Grave Voices_A Storm and Fury Adventure

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Stand back!” Lustig warned, projecting like a trained thespian. “Let me handle this.”

  The men unloading trucks and boats were happy to oblige. They fell back, but made sure they still had a good view. The laborers were scared, but there was a sense of excitement too, as if they realized they had front-row seats at the ring to the match of the century. Jacob saw a short guy in the back moving from man to man, and figured he was taking bets.

  Lustig had his whip in one hand, and a revolver in the other. “Back!” he shouted at the monster. “Leave these good men alone!”

  Jacob rolled his eyes. Lustig’s delivery was like a bad vaudeville skit, but the longshoremen who stared wide-eyed at the monster in the shadows seemed to be eating it up. The monster roared again, and its whole frame shuddered, long arms shaking. Lustig cracked his whip, snapping it inches from the monster’s face, a sound that reverberated like a gunshot.

  The monster roared again and started toward Lustig. The onlookers murmured and drew back a few steps. They were enjoying the show, but no one wanted to be part of the fight.

  Lustig stood his ground. Jacob noticed that, not coincidentally, Lustig made his stand in the pool of light from the streetlamp, his own personal spotlight in the drama he had so carefully choreographed. That left the monster in the shadows where it was the most frightening, a menacing silhouette. He’s a showman, all right.

  Lustig’s first shot made the longshoremen jump. The monster heaved closer. From where Jacob watched, it looked as if the creature swung a long, thick arm at Lustig, which the monster hunter barely dodged. Lustig and the creature circled each other. The monster swung again, slamming a fist into Lustig’s left shoulder, sending him rolling across the cobblestones. A gasp went up from the men who watched from the safe distance.

  Lustig came up shooting. The creature lunged at him, and Lustig and the monster grappled before Lustig tore free and squeezed off two more shots.

  “They’re dancing, not fighting,” Mitch observed.

  “Want to bet he’s shooting blanks?” Jacob replied. He and Mitch had seen their share of gunfights, both as DSI agents and before that, in the army. To a practiced eye, Lustig’s moves seemed designed to make the monster look more menacing, when it was really doing very little except bellowing.

  Lustig moved left. The monster moved right. The monster clubbed him again with its beefy fist and Lustig staggered. He snapped his whip, but the creature absorbed the blow, tangling the long tail of braided leather around its arm. With one move, the monster jerked the whip from Lustig’s hand and thrust out its arm. Lustig went sprawling, and the monster loomed over him, arms raised menacingly.

  “Down, spawn of Satan!” Lustig cried, and shot again at point-blank range. This time, the monster roared and fell back, his huge body shaking fearsomely. The creature sagged to its knees and roared one last time, then collapsed to the paving stones.

  A cheer went up from the longshoremen and onlookers. Lustig staggered to his feet, making a show of reloading his revolver and keeping a wary eye on the downed beast.

  “Thank you,” Lustig shouted. “No applause necessary. Just doing my work, as the City Fathers and The Lord Above ordained. But stay back!” he commanded as the curious crowd started forward for a better look.

  “These creatures are tricky,” he warned. “My associate and I will see to it that this beast never troubles New Pittsburgh again.”

  On cue, a man dressed like a monk in a cassock and a cowl that shaded his face emerged from one of the side streets with the enclosed delivery wagon Della had spotted from the air. Given the other man’s build, Jacob was certain it was Shurlman in disguise. Together, the two men hefted the monster into the wagon. They closed the doors and threw the bolt, then the ‘monk’ went around to climb into the driver’s seat.

  Lustig turned to address the crowd once again. “What you’ve seen here tonight took years of training with master fighters,” he said gravely. “Please, if you see a monster such as this loose elsewhere in the city, I beg of you, do not try to fight it yourself. I would much rather you call for me, and let me handle it. For your safety.”

  Another cheer went up from the dockworkers, and Lustig stood by for a moment, modestly inclining his head, before he joined the monk in the wagon. With another wave, they headed away from town.

  “Moving,” Mitch muttered into his headset.

  “We see him,” Della confirmed from the airship. He’s turning left on Liberty.” She paused. “I’ve got a wagon on its way.”

