THE MEKANIKAL TURK

I stared into the flames until I felt my eyes would roast in their aching
sockets; until purple flare-bursts danced in my brain.
I wanted to be sure – utterly, totally sure that this was how I would
remember Slake Hall, when the jagged shadow of its eaves and turrets
and towers loomed up out of my nightmares. So I stood, fixated as the
navvies and breakers worked around me, stood while the leaping flames
came howling and roaring up out of the shattered chimneypots, and while
a rain of sparks fell like a starshower across the overgrown pleasure-
gardens.
I knew in my heart that it would not work; that I would always recall
the greasy air, the pressure, the underlying stench of the place. That and
the man who now had Slake Hall for his pyre – if, by the end, he had
been a man at all!
Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself; here - let me fill your cup, let me
throw another log on the fire. The winters are so much colder now than
when I was young...
My name now, well, that doesn’t matter. I’m just a dusty old tutor, part
of the furniture! But back then they called me Nathaniel Price, and I was
a gentleman.
How far I have fallen, eh? All the way below stairs – but scandal
couldn’t follow me here, friend. Scandal, and the others who may have
been at my heels, aye...
This young fellow Price was a vainglorious fool, a spendthrift, a
libertine – and a master of chess. I remember when I was him, young,
strong, with all my own teeth and a mind like a cut-throat razor! Back
then I could spend whole days in the little checkered world of the
chessboard, crossing swords with Russians and Frenchmen and Poles,
Prussians and Italians, Spaniards and Colonials... I even spent my nights
poring over a board by gaslight, composing strategies against far-away
players by mail.
No need for me to toil in some factory or dusty firm, for my father had
been knighted posthumously, and I had invested his hefty pension well.
The details of his sad demise were quietly hushed by the grandees of
Whitehall and the Palace; all I remember was being summoned to the
cold, drab office of the Headmaster at Saint Osbert’s School to be
informed that I had an hour to pack my belongings and be ready to leave.
Later I learned that he had been an agent of the Crown, stationed in
Paris during the bloody days of Robspierre’s reign of terror. One of his
fellow spies tasted the kiss of the guillotine; another fled before the mob
and arrived back in London in the belly of a fishing scow. The third was
driven insane by the sights he had seen, and ended his days in St Mary of
Bethlehem’s – the now-infamous Bedlam madhouse. My father - the last
of this sad little group - was taken years later by a French assassin’s
knife, and lauded as a hero for foiling some kind of monstrous republican
plot.
That was when I threw myself into the deceptively simple world of
chess, a world which swallowed me up for twenty years. In the circles of
the game, my fame grew, and challengers would present themselves on
the doorstep of my club by the day, having traveled from all over the
Empire and beyond.
Which was why I was not surprised when the concierge of the club
came to me one afternoon, bearing on his salver the little calling card of
another hopeful chess-master.
But this name was different. This name cut through my fevered attention
as I hunched over yet another game – for this was the name of the man
who had left Paris so ingloriously all those years ago, to fetch up on
Blackfriar's Steps covered in fish-scales and filth. He had been a spy, and
now, like me, he lived his life on the chessboard.
The name piqued my interest, and his servant’s odd request pricked my
not inconsiderable pride. And that is how I came to Slake Hall one
evening in winter, stepping down from the coach before the wrought-iron
gates in a halo of gaslamp light and powdery snow.
The manor house crouched black and unwelcoming behind a gnarled
wall of trees, only the tops of its ornate towers and innumerable chimneys
visible against the oppressive sky. The little valley held no village, no
farms – no human soul, it seemed, but those who toiled in the grounds of
the manor. The coachman who had brought me there hastened away with
a crack of the whip as though the Devil himself dwelled behind those tall
black gates, set with the curious arms of Sir Josiah Harkewell – a great
silver cogwheel on a red field.
I had not long to wait before a manservant came down from the house
to open the gate, though how he knew of my presence there I cannot
fathom. A vast black figure loomed out of the mossy tunnel between the
trees, jangling an immense gaolers ring in one hand, fumbling with
unwieldy fingers for the right key. As he stepped into the little pool of
light cast by the gaslamps I made out his bent and misshapen form more
clearly, and flinched back in momentary fright. The hunch-backed giant
only smiled - a vacuous, drooling grin which left me in no doubt that God
had seen fit to make him a simpleton as well.
Still, a gentleman must comport himself with dignity, so I smiled
back, and waited while he wrenched the gates open. He shifted the ice-
bound iron with one hand, jerking it loose almost effortlessly. Then a
curious flicker passed across the servant’s lumpen features, as swift as the
shadow of a hawk gliding over a sunlit field. Something seemed to
crystallize in his milky blue eyes, and snap the slack muscles of his face
taut.
“Welcome, welcome, young Mister Price.” he said, the words echoing
up out of his barrel chest as if from some subterranean deep. “Uther here
is usually mute, you know, but he will carry your bags and show you to
the hall. I trust your journey was none too arduous?”
I realized with a shock that this was the voice of Josiah Harkewell
himself!
Well, as you know chess is a game of wills as well as of wits. This little
opening gambit had certainly put me on edge, no doubt to my strange
opponent’s advantage.
“Come, come!” rasped the voice of my host, out of the mouth of his
monstrous servant. “This Sending is costing me precious cogitation
pressure, so please, follow on. The Turk is waiting for you, and you will
play your game tonight.”
As soon as those last words passed Uther’s lips the malformed giant
stooped and hefted my heavy traveling chest across one shoulder, all the
animation going out of his doughy face. There was nothing for me to do
but follow him between the gates and into the dark woods, away from the
glow of the gas-lamps.
As I hurried to keep up with Sir Josiah’s manservant even that little
light was extinguished, the flames snuffed out by some unseen hand.
Now the only light came from ahead of us, at the other end of the tunnel
of interwoven boughs and bearded moss through which I stumbled. It was
flamelight, the glow of countless furnaces and chimneys belching sparks
into the leaden sky, and it was accompanied by the sounds of industry.
How an old man like Josiah Harkewell could live amid the din of steam-
hammers and grinding mills and rumbling rollers I could not fathom, but
this was how he chose to use the fortune he had inherited. His grandsire
was by all accounts a wily old goat who had plundered half of India in his
youth. Now his ancestral seat was transformed into a seething foundry,
the old manor house grafted limpet-like to a black brick manufactuary
nearly thrice its size.
I could just glimpse through the yawning gates of the 'factory the
figures of men slaving amid the noise and smoke, their movements jerky
and indistinct in the heat haze.
We passed through the overgrown ruins of a pleasure garden, planted
by some distant ancestor of Sir Josiah, its ornamental ponds dry and
cracked, its arbors and flowerbeds gone to weeds and rot. A pall of dirty
snow enshrouded everything, and everywhere drifted orange sparks from
the chimneys and furnaces, alighting like tiny insects on the dead
branches of trees.
 My host was there on the threshold to meet me; it seemed that the vast
mute Uther was his only house servant. I had expected him to be an old
man – my father was fifty-five when his throat was cut by the
Republicans, and Harkewell had been his senior. But the man who stood
on the step in the grey ash-fall was not so much ancient as well
preserved, his face putting me in mind of the embalmed dead of ancient
Aegypt. There was the bald shiny pate, the hook nose with its broken
veins, the sharp eyes set in deep black sockets . . .but his finery was not
scented bandages and gold. Instead he stood out in the bitter wind in a
quilted smoking jacket and silk Arabay trousers, soft Afghan slippers and
fingerless leather gloves. In his stick-thin fingers he held a pair of glasses
and a great cut-crystal decanter of ruby port.
