Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  “I thought it was lost.”

  The chimera presses it into Gillian’s palm. “It was wasted on Emanuel. Not that he didn’t try. He really does love you as best he can, you know, but—you should give it to someone who understands what it means, who can read that kind of life. Who can read you.”

  Gillian puts down the rag, and examines the marble as if she’s never seen it before. In a way, she hasn’t. This is a relic, a tombstone of another life, a life now dead and gone. After a moment of consideration, she presses it back into the chimera’s hand. “Please. Take it as a gift from me—I insist. You’ve been very kind.”

  “Really? Well, if you love something—you know the saying.” The chimera’s scales shift in the sunlight, sliding from pearly grey into petal pink. She holds it tight for a minute, then puts it into her pocket. “I’ll find a way to thank you.”

  “Well, there isn’t anyone else who can read me like you can. You’ve been the only one I’ve found. Not that I was looking.” Gillian stares back out at the city.

  “You were born, weren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  The chimera smiles, and pops open a second ampoule. “Then there are two others who can read you. At the least, there is one.”

  In the northernmost corner of the great metropolis known as Obsidia, nestled in the outskirts of a dead and forgotten town, twenty or so odd figures wend their way into the earth, away from the light of a weary afternoon sun. From the highest point of a mound of slate and slag, they wind in an inverted spiral around the sides of the central pit toward the dark figure squatting in the flat center. Gillian looks up as she descends, noting how the sky becomes a single disk of blue, with a yellow iris floating toward the edge. Soon the iris will slide off the disk altogether, and the great eye of night will be revealed, its unending sight firmly fixed on her—even now she feels it, the great colorless void beyond the day. No matter the time or the place, she is always watched. The gaze is upon her, relentless and everlasting.

  What Emanuel and the others did to prepare the site, she cannot see. There are no lights in the pit, she doesn’t smell incense or scented wax, she never heard chanting or prayers. Although the heavy respirators are still clamped to their heads, none of the men and women traded their garments for ceremonial robes, as they would have in the neighborhood churches and temples of Marketside. Perhaps they are saving ceremony for Hellynbreuke. They wear no clothing of any kind, though. Gillian dug in her heels and refused—it’s not nudity that bothers her, but what it represents, that they are nothing. After a few tense minutes of negotiation, she relinquished her undergarments and boots, but keeps her second-best dress. Razor-sharp metal and coal shards rip through the soles of her feet, but she’s felt worse pain, and it feels so distant, anyway, as if it’s happening to someone else. Against the barren coal walls, even the darkest-skinned of the group appear as white, wriggling grubs, with the expressionless faces of flies. The group stripped the chimera bare, too—including her mask—but she alone wears her nudity with perfect grace. Her crooked body glides down the sloping paths as though she’s floating through invisible tides.

  Gillian was first to enter the pit, trailing humans behind her like a chained bridal veil, and now she is first to place her feet on the flat floor. Some of the group hang back along the sides of the bowl, standing along the ramps while the rest fan out around the object. Gravel rattles down the slopes, as the wind picks up speed, and the edges of the cloth roll up, revealing a dark mass that Gillian can’t identify. As Emanuel removes his mask, she catches his glance and points to her feet: surrounding the pit in an unbroken circle is a small trough formed from the shale itself, filled with a viscous oil.

  Expressionless, Emanuel gives his respirator to a young girl, then steps onto the floor, followed by a woman built like a prizefighter. In unison, they each walk to a front corner of the cloth, and remove a large railroad spike pinning the fabric in place. The spikes set aside, the woman nods her head, and two more people walk up with lengths of copper piping, each piece close to ten feet tall. No one says a word as Emanuel and the woman work the pieces of piping into a seam at the edge of the cloth, until both pipes meet in the middle. Gillian sees what they’re doing—it’s clever, she must admit. The pipes inserted, Emanuel and the woman, with the help of two others, lift the now stiff corners of the cloth, holding the pipe ends and using them as curtain rods. The pipes are lifted until they form an inverted V: Emanuel and the woman walk back, pulling the heavy cloth away as they uncover the bound stone son of their god.

  “Oh.” Gillian steps forward. “It’s beautiful.”

