Ghosts, Gears, and Grimoires Read online

Turning to go, Joshua was halted and made to do an about-face as the man continued, poking a finger into the younger man’s chest, with which he was approximately eye-level, “But, this shall not happen again or the devil will be paid. Do you understand?”

  “Most tolerably, yes, sir. Thank you, good sir.” Joshua had no hat, but if he had possessed this accoutrement as a proper gentleman would, he’d have at least tipped it to Mr. Busker.

  Perhaps there is something of Christian piety left in him after all.

  * * *

  It was no easy task, but Joshua waded in amongst the crowd and found Matthew under a banner lauding Sadler, Oastler, Bull, and the rest of the workplace reformers.

  He was standing high, perched on the edge of a fountain—inadvertently making himself easier to spot. His ginger hair was curly, not unlike his sister’s.

  Joshua shook his head to get the girl’s image out of his memory. All he could see for a second was blonde ringlets splashed with red. Streaked with gore, then screams, and all blurring together into a whirlpool of final, bleak words.

  Grim letters he was lucky to have learned—not many had the luxury of education in his world.

  He’d written the report into the mill’s record, but this made Lizzie no more real. She was still an invisible human; this Joshua knew to be true. Even with his higher position of overseer, life was not splendid. It was tolerable, workable. He could live and, maybe someday soon, support a wife, if he found one. But he could never afford property. Or livestock. Or a factory or carriage or silken suspenders like Messrs. Busker and Chubb.

  Nonetheless, Joshua was alive. He’d made it past childhood, if what he’d experienced could be called that. He’d worked from about age six, sold into service at the mills by his dying parents. It was either work or starve, and they’d all had their backs against the damaging, damnable rock of poverty.

  In time, he’d escaped scavenging and doffing, and even the piecing. At seventeen and a half, he’d been elevated to overlooker. The slave had become the slave-driver. He wasn’t proud of his path, but he felt himself a better overlooker than most. Certainly he was not as hardened as Joseph Trantham, his own overseer, had been.

  In the mornings, as a child, Joshua had run the two and a half miles to the mill, crying all the way. If he’d forgotten, or not had time, to eat his breakfast before leaving, then he’d regret it. Trantham would take away his soggy bread or moldy porridge, chuckling all the while, and toss it outside to the pigs. Joshua learned later that the animals would eat anything, even meat.

  When Matthew caught sight of Joshua, he thought to duck and run but didn’t. Something, perhaps, about the man’s mien made him stop.

  Or perhaps he was frightened, tired, or simply scared.

  Joshua joined him for the procession, and they marched to the commissioners’ hotel together, behind throngs of other children, mostly boys, sprinkled with a few young women from the mills, looms, or match-making factories. He didn’t know if the king would be persuaded to take up the cause of the empire’s orphans or not, but they’d certainly made a good show. By his reckoning, Joshua guessed a few thousand people, the majority of them bent or raggedy children with smudge- and smear-stained faces, had gathered, chanting, with their banners, with their hat bands. Some lacked limbs, like miniature soldiers—toys for the rich men of the world.

  “Busker has promised you mercy, Matthew.”

  The boy seemed unconvinced, shifting from left foot to right foot and back again, barefoot in the damp afternoon, just ahead of showers hovering behind the swollen cheeks of bruised clouds.

  Even if Joshua had not known Matthew for a few years, he would not have missed the blank look of abject, barrel-bottom grief.

  “You believe ’im?” the boy said at last, still facing the speakers and walking.

  “I do. At least, he gave me his word.” Joshua felt a nagging gnawing at his belly, but knew the boy’s must be worse. Matthew had, quite literally, no one and nowhere in the world to turn.

  The workhouse would not take Matthew back, especially if he were still able-bodied. It behooved them to send the children out because it meant one less person to feed and clothe and shelter. Plus, sometimes they even got a shilling or two from the lords of the loom, mill, and steam.

  Joshua took the boy back to the mill that evening, arriving near their traditional dinnertime.

  Work had settled down over the last few days, so they were able to take an hour for dinner, although they still had to toil until almost nine that evening.

