Machina Obscurum

by J. Edward Neill

  The miller gave me a sad, sad smile. “No one leaves Tessera, my lad. You think we haven’t tried? Ask the jeweler’s wife. Her husband fled north to Ellerae years ago, but when she wrote him, she received a letter back from Ellerae’s mayor. ‘Your husband never arrived, my poor sweet,’ the mayor wrote. ‘No one has seen him, same as the last hundred husbands and wives Tessera wrote us about. It’s time you and your city stop sending letters. We’ve seen none of your ghosts. We won’t answer you any longer.’”

  “How many are missing?” I did not really want to know.

  “Thousands,” replied the miller. “One every day.”

  I did not want to believe it, but in my heart I knew. The next day, my flock of children was one fewer. The day after that, I heard rumors of a woman I’d never met vanishing while washing her clothes at night. The next morn, one of the innkeeper’s cousins never came to breakfast. The evening after, a mother found her son’s cradle empty. And the next two nights, a pair of brothers who worked in the fields never came home.

  After those first two weeks, I still walked down the cliff to visit Tessera every day, but it was a far different experience. No girls walked with me. No one much smiled, save for a few of the children, and our games in the streets soon came to an end. I breakfasted at the inn, but they never topped off my milk or filled my belly to bursting again. It may have been because the milkmaid and the baker had vanished, or it may have been because I wasn’t the good omen I was supposed to be. I bought as much wine as I could carry, but a few weeks later, when the wine-maker disappeared, his daughter never again smiled or offered me the bargains her father had.

  Autumn descended upon Tessera. The warm spaces between the cold, rainy nights became briefer. To conquer my terror of becoming the next soul to vanish, I became a drunkard. Wine was like water to me. With every glass I swallowed, I felt my mind begin to dull. I awoke with a raging headache each dawn, fearing some horror would be waiting in my room, but Hasai would always knock on my door, offer me tea and a cool towel to wipe away my sweat, and guide me to the kitchen.

  “Those poor, poor people.” I sat with the old man one morning at the precipice of winter. It was bitterly cold outside his house, and I felt feverish from too much wine. “They’ve suffered for so long. What must it be like, living under the cloud of death? And now I’m here. Am I a Tesseran, too? Will I vanish like all the others?”

  Hunkered like a pile of old bones in his chair, Hasai shook his head. “It’s best not to think about it, my lad.”

  “Not think about it?” I raved. “How could I?”

  “Become my apprentice.”

  “How will that help?”

  “Hard work has a way of walling off the heart.” He folded his puny, skeletal fingers together. “And as you’ve lived under my roof for so long, it’s time you repaid me.”

  The old man was right. I owed him. I had supped at his table, spent his coins, wandered drunk through his hallways, and soaked in the warmth of his hearth, all of it without working. In hindsight, I suppose it was guilt that made me begin my apprenticeship. I didn’t want to work, to be certain. I wanted to pile seven layers of clothes on my shoulders and stride down the cliff to discover who Tessera’s latest loss had been.

  But no, I stayed. I helped him. I’ll never forgive myself.

  For seven months, we worked every day. He forbade me my daily jaunts to Tessera, and although I hated him for it, after several weeks I came to understand it was better that way. I drank far less. I forgot my fears. I worked from dawn until dusk, and just as he promised, the walls around my heart grew higher. I began to forget Tessera. I cast the miller’s wife, the wine-maker, the little boy I used to run with, and all the rest of them out of mind.

  In the first few weeks, it was mortar for his sculptures he ordered me to make. In the chamber behind his kitchen, he’d pour white grit into a tub and I’d mix it with rain we’d collected in buckets or melted snow we’d sloughed off the eaves. I stirred and stirred and stirred, until the stuff broke down into a pale, viscous fluid. I can’t recall how many tubs I churned for him. Hundreds? A thousand? What I remember most is climbing into bed each night, my forearms afire and my fingernails crusted over with sticky white paste.

