SSCS 03: Installment 24 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 24 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…
When I came to, I was standing in front of my bell-template, my workbench pushed well to the side, and a richly dressed man I didn’t recognize standing beside me. In front of us, in front of the Template, was a small crowd of what must have been most of the artisans in the workshop, indigo tunics dusty and smudged with various powders and ash, and Elka standing at the front. A frission ran through me as I saw her and she spoke, “Bring the Torch and the Kindling.” Her eyes were black – everyone’s eyes were black.
Were my eyes black, too?
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 24: 21.1126
I think they must have been. I think I must have looked like I was just another part of what everyone else was a part of. Because when I stayed standing in front of my tablet, in front of everyone, frozen in fear, no one turned or muttered or seemed to notice me at all. Instead there was a rustling from the back of the group, and a slow ripple of people parting, shuffling to one side with hands together ushering two other people through.
It was Jack and Lily, eyes as black and blank as everyone else’s, moving forward calmly, but also only taking each step when someone patted them forward to do so, as though they were things being herded and not people at all. When they stood at last at the front of the group, Elka’s mouth stretched suddenly wide in a cartoon smile, lips parted but teeth barely visible. Lily’s hands had come up as she had come forward, as though in a strange simulation of surprise, palms out, fingertips… I looked away before I could quite make out her fingertips. And Jack’s face had tipped up, his eyes falling closed, so that I could imagine for a moment that he was the only other normal person standing here. Except that he didn’t move any more, either of them. I couldn’t even see them breathing.
“Touch it,” the man standing beside me ordered, and he gestured to my Bell Template. His eyes were human, not black, but he wasn’t ‘normal’ either. He wasn’t wearing a dusty indigo tunic like the rest of us, nor turquoise like the people downstairs, and he didn’t have that thin look around his face that even plump shop-keepers had, the regular strain of regular folk. Instead he wore a long suit of rich gold and amber silk, with his hair pulled back into a long, glossy-black queue that fell down his back to his waist, held at the nape of his neck by heavy wrought-gold and amber pins. His face was round and sleek without a line to mark it, and his hand that gestured toward my Template was smoother than a child’s, marked only by one long, lacquered talon fixed to the tip of his middle finger, sparkling crimson. This was the Minister; I knew it, even though I’d lost the memory of his introduction and arrival.
At his command, Jack and Lily both stepped forward, Jack stepping so close past me that his arm, now reaching forward, brushed my shoulder. It should have hurt, jangling against my ever-lengthening scar, but instead my skin just felt numb, as though Jack had brushed against a void where my flesh should be. What I could feel though, in that moment, was that my eyes were black, was that I was standing inside a narrow crack of dreaming, carefully peering out.
Their hands touched my Template in the same instant. I didn’t have a chance to see anything else.
***
The crowd surrounding – now – the Machine was even larger, turquoise tunics arrived to mix in among the indigo, though the space we stood in was much smaller, and dark. This time I was aware of shoving the dreaming aside, just a finger’s width, to peer out of it. Was aware, too, that dreaming wasn’t quite what this was, that there was something hollow inside of it, tugging at us to pull us in, or tugging at something else.
Jack was bolted into the machine, his ankles attached to the gearing with what looked like steel bars shot straight through them. And as we waited, Elka worked with a drill, its motor buzzing in the thick silence, to bore into his elbow and attach another piece. That one involved steel bars also, one on either side, but these had been beautifully painted, swirls of sky-blue and white and amber that I somehow knew had been drawn in Jack’s own hand. His other elbow was fastened already, the skin blackened where the metal touched it, but still leaking, slowly, thin, red drops of blood.
Elka finished and stepped back. Jack’s eyes were still black as everyone else’s, and he didn’t struggle. Instead he lifted his face up, standing taller. The machine moved when he moved.