Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Tentacles.

  Clearing her throat to dismiss such thoughts, Cerys lit another lavender cigarette and spent a few moments staring into the flame of her pocket fire. Then, with a familiar sigh, she turned back to the mountain of paperwork on her desk. She was tempted to set fire to the whole lot, and she smiled wistfully at the thought. She was still smiling, with visions of bureaucratic conflagrations in her head, as she turned to the next case file in her unending pile of assignments.

  The Persecution Machine

  Tanith Lee

  Tanith Lee was born in 1947 in London, England. She has written nearly 100 novels and collections and almost 300 short stories, plus radio plays and TV scripts for the BBC. She has received several awards, including the August Derleth Award and World Fantasy Award. In 2009 she was made a Grand Master of Horror. Norilana Books has just published a collection of her horror stories, Sounds and Furies, and is presently reprinting her entire Flat Earth opus, Birthgrave and Storm Lord sagas, with new books in each series to follow. Two volumes of her short stories are also out from Wildside Press. She lives on the southeast coast of England with her husband, writer/artist John Kaiine. For more information visit her website at www.tanithlee.com.

  1: UNCLE

  MY FATHER GALLOPED into the library with a look of terror.

  “Your uncle is coming!”

  “My—uncle? Who do you mean?”

  “Constant.”

  “But I thought—”

  “No,” said my father, running to the window and glaring out nervously. “He isn’t dead. Only mad.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course you don’t.” My father spared a look of distaste for me. As his son, I had had certain duties never properly explained, one of which had been to become a perfect replica of himself in the city of business. Instead I had metamorphosed into a fashionable writer, and it was not in him to forgive me. “Well,” he said now, “since you’re so clever, I’ll leave you to entertain him. Try telling him who you are.”

  “We’ve discussed this previously. I’m not clever, only a genius. As for Uncle Constant, if he’s calling here, presumably he wishes to see you. After all, does he even know of my existence? I’m sure I didn’t know of his.”

  “It was kept from you. I expect he will have learned. Twenty years since I saw him. Horrible.”

  “Is he deformed?” I inquired with pleasant anticipation.

  “No. Only his mind. Stall the wretch. Get him to leave if possible.”

  I shrugged. “Does Mother share your aversion?”

  “Your mother will faint,” said my father, “if he so much as touches the panels of her parlour door.” My mother tended to faint continually when confronted by annoyance. She had already fainted once at my arrival. My father had had the grace only to offer to throw me out. A recent short novel of mine, dealing with forbidden love, very, I may say, tastefully, had caused their latest dislike of me. I, meanwhile, came to visit them from a sense of responsibility, since they were always in want of money.

  But what was the motive for mad Constant’s arrival?

  The doorbell rang below. My father shrieked and rushed from the room.

  When Steppings appeared presently in the library door, I accordingly asked him to show the visitor up.

  A moment later, my Uncle Constant was revealed to me.

  He was a man of about fifty-eight or sixty, corpulent but pale, with a mane of grey hair and disordered clothes. He seemed out of breath, as if he had been running, and he darted a wild look about the room.

  “Are we alone?” he demanded.

  “I believe so.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Your nephew, Charles.”

  “Who? Oh, never mind it. Only let me sit down. I’m exhausted. They’ve pursued me all day. Not a second’s peace.” He fell noisily into a large chair.

  Steppings reappeared, mostly from nosiness, but I sent him off to bring some of my father’s Madeira. I had no qualms in this, since I had supplied the wine myself.

  “Well, Uncle. How may I help you?”

  “Help? Impossible. No one can help. I ask only a minute’s respite.” His breathing quieted a little and he blew his nose into a gigantic handkerchief. “It’s no use my explaining. Only I understand what I suffer.”

  “This may be said of each of us.”

  “I see you’re a philosopher, sir. Did you say we are related? My God, I’ve run into my brother’s house, haven’t I?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “I will run in anywhere I am able when they are after me.”

  “Who? Do you mean the police?”

  My Uncle Constant was racked with melodramatic laughter.

  Steppings came in with the wine and a tray of biscuits.

  Constant struck the tray and the biscuits flew in all directions. Steppings did not flinch, merely put on the expression—of a surprised chicken—which has seen such good service over the years. I rescued the Madeira and poured two glasses, waving the chicken away as I did so.

  “Drink this.”

  “Is it poison?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing short of poison is any use to me. I pant to be released from my suffering. But suicide is a sin.” He reminded me of my father. Uncle Constant drank the Madeira at a gulp, and I refilled his glass. “They’re after me, worse than ever. Their weapons—if only you knew.”

  He, as my father had done, bustled to the window. He stared out, I assumed, at the peaceful street.

  “Not yet,” he muttered. “But soon.”

  “And you have no matters to consult my father upon?” I asked.

