Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Yes, but I’ll be a lot faster,” she answered back. “Please do this.”

  She turned back toward the door but he stopped her. “Who will save you?” he asked.

  “You will.” She quickly pulled the key from her chest and handed it to him. “Pergamum has a book inside of her,” she said. “She won’t forget that man. Do you understand?”

  Mouth open, he took her cog without reply, his eyes huge. He nodded, fingers wrapping tightly around its steel teeth. Half a second to memorize his face, and then she pushed Dewey backward into the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

  The creatures poured into the library, climbing over each other to get out of the pitch-black hallways. Filthy, gray-skinned, and dead-looking, they rooted through the remains of the room. Dozens of them pushed over piles of books, turned over shelving, and fought each other for found treasures for several minutes before they saw her. Huge hands pulled their bodies forward while huge feet pushed, propelling them like animals, on four limbs, though they were built like men.

  Several of the ones in the front reared up on their back legs and rushed, bipedal, toward her. She ran perfectly straight, away from the office, just slowly enough to draw them toward her. Bounding over the reference desk, she grabbed a handful of books and tossed them back, hitting three of them but barely slowing the pack down. Moving together, it seemed the whole group was after her now. She grabbed for a ceiling beam, missed, and fell to the floor. A ghoul was on her, ripping at her chest plate, her eyes. She pushed it off and ran again, this time catching the beam and pulling herself up out of reach.

  “You can’t do this, I think,” she said, knowing they didn’t understand. “That’s right, follow my voice. There’s nothing interesting happening anywhere but here.” They jumped at her, grunting.

  The crank operating her elbow pivot groaned, losing power. She pulled herself a bit higher, got one leg onto the beam. Unable to reach her, the creatures groaned and wailed, reaching for her with over-sized hands and long, dirty, claws.

  “My people were smart. They made us, they made everything. You look like my people, but you haven’t been them in a long time.” They scrambled over each other, trying to catch a piece of her, trying to jump high enough. Climbing on the backs of his mates, one of the creatures grasped a hold of her torso, and pulled her to the floor. As she fell she looked across the room, where a familiar green light spilled out from under the office door. “Good girl, Deci,” she said to herself, before the ghouls tore her apart.

  The Reverend Mr. Goodworks and The Yeggs of Yig

  By Edward M. Erdelac

  It was a night of stars, and the Arizona desert was as black as the space between them.

  A single quivering light sparked into existence far off on the inscrutable horizon. It was a tiny light, but pierced the blackness like the primordial glow that began the world.

  It moved, and like a faltering creator, wherever it moved, whatever it touched, hints of the daytime world spring briefly into being. Chapparal and skeletal mesquite bushes, stone and slate, and a silvery ribbon of railroad that ran from nowhere to nowhere.

  Along this iron thoroughfare the light streaked, burning in the chest of a man, for it was no train or hand car that traversed the track, but a weird figure straddling the ties, a foot on each rail, skating along on wheels attached to the bottoms of his blocky feet. He was a tall, broad shouldered, goggle-eyed figure in a billowing blue greatcoat, long bone yellow hair streaming from beneath his wide brimmed hat. His massive, jutting shoulders were hung with a collection of battered canteens and swollen water skins, like a peasant devotee’s tinkling milagros. A faint hiss and clank of machinery accompanied his steady advance.

  The stranger was Shadrach Meshach Abednego Carter, but almost no one knew him by that name now. Those that cared to call on him, called him The Reverend Mister Goodworks, or just the Reverend.

  He was a circuit rider, bringing the word or the fist of God wherever it was needed.

  And he was fast asleep, or very near to it.

  His mechanical legs were locked and the little that remained of his organic body, his head, right shoulder, and arm, rested in the iron and steel frame, chin to chest.

  He dreamed of the wreck, as he often did, but whether it was truly a dream or just memories passing through his dozing mind, he couldn’t say.

