Danville, Pennsylvania (1837)

For the third consecutive night, it came to him. 

He lay in his bed, statue-still and unblinking. It was not accompanied by any mist or sound and it was absent any fanfare usually associated with such visitations, if he was to believe the descriptions in dime novels. He was expecting it—anticipating it even—and it wasn’t unnecessarily unwelcome.

What it exactly was, was unclear to him, save for the faint features he divined from the darkness: animated tendrils of hair, round hips, and plentiful breasts. Whatever it was, it was quite obviously female and not altogether unappealing. 

Young Sholes was eighteen and an apprentice to a printing press run by his father. He was mostly a virgin having only briefly breached the precious place as Mary Scott lay down by the river, sunning herself on the rocks, her dress hiked up above her knees, her knickers around her ankles. She had feigned no interest, had uttered a few, “No, Christopher,” and an obligatory, “What would God think?” but she made no effort to cover herself or draw up her knickers to cover her precious place. In fact, she took no measures to stop Sholes from laying siege to her womanhood and only forcibly stopped his encroachment at the first sound of her younger sister, Elizabeth, who’d come to fetch Mary for the evening chores. Having reared up so suddenly like a spooked nag, she left poor Sholes in a spot with a swelling too severe to conceal in his britches.

“What you be doing alone with Sholes?” Elizabeth questioned her sister.

“It is no business of yours,” Mary Scott said, smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress.

She did not look back at Sholes, but Elizabeth did—a suspicious stink eye—and Sholes could not hold her gaze as he was already holding himself to shield his engorged appendage from Elizabeth’s curiosity. He watched them disappear up over the ridge, leaving him alone, looking on the Susquehanna flowing southward to the Chesapeake. He thought about Reverend Duncannon’s sermon on the temptations of the flesh in an effort to wrest the blood away from his staff so he could make the short walk back to his house without causing a scene.

It was then that he noticed Mary Scott had left her knickers behind on the rocks. At first he thought it must be a mistake; startled by the sudden appearance of her sister, she mustn’t have had time to pull them back up and properly conceal her woolly splendor. However, he soon came to believe it was not a mistake but rather a keepsake to him—a memento of the time they nearly copulated. He pocketed the discarded garment, but not before inhaling a nose-full of the young Mary Scott’s rank scent, the underpants perfumed with nearly a week’s worth of excess urine and shit, perspiration and other secretions (it only being Friday).

Not nearly as experienced as he might like, he could lay claim, at least, of being no stranger to a woman’s parts and could—mostly accurately—recall the warm folds of Mary Scott’s calla lily (a memory he frequently called up to pull himself off). But since it began to make its nightly visitations, Sholes hadn’t nearly so often resorted to such sinful self-abuse—though since the thing cast no scent, he had not quite fully given up his daily inhalation of Mary Scott’s knickers. 

It arrived as wind when no other wind was present, a barely-noticeable shiver of bedroom drapes and then she was there, standing forlorn, but wantonly, at the foot of his bed. The first time she had come, Sholes had no doubt startled as a cow might startle when you stealthily come up upon it in its slumber and tip it on its side (as the youth of Columbia County were wont to do when making mischief). She was unholy; Sholes would not contest that. But she was also comely and without a stitch on, and the turgid Sholes would have fucked her even if she had sprouted the Devil’s horns. Dear Reader, that’s what he had done: he had coupled with a ghost, for that’s what she was—a spirit of some sort—aching for the flesh just as much as Sholes.

The first few encounters, he dismissed as dreams—vivid dreams—no different than if he had dreamt one of his dreams of Mary Scott and, on occasion, dreamt of her and her sister, Elizabeth, both having their way with him (and sometimes each other in the better of his dreams…Sholes be not proud to admit this). 

He lay like Adam under the sheets before he had partaken of the fruit, unashamed—waiting; his nightshirt lay doffed on the floor. She moved silently across his room, her form taking on something halfway between solid and not in the darkness. As she neared, details of her body had become more defined; full breasts with acutely-tipped nipples; supple hips like the milk maidens hide beneath their long dresses; and a nebulous thicket between her legs that crept so slightly upward to her naval—the mysterious patch committing to no definite shape. And it was this quality of her phantasmagoric wool that most mesmerized him, the viscous black of her crotch spreading across her translucent skin (if it could be called skin), like spilt India Ink across a page.

