Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  But nothing happens, and your arms become stiff and cold. Soft hooting punctuates the silence, followed by another passage of the wind through the ferns and trees. Resisting the temptation to sigh, you curl your arms back into the camper, and fumble for the zipper. As you close the mesh screen, the wind picks up, and small cracks sound throughout the clearing. It’s a familiar sound, but you can’t place it. Something flaps against the screen then whooshes away: startled, you shiver and slide back from the netting, images of insects and bats filling your mind. Jamie stirs, turns away. Another object hits the mesh and slides away—this time you recognize the sound for what it is. Stretching one hand out, you press against the mesh as hard as possible, fingers outstretched, wiggling as if coaxing. When the page hits the flat of your hand, you grab and reel it back in. The wind dies down, and the flapping of loose paper fades. What’s left of the book is gone for good, scattered into the sky. You take the page and insert it into the folds of the map. You fall into restless sleep, paper clutched against your chest like a rag doll. In the early morning before everyone else awakens, when the sky is the color of ash, you’ll wake up and study the pen and ink drawing of an ancient maelstrom, its nebulous center leading somewhere you cannot see.

  The road Father drives down while you fall asleep is smooth as silk compared to the road you wake up to. It had been beautiful before—unbroken lanes of blacktop, with perfect rows of evergreens lining each side, wildflowers of crimson-red and white crowding at their roots. The magazine slipping from your hands, you’d grabbed a pillow from the storage area behind the bench and snuggled against the window, bare feet resting flat against Jamie’s legs. You slept hard, so hard you didn’t feel the vibration in your bones as the road shifted to gravel and dirt, pitted with potholes and large rocks. You didn’t see the forest fall away, dissolve into ragged sweeps of ravaged land, green only in the brush and grasses sprouting around stumps of long-felled trees. You didn’t see the land itself fall away, until all that remained of the road was a miserly ledge, barely wide enough for any car, clinging to the steep sides of barren hills. You only woke up when you heard your mother screaming.

  “Don’t ask,” Jamie says, before you can. He’s sitting on the porta-potty, ashen-faced and shoulders hunched over, methodically placing one green grape after another in his mouth. You rub your eyes, trying to make sense of the ugly, unexpected landscape. To your right, the hill rises in a steep incline, tree stumps clinging for their lives to the dirt like severed hands. To your left: nothing. There is more desolation in the distance, but right beside the camper, there is nothing but jagged space.

  The camper lurches down and shoots up, sending books and backpacks sliding across the floor. Your mother screams again. “Turn around, goddamnit!” Tears stain her face in shining streaks.

  “I can’t turn around,” Father shouts. “There’s nowhere to turn!”

  “Where are we?”

  Jamie shrugs. “A logging road, somewhere. It’s not on the map. Dad says it is, but—” He shrugs again, and shoves several more grapes in his mouth, barely chewing before they’re gone. He always eats mindlessly when he’s stressed out.

  “When did we leave the real road?”

  “I don’t know—an hour ago? It didn’t get really bad until about twenty minutes ago. I can’t believe you slept through all that. I thought you were dead.” The camper lurches again, swaying wildly. Jamie stares out the window, a grape at his lip. “Yeah, I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to be quiet for a while, ok? I need to not—I need to be quiet.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Reaching for the grapes, you start to rise, and Jamie shoots out his hand to block you. “Stop, ok? Just—don’t. Fucking. Move. Sit down.” The camper lurches again, and for a wild second, you get the impression that there is nothing under the wheels, that you’re all about to topple over and fall. The shriek is out of your mouth before you can stop it.

  “Goddamnit.” Father, at the wheel. “Sit down, June, both of you sit down and shut up!” Your mother covers her face with her hands. You’ve never seen her cry. You’ve never seen her lose control of her emotions, or of Father. They’ve always done things as one. Now she’s sobbing like a child. Father turns back to you, motioning.

  “Come up here.”

  “I—” You’re paralyzed.

  “Look at the road—” your mother shrieks. Father’s hand lashes out like a snake. You can’t hear the slap of his hand over the roar of gravel and rock under spinning wheels.

  “June, get up here now. Jamie, get off the goddamn toilet and help your mother to the back. Everybody, now!”

