The Best of Penny Dread Tales (9 page)

His first thought was to be glib—to say, “Metal and glass,” but the girl had saved the machine. She’d earned enough currency to purchase a few answers.

“It is a mechanical heart,” he said. “The four magnetic towers convert steam power to electricity, which then flows to the central chamber. At the right frequency and power, electricity revivifies the heart inside the machine.”

“¿Una corazon maquinal?”

“It mimics the function of your own heart. Your body metabolizes food into small parcels of electricity which move your muscles and beat your heart.”

“It looks like a torn up train to me.”

He turned around. As requested, Rosalina stood behind him, wrench at the ready.

“Yes .…” Again the Smith found himself smiling. “Excepting the magnets and crystal, the machine’s components were … borrowed from the Southern Pacific 2224.”

“They just gave you a train?”

He resumed his diagnostic circuit.

“A rifle between the conductor’s eyes can be an invaluable bargaining tool.”

“How do you know Spanish? You don’t look like no Mexicano to me.” Rosalina spoke between savage mouthfuls of potato two nights into her stay.

“In my youth I was an explorer, a Privateer,” the Smith said, swirling the food on his plate. “I spent years in the southern reaches of the American continent with a group of buccaneers.”

Rosalina’s eyes bulged, contrasting her dark face.

“In your
youth
? You’re barely older than I am! Gringo loco!” She petered into a disbelieving chuckle, amusement glinting her eye.

He flattened his mashed potato Matterhorn with the brunt of his fork, leaving a great grey plain. “Yes …” The Smith cleared his dry throat. “I suppose it only seems like many years ago.”

“What were you looking for?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Vida.”

“How do you know so much?”

Rosalina interjected during an explanation of magnetism and electricity, placing a hand on his forearm. He was surprised at the softness of her palm, the light kiss of her fingertips. Like a spooked rabbit, he hopped backward. Rosalina’s arm hovered before folding gently over her bosom.

“It would take ten lifetimes to gather so much into one head, gringo.”

Her observation elicited a single surprised word from the Smith

“True.”

V

It took the Blacksmith thirteen days to repair his mechanical heart. He hadn’t considered the value of extra hands until he had Rosalina. She fused fresh copper into cracks, calibrated magnets, helped patch and refill the crystal box. No precaution was overlooked. Both the Smith and Rosalina donned rubber gloves and smocks to insulate against the electrical maelstrom. Buckets of water, four for each tower and six circling the heart, sat ready.

Rosalina wore excitement in flush cheeks. She stood at the boiler’s mouth, a shovel of fuel ready. Her wards were the fire and the kill switch. Her head followed as the Smith made a final pass to inspect their repairs. Satisfied, he took three brisk steps to Rosalina and whispered in her ear.

“Esta es el tiempo, señorita.”

Before he could remove himself, Rosalina swept in and planted a kiss on the Smith’s cheek, warm and full of the life he envied.

“For luck.” She winked and heaved the first shovel of coal into the boiler. Fiery teeth gnashed the fuel. Her back turned, the Smith rubbed his cheek where Rosalina’s lips landed, hoping to trap her lingering heat.

The machine groaned.

“More!” The Smith mimed shoveling coal. Rosalina scooped a mountain of briquettes—eyes clenched and arms trembling with strain—and heaved toward the furnace. A surge of raw power rewarded her effort. Pistons driving, the towers moaned steam. Lubricating oil squished obscenely, accumulating at each tower’s base.

Satisfied all was within operating parameters, the Smith again mimed Rosalina to feed the boiler. The coal drove the machine to frenzy. Pistons pumped violent lust, hungry for more. The towers quivered, copper screaming against steel. The workshop floor shuddered under the machine’s primal force. Vials and test tubes clinked a ghostly dirge. Rosalina clenched her eyes, certain the vicious coupling would kill everything.

But the machine quieted to a low hum. Equilibrium achieved, the earthquake shivers lessened. A laden hush fell. The hum matured into a buzz, and Rosalina felt the hairs on her arms stand on end. She turned to the Smith, saw him grinning at the southeast tower.

Pearlescent electricity squirted like heavy water, morphing through the blackness. The Smith, one final time, thrust his fists forward and tossed them left. One last shovel of fuel.

Rosalina tossed in the last of the fuel and slammed the boiler door. Ropes of glistening light shot from the towers, weaving over the machine. Rosalina raised a gloved hand and watched as electricity ran over her fingers and down her hand.

