by Scott Hale
“Lotus… is a freak.” Gemma made a popping sound with her mouth. “That was her idea. She’ll be and do anything it takes to get what she wants. And King Edgar thinks she wants what he wants. That’s why he put her up to it. But we have more planned.”
Whispers wound down from the ceiling. Slick-skinned creatures hopped back and forth between the hanging bodies.
“King Edgar came in here and took everything over. Fine. No big deal. We needed a change, anyways. He went to work on the villages and united them. Good. About time, I say. But there was one condition.”
“Fight for him,” the Skeleton said.
“Well, he said ‘support,’ but even the dumbest that live here can read between the lines. All right. Fair enough, we agreed. One problem, though. The Dread Clock. It won’t let us leave.”
“Why?”
Gemma started forward and swung her arm for him to follow. “I know you’re on a tight schedule. Walk with me.”
“Why can’t you leave?” the Skeleton asked as they crossed the main hall. The ratty, wine-colored carpet soaked up their sounds.
“The Nameless Forest is complex, but also really simple. After the Trauma, people went insane. They were hunting down anything that wasn’t human, because they thought us creatures had caused the Trauma. You’d think being a monster during the apocalypse would be paradise, right?”
The Skeleton shrugged.
“Nope. We were almost wiped out. And then there was this forest, one the humans over the years became afraid of. It didn’t have a name at the time—hence the name, ha, ha—but it sounded safe, especially since they were steering clear of it. We thought we’d hide out here for a while until the humans forgot about us. And they did forget, but when we tried to leave, the Nameless Forest wouldn’t let us.
“Parents ever tell you a fairy tale? Such and such can only be killed by water on the fifth day and all that crap? Sometimes, that’s what the Forest is like. Somehow, something decided all us creatures couldn’t leave, so we couldn’t leave.
“It’s the Dread Clock.”
She went up the stairs, flung her hands back, causing the first door on the second floor to open.
“It’s what keeps it together. It’s what ticks out the rules. It soaks up everything that’s ever happened, could happen, like a sponge. Every thought, every action. Have you figured out what caused the Trauma yet?”
The Skeleton said, “No,” as they went through the door and entered another hall. Here, the bones of children were on display. Except there were strange, dried-up, tube-like organs running up and down their arms. “Do I want to?”
Gemma nodded. They rounded a corner into another hall.
“The humans did. They caused it. They woke up God and then tried to kill It when It turned out to be something other than what they had in mind.”
She knocked on a door covered in spikes and it swung back. Stopping at the threshold, she said, “This forest is a small part of Its domain. Where It really comes from… I don’t know… somewhere deep down, maybe in the Membrane. Somehow, the Dread Clock ended up here, though. Maybe someone put it here to make sure God didn’t wake up again.”
“Is that what King Edgar wants? To wake it up?” The cause of the Trauma? A god? He should’ve been hysterical, but his broken mind couldn’t manage it.
A pale hand emerged from the dark of the doorway and beckoned them in.
“I think he does.” Gemma went through the doorway.
The Skeleton followed her into the next room and stopped, surprised. There were more children like herself inside. They were sitting on the floor, unraveling the rags around their hands as they stared at the gigantic, metal door on the opposite side of the room.
“I’m no chemist, Skeleton, but when you combine an object of pure madness with a place of otherworldly power, well, you’re probably not going to get the best results.”
One of the children looked up at the Skeleton and moaned hungrily. Gemma shushed him and shook her head.
“King Edgar has sent so many men through to take down the Dread Clock. We’re grateful,” she pointed to a toddler in the corner, who was ravaging a soldier’s corpse, “but we’re not stupid. And we know you’re not working for him. So if you pull this off, why should we follow him?”
The Skeleton realized they were moving towards the massive, metal doors. Behind it, he could hear raspy, hard, and heavy breathing.
“You’re not following me,” he said. The empty gaze of the children here was getting to him. “I’m not leading no one no more.”
“We’ll see. Lotus is doing her best, though. She’s human, so she can get out of this place. She fights for us. Hey, you two would make a cute couple.” Gemma grabbed the handles to the heaving doors. “You do know that, if you take the Dread Clock, we’ll be set free right?”
