The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Some workers balanced hooked iron pikes across their shoulders. Some held long saws or other carving instruments. In a leather pouch on his belt, less ominously, Hind carried measuring tape, sets of calipers, his pad and stub of pencil. But they all waited the same, like dogs for their dinner scraps.

  The Chief Engineer, Tweed, had come to stand beside Hind. Other workers had warned Hind that this man preferred the company of his own sex to that of women, had joked that Hind’s handsomeness always seemed to draw the older man to his proximity, but it wasn’t this that made Hind uncomfortable around him. Rather, it was the funny tremble in Tweed’s lips on those infrequent occasions when he spoke openly of Those Above, and the way he always seemed to be keeping half of what he knew to himself when he did speak of them. Hind could see it in his wide, wet eyes.

  “The cartilage doesn’t look right,” Tweed muttered to him, even with the horse-drawn wagon some distance away. He pointed with his own aromatic pipe. “There’s too much cartilage. See there? Its almost pushing right through.”

  Hind glanced at Tweed and saw that his lower lip was quivering in that funny way, as if he might cry, then returned his gaze to the approaching wagon.

  A huge, shapeless mass was being borne along on the wagon, resembling a whale half-turned to ghost. Hind hadn’t as yet heard where it had fallen. Hopefully in a field or pasture or by the side of the lake, and not upon someone’s farmhouse or, even worse, a tenement building full of families crowded like mice. A few canvas tarps were thrown over it, roped to cleats in the wagon’s sides, but enough of the mass showed through. Gray, translucent, amorphous. As Tweed had indicated, indistinctly visible within it was a chaotic network of thin white structures of a more solid constitution. Hind thought of leafless birch trees.

  Listening to the hooves and wheels clatter solidly upon the flagstones, but with his mind drawn away to more celestial matters, Hind tilted back his head to stare up at the heavens.

  The sky was a mass of colossal extrusions, boneless appendages perhaps, tangled and interwoven. They put Hind in mind of a bucketful of earthworms, except that their squirming was almost imperceptibly slow – slower than the movement of the clouds that Those Above had replaced over two decades earlier, though Hind still remembered clouds from his youth. Sometimes, though, they reminded him more of a great pile of glistening intestines. The extrusions were misty with distance, but that in itself didn’t entirely account for their partly-insubstantial aspect. They seemed…blurred. Hind thought of a photograph he had once seen of a crowd of people moving about a square and climbing a set of steps in the foreground. The long exposure time had left the buildings looking quite solid, but had turned the people to a sea of ghosts. The sky was like a sea of ghosts, then – but the ghosts of what, he couldn’t quite say. If anyone truly knew the full nature of Those Above, they hadn’t shared that knowledge with the common masses. Whatever the case, the sky appeared the same no matter where one stood upon this globe. The sun barely glowed through the overcast gray of bloated coils, and at night the sky was utterly black. The stars might as well have been swallowed and extinguished. At best, one might witness the pallid smudge of a full moon, walled off from those below.

  “No, no,” Tweed repeated, shaking his head as the wagon finally drew close to the factory, “the cartilage is too dense.”

  Hind had tried ignoring the Chief Engineer, not wanting to enter into conversation – and to be fair, he was not a talkative sort no matter who the other person might be – but he replied, “That’s why these chunks fall, isn’t it? They calcify inside. It makes them heavy.”

  “Yes, but this is too much, my dear boy. This blubber will be a poor harvest. And there might be other trouble.”

  Hind didn’t need to ask the older man to elaborate. He had seen trouble of the type Tweed alluded to, in the past.

  A peripheral presence tugged at the tail of Hind’s eye. Turning, in back of the small group of harvesters in their black rubber overalls he spied the factory’s Masters, Alastair and Abraham Stoke. Twins, they wore identical black overcoats and black top hats. No one seemed to know which was Alastair and which was Abraham and it didn’t seem to matter, anyway.

