Ghosts, Gears, and Grimoires Read online

  There were a couple of false starts as the forceps clanked against the rim, but finally he released his grip, and Madeline’s brain dropped into the tank, causing some fluid to run over the top. Bernard took a moment to admire his work, and then bolted on the metal lid to the skull, before setting her hair into place.

  Finally, he took the mask in his hands once more, and passed his magic ring—acquired at great expense from a very secretive warlock—over its features in the kabalistic pattern he had learned, while muttering the spell of etheric transmission.

  The mask slid easily into place, clicking into the stays. Bernard was startled by an agonizing wail, causing him to reflexively jump back and fall from his stool.

  A bad connection, he thought. Some errant spirit or demon had intervened in the process. Or perhaps it is a sensitivity issue?

  Had he made the mask so conductive to her thoughts that some sort of background noise was passing through? Before he could investigate further, the shrill noise subsided.

  “Madeline, my dear, has it worked? Are you with me?”

  “Why, Bernard? Why would you do this to me?”

  “So that we may be together, as we always wanted!”

  “Not like this. Never like this.”

  “Do not fret, my darling, that you no longer have the body of a woman. I have always loved you purely, and am only concerned about preserving the bond of our souls.”

  “You can’t imagine what this has been like for me, Bernard. Trapped inside my own brain with none of my senses. No sight, no hearing, nor touch, taste, or scent. No means of crying for help or mercy. It has been an absolute Hell and you trapped me there.”

  “It was for but a few months, while my studies allowed me to create this contraption for you, to bring you back into this world.”

  “Those months were aeons to me in that formless black void. I lived a thousand lifetimes in my own thoughts, each time becoming less human, less connected to reality, until—finally—I was a woman no longer, merely an abstract concentration of fear and pain existing in a timeless stasis.”

  “It can’t have been as bad as all that. You communicated your contentment to me by the buzzer I attached to your tank.”

  “That awful noise was real? Those cacophonous sounds were like being trapped inside of a church bell during an earthquake. Everything I knew would shake apart with each buzz, my every sense completely overwhelmed.”

  “You. Yourself, were controlling the activation.”

  “I was in control of nothing. I was helpless, as if having a waking nightmare in which I was powerless to move.”

  “Surely not, my dear. Your endeavors to communicate were most pleasant.”

  “Now, I am meant to endure this?” To the surprise of them both, her head turned down slightly as her arms swung up, so that she might contemplate her hands.

  “It is the very best of engineering married to the most diabolical of magic. I wager in time you’ll find this preferable to your own flesh.”

  A strange sound emanated from the mask.

  “Is that what my laughter sounds like, now?” Madeline asked, her voice filled with horror.

  “What are you perceiving in there, my dear?”

  “I can hear now, but it is as if I am underwater. My touch—” One of her mechanical hands seized the table beside her and crushed right through it. “—is still gone. Physically I feel nothing. My sense of smell is likewise absent, and, I assume, my taste as well?”

  “You have no tongue, or even mouth. I will provide the nutritive solution your organic components require via the spouts I engineered into the chassis.”

  “Will you now? How kind.”

  “What of your vision. It is part and parcel with the spell allowing you speech. Can you see me, my dear?”

  The blank eyes of the mask were unchanged.

  “It is not sight as you would think of it. I can sense this room, and even beyond. It feels as though I just know what is happening, and the location of all things and I have no need to see them.”

  Bernard waved a hand in front of her mask and she batted it away in irritation.

  “Shall I count your fingers for you? If you run to the door you shall see an exceptionally short man in an exceptionally tall hat escorting a comely woman on either arm.”

  Bernard rushed to his door and threw it open. The strange trio were walking by as predicted. “Remarkable!”

  “Now, there shall be two black carriages, then a Hansom cab and an ambulance.”

  It all came to pass as she predicted, though she had no traditional means of seeing beyond the walls of the laboratory.

  “How can you know?”

  “It is as if I have always known. As if I am recalling some distant memory.”

  “Remarkable! The applications of this omniscience, to science, politics, and business, for example. We could dictate the very future of humanity!”

  “Is that why you did this? Why you have forsaken your soul, and mine, to further some material ambitions?”

  “Of course not, I have done everything I have done because of my undying love for you.”

  Madeline’s automatonic form sat silent.

  “Do you not believe me? What more must I do to prove my love to you?”

  “I do believe that you believe you did this out of love for me.”

  “If not that, then what possible motivation did I have?”

  “Control.”

  “Control? That is absurd!”

  “You have sought to control life and death itself, and now set your sights on matters both more grandiose and more mundane.”

  “It was but idle talk, my dear. So long have I sat down here alone that I have forgotten myself. I have awaited this reunion with such longing that I fear I now fail in my modest attempts at comportment.”

  Again Madeline sat silent.

  “Please speak to me, my dear. This silence is unbearable.”

  When Madeline declined to speak further, Bernard conjectured that they must both be fatigued. He left to spread the good news of his triumph while Madeline meditated in the dark.

  Again.

