Machine

by K. Z. Snow

  Fanule was struck by the fact that in spite of her insubstantiality, Betty could evince far more emotion than his lover. Her features lightened and darkened, shimmered and rippled in response to her feelings. Her speech had as much inflection as any living person’s. The realization was another cruel blow. William, whose open, expressive face and animated voice concealed nothing, now had nothing to conceal.

  The two people who meant the most to Fanule had been reduced to nearly lifeless husks.

  Patricide had begun to seem too kind a fate for Zofen. If, that is, he was in fact alive.

  Of course he was alive. Betty had been mistaken. The Spiritmaster was, without a doubt, Zofen Perfidor.

  Fanule steered William to the bed and sat behind him. He carefully coaxed out the snarls from William’s hair with a comb. If they proved too stubborn, he gently untangled them with his fingers. Then he eased William under the duvet and leaned over him. “I’ll be in shortly to hold you,” he murmured, delivering more loving caresses. “Don’t worry, you’re not alone anymore. You’re safe now. I’ll be your guardian just like you’ve been mine.” He kissed William’s slightly parted lips and let the kiss linger.

  It made no difference.

  Betty returned with a small plate bearing two chicken legs and a handful of grapes. “I need you to help me with something,” she said to Fan. “It might clarify who the Spiritmaster is and what we can do about him.”

  Fanule nodded.

  He’d try anything. He’d begun feeling “tippy” again, which was how he thought of the disquieting sense that he was about to lose his equilibrium. Sometimes the loss was abrupt, as it had been on the Green. Usually, though, Fanule could feel his illness creeping up on him like a cat-pawed mugger in a dark alley. He had to focus on the light at the end of the alley, on possible solutions to the havoc Zofen had wrought.

  “Have you a large pad of paper?” Betty asked as they left the bedroom.

  “The one I use for sketching stonework projects. Shall I get it?”

  “Yes, please, and bring it to the kitchen table along with some sturdy pencils. I’ll turn up the lamps.”

  Fanule did as she asked. When he returned the kitchen, one of Betty’s arms was on the table. She’d stationed the rest of herself in the corner where the bathtub stood.

  “Why are you over there?” Fanule asked.

  “Because I need to be in a trance state and don’t want to be distracted. Place the paper under my hand and the pencils at the head of the pad. I don’t have my gazing box here, so I’m going to try automatic writing.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Sit where you can remove each page as it fills up, and don’t make a sound.”

  Fanule moved a chair beside the ghostly arm and sat down. Betty’s fingers, like tendrils of fog, had already taken up a pencil and poised its graphite tip on the topmost sheet of paper. He stared, waiting, as lamplight flickered over the table and lapped strings of shadow from the silver-plated castor set. Half his attention was directed toward the bedroom.

  have reached first threshold

  take me to the second

  Fanule started at the scratch of pencil on paper—so disruptive of the stillness, it could’ve been the cracking of glass.

  hag awaits

  promises already made

  the more you promise the more you get

  Fanule’s breath caught. Hadn’t he seen those words before—or some of them?

  He pulled aside the first sheet of paper a split second before the pencil descended.

  is evil not an impediment to agency?

  purge the world over

  roam and root out

  for this for this—

  LIFE

  Fanule swept aside the second sheet.

  and

  a means to lure and contain

  and transport

  within a fold from the drape of night

  HAG

  Head spinning, Fanule removed the third full sheet.

  good-bye

  hello

  time to play the crooked cross

  Betty’s arm dropped soundlessly to the table. An odd little noise came from the area of her perch, a prolonged sigh wound through with a whimper. Fanule had no idea what to do but stay in place.

  A minute passed.

  Her head appeared beside him. Without a word, her hand set the scrawled-on pages side by side. Fanule thought he detected a look of consternation on that filmy face.

  “Dear goddess, he’s trying to cheat the Hag,” she whispered.

