Ghost in the Cogs: Steam-Powered Ghost Stories Read online

  Móðir flipped a switch obscenely near the elephant’s tail—were elephant tails supposed to be this thick?—and it sprang to life. Its legs moved back and forth and its head shook and its ears tanged like cymbals. I quickly set the thing on the floor, and it scampered off down the hall toward the bedrooms, striking the wall and ricocheting off at an angle.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A gift for you,” she said. “A playmate. It runs on battery, so you won’t even have to wind it.” And she still had the scary enthusiasm in her eyes, so I just mumbled a thanks and asked about dinner.

  In the coming days and weeks more of the animals appeared, all powered by batteries from the new Dreki Anda power station tapping our hot springs. It was indeed convenient not to have to wind the toys, or it would have been if I had wanted to play with them. You understand, I was too old for mechanical monkeys and giraffes and alligators, no matter how intricate their multi-metal scales or how well they clapped pattycake. I turned them on enough to please móðir, then let them run down their batteries until they slowed to a stop.

  There were always more batteries, though. Grief-stricken móðir had proven a much more capable negotiator than the battery man assumed, and among other perks for leasing them the land, our farm would always have free power.

  I didn’t need her “playmates.” I preferred the company of the sheep and horses, whose simple, sleepy needs were easily met. I preferred hunting among the rocks and lichen for the Hidden People. I preferred the company of my steam friends. A mechanical shark with thrashing tail and snapping jaws was no substitute, especially one that couldn’t even swim. I ruined that one by letting it loose in the spring, where it sank to the bottom like a rock.

  The toys frightened me. I was more than familiar with clockwork; móðir had tinkered with it for as long as I could remember. These were . . . different. They were bigger than most of her creations, for one, and . . . angrier. Not cuddly. Not comforting. I’d sliced myself on more than one occasion with a ragged edge of cold metal, and I’d swear some of them were trying to trip me.

  But it was more than that. Their behavior wasn’t right. I could see most of the gears and pistons that made them work, but even so I couldn’t figure out how they made some of their movements, which changed more than made sense. A mechanical elephant should just walk, endlessly, while the switch is on. Instead, sometimes it folded its legs to sit or raised its trunk to the air. Or fixed its bottomless-well eyes on me for so long that I thought it was either out of power or thinking very deeply.

  And maybe I wasn’t behaving right either because sometimes I’d swear the things had intent, a spooky agency to the way their sightless eyes looked at me. I kept them turned off as much as possible.

  One snowy day, in the waning light of a long late-winter afternoon, I made the trek to the hot springs only to find it empty.

  Don’t get me wrong; it had water in it, steamy hot as usual. Just as I always had, I slipped my toes and legs and body into the reservoir faðir had fashioned from carved stone, but the steam that rose from the surface of the pool held no voices, no shapes, no friendship. It was formless and random, mere gaseous water like móðir always said it was.

  My friends were gone.

  I didn’t tarry long, and I didn’t rush back the next day. Water alone couldn’t take the chill of winter out of my bones.

  On the third day after my steam friends disappeared, I ran back from the hot spring right past the Do Not Enter signs into móðir’s workshop and stopped in my tracks, awed by what her madness had wrought. The place was filled from floor to ceiling with scraps of iron and wood and wires and the assorted parts that made her creations move. As it always was.

  But in the center of the space was what had to be her masterpiece: a metal horse, bigger than life-size. It looked ready to rear up and trample us both. It had no mouth and only sockets for eyes, but it somehow looked angry, like Dögun did before she threw her rider. The rest of its body was a bundled mass of metal rods and gears and pistons and gadgetry that resembled muscles and tendons. The creature’s massive ribcage held dozens of batteries wired together by a veritable nest of coiled copper.

  “Oh,” I said, words failing.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” móðir said, creeping out from around the animal’s flank. If my calculations are correct, it’ll do the work of six horses.”

  “Marvelous,” I replied, slinking away.

  Back in the house I sat on the floor of my room surrounded by a clanking and ticking chorus of the unnerving toys. They really were the only friends I had now.

