Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  “Look.” The young man points to a cluster of megaliths rising thousands of feet in the air, notable not as much for their somber weight and height as much as for the fact that they stand untouched by the presence of factories and machines clinging against their steep bodies. In a sea of pollution and fire, they alone are naked and clean. “El Torres del Pain.”

  Gillian shivers in the stifling air. The Towers of Pain, a circular ridge of megaliths in whose twisting foothills mysterious Hellynbreuke lies. Where Emanuel’s god lies imprisoned, supposedly. “I didn’t realize how large they are. It looks like a giant necropolis.”

  “El Patagones, eh?” the young man jokes. “A cemetery for a lost race of giants?”

  “I believe that as much as I believe in Ciudad de los Césares and El Dorado. I only meant that it’s large. It doesn’t seem real.”

  “Well, you’ll find out how real it is, soon enough. We all will.”

  Gillian slips on a pair of dark-tinted glasses, and studies the man closely as they make their way back up the platform, stopping before the remains of the station. “What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Joaquin.”

  “How old are you, Joaquin?”

  He seems taken aback. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Were you born here? You’re younger than me.”

  “I’m not that young.” Joaquin turns and slips past the broken doors into the tiled waiting room. Gillian follows. In the middle of the room, surrounded by worn stone and wood benches, a tree stands, a fat sprawling oak whose roots erupt from the once-perfect mosaic of floor tiles. The placement is perfect, it couldn’t be coincidence. Someone must have planted it, years ago. Gillian walks up to it and caresses one of the leaves. Green, pliant, strong.

  “But you’re not that old. Call it a hunch, but I doubt you’re much older than my son, and he’s not yet fourteen. So, either you were born here with the team, or….” Her voice echoes through the broken space of the room, and a small flock of birds bursts off the exposed beams and wheels away at the unexpected sound.

  “My older sister was the first Sibyl, before she died.” Joaquin looks away, back out the door to the group. More birds flutter up from the branches through the holes in the ceiling, into the cloudless blue sky. All crows. No canaries. “There are a number of families still living here. Not everyone evacuated. Some of us hid. We don’t want trouble, but we don’t want to leave, and we shouldn’t have to. This is our home.”

  “Is your home underground? In the tunnels?”

  Joaquin frowns.

  “I don’t care if it is—I lived underground half my life. I recognize the look, that’s all.”

  “My grandparents and parents—when the town was first evacuated, looters came through, criminals, rapists. Everyone wanted to pick the bones. Sometimes other things came, from out of Obsidia. So we stayed in the basements, and then—” He shrugs. “—we went deeper. Not all the land under Feldspar is on fire, yet. It’s still safe, for now.”

  “Do you believe that that object I’m supposed to bring to life is the offspring of some forgotten god? A god from under the ground?”

  “With all my heart.” Joaquin nods his head, emphatic in his conviction. “He’s of this land, our land, not some alien god from half the world away. This is the god Obsidia deserves, one that will honor us, lift us up and make our city and people whole, not tear us apart with disease and destruction and ruin. You should be honored that you have such a gift, the gift to free Him.”

  Gillian touches his shoulder. “If you really think I have such a gift, you should go home and get your family, and run as far away from Feldspar as you can.”

  Joaquin starts to smile, but Gillian grabs his arm.

  “I’m not joking. You took something out of the earth that belongs in the earth, and now you want me to bring it to life. Do you think it’s going to thank you?.” She lets go, and steps through the doorway into the sun. “You should run.”

  The group walks into Feldspar from the station. The rails run further into the heart of the town, but the conductor refuses—there’s no way to know what shape the rails and land under them are in, he insists, and he’s not about to find out the hard way. And there are other, unseen passengers, those with the lidless eyes of black fuel who never left their cabins, who the conductor insists must not remain outside the limits of Obsidia for very long. So they leave him and the crew behind to ready Empress for departure. No one speaks except in occasional low tones—their respirators prevent most conversation. Gillian’s respirator was left behind on the train, and no one asks her if she needs it, or insists she put one on. Still the canary, after all. They follow the rails toward the city limits, past ghost neighborhoods clustered around the cracked remains of forgotten crossroads. Buildings list and sag, victims of subsidence—cave-ins—from the mines beneath their foundations. Vent pipes stick up in distant fields, their open mouths spewing out clouds of white steam and fumes from the fires below. From so far away, they look like city fountains, elegant and regal.

