Machina Obscurum

by J. Edward Neill

  On the first day of spring, Pa finally came for me. I knew it was him by the boom of his heavy boots on the stairs.

  “Mia,” he said, gruffer than ever I’d heard him. “Mia, come out.”

  I floated to the door. My white dress was dirty, my socks covered in cobwebs, and my eyes haunted. When I opened the door and saw him standing there, I was terrified of what he’d think.

  “You haven’t seen the sun in weeks,” he grunted at me. “It’ll forget you, Mia. It’ll lose you.”

  “It already has,” I murmured.

  He grinned faintly. “No. Not yet, it hasn’t. Your time’ll come, sure enough. But for now you’ve still got mortar between your bricks. Now come upstairs with me. I’ve something to show you.”

  If I think about it, really think about it, I should’ve stayed in my room. I should’ve shut the world out and waited for everyone else in Ellerae to vanish.

  I should’ve let Pa go on his way. Alone.

  But I didn’t.

  On skinny, wavering legs, I wobbled up the stairs and into Pa’s oaky chambers. Clouds of pale dust greeted my footfalls, and shadows danced on the walls. The whole place stank of something, though I wasn’t sure what. I’d been certain it had been dawn when Pa had knocked on my door, but the pallid light glooming through the window told me that dusk was near, and that the streetlamp is burning.

  “I tried. Oh I tried, I did,” Pa rambled senselessly while scrabbling around on his big table.

  “Tried what, Pa?” I asked.

  “To be a good man. To live a good life. To earn it. These damnable coins.”

  “I don’t understand, Pa.”

  “Course not.” He knocked over an urn and dumped an armload of musty books off a shelf. He was beet red and breathing heavily. I just stood in the doorway, frozen.

  “Gio, Gio, Gio,” he popped a crate open and flipped it over on the floor. “Why’d it have to be Gio? As punishment? To make my end of the bargain hurt more? And you, sweet Mia. We might as well be dead. All of us. All for these damn coins.”

  I’d never been so scared in my life. Somehow, I found the courage to take three steps into the room. I saw what had been in the crate. Coins, I stared at them. Thousands of coins.

  Pa had more coins than ever we’d guessed.

  He scooped hundreds into a sack and thrust them into my arms. I thought I’d collapse under the weight. They were so heavy, heavier than they should have been.

  “Take them,” he commanded. “All of them. Buy a horse, a coat, and a big bag of food. Ride north. Into the mountains, Mia. Don’t go south, whatever you do. Stay away from the lake.”

  I just stood there, arms sagging. “Pa, I’m scared. What are you saying? I don’t understand.”

  “You have to ride. It’s the only way. I know what you’re thinking, sweetie. It’s not permanent. You’re still doomed. But maybe with the coins, you’ll last longer. Maybe even the longest. Worked for me. All these years, one every day, and I’m still here.”

  My fear turned to confusion. Pa was making no sense. His riddles had filled him up to the top of his head. He’d lost his mind.

  “Pa, I can’t leave. I can’t. You’re never here. Grams needs me.”

  He gripped my arm and squeezed. It hurt so bad, I winced. Some of the coins fell out and clattered on the floor. “You…have…to,” he growled. “If you don’t, nothing in Ellerae can help you. My time’s up, don’t you see? Might be the coins buy you a few years. Might not. But you have to try.”

  He stared a hole right through me. I felt like shallow water under the summer sun, steaming with the heat. But inside I was frozen solid. No matter how hard he looked at me and willed me to see his madness, I couldn’t thaw. And he knew it.

  I suppose I should’ve listened to him and ridden away.

  But I didn’t.

  Pa left that night. I knew I’d probably never see him again. He didn’t take any coins. He didn’t throttle me and make me promise to flee the city. He just walked downstairs and out the front door. If he said anything to Grams, I didn’t hear it. Nor did I ask her.

  I hid the coins under my bed. The bag was full to bursting, but I shoved it back into the corner where the sun never shined. Thousands more of the little silver discs sat on Pa’s oaky floor, but those I didn’t touch. I left them right where they’d fallen. The only thing that’ll touch them is the dust, I told myself. I don’t want them. I’ve nothing to spend them on.

