Curse: The end has only just begun

by Rich Hayden

  Perhaps a dusting of Duke Vinzenz’s fortune had fallen upon Amil, for as he was about to forsake his quest and dive in after Ali, he collided with the other door. The impact snapped his eyes open. Without a look back, and with an involuntary response that prolonged his existence, Amil thrust his key into its receptacle.

  As the door swung open, the bridge fell completely away, and left Amil to dangle from the knob of the wooden barrier. The opening floated high in the dark sky, and, as the door flapped back and forth with the wind, he held on tightly to its hardware. The river had become an insatiable whirlpool, and it sucked everything away. The mountains were gone. So too was the charred forest, and all the people who had begged for assistance. All that was left to devour was a desperate man, whose life was held entirely within the constitution of his own fingers.

  As he hung from a door that tried violently to shake him into oblivion, Amil existed in a world of one. Suspended an unfathomable distance into the air, he heard the violent splitting of the wooden bridge as it was smashed to pieces by the grip of the waves. In terror, he saw as the sky itself was sucked downward and into the abyss. He was truly the only thing left for that omnipotent swirl of death to ingest, yet he resolved to again deny the edict of forces higher than he. As he clung to the barrier that sat suspended within the center of a great nothingness, he carefully slithered one hand after the next onto the knob on the opposite side of the door. The mighty wind blew his hair across his face, and his legs were tossed about as all efforts of his muscles were forced into his fingers. He hung from the inside of the door, and it continued to flap with rage and the all-encompassing desire to annihilate, but Amil had already won. The next wild slap of the wood would be a boon. As it made one final attempt to cast him into the swirl of obliteration below, the door unwillingly thrust him beyond the threshold, shutting out that theater of extinction.

  Part 6. Tyme’s Machine

  Shot like a bowling ball hurled down a crooked alley, Amil slid upon his back over a cement floor before a violent collision halted his short journey. His left shoulder and elbow made distinct imprints into the metal storage locker that put an abrupt end to his skid, while the disturbance his body created called down a rain from above. Placed atop the cabinet were glass jars and metal tins that contained all manner of nuts and bolts. Iron gears, and an eternity’s worth of dust were among their company, and fell around the site of Amil’s chaotic arrival. Most of the items clanged harmlessly around him, but one of the heavier jars knocked Amil on the crown of his head. Its impact called a hazy, prismatic wash of color into his vision.

  Once the focus was rubbed back into his eyes, he attempted to look around, but saw only the common black of Aphelianna’s house. Wherever he was, it was very dark, and other than the misplaced parts that lay in a close proximity to his slumped position, his sight was privy to little else. As he sat up and leaned his face deeper into the darkened space, a caress of cheap metal and string washed over his cheek. This sudden touch caused Amil to jerk, an action that earned him another kiss from the cabinet at his back, but he quickly composed himself. Leading with his hand, he felt around for the thin rope, and as that beaded string shivered into his grip, Amil gave it a mild tug.

  A solemn aura of amber bled across the room as the light from a tired and heavily yellowed 40-watt bulb sparked to life. It hung, shadeless, and from a socket that appeared primed to short out at any moment. The pull-string pinged off the side of the old glass, and a sound as melancholy as the light was dull cast a dingy ambiance over Amil’s environment.

  It looked as though he were held within the confines of a storage room. It was cold and cramped, as the thick concrete walls were lined with steel shelves. Each shelf had its own unique state of disrepair, as every possible angle at which metal can be bent seemed to have been indulged. All sported a collection of rust, and some were collapsed entirely, but all were also charged with the retention of parts that seemed to have no relation to one another.

  Splayed out over the shelves and spilled onto the floor were gears, clasps, rubber gaskets, gauges, electrical components, and pins of all sizes and purpose. Thick encyclopedias and tattered manuals swam among the confusion, as did cans of dried-up paint, along with spools of wire and various descriptions of tape. A myriad of pipe fittings could be found almost everywhere the eye could wander, and tools that looked wildly archaic and obsolete slept under the weight of dust. Brooms and tall scraps of discarded metal slumped in the corners with equally ignored cardboard boxes as their eternal companions.

  Amil rose to his feet and cautiously stepped between the frozen rivers of junk that lay around him. His exit from the narrow space felt oddly shorter than his quick and rude introduction had been, and, as the path was retraced, he was made to chuckle at the course that his ass had carved through the disorder. Once he reached the end of the corridor, Amil set his eyes upon the door that had shat him. With no want to linger before it, he stepped away and then parted the dirtied plastic flaps that sealed off the storage room, to explore whatever lay beyond.

  Hauntingly dark, as usual, he realized that he had stepped into a room that possibly occupied the square footage of a small country. Even his soft steps created an echo. To his right there was an enormous instrument panel affixed to the wall. Its door was absent, and the distinctions given to each switch and lever were faded, and of a language that the human brain was pained to try to understand. He reached out and flicked the first switch. It turned over like a sick, lethargic animal roused from sleep, but other than the sharp echo that it created, nothing happened. Switch after switch was tried, but change failed to arrive. There were large levers and knobs that he twisted, and others that were frozen so tight, it would require the grip of an ogre to undo them. But like the first that he tried, all remained functionless, as the room held fast to the constant black.