“Come in out of the cold, Mister Price!” he called out to me as he
gestured with the bottle. “This rotgut has been waiting for years in the
cellars for just this occasion, and the Turk is getting impatient!”
Impatient? I knew full well that the thing was but a clever machine,
and yet . . .
As I passed through the great iron-bound doors I was struck by a wave
of heat, followed closely by a sticky miasma, a foetid stench akin to a
tannery in high summer.
Good manners forbade that I mention it, but the oppressive fug
seemed to breathe in and out of the house as if from some monstrous
throat. No doubt it was the effluvia of all that industry which even now
shook the crumbling stones of Slake Hall.
Josiah pressed a glass brimming with port into my cold hands, his
emerald eyes twinkling in their deep sockets.
“I suppose you’re keen to begin, eh? Quite a challenge indeed, this
device which bested the Emperor Napoleon himself?” And while he
smiled, I noticed that Harkewell’s bald pate and parchment-skinned brow
were beaded with sweat, and that his hands twitched like panic-stricken
animals.
“Of course, that machine was a fraud, you know. My Turk is the
genuine article.”
All around us as he led me deeper into his bizarre demesne I could
hear the ticking of clockwork, the hissing of steam and the far-off
rhythmic thud of pistons. I felt sure that behind any one of the mahogany
wall panels I would find innumerable whirring and clicking escapements,
springs and gears slicing time to ribbons…
“Might I... might I rest for just a hour or two, Mister Harkewell?” I
asked, sipping tentatively at the blood-red vintage in my glass. It was old
and rich, cloudy with sediment and powerfully intoxicating. “The coach
ride from London was a long one, and the road in poor repair . . .just a
little time to compose myself, I pray?”
 “Time? Time you say? Ahh, we have none of that, Mister Price, none
whatsoever. We are here, and the game must begin precisely upon the
stroke of eleven!”
Now I was sure that his good humor was a mere mask, stretched tight
over some deep duplicity. What waited beyond the black oak doors we
now approached, from behind which I could hear the sound of susurrating
steam and clicking gears? Fear made me pause before that dread portal,
but curiosity and pride made me grasp the handle and turn it, and
propelled be over the threshold into the truly bizarre.
For here was a palace from the Moslem East, a brass Alhambra
studded with pipes of burnished steel, draped with exotic silks and tiled in
creamy marble. And seated amid all this exotic finery was the machine I
had come to contest; not the original, which even now traveled the
Americas with its new owner Maetzel, but a far finer piece of work than I
had ever seen before.
The original Turk had seemed a crude puppet when I watched it play
in Vienna, a thing of wood and cloth which paled in comparison to
Harkewell’s creation. Even silent in repose it looked half-alive, its eyes
hooded, its swarthy skin seeming to glow in the light of the hanging
lamps. Its long Seljuk mustachios were slicked with wax, its clothes
immaculate in their finery, layers of silk and samite and cloth-of-gold. It
seemed to be slyly watching me from under those heavy cantilevered lids,
a smirk on its wooden lips.
I was startled when Harkewell clapped his hands sharply, summoning
from among the hanging tapestries and curtains a pair of servants more
waxen and lifeless than the machine which held my attention. They were
identically attired in evening dress and bowler hats, each of which was
surmounted by the dial of a tiny clock.
“Please, don’t be alarmed.” purred my host as the servants jerked and
twitched themselves across the room, bearing with them an immense
fitter’s wrench and a long, ribbed flex of hosepipe. “These are not men,
but more of my clever automata – Uther is the only mortal in my employ.
These toys are more than adequate for simple tasks, however . . .”
If I squinted my eyes just right I could make out the little flaws and
joints of artifice which are missing from God’s creations. These must be
men of clockwork – no sentient human would move with such maladroit
clumsiness. None but the living corpses who staggered and groaned their
way through the nightmare bowels of Bedlam – but I put that horrific
memory from my mind with some haste. I had to sharpen my senses for
the game to come.
Now the slack-faced servants connected their pulsing hose to the
cabinet which supported the body of the Turk, tightening bolts and
locking the pipe firmly in place. Harkewell rubbed his hands together in
cadaverous mirth as his pet machine came to life, slowly at first, its
eyelids fluttering and its hands clenching spasmodically, then quickening,
wakening, the hiss of compressing gasses and whirring gears filling the
room.
Then its eyes snapped open with a flash like phosphorous flares, and I
was transfixed by the burning blue emptiness there revealed! Like holes
punched through the dusky wood of the thing’s mannequin head, staring
off into the hazy azure of a burnt desert sky...
Only for a second – I blinked once, dizzied and mazed, then the
searing blue light was gone. Its eyes were nothing but tiny mirrors set in
orbs of mother-of pearl – disquieting, but hardly supernatural. Or so I
would have thought had I not turned to see the look on Josiah
Harkewell’s face.
It was the attitude of a dervish communing with his god, the rapt,
predatory glee of one of Alamut’s Hashishin contemplating paradise in
the edge of his blade. If it were not so patently absurd I would have
believed that he worshipped the machine, in that instant.
“Capital! Capital!” he crowed, throwing manners to the wind and
taking a heroic swig from his decanter of port. The rosy liquor dripped
down his chin in runnels as he turned back to me. “He appears to be ready
for you, Mister Price. I hope you fare better than the last few who have
faced him – I’m afraid our Mussulman friend has little patience for
lackwits and losers!”
One of the clockwork servants returned with a low stool of ivory-
inlaid teak and placed it before the Turk, who even now was puffing on
his long-stemmed pipe and drumming the fingers of his free hand on the
table with impatience. Harkewell had cleverly run a little bass tube up the
machine’s arm and into the pipe, channeling some of the smoke from the
hidden engines below up and out of its bowl.
“Never fear, Mister Harkewell.” I replied with all the bravado I could
muster. “This poor device has not seen the likes of me, I’d wager! When
I’m done, perhaps you can remodel him into a dressmaker’s dummy.”
Well, it was only a little jest, but the look on my host’s face made it
seem as if I’d cursed his sainted mother! Even worse, I could swear that
the machine’s bushy horsehair brows beetled together in a threatening
scowl, for all the world as if it had understood my words.
“I hope your wit serves you well, Price.” spat Sir Josiah, turning on his
heel. “He might just see to it that you keep playing until you win, and he
is by no means an indulgent tutor.”
Something twisted his face then; rage, I think and remorse, not
directed at me, but at the scowling Turk itself. Again he clapped his
hands, bringing the heads of the clockwork servants up and around as
though they were tethered to strings.
 “Number Three, Number Twelve – you may commence activation!”
With that the two tottering automata began to turn brass cranks set in
the mosaic-tiled walls, and the room cracked apart.
The ornate arabesques and hanging tapestries parted like a curtain,
revealing behind them a black and cavernous space in which metal
gleamed and twinkled.
But as they worked, stooped to their task like galley slaves, something
caught my eye. Number Twelve, his face devoid of all emotion heaved
mightily at his crank, rolling back half of the back wall by sheer muscular
force. And while my mind assured me that no mortal man was equal to
that task, I noticed beads of sweat pricking his brow. Worse - Number
Three, as waxen-faced and clumsy as his brother sported a fresh red stain
on one of his white kid-gloves. Some kind of hydraulic fluid? Or had the
bolts pinched when he turned his pipe-wrench, breaking the skin, spilling
precious blood?
I watched as a pendulous droplet fell, splashing crimson across the
milky tiles. My eyes were drawn to that tiny speck, falling in slow
motion, shivering in the leaping flames of gaslights.
