Auryn
Remember the field with particles? Half clinging to me, the rest unable to come close? The news of Eldon and Khan being in that cunty cave, then Ruffle doing her one-sentence motivation to go find them by listening, presses the release button. The field scatters, re-arranges to a new pattern, gets un-polarised, forms new bonds, new dynamic relationships. The square murmurs like a spring newly cracked open. Around me, the women’s voices gurgle and trickle.
Whispers of surprise and amazement well up. They start soft—hissle, babble, tinkle—a creek learning to speak. Voices rise as they start exchanging experiences and views. Sensed fragments find each other like a puzzle solving itself.
I’m not part of it. I only glimpse the surface—but beneath it, I hear a more important voice. One nobody else can hear. Only me.
I feel urgency. Nothing specific but clear as a distant cry for help. I must respond. Not wait for others. Or have them slow me down. I need to get there. Get there quick.
As I start running, I also distinctly register I need to get out from in between them. A chain reaction has been initiated that rapidly ripples through that gathered little crowd. Something is brewing.
One runs after me.
“Auryn!”
I stop. Don’t want to be stopped. But it’s Pear. The only one I take sort of seriously. The one able to hold me back a few seconds.
“I’ve seen Liora too.”
My face asking. My hand echoing the gesture of touching my chest. She denies smiling. Her expression shows the girl beneath the stern.
“No silly, with my eyes. On our way here, we saw the black-and-white war machine with the poker thingy.”
Her arm does an elephant trunk.
She means the Kemushi. Great. So what?
“She had warp speed turned on. Looked like a tornado in a sandbox.”
I frown. Think of Kemushi’s unclear gender while urged by my legs disagreeing with the hold-up. Then it hits me.
“She?” I say. “You mean Liora was driving?”
“Yeah, yeah-yeah. With another girl. The one with the…” She gestures large melons. Two of them. I know who she means. I wondered about her. God, Christ almighty, Lior has concocted another plan.
“Go!” Pear says and starts pushing me. “Go, get ‘em!”
I leave them to it. Start running. Catapulting past Mig’s, jumping the rubble of the collapsed facade and scanning ahead to find Pyrrh.
My vehicle isn’t there. Not where I left her. I blame Aphram. So typical of the arrogant shit pretending to assist me. The more crucial, the less he’s there when needed.
Now I see the caterpillars’ embossed footprint drunk-driving its way between the buildings. Now I get the demolished house-fronts. Damn. Aph pieced it together too. Reading the tracks. Unable to not go find out where they would lead.
He’s ahead of me. I know where. I also know how. The girls dragging the town’s contents onto the pavements earlier gives me choice. My inner thief picks a pretty old-school bike. A bare-as-bones, unassisted, all-terrain bicycle. Its airless fat tires made for aquaplaning desert sands.
I still remember how to ride a bike. So much faster than running.
As I exit the town, the sun comes out. Wind in my face and glorious light brightening the whole godforsaken world at my paddling feet. Following the rolled sand track through the desert is easy. Going down is quick.
It is the last bit of easy I get that day.
As I race around, avoiding the stone offshoots, the support arcs, to the shadow side of this strange mountainous monstrous cockle of a church I can’t keep my eyes off, I remember being on the lake and seeing the mirrored reflection. I slow down as soon as I am out of the relentless heat of the reborn sun and just stand there looking up.
Something surfaces.
I had Ralph Ledon’s handwritten journal on my bedside for a long time. I studied it, tried to find something deeper in the random collections of that man’s fascinations. It was a grimoire I couldn’t decipher.
There was a whole section on churches. Horny quotes from long-dead saints and saintesses. Drawings of details and their variations. It named the parts. I learned the parts, but never understood. Never linked it to this little side-project of his. Until now.
He has dreamed of making her. But wasn’t around to see it take shape. Wasn’t here to guide when it went off rails and out of hand to become this. A drag queen basilica. A cut-off dick. A tower-less church. A castle of ghosts and madwomen.
She’s stunning. How the light hits. Giving her a blinding aura, a gold lining, the wild contour resisting all forms of symmetry. The rhythms of light and shadow alternating on buttresses and deep root-pits. The surface is braided. Stone crochet with vertical eye-shaped gaps. The moisture is evaporating. Damp rising from the sunlit hips.
