“Oh,” Micah said. “So, wait. You're the cop? He's the cop?”
“I guess you saw this coming, though,” Livvie said. To Ashley, she said: “Micah’s a psychic.”
“He's a psychic?” Ashley smirked. “Then I guess you know what's going to happen next.”
“Actually, that's not how--”
Ashley picked up Livvie again, carried her to the bedroom, and threw her on the bed. Livvie took off her shirt.
“Wait!” Micah said.
“Out, dude.” Ashley pointed to the front door. “Out. Or look into the future and see me, kicking your ass.”
Micah grabbed his jacket and his car keys.
***
He drove away in his rattling old Corolla. It was almost two in the morning. He hit a grungy basement club with a crappy live band, just in time to order three shots of well tequila at last call. It cost him the last of his cash. He gulped the first one down, and then tried to figure out what to do next, after the bar closed.
Maybe tomorrow he could call Tony, but Tony's girlfriend didn't like Micah staying at his place and probably wouldn't let him move back in. He tried to think of other people to call.
He drank his second shot. His brain grappled with his new condition—single, homeless and basically unemployed.
His thoughts kept circling back to the fortune telling machine. The ridiculous old-fashioned hokeyness of it, the gypsy waving her mechanical hands and casually changing the futures he predicted. Practically granting wishes, even. All for a dollar. How could he compete with that?
After his last shot of tequila, Micah drove over to the Shopping Village Plaza, home to the Cirque du Filet and the multiplex cinema. It was deserted, but the movie marquee and the neon-clown restaurant logo burned all night.
He parked and rooted in his trunk, among dirty socks and broken CD cases. He found a tire iron, then slammed the trunk lid.
Micah walked into the covered courtyard area, with its benches and potted plants, outside the business entrances. He approached the Madam Rosetta machine and stared at the red velvet curtains behind the glass pane.
“Tough life, huh?” he asked. “You know what they always say to me? 'Why don't you win the lottery?' 'Why not play the stock market?' 'Hey, you should...you should have seen this coming!'” He bashed the tire iron into the glass, and a vertical crack split the pane from top to bottom. He swung again and shattered the left half of the pane into a thousand bright pieces. Glass splinters bit into his knuckles and forearms, drawing blood, but he barely noticed.
“And you know what I tell them?” he asked. “Of course you know.” He smashed out the right half of the broken pane, but he didn't get as clean a break this time. Big glass teeth still clung to the edges of the frame.
He grabbed the red velvet curtains and ripped them loose. They smelled like mildew and rat droppings. He tossed them to the concrete.
Madam Rosetta sat inside her box, staring straight ahead, black eyes open, hands resting on either side of the crystal ball.
“I tell them,” he said, “It's not like that. Ever try to read numbers in a dream? Ever try to read a fucking book in a dream? It's all garbage. Something has to make an emotional mark before I can see it.”
He raised the tire iron again.
“What are you?” he asked. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Madam Rosetta remained frozen.
He glanced at the silver button engraved with the question mark.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “Why don't you tell me?”
He fished change from his pocket, since he was all out of paper money. He fed them into her coin slot.
“What are you?” He pressed the silver button.
The crystal ball illuminated, the gypsy's hands moved up and down, and she widened her eyes and gazed into the ball. Music played out the phonograph horn.
A card spat into the side tray.
MADAME ROSETTA SAYS...
What you seek, you will find.
“That's great. Thanks.” He crumpled the card and threw it into Madam Rosetta's face. It bounced off the dark spot of blush painted on her cheek and dropped to the black felt, next to her Tarot cards. “Why do you keep changing my predictions? And how?”
He pressed the question button again. She gazed into her crystal ball and waved her hands up and down. Machinery whirred inside the cabinet.
Then the light in the ball went out, her hands lowered, and her face tilted up until she was looking at him. The music stopped, and the whirring machinery fell silent.
“Oh, guess I need to insert another dollar,” he said. He raised the tire iron. “How about if I just beat it out of you?”
