With this image, the Mecha-Ostrich included the following text, glued to the back of a page of the main narrative. "In a later stage of the same comic strip, it became increasingly horrific. Here the inventor, much changed, has added himself to a diabolical steampunk invention that is poised forever between ultimate d.a.m.nation and eternal good luck. The problem, of course, is that the marker itself, and thus the inventor, must reside in a perpetual form of limbo or purgatory. The official story behind this bleak storyline, as alluded to in an interview for Comics Journal in 2001? The artist admitted to "being stressed from a bad relationship and also depressed by the falling readership for the work." However, the ways in which XY, admittedly without success, attempted to integrate himself into his sad inventions during his stay in the mental hospital bear an uncanny resemblance to the incredibly black humor in "American Tinker Under the Influence of Absinthe."" - The Editors Shaken by the encounter with the thing on the hill, XY even considered, much to XX"s dismay, that they should write to the government, asking the Department of the Army to fund the project. XY had at this point taken on board advice about military needs from a former Buffalo Soldier who had gone AWOL and now lived in the commune with his Cherokee wife. Any action alerting the government to their experiment, XX told XY, would just bring unwanted attention down upon them, and the isolation they now felt in their severed relationship with the townsfolk would be compounded by potential scandal in the newspapers.
Ultimately, XY didn"t send the letter. But by then XX knew they were too far along to stop, writing in the journal, "We will either complete it or it will utterly ruin us, but it will be over soon." XY"s entries manifested the strain in other ways; for example, this pa.s.sage: "Those horrible brains that come to the fence and stare at me for long minutes while I am in the half-dressed state necessary to continue working on the machine during this incredible heat spell." (Less nonsensical considering later evidence about S&M, but still demonstrating stress.) Then, a breakthrough, but maddeningly only referenced in either journal with XY"s scrawled: "Success! It rode like a beauty, fast and furious!"
Then, some sort of breakdown, with another brief journal entry: "The legs are insufficient to the challenge. Might as well use toothpicks."
Then, what some might call another kind of breakdown, "The red eyes are there on the hill again," and nothing in XX"s journal.
Then, ominous silence in both journals for several days, except for something scrawled out in XX"s and a few doodles of ostrich legs in XY"s, along with a giant eye.
For XY, that eye would be his last entry-he would never, as far as I can tell, write down his thoughts again.
For the next day the end came, in the guise of a raid on the commune by the sheriff"s department and several mysterious "tall, strikingly pale men who wore suits, and carried rifles and hammers" (XX) and who seemed "unaffiliated with the local police." Paranoia? Unlikely, for this is the typical modus operandi by which S. carries out His plans.
Despite protests by XY and a spirited, if ragged, defense by members of the commune, the intruders managed to pull apart and then set fire to much of the yard around the Mecha-Ostrich, while XX tried to drag a distraught XY away.
The twisted remains of the Mecha-Ostrich were quickly loaded onto a cart drawn by draft horses and driven away at a gallop by a "grim-faced giant of a man in a cloak of all things, who was leering at XY and shouting at him in a language neither of us could identify."
In my mind"s eye I see the members of the commune who had not been led off to jail for any number of imaginary offenses, from being black to being gay to being artistic, looking on in distress as XX comforts XY, now bawling, as the smoldering Mecha-Ostrich is hauled away. Any time I see something large in a cart, it brings me back to that moment-it could be Stalin"s marble head, a buffalo, a heap of pancakes, whatever.
It was all over within an hour, and within two hours no one would have guessed that the Mecha-Ostrich had ever existed there, in the backyard of the house next to the commune.
As it had begun, so it concluded: with XY and XX. Lying in the backyard. Amongst the debris. "Unable to speak, to think, just staring mutely at the sky wondering what we had done to deserve this. We had worked so hard, for so little, for so long, and it hadn"t been enough to save us."
WHAT happened in the aftermath, you might ask? Precious little. Less aftermath and more "anti-climax." After all, that"s what S. prefers, as it is much less messy, less dramatic, and thus draws less attention. The event merited exactly one line in the local newspaper: "Yesterday policemen conducted a raid at-------------Street to apprehend known criminals."
I think often about who must have been somewhere near the back of the crowd, looking innocuous-a middle-age man with a wiry frame and hunched shoulders, perhaps? A weathered Lithuanian woman in a sun dress? I am sure S. was there, in some guise, and S"s role in all of this was to burn its red eye into XY"s brain and bring an end of sorts to him.