  It was 1861 again. He was a grinning young filthy faced engineer for the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, running a train of Union soldiers bound for Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. They were halfway across the Platte River Bridge when his stomach bottomed out. The engine gave a steep forward lurch, timbers crackled, and the engine went flipping thirty feet down into the shallow river with an explosive crash. Then the tender smashed down on top of him. Then the mail car. Then the freight, and the two passenger cars, raining screaming bodies.

  In the end, the boiler exploded in a rush of fire and glowing steel.

  The next thing he remembered was being carried on a door into a backroom of Patee House in St. Joseph. One of the surgeons said he was the last to be found alive. Silas Gordon’s bushwhackers had burned the bridge supports, trying to kill former governor Stewart, who wasn’t even aboard.

  “That one won’t keep till morning,” the surgeon whispered. “Hell, he’s more train than man.”

  But around midnight, when his suffering was at its zenith, a handsome young man all in white coveralls with a pristine belt of polished, shining tools and the strange, perfectly round yellow eyes of an eagle came to him.

  “I am the angel Nisroch,” the man said, and hell, at that point, he was inclined to believe anything. “It is my lord’s will that you live, Shadrach Carter. Yet when my hand is upon you, you shall no longer be as other men. You shall be a tool of my lord. A vehicle of his will. The choice is yours. Live on and serve, or say the word and I shall send you to your reward.”

  Much of his initial faith stemmed from pain, no doubt. Despite his Biblical name, he had never been much of a churchgoer prior. His mama and his daddy had always told him he would one day feel the call of the Spirit, but while all his friends and relatives had gone gesticulating up the aisle, he’d always sat fidgeting in the pew, never quite feeling the urge to testify himself.

  Yet a summons by an angel of the Lord wasn’t the kind you ignored. So he took Nisroch up on his offer.

  The angel worked him over with his glittering tools, bending metal and burning flesh. He had never known such agony. The Lord’s will was hard on mortal men. His mama had told him that once.

  He awoke like Paul on the road to Damascus, a new man, with a new body, one of iron and steel in place of lost bone and muscle, a weapon of God with a boiler heart and bellows lungs, forged by divine ingenuity, purged of almost all earthly needs.

  He never saw Nisroch again.

  In the seventeen years since, he had studied the scriptures diligently, but was still no great purveyor of the Word. He just didn’t have a tongue for moving men’s minds. But there were other ways of serving the Lord. He trusted to Providence to lead him to do God’s purpose, and to the body the angel Nisroch had given him to fulfill such tasks as the Lord put before him. He was God’s engine, delivering His justice to the far flung towns of the frontier, especially those lowdown dens of sin that tended to spring up along the railroads.

  His iron and steel body made him too heavy for a horse, so he tended to ride the rails. That was what he was doing now, no particular destination in mind, when the screams of a woman met his ears.

  He nearly ground her beneath his heavy feet. She had been laying draped across the railroad ties, delirious, dressed only in filthy tatters. She rose up at his chugging approach, her wide, frightened eyes like the glare of an animal in his chest light.

  He slowed at the sight of her, and disengaged his foot wheels with a few turns of the hand cranks below his knees. He pulled down his muffler and goggles, and stooped to help her.

  She was a Mexican woman, no more than twenty, a terrible
sight for a Christian man to behold. Her eyes were bruised almost shut, much of her skin cruelly torn and baked to cracking by the desert sun. He rinsed the grit from her wounds with one of his water skins (he had learned over the years to carry an abundance of water about his person as his boiler heart required constant refilling), threw his coat over her, and wet her lips with a damp rag.

  At first, taking in the sight of him, she screamed in panicked Spanish that he was ‘one of them.’

  But he answered back fluently, in a slightly tinny voice, as though he spoke through the bottom of a can.

  “Rest easy, miss. I’m the only one of me there is. Who did this to you?”

  She babbled rapidly as he examined her. She had the mark of ropes on her wrists and ankles. Her body also bore a series of claw-like scabs on the back and hips, and something else, orderly burn marks on her backside, like a cattle brand, in a pattern that startled him.

