by Ewing, Al
The Locomotive Man picked that instant to offer another grinding, agonised whine from inside its brass dome. Steele winced. “Hell, that does sound ugly. I guess it is time you gave the poor bastard a break.”
“It’s not a ‘poor bastard,’ sir.” Reed snapped, “It’s a machine for performing difficult and dangerous chores –”
“Like killing folks.”
Reed clamped his lips tight together, biting his tongue to keep the anger in. How dare he? He dare he judge me, when he’s killed a hundred men or more? The man’s clearly nothing but a brutal, degenerate n –
He pushed the thought away and leaned furiously forward, flipping and pushing at the remaining switches furiously, trying to coax life out of the machine.
“Kind of vulnerable for a killing machine, all them levers and switches on its back,” Steele commented, dryly. “You might want to do something about that.”
Reed scowled. “Well, they won’t be there for long. I plan to do away with most of them entirely, in fact – I foresee future models with a simple starting lever, no more than that.” He turned to Steele. “The more we – scientists, I mean – study these analytical engines, the more improvements we’re going to make. I won’t bore you with some of the breakthroughs they’re making in London, but with what I know now... well, the second Locomotive Man will be able to make complex decisions on its own. It will, in a very limited sense, be able to think for itself.”
“And then you’ll have the perfect war machine, huh?”
“I’ve told you, Steele, it’s for performing tasks unfit for human beings –”
“Right.” Steele shook his head. “So when these machines of yours can think and decide like a man, what makes you think they’ll want to do your chores for you? Hell, what makes you think you’ll have a right to tell ’em to?”
Reed frowned. “I don’t understand you, sir.”
“No, you don’t, do you? Four years of bloody war and a country built on pain and sweat and blood, and you jackasses still don’t understand a damned –” Steele’s voice suddenly trailed off. Reed turned to see what he was looking at and turned pale.
“By God,” Steele breathed, “what... what is that, Reed?”
Reed licked dry lips. “I don’t... I don’t know,” he whispered. “God help me, I don’t know what I’m seeing...”
They had reached the top of the mesa.
Edison was waiting for them.
HE WAS SUSPENDED in mid-air, a foot above the ground, surrounded by a halo of rocks and stones that floated around him like the moons of some mysterious planet. His eyes glowed a gentle blue, and his flesh was a pale, ghostly white, corpse-like and dotted with great drops of sweat. One of his arms, Reed noted with dawning horror, had actually rotted away, leaving only the bone from the elbow down.
In his skeletal hand, he held a chunk of glowing blue stone.
Steele stared for a moment, as if wondering whether to turn back and leave the whole business behind, but then he swung himself down from Jonah’s saddle. The horse turned and made its way back down the trail, away from whatever was happening, and Steele did nothing to prevent it. Perhaps he thought Jonah was making the wisest choice.
Reed climbed off the front of the wagon and exchanged a wary glance with the bounty hunter. Then the two stepped forward, approaching Edison slowly, like a pair of skittish deer. Neither man said a word.
“Where’s Westinghouse?” Edison’s voice was distorted, oddly hollow, as if it was coming from somewhere very far away. He nodded to a small pile of charred straw lying nearby. “I’ve been conducting experiments. I thought he’d want to see for himself.”
“What...” Reed swallowed, shaking his head. He couldn’t form the words.
Steele scowled. “What the hell is that?”
Edison stared at him for a moment, then looked down at his skeletal hand, still wrapped around the glowing stone. “This?” Another stone floated up from the mesa’s surface as he turned the thing over. “I’m sorry. It’s... it’s hard to think.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if calling the memories back over some immense mental gulf. “I was wandering in the desert. I was drunk. I drank a lot, after... after everything...” He concentrated, rubbing his temple with his good hand. Another stone drifted up from the ground near Steele’s feet.
