Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Corwin stepped forward, breaking the boy’s trance. “What, are you going to persecute me, boy? Burn me at the stake? Over a battery?”

  Brigham began to stammer, but was interrupted when someone at the front of the shop shouted out.

  “Mr. Carroll, sir! Corwin! I bring most important news!”

  This time Corwin blanched so dramatically, he almost lost his balance. He stuffed the Leyden jar into his trunk and locked the lid, then pulled Brigham in close.

  “Not a word of this. Not one word.”

  “Yes, sir—yes, of course.”

  Corwin nodded and then hurried to greet his visitor. He was much surprised to see Thomas Paine making his way through the workshop.

  “Sir,” said Mr. Paine, noticeably out of breath. “I am your most humble servant, heartily glad to see you, sir.”

  “Please, Mr. Paine, I am yours. How is your family?”

  Paine straightened and puffed out his chest. “I come with most urgent and exciting news, Mr. Carroll. I…” he trailed off as Brigham joined them. “And who might this be?”

  The boy bowed. “Brigham Atwood, sir.”

  Corwin nodded sideways at his so-called apprentice. “Another transplant, courtesy of Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Ah!” Paine replied. “Like myself!” He and the boy shook hands most enthusiastically, and Paine’s eyes lingered on Brigham for a second as he spoke. “Corwin, I come because we recognize you as a man destined to shape the future of America—nay, the world. I come bearing a request from our Commander in Chief himself, and to inform you most ecstatically that we have done it.”

  “Yes?” Corwin said. “And what is that?”

  A giant smile cracked open Thomas Paine’s face as he clapped a hand on Corwin’s shoulder. “Why, Mr. Carroll, good sir, we have finally declared our sovereignty from the Crown. Finally, we will have our independence!”

  ***

  Mr. Paine left Corwin with the letter from General Washington, and a weird feeling in his gut. The Colonies were already losing the war. Now the entire globe was teetering on the brink of tumultuous change.

  “Sir, what does it say?” Brigham asked, trying to read over his shoulder.

  Corwin folded the note up and stared off into space. Then he did as he always did to impose order upon unruly thoughts.

  He handed the letter to the boy and said, “We need to get to work.”

  EPIPHANY

  1750

  As a boy, Corwin had once flown his kite at the coast. He had always imagined he was the kite, soaring, high above everything. Tonight, though, his hopes came crashing to the ground.

  Corwin cursed and captured the kite from the wet grass. He felt along the wood, the wet silk.

  For having been assembled on the go, the construction felt sound. He tried to launch it three more times to no avail. It kept diving at the nose.

  Corwin roared and threw the kite back into the grass. He couldn’t think.

  He felt so stupid at times, as if his brain were trying to conduct electricity through inert mud. Even his wife called him stupid, because he never could settle for what he was.

  The sky cracked open just beyond him, and a large bolt lit up the night, just a single instance of it, where heavy raindrops gleamed before his eyes, and a single oak tree clawed at nothing.

  The balance, he thought, and suddenly he was feeling around the hems of his clothes. Everything was matted from the downpour, so it took him a second to find a loose thread. But once he found it, he pulled and pulled, until he had produced and cut two feet, which he used to bridle the nose and tail of the kite.

  “Please,” he said, turning the handkerchief into the wind.

  The lightning knocked him back.

  REVOLUTIONS

  1776

  Days passed as he and Brigham worked on George Washington’s request. People came and went, each of them on official business, either to ask Corwin questions, or to apprise him of their progress in assembling some rudimentary means of production. Corwin didn’t hold out much hope.

  Though they couldn’t see themselves as clearly as he saw them, the Continental Army was what it was: the military equivalent of the Iron Age, compared to Europe’s industrialization. Militias had to cobble together their own guns, for God’s sake.

  To the ringing of the State House Bell, he and the boy went with hundreds of people to the state building and attended Col. Nixon’s public reading of the Declaration of Independence, July 8th. The boy whispered to him under the celebratory firing of muskets, “‘Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ Leviticus,” he said. “Chapter 25, verse 10, rung out now in E-flat.”