  Up ahead, Feldspar looms, a graveyard of iron and steel.

  The younger men and women take turns wheeling the chimera in a light, hand-pulled sedan with a roof to block the sun. She now wears a mask that completely envelops her head and neck, presumably to guard her weak lungs from the dry air. They sign to her with their hands, stopping at intervals so that Joaquin can remove the mask, speaking to her in sibilant whispers as he replenishes her water. Their hushed voices and shuffling footfalls sound naked and small, unnatural in a landscape where nothing stirs, not even the air. Gillian walks to the center of the tracks during those rest stops. She stares at the dulled, pitted lines of steel, noting how they plummet like arrows straight into the empty town. So many buildings and factories, and they are the only humans she sees. It’s everything the rest of Obsidia was not meant to be: empty, still. She can’t tell if it’s beautiful or perverse. In the distance, thick black mountains bake in the sun—culms, the unusable remains of coal and other mined materials. Even so far away those are some of the largest heaps she’s ever seen. They remind her of graves.

  A touch at her arm draws her away. “Miss Jessamine.” It’s Joaquin. “We’re heading this way now.” He points toward the crossroads, to a dirt road leading away from the town center.

  “Aren’t we going into the town? I thought the cemetery was by the steel mills.”

  “We moved Him, remember? He’s hidden outside the town limits, where no one will find Him, and where we can protect Him. Come on.”

  Gillian stares down the tracks again, resisting the urge to blink as the sun beats into her pupils till the horizon becomes a black fuzz. She touches the tip of one boot to a rail, and feels the immediate rush of metallic-tinged vertigo racing up her bones to her head. It’s that way, she wants to say, the knowledge so thick, so bitter on her tongue. Can’t you feel it? It’s in the center, underneath the fire, waiting. Just follow the rails. Follow them in, and down.

  “Gillian!”

  They trudge down the road, watching the culms grow wider and higher, until their ragged summits nudge the heel of the noonday sun. Slowly, surely, workers’ dormitories and tenement buildings give way as they head into the valley: processing plants and winding towers, coal bunkers and blast furnaces rise up and around them like bones jutting from the corpse of a beached whale—and then, just as gradually, industry fades away, revealing once again the broken countryside, dotted with the dead remains of the mines. A summit breaker sags into itself, rows of broken windows catching the afternoon sun and transmuting them into a waterfall of sequined light. Chimney stacks lie in spiraled slices on the ground or rise in the air like empty flag poles. A flywheel as high as a house leans impossibly alongside a tree, the trunk grown around its curved, rusted base. They stop again, and everyone begins switching their shoes to hobnail boots, while Emanuel passes around walking sticks.

  “Are we climbing?”

  Emanuel points to the near
est culm, several hundred feet of black shale piled into a flat-topped mountain. “Up there. That’s where he is. No one goes near the culms, and we can guard him better up there.”

  “Guard him against what?”

  “Everything.”

  It takes another hour to reach the top, even with Emanuel moving back and forth, herding the slower climbers and stragglers along. Gillian offers to help carry the chimera, but the creature’s handler’s seem so repulsed at the suggestion that she quickens her pace, joining the front of the group so she won’t be near them. As they ascend to the flat top of the culm, Gillian studies the layout of the town with an expert eye—she sees how Feldspar exploded in growth, so haphazardly and quickly that the workers’ houses and dormitories butt against the factories, where noxious fumes probably sent them in droves to the doctors and the graves long before the fires ever did. The culm isn’t the highest one lining the edges of Feldspar, but it’s high enough that as they reach the top, for the first time in her life, Gillian see lands beyond Obsidia, a place where Obsidia isn’t: green forests to the north, and tundra-like steppes and desert to the east. It won’t last, that wilderness. Obsidia will gobble it up someday, until no one remembers a time or place when Obsidia wasn’t the name of the world.

