Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (15 page)

The case, already strange, is now turning even stranger. Clearly the chorus boy could not be the murderer; his fatal fall happened before the murders started. But the fingerprints match. That's irrefutable. Constable Etreyo remembers, uneasily, Detective Wilkins's gibe that she could not really prove that two people did not have the same fingerprints. Maybe this was the proof. If so, then she is nowhere closer to finding the true murderer. And she has no other leads. Leave no stone unturned, Sieur Bertillo advised. So, although she knows the dead chorus boy is a dead end (literally), she decides to check him out anyway.

The patrol room is empty; the swing shift is already gone to work, and the day shift has not started to trickle in. Constable Etreyo goes to the locker room and exchanges her spiffy uniform for a threadbare sack-coat suit. On her way out of the locker room, she tucks her shield into her breast pocket and drops her pistol into her pocket. A shadow blocks her way.

"Well, now, busy bee, where do thou wander?"

"Get out of my way," she says, angling to push by Wilkins, but he does not give way. Detective Wilkins is much taller than she is and not very sober. These two qualities make him an substantial roadblock.

"What were you doing in the morgue so late at night?"

"None of your business."

"The captain said to leave my case alone. I hope you are following her orders, dear Constable. The captain would not be pleased to hear otherwise. You think the Sandbank is bad; there is always worse."

Her answer is a sharp heel to the toe of his mirror-shine-polished black boot. While he hops in anger, she breezes by him and out the door. Recklessly, she hails a hansom cab; with the help of a friend in the records division, she'll tab the expense to Detective Gorgeous. The cabbie asks her destination, and she glances, for the first time, at the address that Dr. Kuddle gave her. And she discovers it's an address she knows well, for it is on her beat: the abandoned Octagon House. Fike. The medico has given Dr. Kuddle a shill address.

"Where to?" the cabbie asks impatiently, peering into the cab through the little window behind his seat.

It's the only lead she's got.

A good detective always checks out every lead, no matter how paltry.

"Four-fifteen Sandbank Road," she orders.

The cabbie slides his window shut, and with a jerk and jingle of tack, the cab jolts forward. Normally, the journey to her beat is a long cold one, entailing two cold horsecar rides, one to the end of the line, and then a long trudge along Sandy Road to the intersection of Sandy and Sandbank, where her patrol shack sits. Today, she rides in stylish warmth and gets there in half the time of her normal slog. Still reckless, she orders the cab to wait, and the cabbie, with a shrug that says
it's your diva,
hunches down into the shelter of his great coat and takes out a warming flask and a
Califa Police Gazette.
"The Squeeze to Be Squeezed," the headline says. Etreyo grimaces as she walks away.

The gaslights of the city are now far behind; the house squats in fog-swirled darkness. As she approaches, a gust of wind flaps the front gate open. She walks up the stone walkway to the chipped marble stairs. The air smells of damp salt and something else, something that buzzes and crackles in the back of her throat. The brass knocker is missing its clapper; she raps hard on the door with her knuckles, but the sound is muted by the wind and the rubbing wheeze of tree limbs. As she expects, no one answers. She peers through a side window and sees darkness.

She's not supposed to enter a building without permission from the owners, unless it's an emergency, but a police officer can always find an emergency. Silently rehearsing her excuse —
I heard a distant cry of help; I thought I smelled smoke
—she rattles the front-door knob. When that doesn't open, she goes back to the side window, but it's stuck. She doesn't want to break the glass and alert anyone who might be inside, so she goes around back to find the coal chute. The iron door hangs ajar; it's a tight squeeze, but sometimes being small has its advantages. Detective Wilkins wouldn't fit, but then Detective Wilkins would probably just kick down the front door and be done with it. She goes feetfirst, with her pistol drawn, just in case. Five minutes later, she is standing in the kitchen, covered in coal dust.

