Wreck of the Gossamer Read online

  Wreck of the

  Gossamer

  The Puzzle Box Chronicles: Book 1

  Copyright © 2016 by Shawn P. McCarthy

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Where well known historic names, companies or organizations are mentioned from the 1890s time period, they are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized print or electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of others' rights is appreciated.

  Book cover design by Teodora Chinde

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2016

  ISBN-13: 978-0996896702 (Dark Spark Press)

  ISBN-10: 0996896708

  Dark Spark Press

  www.DarkSparkPress.com

  [email protected]

  For

  Awesome Dan

  &

  Amazing Kelly

  Chapter 1

  Half Life

  June 16, 1891

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  Amanda Malcolm steps back from a window and sits on the edge of her mattress. Quivering hands press tight against her forehead.

  Behind her, cotton sheets lay rumpled atop an unmade bed—the remains of an empty white canvas upon which she had intended to paint the landscape of home. And love. And family.

  But no such masterpiece exists.

  They are not compatible painters, the pair who reside in this bedroom. They lack the shared vision for collaborative projects. The work is sadly left undone, canvas laid bare and the painters now at odds. They linger on in separate rooms of this farmhouse. Steps away yet miles apart.

  One floor below the bedroom of this small Cape-style house she can hear her husband, Wayne, retreating to the kitchen. He slams pans across shelves and sorts through cluttered drawers in the kitchen. He seeks a misplaced bottle of whiskey. Amanda has not yet told him that she poured it out.

  “Where is it?” Wayne shouts. His voice echoes through the floorboards. More clinks and scrapes come from below. “God damn it woman, if you hid it again, so help me ….” Then the swear words come, low and vile and guttural. They stack one atop the other and cut like the teeth of a saw. His rants are worse even than what she remembers hearing as a child, from the dockworkers back in Boston.

  There’s a small thud, and Wayne's voice changes a bit. She knows he’s done something. Banged a finger maybe. Or perhaps dropped something on his foot. He’s so much harder to deal with in a rage of pain.

  Bitsy, their gray and white cat, also senses his mood change. Amanda hears her whine and run up the stairs.

  The thumping and clanking below come to a halt, and she hears the door to her spice cupboard open. Amanda knows he’s found the vanilla extract again. Fine. Let him have that. The rage should subside when that small amount of alcohol kicks in. His beast will be cooled, maybe for the whole night. She stands again and looks out the dusty window. She feels tears drying against her face yet doesn’t remember starting to cry. It all blends.

  She’ll be all right, she knows she will. She always is. She can be tough when she needs to be.

  Amanda listens to the silence. Silly as it seems, she still cares about him. Wayne really isn’t a bad man. He has a good heart. She’s seen it in the way he treats the horses and the chickens. But both of their hearts have grown heavy with the pressures of the farm. And they simply aren’t working well together. His drinking grows heavier each night.

  Is she the cause? So hard to know. So many things that just ….

  She runs her hands over the folds of her skirt, pressing fingers against fabric like magical flat irons. But the wrinkles remain, and her hands grow tired.

  Staring past the window into the darkness, Amanda wishes she could see the ocean from here. She needs to see it. The salt waves, the reflections, the birds. All so close here on Cape Cod, yet kept from her sight. It’s been far too long since she’s gone down to the water. Far too long since she’s felt small and humble, just standing at its edge.

  Standing.

  What if a man is never happy with the way a woman stands beside him? What if her support isn’t what he needs and isn’t properly cherished? How long is she expected to stay at that man’s side, and he at hers?

  Footsteps on the stairs. A low burp. She waits, futile fingers smoothing fabric yet again.

  Thank God there are no children yet. That will make her decision easier. Yet, isn’t it also part of the tension? Three years. No baby. The arrival of children is always the highly anticipated second act to a relationship. But there has been no second act for them. They are stuck in a lingering intermission.

  “Come on out’a there, woman!” Wayne bellows from beyond the door. “I ain’t going to hurt ya. Just want you to tell me … where’s my god damn whiskey?”

  She hears a snorking sound and pictures his too-big mouth trying to wrap around the tiny brown bottleneck of the vanilla, like a calf urgently nuzzling a teat.

  “You’ve got your alcohol, Wayne! All right? Are you happy? You’ve got your drink now, so just leave me be!”

  He exhales slowly, as if considering her plea. “No. No, I won’t leave ya be, you damn shrew! You threw the whiskey out, didn’t ya? I know ya did! I’m so fed up with ya! I’m fed up with all of it!”

  Amanda doesn’t turn toward the door. She just presses her forehead against the window glass. Trees in the yard are visible in the moonlight. Leaves silvery and restless. Tipped upwards. A storm is coming. She feels the tears this time as they start to form.

  A farm that doesn’t flourish can be a lonely place. The nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. This place had seemed like the perfect escape for her, but the distance also brought isolation. Then distrust. Now she’s terribly remote to everything else in the world. Unnoticed. Like the paint on the faded clapboards of the farmhouse.

