The Crooked God Machine (25 page)

“Let's not hurt each other,” I said, “please. Please don't do this.”

She growled and lunged at me. I kicked her face and it collapsed in on itself. The knife clattered away and the girl's body hit the floor. I rolled off the concrete slab and dragged myself across the floor toward her. She had ceased breathing, and her collapsed face no longer resembled anything human.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, burying my face in her dirty hair, “I'm so sorry.”

For a long time I lay beside her on the floor, shaking and stroking her burnt neck and shoulders and arms. I called her Leda. I called her Jeanine. She just crumpled into the floor.

When I finally let her go I found her living space in the corner of the room, underneath the icon of a monster with seven heads and seventeen arms. She had slept on a thin pallet, and the only other possessions she owned were a few bottles, syringes, candles, and some rations. I drank her water and ate what little rations she had left. Then I retrieved my bloodied clothes from the floor, put them back on, and stepped over the burnt girl's dissolving body toward the exit.

I soon found myself lost in the ruins of the abandoned temple. It stretched out in all directions, larger than the pagan temple Ezekiel and I once explored outside of Edgewater. The mosaics on the walls depicted the same sort of strange monsters; many legged, many armed, with lash whip tongues and scepters of light. But this temple also contained bowled out ceilings that rose like skies, and what seemed at the time to be a never-ending labyrinth.

Looking for the way back into the desert, I uncovered abandoned room upon abandoned room. One with a fountain and a headless stone monster with wings and a hovering halo crouching over the dry spout, another empty except for the blood stains splashed upon the ceilings and the walls. I found a small room with a sacrificial altar drenched in long dried black and red fluids, vegetable husks scattered onto the floor.

Occasionally I came to a window looking out across the desert like an open door to the sky. Yet even though I could see the outside world, inside the pagan temple I felt at the center of the universe, outside of time. Inside the temple, searching for the way out, falling backward into step and passing the room with the dead girl over and over again, I'd finally found a place swept aside by God and abandoned by the circle of eternity.

I came across sandstone pictograms in the hallway. In the first pictogram was the black moon, threatening to swallow the earth, hovered over the black planet. Once-glittering machine shells floated around the black moon like birds. Monsters waited below with open mouths.

In the next pictogram the machine shells were hurtling to the planet below. In the next, the machines fought the monsters and tore them apart.

From the beginning we were taught that nothing changes. The bones that went down into the darkness forever. The butterflies pinned inside shadow boxes. Inside the pagan temple I knew that the world had once been different, and I'd never even realized it before.

Nobody had, yet the evidence existed all around us. I’d seen it for only a moment as a child in the temple out in the woods, and now it’d come back for me.

I found a black room without windows or mosaics. It was painted so dark that it seemed like an endless cavern, without shadows or corners. I thought if I entered the room I would fall down into like an abyss.

Yet when I touched the floor the room lit up. A storm of living fire blew from one end of the room to the other, and an immense cloud heavy with lightning appeared on the ceiling, swirling with white light.

I jerked back as if I would burst into flames. When I stepped out of the room back into the hallway the light and the storm shut down, casting the room back into black. Only then did I realize the fire had passed through me without hurting me.

I stepped back into the room and the fire once more blew through the room. This time, I didn't go back into the corridor. The cloud appeared once more and the lightning struck down upon the center of the room. The glowing fire danced upon the walls, the floor. I pressed my hands into the storm and it flowed straight through me.

In the center of the room shapes emerged out of the fire and the lightning. The shapes appeared to have no beginning or end, no discernible identity. They kept shifting in and out of different forms. One minute the figures seemed to have wings or the heads of animals. The next they dissolved into abstract shapes, wheels and intersecting locks and glittering curves.

A voice emanated from the center of the room.

“Stand on your feet and I will speak to you,” it said.

“Hello?” I called out.

I grasped at the front of my shirt and my face and hands broke out in sweat.

“Stand on your feet and I will speak to you.”

“Hello?” I repeated, “I don't understand.”

“Stand on your feet and I will speak to you.”

“Who are you?”

“Stand on your feet and I will speak to you.”

“What do you want?”

“Stand on your feet and I will speak to you.”

The fire continued to blow through me. The cloud of lightning expanded until it filled the entire ceiling. The light in the center of the room grew so intense that I had to shield my eyes. A whining hiss filled the room, like gas escaping from a valve. The cloud shook with thunder.

I stepped back into the hallway. The room dropped back into blackness. Into silence.

“Are you still there?” I called to the black room.

No reply.

“Hello?”

No reply

I left the black room and went down the hallway. Soon I found the way out of the temple and back into the pale desert. I kept touching my arms, my face, as if afraid my skin would soon blow away.

Chapter Eight

An electrician approached me while I lay half dead on the steps of his office. I did not remember traveling through the desert to that town. I did not remember collapsing on the steps. I only remembering dreaming I kept bending down to drink from pools of water that turned into Leda's dead body, dreaming that wherever the sun burned me the girl I murdered in the pagan temple touched me with her crumbling tongue.

The electrician bent down and cupped his hand under my nose to see if I was still breathing. He woke me up from my half dead stupor, with the creaking, of his bones and the smell of leather.

“Did the monsters get you, son?” the electrician asked me.

I reached up and grasped his hand. He squeezed my wrist gently in response. I tried to speak, but could only gasp.

“What was that, son?” the electrician said. His words were slow and cracked. They moved around him like a fragile relic.

“Have I made it yet?” I managed to say.

“This is Stonebrook. And this here is my electrician office. Where were you hoping to make it to?”

“The sea,” I said.

The electrician gave my hand another squeeze. “No more than a few hours to the east.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I passed out in his arms.

I woke up a few seconds later, sick and lightheaded, with my head against his chest. His hands were against my back, and he attempted to pull me up off the steps. I tried to speak, but passed out again.

