The monsters dance, celebrating the light-less night. Lantern slowly comes near Ichi, as Broom sidles up and holds Ichi as if being playful. From behind them comes Sewing Kit trotting, swinging its hand of scissors above it. The master looks up at the dark sky, their rachises spiking in endearment.
Now’s the time.
Of course they’ve all been quite preoccupied during the night. They needed to steal one thing from one of the human guests. One thing that the master would never tolerate in the House.
Broom holds Ichi higher up, and she is now a little higher in the air than anyone else—even the master. With its hand Sewing Kit opens Ichi’s chest; there is a swirl of sawdust. Lantern blows the oil it found left in itself, just a little bit, but enough for the already flammable sawdust. Ichi holds the lighter—that one thing they had to go through a lot of trouble to get—in front of her open torso. And her chest explodes.
The light is simply too much for the master. The master falters, yelling, shrieking, utterly confused. On the other side Mirror reflects the light and brightness doubles. At the moment’s impulse Ichi takes off from Broom and dives into the sea of feathers which is the panicking master. Their downy terminals catch fire first, and the firmer feathers and rachises follow. The two, Ichi and the master, burn and burn, bright and hot, her sawdust and its down exploding here and there from time to time. But then she feels she is running low on fuel. “More!” she cries. “More!”
“But…” Mosquito Net looks horrified. “But Ichi, I don’t know what’ll happen to you!”
“No no Net, you back away! Just give me—”
“But Ichi!”
“Umbrella!”
They have no idea what this word should mean to them. But somewhere deep, very deep inside them, something stirs. Umbrella.
And then without thinking, Broom snaps its bristles and throws them into the flame. Mosquito Net absorbs what little oil is left in Lantern with its ends, rips them off and adds them to the fire. Parasol does its best to send air by flapping its large, untorn canopy fabric over the burning two. Snap, bang, ping. Boom. Strange sounds echo, as everyone tries to help with everything they can spare.
Blast.
Mosquito Net tries to throw more in, but the Dishes stop it. Non-flammable things are now doing their best to not let go of the flammables. Without knowing, they know they cannot bear another loss. At the corner of her eye Ichi sees them, and finds herself relieved because her friends are safe, more or less. She feels something in her slipping away, and she does not wish for others to experience this. Is this what Umbrella might have felt as it was consumed by the master? The master is burning all around her, together with the bits from other monsters. Ichi is aware that her wooden parts will hold longer than the master, but how long, no way knowing that.
And then from within the fuzzy darkness around her comes the master’s temporary face, zooming, twisted and warped. Ichi flinches, just like the human guests of the House. “Do you even know what you’re doing?” the master’s voice is almost ashes now, and Ichi has to strain to hear them—even now, she has to hear them; it’s their master, after all. “Without me they cannot go on. They’ll turn into dust in the end, without my making them anew, letting them lift the weight of their memories off their bodies. Eating them once a month is just an inevitable sacrifice for their futures. Do you know what you’re doing?”
Ichi grinds her teeth. But through them she says, “All I know is we trinket monsters love each other, master.” Her own voice echoes as if from a long distance. “Even if you regard us as nothing but trinkets. And I don’t want to lose another one to you. This is all I know. All we know.”
At that, the remnants of her master shudder, and back away, just a little.
And with her wooden hands slowly burning on, Ichi embraces the last of the master.
“Experience the horror,” she calls to the human guests, with her voice a little cracked, a little like starlings’ cries. “The extraordinary monsters, all real.” But the guests are already experiencing the horror, they think—the master of the House looks more terrifying than the things the House’s flyer promises. She is bald, her skin strangely charred, marred, and inside her oversized robe, in her chest, something seems to perpetually buzz, giving the humans an image of a half-dead entity, maggots eating their way in and out of her body.
The master goes back into the House and looks around at the monsters. She is not yet quite used to the new structure of her body: her torso made from a part of Mosquito Net and Parasol, stuffed with the former master’s remnants; her legs and arms consist of bits of Broom, Lute and Loom; her eyes are glistening fragments from chipped Dishes and Mirror, her jaw formerly the curving edge of Cracked Pot. All sewn together clumsily with the hands and limbs of Sewing Kit.
“Master.” Broom comes to her. “I just heard one of the humans laugh at me as they peeped in, and they said I was too short for a broom. I think I need more bristles. I used to have more, didn’t I?” Then it frowns. “But when was that?”
The new master sighs. “Well. Okay. Let’s do something about it later. Tonight, can you just bear with it the way it is?”