For XY was too delicate, in the end. They had taken too much from him before he had the necessary defenses. He soon went into a kind of catatonic yet gibbering state. XX hugged him to her and yet "I knew he was already gone, that it was all over, and, worse, that I"d known it might happen." Taken to the local sanitarium, the initial fees fronted by the mysterious "Prisoner Queen," XY slid into a state that could only be described as alternating between nonresponsive and manic.
"Practicality is the handmaiden of tragedy," XX wrote during this time, in such distress that I cannot make out most of her handwritten entries.
For she truly loved the fool, and his madness was her burden. XX tried her best to hold onto everything meaningful-to pretend that there would be a return to the old life. But their finances had revolved around the ostrich to such an extent that its absence as sign and symbol of redemption meant the time had come to sell the house and auction off all of their furniture and bits of metal, just to pay debts.
A year pa.s.sed in a slow agony of dashed hopes. XX received no response to any of her letters to the sheriff"s department about the incident, or to the government. The members of the commune had reverted to a polite but distant form of friendship that reflected a sense of blame. XY showed no signs of recovery-indeed, had only become more and more fixated on the shadowy figure on the hill "and its glowing red eye," which XX interpreted as an obsession with the Mecha-Ostrich. XY had gotten no better. XX: "He has little memory of how we met or what we meant to one another-nothing that could bring him back to me." Also, the Prisoner Queen had stopped paying for the treatments.
She couldn"t afford to stay, in any sense. "I was losing my own sanity." So she arranged to have XY sent back to his family in Boston, although not before one liaison: "I left hoping that, soon, a microscopic group of cells might cling to the inside of my body."
Accompanied by Ms. Nagalakshmi, who had become a close friend, she made her way into the West, living like a nomad up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Big Sur. She retired from science for art and gained renown, under a different name, for her sculpture and writings. (Let us call her XX-New.) Tagging along, once XX had become visible again in the public eye, was a child she was careful never to let in on her secrets. But she kept as much as she could of papers, pictures, etc., and pa.s.sed it all down-lost or forgotten until the death of my father a year ago (drinking/bar brawl), whereupon all of the material he found valueless yet had consigned to a safety deposit box became visible to me.
Where the ostrich went, I don"t know-there are hints that it was melted down for sc.r.a.p. It could have been disa.s.sembled into its separate parts and rea.s.sembled as a Model T or a mortar sh.e.l.l lobbed at the Germans or turned up in a submarine or a skysc.r.a.per"s girders in Chicago, or in a common bullet that lodged in the brains of two hillbillies simultaneously during an altercation I witnessed near the train tracks just a week ago. It"s impossible to tell. Maybe it"s lying next to the broken, almost oxidized remains of the mecha-elephant in a pit or quarry, and they tell each other the same decaying stories day after day.
But when I say I am the Mecha-Ostrich, I mean that I am the Mecha-Ostrich. Having recovered also now the plans XX and XY left behind, and using money from a series of re-appropriations at various banks, it now exists, as my forebears might have imagined it, if in more diminutive, single-person form. It, the reality, not the many distortions, the terrible vitiations and the half-truths.
Soon, your dead pixel lives will never be the same. Soon, you will know the power and the glory of the Mecha-Ostrich.
How magnificent it is!
How it mocks S!
How it shines in the New Jersey sun!
How I inhabit it!3 ____________________.
1 From noted scholar Michael Ellsworth comes this additional information: "The Sanskrit word translated as "mechanical doll" is "yantra-putrika," more literally translated as "(little) machine girl"-"yantra" refers to any kind of device. The "Middle Country" is Madhyadesa, corresponding to a region right around Uttar Pradesh in India in the period in question. There is a mechanical girl in the Mechanic and Artist episode of the Punyavantajataka, a Buddhist text (likely) written in Pali, translated into Sanskritized Prakrit, "proper" Sanskrit, Old Gujarati, Tocharian, Tibetan, and Chinese. The version I originally came across was in Tocharian, likely written near Kucha in the Tarim Basin, along the Northern Silk Route around the 6th8th c. CE. There are annotations from a later period referring to something odd that I can only translate as either "s" or "snake" with reference to the destruction of a mechanical girl acquired by an Indian trader from the Greeks-a "raid by snakes," which makes little sense even as some kind of odd joke." The Editors
2 Although the text included by the Mecha-Ostrich from "The Railway War" is indeed correct, this particular translation comes from modern-day science fiction author Brian Stableford (with whose work the Mecha-Ostrich clearly is familiar-see the excerpt labeled Fig. 5 in the appendix), (cont. p.371) some question as to whether the Mecha-Ostrich had direct knowledge of this influence or indirect knowledge; for example, was XY read portions translated in impromptu fashion by the "two brains," Sh.e.l.ley and Mary? The influence on XY of these two at times seems uncanny. - The Editors
3 After several inquiries, we discovered that the return address on the Mecha-Ostrich"s package was for an apartment complex with the whimsical name of "Roaring Oak Springs," in a New Jersey town that will remain nameless. The specific apartment had been vacant for over two years before the arrival of the current occupants, an unhelpful pair of Brookdale Community College students who appear to have had nothing to do with the sending of the package. Despite the threats of posters and further action in the above text, nothing further has been heard from "the Mecha-Ostrich, Steampunk Heretic." The Editors
FIG 2. I have transcribed these sections of the July 1976 mimeographed Bulletin of New Hampshire Folklore & Miscellany, which itself exists only in people"s attics, there being no microfiche to rely upon, nor scanned-in electronic versions. These excerpts and fragments provide potent evidence of the mechanical elephant disaster that helped fuel XY"s Mecha-Ostrich research. It also provides evidence of the lengths to which the gutter press of the day would go to smear tinkers and other free-thinkers. Even the extent to which they allow Matthew Alcott Cheney to ramble on in his insanity should give any reasonable person the ammunition to doubt objectivity, and underscore the possibility of intervention by S. That these ramblings resemble those of XY in the mental hospital is beside the point.
