SSCS 03: Installment 16 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 16 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 then I came around the screens to where my tablet was and found Elka still there, hunched and sitting on my stool, and staring up at the great slab of a thing. “There’s hole in it,” she said without looking at me. “It won’t make a bell with a hole.” Then she turned, and her eyes were depthless black, like the cobble stones outside, wet with rain, in the deep of the night.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 16: 20.1223
“There’s no hole, Elka,” I said, somehow aware that I needed to be careful to use her name. “It’s just not ready. I haven’t dreamed the upper-left corner yet, either.” I didn’t look toward the bell-template as I said this. If I looked, there was a chance I would begin to know what the center – one for each side of the bell – had been partitioned to hold, and I wasn’t ready. I could feel the memory of those shapes rushing by in the rain, so close they seemed to be jostling me.
Elka’s eyes were still as black as wet cobbles, and she hadn’t blinked, though her head moved slowly, tipping slightly in thought.
“What do you think of the upper right?” I asked, aware that her eyes reminded me of that alien face I’d seen looking up at me in the darkness. “Should I avoid adding too much detail, to keep it balanced, mistress Elka?”
“You should add a River’s sight more detail than you’ve got now,” she snapped and swiveled her head around to look up at the corner I’d mentioned, before unbending from her seat on the stool and stepping down. “I’ll send Lily around with some texture plates to get you started. Minister will be here in two days to check on progress.” She was already stumping away around the end of the screens. “Use the texture plates, sacrifice girl. Make progress.”
“I’m Jhanni,” I said, but into the silence. But I was alone again. I still didn’t want to look at the template.
Soon, though, Lily brought a box of what were apparently texture plates. She left quickly too, looking tall and busy, fingers smudged with something blue.
But then at least I had something to do that I could make sense of. The box was crammed full, and I spent over an hour sorting through them, hoping to find a dandelion – and turning away quickly from anything that reminded me of lions, or Fish. I felt too awake. My fingertips buzzed in a way that told me there were no dandelions in my dreaming, but that only made me more determined. I was the one who’d been taken to shape this bell’s template. I was the one who would decide whether something was out of place.
At last I found it. My fingers had grabbed the edge of it to pull it out, when the plate behind it shifted, revealing a field of stars. And suddenly stars were all I could see, my vision tunneling in toward blackness, and the plate beneath my hand suddenly burning too cold to touch. Squeezing my eyes shut tight, I held onto that plate anyway, dragging it out of the box, knowing that the star plate would come too, whether I wanted it to or not.
When they both landed on the floor with a ringing thump, I had a feeling like my ears popping, only instead of sound it was the blackness bleeding away from my vision, with a feeling like a cloth or a cold, stinging rain sliding swiftly over and off of my face. I opened my eyes, still looking down into the box, and saw a third texture plate I hadn’t found yet, this one covered with a shallow winding of gears and pistons.
That’s what Jack’s ankle had reminded me of.
Instead of crying out and falling back, I startled awake, my face coming away from the cool, dusty glass of the bus window, and the taste of exhaust foul in my throat from my sudden inhalation. The bus jounced in a pot-hole and I looked out the window to see the junkyard of shipping containers passing by us. I spotted another lion just as we came even with a break in the stacks, and the sunlight shone through it quick and bright, so that I lost sight of it again immediately.
And when the sun-dazzle cleared from my eyes I was standing on top of my stool again, in the workroom. My nose was again inches from the clay surface, and the upper-left corner was now partially filled with a pattern of stars that almost hid a handful of gears and cogs lurking on the periphery.
Looking down, I saw the dandelion plate was resting in the center of the work-table, alone and apparently untouched.