Phantasmical Contraptions & Other Errors

by Jessica Augustsson

  The beautiful doctor smiled wistfully, as though remembering. “I was born in Shantung, in French Colonial China. My father was a Chinese magistrate. An official in the local government. What you’d call a Mandarin. My mother was French. An heiress. The daughter of a spice merchant. He had brains and ambition. She had money and a disregard for social convention. I was lucky. It meant I received the best education money could buy. Although I was officially named Chasteté, mother used to call me her little Fauve,” she paused then continued, “That’s French of course. In English, it would mean ‘something that is wild’. I think I like being ‘Wild’ better than I like ‘Chastity’, but it is hardly appropriate in academic circles.”

  I was impressed by her. It must have been hard for her to earn her doctorate. Women were rarely faculty members of universities. Sino-Franco academics were almost unheard of. Doctor Chastity Ying was one of a kind.

  We sat quietly together. I relit my pipe. After a while she offered me some of her bread and cheese. I grinned and in return gave her some of my peppermint humbugs. We sat, chewing, without saying much. But, with the simple sharing of food and conversation, something changed between us. We’d taken the first step to becoming friends.

  An awful metallic screaming ripped through the mist. I leapt to my feet. It was the horse! Before I could take even a step, the sound ended, suddenly, with a grim finality that could only mean destruction. I grabbed the oil lantern and shone it before me, heading for where I’d left Wellington. I heard a frantic braying warning claxon coming from Tick-Tock then the sound of iron hooves scrabbling on stone and the noise of my robot mule bolting away blindly into the night. The light from the oil lamp suddenly illuminated the scene before me. There on the broken rocks was the horse’s head. A short distance away I could see where Chastity had stowed Tick-Tock’ pack. All across the ground between lay thick, spilled oil. Broken cogs. Shattered gears. Pneumatic pipes lay torn like severed intestines, a still-moving pile of steaming innards that had spewed out of my horse. But there was no sign of the rest of the body.

  Chastity came to stand beside me. Sensibly she had her rifle held in the crook of her arm. Ready should it be needed. My voice wasn’t as steady as I’d have liked as I drew my revolver and asked her, “What do you think did it? A fault in the boiler?”

  But I didn’t convince even myself. I knew this was no accident. The horse had been ripped apart.

  Doctor Ying looked around her, into the swirling red mist and the blackness of the night. “I don’t know. I... Yes, it must have been an explosion... It must have. Poor horse!”

  Despite her words I noticed she kept looking out into the night, holding her gun.

  We both knew something was out there. Officially there were no animals on Mars, other than a few domestic one brought by settlers. But no cow or chicken had done this. Officially there was no native life on Mars… Yet even so, there were always stories.

  Tales of things.

  Things that were never seen clearly, just half-glimpsed in the Martian twilight.

  Or of uncanny noises. Weird, echoing alien voices only ever heard beneath the light of the twin moons.

  I shuddered.

  I held the lantern high and turned slowly around in a circle, my other hand holding my gun steady as I tried to see through the swirling mist. I could only hope that whatever had killed Wellington had gone away. But it wouldn’t have. Not if it was hungry. There’s no meat on a steam-driven horse.

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the heavens opened and dust-filled red rain began to pour down furiously, falling like the devil onto the hellish Martian landscape. Passing the lamp to Chastity I wrestled with the mule’s pack. I had extra blankets and I felt sure we were going to need them. “We’d better get what shelter we can from that damned obelisk!” I shouted above the sound of the pouring rain.

  Chastity held the lantern high and I struggled to get the pack over the wet rocks. We squatted down away from the wind, barely protected from the rain by the gigantic black column, but grateful for even the little cover that it gave us. I opened the pack and pulled out blankets, then wrapped everything up again as tight as possible. I didn’t want the provisions to get wet, especially not the flour, the dynamite and the bullets.