Confessions and Complaints of a True Man, as Related by Himself by Matthew Alcott Cheney (18231893) EDITOR"S NOTE: This ma.n.u.script was found in a tin box in a cellar hole in central New Hampshire in 1975. Few pages had survived the onslaught of time and weather, and those pages that did survive are brittle, stained, and worn. The handwriting is not always decipherable and the ink is often faded. We have reconstructed the ma.n.u.script here to the best of our ability, but this should not be considered a definitive transcription. We have also included further evidence from print publications of the period for your pleasure and instruction.
from The New Hampshire Gazette, 7 July 1872: One of the most eminent men of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts, Mr. James Raymond, was so distraught at the death of his elephant, Columbus, which received injuries from which he died, by the breaking of a bridge in South Adams, that Mr. Raymond commissioned the Boston engineer Wallace Tillinghast, Esq., to build for him a Mechanical Elephant that would be impervious to destruction. The creature, Pizarro, was immediately proclaimed a true Wonder of our epoch, one of the greatest MARVELS ever to result from the REASON of MAN.
from the Manchester (N.H.) Union Democrat, 6 March 1873: A great tragedy occurred in this city, on the morning of the 4th instant. The particulars, as we understand them, are substantially as follows: The Great Mechanical Wonder known to all the world as the Elephant Pizarro suffered a prodigious seizure of its metal viscera, releasing much steam and smoke into the air, until which time the stout pins fastening its armor around the immense skeleton shot from their place like b.a.l.l.s from a musket, injuring at least three persons in the crowd that had gathered to gawk at the Wonder. This was not the greatest of the tragedies, however, for the tumult of its intestines continued, and the pressure in the great creature"s abdomen was too much to be contained by its structure. Plates of white-hot metal burst into the crowd, maiming many a mother and child who, innocent, had come to see what Progress had wrought. The Mechanical Wonder wobbled and tottered and finally fell, and the rumble of the Earth was greater than that of ten cannons or the most terrifying thunder. Three deaths have been confirmed and more are expected, including the death of Miss Lucy Wellington Bishop of Lowell Street, a child of four years, who was crushed in the giant"s fall.
from The Confessions and Complaints of a True Man, As Related By Himself, by Mr. Cheney, date unknown, handwriting often indecipherable: Progress! A Lie of the Mind which is buried at the City where it made its ruinous endeavors.
The Caravan arrives and you inquire about the Scream, the Prisoned Demonian who rides atop the mechanical monstrosity itself, the Illusionist of Freedom who shepherds naught but suffering and death. Could but one true person stop amidst the carnage so much greater than ordinary pain and hardship-stop to raise a b.l.o.o.d.y shard, testament to being the Last True Man Alive-he, possessed suddenly of the Clarity of Extraordinary Strength that is the birthright of He Who Knows Truthfulness-lifts the slab of Human Hubris and, from under the stifling lump, finds the Form that excess of Beauty makes ruinous-and the reflection of all Man"s Misdeeds lies there, crushed and shattered, destroyed-the Face of Innocence, THE CHILD THAT IS NO MORE.
Such is our allegory. Such is the Tale of the Time in which we live. But to call what we have Living is to know not the meaning of that word.