“There was a man. Foreign, I think – he called out to me in some language I didn’t understand. He was dressed strangely... I took him for a vision at first, or a hallucination born of the bottle. I think... I think he tried to tell me his name... Sorren? Does that help?” A pause. “He died.” Edison shook his head. “I couldn’t do anything. He was burning up with fever, and he’d been baked alive in the desert sun. He died in my arms. He was trying to tell me something about the stone. Trying to warn me away from touching it, maybe, but I didn’t understand... and then it was too late.” He stared into the blue glow of the stone for a long second, and then he raised his head and stared at the two men with narrowed eyes. “It’s mine now. Where’s Westinghouse?”
There was a note of anger in his voice, and the stones spinning and orbiting around him spun faster. Steele took a step back, hand hovering over his holster.
“Where’s Westinghouse? He was meant to –” Edison froze, the blue glow of his eyes fixing on Reed, and suddenly it did not seem quite so gentle. “Wait.” He scowled. “I know you. You shouldn’t be here.”
Reed blinked. “W-what?”
“It’s the stone. It shows me things. You shouldn’t be here.” Edison’s anger seemed to be building, and now tiny sparks and crackling lights danced over his exposed skin. “I should be here. So should Westinghouse. But not you.” He pointed the stone towards Steele. “Or you.”
Steele drew his gun.
Reed didn’t know if Steele meant to fire it, but he never got the chance. A bolt of blue-white energy leapt from the surface of the glowing stone to the barrel of the gun, and Steele cried out, dropping the revolver and clutching at his hand. Reed saw to his amazement that the flesh of his hand was badly burned.
Edison smiled. “Don’t do that again.” He turned back to Reed. “Have you ever heard of Alessandro Volta?”
Reed took a step back, looking over his shoulder for a moment at the Locomotive Man. Could he get to the controls in time? Would the Locomotive Man even stand a chance against whatever Edison had become? “No,” he heard himself say, “I don’t think I have.”
“You wouldn’t have. He was stabbed by a robber in the street. Michael Faraday was knocked down and killed by a horse before he had done anything of consequence, although he had theories. Benjamin Franklin was murdered by a man who should not be here.” He tailed off for a moment, and his eyes were burning like miniature suns. “Is this coincidence? Is this enemy action?”
“I don’t...” Reed swallowed, cursing his dry throat. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The stone knows. The stone remembers. It’s... it’s difficult for me to think with my own mind... to talk in three dimensions...” He grimaced, and his matted black hair rose up, crackling with static. “Where... is Westinghouse? He should be here. You shouldn’t be. Neither of you.” He lifted the stone again, pointing it at Reed. “Now... now I’ll have to start again.”
The stone crackled with power. Reed stared into its depths and saw what was to happen. Edison would use the power to annihilate him, burn him like kindling, and then he would walk – no, float – down from his mesa, and first he would kill everyone in Devil’s Gulch, and then Fort Woodson, and if he did not find George Westinghouse there, he would travel to New York, and everywhere he went he would leave scorched earth and burning bones...
Reed closed his eyes and prayed to a deity he did not quite believe in that the end would be quick. And then, just behind his left shoulder, there was an ear-splitting sound.
The shriek of a steam whistle.
Then everything happened very fast.
Reed was suddenly on the ground, and the Locomotive Man was th
undering past him, belching smoke, gears grinding in his brass head. The orbiting rocks bounced off his metal body as he swung a blood-stained claw towards Edison, and Edison had just enough time to bring the stone to bear –
– and Reed was almost blinded by the blue-white light that flew from the stone to the Locomotive Man’s chest, stopping the deadly charge and tearing the furnace-door from its hinges, then moving to the shoulder joint to rip one great iron arm clean off its body –
– and then Steele was reaching with his good hand for his gun, grabbing it from the dirt while Edison was engaged, and firing twice, all in one smooth motion, aiming for the exposed ulna and the radius, hitting both –
– and when the bones snapped clean in two from the force of the bullet impacts, it was Edison that fell to earth and the stone and the hand that held it that continued to float, the centre of a cosmos of rocks –
– and Steele scrambled to his feet, making a grab for the floating blue stone, catching hold of it while it was still crackling with all manner of strange, unfocussed power –
– and then he was gone.
