Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The New Recruit

  A Feast of Famine

  Chinoiserie

  Panther Nights

  New London Calling

  Where the River Shines

  The Incident of the Clockwork Mikoshi

  The Trouble with Phoenixes

  The Boy, the Bomb. and the Witch Who Returned

  Our Lady of Monsters

  The Mystery of the Thrice Dead Man

  The Clockwork Samurai

  A Nocturne for Alexandrina

  Authors

  Editors

  For all our Kickstarter supporters,

  you made this happen!

  Enjoy the ride!

  Copyright 2013 Imagine That! Studios

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art and Design by Alex White

  Cover Titles by Renee C. White

  Interior Layout by Imagine That! Studios No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means whatsoever without the prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental. Any actual places, products or events mentioned are used in a purely fictitious manner.

  www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com

  From the Desk of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Archives

  Finally, I have managed to sneak these files away from Wellington Thornhill Books, and gathered them together in this edition. I think our agents stationed all over the world, and all the various mysteries and mayhem they find themselves in, have stories that deserve to be told, even if Welly is a bit strict when Ministry protocol and procedure is concerned.

  [Miss Braun, what are all these classified files doing free of their respective shelves? This isn't anything akin to the æthercast I reluctantly host with you, is it? — W.T.B.]

  The growth of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences is one of the most surprising and wonderful aspects of the series. It has been a delight to include so many friends and colleagues in this anthology. All of our guest journalists produced stories that delighted and amazed. It is quite a revealing experience to see your world through other people’s eyes.

  [Yes, how wonderful to encourage such growth and interest in this, a clandestine organisation with Her Majesty's government, dedicated to discretion when handling matters most sensetive to the Crown. You do know the meaning of the word ‘clandestine,’ do you not, Miss Braun? — W.T.B.]

  When we set out to use Kickstarter to fund this venture, it was with great trepidation since crowd-funding is the ultimate test of support. So when we funded this project 152% we knew that we’d done something right along the way.

  [Well, I will grant you that the outpouring of support for the Ministry was most humbling. All things considered, I still find it odd having to crowd-fund an organisation of secret agents. Stranger things, I suppose… — W.T.B.]

  A special thanks goes to our editor, Tee Tate, who kept us on the straight and narrow, and added a layer of professionalism—something we truly desired and achieved in this volume.

  [Really? A layer of professionalism, she brought? Perhaps Miss Tate could, in fact, pass along a skill or two upon your own person, yes? — W.T.B.]

  More thanks go to our cover artist, Alex White, and his team of models, make-up artists, and costumers that created for this collection the magnificent cover image, which is so much more than we could have imagined.

  [Some say to be wary of the quiet ones. For myself, it is the far-too-gifted. Note to self: Increase surveyllence on one ‘White, Alex’ with particular warning that he is considered to be armed and exceedlingly talented. — W.T.B.]

  Additional appreciation is extended to Thomas Willeford and Brute Force Studios for their incredible and ingenious machinations that graced both this cover and the cover of our role-playing game, The Ministry Initiative.

  [Thomas Willeford. A name that will live in infamy. — W.T.B.]

  Finally, the dedication of this book is to our wonderful supporters. If you gave one dollar or a thousand, you made this happen, and for that, we give our strongest and greatest thanks.

  [I do so hate it when Miss Braun is right. — W.T.B.]

  We hope you take delight in these stories from around the world, featuring our fellow agents at the Ministry. Tally-ho!

  Eliza D. Braun

  Field Agent

  [ed. Junior Archivist — W.T.B.]

  [This ætherbook will self-destruct in five seconds. — W.T.B.]

  [Oh bloody hell, Axelrod! How difficult is it to build a gadget that works?! You sodding clankerton… — W.T.B.]

  The New Recruit

  Leanna Renee Hieber

  New York City, NY

  United States of America

  1889

  New York City was as compelling as it was deadly. A dizzying, ever-industrialising monster of innumerable, inexhaustible moving parts; human beings were cogs in intricate wheels responsible for turning the axis of the world’s hungriest city. Living here was a mythic journey one embarked upon with great caution. The fangs of New York’s creeping, climbing skyline sharpened on the souls of the unprepared. If one were not born privileged, mere survival depended upon an exceedingly resourceful, clever mind. Bettina Spinnett hoped hers was up for the task.

  New York was all Bettina had, and she prayed it wouldn’t be responsible for her untimely end. At sixteen, she had outgrown the orphanage. Gracious Sister Anne had allowed her to stay. But it was time to move on. Even Sister Anne, in tears, thought so.

  Wearing her only possessions—a plain blue linen dress, worn socks and tattered boots—Bettina walked out of the modest orphanage building and towards the bustling avenue beyond, praying that the city might deign to help her find her way, here in this land of striving struggle so many had fled to from so far away to call home.

  For any woman without means there was always the trade of flesh, and while she was sure few chose that path, many were driven to it. The idea terrified her and she’d frankly rather die first, which was also an option. She put aside her morbid reverie when she set off down the busy and bustling Lexington Avenue, hoping for a sign. Further downtown, she found it.