Madam Rosetta didn't respond.
Micah smashed her crystal ball with the tire iron. The interior was empty except for a light bulb, and he smashed that, too.
Then he swung the tire iron into her face. Her plaster nose cracked and fell away in chunks.
He struck her again, and a web of cracks spread across her face.
He hit her a third time, and the chunks of shattered plaster fell away.
Behind the face was a skull. The machinery that moved her eyes and mouth had been screwed to the skull's eye sockets and jaw. There was no reason to create such a detailed and realistic fake skull and place it where no one would see it, Micah thought. The skull looked much more real than Madam Rosetta's face had.
Blinding white lights flooded him from the direction of the parking lot.
“Stay right there,” a voice commanded.
Shit, the cops, Micah thought. He dropped the tire iron, and it clanged against the concrete. Metallic echoes reverberated across the enclosed courtyard. He raised his hands, palms open, and squinted against the light.
A dark male silhouette approached him from the lights. The silhouette raised both his hands. It looked like he held a gun in each one, and was pointing them at Micah.
“I'm not armed,” Micah said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stay still.”
The silhouette fired both his weapons, but with a weird downward crank using his thumbs. Long, thin chains sprang from his sleeves, each chain tipped with two iron semicircles.
These smacked into Micah's wrists, then clamped shut, cuffing him.
“What the hell was that?” Micah looked up at the iron rings around his wrists, and the long coppery chains that stretched all the way back the man's baggy jacket sleeves. And now Micah could see that the person approaching him wasn't a cop, but a very short man in a baggy woolen jacket, which had been repaired many times with patches and crude stitching. He also wore a woolen cap pulled low, almost to the top of his bushy red beard.
The gnomish man walked backward, toward the light. He seemed to be unspooling more chain, because he wasn't pulling on Micah at all. More chain fell from his sleeve and clunked on the concrete.
“What are you doing?” Micah asked. He pulled back on the limp chains. They were incredibly heavy, for being so thin.
The man walked too close to the light source for Micah to watch him any more. He heard some loud clanking ahead. Then the chains began to flow toward the light. They rose up from the concrete, drawing more and more taut.
The floodlights snapped off. The chains led up a ramp, into the back of a box truck.
“Come on, don't,” Micah said. “Look, whatever you want from me, I probably don't have it, so--”
The chains snapped tight and straight, and then hauled him forward. Micah jogged to keep up with them, but they accelerated faster than he expected and pulled him flat on his face. They dragged him the last ten feet to the truck, and then up the ramp.
Inside the truck, they dragged him until he was flat against the wall of the truck, dangling from the ceiling. Above him, he could see where the chains had coiled up onto ceiling-mounted, gear-driven spools. The ceiling above him was covered in rotating gears, chains, and hissing hoses.
Two other walls were hung with tools, which looked archaic to Micah, l
ike an iron hand drill, or a hammer with an uneven head and knotty handle, clearly not made in any modern factory. Against another wall, he saw gypsy scarves, magicians' top hats, pointy witch hats, a rack of robes. The back of the truck was half workshop, half theatrical dressing room.
A brass device rolled out from the wall. It looked like a hand truck, but with the big spoked wheels of an antique wheelchair. As it turned, Micah saw the small bearded man steering it.
“Hey!” Micah shouted. “Hey, dude!”
The little man ignored him and wheeled the hand truck down the ramp. Micah watched him slip the prongs of the hand truck under the fortune teller machine. He tilted the machine forward, spilling broken glass and Tarot cards onto the concrete. Then he wheeled it up into the truck and positioned it against the far wall, directly across from Micah.
“Hey,” Micah said. “Is that a real skull in there?”
The man kicked a lever in the floor, and the ramp retracted from the ground and clattered away underneath the floor of the truck, as if it had been mounted on a stretched-out spring. The truck rumbled and drove away from the shopping center, and the overhead door at the back of the cargo area dropped into place.
