Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  The canary hops from the tree, flying over to a half-finished obelisk of pale limestone. All across the rectangular courtyard, pallets of tombstones are scattered, flat slates of stone ready to be hauled into the school workshops, where names, dates and lyrical bits of memento mori will be carved into their blank faces. Gillian rubs the scars on her hands, then picks at the dirt under her short nails. She’s spent the past five years learning how to draw—first on crisp onionskin, then balsa wood, and finally stone—folded hands and flippers holding prayer books, mining and Masonic symbols, skulls encircled by elaborate borders, clusters of violets and rose blooms grasped by stately demons and leviathans. She even carved herself once, as an impassive-faced angel of death gliding across the cool surface of silver-shot Dark Emperiador marble, lifting the departed soul into an endless sky. She doesn’t know who the tombstone was for, if it now resides in one of the vast cemeteries scattered throughout Obsidia, and if so, who or what lies beneath it. Still, it pleases her to know that it’s out there, somewhere. Like most of the working-class residents of the city, Gillian can’t afford a plot of land and a neatly-carved marker. When she dies, she’ll burn like the coal she once helped rip from the lands, and her ashes will find their final resting place in a holding pond of toxic sludge. All that will remain will be her face etched in marble, until time itself wipes that away, too.

  “Another year without lemons. Shattuck will be furious.” Emanuel Pallesynd, her teacher for this last year, and her lover for the past four, walks up to her, one hand lightly touching the small of her waist as he reaches out to the withering tree, and tugs a deformed nub of fruit from a branch. “Great God, look at it. It’s almost obscene.”

  “What did he expect?” Gillian examines the folds of the fruit, her fingers caressing the rough skin of his hand. “We told him it wouldn’t work. The courtyard doesn’t get enough sun, the soil is full of chemicals, and lemons are tropical, anyway. We’re too far south.” She smiles as his hand slides down the folds of her limp cotton dress. The lemon falls to the ground with a weak thump as she touches his wrist. “Too far south, Mr. Pallesynd. Someone might be watching.”

  Emanuel removes his hand but leans in, and Gillian feels his grey-flecked beard brushing the back of her neck. Heat drifts from his body through her dress, and despite the stifling air, she welcomes it. Emanuel speaks in measured tones against the curve of skin, as if imparting another lesson. “Everyone else is gone. In ten minutes, you’ll have your certificate and your placement. We’re free to do as we please.”

  Gillian watches the canary lift from the tip of the obelisk. It circles once, then darts into the rectangle of the sunless workshop door, as if the shadows had swallowed it whole. The sun pours down, sending beads of sweat trickling underneath the limp black curls of her bobbed hair, all the way down her scarred back. The rectangle throbs and looms in the light, grows larger. Images erupt from long-forgotten memories. A sunless city, an empty train track, a silent tunnel opening wide…. Gillian looks away from the door, blinking hard until the dark breaks up into sparkling fireworks behind her crinkled eyelids. She hasn’t thought of that nightmare in years.

  “Free.” She smiles at her lover, at his handsome face and soft brown eyes. Emanuel is almost twice her age, yet the boy still lives so lightly on his skin, in his heart. If she told him how she felt, how little she felt, that boy would die. She’s sure of it. “As free as one can be in Obsidia.”

  Emanuel bats at the dying lemon tree with his worn Panama hat. Dead leaves drift like feathers to the bone-dry ground. “Not very free, is it?”

  “Free enough for any human,” Gillian says.

  Emanuel nudges the hat back onto his shining forehead. “Free enough for any Obsidian, you mean.”

  “Well. Yes, I suppose.”

  “Like I said, then. Not very free.”

  “And like I said,” Gillian says as she hoists her heavy tool satchel onto one shoulder, “free enough.”

