Saturday, September 22, 2012

In the Trees II: Lust on the Limb


And here's the sequel to my Doubleshot 60 second play, this one based on the word "Lust." 



(Scene: we're high in the forest canopy of South America, eight years later than the last scene. Two of our sloths, Cynthia and Albert, are hanging from the same tree limb. They're laughing and flirting.)

              CYNTHIA
     Oh, you!

              ALBERT
     Oh, you.

              CYNTHIA
     No, oh YOU.

              ALBERT
     No, oh YOU.

(They laugh.)

               ALBERT
     God, Cynthia, I love this time with you.

              CYNTHIA
     And I you, Albert. You make me happier than I ever thought I could be again.

              ALBERT
     It's been eight years, Cynthia.

              CYNTHIA
     And sometimes I think that's almost enough.

              ALBERT
     Oh Cynthia. You know I love you. That's why I keep hanging on this limb. Monsoon or drought, brown beetles or brown leaves, I've been here with you.

              CYNTHIA
     It's true.

              ALBERT
     I have wanted you so. Gazing day after day on your svelte curves, your delicate snout, that cute little band of coloration over your eyes....

              CYNTHIA
     We all have that.

              ALBERT
     But on you it's so erotic.

              CYNTHIA
     Albert, I've wanted you too. And now that the children have left the limb and are halfway to another tree, I think that maybe I can imagine a different life.

              ALBERT
     A life with me?

              CYNTHIA
     Yes. Yes, I think so.

              ALBERT
     My darling!

              CYNTHIA
     My own!

(They begin to rush towards each other. They're sloths. Before they can get there, from the trunk end of the limb:)

              OLIVER
     I'm back!


(End of Play)
 

Friday, September 21, 2012

In The Trees




The good folks at NPA are staging Doubleshot, their 24 Hour Play Festival, tomorrow at 7:00 pm as part of the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts' "Free For All" Fall Festival. This time round they asked me to write a 60 second play--with the option of a second one to fill in for a fellow playwright who's had to drop out.

So I did. It was so much fun I wrote a second one right after.

The theme of this Doubleshot's "The Seven Deadly Sins," and yes, I drew Sloth. 

So without further ado, here's a tiny drama I call "In the Trees."



(Scene: We're high in the tree canopy of the South American rainforest, upwards of 60 feet above the forest floor. It's a lovely late afternoon. Hanging on one long tree limb are three large sloths, Albert, Oliver and Cynthia. Oliver is hanging between Albert and Cynthia. Oliver has just woken up with a start.)

               OLIVER
     Ohmygod HELP!

(Albert and Cynthia wake up.)

              OLIVER
     Ohmygod please help me someone I'm slipping!

              CYNTHIA
     Oliver?

              OLIVER
     Ohmygod!

              ALBERT
     What's going on?

              CYNTHIA
     Oliver's yelling!

              OLIVER
     I'm slipping!

              CYNTHIA
     Oh my god he's slipping!

              OLIVER
     Do something!

              ALBERT
     We've got to do something!

              CYNTHIA
     Oliver! We're coming sweetheart! Just hold on!

              OLIVER
     I'm slipping!

(Albert and Cynthia start to move towards Oliver as fast as they can. They're sloths.)

              ALBERT
     It's okay buddy! We're coming!
              CYNTHIA
     Hang on darling!

              OLIVER
     I'm still slipping!

              ALBERT
     Just don't look down!

              OLIVER
     My toes! My toes! They're letting go!

              CYNTHIA
     Almost there sweetheart!
          (they're not a lot closer.)

              OLIVER
     Why god why? Why me?

              ALBERT
     Don't look down!

              OLIVER
     Why just three toes? Do you hate sloths?

              ALBERT
     Almost there buddy.

              OLIVER
     Oh god. Cynthia, tell the children that...Cynthia?

              ALBERT
     I think she's asleep Oliver.

              OLIVER
     Really? Well that's just....
          (he looks over to Albert, who's also nodded off.)
     Well that's just...
          (he nods off, still hanging on.)

(End of Play)

Friday, June 22, 2012

Steamy Port Townsend Tales II: The People Behind the Steam

What made the recent Brass Confederacy Steampunk Convention at Port Townsend special was that it was truly a community event, not just another weird geekfest ignored or at best tolerated by the locals.  The volunteers I spoke to over the weekend included members of the Jefferson County Historical Society and other groups that were co-sponsors of the Convention, and the Festival felt like it had the whole town supporting it.

For Teresa Verraes, Executive Director of the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce, the first challenge to getting the community behind the Festival was explaining what Steampunk was. “When I was talking to the downtown merchants, I said it was like the Victorian Heritage Days and the Kinetic Sculpture Race had a love child and it grew up to be a mad scientist,” she says, referring to two well-established Port Townsend Festivals that run at other times in the year. The result of her outreach was over a dozen original window displays featuring Steampunk throughout the downtown area, including in book stores, jewelers, antique dealers and cafes.

The couple acknowledged as the driving force behind the Brass Screw Confederacy are Cindy and Nathan Barnett, two recent Seattle transplants who took over The Old Consulate Inn, a Victorian B&B, just under a year ago. 

The splendidly atmospheric Old Consulate Inn. Old Consulate not included.

