“The sun moves, so we have maybe an hour,” Shine said. He nodded, and together they heaved the debris aside and opened the door as far as they could to admit all light.
They crossed the threshold of the hidden door, and entered a room bathed in dim red and black shadow, their own shadows dancing ahead of them. It was moist in here, and their feet sloshed through an inch or two of liquid.
“What is this?” Turner’s voice echoed in the chamber. Shine said nothing. She always grew quiet when frightened.
Their eyes adjusted to the dim, red light, enough that Turner began to run his hands over the metal protrusions that projected from the walls, floor and ceiling. “Valves!” he yelped. “Each of these opens.”
“Turner, wait!” she said, as she saw what he was about to do, but it was too late. He had already gripped a lock wheel in both hands, and turned it. It spun easily, as if lubricated. In fact, the whole chamber smelled immaculate, without a trace of rust or mildew. She ran a finger across the metal of the chamber in amazement. This was the cleanest place Shine had ever been.
Turner spun the wheel for a dozen revolutions, and then stepped back. “Nothing,” he said with a sigh. “I thought something would...”
Something did. A low rush began somewhere deep in the pipes, and rose to a high pitch, a climbing note that wasn’t so much a grinding of metal or the flow of fluid, but a song. It sounded like a voice carrying through the steel, released by Turner and the valve.
“It’s beautiful,” Shine heard herself say. Beautiful? When had she ever used that word? Even her best cleaning job had been only “satisfactory,” never beautiful. She had never heard the word used by the others.
Shine had no idea where she had learned it.
“There are more!” Turner began to dart from valve to valve, spinning each lock wheel with such feverish abandon that Shine grew scared again.
“Turner? Turner! We shouldn’t be doing this!” She wrapped her arms around herself.
There were more sounds. Each valve Turner turned released a new song, a new rising and falling of notes. They combined with the sounds from the other valves, until the air was filled with them, like Turner and Shine were eavesdropping on a conversation echoing across their steel world. Turner’s mouth was agape, his eyes shining, glinting red from the reflected sunlight.
After a time, the music fell to a slow, methodical rhythm. It pulsed through the pipes. Slow, then fast, then slow and fast again. It was familiar, yet nothing that Turner nor Shine had ever heard before.
They stayed as long as they could, sitting there on the flooded floor, listening to the pulse and rhythm of the pipes. As the sunlight began to fade, Shine turned to Turner, “We’d better go.”
He nodded, and stood, and it was then that they realized they’d been holding each other’s hand.
They were late to the food line the next morning, so they were near the back when it happened. Mamabrd belched and churned and her beaks trembled with effort. When they opened, it wasn’t the red paste that coughed forth in thick gobs. It was clear, and came out in a rush.
It sloshed over the front of the line with force, drenching Knotty and Binder. Knotty had her mouth open, as usual, since she rarely stopped talking, but she stopped talking now. Instead, she threw her head back and drank deeply of the clear, crystalline fluid.
The others shifted about, unsure. Some few stepped forward. Beater. Folds. Caller. Cool. Even Breaker, the strongest coward Shine had ever seen, dropped his tools and timidly held out his mammoth hands to the stream.
Then, something happened. Shine had never seen it happen before. She caught it in a glimpse, as Breaker sloshed the clear liquid on his face, and let it pour over him.
He did something then, with his face. His mouth twisted, pulled tight, toward either end. She could see his teeth. Then, he laughed.
The others gasped. Some pointed. “Breaker’s mouth!” one said, “What happened to it? Where are his joints?”
Shine stared. It was true. The hinges on his mouth were gone. His skin shone, and not like the shell that all of them had, but like something else. He stood there, staring at himself, turning his hands over as the clear fluid rained down over him. Then, he looked across the feeding plaza, right at Shine.
She stared back, not breathing. Breaker’s face had changed. Changed! His forehead drooped and rose, his mouth flexed and twisted, his eyes widened and his tongue lolled about his lips, tasting the rain.
