Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  “We could postpone the dedication,” Fleischer said.

  “The work is on schedule to finish on the exact day Herr Kobalt predicted, seven years ago,” I said, trying to keep the weariness from my voice. “How many signs do you need? Kobalt is what he says he is. He will not be denied. All our other plans have come to naught. Only the Doctor can save us from him now.”

  “This is madness.” Fleischer’s voice quavered.

  “To you it is madness,” Lichtman said, “because you have no sons. To me it is our last chance.”

  I saw the Burgomeister wince.

  Lichtman turned to me. “What do you think, Karl?”

  “You are both correct,” I said. “This is our last chance. And it is madness.”

  “Kobalt could not really. . . . It is not possible that he seriously means to—” he began.

  “The agreement we made was clear enough to you seven years ago.” I held up my right hand, with the little crescent-shaped scar at the base of my palm. I closed my eyes and recited the terms: “In return for sufficient monies to finish renovation of the Cathedral, Herr Kobalt collects the first man to enter the building on its dedication day, to do with as he pleases.”

  Fleischer ran a finger across the path of his scar. “Seven years is a long time,” he said softly.

  “The afterlife, I fear, will be longer,” the Burgomeister said, closing his own hand into a fist. “We were more naïve then, poorer and less wise.”

  “Do you really think the Doctor can help, Bader?” Lichtman asked me.

  “My sister came here once long ago,” I said. “She and her little friends wanted to see the Doctor’s doll, the mechanical woman. It would dance all day, waltzing along the top floor of the house—we could see it through the windows. So real we could scarcely believe it was a toy. Do you remember, Burgomeister?” We were friends then, I thought.

  “I remember,” he said. He gave a wan smile, and I was struck anew at how the last few years had aged him. “Your sister was a headstrong girl.”

  “She told me all about the workshop,” I said. “She said—”

  “She did a great deal of damage.” The voice at the doorway took us all by surprise.

  He was more cadaverously thin than I remembered, frailer and smaller. His eyes were watery and bloodshot. The white hair, once thick and full, lay in bare wisps across his peeling, freckled pate. His shirt was badly mended, the dirty and creased coat a style long out of date. The Doctor raised one veined and spotted hand and stabbed the air with a bony finger.

  “They broke things, those girls. They had no right to invade my workshop.” His voice had grown high and querulous; it had lost the booming quality that had so frightened me as a child.

  “She was only curious,” I said, “to see your wondrous dancing doll.” And father recompensed you handsomely for the damages, I thought, but held my tongue.

  The crookback wrestled a high-backed wooden chair out of the shadows and placed it near the empty hearth.

  “What a rare compliment, to have such gentlemen pay me a visit,” the Doctor said, making himself comfortable. “Be seated, pray, while my man finds us some refreshments.”

  “We brought a small gift, Herr Doctor.” The Burgomeister gestured to Fleischer, who proffered the bottle of cognac we had purchased at the tavern. The tavernkeeper had taken our money with a grudging, sulky air; an old man drinking in the corner had stabbed the sign of the evil eye towards us.

  “I grow more flattered by the moment.” The Doctor handed the bottle to the crookback, who went out again. “Sit, gentlemen, I beg you.”

  We each moved to find a seat amongst the squalor. Fleischer unfolded his handkerchief across a grimy brocade couch, then settled himself quickly when the Burgomeister caught his eye.

  “Let us have a fire,” the Doctor said. He made a languid gesture with his hand. At once a blue spark blazed up in the hearth; a moment later a fire burned vigorously. The shock and fear on our faces could be clearly seen by its light.

  He knows why we’ve come, I thought. Of course he knows. Our bargain with Herr Kobalt was common knowledge in the town now.

  The crookback returned with the cognac poured out into chipped clay cups. The crackling of the fire was very loud as he served us the liquor, making his distorted bow as we each took our measure from his tray.

  “Your health, gentlemen,” the Doctor said, with a mock-solemn salute, “and the health of your families.” Behind me, Fleischer drew in a sharp breath as the Doctor drained his cup with practiced ease.

