SSCS 03: Installment 27 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 27 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…
I let myself into the flat quietly. Nina would be back by now, and sleeping. And there wasn’t much night left before dawn for me to get my sleep in. I touched my teeth again, to make sure they weren’t still long. I folded my indigo tunic on the chair next to my bed, the dandelion plate still tucked safe inside it. And I laid myself down, picturing exactly what next needed to be added to my bell’s Template.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 27: 22.0302
***
The next day, I stood in front of my Template, looking up at it, and thought about the way blood had leaked from Jack’s elbows as they ratchetted the steel bars of the Machine into place.
It would be easier to assume that what I remembered of the Minister’s visit yesterday had just been a dream. Just like it would be easier to assume that what had happened afterward, on the bus late last night, had also just been a dream. To think that they weren’t dreams would suggest that I was already crazy.
Except that I didn’t feel crazy. For the first time in days, I didn’t feel crazy. Missing pieces of time, random pains and terror. Those things almost made sense if I believed in the events of yesterday.
Today was quiet. The same unspeaking man had let me into the factory and shut the door behind me, but there was almost no one else up here in the workshops. I hadn’t heard even a hint of Elka in the background, growling out her orders. But if we were meant to have a today as a rest day, I had no way of knowing that, either. Even if I was believing my visions now, and memories with claws and sharp teeth and a thousand scents of the city at night, I still wasn’t even sure what day it was. The blank patches I’d had in my memory were still blank.
But everything else felt…crisper. Like the Bell Template. Looking at it now, looking up and around as it loomed over me, I could study it as long and as closely as I liked, and I couldn’t feel the fear I’d had of it before. In fact, now there was something about it that made me want to stand right up close to it, run my hands across the dusty, clay surface of the tablet and breathe in the scent of it. And then to shape it, imprint it with the images that had become clear to me last night.
The Minister was a part of them, there in the center panel, meant to be drawn, to be shaped, standing grand and fearlessly. It was the pose he had already chosen for himself, a spider spinning a web around all of the rest of us, maybe around all of the city, and himself at the center, virtuously implacable. But he wouldn’t be standing there alone. Great Fish circled him, all of them, sharp of teeth and spines, and the panel must depict that too, just as it was. This Bell had to depict truth if the call that would ring out of it was to have a hope of sounding here and in the Dreaming.
You’re all dreaming
The lion had whispered to me in the dark and the metal-creaking silence of the bus after it had showed me how to pull free of my skin, how to slip into a lion shape of my own.
They want to use the Dreaming, but so far it has only used you. Help us make the Dreaming swallow them up, and leave the rest of you alone.
Those terrible Fish. They won’t be the last.
I stared up at the Bell Template, seeing the work that still needed to be done.
“It’s almost beautiful,” Jack said from beside me, and I startled. When had he come up? “I mean…” he stammered, thinking that my wide-eyed look was me taking offense from his ‘almost’. “It’s striking. How did you choose…”
“I think Maia must have started that one, and maybe added a little to that one.” I pointed to the corner with the hands pressed around the lantern, and then the one with the tentacled Fish pulling down a building. “You couldn’t really tell what they were when I got here, but they were already here. I just made them come out.” I fingered the edges of the dandelion plate, now ever-present in my tunic pocket. Jack’s eyelashes were so long and black when he was looking down at his hands like that – was it in uncertainty, or in remembering the girl who’d been here before me? Either way, I could tell I wasn’t blushing this time. “If you show me the project you’ve been working on, will you take me to the noodle shop again after?” I was looking down now, too, but got to watch his beautiful, brown, long-fingered hands jump up in answer to my question.
“If you like. I guess I’m close enough to done Elka won’t say anything if I step away for a bit.” He gestured when he spoke, and his movements were easy, as though he hadn’t had steel rods fastened into his elbows yesterday. Past the sleeves of his tunic I couldn’t see more than the knotted tendons of his wrists, couldn’t check for new scars.