The Grimscribe's Puppets (21 page)

DIAMOND DUST. Whatever it means, the name makes him think of “Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie. Max finds the CD, puts it on without a glance at Cassandra. Too long she’s dominated the stereo with her soundtrack for collapsing buildings.

He sings the opening line, raises his fist on “genocide!”

Cassandra crosses the room to check her pile of papers.

Max sits on the charred futon, reading lyrics in the CD booklet.

She approaches, sits beside him and sidles up close. She keeps her palms flat on her thighs. Despite this, her version of physical affection, he senses her formulating plans from which he’s excluded. A creaking ladder into a sky opaque with the blackness of soot and metal dust. Cassandra wandering, part of some industrial doomsday. Himself alone in this place, ashen black, cold and still.

So close. A thousand tiny scars on her face and shoulders, each a pocket of metal that burned into her and cooled beneath the skin. Such tiny disfigurements, so many in number. Enlarged, in too great proximity, even the beautiful can seem ugly. All Max’s friends, especially the men, everyone commented on Cassandra’s beauty. Impossible to ignore. They all say he’s lucky to have someone like her.

She drapes an arm across Max’s shoulders and he shudders at her emptiness.

~*~

The next morning, a new executive office has appeared out of nowhere beside Boaz’s own, the company now two-brained in control of the cubicle-dwelling segments of its corpus. Max sees within the new office his neighbor conversing with three policemen, probably about the bodies they find every night along Lorraine Street. So many dead. No explanation.

Boaz stays shut away, alone in his office, even after the police are gone.

So much changed. What’s the point of giving up dreams for salary if it doesn’t come with some promise of security? If it can all be taken away, in times of upheaval like these? All Boaz’s promises, hints really, probably useless with a second boss balancing the scale.

Max keeps trying to stamp out his fear before the embers ignite. Despite lacking adequate information, he remains determined to keep up the appearance of forward motion. Someone will let him know what’s going on, or he’ll figure it out himself. He’ll get back on top.

The corner cubicle, Newton’s until last week, is again occupied. Max has already forgotten the new guy’s name. Legs asprawl on his desk, pant legs riding up to expose white skin over black socks, the man endlessly mutters into his phone, so monotone Max doubts anyone’s on the other end. Within the droning monologue, the words: “...DIAMOND DUST...”

Electrified, Max leaps up, stumbles into the next cube. He spins the man’s legs off the desk and grabs him with violent urgency. Max leans in, nose to nose. “What do you know about it?” He mouths the words: DIAMOND DUST.

The neutral-faced man thumbs the disconnect button. “I thought you were inside.” The man’s lips are pale, grayish. He looks around. “This is Planning unit, right?”

Max nods. “Boaz spoke to me yesterday.”

The man looks skeptical.

“The janitor’s closet,” Max whispers.

Recognition. The man’s face relaxes.

Max takes a seat. “The thing is, Dyno. I thought they were the ones getting the bid on Diamond Dust?”

The guy inclines his head toward the new office. “This new man, Fabrizio, he says Diamond Dust is so big, for the first time it’s not Boaz... I mean us, versus Dyno. We’re in it together, every engineering firm in town, every structural fab, every melt shop. And it’s not just Portland any more.”

Max still isn’t sure what it is. He wants more, something to flesh out the projection he imagines from Cassandra’s plans, briefly glimpsed.

Boaz emerges from his office and starts toward Fabrizio’s. He sees Max and stops. “What you said about Newton, I’ve been thinking. See if you can find him on the melt floor. He’s too valuable to be slinging coal, or who knows what.” Boaz mimes shoveling, a motion which unavoidably becomes a golf swing. He gives it up.

There’s sense in what Boaz suggests. It’s what Max wants. Why does it feel like being sent to Human Resources for a layoff?

Passage to the melt shop is blocked by the black-draped scaffold. Max finds a seam, slips through, and navigates a web of crossbars and platforms. Once beyond the layer of fireproof carbon blanketing the inner scaffold wall, a wave of fierce heat waters his eyes. Vision adjusts to a darkness mitigated only by a distant red glow. The factory he estimated doubled in size is closer to ten times larger than before, the expansion covering not just the old parking lot, but north and east as well, where days ago stood empty fields and a crumbling brickworks. A space so vast, walls recede in haze like the desert horizon. Machines hum and churn, the heartbeat of mechanistic life newly birthed. The melt pool a demonic ocean covering acres, serviced by a fleet of giant cauldrons.