  In the dim light of the lamp, Chastity and I looked at one another. The combination of the harsh weather, the brutal loss of the horse and the knowledge that perhaps an unknown Martian predator still lurked somewhere in the darkness had cut through the need for either words or social convention. In unspoken agreement, we moved nearer to each other, huddling together against the wet, and the coldness that came less from the weather and more from fear. With increasingly drenched blankets held over us, I kept my hand on my revolver. Chastity still held her rifle. But at least the rain eventually looked like it was about to ease.

  That was when we heard it.

  A rumbling sound, grinding and groaning, as though some kind of heavy stone gateway was ponderously opening. I wondered what could be causing it and was about to ask Chastity when we both heard the slithering.

  It was insipid and insidious, hollow. Barely noticeable over the dying rain. And yet it forced its way into our senses. Slipping, sibilant, snakelike, as it slid slowly over the wet stones. I heard a serpentine hiss and then a nauseating sucking noise. It stopped, suddenly. Then swiftly continued. Slick. Sticky. Ichorous.

  Chastity screamed. Something had wrapped itself around her leg.

  In the dim light of the oil lamp, I could see a coil of black swiftly winding its way around the horrified woman’s limb. I ran my hand across my eyes, thinking to wipe the rain out of them, because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My first thought was that she somehow must have become entangled in some tree roots. But I quickly dismissed this as impossible. There were no trees on Mars. Then I reasoned it must be a snake, though it wasn’t like any snake I’d ever seen. Even so, I didn’t want to believe there was any other explanation.

  Chastity Ying screamed again, trying to pull free, but even as she cried out I saw her draw her knife and begin to slash at the black coils that were wrapping around her. To my surprise, the knife made no impression. The twisted coils must have been as tough as boiled leather. There was only one thing I could think of that might work. With my left hand, I grabbed the writhing twisted thing that was squeezing and crushing Chastity’s leg. With my right, I put the muzzle of my revolver against the oily cold dark flesh. I felt something piercing my left hand. Barbed suckers were biting into my palm just above my wrist, stinging and burning like acid. I pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Again. And again. The spiraling tentacle thrashed and I heard a bellow of pain and rage. It seemed to come from far above me. But thankfully the hideous strangling coils instantly loosened their grip and retreated into the mist and darkness.

  “What was that thing?” I asked Chastity. I saw her clothes were torn. Her leg was bloody and a mass of welts was rising where it had been engulfed by the snaking tentacle. I could see ring-shaped bruises swelling where the mouth-like suckers had fastened upon her flesh.

  She looked at me, her eyes wild with a mixture of ferocious anger and stark terror. “I don’t know, but it must be the creature that destroyed your horse. How can we stop it if it comes back?”

  I had no answer.

  And then the weird grinding, rumbling, groaning sound came again.

  We both stared at the obelisk, or whatever the structure really was. I grabbed the oil-lamp and held it up to view the dark, glassy column. I took a step back in horror.

  The carved swirls and spirals that covered the obsidian obelisk were all slowly moving. The knotwork twisted and untwisted before my eyes. The engraved lines etched into the metallic glasslike trunk of the artifact were moving over and beneath each other. I knew what I was seeing was impossible. I wondered if I was going insane. A part of me hoped I was losing my mind. Anything would be preferable to the reality of what I was seeing.

  I raised the lantern,
lifting it up and further up. I saw the unnatural bestial alien heads squirm and snarl beneath the beam of light. I raised the oil lamp as high as I could, illuminating the hideous carving of the thing at the very top of the column. But now, now I realized that it was alive.

  I saw that the tentacles all traced back to the slowly undulating forked tongue of the monstrous idol. The cruel tusks jutted menacingly from its colossal jaw. The bat-like ears bristled, hearing things I could not imagine and would not dare to hear. The eyes set in the scaled ape-like face were closed. Blind. All but the central third eye. That seemed to burn with a frozen black flame, blazing with all the shades of midnight. I stared open-mouthed as the eye began to fold into itself.

