Mars is ghost country. I know this better now than I did then, of course, but on that journey I began to get my first true sense of it. The cavalier attitude Sally took to the centipede unnerved me. I could have accepted it if they’d been as dismayed as I was, but the fact that they took it in stride suggested to me that the desert was haunted ground, that the spirit of an extinct animal was no more cause for comment than seeing a family dressed for Sunday service.
As the day wore on, I saw more of them. I’d catch glimpses from the corner of my eyes. I’d turn my head subtly, hoping to catch them unawares, only to find nothing there.
Even Joe started to react after a while. His attention would be snared by something and his whole head would whip around; I could tell by his increasing distress that he had no better luck than I did. He’d end up squinting into the distance, as though something was hiding from him just around the corner of the sky.
One likes to think of ghosts as residents of darkness, but they teemed in the rusty sunlight. Figures appeared distantly, usually alone but sometimes in small groups, too far away for me to note any particular features. Occasionally I would see the peaks of towers or long, hulking structures larger than any building I had seen in my life; a kind of awe would overcome me, and then these structures would be gone, as though blown away by a gust of wind. Once, as we crested a tall dune, we saw what looked like a caravan a mile in length, made up of lumbering, many-legged beasts of burden hauling carriages of multiple tiers, or strapped with what looked like small wooden buildings on their backs, spangled with glittering baubles and long tassels, topped with covered platforms on which strange figures reclined while attended by servants waving great fans. I couldn’t make out much detail, except to know that they were not human beings. The caravan was visible for so long that I became sure it was real, and that we had stumbled across evidence of a living alien civilization. But I turned my head once to see if Sally and Joe saw it, too, and when I looked back, it was gone.
Only one set of phantoms came close to us. For a solid hour, two figures walked side by side in tandem with us, only a hundred yards off. They wore the heavy, clumsy coats and crossed bandoliers of the United States Martian Brigade, from the time the US skirmished with Germany for control of the Peabody Crater. I recognized their uniforms from our history textbook. That engagement had been settled in 1896; that should have made them middle-aged men, but they looked only a few years older than I was.
I felt a curious absence of fear. I broke off from the group and headed toward them. I wanted to talk to them; I wanted to see if they were capable of talking, to see if they knew what they were.
Sally called to me. “Get back here.”
I continued walking. The men took no notice of my approach.
A hand grasped my elbow, and I wheeled around to confront Joe Reilly. I tried to wrench my arm away, but he held fast.
“Let go of me!”
“Come back, Anabelle.”
“I said let go!”
“Will you please come back?”
Behind him, Watson turned on his treads and began to close the distance between us. Sally remained where she was, watching to see what transpired.
“Watson’s almost here,” I said. I knew it rattled him.
“So what? He’s a dishwasher.”
I didn’t have to say that something had changed in Watson, the way it had changed in the very landscape we crossed. We’d passed into a new territory, into wild Mars, and new rules applied.
Watson came closer. He did not call out as he normally did; he came in silence, and I was surprised to find that this unnerved me, too. “Let go,” I said again, and this time when I pulled my arm, Joe released it.
Joe turned to face Watson, his hands held up in front of him. “Ease off, can opener. I let her go.”
“Are you all right, Miss Crisp?”
His orange eyes seemed bright, even in the midday sun, as though something was on fire inside him. I was uneasy, and I did not want to feel that way around my friend. “I’m fine, Watson.”
Watson ignored me. “You’ll refrain from laying hands upon Miss Crisp.” His new mantra.
Joe bristled. “You’re a goddamn Engine,” he said. “You’re a tool, nothing more. You open your mouth to me again and I’ll strip that cylinder down to basic functions.”
“Joe!” Sally’s voice carried like the crack of a whip.
Joe glanced at her. She shook her head. That seemed to be enough. To me, he said, “If she calls you back, it’s because she’s trying to save your fool life. You don’t go wandering off out here. Are you crazy?”