  Corwin, staring up at the House’s white bell tower, muttered, “It’ll break again.” He had come several times to the ringing of the bell, and rarely to good news, but rather to the announcement of Parliament’s Stamp Act, or the battles of Lexington and Concord, as if the bell were a harbinger of, not liberty, but war.

  More days passed. France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic shipped supplies, ammunition, and weapons to American shores. People died. The world turned ’round.

  “You work quickly,” Corwin said one evening as he looked over Brigham’s designs. The boy began to grin, but then Corwin said, “It shows in your work.”

  He snatched up the quill and started modifying the steam gun. “We want the ‘Brigham,’ as you call it, to load automatically, so…” He stepped back from the drawing board. “What do you make of that?”

  The boy studied the invention for a good minute.

  “Sir, shouldn’t we use a separate condenser?”

  Corwin looked sideways at the boy, who visibly paled but persevered.

  “I simply mean, if you’re to suggest we use a vacuum generated by weather fronts of water and steam, perhaps then we should consider a separate condenser, insulated and cold. For example…” His eyes ticked back and forth, scrambling for a suitable reference. “As in Watt’s steam engine, sir.”

  Corwin continued to look sideways at him. “You must think I’m an imbecile.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you think Watt was the first to use a separate condenser? Boy, Watt’s engine doesn’t even employ turbines. Or have you even heard of turbines?”

  Brigham thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Of course you haven’t. I’ll tell you, this world is decades, perhaps centuries behind where it ought to be. And it’s only this far along because, well…” He tapped the work surface for a second. “I just find it curious, very curious, indeed, that not long after I invent something, I hear word of it over in Europe as well, only not as great, as if I were just some muse over here for lesser minds.”

  Brigham stared at their design. “Sir, if you believe you’ve been plagiarized—”

  “I just find it curious, that’s all.”

  “Well, have you considered monopolies, letters patent?”

  Corwin chuffed. “Monopolies, he says. Letters patent. And you should think I would be granted them, for as many in high places who call themselves friend.”

  The boy opened his mouth to say something. But then he must have gotten a better idea because suddenly he was grabbing the quill from Corwin and making his own addition to the design. It looked like gears.

  “And what is that?” Corwin said.

  “Apologies, sir, but I thought if the steam vacuum is inferior as a loading mechanism…why not use something else?”

  “What is that?”

  Brigham lowered his eyes for a moment, blushing. Finally, he pulled something out of his coat pocket. “A clockwork, sir.”

  He offered the gadget to Corwin, who took it, first furrowing a brow, and then raising it.

  “A simple pocket watch?” the old man asked.

  Brigham didn’t answer, fixated on the hour hand poised to strike. “My professor, he once told me of a watchmaker. This man, he stumbled upon something he presumed to be a watch. Indeed, when he peeked in
side, this most curious discovery seemed to have all of its moving parts. So the watchmaker further assumed that this watch must have been intelligently designed. By a fellow watchmaker.”

  “But of course.”

  “Yes, but as truth would have it, this watch had been curiously formed by natural processes, like some snowflake—a complete fluke of spontaneous design.”

  “Poppycock,” the old man said. “The odds of such a phenomenon—”

  “Are equal to the formation of the first human body, sir?”

  Corwin thought about that, about the long chain of events it took to create any clockwork.

  “Because the ultimate question remains. Was this watch truly a watch at all, if it had not been so consciously contrived?”

  Corwin turned the timepiece over in his hand as he listened. Surely the boy had some religious answer to the philosophical probing. Men never could grasp the possibility that the physical universe might well be governed by strict and measurable laws, yet be completely devoid of purpose as it spun faster and farther away.

  “This gadget,” Corwin said, “I take it to be your professor’s fair and fabled watch?”

  “No, sir, it is my design. And it’s hardly a watch.”