Then came an encore to the show she’d witnessed two weeks prior; the ropes and globules congealed to steady streams of blue fire, arching from towers to the central heart. This spectacle, now that Rosalina understood the machinations, resembled a dance. Electric arcs fed by the grunting towers grew in stature and quickened their steps until, at center, illuminated by an oceanic glow, the heart partnered in their dance.

The shimmy was life itself. Rosalina looked to the Smith. His rounded shoulders bobbed, arms and legs slack, utter relief softening his face.

His joy, however, soon died. The scene continued as it had before; the electric dragons grew bored of their restraints and fled. The Smith rushed to the machine’s heart and began finessing the control knob, but the dragons refused their orders, eager to explore the shop.

Rosalina put her palm to the emergency stop, awaiting an order she knew wouldn’t come. The Smith’s face slackened in defeat as raw electricity exploded vials. He watched his heart twitch a St. Vitus’ Dance beyond his control. Entropy advanced, great snakes of blue lighting pillaging the shop. Sparks tumbled from the heart itself, attacking the Smith. He offered no resistance. He only fell to his knees, hands cradling the violent heart in its crystal shell.

Rosalina would take no more. With hell closing in, she slammed the copper emergency stop with all her might.

VI

The Smith fell to despair. He existed only in dark recesses of the shop, staring at nothing, eyes unfocused. His reverie plunged deep, his isolation colder than Rosalina thought possible.

The machine became proxy in her desire to nurse the Smith. Rosalina checked every inch of copper, steel and crystal and repaired all trauma. She swept away the ash and dust. Only minor burns remained as badges to this second failure. The Smith, meanwhile, seemed a statue, eating and relieving himself only once exhaustion had pulled Rosalina to sleep.

Six days on, Rosalina’s patience broke. The last traces of day glowing through the workshop, she put a gentle hand to the Smith’s shoulder. His cold demeanor seemed to manifest physically—chilling her fingertips.

“Cheer up.” She put her lips to his ear. “Esta es temporary.”

“Don’t,” he growled.

Rosalina disobeyed, massaging his shoulders and back, her hands sliding lower with each pass, eventually finding his chest. His muscles softened under her hands. She lingered, playing gentle notes over ringlets of hair.

“I can take your mind from here.” She nuzzled his neck.

“Please—”

Rosalina squelched his protestations and swung onto his lap. Eager hands yearned down his torso, ripping buttons from his shirt, her lips exploring the topography of his clavicle. With a playful tug the tails of his shirt pulled free and fell to the floor. He sat bare-chested and bowbacked, Rosalina astride him.

“Please.” His nasal, desperate plea did nothing. Rosalina’s kisses traveled south, trekking his mountains and valleys.

Then, in a burst of animal sexuality, heat flowing from her in great rolling waves, Rosalina clawed his belt, tearing the sliver buckle from leather.

“Now comes the real fun, gringo.” Her fingers dove under his pants into tufts of pubic hair.

But he did not react—could not react. He sat petrified on the stool, face to the sky. His skin would not warm under passion’s flame. Like so many other times in his life, days and years gone, the Smith wished with all his might that he could just die. He scorned himself for even thinking it—hope was a bankrupt enterprise.

Rosalina, eyes alight, apple cheeked and lips flush with anticipation of kisses yet to land, reached down and felt the Blacksmith, flaccid. Cold. Her playful smile fizzled with the sunset. She recoiled as if bitten, limp member peeking from his fly.

“You a fairy? You like boys?” She cut the Smith with a cutlass gaze.

“No,” he said, “No … it’s—”

“Porque soy una monstrua.”

He moved in to grasp her, smother her fires of self-loathing. She welcomed his embrace with a flurry of body blows—open palms and knuckles to his cold heart.

“You’re not the monster, Rosalina. I am.”

She broke into sobs on his shoulder.

“I’m the monster,” he repeated.

They stood in the advancing shadows, her body rocking against his, the Smith attempting to soothe her false inadequacies with soft words and softer caresses. Rosalina looked up to him, red eyes trying to read his face. A million questions flew through her mind—inquisitions, accusations, expeditions to the core of this man, but all she could ask was “Porque?”

His answer was simple and profound. “Porque.” He took her hand in his, and stepping back, placed her palm over his heart.