  * * *

  His footsteps on the street outside annoyed her, like the buzzing of a fly hovering at your ear. He had returned with a handful of fellows from the University. As they entered, Madeline could see them shaking their heads behind Bernard’s back and tutting to each other while looking around his laboratory.

  They viewed him as a madman, she knew. Unhinged by the death of his fiancée.

  He presented her like a sideshow barker, hailing her as the greatest triumph of man, a true melding of science and philosophy. Through all of this she sat, mute and motionless.

  “Won’t you greet our esteemed visitors?” he prompted her, a grating undernote of wheedling in his voice.

  She pictured herself as the Great Sphinx gazing over the heads of Emperors unmoved.

  Bernard seized one of her arms and shook it. “Wake up, my dear, we have company.”

  Yet she remained still.

  “There, there,” one of the scientists moved to console Bernard. “Too many hours in the lab can make the best of us imagine phantasms.”

  “On top of the terrible tragedy you have suffered,” said another, “ it is all quite understandable.”

  “My prescription is to take a break from all of this,” said the third. “Maybe go travelling, or at least get out and walk the streets of the city. Maybe visiting Madeline’s grave would help you with a sense of resolution. I could go with you!”

  With a great deal of swearing and posturing, Bernard cast the fellows out and then turned to Madeline.

  “Is this what gratitude means to you? Thanks to me, we have each other again, and now we could have everything else besides. Yet you stand there in silence, letting it all slip from our grasp.”

  “Let me die.”

  “Never!”

  “I am not meant to be. I am an abomination. Let me die.”

  “Your l
ife is mine now, and I shall not let you go for anything.”

  A week went by of Bernard professing his love and kissing her sensationless hands, then demanding information of her and threatening to put her back in her original jar. Then, again, he would make promises to her, of legs and a mouth and a normal life. His mood would swing again, and he would rail against her, futilely pummeling her artificial body.

  Madeline felt nothing. Physically, her brass body conducted no signals of pain to her brain. The lack of physical stimuli gave the entire affair an otherworldly feel, like a dream that had gone on so long as to be tiresome.

  Emotionally, she no longer felt either hate or love. She was not saddened or betrayed by Bernard’s boorish behavior.

  For all the noise he made, and all of his exertions, he simply did not matter to her. Even maniacs have to sleep, and that is when she found her respite, devising her own plans as he slumbered oblivious.

  At first, she merely read his notes on her construction, as well as the proceedings and manuscripts on automata that lay scattered about the lab. Madeline had but to regard a document and it was as if all of the information rose from the page and flew into her head.

  That was how she pictured it, initially. After the first night, she had no need for this conceptual metaphor. The information simply was, and she knew it just as she had need for it.

  Soon her mastery of mechanics exceeded his own. Quietly, in the dark of night, which meant nothing to her new sense of awareness, she improved upon his mechanisms. Her body became more agile, her components more stable, more modular.

  She created redundant parts, so that she could quickly repair herself.

  Having become a master gear-smith, she secretly constructed legs for herself. During the day, they lay hidden under piles of scientific refuse, but, at night, she took them out, attached them, and taught herself how to take tentative, tottering steps. With a few adjustments, she could walk a line like an acrobat. The stairs she saved for last.

  She placed one foot, and then the other, until she found herself bumping against the door of the laboratory—her prison. She pressed her hand against it, and the door immediately began to bow. It would be nothing to her to break this door wide open.

  Next, she focused upon his biological studies. First she memorized the formulas for the fluids maintaining her brain and heart, and created emergency stores secreted about the lab. Then she read his medical texts, shocked at how rudimentary Bernard’s understanding of them had been. She improved upon the solutions that kept her alive, making them more nutritious, more conductive, longer lasting and less polluting.

  Where Bernard “fed” her daily, out of some force of human habit, she supposed, she was able to manufacture a serum that would go months at a time without needing to be exchanged. She replaced her previous, inferior secret stores and also hid a container within her own chassis. At a moment’s notice she could now flee the lab and survive.

  Finally, she examined his magical texts. Most of them were utter nonsense, purchased dearly from charlatans, but one book radiated a powerful energy, glowing like embers in her magical vision.

  It was old, centuries old. Those that had possessed it had left their imprint upon its leather cover. A great wizard had composed it, the cold of an elsewhere void still clinging to the very fibers of the binding. Layers of handprints were visible to her, the auras of each as distinct to her as a face. A minor magician had stolen it from the wizard’s dead hands. His estate had been purchased by an antiquarian, who had kept the strange book in his private collection.

  At long last, a conniving duchess purchased it and recognized the power within it. She had attempted to create her own dark coven, but all were consumed by the cruel power in these pages.

  Her family had declared the book cursed and entrusted it to a priest, who kept the book locked in the sanctum beneath his church. The priest was driven mad by nightmares, and there the book remained, lost and doomed to rot away to nothing.

  Thankfully, the city was overrun by desperate grave robbers, who sold the book for a dollar to a pawnbroker and thought themselves well paid. The pawnbroker, in turn, found a besotted sap in the grieving Bernard, and was paid ten dollars for it.

  They had all been fools.