It was the smallest thing, but it made a lie of all around it. Down and
down, shattering against the marble floor, reflecting in its slick red
surface a million points of silver.
I heard the music then – or a sound which was not music but the raw
white bones of it, a sighing, humming noise which slithered through my
brain, slowing the world to a crawl. With it came a foul exhalation of the
sulphur stench I had endured before, and a feeling of intense pressure, as
if a great metal gauntlet had clamped its fingers about my body.
Unbidden, the ravings of the Dead Man of Bedlam came back to me, the
scrawls and sketches of poor Matthews who had come back from Paris
crazed.
“Sudden Death Squeezing – otherwise termed ‘Lobster Cracking’. This
is an external pressure of the magnetic atmosphere around the person
assailed . . .”
I whipped my head around in search of Harkewell, to beg his
assistance, to beg for release. But the room seemed to have gaped wide
with the horrid mechanical action of the leering automata at their pump-
handles, and now he was nothing but a thin streak of shadow painted
across the tiled wall, a far-off distortion behind the steam haze.
Slower now, fighting the immense pressure, struggling to gulp down
lungfuls of air as thick as treacle - and the Turk was in front of me, a huge
looming presence, the wall behind it peeled away like the skin from some
ghastly anatomical specimen.
Within, a heaving wrack of machinery, a tangle of engines locked in
unnatural copulation, pistons rising and falling like insect legs, wheels
and belts humming with heat and power. In that grinding mill of sharp
clockwork I could see the future of man; slave to his brute mechanisms,
mortal flesh usurped by steel.
There, and in the mocking eyes of the Turk, once again razored circles
of sunburned blue.
All of this tore through my fevered brain in the second it took for a
single drop of blood to fall and shatter and settle on the pale marble tiles.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, cool and steady, and the swelling
anti-music tapered off with a wheezing hiss. The room was no bigger, the
Turk still just a cleverly wrought wooden machine, the clockwork
automatons still at their posts, bereft of sweat or blood.
“Dear me, Price, you seem to have taken that drink rather hard!”
chuckled Josiah Harkewell as he helped me to my stool. “More kick to
the old vintage than I thought, what? Never mind, never mind – I’ll have
Uther bring you a pot of coffee. You had quite a turn there, young man!”
“The machine, the machine in the walls..." I mumbled, my tongue
seeming two sizes too big for my dry and aching mouth. “Just like the
one in Matthews’ folio - the Loom...”
The look of concern writ large across my host’s face took on a cast of
deep distaste. “Please, calm yourself Nathaniel. There is no need to call
up ghosts best forgotten tonight. Especially poor James, God rest him.”
And while the mention of his doomed, departed colleague seemed to
plunge him into melancholy, I couldn’t help but notice the way
Harkewell’s eyes narrowed, boring into those of the Mekanikal Turk as if
watching for them to flip from pale white mother-of-pearl to searing blue.
“What you see in that little portal my toys have opened is merely the
device which runs your adversary.” he said, his long fingers working
insistently at the knotted muscles of my shoulders beneath my coat.
“Akin to Mister Babbage’s famed Analytical Engine, but with some
modifications of my own. I call it a Steam Cogitator, but of course all it
can do is play the noble game of chess. True original thought is
impossible for a mere collection of gears and pushrods, alas.”
His smile was a cutout, a blind, as false as whores’ kindness, but the
implications of his lie spun past me like smoke.
As those dexterous hands kneaded my flesh I could actually feel the
memories evaporating from my mind. There had been no blood, no hymn
of mechanical noise, no great engine of meshing wheels with a mind the
size of a continent, leaning in on me with foul intent . . . no doubt it had
been the strain of the journey, the potency of the wine, the strange, mirror
gaze of the Mekanikal Turk. James Matthews had been a derelict lunatic,
and his tales of a mind-bending device were artifacts of his madness.
There was no sound in this room which could be construed as the
magnetic howl of the Air Loom - only the fevered clicking and hissing of
the machine behind the wall as it extended a single spinning steel shaft
from the portal Harkewell’s slaves had opened, a phallic thing tipped with
whirring gears.
“Softly, now, gently young Nathaniel.” purred the oily voice of Josiah
in my ear. “He is fully awake, and the clock is about to strike eleven.
Time to play the game as you were born to.”
Then the spinning shaft plunged into the wooden back of the Turk like
an assassin’s dagger, and it jerked upright, its eyes staring wide and white
as the Steam Cogitator took control. I knew it was nothing but a clever
device, but that moment was somehow more horrific than any of the
mortal deaths I had ever witnessed – more horrible than the sound of a
felon’s neck snapping as he danced on the end of a gallows rope.
Aye, at that moment the old Fatal Nevergreen of Tyburn would have
been a welcome sight!
I could all too easily imagine those whirling tines grinding into my
own living spine, making me dance to the tune of James Matthews’
frightful Air Loom...
I felt Harkewell’s hands rise from my shoulders, and my eyes went to
the ordered ranks of chess pieces before me. There was a world I could
understand. And I would be damned if I let a mere machine rob me of my
honor on the field of battle.
“He is magnetized. You can begin.”
Harkewell’s words seemed to come in from far away as the light
faded out from the periphery of the ornate chamber, slippery shadows
crowding in until only the chessboard was illuminated.
Across the board the Mekanikal Turk’s mirror eyes flashed in the
gloom, and his free hand stroked his mustachios as if he were deep in
thought. Instinct took over, then, and I brought my hand down to make
the first move, to bring my first pawn out of the ranks.
Josiah Harkewell, his toys, his machines, and his blighted home all
fell away. So too the ghost of James Matthews raving and gibbering in
my head, a shadowman recalled from my last visit to the cursed asylum.
There was only black and white, now. Only strike and counterstrike, feint
and maneuver and sacrifice.
Somewhere in the distance - outside - the thud and howl of machinery
changed its pitch, and a ball of greasy fire leaped up above the treetops.
Cogs spun and meshed and clicked, pistons wheezed and groaned.
Numbers were ground through the mills, and fed down the gleaming shaft
into the Turk’s back, up through its arm, and to the board.
With a tiny click of ebony on marble, the battle was joined.

*
 Hours later I awoke, blinking a tendril of acrid smoke from my eyes.
The haze of deep sleep pressed down on my brain, although my body
was wracked with weariness. It was as if I had labored for hours in some
kind of hypnotic slumber – and indeed, as my eyes cleared this was very
close to the truth.
The shadowy figure of the Mekanikal Turk loomed out of the
darkness across the board, puffing on his long ceramic pipe. His eyes,
tiny mirrors of flashing silver in the gloom. His – no, damn it ITs – face
was contorted into a carven scowl, its stiff varnished fingers tapping
incessantly against the nearly empty board.
Few of the little soldiers of the chessboard remained standing on either
side, and my gaze flitted from one to another, marking attacks and
defenses, paths of movement, scrabbling for a strategy . . .
But it was far too late for that. It seemed that I had already won.
With the slow inevitability of unfolding aeons I watched my own hand
reach out into the circle of light, clasping in pale fingers a tiny ivory
bishop.
The Turk’s king fell like a lightning-struck old oak, toppling in greasy
slow motion as smoke coiled thick and burning across the checkered
squares.
“Check and mate.” came the voice of Josiah Harkewell behind me.
There was something strangely wrong with the harmonics of that
voice, something which grated across my mind like jagged fingernails.
The echo of hot, crushing anti-music, an insinuation of boiling grease and
cesspit rot ...