  After Pa left, Grams and I were all who remained in the house. I didn’t go to school anymore. It didn’t matter. Half the kids had vanished. Half the teachers, too. We left the house only to get food and supplies, and then we scurried home, bolted the door shut, and lived in the shadows.

  No matter that nearly all our hours were spent locked away, we heard. We listened to the shouts in the street. We read the news rags slipped under our door. We heard the mutters at market. And we saw the toll the hours were taking.

  One missing every night.

  For seventy years.

  No one who leaves is ever heard from again.

  No bodies found.

  Ever.

  People hoped it would stop.

  But everyone knew it wouldn’t.

  Every night after Grams went to sleep, I went up to Pa’s room. I knew I shouldn’t have. I knew nothing good would come of it. But even so, I did it. It’s not like I could’ve slept. It’s not as if Pa would’ve come back and made everything better. In truth, I just wanted to watch the streetlamp. I wanted to see if it’d get a little brighter each night.

  And sure enough, it did.

  It must’ve been another year that passed. I can’t really remember it now. My ritual was the same every eve: eat supper with Grams, sing her to sleep, clean up the kitchen, and slink up to the window in Pa’s room. It was so quiet. The world felt empty, and little me the only person left alive. Long after dusk, I’d sit in Pa’s ancient chair and gaze through the glass. There stood the streetlamp, its light as bright as the world ending. No one ever lit it.

  But somehow, it burned.

  And then one night, as I sat there with darkness in my eyes, I saw someone walk beneath the lamp. A man, old and bent, shouldered his way through the shadows and stopped in the pool of pale radiance. My bones went cold inside me. My jaw felt frozen, my blood like ice. The man might’ve been Pa, might not have been. He had Pa’s old hat and brown smoking jacket, but the way he walked was different. He was hunched. His bones were all wrong.

  And as he stood there in the light, waiting for something, he looked up at me.

  To this day I can’t remember what I saw.

  The next morning, dark rumors swirled at market. A sad woman murmured that the city guard, or at least what was left of them, had found an old house at city’s edge. In the house, they’d uncovered three floors worth of art. They’d found sculptures, rare tiles, and rotting rugs. They’d found paintings of people who’d never lived in Ellerae. But that wasn’t what scared everyone. What had everyone all aquiver was that the guards had also found tools, as in mortuary tools. They’d found boxes of scalpels, bone saws, chisels, needles, and butcher knives. All of it had been mixed in with the art. Tools. Hundreds of tools.

  Worse yet, they’d found that all the art had been made of people. The sculptures weren’t made of marble or clay, but of hollowed-out humans covered in plaster. The rugs were woven of skin, the paintings drizzled with blood and viscera, and the tiles fashioned of graven bones. They even found little mounds of white powder, bone powder, the leftovers from whatever horrors had taken place. Whoever had lived in the house had long vanished, but the grisly remains were still there.

  “They wanted us to find it,” the sad woman cursed the house. “They wanted us to be afraid.”

  “Who?” someone else asked.

  But no one could answer.

  I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even terrified. I wasn’t curious. I wasn’t anything.

  I just remembered what Pa had said: ‘Migh
t be the coins buy you time. Might not.’

  Days later, a few hundred folk gathered up every horse, carriage, and blanket in the city. In a huge procession, they took the south road toward the fields beyond Lake Po. I wanted to watch them leave, if only to know whether some horror scooped them up or whether they got away just fine, but Grams wouldn’t let me. “Stay behind locked doors, Mia,” she scolded me. “Stay, stay, stay. Nothing can hurt us here. It’s all a lie. A sweet, terrible lie.”

  She’d lost her mind, same as Pa, only worse.

  But maybe she was right not to let me watch.

  Because the next day when they sent an outrider to see if the procession had made it south, the mayor’s man found only riderless horses, empty carriages, and beds that had been made but never slept in.

  Gone. All of them…gone.

  And the next night, the mayor vanished, too.