I looked back toward where the soldiers had been; of course, they were gone now. Nothing but empty sand in every direction. “I wanted to know if they were real,” I said. “Don’t you want to know?”
“No,” he said. “I sure don’t. Let’s keep on.”
He glared at Watson and turned his back to us. He kept walking, trusting us to follow.
We did. “Are you all right, Watson?” I asked, keeping my voice quiet.
The sand in his gears cracked and ground as he trundled along. “I seem to be somewhat out of sorts,” he said.
“Should I be worried?”
He looked at me, the glow of those eyes casting light on my face. “Never you, Miss Crisp.”
Somehow that did not put me at ease. Once we had all gathered again, Sally continued on, offering no commentary on what had just occurred.
One thing troubled me about the ghosts. We were told in school that they were manifestations of our thoughts and dreams, that the Strange somehow affected what we saw. They’re mirages, Miss Haddersham had said. But if that was true, why was I seeing things I’d never even imagined before? And why were we all seeing the same things, creatures that hadn’t existed on Mars for thousands of years?
Who exactly was doing the dreaming?
LIKE THE NIGHT before, we began to set up camp about an hour before nightfall. None of us had spoken much since I’d tried to interact with the phantoms, except Watson, who had taken to muttering what sounded like rhyming couplets. I’d felt a chill when I first realized it. When I asked him what he was saying, he seemed surprised, and claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. Engines weren’t supposed to lie, unless it was part of their cylinder’s programming. It certainly wasn’t part of his.
Until that point, Sally had been the dominant presence in our little group; our attention turned to her when it came time to make any decision, and when she spoke, it carried the authority of a judge. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t pretend otherwise. She cowed my rebellious nature in a way no one else had managed to do. I think it was because I believed her capable of any action. Her threats—all unspoken, transmitted through her eyes—were not idle.
But Watson had changed that. His threatening posture against Sally this morning, his warning to Joe this afternoon, and his odd behavior since then had shifted the dynamic. Now all our apprehensions were directed toward him.
Not him, I thought. It. I felt bad for thinking that, as though I were betraying him. But Watson was an it. Any personality he displayed was a function of the cylinder installed in his head. I had to remember that.
It was an Engine. That was all. And something was going wrong with it.
Once Joe had the fire going, he slopped something out of a tin can and into a skillet. In a few minutes I smelled ham and kidney beans. The wind carried that scent across the desert. My stomach growled. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Sally pushed us too hard.
“Come by the fire, Anabelle,” Joe said. “Get some grub.”
I went eagerly, Watson in tow.
“The Engine can stay where it is,” Sally said.
For once, I was grateful for her input. “Wait by the tent, Watson.”
“If you like,” he said.
Soon enough we were seated around the fire, its dancing light playing over our faces, shoveling food into our mouths. We wore blankets draped over our shoulders. I watched the smoke rise into the darkening sky, where it seemed to carry all the way out to the stars, dissipating into the dark wash of space. I could see a few familiar shapes in the stars, but I couldn’t recognize any of their names. I regretted not paying attention in school.
Joe gestured at me with his bowl, speaking around a mouthful of beans. “What’s wrong with your Engine?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“He just don’t like you, I guess.”
“He’s haunted,” Sally said.
Joe looked from me to her. The firelight reflected in his eyes and made them look big and scared. I wanted to be glad about that, but it only made me feel scared, too. “Bullshit,” he said again.
“It ain’t bullshit. Ghosts run wild out here. We seen it all day. They can get caught up in the Engines. I seen it more than once. You’ll see it, too, when we get to where we’re going.”
I looked at Watson, standing sentry by my little tent. His eyes shed an orange light, but the rest of him was cast in darkness. He looked like a creature from a fairy tale—something stumbled from a dark wood, lured by the moon. I felt cold inside.