Before I left PT they invited me over for coffee and a chat. I was a little surprised when Cindy met me at the door dressed in a long black skirt and a white blouse that went up to a prim buttoned neck, but I shouldn’t have been; the couple are comfortable in neo-Victorian clothing and Nathan (who sported a natty vest and comfortably rumpled formal shirt and trousers) admitted that it’s pretty much their daily wear.

While both were worn out from the weekend’s festivities, they were also delighted that The Brass Screw Confederacy had been a hit in its “blueprint year.” They had assisted with the Victorian Festival back in the Spring, and their energy and innovations had helped revitalize that event and garnered them enthusiastic cooperation for their own Festival. “The Victorian revival in Port Townsend started in the late ’70s when people were working to revive the town,” explains Nathan. “The trouble is, those original participants are now all older, and they haven’t kept the younger people involved, so it’s become something that they’ve started to avoid. When we got involved I brought in things that were more oriented to general interest, like an exhibition bout of bare-knuckle boxing and period fencing. We even brought down a Gatling gun. Afterwards a lot of younger people told me “you know, I grew up hating Victorian days, but this is actually cool.’”

Yet the couple are both curiously ambivalent about the phrase ‘Steampunk.’ “I hate the word,” admits Nathan. “I don’t do punk. There are parts of the ‘punk’ aesthetic I like, the look of a film like Blade Runner for example, but to me that post-apocalyptic aesthetic isn’t a necessary part of Steampunk. Punk is also an attitude. It’s in your face. I don’t think that the sort of Steampunk that I enjoy is about that. It’s more refined and polite.”

“In that way it’s like this town,” adds Cindy. “Port Townsend has its rough edges and rough people, but any of them will hold the door for you. It’s the most polite town to that I’ve ever known.”

“Though one positive thing about the ‘punk’ in Steampunk is that it lowers the bar for entry,” says Nathan. “Not everyone is going to have formal trousers and vests or corsets and bustles. But I can go shred an old leather jacket and buy a cheap pair of goggles, and there’s my Steampunk costume. So while it’s not my style, I think it’s got validity.”

We discuss neo-Victorianism and living a Steampunk lifestyle. Though both are comfortable in every-day Victorian dress, they don’t describe themselves as neo-Victorian. “We have friends in town who truly live a Victorian lifestyle,” explains Cindy. “She lives corseted, even while she’s biking. They use gas lights and oil lamps, and while their house has electricity, they don’t really use it. In contrast we’re both tech-savvy and appreciate modern conveniences. But at the same time we love the aesthetic.”

They talk about their future plans for the Bed and Breakfast, which thanks to their renovations is already a gorgeous testament to their knowledge and appreciation for all things Victorian, even down to the loving stuffiness of bric-a-brac in the parlor. They explain that eventually it will have a Steampunk den downstairs, and while they’ve been reluctant to cross-promote the Festival and their B&B, they feel grateful that the business and the event inform each other.

While other people may don a bustle or a frock coat for a weekend event like Steamcon, Nathan and Cindy get a chance to live Steampunk in a daily fashion, and it encourages them to look more deeply at the movement than simply costume or reading fiction. “A friend of ours is developing a flying machine, not from a blueprint or a model, but by trying to work out things like gear ratios and speed needed for lift-off,” says Cindy. “I think this is great. Just focusing on your costume sometimes feels very self-involved to me. What we want is not just people walking looking cool, but actively thinking about issues of technology and society.”

Looking back at their own journey into Steampunk, Nathan says he’s surprised at just how much you can live your daily life as fantasy. “There was a time when I was in very much into the Renaissance. My Monday, Thursday and Fridays were fencing long sword, and my Tuesday and Saturday were singing Renaissance drinking songs. Now that we’ve embraced this new form, I teach Victorian combat once a week and get to explore this whole new world. That’s what’s so wonderful to me about all of this. Contrary to what you’re told, you can live your fantasy life. Maybe you won’t be chased by zombies or fall in love once a week, but you can still live the life you dream about in books if you dedicate yourself to it.”

As I left their magnificently Victorian home to return to the bus stop and a trip back to the real world, I realized that for me, this is the beauty of Steampunk: it's a fantasy that’s almost actually accessible, not in faraway lands but just down a street we've not gone down before. Perhaps it's something we’re living today anyway, if we adopt the right perspective. Through the wide eyes of a Victorian inventor, we are living in an astonishing future, where fantasies of flight, instantaneous communication, mechanized labor and even interstellar travel come true. Steampunk wakes us up to the miraculous nature of the time that we are actually living in.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Steamy Port Townsend Tales part 1


So: I spent last weekend over in Port Townsend, a town that has long been a favorite of mine but I now like even more after seeing it through the brass-colored goggles of Steampunk. The event that lured me to town was the inaugural year of the Brass Screw Confederacy, a brand-new Steampunk Convention. And I have to say, Port Townsend has never looked finer.


The brainchild of new PT arrivals Nathan Barnett and Cindy Madsen (now proud proprietors of The Old Consulate Inn Bed and Breakfast, of which more later), the Brass Screw Confederacy was pulled together in a series of months by the newly formed Olympia Peninsula Steam, which is passing along some of the profits to local arts and culture organizations. Though there were only a few events on the calendar, they were well chosen, at least from my perspective: at the Friday evening absinthe tastings I had a wonderful time mingling with other guests in assorted finery, enjoyed the fire dancers, and ended the evening by following the Green Faery with unsteady steps back to my tasteful hotel room at the always-elegant Water Street Hotel.
 Oh yeah. My room. This is how I roll, out of town anyway.