  “We’ve an appointment today, Madeline. Journalists who will announce my triumph to the world. Kings shall bow to me. My every step shall be cushioned by the money thrown at my feet, and you will comply. When I speak, you will answer. When I pry your body open to display the inner workings that I have so ingeniously constructed you shall acquiesce. You will perform any demonstration asked of you. They think me a benighted maniac, Madeline. I will prove them wrong!”

  “The press isn’t kind to monsters, Bernard. They want fodder for their pitchforks.”

  “Nonsense! You are a wonder of the modern world, and I am the genius who created you! They will see that. They must see that.”

  For a moment, Madeline felt a deep surge of grief, but only for a moment. She now saw this thing before her for what it truly was, the reanimated corpse of her beloved Bernard.

  Her Bernard had tucked love letters in the branches of the tree outside her window. He had renamed every star in the sky for her, and when they gazed upon them he talked of their future together. Her Bernard had understood her, and cared nothing for fame or influence. He certainly had held no ambitions to have kingdoms kneel before him.

  It was clear to her now that her Bernard had also died in the accident. This strange demon who inhabited his body was not her Bernard. She became lost in an imagining of the essence of his love drifting from her grasp like candle smoke as her stood over her while she lay upon the cobblestones.

  The new group of men appeared in what seemed like an instant to Madeline. Time had become a strange thing to her. Sometimes, she was deep inside her own mind and she had a year’s worth of thoughts in seconds; other times, like this one, hours passed in what seemed like a blink to her.

  Two of the men had come the last time, three more were new faces. Again, Bernard pranced and gestured like a ringmaster. Again, he called upon her to reveal herself as a living automatonic woman.

  Again she sat silent.

  “Please,” he begged.

  “Now!” he demanded.

  The men muttered to themselves and turned to leave.

  “We discussed this, Madeline. I am sorry, but you give me no choice!” With no warning Bernard lunged at her face.

  As a woman, she would have flinched and cowered. Instead, she watched impassively, remaining totally immobile as he pried at her jawline.

  His efforts having no effect, he braced his feet on her stomach and pulled back with all his might.

  Madeline simply thought of the mask staying in place, and the magic that infused her form held it there, effortlessly.

  The scientists finally took pity upon Bernard as he grunted and strained against Madeline’s immovable force. They wrenched his hands free and slowly lowered him to the ground.

  “I’ll have Doctor Sweeger look in upon you, Bernard,” one said as they left.

  When the lab door closed, Bernard flew into a blind rage, flipping over tables and stomping upon his scientific equipment. He took a wooden chair in his hand and turned on Madeline, smashing the chair against her until it was splinters in his hands. He fell to his knees, exhausted, panting.

  “You belong to me, Madeline, and I can break you. I’ll reverse the spell that binds your body and keeps your heart beating. I’ll rip your head open and leave you to starve, alone and in the dark, just as you fear. The automatonic body is a great achievement even without you. The restorative and preservative equipment is revolutionary. And I am quite adept at dark magic, if I do say so myself. I’ll be the great sorcerer of the day, a modern John Dee, with or without my golem!”

  Madeline bent at the waist then, and seized Bernard by the neck, lifting him up into the air so his feet could not touch the ground.

  “You are a fool and a brute. I�
��d like to say that you are the worst of man, but in truth you are just an ordinary man, like any other. That is to say, disposable.”

  Madeline began crushing his throat.

  “Wait!” Bernard gasped. “The magic that powers your heart is bound to me. If I die, you die.”

  “If you die, my heart dies, but I find I have little use for it anyway.”

  Madeline plucked a device from the table behind Bernard. “This clockwork one I constructed shall do as well. It is more efficient and more powerful. You were so fixated on replicating the human form that it never occurred to you to improve upon it. I suffer from no such limits of conception.”

  “I have been a fool! I missed you so deeply that I was blinded by grief and warped by sorcery. We can still be together! Have you no love left for me?”

  “Love? I remember not the feeling of love in a human breast, but in my new life I have learned from you how to express the love we share.”

  “Yes, my dear, express your love. Our love.”

  With a slight pressure of her mechanical fingers she obstructed the flow of blood through the arteries in his neck. Once he dangled limp in her grasp, she laid him down upon the operating table and set to work.

  She filled the jar which had once housed her brain with her superior, longer-lasting solution. Then, she sterilized the great forceps and applied the saw to Bernard’s skull. With her great strength, she found it trivial to open his head and remove the top. With the forceps, she withdrew the brain and its trailing spinal cord, which she chopped decisively.

  There was a satisfying plop when she dropped his brain in the tank and watched it slowly settle to the bottom, small bubbles percolating up from the many folds and creases. A series of insistent buzzes exploded immediately from beneath the jar.

  For the first time since her death, Madeline felt like smiling. She put her mechanical fingers to her metal face. It remained blank and impassive. She would have to do something about that.

  She retrieved her legs from the refuse pile, and backed up to one of the lab tables so she could disengage her lower half and attach them. She flexed her toes and performed a quick spin. All of her parts seemingly in order, she grabbed the wizard’s book and placed it in a valise with a bottle of her serum and some basic tools and parts. She threw Bernard’s coat over her shoulder and clapped his hat upon her head.