Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories

by Unknown

  The figure stretched one shadowy limb out to Thaxton and then to the professor’s wife. The air in the den had quieted, but the hand shifted like smoke in the wind, making it difficult to read its intent, whether accusatory or beseeching. Then, with one final, terrible howl, the thing vanished and the room returned to normal.

  Footfalls echoing from the central staircase and hall announced the imminent arrival of the professor’s assistant. Technically, Darcy Hayes was a reporter for the radical paper Uncommon Sense, but I saw her operate only as Thaxton’s aide. She hurried into the den juggling a trio of devices. Their blinking lights reflected in the dark circles of her goggles. “The damping field is up. I brought whatever meters were close at hand.”

  “Someone tried to force open a gate but couldn’t stabilize it,” Thaxton said, as if there could be no other explanation for the incident. “Assassins after one of us or thieves after the Eye.” He replaced the statue of the muse and turned to his wife.

  “The glass men again?” she said as she holstered her pistol.

  Thaxton scowled and shook his head. “The Patagonians don’t need a gate to sneak in here. They have their invisibility formula.”

  Miss Hayes looked up from the meters. “No help here. Normal readings across the board.”

  “The Deuxième Bureau, perhaps?” Mrs. Thaxton offered. “They’re partial to showy entrances. The way their agents arrived at Angkor Thom last year was nothing if not dramatic.”

  “No. The more I think on it—” the professor’s hand strayed unconsciously to his speaking box and the wicked scar that ran along his throat, almost from ear to ear “—the more this has the stink of the Russian about it.”

  Though he was the subject of many discussions during those two weeks, “the Russian” was the only way I ever heard Thaxton refer to his nemesis, the scientist-spy Pyotr Davidovitch Korolev. No two words have ever held more venom. There was poison enough there to end the man, the tsar who employed him, and a host of their countrymen besides.

  As the professor paced around the den, he expounded upon the Russian’s perfidy. He rattled off the names of a dozen different countries where they’d clashed, but offered only tantalizing fragments of the adventures that had occurred in those faraway places—allusions to mechanized dream thieves and massive sonic cannons, flesh-hungry yeti and flying machines forged from starlight. The daily papers and popular journals had carried reports of a few of these wonders, but most were new to me. Their full stories remain untold, to the general public at least. Thaxton only referenced them that day for his own benefit. He was simply thinking aloud. In the end, he concluded that the failed gate was a feint, an empty show intended to distract everyone from the Russian’s real scheme to steal the Eye.

  No sooner had that proposition snapped and susurrated from the professor’s speaking box than he turned his piercing eyes on me. “You’re fortunate I place so much trust in Miss Hayes. She thoroughly investigated your background. Otherwise, I might wonder why someone who was paralyzed with fear at the sight of the Eye could show so little reaction to the event we just witnessed.” With that, he turned abruptly and stalked from the room.

  I appealed immediately to Mrs. Thaxton. “It was as you said: I only knew enough about the Eye to fear it. The apparition wasn’t frightening. It was bizarre, surely, but it struck me as more mournful than threatening.”

  She held up a restraining hand. “No worries. That was my husband’s way of letting you know you still had our trust. But I’m afraid that this afternoon’s events prevent me from sitting for you today. I have to see to some precautions about the house and grounds.” She turned to Miss Hayes. “You and Mr. Chatterjee should stay here and get acquainted, Darcy. Charles is going to want an hour or two by himself to mull things over. In the meantime, you can answer any questions our guest might have. If you get bored, perhaps you two can uncrate the canvas and paints the courier delivered this morning.”

  On her way from the den, Mrs. Thaxton paused at a shelf that appeared to house a carefully arranged row of leather-bound books. At a touch from her hand, a section of false spines opened to expose a meter. She adjusted one of its knobs and flicked a switch before closing the façade and moving on to another shelf, which held a similar hidden device. A final stop at the door revealed a cleverly concealed speaking tube, which Mrs. Thaxton used to communicate with her husband in his laboratory before she headed off to another part of the house.

