SSCS 03: Installment 30 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 30 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…
–– And then the breeze turned cold, and the sky again cast a red light, and I was crouched alone in the silence beside the wall of the rail-deck. But it was the day that I’d been reaching for, or from, returned to the time that I could think of as the present. So I uncurled myself, unfurled myself. I needed to seek out a place where the banyan trees held up the walls.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 30: 22.0520
Crossing back through the workshop, through the maze of bamboo screens, the silence held, prickling along my skin. There was still light outside, and I could smell the workshop wasn’t deserted, but still I passed no one, pushing past the rickety, clapboard door and out onto the rickety stair leading down with barely a whisper of my own, the scuff of my shoes muted to hardly the click of a claw. There was still a dandelion defiantly waving up out of a crack in the steps, and an uneasy skittering in the back of my mind wondered why it hadn’t gone to seed yet. But the red light bleeding down from the sky made everything feel strange. Made the rust somehow gleam on the doors lined up along the back wall of the courtyard, standing just over the trench of a rusted gutter.
I should go down and look.
What I needed, I knew, was to find the banyan trees, and an old palace the color of a very old sky. I’d caught a glimpse of something, but there was more I needed to learn. But, there was a machine, somewhere beneath my feet, that had had Jack bolted into it, that had worn Jack like some grisly, animate ornament, and my mind was going to be split in two until I could see it again with my own clear eyes. Jack wasn’t mine to have. Yet something inside me growled that the machine couldn’t have him either.
The door (the one closest to the base of the crumbling stairs and so quickest to reach) wasn’t locked, but it was well-oiled, and so, swiftly, I was past that line of rust and inside.
More stairs leading down, made of more crumbled brick and lit by a bare, overhead bulb that swayed, imperceptibly, to the distant, shifting motion of the city. It was bracing itself – against an onslaught that was building, coming, an onslaught of great Fish – bracing itself against knowing. Now that I was inside, I could feel it.
There was also an alcove there, just beside the door. I left my tunic in it, bunched flat around the sharp, steadying lines of the dandelion plate. Slipping free of my human skin, I left that as well. As I descended the crumbled steps on four well-clawed paws, the close scents of the factory underground washed over my other, furred skin, and I drank them all in.
Somehow, I could still smell the plants that should have been barricaded well away from here, on the other side of the glasshouse next to the factory’s gate-door. I could smell green earth, and scents too softly sweet to survive the air of the city, the bitter tang of tough roots. My claws scraped the bricks as I climbed deeper, passing a branching cross-corridor, leaving the green scents there behind me.
The next cross-corridor gave me pause. I could smell fire here – not regular fire, but metal burning. If this place really held a great and sinister machine, surely that would be its smell. But my skin didn’t remember that smell. So I continued climbing downward.
And at the next… It wasn’t a smell, not really. And it didn’t match my memory of when Jack was in the machine either, with the crowd all around him – it was in fact almost the opposite. Because that night I hadn’t smelled any breathing. And now breathing was all I smelled, like standing in the center of the largest crowd, within the most tightly covered amphitheater, when you know that you are fully crushed in the midst of too many living beings. That’s what this corridor smelled like, and my paws turned down it before my mind could register a desire to (or else a repulsion against) doing so.
Less than one turning later, there stood the Machine.
It wasn’t built of metal scaffolding. Steelwork wound through it and under it, thin and delicate and precise. But the rest was all…bones.
A few of those, here and there, glowed phosphorescent green in the faintly swaying electric light. But all of it, all together, made up the bones of an enormous Fish.