Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (21 page)

One small drop. Three minutes time. And Madame Giry was very much herself once more. Perhaps paler, perhaps frailer than other days, but it was hard to tell. Meg watched her mother’s satisfied sigh as she re-stoppered and pocketed the rather miraculous cure with reticence.

“Mother, what was—?”

“My medicine,” Mme. Giry snapped then softened, “Thank you, my dear, for fetching it for me.” There was a loud bang, a rushing noise, then the lights went dark—this time for good.

“That was some excellent quick thinking on the part of your foreman,” M. Monchamin mopped his sweating brow with already damp handkerchief. It had been an exciting half-hour since their narrow avoidance of a true crisis—nay, disaster.

The accounts were different from half-a-dozen of the workers, but consensus was that a sudden shower of sparks from a worker’s tool had come dangerously close to one of the opera house’s multitude of exposed gas lines. One of the men had leapt to action, closing off the valves—which led to the flushing of the system, and the subsequent plunge into darkness that the entire opera house had suffered.

“Someone get this damned thing out of the way.” Firmin was taking the crisis with much less calm than his florid partner. Taking an ill-tempered swipe with his cane at the heavy fire curtain now blocking his entrance onto the stage, the frustrated manager paced the apron, ignoring the explanations from his prop master that the very thing that made such a safety feature work was its hard-to-remove nature after deployment.

“Cut the ropes if you have to, I want it down!” Firmin re-asserted, frowning with satisfaction as a muffled “Stand clear!” sounded from the other side and the curtain descended into a heavy heap upon the stage.

“Monsieur Richard!” a white-faced Meg Giry stood center stage, a gaggle of slack-jawed stagehands and flighty ballerinas surrounding her. She held out a plain envelope to the theatre’s owners in hands that trembled slightly. “We found it when the lights came back on,” she offered tremulously, “along with these.” Firmin now noted that not all the figures he’d at first taken to be members of the dance corps were indeed human. Eight full-sized mannequins, dressed in the taffeta trappings of a ballet troupe, stood arrayed in fifth position, the stage workers pointedly leaving them alone.

Firmin snatched the letter from Meg’s slack fingers, raising his eyebrows at M. Armand as he sliced the seal and began to read the letter within:

Dearest Messers. Richard and Monchamin,

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding under which we currently seem to be operating. It would appear that my initial message as regards how I wish my theatre to be illuminated was misinterpreted. I presume that, if you are reading this letter, the gas jets have been re-ignited with no great harm and you’ll have noted my peace offering—to be implemented in conjunction with the enclosed new opera.

Let me make absolutely clear that I in no way wish the garish and harsh electrical light to make a permanent home within my opera house. You can see from my ballet corps that I am not a man opposed to progress or ingenuity—quite the opposite, in fact. However, I will assert that, if this outfitting of electrical illumination continues, you must be prepared for, shall I say, consequences of an unfortunate sort.

Please again understand that I desire nothing but the best for our theatre and appreciate your efforts to improve relations of late. I am, as ever, cordially yours—

The Opera Ghost

P.S. Future communication may be relayed through Mlle. Giry—I wish her mother the speediest of recoveries.

This postscript immediately turned scrutiny from the ghost’s corps de ballet to poor Meg herself.

“It just appeared. Right outside the room where my mother was recovering. I—”

“Goodness, my dear girl. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”
Not yet anyway,
Armand harrumphed.  He moved, not to comfort the poor ballerina, but rather to M. Richard’s elbow to peer critically at the note. It was genuine O.G., at any rate.

The familiar spidery script made his skin crawl. Still, nobody had died—at least not as far as he knew. And it appeared they’d a new opera—always a good thing. And those life-sized dolls—if they worked—would likely merit a larger headline font from the press than any electrical light ever would. These last two observations he said aloud for the benefit of his wan-faced audience, drawing an impromptu burst of applause and a hearty “Bravo!” from Firmin.

Out of safety precautions, the work crew was dismissed for the rest of the week. They still couldn’t come to a consensus on whose work had caused the shower of sparks that had led to the gas shut-off. The chorus of dancers had their suspicions—“The ghost!”—and for their part, Mm. Firmin and Armand, and Madame Giry, couldn’t disagree.

And so, until a better working solution was hit upon, work on the electrical upgrade was halted. Besides, rehearsals on the new opera had begun almost immediately. Construction would only get in the way as the company attempted to work with the Opera Ghost’s newest “members” of the dance corps.

While at first the new mechanical marvels mingling amongst his very human dance corps excited M. Munier, the reality of dealing with mindless automated actors began to wear upon the dance master. He had taken an immediate shine to the mechanized mam’selles. Their precision was a dream come true, they weren’t prone to fits of hysteria and gossip, and were (almost) always ready to rehearse. However, M. Munier was a man used to being obeyed, and the first time one of the clockwork corps was found out of place nearly threw the man into a fit.