Then she was above him; her oval face—long, yet cherubic, but betraying no mirth—just inches away from his. Despite the close proximity of nose and mouth, Sholes detected no exhalation. She had eyes of some sort—pupils anyway, but nonetheless, eyes (Sholes always noticed the eyes last—if he ever noticed them, at all). His member rose up beneath the sheet, a nocturnal specter of its own sort, and then the thin barrier separating them was gone and she was atop him, writhing—joylessly—not that Sholes wasted an ounce of his attention on her consideration. Despite a body (or 50% less body than, say, a Mary Scott), there was an undeniable warmth to be found; it was not, Dear Reader, as if he was just thrusting his engorged tallywacker into air, as you are probably imagining. There was a definite mass, a definite something into which he deposited his seed, since once extracted, it did not rain down on him as Newton’s Laws would dictate. Once sated, he brought his face up to kiss hers, but she would have none of that intimacy (and in that respect, she was no different than the working lasses in Philadelphia—whom he heard—sought a surcharge for mouth play).

It occurred to him that he might, in fact, love her—if one could be inclined to love an apparition. She started to drift away from him then as if repelled by the thought.

“Wait…”

It stopped.

“What is your name?” he asked, if only so that he could repeat it to himself to pass the daylight hours between visitations (and perhaps also to have a proper name on which to focus while pulling himself off behind the stable). 

She hovered back over him, her udders swinging pendulously just below his chin. Up until that point, she had never emitted a sound—let alone uttered a single word. Her mouth opened, revealing tiny, sharp teeth and a serpentine tongue (though not forked, Dear Reader, because then that would make it just plain weird). The teeth closed and her thin-lipped mouth formed an O…though it was another letter that was ultimately spoken:

Q.

Its voice was wispy, breathless; still it had the quality of wind. Sholes would very much like to hear it speak his name.

She backed away, turned and drifted toward the open window. Sholes leered at her ample bottom as she arched her back like a swimmer and slipped out into the night-noise of the pasture and was gone.

Mellor was already at the press when Sholes arrived. 

“You’re late,” he told the young Sholes as he tossed him his apron.

“I am guilty of failure to rise,” Sholes told him—though I know one ghost who might beg to differ, he thought.

“How the boss’s son can fail to be at his post on time is a puzzle that confounds me,” Mellor said. “But, I suppose that is a luxury of being a boss’s son…a luxury I shall sadly never know.”

Mellor’s own father ran afoul of the law some 20 years before, having paid the price with his life (in a public execution), and which prompted the then-young Mellor and his mother to leave England in disgrace. On these shores, Mellor became quite adept at operating a steam-powered Koenig, so much so, the elder Sholes decided his oldest son should apprentice under him.

Alongside Mellor, he busily arranged the plates to spell out the week’s headlines. There were the usual barn fires, the missing cow—the public intoxication.

“What do you know about ghosts?” Sholes asked, as he assembled letters that told the story of efforts to better fortify the Daniel Montgomery Home for the Feeble-Minded, a precursor to the State Hospital for the Insane at Danville, some decades later.

Mellor said, “I know I shan’t like to encounter one.”

Several recent escapes by a self-confessed pederast and an equally-perverse “horse whisperer,” evoked a public outcry from the good citizens of Danville, who feared for their children’s safety and who also did not appreciate their horses being whispered to.

“But what about a friendly kind?”

“Are there the friendly sort?”

“I mean there must be, right? There must be friendly ghosts just as there are friendly and unfriendly people in life, so it must be in death, no?”

Mellor looked up from his work. “But why would a soul that was friendly in life be condemned to walk the earth as a spirit, in death? Surely, there must be a reward in the Afterlife for having been friendly while among the living?”

“But,” and Sholes was careful with his words now, “what if this friendly soul was the kind that was not only charitable and good-natured, but was also friendly with her body…maybe too friendly, and that is why she is condemned to walk the earth as a ghost?”