“CHILDREN. MOVE AWAY FROM THE MAMABRD.” Auntie’s call ripped through the scene on a wave of static. Shine looked up to see the Maulers descending from Auntie’s tower, steaming and belching and clangk, clangk, clangking as they marched.
The others began to shrink away. Some even fled. Not Breaker. He stood there in the crystal rain, the look on his face alien to Shine, yet the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. There was that word again.
They fell upon him, smashing with their hammers, and Breaker crumpled.
He did not shatter, but he died all the same.
Someone pulled Shine away, and she barely realized she was screaming. She barely noticed as she was dragged across dark access grids and precarious catwalks held aloft by rusted cables, deep into the heart of the city. At some point, she screamed herself into exhaustion, and fell asleep.
She smelled the clean again. There was light, this time, as she opened her eyes. There was Turner, and nearby was a lantern, hanging from a nozzle in the wall. “You brought me here? Was I asleep?”
“You passed out at the Mamabrd. I didn’t know where else to bring you.” Turner looked the same as always, but his eyes reflected the lantern light. His voice was low, almost a whisper.
“Where did you get the lantern? Is that Blaze’s?”
He looked at it, then back at her. “She let me borrow it.”
A second lie. “Blaze would never do that. She loves her lanterns, and the Maulers would pulverize her if they found out she...”
“I took it.”
Shine sat up. “You what?”
“I know, I’m sorry. I’ll give it back, but I needed light to bring you here, and,” he trailed off for a moment, his eyes searching the chamber, “I didn’t know where to go, after what they did to Breaker, after what happened to him. Shine, it’s our fault, isn’t it?”
She stood, and Turner helped her. She looked at the valves, and the pipes and the cieling.
“Can you turn them on again?”
“What? Shine, you saw what happened...”
“Turner,” she said, gently putting her fingers over his mouth. “Shut up, and turn them on again.”
He fell quiet, and after a few moments of thought, he grabbed hold of the nearest valve lock and turned. Then, another. And another. The song began again. It pulsed and drummed and thrummed and sang around them. Loud.
So loud, they didn’t notice the clangking.
“There they are!” Both Turner and Shine turned to face the chamber door. There was Blaze, holding her other lantern, and behind her were two Maulers, steam belching from their backs to curl amongst the singing pipes above them. “Those are the ones what stole my lantern!”
No use protesting, the lantern in question still hung from the nozzle overhead.
“I want my lantern!” Blaze’s voice was shrill against the pulsing rhythm of the pipes. The Maulers moved forward, their boyish faces set in grimaces under their heavy goggles, their tubes swaying back and forth, into and out of their swollen, powerful limbs.
Turner and Shine grabbed hold of each other. They couldn’t fight the Maulers. No one ever had. They would be crushed here, their skins shattered amongst the music of the pipes. “Turner, Turner, I’m sorry,” Shine began.
He turned toward her in time to see it. From her eye, a single drop of fluid. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.
One Mauler noticed it. He stared at Shine, and paused.
The second did not. He clangked forward, belching steam, and raised his hammers above Turner and Shine
, who held on to each other, waiting to be shattered.
Then, a sickening crunch, and the hiss of steam, and a scream of pain. Shine opened one eye, then the other, and saw one Mauler standing over the other, his hammers dripping with blud, the same blud that rushed and pooled around the head of his fallen brother.
“You did this?” The Mauler’s voice was childish, high and whiny. He gazed at the room in wonder. “You made the stuff come out of Mamabrd, that made the boy soft-skinned?”
Turner and Shine still held on to one another, unmoving, but the Mauler would not be denied.
“Is it here? Is the stuff here, in pipes?” The Mauler sloshed forward on all fours, clangking around on his hammerhands and hammerfeet. “In HERE?” he yelled, and he rose up on his hind legs and slammed his hammers into a pipe, bursting the fitting and spraying clear liquid throughout the chamber.
Everyone was drenched. Blaze ran screaming from the chamber. The dead Mauler disappeared under the rush of liquid, colored red by the blud seeping from his shattered head.
