Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  BRING. ME. BACK.

  And so he would.

  The murderous traitors couldn’t comprehend that a being of such magnificence as The Deity could never truly die. It was beyond such petty concerns. Driven from this world by the destruction of its mortal form, it simply returned to its home in the darkness between the stars. And just as he had called it forth the first time, he could do so again. Then all traitors, deserters, and enemies of the Empire would pay.

  Oh yes, they will all pay dearly, Lord Havendish thought bitterly as he sat at his desk in the library, refreshing his knowledge of an ancient tome in a heathen’s tongue. Taking time to lean back in his chair to sip a brandy he heard the door to the room softly open. It had to be his loyal retainer, Jacobs, back from procuring the first vessel needed to house his Lord from some desperate pauper for a few shillings.

  “Back so soon, Jacobs? I don’t hear any crying. Good, perhaps you picked a quiet one this time” he said as he spun around in his chair, a smile on his face.

  The smile faded as he didn’t see his manservant before him, but a strange woman dressed oddly like a man in trousers and jacket of dark gray and black. She was pleasing enough to look at, if a bit too thin with a haggard look around the eyes, but her face, there was something hauntingly familiar about it, but he could not place her.

  “My dear lady, who the hell are you and how did you get in here?” He asked.

  “You don’t you recognize me? We have met before,” the woman said as she stepped closer into the flickering light of the gas lamps. “I have not forgotten you.”

  The approaching woman raised her right hand to show it to him. At first Havendish was puzzled by the gesture, but then he took a closer look and saw that the hand was fake, a prosthetic of wood and brass. He then thought back to another dark night over a year ago.

  “You’re the little thief who tried to steal my book. I wondered what had become of you after you jumped from that window. Wherever have you been?” He said as he stood up. Havendish was over a foot taller and six stones heavier than the slight slip of a woman. He had beaten her down once, and he was confident he could do it again.

  “I wandered for weeks after that beast of yours took my hand. I could hear it in my head, at all times, it never stopped. As it had my flesh, it said we were connected, that I had to come to it to be made whole,” the thief said and she took another purposeful step towards the man who towered over her.

  “I tried to drown out the voice with drink, then I chased the dragon for a while, but nothing helped. Eventually the police found me wandering the streets somewhere, screaming at myself to be quiet. Naturally they tossed me into an insane asylum and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”

  She took another step and that caused Havendish to frown. He didn’t like it when people, let alone women, weren’t afraid of him.

  “That is,” she continued, “until three weeks ago when that evil thing of yours was finally killed. That shut up the voices for good and I got my head right again. The first thing I had to do was to get out of the asylum, but that was easy enough for a woman of my talents.”

  Another step closer which caused Havendish to take a step back.

  “Then I had to pull out some of my savings to get this made for me.” She again showed the man her fake hand, “I had to replace what you took from me. And now, I am here…”

  The wood and brass fingers curled into a fist and a knife blade popped out of the prosthetic hand at its knuckles.

  “…to finish what Jeffrey Langham started.”

  Havendish wanted to run, to flee, to retrieve the revolver he kept in the desk drawer, but before he could do any of those, the woman punched out, striking him dead in the chest.

  Elisabeth, Lizzy to her few friends, felt rhythmic twitches running up her artificial hand to her arm and she knew her blade had found the bastard’s black heart. When she pulled her fist back a fount of blood erupted from his chest. There was an almost comical look of shock on Havendish’s face as he slumped to the floor, where he wheezed for a few seconds on his knees before toppling over. Lizzy used her foot to turn him over on his back so that he could look up at her. She needed her face to be the last thing he ever saw.

  “That’s for Jeffrey, and Raghubir, and Crazy Doctor Vonner. That’s even for Queen Victoria and for what you turned her into.”

  The light began to fade from Lord Havendish’s eyes and only now at the end was he truly terrified of the darkness that awaited him.

  “The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.”

  The Baying of the Hounds

  By Leigh Kimmel

  Even with the windows closed and the curtains drawn, light and sound remained a torment. The faintest flicker, the smallest sound had become a raking agony upon nerves raw from the strain of a problem that resisted solution. Another man might have feared himself to be going mad, but Nikola Tesla had experienced it once before. In the days and weeks before the breakthrough that had produced his polyphase alternating current system, he had endured similar agonies as his mind raced to apprehend the theory he could glimpse but not yet encompass.

  But that time he had been on the threshold of triumph. Now he wrestled with the fragments of defeat. In his mind’s eye he could see every detail of the transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, the equipment designed to enable him to cast electrical energy through the invisible luminous aether in the same manner in which he’d previously transmitted Hertzian waves. Instead something had gone amiss, and in the moment in which he closed the massive knife switch that should’ve transmitted useable power across the miles to the receiving antennas with their attached motors, the very foundations of reality itself had shuddered and twisted. In his mind the memory still echoed of that terrible howl, like the baying of an unearthly hound.