  Distant clocks chime the half-hour as they walk across the courtyard, passing through shadows of half-carved statues and disassembled mausoleum friezes. In the far corner, an aging priest from the local parish gives a benediction to a completed tomb, his webbed hands shaking as he recites the words first in the city’s own language—a mish-mash of English, Welsh and Spanish, which they all speak—then in the Old Language. Gillian has never truly believed in the Gods, but nonetheless she bows her head as they halt, listening in respectful silence with Emanuel. For a moment, the river of heavy traffic outside the building fades, and there’s only the voice, the harsh Language, the glossy drone of flies. And then the ceremony ends: the priest drops heavily onto a half-carved column, panting several times before taking a sip of aguardiente from a glass straw while a young novice squirts warm ocean water from a gilded spray bottle over his scaly face and cenote-round eyes. Gillian leads the way, almost skipping through the workroom and into the brown tiled hall that leads to the upstairs offices.

  “What’s your hurry, Miss Jessamine?” Emanuel laughs.

  “I want to find out where I’m going,” Gillian calls back as she dashes up the stairs to the warren of offices on the fifth floor.

  “You don’t need to run—you always know where you’re going.”

  “No, I don’t,” Gillian says to herself. “I just don’t want to go back to where I’ve been.”

  Headmaster Shattuck’s office is at the northernmost corner, overlooking the chaos of the seven avenues that merge into Marketside Circus. As Gillian pauses at the top of the stairwell to catch her breath and compose herself, Hingham Pitts, a fellow student, appears in the narrow doorway before her, grim as the statues in the courtyard. Down the hall, a stack of yellowing papers collapses onto a pile of ledgers like dandruff flakes.

  “Where did they place you?” Gillian asks. Pitts only snorts and shakes his head—it’s enough of an answer to know it wasn’t where he wanted. “You’re last,” he says as they pass each other. “Best for last, right? Good luck.” He disappears down the stairs, and Gillian proceeds to the crooked end of the hall, mulling over his fate. Like many of the students, he’s not much more than a competent carver. Most will end up as caretaker’s assistants, sweeping floors and mending damaged markers. That can’t be me, she tells herself. After all I’ve been through to get to this moment, I deserve more.

  “Enter,” a voice calls from inside before she can knock. Gillian pushes the protesting wood door open.

  “Miss Jessamine.” Headmaster Nathanial Shattuck stands at the closed windows behind his desk, staring through the greasy panes onto the streets below as he cleans his glasses with the edge of his coat. Gillian lets out a discreet cough, though she knows it’s useless. Shattuck rarely opens the windows, preferring to marinate in the furnace of stale air.

  “Are you well? You seem pale—paler than usual.”

  “It’s the heat, sir. It’s usually not this warm in June.” Gillian closes the door and stands with her hands clasped at her waist, a penitent pose that has served her well in the past, when she’s been in trouble—and she feels like trouble hovers somewhere close.

  “And your son, the tailor’s apprentice—Jasper, is it? I haven’t seen him in some months, is he well also?”

  Jasper Ioen. Her thirteen-year-old ticket out of the mines, born when she was only twelve. She never told him he was born a half-mile underground, that her last act as a canary was carrying his naked, bloody body to the surface of the world. “He’s very well, sir, thank you. Still a tailor’s apprentice, but his skills are quite advanced for his age. He’s hoping to become salaried by summer’s end.”

  Shattuck nods his approval and perches his glasses back onto his nose, then motions to a carved coupe glass on his desk, filled with a clear yellow liquid.

  “Go on, take it. To celebrate.”

  Gillian picks up the coupe, and takes a sip. Cheap champagne—sour, warm and flat. “Very good, thank you,” she says, wiping her grimace against the back of her wrist.

>   Shattuck picks up the bottle, and drains it into his glass. “Lemonade would have been better. Goddamn tree. Well, next year.”

  Trying to hide her smile, Gillian walks to the side of the room, where twelve headstones rest on wooden easels. Each one is a commission, carved from start to finish by each of the twelve graduating students for a paying customer. Above the stones, onionskin sketches and mock-ups are pinned to the flocked velvet wall.