I sigh. What wasted beauty. Soon only this remains, buried in the sand. To be excavated by who knows who, millennia down the line.
Only a stone’s throw further, I see the Kemushi. The boom dramatically lifted like a scorpion attacked. Nobody in or around. No Pyrrh either. They’re all gone for lunch?
I see the cave and get the association. It does look like a crude vagina. Grotesque labia. Not wishing those for any woman.
Just outside the cave, there’s a wire-reel on its side. I squat next to it. A thin red wire meanders from the compact dispenser, and my eyes follow it into the dark. It’s some signal fibre. I put the roll back on its feet. It looks expensive, brand new, has the Ledon mark.
Next, I fall on my butt as the wire suddenly moves, is jerked from the other side, and the reel gives more length. It keeps rolling.
The only explanation I have is unsettling. It’s a trigger wire. Or they gave themselves a thread to find their way back out. Or both. I hope it’s just the last one.
They’re inside. I will follow.
There is still water leaking, walls wet, puddles on the sandy floor. It resembles those caves found at the ocean’s shore, carved by endless waves. But this has been here only for a few years. I wish I brought a light. I would rather not touch the moving wire and warn them of my being here. Don’t know why. I first need to see what they’re up to.
I wait to let my eyes adjust. Listen to the sliding cable. Inhale the sweet smell of wet earth and other layers I can’t place. Something tangy, resin-like, wet plaster, the faint memory of sperm even, fresh out of the box, that fungal note.
The wire stops moving. I wait a second, then pick it up to let it lead me, as it slides through my hand. Taking care not to pull. Alert, on not resisting when they ask for more length.
It’s not a single womb. The insides remind me of a termite’s hill. Many chambers and paths. I can just about see the shapes as there is a faint glow coming from the material. Many dark spots. Holes perforate every surface. There is no longer sand on the floor. There are a million little ponds. Bowls filled to the brim with black water. There’s dripping at varying speeds all around. Filling the space with a frantic melody. A polyrhythmic sequence of patterns played by insane monks. It’s creepy.
Without the thread, I would never find them. For several steps, I wonder how they knew where to go in this maze of many paths. But then I understand. The other girl, which is definitely a Genan seed-stealer, has been here before. When they outed Eldon. Buried him alive.
I have been descending gently since the entrance. This must be underground. Underneath the town? The path, there has been a path all the way in, is now narrow. A flat bit for two feet. Small feet. Catwalk-style slender. The larger rooms and halls have made way for an oval tunnel about twice my height. I am several hundred metres in. Four? Five? The wire hasn’t moved since, and it’s near silent now. No cool breeze here. And the floor is dry.
I drop the wire. It suddenly glows. A sharp magenta line snakes to both sides, then dims to a pulsing green. I hear rustling from further down. Like many wings. But bats fly silently, don’t flap their featherless foils like doves. I can conjure up monsters easily. Unasked-for creativity is triggered. Bad timing. Stop the image generation. But there is no time to get out of hand because the screaming tops the bats. Screaming wins. It’s Liora, freaked-out, as I’ve not heard before. The voice of someone cursing who’s good at it. It’s Cap. That’s how Li named her. Cursing Cap has a short fuse. She’s not just pretty-hot; she has a Scoville score that demands respect. And what the hell is she doing to my daughter?
Feet running toward me.
“Mum!” She hardly ever calls me mum. “Get out, get out! There’s a million monsters. Like a quadrillion bugs about to hatch! Eeeeeh!”
I can see her now. Cap right behind her. Not slowing down. Both looking totally freaked out. I back up. Turn, and follow the green line fading in and out, as fast as I can without falling face down.
It was less far than I thought. Back in the daylight, panting. Liora blabbering and Cap pacing, shaking her hands as if after a cage fight. Both their eyes big as doorknobs. Li shifts to laughter. Lying flat on her back in the wet sand.
Cap recovers quickly. Walks to the hoe and returns with a small device.
“What is going on, girls?” I ask in between the oxygen hauls. “What did you find?”
