At night, when the tanks and the wereships grind to a halt, you can hear the propellers that keep the island afloat. Massive bladed turbines suck the air up and around the hovering hunk of dirt, suspending it half a mile above the rippling green ocean below and the wasted grey lands. If you listen closely, beyond the rushing howl of wind and groan of rusted breeze catchers spinning, there’s just the rhythmic drone of those great big fans, humming under the ground far beneath your feet.
I’m told that there are tunnels leading out from the old factories, trails and tubes that spiral down through rock and iron, to the old engine rooms, where no one has gone in a century. Silly thing to purport, that. No machine could go so long unattended. Even the autotanks need daily maintenance.
Still, I’ve been working this shop for nigh on fifteen years, and never once have I met a soul who’s been down below. Perhaps it’s best just not to wonder…
The sour forced air in the barracks rattles the walls like an angered beast, masking the quiet looming of the propellers. The constant sound is an ocean, thick enough to drown a man, deep enough to seep through your senses. The boys and girls in the barracks cry out when the walls come down to show them the arcing flashes of blood-red lightning that crash through the clouds when we pass through a storm, shrieking for salvation though they know we are safe here. The absent walls are windows, paneless portals to the dwindling forest of metal trees.
I found him in that forest, the little clockwork bird who cannot sing, only hiss with the whisper of twirling gears and springs in perpetual motion. Perhaps the propellers might run as he does, kept mobile by pendulums that catch and recycle their own weight. Yet even he cannot run unmaintained, even the ever-spinning cogs must be oiled.
Someone must travel in the subterranean, maybe once a year, a decade, a month or even a millennium. I often stop to wonder, though in truth I dare not…
It grew quiet one night, and not even the propeller sound could be heard dancing on that rasp of wind. There was a different sort of sound, a primal, frightening roar the likes of which none of us were accustomed to. It was the sound of nothing, the sound of silence, the sound of goose pimples raising on the back of your neck, the sound of a stranger’s hands gripping your shoulders, a sound of the end and the beginning. We thought, I thought, that the island must be falling, dipping into the bright green abyss of the clouds and air and sea below, finely tired of its burden of carrying us all across the world, tired of cradling us in its rocky embrace.
But we never stopped flying. The island kept on. Those strange turbines must have still held on.
Maybe something shut them up. Someone couldn’t take them anymore and shut them out of sight and mind, their will so strong it set up cotton wool around us all. They must know how to get down below. They must have a way, which they’ve hidden from us all.
There aren’t so terribly many of us. It shouldn’t be hard to figure which of them it is.
I feel a chill down my spine.
I wonder, perhaps, if it isn’t the forest that stole that little bird’s voice. Inside the metal bark of those towering imagined lifeforms, what might you find? Maybe nothing. A rap on the trunk always rings hollow. But they cannot be vacuums, that is not this place’s will. Within their gleaming innards, something greedy lurks, waiting to drag any errant moment into its maw. To walk through those facsimilated woods is to walk in silence, every breath and footstep you take sucked into the soft nothingness beneath your feet, up, up into the twisting limbs where only the boldest dare flap a wing or flick a tail.
If my bird once sang on those branches, the forest took it as tribute, as sacrifice, swallowing the sound with formless mouths, gaping and dotted on every gargantuan altar. This little one stirred far too much. Had it not stumbled to my feet, it surely would have been taken whole.
Trees cannot sing nor do they have wings to flap. Metal is unyielding. The forest is a jealous beast.
The insects. So ever-present I often forget about them. They, their incessant, grating buzz, that is the other lone sound that will cross your ears in the twilight hours. When swarms of the jeweled-winged creatures gather, dwelling in the charcoal brush sprouting between jagged earth outside the forest, the keening swells to such heights that one must run to distances at which plugging one’s ears can bring effect, away from the fluttering of sapphire and amber and opal and amethyst that rides on the breezes like a sigh and cuts through one’s skull. My bird would dare to capture these pretty pests as a meal if freed from its cage, but I cannot trust it would not be overcome, outnumbered by beings infinitely fragile and small, more deadly then in numbers for their size. They would rip into the clockwork, and drag that pitiful creation, clicking in pain, into the purgatory of their nests of the depths of the island.
In the ground it must be, in that barren dirt that they live, for no one sees them in daylight, in that brush. No workman nor child do the flit before the eyes of. No husks they shed to be prized by collectors, or crushed unexpectedly underfoot. And the greedy forest, should they call it home, would never allow them escape.
Perhaps it would be a fine thing then, to make my bird a sacrifice, paint its gullet bright red and watch where the hue splashes when the scathing insects tear it apart, track their paths down below. One could imagine that those loathsome things know, better than anyone capable of reasoning, of speech, what and where those fabled blades lie, how to reach them, how they are. Though the precious winged toy would hurt to lose, think what knowledge could be gained for its loss…
I never truly wanted to lose that bird to the greater good. No, he was my only friend in this pallid, putrid excuse for a laboratory. At the last minute, stumbling on towards the woods with their hollow branches and the swarming nests that lie nestled in their roots—yes! For that brief moment I faltered, uncertain in my cause as I had been when I set out from the twisted, rust-born doorway and grabbed my coat in hand. Every step was another doubt that I was being swallowed into a ruse of my own making and the bird stirred, it stirred and twittered in my hands as though he knew that I was bearing him down to the grave, each rasping, mechanical scrape the dying breath he never could have had.