  “It’s like a private museum exhibition,” Gillian says. “Or an art gallery.”

  “I suppose,” Shattuck answers, his voice hesitant. “A few of these slabs might make the dead rise in protest—not all of your classmates have the skills for carving, I’m afraid.”

  Gillian gulps down the rest of the champagne, embarrassed to admit she agrees with him.

  “Mr. Pallesynd tells me you have an inordinate talent with marble,” Shattuck says, “and I concur.” Shattuck walks over to her piece, and runs his hands across the polished slab of Afyon Violet, covered in a tangling of trilobites, ammonites and gastropodes resting under a canopy of shooting stars—her final project for the school. “He says you’re able to speak to the stone, to bring it to life even as you’re slicing into it.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call it speaking. More like coaxing.” It’s a joke, but Shattuck doesn’t seem amused. His fingertip runs along the lettering of the memento mori phrase she carved in the center.

  “‘I ride the wings of the morning sun, and dwell in the uttermost arms of the deep.’ Did you come up with that yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Quite moving. The lettering is exquisitely fluid, almost cursive, like a pen wrote this instead of a chisel and hammer. ‘Of the deep’—you were a canary in your childhood, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sent ahead of the miners to make sure there were no poisonous fumes?”

  “I—yes, sir.” She was going to tell him more, tell him how they would send her into the newly-made tunnels, after the colossal drilling machines had pulled out of them like satisfied lovers; how she wandered the subterranean labyrinth searching for coal seams with no light, no mask, no water; how her hands pressed against stone walls still smoking from the bite of the drills, how she heard and felt and smelled the living earth; how she always found the coal. How she woke up screaming at night, dreaming that the seam had somehow seen her, had found her first….

  “Miss Jessamine?” The headmaster sits at his desk now, files and ledgers spread out before him. “I think you’ve wandered away from me.”

  “Oh.” Gillian blushes. “I’m sorry. Memories of the mines—they took me back. I try not to think about that part of my life anymore.”

  “Then I should apologize. I didn’t mean to bring up such painful times.” Shattuck appears genuinely concerned, and Gillian believes him. He’s something of a crotchety old man, a bit eccentric at times, but he’s never been deliberately cruel to any of the students.

  “I’ll be fine, sir. That’s all in the past. I’m ready for my assignment. I’m ready to start something new.”

  Shattuck holds up a round finger. “Of course you are, and of all in your class, you most deserve it—no, no, don’t be embarrassed, you know it’s the truth. Now let me see, where did I….”

  Now he’s the one who’s lost, in a blizzard of memos. Gillian downs the rest of the champagne in one open-throated pour while the headmaster shuffles through the sleeves of a brown leather portfolio. He draws out a folder with her name on it, and holds page after page to the low light of the banker’s lamp, occasionally glancing up at her. Gillian feels the scars on her back throb with a phantom ache—the heat and press of her corset always aggravate them so—but she resists the urge to hunch against the back of the chair like some animal satisfying an itch. The scars are the remnants of a mine explosion that happened when she was seven, an incident she remembers only in liquid gold flashes, and even then only anymore in troubled dreams. They cover her body from scalp to soles in a patchwork quilt, some fine and spider-thin, others thick and brutally jagged, as though the mine had tried to sew her back together even as it tore her apart, a recalcitrant creature of coal fixing a broken human toy.

  “Excellent! Here it is.” He lifts a file with the name HELLYNBREUKE scrawled across it in green marker, and opens it up. Gillian clasps her hands together into a tight fist. Her middle name, Gobaith, is Welsh for “hope.” She has spent much of her life hoping, and much of her life suppressing that emotion—it so rarely transforms into reality. And yet. Dare she give into hope now?

  Shattuck sees her reaction and smiles. “Yes, Hellynbreuke. Tell me what you know of it.”

