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

  It was accompanied by the Strand magazine bursting into flames in her hands.

  “He killed him!” She shrieked, waving her hands around.

  “Miss Harper, I beg your pardon?” Miss Greensleeves turned her violet eyes upon the owl in the corner. “I’m not sure what the parliamentary vote upon human robotic experimentation could have anything to do with death. No one has been experimented upon yet.”

  “He’s dead.” She began to cry, her sobs summoning a raincloud above her head, a roll of thunder coming out from it as she gasped. “He got thrown off of a waterfall, and he’s dead.”

  “Miss Penelope Harper, if you could recall your cloud, we can talk about this like reasonable witches. It’s not polite to storm inside.” Miss Greensleeves was pulling her wand out of her sleeve and casting a spell to quickly waterproof the entire room—if that raincloud began to storm any harder she’d have the mechanics in here for another month fixing the security systems.

  Miss Harper sniffed loudly and pulled a handkerchief out from inside the ruffles of her dress, wiping the tears from her cheeks. The raincloud stopped thundering and raining but did not dissipate.

  “Miss Greensleeves, I know you’re a fan, as well. And we both know . . .” another deep intake of breath before speaking, “We both know that killing the Great Detective by throwing him off of a cliff is entirely unreasonable.”

  The room went still with only few nos and gasps from wide-eyed, disbelieving witches.

  Miss Greensleeves spoke very gravely. “Our special guest for the séance portion of your exam is none other than Sir Arthur.”

  Penelope Harper’s eyes were already quite large behind the giant magnification of her spectacles, but it seemed as though they grew three times larger as realization dawned. “You don’t mean…”

  “I do. You see, Sir Arthur may think he can kill off the character and leave us all to mourn the man who never lived.” Miss Greensleeves took a breath and then smiled. All of the young girls shrank back. When Miss Greensleeves smiled, no one wanted to know what she was planning. “But I’m sure with a bit of spiritual mussing about, we might be able to show him why he shouldn’t have killed him.”

  “But does that mean that we have to make it look like it’s not real?” Beatrix St. John spoke next, her blue eyes sparkling with curiosity. “You mean we can do whatever we want, as long as it seems as though we’ve made it all up?”

  “I want to scare the shirt off of him, make him think Sherlock Holmes has come back to haunt him and make him pick up a pen again.” Miss Harper spoke, reaching her hand up and tossing the cloud into nothingness.

  Miss Greensleeves nodded in the direction of Miss Harper and waved a hand. A few books flew off the shelves throughout the parlor, a few more flew down from the upstairs. “These should help you understand the tactics that charlatans use. We can build some props and integrate a few new spells into the security system.”

  The pastel-enruffled witches flocked to the book stacks: one girl shouted, “I’ll write to the Fox Sisters,” while another snatched a book entitled Communicating through the Veil and another grabbed a book on demonology.

  The witches of London were ready to do battle in the parlor on behalf of their favorite detective.

  A few weeks later, a swirl of evening dresses and tambourines bustled through the foyer.

  “Ladies!” Miss Greensleeves’s Irish accent rang out from the top of the staircase. She was gowned in a soft lavender evening dress, a simple strand of pearls at her throat. The girls were dressed in froths of satin and lace. Even Miss Harper had traded her brown plaid for an emerald green evening gown, a golden locket at her throat. “As you all know, our guests will be here in one hour to participate in the séance. Since there will be non-magical attendees, you know you cannot use a wand for any spellcasting.”

  “Wands are for show anyhow,” piped up Harriet Featherstone.

  “Very good,” Miss Greensleeves replied. “Now, who is on what piece of the séance?”

  Miss Harper stepped forward. “Miss Beatrix and I will be leading the séance.” Beatrix held up a clapper in one hand, to show she could knock on the table while holding hands.

  “Miss Nessie and I are working on keeping the circle of protection up from inside the classroom upstairs,” volunteered Miss Featherstone “We thought it would be best to have additional support in case the security system is still rusty.”

