Beneath Ceaseless Skies #120 Read online

  The man said nothing, but pumped against her. In a matter of moments he gave a grunt and stepped back. The clockwork trollop dropped her skirts and, one hand trailing along the wall of the alley, returned the way she had come. I could imagine the small jet of steam that was rendering her once again hygienic. The idea both fascinated and disgusted me.

  Professor Haversham had his notebook out. I heard him murmur, “With this fellow a single motion sufficed for the purpose.”

  Light and music poured out into the street from an open door ahead. Janet turned in at the doorway and entered.

  “Now for the real test,” Professor Haversham said. “Keep your back to the wall, and observe.”

  The tavern, for indeed it was such, was slightly below street level and filled with mariners fresh from the docks. The trollop had maneuvered the steps leading down and was now accosting the patrons, one by one, with a husky “Hello, sailor, fancy a go?”

  Before long, one of the tavern’s nautical patrons did indeed turn out to “fancy a go.” The sailor—a packet rat, by his close-cropped hair and woolen pea-coat—pulled a coin from his pocket, handed it to the trollop, then escorted her to a back room and closed the door. A rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings commenced shortly afterward, and, above the din in the tavern itself, came the sound of the trollop exclaiming, “Oh, for the love of God, faster, faster! Oh, sweet lubricity! I spend, I die!”

  A pause; the door opened, and the sailor emerged, his brow beaded with sweat, followed a moment later by the cool and unruffled trollop.

  “She is able to dress and undress herself,” the professor said in my ear. “That was a great technical challenge, but magnetic thread in her garments proved to be the solution.”

  Despite the sordid nature of our surroundings, I could not help but marvel. “This is far beyond anything you have previously accomplished. Compared to this....”

  “A chess-playing automaton is but a toy.”

  As we spoke, another patron was accompanying the trollop into the back room. More squeaking noises soon followed, then a muffled cry and Janet’s voice exclaiming, “Oh, pierce me to the very vitals with your manly rod!”

  When she emerged, she made her way to the bar—navigating by touch, as before—and with every appearance of lifelike animation, purchased gin, which she knocked back neat.

  “Is she running low on fuel?” I inquired. “Should we take her back now?”

  “No, no,” Haversham said. “She is merely replenishing the fluid for her cleaning apparatus, while adding verisimilitude to her role. Our Janet is indeed the perfect trollop: she cannot be threatened, she cannot be insulted, she cannot be murdered, and she does not tire.”

  The professor spoke truth. Before long, two more customers had enjoyed the trollop’s charms in the back room. While she was entertaining the second, a group of clipper-ship sailors pushed their way into the tavern, calling loudly for gin and beer and greeting the barman with many rough jests. He in turn supplied each man with his preferred tipple, from which I judged that they were all known patrons of the establishment.

  When Janet next emerged from the back room, she turned her attention to the newcomers. Instead of approaching the nearest with her usual “Hello, sailor,” she made her way directly to one of their number—a strapping specimen with a tarred pigtail, his muscular arms gaudy with oriental tattoos—as he stood by the bar. He turned at her greeting, but seemed momentarily taken aback by her appearance.

  “How about it, sailor?” the trollop said. “Only a shilling.”

  He hesitated no longer, but took her by the hand and led her to the back room, to the accompaniment of the raucous cheers of his shipmates. The door swung shut, and before long the bedsprings commenced squeaking in their now-familiar rhythm.

  “You may think me foolish,” I said quietly to Haversham, “but for a moment there I thought I saw her smile.”

  “A trick of the light, my boy,” the professor said. “I cast her features deliberately in a neutral expression, so that each customer may read into her countenance whatever he most desires.” He paused. “She still walks a bit mechanically, however. Her skirts disguise it, but that is something I shall have to work on.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, faster, faster,” came the trollop’s voice from beyond the door. The bedsprings creaked and squealed, joined now by the sound of something heavy—the headboard, I presumed—striking the wall with the same rhythm. The man gave a great cry.

