First appeared in History Is Dead

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Allow me the pleasure of beginning this story with its point: Thomas Edison is a being of pure and unimaginable evil. I loathe Thomas Alva Edison.

My name is William Joseph Hammer, electrical engineer and personal assistant to the being known as Edison. I am about to record the events of December the thirty-first, 1899. I am reciting into this modified phonograph, one of many horrific but damnably useful little devices with which Edison has constructed his empire. Doubtless any papers I write will be uncovered and destroyed by his team of spies; it is my sincere hope that they will not suspect this unassuming vase to be holding any of his terrifying secrets. I am aware of the grim irony of undermining the man with his own device; it pains me to know he is as useful as he is evil.

Let not my effete accent and cultured tongue mislead you – I am a gentleman and, having been raised as such, lack the vocabulary to elucidate properly the degree to which I would like to perform an act of grisly murder upon Mr. Edison’s person. However, when the opportunity arose… No, I am getting ahead of the narrative. I do not know if this story will ever be heard, but I do know I cannot contain it any longer. Whosoever may hear me, this is the story of Edison’s dead men.

It begins on the Eve of the New Year when much of the world was in mid-carouse. Edison had closed his Menlo Park laboratory, a rare thing indeed and cause for much celebration amongst those souls in his employ. One of the few truths that have slipped through the expansive propaganda campaign surrounding Edison is that he works his employees to the bone. That he gave them a day off was out-of-character to a mind-boggling degree.

Of course, I had no such luxury. I, being Edison’s so-called favorite, had been called upon to design a display for an upcoming fair, and was expected to have completed my plans in the time that a reasonable employer might expect me to have writ my name upon the page. Thus, while I technically had the day off, I was nonetheless condemned to my study, drearily completing the assignment as opposed to, for example, eating. As usual, I was throwing more and more light bulbs at the problem. They were growing rather commonplace in the cities, but shiny things still played well in Appalachia. I was putting one final boring embellishment on the design when the telephone on the wall chirped.

I glared at the damnable machine – an infinite capacity to better the world whose only practical application appeared to be in allowing Edison more effortlessly to irk me. I contemplated ignoring the call but realized quickly that whatever annoyances the man had planned, not attending to them now would put them in my lap later, after they’d had time to grow larger and more complex. With resignation, I lifted the earpiece and leaned into the telephone. “Ahoy hoy,” I said. Edison hated that particular greeting, due to some petty grudge with Mr. Bell, who had invented it. Needless to say, I used it at every opportunity.

“Hammer!” bellowed my employer. “Come to the laboratory! I’ve use for you!”

“May I ask for what, specifically, you need me?” I asked, not expecting much by way of an answer.

“A scientific discovery on an untold scale! Progress, Hammer, progress!” With that, the connection was lost. Progress, for Thomas Edison, is the end by which even the meanest of means is justified. Especially if such means might greatly inconvenience me.

While not a large man, Mr. Edison is imposing, and powerful in the more political sense. He also is possessed of a look – not the public smile you have likely seen in newsprint or in one of his films, which is humble but beatific. Rather, he can achieve a manic glint and perfectly awful twist of the mouth, a profoundly terrifying look that seems to say, “You are but one misstep away from being killed and consumed.”

Had you ever been on the receiving end of such a look, you would know why, minutes after the telephone call, I abandoned the warmth and comfort of my home for the chill in front of Menlo Park, where I found Edison, wearing his vest but no overcoat, seemingly oblivious to the snow surrounding us.

“What seems to be the trouble, sir?” I asked, as graciously as possible. Edison merely smiled and beckoned me into the building. Dutifully I followed, through the front door, down the hall to his office, over to a lighting sconce on the wall which Edison twisted, upon which an unassuming section of wall swung open, revealing a narrow staircase. Edison began to descend, but I felt it would behoove me to express verbally my increasing discomfort for the situation.

“What in blazes?” I exclaimed, after a moment’s hesitation.

“Ah yes!” he exclaimed boisterously. “You’ve not seen my private laboratory before, have you?”

“You keep a secret laboratory hidden beneath your actual laboratory?” I said. “That is the logic of a madman!”

Edison cocked his head to one side and let his eyes twinkle in an unnerving way. “What’s that?”

“Nothing, sir,” I answered quickly, feeling I did not have much incentive to experience the man’s wrath. The acuity of our employer’s hearing is a subject of much debate at Menlo. While some are certain he merely stone deaf and only able to communicate thanks to a remarkable facility for reading even the lips that were far to his periphery, I and many others, on the other hand, believe it to be just another facet to the man’s false front. This position is bolstered by the fact that one is only ever asked to repeat oneself when one has said something best left silent.

