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The Winter Machine

From the back of the workshop came an array of intriguing sounds. Pieces of metal clanged together, steam hissed, a fire crackled. It was a fine spring day, but anyone following the corridor toward the noises wouldn’t know it except as a memory, for there were no windows here to let the sunlight in, and the air was stale and dank as a coffin.

“I want to build something,” said a voice, a voice no higher than the countertops that were littered with gadgetry and tools.

A deeper voice chuckled. “All right then, son, it is time. What would you like to make?”

“Something like what you make, father! Something marvelous!” said the boy. And it was true that the older man made all manner of wondrous things. One only had to step outside, into the fine spring day, to see a whole hundred of them. Airships that buzzed through the fluffy clouds, grass-cutting machines that drove themselves along fine lawns in front of even finer houses. Toys that wound up and down and up again.

“Well, my Simon, you’d best get started. Do what you can, and show me when you’ve finished.”

Simon slid from the stool at which he always sat to watch his father, the great inventor, construct his great inventions. So many of them, now, that the city wouldn’t function without them. There had come imitators, of course, but anyone who wished for the best pushed open the door to Cracknell’s Clockwork Contrivances and placed their order, prepared to wait. Or else they sent letters written with elegant quills on thick parchment, sealed carefully with wax.

There was simply the small matter of deciding just what Simon would like to build, which wasn’t a small matter at all. He had toys, and games, and things that whirled and ticked and went clunk in the night. An automaton that looked quite like a person brought their dinners to the dining room each evening, and cleared the dirty plates away again to the kitchen, where a great, hulking, water-filled thing scrubbed them clean. Machines sharpened his pencils and tied his bootlaces tight, so that they never came undone and tripped him.

What did he need? What did he want?

It really was very warm, almost unseasonably so. The last of the frosts had turned the trees silver only the week before, but Simon removed his coat just a few minutes after setting off to wander the streets. A familiar creaking behind told him he was perfectly safe walking alone, the automaton Father had built just for this would never let any harm come to Simon. And so he walked, seeing the ladies in their fine gowns step into carriages surrounded by great swathes of steam and gentlemen stop to chat beneath gas lamps that would sputter to life at the first hint of darkness.

The first flowers were beginning to bloom, a dozen clocks in tall, stone towers counted the seconds away to summer, the sun arcing higher over the airships in the sky.

Down by the river, a wide, rippling river which cleaved the city in two, Simon stood. He had skated on it not a month earlier, spinning in circles as snow fell all around him.

Simon decided exactly what he wanted to make.

~*~

“And how is the great invention coming along?” his father asked, looking up from a table scattered with the pieces of a bird, fashioned from brass and copper.

“Fine,” said Simon, though that was not, strictly speaking, entirely true. He had tried many things, and so far, none of them had worked. But Father did not get to where he was by giving up, and Simon wasn’t about to, either. Asking for help would be precisely the same thing.

On a small counter in the corner of the workshop, just the right height, a collection of tools lay jumbled together. Hammers and chisels and blades thin as a hair. Buckets of water trembled with every footstep, waiting to be turned to steam, and tiny cogs glittered like snowflakes.

He had sneaked from his bed in the dead of night and inspected one of the many machines in the kitchen for so long the ice within it melted and puddles formed on the floor. The very next midnight, he’d taken the thing apart and only put it back together after carefully inspecting every piece.

In the morning, he had tried again.

It was a sweltering summer day.

~*~

The first leaf fell from a tree beside the river, and deep in the cool, dark workshop, an enormous machine chugged.

“What are you building, lad?”

Simon smiled. “You’ll see, Father.” Simon was close, he was sure of it, but there was one missing piece, a tiny filament or enormous wheel, that kept the thing from working. Oh, the mechanisms inside ticked and tocked, steam hissed and he had even, just this morning, managed to form a thin layer of ice on the inside, but it still did not work. Not really. Not quite.

He looked around at all of his father’s inventions, perfect moving parts and perfectly functioning wholes. They all had a spirit, his Father said, clucking over them as if they were children. A purpose, an essence. A machine needs a reason to run, not simply coal or gas or clockwork, but a reason why it must exist.

Aha.

It was a crisp, perfect autumn, with warm days, and cool nights that were growing colder. Simon waited, setting the clock beside his bed to ring in the depths of darkness, and when it woke up, checking the window before falling back to sleep. His ice skates sat beside the bed, waiting, too.

Finally, it came. The first frost. It would be weeks before snow fell, or the river froze over, but what is the essence of winter, if not the first frost stealing across a flower?

Simon tiptoed outside, his toes cold, and plucked it from a bush. He could not name the sort of flower, he didn’t know those things, but he knew it was right, that the silvery sheen was the missing element of his grand invention.