  After the mortar, we came to the paint-making. He’d already described the dozens of frescoes he wanted to create. He desired to scroll his walls with fierce, feminine angels locked in battle with hosts of underworld horrors. “Where will you put them?” I remember asking. “Your walls are painted already.” But he’d just flash his yellow teeth and say, “I’ll paint over the others. Old art is tired. It’s new art, fresh and fine, that’ll line these walls once I’m gone from Tessera.”

  As he bid, I toiled. He’d bring in a few buckets of yellows and blues for blending, but it was mostly the reds he had me make. The reds are what I remember best. I hated the scarlet paint, its thickness, and its smell. He’d give me oils to change the consistency and strange inks to add or steal color, but it made no difference. I’d ask every day, “Might I drink some wine while I do this?” But he’d always wag his bony finger at me and say, “You’ve drank enough, I think, and all with my coin. Fret not, my lad. At the end, you’ll have all to drink you could ever hope for.”

  I never stopped to think about why.

  Winter floated past. Spring fluttered by. Summer returned. It rained or snowed every night during my stay at Hasai’s, but never so much as during the hot season. The storms roiled over the cliffs, threatening to tear the world in two. Had I not been so exhausted by grinding, pouring, mixing, sanding, hauling, and the hundreds of other chores the old man made me perform, I might have been afraid. As it was, I’d forgotten how to worry. If I haven’t vanished yet, I never will, I told myself. And since I’d not been back to Tessera in months, I dreamed in my head the disappearances had stopped.

  Then one day during summer’s end, Hasai woke me. I was bleary, hungry, and in want of a storm to sweep the old man’s house into the sea, and with me in it. He took me to the room across the hall, the very one he had kept locked since that first morn he showed me his new tiles.

  That day remains as crisp as any in my mind. As I sit in my room with the moonlight pooling on my table, I feel sick with the memory. I can hear my grandchildren laughing, and it remains my one joy in life that they know none of what happened in Tessera. My children do, of course, and my bride. But they never truly believed me. They heard the rumors from a hundred folk besides me, and they have long reasoned it was the plague that took Tessera. But what about the other cities?

  Hasai hobbled into the room across the hall. I walked in behind him. It took me a moment for my bleariness to fade, but when it did, I saw he’d finished the floor. I’d never seen such beauty. The mosaic of tiles made music for my eyes. My mouth hung open, and I stared as though a dozen angels had disrobed for my pleasure. “You finished it,” I said, still as stupid as ever.

  “One mosaic a day.” The old man grinned at me, his teeth rotting in his mouth. “One hundred tiny tiles in each one.”

  “How many mosaics in the room?” I wondered.

  “Three hundred sixty.”

  “Oh.”

  I walked across the floor barefooted. They were angels I stepped upon, bright and bold as sunshine, warring with hosts of shadows. I saw the simple chores I’d performed come at last to fruition. Bright reds made up the angels’ swords. Pale, perfect white mortar sealed the tiny lines between each tile. The glues I had made were surely at rest beneath the entire floor, holding the mosaics in place. The blacks I had blended gave the demons life.

  “It’s perfect.” I remember drawing a breath after holding it for a long while.

  Hasai let me stand there until I’d taken it all in. Later, as we breakfasted in the kitchen, he pushed me a purse of coins. It was fatter than all the others he’d given me, and full of gold instead of silver.

  “I don’t deserve this,” I told him. It was true. I didn’t.

  “Take it to Tes
sera, my lad.” Hasai smiled one last smile. “Buy whatever you like in the world. You’ve earned your keep. You’ve helped me finish my masterpiece. And now it’s time for me to sleep.”

  “You don’t mean die, do you?” I still hate myself for the tear that dribbled down my cheek.

  “And if I do?”

  “Where’d you earn all this gold?” I was still so young, still so foolish. “You’ve had no customers all year. All the sculptures and paintings we made are still here, still in the house.”

  “So they are,” said Hasai. “And so they shall remain.”

  That was the last thing I ever heard him say. He wandered off behind the kitchen, and I departed for Tessera shortly thereafter. The walk down the cliff was longer than I remembered. It had rained the previous night, and the ground was soft and squelching. I can hardly believe I had forgotten poor Tessera. All the truths the miller had told me had leaked out of my simple little head. To think I set foot on those streets, my bag full of money and my heart soaring with pride for what I’d helped create. I’m as much to blame as Hasai.