Reed blinked. Jacob Steele and the blue stone had simply vanished into the air, as if they had never existed. Edison lay on the ground, coughing weakly, and the Locomotive Man stared down at him with its expressionless glass eyes. Then, quite casually, it reached down with its good arm and grabbed hold of Edison’s head.
“No –” Reed cried out, but it was already far, far too late.
“GOOD GOD. WHAT happened then?” George Westinghouse asked, pouring a brandy.
“I switched it off. It’s standing there still.” Reed rubbed his temples, then reached for the glass.
“You left it there?” Westinghouse seemed incredulous.
Reed sighed. “It was too heavy to deal with.”
Westinghouse shook his head, frowning. “And Edison? What happened to his body?”
“I buried him as best I could with the coal-shovel. The Indian too.” He shrugged, remembering the hard ground and the shallow graves. He hoped some predator hadn’t dug them up again.
Westinghouse scowled. “Very convenient.”
Reed shook his head and ignored the comment. “Anyway, Steele’s horse let me ride on his back as far as the town, and they let me telegram from there. And here I am. If you’ll allow me to retrieve the Locomotive Man at the earliest opportunity, I can look into what went wrong in the mechanism that made it act without orders...”
“Now that, I’m interested in.” Westinghouse poured a glass for himself. “This is something you were working towards – the Locomotive Man acting alone. If that part of your story isn’t...”
“Made up? None of it is.”
Westinghouse took a long sip of the liquor. “Well, I’m not saying you’re lying, exactly, but it sounds like your account might be a little confused. The important thing is what your Locomotive Man did.”
“Killed a man.” Reed took the brandy and swallowed it in a single gulp. Westinghouse ignored him.
“It acted autonomously, based on earlier instruction. I understand that’s the direction they’re going in in London. I’d like to get there first, and this might be the key.”
Reed lowered his glasses and looked into Westinghouse’s eyes. “Steele was right. The Locomotive Man’s nothing but a killing machine. I’ll have no further part of it.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms.
Westinghouse winced. “Now, Mister Reed, you’ve obviously had a shock. I’d go so far as to say your recollections might be –”
“I’m not insane, Mister Westinghouse. I might have been when I thought up the Locomotive Man, but not now. It was a childish fantasy, and if I wasn’t worried about some fool building another, I’d leave it to rot on top of that rock.” He shook his head, reaching down to rummage in a canvas bag at his feet. “Having it pull a wagon was... imbecilic. Why not infuse the technology into the wagon itself? Powered vehicles, sir. A revolution in transport. If that’s what you want to do, I’m behind you all the way – but I’m done with mechanical men, and that’s the end of it. Let the fools in London take the blame for what’s coming.”
Westinghouse looked sceptical. “And the money with it? Well, we’ll discuss that later. Right now, I want to talk more about what happened up there. Now, as I said, I’m not going to call you a liar, but –”
Reed interrupted him by pulling a heavy mahogany box out of the bag, slamming it on the table. “It’s a cigar box. I picked it up in town for the weight.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“You will.”
Unceremoniously, Reed opened the box, and a smallish stone drifted up out of it to hang in the air in front of Westinghouse. For a full minute, the older man was unable to speak. Then he reached out with a fingertip to touch the stone, watching it bob away from him. “Good God,” he whispered at last.
“Every word of my story is true, Mister Westinghouse. I believe some trace mineral present in this stone, and in the others I took with me, was affected by the object Edison was carrying in such a way as to... well, eliminate its susceptibility to gravity. I’d like permission to correspond with certain mineralogists of my aquaintance, with a view to duplicating this faculty. I’ve been in conversation in the past with a Dr. Herbert Cavor, who I think might...” He paused. “Sir?”