“You mean a tart?”

“Not-not necessarily a tart—certainly not the kind that would charge a man for an hour’s use of her body, but I mean—”

“Where is this coming from, Sholes? Have you been consorting with a ghost-whore?”

“No!” he said, feigning outrage. “Of course, not—no. I mean absolutely not.”

Mellor leaned in. “Are you fucking a ghost?”

“Absolutely no—no. I mean, how would that even work?”

“Why are you probing me with questions about ghost-whores then? Do I look like the sort that would lay down with a ghost-whore—if there was such a thing?” Quieter, he said. “Is there such a thing, Sholes?”

“H-how should I know? It was an innocent question. Forget that I even asked—”

But Mellor couldn’t. “Imagine,” he said. “Your own ghost-whore to do with it when and how you want, and as you please…”

“I much prefer a flesh-and-blood woman who manages her own agency,” Sholes protested, mildly.

“Ay,” Mellor said. “But suppose it was in the ghost-whore’s own agency to want to do nothing but fuck you when she pleases? Huh?”

“Let us forget this talk of ghost-whore nonsense now,” Sholes said. “Ah, would you look at that? You have made me go and misspell pederast…”

Mellor drew closer to him and sniffed at his hair. The gesture prompted Sholes to recoil.

“I smell ghost pussy,” he said.

“You can’t! In her slight form she gives off no odor—”

“Ah, ha! So you are fucking a ghost!”

“Foul!” Sholes cried. “You have gone and tricked me, Mr. Mellor.”

“Not much of a trick…”

They were quiet for a moment, the only sound being the metal plates scrabbled together to form words and the coal fire heating the Koenig’s boiler.

“They are but dreams,” Sholes said, finally. “Lewd, sinful, disgusting dreams, and I am not only ashamed to be having them, but also ashamed to have confided in you the same.”

“I am no saint…and certainly no father-confessor. I do not have so much religion that I can say for certain there is no sin in dreaming of fornication but if it is your soul you are concerned about, perhaps you should speak to the Reverend.”

Mister Starbuck—one of the deliverymen and sometimes hand—walked in on the ass-end of the conversation. “Who is dreaming of fornication?”

“There’s just the learn’d man you need to see, Sholes.” To Starbuck, Mellor said, “Our young Sholes here is fucking a ghost in his dreams.”

“Ghosts? Bah!” he said. “Mermaids are my thing.”

“Can we please just forget this conversation?” Sholes asked, now pleading.

“Ah, our young inventor who has dreamed up such aberrations as a mechanical dog, has actual dreams of copulating with such archaic foolishness as a ghost?” Starbuck gazed out the window. “Ah, speak of the Devil and he shall appear; your mechanical dog wants inside, I see; he is now begging at the door to be let in. Just that you should know…it shat on the shop floor again this morn and caused me to soil my brogues.”

“I am sorry, Mister Starbuck. I will see that it not happen again—”

Mellor said, “You have the genius to design an all-mechanical dog, but not the capability to see that it doesn’t shit? It would occur to me that the only benefit of a mechanical dog to a live one, would be that its owner not have to clean up its mess.”

“I wish I possessed your foresight, Mr. Mellor,” he said. “We all have our blind spots, I suppose.” It was rumored that the good Mrs. Judith Mellor was hanging it out for the same reverend that Mellor had recommended Sholes see, not more than a moment ago—a gossip that seemingly the entire town, but Mellor, was privy to.

Sholes abruptly abandoned his post. 

“Where are you going now?” Mellor asked. “You only just arrived moments ago.”

“To walk my mechanical dog back home.”

“But I just made coffee,” Starbuck said.

“All the more for you and Mr. Mellor,” he said, sparing Starbuck’s feelings, for he did not much care for Starbuck’s coffee; it always tasted burnt to him.

“Did I see the ghost-lady climb inside your window last night? The mechanical dog asked.

“Answer me this, first,” Sholes countered. “Did you shat on the shop floor again?”