It is glaring to the Innocent Eye, the Light of our long-unlived Life, and in our era of Manufactured Bliss, when the ma.s.s of men are quiescent, their greatest Efforts given to the creating of Oblivion for themselves and others-in the world of these seers, it becomes the Blind Person to increase what is known by the sighted, or all Beauty and all Knowledge will die under the weight of an Elephant of our own making.
It is weak, the Prisoned Limb; it is faint, the Breath long pent. But oh! The liquid eye, the pring of elastic strength, the reformed blush of Truth-I hold still to my Faith in Possibility, because in the heart of man lies the possibility of Rescue. Our time on this Earth is long, and we are not the only Beings upon it, though you would not know this to be the Truth were you to read the statements of the ilk of Tillinghasts. Nature"s Music still thrums, however quietly, in our heartchords.
The Rescue Person will rise out of the heart of an Angel, if the individual has accepted the Work. The Scholars of Life especially are called, a certain self-culture, a complete development of character within an individual personality. Art, I especially believe, will speak these Efforts and paint Nature"s Notes. The person [missing two lines of text] this intended, that is presumed, [missing words] has indifference completely is not rejoicing, it has not owned excessively this. With private ease and compatibility of the achievement, the World attains worldly good, but the World as World does not need worldly good, for it has that inherent, but instead needs a Spiritual Good unknown to charlatans, spiritualists, illusionists, and mechanical engineers. As for the business of self-culture, there is no compromise which can achieve the desired harmony. Compromise is anathema to the Project. One either must do Truthful, Spiritual action, with full clarity of the Goal, or the Project is given up completely, and the Fate of a Child crushed beneath a Mechanical Marvel will be the Fate of us all, and one richly deserved.
FIG. 4. Artist Sh.e.l.ley Vaughn ("Sh.e.l.ley Half-Brain") account from her journal, acquired at great cost and with much delicacy, that includes her impressions of XX and XY. It sheds no further light on her true ident.i.ty, despite giving more of a sense, no matter how unfair, of XY and of the commune. It also provides further doc.u.mentation of the prevailing prejudice against and suppression of any vision of the future that might displease S., no matter how decorative rather than functional.
27 July 18--, Monday As you will no doubt have noticed, due to the gobbets of ink uncharacteristically spattering too many of your preceding pages, Dear Diary, not to mention the ever-increasingly (and, I might add, uncommonly) illegible nature of the text scrawled thereupon, I have spent much of the interminable week-end working our Brain into a fizz with antic.i.p.ation of Eudamien Fontenrose"s annual review of the Delaware Art Season in Blackwood"s Magazine. It is to be expected, though many a Creator of Art would deny their subscription to this truism, that an object intended for public consumption inspires in its creator a certain unquantifiable desire to be accepted; acknowledged as avant-garde; or, at least, worthy of inspiring future generations to feel inclined to manufacture further works in a similar vein.
In this respect, I must admit, I had fancied our master-works of papier-mache would be lauded by Fontenrose as the Next Big Things. (And, I implore you, explain to me how could they not? We selected only the finest strips of broadsheet-paper, each boasting the ramblings of our greatest Literary minds, to construct the eyes, ears, faces and torsos of our three-headed cats, our long-necked peac.o.c.ks with their trumpet-feather tails, our exoskeletal arachnid gigantes; we fortified their fragile upper parts to iron strength with lashings of the most resilient horse-powder glue; then attached these fabrications to steam-driven lower halves, often with pick-axes or lawn-mowing blades or hedge-clippers for claws or paws, so that our steel-and-papier menagerie could simultaneously adorn and maintain the garden, proving, as all true Art should inevitably prove, to be both useful and beautiful.) Truth be told, such was my certainty in the commendation of our modest exhibit, and such my excitement to read Fontenrose"s acclamations, that the tension threatened to unhinge me; such was my agitation that I was coerced, as early as yesterday noon, into pa.s.sing our Brain entirely into Mary"s care, either until I had managed a few hours" unbroken rest or until my delirium deranged me completely-the former of these options, by the by, to both mine and Mary"s relief, occurred first and foremost. Thus, freshly wakened this morning, I paced, with no small amount of irritation, up and down the sycamore-lined drive which connects our commune with the hubbub of plebeian American life as I awaited the arrival of the (ever-tardy) news-paper delivery-man.