  Jamie stands up, legs shaking, and grabs your mother’s hand as she sidles out of the passenger seat. Mascara coats her face in wet streaks, except for where Father slapped it away, and her lipstick has bled around the edges, making her mouth voracious and wide. Jamie helps her across the porta-potty, while you stand to the side, fingernails biting into your palms. There’ll be raw red crescents in the skin when you finally unclench your hands.

  “Come on,” Father snaps, and you crawl across the toilet, hitting your head against the edge of the refrigerator as the camper slams over a log. Father curses under his breath, but doesn’t slow down. Sweat the color of dust dribbles down his face, collects at the throat of his t-shirt and under his arms. If his jaw was clenched any tighter, his teeth would break. “Sit down. Open up the map.”

  Up here, in your mother’s seat, you see now how bad it is. The road before you is barely there, crumbling on the right side back into the mountain, gouged with giant potholes—more like depressions where the road simply dropped away. No guard rails or tree line, just a straight drop hundreds of yards down, the kind of fall the camper would never survive. And the road curves, so steep and sharp that you can’t see more than ten or twenty yards ahead, assuming there’s even a road ten or twenty yards beyond that. No wonder your mother was hysterical. Father’s going to kill you all.

  “June, the map.”

  “You threw it away in the woods, I don’t have it—”

  “Never mind the fucking seatbelt. Take out the fucking map!”

  Reaching into your blouse, you pull out the warm square of paper.

  “Open it up.”

  You do as he says, refolding it so that only the folds showing the Olympic Peninsula show. It fits perfectly in your lap, the land and the void.

  “Tell me where we are.”

  “Ok, I—” Your finger traces over the hand-drawn roads, so many of the brown-red roads that start and end with each other as abrupt as squares of netting. Below them, somewhere, is Father’s dotted blue ink line, along with your mother’s wishful scrawl of lavender road. Frantic, you move your fingernail along Father’s road, following, following— You lost it. No: it’s simply gone.

  “Where are we, June-Bug?” Father manages a tight smile. “How much further do we have to go? I’m counting on you to help us.”

  “I’m looking—it’s hard to see, it’s like a furnace up here.” Panic sharpens your voice. Again, you find the start of Father’s road, and you follow, follow—it disappears. And it’s not like it simply stops, and you can see the end. The road is there and then it’s not, and your gaze is somewhere else on the map, on another map altogether, on the one that was meant for you.

  “I’m sorry.” The words barely leave your dry mouth. “I just can’t find it. It’s not on here. I’m looking and I see all these lines but there aren’t any logging roads, and I can’t find the road you drew—”

  Father puts his foot on the brake, and the camper grinds to a hard halt. When he cuts the engine, the silence almost makes you groan with pleasure. Only the ticking of the engine now, and the whisper of wind and rolling gravel outside. Father places a hand on your shoulder. It sits there like some cancerous growth, hot and heavy, pressing down until the bones grind together. “You can do better than that,” he says. “You know what map I’m talking about.” He leans toward you, his eyes still on the ever-thinning ro
ad ahead. “Look at your map, June-Bug. I want you to tell me where we are on your map, not mine. Because every time I try to read it, I can’t quite make out the roads. You know what I mean. Read your map, and tell me where we are. How far we are from the center.”

  You look back at your mother. She holds Jamie in her arms. His face rests at her throat, lips on her skin, pressing gently, whispering words you cannot hear because they aren’t meant for you. Those beautiful large hands, around her waist and thighs. He didn’t love you most, after all.

  “June-Bug.” Father stares at you, and you return his glance. There can’t be any lying now. He already knows, and you’re so tired. You just want this all to be done.

  “It’s not my map. I didn’t draw it, you know. I don’t know how it got there.”

  “I know. We didn’t draw those other maps, either, your mother and me.”

  “What?” You lean back in the seat, astonished and angry as you stare at the limp paper. You wanted divine intervention for yourself, not for him, because you were the one who needed it, not him. Did the void betray you? “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you know how it got there?”

  “I don’t know. I got it at a gas station, I didn’t open it till I got home, and there it was.” He stares at the dusty windshield, beads of sweat matting his brown-grey hair. “I think—I think they appeared because that’s where we wanted to go more than anywhere else in the world; and I think something in the world heard us and showed us the way. To a place where we can be ourselves without anyone else’s eyes on us, to where we can be free to do and act as we please.”