  Straight-away, Chubb saw the boy and brightened. It was a herald, Joshua thought, letting a swift smile split his wan, dry lips. Although it was yet chilly springtime weather outside, within the cotton mill it was clogged, hot, and bothersome. He hesitated to call it Hell, although the description would have been apt.

  Beckoning, the lithe and dandy Mr. Chubb ushered them into the office he shared with Busker. Busker came in shortly thereafter, heaving his bulk carefully around the desk. You could always hear Busker coming, Joshua realized, because of the squeak to his boots. The mill floors were often wet, and the water closet had to be passed on the way to the office. If Busker and Chubb couldn’t be bothered to have the water closet repaired and cleaned with some regularity, the way Joshua saw it, it served them right to have to step in, through, and over—if they could—the human waste as their workers did.

  Most of them, especially the children out on the floors, were without shoes or stockings to provide better traction on the floor as they worked. Lack of grip could prove deadly if someone slipped under the machines. It had happened before.

  Joshua placed the boy in front of him and laid what he hoped was a comforting hand on Matthew’s shoulder.

  Busker whispered something to Chubb. The thin man turned aside, his neck looking like jelly, but never removed his dark, raven-black eyes from the boy’s face, chiaroscuro in the dimly lit atmosphere. Slashes of shadow cut across Matthew’s smooth face, making it look every bit as pallid as it was, where the grime had been washed away in the earlier rain.

  “Well, now, we are overjoyed you could join us. Where were you off to, boy?” Busker spoke.

  Matthew had his eyes riveted to the man’s face, but did not speak. It did not seem to faze the man, who continued, it seemed, without much thought guiding his words.

  “Looking for your sister, were you?” He cocked an eyebrow.

  Joshua startled but hoped his grip hadn’t tightened noticeably on the boy’s shoulder out of anger or something else, that spark of fear that never, ever completely flagged while you were another man’s dogsbody. It curled in his innards and squeezed them, such that he felt a wicked fist forming angrily in his abdomen.

  The boy said nothing. Neither did he flinch.

  “Very well, then.”

  At last, he’s moving on. Joshua was relieved, until he saw what Busker meant to do. Standing in a corner of the room, webbed with spiders’ work and clotted with a thousand tears, as Joshua made it, was that evil instrument, the billy-roller.

  He felt his face blanching, and a churning in his ribcage. Taking his hand from the boy’s shoulder, it began to seem as if he had been dropped into a stream—but instead of being made of water, this one had droplets of time, and its channels and currents and wends and ways were seconds and moments and, soon enough, memories of moments.

  But Matthew was moving away from him, Busker toward. Joshua felt himself moving, but it seemed as if by an unguided hand, not his own.

  Have I gone stark-mad?

  Busker was raising a hand. Then Chubb was holding the boy’s shoulders, overpowering him. Now Joshua merely stood there, rooted and cowering. But undulating in that stream of time. There—and yet, not there.

  As he trod water, Joshua noticed at once the pearly dewdrops hanging perilously on the boy’s slight eyelashes. His face was turning crimson, and Busker was eliciting from him a hellish cacophony. Joshua could see the boy’s skin was blackening under the shredded shirt—open
ing up like ripe pods bursting in the spring.

  Whack-throp-whack-throck-fwap.

  Joshua lost count of the lashes. And then Busker put down the roller and handed him the strap.

  * * *

  “You’ll find yourself sacked next time, Crabbley,” resounding in his ears, Joshua helped the boy out of the office. Robust stains penetrated the veil of Matthew’s blouse where the darkened skin didn’t show through. It was as if a trapped bear had ripped the meat of the child’s back into rawhide strips.

  Joshua didn’t know if he was sobbing, or if it was Matthew.

  Of course, Matthew could not lie down in his quarters. He could only toss and turn, finding no solace in any angle, no matter how Joshua tried to help him by placing what few garments and blankets were in the rough communal quarters around his straining limbs. The straw bed was soon swathed in fresh scarlet as the boy moved and moaned, throwing off the covers again and again.

