The Cold Beneath Read Free

“Geraldine Goode.”
    While on the subject of Goode, I half expected the name of his widow to come about. Yet even prepared as I was, to hear the name spoken aloud forced a grand amount of hurt and ache upon me. For the last ten years, not a day passed that I didn’t roll that very name about in my mind. Geraldine the beautiful. Geraldine the betrayer! I won’t waste time going into details about her here. Suffice it to say that my prototype wasn’t the only thing Elijah Goode took from me. The smile with which Lightbridge mentioned her suggested this man knew more about me than I was comfortable with.
    “What do you want from me?” I asked.
    “My dear fellow,” he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
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    back to toc
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Three
    The Request
     
    Against my better judgment, I would like to take a few brief moments to speak of my own past. Then perhaps, as the story unfolds, you can understand why I made certain decisions, as well as fell into dire mistakes.
    I, Philip Corinthian Syntax, am the only son, as well as only child, to a modestly wealthy family with a long and proud lineage. While I would love to blame a terrible childhood for my recent   years of antisocial behavior, the opposite is true. My parents Maxwell and Sophia Syntax—God rest their souls—lavished upon me both affection and comfort the likes of which I wouldn’t understand until long after they departed this life. As a tyke I desired little and wanted for even less. Perhaps this grace of both economic and emotional support in my youth was what allowed my intelligence to bloom without hindrance.
    Gifted was the word my scholars applied to me in those early years. After giving me their undivided affection for so long, I returned my parent’s investment by becoming the first Syntax to graduate valedictorian, as well as enter university before my fifteenth birthday. This was the last duty I would fulfill as their son, however, for my parents both passed away in a carriage accident while returning home from dropping me off to begin my second year of college. Their coach driver took a hairpin turn far too fast, and after a three hundred yard drop into a rocky ravine my parents were no more.
    The morning the headmaster called me into his office to inform me I was an orphan, I nearly expired myself. My parents were the very measure of my entire life’s worth. What would I do without them? I took the news hard, but as the further events of my life unwound I would come to take it even harder. At the time, though, I had the fortune of someone with which to share my sorrow. Yet later, when I needed her most, she would abandon me as well.
    Everyone abandons me in the end. Even as I write this, I worry death will forget about me also. I worry he will leave me behind—as he has done to those just beyond my door—alone in the quiet of the Arctic Circle, to freeze but never die, to suffer and never find peace.
    I now believe that it was my parents’ death that tipped me toward the dark ideals of the power of science over the good of the heart. I drowned my bitter resentment for this so called God—this divine force that dared to snatch away a young man’s entire family in one fell, unloving swoop—in the dependable facts of science. My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a peaceful physician. It was his dream that I should learn to heal God’s creatures. I decided to abandon this idea. Instead I would improve them. If He couldn’t keep His own fragile designs from breaking upon the rocks, then I would find a way to make it happen. I would improve upon the human being. Make him better. Stronger. More durable. I began this by designing the clockwork appendage.
    After which I was rewarded with another backhanded slap from the Almighty.
    Yet, we as a species are an immature lot when it comes to our triumphs, with some of us all but pompous about any small success. We crow and strut over every goal, no matter how tiny. Modern