Free Steampunked by Joe R. Lansdale

the table Beadle was strapped to, lifted it on his back, his arms outstretched, his hands turned backward to clasp the table’s sides, and with little visible effort, darted for the staircase.
    Steam, head ducked, tried to pursue him, but as he went up the stairs the ceiling was too low. John Feather made Steam push at the ceiling with his head and shoulders like Atlas bearing the weight of the world, and Steam lifted.
    The ceiling began to fall all around and on Steam.
    The Dark Rider was up the stairs now, heading for the opening to the roof. When he came to the opening, he flung the table backward so that Beadle landed on his face, breaking his nose, bamming his kneecaps, and in the process, not doing his already maligned toes any good.
    The Dark Rider grabbed the table and tore it apart, causing the straps that bound Beadle to be released. He grabbed Beadle by the head, like a kid not knowing how to carry a puppy, and started up a ladder to the roof.
    When the Dark Rider reached the summit of the ladder, he used his free hand to throw open the trap, then, still holding the struggling Beadle by the head, pulled him onto the moonlit roof.
    To the Dark Rider’s right, he saw that the rip in the sky had grown, and that a rip within the rip had opened up a gap of darkness in which strange, unidentifiable shapes moved.
    Below his feet the roof shook, then exploded. Steam’s crooked head poked through. And then rose. It was obvious the steam man was coming up the stairs, and he was tearing the roof apart.
    The Dark Rider picked Beadle up by shoulder and thigh, raised him over his head. The Dark Rider thought the easy thing would be to toss Beadle from the roof.
    Game over.
    But that was the easy thing. He wanted this bastard to suffer.
    And then he knew. He’d take his chances inside the rip. If he and Beadle survived it, he’d continue to make Beadle suffer slowly. Nothing else beyond that mattered. He realized suddenly that Beadle had been all that mattered for some time now, and when Beadle was dead, he would have only the memory of Weena again. Nothing else to preoccupy his thoughts. No more Beadle, no more steam man or regulators.
    With Beadle raised over his head, the Dark Rider growled and started to run toward the rip.
    *****

John Feather saw through the shattered eye of Steam what the Dark Rider planned. Painfully, he grabbed at the quiver he had discarded, picked up his bow, took a coil of thin rope from the wall, tied it to the arrow with one quick loop, and watched as the Dark Rider completed the edge of the museum’s roof, which was where the rip in the sky joined it.
    The Dark Rider leaped.
    John Feather let the arrow fly, dropped the bow, grabbed at the loose end of the rope and listened to the rest of it feed out.
    The shot was a good one. It was right on the money. It went through Beadle’s left thigh, right on through, and into his inner right thigh.
    John Feather heard Beadle yell just as he jerked the rope with all his might. Beadle came loose from the Dark Rider’s grasp in midair and was pulled back and slammed onto the museum roof, but the Dark Rider leapt into the dark rip with a curse that reverberated back into this world, then was nothing more than a fading echo.
    *****

The Dark Rider’s leap had carried him into a place of complete cold darkness. His element. Or so it seemed.
    He passed between shapes. Giant bats. They snapped smelly teeth at him and missed.
    In time, he thought it would have been better had they not missed.
    Because he was falling.
    Falling … falling.
    His leap had carried him into an abyss. Seemingly bottomless, because he fell and fell and fell, and if he had been able to keep time, he would have realized that days passed, and still he fell. And had he needed oxygen like normal men he would have long been dead, but he did not need it, and therefore he did not die.
    He just continued to fall.
    He thought of Weena. He wondered if there really was a plane on which her soul