“Where are we going?” Micah asked in the dark.
A lantern flared, and the man hung it from a dangling hook. It gave a swaying light as the truck accelerated. Micah looked toward the cab area of the truck, but it was sealed behind a solid wall hung with hand saws.
“Rosie,” the man said. His voice reminded Micah of a croaking frog. “Nearly time to pack her in, anyway. The ectoplasm leaks slow, but it leaks.”
“The what?”
“One hundred and forty years in operation.” He took a fat ring of keys from his belt, licked his thumb as he sorted through them, and then unlocked the front of the Madam Rosetta cabinet. He swung it open. “No electricity, except the light bulb. All driven by springs and weights.”
The interior of the cabinet was a latticework of gears, levers, weights, and pulleys. Micah could see wire frames holding stacks of parchment-colored cards, and the rollers and chutes that fed them toward the answer tray on the side.
“She's a work of art,” the little man said. “First built her in 1872. Haven't done a thing but polish the wheels, wind the springs and update her to accept paper money.”
“Is that...a real person in there?” Micah asked. “What did you do?”
“You're asking? I would think you'd find it obvious by now.” The man opened the cash and coin receptacle mounted inside the cabinet's front panel. He dumped the money into a cracked leather box. “She wasn't 'Madam Rosetta' in life. Or even a Romany. She was a gifted Irish lass, Shanna. She could speak with the spirits of the dead, too. Shame to waste such power on such a simple machine, when you think of it.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I haven't got a design for a 'Speak to the Dead' machine,” the man said. He began disassembling Madame Rosetta's internal gear matrix with a hand drill and screwdriver. He lowered a weathered plank of a worktable from the side of the truck and locked it into place. “Don't know if there's a market. Plus, deadspeak is a rare talent, and those with it tend to go loopy fast. So, not much of a stable supply, either. No reason to launch a new product line.” He placed clockwork gears and long, thin screws on the table. The lower half of each screw was encrusted with black gunk.
“But why do this to a person at all?” Micah asked.
“Oh, I'm no philosopher. Just a mechanic, doing my job.” He continued disassembling the Madam Rosetta machine, laying the parts in even rows across the work table.
“Who do you work for?” Micah asked.
“Oriax Amusements.” The little man beamed. “Founded in good old Eridu. Providing wonders, spectacles and diversions for the human soul for over five thousand years. I have furnished automata for more priests, sultans and would-be god-kings than you could ever name. My contraptions delighted mobs in the Roman Forum, operated by copper coin, counterweights, and water power.” His smile revealed teeth that were unnaturally sharp, most of them crooked and black. "I have put on grand displays in the temples of Babylon, the Circus Maximus, the imperial court at Constantinople."
“But you just do this now?”
The little man scowled. “Times change.” He took off his woolen hat, revealing a mass of knotted, dirty red hair, as well as a pair of stumpy goat horns protruding from his forehead. He scratched his head, then replaced the cap. “Like now. They say my automata are too old-fashioned. They want new, glitzy things, digital, holographic. And we must feed the customer what he demands, must we not?”
Micah pulled at the iron cuff around his right wrist, but it was locked tight. “You can let me go,” Micah said. “I won't tell anyone what I saw.”
“What you saw?” The little man studied him and sucked one of his fang-like incisors. “Ah. You think I'm afraid of getting caught by some human authority.” He croaked out a laugh. “If the Achaemenid Immortals could not slay me, I don't see why I should fear your donut-eating constables.”
“The who?”
After extracting all the bronze and iron machinery and laying out each piece, the little man dropped the long, gunk-encrusted screws into a tin bucket full of brown liquid, where they sizzled.
“We are down one machine,” the little man said. He pulled the body of Madam Rosetta—or Shanna the Irish psychic—out through the open door in the cabinet. He stripped the scarf, wig, blouse and costume jewelry, leaving just a shriveled corpse. Shanna had been a small, short woman, or maybe just a girl. Micah felt a pang of sorrow for her.