  So there I was, striding through the heart of Tessera. Its emptiness washed over me in the same way the storms had in Veni. I suppose I knew even then, but I pretended otherwise. I walked to the inn, but no one was there. The door swayed in the summer wind, and a half-eaten meal lay rotting atop a table. I noticed the windows were shuttered and barred. I saw a sword lying naked on the floor. Someone tried to hide here, I knew. But someone else came for them.

  Still too foolish to be afraid, I wandered the rest of the city. No children ran along the streets. I found a pair of empty sandals in a gutter and a pile of crates stacked high in an alley where the little ones used to meet, but I heard none of their laughter. When I fled to the wine-maker’s house, I hoped against hope to see the pretty girl. I’d have married her, I would, if she’d have had me, but it was a false hope. I battered my way through a side door and descended into the shadows of the cellar. I found rotting bread, a block of moldy cheese, and other evidence that the poor girl had holed herself away in the darkest corner. But she was gone, and Hasai had been right. If I had wanted it, all the wine in the world was waiting for me to drink.

  Terror began to work its way into my blood. I fled to the miller’s house. He was the sanest one, I told myself. He knew more than he told me. I should have listened. His house was one of few without its windows barred and its doors barricaded. His daughter was gone and so was he. Whatever had come for him, he’d let it take him without a fight. He’d known. There was no escape, not for anyone.

  I roamed like a vagabond from street to street, calling out the names and professions of the people I had known. I screamed for the candy-maker, the glass-blower, the piper, the carpenter’s widow, the blacksmith’s son, the farmer’s cousin, and even the whore. I loped from door to door, banging my fist against them until I bled. I shattered windows and crashed through planks of wood, but every house was the same, much as they had been during my first day in Tessera. I heard no sounds but the rats squeaking. I saw no evidence of struggles. Everyone was gone. I knew in my heart they were not missing. I knew they had been taken.

  At dusk, after my desperate, fruitless search, I ran back up the cliff. I was delirious. I hadn’t eaten or sipped any wine since breakfast. My heart was a frozen hammer wailing against my rocklike ribs, near to shattering me with every stroke. As I pelted up the rocks, I worried that Hasai would shut me out of his house. The darkness is here, I told myself. I’ve broken his rule.

  His door was open. I had expected it to be locked. In a panic, I ran through the house, screaming, “Hasai! Hasai! Help!” The statues and paintings which had seemed so magnificent by day leered at me in the dusklight. They looked alive, the angels’ eyes judging me, the demons hungry to stretch my skin. Into all of the house’s nine rooms I burst, but the old man occupied none of them. It only then occurred to me I’d never seen a bed besides my own. Where does he sleep? I asked myself. My bed is the only one in the house.

  I fled into the kitchen. The table was exactly as I’d left it. My breakfast, only half-eaten, remained. Drunk with panic and startled by the sounds of rain beginning to clatter against the roof, I pushed into the room behind the kitchen, a place I’d rarely gone.

  And there I found the door.

  I dream often about the door. I fantasize about what my life would have been had I not opened it. Maybe I’d have walked away from Tessera with my bag of gold and been none the wiser. I’d have known something had gone horribly awry, but not the why and how of it. When I placed my bloodied palm on that dry, dusty plank of oak and pushed, my life and the lives of everyone I’ve met since that night changed.

  I was such a fool. Down the stairs I walked and into the cellars beneath the cliffs. I heard the wind, the rain, and the sea slashing against the walls. I found a lantern. I never remembered how I stoked its light to life, but I did.

  Hasai’s dungeon lay before me.

  I saw crates, each one with a name. Some were empty, but others were stuffed with bones. I saw the wine-maker’s crate and beside it his daughter’s. The pretty hat she used to wear lay within, sitting atop her skull. Her father’s bones jutted over the rim of his crate. Half of each one was missing. I saw a device made of steel lying near. For shaving the bones. My heart stopped and restarted when I realized it. For making powder. For making mortar.

