Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  The pearl was worth a small fortune. It would be grand to get its worth, though I had a niggling suspicion that wouldn’t be very easy.

  The spooks down in central Alston weren’t nearly as aggressive or frightening, and we managed not to look at the few we saw drifting along. By then, I was sort of used to the idea we had us a ghost magnet, so long as we could get it over with.

  By the time we pulled to a stop at the moon sister temple, it was three bells, which I could hear real well on account of the bell ringing three times up at the top of the temple tower.

  Jim parked in the alley, him stopping to hook up a feed bag for the poor old gelding. I was already hammering on the side entrance when Jim jogged up. Something was staggering around amid the old stones in the little moon sister graveyard, but I didn’t want to see it clear, so I didn’t turn my head.

  It took a lot of pounding before Sister Toomey opened up. Usually, she was all sweetness and light, but being wakened at three in the morning puts the brakes on even the best moods. After a few choice words, she said, “You’re making enough noise to wake the dead!”

  “Funny you saying that,” said Gentleman Jim.

  “The law after you?”

  “Spooks,” I said. Right then the thing in the graveyard was scuffling closer.

  “Who’s that with you?” the moon sister asked.

  “Spooks!” I might have sounded a little emphatic.

  Sister Toomey sighed dramatically and stepped away. For a split second, I thought her done with us, but three great latches clicked, one after the other, and the door swung wide. She stood in the doorway with a blue candle. Me and Jim scrambled through, and Sister Toomey let out a little gasp when she caught sight of whatever it was. Jim’s in the habit of holding doors for folks but not them what’s dead, so he slammed it tight, closed the eye slit, and locked up the latches.

  “You weren’t joking!” Sister Toomey said.

  “Spooks,” I said, gasping a little.

  “What Jane said,” said Jim.

  Sister Toomey asked us to tell her what in blazes was going on, so after she sent the little acolytes away—they’d come running up to see what the commotion was—we filled her in. Though we left out some of the incriminating details.

  Sister Toomey took us to the back of the temple, which she said was especially holy, and lit some candles in the wall niches. Each was inset with pretty mosaics showing the different phases of the moons, all in blue and gold. There was an old wooden door just behind us that something was knocking against when we all sat down on the marble floor.

  Toomey studied it in horror. “The crypts,” she said.

  “Can it get through?” I asked.

  “The door’s locked.” Toomey frowned at the door and ran a hand back through her hair, which was about equal parts gray and black and hung back to her shoulders. She fixed us with a stare that could melt stone. Normally, she was pretty for an older lady, even with one blue eye and one green, but right then, she looked like a fairytale witch.

  What with all the commotion, I’d never gotten a real good look at the pearl, and it stole my breath when I got it out. It was perfectly round, like you’d expect of a fine pearl, but it was opalescent and smooth and seemed to glow with some kind of inner light.

  Sister Toomey let out a low whistle as she took it but set right to praying over the thing. After, she held it at arm’s length and peered at it through the candle flame. Me and Jim watched and pretended that there wasn’t some dead thing knocking on the door six feet away. Jim even pulled out his pipe and used one of those candles to light it while the sister wasn’t looking.

  After a while, Sister Toomey lowered the pearl and spoke in a tired, far-away voice. “This pearl’s bad news.”

  Jim took out the pipe. “Can’t say as I’m surprised.”

  “Can I shoot it with a witch bullet?” I asked.

  Sister Toomey shook her head. “No, Jane. That wouldn’t help. The pearl must be taken willingly. Until it is, whoever took it will draw the dead to them, every night.”

  Sister Toomey knew about things like that. Moon Sisters usually do, at least them with the gift, and she had it. We were inclined to trust her, too, on account of all the favors she owed us. Why, if it weren’t for the cut Jim gave her, a lot of those little acolytes would be living on the street instead of getting beds and meals and reading lessons and all.

  Jim puffed on his pipe. “I was afraid of something like that.” He sounded frustratingly nonchalant.

  “Why did Applesby pick us?” I asked.