Then on Saturday I dropped by the Bazaar of the Bizarre, which featured tables full of Steampunk merchandise (in some cases somewhat loosely defined--Steampunk preserves, anyone?).


That's STEAMPUNK Dandelion Nectar!
 
Picked up a new gray cravat for the ensemble, because--well, it's harder to find cravats than you might think. Watched some blacksmithing and daguerreotype processing, and enjoyed the sight of little kids running around wearing top hats and faux brass goggles. Then I headed over to the Key City Cabaret (a fetching little black box theatre) for the scheduled seminars and events. 

The first guest was the major reason I'd come over for the weekend, one of my favorite science fiction writers, Neal Stephenson, reading from one of my favorite of his novels, The Diamond Age. The sartorially elegant Mr. Stephenson read from the novel and engaged in a generous Q&A about some of the themes of that astonishing book and how it relates to Steampunk as fiction and as a movement. It was heartening to hear someone who's done such a superb job of avoiding genre labels in his own career apparently untroubled at his work being taken up by the Steampunk movement. (Even if you think all this Steampunk stuff is some sort of middle-aged derangement on my part, read The Diamond Age. It's a neo-Victorian hearty idea soup about nanotechnology, virtual realities and the revolutionary power of pedagogy, and it's a corker.)


Steamcon founder Diana Vick delivered a great and compact feature on what the well-dressed Steampunk lady is wearing these days. The elegant Ms. Vick is a great ambassador for Steamcon and peppered her presentation with a whole series of amusing anecdotes.


The acts that followed, Professor Payne's Flea Circus and The Shadow Sprites, were both quintessentially delightful. Payne completely reconstructs the old vaudeville Flea Circus act and it's an hilarious and exquisite hour, the sort of entertainment that was once described as "fun for the whole family" before that honorable term was copyrighted by Disney (your check is in the mail, Mouse lawyers). And the Shadow Sprites? All I can tell you is if you ever get a chance to see them, do. Like everyone in the audience I thought that the old fashioned 3D red/blue glasses I was given when I came in to confront a white screen were a joke. But then the music came on, and the shadows behind the screen became three-dimensional creatures before our eyes. Absolutely astonishing, and in our sensation-saturated age an honest-to-god novelty. I hope to steal this wonderful idea some day and make millions.


The evening ended with a Steampunk Hootenany at the American Legion Hall, where the assembled throng was an elegant answer to the question "What's Steampunk, anyway?" (Almost every person I talked to admitted that they hadn't even known what Steampunk was until a week or two before, but thanks to some internet research they'd figured what to buy, what to pull from the closet, and here they were!)


I also got wonderful answers to my eternal question: "what do you think of Steampunk?" My favorite answer came from a young guy working Security who'd grown up in Port Townsend. He admitted that he'd gotten pretty bored with the annual Victorian days celebration, and said that this was one of the first times he'd seen an event where both the young and the old in town had come together and shared interests. (In fact he said "partied like it was Saturday night," which it was and they were.)


More on the Brass Screw Confederacy soon--including zombies vs. steampunks, beautiful books, and my visits with several of the folks who dreamed it all up and made it happen.


I am a visitor to your adorable Victorian town. Kindly direct me towards the absinthe.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Boyproof Watch: Conclusion


(hey friends: and here's where it all wraps up. It's been a fun experiment writing a serial, and while I'd do some things differently next time, I've been enjoying seeing where the story has gone--including a few places that I hadn't expected! Thanks to those of you who've written with comments and suggestions. Keep them coming!)

 
VII

When Maskelyne woke the next day it was late morning so he sent an order to his kitchen for brunch, an order he had to eventually give to his clock in diagram form. Nevertheless the kitchen staff succeeded in the unorthodox task admirably, and as he polished off the last bit of smoked salmon frittata and crisp bacon he momentarily considered making brunch a regular feature.

On leaving his house he considered not activating his garden sentinels, but decided that it was best to do so. His enemy must not suspect the trap, so as near as he could he would stick to his routine.

It was Monday and his absence had created piles of work but he could scarcely concentrate on any of it. Invoices, playbill design, construction and repair orders were all scanned then pushed aside. He left his office and sought out Mirch, demanding his assistant give him a complete tour of the backstage and a progress report from all the mechanics. His staff was flustered and unprepared but though he scowled he really had little interest in their mistakes, so while his questions were pointed he gave no reprimands. At 4:40 when he held the daily meeting with his staff his distraction was obvious, and it was the gossip of the company after his departure.

As he approached his front door he could hear the sound of his hallway alarm bell insistently ringing, but he entered at a steady pace. He didn’t even bother to open up the cabinet and see where the security had been breached. He merely doffed his coat and hat, took his gin and tonic from the coat rack, and walked upstairs, his excitement growing with each step.

The first thing he noticed was that again the Aetheric Navigator had been moved on the workbench, and now the lights on its console were blinking erratically. His visitor had begun here, further meddling with the mechanism. He moved it aside impatiently.

