Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors
Page 26
The chimera sits at the edge of the culm, her faceless bulk looming over the lightless hole of Feldspar. Beyond the gorge, Obsidia shimmers across the horizon, consuming the sun. Gillian curls her broken flesh into a sitting position. The chimera does not acknowledge her. Blood dribbles down her surface, drying in brown lines. She smells like freshly-forged steel. Together they watch the light fade from the sky. Gillian sits under the lights of the galaxy, watching cyclopean tentacles comprised of infinite suns whorl overhead and past the horizon. They came from those bright spiraling arms, these horrible, enigmatic gods of Obsidia, their dark bodies plummeting into the earth and the oceans. But something was already here. They are not the oldest Gods. No, not even elder. Not at all.
The air is hot and still. Gillian loses track of time. All around and above them, indigo night stretches past, an infinite, eternal train. By the time streaks of grey light appear at the eastern curve of the land, the chimera’s smoking stone frame brushes against Gillian’s Carrara-cold skin. Neither of them breathe, as if neither wishes to break open this peaceful spell, and reveal the end. Gillian knows it’s coming. She can feel the chimera in her mind, rising up from the cacophony of her life like the impassive Torres del Pain. Unstoppable. Undeniable. Clean.
What was in the tunnel with you? What waits for you?
Gillian opens her mouth, and the black night rushes into. Her mother, slipping away in the dying light, leaving the failed creation she called daughter behind in the subterranean night. There was no tunnel. His mouth. There were never any mines—Morwyn’s childhood memories, all of them. Gillian never had a childhood. She only had the dark, and the obscenity she called father and lover, building her up from scratch once more, fusing bones and blood, silicates and nickel-iron, time and time again. It never stopped, all those thousand permutations, all those thousands of selves, brought to life and ground back into red mist and dust. It had to stop. But it was like fucking a mountain. Like fucking a world. She never knew his name. She couldn’t have pronounced it, anyway.
Tell me the truth of yourself, Gillian. The deepest truth.
“Peridot. My daughter. Down in the dark, in the abyss. I didn’t want her to be like me. Damaged. Abandoned. Forgotten. And I knew I would do the same terrible things to her that my mother did to me. I knew I would destroy her and leave the bits behind, like she did with me. Because I’m like Morwyn. I can’t feel a thing. There’s nothing inside. There’s only stone. And that’s what I do. I mine things. I bring things out of the deep.”
Deeper.
“I did them to her anyway. Bashed her head in with a rock. There wasn’t any light. I had to feel the bits of skull to make sure she was dead. Her brains and blood, all over my hands. Under my nails. I could never get it out, no matter how hard I sucked them clean.”
Deeper.
“I knew it was the thing I must do, but I couldn’t leave her behind. It would have found them, like it found me. And then…. I had to hide her. From him. From myself. So I dug her up—and—put her back. Inside.”
Deeper.
“I still feel her bones on my teeth, taste her on my tongue, every time I say her name.”
Silence. The sky squeezes its velvet fist. Stars blur, prickling Gillian’s eyes with tears as they fall to the ground. The chimera places a malformed hand on Gillian’s chest.
Surrender your sorrow, and rejoice. You feel her because—
All across the valley of Feldspar, all across the broken land and burnished sky, everything stills as the morning sun crests the horizon, fire and light of the world birthed in a single thought, detonating in their minds like the midnight sun.
She is still alive, in the deep.
“I am the deep.”
Part Four
I ride the wings of the morning sun,
and dwell in the uttermost arms of the deep
When the sky is deep morning grey, casting a muted silver sheen over all the land as if in the iron grip of a storm, Gillian rises. Her chthonic creation remains seated, bulging eyes open and unblinking. She touches a limestone fold: it crumbles to the ground like crushed pumice. The rest of the hulking mass follows. It sounds like the rustling of feathers. When it ends, Gillian reaches down, plucks out a small, blood-stained square of Arihant Spider Green, a delicate leaf carved on its smooth face. She holds it, hard, until her nails pierce her filthy palm, until she opens her hand and finds the stone gone, only the impression of the leaf remaining, a faint outline of glowing green. Pale green, like peridot. Someday the stone will appear again, whole and unstained, resting in the iron-bone palm of her daughter’s hand, rising from the earth into a clean morning sun.
