~ ~ ~
It was morning at last. The crookback brought us a simple breakfast, herring and brown bread and beer. The Doctor ate with gusto while I picked at the fish. The smell in the workshop was not conducive to a hearty meal.
The Doctor wiped his mouth of foam. “You spoke of your sister,” he said. “Where is she now?”
“She’s married,” I said. “She moved away with her husband, to live with his people.”
“She’s better off,” he said, and grinned at me unpleasantly. “Have you told her yet what a mess you made of this business?”
“We did what we had to,” I said. “For the good of the town, for the glory of God.” How many times had I said that in the past year? Did I even believe it any more?
“For your own good, you mean. To line your pockets. You are all rich men now, thanks to your bargain.”
I stood up. “My sister said you had a parrot that whistled at her.”
“Changing the subject, I see. Yes,” he said. He leaned forward and polished a smudge from his creation’s shoulder. “I had a parrot that did simple tricks. It was fashioned from gold. I melted it down when times grew lean.”
“Why didn’t you ever want us children here?” I asked. “Why keep us out? Our parents would have bought your toys. You could have grown rich.”
“I am not a toymaker,” he said, spitting the words at me. “Is he a toy?” He strode across the room to a large cupboard in the corner, threw open the door, and pulled away a cloth, sending up a cloud of dust. “Is this a toy?” he demanded.
She was sitting on a little three-legged stool, glass eyes wide and staring, arms upraised as if we had surprised her. The pink dancing costume was faded and tattered at the hem, the blond wig matted with dust, but her face—her perfect bisque face—was unchanged. The dancing doll, she who my sister and her friends had tiptoed up the stairs to see.
“Does she still dance?” I whispered.
He pulled her to her feet. “Wind her up and see,” he said, pointing to the key of tarnished brass jutting from her back.
He held her as I wound the key. With each turn she drew more straight and tall until she balanced firmly upon her own feet and the Doctor could let go. Finally he gave a short nod and I stepped back.
She made a clumsy pirouette and the Doctor and I both reached out to catch her. From nowhere came music, fragile and high-pitched, and she was off in a stiff-kneed waltz, delicate hands reaching to embrace her invisible partner. Her hip came up hard against the workbench, scattering papers to the floor as she careened away towards the attic windows. The music grew louder as her steps became more graceful. From the street she must have looked much the same as when I had watched her, years ago.
“Even after all these years,” I said. “How does the music. . . ?”
“A music box, attached to her mainspring. A trifle, really.” He smiled at his creation, a smile any father would recognize.
“You are not a toymaker,” I said, as the doll swirled past in a cloud of tinny, lovely music. “You are an artist.”
His bow was stiff and formal, but I could see that he was pleased. He knelt to retrieve the papers from the floor and I took a step forward to help. And so neither of us saw the moment the mechanical man began to dance.
I suppose he stepped forward and caught her in his arms as she swung by. We looked up in time to see him sway in a clumsy parody of her movements, but after a few turns he found the rhythm. They whirled past the returning crookback who dropped his tray in astonishment, then clapped with delight while the Doctor and I laughed.
They danced to the far end of the workshop and then looped back towards us. The doll stared up blindly at the rafters, the mechanical man gazed at her face. The morning sun streamed in, sending diamond shaped reflections from his gleaming skin skittering across the walls and floor.
Finally the music slowed, became thick and distorted. She stumbled, slumped in his grasp. He stopped dancing and stood staring at us, holding her upright in his outstretched arms. Across the square, the clock chimed, seven and one-half hours.
“It is time,” I said, and the Doctor nodded. He pulled the doll from the mechanical man’s arms and pushed her into a chair. The mechanical man reached for her again, but I stepped forward and took hold of his chain.
“Come,” I said, and gave a sharp tug. He let me lead him to the stair. Without another word to me, the Doctor turned back to his work. That was my last view of him, rearranging papers and sifting through the chaos of the workbench.