The jeweled beetles came trotting up, one by one, to pick at the metal bones on the shattered husk. In the wreckage I saw tiny gears of near filigree, their faint little edges prickling at the dirt, shining beacons like pinpricks for my heart.
I watched them pull and tear, and in the end, I could not follow them for sorrow, my knees weak and my hands trembling.
I scraped up the broken gears from the dirt and clutched them to me.
I studied the decomposition. I can put them back together.
In twilight hours I find myself stricken with loneliness, a dull keening sound ringing in my ears from the silence of my study, the four walls entrapping me in my own silent cocoon. I hear screams sometimes from the murky depths outside, far beyond the iron woods, but I cannot say if this banshee talk is real or from my imagination.
I’ve realized, of late, perhaps there is something amiss within my mind. I’ve struggled, since my last failure, to make my companion whole again, but traversing the labyrinthine jigsaw of his minuscule innards is akin to sorting salt from sand, ash from snow. The wheels of perpetual motion that turn each hair-toothed gear were aligned with a precision that must have only been wrought by a god of engineering, and my feeble hands have fought with themselves to recreate them as I saw, but I only fall shaking, weeping to the ground as once and again the metal gnashes upon itself, screeching.
In dead of dawn I’ve clutched at my scalp and laid curse to my own name, but a folly done is done.
The forest calls to me.
An unseasonable warmth betook me this morning, seeking to lighten my mood perhaps, though I am stricken once again by the overbearing silence that rings throughout these metal towers. Days have passed me by now—weeks? I cannot say, though by the grace of a bottomless leather satchel I am nurtured and will be indefinitely, by the fluids of the dripping, intestine-like fruits that grow on the furthest outcroppings of the island. Fortune and good fortune more, for the high, unreachable branches are as barren as they ever were.
In the breast of my tattered lace robe a silken pouch of tiny gears and jewels clatters against me, pushing at my skin like a parasite or tumor, grinding into my sternum. Once I fell, and the edges stabbed into my body.
I cried out, a singular sound.
And in an instant my yelp was stolen, dissipated like dust, into the anti-reverberant stalks that surround me.
My feet have ceased to sense the wiry snags of the underbrush, and my lips are cracked with stagnation. I don’t know if I sleep anymore.
I can’t hear the blades.
The smell of mist.
I hear a rushing as I sit. I have heard it for quite some time. A waterfall, a motor. An oscillating sound sourced from my whole horizon. There is moisture in the air and the soles of my slippers have begun to stick into the slicks of the ground.
I am ever so weary.
A cake of rust has formed over the gears now, like an armour, protecting those sacred parts from anyone—from me, the traitorous fool who orchestrated their body’s demise. I am brilliant, or once thought I was, but I know now that between my ears lies a sludge not even worthy of nurturing a parasite’s larvae. For I have come this far, and found nothing, though my hands are cracked and bleeding, though my eyes dart, paranoid at every glinting angle. I walked without a compass, and this oversight will be the death of me, for if I have traversed in circles all this time, I would never know. The bounds of this realm are endless, in a way that the island could not possibly be.
In the distance now, something else arises. Jagged glass, pyramids, opalescent towers in a spreading field of living geode and temptation. A salvation! In my studies I have never heard of such a land, but scholars and poets can ponder a century and never come close to knowing the depths of this land outside reason. Perhaps I would be the first to know it. Perhaps, though by will of everything I do not believe this discovery shall ever be mine to tell.
I have clamoured and scrambled to reach the edge of this behemoth on slipping feet. Defeat looms over, and my body must rest, and yet, I am so c
Makers and gods.
It is moving. There is a rattling at my chest.
The gears are turning.
As I slept amongst shards of liquid glass, I dreamt of a warmth, an intangible solid body. Something ever so small, and comforting, brushing against my fingertips. Maybe it was a facsimile of he, the bird, the feathers of a true living thing he might have once been, soft and delicate and filled with song. This warmth seeped through my body to fill in an emptiness even I did not know, though it had dwelt within me since before I could think—a void, of something long gone, long forgotten.
Someone?
I awoke in a pool of shadow. On hard ground, bright as it is dark, echoing with the absence of a voice. Shapes shift in the earth beside me, dark, morphing masses that dot the iridescent surface of the field anywhere but where I lay. A soft rumbling I feel only in the poisoned pits of my chest, not in the strings of my ears, resounds.
And yet, I slept. For the first time in so long lest my mind is finally failing, playing cruel illusions.
The gears stopped their raucous trembling as quickly as they begun, though I walked every direction to divine the source that they began to resonate with. I thought that they might lead me deeper, and it brought me hope undeserved. I lost sight of my purpose in my joy to know more and the path once again forsook me.
My purpose?
No, my purpose always was to know. To learn. To find the base of the rhythm of it all.
Loss cannot cloud destiny. I must continue to walk onward.