  In unison, apparently sensing his gaze, both brothers turned their heads to regard him. They nodded solemnly. Hind nodded back, then looked away. The brothers knew him by name, had once approached him specifically to commend him on his work. Either Alastair or Abraham had said, “Good man, Hind, good man. You get your work done and don’t waggle your tongue like most of your fellows are wont to do. It isn’t good, gossip and speculation, fretting and fear-mongering. It’s counterproductive. Not good for the Factory, nor for Society, is it?” The way they said such words demanded the use of capitals.

  “Yes, sir,” Hind had replied to whichever of them had spoken.

  The horses had come to a halt, snorting plumes of steam into the air. The wagon was aligned with the edge of the loading dock, and men were already clambering up onto both like a horde of purposeful ants, to unhook the ropes, drag away the tarps, and begin hacking the “blubber,” as it was called at this stage, into more manageable chunks to be placed upon carts and brought into the factory.

  Within, Hind and the others in his department would set to work treating the hunks of blubber in various chemical baths, subjecting them to electrical charges, and then finally slicing the blubber into smaller, neater blocks. Cubes of what was now termed “gelatin.”

  It was ironic, Hind had often reflected – or perhaps it was simply apt – that it was the very matter of which Those Above were composed that was used to suppress the dreaming of humans. For they spoke to the dreaming mind, did Those Above. That was how they had pushed through the sky initially, more than twenty years earlier. They had latched on invisibly to the collected dreaming minds of the world, to hoist themselves into this reality, presumably to envelope the globe like a pearl in the gut of an oyster. But humans, however insect-like, had risen to the threat, had used their ingenuity to stave off the entities (or was it entity?) – by utilizing the discarded matter of Those Above to insulate their vulnerable, sleeping minds.

  Still, despite this success in preventing Those Above from completing their manifestation, Hind’s sons had never seen the naked sun or moon. Further, Alec and Jude had never experienced the transporting delirium and magic of dreams. Having never known anything but the oppressive ceiling that forever ground them all down with its unfelt weight, its gravity from above, the children could not mourn lost things as their father did.

  Hind released a fatalistic sigh, ready to retreat to the sprawling brick factory and give himself over to the long shift ahead, but he first tipped back his head to once more scan the glacier-slow writhing of the living sky, knotted and coiled like the tissues of an impossibly vast brain. Whatever fragments of Those Above were close to sloughing away and falling, under the weight of the “cartilage” inside as it was nicknamed, from this great distance he couldn’t tell. Even the largest chunks when they tore free were tiny, like his own shed skin cells, in comparison to the whole.

  A commotion caused him to yank his eyes free of the mesmerizing vision.

  The harvesting team had begun applying their various blades to the mass on the wagon, in preparation for breaking it down and transporting it inside in pieces, but something within was cutting its own way out. Workers shouted and backed off, their tools now held as weapons before them, as several white spikes stabbed out of the glossy gray blubber. More of these ivory appendages, like gigantic finger bones, jabbed outward and ripped the translucent matter. An awakened skeletal form rose up inside and in one burst tore its body free of the enclosing membrane altogether – if body this chaotic shape could be called.

  “I knew it,” Tweed hissed beside him, catching hold of Hind’s sleeve as if he hadn’t noticed what was transpiring. “You see?”

  “The ganglia, boys!” one of the Stoke brothers called, thrusting out his arm to point. “Get in there and strike the ganglia! Y
ou know what to do!”

  The inner growth Tweed called cartilage, and which Hind had compared to leafless birch branches, loomed above the split cocoon of blubber like a horde of giant albino spiders fused together in such an anarchy of form that it hurt the eyes to try to sort it out. However, here and there in the lattice of interconnected twig-like limbs were thick nodes or nexus points, and these were what the Stoke brother had referred to as ganglia.

  The great figure reached out in every direction at once, and so it went nowhere, as if those multiple ganglia were numerous conflicted brains. It made no conscious attacks on the workers, though its erratic movements could easily injure or even kill a man accidentally if he wasn’t careful when he moved in close. This had happened before. But as Stoke said, the workers knew what to do. They darted in, swung axes or thrust their hooked pikes, in an effort to reach those scattered nodules.

