Swords & Steam Short Stories Read online

  “How did you do it?” she had asked, amazed.

  “It’s a mixture of my two passions,” he said. “Science and engineering.”

  He explained that this was his true calling: to invent and to build.

  Through all of his studying, his teaching, his inventing, he had been a charming courter and remained a devoted husband. He genuinely enjoyed life and was exuberant about his discoveries. His cheerfulness extended to their carriage rides along the river, their evenings reading by the fire, their Saturday mornings having a cup of tea on the veranda. In those first years, she had wished he would come home earlier from his laboratory or spend less time in his study, but she wasn’t ignored. He would arrive with a bouquet of roses or surprise her with tickets to the opera. In the darkest months of winter, when she was melancholic, she was always able to convince herself that life was as it should be and she shouldn’t ask for more.

  But life did give her more: a son. He was a beautiful healthy baby boy whom her husband doted over as much as she did. And for five years, their life together was even happier. Her husband spent more time at home, his son being his most interesting project yet. With their son, she finally felt complete. But then young Anson became ill. They fretted over him as he lay feverish and unresponsive. They called in doctors, and when those doctors couldn’t give her husband a clear diagnosis, he wrote for other doctors to come, regardless of expense. While their frustration mounted, Jessica became her son’s nurse. Henry retreated to his study and his laboratory, spending more time than ever away from the family. He saw his assistant, James, more than he saw his ailing son. Only then had she really become angry: their son was dying and Henry’s response was to escape the family?

  But then one day, as if by a miracle, Anson’s fever broke. He sat up in bed. He smiled. He ate soup and laughed, and both she and her husband were there to watch the boy’s return. Whatever illness had taken hold of him, he was healing now. And her husband was back. From the moment Anson’s recovery started, Henry didn’t so much as set foot in his study or leave for his lab at the university. She could forgive Henry and allow life to return to normal.

  But then they awoke two nights ago to Anson’s screams. Running to his room, they found him writhing in his blankets. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, his ears and eyes, even from the pores of his skin. She held him as he screamed. Her husband shouted, “No! No! No!” and then moments later the boy’s shrieks simply stopped. He was limp in her arms. His temperature – so hot during the illness – faded, and his body became chilled.

  When the physician and the funeral director came to remove Anson, Henry went mad, shouting that they must not take him, that he needed to inspect the body. She realized that her husband might have gone insane. The constable and two deputies had to restrain him. And he remained quiet, barely speaking, through all of the funeral arrangements.

  Jessica wanted nothing more than to retreat, as her husband had before, and lay in bed weeping all day. But she’d had to collect herself and construct a strong face for family and friends. But her strength was a façade – she wasn’t tough enough to shoulder the death of her son, certainly not compounded with the lunacy of her husband.

  And now the situation had grown even worse. After the funeral, she had come to his study to deliver a cup of tea. Outside the door, she heard voices and listened to Henry speaking to his lab assistant. They spoke about shovels and digging utensils and an agreed time to meet after dark. She couldn’t believe it. He meant to examine the body still, even after it was buried.

  So she feigned going to bed and waited until Henry peeked into the room to make sure she was asleep. The covers were pulled to her neck, but she was fully clothed underneath and wide awake. She crept to the door to see her husband walking along the cobblestones under the orange glow of the street’s oil lamp. She moved to follow him but then stopped at the threshold. She turned back to retrieve his pistol from its mount above the fireplace, trying to convince herself it was simply an extra precaution.

  And now Jessica knelt in the graveyard, hiding behind a headstone, spying her husband and his assistant as they stared into the newly dug grave of her son. The world, it seemed, was going mad around her, and she was clinging to her own sanity as she clung to the pistol in her pocket.

  * * *

  James asked, “Do you want me to do it?”

  “No,” Henry said, standing on weak legs. “He’s my son.”

  He’d brought a toolkit with him, and now he turned to it. He opened it on the ground and quickly found what he was looking for: a large scalpel, with an eight-inch handle and two-inch razor-sharp blade. The metal gleamed in the moonlight like a silver flame.

  He stepped down into the grave, his feet balancing on each side of the coffin. He tried to kneel but there wasn’t enough room. He set his foot down inside, his ankle brushing his son’s shirt. Now he knelt. The smell was rank, and he feared he might retch. He brought out his kerchief and held it to his mouth and nose. With his other hand, he tried to cut open Anson’s shirt. He couldn’t do it one handed. He put the kerchief into his pocket and tried to breathe shallowly.

  He yanked open his son’s shirt, tearing off the buttons and exposing the boy’s yellowing flesh.

  “Dear God, help me,” Henry wailed.

  He stabbed the scalpel into the boy’s abdomen and, quickly, so he wouldn’t lose his nerve, he cut upward. The blade stopped when he hit the breastbone. Henry, holding his breath from the fresh stink emanating from the cut, changed positions, giving himself leverage, and cut upward, opening the boy from navel to neck.

