"Hi," Geoff says shyly. "Did you know the world is going to end?"
I see new cuts. Across his chest. Nogitsune is asleep on Geoff"s chest. I see cuts across Nogitsune"s back.
"Yes," I say. "It"s been ending for a long time now."
Geoff runs his hand over Nogitsune"s naked back. I feel a pang of jealousy. It feels odd, bitter in my mouth. I should have seen this coming, but did not. "When did he come up here with you?"
A hand through hair.
"About an hour ago. Are you all right?"
I nod. What else can I do? I can"t tell him about the boy-wolves. He wouldn"t understand. "Yeah. Why?"
"You look. I dunno. Shook up."
I laugh. "Yeah, a little. I didn"t know that he was "
Nogitsune"s eyes spring open. They are red, glowing. His mouth pulls apart and I see tiny needle teeth. "I smell them. They are close. My brothers, my sisters."
Geoff looks down, his eyes squinting. His mouth twitching. I back away, my shoulder against the wall. "Nogitsune? You all right?"
Eyes return, roll back to normal.
"Yeah," he says, "Sorry about that. My family is here."
Geoff seems unfazed by what has happened. I, on the other hand, am spooked. Spooked by his actions and spooked by the wolf kin from earlier. This whole place feels wrong.
"I"m going to head out. Dunno where. Might see Mister Harvey and give his book back to him. I can"t keep it; it"s too weird."
Geoff doesn"t hear me. Nogitsune doesn"t hear me. They stare into each other"s eyes. Gently, lips meeting. I feel like I am invisible, again. This makes me very sad. I never thought I would be the Invisible Girl to Geoff. I always thought I would be physical and real.
Now, I vanish.
Before his eyes.
I leave the cutting room.
Friday: Mister Harvey"s Office Mister Harvey is behind a large desk. It stretches the length of the room, and is covered in books and maps. Each one is highlighted. Each one has pins in them. Displayed, naked. Like a dissected animal.
He doesn"t see me come in. Not at first.
His eyes are down. Head down. He is not talking. Only muttering, fast. Incoherent stream of syllables. I listen, listen closely. Try to find something to stand on. Some symbol to pull meaning from.
His eyes are moving, fast. His lip thickly twitching. His tongue a loose and wild animal in his mouth. I feel an electricity in the air. It is sharp and bites my skin.
I sit down in the chair. I should just leave the book on his desk. Leave and walk away. I don"t know why but I want to say something to him. I want to confront him with the book.
On the cover, I see Nogitsune. In the shadows. Beneath him is a monk, his robes up over his waist. I turn my head. I do not want to see this.
Eyes roll down. Eyelids flutter. Tongue stops moving. He sees me. I am no longer Invisible Girl. He puts his hands on the desk. They have cuts along them. I wonder briefly if he has been to the cutting room.
"h.e.l.lo! To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"
The book is in my lap. Under my folded hands. "The book you gave me ...."
He brings his fingers together. Into a pyramid. "Yes, yes. You know that books are magic? All books? They are all spell books of a sort. See, words and images. They carry more than just meaning. They carry the codes to our mental landscape. Books f.u.c.k with this. They take the words and change them, take the images and rearrange them. Each time you read a book, you become someone else. Changed inside."
I lean back in the chair. The electricity is still here. I feel it. Under my skin. Like acid. "I don"t understand," I say. I feel weak, stupid.
"Did you read the book?"
I nod.
"How carefully? Did you just flip through it? No, no. You didn"t. I see the change. It"s coming over you, already. You are different now, aren"t you? Can"t you feel it?"
I do not feel any different. Just the same. Same Invisible Girl. Although, part of me is haunted now. But I am haunted by the things I"ve seen the world acting in unnatural ways. That is not the book"s fault. But I do not want to seem stupid. "Yes, I do feel different. But that"s not the point you giving me this book. It makes me feel uncomfortable."
That is a part of it. The discomfort. I want him. I need him. But this book made things clear brought the hidden things forward in my mind. And I didn"t feel right after that. Not comfortable. Not right.
He gets up on the desk. Crawls across it towards me. "Yes, yes. It is because you are changing; don"t you see?"
I get out of my chair, move towards the back of his office. He has pictures hung on the walls of swingsets and playgrounds without children.
