Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  He cupped the warm glass between his hands, willing the wick to ignite. Come to me. He wasn’t sure if he said the words aloud, and he wasn’t sure if that mattered. What did a fairy hear? Dance for me. I need you.

  In a flurry of fire, she answered. The bone wick ignited into splendor, and around its white pillar, the lady spun her dervish spell. She whirled, and she laughed, and she kicked her tiny feet high, and the flurry of her veils whipped his senses away. Her song was a high, sweet piping to shatter an angel’s heart, and her smile was a secret like none he’d ever known. Every pirouette was an epiphany, every fouette a revelation.

  And then she was gone, and nothing he did could call her back. He pressed his fingers to the glass, but it gave him nothing. Even the memory of warmth within its curves quickly faded.

  She likes to be admired.

  He tried, feeling more foolish with each attempt. But his words of praise met with deaf silence, and flowers heaped outside the lantern just wilted and went to black. Offerings of ribbons, fragrance, and bright paste jewels failed to move her. The lady of the lantern shared none of her mortal sisters’ tastes.

  There was only one coin Abernathy knew she’d take. One way to fuel that fire.

  Neither oil nor gas burned in her lantern. It contained nothing but a wick of bone, and now that Abernathy had it to study, he saw that ivory needle was charred to ash at the end of her dance.

  Carefully he prized the lantern open and, using medical tweezers, extracted the wick. It had been sanded down considerably, as if whittled on a lathe, but he could identify the familiar knobs and crevices of finger joints. Human, of course.

  The lady, he now felt certain, was nothing so innocent as a fairy. She was a hungrier sort of spirit, and her appetites were bloody. That was why she required a dead man’s coin. The admiration she wanted was that which the gods of old had demanded: sacrifice. And that was her test of faith.

  The tweezers clattered against his desk. Abernathy sank back in his work chair, frightened and disheartened. He had hoped to comprehend what he’d seen, and he thought he’d begun to . . . but the answer was one he couldn’t accept.

  Death alone didn’t deter him. Medical advances required a willingness to experiment—and to accept certain costs in the course of those experiments—that swiftly weeded out the weak-livered. The technologies of steam and steel could be lethal, too, scalding or crushing those who failed to treat them with due respect. Abernathy had made his peace with that years ago.

  But this wasn’t science. There was no rationale to dead men’s coins or fingerbone wicks. Every step had led him deeper into an ancient and murky way of thinking, a realm where unreason reigned and superstitions held power. The only power. The lady had lured him with glimpses of understanding, but it was a nonsense understanding, filled with the illogic of dreams.

  She had showed him magic, and rationality held no sway where magic ruled.

  Death was not a price too high. But reason was.

  Surprising himself with the sudden violence of the gesture, Abernathy knocked his engraving tools and carved coins into the feeder basket of the grinder he’d used to do his early roughwork. The sharp blades nicked his arm, tattooing crooked red beads across his shirtsleeve, but he welcomed the pain as penance. He hit the switch, feeding coal and air into the machine, and water gurgled in its kettle as the grinder woke. The basket tipped up, spilling into its maw, and the discordant clangor of the tools being pulverized into powder broke a burden from his soul.

  Let the stamped reality of Finisterra nickels be their only reality. Abernathy didn’t want to scratch through their metal faces in search of mystery, not anymore, and he certainly didn’t want to find it. Once, he’d been a man of science, and he’d believed the world was ruled by natural law. He wanted that assurance again.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, Abernathy laid a handkerchief over the cold lantern, feeling like he was draping a flag over a coffin. In a way, perhaps, he was. A white flag, a dream’s shroud. A farewell to a magic he had barely known.

  To the lady in the ghastlight, whose dance could not be of his world.

  Liane Merciel is the author of novels including The River Kings’ Road, Dragon Age: Last Flight, and the Pathfinder Tales books Nightglass and Nightblade, as well as the forthcoming Hellknight (April 2016). She lives in Philadelphia, where she practices law, plays with dogs, and tries to grow fruit trees on the roof. Sometimes it works.

