure that the many varied apparatuses throughout this plant are operating smoothly, and thus we work closely with the mechanics. But we are also chemists, as you can see, for as you well know the blubber has to be treated. We are researchers and inventors, forever working toward perfecting the processes we employ here. Which leads to what you are observing now. We are undertaking experiments to see if we might prolong the use of a finished gelatin cube, so that it might not need to be discarded after a single use. Very wasteful, considering all that goes into rendering them. We need a gelatin that is not damaged by insertion of one’s head, that can perfectly resume its previous form, yet still retain its light properties so as not to discomfort the sleeper.”

  “That would save a lot of trouble,” Hind agreed, “for a family like mine. Acquiring new cubes every day, disposing of them the next day…”

  “Indeed.” Quince stirred his steaming gray broth. “And in fact, it seems that this has been achieved in a few other countries already, though the bastards have as yet not shared their secrets with us. How foolish. We’re all working toward the same end. We have to keep the greater good in mind, not the petty competitions and concerns of the common man. The common man is nothing. We must remain humble, Mr. Hind, mustn’t we?”

  “Mm,” Hind grunted.

  Quince stepped back from the vat, clapping chemical dust from his palms. “Very good, then.”

  As his trainer adjusted a valve beside the gas jet, Hind turned and glanced down at an open notebook on the workbench beside them. Quince’s notes were in a near-illegible scrawl, but Hind thought he could read the underlined heading on the open page. Did it indeed say, “Dream Enhancement”?

  Quince turned his attention to Hind, saw him looking down at the notebook. He stepped forward, closed the book, tucked it under his arm. “In time, Mr. Hind, you will be taught everything. It’s still early yet.”

  ***

  In the observation and charting room on the factory’s top floor, a single great loft-like chamber with windows that ran the length of every wall, Hind watched as Tweed tinkered with the focusing mechanism of a large, complex brass telescope. The viewer would sit in a leather chair incorporated into the base of the telescope, while an assistant turned a wheel to position the whole device at any desired point along a track that ran the circumference of the room.

  “Never seen this beauty before?” Tweed asked while bent over an opened panel, exposing the system of gears within. He squinted through magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles by hinges; there were several sets of such lenses, some of them in colored tints.

  “No, sir,” Hind replied.

  “This is of course how we can predict where the next fall of blubber will be, so we get there quickly before it’s disturbed by locals. And do you know dogs and wild animals will actually eat the stuff?” He looked up, his lips trembling in a smile as if his nerves couldn’t quite support it. “It’s true. But you should see the beasts afterwards—they go quite mad.”

  “I have heard that,” Hind admitted. “As though rabid.”

  “Precisely.”

  Tweed reached into his tool cart for a replacement gear, and Hind’s gaze lingered on the cart after the engineer had turned back to his work. The handsome wooden cart, resting on casters to make it mobile, possessed a series of drawers and a hinged top—currently open to display an array of small machine parts resting in felt-lined hollows. One of these parts drew Hind’s attention, and he reached in to lift it out and bring it closer to his eyes. It was metal, the length of a pencil, one end threaded and the middle mostly encased inside a porcelain insulated housing. It was funny; to him, the piece resembled a miniature of four tall structures—one at each corner—that stood on the flat roof of the building that housed this city’s governing body. Hind had heard varying explanations for their purpose, all of them vague; most people dismissed the spires as purely decorative, evoking this age of industry and technology. Those four constructions had always reminded him, in turn, of the twelve even larger spires that had been added to the roof of the House of Parliament, in the capital, during the great renovations to that structure nearly two decades ago.

  “Sir,” Hind inquired, holding up the object, “what is this?”

  Preoccupied, Tweed glanced over his shoulder and stated, “Transmission amplifier.” He focused on his repairs again for a few moments, abruptly stopped, and looked around at Hind more lingeringly. “You’re not quite ready for that, Mr. Hind. All in good time.”

  Not that again. Hind sighed inwardly, his pride a bit wounded; did Tweed and Quince think he was dense? But he said, “Very well, sir,” and replaced the so-called transmission amplifier into its niche as if slotting it into a machine, the function of which he couldn’t comprehend.

  Tweed shut the panel in the base of the telescope and secured it in place with a screw. “Here…have a look through for yourself. It gives one quite another perspective.”

  Tweed shifted aside, sweeping an arm toward the upholstered chair. Hind bent forward and slipped into the seat, positioning himself behind the eyepiece of the telescope. Tweed leaned in close beside him to show what knobs and levers Hind could use to adjust the magnification and focus of the image, and when Hind announced his readiness Tweed turned several cranks to bring Hind in his chair more in alignment with the eyepiece.

  “Good God,” Hind said involuntarily. The focus was already perfect, and he had all he could do to prevent himself from recoiling from the lens with a jolt.

  From afar, he had compared the weave of Those Above to earthworms, intestines, the convolutions of a brain…but up close, earthly analogies failed him. One section of a single tubular extrusion filled his view, unthinkably enormous. Through its gray tissue he could see pale branches like petrified veins, some moving in erratic scrambling spasms. A few of these many-limbed growths had even esca
ped from within, somehow, and clung to the outside. And a portion of the extrusion within his view was slowly tearing away, would ultimately plummet to the earth below. Already one end of the peeling wedge of flesh was merely tethered by long gummy strings.

  Aware of Hind’s awe, Tweed reflected, “They define us now, Those Above. They have impacted our world, my boy. Redefined our age. Our culture, society—even, for many, our religious beliefs. There is the time Before They Came, and the time After They Came. There is no denying or undoing it—we are too small, too inconsequential, incapable. And so we have learned how to live in the world they have reconfigured for us. But we aren’t to hate them, Hind, are we? Any more than we are to hate other forces greater than ourselves. A mountain, an ocean. Weather. The sun we still revolve around.”

  “What would they really have done to us if we hadn’t stopped their materialization?” Hind asked, not taking his eye from the lens, even though he was leaning into it with such intensity that it hurt the skin across his cheekbone.

  “We can’t be wholly sure,” Tweed said, glancing behind him at the door as if afraid to find it open, with the Brothers Stoke standing just outside glowering in at him. “It’s safe to assume most humans would be destroyed…that is to say, absorbed. But be assured they would not do away with all of us. They are not corporeal in the same sense we are. On our plane, they would still need a trusted minority as useful servants. That doesn’t mean they would love us, but they would take care of us, as a mechanic cares for his tools.”

  “How do you know all that?” Hind asked, removing his eye from the lens at last and turning toward Tweed in his creaking leather seat. There was a pink depression on his cheek like the mark of a giant suction cup.

  Tweed only blinked back at him, his lips in a smile that flickered spasmodically.

  ***

  The brass bell awoke his sons, so loud that it roused Hind and his wife as well. They rushed to the boys’ bedroom to find them awake and wide-eyed, but as if they lay paralyzed, the brothers hadn’t withdrawn their heads from their blocks of gelatin, afraid to ruin them needlessly and be scolded. Yet Netty helped pull the boys out of the gelatin and smoothed their moist hair, while Hind bent over the dream suppressor on its wheeled cart.