The kitchen is empty, forlorn, no sign that anyone has cooked in it for years. The iron stove is rusted with salt moisture; the sink is slick with mold. As the name of the house suggests, the Octagon House has eight outside walls instead of four. In the center of the octagon, Etreyo finds a spiral staircase; up she goes, cautiously, gun still drawn, slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible. The shape of the house means that the rooms are oddly shaped; each floor has four square rooms and four tiny little triangular rooms, all arranged around the core staircase. The rooms are empty, with cracked floorboards and peeling walls. The house appears empty, but it doesn't
feel
empty. It looks abandoned, but it doesn't
feel
abandoned. The fog means that the night is lighter than usual, and in this light, Etreyo sees footprints on the dusty floorboards, fresh footprints. She's reached the top floor now, but there is still no sign of habitation. Perhaps they were here before and are gone now.

She's about to head back downstairs when the ceiling shakes and small bits of plaster rain down. She hears the sound of footsteps and realizes that there must be one more floor above her. Either that or someone is walking on the roof. But the stairs go no farther. She circles through the floor again, each room joining the other, until she's back where she started, and then realizes that one of the windows is actually a door leading to a staircase that spirals around the outside of the house. The footsteps move rapidly—two sets of them: one clompy, the other light.

She exits the door onto the outside stairway, which is rusty and rickety. It coils around the house, nautilus-like. With one hand she clutches the slickly wet railing. In the other she holds her pistol steady; she's never fired it in the line of duty, but she will if she has to. Fog roils around her; it's so thick now that the house seems to drift in a cloud, unmoored from the rest of the world. A tickle begins in the back of Constable Etreyo's throat, a tickle that becomes a sound, low and humming. The sound spreads from her throat up into her skull, down into her feet, tingling her blood, her bones, her nerves. The stairs rattle beneath her; above her, the fog flashes purple, once, twice. Lightning? But where's the storm? The rain? And no lightning that Etreyo has ever encountered before sounds like this: a high-pitched buzzing whine, like two saws being rubbed together. Her teeth tingle, and purple sparks arc down from above. She comes around the last edged corner of the octagon and sees an open doorway to her left. The doorway leads to a solarium: glass walls, glass ceiling, currently open to the foggy night.

In the center of the solarium, a waterfall of purple lightning pours down from a central pillar. The pillar stands on a scaffold; a table lies underneath, a human form stretched out upon it. Purple lightning dances and shimmers around the stretcher, envelops the body in eye-scorching purple fire. Etreyo thinks she has never seen anything so beautiful or awe inspiring. Or so frightening, either.

She shouts, but her words are lost in the high-pitched whine. On the other side of the roof she sees a dark figure silhouetted against the glow. She shouts at it again, and then, as she dashes forward, a strike of lightning flares off the center corona and zaps her. Stunned, she drops the pistol and feels a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back.

"Don't get so close!" a voice roars.

"Stop this right now!" she hollers back. "I order you to stop this right now!"

"I can't stop it! We're almost done!"

"Stop it now!"

"It's running down now! See!"

The lightning is indeed dimming, the purple light sputtering. The high-pitched whine lessens, and then ceases as the corona of light flickers one last time and dies. For a moment the solarium is dim, foggy, and then it floods with a bright white light. Etreyo spots her pistol lying on the floor and grabs it before turning to face the figure closest to her. "Califa Police Department. Put your hands where I can see them."

"There's no need for this, really, Officer," the woman says. She's tall-ish, with a narrow face and wide-set blue eyes. She is wearing one pair of spectacles; another pair perches on her head. A dirty white apron covers her clothes. But when Etreyo repeats the order, she follows it.

"You could have gotten us all killed!" The figure that Etreyo had seen on the other side of the room is now furiously advancing upon her. It takes Etreyo a minute to realize that she is seeing what she thinks she is seeing, but the light in the room is far too bright for her to be mistaken.

The chimpanzee shouts, "Who the fike are you and how dare you break into private property!" It wears a white apron over a yellow embroidered vest and a high starched collar, its shirt sleeves rolled up to display muscular dark forearms. And it is walking upright.

"I am Constable Etreyo of the CPD. And I'd like to know who you are and what you are doing."

"Show me your badge," the chimp demands.

Keeping her pistol level, Etreyo fishes out her shield and displays it. "Please tell me what is going on here."

"I am Dr. Theophrastus Ehle," the chimp says, "and this is my colleague, Dr. Adelaide Elsinore. We are in the middle of a very important experiment, which you and your blundering almost ruined."