"No, that"s not it. I don"t want this book. I don"t I don"t want you. Please. Stop. Just take the book back and let me go."
I move my hand against the door. I feel the doork.n.o.b. But it doesn"t turn. I shake it, trying to force it to open. It doesn"t turn. He is over top of me. Towering.
His hand cuts across the air and I hit the ground, hard. My cheek stings from his fist. I look up to see him pulling his shirt off. Tattoos across his biceps, his shoulders, his chest. Circles. Latin. Symbols I don"t understand. He chants under his breath and my knees feel weak.
I try to move, but I cannot. My limbs have gone limp and wooden. I whimper. I try and say something, but I can only whimper. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends.
A bang on the door from behind me.
He picks me up, moves me across the floor.
The door swings open.
Standing there is Nogitsune.
Mister Harvey does not stop chanting, but I feel different. I feel like I can move. His hands move over top of me, move over top as if they are about to undress me. I can move. I scream and kick him in his b.a.l.l.s. He howls in pain.
Nogitsune walks forward. He has a table leg in his hands. He swings it in circles. Geoff is nowhere to be seen. "That"s not nice," he says, walking up to Mister Harvey, who lies on the ground, clutching himself. I walk past him.
"Casting that spell on such a little girl. And that book such a clever trap! But I am stronger than you. I am older than you."
Crack! The table leg breaks gla.s.ses.
Mister Harvey"s body, curled up like a seash.e.l.l.
Whimpering. "You don"t scare me, Fox Boy. I have followers. Wolves from my world." Mr. Harvey turns and looks at me. "They are here, understand? They are here to feed. We will feed and feed and all of you will be dry husks. Empty things."
Crack! Table leg into the stomach. A howl of pain.
I leave. Quickly.
Without saying a word.
Friday: Roof and Snowlands I have to see for myself.
I walk up the long steps. Walk up through the shadows. Walk up past the uncounted cla.s.srooms. Everyone is gone. Everyone else is in the gymnasium. Probably f.u.c.king. They won"t miss the Invisible Girl. They didn"t even notice I was there, not even when I was being rubbed against and humped against.
The roof is large and wide. I can see no one else up here. Only crows, who dot the landscape like feathered dreams. I want to see the sun. But the sun is gone. I want to see the stars. But the stars are gone.
The sky is a hole.
Nogitsune was right. There is only white, flat snow. A long range of snow plains. As far as I can see. And the only objects in the plain are the giants. They walk, I see them from here. Walk, walk, walk. Their tremendous bodies stomping into the ground, thick hands pounding at their sides.
Their skin is like rubber sewn together. Their eyes are fires burnt into their heads. Their hair is like wire, tangled and broken and strung up on their heads.
They dress in rags.
And they are hungry.
The sight of them makes my blood run cold.
Foxes prance between them, their red bodies like fuzzy fires against the snow. Riding on the back of one is my art teacher, sword in hand. Over her back, I see our sculptures in a brown satchel. I see Fear of Mice and feel hope.
From behind, I hear a kicking of a pebble. I turn and see Nogitsune. Walking calmly, swinging the table leg. I see that it is covered in blood and I hate that it has come to that.
It is so cold up here.
"I had to see," I say. I am crying. I need to be the girl who cries. Not invisible. Not to him. "I had to see for myself."
He nods and walks towards me. "I know. They are there. And they wait. My brothers hold them off and my sisters hold off the wolves. But it is only a matter of time before we are outnumbered."
I walk up and put my head on his chest. I feel his arms around me. I cry against his shirt. "Thank you. For earlier."
He runs his fingers through my hair. I feel something against my ear. Like a breast. Like a breast in his shirt. I wonder where it came from. And I look up and he is a she.
"I can be whatever you want," she says. "I can be whoever you want. But I need you now. I need you to want me. I am vague here, flickering. Soon, I will be gone. Geoff was not enough to keep me here. He is barely real, himself. But you you can keep me whole. You can keep me real."
I say nothing. Only lean my head against the chest. It feels like my mother"s breast, and I remember being small and tiny, and sleeping on my mother"s breast while she rocked back and forth, rocked back and forth.
He doesn"t speak again.
We just stand there and watch a war unfold.
Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed writer of fantastical fiction. He"s been published in a slew of magazines(in print & online) and a mess of anthologies. He has a short story collection out (Gla.s.s Coffin Girls) published in the UK by PS Publishing. He has a novella published by Apex Books (Open Your Eyes) and a graphic novel published by Chronicle Books.
He was also a Recipient of KSU"s Virginia Perryman Award for excellence in freshman short story writing in 2000.
You can check out his crazy stuff at: City of Melted Iron.
By Bobby Cranestone.
Concerning the events in Komplex 5, the industrial part ....
Essen: hundreds of smoking chimneys, factories, melting pots, and steaming iron. Here, where all four elements are centred and put into a new creation. A physically dangerous place, but this is nothing compared to the mental pressure. Decades of hardship, deaths and fears have formed something traceable, as if all those feelings have become manifested into a new form.
There is something out here that lives off your very soul, the guy next to me muttered while munching on his lunch. Not that one actually saw it. But sometimes, if you"re turning round a dark corner, there"s a light creeping over the walls, and if you"re checking the temperatures on one of the kettles, it might happen that you encounter a dark shape leering at you. It changes all the time; it"s different, but you know it, anyway, when you meet it. Whatever it is, it"s most times faithful. Like the Banshee in the old Celtic tales, it seems to be a foreboding of doom. Those who meet it have little time to speak of this encounter before they die. Yet, the tale spreads, anyway, as tales always do.
I was from the lower working cla.s.s, so no one cared if I was scared or not when I arrived at Essen. I had simply no choice, if I wanted to make a living.
My post was at the Gischt, close to the blast furnace at the very heart of the complex, which seemed, with every pa.s.sing day, more and more to me like a living being with a mind and will of its own.
The industrial complex included a confusing jungle of tubes and cables that often measured more than one foot in diameter, an iron and steel mill, conveyor belts with melted iron that led over kilometres of industrially-transformed land, high-pressure kettles, several forging presses and other means of forging the gathered iron. On the surface, there were hundreds of buildings of varying sizes, and bridges leading to watch towers and chimneys. The whole area measured 120 square kilometres aboveground, but there was, as well, a great mining area. A blasted area, mines and tunnels that led deep down. Five thousand men went to work each day; some did it reluctantly and with a bad feeling in their guts that they could not name. Not everyone was given to superst.i.tion, but this place was the likeliest to engender such a belief.
I worked as a machinist at the main gas supply, fixing leakages and building new mechanical linkages where old tubes were wholly worn beyond repair. Strangely, they proved unusually short-lived in my area and the tubes seemed not wholly blasted, but almost torn by claws.
In the glow and the smoke ... sometimes, you didn"t quite see what was going on around you and strange shapes showed up that, even when the smoke was gone, only reluctantly vanished.
The sounds of artificial thunder and whizzing iron were almost unendurable and the smell was, in some places, dangerous, consisting of all kinds of unhealthy particles, and you had to wear a mask. The siren shrilled its warning whenever something wasn"t right. Things were often not right. You could not tame the fire and the treasures of the earth without paying the price.
Maybe the place was haunted, as many old workers stated.
At the very least, it was bizarre. I had worked under similar circ.u.mstances, at other mills, but never had I come upon a tube that should be glowing hot, but was icy cold to the touch.
Young and shy, and the new member of my crew, to boot, I chatted little with the others, even the friendlier youths like Florian or Karl. I kept my misgivings and my fears to myself. At least, for a while.
On one occasion, the alarm shrilled, as it often did. I felt it like a certain sign of doom. Panic-stricken men fled to the next point of safety, anxious and eager to know what had occurred. Hastily, I followed through the labyrinthine ways of tubes large enough for a man to easily crawl through, iron pillars and supporting beams. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I felt a warm breath in my neck, which might have been some other leakage, again, or something entirely different. When I reached the next meeting point, I saw around thirty others of my shift, with grave faces. Three men had vanished. Just ten minutes before, when another repair maintenance team had pa.s.sed them, they had greeted each other with the ironmakers sign, as it was customary. But ten minutes were enough to change luck into doom and life into death ... or worse.
I soon learned other details. There had been an explosion, but only an average one, and the rescue team looking for the missing men expected to find at least some remains of them. However, at the place of the accident, there were no clues. No blood, no shreds of flesh and no bodies. There was no trace to be found of the missing ones.
The source of the explosion was also deemed a mystery, if not such a bizarre one.