  “I miss Whale Breath,” I said, watching a tin sheep headbutt the wall again and again while a quadruped that móðir claimed was a zebra traced an intricate pattern in a circle around me. Across the room, a raven turned its head so suddenly that I had to look and was met with the stare of its black marble eye. It raised both wings and opened its mouth as if to squawk. Luckily, it had no voicebox. But still, the thing seemed agitated. After a minute or two it lowered its wings in a huff, then raised just one, pointing it toward the zebra that still zigged and zagged seemingly randomly around the room. Even the sheep stopped ramming the wall and looked toward the zebra.

  The hairs started rising on the back of my neck. “Are you . . .” I swallowed, “trying to tell me something?”

  The raven flapped its wings. The sheep jumped. A number of the other little monsters reacted in some way, each of which felt like a nod. Only the zebra kept doing its thing, tracing strange shapes around me. Were they random? By the time it made a circuit I couldn’t remember the beginning of it.

  When the zebra came ‘round again I picked it up, minding the sharp edges as its legs kept working mindlessly in mid-air. I set it on its side while I wrapped a winter coat around me and stepped into boots, then went outside. The raven and elephant and sheep and a couple of others had followed me, alarmingly, and I held the door open for them as they stumbled into the snow.

  There were a fresh few centimeters on the ground, windswept into drifts and bare icy patches but overall still deep enough for footprints. I set the zebra into a clean patch and it took off again, slowly, etching its pattern into the snow. It encircled me, and I took a step back to view the outline as a whole. It had almost come around, and it looked like it had drawn a big-headed shark. Which was impressive but puzzling. And then the zebra took off at a tangent from the shark’s head, exploding upward in a spume of trampled snow, and—

  “Whale Breath.”

  They couldn’t talk, but I had my friends back. Sort of. Some of them obviously wanted to play, but others still seemed to want to trip me or cut me with their sharp bits.

  I gathered up the friendlies one day, and we all made our slow way back to the hot springs.

  The menagerie got all excited when we got there. The raven tried to jump right in, and would have if I hadn’t grabbed it. “I’m sorry,” I told it. “Water is no good for metalbirds.” You see, I had learned from the shark’s demise.

  The various creatures were all emoting wildly at me. “I know,” I said, “it’s very exciting.” I stripped and slid into the water like a seal.

  And instantly regretted it. Hot! Heat! Beyond hot, a feeling like all my skin was exploding, like I was being shocked all over. Pain, unreasonable pain. I flailed my arms, but they were so heavy, those fire-arms, burning even under my fingernails. I opened my mouth to scream, but I slipped under the water and the water shocked down my throat like molten lava. It filled my eyes and nose and ears, and then it was over.

  For a few days, everything was okay. My old friends ringed all around, and though we still couldn’t talk, I understood that they’d been trying to warn me about the spring. Oh well. Too late now. Móðir came ‘round to the hot spring eventually, and screamed when she saw my body. It looked bad by then, shrunken and hairless and boiled red like a beet. But I didn’t mind. I felt I’d come home.

  It didn’t last. I felt . . . sucked under. I dove into th
e hot spring and couldn’t surface. Down under the rocks through cracks I’d only ever plumbed with my toes, into the earth I went. Things were dark.

  And then I woke up to a jumble of scrap metal and wires and gadgets and gizmos and a face before me that made no sense—Magnús?—and maybe all of it had been a dream and I was in some kind of mad scientist hospital. There was móðir’s face next to Magnús’s, and I opened my mouth to ask her what had happened, but my mouth wouldn’t open, and I heard her tell Magnús, “Isn’t it marvelous? If my calculations are correct—” and I screamed louder than I ever have in my life, but it made no sound.

  I had no mouth. I was a mechanical horse.

  I couldn’t scream, but I could flail my strong limbs, which I did. They moved differently from what I was used to, but panic is panic. I knocked things over, hearing them clatter onto the workshop floor. Móðir and Magnús cursed as they jumped back from me, out of the way, and I wanted to hurt them. But they were my only hope, weren’t they? If I was ever going to escape, I’d need them to figure it out. I stopped thrashing.