The infinite questions received answers; why he rarely ate, why she spied him awake at all hours of the night, his vast knowledge and why he’d put so much of himself into that damned hulking contraption.

The Blacksmith had no heartbeat.

“It stopped beating two thousand years ago,” he said, barely a whisper.

Rosalina’s mind raced with horror stories whispered around dying fires in the slave quarters. Their macabre words bubbled to her lips.

“¿You …” she stammered, “¿Vampiro?”

The Smith released Rosalina’s hand. It stayed fixed to his chest, probing for some hint of life.

“Vampire?” The Smith looked to the ceiling. “Vampire—yes. It’s been some time since anyone has used that term … But yes, they used to call me ‘vampire.’”

Rosalina cupped her hands around her neck.

“¿Quieres mi sangre, no?”

The Smith pried Rosalina’s trembling hands from their protector positions.

“The stories are exaggerated. I did experiment drinking human blood, but never from living necks.” His fingers played down from Rosalina’s hands. “Wrists are much easier to drain—less splatter.”

His ill-advised attempt at humor only fanned Rosalina’s fear. Feverish shivers wracked her body, her gaze elusive.

“I’m not alive but I can’t die.” he swept errant coils of hair from Rosalina’s face. She flinched but dared not move. “I am every monster history has ever imagined, impotent in every way.”

Her terror a poison, the Smith broke from Rosalina toward his machine. He stroked the crystal box, gazing at the dead heart inside. It shimmered like a carefully wrought gemstone, beautiful but without intrinsic value.

“Years ago I discovered lightning could make cobbled corpses walk again. So this collection of magnetized ore and locomotive parts is my attempt to create and harness life. I hope to revivify my shriveled heart so I may finally die in peace.”

Rosalina shook, crumpled onto the floor, trying to reconcile reality with the man-shaped monster before her. She steeled herself, pushed the panic down so she could again speak.

“How?”

“Like so many of the events in my half-existence,” the Smith spoke in a voice as distant as his origins, “my genesis is more myth than history. The truth is I can no longer remember. Myth says I was, at the dawn of human civilization, a rake and a thief—condemned for coveting that which was not my own. In my final moments, I asked another, one much greater, to save me my fate. I expired and was laid to tomb, only to wake in the blackness, neither alive nor dead.

“Had I known the curse for which I begged, I would have gladly died for my crimes.

“I spent generations debauching, reveling in excess, devil-may-care to the consequences. But each passing year brought diminishing joy, fading happiness. All things human and good evaporated, leaving me an empty shell, a zombie cursed to roam the earth.

“I turned my energies to death, spent centuries spreading famine, plagues, pestilence—secreting help to those who joyed in sorrow and pain. I led holy conquests. I built the gears of war and oiled them with the blood of the innocent. Always in the hope—silly hope—that the next wave of death would carry me with it. I sparked revolutions, kindled wars, burned homelands until all was ashes and death.

“In my máquinaciones, I found the greatest tools of death were not powder and steel, not blades or pandemic illness, but the hands of man. Ensconced in the European mountains, I set about the task of creating the ultimate weapon—human life.

“Needless to say—undoubtedly you’ve heard the gothic tales—I succeeded. Made a pariah, I fled here, following stories of rocks which draw electricity from metal. Hoping to spark life in my own bosom, I manufactured this … this monstrosity.”

He turned from the limp heart. Rosalina sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at him like an attentive schoolchild before the lecturing head master.

“My machine has twice proven a failure. Electricity alone cannot endow life. I failed to realize that even cobbled corpses contain … for lack of a better term … the vitreous humor of soul—the essence of life, a substance foreign to this mass of steel and magnets.”

His words melted the doubt frosting Rosalina’s bosom. She pushed from the floor and strode to him. With memories of sunlight dancing over her skin, Rosalina took his cold hand.

“If you are cobbled from myths, perhaps a myth is your answer.”

The Smith looked to her—eyes brimming with curiosity and surprise—and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Travelling monks tell tales of a spring at the heart of a volcano.” Rosalina spoke in low musical tones. “Legend says one of their number, wandering the southern ridges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, fell to ambush by a warrior tribe. They gave chase, arrows flying. This monk’s escape brought him to the lip of a volcano. There, an arrow hit true and sent him tumbling into the mountain’s bowels. Figuring the interloper dead, the natives quit their chase and offered prayers of sacrifice to their god.