“You did not design me to tell falsehoods,” it said. “it is I who shat on the shop floor.”

“Why?”

“You have endowed me with a number technological advances superior to my corporeal counterparts; however, superior continence is not one.”

“Fair enough,” Sholes said. “A flaw in the design. Since you are truthful with me, I will be the same with you. Yes, the ghost-lady visited me again…and I fear I might love her.”

They walked along the overgrown path leading out of town. For a time, the only sound was that of the birds, a cacophony of insect song, and the metallic joints of the mechanical dog as it trotted alongside him.

“I am just a mechanical dog with no knowledge of human affairs such as love, but it does strike me as odd that a flesh-and-blood being might feel for something that exists only as a wisp of a body.”

“It is a complication,” Sholes said.

“If I might be so bold to offer counsel to my master…”

“By all means, do.”

“From my limited perspective as a mechanical dog, it doth seem to me that Danville is chock full of full-bodied females of which to mate with and perhaps, love; why concern yourself with the spirit kind when the warm-bodied variety are plentiful and, I suspect, more pleasurable to mount?”

“You are infinitely wise and this man’s best friend. I cherish your wisdom as much as your companionship. You speak the truth; my mind is in accord with you but my heart seems to have its own designs.”

“It is a mystery to me—this heart. Where flesh-and-bone canines boast a heart, I am powered by a crude—but nonetheless fully-capable—reciprocating pump. But look at me telling you? It is like an astronomer explaining the Universe to God.”

“The human heart is no less a mystery to me, dear friend, and the matters of the heart, even less so.”

They paused along the way so that the mechanical dog could mount a stray bitch they encountered on the path—a cur that looked as though she’d been bested by mange. Sholes continued along for a moment, putting distance between himself and the mechanized thrusting of his metallic friend—puzzled by how the parts and components, when assembled just so, produced this seemingly sentient creature.

A quarter-mile up the road, the mechanical dog caught up with him.

“Sincerest apologies, Master,” he said. “I have got my own mysteries that compel me, it seems.”

“Sometimes I think I may have designed you too well.”

***

That night, with the mechanical dog secured in the barn to discourage its wandering (and unwanted shitting in the shop), Sholes stripped off his nightshirt and awaited his ghost lover’s arrival. He could hear the snoring of his young brother, Charles, in the room next to his; his father kept the master bedroom upstairs—a room he inhabited alone after dysentery had claimed their mother seven years before. Since the untimely passing of the Sholes matriarch, the senior Sholes had a weak grip on his sanity—if a ghost-fucking Sholes was one to judge; as such, his father took to managing the affairs of the press from his bedroom and not allowed himself to be seen, sending notes through the mechanical servant Sholes had devised, bolstered by the success of his mechanical dog. However, whereas the mechanical dog had developed an awareness almost akin to a soul (a blasphemy Sholes would repeat to no one), the mechanical servant acquired none of the dog’s existential wherewithal or good humor; in fact, as the mechanical dog was more apt to put it: the mechanical servant was “quite fucking thick.” 

On the few occasions Sholes had glimpsed the inside of the master bedroom during the comings and goings of the imbecilic mechanical servant, he was witness to a grocer’s pyramid of canning jars full of urine, and in one instance, caught a fleeting image of his unkempt father in long hair and beard, the nails of his fingers and toes, unmanicured and curled. Upon noticing the gawking Sholes, his father cried out, “Melvin! Melvin! Close the fucking door!” (Melvin inexplicably the name his father had bestowed upon the mechanical servant). The notes—cryptic on their best days, but usually simply deranged—would read Who is watching the Watchmen? and Tell me…does the carpet match the drapes?

It was a short time after the mechanical dog had finished baying at the moon and had finally settled in for the night, that the curtains had rustled and the succubus had once again slipped into his room, had once again found his awaiting member and had ridden him like a bobtailed nag that he had noticed she wasn’t so nearly ethereal as he had thought. In fact, could it be? She was also of flesh and bone, like him?

“What is this?” he demanded, feeling ribs, feeling spine.

“That would be me teets,” she said, as he lay his hands firmly upon her breasts.