  “Who? Who is your father?”

  “Your brother.”

  “I have no brother,” said Uncle Constant. “I am cast out into the wilderness.” Then his face contorted. It grew red, then blue. “I hear it!” he cried. And flinging the goblet on the ground, or rather the carpet, he sprang away and was gone. I heard his cascade down the stairs and the crash of the street door.

  I stood by the window and presently saw him emerge and scuttle fatly down the street. He disappeared from view.

  2: UNCLE’S STORY

  Although I questioned my father and mother about my Uncle Constant, neither told me anything. My father ranted and my mother fainted. Steppings looked like a chicken, and when I tried to enlist his help, only importuned me to persuade my parents to use a new sort of cheese in the mouse-traps. I told him that I disapproved of mouse-traps. Steppings confided that he himself ate the cheese. It was a harmless perversion, during which he sometimes emitted small squeaks.

  I was touched by his trust, but it did not help me to discover my uncle.

  However, a month later, endless searching led me to a tall gaunt house in the south of the capital. Here a gentleman bearing my uncle’s name resided. The instant I beheld the house, I knew it must be he.

  Large bars were on all the windows, and a sort of portcullis was let down outside the door.

  On my ringing the door bell, through the portcullis, no one came.

  It was a sunny day, and I sat down across the street on a low wall to watch and wait.

  Presently a maid came out of the house with the low wall.

  She attempted some ineffectual dusting of the privet hedge, and then bent to my ear.

  “He’s a madman, that one. You after him for a debt?”

  “Not at all. I am a long lost lover of his, come to call on him.”

  “You’re one of them preeverts,” said the maid, and ran in.

  Half an hour later, two somberly clad women, with the figures but not the charm of pigeons, came down the street, mounted my uncle’s steps, and banged on the portcullis.

  I could tell at a glance they were religious persons, and that a lack of response would not put them off. It did not. Getting no reply, they banged the louder. And the larger lady began to cry: “Open the doors of your hearts, O ye lost children of the Lord. Hear the word of the Master!�
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  I expected a window to be raised and some missile inserted through the bars and thrown.

  Instead, to my surprise and delight, sounds of vast unlockings eventually echoed over the street, the portcullis lifted, and my uncle appeared in the doorway.

  He wore a yellow dressing-gown and a look of fear and loathing.

  “Be off,” he yelled at the two ladies, “I know your tricks. Where is it? Is it near? I won’t be decoyed.”

  “Repent,” said the large lady. “Here is a tract—”

  But Uncle Constant swept the article from her gloved hand.

  “Away!” howled Uncle, and thrust her down the steps.

  The lady fell upon the other one and both toppled to the ground. There was the hideous noise of bursting corsets.

  Before my uncle could shut the door and the portcullis I leapt across the street, over the wallowing ladies, and up the steps. I seized Uncle Constant’s hand.

  “Uncle Constant!”

  “Aah! Villain! Unhand me.”

  “I am your nephew, Charles,” I intimated, as he tried to run me through with his sword-stick.

  “Who?”

  “Your nephew. We met a month ago.”

  “You’re not one of their spies?” He peered at me. “No. Your hair’s too long and you have no moustache. Come in then. Quickly. Let me lock the house. I am in deadly peril. If they should once gain a foothold—there! Do you hear it? No. No, you would never hear it.”

  He slammed the door against the world and we were in a dark hall papered with a design of large red bats, or perhaps prehistoric birds.

  “But I did hear—” I began. My uncle took no notice.

  Once he had let down the portcullis by means of a switch, locked the door three times and bolted it twice, my uncle led me up a carpeted stair and into a small, dim room. The bat wall-paper persisted, but otherwise there were chairs and a sofa and some brandy on a stand. Through the bars of the windows and heavy dusty lace, little was visible, and I imagined that he preferred this to be so.

  “Sit down,” said my uncle, “whoever you are.”

  “Uncle Constant, I did hear a noise. Perhaps a train?”

  My uncle looked at me strangely. He frowned. Then, going to the stand, he poured out two generous brandies.

  He did not, though, give either one to me, or take one himself; he left them where they were as a decoration.

  “I will tell you my terrible tale,” said my uncle.

  “Thank you.”

  “You must not interrupt.”

  I nodded mutely.

  Assuaged, perhaps, my uncle seated himself in a vast armchair that rather resembled a pig.

  “In my youth,” he began, “I had no cares. I did very much as I wanted. I had been thought too clever for school, and so a number of tutors had taught me at home. I had no friends and wished for none. My only interest, as I grew older, was collecting young actresses. Then one evening, on my way home from the theatre, I was met by a messenger in the street. My parents had perished in a fire at the house of an ice-cream manufacturer, and I had now inherited the family fortune.”