  The Burgomeister took a sip of the liquor, then set his cup aside. “We are here to ask your help, good Herr Doctor. Your town has need of you,” he said.

  “My help?” the Doctor said. “But surely—under your august leadership, Burgomeister—the town lacks for nothing. A flourishing, prosperous place, ever since the renovation of the Cathedral began. Almost seven years now, is it not? I believe the work finishes soon.”

  “In a month,” the Burgomeister said, his face grim.

  “The town is full of life again, now that our spiritual center is renewed. Father Buchman must be busy indeed, preparing for the dedication ceremony,” the Doctor said. He held his cup out to the crookback, who stood ready with the bottle.

  “He has left the details of the ceremony in our care,” I said, watching in distaste as he guzzled the liquor. Father Buchman’s taste ran to beer; he had been continually drunk for almost three months now, ever since Fleischer had broken down in the confessional. These days the good Father only stopped drinking long enough to curse the four of us as damned men.

  Lichtman started forward. “Please, Herr Doctor,” he said, “you must help us. Kobalt wants his payment, and we are at wit’s end—”

  “And you wish me to sacrifice myself, for the good people of the town? Such dear people, who have been so kind to me, who have given me so much respect these many years?” Spittle flew from his mouth; in the flickering light he looked like a snarling dog. “Is it not for one of you to offer himself?”

  “It is not our bodies we fear for, Doctor,” Fleischer piped up. “It is a question of a man’s immortal soul.”

  “And yet your sons are not afraid,” the Doctor said. “I understand the young men of the town have set up a lottery to choose who among them shall meet Herr Kobalt’s price, should their fathers shirk the duty.”

  I thought of Franz, my eldest, his face pale and resigned. We are not afraid, Father, he’d said. One of us will go. It is for the good of all. My wife had run out of the kitchen, weeping.

  I caught the Burgomeister’s eye. He nodded and reached into his coat pocket.

  “We want you to build us a mechanical man,” he said, and set the bulging leather bag on a low table before the Doctor. The bag, overfull, tipped over, and gold coins spilled to the floor in a glittering cascade. “We are prepared to pay any price.”

  The Doctor’s laughter was harsh and raucous. He laughed until he shook, then coughed and gasped for air. The crookback hopped about in agitation until the old man’s breathing gradually evened out.

  Still gasping, the Doctor took up a gold piece and held it between thumb and forefinger. They were thick coins, heavy and pure, a capering devil wrought upon one side, blank upon the other. I knew them well.

  “Ha, ha, very good gentlemen!” the Doctor said. “You wish to best a demon with a clockwork man! You commission the work with a purse of the very gold he gave you! An excellent jest.” He laughed again, then stood up.

  “We are desperate men, Herr Doctor—” I began.

  “So you are,” he said, laughing again as he stepped to the door. He looked back at us, his expression equal parts contempt and amusement. “I accept your commission,” he said. “Come back in a month, on the night before the dedication, and not before. You shall have your clockwork man. Whether the demon you have bargained with accepts him, well, that is not my affair.”

  The instant he left the room the fire went out, leaving us staring a
t each other in the guttering candlelight. The crookback stood by the door, his arm extended. In a moment we were in the street, the great oak door slamming shut behind us, listening to the crookback shoot the bolts closed one by one.

  ~ ~ ~

  We went back to our lives. My eldest son came and went at odd hours. My wife wept without ceasing. She would not speak to me, or meet my eye. She slept in the children’s room, clutching our young daughters as if she would never let them go.

  A week passed in this way. Lichtman came to see me, stinking of unwashed clothes and brandy.

  “Fleischer thinks we should go back to the old idea,” he said, “find a stranger, some vagabond we could pay. . . .”

  “And how much would we pay a man for his life?” I asked. “How far would we have to go to find someone, now, who does not know of our bargain? Should we capture some poor fool, bind him hand and foot, and throw him across the threshold to pay our debt? Is that any more honorable then sacrificing our sons?” Lichtman’s boy was also in the lottery.

  “How could we have known. . . .” Lichtman doubled over, hands balled into fists.