  “We’re on it,” Mitch acknowledged. With a nod to Jacob, Mitch went left and Jacob went right. The longshoremen startled at the rumble of the steambikes. They pointed and stared at the unfamiliar vehicles as their horses shied away. Jacob opened up the throttle, anxious to get behind Lustig’s wagon and cut off his retreat before the noise of the steambikes gave them away.

  Mitch was already out of sight. The side streets were steep, and Jacob’s velocipede strained, but Farber’s ingenious design gave the bike the power it required to scale New Pittsburgh’s challenging slopes. Jacob barely missed a baker’s wagon and swung wide, ignoring the curses the man yelled after him.

  Lustig’s wagon was moving quickly. “You’d better move on him as fast as you can,” Della warned through the earpiece. “There aren’t as many streetlights in the direction he’s heading. I’ll lose him soon.”

  “Got it,” Jacob muttered. He sped up, and kept the bike steady with his left hand while he drew his shotgun from over his shoulder and chambered a round. He fired, and his shot hit the right rear wheel of the fleeing wagon, breaking it at the axel. A second later, Mitch’s rifle sounded, two shots in quick succession that broke through the tongue of the wagon, sending its horse fleeing in panic as the wagon careened to one side.

  Lustig had his revolver out, though Jacob doubted the monster hunter had time to replace the blanks with bullets. “What’s the meaning of this!” he blustered.

  Mitch flashed his DSI badge. “Government agents. Stay where you are and keep your hands were I can see them,” coming around to level his rifle at the two men in the driver’s seat. Jacob went to the back of the wagon.

  “Stay clear of there!” Lustig yelled. “There’s a dangerous beast inside!”

  Jacob chambered another round and slammed the bolt open. He waited, just in case Lustig’s creature was still alive, then moved to angle the headlamp of his steambike into the rear of the delivery wagon. The monster lay still, a lump of dark, shaggy fur.

  “Drag it into the light,” Mitch commanded with a twitch of his rifle barrel.

  “You can’t just—”

  “Or we can wait until the police get here and see what they think of your monster,” Jacob replied.

  Cursing, Lustig and his partner climbed down. The monk’s cowl fell back, exposing Shurlman’s face. Lustig and Shurlman hauled the monster to the back of the wagon, and the body made a scraping noise against the wooden floorboards.

  Mitch kept his rifle trained on the two men and motioned for them to step aside as Jacob approached the beast. He prodded the body with the barrel of his shotgun, and heard a dull thud as the poke hit something hard beneath the fur. Jacob took a knife from his belt and knelt next to the creature.

  “Hey! That’s my property!” Lustig protested.

  Jacob ignored him and cut a long gash in the fur. He pulled the pelt aside. “Metal,” he reported. He shifted to examine the hump on the creature’s back, and cut through the fur to expose a large metal key. “Well, well,” Jacob said.

  The clatter of hooves made Jacob turn, and he leveled his shotgun at the street behind him before he realized it was a DSI paddywagon. The back door swung open and more agents jumped out. “Take these two in for questioning,” Mitch said, indicating Lustig and Shurlman. “We’ve got them on fraud, probably more. There’s a body in the back, too.”

  Jacob climbed down and let the four DSI men do their work, keeping an eye out should the police show up. This lat
e at night, the warehouse district was nearly deserted, but he still had no desire to answer uncomfortable questions.

  “So?” Mitch asked as Jacob joined him.

  “Mechanical, like we thought,” Jacob replied. “Looks like the Dollmaker is back in business.”

  Part Two: Missing Bodies

  “Been worse than usual, lately.” Mr. Henry, the old gravedigger, leaned on his shovel and gave a nod toward the rows of markers in Allegheny Cemetery. Jacob could see where a dozen or so graves had recently been disturbed. Those with mortsafes had managed to trap their desperate undead residents in the ground, instead of keeping grave robbers out. Rotting corpses lay beneath the cage of iron bars sunk into the ground over the graves. Most still twitched, or groaned unsettlingly.

  “How about the ones that didn’t dig themselves out?” Mitch asked, pointing to a few graves that definitely appeared to have been opened by the living.

  The gravedigger shrugged. “No idea. Seems kinda strange, picking odd ones here and there. But they’re gone,” he added. “Took the whole casket. Didn’t make a mess of things.”

