Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection

by Michael Coorlim

  "I am afraid not. Scotland Yard's deadline draws nigh."

  "But it's almost certainly Vogle. All the evidence supports this."

  "Not conclusively."

  "There is enough doubt," Bartleby agreed. "If we hand the Met one of the patients, they will be all too eager to accept a culprit. The man will be hanged within the month, guilty or no. Even though my father would be satisfied and the inmates safe, do you want to condemn one of your patients to such a fate? When there's even a chance he might be innocent?"

  Teague turned her face from him. "No."

  "Then I do what I must." I said, my hand reaching for the toggle that would activate the apparatus and send me into a madman's mind-scape.

  ***

  It was as though a switch had turned off the world. My flesh felt nothing, my eyes saw nothing, I could hear nothing. The machine's sensory input had replaced my own, and for the moment, it had nothing to tell me. I'd call it darkness but it wasn't even that. It was absence. It was void. Time ceased to pass in a meaningful sense, as without reference it was not to be measured. I could not even count my breaths, my heartbeats.

  And then oblivion rippled.

  I found myself seeing the world through Doctor Joost Vogle's eyes. He was standing in an infinite plane that seemed constructed from equal parts the asylum and what I assumed was the small Dutch town that he'd grown up in. Cobblestone streets became the speckled linoleum of the asylum hallways without warning, and rural homes the size of closets stood next to expansive hallways longer than the Thames. Dimly glimpsed figures moved among it all, little more solid than smoke, in the shape of orderlies, professors, patients, and townsfolk Joost had known.

  Most solid among the phantasms was Joost himself, an idealised version of the dreamer. He was younger by almost a decade, his red hair clean rather than matted, his fair skin unmarred, his teeth closer to white than yellow. This was who Joost saw himself as, who Joost still believed himself to be. Who he still was, on the inside at least, dressed in an outfit that seemed equal parts evening-wear and patient's raiments.

  I watched as he drifted through his dream-scape, a ghost among ghosts. The landscape was mutable, melting and flowing and building itself back together around him, creating its own disjointed passage out of whatever thoughts flitted across the surface of his brain.

  All around me unreality reigned, causality giving way to symbolism. Birds flew backwards across a meringue sky, while pools of blood gathered in spiral shaped hollows. Worse yet, it wasn't even my own symbolic lexicon these forms drew from. Paddock, in his notes, had bemoaned the lack of a collective human symbolic language. Each person's dreams were their own country, each patient an entirely new discipline, and I didn't really have the time to specialise in Joost Vogle.

  I had no influence here, a passive observer. Perhaps, it occurred to me, that if I spoke aloud, Doctor Vogle might hear me, my words guiding his subconscious minds in subtle ways.

  "Show me the murder," I said.

  Funny, that. I couldn't feel my lips move, I couldn't hear my own voice – at least, not with my own ears. I did hear a sort of distant rumble, and realised that that's what Joost made of it, made of my voice.

  "Murder," I repeated. "Doctor Vogle, show me Paddock's death."

  Murder. The sound seemed to rumble across the landscape, bearing with it a dark shadow. Death.

  Doctor Paddock's office seemed to construct itself around Joost. The walls, the bookcases, that ugly Berber carpet. It didn't precisely match the man's office out in the physical world, but was a sort of almost rubber abstract representation. The office as Vogle remembered it.

  Paddock's desk seemed tall, impossibly so, with Romanesque columns in the corners. It was Authority.

  Vogle approached the dream apparatus as soon as it had formed, and reclined in a seat that was more reminiscent of a barber's chair. Was that how Joost thought of his therapy?

  He lay back in the seat and closed his eyes.

  I noticed in the corner where Paddock had been lying was a dark shadow. Not dark, undefined. Like the oblivion before the machine brought Vogle's mind-scape to me. It was something he was refusing to envision. Something he didn't want to see.

  "What is it, Joost?" I asked. "Paddock is dead. Show me Paddock."

  The dream-Vogle turned his head, eyes opening, fixating on the spot where the body had been.