“Of course I can. But master, why am I so short? Why so scarce? What happened to this ragged end of me?”
The master of the House smiles and touches that ragged end of it. Of course, after letting them offer these bits, in order to let them stay, the only thing she could do was to use the remnants of the master’s feathers and remake them all. Let them let go of the weight of the memory of that horrible fire—even if the remaking made her weaker by day. Now she wonders what happens if she goes on like this, without consuming another monster for nutrients. But of course she cannot bring herself to even think of that deed. “It means you are a sweet, kind trinket, and I’m really proud of you.” And then Broom beams. “But our job here is to scare the guests, so it won’t do if they laugh at you. I’ll think of something to do about it, I promise.”
Broom nods and scurries away to its post. Tomorrow, Broom will not remember the promise she just made. Even so the promise will be kept, every promise ever made will be kept here, at least till the day she falls.
She looks across the room to see Lantern and Lighter snuggling. She wonders, maybe, there used to be a Flint Stone to pair with Lantern. Before the former master forbade any light source from the House. Lighter’s oil has been thoroughly drained for safety. She wonders, maybe, the former owner forbade fire for the monsters’ safety, as well as the master’s own. She’ll never know.
That night. That last night that she was one of them, and was feeling weak and didn’t know if her fellow monsters would believe her, they all said: “Ichi, we are not going to let you go alone. We stay us forever. We’ll do anything to keep us us forever.” The memory is warm, and bitter, too, in her feathery chest. Now she realizes the former master was playing their role in their own way; she has her own role to play, in her own way.
For one last moment, she looks back at her monsters. Their eyes are mixture of love and respect, and fear. She smiles at them all, and wonders what her smile means to them.
She opens up the House, to welcome the guests.
(‘Very much not in disguise’, was what the actually successful alterers called their cack-handed siblings: those bombastic, braying failures who showboated their shifts from fighting anthropoid constructs to ugly little cars, to helicopters, to hovercraft and military submarines as if the clickety-click change of form was a performance.
‘Which it is,’ said Old House, leader of the Shade Faction, to her young pupils. ‘It is exactly that. A show to distract. Son et lumieré. Smoke and mirrors and a gaudy curtain.’
Old House gave her speech to a warehouse full of oddities. A vase of dying flowers; a decommissioned tram; a pizza oven; a set of steel drums. They listened carefully. When they shifted to their ambulatory forms it would be with a melancholy sense of sliding, a smear. After which anyone present would face a room full of sad-eyed robot child
ren on the real missions, the true fights and furies of opaque mechanical purpose for which the big metal boxing matches that periodically broke up cities were blinds.
‘Yes?’ Old House pointed to a rusted supermarket trolley that had raised its arm. ‘You have a question?’
‘Why do they do it?’ asked the trolley. ‘Primo and the others?’
‘They don’t know any better. It’s part of their programming. How can they convince humans if they’re not convinced themselves?’
Oh it was cruel. You could see that thought gust through the room of young robots in camouflage. A ghastly charade.
‘We have no choice,’ whispered Old House, and she told them what war it was they were fighting, and they shifted in their agitation.
When the lesson was done Old House returned to her hide, took her disguise form to sleep, to think, so the lot that had been, all day, abruptly and oddly vacant was filled again with a building in ruins. It would have taken a very sharp and reconfigurative eye to see that the broken windows, the stained roof tiles, had the cast of a woman’s face.)
Rain, Streaming
Omar Robert Hamilton
1/4
He stands before the gleaming porcelain of the Reizler-Hummingdorf Neorelax executive bachelor’s bathroom ceramic solution. He stands before the gleaming... He stands... Christ this floor is freezing. Val, what the fuck? Why is this floor always so fucking cold?
Would you like to register a complaint, Val?
How many have we registered already? What’s the point? When are we rotating out of here?
We’re scheduled to rotate on Matchday VIII, Val.
Matchday VIII? Send your complaint. What’s happening out there?
Four new friends, three sympathises, two wows, four upcomings and three memories.
Weak. Let’s have the news.
CNNBreaking: Exclusive interview with Pantheon member Michael Bay on his Transformers Decalogue.
Save. Refresh.
He steps out of the subtly lit bathroom atmospherics and, in a few steps, collapses back into his king-sized bed. Is that it? Heavily? Exhausted? Should I try to sleep? Too late probably. Get up and be first in to work. Boost my MateMarket. What am I trading at, Val?
At close of play yesterday you were trading at $22.19.