The handsome Mr. --------- , our neighbor these past few years, wav"d at me from the landing of his ostentatious house. (You"ll remember I had requested his opinion, not too long past, on the most efficient means of powering a herd of mechanical rabbits and we reciprocated in helping him with his mechanical catfish; ever since, he has taken to greeting me as though we were friends, and, if I am honest, I would say he has formed an attachment to me; for whereas his wife is forever imprisoned by the whalebone stays of her corset, both Mary and I have forgone the discomfort of ours in favor of the loose cottons and diaphanous tulles that are much more suited to this country"s unpleasantly warm climate. In short, I fear he may fancy me; thus I have vowed to avoid him as much as humanly possible, if nothing else but for decorum"s sake.) Luckily, the p.u.b.escent, spotty-faced Mercury charged with winging news of our artistic success chose, at that instant, to land, as it were, on our doorstep; in so doing deferring any possibility of my returning Mr. ----------"s dubious greetings.
Would that the bearer of Blackwood"s Magazine had been waylaid on his journey, thereby preserving me-for a little while longer-from suffering the grotesque effects of reading Fontenrose"s vulgar review.
I will be brief, for fear of clouding our Brain with too much that is melancholy before it is once again Mary"s turn to wield it independently. Without putting too fine a point on it, our sculptures were pulled to the gutters by the weight of the reviewer"s clumsy pen; dubbed as novelties of conception where any connoisseur of Mechanical Art would rightly see them as the catalysts of a modern epoch of the craft. (Reluctant as I am to further his acquaintance, Mr.--------next door, is a fine example of just such a connoisseur, as he has, for more years than I can count, kept a tarpaulin-shielded behemoth in his back-yard which will, no doubt, prove to be a sculpture of immeasurable worth upon its unveiling.) At any rate, the execution of our pieces, to my mind flawless, was, in Fontenrose"s crossed-eyes, perceived as hurried and, in one instance, crude-O! I cannot bear to continue in this vein. How the standards by which Artistic merits are judged have fallen! If we must become bed-fellows with such troglodytes as this reviewer in order to achieve even a modic.u.m of recognition, then sculptors will henceforward have to build not up to the heavens, but down to the level of Neanderthal public opinion, if our creations are to be at all noticed in the broadsheets.
Art criticism has, this season, sunk to such abysmal depths that I am of a mind to turn my hand to challenging the likes of Fontenrose on his own preferred field of battle, namely, the printed page. After long hours studying the blatherings and idiocy of academical writings while laying the foundations of our innovative (crude!!) statues, I have become more than adept at counterfeiting the inanities inherent therein- Indeed, until anon, Dear Diary; I intend to unleash the seeds of a Cultural plague on Fontenrose"s publishing House, which, G.o.d willing, will bear fruit before his vitriolic p.r.o.nouncements dissuade our fine Delaware artists from exhibiting next season; or worse, encourage them to adopt the habits of mediocrity he champions.
FIG. 5 - Typical propaganda in fictional form making the production of steam technology synonymous with the necrotic arts-or further evidence, coming from an acclaimed translator of weird and uncanny texts, that the apparitions and strange weather converging on the house of XX and XY meant that the presence of S. crossed more boundaries than I might have guessed? Here, in this excerpt of a tale taken from The Innsmouth Heritage & Other Tales (1992), Edison has set up a strange invention to connect with the voices of the dead. But might they be something else entirely?
Excerpt from "The t.i.tan Unwrecked" by Brian Stableford The machine crackled and hummed. The pipes emitted eerie sounds, reminiscent of harp strings stirred by a wayward wind-but then the voices began to come through.
They were voices-no one in the saloon could have any doubt about that-but it was quite impossible to distinguish what any one of them might be saying. There were thousands, perhaps millions, all attempting to speak at the same time, in every living language and at least as many that were no longer extant.
None of the voices was shouting, at first; they were all speaking in a conversational tone, as if they did not realize how much compet.i.tion there was to be heard. As the minutes went by, however, this intelligence seemed to filter back to wherever the dead were lodged. The voices were raised a little-and then more than a little. Fortunately, the volume of their clamor was limited by the power of the amplifiers that Mr. Edison had fitted to his machine, and he immediately reached out to turn the k.n.o.b that would quiet the chorus-with the result that the voices of the dead became a mere murmurous blur, denied all insistency as well as all coherency.
Edison"s own voice was clearly audible over the muted hubbub when he turned to his audience to say: "If you will be patient, gentlemen, I am certain that our friends on the Other Side will begin to sort themselves out, and make arrangements to address us by turns, in order that each of them might make himself heard. It is just a matter...?"
He was interrupted then, by an unexpected event.
Allan Quatermain, who happened to be looking out of one of the portholes, observed four bolts of lightning descend simultaneously from widely disparate parts of the sky, converging upon the funnels of the t.i.tan. All four struck at the same instant, each one picking out a funnel with unerring accuracy. . . . The lightning surged through the hull, possessing every fiber of the vessel"s being.