  A healthy town needed a healthy heart, and the Cathedral, old and failing to pieces, had long ago lost its power to draw people in. A rejuvenated house of worship had been the keystone of our plan to bring the town back to life, a center of trade and commerce. We had thought Herr Kobalt merely a glib-tongued investor, eager, as we were, to restore the Cathedral to its former glory. Only after we accepted his terms had he shown us what he truly was.

  I remembered it all too well; the four of us, helpless as the blood from our wounded hands gushed out across the tavern table in a spreading pool around a pile of gold coins. Kobalt leaned forward to lap up an errant trickle. In that glistening scarlet puddle we saw his reflection, his real face, laughing at us. That face, a portrait of evil and corruption. A glimpse of Hell—of our future—leering up as we stared, paralyzed with fear.

  “He tricked us,” I said to Lichtman. “But tricked or not, we did agree and now the price must be paid. Let us pray that the Doctor’s skill can save us.”

  Lichtman went home and did not call again.

  Time passed. The dedication ceremony drew inexorably closer. The town began to ready itself for a celebration, though the four of us were still shunned men. The stonecutters toiled ceaselessly, putting final touches on the gargoyles that leered from every corner of the Cathedral. Bit by bit the scaffolding was pulled away, revealing the gleaming white stone of the new facing. Carrera marble, all the way from Italy, imported at exorbitant cost. Nothing but the best, in the wake of an endless flood of strange gold coins.

  ~ ~ ~

  Those same gold coins had wrought great changes in the Doctor’s house. We arrived just past midnight on the appointed night and were ushered back into the transformed parlor—warm, well lit and tidy—by the grinning crookback, himself scrubbed and resplendent in a suit of aubergine velvet and a black silk turban. He served us brandy in crystal glasses, gave his bow, and waddled out again. We waited in silence for over an hour, drinking and staring at the fire. It had been a long and weary month for all of us.

  “Gentlemen.” The Doctor’s new clothes were of a fine and fashionable cut, and fit his gaunt frame well. He had lost his haggard, hard-worn appearance. Good food, less cheap wine, and something more: he was a man with a purpose. He gestured out to the hallway, to the narrow stairs leading up. The Burgomeister went first, then Fleischer, halting and grabbing at the rail in trepidation while Lichtman urged him forward. We filed in to the workshop, myself last in line, my sister’s long-ago voice prattling in my ear.

  It was magic, she’d said. There was a wizard in long robes and a harlequin and a soldier with a curved sword. There was a long table with gears and tools and piles of colored silks. And a golden parrot with ruby eyes in a silver cage – it whistled at us. A mechanical fish swimming circles in a crystal bowl. Wondrous things.

  I had been sick with jealousy of my sister and her friends, that they had managed a look at the Doctor’s workshop. Now at last I was here myself. I could see the echoes of that long ago day as we wandered about. The top floor of the house was one vast room, filled with tables, desks, and bookshelves. The thick and pleasant smell of wax candles perfumed the air, but beneath that was another smell, not so agreeable. Arms and legs, torsos and heads, doll parts of every size hung from the ceiling hooks like hams at a butcher shop. There was a hat rack festooned with masks, and trunks filled to overflowing with costumes and bolts of gaudy silk. A huge telescope was set under a window cut into the eaves. Off in a corner I caught a glimpse of what might have been the parrot’s cage.

  The Doctor stood at the far end of the workshop before a curtained-off area. As I drew near and took my place next to Fleischer, I realized the unpleasant smell—like meat left too long in the sun—came from behind the curtain.

  “You asked me, gentleman, for a mechanical man. You have paid me handsomely for the project.”

  “Very handsomely,” Fleischer muttered. Lichtman poked him with an elbow and he was still.

  “Then here he is. All that you asked for and more.” The Doctor twitched back the curtain.