“I was quite sure you said something, Hammer.”

“I… what is that stench?” I blurted out. It was a diversion, but an apt one for I was just then aware of the horrific smell wafting up the narrow stairway.

“Death,” said Edison simply, and he bounded down the steps by twos. I followed with considerably more trepidation.

The secret laboratory, I must say, was much like the one upstairs – cramped, full with far too many tables, overflowing with papers and partially-completed experiments. However, I noticed that many of the devices littering the desks had stocks and sights; there were a number of bubbling tubes and concoctions about one side of the smallish room, and most distressingly, at the rear of the room was a cage with three men locked in it, struggling against the bars.

One, judging by his clothing, was a doctor, the second was a Negro, but it was the third that was the most interesting (and here I must take an aside to point out that if one is singling out an individual as “the interesting one” out of a trio of caged men in a secret laboratory, he must be very interesting indeed). The creature looked nothing more than a corpse some months rotted away. His skin was grey, falling off in places. Along his shins I was certain I could see the bone. His hair was coming out in clumps and he was dressed in rags and tatters. So shocking was the apparition that I did not notice that the others were similarly, albeit far less extensively, decrepit, and they were sporting large and unpleasant-looking – though surprisingly bloodless – wounds, the doctor on his wrist and the Negro on the shoulder.

“You… you… what is this?” I sputtered. “Are you harboring beings in some sort of very advanced stage of leprosy?”

Edison shook his head, smiling in the direction of the rotted men. “These are not lepers,” he said. “They are dead.”

“They are upright,” I countered. “They are upright and seem very inclined to escape the cage you have them in.”

“They are not, admittedly, the traditional sort of dead. They are a new, progressive sort of dead. And you, Hammer my boy, are to see what makes them so.” Edison clapped me upon the back and span on his heel, striding away in a manner quite familiar. I had no intention of playing his cannot-hear-your-shouted-objections game on that day, however. I darted around the table in the middle of the floor so as to halt the man’s progress.

“What?” I asked. It was thoroughly insufficient in expressing the depth of my confusion, but Edison did stop and sigh.

He grabbed a beaker full of brown liquid from a nearby bench and thrust it into my hands. “Drink, while I explain.” Mr. Edison was not a man who often saw fit to explain himself, and so I was not about to pass up the opportunity to experience it, even if it required me to drink a mysterious concoction that turned out, rather unsurprisingly, to be rank and tepid coffee.

As another aside, I shall point out that it would not have surprised me if every bubbling phial in the laboratory contained some variation on the theme of coffee. Edison is not much of a chemist, you see, but he grew incredibly enamored of the beverage some years ago when he discovered that, technically speaking, it made sleep optional. It was an imperfect system, and for a while led to irritability and above-average levels of mania on his part. Also, he once showed up to work having neglected to wear clothing of any sort. When Nikola pointed out this fact, Edison grew very confused and began rapidly talking about magnets. Since then, however, he seems to have adapted.

“Three weeks ago,” Edison expounded, “a cargo ship was returning to New York from California. They had just passed the southernmost tip of Argentina when a sudden storm blew them off course. They arrived at an island somewhere thereabouts, uncharted and uninhabited but for the most grotesque of these men in the cage. The captain of this little schooner, being in my employ for reasons better left unspecified,” (by which he almost certainly meant his under-publicized cocaine habit,) “realized that he would likely be rewarded handsomely for bringing so fascinating a being to my attention. He hurriedly created a slapdash brig amongst his cargo proper.”

As he spoke, Edison was setting up a film projector. Here, he began a brief film strip, and the room was just dim enough that I could see what was happening: the wildly thrashing corpse was being unloaded from the ship by several large and burly men. “At first, they assumed the being to be a savage or cannibal, whose violent behavior could be explained away by him being untouched by civilization.” And here there was an edit to the film, and suddenly the same men were unloading the wildly thrashing Negro. “However, when the cabin boy was bit in the course of apprehending the rotten man, he quickly turned ill, and died on the trip home. The entire crew testified to the fact that he was well and truly dead. Then he awoke, as violent as the rotten man had been. The condition that causes the active death, it would seem, also causes madness.”

Here there was another edit, and now the film showed the more rotten corpse, strapped to a table and thrashing wildly as a rather uncertain looking doctor examined it. I could not make out his face, but I had no doubt he was the same man who was now in a nearby cage, shambling mindlessly and reeking of death. “We yet know little,” said Edison. “But these somewhat-living men are truly dead; there is no circulation and no respiration. We know nothing of what causes the condition, except that it is very contagious.”

