Swords & Steam Short Stories

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the classic text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

  6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2016

  Copyright © 2016 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78361-997-9

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78664-513-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

  FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

  Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices

  Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy

  www.flametreepress.com

  Contents

  Foreword by S.T. Joshi

  Publisher’s Note

  Little Healers

  Andrew Bourelle

  The Grove of Ashtaroth

  John Buchan

  Moon Skin

  Beth Cato

  The Demoiselle d’Ys

  Robert W. Chambers

  Hilda Silfverling: A Fantasy

  L. Maria Child

  Dear George, Love Margaret

  Amanda C. Davis

  Pax Mechanica

  Daniel J. Davis

  Fire to Set the Blood

  Jennifer Dornan-Fish

  The Horror of the Heights

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Fires of Mercy

  Spencer Ellsworth

  Sisters

  David Jón Fuller

  Undine

  Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

  The Raid of Le Vengeur

  George Griffith

  The Man Without a Country

  Edward Everett Hale

  Advantage on the Kingdom of the Shore

  Kelly A. Harmon

  The Artist of the Beautiful

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  P.’s Correspondence

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Sandman

  E.T.A. Hoffmann

  Spectrum

  Liam Hogan

  Skulls in the Stars

  Robert E. Howard

  Rip Van Winkle

  Washington Irving

  The Aerial Burglar

  Percival Leigh

  The Crime of a Windcatcher

  B.C. Matthews

  War Mage

  Angus McIntyre

  Three Lines of Old French

  A. Merritt

  Pen Dragons

  Dan Micklethwaite

  The Clock that Went Backward

  Edward Page Mitchell

  The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Winning of a Sword (from Part II of The Story of King Arthur and his Knights)

  Howard Pyle

  Taking Care of Business

  Victoria Sandbrook

  My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror

  Walter Scott

  Death of the Laird’s Jock

  Walter Scott

  Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman

  Mary Shelley

  Eli Whitney and the Cotton Djinn

  Zach Shephard

  Dressing Mr. Featherbottom

  Amy Sisson

  The Touchstone

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Vortaal Hunt

  Brian Trent

  A Drama in the Air

  Jules Verne

  Master Zacharius

  Jules Verne

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword: Swords & Steam

  It is often thought that the genres of weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction are recent products of popular culture. It is true that these genres (as well as others, such as the detective story, the western, and the romance) came into organised existence by way of the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. But all these genres had antecedents that extended back decades if not centuries; and they also attracted the attention of some of the most acclaimed writers of their time. In his masterful study, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, H.P. Lovecraft wryly notes the tendency of mainstream writers to dabble in the weird and fantastic. Cosmic fear, he wrote, ‘has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.’

  Many of the motifs used by the Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by later writers, were drawn from ancient European folklore. Long before the brothers Grimm codified many of these motifs in their various collections of fairy tales, beginning in 1812, writers found them full of inspiration. The German writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine is an exquisite mingling of love and death, as it tells the delicate story of a water nymph who marries a human being. Sigmund Freud used E.T.A. Hoffmann’s enigmatic ‘The Sandman’ as a springboard for his discussion of weird fiction in his essay ‘The Uncanny’.

  In Great Britain, Sir Walter Scott drew heavily upon Scottish folklore in his several tales of ghosts and spectres, while in America Washington Irving created an imperishable modern fairy tale in ‘Rip Van Winkle’. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be the first true work of science fiction, but in several shorter tales she expanded on the ideas in that pioneering novel. ‘Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman’ is an interesting mix of scientific verisimilitude and political satire.

  Edgar Allan Poe revolutionized weird fiction by restricting it to the short story and by relentlessly focusing on the psychology of fear. His ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ may perhaps be a satire or parody, but it was one of several tales that laid the groundwork for the genre of science fiction. His older contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, generally looked to an older tradition in his pensive tales of Puritans and moral temptation; but in ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ he may have written the first known story of a robotic insect.

  Jules Verne became famous throughout Europe for his novels of trips to the moon or voyages under the sea. As such, he became the ultimate source for the entire genre of science fiction, and his focus on advances in technology makes him a revered ancestor to the related genre of steampunk. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle exhibited facility in several different genres. While he may be
best known today for his Sherlock Holmes stories, which set the standard for detective fiction for all succeeding generations, he also worked extensively in horror fiction and even in science fiction. ‘The Horror of the Heights’ makes use of the very recent invention of the airplane to depict the bizarre terrors that hapless aviators may encounter in the mysterious realm of our atmosphere.