  “The rooms on this floor hide a stunning amount of technology,” Miss Hayes said after Mrs. Thaxton had gone. “Groundbreaking, but practical. She designed all of it, either based on her own research or adapted from some of the professor’s more theoretical discoveries. That’s the long way of telling you to be careful what you pick up or poke.”

  Now that the reporter was standing close to me, I could see more clearly the harsh, lingering reminders of what must have been a prodigious aether addiction. I’ve never tried the stuff, but I’ve known quite a few artists over the years who have. They dabbled, hoping it would open up their senses and allow them to experience life in new ways. Most found it more distracting than enlightening, and they gave it up long before the drug’s effects required them to wear goggles in order to see the world the rest of us see. The weaker ones couldn’t live without the distilled aether and consumed more and more of it, until their minds shattered and their bodies withered. The only place I had ever seen scars like the ones blighting Darcy Hayes’s face and hands—the blackened tip of her nose, the transparent fingernails—were on men and women caught up in the drug’s death spiral. The only difference was, her scars were no longer fresh. She must have possessed a remarkable will to get that far down the path to an addict’s oblivion and then turn back.

  We chatted for a time about our respective professions and the mutual acquaintances we had in the art world. Her research on me had been, as the professor suggested, quite thorough. She even knew about the gallery opening at which I managed to offend, among others, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.

  As the afternoon wore on, I grew bold enough to ask about the professor’s plans for the Eye. The answer Hayes gave was both more and less than I had asked for. She told me a little of the ruby’s history, how two soldiers-of-fortune had stumbled across it in 1889 while trying to establish themselves as kings of Khafiristan. The unlucky pair used the gem in a rite that triggered its ability to channel and focus aetheric energy. After the blast, the surviving soldier smuggled the Eye out of the Kush in the severed head of his former partner, then vanished into India. Thaxton learned about the Eye from the Intelligence Bureau and had been questing for it ever since, sometimes coordinating his efforts with Her Majesty’s agents, sometimes competing with them. He intended to utilize the ruby as a power conduit, though in a much more controlled fashion than its previous owners.

  When I pressed for more details, Miss Hayes circled back to that embarrassing gallery party and asked about the gossip that had me offending not just Whistler and Sargent that night, but Enrico Caruso, as well. The topic of the Eye had been closed.

  As dusk approached, a dozen globes in the tin ceiling rotated to reveal electric lights, and arms descended and shifted until the bulbs were positioned perfectly to illuminate the room. The mechanism had been camouflaged to blend with the patterned tin. I came to recognize many such marvels scattered around the den over the next two weeks. Mrs. Thaxton and I spent whatever hours we could cobble together there each day. My subject demonstrated incredible patience. It took me far longer than usual to capture her in my sketches, even excusing the time lost to the mystery of the intruder. Mrs. Thaxton proved unflappable, though. Not even the weird trespasser could dampen her spirits.

  We all had different names for it. “Intruder” seemed most apt to me—even after our discoveries about the thing’s nature on the final day it showed itself. The professor would refer to it only as “the distraction,” in keeping with his theory of its purpose. It appeared at least once a day, som
etimes as often as six times in the course of twenty-four hours. A blast of cold would tear through a room, followed by the disappearance of all color. Then the shadowy intruder would manifest. The incidents favored no specific location or hour. Sometimes the thing lingered in a single room. Other times it wandered between rooms or even floors. It passed right through objects and people in its way. The unstable nature of its form continued to mask its purpose, but it never made any gesture I would class as threatening. If anything, it reached out imploringly to whomever it encountered, while making that alarming, inhuman sound.