The box with the Boyproof Watch was gone. He brought his hands together in a satisfactory clasp. He hadn’t dared hope that his unseen nemesis would act so quickly, but now that he had, he felt like a celebration. He practically danced down the stairs to his study, drained off his drink, and instructed the coat rack to fetch him another. He went on to enjoy a particularly fine Bordeaux that night from his cellars.

That night Maskelyne lay in bed smiling and imagining his enemy’s fascination and frustration with his “gift.” Given the skill that the boy had already demonstrated in eluding his sentinels and breaking into his home multiple times, he was certain that he’d be doing more than dropping the watch down some stairs or prying at it with a jackknife. He thought back on his own childhood exercises in destruction, how he’d studied levers, pry bars, screws and joints in his attempt to crack open any number of items. He had to hand it to the boy: he suspected him of an even greater talent for mischief than he had had as a child.

But talent enough to open the watch? He doubted it. Even Maskelyne himself with his workshop, with forge, presses, weights and drills, would find opening the casing a daunting task. And he had enough faith in his own skill as a watchmaker to know that nothing short of this, not fire, water nor lightning, could otherwise disturb its mechanism.

He fell to sleep to the reassuring tick of his bedside clock.

The weeks passed without event. The silver bell in the hall was silent and his work went undisturbed, with no further disturbances at his house nor any items in the newspaper regarding children and explosions. Soon Maskelyne had returned to his work and his routine.

By December the events of the autumn were a vague memory. The Egyptian Fortuneteller was back at his post, gears and workings replaced, and more popular than ever, thanks to certain adjustments that his creator had made which allowed it to stroke its crepe beard meditatively. In fact Maskelyne’s creative mind had been rejuvenated by the contest, and he had constructed a new act for the Theatre, a trapeze troupe of mechanicals who executed aerial somersaults and pirouettes of such exquisite flawlessness that he had been threatened with legal action from two local circuses claiming unfair competition.

His sole mechanical frustration was the Aetheric Navigator, which ever since its last visit from his adversary had taken to flashing its lights in a steady yet meaningless sequence not corresponding at all to the code he had developed for calculating astral longitude and latitude. Until he could determine how to fix it he banished the mechanism to the basement.

Then one late afternoon the week before Christmas he came up the snowy path to his front door and saw by the porch light a small box covered in silver paper. Leading to, and away, from the box were small shoe prints in the snow.

He left the package where it was, and switching on his electric torch followed the trail. It weaved through the grounds until it intersected with the sculpture of a winsome badger. Beneath the badger was a small pool of blood, and its razor-sharp teeth were red and still wet. From here the footsteps were shadowed by a separate trail of drops of red. He followed these to a section of the perimeter gate. Bending close, he saw that that there was a curve in the metal ornamental juncture just large enough for a small body to wiggle in and out of.

Despite his expectations, Maskelyne felt no exhilaration. Instead an anxious nausea roiled his stomach. For the first time he considered his small enemy as a human being, and it was a deeply uncomfortable feeling.

He returned to the porch and took the box inside. He placed it on a small table in his study and opened it with his fingertips gingerly, fearing a trap. Inside was a small blue pot containing a single flower. It was of a form and color he had never seen before, the folds of a rose re-imagined as flame, with bright red petals at its fringe turning orange and yellow towards its center, and in the deepest part of the blossom was just the thinnest tinge of blue.

Alongside the flower was a folded letter. “Dear Professor Maskelyne,” it began, in a child’s careful cursive. Maskelyne read through the note, of apology and explanation. Then he read it again. And then he turned and walked at a brisk pace out of his house.

When the maid at the Del La Roches opened the door she was clearly agitated and distracted. She explained that Grace, the older of the two daughters, had been injured in a sledding accident while playing and her father had rushed her to the hospital. Maskelyne received the name of the hospital and left immediately.

That evening the De La Roches, father and daughter, received a visit from Maskelyne at their hospital room. Young Grace was asleep and her skin was even paler than her straw-blonde hair.  The wound to her arm had nicked an artery and bled much, but the surgery was successful and her doctor predicted a full recovery.

Mr. De La Roche blamed himself. Ever since his wife’s death several months ago he had failed to give his daughters proper supervision, he said. Maskelyne had no words of comfort, but when the father expressed anxiety about his other daughter back at home, he suggested the man go fetch her while he himself remained watching over Grace.

Two hours later when De La Roche returned with his other daughter, Grace was awake and chatting with Maskelyne. “Your daughter is quick-witted and charming,” he told De La Roche. “And I believe that we have an affinity. I would like to offer her a position as an apprentice in my workshop.” Grace, though still pale, gave her father such a heartbreakingly hopeful smile that he agreed at once.

Within a week Grace had begun her after-school apprenticeship with her neighbor, working until dinner each evening. As a first order of business Maskelyne gave her a copy of the key to his front gate.

In years to come their relationship was not always easy, for they were both strong-willed, devious and imaginative. But on one thing they both agreed: Maskelyne was the greatest inventor of his age. And among his many successes he could count the invention of the world’s first Boyproof Watch.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

The Boyproof Watch VI


VI

The next morning Maskelyne sent a note via his patented Mechanical Courier to his staff saying to not to expect him in the office for the remainder of the week. They would assume he was repairing the Egyptian Fortuneteller, but he didn’t so much as uncrate that venerable automaton. Instead, he skipped breakfast, told his bedside clock to inform the kitchen he wanted a full carafe of black coffee, and walked to the upper workshop as his clock scampered downstairs to deliver his message. Once in his workshop he pulled out a large bottle of superior brandy, poured just a bit more than was required to wet the sides of his glass, and sat at his drafting table.

