Miner’s dreams had been unclear. Witch Mother had yet to reveal herself clearly to him. Always the same frozen expanse was all he would see with the faces of those he had killed.
Miner and Eden tripped on a mud hole. “Water,” Miner said, kneeling as if at an altar in a dilapidated temple of the Midnight Queen. They tried sipping the muddy water, but could not take in enough fluid through the grit.
Temple priests recited tales of the Juggernaut and how beams of electrified fire shot from its eyes, until the missile blasted its brow, and the dead orbs slid from its face, boiling in the mud where they sank deep into the ground like seed in a storm. The blue radioactive eyes had power, leading the short generations of miners to search the tunnels of green ore hanging onto the promise that someday they would be rewarded with otherworldly pleasures. The miners kept working until choked by dust, hoping to find the eyes of the Juggernaut and be set free. None were programmed to live past their thirtieth year.
“For the Juggernaut,” the miners breathed as they swung their picks. “For the Juggernaut,” the prostitutes said in their beds of straw and bugs, collecting the company-milled coin.
In her blindness, Eden would never see the sun, but she felt the earth falling. She hoped desperately that when she found Utopia the miracle promised to her would occur. You will see again. She could not remember whether it was the old woman or the Witch Mother who had promised her.
The witch in the shack and the witch in the tree, still dangling there in sleep and in darkness, She could not be certain if it was the Witch Mother singing to her in the bowels of the Juggernaut tree, or if it was the old woman who had saved her. She existed, but she could not know on what plane—the third eye—real time. She was starting to understand.
Miner and Eden ate the burnt flesh, hoping that the charred slivers would not make them sick. In drifting smoke, they were free.
The posse found the animal carcass that Miner and Eden had taken the leg from.
Driven by the voices, the Manager slumped in his saddle. Seeing the eyes fluttering around him, eyeballs everywhere. The voices speaking, telling him that there was freedom.
“Freedom is death,” he mumbled to himself.
They got through the mountain—the mountain—the mountain, the voices told him.
Flashes of the mutantoid dream, to experience living like they never had before. The Baron’s infatuation spread through the continuum, and now they needed to find the source of the dream. He could hear them talking to him, the machines scattered through his brain had the capacity to transmit as well as receive. He took out a vial and drank from it. The bitterroot kicked in, giving him added strength, at least enough to get him to the end.
The deputy inspected the carcass, where the leg had been cut away with a knife, its user inexperienced in properly butchering an animal, or a human, leaving the dissected parts jagged and ripped. The deputy saw the broken trail through the woods, leading away from the dead animal. Reaching down, the deputy felt the ground, the smell of blood still thick on broken branches left carelessly when the leg had been carried away.
The Manager intended to have the heads tied to his saddle before long, taking proof of the kill back to the Baron, to be boiled and skinned clean, to be placed on the wall of skulls in the Baron’s chamber.
But he wanted the eyes for himself, in defiance of the Baron’s maniacal glory.
In the company town, heads were lowered; the congregation prayed. Human blood was spilled among candles made of human fat.
The Midnight Queen: demon lover, a giant phallus on fire, burning the world asunder, driving humans to plunder themselves under and to eat the weeds of riverside.
In celebration of the event, the Baron allowed for supplication, as followers laid their hands on his chest and took his cock in their mouths as communion.
The eyes of Eden had power. For a long time, there had been no blue eyes in the world. Believers thought the blue eyes would transport them to the court of the Midnight Queen, grant them relief from living. Eden’s blue eyes were a sign of power.
The Manager had proclaimed his fanaticism in the rotten-wood street temples of the Midnight Queen at the mandatory company meetings, listening to the company priest reciting:
“The blue eyes of the Juggernaut stared into a green sky. The raptors swarmed and stabbed with their missiles. The blue eyes fell from the Juggernaut’s head and were swallowed up by the ground, and if the eyes were ever found within the mountain ore, the Juggernaut would live again, bringing delight to the Midnight Queen and glory to the one who finds them!”
The posse, trained to slaughter, technicians driven by fanaticism. Memories from the company faded, even memories of the Baron’s palace, the clanking chains and damp walls, the horrors they perpetrated on naked humans, who scrambled over each other for handfuls of swill and bits of their cellmates’ sliced flesh.
These deputies had been created out of an old machine, fashioned within brick walls that nurtured the fanatic’s dream to strike a human face.
Mutantoids had resumed the experiments of their ancestors. Centuries after all the power went out and production stopped.
The purple light was the only power.
Mutantoid priests had restarted society from the science books hoarded away in preparation for the end—
Deputies followed the Manager, who turned his horse in the direction of the rocks. A twisted face, a fascist prince riding proudly, the sickness already pounding in him before there was any infection from the blows of the witch’s servants.
Dusk light harbored black figures kicking up dust clouds, their hooves thumping the ground.
