by Trisha Telep
They stood there for a while, wrapped in one another’s essence, and Dari’s heart soared. Justin had a plan. He knew people.
He knew white witches in Wales.
And you can bet Dari would do anything to give him another chance at life.
“Nay,” Justin said, drawing his lips close to hers. “Another chance at life wi’ you.”
“You stole my heart in two days,” she accused, smiling at him.
“I suppose that makes me the heart thief,” he said sexily.
And so their story begins.
Ghost in the Machine
Dru Pagliassotti
Thunder crashed and the wire-caged electrical lights that dangled down from the manufactory’s high ceiling flickered. Constante’s hands jerked, spattering ink across the letter she was writing.
She blotted the flecks of black and decided they weren’t bad enough to require a rewrite. With a deep sense of weariness, she signed her name at the bottom of the page.
“. . . attempt to fill your order as soon as we possibly can. With the deepest regret for your inconvenience, Constante Wicketsmith, Wicketsmith’s Wondrous Automata.”
The letter was a formality, but their prestigious clients expected it. Most of them would have already read about Ambrose Wicketsmith’s murder; a letter would reassure them that, despite the shock, his children still had the business well in hand.
Constante folded the letter and sealed it with a gummed Wicketsmith label.
Ambrose Wicketsmith had always insisted on professionalism. He would have been the first to urge his children to stop wasting precious time mourning and get back to work.
Which they would . . . soon. But until the funeral was over, neither Constante nor her brother were quite ready to start up operations again. And with Stephen . . .
No, she didn’t want to think about Stephen.
She picked up one of the Pneumatic Dispatch Company’s tubes, slid the letter inside, and sealed it. Outside, a gust of wind blew rain against the manufactory’s tall windows with a sound like nails thrown against the glass panes.
“Scrapes, deliver.”
The wire-haired terrier drowsing by her slippered feet stood, wagging his stubby tail, and took the cylinder in his jaws. His nails clicked on the wooden floor as he trotted across the vast, shadowed manufactory to the dispatch tube by the front door.
“Connie? What in the name of heaven are you doing down there at this time of night?”
Her younger brother Davenport stood on the rickety metal stairs that coiled up to their small living chambers on the top floor of the manufactory. His round face was still puffy with sleep as he squinted through his spectacles and belted his brightly dyed paisley dressing gown.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She looked down at the pile of stationery. “I thought I’d finally get a start on our correspondence. It seemed a more useful thing to do than tossing and turning in bed all night.”
On the other side of the warehouse, the tin dispatch door clicked as Scrapes pawed it open and dropped the mail tube inside. Constante glanced over at him, feeling a pang of loss. Her father had taught Scrapes the delivery trick.
Tail still wagging, the terrier nosed the button that started the pneumatic pumps.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Davenport began walking down the stairs. “Tomorrow’s going to be—”
A flash of light turned the windows white. A millisecond later, thunder boomed and the overhead lights flickered and went out. Scrapes gave a frightened yelp, and something clattered to the floor as the terrier dived for cover.
Davenport swore, his voice floating through the darkness over the pounding rain.
“Don’t move,” Constante said, leaping to her feet. “The lightning must have knocked out the public works tower again. That’s the third time this month.”
“I read that they’re working on better insulation,” Davenport remarked as the metal stairway creaked. “The problem should be fixed soon.”
“I think the city should go back to using a nice, clean energy source, like coal.” She pulled the lace-trimmed skirt of her nightgown close with one hand and held the other in front of her as she walked.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” said Davenport. “Nobody’s going to be using coal in a few more years! Why in the world would you want people to grub in the dirt hacking their lungs out when we can depend on nice, clean aetheric energy, instead?”
Constante cautiously slid her slippered feet across the manufactory floor. The wide open space was criss-crossed by tables covered with half-built automata, soldering stoves, lathes, aetheric batteries, a diamagnetic generation chamber, standing blackboards covered with her father’s and Steph—no, she wasn’t going to think about him – her father’s notes, and rows upon rows of oak filing cabinets.
It was a veritable maze, and only the fact that she’d grown up in it enabled her to negotiate through in the dark.
“Aetheric energy’s dangerous,” she said, more to distract herself than because she thought she could change Davenport’s mind. “The more I study it, the more I dislike it. It attracts too many other forms of energy.”
“Which is precisely why I love it,” her brother added cheerfully.
“Oh, shut up, Davie. That’s not energy; that’s superstition.”
Outside, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. Constante was grateful when her fingers touched the smooth metal of the emergency generator’s master control panel. Working from memory, she flipped the levers that would activate the heavy-duty battery banks which powered the generator.
The generator clicked and hummed, the crystalline jars on top of its battery banks sparking and crackling as they released their stored energy.
She flipped the next set of levers, breaking the connection between Civic Public Power and the manufactory’s electrical grid and connecting to the generator instead.
