SSCS 03: Installment 31 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 31 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…
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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 31: 22.0821
A great Fish here, underground. Dead, except for careful cog-work holding it all together. My lips pulled back, exposing my fangs. I remembered again Jack bolted into it, the whole great Machine moving when he moved. But it wasn’t just a machine. It was the echoes of a great monster, huge and horrible, being made animate – for what? What was this factory for? Why were its secrets all in some way life-or-death?
I remembered the vision I’d had earlier, a possible future, of Elka screaming, the dreaming being stripped from her, and realized, though Lily called me ‘the dreamer,’ that dreaming had been with Elka a very long time, like this factory. Long enough this Machine should have been complete, if it had been begun before her. This Fish…
A strange wish flickered through the back of my mind: That I had my human hands here with me now. This skin could see deeper into the world, could run faster. But claws were no use against a dead thing. And without Jack…
I remembered Jack shy, beautiful long fingers twisting, asking if I’d seen his earlier work – the gutter-channel claddings. Unimportant. Lost beneath the shuffle of so many feet. But it was clear now that Elka was a liar and, whatever this project was, that Jack’s contributions were never going to be unimportant. His work was meant to bind him into the Machine – what else might it do?
And so I circled the room, scenting out the things he’d made before. Beneath the oppression of breathing multitudes, once I found them they flared brighter than the phosphorescent Fish bones, every piece of his work lighting up in my mind. That work ran through the whole huge room, grounding everything in place. Every piece of it was painted with a beautiful, decorative script – Jack’s script. And every sentence written began the same way: In the beginning…
It was a spell. All of it was. This factory manufactured great…and terrible…spells.
***
Back upstairs, I opened the latch carefully to the rusted, green door, found the courtyard still empty, and slipped back outside. My hands shook folded into the pocket of my indigo tunic, the hard edges of the dandelion texture plate cutting into my palms where I gripped it. I still needed to reach the old Palace, and the banyan trees – the other half of the puzzle was still there. But too much of what I’d known in the dreaming had been forced into my waking mind. And so my hands shook, and my legs. The great Fish were no longer just a dreaded something else I could try not to think about. They were bound into this, into this factory, into what had been happening to me. And now I had to go down to the old Palace, on the River, where the rest of them were.
Under the red light of the sky, I crossed the courtyard to the rusted factory door, then made my way back down the black-brick alley. There were still a few tatted scraps of dusty, pink cherry blossoms littering the edges of the cobblestones, pushed into the corners, but now, easier to see, were bright, yellow dandelions reaching up here and there out of the cracks. If it rained again, I knew, they’d spread further. Perhaps it was only rain, that the red sky held.
The sky and the dandelions…but the bus came like nothing was different, the city perpetual in smog and the constant hum of traffic and horns and rattling engines. Even though, when I breathed in, I could sense it shifting, trying to draw back, to curl in around the edges. The monstrous Fish were circling at the perimeter. The bus wouldn’t take me to the River, but it would get me much closer.
When I descended the steps at the last stop, I found that the paving stones were dusty and soft with a fine layer of mud, even with the River still two blocks away. As much as they could be in this city, the streets here were still and silent. And the red light in the sky had shifted, twisting towards bronze, glinting off the edges of the buildings and painting the shadows blacker than they’d been before. But this street, like all the others, was built straight down to the River, the muddy blue line of it unmistakable, compelling.
And so I was standing on the edge of the water before I knew it. It wasn’t a black-out this time. It was only the song of the River, calling me.
The water was grey, opaque with silt, and the smog smudged the distance across it, so that I knew I stood on the edge of the world. But the bricks beneath my feet were white. And banyan trees climbed a crumbled wall only the distance of half-a-block away, a stretch of still, grey water between us. The old Palace. Half its walls were fallen down, but those still standing were white and blue like a distant memory of sky.
The city shifted, pushed me forward. I began to wade across.