The t.i.tan"s wiring burnt out within a fraction of a second and Mr. Edison"s machine collapsed in a heap of slag, although it left the man himself miraculously untouched, perched upon his stool. So diffuse was the shock, in fact, that the men standing in the saloon, their womenfolk in their cabins, and even the ma.s.ses huddled in steerage felt nothing more than a tingling in their nerves, more stimulant than injury.
Allan Quatermain as depicted by Thure de Thulstrup.
n.o.body aboard the t.i.tan died as a direct result of the multiple lightning strikes, but the flood of electrical energy was by no means inconsequential. Communication between the t.i.tan and the world of the dead was cut off almost instantly-but almost instantly was still a measurable time, and the interval was enough to permit a considerable effect.
Exactly what that effect was, no one aboard the t.i.tan could accurately discern, and the only man aboard with wit enough even to form a hypothesis was Jean Tenebre, who had briefly borrowed the ident.i.ty of the elephant-hunter Allan Quatermain.
If the real Quatermain had made any posthumous protest, his voice went unheard.
What the Chevalier Tenebre hypothesized was that by far the greater portion of the power of the multiple lightning strike, which had so conspicuously failed to blast the t.i.tan to smithereens or strike dead its crew and pa.s.sengers, had actually pa.s.sed through the ship"s telegraph system and Mr. Edison"s machine into the realm of the dead, where it had wreaked havoc.
What the realm of the dead might be, or where it might be located, the chevalier had no idea-but he supposed that its fabric must be delicate and that the souls of the dead must be electrical phenomena of a far gentler kind than the lightning of Atlantic storms.
Thomas Edison had presumably been correct to dispute William Randolph Hearst"s claim that Edison"s machine might only enable the t.i.tan"s pa.s.sengers to hear the screams of the d.a.m.ned in h.e.l.l-but if the souls of dead humankind had not been in h.e.l.l when Edison closed his master-switch, they obtained a taste of it now.
And they screamed.
They screamed inaudibly, for the most part, because the pipes of Edison"s machines had melted and their connections had been dissolved-but there was one exception to this rule.
The brothers Tenebre and Count Lugard"s party were not the only individuals on board the t.i.tan who might have been cla.s.sified as "undead." The fragment of the creature that had washed up on the beach at Nettlestone Point, having earlier been found by a fishing-vessel off Madeira and lost again from the Dunwich, also had an exotic kind of life left in it. Like many supposedly primitive invertebrates, the part was capable of reproducing the whole, under the right existential conditions and with the appropriate energy intake.
When this seemingly dead creature screamed, its scream had only to wait for a few microseconds before it was translated back from the fragile realm of the dead into the robust land of the living.
It was a strange scream, more sibilant than strident, and it was a strangely powerful scream.
As Edison"s machine had briefly demonstrated-confounding all the skeptics who had refused for centuries to believe in spiritualists and necromancers, ghostly visitations and revelatory dreams-the boundary between the human and astral planes was not unbreachable. When the unnamable creature, whose close kin had died by lightning in the Mitumba mountains, was resurrected by lightning, its scream tore a breach in that boundary, opening a way between the worlds-and through that breach, the newly agonized souls of the human dead poured in an unimaginable and irresistible cataract.
FIG. 6 This fragment of a letter from Mary Lewis writing to Eudamien Fontenrose contains further, independent evidence of S."s involvement in the events at the house. Unless, of course, Lewis were in league with S., and thus this evidence is presented to throw me off the scent of some still greater mystery. It also provides more information on the "two brains" references. Most importantly, this fragment is the only existing eyewitness account of the trial-run of the Mecha-Ostrich before its tragic destruction.
13th August 18- Eudamien, Would that I could still write "My dearest," but both you and I know full well what you have done to lose my regard. What I told you, Eudamien, was meant in strictest confidence. My artist"s fears and insecurities were exposed to you in good faith, and in good friendship. My greatest distress is reserved for my poor Sh.e.l.ley, who has contributed in no manner to this situation, and yet has suffered almost as greatly as I; firstly in her avid antic.i.p.ation of your review of our Art, and then in her terrible despair upon reading the mendacities your execrable scribbling have heaped upon our life"s oeuvre. Your terrible mocking of our joint desire to create works that are both beautiful and practical was not merely petty, but also inexcusably cruel.
