The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  Then the monster stopped moving, and its limbs crumbled into dust that blew away.

  I managed to find my way out of the woods and to the bus stop, but the image of the thrashing monster and the mechanical horse toy stayed with me. I coughed up dust. I coughed and coughed.

  Chapter Nine

  When I first saw the ocean I thought it was a block of stone, a gray trap waiting to ensnare me. When the bus drove from the desert to the mountains, and down toward the remnants of the coastal town I saw empty buildings lay strewn across the landscape like bleached whale bones. As the bus neared the water, the ocean came to life. The early morning sun stirred the stone into waves and churned the gray into blue.

  “I’ve never seen the ocean before,” I told the bus driver. I was the only passenger left on the bus.

  “It’s where everyone goes to die,” he said, “My cousin dug himself an oubliette in the sand. Nobody ever did find him.”

  When I got out at the bus stop, I couldn’t think of Jeanine or Leda, Sissy or Momma. I thought only of the ocean and the waves.

  I headed toward the beach. I took my bloodied shoes off in the sand and peeled the last remnants of my shirt away. As I approached the water I saw objects bobbing in the waves, others half-buried in the sand or encrusted in salt and seaweed.

  Deadhead corpses. Even with burst lungs and broken fingers and their nerves turning to glue, the hot wire spiders inside their heads still clicked against their skin.

  My head felt like a balloon, my legs electric synapses. I waded out into the ocean and the water drank at my cuts and bruises. The water breathed with me, in and out and in and out. A deadhead child’s hair brushed against my ankles before the current swept her body away.

  I was about to turn back when a voice spoke to me. It was barely indistinguishable from the sound of the ocean waves, but when I stopped moving

  I heard its whisper. I looked out toward the horizon and saw something wiry and gray sticking out of the water.

  I swam out into the water.

  I came to a giant metal structure lying on its side, half buried in the sand, half jutting out of the ocean. I grasped its side and struggled to keep hold of it while the waves beat against my arms and face. I bent my head down and curled my entire body against the structure.

  The voice spoke to me again, louder this time.

  "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? We haven't heard from anyone out there in a long time. We can't access any of the regular communication devices. It seems something has disabled most of the broadcasting towers. We're not even sure if this message will reach anyone. But, if anyone can here this, we want you to know that we're sending help. Don't be afraid. Help is coming soon. Don't be afraid. Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?"

  The voice repeated itself over and over again. As I clung to the structure, numb and gasping for breath, being beat on all sides by the waves, I realized the voice was not coming out of the ocean. It was coming out of the metal structure and the structure was a tower. It was another thing forgotten like the temples and the pictograms that had almost been completely swallowed up

  "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? We haven't heard from anyone out there in a long time."

  I thought the ocean might unhinge me from the tower and crush me.

  "Don't be afraid. Help is coming soon. Don't be afraid."

  I didn't want to let go of the tower and the thousand miles voice. I struggled to hold on as long as I could while my limbs ached. I kept my head above the water and kicked the storm underneath me, breathed in when the waves breathed out.

  "Help is coming soon. Don't be afraid."

  I couldn't hold on any longer. I let go of the tower and the waves carried me away. My body washed up back onto the shore, but I could still hear the echo of the words repeating themselves over and over.

  "Don't be afraid."

  I lay trembling in the sand. I tried to hold onto the whisper underneath the ocean’s roar, as if I concentrated long enough I could trap the words inside my limbs and never be afraid again.

  Someone grabbed my arm and tried to pull me out of the water.

  "No," I said, "No! Let go!"

  I thrashed in her grip. I wanted to peel the hands off of me and return to the water. I tried to open my eyes but the saltwater stung too badly.

  I grabbed fistfuls of woman’s hair. I dragged her down into the sand with me and held her head under the water. Her body convulsed. She grasped at the sand and her body bristled electric. A whisper passed through her hair. Even as I fought I still heard the voice. I heard “don’t be afraid.”

  She reared her head back out of the water and busted my lip. The water burned on my busted mouth. She shook me from behind until my head rattled. I tried to reach back and grab her neck. I missed and scratched her exposed collarbone with my fingernails.

  "Stop it," she said, still shaking me "please stop. I thought you were dead."

  “Okay, I'm stopping,” I said, each word a gasp, “I've stopped.”

  She released me. I clambered onto my feet, only to collapse a few feet away from the surf. Deadhead arms reached out to clutch at my hair, and the furious clicking of the hot wire spiders beat against my ears. The woman stood in my long shadow.

  “Someone who was dead once asked me where the road goes,” I said, “and I didn’t know. But I know now. It goes here. It never went anywhere else.”

  She leaned over and pressed her wet hands against my forehead.

  “I know you,” she said.

  “I'm sure you do,” I said. I laughed and coughed up water.

  “Charles,” she whispered.

  I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the sea of her hair spilling over me, her hair wine dark and frayed at the ends. I touched the thin mouth. I saw the stretched, yellow skin.

  “Leda?”

  I reached up and parted the dripping hair from her eyes. Her dark eyes were just as I remembered them, heavy with cool water and stars, nearly too big for her head.

