“No, that’s not it. I don’t want this book. I don’t – I don’t want you. Please. Stop. Just take the book back and let me go.”
I move my hand against the door. I feel the doorknob. But it doesn’t turn. I shake it, trying to force it to open. It doesn’t turn. He is over top of me. Towering.
His hand cuts across the air and I hit the ground, hard. My cheek stings from his fist. I look up to see him pulling his shirt off. Tattoos across his biceps, his shoulders, his chest. Circles. Latin. Symbols I don’t understand. He chants under his breath and my knees feel weak.
I try to move, but I cannot. My limbs have gone limp and wooden. I whimper. I try and say something, but I can only whimper. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends.
A bang on the door from behind me.
He picks me up, moves me across the floor.
The door swings open.
Standing there is Nogitsune.
Mister Harvey does not stop chanting, but I feel different. I feel like I can move. His hands move over top of me, move over top as if they are about to undress me. I can move. I scream and kick him in his balls. He howls in pain.
Nogitsune walks forward. He has a table leg in his hands. He swings it in circles. Geoff is nowhere to be seen. “That’s not nice,” he says, walking up to Mister Harvey, who lies on the ground, clutching himself. I walk past him.
“Casting that spell on such a little girl. And that book – such a clever trap! But I am stronger than you. I am older than you.”
Crack! The table leg breaks glasses.
Mister Harvey’s body, curled up like a seashell.
Whimpering. “You don’t scare me, Fox Boy. I have followers. Wolves from my world.” Mr. Harvey turns and looks at me. “They are here, understand? They are here to feed. We will feed and feed and all of you will be dry husks. Empty things.”
Crack! Table leg into the stomach. A howl of pain.
I leave. Quickly.
Without saying a word.
Friday: Roof and Snowlands
I have to see for myself.
I walk up the long steps. Walk up through the shadows. Walk up past the uncounted classrooms. Everyone is gone. Everyone else is in the gymnasium. Probably fucking. They won’t miss the Invisible Girl. They didn’t even notice I was there, not even when I was being rubbed against and humped against.
The roof is large and wide. I can see no one else up here. Only crows, who dot the landscape like feathered dreams. I want to see the sun. But the sun is gone. I want to see the stars. But the stars are gone.
The sky is a hole.
Nogitsune was right. There is only white, flat snow. A long range of snow plains. As far as I can see. And the only objects in the plain are the giants. They walk, I see them from here. Walk, walk, walk. Their tremendous bodies stomping into the ground, thick hands pounding at their sides.
Their skin is like rubber sewn together. Their eyes are fires burnt into their heads. Their hair is like wire, tangled and broken and strung up on their heads.
They dress in rags.
And they are hungry.
The sight of them makes my blood run cold.
Foxes prance between them, their red bodies like fuzzy fires against the snow. Riding on the back of one is my art teacher, sword in hand. Over her back, I see our sculptures in a brown satchel. I see Fear of Mice and feel hope.
From behind, I hear a kicking of a pebble. I turn and see Nogitsune. Walking calmly, swinging the table leg. I see that it is covered in blood and I hate that it has come to that.
It is so cold up here.
“I had to see,” I say. I am crying. I need to be the girl who cries. Not invisible. Not to him. “I had to see for myself.”
He nods and walks towards me. “I know. They are there. And they wait. My brothers hold them off and my sisters hold off the wolves. But it is only a matter of time before we are outnumbered.”
I walk up and put my head on his chest. I feel his arms around me. I cry against his shirt. “Thank you. For earlier.”
He runs his fingers through my hair. I feel something against my ear. Like a breast. Like a breast in his shirt. I wonder where it came from. And I look up and he is a she.
“I can be whatever you want,” she says. “I can be whoever you want. But I need you now. I need you to want me. I am vague here, flickering. Soon, I will be gone. Geoff was not enough to keep me here. He is barely real, himself. But you – you can keep me whole. You can keep me real.”
I say nothing. Only lean my head against the chest. It feels like my mother’s breast, and I remember being small and tiny, and sleeping on my mother’s breast while she rocked back and forth, rocked back and forth.
He doesn’t speak again.
We just stand there and watch a war unfold.
•••
Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed writer of fantastical fiction. He’s been published in a slew of magazines(in print & online) and a mess of anthologies. He has a short story collection out (Glass Coffin Girls) published in the UK by PS Publishing. He has a novella published by Apex Books (Open Your Eyes) and a graphic novel published by Chronicle Books.
He was also a Recipient of KSU’s Virginia Perryman Award for excellence in freshman short story writing in 2000.
You can check out his crazy stuff at: http://pauljessup.com.
The City of Melted Iron
By Bobby Cranestone
Concerning the events in Komplex 5, the industrial part ....
Essen: hundreds of smoking chimneys, factories, melting pots, and steaming iron. Here, where all four elements are centred and put into a new creation. A physically dangerous place, but this is nothing compared to the mental pressure. Decades of hardship, deaths and fears have formed something traceable, as if all those feelings have become manifested into a new form.
