The White City

by John Claude Bemis

  A clockwork man leaped at Ray. The energy Ray had summoned erupted from his palms. The invisible force crushed in the shell of the clockwork man’s body. Ray reached out with his hands, extending his palms to the automatons around Conker. A tension, like the resistance of like-charged magnets put too close together, pushed against his hands. Ray gritted his jaw and leaned forward.

  Clockwork men swung their expressionless slotted eyes to him before their brass skulls crinkled and were crushed flat. Ray brought his hands around to Conker, and a cluster of the men flew from him, repelled or compressed until the mass was driven back.

  Conker broke free and beat down with his hammer. “Let’s go!” he shouted. Ray dropped his hands. They turned and ran with Si, leaping over the broken automatons. Only a handful of clockwork men remained, but others—dozens more—came down the rows.

  Carrying the lantern, Si led them to the far corner of the hall. “It must be down here!” she said.

  They turned the corner. The hallway had no doors except one at the far end. Ray panted as he ran, the exertion of calling up the power to drive back the clockwork men weighing down on him. The click-click-click of brass feet marched behind them. Ray was exhausted and worried he could not stop the Gog’s guardsmen again.

  Si opened the door, where a narrow set of stairs circled down into the dark. As Ray followed her, Conker slammed the door behind them. “There’s no way to lock it!” he shouted.

  Si called out, “It stops down here. No door. Nothing! We’re trapped!”

  Ray looked around the bend in the stairs to see the flat brick wall.

  Conker grabbed the handle of the door. Behind it, Ray could hear the buzz and grinding of the clockwork men coming closer. Conker spread his feet wide, clutching the handle and leaning back.

  Ray took the last few steps down to the bottom. Si held up the lantern and looked around with wide eyes. “Where do we go?”

  A boom resounded from the door up the stairwell, and Ray heard the door groaning as the clockwork men tried the pry the door open from Conker’s grasp.

  “We’ve got to cross,” Ray said, heading back up the stairs to Conker.

  “Here!” Si said, following him.

  “Conker,” Ray said. “Get ready!”

  “What about Si?” Conker gazed at her fearfully as he struggled to hold on to the breaking door. The wood cracked, and the hinges whined.

  “There’s no choice,” Ray said. “She comes with us.”

  His fingers darkened as feathers formed. His body transformed, compressing into the form of a crow. As Ray flew down the stairs and circled to come back up, Si grabbed the lantern. Conker let go of the door and leaped to Si, holding her. Ray clutched their shoulders with his talons. Conker and Si disappeared. The door broke open, and clockwork men poured into the room.

  Ray flew at the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Lights flashed and the noise of the clockwork men’s machinery vanished.

  Darkness swallowed him.

  Ray knew they were somewhere on the Wolf Tree. But it was not in the branches. His wings felt weighed down by some terrible force. He toppled against bark, which was soft and rotten and came apart in his feathers.

  Down they went. Ray saw flashes of light again.

  Falling to a metal girder floor, Ray returned to his form. Conker and Si reappeared and toppled to the floor. The three lay panting. Ray felt dizzy and sick to his stomach. It took all his effort to open his eyes and lift his head from the floor.

  The room was small with a ceiling and walls of metal. Except for a spare incandescent bulb mounted next to an open doorway, it was empty. The air was hot and reeked of oil smoke. A constant rumbling noise seemed to cause the floor to vibrate slightly beneath them.

  Si took Ray by the shoulder. “You okay?”

  The battle with the clockwork men and the effort of crossing had draining him. Ray had to fight to keep from slipping into unconsciousness.

  With the Nine Pound Hammer in his hands, Conker stood to walk over to the doorway. He peered down and then looked back at them with wide eyes. As Si picked up the lantern and joined him, her gasp brought Ray to his senses. He rose stiffly and staggered over to his friends.

  “Where are we?” Si whispered.

