Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Read online

  Steampunk

  CthulhU

  Also from Chaosium:

  A Long Way Home

  Arkham Tales

  Cthulhu’s Dark Cults

  Eldritch Chrome (New)

  Eldritch Evolutions

  Frontier Cthulhu

  Mysteries of the Worm Short Stories by Robert Bloch

  Tales out of Innsmouth

  The Antarktos Cycle

  The Book of Dzyan

  The Book of Eibon

  The Complete Pegana

  The Hastur Cycle

  The Innsmouth Cycle

  The Ithaqua Cycle

  The Klarkash-Ton Cycle

  The Necronomicon

  The Nyarlathotep Cycle

  The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson

  The Terror & Other Stories by Arthur Machen

  The Three Impostors & Other Stories by Arthur Machen

  The White People & Other Stories by Arthur Machen

  The Tsathoggua Cycle

  The Yellow Sign and Other Stories by Robert W. Chambers

  The Yith Cycle

  Undead & Unbound (New)

  Steampunk

  CthulhU

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass

  STEAMPUNK CTHULHU

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons & Glynn Owen Barrass

  Steampunk Cthulhu is published by Chaosium Inc.

  This book is copyright © 2013 by Chaosium Inc.;

  all rights reserved.

  All stories are original to this collection.

  All material © 2013 by Chaosium Inc. and the authors.

  Cover illustration © 2012 Daniele Serra.

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass.

  Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Nacario.

  Special thanks to Kevin Ross.

  Similarities between characters in this book and persons living or dead are strictly coincidental.

  www.chaosium.com.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Those Above by Jeffrey Thomas

  The Blackwold Horror by Adam Bolivar

  No Hand to Turn the Key by Carrie Cuinn

  The Reverend Mr. Goodworks & the Yeggs of Yig by Edward M. Erdelac

  Carnacki – The Island of Doctor Munroe by William Meikle

  Pain Wears No Mask by John Goodrich

  Before the Least of These Stars by Lee Clark Zumpe

  The Promised Messiah by D.J. Tyrer

  Unfathomable by Christine Morgan

  The Flower by Christopher M. Geeson

  Tentacular Spectacular by Thana Niveau

  Fall of an Empire by Glynn Owen Barrass & Brian M. Sammons

  The Baying of the Hounds by Leigh Kimmel

  Mr Brass & the City of Devils by Josh Reynolds

  The Source by D.L. Snell

  Happy Birthday, Dear Cthulhu by Robert Neilson

  The Strange Company by Pete Rawlik

  Introduction

  “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

  So said H.P. Lovecraft in the first chapter of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu (1926). This is also the perfect start for an introduction to Steampunk Cthulhu, for within the stories in this collection mankind has indeed voyaged too far, and the scientific innovations undreamt of but for the fantastic fiction of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and others, have opened terrifying vistas of reality with insanity and worse as the only reward.

  The Steampunk genre has always incorporated elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror and alternative history, and certainly the Cthulhu Mythos has not been a stranger to Steampunk. But until now there has never been a Steampunk Cthulhu collection, so we have compiled for your reading pleasure stories of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and alternative realities tainted with the Lovecraftian and the Cthulhu Mythos. Here you will discover Victorian Britain, the Wild West era United States, and many other varied locations filled with anachronistic and sometimes alien technology, airships, submersibles and Babbage engines. But the Victorian era here is not only one of innovation and exploration, but of destruction and dread.

  Our first story, Those Above by Jeffrey Thomas, features a Victorian world cursed by its own explorations into the realms of technology, and things alien to mankind have brought a curse upon every man, woman, and child. Ever adaptable, the Human Race has sought to survive the horrors haunting their dreams, but this story’s protagonist, a humble factory worker and loving husband, discovers a conspiracy that makes even the horrors of ‘Those Above’ pale in insignificance.

  The Blackwold Horror, by Adam Bolivar, details a young Folklorist’s explorations of the myths and legends of England’s West Country. Here he encounters one of Frankenstein’s contemporaries, although this mad scientist does not limit himself to the flesh of the dead. His creations run like clockwork, literally.

  The theme of clockwork continues with Carrie Cuinn’s story, No Hand to Turn the Key. In a world ravaged by Cthulhu Mythos entities, a group of mechanical survivors, once the servants of humanity, pursue their desperate mission to save the world’s knowledge, even at the loss of their own clockwork-powered lives from rampaging monstrosities.

  In The Reverend Mr. Goodworks & the Yeggs of Yig, by Edward M. Erdelac, the Reverend in question, something more machine than man, encounters an ancient cult that might well hold the key to the secret of his creation and the technology powering his barely human form, if he can survive the encounter.

  William Meikle, with Carnacki – The Island of Doctor Munroe, brings us a wonderful tale narrated by that supernatural detective and ghost finder Carnacki. Here he encounters Doctor Monroe, a man dedicated to the betterment of Mankind through technology. But where does this technology come from? From what strange and unearthly font does Munroe’s knowledge stem?

