The Baying of the Hounds

By Leigh Kimmel

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla's Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion?

In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe.

Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds.

A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223488644

Book preview

Even with windows closed and curtains drawn, light and sound remained a torment. The faintest flicker, the smallest murmur had become a raking agony upon nerves raw from the strain of a problem that resisted solution. Another man might have feared himself to be going mad, but Nikola Tesla had experienced it once before. In the days and weeks before the breakthrough that had produced his polyphase alternating current system, he had endured similar agonies as his mind raced to apprehend the theory he could glimpse but not yet encompass.

That time he had stood on the threshold of triumph. Now he wrestled with the fragments of defeat. In his mind's eye he could see every detail of the transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, the equipment designed to enable him to cast electrical energy through the invisible luminiferous aether in the same manner in which he'd previously transmitted Hertzian waves. Something had gone amiss, and in the moment in which he closed the massive knife switch that should've transmitted useable power across the miles to the receiving antennas with their attached motors, the very foundations of reality itself had shuddered and twisted. In his mind the memory still echoed of that terrible howl, like the baying of an unearthly hound.

The sound of blows upon the door macerated Tesla's tormented nerves and he cried out in wordless agony. The walls tilted in a wild dance of vertigo, and no amount of abstract knowledge of the falsity of his subjective experience could keep Tesla from digging his fingers into sheets and mattress in a frantic effort to cling to the bed. He had seen the cracks in space itself, the place beyond space in which lines of sight shifted into impossible angles that drove ordinary men mad.

He's in there. The voice outside the door was hard with ill-disguised anger.

Even as Tesla's mind ransacked the disarrayed files of memory for the identity of the speaker, the door burst open under the blow of a booted foot. Beyond stood three men of the coarse sort one could find in the rougher parts of this city. But their leader was a different sort of man.

His stout figure was encased in a long brass-buttoned leather coat, and on his gray hair perched a cap with the multifocal goggles favored by aeronauts. Belatedly Tesla's memory clicked into place.

Thomas Alva Edison was Tesla's antithesis, like a living embodiment of Hegel's dialectic. Where Tesla was polished, urbane, full of