I was sipping my coffee when a sudden realization caused me to spurt it out in a manner that might have been most comical were not the situation anything but. For, you see, the coffee tasted exceedingly rank because of the scent filling the room, and it was then that I realized my nose was being assaulted by particulates of a contagious dead man’s flesh. “I have no desire to be a dead madman!” I shouted, somewhat muffled as I was covering my mouth and nose.

“Only men bit have died, Hammer. It is a disease borne of the blood, it seems. That much we know, and I want you to ascertain the rest.”

“Mr. Edison!” I cried. “I am an electrical engineer! This is not my forte! I daresay this is no man’s forte! An immensely talented physician may find this his mezzo-piano!”

For one exceedingly brief moment, Edison was not only caught wordless, but also a little sheepish as well. I quickly realized why, for on the screen before us, the dead man broke free of his bounds and attacked the physician attending him. There was only a moment of struggle before the film ended, but it was… well, it was quite bloody.

“Good lord, sir. Why? Why have you not killed these monstrosities?”

“Two reasons. The first is practical.” Edison extended his arm toward the cage, and a shot suddenly rang out. The doctor was thrown to the back of the cage, a bullet hole in his coat. A moment later, he was back at the bars, struggling to escape and oblivious to the wound.

“Do you have a revolver hidden beneath your shirtsleeve?” I asked.

“That is not what we’re about right now,” Edison said gruffly. “We are on the cusp of a new century, Hammer.”

I opened my watch. “One half-hour away,” I said, and then noted the error in my math. “One half-hour and a year, rather.”

“The cusp!” he continued, ignoring me, as usual when he felt the desire to pontificate. “But I intend to see the next one, Hammer, and the one after. I do not intend to leave the great march of progress in the hands of lesser leaders because of something as mundane as death. I think that with judicious experimentation, it may be possible to separate the immortality from the madness.” He smiled at me, a mad glint in his eye.

“Judicious experimentation on violent and cannibalistic corpses who evidently killed their last experimenter!” I pointed out.

“Ah, yes, I almost forgot,” said Edison, who proceeded to rummage through the junk on a nearby desk, finally pulling out something that looked like a wooden revolver with a steel sphere on the end of the barrel. A wire connected the device to a large cuboid, which I recognized as the alkaline battery Edison had been publicly toying with recently. “The electricity gun,” he said. “Bullets do not stop the dead men, but this stuns them some considerable amount of time.”

“It looks like a smaller version of Nikola’s theoretical teleforce weapon,” I said without thinking. Edison frowned, and shot me.

It was not fatal, obviously, and it did not even cause me to void my bowels, but that was not owing to any attention to sanitation on my part; rather, it was because the arc of lightning emanating from the sphere and terminating on my chest was causing me to spasm far too quickly for any such motion to occur.

“And that’s just setting two of ten!” exclaimed the madman. “I’ve not yet tried out the more powerful levels, as the power used increases exponetially and I suspect they would be very dangerous indeed.”

“You shot me!”

Edison merely grinned. “Are you ready to get to work now?”

“I don’t even know what to do!” Of the many insane things that had so far happened, it seemed odd that the one I latched onto at that moment was this, but my mind was still somewhat rattled from the shock. It was not the worst I’d ever received – working closely with electricity as I do – but it was high up on the list.

Edison’s face softened, and he flashed the beatific-yet-humble smile of which the newspapers were so fond. “Hammer… William. I trust you… you are like the son I never had.”

“You have four sons.”

“Yes but Dash is sort of a prat and– Four? Are you quite sure?”

I nodded. This, I must point out, was a moment that strengthened, rather than shattered, Edison’s pleasant façade, though that may seem counterintuitive to those outside of his employ. The overworked atmosphere at Menlo Park means that everyone’s personal life is lived in dreary somnambulism, and it is not uncommon to forget about loved ones completely. I myself was surprised recently to realize that I had married Alice White. Somehow I managed to sleep through the proposal, ceremony, and consummation. The former two I have been assured were very romantic. The latter I have not yet worked up the courage to ask about.

“Regardless,” Edison continued, “I trust you. And I think you will be successful. And when you are, I will gladly let you become immortal with me.”

It shames me to think it, but my heart was warmed, and for a moment I was totally under the spell of the monster before me. Then the implication of the carrot dangled before me became clear. “Wait. Are you saying you intend to decide who lives and who dies?”

