The company’s treasurer had allocated Mr. Carter funds for a buggy to take him to Blackwall so that he could bring his business directly to the doorstep of Ernst, Morton, and Glass.
The buggy,however, was a horse drawn buggy, which Mr. Carter felt was not at all appropriate transportation given how dire circumstances were. The ghosts were moving off the stage. Who knew when they would be out in the streets, waking up the living in the dead of night?
Mr. Carter wanted to rent a new horseless, mechanical buggy. The Americans had invented them during their brief civil war, though some would say “reinvented’ was more accurate.
Like many inventions of the modern age, horseless buggies came about from engineers studying reports thaumaturgists made concerning the machines of the Dyeus culture. The thaumaturgists, when deep in meditation, sent their minds journeying through memories of the distant, pre-human past. These memories were said to be within the mind of a great, slumbering being named Abramelin, who was old when the Earth was young and who was neither man, nor animal, nor ghost. In the memories of Abramelin, the thaumaturgists saw the machines of the Dyeus, and when they awoke, they drew what they saw and wrote how they moved.
Robert Lumen, one of the more public thaumaturgists, though that wasn’t saying much since the thaumaturgists had become notorious for isolation since they folded Paradial into the sky, once described the Dyeus Civilization as a “superscientific” civilization. With only drawings and notes to go off of, modern engineers weren’t able to recreate the mechanical marvels which pranced across the earth and soared through the sky as if they were living beings, but they were able to glean enough information to make something that rolled on the ground without the need for a horse.
The mechanical beasts of the distant past had the grace of fawns and falcons, but the mechanical beasts of the present had only the grace of snakes and beetles--for now.
The modern mechanical buggy was known for being a bulky, jerky, lurching thing that stopped and started with each belch of steam, but it was also known for being fast, and that was what was important to Mr. Carter.
Mr. Carter did his best to impress upon the treasurer the importance of renting a mechanical buggy for its speed. He went to his office, cap in hand, and calmly and thoroughly explained his need.
The treasurer told Mr. Carter to take a horse drawn buggy, and if he wanted more speed, to take one with more horses.
And so, Mr. Carter had to use his own money to rent a mechanical buggy.
Such was the life of a stage director, he thought, always needed, rarely appreciated.
Mr. Carter was only somewhat surprised the treasurer threw him under the proverbial cart. The treasurer did not like him. The treasurer had never liked him, and the feeling was mutual. The treasurer once read in Illustrated Phantom Stories how a theater in Scotland became haunted by phantom players--and turned those players into lucrative stars. While many feared so much as laying eyes on their theater, there was a dedicated portion of the populace who couldn’t get enough of Macbeth with ghosts.
“Carter, they look at you, and when they look at you, they give you more attention than any of your flesh and blood actors!” the treasurer told him. “So why don’t you talk to them? Give them orders, don’t make them go away! We can monetize this!”
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But of course, the treasurer couldn’t be bothered to face the ghosts himself.
To think, he had the nerve to tell him to just “talk to them,” as if one even could talk to beings that leered like the souls of the damned at any sudden sound. How did the treasurer know that their blank stares meant “Give us stage directions, Mr. Director?” and not “Give us your blood, weak mortal?”
Mr. Carter made arrangements with Mercury Transportation, a subsidiary of National Reclamation, the company that ran the steam beasts that were building Blackwall and rebuilding London, for a man with a mechanical buggy to pick him up next evening. Even if Mr. Carter could have teleported to the door of Ernst, Morton, and Glass, he wouldn’t have. He was exhausted from the haunting and needed to rest. He figured it was only fair. The ghosts that haunted the Gnome theater were inactive during the day, so why shouldn’t he be as well? He slept until noon, but found much to his frustration that upon waking he was just as tired as when he had laid down.
He tried coffee, and cigarettes, but he just could not put energy back into his body. Then he decided to go for a walk to the post office, partly because he hoped a brief walk would revitalize him and partly because he was curious about the recently installed electrograph.
Mr. Carter wanted to see if it was possible for him to send an electrogram to Ernst, Morton, and Glass, but even if he could send an electrogram, he wasn’t going to rely on it solely. He didn’t want to send an electrogram and then have to wait for Ernst, Morton, and Glass to send a reply. The back-and-forth of electronic communication could take days, and by the time Ernst, Morton, and Glass physically appeared at the Gnome theater, the ghosts would be performing in the streets. In addition, there were rumors that electrographs didn’t work half the time they were used. People said that messages sent by electrographs, electrograms, were often swallowed by the air, especially if there was a thunderstorm. The thunderclouds attracted the words like a magnet attracted iron filings. It had something to do with the principles of electromagnetism, so they said, but Mr. Carter wasn’t really sure of the exact mechanics.
When Mr. Carter arrived at the post office, he learned that in order to send an electrogram, he had to dictate his message to a young woman named Elizabeth who worked as the post’s dedicated typist. He couldn’t do that. Young women always talked, and he didn’t want people to talk about the ghosts. He asked if he could type the message himself, but that proved to be an impossibility. It was a liability issue. Electrographs were new, expensive, and rare. They couldn’t risk someone walking in off the street and breaking off a key by handling it the wrong way.
And so, disappointed, both by his inability to send an electrogram and by the looks the staff gave him (God only knew what they thought his reticence indicated), he trudged back to his home and fell asleep, managing an additional twenty minutes of sleep that didn’t make him feel the slightest bit rested.
The mechanical buggy driver honked an air horn to get his attention, but he didn’t need to. Mr. Carter heard the engine loud and clear as it idled outside his home.
The mechanical buggy was just as rough a ride as people said. It was controlled from the front by a burly man named Teddy who tamed the bucking beast with a series of levers and a wheel. Mr. Carter thought Teddy looked like a man hard at work in the world’s smallest industrial factory.
If the unevenness of the ride wasn’t enough to prevent Mr. Carter from falling asleep, Teddy proved to be chatty--very chatty. He told Mr. Carter all about the history of the mechanical buggy, all the things Mr. Carter would have gladly gone his whole life without knowing. Teddy told Mr. Carter how the Confederate States of America developed the first models and how those models helped hold Confederate supply lines even as the Union captured their railroads. Teddy was enthusiastic about mechanical buggies. He could talk on and on about them--and did so, even as Mr. Carter closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the thinly cushioned headrest and tried his best to block out the world.
Teddy explained that he himself had been a mechanical buggy operator under the command of General J.E.B Stuart, which Teddy pronounced as one word: Jeb. It seemed to Mr. Carter that the Yankees gave themselves strangest names.
Teddy spoke worshipfully of Jeb Stuart, who apparently knew a great deal about cavalry warfare and invested a great deal in mechanized cavalry, which he saw as one day replacing the regular kind. In the same breath, Teddy cursed the name of General Jubal A Early, who undercut Stuart’s push for mechanization. Teddy placed more blame upon Jubal Early for the CSA’s defeat at Shenandoah--wherever that was--then he did the Federal army. If J.E.B Stuart was Teddy’s God, Jubal A Early was his Devil. But Teddy was certain that, even with the detrimental influence of Jubal A Early, his side would have eventually trampled the Union beneath the wheels of their mighty mechanical buggies had not the Ror Raas intervened in 1863 by placing a great fire in the sky over the Battle of Shiloh. That brought an end to the Federal invasion of Confederate land, as well as the practice of slavery for both the Union and Confederacy.
Like the ride, Teddy went on, and on, and on…