  Another pair of girls held up a can of phosphorus and the copy of the Strand.

  “I’m making sure that none of our guests have any spells that would tell them we’re working illusions,” Miss Jean said. “Oh, and I’ll be taking coats, of course. Good hosting and all.”

  “A reminder to all of you that Mr. Bentley is an inventor under suspicion from the Crown. Do not under any circumstances allow him to escort you home. While he might be a gentleman, his manners about experimenting upon people are utterly atrocious.”

  The room fell silent, all the young ladies nodding in acknowledgement. No one wanted to become an experiment. Marrying an inventor had its perks of course—being able to talk about all the latest inventions with fluency was certainly a benefit—but the possibility of arriving to an event at the Season with a brand new robotic arm might be seen as amiss.

  The time had come. The young ladies all swept to their places. Some sipped at champagne in the parlor, and others lit frankincense and myrrh in the workshop.

  Mr. Bentley stepped through the door in his tuxedo and offered little mechanical corgis to each of the ladies in attendance. Miss Harper set hers on the ground and pressed the button for it to start, resulting in high pitched yapping and rusted tail wagging. The security system began to fweep in alarm, unaware of the newest mechanical device in the building. With a sheepish smile, Miss Harper turned her new friend off in order to avoid trouble.

  All but one of the guests had arrived—the most important guest—and Miss Greensleeves stepped to the door and opened it just as the final knock came.

  “Sir Arthur, what a pleasure to have you here for our séance. Some of my young ladies are fans of your work.”

  He ambled in, allowing the pretty young lady to take his coat and whisk it off to the coat room. Sir Arthur gave Miss Greensleeves a smile and a nod, kind words of thanks for a warm welcome. “Well, I hope they aren’t too angry about the most recent issue.” He muttered through his mustache, “There’ve been riots outside of the Strand, you know.”

  Iesult feigned surprise and shock. “Oh, I’m so sorry. It must be terribly frustrating to have an authorial choice so challenged by the public. Well, I hope our little diversion can be of some assistance in cheering you. I know you’re quite a fan of the spiritualist movement. My young ladies have been studying it avidly, hoping to learn how to be proper and spiritualist at the same time.” She leaned in conspiratorially, “None of that American ‘free love’ nonsense, though. I promise you that.”

  The Americans were always a good way to show that you were better and more poised than others. As an Irishwoman, she took points where she could score them

  “If you’ll come with me into the parlor, we can begin.”

  Sir Arthur followed as she led him to a seat at the circular table. The twelve participants were ready to take their seats.

  “I’d like to introduce Miss Penelope Harper, who will be leading our séance tonight.” Miss Greensleeves gestured genteelly to Penelope, who took her seat. Everyone followed suit.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Miss Harper spoke before pushing her spectacles up on her nose. “This evening, I’m going to ask that we all hold hands. Palms up, if you please.”

  From another participant, a giggle and a blush as she took the hand of Mr. Bentley. For an inventor potentially hiding out and turning people into part robot, he seemed awfully well dressed.

  Penelope sent a speedy glare in the direction of her classmate before fluttering her eyes shut. “Mr. Jeeves, if you could bring down the lights?” The gas lam
ps automatically lowered. (Not by the power of a butler, though, but rather by the power of a spell bound up in the mechanical security system triggered by the words Mr. Jeeves. Witches are tricky like that.)

  “Please close your eyes, ladies and gentlemen.” She began. As soon as all eyes were closed, the room sank into darkness. Stealthily, young ladies moved into the room, levitating a few objects onto the table and then floating out of the room without a sound. Flicking her eyes over to her fellow witch, Beatrix, Miss Harper squeezed her hand and began. “O spirits, we ask if any of you has a message for us? Can you knock on the table? Knock once if you have a message and twice if you do not.”

  The table shook with a resounding knock. Only one. From below the table, a small steam powered knocker responded to vocal cues through a nifty bit of spell work.