  And there it was. Paddock, dressed in a white suit, red ribbons flowing from under his waistcoat like a mummer's deathbed.

  "How did this happen?" I asked. "Show me just before."

  Dream Vogle shook his head.

  "Show me, damn you," I growled.

  The apparatus sank into the ground, tilting as it did so to return Vogle to his feet. Walls rose up again, and Joost was standing in front of the door to Paddock's office. He stood there, staring at it, breathing short, shallow breaths. I found a sense of encroaching dread filling my gut, filling my heart.

  "Stop," I said, weakly.

  He couldn't open that door. He mustn't. On the other side of that door was the end of the world, the destruction of everything, it was That Which Should Not Be.

  These were Joost's thoughts, not mine. Vogle's fears. Somehow I was feeling his emotion, his hesitation, his dread. He had stopped in front of the door, hand outstretched.

  "Open it," I said. "I know you're afraid. I know. But don't be a fool. You know this is what happened. This is how it happened. You cannot change this, Vogle. You must see it through."

  Vogle reached for the door--

  --to his parents' room.

  I felt a momentary vertigo as I realised that we were no longer in the asylum, no longer in London, no longer in Britain, no longer in 1911.

  We were in Montfort, in his parents' cottage, and it was 1882. I knew these things because they were so heavily true that they came across Vogle's connection to me. I knew them because they were not only fact, but to Vogle these things were vital. There was no dreamish abstract quality to the hall we stood in, now. It was concrete, defined down to the very grain of the wood of the door suddenly-ten-year-old Joost stood before.

  "Moeder?" young Joost said. "Vader? Ik hoorde een geluid..."

  His hand reached out and turned the knob, and everything slowed into a temporal viscosity. The door slowly opened, revealing the same absent void that had previously obscured Paddock's body.

  I didn't want to see. "Show me."

  The void was replaced by the interior of Paddock's office. It was dim inside, though the lantern on his desk had not yet gone out.

  "Director?" Vogle said, his voice yet again a man's. "I heard a noise, and my door was opened--"

  He caught sight of Paddock's still form, and the breath caught in his throat. Vogle rushed inside, falling to his knees next to the slain man, blood welling up from where it had soaked into the carpet.

  "Vader, vader, nee niet weer, vader!" he sobbed, in a voice at once both Vogle the doctor's and Joost the child's. He held Paddock close, to his breast, heedless of the wet warmth inundating his hospital clothing.

  There was a movement and Vogle looked up. "Mam?"

  A solitary figure, almost inhumanly tall but at the same time almost feminine, rose from the other side of the room.

  "Nee! Nee nee nee nee!" He scrambled back, fear turning his blood to ice.

  She – I knew it was a she – was dressed in black shadow, save for the ivory glint of long claws at the end of her hands.

  "Ik ben!" He stumbled away, slipping in the blood on his heels. "Ik ben bang voor de Butzefrau!"

  He ran, then, through the twisting and melting corridors of the asylum, and I ran with him, terror gripping those claws into my heart.

  20 September, 1911 - 5:45 pm

  There was a small jolt and I found myself falling to the ground, away from the machine, the induction helmet pulled by the sudden jerk of my body.

  Leaving Vogle's dreamscape wasn't enough. It was after me, the Butzefrau, the dark killer of my youth. You could
n't hide, for it was everywhere, could be anywhere, could be anyone. I ducked down behind Paddock's desk. It had killed him, for certain.

  Why?

  Because he'd been bad. Naughty. Just like it had killed my father, for being bad. And now it was after me.

  Except.

  Except none of that was true. Except there was no reason for my heart to be hammering away as if trying to escape my chest.

  My father was not a good man, but it hadn't been a supernatural agent of punishment that had taken him, unless that's how you choose to view cirrhosis. He hadn't been murdered in front of my eyes, and it was certainly no spectre that had slaughtered poor Paddock.

  These were Vogle's fears.