  It’s not slag, as she imagined it might be—not compacted industrial waste or the discarded inner workings of some oversized machine. It is a single, massive piece of rock, albeit one so curved and dappled that it resembles piles of fecund limbs topped by a somewhat flat, lopsided head. Gillian knows what this is. It’s a glacial erratic, a boulder pushed around the earth for tens of thousands of years by rivers of ice, then left behind as the glaciers receded, to sink into the earth or be rafted by floods to new lands. Gillian raises her hands.

  “Stop!” someone calls out, and several people rush forward.

  “No, let her.” Emanuel says. “Let her do what she’s here to do.” Frozen, Gillian glances at the woman, who steps back only after Emanuel gestures her away.

  “I’m sorry,” Gillian says. “I should have asked. Did you need to pray first?”

  Emanuel doesn’t take her bait. “Do what you need to do.” His brow furrows as he speaks. It’s not quite anger—remorse, perhaps? Gillian doesn’t know anymore—his face is strange to her, as if those four years together were a dream. Funny how she thought she knew him, thought she could read him, despite all her protestations that she couldn’t understand that kind of life. She was right, after all. She should have taken her own words to heart, instead of trying to impress them on a man who had never listened.

  Her hands make soft patting sounds as they move across the mottled surface of the boulder. Limestone. She’s carved a cemetery’s worth of headstones and markers out of this material. At the very least, if she tries, she can make something out of this, draw the story of its life out of its ancient body and onto the surface. Not real life—her touch, her flesh tells her that there’s no sentience in the stone. Maybe, though, if she carves something truly spectacular, they’ll forgive her. Before they kill her, that is.

  “It’s very old,” Gillian says. “And very large. I’ve never carved—worked with a single block of stone as large as this before. It may take a while—days, perhaps.”

  “No, it won’t.” Emanuel smiles. “You underestimate your talent. And besides, you’re going to have help. Everyone, back on the ramps.” He motions to the woman, who begins to light a torch.

  Gillian feels her stomach drop. How stupid of her. Of course that oil was placed there to be lit. This was their preparation. “Emanuel, don’t do this. If you start a fire up here, it’ll spread to the other culms, it’ll never go out. All of these mountains, burning. There are—” she drops her voice to a whisper “—there are people still living in Feldspar. Don’t do this to them.”

  “I know. But we need the fumes.”

  The chimera steps forward, led by Joaquin.

  “How is she going to help me?”

  The chimera places a hand at Gillian’s throat. “Trustht me. I will.”

  “How are you going to help?”

  The chimera moves behind her, placing one hand on each shoulder blade as she whispers in her ear. “Justht a puthsh or thwo, from the sthone to your minthd. The fumeths will help. Althso, this.” The chimera’s head rests on her neck as Gillian hears the familiar popping of an ampoule cap. She must have kept the glass tube hidden in her elongated hands—or maybe Joaquin knew, and let her do it anyway.

  Familiar odors hit her nose, slick and oily sweet. Joaquin has taken his place on the ramps above the floor, and the flames from the circle of fluids illum
inate his thin body. Emanuel walks toward her, seemingly out of the flames, the respirator once more masking his handsome face. A certain solidity fills his muscular body up, as though being in the place grounds and defines him in a way no other place, no other person, ever could. It suits him. Desire flares up in her, brief and hot. “Hands back on the god,” he shouts through the heavy filtering. Gillian turns back to the boulder, bowing her forehead against the stone as her forearms slide up to frame her face. From behind, the chimera gives her a gentle push forward, until Gillian’s entire body presses against the boulder.

  “How do we do this? I’ve always done this alone.”

  “Have you?”

  Gillian doesn’t answer.

  “I’ll be on the other side,” the chimera whispers. “Think of me on the other side of the rock. I’ll find you. I’ll come to you, and you bring me through.” Gillian feels the creature’s hands slip away. The crackling of flame fills the air, and smoke settles into her nostrils. The weight of the group’s stare settles over her, pressing down. Ignore it, she whispers, closing her eyes. Only you, only me, only the land. Calm, cleansing dark flows through her mind. Time falls away.

  Grey, rising up from the dark.