“If it’ll do what I need it to, I don’t care.”
Gemma smiled. “We’ll see.” She pulled back on the doors.
The first thing the Skeleton saw was the bat. The massive, twenty-foot long, semi-decayed bat that hung from hooks fixed into the ceiling of the church-like room. Though it looked dead, the creature seemed anything but, for it was from its gaping mouth the heavy, rank breaths poured. The bat’s wing span was beyond impressive. In the room, it looked stunted, but the Skeleton was sure that, if stretched, they could envelope the Orphanage entirely.
“We are vampyres,” Gemma said. “This is our master, Camazotz.” She drew his attention to the pews that ran under the bat and across the room. “They are waiting for her blessing.”
In the pews, innumerable children sat, their hands held high, their tongues flicking out bestial praises. They kept their palms toward Camazotz as they worshiped. When the Skeleton stepped closer to the children, he saw why; each of their palms were slit, and in each slit were mouths.
Gemma unraveled the rags around her hands. “Biting necks is all well and good.” She pressed her hand to the Skeleton’s arm. The slit in her hand sucked on his bones like a leech. “But who notices a small touch? A quick graze? Ah!”
She outstretched her hand and caught a drop of blood that fell from Camazotz’s body. She closed her eyes and licked her lips as the beast’s blood coursed through her.
“Delicious,” she said, finally coming out of it and looking more alive than before. “Now that you’ve seen us, you sure you want to let us out?”
The Skeleton nodded and ignored Clementine’s and Will’s pleas for him to reconsider.
“Probably didn’t get to see the spider people, did you? Oh well. If we don’t make you turn on your heels, bunch of bugs won’t, either.” She pressed her head against the Skeleton’s shoulder. “Hundreds of years ago, I might’ve stopped you from taking the Dread Clock. I know what it’s capable of. But I like to think I grew out of that selfish girl I used to be, so it’s yours. You, you seem selfish, though. You’re doing this to get your family back, right?”
“Right,” he said. Why is she trying to stop me?
“They must mean a lot to you to put the whole world in danger.”
The Skeleton said, “Maybe the world needs monsters like you. Otherwise, we just end up with monsters like us.”
Gemma grinned. She flicked her finger and two blue flames came to life at the far end of the room, directly under the bat. Between the flames, there was an opening, and it led outside, to a tranquil lake with a small island wreathed in red grass. And at the center of the island, alone and unguarded, the Dread Clock waited.
“Go for it,” Gemma said, nudging the Skeleton along. “Let’s see how immortal you really are.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
It wasn’t water that filled the lake, but hundreds of long, thick, bruise-colored worms. As though fused to one another, the slimy, hissing creatures circled the island together in a slow, hypnotic rotation. The Skeleton stood at the end of the passage, the Orphanage behind him, watching their movements. What were these sluggish sentries capable of? he wondered. What was it that
did the King’s men in? The worms? The vampyres? Or the Dread Clock itself?
The Skeleton stepped out of the passage. He heard a click, like a latch, and when he turned around, he found that the passage was gone. Being outside, he expected to see the Orphanage, but the mansion had vanished. Whatever portal he’d entered, it’d taken him further into the Nameless Forest, further than most had ever gone.
But, really, it didn’t matter where the vampyres had led him. What mattered was the Dread Clock was here, fifty feet in front of him, and for the first time since he’d started this goddamn, mother fucking, piece of shit journey, it felt like there was actually an end to it in sight.
For an instrument of insanity, the Dread Clock sure fit the part. It was tall, ten feet or so, with two wicked horns curving outward from its notched pediment. Its body was narrow, impossibly black. The moon dial glowed hellfire red, the celestial bodies it depicted surely the homes of chaos, madness, and despair. Below it, the hour and minute hands spun psychotically around the clock face, refusing to land on the numbers scratched into the metalwork. And further down still, at the Dread Clock’s center, a tumorous pendulum swung back and forth, ringing out a song only those at midnight might hear.