~*~

“It’s ready, Father!” he said, before the eggs had been put on for breakfast. Simon’s father smiled widely.

“Show me.”

In the workshop, Simon took a deep breath, and flicked the switch. Outside, the frost was gone and the sun was shining. The grass was green and the river glimmered.

And it began to snow. Simon ran outside to see, his father on his heels. Around them, the air grew cold and colder, and the ladies in their elegant gowns began to shiver. Gentlemen stopped beneath gas lamps to point up at the sky. The airships shuddered, knocked off kilter by the sudden wash of freezing air.

“It’s my winter machine!” said Simon. “Look, the water’s freezing!”

“Oh, now that is clever,” said his father, but Simon barely heard, already inside and halfway up the stairs to fetch his skates. Both his father and the automaton followed him down to the river’s edge to watch him tie the laces tight. Over the ice Simon glided and spun as snowflakes fell around him.

“Very, very clever,” said his father again and again, gazing about as winter fell upon the city. When the lamps sputtered on, he called to Simon to come back.

“We must go and turn it off, before we do any harm,” he said. “All the plants must die so they can come back in the spring. Animals must build their shelters before the cold truly comes, so they can sleep through it.”

“All right,” said Simon, happier than he’d ever been. The machine had worked! He would let the real winter come now, and skate again then, but it had worked. Rubbing his numb fingers, he reached for the switch and flicked it once more.

But nothing happened.

~*~

It was a cold, bitter winter day. All the people who lived in the city huddled together for warmth, eating the last of the food, not knowing when the snows would melt on the roads that snaked in from the farms so more could be brought. Water pipes froze and split, fish were trapped and smothered by the solid mass of ice that was once a flowing river.

Simon watched it from the window, his skates buried beneath a crate in the back of the wardrobe. He had tried and tried, but the machine would not turn off. His father had tried, but Simon had built it too well. It would not turn off, or come apart, or cease working when hit with water or fire or rocks.

It was a cold, bitter winter day.

And so was the next one.

And the next.

Forever.

December will chill you to the bone

Dear lovely and curious readers,

Our first year in the Cabinet of Curiosities is drawing to a close as the cold nights draw in around us. Of course, many rooms in many houses will be glittering and warm, lit with candles and firelight, but here in our chambers things will get decidedly dark and wintry. This month you will find treasures of snow and ice and frost, of cold that bites at your fingertips, if not your very throat.

So step in from the chilly outdoors, darlings, into somewhere even cooler, and prepare to shiver to your toes.

Your Curators.

Fire People

Mama always told me not to speak to the people in the fire.

“Leave them be,” she said, as I sat on the hearthrug and watched. Faces and flames, bodies that crackled orange and vanished, only to reappear again, dancing along another burning log.

Mama told me not everyone could see them, but that our family had always been able to.

She told me not to tell anyone I could see them.

The colder it was outside, the more the fire people gathered. Sometimes, when frost glittered along the branches of the trees that tap-tap-tapped against the windows in the wind, there were so many of the fire people that I could scarcely make out each one. They were a mass of waving arms and flickering tongues, sparks flying up when they opened their mouths.

To sing, or scream, I could never tell.

Did it hurt them? Or could they not be burned, because they were made of the fire itself? I longed to ask, to lean in close until the heat scorched my cheeks, but of course I didn’t. Because Mama always said to leave them be.

The first snowflakes hissed against the glass in my bedroom window. I couldn’t say what woke me, or even if I was awake, for certain. The night certainly felt like a dream. A dream with darkness in it. A dream simply waiting to become a nightmare.

It was quite completely dark. Not even a tiny amber glow came from the hearth, the fire burned down to positively nothing. No whisper of heat. No cackle-crackle of light. And I missed them, I missed the company of the fire people, but only the folk up in the grand manor house had fires that blazed all through the night. Us as were in the smaller cottages, we made do with enough to cook our dinner on, and keep us warm until bedtime.

We weren’t starving, I want to make that very clear. Mama scrubbed and scrubbed to put food on the table, and there was always enough of it. Trouble is, there wasn’t overmuch of anything else. When Maise and Harriet at school had new hair ribbons or dresses that had only belonged to one of their sisters, I made do with my old ones. And I had no sisters; my dresses came from everyone else’s sisters.

But we did alright, Mama and me. Summers, I’d help her with the vegetables and I was always the best at getting the chickens to give up their eggs.