  Then, he started vomiting—and it got worse yet.

  * * *

  By morning, Matthew was dead, and Joshua felt he’d entered some kind of strange lion’s den he would never exit again, not even with faith. With faith or without, his lot was set. What other work can I get? This limp nearly halts me now.

  He looked down at his bowed legs, and knew in his heart that the talk was true.

  Most young men who did what he did…well, they were lucky to live to thirty. As for the children, especially if they were in the mines, they were fortunate to see the age of ten or twelve.

  To say that Joshua was despondent was an understatement. He had seen so much, smelled it, lived it, felt it rush over his body like a living wave of spider-legged revulsion skittering all over. In his ears, in his mouth, his eyes, worse places than that.

  Terror gagged him. The boy who’d depended on him, the one who had believed him, was gone. Even if it wasn’t by his hand and he couldn’t have stopped the strapping anyway, he felt no less guilty.

  The thought ate at his soul, and Joshua could not stomach his morning breakfast.

  Busker, meanwhile, did not avoid him. In fact, he had a bit of a taunt.

  “What’s the matter, son. Lose a friend?” The dark glint in his master’s eye put Joshua zero at the bone. What he’d read in the paper from the procession the other day was right. Some lords of the steam and the loom did sup at the altar of Moloch, laying innocent infants down for a blood sacrifice.

  In Joshua’s eyes—now altered, yet again, though he would never have thought it possible—everything had changed. The world was mad, and it was but for him to be mad along with it.

  Nothing else made sense. For, if God so hated the world that he allowed such evils to persist, the question of blood…the blood was all over God’s hands, all over everything and everywhere.

  He stabbed his knuckles into his own eyes, trying to make the crimson retreat, shrivel, die, but it would not.

  He ran out the door, into the fresher air. Out in the street.

  Joshua fell to his knees and wretched, over and over again, until there was nothing to heave out but his inmost soul.

  * * *

  Bludgeoning was not at all difficult. You slapped their brains out on a flat spot along the shore. Their scales might give you a few nicks, and they’d flop more fiercely than Jonah’s whale, but brain-dead was heart-dead was all-dead.

  And, although brook trout were tasty enough, it was nearly impossible to de-bone them with just a makeshift whetstone and flint.

  Even so, for a few days, Joshua subsisted on fish, stolen apples, and wild greens and berries, catching rainwater that had collected in a shallow depression not too far from the river and the mill. He was still in sight of the wretched slaughterhouse, in fact.

  The mill dreamed for him at night. It created itself. Pitch-black and screaming, with a banshee-mouth to engorge on mother-sun and the cradle of stars and everything else meaningful in the world. Maybe even time itself.

  A mirror or clear, unmoving water might have grabbed Joshua’s attention. He might not have recognized the sunken-eyed, tatter-boned human, scarcely more than a lad, peering back at him; perhaps he’d mistake him for a demon. Or a haint. Some kind of Bloody-Bones or Rawhead.

  If only he could believe in any of those. Horror was life; and life was real, not phantasm. There was no boundary, no veil, no crossing of the Styx, no dark-lined depressive separation.

  Death was life was death.

  Only he had meaning, and only he was a real person. Joshua Crabtree, son of Jacob Crabtree, deceased, and Eliza Riddle, also deceased.

  Even rearing back against what pulled at his being, he could not resist. He was the ferryman, and always had been.

  The monster and the man are one, he dreamed, as he stretched out every limb. A clawed hand closed around that sumptuous, straggling supper, once struggling and pulsing, and he saw it for the first time for what it was: he was a beast, too.

  * * *

  The girls who’d not yet succumbed to phossy jaw were tough as nails, but Joshua was a persuasive man.

  “Spare us a match, love?” he wheedled, and Mary complied.

  It was Joshua after all. Joshua who sat behind her in the pews of a Sunday, with a rich baritone beyond his years.

  Would he be courting her soon? She hoped he might. He was an overseer at the mill, and always dressed unslovenly. He scarcely missed a Sunday, unless working.