In the middle of the warehouse floor, the diamagnetic chamber gave a loud series of crackles before settling down into a steady buzz. The electrical lights overhead began to glow with a yellowish, half-power radiance that did little to illuminate the manufactory floor.
“The battery banks are low,” Constante observed as her brother continued down the stairs. “Have you been letting your friends hold their meetings in here again?”
Her brother liked to run the aetheric generator during his spiritualist society’s gatherings, so that he and the rest of his friends could, as he put it, “thin the veil” between the worlds. Constante had objected when she’d lived with the rest of the family, but she’d been boarding in the Young Ladies’ Dormitory of University College for the last year.
“No.” Davenport hesitated, glancing at the buzzing metal walls of the diamagnetic chamber. “But Father and Stephen had been running the generator that night, for another test of your gyroscopic stabilizer . . .”
“Oh.”
Stephen.
Her fingers crept up to the brass key suspended by a cord around her neck. But she pulled her hand back down. For two days she’d been struggling with herself over whether to take the key off, delaying the inevitable as she’d hoped against hope that the city constabulary would find her father’s missing employee.
And that he would have a very good excuse for having vanished on the same night her father was murdered.
“I turned the generator off the next day,” Davenport continued, uncomfortably. “After the constables came. As soon as I remembered.”
“Of course.”
Despite herself, Constante’s eyes moved to the desk where her father had been found, sprawled on the floor in a puddle of his own blood.
Ambrose Wicketsmith been shot in the back, and the drawer in the desk that had held their confidential plans for the gyroscopic stabilizing mechanism – an invention that promised to make Wicketsmith’s automata capable of a much wider range of movements than any others could achieve at this point – had been empty.
As had been the box that had held their prototype
.
The investigators had been quick to suspect Stephen DeVry, her father’s missing assistant. They hadn’t believed her when she’d told them he couldn’t have done it, that he’d been all but a part of the family.
That someday she’d hoped he’d really be part of the family.
“Here, now.” Davenport walked up and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I told you – we can still find out what happened to Father.”
She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. “I’m not going to allow you to conduct a seance.”
“Father’s spirit will be far more helpful than the city constabulary.”
“Father’s spirit is long gone.”
Something groaned by the door. They both spun around, then nervously laughed as their eyes fell on the pneumatic dispatch tube shuddering in its metal bindings.
“It must be jammed.” Constante mustered a weak smile, grateful for the distraction. “So much for getting a start on our correspondence tonight.”
“There’s really no need for it,” Davenport said, solicitously patting her arm. “I’m sure we’ll see most of our clientele at the funeral tomorrow. Which, I might add, is going to be long and tiring, so we should both do our best to get some sleep.”
“I can’t. Not . . . not when there are so many questions left unanswered.”
Her brother gave her a knowing look. She blushed and refused to meet his eyes.
“And yet you refuse to ask the one person who can offer any answers,” he said, gently.
“You know how I feel about spiritualism.”
“Then you think I’m a charlatan?” he asked, his eyes widening as he assumed a hurt expression.
She rolled her eyes. Her brother could be shamelessly melodramatic, although it didn’t keep her from feeling the guilt he intended.
“Of course not! You know better than that. But I think you and your friends are mistaking rattling pipes for spiritual messages, or experiencing some sort of mass hallucination – I don’t know.” Constante hated discussing spiritualism with her brother. “I’m certain you’re sincere, Davie. I just think you’re wrong.”
He looked disappointed. “Well, that doesn’t change the fact that we have a busy day ahead of us. If you can’t sleep, sit up and read, but either way, do it in bed. You’ll catch a cold if you sit down here wearing nothing but your nightgown.”
“I suppose you’re right.” She picked up the hand-held torch near the generator. It ran on a smaller version of the aetheric batteries that powered the mechanicals that Wicketsmith manufactured for the government and a few high-end private purchasers.
She snapped it on and played the beam around the shadows.
Another burst of rain hammered against the manufactory windows. Scrapes began to whine and snarl. She swung the torch’s beam toward him and saw the small dog staring at a point in mid-air, his ears upright and his teeth flashing as he alternately threatened and hesitated.
“What’s wrong, boy?”
“He must be sensing something,” Davenport said, his voice dropping. “I’ll wager there’s a spirit here with us. Canines are much more sensitive to the spiritual plane than humans.”
“Davie, stop it!”
“We’re not automata, Connie.” Her brother indicated the mechanical dolls around them, each in a different stage of completion. “Our vitalic force doesn’t wear out like the charge in an automaton’s battery. The human spirit is eternal and omnipresent.”
“Rats are eternal and omnipresent, too,” she shot back, “and a lot more likely to be here than a ghost.”
Scrapes suddenly sat back on his haunches, giving a startled bark.
Constante patted her leg. The terrier’s intensity was making her skin crawl. It was almost as if he did see something she couldn’t. “Come here, boy.”
Scrapes cocked his head, his gaze moving as though he was watching something in motion. Constante followed his line of sight and recoiled. Something was moving under the desk where her father had been killed.