  “Very well, is there any one person to whom this message is directed?” A single knock again. “If you could place a marker in front of the individual the message is for, we will open our eyes in five seconds.”

  With the participants’ eyes still closed, one of the girls helping put on the show lifted a small glowing orb out of nothing and blew it onto the table. It floated in front of Sir Arthur’s face, making his moustache cast eerie shadows onto the table.

  “You may open your eyes,” Penelope intoned. She had to shove a self-satisfied cackle down as Sir Arthur’s eyes grew as wide as plates.

  “For— “ he choked out, “for me?”

  “If everyone could please continue to hold hands. Please, do not break the circle.” Penelope spoke softly, working her intentions on everyone in the room. The witches present wouldn’t be able to let go of each other’s hands if they wanted to. “Sir, have you lost anyone dear to you recently?”

  “No. No, I haven’t.” Sir Arthur sounded convinced, as though he was completely unaware of the many hearts he had broken with his prose.

  “How curious.” She smiled. “Well, we shall just have to find out who it is.”

  With a rumble, the table shifted and shook, the feeling of an angry spirit filling the room (or in this case, teenaged witchy hormones), and the table and all of the chairs lifted a foot off of the ground.

  “Well, this spirit certainly wants our attention,” Penelope said calmly while the rest of the séance-goers began to struggle in fear, hanging on to each other’s hands for dear life. “Oh spirit, might you tell us who you are?”

  On that cue, the walls flashed for a moment, red writing appearing. “You killed me, Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  Doyle’s eyes got even wider, his face marked in pure disbelief.

  “This cannot be, this is… Miss Greensleeves, are your students pranking me?”

  And then a copy of the Strand magazine appeared in the middle of the table before bursting into green flames.

  The table began to spin round and round before the whole dining set slammed down to the ground in a huff.

  The participants began to scream, still clinging to each other’s hands, trailing off when a firm, ticked-off British gentleman’s voice spoke throughout the room. “I am the man who never lived and can never die, Arthur Conan Doyle. You will bring me back or face the consequences of damning me to uncertain fictional hell.”

  With that, Miss Harper allowed the attendees to release hands. While Beatrix was making eyes at Mr. Bentley, choosing to risk matrimony to an illegal robotics inventor over common sense, Miss Harper rose, watching Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grab at the scraps of air that once were the Strand. He sputtered and threw his hands in the air.

  “Riots! My mother writing to inform me that I have done the wrong thing! The queen is even angry with me, and now . . . my own creation tells me I can’t kill him?! Fine. I’ll write more. I will. But you’re mine, Holmes. I made you, and I can bury you!”

  The only response to Doyle’s shouting fit was a low chuckle in the same tone as the disembodied voice.

  Doyle fled the School for Young Witches, and the girls followed, watching as he and the rest of the guests all scurried away. Some even left their greatcoats behind. The gaggle of girls in evening gowns circled around in the foyer and looked questioningly at their headmistress.

  “Did we pass, Miss Greensleeves?” asked Miss Harper, her eyes gleaming with triumph.

  “Oh, we’ll just have to wait and see if you’ve successfully terrified the man into writing again.”

  A few weeks later when the Strand announced a return of the Sherlock Holmes stories, a young lady (Miss Harper, to be precise) sitting in the middle of the Hyde Park Mechanical Promenade shrieked from her carriage with glee and shouted across to another, “We did it! We saved Sherlock Holmes!”

  Witches will meddle with anything, even publishing.

  Elsa S. Henry is a one-eyed, Scandinavian writer who lives in New Jersey with a husband, two cats, and a hound dog. She writes for tabletop RPGs, Feminist Sonar (a blog about disability), and creepy things that go bump in the night. This is her first published short story.