  “Not sentient,” Tweed jabbered beside Hind. “Just like a small bit of nerves jumping about…chicken with its head lopped off. No, they aren’t sentient like Those Above.”

  “And just how sentient do you think they are?” Hind asked before he could stop himself, as together they watched a worker trip and fall onto his back after lunging in with a hatchet. Fortunately, another man grabbed hold of him and dragged him a safe distance away before he could be trampled by the thing’s unthinking, convulsive dance. Sections of it had already become immobile, however, owing to successful attacks upon the ganglia.

  Tweed turned to Hind with a face gone slack, apparently shocked or horrified that Hind would openly ask such a question about Those Above. But then, as if he too couldn’t restrain himself, Tweed stepped very close to Hind and in a low voice said, “Their sentience is so far-reaching, so complex, so unfathomable, that it is as though we are without sentience by comparison.”

  “You know things about them, being a Chief Engineer,” Hind stated. “Things the rest of us don’t.”

  “I can’t speak of such things, my dear boy,” Tweed said. “Not here, anyway. But…I’ve been watching you. You have a quick mind, Mr. Hind, and I see an inquisitive nature. Perhaps you’re ready for promotion. I could use an extra pair of hands…if the Masters Stoke consent, of course. Look here – tomorrow afternoon before your shift begins, join me in my office for a cup of tea. We’ll talk.”

  A promotion? Hind had not been thinking of promotions. He had been thinking of the sun, the moon, and dreams. But he stared into Tweed’s wet eyes for several moments and at last said, “Yes sir…I’ll do that, sir. Thank you.”

  The uproar had settled down; Hind saw Tweed looking past him toward the wagon and loading dock, and so he turned around to gaze that way himself. And indeed, the monstrosity woven of branches had been stilled. It too would be broken to pieces, but the factory had no use for its material and it would simply be incinerated.

  Yet it wasn’t the configuration of cartilage Tweed had been staring at over his shoulder, Hind realized. Both Stoke brothers were looking their way, as if even from this remove they had been listening in on their conversation. As before, the twins nodded to Hind in unison. Once more, he nodded back to them – as if some secret had passed unspoken between them.

  “Poor old fool,” Hind muttered, standing at his bedroom window, peering down into the narrow flagstone street below. Two constables had the arms of a disheveled old man with long white hair and beard. The constables themselves wore leather masks with brass-rimmed goggles, and iron breastplates under their flowing leather coats, which were as black as their tall felt-covered helmets. In their free hands they both carried a metal truncheon, hollow and with a powerful spring inside to drive a bolt from the tip if circumstances required.

  “They’re coming!” the old man cried, struggling ineffectually as the constables walked him toward their horse-drawn iron wagon. “Slow…slow-like…but they’re still coming!”

  “What is it, darling?” Netty asked absentmindedly as she collected up their partially collapsed gelatin blocks, to be disposed of in the trash bin.

  “That old man we hear screaming sometimes at night, in the lodging house on the corner.”

  “Oh! Poor man. But he really should have known better. What do you think they’ll do with him?”

  “I have no idea,” Hind said, partially obscured behind one of the gauzy curtains as if afraid the constables might suddenly lift their gaze and catch sight of him there. “But you know how they say people who make too much noise about Those Above just disappear. To keep from agitating others. Who knows…into prisons? Mad houses?”

  Netty looked up at him, smiling prettily, her curly dark hair pinned up in an unruly bun. “Oh, but don’t you think those are just stories to frighten children into behaving, darling?”

  “I think in that regard,” Hind said, “they see us all as children.”

  Hind was not troubled by the taunts of other workers who suggested he had become Tweed’s new pet. Though the tall, slender Hind was reserved in disposition, these coworkers knew he was strong in every sense and hence kept their comments joking rather than accusatory. Anyway, even if their accusations had been real, Hind couldn’t have turned down the additional money that enabled him to buy new clothing for his family, more and better food to stock their cupboards. He and Netty had even discussed the possibility of moving to a larger, warmer apartment in another neighborhood. And then there was the fact that Hind now worked in the day, rather than on the second shift, and therefore had more time to spend with his family. All in all, he felt very fortunate for this unforeseen turn of events.