  For another year and many months, we stayed in our old house. We snuck out only for food and water, though often we’d go without both. Maybe, I hoped, the coins will protect us. Or maybe we’ll be the last to go missing. During that awful time, I many times thought to take Pa’s coins and flee north like he’d told me. But I couldn’t leave Grams. She needed me. Her mind was empty anymore, and most of the work had fallen on my skinny little shoulders. Besides, with all the horses gone and most of the farmers missing, I’d never make it far. No horses meant I’d have to walk the mountain passes on foot. And no farmers meant no extra food for me to take.

  So we stayed. And we survived. One by one, the houses on Osso went empty. Some people vanished in the night like all the rest. Others tried to walk the southern road and were never heard from again. It became comforting, in a way. After that year and a half, Grams and I were the only ones left on the whole street. There was no curfew anymore. There was no one to enforce it. And so Osso became mine. I raided every cupboard, pilfered every toy, and snatched every knickknack. I turned our silent house into a museum, though sometimes it felt like a mausoleum.

  And then Grams died.

  She went naturally, thank goodness. On autumn’s second night, I found her in her old rocking chair, her eyes wide open. I wasn’t even sad. Pa had left her. Ellerae had rotted around her. I hoped there were angels like Auntie Lessa had said, and that Grams was soaring among them.

  Wherever she’d gone, it was better than our house.

  I went to market six days later. No one else came. It didn’t surprise me. I knew not everyone in the city had disappeared, but the last few survivors were probably boarded up in their houses. Not that it’d do them any good. The mayor’s grandson had vanished from the top room of a seven-story tower. Guards had vanished even after locking themselves in their prisoners’ cells. Husbands, wives, and children had gone missing whether wandering in open fields or sleeping in rooms barred and locked ten times over.

  But no one had seen the culprit. No one had seen anything more than a shadow. Except maybe me.

  With my empty basket swaying in my hand, I walked home. It was a silent walk, but I wasn’t sad. I’d walled off my heart to almost everything. Everything my memory of Gio. I came to the streetlamp, and although the midday sun smoldered behind the clouds, the lamp burned. White as an angel’s teats, Pa would’ve said. Hot as the steam from a fresh pot of noodles.

  On the cobblestones beneath it, I saw a coin.

  And then another.

  And still another.

  Not an accident, I knew. So I followed the trail.

  The coins were for me, I guessed. I didn’t know who put them there, or why, and I didn’t care. If some horror snatched me up as I chased the silver line, I figured I’d lived long enough. I’d outlasted most of Ellerae, after all. Whatever happened now didn’t matter.

  I walked and walked and walked. The coins led me to Osso’s end, then down a half dozen more alleys. I came to the grass at city’s edge. It was browning already. The wind ripped across the fields, cold and biting. The sun didn’t much savor autumn’s arrival, and so it skulked behind walls of grey clouds, never once peeking out at me.

  The trail of coins continued.

  Every six steps, I found one in the grass. For a while I plunked them in my basket, but after a few hundred I gave it up and dropped the basket altogether. Too heavy anyway, I thought. What good are coins if no one’s left to take them?

  A ghost in a girl’s shoes, I crossed the meadow between Ellerae and Lake Po. At lake’s edge, the coins curled westward along the shore. I followed. Around rocks, across beaches, and through thickets they led me. There must’ve been thousands; the wealth of an entire city. On some of the silvers I saw Ellerae’s mayor, smiling and stupid. But others were tarnished and older. Those coins looked tired and salted, as though the sea had swallowed them and spat them out. From Tessera, I guessed. Pa’s coins.

  Is Pa still alive?

  When the coins snaked their way into the swamps west of Lake Po, I worried the trail would end. But no, it didn’t. Someone had taken the time to hammer them to the trees. I’d walk six steps through the shallow, swampy broth, and I’d find another piece of silver, staked through its heart with a six-penny nail.

  If Grams could’ve seen me then, she’d have killed me. I waded, waist-deep, into the mucky water. I saw snakes dangling from branches. I glimpsed buzzards sitting high in the trees, waiting for me to die. If I’d have made the same trek a month ago, the mosquitoes would’ve eaten me alive, but even now at autumn’s beginning, they made a fine feast of me.