But neither Turner nor Shine noticed them, so fixated were they upon the Mauler who still stood, bathing in the fluid from the broken pipe, and laughing louder than the roar of the pipes. The Mauler doubled over, his arms hanging at bizarre angles from elongating joints.
Then, the laughing stopped. Blud started to flow from the Mauler’s joints where the machines had been bolted to his hard shell now made soft by the crystalline rain. “No!” he shrieked, as the hammers tore away and fell into the red fluid below, as he looked down at himself in terror, watching as his body fell apart underneath him. He crumpled, shrieking in pain, little more than a torso and a head now, bobbing helplessly in the rising flood.
Turner tore himself from Shine’s grasp, and grabbed what was left of the Mauler, turning him over. The Mauler’s goggles had come free, taking his eyes with them, and his face was a hideous wreckage. But he was no longer screaming. His eyes were gone, but his mouth was twisted the same way Breaker’s had been. He was smiling, and he was dead.
Turner stood, looking down at the dead Mauler as the rain fell upon him, and he felt a hand slide into his. Shine was there, at least he thought it was Shine. Her face was no longer separated into plates and hinges. Her arms and hands were whole, and her neck turned smoothly. Her shell was no longer a shell, but soft, pliable.
Warm.
Her other hand came up to meet his face, and he felt her fingers along his cheek, tracing his mouth. He was entranced by her eyes. How they shifted, following her fingers, darting up to meet his gaze, and down again in modesty as his own hand came up to her skin, her lips, and then their lips met, there in the rain, in the midst of the red pool. He felt her smile, and felt other things, too. Stirrings where there had been none before, flooding with feeling and chills and warmth and tension and softness. He could have lost himself then, and she along with him.
The sound tore through their reverie. A metallic groan, from pipes carrying pressures so long denied them, and rivets coming free, bolts loosening, and steel warping to give way to the deluge struggling to get out.
Shine grabbed his hand. “Turner! We need to get out of here!” Even her voice was different, carrying cadences and urgencies he had never heard, but had always wished for. They pulled each other through the maelstrom, using the valves and nozzles and protrusions as handholds even as the swirling fluid grew ever deeper around them, threatening to pull them back toward the chamber. They swam, clumsily and desperately, sloshing through the red pool, up the shaft to the catwalks over the secret door, as the tide rose beneath them.
Auntie’s voice screamed over the city. “REMAIN CALM. REMAIN CALM. REMAIN CALM.” Never before had so many paid so little attention, as the pipes burst overhead, and every duct and groove filled with the strange, clear, cool liquid that softened their skins and made them feel.
The Maulers met the fate of their brother. Shine and Turner stumbled past dozens of them, screaming in horror and pain and a queer, newly-found ecstasy as they felt their hybrid bodies tear and fall asunder.
“The gates!” Turner and Shine bolted for the walls of city, so long forbidden, and the gates to the Green that had spelled death for as long as they could remember. Shine remembered Slicker, falling to his death in the course of his duty, and Bender’s skull, dripping Blud, his price paid for defiance.
They reached the gate along with many others, all children who had abandoned the tools of their trades, so that Shine no longer knew their names. Was that Candle? Could the one with the lopsided smile be Joiner? She didn’t know, they didn’t know, and none of them cared now but for escaping the city that had been their prison, as it flooded with the crystalline tide that had given them feeling, and hope, and fear. But the Gate was solid, and screwed shut.
“Help me!” Turner still had his backbelt, and still had his wrenches. Together, the children of Auntie turned the bolts as the flood rose. They tore their hands, and bled, and screamed in pain, but still they worked and pulled and shoved and clawed and twisted.
Several drowned, filling soft lungs with rust. More lived, and fought. The Gate was opened, and the flood ran free into the Green beyond.