  As the panic left me and my heart-rate returned to normal I stood and gazed at the comatose patient. His fears had gotten into me. Infected me. Not just his fears, but his delusions. His madness. As a young child he had witnessed his father's murder at the hands of someone, possibly his mother, and his fractured mind had remembered it as this Butzefrau, some sort of Dutch bogey-woman.

  Didn't the machine have any safeguards?

  It was then that I noticed Bartleby in the corner. He was hunched up, arms around his knees, head down. I could hear him muttering.

  Doctor Teague was nowhere in sight.

  "Bartleby?" I said, making my way around Vogle's still form.

  My partner did not respond.

  "Alton?" I said, somewhat more gently. I reached a hand out towards his shoulder.

  His slender hands shot out and grabbed my wrist in a vise-like grip. He stared up at me, froth on his lips, his pupils pinpricks.

  "We are not the barbarians!" Each word was forced between clenched teeth. "Good god, man, these are women and children!"

  "Easy, Bartleby," I said, gently prying his hands away, mindful not to break his fingers. "Easy."

  He broke down into wracking sobs.

  I stood, feeling a bit helpless. "Where's Loni? Where's Doctor Teague?"

  "Gone," he moaned. "All gone. I couldn't stop them. I need to get out. I don't care what markers I need to pull in, Cotter, just get me out."

  He was elsewhere. Had Paddock's machine broadcast Vogle's madness somehow?

  No. That was impossible. But some sort of fierce madness had gripped my partner, and the only woman who could have helped him had disappeared.

  ***

  After summoning inmate orderlies to have Bartleby brought somewhere safe, I took a quick look around for Doctor Teague. None of the inmates I asked – the more lucid ones – had seen her. Defeated, I returned to the room they'd stuck my partner in and sat by his side while he writhed and moaned and spoke to phantoms from his past.

  I watched him carefully, to make sure that he didn't swallow his tongue.

  "He's hallucinating," Aldora said from beside me. "Why is my husband hallucinating?"

  I didn't look up. "I don't know."

  "Is this your doing?" There was a calm menace in her voice.

  "No." At least, I didn't think so.

  She knelt by his side, the back of her hand against his forehead. "He's feverish."

  "I've sent the orderlies for a bucket of cool water and a washcloth. I didn't want to leave his side."

  She glanced at me, then back down at her husband. "You've... taken good care of him, James."

  I looked up. "I wasn't going to leave him to suffer alone."

  "I wasn't talking about only just now."

  My eyes went back to her husband. "Neither was I."

  She was silent a moment, and then gone when the orderlies returned.

  When they'd left, I could hear her wringing out the washcloth. "James, I just want you to know, that whatever the living arrangement Alton and I end up with, you will always have a place in our household."

  I didn't know what to say. I didn't think she was trying to be insulting, but I often miss the subtleties of social intercourse.

  "I've no intention of wedging my way into your marriage," I said.

  "James--"

  "Alton and I are close, Aldora. He is likely the only friend I have. And perhaps the only one I need. But you, even if but in name, are his wife, and I respect that. I love him, I do, he's more of a brother to me than my own flesh and blood, and that's why I'm content to leave the pair of you to your own life.

  "He's my friend, and my partner in this private detective venture of ours, and let's leave it at that."

  Aldora was silent for a few minutes before speaking again.

  "James, if it wasn't that machine, do you suppose he was drugged?"

  "It's a possibility."

  She handed me a teacup. "I found this in the Director's office."

  I held it up, the dim lighting shining from the few drops within. "I don't have the time to run back to the lab – we've only hours before Scotland Yard's deadline is up. But the hospital's pharmacy might have what I need for an analysis."

  "Then go," she said. "Quickly. I'll stay here. By his side."

  I nodded, pulling on my surcoat. It was only what was proper.

  ***

  Improvisational invention isn't as easy as it looks, even if you're an engineer of experience and honed skill. Perhaps if what you're attempting to create is something you've built before, if it's merely a matter of deciding what you can substitute for the missing from what is available, then one might possess more confidence in one's actions. When you're working purely from remembered theory without recourse to schematics or the luxury of even a napkin upon which to plan, when you're feeling the pressure of a friend's ailment, when you've only the most vague notion of what's available in a facility you are unused to, it is then that true genius must step up and claim its rightful airs.