This was his favorite method of creation, to alternate the stimulant of the coffee with the depressive qualities of the alcohol, enough to keep him awake yet not jittery, relaxed but not clumsy, setting his talent like a precision tool. His head and hands floated slightly above sober through the day, aided by the alertness of an empty stomach.

Maskelyne designed through free association, with the lines on the paper begun before he himself knew what their form might be. A curve would become a spring, a line a pin, a doodle a gear. He worked quickly and fluidly and with no regard to the time or amount of paper he used.

He had long had a Boyproof Watch in his imagination. The greatest reason that Maskelyne hated children was their uncanny ability to destroy delicate machinery with their tiny hands and cunning if underdeveloped minds. More than once, tallying up the number of repairs required due to their sabotage, he had consulted his ledger to see if his Theatre could operate with no children in the audience, but no matter how he fiddled the numbers, it couldn’t. It wasn’t simply the income to be gained from the tykes but the high percentage of parents, yoked by custom and necessity to their offspring, who attended his programs. To remain profitable he had to continue to allow the brats in.

That didn’t mean he had to like it. A prerequisite of all of his staff was that they were both childless and discouraged from showing affection for children. While it would not have been in his nature to tolerate discourtesy, he had let go certain employees who were too sentimental towards the younger patrons. And since the day twenty years ago that he had opened the Theatre he had never offered any special ticket price to children—though he was both generous and courtesy to the elderly, and gave many complimentary tickets to deserving charities throughout the City.

Lunch sat prepared but ignored on a side tray and before he looked up from his drawings it had been joined by a dinner tray also grown cold. Inspiration had sat next to him all day, and having decided on this project it was one that eagerly awaited his discovery. He had not only years of salvage work to draw from, clocks and machines and automatons and devices all returned to him after being crippled or killed by boys, but his own memories of inspired destruction.

The challenge was devising a casing strong enough, a mechanism sturdy enough and a form captivating enough to catch the eye of any boy, and then resist every stratagem, every tool that his tiny hands and malevolent mind might try on it. Faced with such a challenge even the greatest of Maskelyne’s creations had proved to be but a Goliath facing David’s sling. But now he would find the solution.

Dawn found him working on his final draft. The bell in the hallway cabinet had stayed silent all night.

 After a few hours sleep he ordered another full carafe of coffee and began again, now gathering the plates, pins, screws, wheels, pinions, and springs he would need. He laid out the miniscule inventory in meticulous order, for there is no “approximate” in watchmaking. Then he began assembling the gear trains, the escapement and eventually the balance and hairspring, not only reinforcing each element but building in secondary fail-safe mechanisms. By the time he finally fell into bed eighteen hours later, he had given the tiny mechanical engine a single key wind and heard it tick with an even amplitude.

While he had worked and while he slept the bell in the hallway cabinet remained silent.

When he rose at noon he took breakfast to settle his stomach then descended to the basement. He had instructed his workshop mechanicals to heat the forge days before as he planned to make the casing from the new wolfram alloy he’d been sent by a colleague in Schaffhausen, and while he was unsure at what temperature it was workable, he knew it must be very hot indeed.

The next few hours were frustrating and so infernal in temperature as to reduce the eternally sanguine Maskelyne to curses and his undershirt. Much of the alloy was wasted and several tools were rendered useless. But by that evening he had finally completed the case, and by midnight he was again at his aerie workbench, delicately setting the mechanism into its grayish-white casing.

Then he reached under the workbench and with a deft movement undid a tiny latch. Out of a hidden drawer he retrieved a small silver tinderbox. On it was written I have myself passed through the fire, I have smelt the smell of fire. He reached inside and pulled out a tiny bright red seed and placed it on the workbench before him.

This was the seed of a Salamander Blossom, gained by Maskelyne through a complex series of trades with various antiquarians. It was the subject of study by scholars throughout Europe and one in America, who noted that whatever was the eventual product of the seed (for no one had every claimed to see so much as a root tip or a shoot emerge from the tiny scarlet casing) it had certain remarkable physical properties. When exposed to a spark, it would explode into a flame of astonishing heat. Maskelyne had discovered in his own experiments that when encased in ectoplasm the flame would burn even hotter, at greater radius and with greater duration. He pulled out his silver flask and extracted a small amount of that near-intangible substance with silver tweezers that he then used to wind it round the seed. Using the same tweezers he inserted it deep into the mechanical heart of the watch.

He then took a miniscule brush and with precise care painted around this gauzy substance with phosphorus paint, highly reactive and flammable. As it dried he took two pieces of flint each no larger than an infant’s fingernail and inserted them resting next to each other in the watch’s frame.

Now was the most delicate part of the operation. Carrying both halves down to basement, he heated a tiny amount of solder on his forge, and then drew it around in a thin line around the interior edge of the watch’s casing. Working quickly but with infinite care he brought the casing to set against the watch’s back, holding his breath. To his relief there was no combustion.

But there would be if the case was ever opened. Indeed, he calculated that the resulting explosion would injure or even cripple any person foolish enough to try.