The next time I awoke I found myself lying inside the electrician's shop, on top of his desk beside an industrial fan. I sat up on the desk and the electrician gave me a glass of water to drink.

“Sip it slowly,” he said, “you look like you've had quite an adventure.”

“You're crazy for helping me,” I said.

“I know, but I already checked you for weapons when you were passed out. I learned my lesson when the last one tried to steal my kidneys.”

I moved to get off the desk.

“Hold on there for just a hot minute,” the electrician said, “You better slow down unless you want to pass out again.”

I sighed and lay back down. My fingers twitched, as if trying to reach out and hold tight to something.

“Just stay there and don't make any trouble for me,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, “okay.”

The electrician turned to his work desk, which was cluttered with wires, busted light boxes, gutted out appliances. He picked up a screwdriver and started unscrewing the plate off the back of a television.

“What's your name?”

“The electrician,” he said.

I said nothing for a while after that. I closed my eyes and passed in and out of unconscious several times underneath the cooling fan. After a while the electrician brought me more water to drink. Then some of his dry rations. I took slow bites and chewed a long time before swallowing.

Two cats walked into the room. A large calico and a brown kitten. They wrestled each other beside the desk, mewling and spitting. The electrician tossed them a small mechanical toy resembling a horse. The mechanical horse fell on its side and tossed its legs, moving on its back in circles against the floor. The cats batted the toy and then stopped and stared at it until it ceased moving.

Something about the mechanical horse made me feel uneasy. I thought the mechanical horse might be kicking me in the teeth. Something about the way the cats slunk around the toy, like it was a stranger, a monster, made me think that a fundamental rule of physics in the universe had been suddenly and inexplicably altered. The mechanical horse seemed enormous and everything else small.

I got down off the desk and left the electrician's office. While I was walking down the steps the electrician caught the door behind me and called after me.

“Where are you going?” the electrician asked me.

“Your horse toy is scaring the shit out of me,” I said.

“What?”

“Forget it. It doesn't matter,” I said.

“Why don't you stay for a while?” he asked me.

I stopped and looked back at the electrician. He stood in the doorway touching his throat. On his throat was a white scar.

“You remind me too much of my father,” I said.

“I remind everyone of their father,” the electrician said, “you shouldn't leave so soon. Come home and have dinner with my family. I'll see you make it onto the bus tomorrow to get where you need to be going.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell him I wasn't falling for his tricks, I may look young but I wasn't born yesterday, oh no sir, that he probably wanted to take me home so his family could murder me and store my body with the rest of the dead young idiots in his smoldering attic.

Instead I collapsed again in the streets because of the heat and the weakness shaking through my head. The electrician picked me up and took me back into his office. I lay on the desk underneath the fan while he wrapped a bandage around my bleeding head.

“I'll stay,” I said, my voice a murmur, “I'll stay. Just put that horse where I can't see it.”

He picked up the horse toy and put it into a closet, then shut the door and went back to his workbench. I stayed on the desk until he closed his office and took me to his home.

By the time we got to his house I could walk as long as I clutched his shoulder for support. When we got to his front door he stopped for a moment and I wobbled, trying not to fall.

“I should tell you something,” he said.

“What?”

“Just brace yourself for what’s about to happen next.”

He swung the door open and at the opposite end of the room sat his daughter and wife, waiting at a candlelit dining table.

A prepared meal of breaded catfish, jelly, fried bread, and wedding cake lay out on the table in front of the two women. The wife wore a necklace with an eye sized, pale green jewel, and a black smock and animal red shoes. She sat with her arms folded in front of her on the table, the silverware in perfect alignment with her needle thin fingertips. The daughter wore a wedding dress.

“Where did you get all this food?” was the first thing I asked.

"We're so glad you’re here," the wife said, "ever since my daughter's fiancé died we haven’t had much company. Would you like to see his ghost picture? We purchased it from a psychic."

I looked over on the wall to see a framed picture of an almost indiscernible figure floating in a black space. Brilliant light of all different colors swelled on the figure's body. Thin filaments of hair splayed out from the figure's head in all directions. Hair colored orange and blue.

"It's a fake," I said.

"No, I'm positive he was a real psychic. Won't you sit down?" the wife said.

"What is this?" I asked.

“Sit down for a while and have something to eat,” he said.

I hesitated. The electrician touched my shoulder. Then he touched the white scar on his throat.

“Eat. I’m sure you’re hungry.”

I sat down at the table in the chair opposite of the woman in the wedding dress.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

"Call me Mrs. Fredrick," the woman in the wedding dress said in a scarred, scratched voice. I couldn't see her face, hidden behind the veil. She picked at her wrists until they were red.

I picked up a fork and grabbed a biscuit, trying to hide the fact that my fingers were shaking, that the blood swelled in my ears like a swarm of bees.

“So where are you from?” the electrician’s wife asked me.

“Edgewater,” I said.

“Edgewater, I’ve never heard of it,” the wife said.

“Mother,” Mrs. Frederick said, and she shook her head, “we’ve been through this before. You know where he’s from.”

. As her daughter spoke to her, the wife’s needle thin fingers touched the jewel on her necklace.

“Don’t ask questions like that, mother,” the daughter continued, “not when you know the answers.”

“Darling, settle down,” the electrician said, “let’s try to enjoy our dinner, shall we?”

We ate for a while in silence. Even though I was hungry and couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a proper meal, I felt like I couldn’t swallow the food in front of me. I couldn’t drink the water, as if I was dying of rabies and the sight of it sunk me with fear. The air around the dinner table shook with heat.

"How did Mr. Fredrick die?" I asked. I turned to the electrician.

"The shuttles took him," the electrician said.

"I think it was all the pre-marital sex," the wife whispered to me.