Steampanic

By John Robert Mills

A short steampunk-inspired tale of horror.

 

In an unnamed gaslit city, awash with corruption and vice, the citizens submit to banality and acceptance of their lacklustre lives. A seemingly innocuous event marks the beginning of a long period of terror. A series of bloody incidents which follow, create a perfect climate in which fear can thrive. 

Journalist Alfred Hertzfeld, a man dedicated to the truth, is determined to uncover the real reason behind the bizarre hallucinations and subsequent carnage. But as he goes in search of the truth, he begins to wonder whether forces beyond the control of man might be responsible for the horror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Robert Mills
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524239473

Book preview

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Evil doesn’t know it is evil, does it? It merely waltzes in doing its own thing and leaves without being any the wiser. It can be like a force of nature. The way that even good men can be lured into the maelstrom of revolution, driven by little more than a fear of standing out when what’s required is blind devotion to a cause. Under such heady conditions, many of the world’s people have succumbed to the pull of evil: simply swimming in the direction that the red river flows. However, evil is a beast with many heads. It can arrive like a naïve simpleton, blind with rage, swinging a cleaver wildly around the room. It can calculate and mete out its wrath leeching from the wallets of men, ruining lives while bankers gormandise in slow parasitic binges on the blood of the poor. Then there is the evil that we don’t really know. It flounders in the realms of the spectral: a world that many doubt exists and one that many don’t wish to believe in. Yet, if those who seek solace in the protective mist of theological faith are to believe, as they do, that their God exists beyond the corporeal, then they must conclude that such evil exists. This kind of evil is the subject of my story.

My first memory of the strange events is of what I saw at the corner of Dalmyre Street and Bellowing Wake Place. I could see everyone slowing down, watching the huge gusts of steam pouring out of the manholes. The force of this was such that it either kept the cover suspended, opening and shutting the lid as if it were talking, or flipped the lid out completely as the vapour blasted up into the streets. People started coughing loudly. It was a very strange sight indeed. People just coughing and wheezing, as far as the eye could see, except for myself and a few others. I remember looking at one tall gentleman in a bowler hat and business suit standing across the road. He was also unaffected. We both shrugged our shoulders, the way baffled people do and looked around us as the coughing stopped. For quite some time, I honestly thought nothing of it for weeks after the incident. And that seemed to be that, and so for weeks, everyone said very little about it.

As a chronicler for a rather well regarded paper like The Clarion, it was thought that I might bring some tidbits of insight, vis-a-vis who I knew and what I might unearth. Alas, in the infancy of the whole affair, there was very little to know at all. The plumbers and sewage men were none the wiser about what caused the 'steam business' as they called it.

'A build-up of natural gas,' was their answer. Quite apt, I thought, considering their explanation stank to high heavens.

'You must have something else for me?' I responded to a collection of shrugged shoulders and befuddled expressions. Indeed, they had nothing else for me. And so that