There was silence in the hall, utmost silence, as the game was prosecuted: this stillness being broken only by the audience’s occasional cries of admiration at a clever gambit, or dismay at an ill-chosen manoeuvre.
The turbaned head of the Automaton shifted at intervals, yet these movements appeared to be random. More disconcerting were the mechanical eyes. The Turk was just above man-sized, and his eyes were slightly enlarged beyond that proportion, so they were perhaps twice as large as a living man’s organs of sight. They appeared to be sightless, and ornamental, for the eyes of the Automaton never once bent towards the chessboard. Yet they moved. The eyelids blinked, the eyes shifted sidelong as if weighted with the guilt of unknown crimes. At the eleventh move, when Mr Hall made an especially maladroit gambit, the Automaton’s eyes positively rolled in their sockets, arousing laughter from the spectators.
On the thirteenth move, the Automaton responded to Mr Hall’s en passant with a bold assault by the black queen’s rook. At this juncture, the Automaton’s right hand – formerly idle – rapped the top of the cabinet, and the Automaton’s jaws opened.
“Echec,” said a voice within the Automaton’s bosom.
Several spectators gasped as the machine spoke. I was less impressed. It is easy enough, by means of bellows, to equip a mechanism so as to voice a bird’s call or a spoken word. One is put in mind of cuckoo-clocks. Indeed, the cuckoo seemed to be the appropriate bird flying over these proceedings, although there were clearly more than a few gulls within the premises as well. I prolonged this theme of birds by observing that the Automaton had played a black rook. Twenty years ago, when my stepfather brought me to England to be schooled at Stoke Newington, I learnt that the word “rook” signifies not merely a chessman and a black-plumed bird. It is also the London criminals’ cant-word meaning to cheat . . .
I arose from my chair, and stepped into the avenue between the seats.
“I have unriddled this mystery,” I said loudly. “The game is over, and it ends in a fool’s mate. Maelzel’s Automaton is a fraud.”
There was a huzzbuzz, as the heads of spectators turned to confront my intrusion. Even the blind eyes of the Automaton seemed to swivel in their sockets, to behold me.
Herr Maelzel gestured for silence. “Who are you, sir?” he asked me.
“I am Edgar Poe, chief reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger,” I said, making so bold as to offer a half-bow. I fancied I saw the Automaton start in surprise as I rendered my name.
“I do not know you, Mr Poe,” ventured Maelzel.
“The Automaton is a fraud whether you know me or not,” I went on. “Five months ago, I might have hailed your clockwork Chess-Player as the greatest hoax of the century. But you have been outdistanced and out-hoaxed this past August by the New York Sun’s series of articles about bat-winged beaver-men allegedly observed upon the surface of the Moon. That hoax was exposed in September, and now your own diddling will be unhoaxed as well.” I held up one hand to silence the clamouring spectators while I confronted Maelzel. “I have unmasked your Chess-Player by means of observation and deduction. I ask everyone here to recall your demonstration, when you opened the Chess-Player’s cabinet and moved the levers with your hand. There was a loud clacking noise, as we saw the gears engaged. Yet the Automaton has been waging chess-moves for several minutes now, and never once in that time have we heard the sound of those gears engaging! Further, we all heard you winding a mainspring within the Turk . . . yet there has been no consequent sound of an escapement, the tell-tale tick-tick-tick as the mainspring uncoils. I will wager that your Chess-Player’s cupboard contains a ratchet, to counterfeit the sound of a mainspring turning, without an escapement.”
The spectators’ murmuring grew louder.
“Those gears were only stage-props,” I continued, “to persuade us that the Automaton’s cabinet is entirely filled with machinery, leaving no space for a man,. Yet why is Mr Hall obliged to distance himself from his opponent the Automaton, with the nuisance of two separate chessboards for a single game? The answer: if the Chess-Player’s antagonist were to sit nearer the board, he would hear breathing from within the cabinet!”
The murmuring loudened, and some of the spectators began drumming their feet against the floorboards.