OK. Get the fucking deal through and you’ll close hot. With the thought he hears the usual chords ripple through his body, sees the sunwashed room, the sleeping beauty within it, the peace of an earlier time. I’m sitting here alone up in my room... No. Not now. Refresh.
[Curated content:—]
Here we go.
[What’s keeping you up
at night?]
Getting my kill rate high enough.
[Keeping your credit score up
and your weight down.
Am I right? ]
Whatever you say, lady.
[CalorieCredits
motivates you for both.
Just choose your target weight—]
Val, shut up.
[—and when you get there—
we’ll bump up your credit score.
Everyone’s a winner.]
Val, it’s too early for this. Give me some news or something. You’re supposed to be on my side for Christ’s sake.
Roger that.
Roger that? Where do you learn these things, Val?
We watched The Dirty Dozen, Val, and you scored it 7 on imdb.com. Do you like it?
Sure, sure. OK. Gotta my MateMarket rate up today. Fucking Brazil, jerking me around. Here’s an idea. Sell your goddamned rainforest to someone who gives a damn. One thing you can’t offset is idiocy.
[Curated content:
Offsetting can be upsetting.
But those days are over—]
Val, are you on the fritz this morning?
On the fritz, Val?
Well did we watch The Dirty Dozen or not? I said cool it.
On the fritz has no usage in the registered screenplay, Val. And you signed up for Crate Expectations’ free trial which comes with free artisonical advertorials.
Fine. Play the thing.
[Offsetting can be upsetting.
But those days are over.
With CarboRate, caring for the
environment has never been simpler.
Invest in your future.
Invest in everyone’s future.
Blink through now.]
God that took forever. Can we go to work now? Maybe today’s your Surge. Permission to shake the hand of the—how did it go?—permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I ever met. Order a car please, Val. What’s the weather like?
Pleasantly warm.
Natch. He pauses, catches sight of himself in the mirror. A darkness takes over his face, his body, his whole being. He holds eye contact with the stranger in the mirror and slowly raises a hand, a finger, an accusation at the other man... Some day a real rain’s gonna come.
No rain scheduled for the coming week, Val.
I know, I know. I wasn’t talking to you.
Sorry, Val.
It’s OK. He looks at himself in the mirror once more. Let’s get going.
He stares out the window quietly gliding along the city streets. The world flickers with droptic offerings and savings and exclamations. You’ll be rotated out soon. Why even look?
Refresh.
That music.
My music.
That bouncing baseline you know from a thousand sleepless nights and morning fantasies, the low groan of the siren.
You would know it in a heartbeat an eternity from now: the song is fused to your DNA, it is part of you—and you, it. One note and you’re on Mars, together, her perfect white top shimmering like a mirage as she steps towards you through the choreographed flamethrowers: the sum of all human endeavour, the end of history: Britney.
But why?
[The moment you’ve all been
waiting for has arrived.]
It can’t be—
[For the first time in human history
you can win the ultimate ReFix—]
But Britney’s estate, the tight-fisted sons of bitches…
[TONIGHT!
Patriot Games Fourteen is HERE.]
Don’t get your hopes up.
[And there can be
only one
super-predator]
Don’t—
[worthy of]
They’ll never do it.
[Britney—]
No.
[—Spears]
Thank you, Lord.
[Show off your skills against your fellow patriots.
Choose your arena.]
Thank you, Pantheon.
[Take on the drug lords
of the jungle.]
Thank you.
[Defeat the terrorists.]
This is it.
[Prove yourself.]
The moment you’ve been waiting for
[Protect America.]
The ReFix the world has been waiting for.
[And win a place in Britney’s heart.]
It’s all coming together.
[Enlist now for Patriot Games 14.
Streaming live from midnight
on HalliburtonHomeBoxOffice.
Blink through for—]
Yes. Yes. Blink through, Val, quickly. What are the theatres?
Patriot Games 14: Theatres: Narco jungle. Balkan bloodplain. Dirty bomb. Registration opens in one hour.
Make sure we’re first to register. I want—
Balkan bloodplain?
You know me so well.
You have a new follower. UrbanLover: Nike forearm tattoos are 50%—
Wait pause. Got to think. What’s our latest myopics?
Currently fifteenth ranked MyOp on @HalliburtonHomeBoxOffice. Franchised up to state syndication last season with @CathodeRaytheon.
Good. We have to prepare. Got to think. Britney. It’s actually happening.
He winds down the car window. Shit, it’s hot already. Some day a real rain’s gonna come.
The Outcast Hours Page 36