I led the mechanical man through the dim hall, leaving the door open behind us as we passed into the street. Startled by the morning sun, he balked against the chain. I gave a hard tug and led him onwards.
It was a perfect day, crisp and bright. I could smell bread baking. Most of the townfolk were waiting for us at the Cathedral, but I could sense eyes watching us, peering through curtains and closed shutters. We stopped at a chuckling fountain and I took a long drink of water, cold and pure, to wash away the sour taste of fish and fear. The sunlight on the water threw reflections up against his silver breastplate.
“You dance well,” I said. “But then you had a lovely partner.” I took out the empty bottle from my pocket and filled it, refitting the cork with care.
He stared at me with his unblinking eyes. What churchyard coffin had the Doctor pillaged for those eyes? I tried to recall any recent executions but my thoughts of late had been only about the Cathedral, the ceremony.
“Did he send the crookback for your eyes?” I asked him. “Did he cut them from a body at a crossroad gallows?”
The clock struck a quarter ‘til. I wiped my hands on my vest. “Wherever they came from, I doubt they have seen anything like what awaits us.” I said, winding his key again. “What awaits you.”
I tugged the chain again, but to my surprise he pulled from my grasp and made a turn back towards the Doctor’s house. I lunged for the swinging end of the chain and pulled, hard enough to spin him around. We stared at each other, my rebuke dying in my throat. Did I see fear in those eyes? I remembered my words to Lichtman, about capturing some hapless wanderer and throwing him across the threshold, what cowardice that would be. Was this so very different? What had we made? What, who, were we sacrificing here?
The clock chimed the quarter hour.
“Come,” I said, “it is too late to turn back. There is someone you must meet.”
I heard the crowd before I saw it. We rounded the final corner and there were hundreds of them, all the town and more besides, strangers and friends and those who had cursed me, all mixed up together across the square, well away from the Cathedral steps. I saw my son, my Franz, in his best suit of clothes, with his friends, the Burgomeister’s sons, Lichtman’s boy, and the rest. My wife and daughters were there as well, with several of our neighbors. When the crowd saw us a sighing moan went up, equal parts fear and relief. I saw many make the sign of the cross and still more fork the evil eye, but whether towards myself or the mechanical man I could not tell.
The Cathedral glowed in the morning sun, magnificent and pure. If the Doctor would only come and look, I thought, he would understand. Surely God would forgive us the sins we had committed in the name of his glorious house.
And to line your own pockets, the Doctor whispered in my ear.
The Burgomeister, Fleischer, and Lichtman stood on the Cathedral steps along with Father Buchman, who had slumped to his knees. The mechanical man and I crossed the square to them as the Burgomeister hurried towards us.
“Kobalt is inside,” he said. “Fleischer went up to the door. He heard him singing.” He eyed the mechanical man warily. “Is it ready, Karl?”
“I have the water,” I said. “We must be sure.”
The Burgomeister signaled to Fleischer and Lichtman. Together they hauled the gibbering priest to his feet and pulled him to us.
I took out the bottle of water and handed it to Father Buchman. “Bless it, Father,” I said.
; Buchman flinched back. “This is heresy,” he said.
“Bless the water and baptize him,” the Burgomeister said.
“It is not a man,” the priest said. “It has no soul.”
“That is not for us to say,” I said, “He has a man’s heart. He does a man’s duty. Baptize him now.” We owe him that at least, I thought. But does it excuse what we do to him, or does it damn us all?
The priest snarled at me but the others held him fast. Finally Father Buchman blessed the water and threw it in an arcing spray – up and down, side to side—against the mechanical man. Then he dropped to his knees again, moaning. Several men from the crowd rushed to his aid, pulling him away.
The mechanical man looked at me and I pointed to the West door. My hand did not tremble as I wound the key. I silently repeated my son’s name with each turning as the main spring tightened.
“Do not break it, Bader, for Heaven’s sake,” Lichtman said.
I finished winding and looked again into the creature’s vivid, stolen blue eyes. Liquid was leaking from his neck again. I took out my handkerchief and wiped it away carefully, then placed my hand upon the panel in his chest, over the lump of muscle and gears that made his heart.