  The sound of Magnús’s laughter overwhelmed me, and for a moment I dared to hope that he recognized me in there, somehow looked into the horse’s dead eyes and knew his sister’s soul, understood what would make a clockwork horse startle. “Yeah,” he said to móðir, “this thing will clearly solve all our problems.”

  Móðir tried to turn me off, but I wouldn’t let her near the switch. I broke out of the workshop and followed Magnús around as much as I could, which wasn’t a lot. I could have busted into the house, but it felt wrong. It was still my home, after all. I overheard some things: Magnús’s obvious struggle with wanting to help móðir without giving up a promising career as the hvali kafbátur’s chief engineer; his intense hatred of the mechanical menagerie (including myself); my own funeral.

  He cried. Big brother Magnús. Who would have thought?

  Móðir kept making animals, even the toys that she’d said were for me. They seemed to know me, though I couldn’t have said who any of them were. At least the new ones were friendly. The ones who’d been hostile before—the elephant and monkey and alligator, and a few others—seemed to be getting worse. They’d peck at Magnús and wind underfoot like naughty kittens and cause basically as much mischief as five-kilo critters can.

  My one goal was to make Magnús see me for who I was. I tried to write him a letter in the snow, but I couldn’t get my four feet to make anything but a mess at first, and then it didn’t snow for what seemed a long time—spring was on the way, finally. I tried nuzzling him, but he reacted with fear. I was, after all, a monstrous metal horse. I couldn’t even bring him things: I had no hands, no mouth.

  One day I found him sitting in the small family graveyard. The earth over my body was still mounded, hard as winter. “I miss you, sis,” he said. “Faðir was one thing, but you too?”

  He started as he heard me behind him. I wasn’t a graceful creature. “You again!” he shouted. “Get out of here you awful thing. Get!” He picked up a stone and threw it at me, and I just barely ducked away. He picked up another. “I’m not kidding.”

  And I flashed on a memory, an old memory of winters gone by. We always had the most fun with snowball fights: stagey, almost scripted reenactments of Viking battles with all his friends and me, the pesky sister, tagging along, and I always had the same role. I always died first, hammily, hugely, falling and writhing into mounds of soft snow.

  Magnús threw a rock at me, and I let it hit me. It didn’t hurt any more than a snowball would have against thick layers of sweater and parka. Which is to say not at all—I was made of metal, after all! But I fell. My four legs didn’t want to let me, but I made them. I toppled over, not caring if I’d ever get up; I thrashed my legs in the air and rolled and then, suddenly and intentionally, went still as a corpse. It was the best I could do with no mouth to moan with.

  Magnús was silent for a long time. He approached carefully, looking at me. My lidless eyes watched him, but I didn’t move a piston. Not until he was right on top of me, and then I twitched once more, scaring him so badly he tripped backward over a rock. Man, did I wish I could laugh.

  He came up, eyes wide as saucers. “Askja?” And then I wished I could cry. I nodded and nodded my horsey head, and he hugged me despite my coldness, and maybe, I thought, it would be all right.

  And it was, sort of.

  Magnús and móðir worked together to engineer voice boxes out of radio parts, and eventually all we monsters could talk again. Whale breath and the others still wouldn’t tell us their real names or their history, only that they missed the hot springs. We tried sending some of them back into the angry, now-boiling cauldron. But while it did soothe them, the effect was never very long-lived. The power plant sucked them right back out of the earth, and then it was anyone’s guess where they’d end up. We lost a few that way. I still miss them.

  But the real tragedy was faðir.

  It took us a long time to figure out why, but some of the toys—the earlier ones—just never came around. When Magnús and móðir gave them voices, they blabbered. They ranted and raved. They became even more murderous.

  The only real clue was in snippets of things that felt like memories. The elephant would look at Magnús and say, “Proud of boating. Just like me.” And then it would pounce like a cat and leap on its stumpy legs and gore with its pointy metal tusks. But faðir had been a fisherman in his day, and surely he was proud of his son’s whaling.