  Although the panel was as tall as Amil and nearly as wide as a car, he was halfway through its puzzle with no reward for his hasty efforts. He stepped back, and then it occurred to him that there was most likely a precise pattern required to unlock its secrets. For a moment he debated the merits of forsaking the task of unraveling this riddle. Perhaps whatever it commanded was better left alone, unmolested by the hands of clumsy men. But then Amil peered into the rolling black. The want of light was felt supreme inside his quivering mind, as a venture into the dark was a task he felt ill-suited to best. Between palpitations of his weary heart, the light from that old 40-watt suddenly flickered and drew his eyes away from the unknown. Just off to the side of that massive network of levers and valves, there sat a previously undiscovered and lone button. It seemed unnecessarily big, and placed below it was a symbol that was comically auspicious in its simplicity.

  A metal plate had been riveted into the wall with the carving of a perfect circle at its center. All around this object, short straight lines were spaced evenly apart, and as they ventured further away from their source, the lines began to thin. Amil ran his fingers over the recesses, and felt the callous touch of rust as it stained his tips in a crimson residue. His hand ascended up the plaque, and with the delicate nature of a hummingbird as it feeds upon a flower, his index finger came to rest upon the dull button. He ran his fingers around the circumference of the object and heard the tale of its interminable existence as every fine chip and scrape introduced itself to his skin. He closed his eyes and balled his fist. With a deep breath sucked into his lungs, Amil drew back his arm and then forced the side of his tense hand against the button.

  So very far above him, held aloft to dizzying heights, filaments and tubes burst to life. Bulbs that were set in rows and bulbs made to resemble small planets all became flush with energy. Some failed to join their brothers in this mass awakening, but with the absence of some, the room had still found itself flooded with light. As Amil gazed up to the thousand suns that burned above, he saw the frailty of life displayed in the form of minute insect carcasses that lay dried and brittle under the glare of their gods. He
also was witness to the might of industry, as the great fixtures were hung from heavy chains and platforms of iron. All were suspended from a ceiling insulated with yellow foam, a substance that promised to make the effects of asbestos feel pleasant by comparison.

  Once his gaze descended from the world of illumination above, Amil tried, in vain, to gather the enormity and purpose of the room. The floor was a gray and nondescript concrete that had been blanketed by dust, but the reason for which it had been poured was a fascinating one. Plastic tubes and metal piping of all conceivable sizes rose from the floor and ran through the gigantic room in elaborate patterns. Some were smooth, and looked to have felt the touch of fresh paint a short while ago, while most others were dull, the sweat of moisture and oil caked around their connecting points. Nearly all of the pipes looked to have had repair or inspection at some point in the past, as they wore patches of differently hued but similar materials. The majority of the metal tubes were decorated and fastened by the likes of iron bolts or rivets, but their plastic kin were held together by all manner of hose clamps, tape, and putty.

  As Amil slowly walked among this perplexing creation, he noticed that gauges sprouted from the pipes like coarse flowers. In triangular and circular shapes, the meters grew from all directions out of the tubes that they were meant to monitor. Though few were found, the most puzzling instruments that he had come across were gauges that had a crescent-shaped body. Rimmed in a dull glow, they floated mere inches above the pipes on nothing more substantial than the constitution of thin air. He placed his palm between the empty space of a pipe and its little moon, and as he did so, the strange gauge dropped from the air and clacked off the ground. Once the curious object came to rest, its light flickered out and extinguished itself by way of a small effusion of violet smoke.

  Startled, Amil looked around to see if his trespass had been noticed, and, once he had been comforted by the uninterrupted march of silence, he bent down to examine the odd tool. The markings meant absolutely nothing to him, as he couldn’t glean any understanding of what the bizarre symbols were intended to represent. He had noticed these foreign characters on some of the other gauges, and in a condition that was perhaps the strangest of all, he also looked upon some that numbered a common one through ten. However, every last one of the dials, no matter how cracked, clean, or dirtied they were, all failed to register the presence of anything with their needles.

  Directionless in his advance, Amil set his eyes upon cables of wire both bare and insulated. He traced their paths as they ran into and out of transformers, switchboards, and, in some cases, directly into the pipes themselves. He passed puzzling amalgamations of valves, brick stacks that were made to purge who knows what, and massive coils that looked capable of passing all the energy of one world directly into the next. Built into a far wall was an enormous column of fans that sat cold and motionless, a netting of cobwebs on their blades. Spoked turbines of iron, as silent as the fans and the size of modest houses, peeked through gaps in the thick floor. In more unsettling cases, others dangled from the ceiling on ancient cables of braided steel.

  He drifted his eyes over countless stairways of extruded metal. Rickety in appearance, they rose into the air and birthed catwalks of the same mesh. The narrow walkways were without railings, and most likely had been used to work on the upper portions of this mammoth machine. Strings of loosely tethered lights streaked the platforms like the rigid nervous system of a great beast. As the elevated paths traveled in complex patterns throughout the room, to traverse them would seem tantamount to suicide.