As if summoned by an invocation, ghosts appeared around us in the darkness, too: phantoms curling in the wind with the sand from the dunes, rising up in breezy spirals, coalescing into the suggestion of a form, and then dissolving into the wind like blown seeds. They seemed capricious, dancing just outside the light of the fire, teasing us with half shapes and almost sounds.
“You see them?” Joe said. His voice was a whisper.
I nodded.
“Of course I see them,” Sally said.
“I don’t like that they’re paying attention to us. They weren’t doing that before.”
Sally shrugged, finishing off what was left in her bowl.
“Is that bad?” I said.
“It’s why I’m pushing us so hard,” she said. “They’ll get bolder.”
“But they’re not even real!” The illogical nature of the whole thing infuriated me. It was ridiculous to be afraid of figments.
And yet I felt the stirrings of real fear. Sally was the one among us who had been out here many times, and there was no mistaking her apprehension. She tried to hide it, but I could see it there nonetheless, coiled behind her eyes and behind all the muscles in her face.
“It’s not them that’s the threat,” she said. “It’s what follows them. Too many of them ghosts around and they might as well be a beacon for the things that live out here.”
“Like what?” I said.
She cast a dark look at Watson. “Things like him. Engines with cylinders gone feral.”
“Watson’s not feral,” I said weakly, avoiding her true point.
“Not yet,” she allowed. “But there are others have been out here a lot longer. War Engines left over from the conflicts with Germany. They have ghosts in their heads, and engaging in any way with these phantoms tends to bring them out. It’s like they can hear each other. It’s best you don’t get them worked up.”
The War Engines. I’d managed to forget about them somehow, caught up as I was with the spirits, and with Watson’s odd behaviors. I felt a different kind of terror begin to build, this one much more immediate. War Engines were not figments.
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” I tried to ask it in a reasonable tone, but I seemed to be well past that now; I could hear the fear in my voice, I could feel it crawling up my throat.
Joe kicked my foot with his own. He smiled at me. “The fearless Anabelle Crisp, ready to soil her britches over some shapes in the wind.”
I looked at him like he’d just slapped me, and for a moment anger occluded the fear.
“I’m just messing with you, kid,” he said. “Don’t hurt me. And I mean that, by the way. My pride’s taken enough of a beating these last few days.”
I took some long breaths, settling myself. Sally lit up one of her cigarettes, ignoring the both of us, finding her own peace.
“I saw you looking up at the stars a few minutes ago,” Joe said. “You know the constellations?”
I looked up at them again. The longer I stared at them, the calmer I felt. It was easy to let your mind drift out there with them, riding up on the smoke from this cooking fire to sail out into the gulf; free from this cold planet, the ghosts in the desert, the feral Engines, the neighbors who smiled to your face and ransacked your whole life when you were knocked down. Free from the whole madhouse.
“No,” I said.
“Too busy skipping school, hanging out in spaceships?” He was still smiling at me; he was trying to be my friend. It made me sad in a way I couldn’t put words to. When I didn’t answer, he said, “I had to learn to navigate by the stars to be a pilot. In case our systems went down, and I had to steer us with nothing but the naked eye. Those names were pretty dull, though. Some were just strings of numbers as long as your arm. I always preferred the names of the constellations.”
“Well, do you know them?” I asked.
He looked a little sheepish. “Not many. Mostly I just know the strings of numbers.”
Sally pointed to a pattern of stars a few inches above the crater’s distant edge. “That there is the Big Dipper. You see how it looks like a pot?”
“Everybody knows about the Big Dipper,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “That’s the only one everybody knows.”
She scoffed. “Well, did you know it’s just part of a constellation called the Big Bear?”
“Ursa Major,” Joe said.
“Which means Big Bear, right? The ladies are talking, Joe. You just button it for a little while.”
I smiled despite myself.
“Over there, that’s Cassiopeia. And over there is Orion, you can tell by those three stars that make his belt. What kind of stars would we see if I yanked down his britches, what do you think, Joe?”
Joe turned away so I couldn’t see his face.