Edison’s face hardened. “There are some types one does not want to spend eternity with, Hammer.” I was aghast. “Obviously this isn’t for everyone! You think everyone will have access to the electricity gun? To the omniplex telegraph? To the extended-play phonograph? Any number of the inventions I’ve created that would grow uncontrollably powerful in the world at large! What is the point of progress if the world progresses in the wrong direction?”

And that was it, the very line which pushed me into rebellion. “No!” I said. “No! You are a sick, sick madman, and not only do I resign, but I am also marching straight to the constabulary. I don’t know if anything here is, properly speaking, illegal, but I’ll see to it that you are closely watched for the rest of your natural and unnatural life!”

It was not the wisest move of my life, although it was terrifically refreshing for that moment. However, Edison did not like to lose control over situations, and he was also armed. This time, I felt a slightly higher charge of the electricity gun, and while my trousers again remained unstained, I was thrown several yards backward, crashing into a table, which splintered in a fantastically dramatic way.

“I cannot let that happen, Hammer,” he said. “Fortunately, I could always use another specimen.” He extended his arm toward the cage and his unseen revolver fired again, this time causing the padlock that kept the door shut to shatter. A thicker lock might have survived the blast, but Edison was remarkably spendthrift, you see.

This brings me to the strangest leg of the story; a dissertation which I feel bears repetition. I am relating a story about walking dead men in a secret laboratory, and the strangest bit is yet forthcoming.

I am not the strongest of men, I will admit, but when called into action due to necessity or rage, I am capable of feats of grand masculinity. Shaking off the effects of the gun and the desk far quicker than would be expected, I leapt to my feet and then to Edison, who was attempting to beat a hasty retreat up the stairs. In an adrenaline-fueled frenzy, I grabbed the man and threw him to the back of the room, toward the shambling horrors even now fighting each other to get through the door of the cage.

There was a sickening crack, as the most rotted of the corpses missed his footing and his shin splintered. Slowly he toppled forward, snarling, and landed inches away from Edison’s sprawled form.

“No!” I cried. I was angry at the man, certainly, but throwing him to the corpses had been a gut instinct to prevent his escape and not a desire to turn my admittedly demonic employer into one of those beasts. In the throwing, I had caused Edison to drop his electricity gun, which I seized and fired in the general direction of the dead men. This was foolish on my part: instinctively I was treating the device as I would a proper revolver, assuming it would fire more-or-less true to the direction in which it was pointed. The arc of lightning, however, twisted chaotically as such things do and stopped well short of its intended target, pouring instead directly into Edison’s arm. I released the trigger, but though he had received only a split second’s worth of power, his limb was spasming in a most violent way, dragging the man behind it, and ultimately landing with a regrettably memorable crunch in the brainpan of the downed corpse.

I ran toward the chaos to aid Edison. The spirit of humanitarianism, even toward those whom I hated utterly, had been instilled in me a long time ago. I bounded forward while Edison scrambled to his feet, his arm limp and lifeless in a most abnormal way. It was in this brief moment that I noticed that, while the doctor and the Negro were still shambling, the corpse whose skull was now in pieces was motionless.

“Sir, the rotten one…” I said breathlessly. “Destroying the brain killed it!”

“It was already dead,” he rejoined, as he slapped his arm, trying to restore some life to it.

“Properly dead!” I yelled, having no time for nuance. “You shoot the doctor, I shall take the Negro!”

I was not sure how Edison was supposed to deal with his corpse, his injured arm being the one where the seemingly invisible revolver hid. But I was too busy working on my own problem; I had electrocuted a number of animals in order to justify Edison’s esoteric grudge against alternating current, and I was attempting mentally to relate the shocks I’d felt to the shocks I’d delivered to determine an approximation of the amperes the upper levels of the device would deliver, and how long I would have to maintain the charge until the creature’s inner meats would begin to boil away. I ended up dialing the charge to level seven, and holding the sphere directly against the Negro’s bare chest for about ten seconds. It created an unpleasant visual I am loath to describe in detail but, suffice it to say, his already putrescent form became quite nauseating before he fell to the ground, still.

I turned to see how my employer was faring, and my heart turned in an odd way. It first fell, for Edison had failed to dispatch the doctor, who was now gnawing greedily on Edison’s injured arm. Then, swiftly, my heart lifted because, frankly, I hate that man. I am not proud to have felt that way but, given what has transpired, I think you cannot blame me. Still, being a gentleman, I addressed my employer with sympathy.

“My lord, sir,” I said, grasping for the right words. “I… I’m not… I won’t let you live in madness,” I settled on, and aimed the electricity gun at him.

