In the lowermost belly of Clockworks City…below the steam ducts and the sewage veins…there’s a place the locals call Rustmouth Row.
No maps, no lanterns, no reason to go there unless you’re running from something worse than the dark.
Every Halloween, or so the story goes, a single gear starts turning again.
No power lines hum. No pistons breathe.
Just the click...click...click of an ancient machine, deep under the Foundry Orphanage.
They say it’s the soul of a novice ghost—a gnome apprentice named Tiddle Gask, crushed in the gearworks when he tried to fix the mainline during a blackout.
Tiddle hated Halloween. Said it was “an idiotic surface holiday for humans who pretend death’s a costume.”
Now he spends every October 31st proving himself right.
No one ever sees him, exactly.
Just the glow.
Like candlelight trapped in fog, that glow seeps through cracks in the floor of the old maintenance tunnels.
Engineers swear they’ve heard his voice down there:
“Don’t go in there.”
Most folks listen.
A few don’t.
Those few vanish.
Last Halloween, two scrappers…Lug and Finna…decided the ghost was a joke made up by the upper tiers to keep scavengers out.
They wanted the copper veins rumored to run through the Row.
Finna packed a lantern. Lug packed a hammer.
Neither packed common sense.
They found the tunnel mouth behind the Gearwright’s Chapel…an iron door half-welded shut.
One kick, a hiss of dust, and the smell hit them: rust, oil, and something… sweet. Like burnt sugar.
“Unsettled safety,” Finna muttered, though she didn’t know why she said it. The words just fell out of her mouth.
Lug laughed. “Sounds like a bar name. Move.”
The gear noise started almost immediately.
Slow. Patient. Hungry.
Click…click…click…
Every step deeper, the air grew colder. The lantern’s flame shrank, fighting something that wanted it gone.
They came to a chamber where the walls were slick with grease, and the floor was a lattice of spinning cogs.
In the center…half-buried in iron…was a boy-sized silhouette made of light and smoke.
“Don’t,” said the light.
But greed’s louder than ghosts.
Lug leapt the gap, hammer raised.
Finna screamed.
Too late.
The moment his boot hit the gear, it spun.
Metal screamed.
The hammer fell.
So did Lug.
The gears didn’t even slow down.
Finna bolted. She didn’t stop until the door slammed shut behind her, sealing the tunnels with a sound like a coffin lid.
When she told the constables, they laughed…until she showed them her lantern.
Inside the glass, oil shimmered like molten gold.
And there, pressed against the inside of the glass, was a fingerprint…small, child-sized, glowing faintly blue.
That was three years ago.
Now, every Halloween night, the maintenance lines drop half a degree in the lower city.
The gear noise starts up again.
And any lamp left burning after midnight flickers with a tiny handprint on the inside.
They say Tiddle’s still learning…still trying to fix the system that killed him.
So if you ever find yourself down there on Halloween and you hear that steady rhythm…
click...click...click...
…remember:
He’s not warning you to leave.
He’s asking for help.
Lore Note by Höbin Luckyfeller, Field Historian & Paranormal Cataloguer
Filed under: Urban Myths – Mechanist Tier / Classification: Type IV Echo Apparition
I’ve verified fragments of this tale through the Steam Guild’s maintenance logs. Indeed, a Tiddle Gask existed—junior apprentice, age fourteen, deceased. Cause of death officially listed as compressive trauma due to unauthorized repair during power failure.
Unofficially?
The Foundry foreman noted that the gearworks restarted themselves thirty-six seconds after the lad’s pulse stopped.
No external energy feed.
No operator input.
Since then, engineers claim to hear a rhythmic ticking from beneath the orphanage—though no machinery remains active there.
My professional conclusion: Tiddle’s “ghost” is not a ghost at all, but a mechanical resonance memory…a soul echo fused with gear imprint. Dangerous to approach, yet oddly… purposeful.
If encountered, do not attempt to communicate verbally. Instead, lay a single copper cog on the floor and retreat.
He’ll understand.
— H. Luckyfeller, Clockworks City Paranormal Registry, Case File #441-R (“The Whispering Gear”)