  Until today. Then there was a hubbub.

  “It’s a-fire!” someone shouted, sailing in through the church doors and down the aisle. “The mill!”

  Mary had arrived early, nigh six a.m. to help the Reverend Bradshaw prepare for the sermon, which was to be about the nature of evil. She had the best printing of any of the young ladies in the church, and he often sought her out for such special occasions.

  She’d looked up from her paper, mouth agog, unconcerned the handsome twenty-two-year-old vicar was present.

  At once her mind flashed to the strangeness of seeing Joshua last evening as she walked home from the match factory; her inquiries about why he was not working were met with evasion. She had not discerned either the extent or the descent of his melancholy.

  But now, she feared the worst. Her heart-skips told her so.

  People streamed as near as they dared. The conflagration was not unlike the great fire of 1666, albeit in a contained area.

  Only the mill seemed to be on fire, and it lit up the early morning sky and water, so that they were one. Mary saw a goodly number of children standing about, and went over to ask what was happening and how to help.

  She got as close as several hundred meters from the blaze, then was forced back by the heat and the onrush of horses’ hooves. It was the fire brigade, no doubt.

  But they were far, far too late.

  The building was fully engulfed and halfway collapsed. It reminded Mary of something out of Revelations. Abaddon with his locusts in tow, perhaps.

  Later the next day, she learned that all the children in the factory, some one hundred and seventy-two, had made it out before the fire had done its dirty work. Only one body was ever found, partially intact.

  It was lashed by chains to the water-wheel outside the mill. The charred corpse wore Mr. Busker’s top hat and bulgy frame, the flesh peeling off in folds, exposing raw bone here and there. It nearly made her heave to see it.

  She never knew what became of Joshua (or Chubb, for that matter): whether he died in the fire, whether he’d started the fire, or if it was an unfortunate coincidence.

  * * *

  The scuttlebutt whispers that, to this day, you can still hear the mill’s cries of anguish and lament when you’re walking down by a certain crook in the river. Or perhaps it is the berserk wailing of Busker, begging for his paltry existence? In life, the workers and these particular mill-owners did not mingle, but after their deaths, their torment and suffering wed them all to the land in one massless, infinite sorrow.

  You would do well to avoid that grim place, lest it
suck out every drop of your soul too.

  The Light Over Birmingham

  Mattia Ravasi

  Rupert fired his blunderbuss at the monster’s face.

  The heavy bullet emerged with a thunderous bellow and a cloud of black smoke, hitting the creature squarely on the jaw, and dislocating it. The monster’s webbed hands flew to the gruesome wound, his clever eyes darting toward the bullet rolling between his legs.

  Rupert remembered the Professor’s words, “Once it’s out, run and shout!” and he did exactly that. “Fire in the hole!” he shrieked, sounding much less manly than he had planned.

  He jumped behind a hedge and put his fingers in his ears just in time for the explosion. The bomb sprayed phosphorous everywhere and set the monster on fire.

  From his leafy shelter, Rupert saw the horror sprint back across the road, running to his friends, screaming in agony and beating at his flaming body. Two of his fellows grabbed him and tried to put out the fire. Seeing how viciously persistent the phosphorous was, one of the creatures grabbed his spear, and used it to slit the wounded one’s throat. Such was Rahab mercy.

  Rupert stood, removing a twig from his scruffy hair. He looked around for Miss Hayes, and found her a few feet away, kneeling beside her long sniper rifle, her back to St. Martin’s Church. She had a pistol in each hand, and she was rapidly emptying them into the oncoming wave of monsters. With her pinky, she pressed a small button on the left gun’s grip; a short jet of steam expelled its empty magazine. Still firing with her right hand, Baylynn Hayes—Imperial Constable—plucked a new magazine from one of her battle-gown’s pockets and reloaded her left weapon. The fish people assaulting her continued falling like dolls dropping from a shelf.

  God, I love her so much, Rupert thought.

  The girl glanced in his direction and caught sight of the flaming corpse he’d left on the ground.

  “Quit showing off and just kill the bloody things, Sir Marris!”