Phantasmical Contraptions & Other Errors

by Jessica Augustsson

  PHANTASMICAL

  CONTRAPTIONS

  &

  OTHER ERRORS

  Stories collected and edited by

  Jessica Augustsson

  Published by JayHenge Publishing KB

  Published by JayHenge Publishing KB

  Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Augustsson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 1539450821

  ISBN-13: 978-1539450825

  Cover Illustration by Lukas Thelin

  Cover Design by Jessica Augustsson

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Verdigris by Jay Knioum

  The Fantabulous Clown Machine of London Superior by Damon L. Wakes

  Devil Red by Jennifer Silverwood

  Homeostasis by Petter Skult

  Beyond the Amethyst Mountains by Andrew Johnson

  Plattery Will Get You Nowhere by Charlotte Frankel

  Obelisk by G.H. Finn

  Servant’s Log May 18-24 by G. Deyke

  Brotherhood of the Wolf; Sisterhood of the Horse by Crystal Carroll

  Hold the Dirigible by Lynn Townsend

  The City of Dragons by Ariel Ptak

  Dream Preserves by Susanne Hülsmann

  The Dieselman of Devil Wells by C.W. Blackwell

  The Fantabulous Clown Machine of Roger’s Discount Circus by Damon L. Wakes

  Nick of Time by Jay Knioum

  Occurrence at Kettle Falls by Jessica Augustsson

  The Gearmaster by Ariel Ptak

  The Hearing Aid by Charlotte Frankel

  Professor Drake’s Discovery by Kimber Camacho

  Paper by G. Deyke

  Some Disassembly Required by Damon L. Wakes

  Runaway Airtrain by Jennifer Silverwood

  The Lost Capsule by Petter Skult

  Bartleby and the Professor’s Soggy Singalong by Shondra Snodderly

  The Kraken by Kimber Camacho

  What is Steampunk?

  Steampunk is a movement of creativity and imagination inspired by authors from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Whether the backdrop is Victorian England, Colonial India, America’s (or even Mars’s) Wild West, modern technologies are constructed to run on the gears and steam of the 1800s, as well as expanding to times prior to and following that; they are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. I hope you enjoy the stories by these talented authors as much as I enjoyed collecting and editing them.

  Verdigris

  by

  Jay Knioum

  The sun was red the day Slicker died. She watched him fall a hundred levels, to shatter against a fat, reinforced gas pipe, shards of him breaking across archways and supports and cables, plummeting into the foggy void below. His blud drenched a cluster of backup valves. It dripped from the nozzles, thick and syrupy.

  Slicker was unsticking the gears on the Bigtime with such focus that he paid no attention to the approach of the Quickhand, making its minute-long journey around the Bigtime’s face. He had clamped safety cables to the supports, but was careless. The Quickhand caught a support line, and dragged him off the gears, sending him plummeting. The Bigtime was in such poor repair that the other clamps had torn free, sending scraps of rusted steel along with Slicker to his death.

  Shine had tried to shout a warning, but Slicker couldn’t hear. Or wouldn’t. Slicker loved his work, loved the way things ran smoothly when he was finished. Mostly, he loved it when things worked, as they frequently did not here.

  The Quickhand had worked well enough. It had killed him. The others stared after him for almost a full rotation, and then returned to their duties. Not Shine. She watched the blud drip from the valves, and remembered Slicker’s voice. He used to sing for her. She loved that. She returned to the the Bigtime’s face, and began to wipe away a bit of scum, and tried to remember one of Slicker’s tunes. The memory of the shards of Slicker’s body, so vivid in the morning light as they broke across the steel below, faded as quickly as the morning damp, and the scum beneath Shine’s brushes.

  Shine caught up with Turner in the food line. The red sun was high in the sky, an angry eye behind the clouds. A lazy drizzle of thick, oily rain fell, and erupted in steam from the hot rust that surrounded them. Everywhere, the speakers rumbled from their precarious sconces in the pipes, superstructures and catwalks that threaded throughout their world.

  From the speakers came the voice of Auntie. All the children knew Auntie. She warned them against danger, and against misbehavior. She told them when to eat, and when to sleep. She was telling them to eat now, her static-flecked voice banging against the layers of pipes and rails, changing pitch with each echo.

  Turner turned toward Shine. Raindrops skittered across his features, beading against his shell. His eyes moved. They always moved. Shine liked how Turner always looked around at everything.

  “What’s new?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he answered, as he always did. She was the one who always brought the news when there was news.

  “Slicker’s dead.”

  His eyes darted left and right, but then settled on her. She liked that. “How did that happen?”

  “We were working on the Bigtime. He didn’t notice the Quickhand. It knocked him off, and he fell.”

  Turner looked at the ground. Slicker had been his friend. “Did he break his skin?”

  Shine nodded. “All over.”

  He nodded. “I liked how he sang.”

  Shine nodded. “I did, too.”

  “I’ll miss him.”