  “We’ve made a lot of enemies,” Jim said. “The why’s not as important, is it? The trick’s figuring a way through.”

  “We just have to find some bloke to foist the pearl on,” I said.

  “No one but Lord Grevon and Applesby are getting that pearl,” Jim said, and he had that glint in his eye that meant trouble.

  “How are you going to get them to take it?” I asked. “They know about the curse.”

  “They deserve it,” Jim said.

  I reckoned they did. “But Jim, if they know about it, how are we going to get them to take it?”

  He smiled real big and put the pipe back in his mouth. “I’ve got an idea.”

  As ideas went, it was fair, though a lot depended on how Jim worded the letter he sent to Applesby’s contact and upon Grevon’s greed. I was skeptical of Grevon wanting any more money, but Jim said rich men always want more money, no matter how much they have. Like a weed drinker—once you start on the stuff, you keep putting more and more of the little blue puffballs into your beer.

  Me and Jim stayed in the moon temple ’til dawn, when the ghosts was gone, then grabbed some sleep in our rooms off Felding street. By three, all of our arrangements were in place, and we were back in the same room at Captain Thorne’s, though he’d moved his dirigible to a different berth. Thorne flew around a little bit every day over lunch and during the dinner hours so’s to give his guests a view.

  Me and Jim ate some fish while up in Thorne’s, which always struck me as kind of funny, and waited on Applesby, who Jim had told to show up at four. I was looking at the pearl every now and then, seated on the black cloth on the table, and wondering how much it was really worth and who we could trick into taking it if Applesby didn’t show. There were plenty of bad folks in the city, after all. In some places, just leaving the thing on the street would just about guarantee only a black-hearted man would get it.

  I ran this idea and others past Jim, but he was set on getting it back to Applesby and Grevon.

  Four came, and then five after, and then five ten. I could tell the time because I was looking at Lord Grevon’s gold pocket watch, which is how I know it was exactly five sixteen and forty-five seconds when Thorne’s waiter announced there were two gentlemen to see us. Jim didn’t show his relief. He just nodded and told the waiter to show them through.

  Applesby looked even more nervous than the last time. His little blue eyes kept shifting back and forth. I paid ’specially close attention to his right hand, which was slipped into the pocket of his overcoat.

  Much as I noticed Applesby, I paid even more heed to the fellow with him. He was dressed in a black overcoat of finest Moravian silk, complete with a winding dragon pattern. He had a scarlet kerchief of the same stuff—pattern and all—and a little scarlet flower poked into the side of his top hat. Lord Grevon was even harder-eyed and grimmer-lipped than his servant, but he cut a dashing figure, really, and if he hadn’t held his face like he’d sucked down a couple of lemons, he might have been a good-looking bloke.

  “My man,” he said in a reedy voice, “has a revolver upon you. I wish you to know that right away.”

  Jim laughed genially. “Lord Grevon. Please, join us for a drink.”

  Grevon sneered. “I have no interest in your fellowship, thief.”

  Jim completely ignored the hostility. “I admit,” Jim said, “it was a fine trick until I figured out how to make it work.”


  Grevon’s cold gray eyes narrowed. “There’s no way to make it ‘work.’”

  “Ah, but you’re curious, or you wouldn’t have come.”

  “I came to gloat,” Grevon said. “To see you come to your just desserts.”

  “And why is that, exactly?” Jim asked.

  A cold, cold smile frosted those lips. “That little caper those rags printed last month? That steel was intended for my factory.”

  Jim didn’t like factories, and you could see it, briefly, in his eyes before he smiled again. “Well, it seems like we got off on the wrong foot, lord. Fate may give us a second chance to work together.”

  Grevon snorted.

  “The trick to the pearl,” said Jim, “is to know what to do with the ghosts when they turn up. Jane studied with the moon sisters and saw the how of it after a few hours.”

  Grevon’s eyes snapped over to me. I focused hard against a desire to curtsy.

  “Think of it. You know how many secrets the dead know?” Jim lifted the pearl in one big hand and held it up to the light. “It’s even more priceless than you thought. Why, with Jane’s skills, we can learn all kinds of things that could profit us!”