  Fanule had had enough mumbo-jumbo for one day. “I’m going to bed,” he announced, rising from the table. “I’m exhausted, and I need to be with William. You can explain all this to me in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” Betty said, “I’ll be doing more than explaining. I’ll be taking you on a little trip. Mirabelle can sit with William until we get back.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You don’t need to know that yet.”

  ALTHOUGH FANULE had fallen asleep holding William, he’d slept fitfully. Images and phrases tied to the Spiritmaster pervaded his dreams. Whenever he awoke from them, awareness of William’s inertia made consciousness more frightful than its lack.

  By the next morning, he was ready to go wherever Betty wanted to take him. Something had to be done. After he’d ushered William to the privy, drunk a cup of tonic and cleaned himself up, and ate a few bites of food for which he had no taste, Mirabelle arrived to play nursemaid. She, too, looked tired, for she’d already been to Simon’s house to check on Clancy. His condition hadn’t changed.

  She and Betty conferred privately while Fanule sat on the bed, talking to William and massaging his disused muscles, hoping to ignite whatever fleck of his Spark might have been left behind.

  Fanule was empty of tears. In their place, anger seethed and determination solidified.

  Finally, Betty joined him. “Mirabelle kindly agreed to let you use her OMT. You can’t ride Cloudburst, you know, because I’ll be with you. And because of where we’re going.”

  Fanule rose from the bed. “Where are we going?”

  Betty drifted before him as they left the room. “Mummikin Bog.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  STUPEFIED, FANULE stopped in his tracks. “That was where Pandemain dumped your body. That was where—”

  “I received the gift of renewed agency. Yes.” Betty opened the front door and moved outside, where frost glistened on the ground. “Now hurry up and fire the OMT. Mirabelle keeps plenty of water behind the seat should you need to refill the boiler.”

  “Renewed agency?” Fanule repeated, still stunned. Mummikin Bog was a hidden place, a secret place, imbued with the most powerful kind of magic. He never thought he’d ever get near it. In fact, had no idea where it was.

  “Yes, Fan,” Betty said with mild impatience, as if he were playing stupid. “‘Agency’—the ability to exert influence, effect change. The ability to act, to do.”

  He’d never thought of her reanimation in those terms, but he supposed they fit.

  “And you’re not to tell anybody you’ve been there, or where it is. Do you understand?”

  “I assumed as much. And I promise I’ll keep mum.”

  Just as Fanule began firing the transport, he realized what this destination meant. He pulled out from under the vehicle. Betty had collected herself within it, probably to keep from being seen by any passersby.

  “So we’re going there because you believe—”

  “Someone slipped your father into Mummikin Bog as soon as he died. I’m sure of it.”

  So that explained how he could’ve died yet was now alive. “But why is he substantial and you’re not?”

  Betty seemed to collapse in on herself as a horse-drawn wagon passed. Fanule waved to the driver. Betty’s voice came through the OMT’s window. “First, because I was dead considerably longer than Zofen before I entered Mummikin. Remember, I had to be transported f
rom Purinton. He was already at the bog’s edge. Second, he must’ve made far more grandiose promises to the Hag than I did.”

  “The more you promise, the more you get,” Fanule murmured. “Who or what is this Hag?”

  As the OMT began to steam, Betty exited its cab. “The Guardian of Heavenly Agency. Or one of the guardians. You’ll soon see for yourself. Maybe. Now pay attention. Here’s the route you’re going to take.”

  Fanule would be traveling west by southwest out of Taintwell on the Midbucket Highway, so named because it angled clear through Purin Province, which was shaped roughly like a pail. Along the most heavily forested section of Midbucket was a series of three obscure, unnamed crossroads. Betty would be waiting at the second. She’d have to lead him from there, she said, because the road became little more than an aboriginal trail that led down into a large area of uninhabited lowland. At some point he’d likely have to park the OMT and proceed on foot. The going would be slow and difficult, Betty warned, but Fanule assured her he was wearing his sturdiest pair of boots and was prepared to face any challenge.

