I'm Alive! Sparky The Superhero's Story

By Michael J Sheppard

An adventure in a clockwork world, a world of magic, steam and clockwork. A world that looks like something out of Victorian London with magic . . .

In this world are Creators who make fantastical dangerous monsters resembling creatures from myths long gone. Against them stands only one person, if he can be called

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amazon
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399978903

Book preview

I’m Alive!

Sparky The Superhero’s Story

M J Sheppard

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental.

No Creators, Mechaniks or Inventors were hurt in the writing of this book.

© Copyright M J Sheppard 2022

MONEY IN CLOCK – THE SAME CURRENCY AS IN OLD, OLD EARTH

A farthing – A quarter of a penny

Ha’penny – A half penny coin

Penny – Twelve of these to a shilling, 240 to a pound.

Tuppence – Two pennies, no coin but common usage as an expression

Thruppenny Bit – A three pence coin, four to the shilling

Sixpence – A six penny coin, half a shilling (sometimes called a tanner)

Shilling – Twenty of these to a pound

Florin – Two shilling piece, ten to a pound

Half Crown – Coin worth two shillings and sixpence. Eight to the pound

Crown – Coin worth five shillings, four to the pound

Sovereign – Gold coin worth one pound

Contents

Chapter One – The Train Journey Home

Chapter Two – Hunting the Vampyre

Chapter Three – Hunting the Vampyre

Chapter Four – Hunting the Vampyre

Chapter Five – Hunting the Vampyre

Chapter Six – Wanting to Hunt Demons

Chapter Seven – The Wilderness

Chapter Eight – The Riddle

Chapter Nine – The Magistrate’s Command

Chapter Ten – The Old and New

Chapter Eleven – A Matter of Life and Death

Chapter Twelve – Going Home

EPILOGUE

Chapter One

The Train Journey Home

The Spark that lit my life lit the world

Historical, Great Earth

S

ome people call me Sparky, for that is my name. I don’t use that name often but that is my name – in this life anyway.

I used to be called Parker Maitland. Before I died, that is.

I have the names of all the people who died to make me. I sometimes use one of those.

Today I was calling myself Chunky, as that is what I am not.

Six foot tall and skinny is what I am. My head is a mass of wild black hair, spiking out in some places and flat in others, and at the back in a long ponytail past my shoulders and down my back.

A leather trench coat I wear, hobnailed boots. I look normal, but I am not.

I was on a steam train returning from a hunt. I had been killing werewolves in the surrounds of the city of Hex. That’s in the West Country. Now I am returning to the city of The Smoke – the main capital of the city lands, that is.

As I looked up at the clockwork magic glow-bulbs, floating on the train’s ceiling, I was thinking about my life. This one, my latest one.

You have to understand, ten years ago I died. I was an engineer, one of those persons who could make anything from anything. To fix things was easy, complicated things took longer and the impossible, well, that did take a very long time but I could do it.

With those skills I became an inventor in this clockwork world. That was what worked here: clockwork, a little magic and of course steam.

This was not Old Earth or even Old, Old Earth. This was NEBULON 6, now called Clock. It was different from the other worlds. Very different from Old Earth where we had come from in The Ark. Different even from Great Earth where my ancestors were supposed to have lived.

Here, the highest intelligence was the Punks, the punkawathas, but they have vanished now. No-one knows where they have gone. They are like a myth. They’ve been gone centuries. Next in the levels of genius were the Gods, or that is what they called themselves.

Actually, they were Creators. Men and women who messed around making new things. Not inventing like I can do, instead they created new creatures. The werewolves that I had been hunting were one of the breeds of those creatures.

They were geniuses one and all, the Creators. After all they had made me. This me.

The best of the creators was Doctor Gory. She was a female doctor of incredible beauty who was totally nuts and liked inventing the weirdest things ever to be been even imagined. Zombies, vampires, dragons, werewolves, hellhounds, killer robots, mummies, gargoyles.

Yes, she could make them all.

She dug up corpses and would have turned them into demons and devils but she could not perfect the reanimation process. That process was taking a dead body and turning it into a living creature.

