Planetesimal creation. Deflection, flight and fall. Metavolcanic cradle rocked by the subduction zone.
Nonsensical phrases spill from the chimera’s mouth, all spoken with absolute precision. The creature isn’t psychic. She’s a Sibyl.
“Gillian.”
Emanuel stands at the window closest to the connecting door, speaking into a small amplifying device. His voice floats through the car, tinny and distant.
“I need you to show the Sibyl what you can do with stone. Pick it up and carve it.”
Gillian shakes her head no.
“Gillian, I cannot let you out until you carve the stone. This is imperative.”
There are close to twenty strangers, in all, hands pressed against the glass, watching the chimera’s body bend and twist over the bubbling crucible like soft taffy.
“You said you loved me. How can you do this to me?”
“I do love you. I’ve never not loved you. But you must carve the stone for the Sibyl. She needs to see what you do, to see if you are able to—do what we need you to do at Wormskill.”
“Which is? What?”
Emanuel pauses, then: “Shattuck has kept very close tabs on Jasper, he cares for him as a grandfather. I love him like my own son. But you risk his life if you do not do what I ask.”
Gillian pulls the respirator off her face, ignoring the pain as the small hooks disengage from her skin. Small lines of blood trickle down her forehead and cheeks, dotting her dress. She takes a deep breath. “Fuck your threats. My son can take care of himself.”
She hears the smile in his voice. “I knew there had to be more to you,” it whispers across the car. “Canary in a coal mine, a million of them every year carried out on stretchers, but not you. Never you. What other abilities do you have?”
“So, this is your idea of love.”
“I also love my god, darling. His love comes first.”
“Why are you making me do this?” Gillian shouts her question to the ceiling, ignoring Emanuel’s figure behind the glass. “What is it you want me to do at Wormskill?”
“Just what Shattuck said—retrieve an object and deliver it to Hellynbreuke.”
“Something you need me to carve?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to bring something, some piece of stone, some boulder to life.”
Emanuel’s voice hesitates. “Yes.”
Gillian understands now. She’s seen this happen before, in the mines, among men and women isolated too many years below-ground. “You found a lump of stone, and you want me to turn it into some kind of magical being you can dance around naked—”
“Pick up the stone—”
“—smearing dirt into your faces like little children and chanting at the ground—”
“Pick up the fucking stone or your son dies.”
He has no idea how much of a non-threat his words are. She doesn’t fear for Jasper, he’s smarter than she ever was, wiser and deadlier, and Shattuck’s a drunken old slug—chances are, he’s already dead, and her son slipped away into the city like so much dust. But Gillian lets the respirator drop to the floor. She’s tired and hungry, and wants this over with. So they want to play secret pagan cult to an imaginary earth god? Fine. She’ll carve this marble, then whisper sweet nothings to a lump of slag, probably leftover waste from some old steel mill, and take it to Hellynbreuke. It’s nothing to her. She’s never believed.
The block of Onyx Camello is warm to the touch. Gillian lifts and cradles it in her arms. It’s perfectly cut and polished, with hundreds of layers of cream alternating with caramels and browns, like layers of baby blankets. Gillian cringes. Soft curves of flesh, and the marble lies against her breast, already just the right size—is this what they want her to do? She feels the block shift, the edges soften. “No,” Gillian says, and bites down hard on her tongue. Saliva and blood fill her mouth, and she thinks of the furthest reaches of Obsidia, where industrial sprawl gives way to the ice and chill of the Southern Ocean. A hard and dangerous country, where humans do not live. Glaciers pour from mountains, stream together into a solid moving cliff of ice, rising hundreds of feet in the air; while overhead, seagulls mass and swell, rising and falling with the stiff Antarctic currents, weaving through thunderheads and lightning bolts, at one with both sea and sky.
