Thanks.:-)

Some time after I posted that, I started thinking that the narrator would somehow morph into someone like Horridge, the psychotic killer from Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die, which might make the steam punks a lesser issue. The story would still be a comedy, of course … I think.

Ah, but does it help you button your knee-high boots? “Let me just get my shoes on and I’ll help you with the yard work” takes on a whole new meaning in Steampunk!

Cat, thanks for the link to that story. I’ve bookmarked it and will read it at my leisure. When dealing with Steampunk, that’s pronounced “leshure”.

Damn! Should have known — cold day like it was, lots of heat running through the pipes under the streets. That’s when they always show up.

I ducked back behind the corner, hoping they hadn’t seen me. But I’d gotten a decent look at them. There had to be four, maybe five of the hoodlums, or maybe more — hard to count, considering their wispy transparency and how they tend to merge into one another. They were all leaning — cool, tough, watchful — against a parked car, looking for the next opportunity to impose their brand of trouble on decent, innocent people like me. (And did the car even belong to one of them? Can people made out of steam even drive?)

I’d seen them gang up on people before, heard their taunts…

“Got asthma, huh? I hear humidity’s bad for that.”

“Stop saturatin’ yerself! Stop saturatin’ yerself!”

“Too hot, ya say? Well I hear it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. HAW HAW HAW!”

“Nice book store. It’d be a shame if your stock got wet.”

“Oh, hey, just went to the hair salon, didja?”

“What ya gettin’ all steamed for, huh? HAW HAW!”

…or even something simple as…

“Nice glasses.”

Where were the damn police? It almost seemed like the city had given up on what used to be a decent neighborhood. There was some ridiculous talk of whether the police had jurisdiction and so forth.

And what about the place these thugs came from — the pipes? Was this the best kind of people the pipes had to offer? Maybe the pipes had their own criminal element for a time, and whatever government existed down there managed to achieve some illusion of success by chasing these thugs up here. But dropping your problems in somebody else’s lap is no solution, and certainly no good for my neighborhood. I made a mental note to find out who I could call to complain.

It was obvious nobody was going to do anything about these guys any time soon. I was on my own, but I wasn’t going to be the next victim — no sir, not me. I decided to take the long way home — detour a few blocks, cross a distant part of the street where they wouldn’t notice me, and make my way to the alley behind my apartment.

I started walking.

Was that a hissing sound I heard? No, I was just paranoid.

…

Two words: blimpboard artillery.

Oh! So that’s what those things in Phantasm were.

This is my favorite steampunk story of all time – http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/anderson_03_07/