“Furthermore, look to the candles,” I spoke. “One candle gives sufficient light for Mr Hall to distinguish his chessmen. The Automaton’s eyes are sightless and ornamental, needing no light whatever . . . yet Herr Maelzel has set six candles by the board of his mechanical Chess-Player. That is because six candles are required to cast sufficient light so as to penetrate the thick gauze fabric of the Automaton’s waistcloth. I deduce that there is a human confederate within the Automaton. He is seated upon the small pedestal which we all observed inside the cabinet. His head is of a height within the Turk’s abdomen. And his eyes peer outward through the gauze of the Turkish sash.”
I heard the shifting of chairs in the rows behind me, as several spectators now stood, to have a better vantage of the Automaton.
I gestured for silence. “Pray compare the six candles at the Automaton’s chessboard. The four candles farthest from the Automaton burn steadily. There is no draught in this room. Yet the two candle-flames nearest the Turk are seen to flicker, as if caught in a current of air that oscillates back and forth. Only one manner of air current moves back and forth steadily: that of respiration. Good people, the porous cloth of the Chess-Player’s sash affords two functions for the human agent concealed within the Automaton: he can see through it, and he can breathe through it.”
By now, the spectators were demanding a chance to open the Automaton’s casing. Once more, I bade them remain silent while I resumed:
“The gears and pinions in the Chess-Player’s cabinet are merest stage-dressing. I will wager that among them are mirrors, casting reflections so as to make the gears and pinions inside the cabinet seem more numerous than they actually are, and so the cabinet more crowded. True, sir! You have opened all the cabinet’s doors for our inspection, yet you were careful never to open all of them at once. The cupboard’s human inhabitant must shift himself during your demonstration, so that there is always one shut door to conceal him. But I believe that some portion of your enginery is genuine, at least. Inside the Automaton, there must be an ingenious arrangement of levers, so that the human tenant can manipulate the Turk’s arm from within the cabinet. The system probably involves a counterbalance. This would explain the cross-problem that had puzzled me: the operator within your cabinet is probably right-handed, yet the Automaton favours its left hand.” I bowed again to the assemblage. “Good evening, ladies, gentlemen . . . and Automaton.”
Then I turned and strode up the corridor, and made good my departure.
As I left the Museum’s vestibule, and turned homeward for Mrs Yarrington’s rooming-house, once more the grotesque image of a large black-plumed rook swooped through my fancy, its talons arousing my brain to preserve this stark image in a stanza of verse. But the black-winged rooks of England are unknown in America. Perhaps, for the sake of my readers, some other dark-plumed bird of carrion will serve the purpose . . .
My encounter with Maelzel’s Chess-Player occurred three weeks ago. This afternoon – the sixth of January, 1836 – I was again busying myself at my desk in the Messenger’s offices at Fifteenth and Main Streets, when an apologetic messenger-boy brought me a folded length of foolscap. Opening this, it proved to be a scrawled letter. The author’s handwriting was disarrayed, his capitals and cursives elbowing each other in confusion. There was no signature. In fine, the letter had plainly been written by someone in great distress, or by some paralytic who had only the vaguemost control of his own limbs. Here is the missive:
EDGAR POE. Maelzel’s troupe have finished their engagement in Richmond, and depart on the morrow for their next booking. If you will come alone to the Monumental Church tonight, after the vesper-service, you will learn something to your advantage.
Tha
t was all. I flung the letter into a waste-paper receptacle, and resumed my duties. But the missive, and its mysteries, held hostage my curiosity. Thus, at eventide tonight, guided by a bright moon nearly full, I made my way through Richmond’s cobblestoned streets to Shockoe Hill.
The Monumental Church is octagonal, surmounted by a dome of peculiar shape and modest convexity. Within the front portico, between the Doric pillars flanking the church’s entrance, stands a white marble tablet commemorating the unfortunates who were lost in the fire of 1811. Stepping past this, I was surprised to find the door-bolt of the entranceway set ajar . . . perhaps by someone anticipating my arrival. Pushing the door open, I stepped within.