  Professor Thaxton set up a few pieces of equipment around the house the first evening. It was left to Miss Hayes to check the stationary monitors and deploy the portable ones as needed. The reporter revealed her findings to Mrs. Thaxton during one of our sittings. I understood very little of what they said about power fluctuations and field distortions. The conclusion was clear enough, though: apart from quantifying some disturbances in the aether, the data provided no positive insights. They could only say with certainty that the phantasmal visitations were unlike anything they had ever seen before. For the professor, this made the phenomenon a little more interesting, but ultimately confirmed his belief that it was mere light show, intended to distract. He refused to allow himself to be pulled into that sort of dubious mystery. Better that the rest of us pursued it as we wished, while he continued his work with the Eye.

  A feeling of unease soon settled over the household. Strange noises in a distant room demanded immediate investigation, no matter how often you told yourself that, this time, you would stay focused on whatever task you had at hand. A sudden cool breeze could paralyze with anticipation of the intruder’s imminent arrival. Every room and hallway twitched with odd and oddly moving shadows that vanished if you tried to focus on them. Sleep became difficult, and the lack of rest further soured everyone’s mood. By the fifth day, my sleep-deprived brain concluded that the intruder was always there, unseen, biding its time between appearances. Mrs. Thaxton made comments to the same effect, only she felt that the invisible presence was watching her. By the end of the first week, the cook had resigned and fled the house. Had the gardener not been an automaton, he surely would have deserted the place, too.

  Miss Hayes had it especially hard. She divided her time between the professor’s laboratory on the lower floor, where their investigation of the Eye continued at a furious pace, and the rest of the house, where she did her best to gather whatever data could be wrung out of each incident. She seemed always to be scrambling from one place to another, no matter how much aid Mrs. Thaxton and I offered. Headaches plagued her intermittently. The reason for that, at least, was no mystery. Her addiction had left her particularly sensitive to disturbances in the aether.

  The attack Miss Hayes suffered the morning after the cook left was typical. I had just asked her about a piece she had written on the Zulu king’s spectacular airship embassy to England when she grimaced and brought her fingertips up to her temples. “It’s returning,” she said. “Close by.”

  The intruder manifested in the hallway, just outside the kitchen, with the now-predictable burst of bitter air and extinguishment of all the nearby color. As we got close, the figure cried out in that terrible voice and moved off down the hall. It glided along slowly on shifting, shadowy legs, feet never touching the floorboards. We trailed it at a respectful distance. Miss Hayes scribbled details about the visitation into a little notebook. I found myself captivated by the absolute blackness of its core. The darkness there was so complete that it pained me to stare at it, yet I could not tear my eyes away.

  We followed the intruder down the central stairs. It stopped in the open doorway to Professor Thaxton’s laboratory, hovering on the threshold. The whir of machinery and the sharp crack of energy arcing between leads came from within the workroom, but we could not see past the shape. The thing had lost its vaguely human form and swelled to fill the doorframe like a black curtain, hiding everything beyond. A loud cry rang out from the murk. Then the darkness dissipated, revealing Professor Thaxton’s laboratory.

  This was my first sight of the place. I’d been curious about it, certainly, but no errand had brought me there before that morning. It was everything the den was not. In that cavernous space resided the artifacts the professor had recovered during his travels and the trophies commemorating his victories, right down to the working scale model of his racing mechaniphant, which trundled self-importantly back and forth along one wall. If fantastic objects such as these were not enough to dazzle the mind, an overwhelming display of inventions surrounded them on every side—toiling automatons wrought of various metals and weird machinery beyond the dreams of Tesla or Babbage.

  At the center of it all, a complicated network of grasping arms held the Eye of Khafiristan. A beam projected from an aether-burning device bathed the ruby in an eerie blue-white radiance. Thaxton’s face looked cadaverous in the strange light as he stood close by, adjusting the beam and jotting down readings from the half-dozen or so meters arrayed around him. “If you’re done dallying with the distraction, Miss Hayes, come assist me,” he said without looking up at us. “You, artist, may go away.”