Clearly not Eldon or Khan.
Liora is shaking her head. Cap gives me a look but kneels next to the reel to lay out the toolset she brought. I don’t like not being answered.
“Eldon is in there, Liora. We have to get him out.”
She sits up, suddenly dead serious.
“There’s a breeding chamber or something…,” a tremor of eek travels head to toes, “…for an army of monsters. Pill-bugs the size of small cars…” Hands show a foot and a half, “…have blocked the tunnels. All of them. We will never reach him unless we…”
She crawls toward Cap, hands and knees. When obsessed, she’s hard to reach. The size fits the builder drones. I look up again. Makes sense, they have been busy with a big project. You need more than a few for this scale.
Now Cap talks.
“They’ve sealed the entrances. We must blast them out to get to Eldon and Khan. We were halfway done with setting up when we discovered the nest.” She works while she talks. Unscrewed a cap. Preparing the wire end for a splice, I guess.
“How much have you installed?” I ask.
“We had a splitter for ten, but only hooked up four. Should be enough. I never worked with sizes like this.”
“How much bigger are these?”
“Twenty?” She asks.
Twenty what? Twenty times anything is a booming lot. They could destroy half the church, kill anything near. Us included. And sure, Eldon and the woman and a quadrillion gentle crawlers.
“You can’t do that.” I say.
Watch me, her eyes say. Liora gives me her determined look. The independent, strong-character child I had so much trouble with over the years has found a new level of rebellious. She can be a handful or two.
I could cut the cable if I had anything resembling a tool.
“You’re not getting my knife,” says the one who I gave one as a present only hours ago. Cap protectively rolls up her collection of screwdrivers and cutting pliers. I hate working with telepaths.
My eyes drift to the Kemushi.
“Don’t you dare,” Liora says and gets to her feet. Draws her knife.
I can’t believe this is happening.
“You’ll kill everything in there,” I shout, but she’s not listening. A wild look has crept onto her face. She’s picking up something I can’t. Then moves backward to the big machine. I’m afraid I sparked the idea.
Cap starts cursing between her teeth.
“I’m not done yet,” she says without looking up. “I need at least five minutes more. Not a friggin routine job here.”
Liora climbs up. She will defend the plan with the Kemushi against what is on their way to make it impossible.
I know, before I can hear them. Of course, they’re coming here. Didn’t expect anything less.
I run out into the desert to see how close they are.
The first thing I see is a dust-storm caused by all of my trucks driving next to each other. Mid-front is Pyrrh, with a container on her back. Pretentious motherfucker, that’s Aphram leading them.
That’s not all. From the other side, an army is approaching. Jaw-dropping isn’t just words. My mouth opens involuntarily. The girls have gathered every possible thing to make them bigger, brighter, and louder. They’ve tinkered with sticks, flag-lines, parasols, and fake houseplants. Wear hats that make them look like walking trees, there’s flowering shrubs with feet, herbs on bikes, and the whole garden is dancing while progressing. Running and circling, spreading out and contracting. They look dangerous. The garden tools have been upgraded, with ribbons and paint to magical weapons. All eyes have been blackened. And the singing they do gives me goosebumps all over. Like it’s in my head. There’s a bundled energy that could wipe me out without lifting a finger. It itches in the back of my brain.
There are three parties. And I’m right in the middle of them.
There is only one thing I can do.
I turn and look up at Her. Almost in prayer. I need help. And there she is. Massive. Unshaken. Unconcerned.
And there are birds. Among the shards of mist from the structure heating up, a group of migrating birds do their practicing rounds, watched by others sitting on the sky-climbing finials. The winged ones have joined her. They’re just little black scribbles, points, almost. And still, they give me the courage to do the only thing left for me.
I run. Without hesitation, I run back to Liora. She’s turning the machine, almost ready to defend her friend’s preparations. I run past them straight into the mouth of the bigger daughter, the bigger sister.
Cap can’t come after me and get the detonator ready too. Li is too busy with the bigger threat. I do not want to fight. I do not want this bomb to go off.
The line has turned yellow. I am practically blind a few meters in. But the entrance is wide. I trust my memory and keep going as fast as I dare.