There is something out here that lives off your very soul, the guy next to me muttered while munching on his lunch. Not that one actually saw it. But sometimes, if you’re turning round a dark corner, there’s a light creeping over the walls, and if you’re checking the temperatures on one of the kettles, it might happen that you encounter a dark shape leering at you. It changes all the time; it’s different, but you know it, anyway, when you meet it. Whatever it is, it’s most times faithful. Like the Banshee in the old Celtic tales, it seems to be a foreboding of doom. Those who meet it have little time to speak of this encounter before they die. Yet, the tale spreads, anyway, as tales always do.
•
I was from the lower working class, so no one cared if I was scared or not when I arrived at Essen. I had simply no choice, if I wanted to make a living.
My post was at the Gischt, close to the blast furnace at the very heart of the complex, which seemed, with every passing day, more and more to me like a living being with a mind and will of its own.
The industrial complex included a confusing jungle of tubes and cables that often measured more than one foot in diameter, an iron and steel mill, conveyor belts with melted iron that led over kilometres of industrially-transformed land, high-pressure kettles, several forging presses and other means of forging the gathered iron. On the surface, there were hundreds of buildings of varying sizes, and bridges leading to watch towers and chimneys. The whole area measured 120 square kilometres aboveground, but there was, as well, a great mining area. A blasted area, mines and tunnels that led deep down. Five thousand men went to work each day; some did it reluctantly and with a bad feeling in their guts that they could not name. Not everyone was given to superstition, but this place was the likeliest to engender such a belief.
I worked as a machinist at the main gas supply, fixing leakages and building new mechanical linkages where old tubes were wholly worn beyond repair. Strangely, they proved unusually short-lived in my area and the tubes seemed not wholly blasted, but almost torn by claws.
In the glow and the smoke … sometimes, you didn’t quite see what was going on around you and strange s
hapes showed up that, even when the smoke was gone, only reluctantly vanished.
The sounds of artificial thunder and whizzing iron were almost unendurable and the smell was, in some places, dangerous, consisting of all kinds of unhealthy particles, and you had to wear a mask. The siren shrilled its warning whenever something wasn’t right. Things were often not right. You could not tame the fire and the treasures of the earth without paying the price.
Maybe the place was haunted, as many old workers stated.
At the very least, it was bizarre. I had worked under similar circumstances, at other mills, but never had I come upon a tube that should be glowing hot, but was icy cold to the touch.
Young and shy, and the new member of my crew, to boot, I chatted little with the others, even the friendlier youths like Florian or Karl. I kept my misgivings and my fears to myself. At least, for a while.
•
On one occasion, the alarm shrilled, as it often did. I felt it like a certain sign of doom. Panic-stricken men fled to the next point of safety, anxious and eager to know what had occurred. Hastily, I followed through the labyrinthine ways of tubes large enough for a man to easily crawl through, iron pillars and supporting beams. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I felt a warm breath in my neck, which might have been some other leakage, again, or something entirely different. When I reached the next meeting point, I saw around thirty others of my shift, with grave faces. Three men had vanished. Just ten minutes before, when another repair maintenance team had passed them, they had greeted each other with the ironmakers sign, as it was customary. But ten minutes were enough to change luck into doom and life into death … or worse.
I soon learned other details. There had been an explosion, but only an average one, and the rescue team looking for the missing men expected to find at least some remains of them. However, at the place of the accident, there were no clues. No blood, no shreds of flesh and no bodies. There was no trace to be found of the missing ones.
The source of the explosion was also deemed a mystery, if not such a bizarre one.
A valve had been stuck and the growing forces had finally found the weakest point to get out. Everything in nature was struggling for balance ... even if we could not understand it.
The place the explosion had laid waste had to be freed from its ruins and I was among the helpers. What puzzled me was the fact that everything was so clean, so unlike any outburst of gas or flammable substances. I tried not to think too much about it and worked on. What else could I do?
At night, it was hardest. When the flames shone more brightly. Often did I catch the impression of something rushing past me, soundless, yet somehow traceable. Like a shadow with luminous edges, but I was never sure if its source was the fumes that hung heavy in the air or the noises. The dust and the glowing heat could drive any man mad. But even so, I could not wholly shake myself free from the idea that something was lurking there amidst the cylinders and tubes.
•
This place was first known as ‘Astnide’, which was also the name of a Greek priestess who was eventually sentenced to death for having called upon great forces that were neither from Heaven nor from Earth. It was said that she had made a pact of a very mysterious nature, though with whom, I cannot say.