“It is a rat! Scrapes, get it! Get it!”
The terrier cocked its head, one ear twitching.
“It’s not a rat – it’s a ghost!”
“It’s a rat.”
“If it were a rat, then—” Her brother’s voice trailed off as the terrier stood up, whined again, and then slowly walked forward, his tail moving in an uncertain back-and-forth. Then the dog stopped again, his head rising with half-closed eyes, as if he were enjoying a head scratch.
“It’s a ghost,” Davenport said with conviction.
Thunder cracked and Constante’s heart skipped a beat.
The thing under the desk moved again, and this time Scrapes approached, angling himself sideways to paw and bite at the object until he’d dragged a corner out.
A leather-bound book.
“Father’s calendar!” Forgetting her disgust at the thought of rats, Constante hurried forward and grabbed it. The book seemed stuck to something, and for a moment she tugged on it – and then it was released and slid into her hands, almost as though something behind it had given it a push. She sat back and lifted it, her eyes widening as she saw the dried blood all over the cover.
With a cry of anguish, she let it fall back to the floor. Scrapes jumped out of the way, giving her a surprised look.
Her father’s blood.
“What’s wrong?” Davenport hiked up the hem of his dressing gown as he crouched next to her. “Oh, dear. Come here, Scrapes.” He pulled the terrier close. “I suppose it must have fallen off the desk when Father was shot.”
“How horrible.” Constante raised the cover with one finger squeamishly and let it fall open. Blood had seeped onto the pages, over her father’s name handwritten on the front. A lump rose in her throat.
The pages began to turn, one by one.
She snatched her fingers back as Scrapes gave a protesting yelp. Davenport loosened his grip on the terrier with a muttered apology.
Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip.
Mustering her courage, Constante forced herself to hold her hand out again, hoping to feel a gust of air – a breeze through a cracked window, a vent, a gap in the masonry, anything – but even though a lightning storm raged outside, the manufactory’s cold air remained still.
The bloodstained pages stopped moving on last Wednesday’s date.
The day her father had been murdered.
The page was covered with scribbled notes and appointments. Constante picked up her torch and held its beam on the page to give them more light than the dim overhead lamps were providing. Davenport’s head moved next to hers as they inspected the entries together.
“Meriwether . . .” They both saw the name at the same time.
“Why in the world would Father have been meeting Meriwether?” Constante demanded.
Davenport frowned. “Come to think of it, he did mention that Meriwether had approached him a few weeks ago, wanting to discuss some sort of joint business venture.”
“Henry Meriwether?” The grasping owner of Meriwether’s Mechanicals was no friend of theirs.
“Caught wind of your new invention, most like, and was hoping to ferret out a bit more information. Father and I laughed it off, but . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked around, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles. “Father? Is that you? Do you have a message for us?”
“Davie!”
One of the overhead light bulbs popped and went out with a hiss and a puff of smoke.
“Ah.” Davenport swallowed. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”
“No!”
“Connie, you aren’t going to tell me those pages moved by themselves.”
Constante shivered. That’s exactly what she wanted to tell him. Except she didn’t believe it herself.
The problem with having a scientifically trained mind was that it was very difficult to deny the evidence of one’s own senses.
How many people, exactly, did it take to experience a mass hallucination?
Another light popped overhead.
“Was that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?” Constante asked, nervously.
“I couldn’t say.” Davenport stood, setting Scrapes down. “But it seems quite clear that Father’s spirit wants to communicate with us. I’m going upstairs to get my planchette.”
Constante groaned.
“You stay down here and turn on every aetheric battery you can,” he directed, smoothing the front of his paisley dressing gown. “All the torches, all the automata; everything. With only the two of us, and you a skeptic, we’ll need to thin the veil between the worlds as much as possible.”
“Using that much aetheric energy in the middle of a lightning storm could get us both electrocuted.”
“Then let’s hope the communication goes swiftly.” He picked up another torch and headed up the wobbly metal stairs to his room.
Constante stood, giving the calendar on the floor a wary look. “Is that really you, Father?”
The book slammed shut.
She gasped, jumping back and bumping into the work table behind her. Scrapes barked, his tail wagging and his eyes fixed on an empty spot in the air.
Heart pounding, Constante decided not to question any more inanimate objects.
She hurried to the nearest work table and reached for the half-built automaton lying on it. A metal panel fancifully engraved with a heart around the keyhole adorned the torso of every Wicketsmith automaton, securing its battery chamber. It had been her mother’s idea, back when the manufactory was first starting out. The panel was only there to keep the battery from jarring loose, and all the locks were identical, but the design was a Wicketsmith signature. Even after his wife’s death, Ambrose Wicketsmith had fastened the decorative plates on all of his creations.
Constante ran a hand over the table, scattering pliers and coils of wire and screwdrivers and wrenches as she hunted for the key. Wind and rain rattled the windowpanes, making her imagine someone trying to get in.