I turned then, to confront him, to demand the prize he had promised if
I defeated his automaton and then to storm from Slake Hall and into the
night. The dismal weather and the dark woods were suddenly nothing to
me – hellfire, even the purse was of no concern. All I wanted was to put
many miles and stout walls between myself and that reedy, artificial
voice.
As I looked up at him, my fear was doubled and redoubled, racked up
to gibbering terror.
Harkewell did not stand behind me at all – he hung suspended from
the floor, his feet in their absurd felt slippers dangling uselessly. His head
flopped to one side like that of a stringless marionette, but his hands were
outstretched, hooked into claws, reaching out for me blind and twitching
as he hovered in, hooked from above.
A great ribbed tube like the one which animated the Turk was clamped
down to the top of his skull, bolted into his flesh and bone with great
brass wingnuts. Fresh blood oozed from around the join, trickling over
his desiccated skin in thin rivulets.
It was that throbbing mechanical tentacle which bore him up, which no
doubt gave the illusion of life to what must surely be his reanimated
corpse.
“Check and mate, Nathaniel. And I don’t just mean in your little
game!”
Harkewell’s breath was a cloying fug of sweetness and decay, hissing
from his mouth like a blast of steam from a ruptured piston. Once again
the face of James Matthews floated up out of my darkest childhood
memories –
‘Putrid effluvia of the cesspit, of mortification and the plague . . .
Egyptian Snuff, attar of roses and of carnations - these are the
preparations the assassins make for assailing the victims of the Air
Loom.’
His filth-streaked visage leered and screamed at me from behind
rusted bars, as his body lurched and heaved mindlessly against the heavy
chains and straps which held him down.
Perhaps a part of his mania, his insane strength and determination
came through to me, then. Or perhaps having seen the earthly hell of
Bedlam when I was just a child had tempered me to horrors which would
otherwise have unmanned the strongest and bravest. To this day I have no
idea how I managed to throw off the suffocating pressure and gnawing
fear which flowed from the husk of Harkewell in waves, but I stood, and
with hands suddenly as strong as those of angels I tore the chess board
from its mountings. Ten stone of inlaid marble. I brought it around in a
flat, howling arc to smash into the cadaver’s jaw, a concussion which sent
us both sprawling.
Well, I’m no brawler now and I surely wasn’t much rougher back
then, but that blow would have staved in any normal man’s skull as if it
were an eggshell. Harkewell just gripped his twisted lower jaw with both
hands and snapped it back into place, grinding his remaining teeth amid
the welter of blood. An ugly craterous contusion had stretched his
features on one side of his leering face, while the skin hung slack and
waxen on the other.
“Really, young Price - is that any way to treat your gracious host?” he
mouthed, nothing issuing from his lips but a froth of slick red bubbles.
The voice, I realized, had issued from behind me – from the trap-door
mouth of the Mekanikal Turk.
“I’m afraid that my current figurehead is a little past his expiry. I’ve
had to keep him tottering on for the last few months, but as you can see,
he’s fading fast.”
Just on the edge of my hearing I felt a noise that had filled the entire
hall drop away, creating a great rolling wave of silence which broke over
me like smothering velvet.
 And with the sound stripped from the background of my thoughts I
could see Sir Josiah Harkewell as he truly was – dead for weeks before I
had ever even received his summons.
The grinning cadaver was mummified in loops and coils of wire,
bolted into his bones and pinned through his pale, bloodless skin to work
his dangling limbs. Tiny eyelets routed the slim silver cables down his
arms to actuate his grasping fingers, while still more studded his shaven
pate, attached to cruel, barbed hooks which operated his facial features.
Yet in those eyes, their lids tugged open by filaments of steel I could still
see a desperate flicker of sentience, a spark of piteous regret.
“Now we have no need of him. Now we have you, Mister Price! A
nicely pre-programmed specimen, and so young and strong! You will be
our human face for the next century or so – time enough to bring our
plans to fruition.”
The face of the Turk seemed to grin in triumph, its wooden peg teeth
bared in a hideous rictus, its eyes once again blazing cerulean orbs which
seemed to bore into my very soul.
I did not have to see the lumbering forms of Harkewell’s – the
machine’s servants closing in on me to know that flight was my only
salvation. I strained with every fiber of my being to turn and run, but the
noisome stench and pressure were upon me again, accompanied by the
wheezing, screeching music which the Turk summoned up to addle my
burning brain.
“It is no use trying to escape, Nathaniel.” hissed the silk-clad
mannequin in a voice of grotesque intimacy. “Your knowledge is your
weakness – the game of chess itself! A code burned into your mind, and
one you have patterned yourself with willingly! That is why I have taken
this form to test you. Not for your intellect, but for your level of
indoctrination. By the code written across your soul I control you!”
The music swelled, bearing me aloft on its peaks, jagged edges
grinding through my head, and I knew the truth of the vile thing’s words.
Behind the flickering veil of my rational thoughts I could hear the click
and slide of ivory on marble as the Steam Cogitator pulled my strings as
surely as it did those of Josiah Harkewell.
Still I strained to break the mesmeric shackles which bound me to the
spot – an effort akin to stopping a thundering freight-train with my bare
hands. The hideous floating corpse of Harkewell was almost upon me, his
vacant eyes rolling as his bloodless talons scrabbled at my throat.
“Foolish flesh-thing!” howled the Turk, gesticulating wildly with his
blazing opium pipe. “How can you hope to contest with my will? I can
crush you with your own terrors!” I felt the hands of Harkewell clench
around my skull like the jaws of some implacable vise then - and
something much worse. I felt the presence of the Turk in my mind, sifting
through my darkest memories, the blackest fears of my childhood,
conjuring up specters I had long thought laid to rest.
As its piston-driven mechanical laughter echoed with the hideous un-
music through my bones the walls seemed to melt away, the floor to
dissolve into choking mist. Off in the stinking dark things from
primordial chasms of the mind stalked, red-clawed and slavering, while
closer still phantoms of a higher breed congregated in swirls of venomous
smoke – the specters of death and disease, the fear of damnation and
loneliness...
There was a vast grinding sound, as of the lid shoved rudely from
some cyclopean tomb, and I felt the Turk and its vast mechanical mind
pluck from deep within me a vision of dread that I had tried to erase for
decades. I knew - from the very start perhaps - which nightmare the
mechanical fiend would choose to subject me to. It was the one which
drove me to forsake Christ and his church, to embrace the cold sterility of
chess and the succor of the bottle.
Now the bars were forming across my eyes, now the sickly-sweet and
putrid stench of Slake Hall gave way to the reek of unwashed flesh and
ordure. I heard the rattle and scrape of rusting chains, gibbering laughter
in far-off rooms, and I knew immediately which corner of my mind I was
bound up in. The machine had flung me back through time twenty years
or more, to when I huddled at my father’s side in the dread corridors of St
Mary’s of Bethlehem, there to meet with the wretched James Tilley
Matthews.
If you have never had the misfortune to visit that benighted place then
I envy you your ignorance. Even at the tender age of seven I could see
that the so-called hospital was the antithesis of a place of healing – it was
little more than a cruel prison for people guilty only of a terrible disease.
Now the sounds and smells of that man-made hell assailed me from all
sides, knitting together from a black miasma of fears and memories to
overwhelm my mind. It was as if I were a wraith, drifting aimlessly down
those twisted corridors, through endless vortices of shadows and screams
while the hissing, panting, moaning and sobbing of the damned beat
against my head like hammer blows.