  I went mad with terror. I ran to each crate, calling out the names. I saw children’s crates, the innkeepers’ crates, the miller, his daughter, and his wife’s crates. All the pretty widows were there, right beside their husbands. I saw jars with black fluid in some and pouches stuffed with bone dust in others. The dank, stone walls sheltered all the dead Hasai had ever collected. Thirteen years’ worth, I knew. One a day, every day.

  I feared the monster would find me. Lost in his network of chambers, I fled for the door, but instead came to the old horror’s workbench. His art, I knew when I saw the surgeon’s saws, the black tubes, glass phials, and other instruments of dissection. No. No, no, no. Please help me. His art, his art, his art.

  I knew then I’d helped him. The red paint, the mortar, the fluids, the smells, the oils, the glue, and all the rest had come from Tessera’s people. The canvases for his paintings were skins. The carpets were spun of maidens’ hair. The statues of nude girls were not statues at all, but humans preserved by some manner of madness. His paints were Tessera’s insides, his tiles made of carefully carved bone. Hasai’s house was an exhibit, and he was its ghoulish artist, a demon in an old man’s skin. No human could have cleaned out the city with such morbid efficiency, I knew. No feeble sack of bones possessed the power to overtake grown men without a struggle. One by one, the unholy creature had sniffed them out and stolen them away. No matter where they’d run, he had chased them down and tore their lives away in the silence of the night. And he’d done it all while I lay to sleep in his house, drunk and dreaming of the poor dead women locked in sculpture all around me.

  I ran howling from the house, from Tessera, from the world. I still had his bag of gold tethered to my waist. Where I went and how I survived all those nights in the bitter rain, I’ll never be able to piece together. Hasai never came for me, but he’d killed me all the same. I’ve wondered ever since if the angels he’d painted were the Tesserans, and himself the demons made of shadow.

  And so here I am, still breathing, but dead inside. I sit alone in my study. My grandchildren have gone quiet and my wife has stopped asking for me to come to bed. My lamp long ago burned out, but the moonlight remains. Only two things rest on my table. One is the pouch Hasai gave me. A few golden coins remain within, a small fortune to most men. They are Tesseran, these coins. I earned none of them. If Hasai was one monster, I am the other. I spent Tessera’s gold to buy this house, these clothes, the ring on my wife’s finger, and a thousand suppers besides. All I own is lies. All I am is stolen.

  The other item atop my table is a list. Tessera, the curled up sheaf of p
aper says. Milici, Catani, Polera, Ellerae. They are the names of cities. Tessera, Milici, Catani, and Polera are all dead anymore. They say the plague killed everyone years ago, but then, the plague has been gone for half a century. It was no disease that emptied these places. Go to any one of them, and you’ll find no graves. It was Hasai who cleaned them out. Give the old ghoul enough time, and he’ll make a mural of all the world.

  It’s raining tonight. The street lamp beyond my window hisses and dies. It’s autumn in Ellerae, and the rain is hardly unusual, but I know the truth of it. It has rained every night for the last thirty. People have started to go missing.

  One a night. Every night, I tell myself. Until everyone is gone.

  H ello.

  My name is Mia.

  I’m a little girl, or at least sometimes I still pretend I am.

  I used to live in Ellerae, a stone’s toss from Lake Po.

  Ellerae was the most beautiful city in the world, so says everyone who’s ever been there. We had blue waters in the south and white mountains to the north. We had olive trees everywhere. We had vineyards, farms, and orchards, too. Everything was green and blue and white. Everywhere I looked: trees, water, and pale stones.

  I loved Ellerae. I didn’t ever want to leave.

  My first memories of living there are of our old stone house on Osso Street. I lived with Grandpa and Grams in a tall, skinny, three-story house. The bottom two floors were bricked with river stones, and the top story made of old oak planks hammered together with rusty nails. All the houses looked the same on Osso. ‘Thin as switches,’ Grandpa used to say. ‘Older than the rocks they’re built of. A missing brick and a half-hearted kick from falling right over.’