“Go,” I said, and then, “have courage.”
The Burgomeister started at that.
The mechanical man walked away from us slowly, climbing the steps. The Western door, decorated with a bas-relief depicting the Creation, swung open as he drew near. Inside the darkened narthex a figure beckoned. The mechanical man passed inside and the door swung shut.
We waited. I could hear the priest mumbling prayers to the cobblestones.
I turned to the Burgomeister, “If Kobalt is not appeased—”
From within the Cathedral came a sound like nothing I had ever heard—a scream of rage and a roaring laugh together. Fury and mirth co-mingled, it filled the square like a vast wind, whipping the trees into mad frenzy, sending hundreds of drowsing pigeons to the air in a fluttering cloud that blocked out the sun. People screamed and bolted in headlong panic. Fleischer fled with the rest. Franz shouted to me, and I gestured frantically towards his mother. To my relief he pulled her and his sisters away, towards home.
In moments the square was deserted but for Lichtman, the Burgomeister, and myself, our hands clapped over our ears, and the priest, still on his knees rocking back and forth.
Finally the screaming wind stopped and Father Buchman’s whispered prayers were the only sound. Then Lichtman shouted and pointed to the Cathedral.
The west door was open again. A wellspring of blood poured across the stones of the narthex. The torrent of red ran across the portico in a vast, unstoppable tide. We watched horrified as the flow drew closer, then slowed as it reached our feet. I knelt down and touched the edge of that dreadful crimson puddle.
The marble was dry beneath my hand, warmed by the morning sun. The horrible red stain—as clear and irrefutable as the mark of Cain—lay within the stones.
Trembling, we three moved up the stairs, peering into the church. I heard the Doctor in my head. What if he simply waits for the first man that follows after?
I took a breath and stepped forward. For my son, I thought, for my family.
But before I could step across the threshold, Father Buchman pushed past in front of me. He crossed the threshold and stumbled down the aisle.
The Cathedral was empty.
Of Kobalt and the mechanical man there were no signs. But like the portico, the stones of the narthex floor were stained crimson all the way back along the nave, stopping just before the altar.
“We will repair it, Father,” the Burgomeister said. There was confidence in his voice, strength I had not heard in months. Lichtman heard it too and smiled. It had worked. We had won.
Back to business, I thought. Back to how it was before.
~ ~ ~
That night I went to bed believing we had reached an end to the whole wretched mess. I embraced my son and called him a man, kissed my daughters and my wife, lay my head upon my pillow and—for the first time in seven years—went to sleep at once, without listening to the wind whistle in the eaves until exhaustion claimed me.
In my dream I was at the Cathedral, on my knees with a scrub brush and bucket, frantically cleaning the ruined steps, though I knew I could never turn the stones white again, not if I scrubbed until the brush wore away to pieces beneath my bleeding fingers.
The mechanical man appeared. He reached down and took hold of my shoulder, shaking me. . . .
My wife shook my shoulder again, calling my name. Someone was knocking at our front door, pounding fit to raise the dead. The Burgomeister’s servant, summoning me with all haste to the Doctor’s house.
The stout oak door had been torn off its hinges. The little crookback lay on the floor, wailing piteously, cradling the Doctor’s severed head in his arms. The torso lay sprawled in the high-backed chair by the smoldering fire, an arm dangling from an oak beam like the doll parts in his workshop. The Burgomeister stood before the mutilated corpse, his eyes wide and unbelieving. Within the wounds, something glistened. As the Burgomeister gasped, I pulled a length of silver chain from the hole in the Doctor’s chest. Then I knelt down and after a moment of gentle struggle retrieved the Doctor’s head from the sobbing crookback. A bright silver key protruded from the neck, just behind the ear.
“I don’t understand, Karl,” the Burgomeister said.
I thought of those eyes bright with fear, of how he had balked against the chain.