  “Leda,” I repeated.

  I lay there for a long moment, paralyzed as I held her hair away from her eyes. The ocean spray and the sun sent a halo down on her head. Her eyes grew wider and wider until I thought they might break.

  “You heard the voice,” she said, “it spoke to you.”

  “What is it?” I asked, “where does it come from?”

  I kissed her before she could speak. Her mouth was a foreign entity, wet and scorched with heat. She took my head in her hands and I locked her down in my arms. I pressed my lips against her nose, her chin, her throat.

  She moved to settle on top of me. Our hips locked together and she rocked against me. I clutched at her frayed hair. She kissed every finger of my hand. She pressed my palm against her face.

  “Why did you leave me?” I found myself asking her, “why did you leave me?”

  She lowered my hand from her face and her body shook. She was skinnier than before. Her bones pulled against her face and neck and waist like little metallic faces.

  “I have so much to tell you,” she said.

  She took my wrists and pulled me off the ground. She brushed the sand from my arms and face, then led me across the beach toward a house that sat on the cliffs above the water. I nearly collapsed halfway to the house, would have fallen back into the sand if she didn't catch me. I folded against her body and she held me, silent as she stroked my hair. I lay my face against her collarbone, clutched at her skeletal back. I felt small and weak against her. She seemed like a house about to slide down and crush me.

  “You're so tall and strong,” I said, “even now, after all this time. You were always the strong one.”

  “You know that’s not true,” she said.

  You've come a long way,” she said.

  I kissed her mouth. She touched my busted lip with the tip of her finger.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  "You were dead," I said, "but now you're alive again."

  Leda kissed me. My body seized
up and I could only cling to the fabric of her dress. I stumbled and fell onto my knees, but I couldn't get up. All of my bones were curling inward like spiders. Those spiders bit into my skin and locked me down into the sand.

  I clung to Leda's dress, her white-weave dress, fringed with lace and doused in ocean spray - my Leda's dress, the avatar of the ocean. I expected at any moment for Leda to flee from her dress, dissolve into the ether and leave me kneeling alone in the sand with nothing left but the lace and her scent to haunt me.

  But her body remained, dripping out into physical space. Her body, able to be grasped and touched.

  "Charles," she said again.

  Leda traced the outline of my face, as if unlocking me from a spell. My bones uncurled from their fetal paralysis. I pulled myself to my feet, and together we walked up to the house on the cliffs. It stood on a platform that raised itself above the rocks. It was built out of stones the color of smoker's lungs.

  At first when Leda opened the door and we went inside, I couldn't see in the dark. Leda closed the door behind us. The air inside the house smelled musky and wet.

  When my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out a figure sitting in a rocking chair in a corner of the room, Her body was dripping wet, skin shining like insect eyes, her hair a nest of moss and thorns and bone.

  "Charles," she said, and she smiled to show me her bloodstained teeth.

  Chapter Ten

  Jolene held out her hand for me. Her needle fingers poised to press into my skull, and her ink black mouth dripped down her in the chin.

  “Jolene,” I said, “you brought Jolene here.”

  Her body sucked the space out of the room and flattened the objects around her down into a two dimensional space. She smeared the table and the rocking chair like tar against the wall. Even from where I stood I smelled the animal rot on her breath, the burnished feathers and flecked fish scales. I wanted to run, but once more I couldn’t get my limbs to move. An ancient weakness clamped down on me and sucked on my neck.

  “We've been waiting for you,” Jolene said.

  “He doesn't know what this means yet,” Leda said.

  “I know,” I said, my voice quiet, “it means every moment comes back to the first moment.”

  “Isn't that so?” Jolene said.

  Leda tried to get me to sit down in a nearby chair, but I felt my wrists peeling away and my body melting into my ribcage. I imagined the bones of children in the dark, the bones of my baby brother, gnawed and chewed and cracking underneath the rocking chair.

  I saw myself at the bottom of Jolene's pool, looking up through the green water at the town of Edgewater burning down. I saw Momma and Sissy in our dark-creak house, smoking cigarettes and watching television as their skin crackled and turned black in the flames. Every time I tried to emerge from the bottom of the pool to save them, Jolene pinned me underwater with her tiny white feet.

  "She's a friend," Leda said to me.

  "She's a monster," I said, my voice coming to me through a thick haze, "she ate my baby brother. She took his enzymes."

  I stood up so fast I knocked my chair into the wall. I headed for the door.

  "Charles," Leda said.

  I fumbled for the doorknob. Leda grabbed my shoulder, but I shrugged her off and wrenched the door open. I ran out into the daylight, out into the sand. Leda ran after me.

  When I got to the beach I fell down in the sand near the tide line. The voice whispered through me once more, “don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not going back in there,” I told Leda when she caught up with me.

  "There's nowhere else to go," Leda said, "If you didn't think otherwise, you wouldn't have come here."

  "You brought Jolene here," I said.

  Spit ran down my chin and in between my fingers. It coated the sand on my arms.

  “She’s going to help us,” Leda said.

  I lifted up my head and my body seized up in paroxysm.