She turns, and lifts out the block to the chimera, then lets it drop to her feet with a thump. “There. It’s done.” Her arms are slick with sweat, and her body feels like she’s running a fever. Heat from the burning oil prickles the old scars with pain, from the nape of her neck all the way down to just above her knees.
“Nothing.” Emanuel’s voice drips with disappointment.
“No, there’s carving—” Gillian gives the block a light touch with her toe. Gulls, entwined and tangled all over the surface of the stone, beaks and feet and wings morphing in a single mass, as if trying to collide themselves into something larger, more formidable.
“I’m sure there is. We needed to see something more, love. I think you can do more.”
“I told you I don’t know that kind of life.” Gillian crouches, hands on knees as she fights the wave of weak nausea washing through her. “I only know stone.”
Voices rise up behind Emanuel’s, heated and urgent. She hears him replying, and then: “Gillian, I need you to stand up. Turn around and show the Sibyl your back. Show her your scars.”
“I’m not undressing for you. I did what you wanted. Unlock the door. I need fresh air—I’m not completely immune. I’m not immortal.”
“You don’t need to undress, darling. Look at the windows—look at your reflection.”
With a tortured sigh, Gillian rises and turns, letting the light from the windows illuminate her back. A faint image of herself looks back, a slender figure in a light-colored dress, printed with yellow roses. Underneath the dress, the old mine scars glow neon-red.
Heavy traces of a Widmanstätten pattern within her recrystallized structure. Result of a monumental impact-heating event at the time of the arrival of the parent.
Behind the glass, the men and women say nothing. She doesn’t need to see to know what emotions warp their faces. They are looking at her scars, which are a single scar, a single radiating half-whorl of a fingerprint, embedded in her skin. The God, someone whispers. But they don’t understand. The fingerprint is nothing. It’s minuscule. What she encountered in those mine fires, what reached out through the roiling flames, could not truly perceive her existence anymore than she can see the individual fibers beneath her heels. And yet it was not a god, it was only a wounded creature, trying to escape. There are larger things, further down, that fathered them all.
Olivine bronzite chondrite descendent of 4 Vesta. The God cradle awaits her, in the deep. She will take the godhead to the Towers of Pain. She will deliver The God. The chimera takes one last breath from the fumes before collapsing in her seat, head rolled back and eyes closed.
“That’s what we needed to know. Thank you, Gillian. You’re free to go now.” Emanuel’s voice sounds relaxed, relieved as he turns off the intercom. All around her, glassine and shadow figures talk and gesture in bright animation. As the door opens and several men walk into the car, a portion of the roof slides away, and fresh air whips the fumes up into the night. The men pass her without comment, offering only guarded stares, tinged with a bit of fear. Perhaps they are thinking, this is the creature who will bring their God to life. Perhaps they want to worship her as well. Or perhaps, they wish to kill her. Gillian will find out, soon enough.
Along the walkway, several women begin feeding the chain back up into the roof. The men guide the lowering lid back onto the iron box, their hands protected by thick, fireproofed gloves. Gillian hears the little squirt bottle wheezing away, as the young man tends to his chimeric ward. Everything back to normal, of a sort.
“Gillian.” Emanuel stands before her, handsome as ever, a look of concern on his face. “Will you ever forgive me?”
“How lon
g have you been planning this?”
Pain crosses his face, or what he believes to be pain. Now she sees it for what it is, more of a constipation of the truth. And to think she’d ever felt concern for his feelings, and guilt at the lack of her own.
“Please, don’t bother trying to lie. You never do it very well, I could always tell.”
“Really?” Emanuel appears genuinely offended. “How disappointing. I thought I lied very well.”
“You were in Wormskill far longer than a few months.”