Now, she will go down.
It isn’t necessary for her to wander, searching for the way. She only has to lean out, drop from the edge of the culm, let the invisible tentacle of perception hook into her heart, drag her below the surface into the endless, dreamless deep. Gillian floats through the ruins like the terrible train of her dreams, and Feldspar flows around her, mute with age and the tired defeat of time: buildings of dust and ash and memories, bricks forged of blood and pain, and the voracious kiss of underground fire, consuming until there is nothing left to eat save itself. There, in the center of the town, surrounded by buildings stacked like broken jaws, the avenues unfurl to reveal an underground train yard. Gillian hovers at the overpass, a black lightning-shot Dark Emperiador chryon floating in steel-flecked air, looking down into a pit of rails and rotting ties. So many fingers of iron and steel, all of them pointing into the low wide mouth of a tunnel. It is as if she is staring into her soul.
It waits down there. It stares up through all the layers and strata of rock and time, and it sees her. She knows, because the gaze has never left her, not since her mother squeezed and coaxed her squalling body from some profane crucible within the world’s core, not since the Welsh witch Morwyn split her apart and ran, leaving the spurting wreckage to the geologic being that fathered her. It is the gaze of her true self, a self not of this world, this space, this time—the self that never left the darkness, that always knew what she would have to sacrifice, how far she would have to travel within to save her daughter. And she will descend until she finds that geologic womb where the silence is three billion years long, and she will break herself apart. Gillian will rend her Carrara-cold tombstone of a body, draw Peridot up and out of every sliver of metal, blood and bone, and forge her daughter back into life.
And there is nothing now. No birds, no crackling of broken glass, no keening of wind. Her heart beats once, twice: and stops. The overpass slides away as she pushes off, and like the old dream, Gillian soars, slow and serene, down through the carapaces of the factories, over the rusting bones of the rails. The city rolls back and fades away and she is diving into the maw of the tunnel, and there is nothing else except the long fall and the anthracite void, the billion-year smell of the earth, and something older, someplace further than she has ever gone before.
And then there is the crack of wings, distant and sharp, darting through the opening of a sunless door, plummeting past the black and into—
These stories first appeared in the following publications:
“Horses,” first published in This is the Summer of Love: A Postscripts New Writers Special #18, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, PS Publishing, 2009. Copyright © 2009 Livia Llewellyn.
“At the Edge of Ellensburg,” first published in Short and Sweet: Original Novellas by Erotica’s Hottest Writers, edited by Michael Hemmingson, Blue Moon Books, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Livia Llewellyn.
“Teslated Salishan Evergreen,” first published in A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, edited by Janet Chiu and Jason Erik Lundberg, Two Cranes Press, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Livia Llewellyn.
“The Engine of Desire,” first published in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder, Dark Scribe Press, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Livia Llewellyn.
“Jetsam,” first published in S
ybil’s Garage No. 4, edited by Matthew Kressel, Senses Five Press, 2007. Copyright © 2007 Livia Llewellyn.
“The Four Hundred Thousand,” first published at Subterranean Online, edited by William Schafer, Subterranean Press, Fall 2007. Copyright © 2007 Livia Llewellyn.
“Brimstone Orange,” first published online at Chiaroscuro Magazine, edited by Brett Alexander Savory, 2005. Copyright © 2005 Livia Llewellyn.
“Take Your Daughters to Work,” first published in Subterranean #6, edited by William Schafer, Subterranean Press, 2007. Copyright © 2007 Livia Llewellyn.
“Omphalos” is original to this volume. Copyright © 2011 Livia Llewellyn.
“Her Deepness,” first published at Subterranean Online, edited by William Schafer, Subterranean Press, Winter 2010. Copyright © 2010 Livia Llewellyn.
About the Author
Livia Llewellyn was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. In 1994 she moved to Manhattan, working various odd jobs in coffee shops, bookstores, theatres and movie sets until finding her calling as secretary-by-day in the oldest publishing company in America, and writer-by-night of erotica and dark fiction. She’s currently at work on her second collection of stories, and a novel. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.