  Gramercy Park stopped her, the avenue running right into the gated garden only meant for residents. Thankful the beautiful Central Park further uptown had no such restrictions, Bettina reflected on fond childhood trips to that glorious expanse open to poor folk like her. Gates barring access to a neatly groomed park, preventing her a glimpse of New York’s finer homes, grand townhouses, and luxurious carriages, unfortunately, were more familiar to her.

  What really caught her eye of the world belonging to the better-off were all the ghosts.

  There was one particular building that was less fine than the others. Its bricks were in need of washing. All the city’s steam, soot and grime had turned its once pleasantly cream coloured bricks a sickly ashen shade. Its shutters were all latched, a kerosene lantern burned upon its front stoop, but at a slight angle, its great hook bent and the flame made a black mark upon the glass. She didn’t notice an address upon the front door.

  But all the ghosts were pointing. They floated and bobbed in the air as one might expect. What was surprising to her was that they were in colour. She would have expected grey out of spirits, not that she’d had a great deal of experience with them. They had occasionally haunted the orphanage, mostly childr
en who had died there, but the nuns were quick to shoo them away, and from what she had remembered, they were generally white or silver, or an occasional silhouette in the corner of the eye.

  Illnesses and melancholies in the previous year meant Bettina kept to herself at the orphanage. Perhaps that isolation made her more able to see the spirits now, or perhaps New York had simply grown more haunted with a different variety of spirits since she’d last strolled its vibrant streets.

  A throng of them floated before her, undulating like flags in the breeze, facing the unremarkable brick facade. Once Bettina placed her foot upon the slate stoop that sported a faint hairline crack on each step, the spirits vanished. With far finer buildings around it, this one almost looked like it was trying to be uninteresting. Spirits, she noticed, tended to like things that were a bit off. Now that she was paying attention, they evidently had better things to do.

  Something buzzed at her when she stepped fully upon the first step. Her slight weight couldn’t have made much of an impression, but she couldn’t see the source of the sound. It was like a bird’s chirp, but mechanical. She mounted the next steps, up to the doorknocker.

  A small circular crest above the plain knocker was marked O.S.M: Office of the Supernatural and Metaphysical.

  Bettina had never really thought much about either the supernatural or metaphysical, but both sounded quite interesting and exciting. She hoped she could beg for work in an office rather than on the street. Her aptitude for reading and passion for mathematics and science offered faint hope that she wouldn’t be laughed at, seeing that she was a girl. Maybe the spirits had done her a huge favour, her prayers to the city not for naught.

  Just as her trembling fingers moved to lift the knocker, the door swung open to reveal a spacious entrance foyer, a coat tree bearing hats, a great coat, cloaks and several umbrellas stood to her right, and a mirror to her left with odd fixtures about its frame. If she wasn’t mistaken, a glass eye upon a metal stalk was looking at her from the mirror’s crest and followed her as her foot stepped across the threshold.

  The corridor was panelled in finely polished maple wood. Open wooden doors on either side of the entrance foyer led to sitting rooms and fine landscape portraits adorning the surrounding walls. A staircase swept up behind a hefty woman at a hefty desk a few yards from the doorstep.

  “Welcome to O.S.M, young lady,” said the stocky, matronly woman. Bettina didn’t know what she meant, but the word was pronounced like “awesome”. After a moment Bettina realised it was the acronym for the office.

  The woman was dressed in plain, thick navy wool, like a police officer might wear, a pin upon the lapel of her smugly buttoned jacket, hair in a pile atop her head, grey strands flecking the brown locks. Behind her sat file cabinets and a fascinating array of metal things that Bettina couldn’t begin to describe or place.

  “Hello, ma’am,” Bettina said, bobbing her head before she turned to see who had opened the door. She saw no one there.

  “You could see this address,” the matron stated, as if that were something surprising.

  “Well... yes. Why wouldn’t I be able to?” Bettina asked.

  “Seeing this place would mean you’d have been sent here. We’ve a system. A subterfuge.” She waved her hand at the facade of the building, as if it shouldn’t even have been there. “We don’t get ‘visitors’. Especially not from young ladies like yourself.” Her eyes widened. “You’re not the Crimson Lark are you?”

  “Ah... N-no...?”

  “Good. You don’t appear to be a swashbuckling pirate, bank robber and international man of intrigue. But one never really knows, do they? We’re expecting the Lark within the month, trouble is, we’ve absolutely no idea who we’re looking for.”

  “I... wouldn’t know the first thing about robbing banks... or piracy...” Bettina murmured.

  “Well, that’s good.” The woman furrowed her brow. “But we’re not expecting visitors this week. Tell me your name and what you’re doing here? I am Mrs Marsh.”

  Bettina opened her mouth to explain herself, but wasn’t sure what to say, even though the woman was a bit odd, and it was, after all, an office dealing with the supernatural... should she mention the ghosts? She paused inelegantly with her mouth ajar.

  “Let’s try again,” Mrs Marsh began with a patient tone that contrasted her sturdy frame and expression of sterner stuff. “Why are you here?”