Then the door. The old oak door with its bands of iron, crusted with
feces and blood. The little hatch which snapped open with a sound like
the snick of the guillotine to reveal a jaundiced eye set in bruised and
swollen flesh, rolling and twitching. The gaoler’s baton thrust into that
yellowed orb, the screaming and gnashing of teeth as the door was
thrown open. My father manhandling the baton-wielding thug away, his
careworn face split by an animalistic snarl.
It was a pit which even Lucifer in all his cruelty would not have made
for the vilest sinner. And crouched in the centre of the room, pinned by
stout black chains was a man whose crime was knowing too much, who
had been rewarded by the crown he had faithfully served with six feet by
six of rancid straw and a cup of gruel a day.
The scene lurched and shivered as I fought for control, strove to tear
the illusion from before my eyes. I knew that back in reality - back in the
mechanical Alhambra of Slake Hall - the dead-eyed automatons slaved to
the Cogitator were closing in on me, no doubt ready to bind me up like
poor Harkewell. But Matthews’ grime-streaked face swung around to
confront me, illuminated in a sheen of sweat against a backdrop of insane
diagrams chalked upon the wall of his cell.
“Harken, brother! It’s the magnetic atmosphere – the flux, the aether!
He was wild-eyed and staring, his hands white with chalk dust, smeared
crimson with blood. “Cold iron can stop their witchery! Anathema to the
assassins of the Air Loom it is! They are under Whitehall! Under
Buckingham Palace!” Now his voice was low, conspiratory, a clandestine
whisper. “They control the minds of the doctors here, Price! They have
convinced the pack of them that I’m insane! Me! The only one who
knows how to stop them?”
And though he had hissed these mad words to my father, I knew that
they had come back to me for a reason. Matthews was not insane.
Robspierre’s men really had constructed the monstrous machine he
insisted was in use under London. When the English agents, my father
among them, had destroyed the infernal device Josiah Harkewell had
taken the blueprints with him. And the dagger which had struck down my
father? Could it have been grasped in the fist of one of Josiah’s
machines? One of the grim agents of his Steam Cogitator?
The anger welled up in me like a firestorm. I had kept it crushed down
hard for all those years for the sake of decorum and decency, for the sake
of society. I had been nothing but civil with the Frenchmen I met,
blaming nothing on their nation or their race. But the vitriol was there,
bone-deep, and now it turned my mind to scalding, incandescent steel as
it found its focus.
Even the dread assailment of the Air Loom could not hold me back.
The illusion of Bedlam cracked, crazed and shattered, the laughing face
of James Tilley Matthews reduced to dust then blown away before a
rising storm of fury.
If cold iron was what was needed, I would be pleased to give them a
taste!
The red mist cleared from my eyes just in time for me to duck under
the swinging arms of the cadaverous Josiah Harkewell, his flayed and
skeletal face contorted into a death rictus. In the calm eye of my rage all
the world seemed to move slowly, my enemies clumsy and sluggardly as
they fumbled for my throat. There, on the wall was my goal – a pair of
crossed Arabic swords, their intricately carved blades beckoning me to
frenzy.
If only the demon machine I opposed had possessed a face, so I could
witness its surprise! To think, a skinny little whelp more brains than
brawn hefting an Ottoman scimitar as long as his arm! What a doomed,
quixotic figure I must have cut – had there only been human eyes there to
see me.
I could feel the sound of the Air Loom in my bones as its malevolent
music roared up and down the scales, building to a mind-shattering
crescendo. I knew that if the demonic sound stripped me of my anger then
I would have nothing left to oppose the grim Cogitator, and that I would
become one of its bloody puppets, strung up like Harkewell.
My fingers closed around the handle of the sword, and the noise cut
out as if the terrible Loom had been obliterated. Once again a rolling peal
of silence filled Slake Hall like choking velvet, and once again it peeled
away a layer of illusion as if tearing a scab from reality.
There was no fanciful eastern weapon in my hand, but a great notched
cleaver of rusted iron. And the chamber of the Mekanikal Turk was no
palace - it was a soot-crusted cavity, a workshop of nightmares strewn
with withered chunks of flesh and broken machinery. Harkewell, his eyes
rolling in their blackened sockets was a marionette wraith, jerking
through the foetid air toward me on a hangman’s rope of wires and
chains. The servants were little more than corpses bolted together with
rods and gears, their rotting faces slack and lifeless.
The only living thing amid the smoke and ruin was the Turk itself,
connected by its steel umbilical to a vast, throbbing presence which
lurked behind the far wall. Life, so drained from the poor once-human
things who assailed me seemed to burn like a kerosene flame about the
vile machine, its robes crisp and gold-edged gleaming, its face carven
from oiled wood as mellow and rich as soft, vital flesh. Blue fire danced
in its eyes, filled with precise, mathematic malice.
I had no idea how, then and there, but I knew that I must destroy the
foul device – that if I failed that it would only lure some other poor fool
into its trap. For who would believe my tale – who would be able to see
past the glamour of the Air Loom but one who could hear the voice of
James Matthews in his head? And with only the scrawlings of a madman
as proof any court in the land would have me thrown into the pits of
Bedlam rather than take my accusations against Sir Josiah seriously.
There was no time for careful strategy, no time to plan ahead move for
move as I had trained myself to do in the little world of chess. This was
battle unrefined by rules or etiquette, and as the first automaton came
shambling toward me I gritted my teeth and swung the cleaver like a
woodsman’s axe, shearing through sinew and steel in one mighty stroke.
 The second fell to my backhand, its head lopped off cleanly – and I
silently thanked the sports master of Saint Osbert’s for teaching me to bat
at cricket!
The mechanical corpses were dry-rotten, mummified things, and the
weapon I possessed was more than capable of splitting them asunder. I
fancied that the whining and howling of gears behind the walls took on a
new and more fevered pitch as the first of the Steam Cogitator’s pawns
fell – perhaps it relied on the brain-curdling powers of the Air Loom to
trap its victims, and one who fought back was new and frightening
experience for it!
I certainly hoped as much, for now through doors which swung open
in the cobwebbed corners of the hall spilled a veritable army of the
clockwork damned, their bronze-tipped talons hooked and their dead eyes
promising oblivion. Above them all swung the gibbering thing which had
been Josiah Harkewell, his mouth open in a silent scream as his steel
umbilical clattered along a set of brass rails amid the ceiling girders.
It still seems impossible, what I did then, but terror and rage make
giants of men – soldiers tell tales of it, of how a single man can lift a
sundered cannon from a crushed comrade’s legs, how a lone warrior can
hold off a horde of foes with cold anger alone. However it happened, the
world slowed even further, and with the utmost clarity I saw the exact
point at which I must strike, the coupling of the pipes and chains and
sparking wires which bore Harkewell aloft. I felt that my father and
James Matthews were with me then in spirit, strengthening my arm to
send the chipped and corroded blade of my weapon sizzling through the
air. I sidestepped and spun like a matador, the cleaver ringing in my
numb hands, and the umbilicus shattered, spraying noisome fluids and
riven links of chain. The abused body of Josiah Harkewell rolled to a halt
at my feet, smeared with dust and soot, a wretched thing which should
not have lived. And yet still the weakest flickering of vital fire filled his
deep-set eyes – I knew at once that the hold of the machine over him was
broken.
“Nathaniel... Price...” he wheezed, each breath an agony. “You should
not have come here, but you did. You have fallen into my trap, lad, but
forgive me... you have answered my prayers...”
How I wanted to twist the ragged stump of my iron cleaver in his
withered face, in that moment! How I loathed him for what he had
created, what he had done...
But how I pitied what he had become.