  A spiral staircase wound down from the doorway to an enormous grid of conveyor belts and assembly tables that were lit by a network of spare electric bulbs mounted on poles. The room stretched out in every direction, fading into a haze of smoke and dimness. Filling the aisles of the factory floor were gray ghostlike workers, piecing together bits of machinery coming down the belts, oiling small parts, inserting dials and levers, and returning their work to the moving platform before taking another part to assemble. What purpose their individual tasks served, Ray could not tell. But he knew each piece was part of the larger Machine, something to be added to the evergrowing engine of the Gog’s soul.

  “We’ve reached the Gloaming,” Ray said. “Or at least what the Gog has turned it into.”

  He looked up to see that their room was mounted into a ceiling of exposed rock and tangled roots. Conker said, “I guess we go down.”

  “I’m ready,” Ray said, taking a deep breath. He was still winded and leaned on Si’s shoulder as they followed Conker down the staircase.

  The hot, fume-laden air was filled with the sound of whirling belts, churning gears, heaving valves of steam, and the incessant chug of some dark industry. Ray heard larger machines beating and pounding and could only imagine some foundry somewhere out there constructing the pieces of machinery for these workers to assemble.

  As they reached the factory floor, workers turned to stare at them. Ashen-gray men, women, and children stood along a long aisle of machinery. They had no color, like people plucked from a blurry daguerreotype. Their hair was bleached and their skin drawn and sallow as if years had borne down on them, beyond whatever natural age they were.

  The people paused only a moment to gaze blankly at Ray, Conker, and Si. Then they returned to their work.

  “Who are you?” Conker asked a man working nearby.

  The man cast a fearful glance at Conker over his shoulder. His cracked lips and toothless mouth worked to make words, but no sound came out except for a dry gasping. After wincing and hunching away from Conker, the man returned to clamping metal plates over small casings of gears no bigger than what would operate a pocket watch.

  “The Darkness … has done this to them,” Ray said. “They are servants to the Machine now.”

  “How can we help them?” Si asked, her eyes on a small boy sliding cogs onto tiny rods.

  “We can’t,” Ray said.

  “We can destroy the Machine,” Conker said. “Wherever it is.”

  He furrowed his brow and looked around at the conveyor belts. “We got to find where these parts are being sent.” He started down the aisle following the stream of machinery.

  With Si’s help, Ray followed him. They passed workers who cast anxious looks then busied themselves at their posts. After a hundred yards, they reached a place where the conveyor belts dumped the parts into a wide chute. It made an intersection, and looking to the right and left, Ray saw chutes at the ends of all the rows.

  Conker leaned over to look down into the hole. “I think there’s another floor below us.”

  “Let’s hope there are stairs—” Si started to say, but Conker pulled her and Ray back.

  A few aisles down, a clockwork man crossed an intersecting walkway and disappeared down a row of workers. “They’re guarded here too,” Conker said. “Let’s head the other way.”

  They hurried down the aisle, wandering through the enormous buzzing grid. They passed more of the chutes and eventually saw mechanical lifts cut into the floor lowering large containers of the assembled parts.

  Ray felt they were utterly lost. He could no longer see the spiral staircase rising up to the room where they had arrived. Just when he began to suspect they were passing the same workers again and again, Si said, “
There it is.”

  The aisle ended at a circular stairwell in the floor. “Let’s go,” Conker said, leading the way down.

  “More workers,” Si said at the next floor. She began to continue down the stairs.

  “Wait,” Ray said. A worker had stepped back, showing his face in profile. Then he had moved close to the machinery, disappearing behind the other workers around him.

  “What is it?” Conker asked.

  Ray walked forward slowly until he stood behind the worker. He was a boy, about Sally’s age. At his back, Ray could see that his hair had not turned completely gray. Faint hues of brown showed. Ray touched a hand to his shoulder. The boy flinched, spinning around.

  “Gigi,” Ray gasped.

  The boy’s mouth opened and closed. He struggled to speak, and his words came thin and distant. “Ra-a-ay. Is tha-a-at yo-o-ou?”

  “Gigi,” Ray said, taking the boy’s arms. “Why are you here?”