  Indeed, Corwin could see that the back plate, gleaming of highly-polished brass, wasn’t continuous, but, rather like a puzzle, it was cut.

  “Press it,” the boy said, nodding at the winding knob at the top of the case.

  Corwin didn’t hesitate. He pressed down with his thumb, and jumped when the gadget made a loud click.

  The brass puzzlework popped open, and from the spinning central gears inside, three tiny cogs took flight, telescoping as they went. They quickly transformed into a trio of little aerial screws, each with a spiral of linen to compress the air. Corwin didn’t understand this technology as well as he understood steam; he couldn’t fathom how it worked.

  But it did work.

  Meanwhile, the timepiece whirred with its own activity in the old man’s pitted hand. After a measured number of revolutions, the watch discharged four sharp-toothed cogs. Each one took out an aerial screw apiece, except for the third cog, which missed its target; but the forth compensated shortly after.

  Linen wings shredded, all three screws dropped to the floor, still whirring and spinning around on their ventral gears. Then, reaching some critical increment, they burst into separate, lesser parts, which scattered.

  Corwin stared at the watch in his hands. “How did you…I mean I must have moved.”

  The boy blushed and looked away when he noticed Corwin’s significant stare. “Apologies, sir. My mum always said I should leave a trail of peas if I plan on getting lost.”

  Corwin cleared his throat. Finally he reached over and set the watch on the illustrated gun. “A clockwork to reload it,” he said. “But…use steam to fire it. And for criminy’s sake, don’t name it after yourself. This is not how you want to be remembered.”

  “Sir, wait!” the boy called as Corwin went hobbling off. “You have yet to tell me how to generate the steam—”

  “Oh, and Brigham?” Corwin turned back, holding up a finger, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

  “Yes, sir?”

  The old man scratched his chin one more time. Briefly he let slip a smile. “Brilliant work.”

  EPIPHANY

  1750

  Corwin picked himself up out of the field, dazed but fine, and covered in bits of grass. The gigantic bolt had scorched the earth no more than fifteen feet from where he’d stood, and he could still see the energy, burnt into his eyes; it was branched and squirming, a vibrant blue and white.

  But now the storm was on the move again, tearing across the Pennsylvania countryside, leaving behind rattled houses and burning trees, like some passing dragon. And with it, it carried Corwin’s kite.

  He ran after it, stumbling, staggering, boots squelching in the muck. As he jumped up and reached for it, and reeled in the kite, he received an electrical shock from the skeleton key, which he had tied near the end.

  “Yeow—hah!” he cried as a blue feeler arced off his knuckle. Then he started laughing and shocking his fingertip, engaging with the electricity like it were some playful insect.

  “Cordelia!” he called to his wife, even though she was a mile away, and dry. “Cordelia, I did it! He was right!”

  Still laughing and shaking and dancing in the rain, Corwin retrieved the Leyden jar from his waist, where he had slung it from a leather belt. He lifted it up and touched the brass knob to the skeleton key, giggling as the blue tendrils of electricity flowed into the negatively charged jar.

  The sky rumbled, and he felt a shift in the air and in the rain and space itself, felt every fluid-filled, gas-filled cavity in his body react: the storm was moving, coming for him.

  Corwin looked up.

  A giant bioluminescent eye was staring back.

  REVOLUTIONS

  1776

  Corwin sat at his desk at home, barely registering the rooster crow and waning twilight.

  He was staring at a miniature portrait of his wife, trapped in a locket and painted with pigments from crushed burnt walnuts, ground chicken bones, and local clays and mud. The limner had unusually accented her eyes, and had included a background of rusty metal parts and pipes. She looked flat and uninterested.

  Someone knocked.

  Quickly, Corwin slid the locket back into the box of his wife’s things, tucking it neatly into her silk handkerchief. Her wooden dentures rattled as he shut the lid.

  The knock came again, more urgent this time.

  “Mr. Carroll, sir!”

  He got up too quickly, wincing at the pang in his right knee. “Yes?” he said, answering the door.