  My blood seemed to chill in my veins. My limbs became heavy. Too heavy to move, as I stared uncomprehendingly into the awful eye. Shortly, the eye appeared to dissolve, and in its place I saw a thing begin to materialize. I can’t describe it. I don’t understand what I saw. I’ve done my best to mentally scrub my mind free of the vision, but I’ll never truly be able to forget it. I felt myself vomiting as I watched. Mostly I remember it as an opening, fibrous like a canker. A tumor. A cancerous blight oozing into our world. It was forming itself in the frozen flame of the idol’s eye.

  I suppose you could call it a mouth, but it might have been a vagina or an anus. Or all three.

  It was an orifice. A hole. A hole into our world.

  As I watched the thing that was appearing, it seemed to be simultaneously consuming and producing itself, all through this single orifice. No, it was more than that. It was as though it was devouring itself, mating with itself, giving birth to itself, excreting itself out and sucking itself back into a void, all at once. The cycles of creation and destruction had gone mad – there was no difference between them, not even a way of separating them into opposite parts.

  The thing hovered there, vomiting and swallowing and birthing and defecating itself in and out of existence. Again and yet again, in a twisted cycle that had no beginning and no end. And all the while it gibbered, laughing with an inhuman, unearthly, eldritch, insane sound. There was only one thing I could be sure about this unknown and unknowable entity.

  It was hungry.

  I could feel its desire to eat. To feed. It was all-encompassing. The dark all-consuming lust to devour was all that motivated the thing.

  The tentacles writhed across the bleak stony ground wet with the red-mist rain. Somehow I knew what was going to happen. They were going to wrap themselves around me. They would engulf me. Lift me. Draw me up to the thing that floated, gloatingly gibbering in the frozen, burning eye. Then it would feast upon my soul.

  “Give me the lamp.”

  I heard her voice, but it was though it came from far off. I knew Chastity was talking to me, but there was nothing I could do to answer her. I felt her take the oil-lamp from my unresisting fingers.

  Darkness descended as the light was removed. Thankfully I could no longer see the thing. With it no longer visible, a little of my will began to return. I felt I could move again. “Get ready to run!” said Chastity.

  I turned my head and saw what she was doing. She had fetched the dynamite from Tick-Tock’s pack and had used the oil-lamp to light a fuse. She threw the fizzing bundle of explosive sticks toward the writhing pillar. The carved tendrils engulfed the dynamite, but the fuse remained alight. I watched as the tentacles began to pass the deadly bundle upward, carrying the dynamite toward the horrific maw at its apex. Suddenly my senses came back to me. Chastity grabbed my hand and we both ran. Neither of us could see where we were going. We scrambled and slid upon the wet rocks, nearly falling again and again, but we held each other up and ran into the mist and the blackness of the night, trying to get away from the obelisk as fast as possible.

  Even so, the detonation knocked us off our feet. We were hit by a shock wave, though whether it came from the dynamite blast itself, or the sudden closing of the otherworldly gateway, I shall never know. The force of the explosion was enough to shatter the obelisk and send the remains crashing to the ground.

  We lay, stunned, upon the ground, hardly daring to breathe. We didn’t move until first light, when we fearfully checked that it was safe to show ourselves.

  The ancient Martian obelisk was utterly destroyed. All that remained was a vast number of black and broken obsidian shards, littering the rocky ground.

  Thankfully we found Tick-Tock the next day, wandering nervously in the woods. I gathered up the remains of Wellington hoping he could be rebuilt, and Chastity collected samples of the shattered obelisk.

  And that was how our small business grew.

  I say “we” because Chastity became my partner. First in the mining business and then, well, I’m hoping that in time she will agree to become my wife.

  As well as cobalt, we took to selling obsidian. I figured we deserved to make some money from it after all we’d been through. We knew that the supply would run out eventually, but in the meantime we were turning a very tidy profit. We sold fragments of the obelisk that still showed signs of carving to museums and private collectors. We made a fortune. Not everyone believed they proved the existence of an earlier Martian civilization, but even those who didn’t still wanted to examine the fragments to discover what they really were. And we charged them high prices for the privilege. The more severely broken chunks of obsidian were disregarded by the museums but still in demand as souvenirs and curios. I sold those a lot more cheaply but they still made a mint.

