Story: Drownings (conclusion)

Drownings

(part eleven)

“How…? I don’t believe you.”

“Our own provincial da Vinci, Stephen…now I recall. Victor Tambinder himself, the ancestor. The magnets in their circles, the great ring of smaller rings, to move perpetually with the rotation of the earth.”

Among attractions in this district of the Old Parish was the Heritage House. Most of its displays were dull glass boxes on tables, housing commonplaces under muted light. In the way of museums lacking enough to show, the walls were painted, a timeline and history of the Old Parish unfolding under no one’s eyes, from the indigenes to the engineers’ opening of the floodgates. Tambinder’s sketches were on great-sized papers once tacked to his garret walls; they were full of his equations, his private symbols with no Rosetta stone to decipher them.

“But you and your fellow directors took these matters seriously. You wished to achieve it, the Tambinder Engine, the engine of Mother Nature’s design. To lay claim to the globe itself, as essential to your own designs.”

“We’d got it keeping itself going, but Victor.” Another stop, as a moment since in mentioning his wife. “Would play his games. Sent one of our telephone reps, barely known to me, had wound him up…they can, you know. You need to do what is best for you. Are you familiar with those people?”

Not at all, Faia’s and McAlley’s shaken heads replied.

“Days ago…only days…we were discussing what was the trouble. Even writing it off, talked of. A failure, but the company would recoup.”

“You had a spate of workers missing from their posts,” Faia said.

“No reason it would have meant anything. You want me to say we were covering up. Others of the directors felt convinced a rival had hired them away.”

“A gag order, the matter to be looked into. The drawings were stolen from the museum.”

“As was reported. We did not conceal we’d made scans of them. I was told two from building two had washed in. That someone had named them.”

“Reported as well. Stephen, Victor had begged you to stop it. Stop the machine. You must.”

“Victor! His mouthpiece. Whatever is wrong, they’ll discover. I can’t stop it. I can’t. A little time…”

Here, as the dead were close, emerging in such numbers they spread the riverbank like wings, Stephen broke and gave a shriek. He eluded the hands of his protectors, stood on the slats of the bench and tumbled backwards…lay supine emitting a thin continuance of noise.

McAlley elbowed to his aid. “Do not panic over these poor souls. It was you who summoned them. Will you let the engine run, default with your fellows on accounting for yourselves, allow tinpot authority to think of flames and bullets? A disgrace.”

He had Herbertson standing, jerking clear of a hard look in McAlley’s eye, fleeing.

Yet the drowned pinched his garments, with cold fingers patted his face. With the stubs of fingers, and the traces of them.

One with its mouth close to Herbertson’s exhaled a gust of syllables, almost of color and temperature, so river deep was it…

And Stephen Herbertson fell faint to the ground.

11

Drownings

Drownings (part one)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)