  Shine looked around, suddenly worried. The Maulers wouldn’t like it if they heard them talking. There was one now, walking past on all fours, his arms and legs ending in huge, metal-studded hammers that rang across the steel of the city as he moved. He peered around with tiny, black eyes set deep into a boy’s face, with breathing tubes sprouting from where his mouth should be, coiling into the regurgitation machine riding his back, his whole body hissing angrily with steam.

  “I will, too.” she whispered.

  Then they both turned to face the food line. Ahead, there was the Mamabrd. A hulking, teardrop-shaped hunk of metal bristling with hoses that ended in sharp, metal beaks. One by one, the children queued up beneath the beaks, and waited.

  It was Turner’s turn. He stood beneath the nearest beak. It lowered toward him, and the beak opened with a groan. A thick, pasty, red gruel issued forth to drench Turner, who stood beneath with his face raised high and his mouth open.

  He ate his fill, just as they all did. Shine would have her turn. Then, they would clean off and sleep.

  Shine wondered if she would dream. Sometimes she dreamed of green.

  Turner pulled his largest wrench from his backbelt and clamped it to the bolt. He pulled with all his might, until he was afraid he would crack his skin, but eventually, the bol
t began to turn. He could hear the satisfying rush he had just freed, flowing through the huge metal pipe toward the Weldingworks, rising black and smoking in the distance, and flanked by the craggy Scraphills huddling on all sides of it.

  “What’s new?” Shine had been watching him turn the bolt, “Didn’t need me after all, I guess.”

  “I might have needed you, If I’d known you were there.”

  “But you didn’t know,” she said, “and you didn’t need me.”

  They stayed together the rest of the day. They freed gears, unstuck hinges, and loosened nuts. Shine cleaned the scum with her chemicals and brushes, and Turner pulled the hardware free. They worked like this often, had done so as long as they could remember.

  They didn’t talk about Slicker again. No one did.

  This time, Turner let Shine go before him in line for the Mamabrd. He was quiet. He was always quiet, but even more so today. He wasn’t even looking around at things. Instead, his glassy eyes focused on the steel grate under their feet.

  “What’s new?” she asked him.

  “Nothing.” But he was lying. That in itself was new. Turner never lied.

  She looked down, to see a thick strip of cord wrapped around one of his hands. Blud oozed from between the coils.

  He had broken his skin. She was about to ask him about it, but then there was the clangk-clangk-clangk of the Maulers, hissing and lurching down the ramp from behind the Mamabrd, from the tower of grinding pistons where Auntie was said to live. Turner, Shine and the others scattered out of the way, because no one got in the Maulers’ way, even by accident.

  They had their goggles flipped down over their eyes. Bright beams of light shot from the lenses, sweeping across everyone huddled against the rusting walls surrounding the Mamabrd. The only sound was the hiss and thud of the Maulers’ engines and joints, and the oozing drip of the paste from the Mamabrd’s beaks.

  The beams focused on each of them, until they all came to rest on Bender, across the platform from Shine and Turner. Bender looked about helplessly, but everyone else moved away from him. It was not good to have the Maulers’ attention.

  The loudspeakers crackled to life. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE,” said Auntie. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE.” Her voice was as it always was. Urgent. Stern.

  Bender was alone, with his back pressed against a boiler. He shook so violently that his shell rattled against the corroded steel behind him. The beams from the Maulers’ goggles focused upon him as they clangked closer, surrounding him, pinning him to the boiler with their presence.

  He slid down and curled up under the bright lights. “I didn’t do nothing, Auntie. Didn’t do nothing’!”

  “GOOD CHILDREN STAY INSIDE THE WALLS. BAD CHILDREN DO NOT.”

  “I didn’t do nothing! I just wanted to see the Green, Auntie! I wasn’t goin’ nowhere, I wasn’t goin’ nowhere...”

  The Maulers reared back, and brought their arm-sledges down on him, their joints bubbling with steam and lubricant. Bender’s skin shattered, bits of it skittered across the floor grate. Blud oozed from his pulverized body, to flow and drip through the grate, raining down on the levels underneath.

  The Maulers hissed and thudded away, back up the ramp to Auntie’s tower. All eyes rested on where Bender was, where the blud ran in thick rivulets down the side of the boiler, and on a bowl-shaped chunk of his skin, wobbling back and forth.

  The food line re-formed again, except for Scrub, who picked up Bender’s pieces and mopped up the blud. Turner and Shine found their places again, keeping their eyes to the floor, lest the Maulers decide to create another example.

  “GOOD CHILDREN STAY INSIDE THE WALLS. BAD CHILDREN DO NOT.” Auntie’s voice screeched across the city, as the Maulers glowered at the lines of children awaiting their dose of paste.

  Shine felt Turner’s whisper in her ear more than she heard it over the din of steam, and clangking, and Auntie’s shrill warnings.

  “I got something to show you.”

  The door was hidden in shadow, half-blocked by a load of rusted pipes, springs, gears and casings, probably thrown down here by Loader and Drag. They never put things where they belonged.

