SSCS 03: Installment 25 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 25 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…
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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 25: 22.0123
The Machine moved. And something inside me moved as well. Something that had been waiting.
Pain flowed across my arm, my shoulder, my back. But it wasn’t sharp and consuming like before, but rather like the pain of a cramped muscle being stretched out. A pain that brings strength and ease.
The Minister was saying something now, had stepped up to Jack and the Machine, directing him to take a step forward, then back, to spread wide his arms. The Minister’s suit glimmered gold and amber in the dim space, his hair a long, gleaming coil of black down his back. With my eyes that weren’t dreaming, I watched it shift between his shoulder-blades like a serpent, undulating and slow. I wasn’t dreaming. At least…
Ah. The Minister stepped back from Jack, and brought his hands together, palm-to-palm, and as soon as he did I saw him in my own sort of dreaming, his figure fixed clear where it would stand in the center of my bell half-template, pinning him to both sides of the Bell that would become. That wasn’t the whole of the center scene – and the pain in my arm and back stretched again when I thought about that – but he would be there.
But if I was dreaming my bell-Template now, what was the other dreaming that I had just now woken up into – or out of? And how was I so sure that’s what it was? Turning away from my own dreams and visions, I fixed my thoughts on that question, kept my teeth clenched around it, as this strange scene – the Minister standing in front of Jack bolted into the Machine – continued to play out before me.
Lily had come forward out of the crowd again. This time she was accompanied by a man in a turquoise tunic, and each of them had arms laden with a jumble of things too difficult to make out in the dimness. The others in the crowd were pressed so close around me I could smell the scents of their bodies, the turpentine and acrid steel, plaster and smoke of my workshop, the moisture and thick loam, sharp green and soft decay of the glasshouse. Lily and the other man were spreading their burdens out on the floor at their feet, and then at the same time they both paused as though waiting for some next instruction. The Minister nodded, and then it was Elka’s turn to come forward.
I tried to watch carefully, to track each and every thing that was being done. Jack still stood within a great Machine that moved when he moved, every tremble. The long coil of the Minster’s hair still seemed to sway, snakelike, twisting at every gesture of his red-taloned hand. But my attention kept being caught by each new peculiarity of the scents rising around me. And somehow…somehow I realized that I didn’t smell breathing, and also that something in the hush and the silence was empty, as though I ought to have heard heartbeats, and did not. Was this dreaming or not dreaming? I could feel my teeth pressing together as I watched and listened. I could feel something very close to a tightly restrained growl rising in the back of my throat. Together Elka and the Minister seemed to be measuring Jack for something. Would his ankles and elbows pain him tomorrow? Would he remember any of it? And why did I?
Just then, something that was part of me came loose, and I found myself clutching at my own arm. Not in pain, but in fear of some sort of collapse and discovery. All the scents still rising around me, the paint and the metal upon metal of the Machine, a touch of blood, seemed to wash suddenly across my skin in a way far too intimate to be real. It was as though my skin had suddenly come loose from my body, and now the world was pressing itself into all the exposed cracks and crevices, and I couldn’t pay any attention to the scene playing out in front of me any longer. I had come loose, or the world had come too close, and it burned, in a horrible, stretching sort of way.