  Henry leaned back and ordered James to move the light. The assistant changed positions, illuminating the incision. Henry could see the gray meat of the boy’s organs.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t –”

  Then he saw movement inside the boy’s chest cavity. A mass of what looked to be tiny insects poured out. Individually, they were barely large enough to see with the naked eye – much smaller than any ant – but they swarmed out in a heap, thousands of them, growing like an eruption of thick black foam.

  Henry gasped, dropping the scalpel, and scurried out of the hole.

  “The oil!” he shouted. “Get the bloody oil!”

  His assistant hesitated for a moment, looking into the grave, and then his face turned pale, and he scrambled backward. He pulled a flask out of the toolkit. Henry snatched it from his hand and ran over to the hole. He began dumping the oil out onto the mass of tiny creatures. He splattered the oil over his son, trying to douse him from forehead to shoe tip. The creatures were now piled several inches high, with the pile growing and spreading with each second. He couldn’t believe how many of them there were.

  “Get the matches,” he shouted at James.

  The young man reached into his coat and drew out a box of matches.

  Henry emptied the bottle and then tossed the flask into the grave. It landed in the growing mass of insects and immediately it was covered.

  “Set fire to them!” Henry yelled.

  His assistant stepped forward and struck the match. He held it high, over the grave, allowing the flame to grow to a healthy, vigorous height.

  “Burn them!” Henry shouted. “For the love of God, burn them a–”

  * * *

  Jessica squeezed the trigger, and flames jumped from the barrel, lighting the darkness around her. Her husband’s assistant grabbed his chest with his free hand, inhaled loudly, the sound constrained and wet, and then he fell face forward into the grave, bringing the match with him. Flames erupted from the hole in a flash of bright white light. She heard the man’s shrieks and saw the flames twisting up out of the grave, orange and red and yellow. This wasn’t what she’d wanted – she’d hoped he would fall backward, the match falling with him into the extinguishing chill of the icy grass.

  She lowered the gun and opened her mouth to scream. But n
o sounds came out.

  Next to the cauldron of fire, she saw her husband staring toward her.

  * * *

  Henry could see nothing in the darkness. The lamp stood next to the pit, and flames reached up out of his son’s grave, making the immediate vicinity as light as if it were day. But the light also had the effect of blinding him beyond its reach, and past a few gravestones, he could only see blackness.

  He looked down into the hole and saw that James had stopped moving. Flames engulfed his son and his assistant and, he hoped, the creatures that he’d come here to destroy.

  He stared back in the direction the shot had come from. He thought perhaps he was now in the sniper’s sights. He turned and fled. As he ran, the headstones of the dead stood like sentinels driving him away.

  * * *

  She approached her son’s grave, moving slowly. The fire had begun to die, but her husband had left the lamp and she could see clearly within its circle of light. She lifted the lamp and peered down into the grave. Tentacles of smoke undulated from the blackened remains of her son and the assistant. She looked carefully and thought she saw movement amidst the charred flesh, a blob of darkness among the coals that seemed to shift and writhe.

  She turned in horror and ran into the night.

  * * *

  She found him in his study, sitting in front of his work bench, his head in his hands. The room was filled with microscopic lenses, magnifying glasses, and spectacles with glass of varying dimensions and thicknesses. Tools and gears and mechanical pieces – made of brass and copper and iron – lay scattered among the benches as well, but the dominance of the lenses made her feel as if she was being watched, surrounded by glass eyes.

  She walked to the other side of the table, lifted the reloaded gun, and said to her husband, “What have you done?”

  He raised his head, looked at her at first with an expression that suggested he didn’t recognize her. Then his face changed to a look of recognition followed by a look of confusion.

  “You?” he said. “It was you?”

  “Tell me what you’ve done!” she yelled.

  He leaned back in his chair, hunched in defeat. “You can lower the gun. I will tell you.”

  Hesitantly, she lowered the pistol. Her chest heaved with each breath.

  His hand reached for a glass jar on the table, clear glass tapered at the top and sealed with cork coated in melted wax. He slid it toward her.

  “Look inside,” he said. “Don’t open it.”

  She picked up the jar with her free hand. She thought it was empty, but then she held it close to her face and saw that inside were a few tiny black dots, perhaps a dozen, no bigger than grains of soil. They were moving, rolling around the bottom and up and down the sides of the glass, as if of their own volition.

  “Here,” he said, holding up a magnifying lens the size of a saucer.

  Hesitantly, she holstered the gun in her cape pocket and took the lens. She held it before the jar and looked through it. The black objects were still small, but now she could see with more clarity. Each dot was a tiny centipede, with shells and hinged legs made of what looked like metal. They raced around the glass like insects, but she could see with enough detail to know that they were mechanical not biological.

  “My masterpiece,” her husband said, but he spoke the words with irony. “My greatest achievement.”