  Cuckoo

  Richard Pett

  Her sound is with me always. Her heartbeat is behind my heartbeat, the song of below. A steady susurrus of wheezing is my second bride, and hers is the song I hear most even from so far away. One day, she will see me to my grave and still her song will go on. No one will ever see her to hers. Her lot is to toil, not to rest.

  It is night, the cloying darkness of below where the work doesn’t stop. Sweat cannot escape and hangs in the stale air, drowning in human toil. I cannot sleep, and the more I wonder about why I cannot sleep despite my weariness, the more awake I become, waiting for tomorrow’s shift. Or is it tonight’s? Darkness strips away rationale and nurtures primal feelings and fears. Where concentration should be easy is the easiest place to become confused.

  I abandon my attempts to slumber, so I rise, bleary-eyed. Outside in the bedroom, my daughter cries. I hear her mother whispering. I flounder for cigarettes, a blind man feeling for comfort. The sulphur burn is blinding as I strike a match, the fire’s echo dancing in my vision. Sucking on the teat, I fumble to stand and light the pyrebeetle lamp. Her victims crackle and spit, crawling from each other as the flame engulfs them and their immolation turns them into light.

  The room gropes into uneasy view as though ashamed at being disturbed. Simple function lurks in all the corners: a stove, a tawdry washstand with the broken shard of a grimy mirror hanging above, the old wooden larder lurking by the leaded window that somehow clutches at the odd shard of daylight lost down here.

  “You have a window,” they tell us. “You are lucky.”

  We do not tell them that we have two, that both have long surrendered to opacity beneath the grimy spit that encrusts their exteriors, places untouched by humans since they were first fitted.

  The horsehair couch creaks as I rise and begin to function as a person in the new day. I light the stove to make tea, awaken slowly, and prepare myself for work. All about me is the distant ceaseless toiling song of the fleshgines. Some call it their hymn. To me it is more a song of distress.

  I comb my greasy, angry hair and shave my protesting skin. The blunt razor pulls rather than cuts. I bear the smell of cheap waxy soap that has gorged on too many chymicals, perhaps it is my feral scent, my spoor tattoo. It is the smell of me, of scrubbing and dirt and the mask of sweat. The mirror has cracked twice before and now bears only a sullen vague face in its depths. I stare, perhaps hoping it will change, pulling skin back to remove years. Movement from the other room draws back a creased smile in my echo. I tell my darling I’m going to work, tell her to remain in bed until they are both better. Tell her not to worry.

  The machine is waiting.

  I join the dance to industry. Segs on metal echo through the shaft, countless shuffling feet descending into the bowels of the city through winding iron spiral stairs. The work clock clicks out four, and outside, the salt rain begins to fall through the slumbering night into the soul of the city. High above, on the cauldron streets of Brine, the tidal storm will be drowning the city streets. Twice a day, the tides rush beyond the levee and scream into the city below, driving her countless waterwheels of industry. The dampness follows me down into the bilges of the city. Drip, drip, drip. As I descend, my watery pursuer echoes my descent and threatens to drown me in her embrace. Perhaps, water is my third bride. I try to remember the last time I felt truly dry and fail.

  In the sweaty air below, the machine waits for me to tend her.

  I smell the machine long before I see her. Her dry sweat of labor pervades high beyond her reach, tell
ing me she still works, telling me she has not halted in that awful stillness that comes if a machine ceases. They do not die, but sometimes, they fracture or halt and are discarded. I try not to think of the stories I have heard. What would she give to escape? Does the thought ever occur to her? I enter the chamber. Somewhere nearby, her two sisters toil away as endlessly as she does. I’ve never seen her companions, nor their attendees, but sometimes they call to each other, these machines of gristle and bone. I imagine they are talking, but about what, I never guess. Sometimes, I could swear they are singing. Just once, it seemed that the song was taken up by them all, the countless engines calling to each other across the bilges of the city. Some said it was the end of the world approaching.

  As I arrive, my fellow takes his leave. I try not to meet his stare, not after the beating I gave him for the one he gave her—an anger that nearly cost me all.