  We told almost everyone that when we discovered the obelisk it was already in its shattered state. We were sure no one would have believed the truth. Doctor Chastity Ying would probably have been thrown out of the university as a crackpot. I only told the full story to a handful of people. And of those few, the only one who ever really believed me was Bo Luggs. We both recognized the look in each other’s eyes.

  Now almost a year has passed since that fateful night and most of the shards have been sold. Chastity and I have made enough money and have decided to leave Mars. We think it may be safer for us to go back to Earth.

  I’d like get as far away from this place as I can.

  I’d thought it was all over.

  I thought we would be safe.

  But over the last few weeks some of the museums and several of my private customers have been asking if there is more to the fragments of the obelisk than I had told them.

  They say it isn’t made from obsidian at all. The black material is something else.

  Something they can’t identify.

  And a few swear that in the dark of night, sometimes, just sometimes, they hear a strange laughing and a slithering, gibbering sound.

  G. H. Finn keeps his real identity secret, possibly in the forlorn hope of one day being mistaken for a superhero.

  Having written non-fiction for many years, G. H. Finn decided to start submitting short-stories to publishers in 2015 and was flabbergasted when the first story he’d ever submitted was selected.

  Since then he has had a wide range of fiction published and especially enjoys mixing genres in his work, including mystery, horror, steampunk, dark comedy, detective, supernatural, speculative, folkloric, Cthulhu mythos, sci-fi, spy-fi, crime and urban fantasy.

  Servant’s Log

  May 18-24

  by

  G. Deyke

  18th May

  Busy all day: cleaned windows, washed curtains, beef stew with leek and onion. On the master’s request, dusted the foyer with special care today and prepared a vase with a bouquet of roses for the small bedroom. He expects a visitor tomorrow.

  19th May

  Spent the morning with standard duties; waited to greet the master’s visitor, but the master requested that I busy myself elsewhere, as his visitor is uncomfortable with artificial servants. Cleaned the library extensively. Steak and potatoes with parsley for the master and his visitor. Hedges want trimming.

  20th May

  Brought the master his breakfast, the
n apparently took an unscheduled nap in the bathroom. Internal clock two hours out of sync with the master’s atomic pendulum. Unsure how this happened; apparent systems failure. Will bring to the master’s attention tomorrow.

  Resumed duties as usual. Found sufficient breakfast dishes for two; cannot explain this. Checked for intruders, found none. If systems failure this morning, may have brought the master his breakfast twice. Will apologize to the master tomorrow.

  21st May

  Brought the master his break

  21st May

  Brought the master his breakfast. Meant to clean windows and wash curtains; happened to glance outside and found the hedges urgently wanted trimming. Unsure how they grew so quickly. Weather has been mild. Will ask the master tomorrow for an update to my gardening software.

  Trimmed hedges. Prepared supper: beef stew with leek and onion. The master found it unsatisfactory. Insufficient in quantity and too recently repeated. Will adjust food schedule. Last prepared beef stew with leek and onion six weeks ago; will change rotation to seven weeks.

  22nd May

  The master ordered a double portion of breakfast. Have never seen his appetite so healthy.

  After washing-up took two-hour nap in the library. Unscheduled; unsure what happened. Possible systems failure. Will bring to the master’s attention tomorrow.

  At the master’s request, extensively cleaned the small bedroom. Found numerous traces of use. Cannot explain this. Bouquet of roses, slightly wilted; must have been several days old, but do not recall seeing it before. Vase was one of those I keep for the master. Unsure who could have gotten at it except myself or the master. Possibly the master set up the roses; not sure where he must have kept them until now, or why they were in the small bedroom. However, not my place to speculate.