I can only be grateful that you did not reveal our secret to the entire world. Here in Delaware, in our sanctum sanctorum, we are at home. We are amongst friends-the family we have chosen for ourselves. We are not accustomed to being subjected to the ridicule and opprobrium we would otherwise garner should our malady be discovered by the broader community. We are but victims of a dreadful accident, not entirely of our causing, and the only saving grace, which allows us to continue to exist, is the Cerebral Exchange Compressor, built by my father before his untimely death. In sharing a Brain, one day each, and being able to maintain our own memories and privacy from each other, we preserve each of us a modic.u.m of a normal life. You do not know how difficult it is to communicate with one"s best friend and dearest soul, only via the medium of letters and notes left for one another; letters and notes and the pieces of clockwork mechanic-erie which we create and leave each for the other to incorporate into our Art. You cannot conceive, Eudamien, what you have done-you have impugned not only our Art, but our fundamental means of communication.
Since your ill-considered criticism, Eudamien, things in our little corner of Delaware have not been quite right. I know you truly believe that the world is ruled and governed by opinion, but you seem unaware or uncaring of the consequences of airing yours.
Our neighbors have become a source of constant concern to me. Sh.e.l.ley does not seem to share my worry, although her main discomfort of late falls at the feet of Mr. --, who has displayed a rather prurient interest in her. I, on the other hand, may simply see more clearly because of the unconventional hours I am accustomed to keeping. It has been my custom, these past years at the colony, to take an evening stroll, but in recent weeks I have been troubled by a sensation of being...observed; watched by elements unseen and nefarious. As you are well aware, there can be mists around these parts, the river being not so very far away from our settlement. I am a creature of habit and prefer to walk the boundary line between the colony and the land of Mr. and Mrs. --, but lately...there have been strangers- Or, rather, things that at once appear human and, at the same time, somehow incorrect-they fade from view faster than any mortal should; they move too quickly to be quite... right. I know PQ has acted in the position of guardian for our colony for some time now, but in these latter days I begin to fear that protection may be more dangerous than any threat offered by the outside world.
Why, three nights ago I walked along the hedgerow separating our two lands -there was a most tremendous clanking sound, something I have never a.s.sociated with the steam art Sh.e.l.ley and I have made our joint life"s work; a most terrible grinding like something gnashing its teeth. I froze and waited-for agonizing minutes, it seemed, but good sense tells me it was not more than a few seconds. This thing loomed at me out of the mist and over the hedge, a dreadful specter a full thirty feet in the air, making an awful racket as if to devour me and anything else in its path. Eudamien, I ran...(and we two have known each other long enough for you to recall I do not indulge willingly in such physical exertion).
I threw a single glance over my shoulder as I fled and recognized the thing for what it was-a gigantic metal bird, an ostrich to be precise, black-winged with metallic limbs and steam puffing from its nether parts like a veritable rent torn in the fabric of h.e.l.l itself. The contraption was a hideous symphony in wire and steel, hardwood and aluminium. I did not slow my flight, but merely returned to our little cottage shaking like a leaf. I fear Sh.e.l.ley did not receive too excellent a start to her shift, but rather wondered why she felt so nervous and frail upon taking solitary possession of our Brain. Perhaps I should have left her a note, but my hands shook so violently that I couldn"t muster the energy to hold the pen. Even now, knowing what it was, that it is nothing truly worse than anything Sh.e.l.ley and I have created over the years, I can no longer bring myself to go out once afternoon borders on its sister, the night.
I fear, I fear, I fear.
[fragment ends here].
After a while I detected a smell of smoke, which it seemed to me must be a sign of civilization. I imagined perhaps a little woodcutter"s hut, as in an old-fashioned fairy-tale-though the noise of clanking & clattering that grew around me as I approached was not such as I could imagine any woodcutter making-and what I found was not old-fashioned at all, but rather the beady red eye of the Future, glaring at me-but I get ahead of myself.
The woods parted. There was a green & rolling hill. There was a house, & around it a yard with a white fence. The noise had ceased-all was quiet & still. Thinking perhaps to beg for food I looked for a gate.
It was a tall fence-rather taller than I. Over the top of it poked a long stem of metal, which at first I took to be a chimney, or stovepipe. Only slowly did the peculiarity of its shape strike me-the slight spinal curve of the shaft, & that sideways sharpness that can only be described, albeit redundantly, as beak-like, & those two apertures, from which steam puffed gently, which one has little choice but to call nostrils, & then-as I pulled myself up to peer over the fence-the red eye that opened!
The lid of that eye was steel, and it opened with a sound like the loading of a revolver. The eye revealed beneath was red as a burning coal. Gentle nostril-puffs of steam became fierce jets. The whole flat metal head lurched, the long shaft of the neck below creaked & clanked, snapped & jerked. I fell.
