The Sea of Ash by Scott Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

dimensions
merge. Maybe this room is an entertainment, or a fake, like doctored Victorian
“ghost” photographs, mock ectoplasm, profitable spirit-knockings and the like.
Maybe Vincent is rushing into a hidden room to operate levitating bed sheets,
or to moan and rattle chains through one of the vents. Maybe his
great-grandfather Arcangelo Banchini made his fortune hoaxing during the
spiritualist craze.
    Trembling, I hear a soft hiss of
steam as the lights flutter. A gear alongside one of the walls squeals and
starts to revolve, hesitantly at first, loosened scabs of rust clicking like
hail as they fall to the metal floor. Then plates in the floor begin to rumble
as mechanisms beneath the room stagger to life, groaning and rasping. I hadn't
realized that there was another level beneath the cellar. As the
platform under my feet vibrates I find myself hoping that the plates are stable
and that I don't end up falling through the floor, chair and all. To my left
something bangs as though someone has hurled a hammer. Pistons pulse, and the
whole chamber rattles like a factory. There is clanking and squeaking, and I
imagine disrupted mice scurrying unseen over the floor, their footfalls lost in
the cacophony.
    "What if this is real ?"
I say to myself.
    I must do something. If spirits,
or whatever, are being conjured, it's best that I dictate what they are. I turn
to the mouth-funnel and stutter…
    "Albert Pond...Dr. Albert
Pond..."
    I hear several loud booms as if
something powerful is punching to get through the metal doors.
    "Albert Pond, please...Albert
Pond...."
    Pale motion draws my eye. Only a
mist of steam leaking from a pipe. But then a more dramatic movement. One of
the far doors is starting to open.
    It is the right door sliding up
into the ceiling like a guillotine blade in reverse. I tense, recalling what
Vincent had said about the right door. Something bad is trying to enter.
    I look down at the stiff levers.
He had jabbered instructions about what to do if the bad door opened. But there
are three levers, and he was talking so fast that I didn't quite take in what
he was saying. Which lever do I pull?
    The door makes a grinding sound as
it goes up. I see only darkness beyond it. The door is fully open. My eyes
adjust, and the light reveals a vague figure seated in a chair. It is thin and
dark, coming into focus as the chair slides forward on rails. The chair jerks
as it halts and the ghastly metal puppet sitting there lurches forward.
    I cry out and grip the arms of my
chair.
    "Dear God!"
    It's an animatron and nothing
more, I tell myself, like the figures at Disneyland. Its lines date it as a
work of the Victorian mind, for like the other machine parts that surround me,
it has grace and floridity, the elegance of a past sensibility. But I am too
frightened to be awed by the technological aspect.
    The puppet has a demon face, part
man, part beast, the prominent snout revealing upper and lower sets of sharp
black teeth as the mouth opens, and the thing jerkily stands up from its chair,
joints whining.
    " Expletive !"
    I look back at the levers,
struggling to remember. What if I were to try them all?
    I get a better view of the torso
now. It is split down the middle and has lines suggesting ribs, or the
definition on the shell of a trilobite. The thin arms bend at the elbow, and
skeletal hands reach to open the twin plates of the chest as if a big black
book.
    Now I am looking into a window of
dull luminescence. Mist in moonlight, or a low-wattage light bulb drowning in
milk. My eyes try to adjust, or make out detail, but the light is like water,
shifting, protective of its secrets.
    I lunge for one of the levers and
yank it toward myself. Nothing happens.
    I begin to notice nebulous spheres
rising like great bubbles in the water-light. They bob, floating closer to the
window in the metal demon's chest.
    I must try another lever...
Something is coming.
    They are faces, I can see that now
as they hover closer, eagerly