The Lamplighter's Last Round: A Steampunk Short Story

Elias had walked the same eleven streets for forty-one years, and he could light them with his eyes closed. He knew the third lamp on Marrow Lane leaned two degrees left, that the one outside the apothecary always needed a second strike, that the fog off the canal ate matches faster than anywhere else in the city. He carried a brass pole with a hook and a wick, a tin of matches in his coat, and a bad knee that complained in wet weather. Tonight the weather was very wet indeed.

The fog came in thick and yellow, the color of old teeth, and it carried a smell he didn't like. Not coal. Not gas. Something sweeter, like scorched sugar, and underneath it a tang of hot metal. The lamps along his route were burning low, their flames small and blue instead of the warm orange he'd tended since he was a boy. He stopped under the lamp at the corner of Ash and Bell and looked up. The flame guttered, leaned, and straightened again, as if it had turned to watch him.

He'd heard the rumors, of course. Everyone had. The city had been buying its gas from somewhere new since the old works flooded, and the men who ran the new works didn't take visitors. The pipes under the streets hummed at night, a low note Elias felt in his teeth. Children in the tenements had started singing a rhyme about the lights that dreamed. He'd laughed at it. He wasn't laughing now.

The Flame That Knew His Name

At the ninth lamp, the one by the old clockmaker's shop, the flame bent toward him. There was no wind. Elias stood still, pole in hand, and watched the fire stretch like a thing on a leash. It touched the glass and left a mark, a thin smear that looked like a fingerprint. He reached up with his cloth to wipe it away, and the flame pulled back, and the mark stayed.

He lit the tenth lamp. Same blue core. Same slow turn. And then, faintly, from inside the iron housing, he heard a sound like a breath. He put his ear close, which was a foolish thing to do, and the sound resolved into a word. His name. Spoken the way his mother used to say it, softly, from the doorway of a house that had burned down thirty years ago.

Elias stepped back. His knee gave a sharp complaint. He thought about the new works, and the pipes, and the sweet burnt smell, and he understood, in the way you understand a thing in your gut before your head agrees, that the city wasn't burning gas anymore. It was burning something that remembered. Every lamp on every street held a small, patient piece of someone, and every night the lamplighters of the city walked their rounds and woke them up.

What He Did With the Eleventh Lamp

He had one lamp left. The eleventh, at the end of the row, outside the iron gate of the cemetery where his wife was buried. He stood in front of it for a long time with the match in his hand. The fog pressed close. The flame inside the glass was waiting, small and blue, and he knew without being told whose voice it would use.

He struck the match. He lifted the pole. And then he did something no lamplighter in the city had ever done. He opened the little door on the housing and blew the flame out, gently, the way you'd blow out a candle so a sleeping child wouldn't wake. The blue light died. The fog seemed to thin, just a little, and the street felt colder and cleaner than it had in months.

He closed the door and walked home without lighting another lamp. Behind him, along eleven streets, the flames leaned in their glass and watched him go. In the morning, the city would send men to relight the lamps, and they would find them cold, and they would blame the fog. Elias would be gone by then, his pole left on the apothecary's step, his route walked for the last time. Some rounds, he'd decided, were better ended early.