  The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might be considered a ‘golden age’ of horror and fantasy fiction, with many towering writers emerging, including the Scotsmen Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. One of the most unusual was the American novelist Robert W. Chambers, whose The King in Yellow has become something of a cult classic by virtue of the fact that elements from it were cited in the first season of the popular television show True Detective. Chambers was able to work as well in ethereal fantasy as in supernatural terror, and ‘The Demoiselle d’Ys’ is a hauntingly beautiful tale about a man who is supernaturally transplanted into the mediaeval age while hunting in the Breton countryside.

  With the dawn of the pulp era, such writers as A. Merritt and Robert E. Howard were able to find many venues for their tales of fantasy. Howard is the virtual inventor of the genre of sword-and-sorcery, although some antecedents can be found in the work of William Morris and Lord Dunsany. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian (the basis for the Conan the Barbarian films) is his most iconic creation; but in ‘Skulls in the Stars’ he has invented another memorable figure – Solomon Kane, a seventeenth-century Puritan who travels the world in search of adventure. This tale is only one of several in this book to focus on historical fantasy, a genre that has exploded in popularity in recent decades.

  Readers who only know contemporary examples of fantasy, horror, and science fiction owe it to themselves to delve into the origins of these genres in the literature of the past two centuries. They will see how these genres were shaped by the hands of some of the most distinctive writers in European literature, and they will also find that their tales, although seemingly remote from present-day concerns, offer imaginative thrills and supernatural chills rivalling the best of recent work.

  S.T. Joshi

  www.stjoshi.org

  Publisher’s Note

  Our latest short story anthologies delve into new realms, with the topics of Swords & Steam and Dystopia Utopia. We received such a great response to our call for new submissions that choosing the final stories to include proved to be incredibly tough. Our editorial board thoroughly enjoyed discovering the multitudes of different worlds on offer – from supernatural pasts to clockwork inventions – and ultimately we feel that the stories which made the final cut were the best for our purpose. We’re delighted to publish them here.

  In Swords & Steam we’re whisked away to historical settings and arcane escapades, with classic adventures by Walter Scott, mysterious encounters by John Buchan, and sword and sorcery grounded in our own world by the master Robert E. Howard. We also journey into steam-powered worlds, seeking the predecessors to the Steampunk genre through the pens of Jules Verne, George Griffith and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of these stories will be familiar, but we hope to have uncovered seldom-read gems too.

  Little Healers

  Andrew Bourelle

  Jessica stepped through the gate of the graveyard and began walking among the tombstones. Her breath came out in nervous bursts, white in the darkness. Her wool cape was pulled tight around her, but she still felt chilled. The cold came through the seams of her clothes, icy tendrils so tiny that they wormed their way through the threads of the fabric. Her hands trembled, but she thought this might not be because of the cold. She had journeyed into the graveyard to look for her husband.

  She could see quite clearly, with the moon casting a bluish-white light on the frosted ground. She saw a feral cat sitting atop a stone cross, and in the distance she could hear the faint howling from what she hoped was a dog and feared was a wolf. She reached involuntarily into the deep pocket of her cape and wrapped her hand around the grip of her husband’s gun. Henry had shown her once how to load it – how to measure the powder and ram the ball down the barrel, tamping it to make sure it was in place – and she had remembered the instruction well. There had been no real purpose to the lesson. He was target shooting – practicing for a fox hunt he’d been invited to – and she’d asked him about the gun. He then showed her how to use it. He let her shoot once, and when she hit, on her first attempt, the target he had missed his previous three tries, he had snatched the gun away from her and told her to leave him be. He had the steadiest hands of any person she’d ever known, but he was a poor shot with the pistol because he flinched when he pulled the trigger. She had been secretly proud that she could shoot better than him. She had never dreamed that she might need the gun to protect herself from him.

  In the distance, Jessica saw the faint glow of a light: a lantern. She crept through the grass and could hear each step pressing down on the stalks, frozen stiff from the cold. She used the trees and the headstones for cover, and as she drew closer to the light source, she heard the scrape of a shovel against frozen dirt and an occasional muffled voice. She finally came to a point where she could see them, and she knelt behind a large marble headstone and spied. Her husband was in the grave, his waist level with the ground, tossing shovelfuls of dirt into a pile. Her husband’s assistant, James, stood above, holding the lamp. Henry wasn’t wearing his top hat – it sat atop a nearby grave marker – and the lamplight illuminated his face. Even at this distance, she could see his eyes were wide and crazed, like a lunatic escaped from the asylum.