  Although I knew that my grandparents were not dead, and that there had never been a family fortune, I did not argue with Uncle Constant at this point. I felt that probably he was instinctually lying in order to give some framework to what might follow.

  “I fell,” he continued, as if gratified by my sensitive abstention, “into a melancholy. I stayed indoors and only wandered from room to room of the house, recalling the unhappy hours I had spent there with my parents, who were both obtuse and ugly. The prettiness of my actress collection came to repel me, and I saw these girls no more. After some months, I ventured out at night, and walked the nastiest thoroughfares of the city, until it was almost dawn. Gradually, as I was returning to the house, I became aware that I was being, and had indeed been for some while, followed, by a number of mysterious shadowy figures. At length, a peculiar noise resounded distantly behind the smoking chimneys and smouldering refuse pits of the alleys.”

  My uncle looked at me expectantly, but, true to his wish, I did not interrupt. Consoled, he went on.

  “I can only describe this noise as that of some curious engine, which also whistled, rather like a factory hooter. Chug chug, it went, and then Whoop! Whoop! Alarmed, I hastened home, but after I was indoors I heard something move down the street and a shadow was cast upon my windows.”

  My uncle got up, and going to the brandy glasses, he poured their contents into an aspidistra, then refilled them carefully from the decanter. He left them on the stand, and resumed his chair and his tale.

  “Soon after this, when I had gone out once more on some necessary business, I was again followed, and after a time I heard repeated the ominous chugging and whooping of the sinister engine. I hurried at once on to a busy thoroughfare, and there the din of the crowd somewhat mitigated the sound of the pursuit. After a few minutes, however, a frightful shooting pain began in my right knee. And then another, worse, in my right arm. I fell against a lamppost, and an old gentleman came up and smote me in the face, accusing me of being drunk. As I partly lay there, I saw, through the ranks of the oblivious and jeering crowd, a fearful thing rolling slowly and mightily down from the end of the street. It was a sort of carriage, yet it had no horses, and from it protruded all manner of pipes and coils, wheels that whirred and the nozzles of what could only be guns. Suddenly one of these flashed with a cold green fire, and a new pain lanced through my belly. Atop the device was a crew of men clad like explorers in long coats, goggles, and unlikely hats. They had moustaches and their lips were thin and cruel. From the midst of them a funnel glowed and steamed and out came the noise. Chug, chug. And then Whoop, whoop. No one in the street but I could see this evil equipage. I turned; and, as best I could for my hurts, I ran. The more distance I could put between myself and the engine of torment, the more relief I gained, and finally I shut myself into the house and knew an end to my pain. Its four walls, imbued as they were with boring memories of my parents, protected me. But as I crouched behind the door, the machine passed down the street. Its shadow fell again inside the house. From that day, I have not been free of it.”

  My uncle rose once more and paced to an empty parrot cage. He stared into it and shook his head.

  “So far, they have not gained access to my home. Now and then their spies seek me. The machine never lies in wait for me outside the house...a sporting chance is allowed me—although they are not really fair. If ever the machine can by stealth enter these premises, I am lost.”

  A vague rumbling sounded in the street. A faint shadow crossed the window and next the ceiling. I got up and went to look out. The street was empty but for another maid dusting a hedge, and two porters carrying a stuffed bear. The religious ladies had picked themselves up and gone away.

  “You may speak now,” said my uncle.

  “Have you,” I asked, “approached no one for help?”

  “In the beginning, ceaselessly. I went to the police, and then to private companies. But all laughed me to scorn. An eminent doctor has certified that I am harmlessly mad.”

  “The engine or machine is invisible to all others but yourself?”

  My uncle returned to the brandy stand and drank both glasses of brandy. “I am doomed.” He then showed me out of the house.

  3: UNCLE PURSUED

  After that second meeting, I took to following my Uncle Constant. He went out, as can be imagined from his fears, very seldom, and so my vigils were frequently long, dull and unrewarded—except by the emergence of the privet-dusting maid, who seemed to think that, despite my “preeversion,” I fancied her person.

  This was rather trying. However.

  Finally, my uncle began to slip cautiously out of the house on hobbled rapid errands.

  He would first of all open the door a crack, having of course noisily unlocked and unbolted it, and raised the portcullis. He would then gaze fixedly at each side of the street in turn.
He never noticed me, even when I had not taken the trouble of obscuring myself behind the hedge. And I noted presently that, even if he looked at me on the street, he never recalled who I was or that I was anyone but a complete stranger.

  Having perused both directions, Uncle Constant would leap forth and bolt one way or the other. Being portly, his quickness soon flagged, but he kept up what pace he could, his arms clutched to his chest, rather in the manner of a squirrel. Now and then he would break into a run. And frequently, he would glare behind him. In doing this, he often saw me, but paid, as I have said, no heed.