  Jim had more speechifying ready, but Grevon was canny enough to see the potential already. And suspicious, naturally. Although I saw his eyes drift back to the pearl as Jim set it down. “If this is true, why do you need me?”

  “You, lord, have access to places we can’t get. Oh, we can sneak into Baneridge, but we’d attract attention eventually. But not if we’re in the company of a lord. And who knows better which dead are likely to have useful secrets than an aristocrat? We could help each other.”

  I could tell this sounded a lot more interesting than Grevon had expected. He was trying awful hard not to look at the pearl. His eyes flashed to me. “This is true, girl? You studied with the moon sisters?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in the temples,” I said, which was true. The secret to lying is to wrap that lie in truth and stuff it full of implications.

  Grevon opened his mouth to speak, and I had myself ready with more lies, when the door bursts open.

  In come two big gents in black pants, red coats, dark cloaks, and shining gold helms with ebon horse hair crests.

  “Black cloaks!” Jim cried.

  “Gentleman Jim,” the black-haired one on the right said, “you and Jane are under arrest! Get your hands up! One side, sir.” With that, he stepped forward, raising a revolver. Applesby went popeyed and Grevon stiffened in alarm.

  The black cloaks came past Grevon and Applesby, pointing their weapons.

  Jim reached for the inside of his coat, and that’s when the black cloak fired. My friend let out a moan and sank backward, dropping like a stone.

  I screamed, all girly-like, and put my hands to my mouth, and the black-haired one fired at me.

  It was a blank, of course, like Jim had worked out with the Somersby boys, but it was still a shock to see a pistol aimed at you and hear a bang. I jumped back and then remembered to drop. I even groaned because I accidentally hit my head on the chair leg.

  While I heard Frank Somersby complaining to his brother that I was a woman—he was really getting into his part—Ed came back that I was a criminal and deserved what I’d gotten. I squeezed the packet in my hand and groaned some more as I rubbed the red stuff all over the belly of my brown dress, as if I was feeling a stomach wound. The Somersbys turned their backs on Grevon and Applesby and came to investigate us, like they would if they were really black cloaks and we were really criminals. Well, we were criminals, but you know what I mean.

  “Jim’s dead,” Ed said in his deep voice. “What about the girl?”

  “She won’t live long,” Frank answered, though he gave me a wink. I glared at him. I happened to catch Grevon looking my way, so my angry glare slid right into the scene. And speaking of sliding, Grevon’s hand swooped up that pearl and popped it into his pocket. He then stepped back and drew himself up like the lord he was. “I’m Lord Grevon of Baneridge.”

  Ed and Frank both turned.

  “I’m sorry, Lord,” Ed said, very proper. He holstered his revolver. “We didn’t recognize you.”

  “I quite understand,” Grevon said with false cheer. You’d think he’d found an old friend. “You had your eyes upon your quarry, like a keen hunter. I commend you. You’re quite sure they’re both dead?”

  “The poor lass won’t last long,” Frank said. He sounded a touch too sympathetic to me, but Grevon was too nervous to notice.

  “They were attempting to blackmail me,” Grevon said, “so I’m afraid I can’t muster much sympathy.”

  “Oho!” said Ed. I guess he didn’t know what else to say because he stayed quiet after that.

  “We’ll send someone around to collect your statement, Lord,” Frank said. “Probably tomorrow morning. Now Officer Frunk and I will need to deal with the owners and arrange transport for the bodies and try to make the lass comfortable in her final moments.”

  “Of course,” Grevon said.

  I rolled my eyes back, like I was getting woozy and weak.

  “Well then,” Grevon said. “I shall expect someone in the morning. Come, Applesby.”

  And like that, they were gone. Me and Jim stayed quiet for a good long while, though, until Ed had closed the door and started laughing. “Frunk? What in blazes was that?”

  “Your timing,” Jim told them as he pulled himself up, “was perfect.”