“I guess I expected more of a fight,” the Skeleton said.
He put one foot into the lake. The worms tightened to support his weight. But as he brought his other foot in, a thought crept into his mind and paralyzed him, from his bones to his soul.
How did I get here?
He had been a simple man, reformed to an extent, with a little bit of land and a family to call his own. He hadn’t any grand aspirations, or wild notions about the world and the worlds within it. Satisfaction came in the form of a good farm and a job well done. Happiness was Clementine’s smile and Will’s laugh, and some of that same old, same old to fill an empty stomach. When his time came, he had figured history would go hard on him, but he always kept his fingers crossed there’d be a footnote with a little fancy asterisk that said, “Atticus wasn’t a great man, but he sure tried.”
But all it took was one night and three murders to take that all away from him. Over the last year, that simple man had died more times than he had ever lived. He learned there was more to death than death. He realized that it had a structure, a system, like a country all its own. Over the last year, he’d became a symbol for a rebellion he couldn’t give two shits about. He’d taken part in a secret alliance between humans and Night Terrors. He’d discovered what Eldrus was putting into the earth, and what King Edgar was trying to dig out of it. Over the last year, he’d been hunted by shepherds, lied to by friends. He’d killed more people than he ever thought he could stomach, and god damn if each killing didn’t make his stomach growl. Over the last year, he’d become nothing more than a proper noun running across the continent, like a mad dog with too long a leash, feebly trying to claw out treasures that were probably better off being left buried.
And here he was. Here he was. He’d come from Ghostgrave, his initial destination, to the Nameless Forest on the word of a stranger alone. He’d seen and heard more profane and sacred secrets here than most, and yet they did little to move him. Maybe it was a fact that he’d been eaten alive dick first, but clearly, after all he’d gone through, something wasn’t right with him. Not anymore.
Finally, he started forward. The waves of worms quickly took over, however, and guided him to the red-grassed island. As they did, he remembered the flowers he’d seen in the Membrane; Death’s Dilemma they were called. Each one represented a love of Death’s who dared to love Death in return. It made him laugh to think it, but he felt a kind of kinship with Death now, for the Gravedigger had a dilemma of his own. In place of flowers, he imagined headstones, each one representing someone he’d tried to save, and someone who’d tried to save him return.
Like a pit of snakes, the worms writhed and undulated until they practically heaved the Skeleton onto the island. He caught his balance, told himself this was it, that if this didn’t work, nothing would, and went to the Dread Clock.
His dead eyes couldn’t help but be fixed on the swollen, cancerous mass that was the clock’s pendulum. At the height of every swing, a sinking feeling came over him, as though he were swallowing himself up. But it wasn’t the pendulum he needed. That was only one part of the machine. What he required was its infernal engine. He reached for the handle of the glass door the pendulum sat behind and pulled it—
Yellow flames flaring under a wilting sky. Hundreds of horses pounding across a flooded desert. Caskets like chrysalises glowing in a new dawn light, the world below them empty and unformed.
—The Skeleton ripped his hand away and screamed. The images had torn through his skull like a knife. Shaking it off, he went in again and—
Metal stars in a blood-drenched night. Babies in a barn, chains at their feet. Skyscrapers on fire. Cars dead and rusted in a lake. Men in suits with body-shaped briefcases. Mountains of eyes blinking from the folds of space. Guns. Flesh fiends. Women holding hands as they cut each other’s wrists. Tornados of the dead. Entire cities reduced to rubble. A small girl frothing at the mouth. Fissures in the earth. House catching the sunlight on a hill. White grass. Red Death.
—Again, he pulled back and then fell to the ground. What little was left of his mind had been stretched to its limit, and it was starting to tear. The power in the clock was overwhelming. Each image was a lifetime. He felt them completely with every sense he possessed, and every sense he didn’t even know existed.
“I… have to focus,” he said, slurring his words. He got up and grabbed the clock.