While the case cooled, he pulled out a blank watch box. In his florid yet supremely legible handwriting he wrote:


The Boyproof Watch

When it had cooled, he would place the watch in the box, and the box on his workbench. And then he would wait.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

The Boyproof Watch V


V

Maskelyne made the rounds of his neighborhood that afternoon, calling at every residence in a three block radius of his house. He knocked on each door and explained, top hat deferentially doffed, that as a gesture of autumnal goodwill he was offering free tickets to his Mechanical Theatre to all his neighbors. Normally this would of course exclude the servants, but they were welcome as well, with their tickets thoughtfully reserved for a night separate from their employers to avoid embarrassment. He simply required the names and ages of each of the home’s residents—information gratefully given, and noted in his little silver notebook.

Despite his thoroughness, the results were unpromising. His neighbor’s gardener’s son, it turned out, was now away at boarding school, thanks to an ambitious father. And as suspected, the family with the two daughters down the street only hosted “dear cousin Jack” during the summer holidays—and besides were preoccupied with the recent death of one of the parents, though he was too polite to ask which one. The rest of his neighbors had no sons or had boys either too young or old to be likely suspects.

It had been an expensive investigation, he mused, looking over his notes. He’d be giving away a lot of tickets in the next month.

When he returned to his home the large wooden crate with the Egyptian Fortune Teller had arrived and stood on the sidewalk, attended by two of his mechanics. He opened the gate and they followed him through to the front door, struggling with their load and eyeing the lawn ornaments whose heads ominously followed them. Maskelyne engaged the porch lift, and as they lowered the crate and its contents to the basement he walked the grounds with tool kit in hand, looking for signs of malfunction in his decorative sentinels. Aside from a delicate faun whose hidden fangs needed oiling, all seemed in working order.

He returned to find the two mechanics still on the porch, petrified, as he hadn’t told them that the ornaments had been switched to “observe.” He would have scolded them for their timidity, but there had been a few incidents involving his employees and his automatons in the past decade that had resulted in injury—but not, he was careful to remind them, death. They nodded in agreement and hurried down the path to the gate as if they feared it might shut them in permanently.

He entered the house, set the sentinels, and realized that it was past six and his entire evening’s routine was off. The ice had melted in his gin and tonic, and there was no time to more than glance at the newspaper’s headlines before dinner. As if affected by their Master’s mood the kitchen staff produced a meal both undercooked and over-spiced, with the low point being a warmed romaine salad draped listlessly over white fish.

Leaving his meal half-eaten, Maskelyne ascended to his aerie workshop more or less on schedule. He turned up the gas lamp over his workbench, revealing several projects in various stages of repair or creation. There were two differential equation centers and an experimental oil regulator, and at the back of the bench was an invention that had sat there for months, the Aetheric Navigator. He had felt certain that the device could increase his nightly yield of ectoplasm by crudely mapping the invisible world for richer currents of the stuff. Yet so far it was sporadic and unreliable and when switched on the colored lights on the console sparked feebly and in no clear pattern.

He walked to the window and surveyed the warm September night. The porch lamp cast a warm glow over the path below but most of the grounds were in darkness. He reached out and pulled the curtains slowly shut, knowing that the light from the room would continue to illuminate them.

Then instead of returning to his seat, he crept silently down the stairs, into the kitchen, and descended into the basement. Moving in the darkness, he took a seat in a wooden chair against one wall, facing the bank of windows through which his visitor had entered the night before.

He felt certain that having visited him once without being caught, the boy would come again. After all, he had been a boy once.

As a child he had been tremendously destructive. When scarcely more than a toddler in the orphanage he had dismantled and destroyed clocks, watches, kitchen appliances, gardener’s tools, the laundry’s mangler, the headmaster’s trouser press, the kitchen’s dumbwaiter and the orphanage’s furnace before the staff wisely shipped him off to an  apprenticeship with an aged watchmaker in Brussels. Compared to his master’s dour demeanor the gray rain-soaked buildings of that city were practically florid.

The man was stern and cruel and a firm believer in corporal punishment, but at least he recognized in his student a great talent. “Any moron can destroy. Rise above your bastard beginnings boy, and learn to create,” he would tell him between beatings. When Maskelyne began to learn his craft, he was sometimes so absorbed that he would work far past dinner. The clockmaker, who at least didn’t starve the child, would leave him a tray of congealing stew.  “Solitude is the inevitable companion of genius,” he would quote, turning the key in the lab’s lock, shutting the boy in for the night.

This night reminded him of those, the intensity, the sense of purpose. For tonight he was sure he would meet his nemesis.

As he continued his vigil he thought on his history of creation, of the long road from obscure apprentice to world-renowned master, from a child driven only by anger and loneliness to a man of power and triumph. Now at the height of his art, some awful boy was smearing his pudgy fingers into the inner workings of his mechanical children. It would not be tolerated.

Suddenly he heard a bell ringing. It was the same bell he’d heard the night before, yet the windows before him remained closed.

Swiftly he was out of his chair and up the stairs. He threw open the doors of the Perimeter Monitor, and saw that the copper wire glowed red at the window of his library.

He rushed into the room and saw the open window, but nothing else was amiss. He pulled out the derringer kept in his right waistcoat lining and began going from room to room, his nerves quietly humming.