  She realized her fears were warranted – he was doing exactly what she’d dreaded – and she felt rage swelling from within, so powerful she wanted to rush into the lamp light, gun drawn. But she restrained herself and continued watching from her remove.

  How could he do this? He was digging up the grave of their son.

  * * *

  Henry had begun to sweat underneath his shirt and trench coat. His chest rose and fell, pulling cold air into his lungs and exhaling smoky bursts. He thrust the shovel again, biting into the black soil, and then swung the dirt up and out, dumping it upon the growing pile. James, his protégé, stood above the hole with the lamp. Only one of them could fit in the grave at a time. Henry was tired, but he felt this work – digging up the grave of his own child – was his responsibility. He had brought James along only for …for what? he asked himself.

  But he knew the answer: in case he found what he was looking for.

  Finally, the blade of the shovel struck wood, and the two men looked at each other. The hole was five feet deep now, and Henry was buried almost to his shoulders. He scraped and shoveled more, clearing the top of the coffin lid. He tossed the shovel out, and his assistant handed down the pry bar. The space in the hole was tight because the coffin was only four feet long, and he kept bumping into the walls with his shoulders and elbows. His coat was mud-caked, and his gloves were blackened and stiff. He pried the lid at its edges, the wood creaking loudly in the black night. But he couldn’t pry up the lid because he was standing on the coffin.

  “Damnation,” he growled.

  He stopped working, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. His specialty was working in close quarters, working with the tiny, the miniscule. If he could build the inventions he had, using magnifying glasses and instruments smaller than sewing needles, then he could find a solution to this problem.

  He climbed out and instructed James about what he wanted to do. James set the lamp down at the edge of the hole. Henry, holding the pry bar in one hand, lay chest down on the ground, his arms hanging over the edge. His assistant grabbed his legs, lifting him forward, lowering him head-first into the open grave.

  The lid of the coffin shrieked as Henry pulled it away, and then he was face to face with his son. Both of the coins that had been laid across the boy’s eyelids had slipped off in burial, and Anson’s eyes were wide and st
aring. Sitting in dark, sunken sockets, the whites of the eyes had begun to turn yellow, and the irises – once a brilliant blue – were softening into a milky gray. The boy’s skin was yellow and already tightening against his skull.

  No father should have to see such a sight, Henry thought.

  And then the stench crawled up his nostrils, and he shouted to his assistant to pull him up.

  * * *

  Jessica watched as James pulled Henry out of the grave by his feet. Her whole body was trembling. That was the grave of her son they were defiling, and it didn’t matter that the one doing the defiling was her husband. In fact, that made it worse.

  She hadn’t wanted to believe he was capable of something like this. He had always been obsessive, but that’s what gave him his genius. And he was a genius; this was no exaggeration. He was the son of a watchmaker, taught at an early age to examine the inner workings of machinery. By the time he was a teenager, he was more skilled than his father, able to design and assemble the gears and pins to build clocks large and small. It was widely known that he helped his father build the town’s clock tower, which had run without slowing for twenty years. However, Henry had confided in her – and she believed him – that he had done the majority of the work, and his father had actually been the assistant. Each night, from their home, she and Henry could hear the distant ringing of the clock at each hour – its long, slow cadence of chimes was soothing to her – and she always felt a swelling of pride that her husband had created such a marvel.

  His real specialty, however, was in smaller machines. He built complex time pieces no larger than a coin, with intricate gears virtually invisible without the use of a magnifying glass. This had begun his fascination with the miniscule. “There are other worlds just out of our sight,” he had told her when he began his courtship. He was a student at the university then, studying chemistry and biology and trying to understand the worlds that he said were there even if you couldn’t see them, worlds of cells and molecules.

  Teaching others about this invisible world of science became his profession, but watch-making continued as his hobby. He loved to toil for hours in his study, using hair-thin needles as instruments, staring through magnifying glasses, and making the inner workings of his timepieces smaller and smaller. Then he extended his inventions beyond watches and clocks, making elaborate and strange metal machines. He built mechanical figurines, foot-high toy soldiers, who could be wound up just as a pocket watch and walk and move their arms. Then he invented an elaborate pair of goggles, with multiple lenses he could move in and out of his view, allowing him to work on an even smaller scale. Afterward, he made smaller versions of his figurines as chess pieces – knights, rooks, kings, and queens no taller than an inch, with microscopic inner-workings – and created a game where the pieces played against each other without the aid of human participants. Once wound up with a turnkey, the pieces moved themselves. No strategy was duplicated no matter how many times the figurines played.