Sally was already back to me. “You know about Chauncy Peabody, right?”
“First man to land on Mars,” I said, suddenly bored. If she was going to try to play Miss Haddersham, I was going to bed. It was getting cold enough that it might be the best idea for us all, anyway.
“Sure. Everybody knows that, too. Do you know where he landed?”
“Let’s see, could it be Peabody Crater?” I said. “Could that be it?”
“Goddamn right. Smashed right into a rock all loaded up with the Strange. I bet you don’t know what happened to him.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, feeling testy. “He got lost and died of dehydration, and his ship was tracked by some dumb friend. This is little-kid stuff, everybody knows it. It’s cold and I’m going to bed.”
Joe seemed to think this was a good idea. He grunted his concurrence, breath clouding in front of his face.
But Sally wasn’t done. “You think he landed in the Strange and what happened to him was he just didn’t drink enough water? You better believe that’s little-kid stuff, smart-ass. You want to know what really happened?”
I watched her across the dwindling fire. She smiled at me, her teeth dull and crooked, but she looked angry somehow. Like something boiled inside her and caused her a pain that wouldn’t abate.
“How would you even know, anyway?”
She leaned back and smiled for real, satisfied. I’d asked the question she’d been waiting for. “I asked him, that’s how.”
I’d had enough. Peabody had landed on Mars in 1864; even if he hadn’t died of thirst, he’d be dead of old age by now. I stood up and walked back to the tent. I was tired of adults thinking I was stupid just because I was still a kid. I decided I wouldn’t argue with them about it anymore, especially not these two idiots; I would just turn around and leave. And anyway, it was cold and I was tired. It was time for sleep.
“Go on and walk away then,” she said. “You are a little smart-ass. You’ll see soon enough.”
Joe said, “Sally—”
“Squeeze some more juice into that fire, Joe.”
“It’s cold, Sally.”
“We got a little while yet. I’m thirsty, aren’t you?”
Something was going on between her and Joe—that much was obvious. I was still a child, but I knew enough about the jittery energy between men and women. Though my own parents’ relationship had always seemed sedate to me, I’d seen enough calamities of the heart from other people around town to recognize the tension here.
I’d never felt it myself, not for any of the boys in New Galveston, nor the girls either. It wasn’t a thing I missed or wished I felt, mostly because I only ever thought about it when I had to listen to Dottie or Brenda back at school get all moony over one of the fool boys around town. I wasn’t conscious of its absence at all.
Maybe that’s why I was so curious about the dynamic between Joe and Sally. It seemed different, too.
Joe sighed and went to get the fuel canister. He came back with a flask of whiskey, too. As the fire flared to life again, I saw a phantom retreat to the darkness beyond its light: a shimmering, flowing whiteness, there and gone. Another behind Sally did the same. They rose and fell at the firelight’s edge, dozens of them, dipping farther into the distance and returning, like curious feral dogs.
AT SOME POINT in the middle of the night, Watson woke me up. He was whispering so as not to wake the others.
“Miss Crisp. Miss Crisp, can you hear me?”
I blinked, staring through the small plastic window that afforded me a view outside. It was deep night. The stars were a crystalline field overhead, Deimos a cold flare among them. The interior of the tent was warm; the blanket wrapped around me felt like protective arms.
“What is it, Watson?”
“I’m frightened.”
I wanted to go back to sleep. Not because I was tired, but because I didn’t want him to say any more. It was impossible that an Engine should be frightened. He didn’t even understand the concept.
“Why?” I said quietly.
“When I entered conservation mode, I was in another place. And yet I was here at the same time. It was a mushroom garden, and it went on for many miles. It was full of floating green stars. How is it possible that I can be in two places at the same time?”
I turned over, tears in my eyes. I wasn’t frightened exactly, and I wasn’t sad. But I had begun to mourn something. I didn’t know what.
“You just had a bad dream, Watson,” I whispered, my voice quavering. “Just a bad dream.”