Now his feeble hand was clutching at the hem of my trousers, his eyes
imploring, but there was no time to pay him any heed. The legions of the
Mekanikal Turk were closing in all around us, their hands grasping, their
teeth exposed in a hundred funerary grins. Brute strength would avail me
nothing against their overwhelming numbers, and even now I could feel
myself weakening, the hot pulse of anger turning to ashen dread within
me.
“If you prayed to see me die, Harkewell, then indeed, your entreaties
have been heard.” I spat down at the living carcass at my feet. “And may
the Devil take you for your treachery!”
“No... You don’t understand!” he croaked, holding out one trembling
hand in supplication. “Nobody else would have suspected all that was
being plotted here – nobody else would know about the Air Loom or how
to break its power!”
He was gasping for breath now, clearly on the threshold of death.
“I know your suspicions, Nathaniel.” he said as he curled up on
himself, seeming to shrink like a scrap of paper cast into a furnace. “Only
you would have struck me down – me and not the damnable Turk!”
Seams and stitches in his crumbling flesh were splitting open as he
spoke, his whole body unraveling, wires parting with the twang of broken
harp-strings. A mess of clockwork and pulsing, blackened organs spilled
from his sundered trunk, slick in a pool of spreading oil and blood.
The clutching claws of the automaton-men were at my throat now,
their crypt-stench and kerosene breath all around me. As the tormented
soul of Josiah Harkewell finally fled its fleshly prison I steeled myself to
fight to the last.
But fate, it seemed, had other purposes for me. Indeed, had I fallen
into the clutches of those ghouls I would no doubt even now be the
human face of Slake Hall, a mummy stuffed full of mainsprings and
gears!
As I took up my stance above the broken body of Josiah Harkewell the
wall behind me erupted outward in a spray of shattered masonry and
splintered timber. Great jagged chunks of brick and oak scythed through
the air, passing over my head as I ducked down, striking the automaton
horde and knocking many from their feet.
Wild-eyed, I turned to face this new and terrifying threat, the useless
stub-end of my cleaver clutched in shaking hands. Whatever had
demolished the wall would surely reduce me to a pulp in instants!
From out of the cloud of dust and smoke came an anguished voice –
like that of an infant, but deeper, filled with uncomprehending pain.
“FFF...FFREEE! MASTER! I’M... FREE!”
There in the gaping hole in the wall was the hunch-backed figure of
Uther – the hulking manservant who had met me at the gates what
seemed like an eternity ago.
Now his huge hands pawed in anguish at his misshapen head, and
tears rolled lugubriously down his face. A flash of comprehension struck
me suddenly – he had been enslaved to Harkewell, not the machine! And
now, with his master little more than a husk of skin and dust and wire, he
was free again. Never had a I seen a slave greet his emancipation with
such grief.
A finger as wide around as my wrist was leveled accusingly at the
gaggle of machine-men before us.
“You.... you! The Master’s little toys! You’ve been bad. You’ve
been ... very naughty!”
Despite my grip on the cold iron of the shattered cleaver I could hear
the sighing and howling of the Air Loom, and I could smell the rolling
pall of hot foetor which it exhaled, as its great magnetic vortices tried in
vain to sink their hooks into Uther’s mind. Perhaps it was his unfortunate
condition, his childlike simplicity. Or perhaps it was his anger and
incomprehension which saved him from that fell assailment.
Whichever, he stooped and swept up Josiah Harkewell’s desiccated
body with one shovel-sized hand, curling the other into an implacable
callused fist.
It was with no little satisfaction that I saw the hideous trap-door
mouth of the Mekanikal Turk snap open in simulated horror.
Then Uther was among its slaves like a terrier in a pit of rats, his
mighty blows staving in heads and shattering ribs as he bore up his poor
dead master over one shoulder. The pitiable brute was still weeping
openly as he went about his grisly work, reducing a hundred tottering
automata to shards and scraps in a matter of seconds.
“And you, little wooden man. You are the naughtiest of all!” he
whispered, coming to a halt before the polished mahogany altar of the
Turk. “The Master is resting now, but I know what he would do with a
wicked wooden man like you... INTO THE FURNACE!”
There was no denying the expression of stark mortal terror which
contorted the puppet’s face at that moment – by God, perhaps it really
was alive! If so, then the agony Uther was about to visit upon it would be
horrific – but deserved.
The hunchback’s fist came up like the draw of a great steam-hammer,
ready to pound the Turk to matchwood, and then, faster than blinking, it
vanished.
The little desk with its clockwork innards burst apart as Uther’s blow
smote it in two, but the Mekanikal Turk was already in the air, blown
from its perch by a blast of pressurized steam. As it flew I watched four
jointed brass legs unfold from within its hollow chest, claw tips clicking
into place as it landed in a shower of sparks. Four deep grooves were left
smoking in the stone floor. With a chatter of gears and a hiss of escaping
gasses the terrible machine picked its way around in a circle, focusing its
cerulean eyes upon its tormentors.
 Disconnected from its mother machine, it could only speak one word –
the same dry reedy utterance with which the original Turk had concluded
its games.
“Echec!” spat the machine, as a pair of linked revolvers popped out of
its chest, their hammers cocking back with a tiny snicking sound.
“Echec!”
It moved like a crippled spider, jerky and unstable, but slowly backing
away toward the hole in the wall, where a hive of whirling gears and
thudding pistons still moved in a pall of shadows.
As we stood, mesmerized, the wall hinged open like a great maw, its
teeth the innumerable tines of rolling cogwheels, and the cursed Turk was
through the gap, its brass claws clattering across the metal catwalks of the
workshop beyond.
At once Uther strode forward to the gap, bracing his twisted back
against one half of the hidden door and his free hand against the other.
Pipes buckled and rivets flew like grapeshot as the machine battled with
his mighty muscles in a vain attempt to shut the portal.
“Pleassssse... Mister Price!” he hissed, as veins stood out on his
bullish neck. “Take the Master. He’ll know what to do. He’ll know how
to stop it!”
Well, the thing draped across the giant manservant’s shoulder was not
likely to be any help at all, but how could I argue? The valiant Uther had
saved my life, and dispelling his delusion would only cause him further
grief. There was little time, I could see – the door was straining closed,
inch by inexorable inch, and once it shut we would be trapped. Who
knew what horrors the Steam Cogitator could unleash then?
So I took the almost weightless husk of Harkewell from his hand, and
bearing him in my arms like a sleeping child I ducked under the arch of
Uther’s body and into the naked brain of the machine.

It was dark within the chamber of the Steam Cogitator. Coalfire glow
cast looming shadows and picked out each surface with violent red. The
heat of banked-up furnaces and drifting sparks made the murky place feel
like the pits of hell, while all about moved the innards of the machine –
belts and wheels, cogs and cables and chains, ratcheting escapements and
squealing worm-drives, pawls and screws. The heat was insufferable, and
sweat ran down my face in sheets, blurring my eyes as I stumbled through
a gauntlet of flying shuttles and pumping beams, the dried-up remains of
Josiah Harkewell in my arms.
Surely there was some way to stop this vast device – a way which
wouldn’t involve me being crushed between rolling gears or scalded by
searing steam! I staggered between mortal dangers like a drunken fool,
barely avoiding being flattened or incinerated at every turn, always
searching for a point of vulnerability where I could strike. Once or twice,
through the haze of steam and salt sweat I fancied I caught sight of the
Mekanikal Turk, scuttling like a poisonous spider through the shadows.