“Herr Kobalt is not finished making deals,” I said. “It is the mechanical man’s turn now. I only wonder what Herr Kobalt will ask for in return for freedom from chains and winding keys.”
~ ~ ~
Lichtman tried to run, packed up his family and fled to his people in the North. The mechanical man dragged him from the carriage and eviscerated him on the road, before the eyes of his horrified family. As he was pulled apart, Lichtman’s wife heard horrible laughter from the darkness nearby.
Fleischer was next. He turned his home into a fortress, barring every door and window, sleeping with a pistol beneath his pillow until the morning his wife woke to find the bedchamber an abattoir awash with the blood of her husband.
The body of the Burgomeister—what remained of it—was found early one morning on the ruined steps of the Cathedral. His pistol was also nearby, a single shot discharged. As with the others, the priest refused to bury him in the churchyard, so the remains of my childhood friend were thrown into a barrel like so much rubbish and buried in the potter’s field outside of town, far from even the shadow of the Cathedral.
And I? I am back in the Doctor’s house, in self-imposed exile from my family. The people of the town—those good people, as the Doctor himself once called them—destroyed his workshop soon after his body was removed. They burned his books and smashed his models, tore his notebooks to pieces as they cursed his horrible creation. They would have killed the crookback but I stopped them before they could manage the rope around the creature’s misshapen neck. He serves me now, waddling amongst the wreckage, bringing me plates of bread and cheese and pots of beer from the tavern.
The dancing doll was trampled in the soot and muck, her perfect bisque face smashed on one side, her costume soiled and ruined. I have tried to fix the damage to her dress as best I can, turned her where she sits so that her good cheek and eye face the street. Anyone looking up from the street can see us here together through the windows, a wretched man and a beautiful girl.
The front door stands open, the full moon shines down. I am ready for the mechanical man’s homecoming.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Kris Dikeman lives and works in New York City. Her stories have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, All Hallows, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Year’s Best Fantasy 9, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is currently at work on a novel about life, love, and zombie hordes in Manhattan. You can read more of her work at her webs
ite: www.krisdikeman.com.
THE LEAFSMITH IN LOVE
K.J. Kabza
THE FIRST THING JESPER NOTICED was her parasol, twirling like a ghostly pinwheel beyond the branches and webs. He was instantly intrigued. On previous occasions, when watching all the visiting women on the Red Path, he had often told himself, If I were a Lady with a lacy parasol, I would be entranced by the decorative absurdity of it and play with it constantly, not stand there dumbly beneath it like a worm beneath a mushroom.
Compelled by its beckoning clockwise motion, he wove between the trees and smithing with the skill of a hart. In minutes he was behind her, three paces from the edge of the pink gravel clearing. The bench opposite her was empty, and she was conversing with herself in a quite lively manner.
“Indeed,” she was saying aloud, “but I do not know their names. All I know is that I have truly never seen so queer a place in all my life. We could simply name them ourselves, you know.” The parasol slowed, paused, and began to thoughtfully spin in the other direction. “Oh certainly not! They would never come up with something suitable.” She laughed. “Zuhanna, from whose head do you pull such ideas? They don’t care a bit. It’s clearly too splendid for them to understand anyway. If they would only open their eyes and look around—and around and around and around. . . !” With this, she tossed down the parasol, hopped up from the bench, held out her arms, and spun.
Jesper’s heart quickened. Lady Zuhanna’s eyes were closed in overflowing joy, her palms upturned to the sweet spring air, her quick feet pirouetting her in a rhythm that was almost a dance, savoring this one silly, spontaneous moment.
And as he watched her, Jesper, the Master Leafsmith of Holdt Castle, finally fell in love.
Around them, the Arboretum sang and rustled and clicked. Jesper’s heart rose up, past the gleaming webs, the thousands of clockwork creatures on uncountable hybrid branches, the interlocking cogs nestled in the forest’s crown. A flock of real birds rushed overhead, and a score of ticking dragonflies took flight; they settled around her blooming petticoats in a ring, baffled by the spinning laughter in their midst.
Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Page 8