“Don’t you dare, Hammer,” he shouted, evidently unconcerned with the pain one would expect a chewed-on arm to deliver.

“Immortality is not worth becoming one of these beasts!”

“Yes but… damn!” he said. “I was hoping not to have to reveal this.” And with that, he performed a complicated action on his shoulder with his free hand, and his right arm fell off, shirtsleeve and all, trailing a small length of cable behind it. The corpse, having been denied the leverage on which he was relying, fell forward with Edison’s disembodied arm in his grip and his mouth. As he hit the ground, the arm slammed against the concrete floor and split. Escaping springs and gears tore the sleeve to tatters, and I could see a wooden shell filled with a complicated array of wires and levers and tubes and pulleys and other, unidentifiable components. “All right, Hammer, help me get him back inside the cage.”

“What… in the name of Hell… are you?”

“I am a man interested in progress, Hammer!” he shouted. Through the now-useless arm-hole of his vest, I could see tiny cogs turning, as his left arm rose in a defiant manner. I presumed he was unconsciously being symmetrical.

“You are a machine!”

“I am the future!”

“How much of you is even human anymore?”

Edison grabbed the slightly-stunned doctor by the back of the coat and hurled him into the cage in a fit of literally inhuman strength. “My head, of course. Most of my trunk. There are some important organs it’s proving difficult to replicate. Hence, the interest in progressive death, to render them unnecessary.” He strode over to the cage, wherein the dead man was attempting to right himself. Edison’s one arm was strong enough to twist the bars of the door around its frame in such a way that it would not be opened in the near future. “I fear my supply of subjects has run low,” he said, mostly to himself. “Irrelevant, society abounds with vagabonds.”

“You intend to kill people in a horrific way and torture their corpses so that you, and whomsoever you deem worthy, will live forever,” I said.

“Well, I would like someone else to do the actual experimentation as I am a busy man, but that is the core of the plan.”

“You are sick.”

“I am Progress.”

If this recording survives, and you are listening to it, I suspect that the bile has risen in your throat as it did in mine. There is being a megalomaniacal madman, yes, but then there is– honestly, I don’t know what that level of insanity could be called.

I did not speak. I turned the dial of the electricity gun all the way to ten, aimed at the cage, and fired.

Edison gave me his private look, which I now recognize as harboring more than just a mania. It has a distinct undertone of disgusted superiority. Meanwhile, I held the trigger down, the doctor roasted, and the smell of death was slowly replaced with the smell of frying flesh.

“Your revolver was built into your lost arm,” I said. He nodded. I knew he would have stopped me if he could have. Sure that the doctor was well and truly gone, I aimed the electricity gun at the madman before me.

That was when it struck twelve o’clock. Usually, the church bells were silent at night, but as this was the dawning of a new century, they rang in celebration, and their reverberations sounded loud and clear even down there in the underground laboratory. And that gave me pause.

It was the cusp of a new century, and the old one had been amazing: the telephone, moving pictures, the light bulb, the weapon in my hands and every other minor miracle that this man had conceived or improved upon. If you looked away from his obvious madness for a moment, you’d find someone who had made the world an infinitely better place. The newspapers present him in the most incorrect of all possible lights — as a person — but he is a genius. Perhaps it was a most inopportune moment of philosophy that the New Year brought, but I passed up the opportunity to rid the world of one of its more heinous villains, a decision which has haunted me since.

Still, I know his secrets. I must be forever on my toes, but he must be forever wary of me. If he goes too far, I can reveal his true nature to the world. That’s why I am making this recording. Should I die under mysterious circumstances, my will stipulates it be played. It’s regrettable that I must go to such lengths to control a madman, but he’s a genius too. I was right to let him live.

Whether I was right to dial the electricity gun back to four and shoot him in the face, the only bit of him I knew still to be human – well, of that I am unsure, but I must admit it was the most satisfying experience I’d ever felt. It also allowed me an unmolested exit with all the items of interest I could carry.

And as for the so-called progressive dead men – I’ve not yet heard any other tales of their kind, and I hold out hope that the ones I saw were unique exemplars of a bizarre plague whose last remnants were cooked away by me. Perhaps the twentieth century will never see a living dead man but, goodness knows, the world is rarely that fortunate.

Ed Turner lives somewhere around Sacramento with his girlfriend (Amber) and rats (Bernard and Neville). When he’s not doing the writing thing, he is a barista, at least until the writing thing delivers the untold millions that he’s quite sure are just around the corner. He maintains an internet presence at http://www.thestrangestbit.org that you are welcome to visit if you are interested in that sort of thing.