Constable Etreyo has never heard of a chimpanzee with a doctorate, or, for that matter, a chimpanzee who can speak or walk upright. However, just because she hasn't met one before obviously does not mean that they do not exist, for here one is, standing there glaring at her.

"What is that?" Etreyo asks, pointing in the direction of the column, which in brighter light is revealed to be topped with a donut-shaped ring.

"It's a galvanic coil transformer," Dr. Elsinore says. "It concentrates galvanic current and strengthens it."

"And what exactly where you doing with it?"

"Renewing life!" Dr. Ehle says scornfully. "Or we would have been if you had not interrupted us. Now I shall have to start all over again!"

"I cry your pardon," Constable Etreyo says, "but you have to admit that your experiment did appear quite alarming. What kind of doctor are you, anyway?"

"Dr. Elsinore is a surgeon. I am a doctor of galvanic physiology."

"What does that mean?"

"Dr. Ehle studies the galvanic patterns of the body, Officer," Dr. Elsinore answers.

"I study life itself," Dr. Ehle interjects haughtily. "And you haven't yet told me what you are doing sneaking around private property."

"I knocked on the door and got no answer. And the house appeared to be abandoned," Constable Etreyo said. She speaks her rehearsed excuse, but Dr. Ehle does not look as though he believes her. "Did either of you purchase a body from the Califa City Morgue?"

"I did," Dr. Elsinore says. "And what of it? The coroner assured me that the poor soul had no family, no friends. And it's perfectly legal to purchase bodies for scientific reasons."

"And where is this body now?"

The two doctors exchange glances, and then their eyes shift toward the figure lying on the stretcher. They don't answer, but they don't have to. The answer is obvious in their glances.

"Why do you ask?" Dr. Elsinore says.

Etreyo counters the question with one of her own: "Are you familiar with the Califa Squeeze?"

Dr. Elsinore answers her. "No, I fear not, Constable Etreyo. Dr. Ehle and I only arrived in the city two weeks ago. Is that a new kind of a dance? Or a drink? We have been deep in our work and have not had much time to read the newspapers.

"Can this wait until later?" Dr. Ehle says impatiently. "I must see what I can salvage of the experiment."

"No, it cannot wait," Etreyo says.

"Can we at least close the roof? It's very cold in here." Dr. Elsinore is correct; the foggy air flowing in through the open roof is very chilly. Etreyo watches closely as the two doctors crank the roof shut. A small barrel camp stove sits near a table of jumbled scientific equipment: beakers, weights and scales, bottles of mysterious liquid. Dr. Elsinore turns a dial on the stove and heat begins to pour off of it.

"What kind of a stove is that?" Etreyo asks.

"It's an Ehle stove," Dr. Elsinore explains. "It runs on the galvanic current generated by the coil transformer. So do the lights." She indicates the white glowing globes that hang from the glass-ceiling trusses.

"How does the current get to the stove?"

"It's conducted through the air."

Etreyo has read, in one of her scientific journals, about a theory that galvanic energy could be transmitted through the air. But she had no idea such a feat has actually been achieved. In fact, as far as she knew, no one had successfully harnessed galvanic energy at all. And yet here is that giant coil. And she had seen with her own eyes the galvanic current it produced.

"Please finish with us and get out, Constable," Ehle says. "I want to get back to my work. What is this Califa Squash you were asking about?"

Constable Etreyo gives the two doctors a brief history of the Califa Squeeze. As she speaks, Dr. Elsinore grows more and more pale. Etreyo glances at Dr. Ehle, but his face remains inscrutable. Or maybe she just doesn't know how to read a chimpanzee's face. When she is done, Dr. Elsinore, now perched on the edge of a trunk, as though her knees will no longer support her, says, "Theo, I think I need a drink."

Constable Etreyo waits while Dr. Ehre brings Dr. Elsinore a beaker full of a clear liquid that she's willing to bet is gin. Dr. Elsinore drinks it down and then says, "This is terrible news. I had no idea. This is awful, terrible, awful."

"Don't be histrionic, Adelaide," Dr. Ehle says. He takes back the beaker and shakes his head no to Dr. Elsinore's hopeful look. "They can hardly blame us."

"But who else is to blame? I knew I should have gone after it. I knew it! Oh, blasted hell!"