Beneath Ceaseless Skies #16
Page 4
“You dance well,” I said. “But then you had a lovely partner.” I took out the empty bottle from my pocket and filled it, refitting the cork with care.
He stared at me with his unblinking eyes. What churchyard coffin had the Doctor pillaged for those eyes? I tried to recall any recent executions but my thoughts of late had been only about the Cathedral, the ceremony.
“Did he send the crookback for your eyes?” I asked him. “Did he cut them from a body at a crossroad gallows?”
The clock struck a quarter ‘til. I wiped my hands on my vest. “Wherever they came from, I doubt they have seen anything like what awaits us.” I said, winding his key again. “What awaits you.”
I tugged the chain again, but to my surprise he pulled from my grasp and made a turn back towards the Doctor’s house. I lunged for the swinging end of the chain and pulled, hard enough to spin him around. We stared at each other, my rebuke dying in my throat. Did I see fear in those eyes? I remembered my words to Lichtman, about capturing some hapless wanderer and throwing him across the threshold, what cowardice that would be. Was this so very different? What had we made? What, who, were we sacrificing here?
The clock chimed the quarter hour.
“Come,” I said, “it is too late to turn back. There is someone you must meet.”
I heard the crowd before I saw it. We rounded the final corner and there were hundreds of them, all the town and more besides, strangers and friends and those who had cursed me, all mixed up together across the square, well away from the Cathedral steps. I saw my son, my Franz, in his best suit of clothes, with his friends, the Burgomeister’s sons, Lichtman’s boy, and the rest. My wife and daughters were there as well, with several of our neighbors. When the crowd saw us a sighing moan went up, equal parts fear and relief. I saw many make the sign of the cross and still more fork the evil eye, but whether towards myself or the mechanical man I could not tell.
The Cathedral glowed in the morning sun, magnificent and pure. If the Doctor would only come and look, I thought, he would understand. Surely God would forgive us the sins we had committed in the name of his glorious house.
And to line your own pockets, the Doctor whispered in my ear.
The Burgomeister, Fleischer, and Lichtman stood on the Cathedral steps along with Father Buchman, who had slumped to his knees. The mechanical man and I crossed the square to them as the Burgomeister hurried towards us.
“Kobalt is inside,” he said. “Fleischer went up to the door. He heard him singing.” He eyed the mechanical man warily. “Is it ready, Karl?”
“I have the water,” I said. “We must be sure.”
The Burgomeister signaled to Fleischer and Lichtman. Together they hauled the gibbering priest to his feet and pulled him to us.
I took out the bottle of water and handed it to Father Buchman. “Bless it, Father,” I said.
Buchman flinched back. “This is heresy,” he said.
“Bless the water and baptize him,” the Burgomeister said.
“It is not a man,” the priest said. “It has no soul.”
“That is not for us to say,” I said, “He has a man’s heart. He does a man’s duty. Baptize him now.” We owe him that at least, I thought. But does it excuse what we do to him, or does it damn us all?
The priest snarled at me but the others held him fast. Finally Father Buchman blessed the water and threw it in an arcing spray – up and down, side to side—against the mechanical man. Then he dropped to his knees again, moaning. Several men from the crowd rushed to his aid, pulling him away.
The mechanical man looked at me and I pointed to the West door. My hand did not tremble as I wound the key. I silently repeated my son’s name with each turning as the main spring tightened.
“Do not break it, Bader, for Heaven’s sake,” Lichtman said.
I finished winding and looked again into the creature’s vivid, stolen blue eyes. Liquid was leaking from his neck again. I took out my handkerchief and wiped it away carefully, then placed my hand upon the panel in his chest, over the lump of muscle and gears that made his heart.
“Go,” I said, and then, “have courage.”
The Burgomeister started at that.
The mechanical man walked away from us slowly, climbing the steps. The Western door, decorated with a bas-relief depicting the Creation, swung open as he drew near. Inside the darkened narthex a figure beckoned. The mechanical man passed inside and the door swung shut.
We waited. I could hear the priest mumbling prayers to the cobblestones.
I turned to the Burgomeister, “If Kobalt is not appeased—”
From within the Cathedral came a sound like nothing I had ever heard—a scream of rage and a roaring laugh together. Fury and mirth co-mingled, it filled the square like a vast wind, whipping the trees into mad frenzy, sending hundreds of drowsing pigeons to the air in a fluttering cloud that blocked out the sun. People screamed and bolted in headlong panic. Fleischer fled with the rest. Franz shouted to me, and I gestured frantically towards his mother. To my relief he pulled her and his sisters away, towards home.
In moments the square was deserted but for Lichtman, the Burgomeister, and myself, our hands clapped over our ears, and the priest, still on his knees rocking back and forth.
Finally the screaming wind stopped and Father Buchman’s whispered prayers were the only sound. Then Lichtman shouted and pointed to the Cathedral.