  The sound of blows upon the door macerated Tesla’s tormented nerves and he cried out in wordless agony. The walls tilted in a wild dance of vertigo, and no amount of abstract knowledge of the falsity of his subjective experience could keep Tesla from digging his fingers into sheets and mattress in a frantic effort to cling to the bed. He had seen the cracks in space itself, the place beyond space in which lines of sight shifted into impossible angles that drove ordinary men mad.

  “He’s in there.” The voice outside the door was hard with ill-disguised anger.

  Even as Tesla’s mind ransacked the disarrayed files of memory for the identity of the speaker, the door burst open under the blow of a booted foot. Beyond stood three men of the coarse sort one could find in the rougher parts of the city. But their leader was a different sort of man.

  His stout figure was encased in a long brass-buttoned leather coat, and on his gray hair perched a cap with the multifocal goggles favored by aeronauts. Belatedly Tesla’s memory clicked into place.

  Thomas Alva Edison was Tesla’s antithesis, like a living embodiment of Hegel’s dialectic. Where Tesla was polished, urbane, full of Old World elegance, Edison was crude, boorish, a frontier hayseed. And each was proud of it.

  Edison scowled down at his rival. “You haven’t exactly made yourself an easy man to find, Tesla.” The sarcasm was unusual for Edison, who tended to the blunt and straightforward, and suggested just how much recent events had affected him.

  He narrowed his eyes, looked Tesla up and down. “You’re worse off than I’d expected. Here.” From within his coat he pulled a vial and unstopped it. “Drink this. It’ll taste like the devil’s own wine-bottle, but it’ll do the trick.”

  Edison was as good as his word. The stuff proved so vile Tesla choked twice before getting it down, but when he did, an icy wall of sanity descended around his mind, blocking out the nightmares that had gripped him since that disastrous day.

  And now they must be going. Loathe as Tesla was to appear in public while in such sartorial disarray, Edison’s bully-boys gave him scant time to change his clothes. He could shave and otherwise freshen his appearance once they were in the air.

  ***

 
The airship made its stately way over the countryside with a soft whir quite unlike the clatter and bustle one experienced on the railroad. In all his years in America, Tesla had never lost his awe at the sheer size of his adopted homeland.

  Now, after a day and a night’s travel, their objective was coming into sight. Once this place had been one of the great cities of the Republic’s heartland, built upon the joining of two of its greatest rivers. Poets had called it the Gateway to the West, and both businessmen and laborers had flocked to the opportunities it had offered.

  Now it lay in ruins, its docks and railroad yards abandoned, its people scattered before the horror that roiled and twisted at its heart. The eye flinched away from focusing upon the impossible geometries within the gap that had been ripped into the very fabric of existence.

  “So just what is that thing, Tesla?”

  Astonishment hit Tesla like a physical blow. How had Edison joined him at the rail of the observation deck without his noticing?

  More to the point, how to answer that question in terms acceptable to a man who had no use for theory? Edison had only one response to an obstacle: throw everything at it until he found something that stuck. At times Tesla wondered if Edison was even capable of absorbing any information from a scientific journal, a technical paper, anything save his own hands and eyes.

  But the steady gaze of those very eyes made it clear Tesla would not be permitted to evade the question. And it wasn’t even a matter of Edison having those three bully-boys at his back, but of professional standing and reputation between two of the world’s greatest living inventors.

  Tesla picked up a rectangle of pasteboard from a nearby table. “Recently a German scientist by the name of Einstein has argued that space is not flat, but subtly curved,” he bent the pasteboard into a shallow U-shape, “and that curvature is responsible for the phenomenon we call gravity, and explains why planets and moons follow curved orbits, why planets are round. However, it appears that the good Herr Doktor did not go far enough, for he assumed that the universe we observe is all that exists, all that can exist. Instead, there is another kind of space, one that gravity does not merely bend, but folds.” Tesla snapped his hands together, so fast that the pasteboard buckled in the middle to form a sharp angle.

  “And that device of yours out at Wardenclyffe managed to knock a hole into it?”

  Tesla was so astonished to see Edison not only comprehending a highly theoretical explanation, but drawing a useful conclusion from it, that it was only by main force of will that he was able to keep his mouth from falling agape like a fish. “That would be a rather crude way of putting the situation, since the mechanism appears to operate more akin to bridging a gap between two isolated electrical conductors. But it certainly does a capital job of conveying the urgency of the situation.”

  Edison started to speak, whether to make some objection or to ask a clarifying question, Tesla never knew. At that moment there arose an unearthly howling of such intensity that the very structural members of the airship began to vibrate with the harmonics. A howling Tesla had heard once before, in that terrible moment after he closed that switch only to discover that he’d made a terrible miscalculation, that instead of bringing the world into a new age of clean power without the ugliness of spiderwebs of wire everywhere, he’d unleashed upon it a nightmare.

  Overhead, the airship’s frame began to make the strangest creaks and groans. Edison cast a narrow-eyed gaze upward. “What the Sam Hill is going on here?”

  “Harmonic resonance.” Even as the words passed Tesla’s lips, he realized just what dire straits they represented. Soldiers broke step and walked across bridges because the rhythm of so many marching feet could set up destructive resonances and damage or even collapse the structure. But how to break-step something he did not even fully understand, let alone have any control over?