Not one of the Creators had managed this. It was said to be against the will of the higher beings of this world. However, as far as we knew, here on Clock there were no higher beings. That thing about the higher beings was an old saying, a hangover from Old Earth. Here the people did not really believe in Gods and the like. The closest things to them were the Creators and they could not give life to a dead person.

This was considered on Clock to be the difference between Gods and Mortals, the essence of life. As no-one here could demonstrate that elusive power, no gods were worshipped.

We had no Gods but we did have a few cults. The Cult of the Old Ones, the punkawathas. Also, the Cult of the Green Earth who were into growing things. They thought all things living were beautiful and all connected to one another in some mystical way.

No Gods though. Not on the planet of Clock.

Now though there was a Creator who could give life. Doctor Gory. I knew this for a fact. After all, she had given me life. Made me from many corpses, adding and subtracting bits until one day I arose. Alive.

A glow bulb above me blew and I reached up and took it in my hands. I twisted it and it split into two pieces, each piece a mass of clockwork. I span the flywheel and it glowed for a second and then died. The magic in it was weakening.

I turned my back to the other passengers and touched that tiny little wheel and sparks came from my finger. The wheel span again. The sparks from my finger had powered up the small amount of magic again.

I twisted it back together again and it glowed with a pearl-like light. I let it go and it floated upward to the ceiling of the compartment.

Everyone clapped.

I saw the conductor coming and, after a quick bow, walked to the little compartment between the carriages.

You see, I could not afford a ticket. You don’t get paid for killing werewolves, you know.

The price of train tickets these days is extortionate, hideously expensive. Fifteen shillings and thruppence when you could buy a loaf for a halfpenny. That was the price for a trip from one city to another. In my youth, near on eighty years ago, the price was one shilling for a ride from one city to another. Travel two cities along and it was two shillings. The price of a loaf then . . . a ha’penny.

There was only one thing to do.

Tickets, please! came the cry as the conductor opened the door to this compartment and faced me, shutting the door behind him.

I nodded at him and he came close. I held a coin and put it in his hand and then I used my power. Sparks flew and he got a jolt of my power, pure ‘tricity and he flew back and hit the compartment wall. I coshed him and rifled the fares pouch, big leather folding thing it was, to hold tickets and the money. It was a lot of money but I rifled his pockets just the same.

A screwdriver, that would come in handy. Obviously, he did odd jobs on the steam train as many others did. Screws, nuts and washers in a little pouch. Excellent. Some small change, he wouldn’t need that. Handkerchief, no. Kerchief around his neck, no. Keys, excellent. I could use those. Mints, they would help pass the journey.

Now it was time he left. So out of the door and onto the tracks he went. It was alright. The train was picking up speed. One hundred and ten miles per hour. He would be dead as he hit the ground. All right and dandy. No witnesses at all.

I could not afford the fare and I would need to eat tonight and maybe get new lodgings, so my need was greater than his. It seemed simple to me.

Who hunted the beasts to keep the city folks safe? Me? It was only right he pay me back.

As I passed into the next carriage, there was a food seller. There would be at least a couple on every train. This one was selling meat pies. He didn’t state what the meat was and I did not enquire. On some matters, it is best to be in the dark.

Oh? I am an animated corpse, do I need to eat? The truth is, not really. It’s more of a habit from previous lives. Not my previous lives, all our previous lives.

If I eat, I need to eliminate. Urinate the liquids and defecate the solids. It’s a messy business so sometimes I go weeks without eating. Nonetheless I like to eat and drink.

It makes me feel human.

Can I die? Fucked if I know!

My heart beats, my brain works but can I die? I do not know.

All I know is ‘tricity flows through my body at all times.

Do I weaken if my blood flows away? Again, I have no idea whatsoever.

I still have blood, my heart still beats, my brain still works. That is enough.

I am good at surviving. I have to be, to stay one step ahead of the Creators.

The first true animated human. They all want me, the Creators that is. To know how I work.