  “My fa-a-amily.” Gigi’s gaze drifted to his left, and Ray saw men working at his side, one older and several who seemed about his age. Gigi’s father. His brothers. They had all been brought here along with the other workers from Omphalosa.

  Gigi took something from his pocket and held it up for Ray. The black bat-shaped seedpod. The charm Hethy had given Gigi to protect him against the Darkness. In Omphalosa, it had worked. But here in the Gloaming, shackled to the Gog’s machinery, Gigi was becoming like the others—a wispy phantom, soulless, little more than the shell of a person.

  “Ray!” Conker said.

  A clockwork man stood at the stairwell, the blank slots of its eyes locked on them. “Don’t do anything,” Si whispered, putting down the lantern.

  The clockwork man walked forward, brass feet resounding on the metal floor. Ray tensed as it approached. Tiny gears buzzed as it cocked its head. A tinny sound came from the little cone in its mouth. “Back to work,” it said.

  Si nodded to Conker and Ray and then turned to squeeze between two workers at their posts. Conker pushed in beside Si, and Ray stepped between Gigi and his father. The clockwork man remained at Ray’s back, hovering, and as Ray cast an eye back, the automaton just stood, watching him with its blank face.

  Ray stole a glance over to see what Gigi was doing. The boy took a metal part from a box and attached some dials to its side while his father bolted on a lever. Ray reached into a bucket that had stopped on the assembly belt before him. He took out a small tin part, open on one side for the dials to be inserted. Ray reached over to the other box, where Gigi had taken out the dials. He stared at the pieces, not knowing what to do with them. Before he could work it out, hatred welled up in him.

  This was for the Gog’s Machine. He was doing a part, even a small part, in helping it operate. Helping it generate the Darkness. Helping it enslave more victims.

  A squeal began, first faint and then growing. The part within his hand writhed, and then the metal began to compress, crushing in on itself as Ray had done to the clockwork men attacking Conker. The part grew hotter in his hand.

  “Stop,” the clockwork man said with its expressionless, tinny voice.

  Ray dropped the broken part onto the work table and staggered back a step, dizziness returning. The clockwork man leaned forward and began trying to fix the broken piece.

  As Ray started for the stairs, the clockwork man reached out to grab his arm. “Stay here—”

  The Nine Pound Hammer hit the clockwork man’s skull, punching it straight down. The brass skin of its chest burst open and pulsating rods and gears spilled out. The clockwork man crumpled to the floor. The small cone of its mouth, now somewhere buried within its chest, issued muffled words: “Back—work—stop—release—”

  “Come on!” Si said, grabbing the lantern and running for the stairs.

  Ray turned back to Gigi. The boy’s pupils were covered in a misty haze. He could not bring Gigi with them. Only one thing would help Gigi and the other workers.

  “Where does this machinery go?” he asked.

  “Do-o-own,” Gigi whispered.

  The three ran to the stairs, spiraling past floor after floor until Ray felt he might collapse. Conker clutched him under the arm to help. The heat diminished as they descended. Each subsequent floor seemed taller, with larger and larger pieces of machinery being assembled. The floors filled with long assembly lines of workers gave way to floors with large, steam-powered lifts and men working in clusters with white-hot torches and heavy drills.

  At last the stairs ended in a cavernous room lit by more of the bare electric bulbs, now mounted to the ceiling. Large pieces of machinery attached to heavy hooks and cables came down through wide chutes. Waiting below was a line of workers with enormous rolling carts. Once the pieces were placed inside, the workers, oblivious to the three who had arrived in their midst, pushed the carts along iron tracks.

  “Where do we go from here?” Si asked.

  Ray watched the workers. The network of tracks led in one direction. “That way,” Ray said.

  They followed the tracks. After several hundred yards, Conker stopped and pointed. “Look.”

  Ahead was an enormous circular opening in the floor, several hundred feet across. The tracks joined together, workers stopping their carts as each fed onto a solitary line. That track reached a ramp at the edge of the opening, where empty carts were coming up a second track next to the other.