  The giraffe and the monkey would team up and use tools to trap us, but then they’d look at móðir and say, “just beautiful wedding day.”

  We think they all were faðir. It seems the spirit can only be fragmented so much before it goes insane.

  It makes me wonder, sometimes, what I might have lost.

  We returned all the suspect toys to the springs, hoping maybe he’d be back, but if he has been it was only to illuminate lightbulbs, and we never noticed his particular light.

  Magnús went back to the whale submarine fleet for a while but returned while still young, married, and raised your parents. He said he was afraid to die out there under the big sea, afraid that no part of his spirit would make it home if he did.

  When he died, your parents really, really tried to stop Dreki Anda, to explain why that day’s power could not be allowed out through the transmission lines to every house and shop in the town. But the plant’s new owners were not “superstitious,” they said, and the people needed electricity.

  I am sorry that the metal bird will never fly.

  You are left with me and my silly old stories, and I know it’s not enough. At least móðir’s tinkering left me a bit cuddlier than I once was. Yes, it’s nice when you scratch my furry ears that way.

  Yes, I will take you for a ride if you fetch your frænka Askja a fresh battery.

  Where would you like to go?

  Emily C. Skaftun is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and holds an MFA in Creative Writing. If she could zap things out of this dimension there’d be a lot less traffic, chewing gum, and rain. Despite the inability (yet!) to vanquish rain, Emily lives in Seattle with her husband the mad scientist and a cat who thinks he’s a tiger. She dabbles in roller derby and other absurd opportunities, while writing about fate, flying tigers, and strange fish. Emily is the Editor-in-Chief of the Norwegian American Weekly. Visit her on the web at www.eskaftun.com.

  Edge of the Unknown

  Elsa S. Henry

  It was a beautiful home. A home with red brick on the outside and a bright blue door. The wisteria and ivy climbing up one side perfectly manicured, and the gate to the front shining with recent polish. To the society of Primrose Hill, it was known as a proper finishing school for young ladies. They delicately marched through the front door each morning. It was said that the owner of the building, Miss Iesult Greensleeves, taught her charges all the most important things. How to make proper social introductions on Hyde Park’s Mechanical Promenade.
Which forks to use and when. Which gloves are appropriate at what occasion. Whether or not it is acceptable to use steam-powered gadgets to entertain one’s guests.

  The truth of the matter would certainly curl the neighbors’ hair into perfect ringlets.

  Miss Greensleeves’s Finishing School for Young Witches was no more a place for learning about tea service than it was a place to learn about how to turn one’s husband into a newt.

  In the parlor, her charges all dressed appropriately in day dresses, each in a different pastel shade. Their bonnets set aside, their hair coiffed in the most recent styles. And each one of them had a wand in their lap and a teacup in their hand. The girls ranged in age from ten, to the eldest, a sixteen-year old witch. Surrounded by prim and frilly flowers, an owlish young lady sat in the corner, her giant spectacles perched upon her nose as she read the latest Strand magazine. Unlike the rest, she was dressed in a simple tan gown. The others twittered and gossiped about their promenade in Hyde Park, discussing the latest addition: the steam carousel, which moved faster than any other carousel in the world. She sat apart, reading by herself.

  As soon as Miss Greensleeves stepped into the parlor, she counted under her breath to be sure that all her charges were in attendance. She dressed in a deep blue skirt, bustle, and vest and a white high-necked lace blouse. She strode purposefully to the front of the room. With a snap of her fingers, a small tea cart rolled into the room, tiny puffs of steam emanating from the back of it to propel it across the floor.

  “Good morning, ladies. I hope that you are all well rested from the weekend. As you know, your final examinations for the year are coming up, as is the Season. Some of you will no longer be with us after that time as we hope you will have been presented at court and will have met a husband.” The room burst into a flurry of giggles, except for the owl in the corner. “There will be a few different exams: one in comportment, one in spellcraft, and, of course, one in surreptitious casting. The final piece of your work—” The owl in the corner let out a scream. It was a howl of mourning, keening.