  John Goodrich’s Pain Wears No Mask describes an adventure of dashing airship pirates in an alternate Victorian world where a decadent poet now rules the British Empire. The themes of seduction and corruption, greed and madness run hand in hand in this colorful story.

  Lee Clarke Zumpe’s Before the Least of these Stars concerns a visitor from another world, a brave adventurer who by accident is transported from the Carolina of 1866 to a world that although similar to his own holds technological marvels undreamt of and horrors unbound. Luckily, he is not alone.

  In The Promised Messiah, by D.J. Tyrer, an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research visits an eccentric scientist to examine a machine purported to hold the abilities and art of a living human poet. Is this ‘Mechanical Messiah’ a true marvel of human ingenuity or does something mysterious and unfathomable lurk beneath its fabricated shell?

  Unfathomable, by Christine Morgan begins with a sea captain’s witnessing a strange object falling from the sky. This ends less than happily, but the story does not end there, as Victorian invention and a thirst for knowledge returns him and a team of heroic souls on an adventure that would make both Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft proud.

  Christopher M. Geeson’s The Flower is a powerful piece describing the terror and futility of war, combining H.G. Wells sty
le invention with Lovecraftian horror. The protagonist in this Steampunk Civil War story fights for the Union in a world gone to technological hell.

  Thana Niveau’s Tentacular Spectacular is a particularly atmospheric piece that takes the oft-used Steampunk theme of corsets and turns it on its head in a water-soaked and particularly fishy tale of eldritch horror.

  Fall of an Empire by your editors Glynn Owen Barrass and Brian M. Sammons, holds the staples of Victorian adventure, an enigmatic female thief, a dashing Lord and his faithful Hindu servant, but drops them in a world of despicable alien monarchs and mass sacrifice by means of concentration camps.

  In The Baying of the Hounds by Leigh Kimmel two renowned scientists of the day, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison (both revolutionaries and arch rivals), are forced to pit their ingenuity against a power intruding upon the world that is possibly a monstrous attacker, or perhaps a curious explorer and scientist such as themselves.

  Josh Reynolds’ Mr. Brass and the City of Devils is the tale of a Pinkerton detective, mechanical but for his still human brain, and his hunt for a despicable cultist across the Rub’ al Khali, the largest desert in the world. He encounters another, far less hospitable world as he closes in on his quarry.

  The Source by D.L. Snell details a scientist’s obsessive quest for knowledge and scientific accomplishment. As with many of these stories, with knowledge comes horror and paranoia. Here you will read a beautifully evoked tale where man’s technology is combined with the arcane to become something truly terrifying.

  Happy Birthday, Dear Cthulhu by Robert Neilson starts with an innocent children’s Punch and Judy show, only to transform into a tale of cold-hearted murder, human sacrifice, and bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Pete Rawlik’s The Strange Company brings both heroes and villains of the Cthulhu Mythos together in a wild tale of good against evil in an alternate reality Victorian world. The combination of familiar characters in strange settings and even stranger roles is superb.

  So there you have it, 17 Steampunk tales unbound from the tethers of mere airships, goggles, clockwork, and tightly bound corsets. We hope you have as good a time reading these stories as these truly talented writers had writing them.

  Glynn Owen Barrass

  Brian M. Sammons

  Those Above

  By Jeffrey Thomas

  Home from the night shift at the factory, Hind looked in on his children before joining his wife in his own bedroom. There were two bedrooms in their chilly little flat, his two sons sharing one of them. Five-year-old Jude lay stiffly on his back in his cot by the door. Eight-year-old Alec was by the single window. The older boy had the quiet handsomeness and straw-colored hair of his father, while Jude possessed his mother’s dark hair and eyes and rounder face. But Hind knew these details by heart more than he actually observed them now. With the boys’ heads inserted into grayish blocks of gelatin, their features were presently hard to discern.

  Hind moved on to his bedroom, treading lightly on the creaking floorboards of the hallway as he thumbed off his suspenders. While stripping off his black trousers and white shirt to the dingy long johns beneath, he stared down at his sleeping wife. Netty’s pretty face, too, was indistinct in its pillow of gelatin. It was Netty who set out these large cubes each night, as they could only be used once. A blunt-tipped metal probe was inserted into the block, attached to a thick black wire that ran to a brass mechanism on a cart beside the bed. Idly, Hind shifted closer to this heavy device to confirm that it was functioning properly, as he had done in his sons’ room. Gears delicate as snowflakes whirred almost silently inside it, and there was a faint ghostly sound of scribbling as a graphite needle traced an ever-unfolding landscape of peaks and valleys upon a slowly unspooling roll of paper. It wasn’t really necessary for him to check on the machine, however. If any of these peaks or valleys extended beyond their safe parameters, a brass bell would ring and the sleeper would be awakened to recalibrate the device.

  Clever machines, they were—the height of technology. Due to the gelatin’s conductivity, the machines were powered by the brain’s own electrical output. But they were not meant as batteries to harness such energy, though Hind had read in the newspaper that there were scientists studying how the electrical output of human minds might be utilized to power whole cities, replacing steam-driven thermal power. No, the function of the gelatin and the apparatus on its wheeled metal cart was to suppress dreams.