Westinghouse grinned like a boy. “Good God. More of this, you say?”
Reed smiled. “Well, we’ll see. It might take a century or more before we can actually synthesise it, but... it’s nice to think I might have been instrumental in the creation of something that won’t end in death.” He looked down, as if embarrassed. “I even thought of one interesting application of an anti-gravity alloy on the way here – something that couldn’t possibly be used to kill...”
“Hell, I’ll bite. What did you think up?”
“Wings, sir.” Reed grinned. “A pair of steam-powered wings.”
THE EVE OF WAR
(Excerpt from The New York Clarion, dated August 27th, 2000.)
FORBIDDEN ECSTASY
Jason Satan, the Man With The Touch Of Death, gazed hungrily on a beaker filled with his own blood, and hissed like a cat!
“What wonderful poison flows in my veins!”
The oozing liquid had the colour and consistency of spoiled milk and a sour and sickly smell, that seeped into the air and filled every nook and cranny of the warehouse. Satan breathed it in, shuddering in depraved, forbidden ecstasy at the unholy scent!
What horror did his unspeakable pleasure portend for the citizens of New York?
HE LIVED ONLY TO KILL
(For the benefit of readers new to the most action-packed news-paper in the five boroughs, there follows a brief description of this noted enemy of mankind.)
Jason Satan was a tall man – six and a half feet – and rail-thin, with the appearance of a skeleton wreathed in skin the colour and texture of office paper. His hair was as fine as cobweb and as white as his face – in fact, there was almost no part of his body that held colour. When he ran his bloodless tongue over his thin lips, it was as if a grey slug was emerging from some sunless cave. When he fixed you with his pitiless, inhuman gaze, his pupils were tiny black dots in a sea of wet, white jelly.
The only exception was his smile – for his teeth were yellow, rotting gravestones poking from grey gums. That devil’s rictus was the last sight hundreds of innocent victims had ever seen – for Jason Satan had a love affair with Death, in all its varied forms, in all its horrors and brutalities. He was happy only when Death was near, when he could taste it on his tongue, feel its awful power working through him. He lived only to kill.
CATALOGUE OF HORRORS
“How beautiful.” The Prince Of Poisons purred the words, his eyes glittering with unholy light! “My blood – the source of my killing power! Were a single drop to fall on your exposed skin, my friend...” – his eyes narrowed suddenly, a trace of anger showing in his skeletal features, and a discordant note of
malice entered his voice – “...had you not inoculated yourself against my gift... why, you would be dead before you hit the ground! Were I to shake your hand, or kiss your cheek, you might have time for a few last seconds of horror before that final end claimed you -- for all time!” He brightened at the thought, his sickly yellow smile springing to life like a jack-in-the-box. “And now... now you say you will translate the deadly power of this perfect ichor to the very air itself?”
He addressed his question to the other man in the room -- though ‘man’ was hardly the correct term.
For Mister Murder, The Master Of The Murder Chair, was much more – and much less – than a human being!
VAST, BALLOON-LIKE HEAD
(Again, for the benefit of new readers, we will attempt a description of this most hideous of master-fiends.)
Mister Murder was, in truth, not so much a man as a vast, balloon-like head, criss-crossed with pulsing veins. The diameter of his skull measured a touch over four feet, and as if in compensation, the body that hung from his neck was almost vestigial – tiny and withered, as if it had barely grown since emerging from the womb. His face was a hideous, cracked mass of wrinkles, grotesquely magnified in proportion to his gigantic cranium, and his bulging eyes possessed a secondary, nictitating membrane, like a bird’s – so that a murky green film flickered occasionally over them as he spoke. Otherwise, his gaze was utterly fixed and unblinking, an endless stare that seemed to penetrate deep into the soul, worming out all hidden secrets. There were whispers that the hideous experiments which had given him his gigantic brain had also blessed him with telepathy, for he often seemed to know exactly what an enemy or ally was thinking – a talent which made him all the more dangerous.