“Yes.” He leads her out of the car, and through a hidden side door onto the narrow walkway, now empty and dark. They stand alone between the walls, with the group rushing about inside, and the floating city outside. “I was there several years—we all were.” He gestures to the men and women. “In the middle of disinterring the cemetery, we found something. Not a body or a monument—a stone, but not a stone. Something more. A woman with us, a chimera, would breath the fumes from the mine fires seeping up through the ground, and she began to interpret—it spoke to us through her. Broken bits of dreams, equations, images—visions of a future far beyond our comprehension.” Emanuel takes Gillian’s arms in his hands, squeezing them tight in his excitement. “We transported it out of the cemetery, took it someplace safe. We did everything, worked every kind of magic, every kind of science. Nothing. Our Sibyl only gave us bits and pieces, but nothing we could use. Most of the group remained. Shattuck and I and a few others came back to the city eventually, but only to find something that would work, so we could go back and free it. Free him. He is the son of a God, trapped in stone, and he needs someone who can read and carve away that prison to release him. The moment I met you, the moment I saw what you could do with stone, I knew.”
“Whatever your Sibyl said, she was wrong. The fumes from those fires—they’re toxic, Emanuel. You know that. They don’t open the third eye, they shut everything down. She was poisoning herself, she was hallucinating, dying. You were probably all hallucinating.”
“You said it yourself, it’s a different kind of speaking, and the Sibyls understand it because of what they are. You also said, it’s a different kind of being alive. And you can bring it to life, because of whatever you are.”
Gillian shakes her head. “Stones are not alive. I’ve told you before. Earth, metal, rocks—it’s not life. Not that kind of life. I can’t help you.”
Emanuel presses Gillian close to him. His breath smells warm, like the fumes of the burning oil. She feels herself grow small in his arms. She doesn’t fight him. Now is not the time. His lips brush her ears, and his voice pours into her lungs.
“You will read that stone, and you will bring it to life and convince it to reveal the true of name of his Father to us, as I know you can. You will free him, and together we will take him to Hellynbreuke. And then you and he will free our one true God who is imprisoned there, you will free everything there, everything that slumbers and waits and dreams, and bring down all the false temples, destroy all the false prophets and faiths. No more waiting for Obsidia. No more searching the ocean depths for a god from another time and space who can’t be bothered to do more than dream eternity away, a being that doesn’t even exist. Our God is here, and His time is now.”
Gillian raises her lips to meet his. “And what if it’s not the son of a god?”
“Ridiculous. How could he be anything else? What else could he be?”
“Something worse? Worse than a god, even?”
“What could be worse than a god?”
Gillian closes her eyes.
In the still heart of the night, when even the stars appear to fall asleep and slip from the sky, Gillian creeps through the train again, tracing her path from earlier in the evening. Empress moves in inches down this portion of the track, more rocking cradle than racehorse, and what little light and movement she’d seen before in the compartments has vanished. Either all the passengers are asleep, or they are elsewhere. Or perhaps, they watch her secret progress in the dark, lidless eyes dilated and shining like stagnant puddles of oil. Her heart beats in sharp, painful thumps against her ribs, and she holds her breath, letting it out only when she’s between cars, afraid even those exhalations will be detected, and she’ll be sent back to her cabin.
When she finds the first windowless car with the hollowed-out contours in its floor, she stops, and lies down in the depression, settling in against the thick carpet lining the strange curves. With her back against the floor, Gillian stares up into the nothingness of the car. The moorings of her mind loosen, as they did long ago, when she first taught herself this false escape from the mines, when the thought of all that rock pressing around and onto her threatened to send her screaming into madness. In the compleat dark, there would be no tunnel. There would be no machine-carved ceilings and walls. Overcome by the vertigo of losing all sense of up or down, the rock at her back unfurled into bituminous wings, and she would thrust forward and travel through the darkness of space, falling until she flew, endlessly plummeting and soaring, free of the constraints of physical space and time.
But this is a train, not a tunnel, and she is surrounded not by the earth but by a shuddering, moving machine. A carpeted floor is no substitute for wings of stone, and she cannot escape the relentless pounding of the Empress, her unstoppable pistons and wheels. Feldspar rushes toward them, closer with every second, and everything else in her life fades to grey. She knew it from the moment Shattuck spoke the name. Wormskill will be the end of her. Yes, she whispers to the night. All Obsidians know how they will die. This was always meant to be.