On my hands & knees I pressed my eye to a crack in the fence, in time to see the thing turn tail and run-& what a magnificent tail!-a fan, a knot, not of feathers but of solid gleaming bra.s.s, like the shield of a Spartan!-& rising & falling two wings of good strong battleship steel!-& what legs! Silver and mahogany, rather like two Winchester rifles!-& the telescoping of its neck-& oh, the pistons on its back, up & down & in & out the pistons! Ostrich! Ostrich! -for such a bird it was, yet also- Understand: I do not speak metaphorically. I shall never speak metaphorically again. When I say that bird was made of bra.s.s and battleship steel, I mean precisely that. If I say gears I mean gears, & if I say rivets, then rivets, d.a.m.n it.
Kicking high its legs & swaying mightily from side to side & pouring steam from each of its many vents it began to run, around & around the edges of that little yard. At each step its feet sank in the earth, for there had been rain overnight, & it cannot have weighed less than a grand piano-yet it was indefatigable. Always it seemed it might topple-always it righted itself. The noise was deafening & the heat & steam like that of an African jungle. The wings, I swiftly intuited, worked to fan steam from its delicate internal workings, which might otherwise rust-for like its primitive savannah forbear, that splendid machine was flightless.
If the word opium enters your head it reflects poorly on your lack of charity & imagination. Besides it has been devilishly difficult to acquire opium out here in the sticks, as no doubt you knew it would be, d.a.m.n you.
A vision came to me: one day the streets of New York will throng with these creatures, as men ride to work & women to their appointments on mechanical-ostrichback. & then a further vision: one day the Great Powers of Europe will settle their conflicts with ostrich-mounted riflemen, faster than any cavalry-imagine what mischief the Kaiser might do with a thousand head of mecha-ostrich! & then- A man stood watching in the window of the house, as around & around his creation ran. I did not, I could not, approach him-not because I was afraid but because I was not worthy-one might as well interrupt G.o.d at work in his Garden.
Next to this triumph of Engineering, how trivial are the accomplishments of Art! Down all the weary centuries since first Homer sang, what have we artists created to compare-to this splendor, this terror! Nothing.
The ostrich lurched to a halt, not three feet from my hiding place. Its wings drooped & its pistons ceased. With one last great grinding of gears it lowered its head & drove it into the earth, as if to command, by example: SILENCE. & there it remained, dear children.
THE FLYING MACHINE OF THE FUTURE WILL PROBABLY BE BASED UPON THE STRUCTURE OF A FLYING BIRD, THE LOUVRES IN THE WINGS CORRESPONDING TO THE ACTION OF THE BIRD"S FEATHERS.
Artemisia Absinthe "ARTEMISIA"S ABSINTHE": From the time Anyushka Rutkauska was a young girl, chemistry was all she could think of. While it was difficult for girls to pursue such professions in Poland in those days, it was not impossible, and Anyushka was finishing up her PhD at the University of Warsaw when rumors of the war began bubbling out of lecture halls and cafes like a laboratory concoction gone awry. Perhaps she was prescient, or maybe just restless, but she packed her bags and took off for Paris the day she pa.s.sed her oral exams. At the time she certainly regretted the decision, as her freshly minted diploma did not translate into French easily, or truth be told, at all. That is how Anyushka found herself tending bar at the Taverne Coeur Noir in the 6th Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. Despite what she told the proprietor, she had no experience with tending bar, but for a chemist, how difficult could it be? Certainly easier than p.r.o.nouncing "Anyushka" in French-patrons simply dubbed her "Artemisia" after the potent wormwood-tinged c.o.c.ktails that were the ruin of many a Coeur Noir customer. Indeed, it became a badly kept secret that Artemisia"s c.o.c.ktails were the best in the City of Lights, and artists, courtesans, poets, academics, and diplomats began to pour into the cramped little bar to sample her potent concoctions. The c.o.c.ktails proved to be great equalizers, rendering the rogue as well as the statesman a blissful yet blithering mess by the end of the evening. Inevitably, a bombast of German soldiers blundered in, rude and imperious, and with a hard, cold glitter in her heavily kohl-rimmed eyes, Anyushka cooked up something very, very special for the lot of them. No sudden deaths, no, nothing as obvious as that. Permanent impotence, total hair loss, an unshakeable sense of dread, irretrievable madness, the firm conviction that one was really a woman-these were the subtle gifts Anyushka"s c.o.c.ktails imparted to the German occupiers. Where no finger could be pointed, no credit could be given, either. Nonetheless, Artemisia was awarded a Medal of Honor at the end of the war, enjoying heroine status, and best of all, an appointment to the chemistry department at the Sorbonne. Art & text by Ramona Szczerba.
Which is Mightier, the pen or the parasol?