  “I can’t believe he took it,” I said. Frank handed me a napkin to wipe my “blood” with. He was always a little sweet on me.

  “Call back the waiter, boys, and stay for a drink.”

  Frank and Ed took off their helmets and cloaks and trotted off.

  “I don’t get how Grevon expected to use the pearl if I was dead?” I asked Jim.

  “What’s one dead girl to him? If you could talk to the dead, he figured someone else could too.” Jim pulled out his pipe and lit it.

  “You called it,” I admitted, dabbing more napkins on my dress.

  Jim puffed once on the pipe and chuckled. “I just wish I could be there when he goes to the graveyard some evening and tries it out. He’ll be in for a rude awakening.”

  “No bones about it,” I said.

  Howard Andrew Jones is the author of an Arabian fantasy series for St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne, starting with The Desert of Souls, and three Pathfinder novels, including the recent Beyond the Pool of Stars. A former Black Gate editor, he also assembled and edited 8 collections of historical-fiction writer Harold Lamb’s work for the University of Nebraska Press. He can be found lurking at www.howardandrewjones.com.

  Frænka Askja’s Silly Old Story

  Emily C. Skaftun

  Well, I didn’t want to taste that anyway,” Whale Breath said petulantly, and dissipated into the dark sky. A scant half-kilometer away, the lights from the new electric plant cast an orange sheen on the already-dark afternoon, reflecting between snow and snow-laden sky.

  Móðir didn’t need me to come in. The animals were put away, and she’d probably forgotten dinner entirely, locked away doing whatever it was she did in her workshop these days. I was older than you are now, little ones. But since Magnús had run off with the submarine whaling fleet and faðir died, móðir thought I was alone too much and kept a closer watch over me. I was late.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  I had a number of good and true friends of discarnate nature who lived at the hot spring. They wouldn’t tell me their names, so I was forced to dub them with the most unappealing monikers I could manage—in hopes they’d hate them enough to reveal themselves. That was really the only flaw in our relationship.

  “She’ll be wanting you the instant she’s done,” Hairy Troll Bottom advised, a stretch to his steamy limbs that reminded me of squinting.

  I sighed. “I’m going. See you tomorrow?”

  “We’ll be here,” came a chorus of their wispy, chirpy, drippy voices. Even the ones
I couldn’t see at the moment chimed in, as usual, in the ritual goodbye. Of course they would be there tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, for longer than I planned to live. They were made of steam. Where else but a hot spring could my steam friends survive an Íslensk winter?

  Móðir had her face pressed to the window like a puppy when I came up the path, steam from my water-heated body curling off me into the dark night. I stepped out of my boots, leaving them in móðir’s fancy wind-up drying rack. She held her hands by the bustle at her back, the hump in the silly imported dress she’d had to have. The look on her face was a sort of manic excitement that, since faðir’s death, I’d come to fear even more than her cold somber silence.

  She waited just long enough for me to hang my coat up over a radiator, mercifully not scolding me for being “late,” before whipping the surprise out from behind her. It was . . . something I’d never seen. A collection of bolts and cogs and gears and strips of tin and copper sheet intricately welded into the shapes of limbs and body and massive sheet metal ears, hinged to flop this way and that. It was a type of animal, something I’d seen in drawings in teacher’s big reference book. An elephant! One of the whale-large monsters that roamed Africa and other such places. But móðir must have made this one strictly from memory. Its chunky body was a mere wire skeleton cradling blocky copper and wires. Its trunk was long and lumpy, segmented and bendy looking, dropping down between two black marbles sunk into the thing’s face to make soulless, lidless eyes.

  It was a horror.

  Móðir held it out to me, thrusting it toward me as if she wanted me to take the thing from her. I reached out carefully, afraid of sharp metal edges. She’d made me toys before, delicate wind-up birds and sheep and horses, but none of those had looked so menacing, and none of them had made her so obviously proud.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  The unexpected weight of the thing dropped my outstretched hand as she let go. The tip of its ear snagged in my wool sleeve. “It’s heavy,” I said, grateful for an honest comment.