  The messenger handed him a piece of paper. “General Washington has requested your plans.”

  Corwin stared at the paper for quite some time.

  “Sir? Is everything—”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He sent the messenger on his way and grabbed his coat.

  Corwin passed by the boy’s house on the way. He almost knocked but decided to send for him later. First he needed to prepare a few of his own plans.

  At his workshop, Corwin climbed down into the belly of a boiler, where he hid one of his trunks. Immediately he noticed the broken lock.

  “No,” he said, kneeling down and flipping open the lid. “No, no, no, no…”

  Corwin’s vision flashed, and the physical world expanded to reveal its emptiness, the stark blackness and flutes and the pounding of drums; and he moved as if he were falling through space, out of the boiler and out onto the main floor.

  He threw a ladder against the far wall, then climbed up to where the boot was framed, wobbling, swaying, as if he were on stilts, because nothing was real or solid anymore, and everything was storming and crackling with static-electricity rain.

  At the top, he unlocked the box frame with a skeleton key and opened it. He jammed his hand inside the boot, the smell of old burnt leather, and nearly fell off the ladder when he felt nothing inside. His fingers stuck out the burst-open toe. Corwin clambered down to the floor and collapsed into nothing.

  The Leyden jar was gone as well.

  ***

  He could hear the boy playing something grandioso on the piano inside, so Corwin let himself in. He stared at the back of the boy’s head, his stupid wig.

  Corwin reached for the flintlock pistol hidden under his coat. It would be so easy. A little kick in the powdered curls.

  The boy jumped when Corwin laid a hand on his back.

  “Sir. What are you—”

  The old man handed him the letter and watched as Brigham read it.

  “Today?” the boy said.

  “Today.”

  Brigham looked again at the letter. “Yes, of course.”

  As the boy scrambled to get ready, Corwin looked around the house. It was a saltbox, just one big room. Brigham kept the place impeccably clean and sparsely furnishe
d. Just a jack bed, a wardrobe, and a desk and chair. He kept no personal belongings. No books, no mementos, no art of any kind. As if his stay here were only temporary.

  “Sir…” Brigham said, opening the front door for the old man as they prepared to leave.

  “Please,” Corwin replied, gesturing for the boy to go first.

  Brigham gave in, and again Corwin stared at the back of the boy’s head. He gritted his teeth. So easy.

  On the way to the workshop, Corwin expected Brigham to make some excuse and turn back. The boy kept wringing his hands and staring down at the wagon ruts in the road.

  “Did they say why?” he asked. “Why today?”

  Corwin shook his head. “Not our place to ask why.”

  “But…isn’t that the single driving question?” The boy glanced at him as they walked. “Isn’t that the kernel of America, why?”

  Corwin stared straight ahead, lips set in a grim line. “I suppose. That and…how.”

  When they reached the workshop, Corwin unlocked the door and opened it upon a holy mess.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, taking a risk. Brigham could easily report the blasphemy, if he wanted Corwin out of the way. But the old man needed to sell his performance. “What in God’s name…?”

  The boy pushed past him and looked inside. Corwin had torn the place apart, had tipped worktables and had disassembled contraptions and scattered scrap heaps all across the floor, looking for the Leyden jar, in the hope that it had simply moved itself. But he had known for a long time that it moved only when it wanted to be found.

  Brigham took off running, clambering over the pipes and large mainsprings and gears. The old man cursed under his breath and started hobbling after him. He couldn’t lose sight.

  By the time he caught up at the back of the shop, Corwin was out of breath and sweating beneath his waistcoat, not much of an adversary.

  The boy was looking into the tacked-hide trunk in the scrap metal, where Corwin had instructed him to keep his designs. The old man said nothing.

  This boy, this Tory…Corwin had to applaud his act. He looked as empty as the dusty trunk. But why? Why stay behind? Why keep up the charade? Corwin could think of only a few reasons.

  But then the boy was vomiting and feinting and falling toward the floor, and the old man caught him before the kid could bash his own head.