Anyways, I was shivering in my bed, thinking about the chickens. I hoped they were warm in their coop. The floor was terribly cold on my toes as I crept from bed, down the stairs of the tiny cottage to the room where Mama and me did everything but sleep. And oh, it was cold. The coldest night of the year by a long ways. I shivered in my nightdress, toes so chilled they hurt. I was sure if there was enough light to see by, I’d see they was blue. I tried to pour a cup of water from the jug, only it was frozen solid.

One lonely log sat by the hearth, and I wouldn’t normally—you have to know I wouldn’t—but it was so very cold, and I knew Mister Lavender would be by in the morning, carving tracks up through the snow to bring Mama and me extra firewood for the cold spell.

Mama kept a bowl of matches on the mantel. The fire caught with a snap.

“Hello.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard it, not at first. Fires, you see, can make all kinds of strange sounds.

“Hello.”

I saw its mouth move, right at the exact moment it spoke.

“Hello,” I said back. This couldn’t be disobeying Mama. I hadn’t spoken to the fire person, it had spoken to me. There was, curiously, only one, despite the chill outside. But it had the full length of our last log to dance upon.

“You are cold,” said the fire. I wondered how it knew, and then decided it probably knew of such things better than anyone, having the leisure to sit back and witness them from afar.

I nodded. It had long legs and log arms and wild, spiky, sparky hair and I held out my hand before I could think what I was doing. And before it could think what it was doing—or perhaps not—it leaped into my outstretched palm.

My yelp drew a loud snore from Mama above. The fire jhopped back into the hearth. The bed creaked as Mama rolled over. Two tiny foot-shapes blistered on my hand.

I wasn’t cold anymore.

“What else can you do?” I asked. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps warmth was the fire’s only trick.

It raised its arms and an enormous, searing ball of flame flew up the chimney. It spread them, and my face appeared, shimmering red and orange. It jumped from the grate again and ran around the room, laughing as my heart rose into my throat, moving too quickly to damage much of anything.

And we didn’t have much of anything to damage, so I suppose that worked out just fine. A few bits of furniture, and Mama’s old chest filled with books and papers. Sometimes, when the light stretched out just a little longer, she’d read them to me.

The fire person still hadn’t answered my question. “What else can you do?” I asked it again. It grinned a wide, red grin, its hair twisted and curled.

“Follow me, Mary,” it hissed.

“How do you know my name?”

“We watch you. And now, it is time for you to watch us. It is time to learn.”

Sparks flew from the floorboards as it ran to the door and slipped through the crack beneath it. I fumbled with the latch, my fingers numb and cold again now that the fire was gone. An inch of snow lay over all the ground, perfect and untouched except where the fire person stood. In the snow, he—and I will always think of it as a he—was almost blinding, such a bright and flashing flame. A circle had melted around him, the grass below too sodden from the snow to catch fire.

“Where are we going?”

He smiled. Flicker, flicker. “Come close. Stay warm. And now we go make everyone else warm, too.”

I should have been shivering, my teeth should have been chattering as I stood there, all in my nightdress and bare feet. He ran ahead, not so far that the cold came rushing back to me, but far enough that I had no choice but to follow. How could I not follow this dancing, running, skipping creature of crackle and flame as it led me deeper into the village?

“Now,” he said, stopping outside a grand house. Not the grandest, but larger than the little cottage Mama and I shared. “Come, friends!”

And there they were, all at once. All the fire people who hadn’t come inside when I lit the last log. They jumped and twirled and crackle-cackled, and the grass might have been too wet to burn, but the old, dry wood of the houses was not.

A half-dozen were alight before I realized what was happening. My screams were lost to the roaring fire.

All I could do was turn and run. Run back up to the cottage, chased by the fire that had spread to every house in the village. Every house except our little cottage, where Mama was outside the door, holding my coat and my shoes, her old trunk by her feet.

“We have to help them!” I said.

She did not look angry, but she did look sad. “Put those on, Mary,” she answered, pointing at my things. I still wasn’t cold, but I did as she told me. From the chest, she pulled a square of folded paper, and from her pocket, a match.

“I told you not to speak to the fire people,” she said, unfurling the paper on the lid of the trunk. It was covered in tiny holes with ragged, scorched edges. Mama flicked the match with her thumb and touched the flame to the tiny spot where the name of our village was marked. Sparks popped as she blew out the tiny flames and studied the map for one more moment.

“This way,” she said, taking my hand and pulling the trunk along behind us, over to the road that led north. “In the next place, we leave the fire people be.”

The Cabinet’s New Face

Good morning, lovely readers. Are you having an enjoyable Monday? We do hope so.

Recently, our merry band of Curators was all aflutter at receipt of what will be our most lovely, tangible collection to date, That is to say, the stunning artwork that will grace the cover of our book. Because we are tricksy and it is in our nature to send you off on your own adventures, we revealed the art first on BookSmugglers.com, but now we have it here to share with you. Feast your eyes!