  She set the glass down and slid it back across the table to him.

  “What are they?”

  “I call them my Little Healers,” he said. “They eat germs, microbes of disease, only the bad. Or so I thought.”

  Now she was beginning to understand. During Anson’s illness, Henry had retreated to his laboratory and his study, and she had thought perhaps he didn’t care that his son was dying. But all along he was trying to create some new invention that would cure Anson.

  “I tested them,” he said. “But only on dead animals. When they consumed the dead flesh, I thought it was because they took the rot for disease.”

  She stared at him. His face was white.

  “And you unleashed them on our son?”

  “I did not know they would multiply as they did,” he said. “I only administered three: one in his mouth, one in his nose, one in his ear. I thought they would eat the disease and then die. Or perhaps stay inside him, bolstering his immune system. I did not think they would eat the bad and the good.”

  She thought of her son’s final minutes.

  “You killed him,” she said.

  “He might have died anyway,” he said absently, as if more to himself than to her. “I wanted to make the world better. Starting with our family.”

  “Don’t you remember his screams?” she said.

  He lifted the glass jar and looked in at the mechanical insects.

  “I still hear his screams,” he said.

  Then he set the jar down and stood quickly, moving so abruptly that she reached for the gun, startled.

  “I’m going to the constable,” he said. “I plan to confess everything.”

  She looked at him and remembered the man she’d fallen in love with. He had been overly obsessed with his work, but he had been a good husband. A good man, with good intentions.

  She had forgiven him his imperfections before, but now ….

  In the distance, the clock tower he built with his father began its midnight ring.

  * * *

  The sound of the clock tower made Henry think of the potential he had once had. And of the happiness he had once shared with Jessica.

  He looked again at his wife, remembering how beautiful she always was. Her face was stern now, expressionless. Her complexion was flushed, her eyes narrowed, her lips pressed into a thin, straight line. He had never seen her look this way. He hoped she could forgive him. He had acted for the sake of helping their son, not killing him. Surely she must understand. She was always very smart. She would understand, perhaps even try to talk him out of turning himself in.

  He took a step, and she said, “Wait.”

  He stopped – as the clock tower chimed again – and he turned to Jessica, longing for a loving look, an expression that said she forgave him.

  “Before you go,” she said, “you must do something.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Anything.”

  She motioned toward the glass jar.

  “Swallow them,” she said.

  He looked at the jar and gulped. “But,” he said, “they are evidence. I must –”

  She raised the pistol, cocked the hammer back, and pointed the gun at his face. The gun was steady in her hand, the black circle at the end of the barrel staring at him like a dark eye.

  He sighed. “A bullet would be more merciful,” he said.

  “Do you deserve mercy?” she said.

  He lifted the jar and looked through the glass at his Little Healers. He looked back at her and saw hate in her eyes.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I cannot forgive myself.”

  “Then you shall not be forgiven.”

  He pulled the cork off the top of the jar.

  In the distance, the last of the clock tower’s midnight chimes was followed by a long empty silence.

  The Grove of Ashtaroth

  John Buchan

  C’est enfin que dans leurs prunelles

  Rit et pleure-fastidieux

  L’amour des choses eternelles,

  Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!

  Paul Verlaine

  We were sitting around the camp fire, some thirty miles north of a place called Taqui, when Lawson announced his intention of finding a home. He had spoken little the last day or two, and I guessed that he had struck a vein of private reflection. I thought it might be a new mine or irrigation scheme, and I was surprised to find that it was a country-house.


  “I don’t think I shall go back to England,” he said, kicking a sputtering log into place. “I don’t see why I should. For business purposes I am far more useful to the firm in South Africa than in Throgmorton Street. I have no relations left except a third cousin, and I have never cared a rush for living in town. That beastly house of mine in Hill Street will fetch what I gave for it – Isaacson cabled about it the other day, offering for furniture and all. I don’t want to go into Parliament, and I hate shooting little birds and tame deer. I am one of those fellows who are born colonial at heart, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t arrange my life as I please. Besides, for ten years I have been falling in love with this country, and now I am up to the neck.”

  He flung himself back in the camp-chair till the canvas creaked, and looked at me below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines of him, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untanned field-boots, breeches, and grey shirt he looked the born wilderness-hunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down to the City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being a fair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at his shirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known him years ago, when he was a broker’s clerk working on half-commission. Then he had gone to South Africa, and soon I heard he was a partner in a mining house which was doing wonders with some gold areas in the North. The next step was his return to London as the new millionaire – young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and much sought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polo together, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs that he did not propose to become a conventional English gentleman. He refused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of England were at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had not time to be a squire. Besides, every few months he used to rush out to South Africa. I saw that he was restless, for he was always badgering me to go big game hunting with him in some remote part of the earth. There was that in his eyes, too, which marked him out from the ordinary blond type of our countrymen. They were large and brown and mysterious, and the light of another race was in their odd depths.