  More smoke, the hiss of dark clouds fuming over the bulging curves of malleable limestone, like the clatter of waves over an empty pebbled shore. Roiling clouds of hot magma pump from a soft mud floor into waters the color of a coelacanth’s scales. This is not the boulder she is reading. Gillian tries to break contact, but her body is gone, the boulder is gone, and she floats, staring down at a watery world. Far from the coast of Obsidia, under the steel-grey waves of the Southern Ocean, a vast indefinable shape is thrashing its way to the surface. I’ll be on the other side. Blood runs from Gillian’s nose, and the droplets fall like a chain of rubies into the swallowing waves. No. Her lips form the word, but it rushes from her body like the blood, too quick for her to hear. There’s too much power in whatever is rocketing from the ocean depths, too much anger and pain. Gillian forms the word in her mind, imagines sending it out through every pore of her body, blanketing the surface of the ocean. NO. At her back, she imagines anthracite wings and all the weight of her subterranean life cracking apart, raining down like pyroclastic ash. The skies vomit fire onto the churning waters. Waves rush up only to collapse into themselves, their movements becoming sluggish. Beneath the slow-forming crust, the creature’s movements harden and still; the ocean follows suit. Gillian hangs over the dead country, the Archean lands. Shattuck lies there now, and so does the chimera, or whatever hideous new creation she would have been, if Gillian had allowed her to transmute back through the ancient stone.

  Gillian falls onto the floor of the pit. Above her, the afternoon sky devours smoke from the burning fuel. Before her, the boulder stands, not a single carving or new mark on its worn skin.

  “Again.” Emanuel grabs her hand, pulling her up before she can protest. “Try it again.” She pushes him away.

  “Get off me, get away from me.” Joaquin is in the pit—she grabs at him as he passes. “Don’t touch that stone!”

  “Where’s the chimera?” He whips her away and circles the boulder. Gillian and Emanuel follow. Several more people step onto the floor, pulling off their respirators. “Where is she?”

  Gillian follows him to the opposite side of the boulder. From this angle, the mass looks like an angry fertility god, all breasts and stomach and head. A current of wind whips through the pit, whining as it collides with the stone. “She’s here,” Gillian says, goosebumps racing up her arms. “She’s right in front of us.”

  “What did you do to her? Where is she?” Joaquin pounds at the boulder with his fists, and Gillian flinches hard.

  “Gillian?” Emanuel touches her waist. She runs her fingers over his, squeezing. It’s the last vestige of feeling she has to give him.

  “Please, Emanuel. Go back to the ramp.”

  “Until this is finished, I’ll stay where I am,” Emanuel says. “So will you.”

  Cold despair washes over her. “I know.” The boulder squats before her, swathed in black vapors. A long crack on the top fold looks like a crooked, toothless smile: it wasn’t there a second ago. Her hands tremble as she touches it once again. Are you inside?

  I am the inside.

  The words burst into Gillian like hammer strokes: she staggers back, clutching her head. But before she can howl out her pain, the boulder shifts, raising a fold of itself up like a large paw. Somewhere, someone screams. Gillian doesn’t see the strike: she slams into the ground, head first. For a moment, she feels only distant surprise, and the sense that her body has disappeared. Then pain floods her, sudden and sharp. She cut her head open, she feels blood pouring into the shale, and every muscle and bone throbs. “Come on.” She forces the words past her broken teeth. “Finish it. Let them run. Come to me.” Her plea bleeds out into the air.

  Emanuel is first. The chimera picks him up in a shifting fist of limestone, and squeezes tight. His life jets out between the stone digits like waterfalls of steel sparks, and when he’s dry, the chimera pounds her hand repeatedly against the shale until his head comes away. When she opens her fingers at last, she scrapes them against the sides of the pit. Rubble cascades like water. Gillian lies on her stomach, head bleeding into the rock. Her broken arm is flung out from her side as if reaching, compelling all the pieces of her lover to rise and come together, become whole again. After the second body hits the ground, she closes her eyes. Vibrations bounce the slag against her cheek as the chimera thunders past. She doesn’t try to move. She doesn’t have to. It won’t touch her.

  Time passes behind her eyelids in a perpetual river of bright flashes and drawn-out screams. Dust settles onto her legs, prickling her skin like ants. Gillian presses her nose into her shoulder, but the smell of hot organs and excrement seeps into her lungs anyway, a mephitic vapor that disturbs the forgotten recesses of memory. Time hemorrhages inside her, and her childhood seeps out in carnelian memories: cartilage, cracking as it’s pulled from her face, and the volcanic touch of stone as it pours into her cavities, turning her broken remains into a cauldron, a cradle in which she will be reborn. Gillian is now and she is then, she is all the times she has been dead and alive, pregnant with life and pregnant with iron, broken with fire and marble-cold whole. She sees the falsehood of herself, and the truth. Everything about her life has been a lie, except for one small thing. Bile dribbles from her mouth.

