Peculiar Tales (3 page)

DEUX EX MACHINA

1. Then

L
ynn, Massachusetts was an ideal location for the birth of the Physical Savior, the New Motive Power, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man. There had always been a toleration of unusual religious beliefs peculiar to New England and the town had long been a hotbed of Spiritualism, social reformers and utopianists. Small wonder, then, that John Murray Spear, a little-known Unitarian minister and newly converted Spiritualist, found himself attracted to the bustling little town, whose busy shoe factories seemed to epitomize the success of the Industrial Revolution, a herald of the new age of the Machine.

One momentous night, after months of making a tenuous living through mediumship (even though he advertised direct communication with such popular spirits as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Benjamin Franklin), Spear was conducting what he thought was to be yet one more ill-paying seance. A short, broad man with the long, curling hair of the dreamer or philosopher, and a wide, open, not very intelligent face, Spear had never been a terribly convincing medium. Showmanship was certainly not in his blood—not as it had so copiously flowed in the veins of the fabulously successful Fox Sisters—possibly because he took his calling too seriously and possibly because the messages he delivered from the Other Side were both banal and boring. But that night in 1853 something came to him that transformed not only his life and the life of everyone in Lynn, but the human population of the earth itself.

Instead of the words of Emmanuel Swedenborg coming from Spear’s lips in a nasal Yankee drawl that did not seem much like what most people expected from the great Swedish philosopher, Spear began writing. As he stared blankly ahead, his eyes half-rolled into their sockets, his hand flew over sheets of paper like a bird frantically pecking out worms. Words, hundreds of words, flowed onto the paper in a tidy, workmanlike penmanship that most witnesses agreed was most unlike Spears’ usual illegible scrawl.

It was, it turned out, a message from the great American patriot and scientist, Benjamin Franklin. John Murray Spear, Franklin declared, had been selected as the earthly representative of the Band of Electricizers—an ethereal academy of departed scientists who were dedicated to raising the status of the human race through the application of technology.

Franklin explained that his organization was composed of several sub-committees with such names as the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers and so forth, each of whom was to be assigned an earthly representative. The Electricizers were the most important, however, and Spear, to his astonishment, had been made its official liaison with Earth.

No one had ever heard anything like this, not even from the Fox Sisters or Andrew Jackson Davis, and word began to get around that maybe this fellow was really onto something.

The sole interest of the Electricizers, Spear said, was the promotion of “man-culture and integral reform with a view to the ultimate establishment of a divine social state on earth.” They had some pretty definite plans on just how this was to be carried out, too. There would be great cities built, of course, laid out in a sensible, circular plan just as the Utopianists had been urging all along. And people would travel between these cities in electrically powered vehicles and flying machines. And they would no longer curl the hair on the backs of their heads because this interfered with the proper functioning of the brain.

But before any of this could happen, Spear declared—or Franklin declared through him, as the case may have been—the New Messiah had to be constructed.

By this time, the Reverend Spear had accumulated a sizable following of devoted acolytes or apostles. Among these were Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson of Lynn, dedicated Spiritualists, devout Unitarians and rabid reformers the both of them; and the Reverend J.C. Hewitt, editor of the
New Age
, and Alonzo Newton, editor of the
New England Spiritualist
; and a mysterious woman who would only allow herself to be called “the Mary of the New Dispensation.” No one knew what her real name was, though everyone doubted it was actually Mary.

The Hutchinsons donated a shed that was located near their tidy little hilltop cottage—High Rock by name—and Spear immediately launched into his last, great work.

It took nine months (by accident or intent is not known) to build the New Messiah. It might have taken less time but for the necessity of Spear to enter into a trance in order to receive and transmit the next step in the Electricizer’s plans. No one, not even Spear—or so he claimed—had any idea about what the finished machine would look like, how it would operate or even exactly what it was meant to do.