  “Oh drive your mighty engine into my mossy grotto!” Janet’s voice exclaimed in response.

  “How do you make it appear that she breathes?” I asked, in order to distract myself from imagining the scene. Sailors in general were renowned for their prodigious reserves of amorous energy, but Haversham’s trollop, as the professor had described her operation to me, could match her partner’s stroke indefinitely.

  “The appearance of breathing is accomplished by means of a simple bellows arrangement,” the professor said. “It also supplies air to her firebox.”

  In the back room, the bedsprings squeaked.

  “Oh, sweet lubricity!”

  Thump! went the headboard against the wall.

  Outside, the church bells of St. George in the East tolled the coming of the day.

  One of the clipperman’s shipmates rapped sharply on the back room door. “Tom!” he called out. “Come away from your doxy. We’re sailing with the tide.”

  The squeaking of the bed springs continued without pause.

  I looked at my watch. “The man must be a veritable Hercules,” I said. “He’s been at it for over a quarter hour.”

  “Pierce me to the very vitals with your manly rod!” cried Janet from within the back room.

  Squeak, squeak, went the bed.

  Tom’s shipmate pounded again on the door. “Tom, are you deaf, man? Captain’ll flog us hairless if we’re on board a minute late.”

  No reply; only the continued thumpings and squeakings. The sailor tried the doorknob. The room was locked.

  “I spend, I die!” came the voice of the clockwork trollop from within.

  The clipperman put his shoulder to the door. When it did not budge, he brought over two of his messmates, who lent their own force to the endeavor.

  “Something is wrong,” I said, a cold feeling growing in my stomach.

  Over Haversham’s muted protest, I joined the men at the door, determined to render them what assistance I could. I had scarcely joined the group when the largest of them broke open the door with a mighty kick and a splintering of wood.

  The men surged forward—but rather than tumbling into the room, they stopped as if halted by an invisible wall. Then those rough sailors backed out, pale-faced and shaken, one of them making the sign of the cross as he did so.

  Through the open door, I saw the bed, and on the bed, lying on his back, a man no longer recognizable as a man. His head had slammed—was still slamming—into the wooden headboard, so that the top of his skull was crushed and his brains exposed in a welter of ruined flesh and clotted blood. Had not the bright tattoos on his arms remained for the most part visible, I would not have known the gore-stained wreckage for the fellow I had seen before.

  The clockwork trollop, naked, knelt astride him, her iron hips grinding down onto his flayed and splintered pelvis. A spurt of steam arose from between her thighs.

  “I spend,” she howled, still pumping. “I spend, I die!”

  In the distance, a policeman’s whistle blew. The shrill noise loosened my voice at last.

  “Professor,” I said. “We need to take her away while we still have time.” The macabre spectacle threatened to close up my throat again, and I had to draw a shaking breath before I could speak further. “I fear that the police will not look upon tonight’s experiment with a sympathetic eye.”

  * * *

  Little left remains for me to tell. Those few of the tavern’s patrons who had not fled at the sight of the horror in the back room did so at the approach of t
he police. The professor and I between us threw a blanket over the clockwork trollop and dragged her out through the now-empty tavern into the street and thence the short distance to the quay.

  She sank like a stone.

  The following year, Professor Haversham presented his mechanical chess-player at the Institute. Although the applause was polite, the academics concurred that the machine was not very lifelike and played but a perfunctory game.

  A waste of his talents, they all said, and I agreed—and never confessed how grateful I was that this should be so.

  Copyright © 2013 Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Debra Doyle earned at PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, with a concentration in Old English poetry. While studying in Philadelphia, she met and married James D. Macdonald, who was then serving in the US Navy, and subsequently traveled with him to Virginia, California, the Republic of Panamá, and far northern New England. James D. Macdonald, after his stint in the Navy, turned with Doyle to writing fantasy, science fiction, and horror for adults and children. Together and separately they have published over sixty novels and short stories. Doyle and Macdonald are instructors at the Viable Paradise workshop.