  A touch at her arm. Gillian’s body jolts, and she opens one eye. Joaquin lies beside her on his back, tears running down his filthy face. Gillian has never seen such fear before. It makes him look younger than her son.

  “You’re alive,” he whispers. “I thought—I saw you breathe, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “How long—” Her voice cracks.

  “I don’t know. Forever. Why is she doing this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We did it wrong. We never should have….”

  “Well. I told you to run.”

  More screams, floating like sparrows along the wind, followed by silence. Seconds later, a heavy object hits the nearby ground. Joaquin squeezes his eyes shut.

  “If we just lie here, if we pretend we’re dead, it’ll go away.”

  “No. She won’t. She’ll find you.”

  “She’ll come for you, too.”

  “Forget me. I was born dead. You have to get out of here.” Ignoring the pain, Gillian raises her head. Nausea rolls through her, and blood washes down the right side of her face.

  “No no no don’t move don’t move,” Joaquin pleads.

  “Shut up.” Gillian rises, rolling her body so that she’s partially sitting up. The edges of the pit are black against the early evening sky, lavender and rose with tinges of orange, like a garden in riotous bloom. “She’s not here. She’s outside the pit.”

  “If it knows we’re alive, it’ll come back for us. I’m begging you, just lie down.”

  “I can�
��t do that.” Gillian grabs Joaquin by the hair and pulls him up. Almost instantly, he freezes in her arms, too frightened to even fight her. Gillian holds him as she scans the rim. “Look up at the edges of the pit,” she whispers. “Wait for it.”

  A quiet minute passes. They breathe in unison. Joaquin’s hair brushes against her mouth, leaving more blood. The sun lowers further, and the colors staining the sky deepen into a collar of jewels. Then: a head, sailing over the curve of the pit and onto the ramps, bouncing its way to the floor.

  “Forgive me, Great Dreamer,” Joaquin whispers.

  “The opposite way: go. Run.” Gillian pushes at him. He stares at her, and she pushes her face into his, baring her broken teeth. “Run now or die.”

  Joaquin runs. Gillian watches him scramble back and forth up the paths to the top of the culm, into the setting sun. She watches his figure grow black and small against the deep purples and pinks of sunset; and she watches how, at the last, another, larger figure appears from the side and from behind, almost from out of nowhere, and overtakes him in quick, decisive strides. Even in her bulky rock form, the chimera still moves with such grace. Gillian watches how they dance like shadow puppets against the aniline-bright hues, black figures outlined in a dazzling corona, merging in and out of each other until they are one. And Joaquin comes apart, inevitably, pieces scattering skyward, a human asteroid. She watches how the chimera stands still after the last of him parts her stony hands, watching the crimson disk sink in an ocean of colors. All the reds of the bleeding world, slipping off the earth with a young man’s soul. It is a spectacular sunset, after all: on that, she will agree with the creature. She shouldn’t miss it. It’s going to be her last.

  Shale crunches under her bare feet as she makes her way to the top, and blood stains her gravel-studded soles. There isn’t a clean way up. Everywhere she looks, broken bones poke up through shining masses of veins and organs, still warm, still pumping blood. Some of the bodies are ground so thoroughly into the slag, they can no longer be called human. She doesn’t see Emanuel: then again, she doesn’t look for him. Gillian averts her eyes, staring at her hands as she guides her feet around the dead. What would it take for her to lay her hands on each one, let the memories of the stone rush into her body and mind, gather up each glistening particle and bind them together? Would they come alive again? Would they walk and talk, make their way back into the world, grateful to be half-human yet half-stone, damaged yet alive? She touches the fine line of a scar, just under her jaw. A woman stares up at her with one surprised eye, her head half beaten into the rock. Limbs fractured, torso cracked and spilling onto the ground. Ribs like striped fingers, rising from her flesh to touch tips as if in prayer. Gillian licks her lips. She’s seen this face before, this terrified surprise commingled with wet red sorrow.