  He was slumped forward in his chair, eyes closed—a clockwork miracle, metal, glass and springs wrought together in a magnificent semblance of life. His limbs were covered with a fine skin of hammered brass polished to a mirrored shine, with elaborate cutout shapes along the thighs and arms affording coy glimpses of cogs and gears within. All the joints of his body, knees, ankles, waist, elbows, wrists—even the knuckles of his fingers—were covered with fine overlapping scales. His chest was an articulated breastplate of silver engraved with muscles and bones, with a hinged panel in the center. Below the panel was a short length of chain, welded to his chest. A mask covered his face, a man’s features done in papier maché and painted white.

  With a flourish, the Doctor produced an enormous silver key, fit it to a hole in the mechanical man’s neck the size of a penny piece, and turned. He struggled at the start, but as the spring tightened the work went quicker. I saw Fleischer’s finger’s twitch—like me, he longed to pull the key from those old hands and do the job properly. Finally, when he could wind no further, the Doctor reached behind the mechanical man’s ear and pressed a hidden button.

  There was a humming noise as gears began to turn. Within the cut-out panels along his arms and legs, his clockwork innards began to whirl. The dreadful smell of spoiled meat grew stronger. The mechanical man hitched forward on his chair and opened his eyes.

  I had expected doll’s eyes, glass and unseeing. These were a startling blue but unquestionably not glass.

  “What—” the Burgomeister began.

  Clear liquid began to weep from the seams of the mechanical man’s neck. The doctor wiped at it with a rag.

  “What is this?” Lichtman’s voice was shrill with anger. “What kind of shabby business is this?”

  More fluid trickled from the neck. Clucking his tongue the Doctor took a small sharp-looking tool from his pocket and pried off the mask. We all took a step back.

  It was not a skull but rather a frame of metal and wood. The eyes sat in metal cups, with a brass tube just above constantly spraying a fine mist of fluid across them.

  It had no nose. Where a mouth should be was a smooth metal panel. It looked at us. It looked at me.

  “Its eyes,” I said. “How did you make its eyes?”

  The Doctor began fussing with the leaking metal plate, using the tool to crimp the edges tighter. “There is much within him that is not strictly mechanical, in the sense that you understand it. Surely by now you have sniffed out the more. . . natural elements of his construction.” He finished his adjustment, mopped up the last of the excess fluid, and replaced the mask.

  “They look human,” the Burgomeister said.

  “So they were. Their original owner no longer had need of them,” the Doctor said. He wiped the tool on his sleeve, leaving a long smear of
red. “Nor of this.”

  He flipped the panel on the breastplate open, revealing a tank of glass filled with thick yellow fluid. Within, a knot of muscle and gears strung on wires ticked steadily.

  There was a retching noise to my left. Fleischer was vomiting in the corner.

  “I. . . I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s just. . . the smell. . . the way he stares. . . I can’t stand it. Please, I must go out.”

  “Let us all go out, for the love of God.” Lichtman looked queasy as well. “We must go to the Cathedral and make ready for the dedication. There are only a few hours left. Let there be an end to this, please.”

  “One of you must stay and help me keep him wound,” the Doctor said. “I am not up to the task. Now that he has been started, it will not do to let him run down.”

  Fleischer was across the room and down the stairs before the Doctor finished speaking, and Lichtman hurried after. The Burgomeister looked at me.

  “I will stay,” I said. I wanted the wretched business done with as much as they.

  “The ceremony begins at eight in the morning,” the Burgomeister said as he left. As if I might have forgotten.

  And so I passed the rest of that long night in the Doctor’s workshop, winding the mechanical man at regular intervals. The Doctor showed me how his creation walked, taught me to guide him this way and that with the chain set into the chest, how he responded to simple commands.

  “He is amazing,” I said, as he passed by me the second time.

  “But will he suit Herr Kobalt?” the Doctor asked. “Or will the demon simply wait for the first of you that follows?”

  “The first man over the threshold,” I said, “that was our bargain. If we follow the agreement to the letter, we might yet have a chance.”

  “But is he,” and here the Doctor gestured to his creation, now staring sightlessly at a wall—”a man, in the strict sense of the word?”

  “We shall see,” I said, and felt in my pocket for the small bottle that rested there, empty for now.