The west door was open again. A wellspring of blood poured across the stones of the narthex. The torrent of red ran across the portico in a vast, unstoppable tide. We watched horrified as the flow drew closer, then slowed as it reached our feet. I knelt down and touched the edge of that dreadful crimson puddle.
The marble was dry beneath my hand, warmed by the morning sun. The horrible red stain—as clear and irrefutable as the mark of Cain—lay within the stones.
Trembling, we three moved up the stairs, peering into the church. I heard the Doctor in my head. What if he simply waits for the first man that follows after?
I took a breath and stepped forward. For my son, I thought, for my family.
But before I could step across the threshold, Father Buchman pushed past in front of me. He crossed the threshold and stumbled down the aisle.
The Cathedral was empty.
Of Kobalt and the mechanical man there were no signs. But like the portico, the stones of the narthex floor were stained crimson all the way back along the nave, stopping just before the altar.
“We will repair it, Father,” the Burgomeister said. There was confidence in his voice, strength I had not heard in months. Lichtman heard it too and smiled. It had worked. We had won.
Back to business, I thought. Back to how it was before.
* * *
That night I went to bed believing we had reached an end to the whole wretched mess. I embraced my son and called him a man, kissed my daughters and my wife, lay my head upon my pillow and—for the first time in seven years—went to sleep at once, without listening to the wind whistle in the eaves until exhaustion claimed me.
In my dream I was at the Cathedral, on my knees with a scrub brush and bucket, frantically cleaning the ruined steps, though I knew I could never turn the stones white again, not if I scrubbed until the brush wore away to pieces beneath my bleeding fingers.
The mechanical man appeared. He reached down and took hold of my shoulder, shaking me....
My wife shook my shoulder again, calling my name. Someone was knocking at our front door, pounding fit to raise the dead. The Burgomeister’s servant, summoning me with all haste to the Doctor’s house.
The stout oak door had been torn off its hinges. The little crookback lay on the floor, wailing piteously, cradling the Doctor’s severed head in his arms. The torso lay sprawled in the high-backed chair by the smoldering fire, an arm dangling from an oak beam like the doll parts in his workshop. The Burgomeister stood before the mutilated corpse, his eyes wide and unbelieving. Within the wounds, something glis
tened. As the Burgomeister gasped, I pulled a length of silver chain from the hole in the Doctor’s chest. Then I knelt down and after a moment of gentle struggle retrieved the Doctor’s head from the sobbing crookback. A bright silver key protruded from the neck, just behind the ear.
“I don’t understand, Karl,” the Burgomeister said.
I thought of those eyes bright with fear, of how he had balked against the chain.
“Herr Kobalt is not finished making deals,” I said. “It is the mechanical man’s turn now. I only wonder what Herr Kobalt will ask for in return for freedom from chains and winding keys.”
* * *
Lichtman tried to run, packed up his family and fled to his people in the North. The mechanical man dragged him from the carriage and eviscerated him on the road, before the eyes of his horrified family. As he was pulled apart, Lichtman’s wife heard horrible laughter from the darkness nearby.
Fleischer was next. He turned his home into a fortress, barring every door and window, sleeping with a pistol beneath his pillow until the morning his wife woke to find the bedchamber an abattoir awash with the blood of her husband.
The body of the Burgomeister—what remained of it—was found early one morning on the ruined steps of the Cathedral. His pistol was also nearby, a single shot discharged. As with the others, the priest refused to bury him in the churchyard, so the remains of my childhood friend were thrown into a barrel like so much rubbish and buried in the potter’s field outside of town, far from even the shadow of the Cathedral.
And I? I am back in the Doctor’s house, in self-imposed exile from my family. The people of the town—those good people, as the Doctor himself once called them—destroyed his workshop soon after his body was removed. They burned his books and smashed his models, tore his notebooks to pieces as they cursed his horrible creation. They would have killed the crookback but I stopped them before they could manage the rope around the creature’s misshapen neck. He serves me now, waddling amongst the wreckage, bringing me plates of bread and cheese and pots of beer from the tavern.
The dancing doll was trampled in the soot and muck, her perfect bisque face smashed on one side, her costume soiled and ruined. I have tried to fix the damage to her dress as best I can, turned her where she sits so that her good cheek and eye face the street. Anyone looking up from the street can see us here together through the windows, a wretched man and a beautiful girl.
The front door stands open, the full moon shines down. I am ready for the mechanical man’s homecoming.
Copyright © 2009 Kris Dikeman
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Kris Dikeman lives and works in New York City. Her stories have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, All Hallows, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Fantasy 9. She is currently at work on her first novel, which is about life, love, and zombie hordes. You can read more of her work at her website: www.krisdikeman.com.
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
COVER ART
“Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha
Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media, however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.
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Table of Contents
“The Sacrifice Pit,” by Brian Dolton
“Clockwork Heart, Clockwork Soul,” by Kris Dikeman