Up in his aerie workshop he saw it. The Aetheric Navigator had been pulled forward right to the front of his workbench and his Lensing Station had been set over it. The lights on the console now glowed steadily.

He had been here, and left this, his handiwork. It was an insult. And he knew now there could be no mercy. He would have his revenge.

“I shall catch him,” he said, leaving the workshop. He would of course check the rest of the house, but he felt sure that having completed his taunting vandalism, the boy had left. “I shall catch him,” he repeated, in a low tone. “For I shall create a trap he cannot resist. I shall create a Boyproof Watch.”

Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Boyproof Watch IV



IV

The next morning Maskelyne was in his office pretending to look over the month’s financials while compiling a list of possible suspects. The list was chiefly descriptive, as Maskelyne had no idea of any of his suspects’ names. There was the butcher boy and the son of one of the servants across the street—the gardener’s child? There were the two brothers down the block, though he was fairly sure that one was scarcely out of his pram and the other had recently headed to college. There was the boy who sometimes lived with the two girls three doors down—a cousin perhaps?—though he seemed to be present only during the summer months.

He had much research to do. He’d never bothered to learn the names or relationships of any of his younger neighbors, let alone any of the assorted guttersnipes who roamed the nearby streets.  Frankly he’d never had a reason for noting their individual qualities.

His musings were interrupted by a tepid knocking at his door—the door which was wide open. Maskelyne’s staff knew their master’s temper well, and treaded softly even while trying to get his attention.

The grease-stained yet pallid figure who stood at the doorway of his office was Mirch, his chief automaton craftsman. Mirch was obedient and observant if not particularly bright, and his exalted position meant that more often than not he was charged with bringing bad news. Maskelyne swiveled in his chair to regard him.

“I’m afraid I have some unpleasant information, sir, the nature of which is serious enough to warrant my appearance in this office at this time so as to provide you with full details of said information, despite the fact that seeing as it is unpleasant information it is not information that you will probably want to hear in detail.”

Mirch routinely wrapped bad news in this sort of fulsome speech like a cherry round a pit.  Maskelyne nodded for him to continue.
“It seems sir that the Egyptian Fortune Teller is in serious need of a repair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Mirch shifted feet uneasily. “Perhaps I could speak as to the probable cause and potential solutions that I have been considering as we proceed from here to the automaton in question, that is if you could spare a few minutes for such an examination.” Maskelyne sighed and rose.

One of Maskelyne’s first masterpieces, The Egyptian Fortune Teller sat in a glass booth that greeted patrons in the lobby. When a coin was fed into the slot, it would not only cast hieroglyphic runes, but its sonorous voice would divine the meaning of the fortune, and dispense a small piece of rolled papyrus with a short prayer taken from the Book of the Dead. It was a popular attraction and there was practically always a queue of eager querents gathered for a fortune.

Though his skill had advanced far beyond its craftsmanship, Maskelyne retained a fondness for the swarthy automaton. The voice of the oracle was his own, recorded over several days on wax cylinders. In some small nearly sentimental corner of his heart he was truly proud of the Fortune Teller, not just the clockwork movements but the ingenuity, the philosophy that he had put into it.  It reminded him of his youthful ambition, which is a very different sort of ambition than the one of a middle-aged master of his craft.

As they reached the lobby Mirch was still explaining. “Was Wiggins saw it first sir, noticed that the queue to see the Egyptian was getting awfully long, at which point a small child came up and tugged at his coat until he asked the urchin what was the matter. Any road, it turns out that some unknown child, not we must assume the child speaking to Wiggins, had stuffed several caramels above, under and through the coin slot of the machine. Frankly sir seeing the resulting sugary muck, and please do excuse my strong language sir, I half-believe that the child must have had access to some sort of crucible and an independent heat source to melt the sweets and create the situation what you are about to see.”

The automaton stood just off the foyer to the street and slightly to the left of the life-sized portrait of Maskelyne himself, painted just three years ago following his triumphant return from his world tour. Ordinarily the Fortuneteller’s eyes glowed with an eerie green light, but now the right eye blazed bright emerald while the left was completely dark, and the mechanical arm that picked up and tossed the hieroglyphic runes was twitching and tapping the glass in a spasmodic fashion.

Maskelyne gave the hatch cover a clever twist and it came open. He looked into the innards of his creation and saw that the melted caramels had left a wet brown river down from the coin box into the gears at three different places, and now a sticky film covered cogs, pins, and gears as deep as he could see. No doubt the entire mechanism would now have to be replaced—a mechanism for which he had no schematic other than his own memory.

Maskelyne rose to his feet. He stared in the face of his crippled creation as its fingers continued to tap erratically at the glass. “Mirch.”

“Sir?”

“Shut him down, pack him up, and deliver it to my home workshop this afternoon. I will leave for home now to prepare for it, and so you will chair the meeting of the Theatre Staff at 4:40.”

“Absolutely sir.”

“Make sure to tell the stage manager that I expect a full show report on my desk tomorrow morning.”

“Yes sir.”

Maskelyne began to cross the lobby back to the stairs to his office. “Oh, and Mirch?”

“Sir?”

“Tell the Theatre confectioners that their services are no longer required. Prepare them each a final pay packet. We shall have no more sweets of any sort for sale in the lobby, in the theatre, or anywhere near our premises.” And with that he was out of the room, leaving the unfortunate Mirch to his tasks.

