All Those Vanished Engines (8 page)

She closed her eyes. Cold night, deep snow, moon and stars icy and bright. The flare set off an explosion, which illuminated the airship above them, as if in ghostly green cloud. She heard the patter of incendiary grenades, rattling through the naked branches. One after another, they detonated in a muffled blot of flame, a series of concussive jolts that she felt in her body. The grenades released a drizzle of green fire, a spattering of drops that sizzled in the snow.

Now she described it: “Lizzie was gone, and at first I thought Matthew was hidden in the smoke on the other side of the bonfire and the Karnak pile of boulders. But in the green light I could see he'd gone away, abandoned me. He'd vanished. I turned away and staggered through the snow, searching for a place away from the light. Above me I could hear the harsh, metallic, foreign words, which seemed to come from the machine itself.…”

“You're doing this on purpose,” he murmured. “It doesn't have to be that bad.”

Paulina stood at the cliff's edge. “I was in terrible trouble. I was all alone. My coat was unbuttoned and I had lost my gloves. I just knew I had to get away from the fire, the light dripping down from the naked trees. How could those two have left me alone? And as soon as I had stumbled off into the dark, away from the fire, I saw the slinking shadows around me in the trees, white wolves drawn by the bonfire. Now they kept pace with me, their eyes shining with reflected light.”

“Oh, come on…”

Suddenly she was enjoying this. “As I ran, I followed a set of footsteps that turned out to be my sister's. I found an abandoned stick of dynamite. I picked it up, thinking it might help me with the wolves. But as I stumbled between the trees in the new snow, I thought of a new idea. I thought I would find the Martians where our reconnaissance had shown their base, the station that had come to Earth a few miles south of town, the source of the airships and the steam-powered chariots, the engine that had broken through the dyke as if erupting through the snow. And in that metal nest I'd find the Martian queen. Lizzie and Matthew had deserted me, so I thought at least I could…”

“Stop,” he said. “All right. All right. You don't even know how dynamite explodes.”

And as if his words had been some kind of signal, the world leapt into motion once again. The steam whistle blew. Paulina opened her eyes to see the train jolt forward. The last of the flatcars, which had seemed empty before, disgorged two of its black dogs.

“Thanks for the idea,” Matthew said. “It doesn't matter if it's you or not. They've got the clothes, they've got the diary, they've got the doll. The girl doesn't even have to know she's going to die. She just has to pretend she's you for a few minutes, so he can get up close.”

It was hard for her to listen because she had turned to watch the dogs, still far away. A cloud of dust followed them. “Come,” she said—she didn't care if he came. She put her toes over the edge and clambered down into the ravine.

Now all the aching in her body came back, the raw, scorched feeling in her arms and thighs and on the heels of her hands. The sun had broken above the peaks, and she felt the pressure of the light as she began her controlled, sliding descent. Stones and sand cascaded through her fingers and rolled past her down the slope. She grasped at roots and patches of grass, and when, scratched and sweating, she found a place to stop two hundred feet down, she was able to look up and see the boy following her, kicking down stones that did not hit her; he had chosen another route.

From down here, perched on a boulder, she could see the valley at a different angle, and the light was better too, now with the sun above the rim. She could see the railway track, cut into the slope, spiraling down the long grade. She could see the train itself, small now, puffing steam. And she could see where it was headed, not only the town at the valley floor, but the station perhaps a thousand feet below her, a clutch of steep-roofed houses built into the slope. Peering down over the abyss, she saw the preparations, the banners and flags, the night-black imperial standard, the crowd of people there to greet her. At moments she could hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the anthem of the Yankee army, somber and slow, drifting in the morning air.

Above her, the dogs had reached the cliff's edge and leapt down the slope. Hairless and huge, bred for battle, injected with vitamins in the Yankee laboratories, they did not hesitate or whine or bark. The empress's veterinarians had removed their vocal cords, Paulina knew. Terrified, she jumped down from her boulder. There was nothing selfless about her motive now, nothing left of the desire to warn or save the mother she had never seen, the innocent people who might be caught in the explosion. There was nothing left of any baser motive, to thwart the schemes of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or to revenge herself on Mrs. McKenney and the colonel, who had manipulated and betrayed her. What remained was an animal substratum of fear as the monsters slid down after her in a deluge of rock and sand.