  As animals, you think. As monsters. But you remember Jamie in the same breath, curving over you in the quiet corners of the school. Like father, like daughter. Animal, monster, too.

  “Why can you see my map? Why can’t we both see yours?”

  “Because your map, that’s where we both most want to go now. Because I love you, and I want to be with you. We need to go there together.”

  “All of us, together?”

  Father’s hand moves from your shoulder, gliding over your breast as he lowers it onto your thigh, the fingers rubbing hard against your sore crotch. “Us, together. Just the two of us. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  The sun boils the fabric of the seat, searing your skin. You stare out your window at all the desolation, feeling his hand, working, working. You barely see a thing in the glare, but you don’t need to. You don’t need to see anything at all. The cool, black edges of the void nip at the edges of your conscious, small nudges that leave smears of black in your vision, as though ink is trickling into your tears.

  “I know the way to the center,” you say.

  “Good girl.” Father leans in, kissing you on the cheek, almost chaste in his touch. “Good girl.”

  The engines roar, and the wheels whine as Father shifts into first, sending the camper rattling back up the small ledge. It’s not that much further, you tell him, just a few more corners to round, and we’ll be at the top, and the road will even out. You stare at the map as you speak, fingers moving back and forth as they trace the roads to the nothingness in the middle. Another corner comes and goes, and another, and you can see the anger in his face start to rise again, anger and impatience because he thinks no he knows that you lie, and you move your hand to his shoulder and squeeze it, then place it on his thigh. He smiles, takes your wrist and moves it in and down, wrenching the small bones in his haste. Repulsion fills your throat as you slide your hand past the folds of fabric, but you grab tight, grab as you slide to the edge of your seat, place your other hand on the wheel and your foot on the gas, down hard. And the road becomes a blur, the cliff is a blur and the screams and Father’s fist against your face are mere blurs, and only the momentary silence under the wheels before the sharp weightless flip of the entire world strikes you as having any substance or weight, just the right weight and terror to send you into the flat black void, into the nothingness of the center, as you whisper to Father and Jamie and your mother and to anything else that can hear:

  Can you see everything now?

  You open your eyes.

  You stand in an open field on a hill. Beyond this hill, more hills—small mountains bristling with dark green trees. Beyond those, the Olympics rise up from one end of the horizon to the other—endless, imperious, cold and white, their jagged peaks tearing through passing clouds like tissue. Until now, you never thought they were quite real. You never knew anything so colossal, so beautiful, could actually exist. Behind them, the sun is lowering, and long shadows are creeping toward you and the hill. The light is wrong: thin and pale. The air is cool, almost cold. It doesn’t feel like summer anymore. It doesn’t feel like June.

  Both your hands are covered in clotted scars and blood—your right hand clutches a long, pitted bone. Many of your nails are gone, the rest have grown out hideous and sharp. It takes a moment to recognize the filthy strips hanging from your body as the remains of your pajamas. Your skin is deep blue: hands, arms, torso, legs, feet. Dye from small septic tank in the porta-potty. You smell like shit and death.

  An animal-like grunt sounds out. Startled, you turn. To your right, a small herd of elk graze on the short grass. They are large and thick-furred, the males with antlers high as tree branches. They pay no attention to you. To your left sits the camper, monstrously dented and mangled, windows shattered, sliding side door long gone. Inside, it’s dark. There’s no movement in or around it, save for several birds perched on the pop-top. Scattered all around you are bits of clothes, empty cans and boxes, plastic bags, with a larger pile by the front tire of the camper, like a large nest. The hill. The road. The fall. The camper should not be here. You should not be here, alive. This is not the remains of the logging road. This is the interior. This is the center. But of what, you do not know.

  Turning to the camper again, you wait.

  You wait for Jamie. You wait for anyone. You wait until the sun begins to lower behind the range. Waves of nausea roll through you, sending drool and bile spilling out from between your lips, and your muscles spasm and twitch. But you are not ill, and you are not hungry, and you hold a long clean bone in your hand. You raise the bone to your face. It’s been scratched and scoured clean.