I have been here before. This was the church of my childhood. The place was dark now, yet I have been here so often and so intimately that I knew each detail of the church’s interior by embittered memory. Before me was the chancel. I knew by heart the inscription carved in gilt uncial script above the chancel-frame: GIVE EAR, O LORD.
My footsteps echoed on the tiling as I proceeded down the aisle towards the altar. Two candle-frames stood there, either side. Some few of the candles were lighted, and by their faint gleam I beheld a dim shape placed in front of the altar, like some sacrificial offering. A shape like an oblong box, surmounted by an effigied resemblance of a man.
It was the chess-player. Maelzel’s Automaton.
The unseeing eyes of the Turk were downturned, regarding me silently. On top of the cabinet, a few chessmen stood vigil on the gameboard in front of the cross-legged effigy. As I approached, I saw that the chessmen on the board were positioned for the gambit known as an endgame.
With a sudden right-angled convulsion, the Automaton’s left hand jerked sidelong, and nudged the black queen’s rook to the bishop’s file.
I responded in kind, grasping the solitary white knight, and placing this so as to endanger the Automaton’s king.
“Echec,” I declared.
“You were wrong, Edgar Poe,” spoke a muffled voice emerging from the Turk’s abdomen. “There is no man within Maelzel’s Chess-Player.”
I kept standfast. “I have proved through rational deduction that the cabinet is fashioned to contain a human operator.”
“Indeed. And it contains an operator, right enough. But the Chess-Player within the cabinet is no man . . . for I am no longer human.”
There came a sound of gears meshing within the oblong box. The rightmost door of the cabinet swung faintly ajar. From within the cupboard of the Automaton, a hand emerged . . . beckoning.
By candlelight, I beheld the hand of the unseen Chess-Player. There was a discrepancy of fingers, three digits being entirely absent. The remaining thumb and forefinger were scarred and fractured, bent into appendages more nearly resembling claws than any human flesh.
“I was a chess-gamer once, of no little ability,” harshed a voice within the cabinet. The unseen speaker’s voice, like his hand, seemed defective and bestial. “My father, being of respectable Maryland stock, desired for me a career at law. If I had heeded his wishes instead of my own, I would never have come to this crossing.”
I could just barely perceive, within the shadowed cabinet, a human face. Human? There was a hideous concavity within the face, as if some of its portions had been gnawed away, and the remainder twisted beyond recognition. The candlelight threw its faint gleam against a bright cicatrix of scar tissue, bordered by a single pale eye and a cavity where nostrils should have been. A man that was used up . . .
“This church was built upon the wreckage of the Richmond Theatre,” said the voice within Maelzel’s Chess-Player. “I was there that dread night, Edgar Poe. In the first act of the melodrama of ‘The Bleeding Nun’, in the stage-setting representing the house of Baptiste the Robber, a chandelier was employed to illumine the stage. At the second-act climax, a call-boy was ordered to raise the chandelier into the fly-lofts, where the candles could burn in safety.”
The patchworked face within the cabinet paused, as if each word required immense effort. Then it spoke again: “I stood watching, in the wings. I snatched the rope from the boy’s hands, intentionally pulling the chandelier askew so that it went into the scenery flats. These were made of oiled canvas, and they burnt most industriously.”
“You did this?” I asked. “Why?”
“In the service of envy, and anger, and a few other sins. I was a disgraced gambler, a drunkard, a failed actor. My own inadequacy before the footlights was made more embittered by the envy I held for my wife’s superlative talents on the stage.”
The Chess-Player moved within the cabinet. I beheld his face now from a fresh angle. The thick scarrings and disfigurements were less numerous here. In utter revulsion, I discerned in his mutilated countenance a grotesque parody of my own face . . .
“I was David Poe, your father,” said the beckoning thing. “When word reached me in Philadelphia of my wife’s penniless death in a Richmond tavern, I came back here in mourning: to the Richmond Theatre, the scene of her triumphs. I could scarce contain my rage as I stood in the wings and I heard your mother’s understudy speak her lines. How dare this actress live and breathe, when your mother could not? How dare the audience applaud?”
“Wretch!” I said. “You speak concern for my mother, yet she might never have died in poverty if you had not abandoned her.”