“I meant your bones.”

“Bones…yes,” she said. “Under my teets, there is bones. That is how I am constructed.”

“Well, how is it,” he asked, rolling her onto her side and examining her, “that a ghost-whore would come to have skin and bones like the living?”

“Who you be calling a ghost-whore?”

“Why,” he said. “The ghost-whore who is now occupying my bed and sports my seed dripping down her legs.”

“Ha! And they say I am crazy!”

“Who?”

“The doctors.”

“Ghost-doctors?”

“Are you mad? What is this going on about ghosts?”

“Are you, or are you not, a ghost-whore?”

“I am an involuntary guest of the Daniel Montgomery Home for the Feeble-Minded, though from my perspective my mind is not so feeble.”

“So you are not a ghost…just insane?”

I am clinically-disposed to bouts of insanity, so yes…it is as you say.”

“What are you doing in my bed?”

“Has your mind turned to mush from my gash? I know I am good—even my own father has told me so—but I did not know I am so good that my hole can infect a man with my insanity.”

“I mean why are you not secured to your cell or however they keep your kind at Mr. Montgomery’s asylum? How is it that you have chosen me for your nightly eroticisms?”

“The asylum is not a prison, sir, and quite easy to escape. Once I had discovered the ease at which to slip my confinement, I took to wandering the countryside at night—”

“Naked?”

“That is how they keep me. They fear any clothing could be made to fashion a length of rope for which to hang myself until dead—’cept I don’t harbor those kind of thoughts.”

“But how is it that you happened upon me, that you have tricked my body to perform for you?”

“Trick? You are the one with the talking mechanical dog.”

Sholes mouth was agape.

“Oh, yes. I know your mechanical dog talks. I’ve spoken to him, myself. I’ve watched you, admired you from afar as I whispered to your horses—”

“It is you! The at-large horse whisperer in my own bed!”

“And by now,” she said, “surely with child—a brainy child that will reverse the madness that plagues my family.”

“Madness?”

“Surely, if you know of me as the horse whisperer, then you know my brother, as well?”

“Brother?”

“The pederast, they call him—but he is fine with simply being addressed as the child molester.”

“You hail from a family of mad men?”

“And mad women, but with your seed—a seed that can forge metal into talking canine automaton—I will change the course of my family forever so that we will no longer be known as whisperers to horses and fondlers of children, but rather inventors of things. They will praise us. The name Manson will be synonymous with all that is good!”

“Be gone from my bed, mad woman, and do not return!”

“Before I do, let me share with you an idea that my roommate, Remington the Rat Whisperer, devised with me…wait for it. Are you ready?”

“Out with it, woman,” Sholes said, impatiently.

“A mechanical contraption that allows you your own portable printing press, but powered by the author’s manipulation of keys.”

“That is ridiculous,” Sholes said. “A ludicrous invention that only a horse whisperer and rat whisperer could dream up.”

“Ay,” she said. “You’re right.” She thought for a moment. “Then at least let me show you something else I have learned at the asylum before I depart your bed for the last time.”

“Very well.”

“It is called a blow job,” she said. “But it is a deceitful name as there is no blowing and honestly? It is hardly any work at all.”

As Q slurped and sucked away on Sholes, his mind danced around the idea of the mechanical writing device. When she had finished and succeeded in yet separating him from even more of his seed, she lingered by the window, reticent to leave.

“I know I am but a mad woman prone to whispering to horses and sneaking into a house so that I might give my body nightly to a hairy man and his son, but I hope you will nonetheless remember me kindly.”

“Hairy man?”

“Ay,” she said, and pointed to the ceiling. “But if he wants any more of my shanks, he best do something about his nails.”

“Gack! You have lain down with my father, too?”

“Of course,” she said. “A woman as mad as me needs insurance. What if your stock is not nearly so hardy as the one who sired you? In the business of insanity, one cannot afford to take chances.”

“Wait!” he called after her as she swing one naked leg already out of the window. “What if you are with my child—or even worse, my father’s, meaning my half-brother? What then?”