Miner bent over the meat, trying to keep it down, tired and hungry amid the smoke rising and drifting off the plateau. Eden fell asleep exhausted after eating a little of the meat, receiving transmissions of a war being waged since the first city was built in the forest, and even though the green sky was thought to signal the end of the world. The world continued on with the first life buried deep underneath, illuminated by its own burning heart, watered by the original spring, its flesh glistening, and effluent exuding from its red and purple veined skin. Even if she could not fully recall the transmission from memory, the program was already implanted since sitting in the rocking chair beneath the Juggernaut tree.
In fading light, the posse drove harder their steeds that tossed their heads to avoid the branches whipping their eyes. The riders followed the scent of the smoke, moving faster to capture those fleeing.
“Listen!” Eden said, rising from the thumping noise.
Miner looked up from the fire, hearing the hooves pounding the ground like frantic hearts beating, seeing the posse’s ghastly figures passing in the twilight. Miner tried stomping the fire out, but only succeeded in producing smoke and sputtering flames. Eden struggled to stand, reaching out for a hand hold. Miner stood, grabbed her arm. She felt his grip tightening, felt the pain in her shoulder from being pulled to her feet.
The horses’ hooves pounded closer. Miner and Eden scrambled, leaving their satchels, their blankets, and crumbs behind; the stones that had been struck together to start the fire, lost in the dirt and ash kicked over by Miner.
At the edge of the planet, they tried to hide, tried to find a way down into the dark. There was no voice to lead them there, nothing but pitch.
The horses trampled closer, carrying the murderers, carrying the Manager that galloped towards them, searching for Eden’s eyes. A breeze blew across the embers of Eden’s fire, causing the flame to reignite.
The deputies dipped their torches into the resurrected flames, and strode out to the edge of the plateau, peering over the rim into the Midnight World.
One of the deputies did not dismount. His horse swung its head as the rider held still. “You!” the Manager pointed at the deputy. The Manager’s horse snorted and shook its mane. Sweat from the fever poured from the Manager’s brow. The wind shifted and the mounted deputy’s torch showed the deputy’s eyes—n
ot lifeless, but staring back.
Looking closer at him, the Manager finally recognized that it was the same rebellious look the miner had shown, breaking through the door of the company office while the Manager took aim with his revolver.
The Manager could not turn away from the deputy’s gaze—seeing the rebellious face of the one who first took the eyes, and whose skull he had bored into with the skull machine’s drill, revealing the deputy’s crimes against the company.
It was not a look of anger, or hate, but resistance—freedom contagious in the psychic power of a made-up story told by a fanatic, a messiah, preaching the glory of the Midnight Queen.
“For the Juggernaut,” the Manager said, raising his revolver, cocking back the hammer, and pulling the trigger. The projectile knocked the deputy from his saddle, the torch falling in the dirt beside him.
The horse stepped away from the dead rider, while the other deputies silently watched the smoke from the muzzle drifting away over the mesa top.
The deputies surrounded the Manager, and in the wavering torchlight a swarm of rebellious faces stared at him.
“I command you! For the Baron! For the Company!”
The flames from the dead deputy’s torch bent in the wind and lit his sleeve on fire. The breeze revealed the rebellious intent of the other deputies. The Manager raised his weapon and readied himself to fire at the shadows moving in.
One deputy thrust his heavy blade into the Manager’s chest, breaking through the breastbone, knocking him to the ground. The Manager struggled to push and pull the air—he could not stand, could not breathe. He writhed in the dirt and sand.
The deputies circled around the bodies, staring down at the Manager who looked up at them in death. The fire grew, engulfing the legs and torso of the dead deputy.
When they were children, the deputies had been handed knives, their small hands barely able to hold the blade. They’d been trained to skin the backs of caged humans, thus completing their transformation, born again of the Midnight Queen, bred within company walls, whipped and trained in putrid stalls.
In the firelight, the deputies removed the caps from their vials, raised them up to the sky, each one speaking the phrase: “For the Juggernaut!” Then they took the poison cure needed to carry out their sacrifice to the Midnight Queen.
The posse turned their horses towards the end of the planet, charging at full gallop until they were in flight, tumbling one by one into oblivion, leaving the great conspiracy that created them on the plateau with the dead manager, the representative and agent of tyranny.
The riders and their horses, driven by glorious fanaticism, breaking on the rocks below, without fear in following the human children to the ground.
Miner held Eden, keeping her from falling from the edge of the planet into the Nighttime World. The Midnight Queen’s realm was spreading in the blackness, with the stars hidden in clouds, and the deputies with their spectral heads, the orange, rippling glow scanning for them.
Miner and Eden held tight, holding their breath so as not to be discovered. They heard the single shot of the revolver sounding like thunder, the flash like lightning, and Eden remembered the summer rains, the water soaking her shoulders, pulling the rag free from her face, the rain stinging her empty wounds. Miner recalling the temple bells in the center of the company town, calling the deputies in from the range.
They held tight to the planet crumbling away from them.
Eden and Miner heard the steeds galloping and bellowing, flailing through the air. The deputies separating from their wailing beasts, consumed by the dream of the Midnight Queen.
Eden had a fading memory of a bright morning next to a stream, the deputy’s hat brim brushing her face.