  I was more than happy to comply. There was something about the laboratory that made it inhospitable to mere humankind. Such mundane, fleshly expressions of nature were unworthy of inclusion alongside the invented wonders and rescued marvels. Hayes surely seemed out of place as she crossed the room to join the professor. Her scars were vivid reminders of her fragility, a stark contrast to the machines’ shining metallic perfection. Even Thaxton looked the trespasser, until you noted his mechanical speaking box. That marked him as something more than human and, therefore, worthy of his surroundings. The thought depressed me utterly.

  Wrapped in a cloak of overwhelming gloom, I made my way to the den. I had scheduled a sitting for Mrs. Thaxton that morning, but neither she nor I could rally our spirits enough to make the effort worthwhile. I frittered away the rest of the afternoon in the library, scarcely aware of the rare volumes through which I was paging so idly: illustrated editions of Inventio Fortunata and Homer’s Margites, On Sphere-Making by Archimedes and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Libri. Like the marvels in the professor’s laboratory, I regarded these treasures through weary, careless eyes.

  I retreated to my room after dinner, eager for sleep and the temporary respite it might grant me from my dark thoughts. Yet sleep would not come. I tossed and turned for a time, as twilight dwindled and died, and night fell on Kew.

  The hollow, metallic growl of clockwork mastiffs in the garden below my window finally drew me from my bed. A pair of the intimidating beasts stood on a stone path, the now-familiar figure of the intruder trapped between them. The mastiffs advanced a step or two, closing on their target from opposite directions, then hesitated. One tilted its head from side to side, trying to get a better look at the shape. The other mastiff gave a high-pitched whine and crouched—not to ready for an attack, but to retreat. The two automatons backed slowly away, until the wavering figure stood alone in the doubly pale garden.

  It was the pallid hues of that wan, sickly nightscape that reminded me so vividly of a midnight in Jalalabad two decades earlier, and my uncle, and the things he tried to teach me about the way of matter. I never got to explain that moment of inspiration to the Thaxtons or to Miss Hayes. I only shared the results early the next morning, just as soon as everyone had gathered in the dining room.

  “Perhaps the intruder isn’t an empty distraction or someone trying to open a gate,” I said. “Perhaps it’s a ghost.”

  Professor Thaxton laughed. The speaking box translated the derision into a sound very much like the growling of the clockwork mastiffs.

  I had already steeled myself against that sort of reaction from the professor, so it did not fluster me. “In Hinduism,” I continued, “it’s said that the disembodied souls of the unenlightened can become trapped in the world until their new bodies are born. But the world is
not just what we see. It’s the akasha, too. The aether. They can become trapped there.”

  “I want to know what that thing is as much as anyone,” Mrs. Thaxton said. “But I don’t like where this is going.”

  “Neither do I,” Professor Thaxton said. “Religion is the stuff of superstition, so of course it leads us to this ridiculous discussion of ghosts. Next we’ll be consulting a psychic detective. Didn’t you interview one last year, Hayes—that quack alienist Low?”

  “I’m not suggesting it’s a true ghost,” I explained. “I don’t believe in them either. But perhaps we should investigate the intruder as if it were some sort of aetheric creature. If someone could look directly at it . . .”

  Mrs. Thaxton scowled. “That’s what I thought you were going to suggest. Do you have any idea of the risks that course of action might pose to Darcy?”

  Miss Hayes had been standing quietly. She surely knew that there was only one certain way to view an aetheric creature and seemed more saddened by the proposition than frightened. “Taking the goggles off isn’t difficult,” she said. “Getting them back on is another matter entirely.”

  “It’s your decision to make,” the professor said with surprising kindness.

  Miss Hayes nodded, and a faint, cynical smile quirked her lips. “And it’s already made.”

  We didn’t have long to wait.

  The final time the intruder appeared it manifested in the great room, in the maw of a mammoth fireplace that dominated one entire wall. Mrs. Thaxton saw it first and shouted for the rest of us to hurry, in case this visitation proved to be short-lived. Sometimes the intruder lingered, as on the morning we trailed it from the kitchen to the laboratory. Other times it arrived and departed before anyone could raise an alarm. If there was a pattern to its movements, we never uncovered it.