  “I’m surprised you’re allowing me to see this place,” he said, and Betty answered, “I don’t have much choice. I have a feeling you’ll need to petition the Hag for a special favor.”

  IT TOOK three hours for Fanule to reach the designated crossroads.

  Up to that point, the journey was uneventful. He simply drove and thought, drove and thought, and because he had so much to think about, the time flew by. When Betty dropped out of an overhanging tree and appeared in front of him, Fanule almost puttered right through her. She looked like little more than puffs of vapor from the two-man transport that had been traveling ahead of him.

  They turned left off the highway. If a person wasn’t looking for this crossroads, he’d never know it was there.

  Now that the ground was hardening, Fanule’s borrowed OMT was able to trundle farther along the crooked path than he’d expected. He finally had to park it beside a sycamore tree when the trail narrowed and began to slope downward, and the soil grew softer and more slippery. Upland cold hadn’t yet permeated the heavily shaded marshland toward which they descended.

  “How are you doing?” Betty asked after Fanule had trudged and slid and clutched at branches for the better part of an hour.

  “Still on my feet,” he replied. His leg muscles ached like mad, but when he saw William’s face in his mind’s eye—his normal, animated face and that now-expressionless countenance—he lost his desire to stop and rest.

  “Buck up,” Betty said, “we’re almost there. Just follow me carefully. We’ll be leaving the trail soon.”

  No great loss, Fanule thought. By this point the trail had dwindled to a rut of a track, barely discernible.

  Fanule wiped his brow with his sleeve. The land had begun to level somewhat, but gods, how little light there was! He peered at Betty’s filmy form, trying to keep it in sight as she slid through tangled growth into a gloomy hollow.

  They’d entered a world sunk in perpetual twilight, its air sodden with moisture and the almost suffocating odor of organic rot and amphibious life. Skeletal branches arched overhead, so densely interwoven the sky was only visible in tiny swatches. Weird sounds just at the edge of Fanule’s hearing, sounds without identifiable sources, made his skin prickle into gooseflesh: a soft, wet pattering of feet up and down tree trunks; the faintest wail winding through the sky, as if a banshee were approaching or retreating; deep, woeful sighs from the earth itself.

  What coaxed his arm hair to stand, though, was an overriding electric pressure. The supernatural held sway within this dank arena, and it made its dominance known.

  Fanule followed Betty to the edge of a large, irregular blot that seemed to have no depth—or immeasurable depth. Like a spider web, her dim form all but faded into the grayness. The ground became spongier and spongier until it lost solidity. Soon, there was little more than slop beneath Fanule’s feet, and it sucked at his boots as if it wanted to swallow him.

  They’d arrived at Mummikin Bog.

  “Welcome to the site of your father’s resurrection,” Betty said solemnly.

  “I don’t like it here.”

  “You’re not supposed to. Only those languishing on the threshold of death appreciate this place.”

  The fact she spoke from experience frayed Fanule’s nerves even further.

  “I wonder if Zofen arose with the other gifts he was granted—the wagon and its horses.” Betty glanced at Fanule. “Weren’t they in last night’s writings?”

  Writings. Writings. Hadn’t he recently scribbled things he shouldn’t have known on his parlor wall? They must’ve sprung from his connection to Zofen. At the time, Fanule had been too tightly wound, or unwinding too rapidly, to notice exactly what he’d put down.

  But Betty wasn’t referring to Fanule’s chalk scrawls. She was talking about her automatic writing.

  He unstuck his mind. “Yes, I believe they were. And something about a fold from the drape of night. Which is what?”

  “Concealment, invisibility. The word fold makes me believe it’s limited, though.”