  “Engineer is but an easy title to encompass all we do here, Mr. Hind,” said another of Tweed’s small crew, a man named Quince, as he poured a powdered chemical into a solution bubbling in a large copper vat over a gas jet. Hind stood at his side, observing. Quince went on, “Yes, we ensure that the many varied apparatuses throughout this plant are operating smoothly, and thus we work closely with the mechanics. But we are also chemists, as you can see, for as you well know the blubber has to be treated. We are researchers and inventors, forever working toward perfecting the processes we employ here. Which leads to what you are observing now. We are undergoing experiments to see if we might prolong the use of a finished gelatin cube, so that it might not need to be discarded after a single use. Very wasteful, considering all that goes into rendering them. We need a gelatin that is not damaged by insertion of one’s head, that can perfectly resume its previous form, yet still retain its light properties so as not to discomfort the sleeper.”

  “That would save a lot of trouble,” Hind agreed, “for a family like mine. Acquiring new cubes every day, disposing of them the next day…”

  “Indeed.” Quince stirred his steaming gray broth. “And in fact, it seems that this has been achieved in a few other countries already, though the bastards have as yet not shared their secrets with us. How foolish. We’re all working toward the same end. We have to keep the greater good in mind, not the petty competitions and concerns of the common man. The common man is nothing. We must remain humble, Mr. Hind, mustn’t we?”

  “Mm,” Hind grunted.

  Quince stepped back from the vat, clapping chemical dust from his palms. “Very good, then.”

  As his trainer adjusted a valve beside the gas jet, Hind turned and glanced down at an open notebook on the workbench beside them. Quince’s notes were in a near-illegible scrawl, but Hind thought he could read the underlined heading on the open page. Did it indeed say, “Dream Enhancement”?

  Quince turned his attention to Hind, saw him looking down at the notebook. He stepped forward, closed the book, tucked it under his arm. “In time, Mr. Hind, you will be taught everything. It’s still early yet.”

  In the observation and charting room on the factory’s top floor, a single great loft-like chamber with windows that ran the length of every wall, Hind watched as Tweed tinkered with the focusing mechanism of a large, complex brass telescope. The viewer would sit in a leather chair incorporated into the base
of the telescope, while an assistant turned a wheel to position the whole device at any desired point along a track that ran the circumference of the room.

  “Never seen this beauty before?” Tweed asked while bent over an opened panel, exposing the system of gears within. He squinted through magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles by hinges; there were several sets of such lenses, some of them in colored tints.

  “No, sir,” Hind replied.

  “This is of course how we can predict where the next fall of blubber will be, so we get there quickly before it’s disturbed by locals. And do you know dogs and wild animals will actually eat the stuff?” He looked up, his lips trembling in a smile as if his nerves couldn’t quite support it. “It’s true. But you should see the beasts afterwards – they go quite mad.”

  “I have heard that,” Hind admitted. “As though rabid.”

  “Precisely.”

  Tweed reached into his tool cart for a replacement gear, and Hind’s gaze lingered on the cart after the engineer had turned back to his work. The handsome wooden cart, resting on casters to make it mobile, possessed a series of drawers and a hinged top – currently open to display an array of small machine parts resting in felt-lined hollows. One of these parts drew Hind’s attention, and he reached in to lift it out and bring it closer to his eyes. It was metal, the length of a pencil, one end threaded and the middle mostly encased inside a porcelain insulated housing. It was funny; to him, the piece resembled a miniature of four tall structures – one at each corner – that stood on the flat roof of the building that housed this city’s governing body. Hind had heard varying explanations for their purpose, all of them vague; most people dismissed the spires as purely decorative, evoking this age of industry and technology. Those four constructions had always reminded him, in turn, of the twelve even larger spires that had been added to the roof of the House of Parliament, in the capital, during the great renovations to that structure nearly two decades ago.