  Amanda, never a big woman in the first place, has become even thinner. Paler than ever. She is a falling raindrop, never quite reaching the ground.

  “Go to bed, Wayne,” she calls out. “Just … just go to bed.”

  He slaps at the door. “I can’t. You’re in my goddamn bed, woman!”

  Then he laughs. Amanda knows that laugh. When she hears it, her back straightens and she brushes stray light-brown hairs from her forehead.

  “Besides,” he says, now with a playful lilt in his voice, “I don’t want to go to bed yet.”

  “Now don’t you start, Wayne. Not after the way you’ve been treating me. Don’t you start that at all.”

  She hears him take a long suck on the bottle. It isn’t just the vanilla making him disagreeable. He’d come home drunk too. The vanilla’s just put him over the top.

  If only it would put him to sleep.

  A strong thud shakes the door. She blinks, then holds her temples.

  “Open up, damn you! You’re my wife, and don’t you forget that. Don’t you ever, ever forget that, ‘Mrs. Malcolm.’” He sneers out the name like it’s a label pasted on a piece of property.

  He kicks the door twice more, laughing in self-satisfaction with each blow. The metal lift-latch bounces. Small screws in the slide bolt submit to t
he pressure and splinter out of the doorframe. Wayne stumbles in, mouth open, pants open too.

  Drawing out the last swig from the bottle, he throws it hard against the wall.

  “Well, looky you, all settled here in the bedroom waiting for me. Ain’t that nice.” He pushes his pants down farther. “And looky me, all ready for you too, huh?” She can see his state and realizes that he’s not going to take no for an answer.

  Amanda stares at his nakedness. Then she stares deep into his eyes. Then at the door.

  “Come on, sweetie. Let’s lay down. You don’t even got to do nothin’. You just lie there, okay?” He slides his pants down past his knees. That’s all she needs. Bolting toward him, she pushes him hard. Wayne stumbles backwards in a drunken gait. Lowered pants keep him from taking a balancing step, and he crashes down hard on his backside, howling when he lands on some of the vanilla bottle’s broken glass.

  Amanda leaps over and past him as he grabs at her feet. Catching her by an ankle, he slurs a string of threatening words, including a threat to kill her. She bends down and drives a knuckle into his wrist. She manages to stumble backward as he lets go and grabs the broken doorframe. She lunges through it, then on down the short staircase in three bounds. Grabbing her light summer shawl from a wall peg, she rushes out the front door.

  The young woman runs into the blackness, biting her lip and puffing hard through her nose. She doesn’t know where to go, or how long to stay away. The few people that she does know out here on Cape Cod were friends of Wayne’s long before they became friends of hers. The true loneliness and isolation of her situation closes in like a dark, heavy blanket.

  She’s nearly across the yard when the rain starts.

  When she reaches the edge of the dirt road at the far corner of their property, she simply stops and hangs her head. Drips fall from her small nose and fine chin. A waif who lacks the power to even run away.

  Amanda stands for several minutes, refusing to do even so much as shiver.

  This wasn’t the life she chose. It wasn’t even half of what she had hoped to build. And that’s been the central question in her life for several weeks. Is half a life a reason to stay? Or is it half the reason she needs to just let it go?

  The rain falls harder and colder. She walks back through her yard, temporarily defeated but determined not to return to the house. Instead, she heads toward their small barn.

  Grunts from the milk cows greet her as she slides open the heavy door—just enough to squeeze inside. The familiar smells soothe her.

  Amanda checks on each animal, mostly to give herself something to do. Jessie, her favorite cow, needs water. Another one needs a bit of hay. She walks through the barn, giving each cow and horse a little pat, settling them. Comforting herself in the process. Then she grabs a horse blanket and makes the precarious climb up into the hayloft. Despite her racing heart, despite her wet clothes, she tries to sleep, eventually losing herself in the soothing drone of chewing cows and raindrops on the tin roof.

  Chapter 2

  Gossamer

  Atlantic Ocean – North of Georges Bank

  Wide circles carved over dark gray water. The wings of a gull stretch wide to catch a following wind. Mild updraft, warm moist air rising with it. Different temperatures. Different swirls. Perplexing eddies in the air. White feathers at the edge of darker wings slowly flare outward. Now there’s a cooler breeze to ride. A sea bird feels every nuance in the wind.

  Several miles to the east, a ten-year-old cargo ship chugs in a wide, slow loop. Its steam engines sound powerful and reliable, though its hull and scuppers are stained with scruffy grease and rust.

  The ship’s circular bearing is no accident. The skipper of the Gossamer has been paid to let his ship linger one extra day near the notorious fishing grounds above Georges Bank. One of the men on board, an oddly dressed man currently uncrating some strange-looking equipment, will use this time to conduct a series of technical experiments as the ship wanders in its slow circles.

