SSCS 03: Installment 10 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 10 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
But there was something faintly brighter on the street just beyond the factory wall, too. First it just seemed a paler shadow, but then as my eyes grew used to the night it seemed to glow a ghostly white. It passed in front of where I thought the door was, and then it turned a corner, and I saw it was a lion. I could even hear, very faintly, a rumbling growl.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 10: 19.1220
A second rumble sounded in the quiet night, a bus pulling away from the far end of the alleyway I couldn’t see from here. It was a city noise, like all the other, more distant city noises that are always there, even when full night has fallen. The shadows of the buildings were very black, and when the bus’s rumble faded another sound rose to take its place. But it wasn’t the growl of a lion, nor could I see where that ghostly shape had gone; the shadows had swallowed it. This sound was a clicking, metallic and crisp, enough so that it even echoed faintly off the surrounding buildings. And then, on the street, something else came into view. A figure walking. Not swiftly, more …deliberately. And with every other step, the click of a steel-tipped cane on the rough, black cobbles.
The figure stopped just below me. The street was dark, but I could see this clearly. A man probably. Wearing a long dark coat that wrapped him closely all the way up to his throat. When he tipped his face upward, staring up at me, I saw that he was far too pale to be human, but hauntingly beautiful. His lips parted, his voice soft and too far below me to be heard. Still, my ears filled with a roaring of not-sound, and that not-sound said, “Jhanni.”
The bus jolted over a hole in the street and my eyes jolted open, wincing against the early, orange sunlight spearing in through the window from the canyon-slots of the junkyard towers. Rusted green and orange and yellow, faded blue, the colors all barely visible in the shadows beside the flaring of morning light. If there were lions out there, they were well-concealed by the glare. For a moment, a larger shadow seemed to move through the midst of the fields and towers of the old shipping containers, but it was probably just the up-thrust silhouette of a building on the far side of the field. The bus crossed a cross-street, and now more buildings crowded around on both sides, making the city outside the window only grey again, striped with only little bits of sunlight, illuminating smog and dirt.
When I followed the alleyway toward the factory door, I stepped over the bright pink smudge of a lone, tattered cherry blossom abandoned on the cobbles. When the door to the factory opened, the red lantern hanging above it swayed a little, but the only breeze there was came from the few of us hurrying under it. Inside the gate, the smell was different from the rest of the city, mossy, as though last night it had rained.
Today I was quick enough that I followed behind Selmi, climbing the rickety stairs. My tunic was rumpled and the bandages on my hands dirty from not being changed. I hurried to weave my way through the maze of bamboo screens, hoping Elka wouldn’t see me to stop me and chide me for my appearance. When I reached my tablet, I sat down in the dust in front of it to unwind my bandages, then pull down and retie my hair. Humidity was seeping under the screen to my right, curling the wisps of hair fallen alongside my face. My hands still ached from my blisters, the skin of my palms stiff and tender, but all still strong beneath. I stood up.
And finally looked up at the tablet for my bell half-template. There was something there, in the upper-right corner where before there had been only nothing. Two arched lines. But I could see what they really were: The beginnings of a strange face, half-hidden, but staring up at me.