So unfamiliar, all this. What insight can Max offer? The perspective of decades, worthless now.

Dead-eyed laborers plod in step to discordant clanging. Rows of sullen hunchbacks, faces featureless, powder black. How will he find Newton, let alone recognize him? Drifting, drawn toward the central vat is if by gravity. A seething orange lake, millions of liquid tons, a city-sized repository of of thermal energy. Ordinary melt pools are terrifying enough. This is like standing near the surface of a tiny, remorseless sun. One slip, and all that energy unmakes you. Fall in, leave nothing behind but a puff of ash and a tiny pocket of impurity soon churned away, dispersed. So easy to disappear. To be devoured by all this.

Max has visited steel mills around the world. Twenty years. He’s seen nothing like this.

Too hot, stifling. Wants to move closer. Drawn toward an area of blinding intensity. Luminescent currents swirl just below floor level. What is it? Within hypnotic patterns of yellow-hot eddies, he perceives familiar shapes. Human forms. His mind reels. Yes, a pair of bodies. They swim and frolic together in molten steel. Impossible, of course it is. Max leans, grips the railing, squinting against the heat. Not just the two of them, intertwining in a fluid sort of dance. Beyond, others in the background. So many. All moving, unharmed.

One of the pair resolves to greater solidity, a set of proportions familiar as a face. Max gasps. His heart rattles painfully in his chest. It’s Cassandra, enfolded, writhing with another. Max wants to turn away. Even in such shock, he can’t deny what he’s seeing. Everything’s changed. It’s all unknown, not just Boaz, the factory, Cassandra. All solid ground vanished. A world of deadly fluidity.

Her face rises from the glowing steel lake and turns to confront him. Any doubt, erased. The second shape, still touching her, Max recognizes as well. Fabrizio, it must be. Cassandra and the neighbor. The new boss. Too much. Max can’t bear watching. None of this makes sense. He backs away.

The Cassandra shape disentangles from Fabrizio. Her movements change, from fluttering easily like a swimmer in a pool, to the slower motions of struggling against resistance. She climbs, as if stepping out of thick mud. Finally she steps free, the flow seemingly fully solid and able to support her, as if responding to her desire that it do so. Air cools her to reddish orange, standing there atop the steel, then climbing stair-like ridges at the vat’s edge. As she reaches the concrete floor, she’s becoming flesh again.

Fabrizio remains behind, watching nose-deep from the pool, which remains fluid for him.

Cassandra approaches Max, her body some evolving intermediate between steel and naked skin.

“You aren’t...” Max begins. “I thought we were...”

Cassandra lifts her arms, demonstrating for Max her new form, unblemished white, free of the many tiny scars. She turns and glides off toward darker realms beyond the pools, motioning for Max to follow. Eyes adjust, until he discerns the edge of a vacant space, a deep cavernous pit.

“I saw plans in the apartment. Some kind of sky ladder.” His gestures, indicating uprising levels, stop abruptly when he realizes his closeness to the precipice.

Cassandra stands on the verge, toes extending into emptiness. “Wrong direction.” She raises a thumb and points it emphatically down.

Max tries to look down. Such dizziness, he almost swoons. The yawning scale of the abyss. “I came looking for Newton,” he gasps. “I don’t even know how I—”

“You’ve been meant for this all along.” Cassandra reveals a smile he’s never seen before. It’s terrifying. She isn’t what he thought. Maybe never was.

A great descent is underway. A metal latticework of trusses and beams penetrating the earth. Rungs on which climbers probe the deepest dark, some of them colleagues, members of his team.

“H-horrible,” Max stammers.

“No.” Her smile broadens, disproportionate. More than ugly. Monstrous. “Progress. Culmination of our utmost destiny.”

Again straining toward the threshold, Max cringes at the bottomless infinitude, desiring at once to turn away and to behold the alien construct of parts made by Cassandra and others like her. Pieces interlock, held in place by anthropometric steel fixtures. Workers swarm the metal grid, suffering at the tension. Ever more join the effort. Machines link in, ratchet lower, and hammer foundational stone. Diamond-tipped burrowers swarm, glistening as they spin.

