Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (25 page)

As she reached the summit, something scythed past her, thrumming. It was one of the mooring lines of the zeppelin. The airship was still secure on three anchors, but it was circling the crater lip, as though a giant invisible hand had it by the end of those ropes and was lazily twirling it. The ground was trembling. Small stones shaken from the lip of the crater crumbled in a continuous flow into the thick grass inside. That grass was bristling like hair on a chilled arm.

The men around the huts and derrick were stooped and staggering and clutching their mouths. The girl hesitated at the sight of this inexplicable clumsy dancing, then set off down one of the goat tracks into the crater. She went carefully, watching her feet. She didn't look up again till the sole shouting voice below her reached a certain mad pitch.

There had been one man on the platform at the top of the derrick. As she'd started down the slope, she had registered that he was descending the ladder to see what was up with his fellow workers. She looked again when he began to shriek, "God!" He was retreating back up the ladder, howling with terror. The men were lying on the ground now, flailing open-armed as if trying to gather in the air. The retreating man reached the platform. He looked around him, desperate. He was shouting, "Oh, please, God, help me!"

The air in the crater had changed. It felt strangely feathery on the girl's feet and legs. She began to step backward up the hill. Below her the screaming man collapsed onto his knees and began to vomit. The girl saw that the air between him and her was roiling like the water in a tidal stream, where saltwater and fresh mingle but don't melt together.

The girl turned and fled up the crater wall. There came a different sort of thud in the thumps and bangs all around her. A
twang.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a black coil of rope drop, and then the zeppelin swung over her, tilted at a crazy angle and attached by only two lines. She saw a rope ladder dangling from its control cabin, only partly unfurled. She saw white frightened faces at the open hatchway.

She charged upward, hauling herself forward on hunks of the soft grass.

Another mooring line was cut and dropped. The girl reached into her apron pocket and grabbed her knife. She yelled wordlessly at the airship, waved her knife, and rushed to the last anchor line. She didn't stop to spare a glance at the men above her, who were clambering quickly to that same last line with their own knife. She reached the anchor, grasped the taut rope, and slashed at it. She sawed furiously with one hand, holding hard with the other. The rope parted, her feet left the ground, and the jerk flung her arm down so abruptly that she stabbed herself in the leg. But she didn't let go of the rope. She dropped her knife, and fastened both hands to the rope, and was swept up, spinning, and plowing through the air like a rudder through water. The soft, heavy, gaseous stuff had filled the crater and overflowed, following the airship, rolling behind it like a wave and pushing it down again, toward the slope of the mountain.

The girl heard frenzied activity above her, and things began to fall past her — a big leather bag, a telescope, books, a chair —

The rope ladder was fully extended now, and the zeppelin was so low that the ladder was dragging along the slope. It combed through the geyser at the fumaroles, caught on something for just a moment, then came away again, swinging heavily. The girl saw two figures dangling from the ladder, one apparently struggling with the other. Then the airship hitched higher, and one figure fell, plunged through the plume of steam, and disappeared.

Once the girl had left them, the old man had taken Mary's hands and laid them with his own, clasped, on McCahon's chest. They bent over

McCahon, very intent, on him as well as each other. They seemed so calm. McCahon was in pain, but the pain was remote. He didn't have to be patient, because he wasn't hoping to be rescued. He only wished that the girl had stayed. He wanted to see her. To see her and what would happen. He hoped he'd still be conscious when the fireworks really got under way. And he hoped that before she was killed, girlie got to see something truly beautiful.

The old people were talking, and after a moment he began to attend.

Mary told her story. She explained how she had come to be on the road where she and the girl had met, and how she had followed the girl to Gethsemane just to see what she did. "But," Mary said, "I didn't want to survive. I only wanted a moment free of the pain. So I made a promise to it: I won't be long—I said—I won't stay in a room I can't pay for."

The old man pressed his palm against her cheek. He touched her very tenderly.

She said, "I only wanted one moment free, to climb to a high place and look back on my whole life, not just the final low place it had taken me to."

McCahon slipped away for a moment and woke when the earth tossed him, as if it meant to turn him like a pancake on a skillet. Mary was asking the old man questions. "He's your kin, isn't he, the boy?"

"Yes, my grandson, though he goes by another name. It's understandable. He wants what he can have. And I don't feel disowned." He sounded like someone making an effort to make his peace.

A volley of stones went by, vicious and hissing, over their heads.

"God save them," Mary said — of everyone.

"Tell me about your girl."

"She's a runaway. She stole her father's horses and sold them in Gethsemane, and that's all I know. I don't even know her name."

"That's not
all
you know, though, is it?" the old man said.

Mary thought for a moment. "No. You're right. We know this, too
What? Could you not even watch with me one hour?"

The boy was able to reach the coastal road, where he borrowed a very nervous horse. He rode hard for town and help. He rode right into the sheriff and some deputies. The sheriff called the boy a panic monger — and a number of other things — and told his deputies to carry him off to jail.

Thirty minutes later, the mountain exploded. A great white cloud swelled up into the sky, then its soft flesh of steam burned away to show its black, ashy bones. The cloud flashed with fire and continued to grow and throw off boulder bombs and thick bolts of lightning. The ships in the harbor leaned over till their spars touched the water. Then they were torn from their moorings and overturned. The cloud toppled slowly and inclined toward the town. A white half circle raced off across the sea toward the horizon—faster than anything in nature.