  “Beasts are to be beaten,” the overseer had said afterwards. “We do not beat men anymore.”

  Not their flesh, anyway, I thought afterwards.

  I enter the sough, slithering into the fold. Above me and about me, her thin limbs stretch and arch upward, arms pumping and dislocating. Within, like a behemoth crippled spider, is the fleshgine’s body. From inside that fleshy cathedral, her eye stares at me: perhaps recognizing me, perhaps just hungering. I move toward her, soothing, and reach out to stroke her calloused flesh. Why do I bother? Does she feel it? I carefully check the copper pipes that enter her spine, her suckling mouth for feeding the elixir—the lowest grade of elixir—that keeps her moving. Endlessly moving.

  Every hour, on the hour, she must be fed the elixir. We You know the consequences if you fail. I fill the empty trough before her with water, and from her wide mouth, a tongue lolls out, lapping. Why did they give her a mouth? The water splashes across the floor, joining other pools of moisture to create the echo chamber I occupy. Her lapping disturbs the image, fractures it. I am the only one who gives her drink. It does not need it, they have told me, the elixir gives it everything it needs. I do not care what they tell me; I know only that she likes it.

  She laps at the water greedily as my watch begins. Her rhythm goes on, taking the water from the mines far below and back up to the levee, gulping air into the windpipe of the city.

  Why do I call it her?

  Because I make her suffer.

  I prepare the elixir away from her. I try not to let her see it, even though there seems no logic to my secrecy with the machine. When I feed her, she suffers, her body tormented by the very thing that keeps her alive. Burning within her, the stuff of life jolts her into continuation. I inject her as quickly as I can to get it over with, using soft words as I do.

  Her body shudders as the elixir boils within her, feeding her, driving her on. The whole chamber shakes with her misery, her movements slowing as it seethes into her veins and arteries and muscles and nourishes them, feeds them, drives them.

  Soon, but not soon enough, the first of twelve doses is within her, and her work and mine goes on.

  Much later, I leave my ward as the other man returns. Eyes not meeting, we pass like strangers. He only watches.

  “She is a machine,” he says, “a machine of flesh and blood made to toil. She feels nothing. She only serves. You are sentimental.”

  It is soon night again. I lie awake smoking and wondering. Beyond, all is silent save for the distant wheezing of the flesh machines. No one stirs.

  Something moves in the dark: cockroach or manyleg, perhaps. I wait for it to halt, its scratching noise taunting me. I rise. I know the stories about insects and babies. I determine to resolve the battle in my favor. I heroically grip my shoe and fumble for my matches, phosphorous flaring as my eyes stare into the corner where I heard the noise.

  I see nothing. I wait, alert, eyes fixed on the floor.

  A noise echoes from the wall by the washstand. I stand clumsily, look around. There is nothing.

  The noise echoes again right behind me. I turn and face myself in the mirror shard, momentarily confused. The noise is from behind the mirror.

  No, not behind.

  Within.

  Then I see it. A thing behind me. I turn and there is nothing. The room behind me is empty.

  Yet it was there in the mirror.

  Not enough sleep?

  I saw it.

  The long face.

  It was there, behind me in the glass.

  But just within the mirror.

  I know the stories.

  I tell my beloved that everything will be alright. Soon, they will both be better.

  When I leave, the mirror is in my pocket.

  I wrap my clothes about me and slumber to work through oily corridors and decay and meaningless graffiti. I am Gideon Weal. I am Gideon Weal, and I tend the machine. In the streets above, I wonder if the sun has groped through the smog or if it is dark. When did I last feel the wind on my face? When did I last see the sun? I imagine it imperfectly as I wander on, holding the mirror tight.

  As I reach the long spiral stair, I grip the mirror in my hand. Momentarily, I am of two minds, but within seconds, the glass is shattered on the metal walkway, shards fracturing into slivers beneath my feet.

  I’ve heard the stories.

  I tell the machine about the thing in the mirror. “The thing in the mirror is gone,” I tell her, “its threshold shattered and lost.”