Nursing home nurses stalk the halls, crawling on the ceiling, like bugs on a wall. Tired-eyed students reach into their laptop screens. Pestilence in a synagogue. Ancient flowers subjugating human pulp. Organs in revolt. Torn-open books. Backyard spacecraft. Nightmares from a canvas.
The Skeleton gritted his teeth. The images clawed at his sanity, leaving most of it shredded. He gripped the glass door’s handle. Struggling, shaking from a seizure, he pulled it open.
Dance hall devastation. Prom queen cannibal. Crime in a classroom. The dead marching down an upside down street. Hollowed-out children. A cackling coven. Wars raging across a vomiting cityscape.
He gritted his teeth and grinned through the onslaught. His arm slipped past the pendulum. He worked his fingers between the arterial pulleys.
Pink rivers clogged with human glaciers. Suburban violence in gangland haunts. Infected satellites falling to earth. Wedding vows made in flesh.
Focus, the Skeleton told himself, drowning in the deluge of past and possibilities.
Children killing children. Snuff films taped over birthday parties.
He needed the heart, and a heart it had. He could hear it beating behind the complications, somewhere further back.
Poisoned water. Forgetful kings. God on Its throne, vermillion and vengeful.
Pressing his face to the clock, letting the hour and minute hands grind at his skull, he dug deeper.
Clementine and Will in heated debate, as she tries to fit him back inside her.
The Skeleton shook off the scene. The Dread Clock was reacting, which meant he was getting closer.
Carnage at the zoo. Ligaments for hair. Bursts of color in gawping throats. A masked orgy in an abandoned warehouse. Cold skin. Milky blood. Airplanes bombing countries into dust. Diamonds on drying brains. Politicians with nails through their teeth.
Shoulder inside the Dread Clock, he reached past the weights. There, through a layer of mush, a cradle.
Blythe and Bon, raping Clementine and Will, making new orifices when theirs wouldn’t suffice.
The Skeleton could smell their sweat. He could hear their cries. He could taste what they tasted, could feel what they felt inside. He hesitated, and then kept clawing at the cradle.
Tanks roll over an open field, as artillery pummels the writhing gates of heaven.
His fingers broke through the hard barrier. Freezing
liquid poured out, shattering his bones.
Earthquakes cough out hailstorms. Dark tabernacle in a forbidden grotto.
His bones reformed in an instant, his cursed soul empowered here, and he kept at it.
A mass of humans a million strong, their creations in upheaval, filling up the sky.
The Dread Clock’s body split apart. Fleshy, gear-covered sacs ballooned from it. Astral tendrils shot out and pierced the Skeleton. They bore into his eyes, into his tongue. They split open his bones and drilled through their centers, carving him out and filling him with fathomless pain.
Frozen oceans. Consuming shadows. Spinal cord currency.
Screaming, the Skeleton grabbed the tendrils and shoved himself inside the Dread Clock. He broke his face through its mechanical innards, gears like crumbs spilling from his chattering mouth. With both hands, he clutched the Dread Clock’s heart—
Howls from the underworld. A great, grinding machine, making meat to feed the slugs lying bloated in space.
—and, with all his strength and the strength Clementine and Will leant him, he—
Candlelit homes. Empty wells. Gurgling stomachs spitting out wine and host. Animal skulls on sunburnt shoulders, moving from palms to heels.
—ripped the heart out of the Dread Clock and fell backward, collapsing into the red grass. He grasped the clicking, bleeding trophy and held it high. Dark oil dripped from the throbbing heart-work onto his tongue and stained it black.
“That’s it,” the Skeleton said. He opened a pocket in his cloak and dropped the heart inside. As soon as it left his hands, the images began to fade. “It’s done.”
Without it’s heart, the Black Hour’s vessel could not keep. It collapsed in upon itself. The glass doors blew outward. Wood splintered, metal rusted. The tumorous pendulum had one last swing and then was flung from its confines, out of the clock and into the lake of worms.
The Skeleton got up, laughing. “Show me what I want.” He dug into the cloak’s pockets. He couldn’t wait. “I need to know you work.” Gasping, he grasped the Black Hour’s heart and said, “Show me Hex. Show me Lacuna. And take me there.”