  “Over here.” Emanuel heads toward the center of the culm, where a massive depression has been dug. Gillian understands now why they chose this spot to hide their stone deity. The culm is barren waste product and nothing more, difficult to climb, and free of predators. And it’s hidden in plain sight—only travelers in a plane or dirigible would be able to spot the hole. The rest of the group, save for the chimera and the young man, drift to the edge of the pit, listening.

  “You did this yourselves? All of you?” Several people nod.

  Emanuel takes off his mask, running his hand over his red, sweating face. “After we disinterred the cemetery, we brought the equipment up here,” he explains, “steam shovels, trucks to haul away the excess rock. When it was finished, we erased all traces of the road back down as best we could.”

  “I have to admit, you did an excellent job. I’m impressed.” Gillian isn’t lying. Before her sits a depression approximately one hundred meters in diameter and twice as deep, with graded spirals of paths that wind down to a flat, circular center. They essentially created a strip mine, similar in shape to the huge copper mines outside the limits of Obsidia, further north. Here, the effect is of a pitch-black amphitheatre. No: an impact crater. A cradle of birth.

  You don’t need to know your father’s name, Morwyn had said, melting into the fading lights like a glacier. You couldn’t pronounce it.

  “Are you all right?” Emanuel slips a hand against her waist. After all he’s done to her, she knows any ordinary woman would push him away in anger, but she doesn’t move away.

  “Yes. It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

  “We’ll get some food in you, and you’ll be fine.”

  “And that?” Gillian points to the figure at the center, a story-high mass covered in mud-colored cloth, obscured by long shadows from the high pit walls. “Is that the child of your God?” Behind her, someone gasps. Emanuel grabs her hand and pins it down to her side, the mask of pleasant demeanor gone.

  “Never point,” he whispers. “Never. Would I go to your temple and point at the statues and altars like some gawking, unbelieving fool? This is not a game, no matter what you think. Show respect, and act accordingly.”

  “Of course.” Gillian draws her hand out of his grip, gently. This man that she thought was so grounded and real, is so lost. It would sadden her, if she could care. “I apologize.”

  “We need to prepare. Go keep the chimera company. We’ll come for you when we’re ready.” Emanuel walks away, and the others follow. Gillian stands there for a moment, unsure of what to do. An impulse to rush upon him, push him over the edge of the pit and watch him tumble down the ledges until he cracks his head open onto his god comes and goes too quickly for her to savor. She’s never been violent, anyway. Life provides violence enough, without provocation. And she wants to see this through to the end, because she knows it will not end how Emanuel thinks. She wants to see his face at that moment, to see that transformational moment of understanding. It will be as if she’s giving birth, all over again.

  Under the canopy of the small passenger sedan, the chimera lies on several filthy pillows, staring at the distant town through a scrim of gauze. Gillian sits next to her, her body wedged into the tight space so that their knees press against each other. Sweat trickles under her arms and breasts, staining the faded fabric of her second-best dress. Both hold flasks of water, the chimera taking hers through a glass straw. A touch of whiskey flavors Gillian’s water, courtesy of Joaquin. Beyond the scrim, beyond Feldspar and the thin gorge, far-off plumes of factory lights flare and fade.

  The chimera leans forward until her scaly face is inches from Gillian’s. She smells of brine and dying flesh and softening bone.

  “Thiths is notht going to end well, is ith?” she whispers in Gillian’s ear.

  Gillian smiles. “Well, no,” she says, “it’s not quite that. It’s simply going to end however it ends. There’s no good or bad about it. The mines burn and the town dies. It’s not malice or judgment. It is what it is.”

  The chimera coughs out a small laugh.

  “All right,” Gillian admits. “Probably not.”

  “Then why dithd you come?”