  Ocean smooth as glass. Clear skies. Warmth on the wind. That’s the view seen by the sailors on this steamer. They’re unable to feel what the gull feels much higher in the sky.

  High above, that great black-backed gull, lingering hints of youth still speckling its neck, slowly banks to the left. Flapping hard and fighting the strengthening breeze, it heads toward the Gossamer, seeking brief purchase. Below the wind. Above the waves.

  The glassy surface of the ocean slowly changes. Swells appear. The rising sea seems to come from two directions, pushed by competing sets of winds. The ocean assumes a different face now—that of marble, but not the polished white kind of surface. This marble is dull and black with twisted veins of ivory streaked across its surface, the white veins being ribbons of bubbles left behind when the competing wave patterns intersect, foaming forces that cancel each other’s ambitions.

  Wings held wide, the bird drops onto a stubby mast at the center of the steamship. The Gossamer is a wide, twin-engine ocean-going steamer. Its short masts are little more than a backup plan, employed only if both engines fail—an unlikely occurrence on a well-built vessel. Like most ships plying the Atlantic in the 1890s, the Gossamer has two large paddlewheels—port and starboard sides. Through a series of shafts and levers, either of the engines could be called upon, if needed, to run one or both of the side-wheels.

  The men on the deck were carefree just minutes before. Now they seem agitated by the sudden weather change. Crates holding strange equipment need to be resealed. Deck gear must be stowed.

  There’s apprehension in the sailors’ voices. Hints of dissension in their ranks. Some say they should turn south. Others say west. But they stick with the captain’s choice. His course sends them east by southeast as the main part of the storm bears down from the northeast. There’s a fair chance they can throttle up the engines and scoot around it.

  Below the perched gull, three men stand near the largest of the crates. One hastily plucks two intricate, highly polished wooden boxes off its top, hauling them away in a sack.

  “Where ya going with those?” another man calls out.

  “Below! Going to stow ’em!”

  “Well, you be careful with those, ya hear? That’s my future in there!”

  Victor Marius, holding the sack, looks back and nods. Victor is the man with the strange clothes and the strange crates. He is the man who hired the Gossamer to spend an extra day traveling in circles, roughly 100 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.

  This man Victor, the other men on the ship have realized, is an enigma. They’ve learned that he has the sea in his blood. His father, Eli, was a sailor. So was his grandfather. Victor told them when he was a child, he was one of the dozens of dirty-faced kids who skittered around the greasy docks lining Boston Harbor. In his youth perhaps half the visiting ships were still powered by sail. Victor loved the celebrated look and lines of the old sailing ships. Yet, even as a boy, he knew their days were numbered. The world already was changing to steam.

  Victor’s love for all things new and mechanical drew him to the increasingly reliable steamships, and whenever a new steamer arrived in the city, he’d race out to see it. With a wondrous smile he’d watch it hiss and clank its way to the piers. Then he’d stand nearby as it tied off, tossing questions to any crewmember who would listen to him.

  What’s the length? Beam? Displacement? Horsepower? Cargo? He gathered facts like stolen taffy, tucked away for later consumption and enjoyment.

  But even with the sea in his blood, Victor seems more like a contraption-building industrialist than a sailor. In Boston he had originally studied to be a marine architect, then switched to mechanical engineering at the twenty-five-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After two years, feeling increasingly unfocused and unsure of himself, he found his true calling. His interest lay not on the water, nor in the hiss of ever-larger steam machines. He tied his future to the blossoming domain of electricity, the fastest-growing technology of all.
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br />   Even though fledgling electric motors had been invented decades before, Victor could count on one hand the number of times people had talked about electricity when he was a boy—unless those people were attempting to describe the lightning in the sky or the sparks that danced across wool sweaters on winter evenings. Static electricity. No other explanation given, or needed, or even comprehended. It remained a crackling mystery.

  But then the electric lightbulb appeared. People took notice. Soon electricity became the topic of conversation everywhere. Every community wanted this new power. And Victor was becoming an expert in the mysterious craft.

  But even as Victor set sail on the Gossamer, less than one percent of homes and businesses across America’s forty-four states were wired for electricity. Yet for all its growth potential, it’s not electricity that brings Victor to the deck of the Gossamer. It’s something beyond even that. His tests are aimed at something so new, different, and wonderful that he himself is still trying to understand it.

  The storm forces him to hastily pack up his equipment, but until then he has busied himself investigating an exotic new concept called radio. He is the only man on the Gossamer, and one of only a handful of people in the world, who understands even a small portion of this strange and wondrous phenomenon.

  He'd been looking forward to this set of tests for weeks. And now they must wait. After stowing the equipment, he heads below to stow the sack containing two beautifully polished wooden boxes.

  Yes, he thinks, a very interesting future indeed in those boxes.

  Victor returns to the rolling deck. He finds it deserted.

  Clanking sounds come from a hatch. A fellow sailor sticks his head up and yells, “Everything safe? Pack up all your gear?”

  “Yes, Johnny, I sure did.”