The land that they held onto gave way, and they slipped from the edge of the planet. Miner and Eden fell, reaching out to the Nighttime World. The screams they held in were released with their gasps.
Eden held tightly to the jar, protecting the glass from the blows that she knew would break her bones. She plummeted. Falling through space. The tilted ground drifting further away.
Unable to move in the darkness, still she breathed.
“Eden,” Witch Mother said.
“It’s you. Help us,” she said.
“I have.”
Eden could not have known. No birds or breeze, she could not feel sunlight, hunger, or thirst.
“I can’t move.”
“You are hurt.”
“Miner!”
“He cannot hear you.”
“Why?”
“He is not here.”
“Where? Where is he? Why don’t you help us?”
“But I have.”
“I cannot move. My eyes. Where are they?” Eden begged.
“Reach out to your side.”
“I cannot.”
“Reach.”
One of Eden’s arms went out and she found the smooth round surface of the jar and pulled it closer.
“It is still here,” Eden said. The smooth roundness of the jar that held her eyes. She imagined the liquid swirling within, and the eyes still perfectly round and shimmering, somehow alive.
“Why don’t you help us?” She said.
“I did.”
Eden’s other hand grabbed a fistful of sand.
“Did we escape?”
“You did,” said the Witch Mother.
Before she faded away, she thought she heard horses, and feared that the deputies would soon be standing over her with a knife, to take her eyes again.
“They found us, no, no …” Eden said.
Part Two
Seven
Eden registered a familiar smell of flowers, emanating from a distant memory of the feel of soft petals in a field. Her fingers slid over a rock slab, and she was not sure she would be able to lift herself up, pushing with her arms against the slab’s surface.
Feeling the folds of her gown made of soft, fine material, light and smooth.
In the cave’s orange glow. Standing from the slab, she saw the stone basin filled with liquid. Her fingers moved across the surface, she lifted them to her lips, tasted the water she had been craving. Reaching in, she cupped her hands and drew the water to her mouth. Seeing her eyes in the basin’s reflection, forgetting that she had lost her sight.
Looking up, she saw the marks made in the stone, the chiseled lines. With her hands around the basin, she followed the curve of a stone cylinder that led to the carved stone of the ceiling.
The light from outside filtering through the wall’s transparent stone, emitting an orange glow.
At the base of the wall were the rooted plants, their stalks stretching along the surface of the cave. In the orange-light, the stalks looked almost black, and the limbs sprouted petals, the colors unclear in the all-consuming orange luminance reaching back to the cavern’s shallows. The source of the light coming through the transparency of the mica stone.
She stepped over to the plants and recognized something similar to what she had seen in the gardens of the conditioning camp. She took the fruit from a limb and bit into it. It should have been sweet, but there was no taste. Black juice squirted onto her naked feet, staining the hem of her vestal gown.
The soil was moist where water had dripped onto the roots of the plants, trickling out from the base of the wall. Empty niches carved out of the rock held the either sacred or useful objects of the unknown occupants who carried away their items with them when they left. The chiseled walls, a technology of stone. Eden did not recognize the provenance of the machine that allowed light in and the fruit to grow. She was unable to find any other sign of the creator of the cavern. The chiseled code was all that remained.
Like a heavy lung, the machinery breathed in the air from behind a large flap made of thick animal skin, while the plants potent sugary scent floated—a sweetness in the orange-lit cave.
—Unable to establish–
She heard voices breaking in and out, a metallic hum somewhere out
of her reach.
The light shifted, the orange glow dimmed.
She noticed that the sweet smell of the flowers had turned to decay.
The feeling of comfort she had when she woke was being replaced with a disturbance from somewhere outside, behind the hide.
The cavern’s creators.
—Connect—
“Are you there?” Eden called out. But she was unable to make clear the undecipherable chatter that fluttered and crackled.
She heard a gust from behind the thick hide.
The light shifting and the warm orange light was turning gray, while the sheen of her gown turned from orange to white.
I could see—she seemed to remember a time when she could not. She had forgotten where she’d come from.
—Transmission, transmission—
The voices tried cutting in again. The plants that had budded with fruit turned sickly brown. She felt the cave walls shake without moving, jolted by the voices that broke in with their sounds.
—Change—frequency—
As if the voices were all speaking at once. The orange light faded, and the color of the gown switched to gray, the flowers, the fruit in her hands shriveled, leaving only dead stems, she let the rotten fruit in her hand fall to the ground.
—Eden—
A voice whispered to her, a voice unlike the voices that were hollow and droning, transmitting, attempting to connect. This voice was from somewhere further outside or from deeper within. The hide rippled with the words being recited, being tapped out on the shifting gears of Earth Machine.
“Witch Mother?” She muttered, suddenly remembering something from beyond the wall that separated her from what was outside.
Eden.
Pieces of her memory coming through in waves, voices floating on gusts lifting the animal’s skin to reveal the ice and snow covering the pine trees in the blowing wind.
Snow Over Utopia Page 6