  Perhaps that sounds arrogant.

  The fact of the matter is that I might only be considered an apothecary by virtue of my understanding of chemistry, and I am not much the chemist. My task was elementary enough; forensically examine a teacup to determine if the drinker's tea was drugged, and if so, synthesise an antidote from the contents of the asylum clinic.

  As I stepped into the clinic I felt a calmness overcome me, rationality and procedure spraying away the clinging elements of doubt, of fear, of concern for my partner. All of those elements that did not serve me in the task at hand were impurities to be isolated and contained, locked away within the great gear-works of my mind so that the analytical process of engineering could work unimpeded. Human frailty gave way to high-functioning man as machine.

  I loved Bartleby. I feared for his safety. I had doubts and suspicions about how he had come to be drugged. While these concerns would motivate some men, I did not need them impeding my process. I had to be precise. Exacting.

  Neurons fired electrical pulses that searched the architecture of my life's formal and informal education. Memories sparked.

  I watched as my hands moved, almost of their own volition, pulling the clinic's wall clock down and disassembling the apothecary scale almost before I myself knew what I needed to build. They moved efficiently, precisely, without a hint of tremble or hesitation. Looking at my hands, great mitts with stubby fingers, you would not guess me suited to such fine work. Some assume me clumsy and brutish.

  Picks and the smallest size spanners were withdrawn from within the band of my bowler as I began work on recreating the Materials Separator I had in my lab. It was a small version, suited both to the small parts I had to work with and the minute amount of tea remaining in the cup. A single drop was all I needed. A single drop was all I had time for.

  Transporting a literal spot of tea from the cup to the separator with an eye-dropper, I wound the machine and left it to shake without pause, moving swiftly to my next task, constructing a Substance Array out of specimen dishes. This was the most technical of my craft-work, using a scalpel to carefully create minor flaws in the glass, so that when struck it would break into the shapes I needed.

  What I ended up with was crude, but serviceable.

  The Material
s Separator shot itself apart with a rattle. It had done its job, and I found that each component substance had formed its own streak. Water. Dregs. Cream, and just a nip of brandy instead of sugar, proving it Bartleby's cup. Not much to work with, though on sight and smell I could tell the tea was not green or Earl Gray. It smelled fecund. Bitter.

  My hands decided that the dregs of tea were the most pressing, and quickly spread it out flat on a sheet of glass below the clinic's electric bulb. While waiting for that to dry, I went through the medications available. Aside from the lithium and laudanum, there were specialised psychiatric drugs of a sort I'd never heard... but that didn't really matter. When I saw what the tea reacted with, I would have enough information to move forward.

  The medicines ready on my makeshift Substance Array, I found myself out of tasks to perform while waiting for the tea to dry. I plummeted from the purity of raw thought to the depths of my fears with a suddenness that was physically jarring. I sagged, my hands coming to my face, my insecurities and fears washing over me in a sudden torrent.

  I stayed that way, still, biting the flesh of my palms to keep the thoughts at bay. I knew all too well that if I gave in to the worries, my concerns for Bartleby, I would lose myself in a desperate melancholic rage that would not end until I had physically torn the asylum apart until I had found the killer, or until Scotland Yard themselves had been forced to put me down. I would become a monster to the first guilty party I came across, for a certain value of guilty. There is a beast in me, a terrible creature that I must not unleash without a clear target... for in the absence of clarity, any target will suffice to slake its sense of frenzied justice.

  My teeth released their grip upon my calloused palms and I shifted back into efficiency, wiping the tears away and grabbing the slide with the now-dry powder upon it. With an almost mechanical precision I used a pair of tweezers to partition a small amount onto each section of my Materials Array, an artist mixing pigment on his pallet. I topped each off with a drop of cleaning fluid sufficient to act as a catalytic agent.