Artefacts from the Stone Age have been found in Essen, proof of some prehistoric past beyond our written and traceable history. Early buildings all centred around one vast temple complex of pits and small lakes. The inhabitants must have paid tribute to some kind of god or other powerful creature, for archaeologists found great amounts of ash, and pieces of plants and shells, as well as pieces of charcoal. The area had been discovered in the early 1920s, when archaeology was still at its beginnings and only the pyramids in Egypt, with their treasures of gold, and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum received attention. The temple complex didn’t fit into the owners’ plans and its buildings were either removed or simply filled in with soil. The past was forgotten, but it was never wholly gone and maybe it didn’t care what we thought of it.
•
I was working at one of the great kettles, doing some maintenance, when I had again the strange feeling of being watched. When I turned around, I couldn’t detect anything but the spouting kettle and its sounds of working metal that was endlessly heated and cooled down, until it was worn and had to be melted and formed into something new. Somehow, my attention was drawn to the melting furnace, to the small door at its front, and when I moved stealthily forward and looked into it, I thought I saw the flames dance wildly and form some kind of face, fretting at me. When I tried to retreat, I felt a heavy weight upon my shoulder, holding me still. A valve opened and the spell broke and I ran away without any true explanation as to what had just happened.
Only hesitantly did I tell the others on my shift what had happened, and over the weeks, I learned their stories, too.
Florian said that he had seen a big, silvery, shining ball, waiting in one of the hallways. Inside, there was the form of a women leering at him. The face was odd. The head more like an elipsoid and the skin of greenish hue.
When, three days later, his twins were born, something wasn’t quite right about them.
And there were other tales, of unexplained noises and lights.
•
The next time the alarm rang, it was in my area. I knew the people of my shift very well now, so instead of running to the next point of safety, I ran in the direction where the alarm was sounding, to see if I could do anything. I stopped stone-still when I saw that my efforts were, and must be, futile. Before me stood, as if built from iron clinker (the iron oxide formed during forging), the human shape of a screaming man. Looking like the human remains from Pompeii that were shown on exhibition at the museum, this thing stood before me, unearthly and yet human. I couldn’t help but shrink away. I could discern the features of my coworker, Karl, who had been working in this area, but was nowhere to be seen. Yet, this couldn’t be him. How could that be possible? This was a thing beyond physical laws and reality. Yet, it was standing before me.
I heard a faint sound behind me. A shadow flickered over the tubes and bunches of cables. Turning around, I saw a stag beetle buzzing against one of the lamps.
When I turned back, Karl was gone.
•
After the accident, in which we lost Karl – another broken valve, they told us – the air in our lounge area turned serious and our emotions seemed to hang heavy above our heads. Some played cards, but only half-heartedly did they follow the game, they just wanted something simple to do, so they did not have to think about the latest turn of events. You could have cut the air with a knife and the vibrations from the outside world of working machines seemed to us now like the bringers of doom.
“It’s not the worst thing that has happened,” mumbled Chester..
I raised my head in surprise. “What do you mean by that?”
He rubbed his chin and took a sip of milk. “There were guys before, in my youth. They were not dead when we found them, but the foremen were so hasty in taking them away that there was much room for imagining. Something weird had happened to them. We were not allowed to see them anymore. One of the officers did slip us a word that they were put in some kind of asylum with another man who dared to look ....”
“But what is that thing out there? What does it want?”
“Some say it is some kind of personified evil. It’s said it is a man; others believe it’s some kind of force, nature-bound, like rain or a heavy storm.” This time it was Pit, who always smoked a cigarette, even though it was forbidden to smoke inside Komplex 5.
“However it is ... there is still the question”.
Chester looked ominously at me, as if this was an especially important detail.
“The question?”
“They say that whatever it is, it asks you a question. If you answer right, you might find some kind of reward. If you’re wrong ... well …”
“And what kind of qu
estion is it? I get that you’re speaking about some kind of riddle.”
Chester shrugged his shoulders. “It’s always a different one. A different one, depending on what person you are, what character you have.”
•
I couldn’t get the his words out of my head. The whole evening, I worked in a kind of mechanical stupor, I did not listen to the greetings of my ship mates, nor to the call for supper or lunch. Only when my shift ended did I wake up, as if from a very deep dream.
I took up my stuff and turned around the corner. All seemed very silent. Had I lingered too late? Too deep in thought to think about time? The Komplex usually never slept, but the two hours between one and three o’clock were the quietest hours. I should have left four hours ago. Getting my overalls out of my locker I withdrew my hand as if touched by an electrical discharge. The door was icy cold. Hastily, I changed into my fresh clothes, with my mind made up to leave the Komplex as fast as I could. Today was an unlucky day. I felt it with every fibre of my aching body.
Someone opened the door. I turned around, but my eyes took some time before they could discern the person’s features in the dark.
There it stood. It was humanoid, but almost double my height. Its skin was red and seemed to steam, while its face was a mocking mask, with very deep and dark eyes that shone like charcoal in its sockets. When it reached out and pointed at me, it seemed to do so in a kind of slow motion. It held out a claw with three fingers. An unearthly voice that seemed to hold at least a thousand other tongues from ancient times spoke.
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