  “My name is Bettina Spinnett and I don’t exactly know where here is. But I’m looking for work.”

  “At present the only one working here is me.”

  “Then I’d like your job. I mean—” Bettina clapped a hand over her mouth, biting at her fingers. “I don’t mean that as if I want to replace you, I mean, I’m sorry, what I mean is—”

  Mrs Marsh barked a laugh. “You’re looking for work? This is New York. Everyone is looking for work. But I don’t understand how that made you able to see the place. Usually we’re cloaked.” The woman turned to the wall at her left where two small swords were crossed upon a placard and pressed a protruding seal above their crossed blades. There was a strange sound, like a gate being closed and the light in the room seemed to ripple a bit, followed by a rumbling hiss of some exhaust valve deep in the basement below. “There. Perhaps our curtains needed to be freshly shut. What do you think, Miss Spinnett?”

  Bettina just stared at Mrs Marsh, afraid to seem confused when the woman seemed perfectly clear about this mysterious building with its strange contraptions and desire to hide. If this was an office of the improbable she couldn’t act like she didn’t believe. She had to seem amenable, as if all this was perfectly ordinary. “Of course,” she said with a strained smile.

  The matron examined her. “So, you can see our building, even when under our SpectraVeil? Most intriguing. I’m not sure what sort of wages you’d be looking—”

  “I was turned out of my orphanage, Mrs Marsh,” Bettina blurted, feeling her poise escape her for desperation. “I don’t need much. Just a dry place to lay my head and something to eat.”

  “An individual newly granted independence, ready for the world, but already lost within it.” Marsh looked Bettina up and down, something complicated at work in eyes that likely had once been bright but were dimmed with age. “You’d have to work for peanuts, girl. If the President isn’t all that fond of us, you should see what the Mayor has to say. We survive only because the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences has better luck with their government in London and keeps us afloat. But seeing as we’re a former colony, it isn’t much to float with.”

  A nervous Bettina broke the tension by blurting out the rest of her pitch in hopes of assuring the woman. “Sister Anne, who was in charge of my ward, bless her, tearfully told me today that I had to move on. She liked me a lot— she was the only one who ever took interest in me—because I was smart, so she said. She taught me to read and write, and I’m very good with organising. May I help with paperwork? I promise I’m a quick study for whatever you’d need. I’ve nowhere to go. This place seems very nice.” Bettina bit her lip after her breathless rush.

  “And you were not... sent here?” Mrs Marsh again looked puzzled.

  Bettina shrugged. “No. At least, not by anyone...” She thought of the ghosts. They had pointed up these steps. “Led here maybe, by Fate, perhaps?”

  Mrs Marsh harumphed. “Not sure I believe in fate.”

  Bettina looked towards the button Mrs Marsh had pushed over the odd crossed swords. “But you believe in magic?”

  “Science,” Mrs Marsh clarified.

  The place seemed very magical to Bettina, but she didn’t argue.

  “How are you with numbers?” Mrs Marsh asked. “If I were to send you out on a mission to collect data, could you do it? We just lost one of our best analytics men to another office.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I most certainly could, thank you—”

  “Don’t get too excited, child.”

  “No ma’am, sorry, ma’am—”
r />   “Come.” The woman stood and her thick wool skirts brushed around sturdy boots. Bettina envied the woman her prim, sturdy jacket and skirt when she herself had quite a chill. “I’ll have to assign you a very special piece of equipment.” Mrs Marsh turned to face the stairs. “Oh Mister Books, sir!” She called, her deep voice filling three floors above and resonant through the side rooms. “I’m dispensing equipment. Would you like to come supervise and give instructions or shall I?”

  A British accent barked back. “How many times will I have to say ‘do not bother me, I am on holiday,’ Mrs Marsh?”

  “Well then, next time, sir, book your room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel if you don’t want to be involved with the goings on of an O.S.M. field office.” Mrs Marsh’s scornful tone carried up the stairs like the snap of a whip. She shook her head, returning her weighty gaze to Bettina. “A Mister Wellington Thornhill Books, Esquire, is in town, supposedly ‘on holiday’ though at the sight of file cabinets he is evidently transported and can’t seem to keep his hands out of our own Archives. He is an important Ministry asset, or so he tells us; working with those who serve as our British ‘parents’”, she explained. “And Lord do they like to act like high born parents; wanting us to be very good little boys and girls, but not caring one whit to raise us themselves.”

  Bettina smiled at Mrs Marsh as if they were co-conspirators as the woman gestured her into the other room. Shuttered windows made the light of the room dim lit instead by a few small flickering gas lamps. They were as well kept as one might expect of a first floor parlour, it was unique in the massive length of wooden file cabinets going across one wall.

  Writing desks lined the wall opposite, all wired to telegraph machines, many of which were whirring away in pleasant faint taps. Long thin paper tickers bubbled up from whatever implement was taking in the code. There were wires all about the room, leading to small sockets that Bettina at first thought were gas-lamp fixtures, but she saw that odd metal spokes went up from their sconces. She thought, perhaps they helped keep the building hidden, but she wondered why she could see it then. Maybe the wiring was faulty?