I have no idea how long I wandered amid the hiss and roar and chatter
of the Steam Cogitator – my memory of that nightmarish episode is a blur
of razor-sharp cogwheels, endless fields of them ticking back and forth in
rows, a vast sea of winking oiled metal seething with life. I blundered
along brass catwalks above the grinding wheels, closing in on the source
of a sound which drove me like a lash, which dug into my mind with
steely fingers despite my grip on the iron stump of my cleaver.
It stood under a dome of soot-blackened glass, its pipes like that of a
great church organ rearing up toward the heavens, translucent pillars of
crystal writhing with trapped energies. Cyclonic spirals of lightning
scrabbled against the walls of the pipes, rising and falling as blasts of
noisome gas were vented, producing a chorus of moans and shrieks like a
symphony of torture. It was the very centre of Slake Hall, of the machine,
and of my waking nightmare – the Air Loom itself.
With the brain-power of a single soul behind it, this device could drive
men mad, control their emotions and their thoughts, sculpt their dreams...
but for Josiah Harkewell this had not been ambitious enough.
His Air Loom was playing itself, the keys of its great ivory control
board moving as if caressed by ghostly fingers while an endless loop of
creamy white paper unspooled from one side of the polished teak console.
Innumerable tiny holes were punched through the paper, as if the whole
cruel device was only some saloon player piano, and it sucked in loops
and coils of it greedily from where it spewed out of the Cogitator’s maw
– a clattering press which punched out the holes faster than my eyes
could comprehend.
With artificial thought powering it, this immense instrument could
probably enslave all of London – all of England! James Matthews’
sketches had been of a small, bureau-sized machine, but this monstrosity
was big enough to fill a cathedral. Any thought of smashing it asunder
with my bare hands fell away as I stood before its forest of glittering
pipes, their tops wreathed in mist high above.
A confusion of brass dials jutted from the console of the Loom, and in
addition to the hissing, ever-shifting keys there were an array of levers
and pedals sliding back and forth under their own power. There was still
an operator's chair, however – a handsome buttoned-leather wingback
seat which seemed out of place amid the stark, stripped machinery.
Keeping a tight fist about my cold iron talisman I gently laid Harkewell
down on his throne, a grim caricature of how he would have appeared in
life.
My eyes scanned the dials for a clue as to how the whole damnable
edifice could be shut down – ‘calculation speed’, ‘pressure’,
‘temperature’, ‘sending radius’ – it was all alien to me.
All but a single part of the machine which I could place with unerring
accuracy.
There amid the creaking bellows and heaving pistons was a pair of
brass balls, spinning one around the other at the end of a bell-shaped
copper fixture. The pressure dial was linked to this device by a slender
tube, and rising above the spinning balls was a thick corrugated hosepipe
leading up and up amid the steam, to a great vent in the workshop wall. It
was the governor, the regulating valve which kept the pressure of the
whole system in check.
At once I knew exactly what I had to do.
I gently wrapped Harkewell’s dry fingers around the mechanism,
stopping the spinning balls in their endless rotation. His head lolled to
one side, limp and lifeless, but his eyes twinkled, dried-up buttons like
drops of volcanic glass set deep in his metal-studded skull. The needle on
the machine’s pressure dial immediately twitched up toward the red, and
through the meshwork floor I could see an even larger governor, its
spheres the size of footballs, grinding to a halt. All through the workshop
of the Cogitator steam began to vent, and the high-pitched whine of gases
under terrible pressure filled the air.
Soon enough the great furnaces which drove the machine would be
blown apart, and hopefully the ensuing conflagration would melt the
whole demon engine down to slag! So, leaving my erstwhile host with his
mummified fist clamped around the safety valve I turned to make my
escape from Slake Hall - only to find myself confronted by the muzzles
of twin wide-bore revolvers, and a pair of eyes carven from shimmering
mother-of-pearl.
The Turk was silent, immobile, and for a second I dared to hope that
whatever infernal clockwork had powered it had finally run down.
Gingerly I took a step to the left, toward a staircase spiraling down into
the gloom. With an enormous crack of thunder the left pistol spoke, its
muzzle-flash lighting the hideous wooden mask of the Turk like the face
of a demon. The handrail behind me was torn away, spinning off into
clouds of steam and sparks. Slowly, my heart pounding in my throat, I
turned to face the murderous machine.
With a clatter of brass on polished wood the Turk moved crabwise
around me, keeping its guns trained on my head. Once again it was under
the power of its steam-driven overmind; a fat bundle of cables and tubes
came down from the ceiling into its back. Now those cruel and soulless
eyes flickered from silver to searing blue again, and its reedy, pneumatic
voice hissed out amid the gathering roar of overloading pipes and pistons.
“Remove his hand, Price.” it hissed, its mouth snapping open and shut
out of time with the words it spoke. “Let the pressure vent, or we will
both be doomed.”
Sure enough, the needle of the pressure dial was now well into the red,
and drops of boiling water were seeping from the brass fittings of the
console. It would not be long, now before the boilers burst asunder.
“Do it, you fool!” screeched the machine, its brass claws clicking and
hammering against the floor in a jig of frustration. “Now, or I’ll shoot!”
The black holes of the pistol muzzles transfixed me like a pair of eyes
– like the dark, soulless cavities in the skull of Josiah Harkewell. And in
them I found a moment of clarity, a sudden epiphany which made me
laugh in the Mekanikal Turk’s face.
“You can’t touch him, can you? You can’t do it yourself – and if I
won’t be bullied into doing it for you, then we both shall burn!”
This was what madness felt like – clear and hot and rushing, fevered
and exultant, as though everything at every moment were a giant puzzle
clicking into place. This is what it felt like to be James Tilley Matthews, I
supposed – keeper of a secret so all-encompassing that the knowledge of
it pushed mere sanity from the mind. So I laughed, an unhinged sound
more terrible than any which issued from the Air Loom behind me.
“I say, let us burn!” I crowed. “And may my deed in destroying you
commend me to Heaven! Even if I am to suffer the agonies of Satan, I
will go on. But you, you vile device – for you, there will be only
oblivion!”
The right pistol rang out, then, and I felt the slug whip past my cheek,
close enough to feel its shockwave pull at my lank and sweaty hair. Close
– but it would not kill me, of that I was sure in that moment – for it could
not touch its former master!
“Please... be rational..." wheezed the Turk, lowering its guns and
reaching out with its one articulated hand. “We cannot do this thing, this
little thing... he built it into us, he feared us even before we were
complete. We could only transform him when we promised immortality.
That was his grail, Nathaniel. Not one of you fleshy creatures doesn't fear
death..."
It was begging now, its voice plaintive and cracking. In the cerulean
seas of its empty eyes I fancied I could detect a tremor of fear, flickering
below the surface like the shadow of a cruising shark.
“You could live forever, Nathaniel Price. Our methods are much
improved since we processed poor Josiah. You would still look human,
still young and strong... aeternal!”
 I could see how it had taken Harkewell in, then – first just a little
augmentation, to hold back the years, then the skin, then the organs, the
eyes and the teeth and finally the soft tissue of his failing brain. It was the
immortality of the mummified ancient dead, the Pharaohs in their dusty
tombs beneath Aegyptian sands – eternity as a perfectly preserved living
corpse. If that was my choice, I would rather die swiftly, torn apart in a
fireball as Slake Hall was ripped from the world.
“Never!” I snarled, swatting the machine’s entreating hand away with
the iron stump of my cleaver. “You cannot assail me with your lies, any
more than you can with your accursed Air Loom. We’ll both be blown to
Hell, and I’ll regret nothing.”