  He noted that the peaks and valleys were all of proper height and depth. No dreams had insinuated their tendrils into Netty’s sleep. She was, thankfully, as empty of thought as the corpse she so resembled lying there flat upon her back.

  Hind slipped under the blankets beside her. It was warm within their envelope, warm from her body heat, but he shivered as he pressed his head into the cool block of gelatin that Netty had positioned on his side of the bed.

  He stared up through its smoke-tinted substance at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to close around him as the gelatin had. Though the pressure of the substance was little more than that of the air, he kept his lips pressed in a small thin line against it.

  Hind didn’t want to turn his head and stress the material, but he did shift his eyes to glance over at the bedroom window. The curtains hung to the sides of it like a pair of specters stealing a glimpse of the street below, as silent as a street in an abandoned city. He wished he had closed the curtains before climbing into bed, but he couldn’t withdraw now. He wouldn’t leave the bed again until that same bell rang in the morning, announcing it was time for the children to be up and preparing for school.

  Yet it still bothered him, those parted curtains, as if the night sky overspreading the jumbled rooftops and sentinel chimneys might be gazing in at him while he lay vulnerable like a frog awaiting dissection.

  Ha, he thought…as if those gauzy veils, even if he had drawn them together, could keep out the icy scrutiny of the sky.

  ***

  The start of his shift, and Hind stood outdoors on the broad loading dock smoking his pipe amongst a cluster of other laborers, all of them shivering against the golden afternoon cold as they watched a team of burly dray horses pull a long wagon up the street toward the factory—the street with its flagstones like the scales of some immense dragon on whose body they all dwelt as precariously as parasites.

  Some workers balanced hooked iron pikes across their shoulders. Some held long saws or other carving instruments. In a leather pouch on his belt, less ominously, Hind carried measuring tape, sets of calipers, his pad and a stub of pencil. But they all waited the same, like dogs for their dinner scraps.

  The Chief Engineer, Tweed, had come to stand beside Hind. Other workers had warned Hind that this man preferred the company of his own sex to that of women, had joked that Hind’s handsomeness always seemed to draw the older man to his proximity, but it wasn’t this that made Hind uncomfortable around him. Rather, it was the funny tremble in Tweed’s lips on those infrequent occasions when he spoke openly of Those Above, and the way he always seemed to be keeping half of what he knew to himself when he did speak of them. Hind could see it in his wide, wet eyes.

  “The cartilage doesn’t look right,” Tweed muttered to him, even with the horse-drawn wagon some distance away. He pointed with his own aromatic pipe. “There’s too much cartilage. See there? It’s almost pushing right through.”

  Hind glanced at Tweed and saw that his lower lip was quivering in that funny way, as if he might cry, then returned his gaze to the approaching wagon.

  A huge lumen mass was being borne along on the wagon, resembling a whale half-turned to ghost. Hind hadn’t as yet heard where it had fallen. Hopefully in a field or pasture or by the side of the lake, and not upon someone’s farmhouse or, even worse, a tenement building full of families crowded like mice. A few canvas tarps were thrown over it, roped to cleats in the wagon’s sides, but enough of the mass showed through. Gray, translucent, amorphous. As Tweed had indicated, indistinctly vis
ible within it was a chaotic network of thin white structures of a more solid constitution. Hind thought of leafless birch trees.

  Listening to the hooves and wheels clatter solidly upon the flagstones, but with his mind drawn away to more celestial matters, Hind tilted back his head to stare up at the heavens.

  The sky was a mass of colossal extrusions, boneless appendages perhaps, tangled and interwoven. They put Hind in mind of a bucketful of earthworms, except that their squirming was almost imperceptibly slow - slower than the movement of the clouds that Those Above had replaced over two decades earlier, though Hind still remembered clouds from his youth. Sometimes, though, they reminded him more of a great pile of glistening intestines. The extrusions were misty with distance, but that in itself didn’t entirely account for their partly-in-substantial aspect. They seemed…blurred. Hind thought of a photograph he had once seen of a crowd of people moving about a square and climbing a set of steps in the foreground. The long exposure time had left the buildings looking quite solid, but had turned the people to a sea of ghosts. The sky was like a sea of ghosts, then—but the ghosts of what, he couldn’t quite say. If anyone truly knew the full nature of Those Above, they hadn’t shared that knowledge with the common masses. Whatever the case, the sky appeared the same no matter where one stood upon this globe. The sun barely glowed through the overcast gray of bloated coils, and at night the sky was utterly black. The stars might as well have been swallowed and extinguished. At best, one might witness the pallid smudge of a full moon, walled off from those below.

  “No, no,” Tweed repeated, shaking his head as the wagon finally drew close to the factory, “the cartilage is too dense.”

  Hind had tried ignoring the Chief Engineer, not wanting to enter into conversation—and to be fair, he was not a talkative sort no matter who the other person might be—but he replied, “That’s why these chunks fall, isn’t it? They calcify inside. It makes them heavy.”

  “Yes, but this is too much, my dear boy. This blubber will be a poor harvest. And there might be other trouble.”