“True enough,” said the remnants of my father. “I had no right to live, and I hungered for death. I coveted my wife’s safe passage out of the living world, and I decided to join her onstage in some other realm. When I set the theatre afire, eighteen nights after my wife’s inglorious death, I resolved to immolate myself in the flames . . . and to take with me as many innocents as possible.”
“You succeeded in that last particular.”
“True. The place went up like matchwood, and the entire Richmond Theatre was aflame in two minutes. The pit and the stalls were swiftly abandoned, as the patrons in the dollar seats fled quickly. The galleries upstairs were not so fortunate.” The half-man in the cabinet gestured pathetically; I glimpsed the stub of an interrupted limb, bound in ragged bandagings.
“I was gravely maimed in the conflagration,” moaned the voice of the patchworked half-man. “The major portions of my limbs were amputated in a Richmond poor-ward, where I took care not to give my true name. I knew that my family in Baltimore would not welcome me, so I sent them false news of my death. I lived on such charity as I could find.” The half-man coughed. “Charity came easier for me after August 1812, when I could claim I lost my limbs as a soldier in the siege of Detroit, in Madison’s war against the British.” He coughed again. In the light of the church candles, I saw that the chess-player’s disfigured mouth was coughing up blood.
“How does Herr Maelzel enter this conundrum?” I asked.
“Maelzel was my savior,” said the maimed thing that alleged to be my father. “Maelzel had need of a chess-master who could fit into a small cabinet.” The half-man laughed mirthlessly, and brandished one of his stumps. “In this one vocation, my abbreviated limbs give me an advantage over men more complete than myself. If only your mother . . .”
The Automaton fell silent.
“What about my mother?” I asked.
A faint rustling within the oblong box.
“You spoke of my mother,” I persisted.
The thing in the box uttered a profane oath.
From that instant, I found myself overcome by a grotesque phrensy. It felt precisely as if my arms and legs were suspended on wires, and I became a marionette whose movements were governed by an unseen puppet-master. Confronting me was a man who masqueraded as an Automaton. True! But now I became an Automaton in the guise of a man . . . for my soul no longer captained my flesh, and I found myself moving and gesticulating as if by clockwork: no more the master of my actions, but compelled as if by gears and levers unseen. As a puppet moves on jointed limbs, so I sprang to the altar.
Just as a chesspiece, with no soul of its own, is manipu
lated by a grandmaster who cares not for the pawn’s ultimate fate, so I was controlled now by a mind alien to myself.
On the chancel’s wall was a wrought-iron sconce, holding three lighted candles. My hands grasped it, obeying the whispered commands of some unseen clockmaker – perhaps it was Maelzel – as I seized this heavy implement, tore it loose of the wall and smashed it squarely into the carved wooden head of the Turkish chess-player, knocking aside the plumed turban and shattering the face. As the Automaton’s face burst open, I saw the articulated eyes tumble forth; they were fashioned of Vienna-glass, and for one instant my own mind was freed from the clockmaker’s grasp long enough for me to admire the workmanship of the counterfeit eyes. Then the mind of the clockmaker seized me again, bidding me to strike the hour. I brought the sconce down – again! again! – upon the cabinet of Maelzel.
The Automaton was headless, for I had decapitated the figure of the Turk. Now a low groan emerged from the figure’s abdomen, and I recalled that the monstrous figure within the chess-player was concealed in that portion. I fractured this with the sconce. I had the fierce pleasure of seeing blood upon the wrought-iron flange in my grasp. I brought it down again . . .
There was an odour of burning cloth. I turned, and perceived that in my phrensy I had scattered the candles. One of these had ignited the drapes behind the altar. And now the chancel was afire.
Inside the cabinet of Maelzel, some scuttling thing – an abridged edition of a man – was struggling desperately to free itself. I brought the sconce down once more, full in the patch-quilt face of the inhuman occupant. The thing groaned, and went slack. I saw the two remaining fingers of its fragmented hand fall open. A single chessman – a carved wooden pawn – tumbled out of the maimed grasp, and it fell upon the burning altar-cloth.
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