  The Blood on the Walls

  Eddy Webb

  Carnacki’s usual card arrived, inviting me to his home on 427 Cheyne Walk to spend the evening having dinner and listening to his latest story. I arrived promptly, exiting the cab so quickly that I nearly forgot to deposit my fare in the brass box bolted to the side. The coins clattered through the pipes, and the automated cab trundled off in a gust of steam. As I entered, I saw that Arkwright, Jessop, and Taylor—his other guests, as well as my friends—were all seated around the table. I joined their amiable talk, and we spent a comfortable fifteen minutes together until our host came out with the food.

  “Your last investigation was not so long ago,” I said, slicing into the venison.

  The table fell silent, aside from the small hiss of steam from Arkwright’s mechanical arm. “Indeed,” Carnacki said, as he took a bite of his meal.

  Quietly, I admonished myself—I had again forgotten Carnacki’s dislike of even hinting at his story over dinner. Once we were done and the pipes and shag tobacco came out, he would be as loquacious as any man I have ever met. For the moment, though, I changed the subject, telling Jessop about a new form of typewriter I saw advertised in this morning’s paper. As a writer, I am always fascinated in tools that can make my craft easier and more efficient, but I fear sometimes that I alone have such interests.

  Once the meal was over, we all adjourned to Carnacki’s library. The honor of the big chair always went to our host, but the rest of us quietly fixed our pipes and waited for him to begin his latest ghostly tale.

  “To start, and as Dodgson alluded to, this most recent case was quick upon the heels of my previous one. It seems word of my scientific investigations into all kinds of ghosts—real, imagined, and fabricated—has spread far wider than I expected, and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t receive some letter requesting my services. I have actually investigated a few such pleas since we last dined, but none are of much interest or indeed required me to even unpack my electric pentacle and bag of salt. But this latest one is by far one of the most extraordinary things I have ever witnessed in my short career as an investigator.”

  I leaned back into the comfortable leather chair, closing my eyes and smiling as I puffed on my pipe and listened.

  I received a letter (Carnacki continued) from a man whose name I must not mention, at his own request. Let us call him Mr. Davidson. He is a poor man with noble blood and has recently come into possession of a mansion and a small amount of money with which to maintain it. The mansion, according to his letter, is in disrepair, and it will take a considerable sum to bring it back to its original luster. For a while, he spent all the money he had inherited and more of his own besides in an attempt to bring it up to modern living standards. However, the progress has been minimal. During the reconstruction he has attempted to live in the house with his daughter, but despite his efforts, he is simply unable to retain a staff to maintain it.

  Yes, Dodgson, you are correct—he would not be calling up
on my services if the issue were not, at some level, believed to be supernatural. His letter to me contains all of the particulars of the situation, which is a rare and treasured quality among potential clients. Here it is, if you wish to read it for yourselves. There are some strange omissions, however, including a lack of a human presence in any of the alleged manifestations—or “hauntings,” as Mr. Davidson insists on crudely qualifying them. These omissions led me to consider his case. After we exchanged a few brief messages via my automated telegraph, I agreed to look into his problem.

  Within two days, I drove to the house in question to meet Mr. Davidson for a late dinner. He is a large man, and a bit younger than I expected—about as young as Arkwright, I would say, and injured from the Boer War much like she is. He always wears gloves and refused to shake my hand, claiming his war wound never healed properly and made his hands stiff. He seemed eager to dive right into business, so I overruled my usual reticence to discuss such matters over meals. During a simple but filling dinner served by himself and his charming daughter, whom I shall call Melanie, he explained his situation.

  “To be frank, Mr. Carnacki, I’m a soldier, not a landowner.” He motioned to his daughter, who was pushing her food around her plate. “I am a blunt man used to a hard life, and my wife and my daughter are the only forces in the world that can bring out my softer sentiments. I say this not to try and impress you but to explain that I am not one given to hallucinations or flights of fancy.”

  “I fully understand and appreciate your assertion,” I said.

  Looking around for something to put on my bread, I noticed there were no condiments on the table. “I am sorry,” my host said, clearly embarrassed to be unprepared. “We haven’t had amenities like salt and butter since I gained ownership of the house. I have always meant to stock up, but . . .”