  Ray followed Conker and Si closer to the rim. The side-by-side tracks were bolted to the walls of the pit and spiraled down into the black. The three fell in behind some workers and started down the ramp.

  Ray shivered. These workers were bringing parts to add to the Machine. And it was somewhere down there in the darkness below. As he followed the others, he peered over the edge into the mouth of the vast opening. Like some gigantic well it descended, lit only by lanterns fixed on the carts. They made two side-by-side lines of lights, one going down, the other coming up. The steady movement of lights spiraled down the walls of the shaft until they disappeared into blackness.

  “How far down you reckon it goes?” Conker asked, peering into the void and then looking wide-eyed at Ray.

  The answer terrified him.

  Far. Very far.

  ROUND AND ROUND THEY DESCENDED. LOWER AND LOWER. Ray realized that the walls of the shaft seemed to be of blasted rock and shoveled earth, but all along pieces of roots stuck out. Some were as thin as a man’s finger. Others were as fat as an oil drum. But what was obvious to Ray from the foul smell and mushy black spots was that these roots were rotting. And with them the Wolf Tree was dying.

  The workers ahead and behind them pushed the carts of machinery along the tracks, while just to their right other workers passed them without a curious glance. None of them spoke. Only the clack-clack-clack of iron wheels on iron tracks resounded, but at such great numbers, the noise was overwhelming.

  “Not all of these people could have come from Omphalosa and the Expo,” Si murmured.

  “I was thinking that too,” Ray said. “The Gog has been capturing workers for years, probably before he ever kidnapped Sally and the other Shuckstack kids.”

  “You’d think they’d be missed,” Conker said, looking at the ashen-faced men trudging along before and behind them. “Ain’t they got family somewhere who’s wondering where they are?”

  “Some, probably,” Ray said. But most he knew were missed by no one. They were the lost. The anonymous. The ignored. Immigrants. Orphans. Poor and displaced people. These were the Gog’s prey.

  As they walked on, Ray watched Conker and Si ahead of him. The two of them had been trying to avoid looking at each other. Ray caught from time to time the tension in Conker’s jaw, the painful sidelong glances at her when she was not looking. Si never should have come with them. Ray could not bring her back out from this dark portion of the Gloaming. Or he could, in fact, but he would have no strength to return to Conker. Besides, how could he ever find again this dark bottomland of the Gloaming that the Gog had us
urped?

  They would never return to their world. They would never again see the open air, the morning sun on Shuckstack, the mountains, the prairie, the windswept trees around Mother Salagi’s cabin, the beautiful places they loved.

  Ray was surprised to find this somehow reassuring. It honed his attention. It gave him strength. There was no saving himself or his friends. There was only this final task to complete—to find the heart of the Machine deep within this abyss and destroy the Gog’s wicked source.

  “We’re nearly to the end,” Conker said.

  Ray looked down the huge shaft. Below, the lights from the carts seemed to stop a few turns below, with only blackness beyond.

  As they got closer, they watched as the carts before them were unloaded by huge cranes fixed to the walls of the shaft. While the empty carts were transferred by the cranes to the track going up, other workers began bolting and fastening the parts and pieces directly into the rock and decaying roots that made the walls of the shaft.

  Ray followed Conker and Si as they passed the last workers and continued down the empty tracks.

  “You were wrong,” Si said, turning up the flame on the lantern and holding it higher to illuminate the track ahead and the walls writhing like a black mass of insects. “We’re not at the end.”

  “We’ve reached the Machine,” Conker said.

  Dull orange lantern light reflected off bolts and metal faces and spinning parts. The clatter of the carts dissipated above, leaving only the noise of the machinery all around them. The farther they descended, the louder the noise grew. Cogs whirled, pistons fired, valves sputtered and hissed, belts churned, and engines roared. It was as Ray remembered from the dream he had witnessed long ago, the dream Conker had been having of their fathers facing the Gog’s previous Machine. But then he had seen only a small portion of the Gog’s creation, and here—groaning and pulsating from the vast dark below—the Machine encased in the walls went on and on and on, deep into the abysmal well.