The rust was behind them, now. They stood there on a hill, watching the red sun dawn anew over a place without steel, or rust, or Auntie’s crackle. The river flowed silvery beneath them, and they could almost see in the early, faint light how it flowed into the city that had been their entire world for so long. They heard laughter, and watched the children enjoy their soft skins in the green moistness and the clear flow of the river, exploring each other and themselves even as they stared at the others who did the same.
Turner felt Shine’s hand slide into his, and her voice warm upon his neck. He felt the prickle of tiny hairs on his skin, and could not blame the chill of morning air for the sensation.
“What’s new?” she asked.
“Everything.”
FIN
Jay Knioum is a husband, stepdad, Community College administrator, graphic design and part-time writer—which part, he’s still not entirely sure—living in Corpus Christi, Texas. He has contributed pieces to Dragon Magazine and the Sci-Fi Flash-Fiction site 365tomorrows.
The Fantabulous
Clown Machine of
London Superior
by
Damon L. Wakes
The suited gentleman entered the office with that particular swagger that could only suggest pockets bursting with money. Sillywig Stevenson hurriedly set aside his paperwork: customers like this didn’t know the meaning of the words: “just a minute.”
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Mmmmmm, I very much hope so.” With a flourish of his cigarette holder, the gentleman sat down and folded one gangly leg neatly over the other. “It’s my nephew’s birthday and naturally my brother would just have to go out of town. Inevitably it falls to me to organise the little blighter’s party: streamers and cake and all that. I had heard that your business would be the one to visit for the entertainment. That you had some sort of...clockwork humour device.”
“The Fantabulous Clown Machine of London Superior.” Stevenson stood up, moved to the corner of the office and pulled away the oily canvas covering his masterpiece. “Capable of inflating thirty-eight balloons per minute and with a repertoire of sixty-four theatrically distinct pratfalls. The hand painted porcelain face is also one hundred percent pie-resistant.” He hoped that this customer would not notice the large and conspicuously absent R-valve of the left knee piston.
“Oh my,” said the gentleman. “It does look rather...unsettling.”
Stevenson twanged one of the spring-mounted eyebrows. “That’s entirely the point. Clowns are supposed to be scary, and there’s no better clown than my Fantabulous Clown Machine.”
“Well,” said the gentleman. “If that’s the case, I’m sure little Francis Franklin-Melville will be most pleased with it.”
“When are you holding the party?” asked Stevenson.
<
br /> The suited gentleman took out a very ornate silver pocket watch. “In...almost twenty minutes. Let’s say a quarter past three.”
“Twenty...” Stevenson glanced at where the R-valve wasn’t. “I’m er...I’m not sure...perhaps...”
“I know it’s short notice,” explained the gentleman, placing a hand on Stevenson’s cheek. “But if you could arrange this I would be very grateful indeed.”
“You mean like...you’d pay double?”
The man took his hand away. “Oh. Yes, I suppose that would be reasonable.” Disappointedly, he took out a notepad and wrote out the address. “Be here in...seventeen minutes and I’ll make it triple, just to be fair.”
As the door jangled closed, Bignose Bennie stepped in from the side-office. “That guy was weird,” he said.
“Who cares?” said Sillywig Stevenson. “He was rich. Triple our regular fee? This’ll be the biggest break in the history of mechanical clownery!”
“Not without that R-valve, it won’t.”
Stevenson’s face fell. The thought of all that money had pushed all the less pleasant thoughts out of his head. “Blimey,” he said. “You’re right. Bennie, you must get one.”
“But the shops aren’t...”
“You must get one,” said Stevenson, forcefully, “by any means necessary. I’ll lug the Fantabulous Machine to the party and you can meet me there.”
But the traffic on the high-rise streets of London Superior was as bad as ever that day, and Stevenson began to worry that, whether or not the R-valve got to the party, the clown would never make it. Taking a short detour, he came to a station for the steam monorail and shoved the wobbling Clown Machine through the doors. He double-checked the bit of paper with the address on it. What luck! There was a station virtually next door.
But though the steam monorail reached the station, it did not to do so quietly.
Phantasmical Contraptions & Other Errors Page 2