  They lapsed into silence and gazed over Mummikin. Fanule pictured Zofen’s resurrection, and the picture was hardly pleasant. A team of black horses (how did he know they were black?) emerging from the bog, looking as if its darkness had saturated them, their legs churning for purchase on the slimy, matted moss and leaf rot of the surrounding ground. But their hooves never touched it. Theirs was a pretense of life, strength imparted by spirit rather than substance. Then the fearsome bulk of that wagon, exposed inch by inch to the miasmal air. Fanule could see the bog’s thick corruption sliding off it in heavy, stinking patches, hear the wet plops as muck returned to muck. The double-gulp calls of the bullfrogs had gone silent. Tentatively, as if it, too, was revolted, the moon slid fingers of light over the exposed gold walls.

  Zofen sat on the driver’s bench. He smiled at the realization he was alive once more. He congratulated himself on his cleverness.

  From a nearby rise, a wolf balefully announced his emergence.

  Why had Zofen wanted the wagon? Maybe there was something in it. Or maybe it was merely a showpiece meant to attract crowds.

  “The more you promise, the more you get.”

  “What did he promise?” Fanule whispered, forcing down his bile. Something gurgled just beneath the surface of the bog. A chill raced through his body.

  “We’ll never know for certain,” Betty answered. “That’s between him and the Hag. But it’s safe to assume he vowed to purge people’s lives of whatever wickedness stood in the way of their advancement. I doubt he mentioned why he would be doing it—the real reason, anyway—or how indiscriminately.”

  Why? Fanule knew why. To satisfy his nature. To amuse himself through the spirits he would draw in. To study them like the perverted scholar he was.

  To animate himself further and keep from feeling lonely, empty, purposeless.

  “Now he’s in trouble,” Betty said, “and I think he knows it. That’s why he’s laying low.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I told you, the gift of second life is the gift of renewed agency. One must use it constructively, to help empower others, to strengthen their agency.”

  “How?”

  “By teaching or inspiring or healing. By creating or building or repairing. Whatever you promise to do, whatever bargain you strike with the Hag, is a contract, and one of enormous significance. Because you’ve essentially vowed to contribute to the infinite and eternal clockwork of the universe.”

  “It seems to me Zofen has violated the terms of his contract.”

  “Precisely. And subverted cosmic law in the process. He’s stripped people of agency. That’s like tossing a wrench into a perpetual motion machine.”

  “He’s played the crooked cross,” Fanule said with dawning realization.

  “Indeed he has. And one does not do that with a Guardian of Heavenly Agency.”
Betty, her head inching forward, peered over the bog as if she expected to see something at any moment. “You needn’t be consumed by how to get rid of Zofen. The Hag will recall his gifts.”

  As soon as Fanule grasped the full meaning of this, he shuddered. “You mean Zofen will be—?”

  “What he was before rising from the bog,” Betty said. “Dead.”

  Now coldness squirmed through Fanule’s marrow. “But… how? Will he drop on the spot? Or suffer through consumption again? Or be dumped here alive and allowed to suffocate as this mire sucks him in?” Why do I care? All that matters is being rid of him!

  Betty watched him insightfully. “No, Fan. His second life will simply wink out and his physical being will vanish from where it is at the time. His body will be back in the bog, in whatever condition it would’ve been in had nature taken its course.”

  Was the Machine among the Hag’s gifts, the Machine William and Mrs. Rumpiton had talked about? There’d been no mention of it during the automatic writing session. So either it was considered part of the wagon, or it was installed at a later date.

  “I can’t let the Hag take the wagon,” Fanule said. “Not yet. It’s somehow connected to all the spirits Zofen stole. I have to get inside of it.”

  “Yes indeed. And that’s why I felt you’d have to petition the Hag for temporary possession of it. That’s the special favor I referred to before we left.” Betty turned away from him and faced the bog’s lumpy expanse. Lifting her voice, she spoke to the air in a strange, musical language Fanule had never heard before. He recognized Zofen’s name, and his own, but no other words.

  At the far end of the bog, the air shuddered and the ground heaved. A sweet fragrance briefly replaced the area’s fetid reek as a figure rose into view—a hazy figure neither male nor female, sitting astride a black unicorn with emerald horn. It didn’t look at the visitors, but it must’ve been aware of their presence or it certainly wouldn’t have appeared.