A missing ballerina one could bark at and bring running. A missing machine, one that required three stage hands to move if not wound properly, was a touch more difficult to call into line.

It was odd, really, how these mindless machines managed to wander off—but then again, nobody, save the Phantom, really knew how they worked. And these random occurrences would have likely inspired more suspicion than exasperation had the roving set pieces been found in more compromising circumstances. Instead, such eccentricities as finding a clockwork ballerina pacing the dim corner of a room, the fire from its electrical circuits glowing out of the dark, were simply marked off as glitches.

Unfortunately, with the added efforts required to keep the clockwork coryphée in line, Dance Master Munier could not rehearse certain scenes to his heart’s content. The entire performance had to be run from start to finish. Curtains had to be incorporated into rehearsals, and the entire company was made to schedule more dress rehearsals than normal.

One benefit of this: they were becoming an extremely polished and cohesive company. The only problem: a complete halt on the electrical retrofit.

But for the most part, everyone was too busy to notice, most especially Meg, who now pulled triple duty as senior dancer, opera ghost intermediary and, perhaps most importantly, nurse to her increasingly ailing mother.

The aged concierge, always mobile but never sprightly, had now taken to resting whenever and wherever possible, limiting trips from the front of house to back. Obstinate as always, she refused to relinquish her position, and neither M. Monchamin nor M. Richard asked that she do. After all, her work was not physically demanding. Most of it was deskwork, and they didn’t dare risk the Opera Ghost’s wrath with such a dramatic personnel change.

It was a shame, though, that someone so headstrong and vocal be robbed of her vitality through lungs that simply no longer worked the way they ought. Unnamed and unexplored, Mme. Giry’s ailment progressed so that she could no longer be without her little brown bottle of elixir, a steady supply of which was now being delivered to Box Five alongside the Ghost’s communications.

The first instance of Meg’s discovery that her mother’s preferred physician was none other than the Opera Ghost himself set the young woman into a fit of stubbornness nearly equal to that of Mme. Giry. For once, the familial resemblance was acute as the young lady refused the patient her cure of dubious origin. Instead, she called upon the company’s physician, in order to save her mother from the aid of the fiend.

Too many years in the ballet corps, succored on tales of the Phantom, Meg saw not a kind physician but a madman. Even so, after five days of watching helplessly as her mother’s condition deteriorated at a new incredible rate under the doctor’s ineffective care, she capitulated.

Luckily, re-introducing the phantom’s cure halted further degeneration, and Meg found herself free to concentrate on her duty to the dance corps.

The Phantom’s latest was a smash hit. The papers swooned, the audiences wept with awe, and there were no empty seats—save for Box Five.

A modern piece, the tale followed the tumultuous relationship of a boy and his father, a toymaker who turned to his craft when he couldn’t bend his son to his ambitious visions. Resplendent in effects wrought by new scenery and props lovingly rendered, the story brought to life the toymaker’s magical workshop.  

In spite of its novelty, some were not entranced with the Phantom’s latest work. One critic called to question the whole production, unique and heavily mechanized as it was:

“While undoubtedly a solid performance, the company of the Palais Garnier Opera must temper their ambitions if they are to expect audiences to believe their fantastical undertakings are the genuine article. One comes expecting Art and finds a Circus, chicanery of the worst sort. I half expect we’ll see the bearded lady in their next performance.

“The singing was fair to excellent, however.”

Armand could not care less about the artistic merits of the production. A businessman first and theatre manager second, he could have laughed at the highbrow criticism they received were it not for the potential chilling effect it could have on ticket sales. “There ought to be laws against this. Libel and slander,” he paced the office while Firmin chuckled, rather inappropriately, over the harsh review.

“Chicanery,” Firmin snapped his fingers, “Bah. Someone probably paid him off to say that—just jealousy.”

“Jealousy or not, this mechanical mayhem is driving me mad,” Armand interjected, “All I hear from the staff is how deucedly hard this stuff is to work with—”

“I’ve heard no complaints.”

“Yes, well, they’ve filled my ear,” Armand grumbled. “ ‘The clockwork ballet is making my dancers look sloppy.’ ‘The props need winding and oiling.’ ” he did a fair imitation of each complainant.

“They’re just lazy,” Firmin waved the concerns away. “‘Course some of these things need maintenance; of course M. Munier’s corps looks sloppy—they are. Even that Giry girl. How many times has she been passed over for prima?”

“So you side with the ghost?”

“I’m not saying that—”

“But you do—”

“I’m not saying that, Armand. Though I find it interesting that the staff seems only to complain to you.”

The heated debate raised both tempers and voices, the final exchange leaving the two men in discomforted silence.

Firmin bent his head and began scribbling upon a piece of stationary.