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  THE DROWNED MAN

  by Laura E. Price

  The Leucosia had seen better days (much better, judging by the number of clockwork sailors aboard), and now, faced with the new Canal and the steam ships, her captain was reduced to running whatever passengers and goods he could contract. So it was a good ship for two young women who didn’t want to attract very much attention on their return journey. That said, the Misses Teachout—young and unchaperoned sisters, returning home from the once-lost island of Bilal—were still scandalous.

  Corwyn’s wounded right leg meant they couldn’t hide in their cabins as much as she might have preferred; it needed to be walked. They expected chilly politeness from the elderly man with the military bearing and his granddaughter, and occasional looks from everyone else ranging from disapproving to downright lewd. But everyone looked more than occasionally: when they arrived on deck, when they entered the galley for meals, when they passed anyone not made of metal and gears and alchemy. It made them both uneasy, Corwyn perhaps less than Gwen, as to whether or not their cargo could be kept safe, if it was indeed said cargo drawing attention to them.

  Because it was at least partly the songs. The boy who lived behind the waterfall had warned Corwyn about them; he had given her a sticky gray wax to seal the seam of the box strapped to her right thigh, but the songs still seeped out and circled round her head. At first they were pleasant enough, but after two days of almost hearing music that clawed at her ears and attention, she got disgusted with the whole business. By the third day, she managed to ignore it.

  They walked in the mornings along the railings of the ship, looking out over the water or staring back at whomever stared at them. That part was entertaining, anyway. Today it was two sailors.

  “So much for our low profile,” Gwen said as they passed.

  “Nothing to do about it now,” Corwyn replied, looking out to sea. They were in the open ocean. Every so often Corwyn saw something in the water: a ray, perhaps, or a dolphin’s fin. The sea smelled briny and sharp, and it undulated from blue to gray to, in some places, green.

  “What in nine hells is that?” she asked, moving closer to the rail, squinting and wishing for the spyglass locked in the trunk in Gwen’s cabin.

  Gwen leaned out, as well. She had the better eyes, and so she was the one who shouted, “Captain! There’s a man in the water!”

  All hell broke loose: Gwen and Corwyn were shoved out of the way by the sailors—amusingly, the clockwork ones begged pardon—and by the Captain as the anchor was lowered, the ship was slowed, the man was hailed. Mr. Underwood, the elderly gentleman, joined with the crew, but Miss Tennyson, his granddaughter, joined Corwyn and Gwen near the back of the crowd. They watched as the crew tossed a life preserver out to the man.

  “Is he unconscious?” asked Miss Tennyson.

  “Likely he’s dead,” said Corwyn. Miss Tennyson gasped, then craned forward as one of the sailors dove overboard. Gwen elbowed Corwyn—who, unlike her sister, had a tendency to drop her well-practiced accent—but the young lady seemed too distracted to notice. The sailor reached the drowned man, dragged him back to the ship; the rest of the crew hauled them aboard. Water sluiced across the deck, soaking Corwyn’s hem.

  “He’s not breathing,” said the sailor who’d swum out, and so the ship’s doctor, who doubled as the cook, kneeled down and began to attend to him. The drowned man’s skin was pale, waterlogged; he wore torn stockings and a pair of high-waisted pants that were so ragged they might as well have been breeches. No shirt, no shoes. Corwyn had seen corpses whose flesh looked more lively.

  With an enormous heaving cough, the man’s back arched, his head turned, and he spewed a gout of water across the deck. Miss Tennyson flinched violently backward. The Captain started asking the drowned man questions, but the man was too busy choking up more water to answer. The cook got an arm around him and led him below, the Captain on their heels. The crew went back to their posts. Mr. Underwood collected Miss Tennyson.

  “I need to change,” Gwen grumbled. “These skirts are wet through.”

  Corwyn only half heard her; her gaze had wandered back to the ocean. “Where did he come from?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ain’t land nor wreckage nor any other bodies out there, Gwen. So where the hell did he come from?”