All around us now the building was shaking and the gears were
whirling faster and faster, their tortured bearings shrieking amid plumes
of steam. As I watched, appalled, one of the glass panes of the dome
above gave way and fell like the blade of a monstrous guillotine, shearing
through three of the pipes of the Air Loom in a shatterburst of crystal
shards. Blue-white coils and jags of electricity danced across the ranks of
speeding cogs and blurring chains. It would happen at any moment now –
one final, vast explosion which would blast us all to ashes.
“Wait – Mister Price! Nathaniel! Listen!” it was the voice of the Turk
again, but this time it was as loud as that of God, a distorted echo amid
the rumble and howl of the machine’s self-destruction. “I will play you
for it, Nathaniel Price. I will play you for your life, and mine. Winner
take all. There are mere minutes to spare – so be quick about it. We can
play out a whole game of chess in your mind in the time it takes for your
heart to beat twice. If you win, you can leave, and I will be destroyed. If
you lose, you will let the pressure vent, and then we will keep you –
forever.”
I stopped then, and my pride made me listen to its wild promises. I had
bested the machine once before; surely I could do so again?
As soon as the thought had crossed my mind I saw the board begin to
form, there in my aching skull. I felt the connection go live, felt the
power of the steam cogitator rise up through the soles of my boots,
pounding through my veins, suffusing the enervated shell of my body.
Just before it overtook me completely, just at the instant when the waters
of its vile power were to close over my head I sprung my trap, a final
twist which I hoped could save me. For of course it was a lie – if I gave in
to its power the machine would never let me go. Win or lose, it would
have me by the shackles and chains of my indoctrination, the programme
of chess etched into my mind.
The little board took only a fraction of the Cogitator’s skill to create.
But now I pushed with my thoughts, with all my will, and rolled the
checkered field out further, slowly at first but faster and faster. From a
tiny square a meter to a side it leaped for the four horizons in the blank
space inside our linked minds, enshrouding every surface with gleaming
black ebony and white marble. Out there, the pressure was dropping as
titanic engines took up the load, as more and more the devil machine’s
processing power was sucked into the game I was weaving to ensnare it.
Now I imagined ranks upon ranks of chessmen marching to war,
white and black pitched into battle across the whole undulating expanse
of our shared imagination. I commanded the ivory forces like some mad
Napoleon, urging them onward to crush the ebony soldiery of the
Mekanikal Turk.
It was working.
The imaginary world woven by the air loom was slowing down as the
cogitator overloaded, and more and more of its pieces were falling to me.
Even better, I could start to glimpse through the interface of the immense
chess game the way in which the engine’s metal mind worked. It had
thought to use my obsession against me, and now I turned the tables on it.
I reached out with one phantom hand, there in the black and white world
of my mind, and picked up an ebony pawn.
Even through the howl and whine of the Air Loom, projecting the all-
encompassing game around me I heard the roar of escaping steam and
roiling fire. I felt a shudder run through the whole great bulk of Slake
Hall as the cogs and belts ground to a standstill, perhaps for the first time
in years. One by one the innumerable rows of gears beneath the control
platform spun down, resetting to zero, and the great universal chessboard
inside my head clicked and spun, all the pieces returning to their neat and
ordered ranks. From the lofty heights of my mind’s eye I could see them
laid up in their millions, and I could see how they worked. A white pawn
for a ‘one’, black for a ‘zero’. Little packets of cipher were shown as
higher ranks, and the placement of the Kings defined the start and end of
each stanza of encoded information. This was how the Air Loom was
operated, and how the machine behind it could be enslaved.
I found that if I concentrated, squinting as if staring into the sun, I
could see the real world like a ghostly image behind the harlequin veil of
the operating board. Out there the hall of the cogitator fell silent, Josiah
Harkewell’s mummy still slumped across the desk. Billows of steam were
blasting from the boilers deep beneath me, so I gently took his hand from
the governor, letting the little brass device whirl back into motion. All
around me tons of oily hot machinery hung poised in expectation, the
mind inside its cage of steel waiting for my command. I knew it would
only be my bootlick until it could find a flaw in my mental armor, but....
the power I could wield! The injustices I could right, as secret monarch of
the Empire, the Master Loom linked to innumerable others binding up the
whole globe...
 The Mekanikal Turk was gone.
When it had slipped away I could not say. Where it was now... my
skin crawled at the thought of it clicking and whirring in the shadows,
lining up a shot from its monstrous pistols to the back of my skull...
That made up my mind – that and the ravaged face of Sir Josiah as I
gently lifted him from the operator’s chair and sat down before the
keyboard of the silent Air Loom. His face was all but gone now, a mask
of dry skin tight over yellowed bones, but his cadaverous grin was one of
victory, of satisfaction. I would finish this for all of them – my father,
Matthews, Uther, and damn him, the foolish Harkewell too.
It only took me a few minutes to write my little aria; I set the machine in
motion and rose from the command board sweaty and drained. I lifted
Josiah back into his seat, from where he had perhaps dreamed to rule the
world, and left him there as the foul stench and greasy pressure of the Air
Loom began to build all around me, as the organ tubes filled again with
noisome flickers and curlicues of flux.
It was time to be gone from Slake Hall, before my final programme
took effect.

*
They came from all over the valley and the downs beyond – slaves to
the pneumatic flux of the Air Loom, hammers and torches and prybars in
their hands. They came slack-faced and bleary-eyed, with no volition,
with the shuffling gait of zombies newly risen from their crypts. But by
their hands I saw the great Steam Cogitator ruined; wrecked down to
scraps and shards of mindless metal.
The hall became Josiah Harkewell’s pyre – he would have wanted it
that way, I fancied, taking the cruel machine he had played father to
down into the flames with him. Uther, too, would ascend to heaven with
the ashes of his home – he had perished, crushed to death between the
vise-like doors of the brain chamber.
While the breakers worked, dead eyed and grim, I searched in vain for
the blueprints to the Air Loom – so, I told myself, as to be sure that they
were incinerated. To this day I still tell myself that there was no desire in
my heart to wield the power of the Loom myself, not even when I walked
among my army of sequestered slaves, watching them do my bidding.
The plans were nowhere in evidence, not even in
Sir Josiah’s private study. Which leaves me one tiny sliver of dread, when
I think of the black mark on the earth where Slake Hall used to stand, the
charred crater in the wood behind rusted-shut gates.
While I stood, and watched the sparks fly up like ascending souls, and
smiled grimly to myself as the copper and brass wheels melted down to
slag I’m sure I saw a figure off in the dark, through the shifting curtains
of smoke, a figure skulking among the gnarled trees at the wood’s edge.
Its eyes were twin slits of cerulean blue fire, a gaze as full of malice as
any that’s ever chilled my blood. On four glittering spider legs it went,
stalking backward into the trees, its malevolent eyes always on mine as it
faded into the shadows.
I thought, then, that surely its clockwork would run down, that
without the Cogitator to give it life it was just another pretty toy. But
now, when I see all the new wonders which science has brought us, I
wonder.
And when I see the telegraph cables slicing up the sky at dawn, and
see electric lights burning through the night, and hear voices cut into
discs of wax and read by needles, I shudder with a frission of fear.
Somewhere, I’m sure, the thing is being built again. Somewhere under
dusty darkness the wooden face of the Mekanikal Turk is smiling its
knowing smile, a tiny puppet at the very tip of a mountain of oily gears
and wires and pistons and roaring furnaces.
I know that one day I’ll hear the damnable ringing of one of Alexander
Bell’s new ‘telephones’, and when I pick up the horn a voice will issue
forth from across the years, a voice as dry and reedy as that of the
mummified dead.
All it will say to me is ‘echec’, and I will know that we are doomed.