The little man dropped her body into a burlap sack and gave it a kick. It slid away into a far corner.
“What are you going to do with her?” Micah asked.
“What do you care? You've got your own problems.” The little man grabbed two more open iron rings dangling from chains. The chains uncoiled, clanking, from spools on the ceiling as the man approached Micah. The man dropped one of the rings and grabbed Micah's left foot.
“No!” Micah drew back his shoe and kicked the man in the face as hard as he could manage.
The little man shrieked as he somersaulted backward, then landed facedown on the floor of the truck. He looked up at Micah. His lower lip was split open and bleeding.
“That hurt,” the man hissed. “I was trying to be nice to you. I liked your attitude. No more.”
The man hopped to his feet. He flung the open iron rings at Micah, and they cracked into both of Micah's ankles. Micah hissed in pain. The rings closed tight around his ankles, squeezing the freshly bruised bone. Micah cried out.
The man turned a crank on the wall. The wooden wall slab against which Micah was chained swung out until Micah lay flat on his back, staring into the oily gears and chains arrayed on the ceiling. Then the platform lowered until he was waist-high to the little man. The little man pulled a lever on the side of the crankbox, and the platform bounced as it locked into place.
The man approached him with a smile.
“If you're going to kill me,” Micah whispered. “Just make it fast.”
The man lifted a straight razor with an ivory handle from his leather tool belt. He unfolded the long blade. “Is that what you want?”
Micah swallowed. He was too scared to speak, and he had no idea what to say.
The man moved closer and set the blade across Micah's throat.
“Please,” Micah whispered. “Just let me go.”
“I've been watching you,” the man said. “You're good enough. Nothing like Shanna was, but there's juice in you. You don't deserve her beautiful cabinet, though. I have something else in mind.” The man scraped the razor up Micah's jaw. Then he repeated the movement, taking off some of Micah's skin. “I could have used soap and water, you know. If you hadn't tried that stupid attack.”
“What did you expect me to do?”
“You could thank me.”
“Huh?”
“You're alone. You're
suicidal. You needed a new life. Along come I with a fantastic offer.” The man scraped both of Micah's cheeks, then shaved off his eyebrows. He hacked at Micah's unkempt black hair.
“What offer?” Micah asked.
“Work,” he said. “Job security. A position from which you can't be removed.” He croaked another laugh.
“What if I say no?”
“You can't say no.” The man worked quickly—he was scraping Micah's scalp raw now. “You already said ‘yes’ when you smashed up my machine, as I measure things.”
“I'll pay you money for it,” Micah said. “Just let me go.”
“You don't have any.” The man pushed the pile of Micah's hair off the platform with a dirty rag. “And I wouldn't want it if you did. I earn my own keep.”
“Please,” Micah whispered.
The man held up a device that looked like a leather gas mask, with a tube that reached up to a distended sphere of bottle glass, which sat inside an antique birdcage bolted to the ceiling.
“What's that?” Micah asked.
“In case your ectoplasm slips out during the procedure.” He pressed the mask to Micah's face and pulled the strap tight. The leather smelled like vomit and blood.
The man adjusted the iron rings on Micah's wrists, slid them midway up his forearms, then locked them in place. He framed brackets around Micah's wrists. Then he lined up a long screw in a bracket hole against Micah's left wrist, and Micah felt its sharp tip poke into his skin, drawing blood.
Micah shook his head, but the man turned the screw with the hand drill. The screw pierced between the bones of Micah's wrist and drove out the other side, while Micah screamed into the mask. The man capped the screw with a washer and nut. Then he repeated it with Micah's other wrist, while Micah writhed and bucked in pain.
Micah's blood pumped out into two growing puddles on the table.
The man cut off Micah's clothes with sewing scissors. Then he mounted more brackets along his body, installing sockets at his wrists, shoulders, ribs, and knees. Micah felt himself blacking out from the pain, but he fought against it.
Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition Page 3