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Boyproof Watch III


III

Maskelyne did not believe in the spirits of the dead. He was also a man of fearsome aspect, and to tell the truth was as dangerous as he looked. His elegant clothes concealed an assortment of subtle but effective weapons. Under his hat brim was a rounded razor, his shoes produced spikes with a heel click, and his walking stick was armed at both tip and handle. There were no less than three small pistols on him at any time, though only two could be found in a casual search of his person. So when he rose from his worktable he was unhurried and deliberate.

He walked down the side of the stairs to avoid creaks and into the hall next to the study, where a large teak cabinet stood. It was from here that the bell was steadily pealing. He opened the cabinet doors to reveal a detailed map of his house, with all three floors and the basement outlined in copper wire.

This device, the Auto-Electro Domicile Perimeter Monitor, had been a commission for the Premier of Canada, but Maskelyne had installed the prototype in his own home. The copper wire surrounding the outline of the house glowed a dull red in one area, showing a breach of the perimeter down at a bank of basement windows.

Maskelyne stared intently at the map. Whoever it might be, they had exhibited both skill and courage in climbing over the spiked iron fence and passing through the mechanical guards stationed around the grounds. Anything larger than a squirrel or crow that entered his estate was set upon without warning, and anything slower than a cat would almost certainly be killed. (And indeed, he had found shreds of fur and bone scattered about his garden in the past. The neighborhood felines had learned that there was nothing but chase and fear within those dark gates.)

Usually when he descended to the basement workshop it was via the stairs in the kitchen. But his ingenuity and caution had led Maskelyne to include hidden paths throughout his home, so instead he walked down the hallway and took a right to enter the library. On the way he passed several automatons that sat, hung or stood motionless. Several of these could be activated for protective measures, but for the moment, not knowing the identity or attributes of his intruder, he preferred to have nothing moving in his house except for himself and his uninvited visitor.

In the library he crossed to the middle of the six tall bookcases which curved round the spherical room. Well aware of the cliché of bookcases that revolved or slid aside to reveal a hidden door, he had decided, for his amusement as much as for security, on a different construction. He grabbed the middle shelves hard and yanked upward, and the entire bookcase slid with counterbalanced ease into the ceiling, revealing a dark doorway. He struck his stick sharply on the ground and the handle burst into a white-hot flame, an excellent source of illumination and a formidable weapon.

He walked down the steps, and when he reached the blank wall one floor down his fingers deftly found the small hidden catch. With a light groan the doorway slid open (must make sure that’s oiled, he thought to himself) and he was in the dark basement, now lit by his brightly-burning walking stick.

The basement was vast. When Maskelyne had met with his architect, his original instructions had been for a basement and sub-basement, seeing as he was a man with many projects and even more secrets. Instead the architect had persuaded him to invest in a single particularly deep cellar dug past the walls of the building above, so the workmen had excavated under a portion of his back lawn. That half of the basement was doubly supported by sturdy if ugly hardwood posts. Arranged in orderly rows throughout the single large room were tables on which rested automatons in various stages of building and repair, each covered with a thick white sheet to protect them from dust.

 To someone of even moderate imagination it resembled a morgue, but Maskelyne had practically no imagination at all.

He made his way over to the bank of windows that had been indicated on the Auto-electro Domicile Perimeter Monitor, outwardly casual but alert as an owl. He held the stick up, and saw in its brilliant white light an open window above, its latch hanging. The window was low and narrow, made even less accessible by two thick iron bars. It would take a flexible frame indeed to wriggle through such a small opening.

He stepped back and held the light to look across the room. There was no motion, no sound. As he slowly moved the stick the unvarying white flame shuffled the shadows of the sheets on the tables, and he saw that on one of them the sheet was lying unevenly. It was not in his nature to leave anything uneven, so he crossed to it and in one motion grabbed a corner and threw it back.

Underneath was the automaton that he had left there, a mechanical stoop and pavement scrubber that Maskelyne had not yet managed to cure of a tendency to also ferociously scrub any small domestic animals it met. Roughly the size of a barrel hoop and only twice as thick, the scrubber’s differential equation center, a panel on the left side of its hood, had been open for the inventor’s tinkering. He now saw that the panel was closed.

He opened the panel. Inside he saw that his most recent work had been completely undone. Wires, gears and cogs that he’d painstakingly rearranged after the scrubber’s recent encounter with a beloved Pomeranian had been shifted by an unknown hand. He was even fairly certain that several components were missing.

He swung around, stick raised and ready, his face reddening. The contracts that he had potential clients sign always included a lengthy clause regarding penalties for unauthorized tinkering with his creations. Maskelyne guarded his art as an eagle guards its eggs, and once his work was ready to leave his shop the maintenance panels were welded shut. Whoever had been here had been poking his fingers into the proprietary genius of a very dangerous man.

There was no motion, no sound. Maskelyne turned his light on the ground next to the table. A recent incident with a patented Articulated Chimney Serpent had left traces of soot on sections of the floor that had not yet been cleaned. He saw footprints leading from the table to the floor under the window—prints coming and going, suggesting that the intruder had entered from the window, and had already escaped via the same route.

The evidence of those small footprints was conclusive. Maskelyne’s intruder was his natural nemesis: a boy.