  She says nothing. Her arms arc and grip and wrench and toil in the clammy chamber we share for half of my life.

  She has an odd face: too much flesh trying to stay in too little skin. She is blemished.

  She is my friend, my wife, my lover.

  Bolete.

  I tell her about the mirror. She asks me what I saw.

  “A face—a long face. A face without humanity,” I tell her.

  She puts her arm around me and tells me she understands why I broke the mirror. The baby comes first. The baby grins up at me, and I hug them both tightly.

  One day things will be different.

  That night, I sleep like a log.

  She is there again in the morning, lurking in her mist of sweat. The Machine. The instrument, the fleshgine: thing of gristle and muscle and bone. Always moving, always toiling, her limbs dislocating back and forth, pumping air into the mines beyond our homes.

  I wonder if they are kin, the machines?

  Do they think?

  I pause, wiping the sweat from my brow. The heat clings to me, her smell enveloping me. I ready the elixir for her, sensing her despair. Her muscles tense; her movements become more nervous, erratic. I move as quickly as I can. I clamber up the iron rungs and over her body. Her flanks heave below me as I reach for the copper pipes to feed her through. The elixir hangs at my belt. Momentarily, I see something move across the puddle of water below me. A thing too swift to be mundane. I wait, staring at the slippery floor. It moves again at the edges of the slick oily tar beneath me.

  Long face.

  This time, the face is hungry, envious. It leers up at me from the liquid. Is it smiling? It drags its crooked fleshy form up toward me. I’m lost in its familiarity, its brotherhood, yet appalled by just how different it is.

  The figure staggers to the edge of the reflection. With one swift movement, its hand reaches up, overly long digits groping at the edges of the oily water, violating the chamber with its presence as it tries to drags itself from the reflection and into the mundane world.

  I look about me, seeking a weapon.

  “Daydreaming again?”

  The voice of the overseer below. She stares up at me and immediately senses my fear, which she takes to be fear of her. She wraps herself in it and scowls up at me, her uniform starched like her soul.

  Below her, my echo fades into a confused blur of ripples as she walks across the moist floor, lacerating the image. The fingers slip into the oily liquid and are lost. I breathe a sigh of relief.

  She is angry. The fleshgine is sluggish. It may need replacing, but for now, t
he elixir must be stronger, she says. The dose will be doubled, and the production had better double with it.

  I agree with the overseer: we have been slack. She is right.

  She tells me she has seen Sedge, my partner. The word seems wrong when she pronounces it, laced with hidden meaning. He brokers no nonsense from the machine. His methods are stricter and more productive. She hopes I’ll take a lesson from his ways.

  I tell her I shall.

  But when she is gone, I hate her and him.

  I stare at the machine as she continues to toil. How would they dispose of her, I wonder. She cannot die. How would they end her? Would they do so?

  I stare back at the rippling waters below and look for my mop, determined that, for once, the floor will be dry.

  That evening, the stairs take an eternity to climb; a mountain ridge of industry and time rises beyond the clock. I am exhausted from my labors, but for now, the echo has gone, lost in a panicked cleaning of the floor. I stagger upward, warily eyeing every dancing rusty smear for a pool.

  I see none, but by the time I reach home, I’m almost sleeping on my feet.

  Bolete leads me to bed and closes the door behind me. Beyond, I hear her whispering to our child. I try not to sleep, but exhaustion soon claims me.

  It is dark when I awaken, but I am not alone. There is a steady breathing beside me. She stirs as I stir and then is still once more.

  My mind begins to wander back to the machine and to the thing in the mirror—the echo vision. I idly wonder if the overseer has a softer side and decide she probably hasn’t. What will happen if the machine fails? Will we be punished, will we be dismissed? I try not to worry. I try to focus upon happy things.

  She stirs again beside me, shuffling in the darkness in our bed.

  Then I hear my wife singing a lullaby to our daughter in the room outside.

  I pause, frozen, wondering at the weight beside me as it turns in the bed. Our bed. I’m caught between outrage and terror: a need to see and to shout and a wish not to know.