The train’s horn sounds out, three piercing sobs. Gillian jolts out of her vision and sits up, noting that she can see the formation of shapes and shadows, both inside the train and out. A large mass of light throbs and glows in the far distance to the left, as though the entire car had turned to glass. Empress moves toward it in slow, rhythmic bursts of the engines. Gillian sits in the hollow, knees up to her chin, watching the light take shape. It’s phosphorescent, a luminous bile green that with each pulse casts the shadows away, illuminating everything with a sickly glow. They are traveling through a part of Obsidia Gillian knows nothing about, high on a trestle, passing a forest of needle-thin towers and twisting spires; and some colossal being that glows like the aurora australis, that moves like a thunderstorm, resides in their midst. She feels like she’s the only human left in the world, the only thing left alive. The train continues its slow pace, blasting the horns with military precision, as if pleading with the light to let it pass unscathed. Gillian slides around and down into the hollow, curling up until she’s nothing more than a hard ball of flesh and bone, eyes pressed tight against the curves of her knees. And still she sees it, feels the light trickle into her veins like fire ants swarming into the ground. Empress of Devastation slides past the light, and Gillian senses the luminous creature turning upon the train one single, unblinking, cyclopean eye: it sees her.
The eye closes, and the light fades, and the train moves on. Gillian is left alone in the dark.
Because, it knows, and she knows.
She belongs to something else.
Part Three
Ride easy, lover:
Surrender to the land
Your heart of anger.
Early in the morning, five mornings since Empress of Devastation departed from Highgate and traversed over half the length of the city, through the choked inner core of factories and train yards and far past the northernmost suburbs and warehouse districts, the train slides into the skeleton of Feldspar’s long-abandoned commuter station, wheels squealing to full stop in explosions of wet clouds. Gillian only fully wakes up when the engines quit their shivering beneath her seat: it’s the utter absence of noise that shocks the sleep fully away. Sunlight sifts through the dust-coated windows, strong and bright: outside, she sees the rib cage of the rooftop soaring in parallel arcs overhead, broken glass and iron fretwork binding each beam like patchwork sails. Gillian pulls her sleepin
g mask down, and unlatches the window, pressing her nose against the narrow crack. The air is clean and crisp—it smells wide, a quality she never thought air could contain. I can hear myself breathe. Wonder steals over her, so heady that it takes a second look at the small crowd milling on the platform to realize that everyone else has disembarked. They’re waiting for her. The wonder burns away. She pushes her fingers out the window, letting the sun and cool air play over her skin. “The last morning,” she whispers. “The last day.”
She joins Emanuel on the platform, placing her portmanteau next to his before walking over to the far edge, beyond the train’s caboose. The rails lead back through low ruins to a bridge crossing a narrow gorge: it is after the gorge that Obsidia proper begins.
“They dug the gorge to stop the fires. It goes down for almost a mile.” The young man walks up behind her—following her, no doubt, to make sure she doesn’t run away. He no longer wears the ill-fitting jacket, only the slacks and shirt, untucked and flapping at his waist. “I think they were going to fill it, but—you know. Public funding, red tape, et cetera. It will be centuries before it’s finished, if ever.”
“It wouldn’t have worked, anyway,” Gillian says. “There’s not enough fly ash in the world to fill that gorge.”
“As long as people keep being born, there’s enough ash.”
Beyond the gorge, Obsidia fans across the distant horizon, a rusting blight on the land. From this vantage point, it’s the length of the city that impresses, not its width; and here she can also see for the first time how high the Cordillera del Tenebroso truly is, as though the earth punched a hole through its own skin, thrusting the mountains up to bat away the sun, the sky, the stars.
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors Page 23