“I have already decided I will place the blame on Remington. He will make a good father…so kind and gentle he is with his rats. Good-bye, my love!”

 “The naked woman was not a ghost at all?” the mechanical dog asked as it lifted its leg and sprayed a stream of hot hydraulic fluid onto the base of an elm.

“Quite the contrary, dear friend,” Sholes said. “Just a feeble-minded horse whisperer.”

“But yet you love her?” the mechanical dog said, finishing up his business with the tree.

“I fear she is with my child…or perhaps my half-brother.”

They were in a grove, a half-morning’s walk from the family farm, where Sholes tended to do his best thinking.

“You have not designed me to puzzle over riddles,” the mechanical dog said.

It was Sunday. Sholes had not been visited by Q in four nights and his scrotum ached under the weight of his unspent seed. After fully relieving himself inside a woman (even one who has been clinically-diagnosed as possessing an unclean spirit), it was now impossible to go back to Mary Scott’s knob-deep half-fucking that only led to more frustration, and—ultimately—knickers-sniffing and self-abuse behind the stable.

“I will confess only to you, my mechanical friend, that when I believed her to be a ghost, there was something of the notion that set my heart—and other parts of me—aflame. But now, in the knowledge that she is merely simple-minded and that her serpentine tongue (not forked) and jagged teeth are just a result of her shallow stock and her viscous pupils an effect of a tincture by physicians to temper her horse-whispering, continued fornicating with her is an idea I can no longer get behind” (though the position admittedly appealed to him).

“Perhaps for the best,” the mechanical dog said as it bounded into the brush to spook a wild hare from its hiding. “I have had the misfortune to overhear some of her whispering in our stable, and I daren’t not repeat it out of fear for my mechanized soul.”

In the days after the last visitation, an inebriated Mellor—perhaps owing to his late father’s own tainted stock—took a hammer to Enoch Hamilton’s cotton gin, fatally injuring it, before being dragged away by the constable, screaming some nonsense that the “machines will not replace” him, an act that brandished him as an “anti-mechanite” among the denizens of Danville. 

The resulting loss of Mellor and his subsequent incarceration in the Columbia County Jail meant longer hours for Sholes on the Koenig and less time dreaming up machines (but also less time devoted to lust). Nevertheless, on this aimless July Sunday, Sholes’s and his mechanical dog’s wandering led them to the property line of Daniel Montgomery’s Home for the Feeble-Minded (a destination which might make the reader wonder just what exactly was doing the navigating). There, in the wooded boundary that denoted the limits of Montgomery’s stewardship, Sholes and the mechanical dog beheld the goings-on of the patients.

“They certainly seem content in their feeble-mindedness,” the mechanical dog said, as he watched a trio of mad patients happily smash each other in the head with large river stones, as the muscle-bound Daniel Montgomery staff looked on.

Sholes scanned over the nightgown-clad residents dance and frolic on the grassy common adjacent the home, and where no audible song could be heard; nevertheless, they danced and made merry just the same. He did not see Q, though he reasoned, he did not see any horses either and concluded that absent equine to whisper obscenities to, the affair they were witnessing held little interest to her.

“I shall ask a favor of you,” Sholes said to the mechanical dog.

“It is not in my design to say no to you,” it replied. “I am at your service, eternally.”

“Very good. I wish for you to create a diversion so that I may sneak into the home uncontested and steal a few more minutes with Q. Though it is understood she is not a spirit, but simply a madwoman, I have yet to fully disentangle myself from her.”

“You seek one last coitus with her to fully purge her from your heart?”

“Yes.”

“If I am permitted to say, the human heart is unnecessarily complicated. I am grateful for my mechanical heart which has no capacity for love—or in your case—lust.”

“On with you now,” Sholes said, cracking the ass-end of the mechanical dog with a length of maple branch, propelling the artificial animal into the clearing.

Sholes watched as the mechanical dog ran figure-eights around and through the legs of patients, quickly getting their limited attentions. Soon, the mechanical dog led a parade of imbecilic outcasts—automaton born without souls—to the far edges of the grounds, the befuddled staff in tow. Assured now that he could enter the building unobserved, Sholes left his hiding place and streaked across the common in a direct line to the home.