  “We must set down.” Tesla scanned the ground in search of some place where they could moor the huge, fragile aircraft. Which assumed they could even bring it to a controlled rest in the absence of trained ground crew. Or any ground crew, like the countless ordinary New Yorkers who’d run from their places of business to help halt an airship that had been stolen by anarchists with the intent of crashing it into the Stock Exchange.

  The floor lurched under their feet. Behind him, someone shouted, “They’re venting hydrogen.” The voice was ragged, on the edge of panic, which suggested it wasn’t one of the trained crew.

  Tesla grabbed the rail, holding on as the airship rolled to starboard like a ship taking on water. Either the captain or the pilot must’ve reached the same conclusion he had. More specifically, they had decided the flammable lifting gas posed too much danger and must be dispersed, even at the cost of grounding the ship.

  With a crunch of impact the passenger gondola hit the ground. On an ordinary flight there would’ve been a hundred or more untrained people, like as not panicking, fainting, increasing the danger to themselves and others. Today they had a total of five – himself, Edison, and the three bully-boys. Everyone else was crew with duty stations for the emergency.

  The windows of the observation deck shattered with a tinkling like a thousand wine goblets dropped at once. It was only then that Tesla realized the horrible howling had stopped, and he wondered how long it had been since it ceased.

  Even as the thought passed through his mind, Edison was shouting to his goons to get out of here. Strong hands closed around Tesla’s arms, pulled him through the frame of one of the windows, past razor-sharp shards of broken glass. Overhead the broken hull of the airship was sagging, metal structural members forcing their way through the fabric covering.

  “Run, damn you, run.”

  With two of those bully-boys holding his arms, Tesla didn’t have much choice in the matter. It might be more staggering and stumbling over the broken ground and tumbled buildings, but in such a situation, any sort of progress was good.

  Edison gave the wreck a scant backward glance. “So now we continue on foot.”

  Another man might’ve spoken in anger, or despair. Edison’s voice remained matter-of-fact, the tone one might use to announce dinner. But this was a man who, when his laboratory burned to the ground, had shrugged it off as naught but the destruction of a thousand ideas that hadn’t worked.

  All the same, Tesla couldn’t resist a question. “Continue where?

  That got him the reaction Edison had refused to show. “To the source of that, of course.” He jabbed his finger at the fracture through which angular space had burst into curved space.

  From the distance of an airship, it had seemed a matter of distorted lines of sight, which refused to converge as they should have upon any point within that place that was nowhere of this world. But now, on the ground, Tesla could see the more subtle distortions of color, of texture, of everything that had material presence. Small wonder that so many who escaped had arrived in safe havens babbling about the hinges of Hell coming loose to spew forth madness. Or that those survivors should’ve represented so small a fraction of a great city’s population.

  As they marched onward, Tesla realized that the distortion was not confined to the three spatial dimensions familiar to the students of Euclidean geometry. Time too had undergone a peculiar folding – here solid granite had crumbled to dust as if subjected to ten thousand years’ erosion, while across the street a kitchen remained as if the homemaker had stepped out only moments ago, rather than having fled days earlier.

  From the oven of one such home came a fruity odor of such sweetness that the three thugs started licking their lips in unabashed eagerness. Far from being appalled at such a boorish display of animal appetite, Edison had been amused to the point of going inside to see what it could be. He opened the cast-iron door to extract a pastry from which oozed yellowish syrup of such freshness it could have been set to baking only an hour ago.

  Realizing what they intended, Tesla protested, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Edison p
roduced a knife of indeterminate cleanliness and set to portioning his find five ways. “You know, the problem with you Europeans is you don’t eat enough apple pie.”

  “No, I am not speaking of differences in culinary tastes.” Tesla groped for words that would counsel caution. “We are in the midst of a region in which the physical laws of another plane of existence have intruded. Can we be certain that they have not worked some subtle transformation on what appears to be wholesome food, such that it might instead prove poison?”

  “You see anything else to eat?” Edison’s scowl returned in full force. “We lost all our supplies when our airship went down, and we’re not going to do anybody the first lick of good if we collapse from hunger on the way. Now eat.”

  Tesla eyed the wedge of pie before him, yellowish slices of baked apple spilling out onto the plate one of Edison’s bully-boys had pulled from the cupboard. Neither it nor the fork looked dirty, but Tesla had never forgotten peering through a microscope at the multitude of tiny organisms in a drop of water.

  But here they had no time for his usual means of cleaning his utensils before a meal. Revolting though the thought might be, he forced himself to take one bite after another and not think too much about what else he might be consuming. Better to be grateful to preserve a mite of civilization while those bumpkins shoveled their portions into their mouths with their bare hands.

  Finished, they continued on their way. Yet Tesla could not help but recall the various stories in which mortals who partook of unearthly food became entrapped in places not of men, unable to return home. Serbian folklore was as rich in fairy tales as English, French, or German, and one could even see the theme in the ancient Greek myth of Persephone in the court of Hades. Might there be some seed of truth in those tales, some folk memory of times past in which humanity had come into contact with eldritch realms and their inhabitants?