Fortunately, Lynn, being the New England industrial town that it was, was not lacking in skilled machinists and high-quality materials. Fortunate in that even though neither Spear nor his cohorts had any idea what the parts were, the specifications had high tolerances and needed to be constructed with extreme care and precision. Copper, zinc, steel and brass all went into the machine, and so did ebony and ivory and glass. And as each part was completed and delivered it was added to the ever-growing device that loomed, ominous, oily and glittering, in the parlor of High Rock.

All of this was enormously expensive, of course—far beyond even the combined means of a pair of spiritualist newspaper editors, a second-rate medium and their families. But there always seemed to be money available when they needed it. As word spread through the community, donations began to trickle in. Then from across the state, then from all of New England, and eventually from everyone in the Union who had heard of Spear and believed in what he was doing.

And eventually, nine months to the day from the beginning of the great project, the New Motive Power stood complete. There’s no record, sadly enough, of what went through Reverend Spears’ mind as he contemplated the machine, nor that of any of his colleagues. We can only imagine what they thought as they stood in a circle around the table in the center of the lamp-lit parlor. For on the table was the Engine. From its middle rose two polished brass columns, connected at the top by a horizontal steel shaft. In the middle of this and at right angles was another steel rod. At its ends were a pair of hollow steel spheres, each containing a powerful magnet. Beneath the columns and the spheres was a complex apparatus, an inexplicable mass of wires, magnets, coils, rods, spheres, gears, pinions, ratchets, bars, asbestos sheets, rubber tubes and glass jars filled with bubbling liquids. Sandwiching all of this were broad plates of zinc and copper. From the plates extended finger-like conductors that Spear (or Franklin) intended to draw electrical current directly from the atmosphere. Somewhere below the table spun a large flywheel as well as a pair of bellows that inhaled and exhaled slowly and with considerable dignity.

After inspecting the Machine and making certain that all was as had been dictated, Spear climbed into a kind of metallic cage, not unlike those that used to hang at the city limits of medieval villages, containing the rotting corpses of the lawless and disobedient. This was, of course, a little higher-class than those instruments of torture, being meticulously and beautifully constructed of contrasting metal strips, crystal and gemstones. As the cage drew energy from the great Machine, Spear fell into a deep trance and a thin, undulating stream of light, a ghostly, electrical umbilicus, grew between his cage and the whirling gears of the New Motive Power.

Another nine months passed with little news for the faithful from High Rock cottage. But when the news came—in banner headlines in the
New Age
and
New England Spiritualist
—it was sensational. The New Mary, they reported, had appeared before the New Messiah as directed by the Electricizers for the final stage of their experiment. She was in the final stages of pregnancy.

Spears gave his place in the metal cage to the woman; switches were thrown, clutches engaged and the great Machine began to stir.

The only witnesses were Spears and his disciples and they could only speak of light and terrible noises, but when darkness and quiet returned to the Hutchinson’ parlor the New Mary was no longer pregnant.

From that moment on, the New Mary tended the Machine as though it were her own child. She tended it, cared for it and nursed it—some said with the milk from her own breasts. Whether this was true or not, no on can deny that the New Motive Power had become transformed, that in some indefinable way had become animate. For Spears it was unequivocal. “The Thing moves!” he declared. “The time of deliverance has come at last, and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward—a mighty noble and a Godlike career! It is the coming of the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah!”

And he was right.

2. Now

I
’m not normally a very religious man. I mean, I rotate the Holy Rheostat 271 degrees every day at 9:15, 12:21 and 10:32 (Eastern Holy Time) exactly and say the Electronomicon and speak the Words of the Great Spear pretty faithfully and I wear my Magnet of Spiritual Revelation right where I’m supposed to.
Everyone
does those things, of course. What I mean to say is that I don’t go overboard for all this religious stuff.

Oh, yeah, and I fear God, of course, but then what right-thinking person doesn’t? I’ve seen what He can do and I know for sure it doesn’t pay to cross Him. So, okay, maybe I don’t
have
to paint my left index fingernail with mercury amalgam, but who wants to take chances? Like I said, I’m not very religious but neither am I a fool.