  “The graves that were dug out by someone else, did they have anything in common?” Mitch pressed.

  Again, Mr. Henry shrugged. “Not that I can see. Weren’t related, if that’s what you mean. Have a look for yourself at the headstones. I’ve got to clean all this up.” He sighed. “Old Mr. Kemmer is up for the third time in as many weeks.”

  Mitch thanked the Mr. Henry, then he and Jacob began to walk across the cemetery’s rolling hills. Jacob wrinkled his nose. The stench of decay was unmistakable. “Got a theory?”

  Mitch shook his head. “Nothing yet. Just observations. I’m willing to bet we’ve got two different forces at work here, and we don’t know enough to guess whether they’re working together or not.”

  Jacob nodded. “Grave robbers, and a necromancer.”

  Mitch grimaced, catching a particularly strong whiff of sun-warmed zombie. “Necromancer, dark warlock, or maybe something else—I heard the Romanians were working on an energy projector that could force the dead to speak. We don’t know what we’re up against, and that drives me crazy.”

  “Why would a necromancer call up zombies that couldn’t get out of their graves?” Jacob mused. “Not very effective. Alerts everyone to the fact that you’re around, but doesn’t get you any evil undead minions.”

  “And if you can make the dead dig themselves out, why send people to rob the grave?” Mitch asked, as they walked up to one of the plots that had been disturbed. “Seems more risky to send people in to do the work if you can just get the dead to bring themselves to wherever you are.”

  “Thomas Bakewell,” Jacob said, looking at the tombstone. “Not a recent death. Eighteen sixty-six. Can’t imagine he was in great shape after all that time.”

  Mitch frowned. “And he’s one the grave robbers took. Maybe that’s why. Maybe he couldn’t get out by himself. But why him?” Mitch took a small tablet out of his coat pocket and began to make notes as they surveyed the damaged graves. Jacob read off the names and dates of death, and Mitch wrote them down, as well as any unique epitaphs. They catalogued six more sites where the departed had dug themselves out, as well as a mausoleum where the zombie had tried and failed to bend the iron door to escape.

  “Bernard Lauth,” Jacob said as they came up to another robbed grave. “He’s pretty recent. Eighteen ninety-four.”

  “That name rings a bell, but I can’t place it,” Mitch said. “Anyone else?” Their inventory of the newly undead had taken them deep into the large cemetery, toward a large stretch of forest that ran along one side of the cemetery.

  “One more—another robbery,” Jacob said. “George Ferris. He’s also recent—just two years ago.”

  “Ferris? Like the Ferris wheel?” Mitch asked.

  Jacob shrugged. “Maybe. Adam Farber would know.”

  Mitch started to answer when a low, feral growl came from the darkness of the trees. He and Jacob exchanged a warning glance, and both agents drew their guns at the same time, leveling them at the stretch of forest. In the next breath, a dozen rotting corpses broke from the tree line, heading straight for them. Some of the zombies were well-preserved. They moved the fastest. Others were ravaged by time or poor embalming, cheeks sunken, eyes hollow, clothing from decades in the past. They shambled, as if whatever propelled them could barely make their badly decomposed bodies function.

  Mitch and Jacob opened fire. Jacob’s shotgun caught the well-dressed corpse of an old man full in the chest, blowing a hole through his rib cage. The zombie fell back a step from the blast, then kept on coming.

  Mitch’s rifle shot took another zombie in the middle of its forehead, taking off half of its skull when the bullet exited. The zombie fell to the ground, quivering.

  Jacob’s next shot caught a zombie square in the pelvis, blowing the legs off the rotting body. Mitch shot again, going for the kneecaps of a fourth walking corpse. None of the downed creatures stopped moving, quivering where they lay or trying to claw their way forward on the lawn.

  “This isn’t working too well!” Jacob yelled above the gunfire.

  “Beats hand-to-hand combat,” Mitch snapped back, and his rifle shot dropped a fifth zombie as Jacob’s shotgun blast felled the sixth.

  “They might not be destroyed, but they’re not going anywhere fast,” Jacob said, watching the twitching zombies and keeping an eye on the tree line in case any more walking corpses emerged. He spared a glance toward Mitch.

  “I hope you’ve got a theory about this.”