  Stamped all over the Reverend’s metal components were various symbols which he had always taken to be angelic script, maker’s marks in a language known only to Nisroch and his kind. Indeed, over the years he had found many evil creatures reacted to their touch as to a hot stove. Each symbol glowed like fresh steel in the presence of certain creatures. He thought of them as a kind of a built-in detection aide.

  But scorched onto the right buttock of this poor woman was an emblem discouragingly similar to one he himself bore.

  It was a circular symbol, apparently of a snake with a head at either end, the two meeting in the center.

  The design of the serpent was unmistakably the same unearthly style as the one on his left shoulder plate. It was as if they’d been wrought by the same hand.

  A chill passed down the length of what remained of his spine.

  But there was little time to dwell on it, for the woman seized his human elbow and presently begged him,

  “Kill me, senor. Kill me, before it is born!”

  He hadn’t even noticed the undulating swell of her belly till then.

  He laid her on the sand and held her, trying to speak soothingly through her ecstatic pleas, which fell at last to tearful, gibbering screams.

  He did not know what had driven the poor woman to such a state, but he was loath to fulfill her request. Killing an infant wasn’t in the Lord’s line.

  He turned all his considerable strength to restraining the woman, who in her labor moved at last past all reasoning. She threw back her head and wailed, crossing her legs as if trying to keep her baby within her.

  He pinned her flailing limbs with his iron left arm and forced her knees apart with his hand, doing his best to spread his coat beneath her to catch the unfortunate child.

  But what crowned in the glow of his chest lamp was no human head.

  From the slit of her womanhood oozed forth a wriggling, broad, flat skull, encased in white scales. Two black eyes the size of silver dollars slid open vertically on either side of the head, with a third parietal eye opening afterwards in the center. A long forked tongue slipped from the reptilian lips.

  To the Reverend’s horror, six spindly fingers, budding with yellow claws, pushed aside the curtains of her labia and freed a set of narrow shoulders, followed swiftly by a wriggling body that tapered into a tail.

  The snake-thing flopped out onto the coat and immediately pushed itself up on its two trembling arms, issuing a terrible hiss as it took its first breath.

  In the time it took the Reverend to register his revulsion, a second creature slithered forth. The head of a third breached, slashing its wailing mother savagely in its haste to join its siblings.

  The first creature clambered and pulled itself up the woman’s blood-splashed leg onto the Reverend’s wrist, coiling its lower body tightly around his forearm. It proceeded to clamp its gummy mouth down on his right shoulder.

  The sensation was unpleasant, but the thing’s fangs had not yet descended.

  Its intent was clear however. As the second snake child hissed and coiled its lower body, hunkering down to spring up at him, he let go of the feebly shuddering woman and grasped the throat of the first creature, turning to slam its snapping head down against a stone.

  The soft skull came apart like an egg and the grasping tail and claws slackened.

  He swung up his mechanical arm as the second creature sprang. He took satisfaction in hearing its face flatten against the unyielding iron.

  He rose to his feet. The third creature had scuttled out of its reluctant mother and off into the dark somewhere.

  For a moment he was distracted by the fiery glow of the serpentine emblem on his shoulder; not circular like the brand on the mother, but a snake entwined about a short armed cross, as if scaling it.

  He had always taken it to be a rendering of the Nehushtan. The brass serpent God instructed Moses to place upon a pole when the Israelites were plagued by poisonous serpents in the wilderness. All who looked on the Nehushtan were healed of the venom, and the serpents were driven off by the sight of it.

  Suddenly the thing was hissing in his ear. It had leapt onto his back, wending up the complex pipework there. But it had learned from the deaths of its siblings. It did not attempt to feebly bite him. Its tiny scrabbling claws sought his neck. Only a quick thrust of his chin saved him from having his throat torn out.

  He reached up and grabbed the creature by the nape of its neck. It didn’t have time to anchor itself. He swung it around in front of him, holding it at arm’s length.

  It hissed and fought, its wormish tail lashing, coiling and uncoiling around his forearm.

  He slowly forced it against the glowing glyph on his shoulder. The thing let out a gurgling sound and redoubled its efforts, but it was no use. As its mother had been branded, the symbol of the Nehushtan burned her offspring. Finally its struggles ebbed, and he flung the lifeless, sizzling monstrosity out into the night.