Maybe they will cut me up into little bits to find out. That is why I stay one step ahead of them.

I know them all. From a research point of view anyway. I know where they live, what they like to create and what they want to make in the future.

The fog was getting thicker. We would get to the city soon. Getting off would be no problem. I had my ticket. In fact, I had a whole load of tickets.

Everything had been tucked away in my long trench coat. A big black leather one it was, that went down to my knees. There were so many pockets in it, I couldn’t count them up. Normal pockets, hidden pockets, clockwork-magic pockets. Even one that needed steam to open it.

On top of that, my backpack. That too had lots of pockets though it was not large. Just a little pack like walkers use.

It was dark outside but then it always was from the train. City magic and the rest of the country did not mix. They couldn’t see the cities and the trains, those from the country.

I saw someone with a music box. Just a little one, smaller than the palm of my hand, churning out a horrible tinny little tune that sounded discordant and annoying.

Fog was seeping into the carriages now. The floor was like a carpet of gloom. Good, that meant the station was very close. A whistle echoed down the train and the lady put her music box in her long pouch.

I did not grab it or hurt her. That would be rude. She had done me no harm. She had not overcharged me.

As we embarked from the train, we queued to return our tickets to the guard and leave the station. As the lady got her ticket punched, I cut the cords to her pouch with a tiny razor blade. The music box dropped into my hand and was in one of my pockets in a flash.

I was then impatiently waving my ticket about and the guard took it and I passed through. I went in the opposite direction as the lady. I was going towards the Murky Café.

All was gloomy on this street. The fog made my vision ahead into a haze so I could barely see ten feet. Steam powered trams were rocketing past on the roads making them difficult to cross. The lights were from gas lamps, the poor man’s choice but used by the city to light the area at night.

Wealthy people, even middle-class people, lit their houses with clockwork magic. A few used this new-fangled ‘tricity that had been invented some years back. Invented but not quite trusted by most. Clockwork magic could light and heat your home at the flick of a switch so why use this untested ‘tricity? It was mostly the flashy new rich that did it. The more steady rich stuck to the old ways.

The poor, all they could afford was gas and then only for lighting. Heating their little hovels would have just cost too much.

I went into the café and ordered a Roo pie and a cup of java. The Roo pie dutifully jumped around on the plate until I speared it with a fork. It wasn’t alive, just a magical effect to make the food more interesting. As I ate, I took apart the music box.

I did not nick it out of spite or even because of the horrible noise it made. It had components I needed. I took it all apart until it was just cogs and gears and bits of metal on the table. The flywheel was rising and dropping just slightly on the table, thus showing it still had magic in it.

I took out my jeweller’s screwdrivers and a magic battery from one of my pockets. I rearranged the music box and its components around the battery and fitted it to the end of my cosh. The cosh had lines of sparks running up and down it now. There was only a little metal box left of the music box. I screwed this onto the base of the cosh and the sparks stopped. Tapping that box would make the sparks flow through the cosh or stop them if it was on.

The café was quite large but also dingy. Grease slid down the once painted brown walls, fog carpeted the floor. The wood of the chairs and tables was cheap, indeed the legs of some of the chairs were quite spindly. They would not survive another year.

There were no table cloths here, just the tops of the tables, discoloured by many years of use.

I drank some java out of the ceramic pint mug. Suddenly my pie was snatched away and a goon was leering at me and laughing. He crammed the whole pie into his mouth, crumbs and bits of food spreading across his face or dropping on the floor.

This café was for solitary folk, but sometimes the clients were not the best brought up.

Give me money for java, runt!

I was no runt at six foot tall but he was no runt either. He had a couple of inches on me and was built like a brick train station.

I stood up. He just laughed, spitting what remained of my pie on the floor. There was no doubt of it, he was a big man. Dirty, heavy overcoat, big black hobnail boots that might have been from a Crusher. Leather knee britches with patchwork cloth gaiters to cover up his wool knee-length socks. A cap that looked like it had been dipped in oil.

This man was a roadman. The sort that slept outside under the train arches, who stole for a living and moved from area to area in the city to avoid the Crushers catching up with them. Hard as nails and twice as thick.