  Gillian opens her mouth, to talk about fate and birth and death, and the great wheel of Obsidia upon which all citizens helplessly spin like pinned insects: the chimera slides a webbed hand over hers, clasping it tight. “Don’th lie. I’m really am thycic, too.”

  “I thought so.”

  The chimera reaches into the bag at her feet, and rummages around, pulling out a small ampoule filled with yellow smoke. She pops the cap and sticks the end into the O of her mouth, sucking hard. Gillian says nothing, shocked. The chimera’s eyes roll up, and she shudders, then after a long minute, lets out a soft, languorous sigh. Gillian sniffs the air, but detects no odor of any kind. Whatever the creature inhaled, she completely absorbed it.

  The chimera drops the empty ampoule into the bag, and smiles. “I’m also a drug addict.” Her voice is succinct and clear, though her lips hardly move. It’s as if she’s speaking from within Gillian’s forehead. “Certain abilities and gifts require augmentation to fully work. It’s the price I’ve paid for moving from one world into another.”

  “Aren’t you part human, though? It shouldn’t be this bad for you, breathing air.”

  “I’m human on my mother’s side. Evidently, she wasn’t human enough. Now, let’s try this again. Relax. Tell me why you’re here.”

  Gillian lets herself slide inside the calm, round pools of ink and shadow. “A dream I had,” she begins, “when I was a child. Before the mines. I dreamed of Feldspar, or a place like it. Empty, abandoned. I dreamed I was in an empty city, looking for something.”

  “For what?”

  “Something—below. I don’t know.”

  “Your daughter?”

  Gillian squirms. “I didn’t—I wasn’t expecting twins, not that it would have mattered. She was stillborn, which was a blessing. She was—wrong. Deformed, horribly—I buried her in the mines, and took Jasper. I’m not sorry I left her body down there, and I’m not sorry I left. She was already gone. I gave her a name and a grave. That’s more than most of us get who actually live.”

  The chimera draws back, but keeps her hand pressed against Gillian’s. It feels as if they are welded at the joints, sharing the same bones and blood. A smoky taste steals over Gillian’s tongue, and the sun grows brighter, coats the culm in a platinum veneer.

  “Not your daughter, then. Not your son. Do you look for your creator in your dreams?”

  “I don’t believe in god, or gods.”

  “Did I ask you about the gods?”

  “You asked me about my creator. I don’t believe in
him, in it.”

  “It believes in you. Its endless thought is upon you, pressing against your back like crushed wings. It is a hook in your soul, and the chain is yours to grasp, the way to him clear. It has always shown you the way. It’s as easy to see as—”

  “—train tracks, running through the desert into a nova sun—”

  “—it is the metronome at the earth’s core, marking time until the continents align—”

  Gillian swallows hard, fighting the drug, fighting the cenote eyes.

  “—no, it’s stars, it’s supposed to be the stars. What we’re taught, when we’re young.”

  “Is it? Does a being with an iron core heart care about the stars? What do we care most about? What do you care most about in the world?”

  “My son. I was never the best parent, I’ll admit, but yes, I care about my son.”

  The chimera smiles. “A parent always cares about their child. More than life itself. More than the world itself. And why is that, I wonder?”

  “—when you create a child, you’re creating yourself, again—”

  “—creating a new world—”

  “—world within a world—” Gillian stares. She sees the tracks.

  “—what’s in the tunnel with you?”

  Blackness rushes across Gillian’s vision. An answer is in there, somewhere in the dark: the answer is all around her. But her throat constricts, and she chokes on the words as she tries to speak. They words aren’t enough. The chimera breaks the spell, pulling away her hands. Nausea rushes over Gillian in a tidal wave: she leans over the side of the sedan and vomits onto the ground. “I’m sorry,” she croaks through strands of drool and bile. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “A hazard of my habit. The apologies should be from me. Here.” The chimera hands Gillian her handkerchief, then reaches into the bag again, and pulls out the leaf-carved chip of Arihant Spider Green. “For luck, was it?”