Fabrizio approaches from behind. Slowly cooling, he stands beside Cassandra. Max feels a possessive reflex. He’s aware this is absurd.

“The bosses like you, Max,” Cassandra says. Always hinting, tenuous. Never quite a promise, not tangible enough to grasp. That’s all she’s ever given.

“We’re ready to bring you in, Max.” In Fabrizio’s half-metal state of flux, his speech is slurred, guttural. “Just stop resisting. Do what you’re told, and you’ll run this. Otherwise...” Grinning, he extends an arm in a dramatic, balletic gesture towards the pit. His skin is clean and white, free of scars.

Max gives no answer. None is needed. He has no alternative.

Creatures barely human climb slippery hot from the melt pool, pass without stopping and slither over the brink. Each descends to an ordained position and slowly hardens in place. Bound together in an agonized realm of ash and steel, their relinquished dreams and forgotten pleasures form underpinnings of a new, transformed world.

The trembling ladder vibrates, emits a head-splitting tone. This resonance harmonizes like an infernal chorus with moans of torment echoing from the depths. Cinder plumes rise, black orchids blooming against seething red. Eyes water and burn, stung by primordial dusts which swirl up from the bitter dark.

Nothing to see or hear but a hellish roar. The future, unknowable. Max drops to his knees and crawls blindly toward the heat.

By Richard Gavin

Are you out there, Professor Nobody?

I’m hopeful that these words will somehow reach you, wherever you might be, whatever you might be.

In my starker moments I find myself questioning whether you were ever really here at all, whether those sermons that spilled from your dusty throat were not simply the vestiges of one of my wish-lush dreams.

But if you did truly grace a classroom with your singular presence, if the trances you evoked were real, then I cannot help but wonder if you might return to your more dedicated pupils, the ones you left behind on this shadow-encrusted planet.

Do your thoughts ever stray to me, Professor? Rarely, I would wager; rarely, if at all.

I have roamed many roads, exhausted so many different methods, all in the hope of finding you. Every one of my efforts has come to nothing. But how could it be otherwise? After all, how does one even begin questing after a man known only as Nobody, a man whose vocation is that of a secret shepherd to what he calls “the true macabrists”?

Macabrist. It was your phrase, yet it chimed so deeply with me that I cannot help but regard it as a grand truth, every bit as immutable as love or fear or pain.

I shall never forget that first after-hours lecture when you defined a macabrist as “one whose dreams are as a great charnel ground, dimmed by personal eclipses and slaked by a private Styx.” I remember how you stated that the macabrist is free of faith, strictly speaking, but that if they were to invent a religion it would be based not on the supernatural, but rather on the “grubby
sub
natural; underworlds.” We trawl up our philosophies from our unconscious, and they emerge dripping with abjection.

I remain determined to gain full admittance to the great subnature, Professor, if only to prove to you that I am worthy of seeing the darkness, that I am truly
of
the darkness.

Do you see how assimilated your teachings have become with me? Your “little lectures on supernatural horror,” as you somewhat dismissively called them, made me feel as though I had been granted admittance to the buried sphere from which I’d been wrongly banished, condemned to being born into this world.

I’d always thought I was the only one who longed for some grue-dimmed otherworld. But in you I had, at long last, found one who understood. You voiced things which had always felt like shameful intuitions to me, ones that I had to keep pent at the back of my mind, perennially praying that they would not leak out to condemn me among the Normals. But you uttered your bent observations plainly, with a boldness that could only have stemmed from experiential knowledge and a confidence I have never possessed.

You taught us that the Horror toward existence is not only real but is in fact more real than we are, that it is the boundless gory foam upon which all things, known and unknown, merely bob like so much flotsam.

I was the best pupil you could ever hope for, Professor. If only you would return to experience the fruits of your teachings. I can still see you creeping toward the classroom door on that last night; can still hear your parting words echoing through the halls of my brain: “Good luck on the final.”

I waited for that final examination, waited an unmentionable span of time. After more anguished nights than I care to recall, I came to suspect that the final was not to be held in the cozy confines of your classroom, but in the world at large.