I think this one has been on the guano juice. The guano was a fruit that only insects ate because its smell was disgusting. Its taste was supposed to be worse. If you had the stomach to drink its juice though, it had a psychotropic effect, as well as getting you pissed in one second flat.

I need money for java, runt, and so you got to pay.

You never showed your purse to a roadman. He would steal it the second you went to give him a coin. He would then punch you in the mouth to say thank you.

He won’t leave! complained old Tucus, the owner. He leaves and you eat for free for the night. He never comes back and you always eat for free.

I understood what he meant, though the roadman probably had not.

Get him out and eat my fill, kill him and I would always be fed here.

Old Tucus was the owner of the Murky Café. He was in his fifties, old for this part of the city. He was as fat as a porcine, a good thing for a cook. I never thrusted thin cooks. He was always sweating but then it was hot back there in the kitchen.

He was a good man Tucus, a man you could trust. A man who had fed me for nothing on more than one occasion

I pushed my head backwards and it tapped my neck support. Though it was not really a neck support. I pulled the piece of metal at the back of my neck and as it slid upwards and out, sections of metal dropped down to form a crossbar. As it slid totally out more sections dropped into place and there was a sword. A good sword. One of my own design.

I shook it to make sure it was rigid and all the bits were in place. The handle was long so I could use with a one hand grip or two. By the looks of the roadman I would need two.

Now he was looking at me with apprehension. Roadmen are bullies, plain and simple. They get out of their heads on guano juice and bully all around them to get their food and drink. The only ones they didn’t bully were café owners. They needed places for shelter in the day, hot food and drinks so café owners were safe. Hurt one and the cafés all across the city could ban them.

Worse, the café owners could get Crushers to guard them.

I swished the sword through the air. It cut through the air with a satisfying breeze.

The roadman was no fool. He slipped on a metal gauze glove and pulled a knife. The glove was to grab bladed weapons, the knife to cut me and make his point.

Leave naked or don’t leave, I told him to wind him up some more. His whole life would be in his pockets. He was a roadman.

I stood there, breathing easily but doing nothing else. Tucus was hardly breathing at all I saw.

A flash of movement and the huge man was charging me, one hand out to grab the sword, the other hand held back in readiness to thrust deep when my move was exposed. I did not move and, hardly believing his luck, he grabbed the blade . . . and I let the sparks flow through me into that sword and from the sword into that metal gauze gauntlet.

Cooked flesh, smelling like porcine, wafted its odour through the room as the man screamed and snatched his hand back. The blade swept through its arc and the roadman’s head came off clean. Blood spurted like water from the neck in a fountain. One second, two, three, four and the body fell, spraying blood onto the tile floor.

Sparky, you excel yourself! Tucus seemed exuberant, maybe too happy to just have rid himself of a roadman. Maybe he actually cared whether I lived or died. You come back later and your old mate Tucus will lay on a feast for you. Porcine with ogre-berries, you like that. Your favourite, yes?

If the Crushers come in, it was Chunky here tonight, not Sparky. I gave him the stare to show how serious I was.

He looked a little lost for a moment and then caught on.

Chunky, the fat boy, yes. He carries an axe. That one?

I grinned and left the café.

I was wary of Crushers.

What’s a Crusher?

Like a policeman. I think that’s what your word is. Securiza they were on Old Earth and on the Old, Old Earth world, I am sure it was police. Or was it polite?

Our Crushers are nothing like polite. They are seven foot tall with huge feet in hob-nailed boots. The Magistrate is in charge of them but they follow no rules.

It is their job to stop trouble. If they see a theft, they catch the wrongdoer and give them a beating that puts the culprit in the wellbeing clinic. If they see a criminal beating on someone bad or killing them, the Crusher will kill the culprit, just like that.

I once heard of a word called Law – there are no laws here. You live with each other peacefully or a Crusher beats your brains in.