Nor did she, initially, spare the boy any thought as he stumbled down the opposite slope of the ravine. Perhaps resentful of the ways he failed to resemble the hero of
The Bracelet,
for a moment she had succeeded in forgetting him. But now she saw he had altered his angle of descent to intercept not her but the dogs that followed her. Already he had lost his balance a few times, fallen to his hands and knees, ripped his flannel shirtsleeves. One of the dogs turned to face him, and Paulina could see he had a weapon of some kind, some flashing piece of metal that she hadn't noticed on the cliff-top or on the train. Perhaps he had drawn it out of the earth, found it somewhere among the stones. But now the dog was upon him and he hacked into it, pressing the blade into its open mouth and then wagging it back and forth like a red tongue, an action almost super-human in its power and adroitness; the beast curled around itself, fighting to get the blade out of its mouth.

Of course, she thought bitterly, why couldn't he discover or accomplish anything he wanted in this world, remake it in any way he pleased, conjure swords out of the air if he desired? There was no reason to admire anything he did, short of self-annihilation.

Above her, in the middle of a shower of sand, she heard a wheezing, rasping sound more horrible than any snarl. She couldn't look back. She lurched out of the stream of sliding stones. The second dog rolled past her, the boy on its hairless back, his forearm locked between its jaws. She had found a seam of loose debris at the angle of repose, but below them the chute steepened as it gave out onto the bare red rock. Struggling together, they fell into the chasm's stony throat and disappeared.

4. T
HE
T
HIRD
H
INGE

Gasping, I woke. I turned my face onto the ceramic surface, cold under my cheek.

I found myself in a species of laboratory: cold white surfaces and cabinets of varnished wood. Elaborate mechanical devices, with knurled knobs and handles, and brass assemblages of cogwheels, rose from the tops of the dissection tables. Light came from an electric rod between copper stanchions, a bluish glow. There was an acrid, unpleasant odor in the air, perhaps some kind of fixative.

My flannel shirt was ripped and torn. A warmer light stretched from the far corner of the room, where Elly sat in an armchair holding her doll, examining the bracelet on her arm. I was astonished to see her. I tried to speak, tried to lift my body, turn my head. I flexed my wrists against the manacles that held me down, and tried to pull away from the net of wires attached to various places on my scalp. Braided into a heavy cable at the nape of my neck, they connected me to yet another machine, this one clamped to the table's head, a type of camera obscura, which projected an upside-down picture onto a screen of treated cloth, a moving image, I was surprised to see, and one I recognized—flickery, black-and-white, fading even as I looked, a boy and a dog falling straight into the air, struggling and twisting before crashing onto a rocky ceiling.

An airless, nasal voice: “You are awake.”

With difficulty, I moved my head. I saw a skinny figure in the doorway, dressed in a white rubber coat, wearing rubber gloves, its bleached-white features suggesting a mask or else a layer of greasepaint. “Do not twitch. We were obliged to shave your scalp and also remove a section of your skull.”

This did not reassure me. “Why?”

“Do not move. It is imperative to give us information. The princess cannot speak to tell us.”

In the corner, Elly moved her bracelet up and down her skinny arm. I had watched her so many times, even at that distance I could see the four linked oblong plates, gold inlaid with burnished lines of darker metal, clasped together with a round cartouche. The tiny incised pattern on the plates—simple figures and landscapes—were not identical. Yet they echoed each other, suggesting a larger pattern or narrative. In some cases the images were reversed.

“She will not tell us of her experience among you. Perhaps she has suffered trauma that she cannot describe. The queen her mother wishes to know. We have brought you to record an alternate view.”

“Ah.” None of this was reassuring.

“But we are finding difficulties. Perhaps you can explain.”

“Ah?”

“Do not move. You see the difficulty. There is material that is not accurate. Your memory is flawed.”