  And then, wet and shivering, I crawled out of the muck and onto a rotten little island. My shoeless feet squelched in the mud. Vines as thick as Pa’s forearms hung from trees taller than any tower in Ellerae. The coins stopped. I looked around, swatted another mosquito, and sagged. I was somewhere in the swamp’s middle. I was lost.

  Now where?

  Was this a sick joke?

  Is this what everyone does before they go missing?

  I knew then I’d walked for longer than I’d imagined. The sun had sunk to the horizon, and the sky looked a sickly shade of purple and grey. In the deep shadows beneath the trees, I squinted.

  Is that a light?

  Inside one of the trees?

  No. Can’t be.

  I walked toward the hugest tree on the swamp-island. It was bigger than my house on Osso, this tree, though it looked ready to die. On its black-barked flank, I glimpsed a gaping hole. And coming out of the hole, I saw a pallid light. I don’t know why, but the tree and the light made me want to vomit. The whole place stank, but not of death. It smelled of evil.

  Can’t sleep here.

  Didn’t bring any food.

  I think I may have just killed myself.

  Oh well. Might as well go find what’s making the light.

  I walked toward the light. It reminded me of something Grams had once said about people seeing bright lights before they die. If it were true, I hoped she hadn’t seen it. Not if it looked anything like this.

  I took a deep breath and slipped inside the tree. I still didn’t see the light’s source, but I saw everything else well enough. The tree’s guts looked like the inside of a twisted house. Tapestries hung from stakes high above. Plush red carpets tickled the bottoms of my filthy feet. White tables and chairs stood in the middle of a grand room. A curling stairway wound its way up to places higher in the tree, and another descended through a gaping hole in the floor.

  Tapestries. Carpets. Tables. Chairs.

  All made of people.

  One of these is Gio.

  Anyone with half a brain would’ve run. Not me. I walked up to one of the chairs, saw a sack half-filled with Pa’s old coins, and plucked one of them out.

  I wasn’t really scared until Pa climbed up the stairs and looked at me.

  “Mia,” he said, unsurprised, “You’re here.”

  I looked at him. His clothes moldered on his skinny arms. His pale, hairless scalp looked ready to rot. If someone had asked me to describe him, I’d have said, haunted.
>
  And I’d have been right.

  “Pa…” I backed away and dropped the coin. “What are you doing here?”

  He walked up to the table and snared a silver piece out of the sack. It looked huge in his skinny, almost skeletal fingers. “I hoped you wouldn’t come,” he said.

  “Then…why’d you leave the trail?” I shivered.

  “I had to. No other way.”

  “No other way to what?”

  “To be rid of it.”

  “To be rid of what?”

  “My life.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m tired of it.”

  I almost bolted. But when I looked out into the eve, the swamp scared me enough to keep me inside.

  “Pa…” I felt a tear dribble down my cheek.

  He stared at me. I fell silent.

  “Mia, poor Mia,” he began, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “To be a killer?” I hissed.

  “No. Never.” He looked wounded. “You think I did all this? No. I’m just the one who helps. Who waits. Who knows. It’s my punishment.”

  “I don’t understand, Pa.” My tears rolled down my chin. “Please…you’re scaring me.”

  He hung his head. “I know. And I’m sorry. It’s unforgivable. But it was the price I agreed to. If I hadn’t, I’d have died with Tessera. There’d never have been a Gio. There’d never have been a you.”

  “Pa…who…? Who took all those people? It wasn’t you? Who was it, then? Or…what was it?”

  Pa looked up and down, left and right. His eyes were slitted. He was terrified. “It’s not here now.” Pa shook his head. “It’s gone to claim the last few. And when it’s done, it’ll be my turn.”

  “You knew?” I swallowed my fear for a second and became angry. “You knew all along? Ma and Da? Did you know about them? And Grams? You lied to her? And Gio? Pa, how could you?”

  All the light in Pa’s eyes fled. He glared at me, and I fell silent. If I’d have understood then that the evil shining in him was but a tiny fragment of what awaited me, I’d have run into the swamp and drowned myself.

  But I didn’t.

  Coward.