I left the café and hit the fog. Night-time fog was the worst. Soot covered buildings reared out of that mist, trams flashed by on the roads, hardly to be seen. Paths always full, people busy from dawn to midnight. Everyone being careful not to be pushed into the road. The trams would not stop. They were going too fast. Fall into the road and you were probably dead. The tram would ride right over you.

I hit the shadows for two backstreets and then saw my room from the rear. No light. The curtains looked to be open but in the dense fog it was hard to tell. The streetlamps were not bright and could not cut through the fog, they made patches of light and gloom with the odd patch of good vision up to ten feet away.

I shinned up the drainpipe. Nothing. I hung over and peeked in. Nothing. I slid from the drainpipe onto the window ledge and carefully eased up the window. I heard a pin drop, which was good. No-one had entered this way.

I flicked a spark from my finger to the globe above my bed and it lit up my room. Empty. In I went and rushed to the door. I checked it. Yes, there was the wedge in the bottom, there was the wedge in the door-crack, there was the pin at the top. No-one had been in here.

Every month I put money in the landlady’s safe. I opened it without a key and locked it after. The coins were always in a blue cloth pouch so she knew it was I paying. Just to be sure.

For that, she rented the room and did not pry. Which was good. Anyone opening that door would get a crossbow bolt into their body, aimed for the trunk, not the head. I never used the door, only the window.

I stared at the glow bulb and drifted off into my thoughts.

First was The Ark. Praise be its name. Don’t know what that means. They taught to me in school in my real life, over sixty years ago.

Here’s what I do know. A planet called NEBULON 6 (now called Clock) was to be colonised. Great Earth was overpopulated and had problems with something called solar radiation.

The Ark came here many years ago: some say an age, some say two or even more. Hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands, no-one really knows.

The Jezel Ark had been carrying the ten thousand new inhabitants. Instead of the smooth landing it had been supposed to fulfil, it crash-landed. All of the scientific equipment was damaged. It was in the rear of the ship and that part blew up.

After that, life was basic. There were two factions. The modernists who thought they could somehow bring all the technology of Great Earth to this world by building it. Opposing them were the veterans, the armed forces that was supposed to protect the others in case of hostile beasts. The veterans wanted a basic existence, hunting and fishing. Farming for all who would not hunt.

The veterans won. They had the weapons and the skills to use them. They went out of their way to kill all scientists and modernists so there could never be an advanced society.

The air was breathable, there were beasts to hunt for food, fruit on trees and the grain was plentiful. The planet had been selected as it was a veritable Eden.

Unfortunately, within a hundred years, the thing called science was near enough forgotten, it had become myth.

Life was very primitive . . . until the punkawathas came forth. The punkawathas were the true inhabitants of the planet. Something that did not appear on the checks before colonising this planet. They had their own city. One that was shielded from scans or even Neo-Earthling eyesight. Unless it was shown to you, then you could not always see it.

It was a city of clockwork and magic and steam.

The punkawathas showed this city to some of the brightest men they found. A thousand men and a thousand women were selected.

I can only tell you what the punkawathas looked like from the myths that have come down from generation after generation. They were twenty foot tall and looked a little like baobab trees. A dull purple flesh with green rush like hair. The masses of green hair surrounded the purple body so it could hardly be seen. Seven arms projected from under that green hair. Each of these arms had hands that seemed to have a dozen fingers. Long delicate fingers with many different joints in them.

This is just the myth, of course. They could look like regular human beings for all I know.

The punks, as they were called, taught the chosen people, men and women alike. They showed them how to use these things of the city, how to make them. How clockwork magic was better than any technology or science. They taught these select people how to live in the luxury of the punkawatha way. The humans mastered these skills with the teaching of the punks. It did not happen overnight. It took over a hundred years and the human numbers increased fourfold.

By then other cities had been built and connected up with the steam railways. The  punkawathas smiled on their efforts and then just vanished. Maybe to another city like the first one or maybe to another sort of civilisation altogether.

The human numbers grew. They stayed in their cities that the Veterans could not see. They made another city and another, linking them up by steam railways that had clockwork magic to make the trains invisible to the outsiders.

Years passed and now there are now