  “Where does that lead?” Shine asked.

  Turner shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. I just found it a couple days ago.”

  They stood at the bottom of a cavern of steel. Red sunlight peered in through holes in the forest of pipes and valve stoppers. Everything was covered in a thick patina of green corrosion.

  “How did you find it?”

  “I dropped a wrench down here, one of my big ones that I can’t do without. Climbed down here and found this place.” He was staring at the door. Shine looked over the debris that blocked it. Some of it was strewn about.

  “You tried to move all that by yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I wonder what’s in there, Shine? I mean, look at the hinges. It hasn’t been opened for...for...”

  He didn’t know how to say how long, but Shine understood. She also understood the way his fingers played about the wrenches and pliers on his belt. He wanted to open that door. His face was the same as always, but his eyes shone as if they’d been polished. She wished she had been the one to polish them.

  “We should leave it be, Turner.”

  “Anything could be in there.”

  “No!” Shine hadn’t meant to shout, and her voice carried among the corroded webwork of dripping pipelines. “Bender didn’t do what he was told, and you saw what happened to him.”

  “Auntie doesn’t have eyes down here.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Turner nodded at the debris. “You think Loader and Drag would dare dump their loads down here if Auntie could see?”

  Shine sighed. Turner had a point. Sloppiness in one’s work would get you a visit from the Maulers if you were caught. Shine looked at the debris in a new light. “Brave boys, those two.”

  “Nobody’s going to find out, Shine.”

  “Why do you want to do this? Why even risk it?”

  Turner thought about that. His arms fell to his sides, and he looked right at Shine. “Everything we do, it’s for Auntie and the City. That door is mine, it’s for me. I want to open it, because I want to open it.”

  She looked at his eyes again. They still shone, and she could see herself mirrored in them. He needed her. If he could have opened the door with only his strength and his wrenches, it would already be open. She looked again at his bluddy hand, wrapped up in cords. He had tried, and failed.

  If she left, she would be safe. She could pretend she’d never seen the door. But Turner would stay. He’d keep trying, and eventually the Maulers would find him, or he’d shatter himself in the effort.

  She remembered that bowl-shaped piece of Bender’s skull, spattered and dripping.

  “Help me clear this stuff out,” she said, “we need to be quick.”

  His eyes widened as wide as they could widen, though his face stayed the same. Together, they shifted the pile of pipes and scrap just enough to expose the hinges, and Shine went to work. She covered them in her chemicals, waited for the thick suds to foam up, and then scrubbed. Slowly, the metal brightened into a shiny, clean copper under her care. Next, she treated the rotary locking bolt that held the door sealed. She ignored Turner as he rocked back and forth on his heels and toes, agitated and impatient. Satisfied, she looked back at him.

  “Okay.”

  He affixed his largest wrench to the thick screw behind the locking bolt wheel to give himself leverage, and pulled. He pulled hard, so hard that Shine saw tiny, hairline cracks start to form in his skin. “Stop!” she said.

  She nudged him aside, and grabbed the wrench, her hands mingling with his. They both pulled. Too slowly, the locking bolt turned, and the door sang a dirge of metal sliding on metal, echoing about the chamber.

  The bolt finally turned free, and Turner grabbed the wheel in both hands, yanking it counter to the clock until it spun as if newly made.


  Shine had to wipe down the rim of the door then, as it was rusted shut. They both combined hands on the bolt wheel, braced their feet against the wall, and pulled.

  With a groan and a rush of air, the door came away, yawning into darkness beyond. They managed to open it about a foot until the debris pile stopped them.

  Shine looked down to see droplets of blud appear in the cracks in Turner’s arms, but he paid it no mind. He stared at the open portal before them. “We’ll need light.”

  “Do you have a torch?”

  Neither did, and Lighter, Blaze and Glow would be deep in the sewers right now, helping the crews declog the arteries feeding the Mamabrd. Nothing was more important than that. “Come back tomorrow,” Shine said, “The door will be here then.”

  Turner was getting frustrated. “We can’t wait ‘til tomorrow. I could be working the other side of the City then! Who knows when I’ll get back here?”

  Shine stepped back from him. She had never seen him agitated like this. She felt something then, while she watched his fingers flex open and closed, his eyes dart helplessly as he searched for anything to light his way into the black maw before them. Even though they could be killed for it, she wanted to help him. She couldn’t have told him why if he’d asked.

  She looked around. “Here,” she said, “Help me.” She grabbed hold of a large, oblong sheet of scuffed steel from the debris pile. Curious, Turner grabbed the other end, and helped her haul it from the junk. She crouched, sprayed the thing with chemicals, and scrubbed until there was a perfect reflection of her in the metal. She pointed toward the back of the chamber, where a red sunbeam struck the pipe-strewn floor. “Use this to catch the light, and angle it toward the door.

  He did as she bade, and was amazed when the sunbeam bounced from the steel and bathed the darkness beyond the door with red light. She nodded, and he fixed the steel to a girder with one of the clamps he always carried.