  The woman still breathed, but it was a ragged, hopeless sound that rattled in her gasping throat.

  He knelt beside her. Her eyes were wide, desperate to admit the dimming light.

  “Are they dead?” she asked.

  “Yes. What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Concepción.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Susannah. She is called Susannah. The great tall bitch of the serpent. The men in white, they stole me from my hacienda in the night, took me beneath their town. They made me to…”

  She shuddered. Her eyes flitted about wildly.

  “Señor?”

  “I’m here,” he said, grasping her hand with his own. She was clutching something. A bit of yellow paper, crumpled and wet with blood and sweat. She pushed it into his hand.

  “Jesús will punish them?”

  A tear slid from her eye and she was still.

  “Jesus will forgive them,” the Reverend answered quietly. “I’ll punish them.”

  He smoothed out the ragged sheet of paper. It was a handbill.

  AND BEHOLD A GREAT RED DRAGON,

  HAVING SEVEN HEADS AND TEN HORNS

  AND SEVEN CROWNS UPON HIS HEAD. – Revelations 12:3

  THE END TIMES ARE AT HAND!

  AWAIT THE NEW KINGDOM WITH

  THE BRETHREN OF NEW VALUSIA

  THE RIGHT REVEREND MS. SAVANNAH COYLE INVITES

  YOU TO LIVE IN SUSTAINED, INDEPENDENT EQUALITY

  WITH THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TRUE FAITH

  There was more. Secondhand expoundings on the supposed ‘virtues’ of stirpiculture and complex marriages, communal Noyesian claptrap a dozen Utopian communities had failed at before.

  He had heard of these New Valusians. Susannah Coyle was said to have led a dozen religious dissidents out of the Oneida Community in New York a few years ago. Her name had turned up in the newspapers now and then. Various ‘miraculous’ time-saving farm implements and household ‘wonder tools,’ all bearing the NV brand, had kept the remote settlement self-sufficient.

  Two things about the handbill arrested the Reverend’s at
tention; the repetition of the circular serpentine emblem, and the map of the community’s location.

  It took till dawn to bury Concepción beside the railroad tracks. Her unholy offspring he left for the varmints of the desert to pick over.

  He lurched into New Valusia sometime before noon, the sand grinding in his knee joints. It was little more than a few communal frame houses, some gardens, and a couple outbuildings, all arranged around a two story farmhouse with a veranda.

  On the porch stood a strikingly tall, lean, yellow haired woman in a white and purple robe. She folded her sun freckled arms at his approach.

  Several of the New Valusians in white cassocks rose from their various tasks to interpose themselves, bearing only shovels and hoes as weapons. The Reverend was forced to halt or else plough through them.

  He stood quietly, a head taller than their tallest, and surveyed the small crowd.

  “Which of you is Susannah?” he bellowed at last.

  “I’m Sister Susannah Coyle,” said the woman on the porch. “What brings you here?”

  “The Lord brang me here,” drawled the Reverend, unfastening his coat.

  “Well, the Lord welcome you.”

  “Not your lord, bitch,” growled the Reverend.

  He threw open his greatcoat like a knightly tabard.

  Beneath, his body was flat black with steel accents, like the shell of a richly ornamented locomotive engine. Indeed, his chest resembled the face of a locomotive, with the dim lamp set in the center. His torso was further festooned with dancing pressure gauges and valve wheels, like a harness of little metal daisies. His heavy, ironclad legs bristled with pistons and driveshafts that plunged and hissed as he moved.

  There was a thick bandolier belted around his blocky waist. Hanging from the belt was an old LeMat pistol. He brought his left arm up sharply, accompanied by a series of mechanical whirs and clicks. The sleeve was split down the middle from elbow to cuff, allowing the arm to emerge from the fabric unencumbered. His right hand went to his elbow and jacked a brass lever there. A strange amalgamation of octagonal rifle barrels, three in number, and situated in a kind of pyramid one atop the other, appeared at the end of the metal arm.