Inside, he found all staff had left their posts to round up the patients whom had become riled up at the sudden appearance of a mechanical dog. Sholes located a reception area, a desk, an untouched cup of tea (still steaming), and a registry. Flipping through the book, he searched for Q… There were no patients with the last name beginning with such an unused letter…

But there was one with the first name of Quilla. Quilla Werty—room 143.

Sholes hurriedly walked past rooms where he witnessed patients in various forms of undress, engaged in such activities as finger-painting, basket-weaving, or embroiled in some debate with unseen persons—or some simply pulling themselves off as they stared mindlessly at the walls, perhaps recalling a past or not-yet-happened eroticism. He found 143 and barged in, happening upon a still-unclad former ghost-whore here now referred to by her Christian name, Quilla. She was not alone. Seated next to her on the floor of her furniture-less room was a slight man, bare-chested, and wearing a diaper. He paid no attention to Sholes, for he was far too busy whispering to a live rat in the corner. To the rat’s credit, it seemed perfectly content being whispered to, and Sholes briefly pondered whether there was something to this whispering business, after all.

“Ms. Werty,” Sholes said, breathlessly. “If I might have a moment of your—”

“Shh!” Quilla said, and pointed to the diapered man. Quietly, “Remington is on the verge of a breakthrough. He is the rat-whisperer I told you about.”

“I gathered that much by his rat-whispering.”

She stood and motioned to the hallway. Outside, she said, “What further business do you have with me? You made it clear the last time we coupled that there was to be no more fornication as you could not bear to share me with your father.”

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me of that.”

They were interrupted by Remington, who suddenly erupted in laughter.

“He’s got himself a funny rat,” she said.

Sholes looked at her. In broad daylight, her nakedness was made even more naked and her raw beauty caused a dull ache to briefly seize his chest. At that moment, he wished he had devised for himself his own mechanical heart because there was something about human frailty and the weakness of the flesh that was often too heavy to bear.

“Come away with me,” he said. “Quick! We shall find you clothes and we will leave here—leave Danville—go somewhere like Wisconsin where they know nothing of your madness—”

“I am with child,” she said. “My crimson caller failed to appear—”

Remington could be heard laughing so more.

“We will go west, then,” Sholes said. “Even if the child is not my own—but instead be my half-brother—I will love it as if it were my own.”

“But we can’t leave my madness behind,” she said. “Surely, my compulsion to whisper vulgarities to horses will follow. Do you think I can just stop? Do you not think I want to be a dirty whisperer to horses? It is in my blood, just as your seed and your father’s seed and the seed of two-thirds of the men in here—both inmates and staff—mingle inside me—”

“I won’t hear anymore,” he said. “I love you.”

She touched his face. “And I you…but I am okay with—” Remington laughed again. “He certainly has found a rodent of good-humour. As I was saying, I am fine with who and what I am. I am full of obscene whispers that if overheard would certainly see my neck in a noose, but the horses cannot speak, and they are good, impartial listeners.”

“But Wisconsin is fully of cows,” Sholes said. “They are good listeners too—”

“I am a suicidal horse whisperer and no good for you. You shall go onto to great things with that mind of yours that can create such wonderful devices like mechanical dogs and servants. Let me be. Remington will be a good father to the child that grows inside me. Go, and remember the writing machine I told you about.”

Sholes still thought it a stupid idea.

Later, when he and the mechanical dog had returned home, Sholes decided he could no longer remain in Danville or Pennsylvania; he could not bear to know Quilla was so close but he could no longer have access to her. 

“What about me?” the mechanical dog asked.

“The West is no place for mechanical dogs, I’m afraid. One day I shall return and we will renew our friendship. Until then, I will put your mechanical heart on standby until which time you receive the secret command from me” (a command that sadly was lost to history as Sholes never returned to Pennsylvania).

On the wagon train making its slow progress westward, Sholes was prone to daydreams, to schematics and calculations—of the clockwork and predictability of sun and moon—of whispers on the edge of slumber, of things that might be and what could have been.