  “I don’t rightly care where he came from—he’s one more person to keep watch on.” She nudged Corwyn toward the stairs that led below. Her voice was dark as she added, quietly, “I am not fond of new wrinkles on a job.”

  * * *

  The sixth day out, they sat in Corwyn’s cabin, jammed together on her bunk with their skirts bunched up like blankets. Corwyn stretched her bad leg out so her foot rested on the shelf that served as a bedside table. They played a hand of Dilly-O, a long and complex card game that Corwyn suspected had begun as War before being refined by successive generations of kids coming through Mrs. Simcote’s until it went more like a story than a card game.

  “So if that box won’t completely contain the songs, how exactly is the museum planning to store it?” Gwen asked.

  “I don’t know,” Corwyn replied, studying her cards. Gwen could be making conversation or trying to distract her. “I’ve got the wax stuff for the seams, so I suppose they can make sure to keep it sealed with that. ‘Course, it ain’t entirely effective....”

  It also wasn’t infinite, and it wore out fast. But the amount of money the museum was paying was enough to keep the two of them for a while, without having to hunt down missing folk or toss drunks out of bars, so Corwyn refused to wonder if the museum directors really knew what it was they’d asked for. She put the Queen of Diamonds down, sideways, and drew a new card.

  Gwen snorted. “I don’t hear anything, myself,” she said, studying her hand.

  “Perception ain’t a prerequisite for something working,” Corwyn said. “You saw the readings on my resonance monitor. And remember that house in Cobbler’s Hill, where after that girl disappeared inside nobody could get in? Everybody could see the door, but nobody could find it, yeah?”

  Gwen blinked at Corwyn for a long moment, as she usually did when Corwyn talked like a teacher. Then she went back to her hand. “You think they’ll give us more work? The museum directors?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Corwyn said. “Finding things would surely be a change from finding people.”

  “One with generally more pleasant results.” Gwen put down the Jack of Hearts, crossways, on top of the queen.

  “Speak for yourself,” Corwyn said with a grin. “I’m still limping.” She looked at her cards, hoping she’d somehow missed a three or a King, then waved her hand at the pile in front o
f her. “Take them.”

  Gwen scooped the cards up. “Evil adulteress,” she said fondly to the queen.

  Corwyn flexed her thigh. It ached, but in the good way that meant it was healing. She didn’t want to hope for more work from the museum—this was only the sisters’ second job for them, and the first had been a bit of an accident—and yet. Her knack for finding didn’t extend to the not-and-ain’t-never-been living, but there were a fair number of ways to find things, and come to find out she was pretty good at those, too. Even the leg wound was, while not enjoyable, better than the smell of rot and crying families—which she encountered a sight more often than anybody would like.

  Something hit the shared wall between their cabins, jolting Corwyn a bit from where she was leaning on it. They glanced at each other, and then, in one motion, were up and out the door.

  In the corridor they found the drowned man—well, clearly not drowned, but Corwyn couldn’t remember the name he’d given—leaving Gwen’s cabin. Unsteadily.

  “Why, hello,” Gwen said, “I’d not heard you were up and about.” She stepped closer to him, slowly; he stepped away until his back hit the doorframe. “What, pray tell, were you doing in my cabin?”

  “I was... lost?” He had an accent—it surely must be an accent; he couldn’t really, as Corwyn fancied, be speaking through lungs full of water. He wore shoes and a shirt, now. His long, wetly black hair fell over his face; the veins showed blue under his skin like rivers on a map.

  “Indeed,” Gwen said. Then, with a sharp jerk of her head, “Out!”

  The drowned man brushed past Corwyn in his hurry to get away from her sister. He smelled salty, like brine and something unpleasant.

  Their trunk had been touched. Corwyn kneeled next to it to re-set the lock. “Did you know that messing with this would send someone flying across the room?”

  “Ioren did not tell me that, no,” Gwen said as she peered around the cabin. “Nothing’s missing.”