This wondrous object is now also available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble if you wish to add it to your own collections.

We Curators thank you for coming along on this most exciting journey with us.

The Forever Book

Dust drifts through the air, landing on old, weathered spines and faded pages. I can do little more than watch from my shelf, wedged between an old dictionary and an atlas full of countries that now have other names.

We’re hardly going to talk about dust, even on this long and quiet afternoon, now are we? Not when there are so many other tales to tell each other. Those written on our pages, and the things we have seen from the bookcases and cabinets in which we have spent our years.

A great many years, some of us. For me, especially.

The customers who enter the shop likely do not know that we, the books, speak to each other. We whisper and rustle, and some of us are terrible gossips–though not me, of course.

All books do this, when no one is listening. And no one ever is, because they do not know they should.

No, the customers who visit are in search of a gift, perhaps, for a daughter or mother or brother, or in need of something with which to amuse themselves on a cold night by the fire, while the gas lamps outside sputter and spark.

The door creaks open, and for an instant the sound of horse hooves on the cobbles outside is quite loud, louder than the two chattering almanacs on the shelf below mine.

“Bonjour, Christophe,” says the customer. The words between my covers are English, but one picks up a thing or two. Hello. And I recognize the voice, which is a very good thing indeed. I may relax now; this gentleman won’t pluck me from my cozy spot and regret it forever.

This may seem a great exaggeration, but it is not.

“Ah! Bonjour!” Christophe says in return, coming out from behind his little desk to lead the man down through the crooked paths between shelves, piled high and teetering. As they pass, Christophe’s glittering black eyes flick up to read my spine, and quickly away again before the customer–whose bald head is gleaming in the dim light–notices and takes an interest.

Clearly, I am not kept in the room of rare books into which they disappear, though I should be. Nor am I kept locked away, safe from prying eyes, though I should certainly be that, too.

The constant babbling of the other books soothes my charred covers, crisp and ragged at the edges frm the countless times I have been hurled, tossed, gently placed into the flames. My pages crinkle, warped from the waters of every river marked in the atlas to my left.

I cannot be burned, or sunk, or torn apart. And so I am here, where no one will think to pick me up.

“People will open a book sitting on its own,” Christophe says, in French, but he has muttered this to himself so often I have come to know its meaning. “Here, they will ignore you.”

So far, this has worked. And as I say, I am calmed by the ceaseless talk around me. I do not long for a new…

…well, I suppose victim is truly the only appropriate word.

Cristophe was my last, and this is why he watches me with those obsidian eyes, carefully steering visitors away from my cracked spine. Because he knows. Oh, he knows all too well.

The bookshop is muffled, the voices from the back room too far away to hear, but for the bald man’s occasional exclamation over a book full of delicate paintings of birds. I’d forced Christophe to move that one–its chirping was near unbearable.

The door creaks again.

“Maman! The books!” a child says. There are snowflakes on the shoulders of her scarlet coat, winking like stars in a sky still red from sunset. Up and down the shelves, pages rustle excitedly. Pick me! they say, though of course she cannot hear. She does not know she is supposed to listen. No one does.

I am very still between my dictionary and my atlas. It is no thanks to them that I know so many words, so many places. My own adventures are responsible for that, and it has been a long time since I’ve had one.

“Oui, Madeleine. Be careful, yes?”

“I will!” says the girl, but she is not. Her little shoes kick up more dust from the carpet as she runs back and forth, nearly tipping over a stack of novels having an extremely animated conversation about…cheese, I believe. It’s possible I wasn’t listening quite close enough. For I am watching the girl.

Christophe and his other customer are still looking at birds, and I don’t know how I know this time will be different. That no one will steer the girl away, keep her small fingers from plucking me off the shelf.

The atlas begins to tremble hard enough to shake the mountains within. The dictionary mutters under its breath, words I surely won’t repeat here.

“Not me,” I say. She is still not listening. They never listen.

Her head tilts sideways. “The Forever Book, ” she reads. “Maman? What is im-mor-tal-it-y?”

“Why, it is living forever,” says Madeleine’s mother. “Never growing old or leaving this world for the next.” She shudders, this woman with a brain, for people do not know what they wish for when they seek this.

“Oh!” says Madeleine in her scarlet coat, and I am free, pulled from my cramped place between the dictionary and the atlas. All the other books are quiet now, their whispering silenced by fear.

Her eyes are very blue. My spine cracks and my pages stretch. From the back room, a shout comes, a thump, Christophe falling to the floor as Madeleine, my new owner, perhaps for a great many years to come, begins to read.