  “You’re a servant of the monsters,” I said, “this is all a ruse, to prove that I’m a heretic.”

  “Charles-”

  “-Now you’re going to send me to the hell shuttles. Is that it? Is this is what this has been about?”

  Leda crouched beside me and touched my face. Her black hair covered my eyes. The curve of her nose and mouth fit into the space of my forehead.

  “Hush, Charles,” she said.

  I hushed. All that time since she disappeared and she still smelled like I remembered, like the ghost that used to crawl into bed with me. I trembled.

  “You know none of that is true,” she said, “you’ve heard the voice.”

  “But what does it mean?” I asked, “and what does this mean?”

  I lifted my head and reached for her hair. I brushed it back to reveal the number six tattooed on her head. The same tattooed number I saw on Smarts’ head the night he died, the same number I'd seen on the armbands the heretics wore.

  She grabbed my hands. I touched her hips, and underneath her dress I felt the contours of the dead flower chain. The stems broke against my fingernails. Her body went rigid like she’d been shot.

  “Please don’t hide this from me,” I said.

  I let go of Leda and I started sobbing like a child, like I’d never allowed myself to as a child. The surf bowled me over into the sand and the grit struck my teeth. I crawled away from the water like it had claws and the sun beat me over the head like it was a rowdy drunk. The corpses of deadheads rose up in my peripheral, limbs bent down into the shapes of trees.

  “Wait,” Leda said.

  She ran to me and grabbed me. She pulled me again into her embrace, and I thought that all women must come from the ocean, that Leda’s heart was made of anemone and her skin was seal skin, slippery and dissolving into the ocean depths.

  “Hide this from me and I swear I’ll leave,” I said, spitting up chunks of sand and plastic, “No more of this. Please, you know I couldn’t take any more.”

  “I lied before, when I told you I moved away from the ocean,” Leda whispered, her breath quickening.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.

  “It seemed like a lie you needed.”

  “The hell shuttles took me away,” Leda said.

  She stopped for a moment. When she continued speaking, her chest rattled with enamel.

  “It’s just like in the stories when they take you to the hell shuttles. They come in the night, come through the doors and the windows, almost like ghosts, without making a sound, except their shoes - those sound like piano keys. They wake you up like you’re in a dream, pull you out of bed and spin you down the street. And when they march down after you, their piano shoes, they play gospel hymns.

  “It doesn’t matter what you say, what you ask, the guards won’t speak to you. They just pull you into the line at the end of the block, where you wait with the other prisoners, your neighbors and childhood friends, for the hell shuttles to arrive. In the cold, in the dark - no light except for the flare of the guard’s cigarettes. When a guard pinched a girl’s arm and she cried out, all the neighbors closed their curtains with a crack.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “I was a good girl,” Leda said, “I never cussed or made people angry or went after the neighbor’s dog with a hunting bow. I prayed around the television with my family. But none of that mattered. When the hell shuttles came they shoved us in like cattle and drove us down into the earth, down into the place where we could never come back. The guards stripped me of my clothes and shaved my head. They told me I was filthy and worthless - the gutter trash scraped up from the bottom of the world. They told me my name was not found in the book of life, and I would be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity."

  "It doesn't mean a damn thing," I said, "Ezekiel told me. It's completely random, who goes to hell. Who lives and who dies."

  “They read out a list of my sins” Leda asked, “everything I’ve ever
done wrong. I don’t even remember if they were true or not, but I couldn’t think. Down there, you don’t own your thoughts. I tried to imagine the ocean and the flowers in the floral shop, something good and untainted, I don’t know, what it felt to be rocked in my mother’s arms. Some cocoon memory that I could crawl in. But there was nothing. That place stripped it all away until there was nothing left.”

  I said nothing.

  “When I saw the tattooing needles they laid out for me I tried to get away, run straight through the concrete wall, so they held my arms to the floor and one guard pinned my neck underneath his boot. He said I had a bird neck, a broken bird body, that the problem with birds was that they were always trying to fly away, breaking themselves against windowpanes. He said he wanted to make love to me if he could only remember how to do it. Then they tattooed the number six onto me. An identification number. Block six. Where they put the heretics.”

  Leda’s eyes shone.

  “In hell there are big rows of gleaming machines, a faceless army of machines, all waiting for us to die. Machines meant to torture us. To make us freezing cold one day, burning hot the next. To make the air prick us like pins and sear our skin. Some of them have jaws like animals, mouths full of steel fangs. Others repeat words all day and night so we can't sleep, words like, 'there is no hope. You deserve this pain. There is no hope.'

  Leda's hands shook as she held onto me. She bowed her head so I couldn't see her face, only the black strands of her hair, the dark stain of the number six tattooed on her head.

  “Don’t stop now,” I told her, “you were the one who told me not to be afraid.”

  “I met this woman named Hadley. She found me in our cell block, trying to kill myself by ramming my head into the concrete wall. Except I couldn’t do it, because my bare feet kept slipping on the frozen floor” Leda said, and she laughed like I’d never heard her laugh before, shimmery and strained.