You probably haven’t forgotten last month when that little Bobby Iverson kid asked his teacher if God ever wound down like a watch and lightning hit the school that same afternoon and burned the whole thing to the ground, little Bobby Iverson, his classmates, teachers and all? Or when Luella Snart erupted in cancers the size of cauliflowers when she failed to wear her Magnet of Spiritual Revelation over her left third rib like everyone knows you’re supposed to? Or that week in ‘52 when the atmospheric oxygen in Lynn was reduced by 60 percent after the manager of the Odeon showed that foreign movie with the woman in it who revealed her -nkl-s? The motion picture studio itself was consumed by an earthquake that same day, I am given to understand. But then, people
will
flaunt the laws of the Messiah so you can hardly feel sorry for what happens to them.

And I have to admit to a certain pride in living in Lynn, Massachusetts. I guess it’s like those folks who used to live in places like Jerusalem or Mecca or Salt Lake City. When those places were still around, I mean.

The company I work for, Amalgamated Theoengineering, Inc., is one of only half a dozen contractors licensed to maintain the Messiah. Some of these work on the electrical components, others the chemical. ET, Inc. specializes in the mechanical arrangements and in doing so employs some of the finest engineers and machinists in the country...if I do say so myself.

The last day (as it turned out to be, though of course no one knew this at the time) was supposed to have been nothing more than a regularly scheduled service and maintenance call. I very much enjoyed these. Not because the work was easy—there was never anything much more to do than a little greasing, cleaning and tightening. The New Motive Power has been clicking along splendidly for over 150 years and there appeared to be no reason for it not to continue to do so forever. No, not because the work was easy, but because of the honor attached. I was, after all, one of the select attendants to God Itself.

I packed up my tool kit, bundled it into the trunk of my new Ford Spunkster Runabout, fired up the boiler and, as soon as I’d gotten a good head of steam, headed for High Rock. I had only a little difficulty as my machine climbed the long grade into town and I found my clutch beginning to slip, but a quick prayer to Saint Henry soon put that to rights.

It was a beautiful Spring day...though they have all been so since 1853, of course...and the streets of Lynn were crowded. There were even a few women about, properly attired in their black plywood boxes. I was glad that the reformers who had made so much noise last year, campaigning to allow the boxes to be constructed of one-half inch plywood instead of three-quarter inch, had not had their way. Nor the ones last Winter who wanted to raise the edge of the box to a full two inches above the pavement. It’s unlikely that any such will have their way in the future, either, given that their predecessors had been vaporized each and every one of them. My wife and daughter were among the heretics, I’m sad to say. I do miss them a great deal, of course, but, after, we can’t have women shamelessly showing their -nkl-s in broad daylight on a public highway. What would come next? Removing the iron buckets that cover their heads?

I pulled the car over to the curb. That’s what happens when one’s mind starts wandering. As soon as I’d thought the word
“-nkl-s” a disturbingly vivid mental picture of that anatomical hinge came to mind. I immediately pulled my well-worn copy of the Good Book from the glove compartment and read aloud from it until the shameful image was thoroughly purged from my thoughts.

“Things which equal the same thing are equal to one another. If equals are added to equals, then the sums are equal. If equals are subtracted from equals, then the remainders are equal. Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another. The whole is greater than the part. Amen.”

That made me feel a great deal better and, putting aside any further sinful thoughts, I threw the Spunkster into gear and continued up the road to High Rock.

The priests at the Holy Cottage smiled and waved me through the gate. They all look pretty much alike, being every one of them direct descendants of the New Mary and Saints Spear, Hutchinson, Hewitt or Newton. Fortunately, I have always been spared the embarrassment of needing to address any of them by name.

The New Motive Power was where it always was and looking pretty much as it always did...yet being in the presence of God always made me feel humble and awed.