The people in the airship watched the mountain fall in on itself and the sea turn into a mountain.

The zeppelin was blown away from Gethsemane on a blast of hot wind, but when the cloud collapsed, it was caught at the edge of the ash fall. The survivors waited in numb dread as ash accumulated on the airship's canopy. But the top of the canopy was thickly rubberized, strengthened for flights in European snow. The ash scoured the rubber but didn't puncture the canopy. And the weight of accumulated ash finally brought the ship down in the ocean seventy miles from Gethsemane.

Weeks later, in his hospital bed in Westport, Southland, McCahon told reporters that he owed his life to an able seaman from the
John Bartholomew.
The quick-thinking, strong old man had caught the ladder as it flashed by, fidgeting over the turf. "He grabbed the ladder in one hand, and me with the other, and told me to hold on. We were, by turns, dragged along the ground or in the air. He took off his belt and fastened me to the ladder, and then he let go."

When people heard that a girl had survived, carried off on one of the airship's mooring lines and hauled up by its crew, there were many who had hopes. Even Alice had hopes of her bold friend, Sylvia. But only one man was lucky. It turned out that the girl was his daughter, Amy.

The lucky father told people that he'd known his daughter was in Gethsemane. She had run away a year before. She had stolen his horses and sold them. He'd traced the horses, but hadn't been able to find his daughter. He didn't like to speak ill of the dead, but he had to say that Gethsemane's sheriff wasn't a very helpful man.

Why had she run away? Her mother was dying of a terrible illness. A cancer of the bones of her face. No one had expected the girl to keep watch by her mother's sickbed, but still . . .

What's that? Do I think it was a punishment? Well, sir, do you suppose God would destroy a city in order to punish one weak girl?

The doctor left town, and lived. Alice was sent away, and lived. The nine men and one girl on the airship lived—and witnessed everything.
"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us,"
said the skipper of the airship. But McCahon said it wasn't like that. Years later he wrote a memoir of the eruption that destroyed the beautiful town, burned and buried all its houses and gardens, and sent a giant killing wave rolling northward, swamping islands and drowning villages. He wrote, with stark honesty, that he'd willingly dig a thousand graves and fill them himself just to see something so beautiful again.

There was one other survivor.

The manager of the carnival took Amy's hand as she climbed the steps to the low door. "There you are, ma'am," he said, and went away.

The colored lights of the midway failed to illuminate the interior of the caravan. Amy left its door open. There were louvers on one window. The bed was striped with light. She said, "May I sit?"

A hand came through the grid of shadow and pointed with blunt, fused fingers at a stool tucked under a bench. She drew it out and set it down by the head of the bed. "Does the light hurt your eyes?"

There was no answer.

"The darkness must be a respite from being looked at."

The figure in the bed moved his head on the pillow and faced her. His flesh was like rough plasterwork, the scars were like trowel marks, and pigmented purple, and beige, and gray-white. His right eyelid had fused to his brow bone, and the hairs of that eyebrow showed in places like some dry herb not fully mixed into a smooth batter.

She regarded him calmly. "The bill of fare doesn't have your picture, only your story. It says the jail had thick walls and its windows were high and small and faced away from Mount Magdalene. It relates how that jail, its walls packed in hot ash and pumice, turned into an oven. And how, when you were found, the newspapers dubbed you the Baked Man. It says that the carnival has no option to call you anything different, since you never told anyone who you were."

His mouth was like a turtle's beak, but he could make himself understood. He said, "I know you."

Amy said, "I hadn't ever thought to speak to the Baked Man, because I never realized it was you, James. Tonight I came along to the carnival with my children, and a barker on the midway was shouting out your story." She unfolded a bill of fare and smoothed it on her skirt. She read: " 'The Baked Man is the only person to live through the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Magdalene, which destroyed the South Pacific town of Gethsemane. He was discovered in the town jail and it is possible he has kept his identity secret because his ordeal and disfigurement were not enough to make him stop fearing the rope. For, with no record of arrest, or witnessing officers of the law, who is to say that this pitiful figure's silence isn't evidence of the magnitude of his crime? For why else, ladies and gentlemen, would this man have remained silent for so many years?' "

Amy stopped reading and returned her gaze to the eyes in the botched face. "It says the Baked Man wouldn't even admit to his race, wouldn't say whether he was black or white. And that's when I realized it was you. You see, your grandfather told Mary your story. And McCahon was there. And, as soon as he was able, McCahon came to tell me how Mary had died, and that she hadn't died alone."

The figure in the bars of light gathered himself to speak, and Amy leaned close to hear him.

He said, "I wanted the life a pale skin could give me. I wanted to be something I wasn't, and because of that I accepted the attentions of anyone who would go along with my fiction. I was trying to steal a better place in the world. And I didn't have the patience to try to make my purchase with my good character. My grandfather was a good, civil man, and I let everybody think he was only my shipmate. I was ashamed of him. I
denied
him. And now I'm dead." The ruined eyes grew wet.