  The disrepair and dirt that clung to everything, like the overbearing mother of filth, gave this monstrosity the feel of pre-World War II industrialization. It was dangerous, heavy with a dense variety of cast metal, and cramped. The components were old and neglected, and most of the parts that looked capable of motion were without guards or other shields. Furnaces, long disused, sat perilously close to objects that should never be in the vicinity of fire, while hastily spliced wires often bathed in the same sweat as the pipes. But as Amil carried on, he realized that all the decay masked the true order of the place, and the undeniable majesty that it presented. He began to think that the most technologically sophisticated power plants of modern America would be ashamed to consider themselves advanced if ever placed beside this maddening collection of scientific understanding.

  Amil continued to move about this industrial labyrinth, and soon his mind entertained the iron Minotaur that diligently stalked him. It was only a matter of time, he figured, before his curious stroll through this quieted wonder of mechanics turned into a frantic flight for his life. Or, rather, were the entire workings of this creation merely the tortured insides of a sleeping animal that had already swallowed him? That summation seemed all the more plausible, for sure enough, as he explored deeper into the guts of this beast, Amil came to face its monstrous heart. Before him lay the very soul of the room’s existence, its reason for being. But like the failed gauges and frozen turbines that he had passed by before, it revealed itself to be as still and dead as the rest of its overgrown body.

  From the floor, and all the way to the cancerous touch of the ceiling, was a framework of polished silver. The gleaming skeleton shimmered like a galaxy when juxtaposed with all the ruin around it, and looked to have been formed from one monumental piece of material, as not one fastener or weld graced the structure. There were no breaks or creases. Its entire flow and form was an uninterrupted series of carefully molded curves and twists. Artistic sweeps of the shiny metal bulged from the outer areas of the creation, giving it a robust look, while a complex assortment of hammered bands and thin silver netting crafted a great globe at the center.

  Held within this reflective world was a dense collection of gears, all as equally splendid and cared for as the silver. They were bound and held snugly in place by the likes of rubber belts. Made to run true with the aid of bearings and pulleys, the gears all sparkled with a slick of fresh oil. Massive chains, whose blackened links most likely outweighed the heft of a herd of oxen, wrapped themselves around the larger gears, and slept delicately between the iron teeth. As Amil stepped around this divine beast in order to fully appreciate its magnitude, he peered deep within the machine. He spied gears that were no larger than nickels, and as thin as a slip of paper. He examined their placement, and was humbled by the mad precision of this device, as even the tiniest of cogs swam in complete harmony with the mightiest of their brethren. They interlocked with one another in a massive and interminable display of gracious intercourse.

  In a task that demanded Amil to step backward a considerable distance, he finally set his eyes upon the top of the machine. One gear, larger than all the rest, and the breadth of a Fog Lake baseball diamond, stood still. Frozen in place, it was enwrapped in that dark chain and frosted with a glow that language was ill-equipped to describe. The way in which beauty lovingly gazes upon something even more beautiful than itself, the gear radiated a brilliance that awakened a guilt in Amil as he looked upon it.

  Above that magnificent example of metallic supremacy, a brick column descended from the ceiling and obscured the top of the gear. That hollow cylinder of stone, which seemed to kiss the jewel of this marvelous apparatus, hung open, patiently awaiting the day when the machine would run again and deliver forth its divine breath.

  As Amil thought of to where the rise of the bricks might extend, he felt as his eyes fell down the creation until they drifted onto its base, and the awesome nature of its being. He hadn’t thought of it before, as it seemed a foregone conclusion that this elaborate mechanism would be supported by titanic means. But, as he had been made to accept many times before, the impossible was the new common.

  A few feet from the floor, the silver boning twisted around itself like a mirrored whirlpool, and formed the structure’s only point. With a base no broader than that of a pinpoint, the metal tip rested upon the ground and supported the entire workings of this gorgeous monstrosity. In perfect ba
lance and rapturous synchronicity, the enigmatic machine sat sturdy, sound as a mountain. However, it did so on only the pinnacle of minute craftsmanship and the wild genius of its creator.

  “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” a voice offered, in a brogue flush with grandfatherly affection.

  Though spoken with no malevolence, the question caused Amil to nearly jump out of his skin. As he spun around with a heart full of flutters, his eyes set upon the proud caretaker of the stilled device.

  A short man stood a considerable distance away. Dressed in wrinkled clothing that was a few sizes too large, he polished a pair of scratched glasses with the bottom of his shirt. His hair was thin and mostly gray, although streaks of his former crimson shone through, with a matching cooperation of stubble forming the shadow of a beard. He had a pot belly, the only portion of him that held excess meat, and stood with a posture that told of the distress nestled within his back.

  “Well? What do you think?” he kindly asked of Amil.

  “It’s...I’m at a total loss for words,” whispered Amil, as he gazed back at the machine. “I’ve never seen anything like it. What is it?”

  “My greatest creation,” the man relayed, in the way that a parent laments the accomplishments of a child who has passed away.

  “What does it do?”