  For once, Mitch lacked a sarcastic reply. “I’ve got nothing,” he admitted. “We’re going to have to pull in Renate Thalberg as well as Adam Farber and do some research.”

  “Uh oh,” Jacob said. “Trouble.”

  Mitch raised his rifle, only to see Mr. Henry striding across the lawn scowling. “Stay away from the forest!” Mr. Henry shouted. “You’ll only make them angry.”

  Jacob stared at the gravedigger. “You mean the zombies? You know about them?”

  Mr. Henry rolled his eyes and spat to one side. “Of course I know about them. Hard to miss, aren’t they? We’ve got a truce, sort of. They keep the rats away and I don’t go hunting them.”

  Jacob cleared his throat. “Are there always zombies in the forest? And you didn’t think to mention this when we asked about the graves?”

  Mr. Henry looked at him as if he had gone daft. “Lately, yes. They don’t usually last long before they fall apart, but then something brings up a new batch and it starts all over again.”

  “Has this been going on long?” Mitch asked, frowning.

  “It’s always been an on-and-off thing,” Mr. Henry replied. “Lately, last month or so, more than usual.” He swore. “Gets so that I can hardly bury the new dead before they pop up again. Wastes my time burying them two or three times. I don’t get paid for that.”

  Mitch and Jacob exchanged glances. “Grave robbers, zombies, and mechanical monsters,” Mitch said. “There’s got to be a connection. And we’d better find it soon, before things really get out of hand.”

  “It’s a pretty interesting mechanism, once you clean away all the fur and whatnot.” Adam Farber looked down at the clockwork remains of Lustig’s monster, which lay partially disassembled on a worktable in his basement laboratory at Tesla-Westinghouse’s headquarters. The skinny inventor wore a stained lab coat. His wire glasses were askew and slightly smudged, and his sandy brown hair was falling into his eyes.

  “What’s so interesting about it?” Jacob asked. He and Mitch had come straight to Tesla-Westinghouse’s ‘Castle’ in Wilmerding after they left Allegheny Cemetery.

  Adam pointed toward the monster’s mechanical innards. “It’s really a big wind-up doll, but more sophisticated than any toy I’ve seen. On the other hand, it’s not nearly as complicated as the werkmen I’ve built.” He gave a nod toward Lars, a brass and chrome metal man wearing the uniform of an elevator operator.
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br />   “Any idea who made it?” Jacob asked. He and Mitch had their suspicions, but he wasn’t ready to rule anything out, not yet.

  Adam grabbed a cup of coffee from the workbench and finished it off. He set the empty cup off to the side with half a dozen others. “I suspect any good clockmaker could put something like this together. It can move its legs to walk, raise and lower its arms, and swing them from side to side, and shake. Not all that different from a toy that hops or dances. But it’s got an Edison cylinder for a voice. That’s odd.”

  “That’s how it was able to roar?” Mitch asked, leaning closer for a better look. With the old fur pelts stripped away, the body of the monster was plain and crude, a metal barrel with jointed cylinders for its arms and legs and a round metal head with a clockwork jaw. The inside of the chest area was full of gears and pulleys, along with a dark waxy object set in a metal case.

  “So someone recorded that noise, and stored it on a cylinder,” Jacob said, looking more closely. Edison cylinders were pretty new, and rather remarkable. A machine etched markings onto a hard wax tube to record sounds, and another machine played them back. The machines were touchy and expensive, but the involvement of genius inventor Thomas Edison made their ultimate success likely.

  Adam nodded. “Yeah. Easier said than done, especially in a mechanism that moves and jostles so much. But making ‘monsters’ like this would be pretty expensive. I don’t think you’ve got to worry about someone unleashing hordes of these things on an unsuspecting population.”

  Jacob sighed. “Lustig didn’t need hordes of them. Just one, enough for him to get paid plenty of money to ‘kill’ the beast and for his accomplice to sell worthless amulets and monster repellent.”

  A smile quirked at the corner of Adam’s mouth. “Really? Monster repellent?” He chuckled. “Mr. Barnum was right about there being one born every minute.” He poked a tool into the mechanical man’s chest. The creature’s left arm came up fast, hitting Adam in the chest hard enough to knock the thin inventor onto his ass and slide him across the floor.