  “A private necropolis, very historic,” she begins, keeping her voice Roman Sicillia calm—chilly, creamy gold. “The most perfect examples of funerary art in the world are located there, created by the most skilled artists in Obsidia.

  Family mausoleums carved entirely of single, seamless blocks of anthracite and amber, monuments created from giant geodes and other rare mined crystals—or so I’ve heard. There are no photos or drawings of it that I’ve been able to find. I’ve heard rumors that it’s located somewhere within El Torres del Pain, accessible only to the highest levels of government and industry officials. I’ve also heard—” Gillian stops.

  “Go on.”

  Gillian shakes her head. “No, it’s stupid. Just rumors.”

  Shattuck smiles. “Such as?”

  “Oh. Artifacts and creatures ripped out of the mountains and ocean, kept in collection rooms and holding pens. Objects of profane power, doorways and portals to other worlds—” Gillian breaks off once again. Shattuck stares at her, visibly impressed.

  “Well. How did you find all this out?”

  “When something interests me, I become—determined.”

  “Evidently. Tell me something else, have you ever heard of Wormskill?

  “No, I’m not familiar with that name.”

  Shattuck waves an aging sheaf of papers in her direction. “It’s a small company cemetery up north in the middle of Feldspar—the first district, the humble birthplace of our vast city. At its peak of production, Feldspar produced two hundred thousand tons of coal a day, and hundreds of thousands of ties for the railroad tracks, as well as the great engines that would begin burrowing through the mountains to the ocean beyond. It was only when a fire, most likely started by the illegal practice of burning trash, spread underneath most of Feldspar, destroying the mines and rendering the city limits uninhabitable—”

  Gillian interrupts his lesson. “I know about Feldspar’s history, but I thought it was quarantined.”

  “Oh, it has been, for over a hundred years now, along with the cemetery. However, about twenty years ago, several descendants were given permission to move their ancestors’ bodies from the city limits.”

  “So, Wormskill no longer exists, then.”

  “Yes. However.” The Headmaster hands her a slip of parchment and turns to the window. Gillian reads the spidery words. One carved quartz or metal reliquary, which may or may not contain the partial remains of an employee of New Y’ha-nthlei Steelworks.

  Outside, clouds move above Avenida Providencia and Marketside Circus. The room sinks into murky grey.

  Gillian’s mother was a cool creature, not one to grace her daughter with compliments or smiles. She gave Gillian nothing, not even a history, not even her father’s Tehuelche name—assuming her mother had even known it. The woman disappeared in the middle of summer, the last Gillian spent above the ground. Gillian holds that image close to her heart: silver-haired Morwyn Jessamine giving her half-breed daughter a tight-lipped nod of farewell before slipping into a flame city sunset choked with black telegraph wires. Was it relief on her mother’s imperious face that she’d seen? Regret? The image, like an empty grave, holds no knowledge to illuminate her with. She only knows how it made her feel even to this day, to think of her mother, like hope, abandoning her with the setting sun.

  Shattuck open
s his mouth, but Gillian already knows what he’s going to say.

  “You want me to retrieve what was left behind. That’s my new job. You want me to go to Wormskill.”

  The Headmaster holds an envelope up, near to the lamp’s weak flame, so that she can see the writing. Miss Gillian Gobaith Jessamine, Hellynbreuke Necropolis is typed on its cream front, the flaps sealed by a dark oval of gold-flecked wax, imprinted with the official city seal.

  “Not me, my dear. The Minister of Necropoleis wants you to retrieve the item, and deliver it to Hellynbreuke, after which you will remain there permanently, as director of Hellynbreuke’s carving and restoration shops. All those beautiful monuments, and you’ll be in charge of them all.” Shattuck leans forward, sliding the letter toward her fingertips. His watch chain clicks against the desk. She recognizes the metal, knows its qualities, its name.

  “Gillian Jessamine of Hellynbreuke, the cemetery queen,” he says. “How does that sound?”

  It’s pyrite.