  You know they will not appear. You know where they’ve gone.

  As you lower your hand, you notice how rounded your belly is, like a little pillow, and how your naval sticks out like a round fat tongue. You’re thin but not starved. Bending over slightly, you study your inner thighs: they, of all places on you that should be caked with blood, are clean. “Oh.” It’s the only word you can form. You know what this means, and you now know you’ve been on this mountainside longer than just three months. The tight, blue skin of your stomach is dotted with a latticework of markings as intricate as lace. You touch the blood, a roadmap of brown ink—it’s the map, you realize, it’s your map made flesh. You run your finger in a spiral around to your naval, circled three times in dried blood. Press at the soft nub of flesh, the place that still connects you to your mother’s womb, and to all the women before her, to the beginning of time, the first woman, the first womb. It was always going to be like this. It has to end like this. It cannot begin again.

  Behind the mountains, the clouds and skies deepen into vivid pinks and purples, rich and wonderful. A wind barrels down, sharp and stiff: the herd raise their heads from the grass in a single movement, then shoot off down the slope. You smell the change in the air, see the shimmering dark gather around the high peaks as the first thread of lightning splits down and away. Shivering, you sit down in the grass, balancing the bone at the crest of your mounded stomach, and carefully, firmly, run your wrists across the sharpened edges. And the sunset begins its slow dissolve, while lightning dances around the mountaintops, as all light fades from the world, and you start to cry. It’s not a mirage, you see it: a separate, circular mass of black flowing up from the hear
t of the mountains, up and over the peaks like a tidal wave. Clouds and lighting curve toward the darkness, sliding into the mouth of the maelstrom and away. Near the edges of the whorl, uprooted trees begin to swarm into the air like locusts, disappearing with the earth itself. The ground beneath you shifts, and the entire hill jerks forward: the camper topples over and rolls out of sight. This is it. This is it. Raising your arms high, you inhale as much as your cracked ribs allow, and shout as hard as you can.

  Take me. Save me.

  It’s not very loud, or hard, and your broken voice can barely be heard. But it doesn’t matter. It’s widening, consuming everything, and it doesn’t even care or know that you exist because this is chaos, this is nothing and not nothing, and this is where you want to go more than anyplace else at all, because inside that, there is no sorrow, there is no pain. Only everything you ever were, waiting to be reborn.

  And while you can still feel, you feel joy.

  Within your belly, movement—a deep watery ping of a push, like someone beating down against a drum, over and over. You cover the mound of flesh with your weeping arms, and crouch before the rising winds. Everything’s going, this time. Nothing will return. Cherry red ribbons cover the blue stains and black scars, erase the circles, the roads. No new map this time. Only a river rushing into itself, only a girl striking out on her own, with no directions left behind that anyone can follow.

  Which is as it should be. Where a girl goes, the world is not meant to know.

  Her Deepness

  Part One

  Sometimes There’s No Poison Like a Dream

  In a corner of the great southern metropolis known to its citizens as Obsidia, in a sprawling district known to its inhabitants as Marketside, a squat, hollowed-out block of a building sits at the edge of a roaring traffic circus, windows gaping like broken teeth in an ivory skull. In the center of that century-old pile of stone, a young student named Gillian Gobaith Jessamine stands under the drooping brown leaves of a lemon tree, a frisson of morriña trickling through her as she observes a canary groom itself in the sticky summer air. The canary is bright yellow under a layer of soot, and a small ivory ring marked with a row of numbers and letters binds one leg: this tells her that the bird isn’t some wild passerine but a domestic, bred for a specific anthracite mining company, several hundred miles away. Gillian knows because she wore a ring just like that, a scrimshaw bone collar fastened tight around the pale brown of her neck when she was young, when she worked in the deep of the earth. How it came here, all the way from the industrial heart of the city into the dank inner suburban courtyard of her school, is a mystery. Then again, she took that same journey when she was merely twelve. Is that the reason for the jolt of morriña? It unsettles her to feel sudden nostalgia for such an ugly, terrifying time and place, a place she’s tried so hard to leave behind. Then again, nothing in Obsidia is impossible, Gillian has found. Everything, both wonderful and horrifying, can be, and is.