“Ah.”

“If it is memory at all. These events have not occurred. Can you explain?”

When the creature told me they had shaved my head, I had felt a chill on my temples and the back of my neck, everywhere the wires were attached, because the skin along my scalp was bathed in alcohol. And when it said they'd trepanned through my skull, I'd felt that also, a naked, shivering sensation in the upper-left-hand quadrant of my occiput. “Let me show you,” it said, turning the table in a semicircle. It rolled easily on rubber wheels, but I could feel the wires dragging on my flesh.

Now I could see the screen without moving. The creature was behind me. I felt a tremor in the exposed tissue of my brain, and watched the dog and the boy, fighting and struggling, shoot upward once again into the stony sky and hang there, crushed by the force of impact. Another tremor and it happened again.

The voice came from behind me now. “You see our dilemma. The perfect mind of the princess contains a precise record which cannot be recovered, because her mother has forbidden it. We cannot risk further trauma. Your mind, however, contains nothing of value, because the record has been vitiated and distorted, layer upon layer.”

From this new vantage point, I could no longer see Elly in her corner, playing with the bracelet on her wrist. I don't think if I'd been watching her she would have glanced up or caught my eye. Yet I imagined her smiling at me, reassured by my smile—this was an example of the distortion the creature had mentioned. I was happy she'd be spared this particular ordeal, which would have terrified her. And I imagined that she pitied me. Surely this was a bad day for her, a daybump or a daynothing. Four clouds, surely, and no doors.

“I see your problem,” I managed to say.

“Do you? This is not memory. What are we to make of it?”

I felt another tug at the wire, this one harder and more sustained, as if the creature were trying to punish me for noncooperation. And as if in response, the image on the screen began to change. Upside down, black-and-white, a girl climbed up the slope.

Exhausted by the effort of reversing the projection, I closed my eyes:

… and felt under her bare, bruised, dirty feet the surface of the rock, unresponsive, so far, to the heat of the rising sun. She was happy to be out of the gravel and scree, happy to be on the red slip-rock, happy that the dogs were gone. Far below the canyon's lip, she felt she had left behind all her past life on the plateau, the lies and the illusions. Instead she had penetrated down among the rock bones of the earth, a country that was unforgiving and uncomforting, perhaps, but where nothing shifted under her weight. Above all she was no longer running away. Instead she was moving forward, clambering down, placing judiciously one foot and then another, one hand, then the next. And below her, halfway down the immense wall, she saw what she was climbing toward, the sloping line of the railway, the smoke and steam of the locomotive as it circled down, and the little village where her mother—presumably—was waiting in a knot of Yankee dignitaries in bonnets and top hats, the military officers resplendent, and the band now playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the dawn's early light.

As if with her eyes closed, she could picture what was happening on the train, the colonel brushing his hair for the last time, examining his handsome face in the washroom mirror, swallowing, to calm his nerves, some whiskey from his pocket flask. He smiled, blew himself a kiss goodbye, then reentered the compartment where the false Paulina waited, dressed in her ripped Mardi Gras finery, clutching the diabolical device, the doll with the gutta-percha head, its white face inscrutable, its soft body concealing unbeknownst to her a bomb, fixed with some sort of timing device, its ticking deadened between layers of cotton wool.

Watching the screen in the Martian station in the snow, the creature gave out an exasperated hiss. “What is this—you see? What is this?”

But Paulina herself could not bear to look at this imagined scene outright. She was too afraid of failure. Instead, as she climbed down the warming rocks as quickly as she could, as she tried to forget her labored breathing, the stitch in her side, as she quelled the fear that she might be too late, she found herself imagining another scene entirely, something familiar and yet far away. There, clutching the stick of dynamite she stumbled through the crusts of snow, through the dark woods. Her hands were stiff and cold. A white wolf pursued her, waiting for her to tire; she could not look that way. She was afraid she might be pulled down from behind. Instead she staggered forward toward the Martian station, hoping to rid her town once and for all of these horrifying creatures who had smashed their engine through the dyke, blown through their defenses—