Which is not very fast. This is not going to work. I thought I’d dismantle the splitter, pull the plugs on the bombs themselves, and make sure none of them will blow. And gamble on me as a human shield. Hiding deep in the cave. They’ll find me. Tape me up again, and restore the set-up.
The line is flickering. Different shades of yellow and orange. It’s communicating or something. I don’t have time left. I get desperate. Tears are running down my cheeks, fucking annoying. I fall to my knees. I assume the cable is too strong to break by hand. But I can try.
With all of my strength, I pull the thin and slippery line. Did it stretch? It’s still rapidly firing data across. Now what?
I’ll use my teeth.
I bite through it. The jacket gives with a plasticky snap, but the core inside—glass?—shatters between my molars. Tastes like blood and laser ink. Needles. I spit. Not something I want inside me. It’s not broken yet.
I pull again. Hard. Now it snaps. Goes dark. Just like that. I’ve done it.
A reckless impulse fills me. I grab the end going out the cave and start pulling. It gives easily. And keeps giving. I keep hauling in the wire until I feel the fish. I am at the end of the line and now pulling in the reel. I keep going until it’s at my feet. Then throw it behind me. Deep into the dark cave. Find that, and see if it still works.
I feel this is it. Compose my breath and walk out.
Cap is furious. Behind her, Liora has become gatekeeper with the Kemushi. I walk past Cap, who is still on her knees, tinkering with the device she saved from my sabotage.
“You haven’t accomplished anything,” she says.
“The optics were just to be sure. This thing has a wireless backup. I can still push the button, press release. Get Eldon out. Kill the woodlice eating the building.”
This is where things become confusing.
“The crawlers,” I try to argue, “that’s what they’re called, are not eating Her. They have made the place. They are the builders, the architects.”
“To trap people, yes, and eat them, cause there’s nothing to eat here. It’s a desert. A dead one. Let us free Eldon and get out of here.”
She has finished whatever she did. Stands up with the remote device thing and looks behind me. Startled.
I don’t get the chance to look over my shoulder. I should have done that earlier. Cap was too busy with her knobs. Because several girls stampede me to get to Cap. I slam into the sand and roll over. The Kemushi has been lured further away by another group. Liora’s busy taking swings at them. More of the women have gotten past Liora’s defence, and I can just about get out of the way and not be trampled some more.
They are attacking Cap in a whirlwind of wide skirts and clashing colours. Cap is screaming.
“You can’t press it here. We will all be buried if you do.”
But they’re not interested in the detonator. It lies to the side. In the sand. Unattended. The girls don’t know. Five of them sit on Cap.
Five of them sit on Cap. A sixth is holding her head with both hands. They all have their eyes closed. What the hell are they doing?
It is as if… I can’t see properly because of how dark they have painted their eyes. It looks so gross. I feel physically sick. But I won’t be stopped.
I step back silently, pick up the detonator with two careful hands, and walk away with it. If I can get on the bicycle and take this thing as far away as possible—hide it, throw it over the garden wall. I left the rope hanging. That thought excites me. I could scale the wall, then pull up this devil’s apparatus, disappear into the grid, and nobody could follow me.
I speed-walk with the egg-box. Don’t dare to run and accidentally trigger it myself. I leave the bike to my left. I can’t do both—hold it and pedal—and not fall. I’d kill everyone.
But I am too focused on my holy task. And I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. They’ve sensed me, read my plans, sneaked up on me, and run at crazy speeds for eyeless creatures. The dresses overhaul me left and right. I am tackled by silent, barefooted heel-biters. I tumble, somehow hold on to my main task of holding the trigger-button thing. Flat on my chest. Arms stretched above my head—I didn’t even bump it. I bite the hot sand.
It’s all been in vain. Twenty of the carnival from hell treat me like they treated Cap. I don’t stand a chance. Flattened like a pancake, the air pressed out of me. I have lost the device.
One of them holds my head in her hands, unburying it from fabric and limbs. The bright sun. And a near-the-ground perspective of the cave scene.
The women have left the Kemushi alone. Apart from the team incapacitating me, the rest are on their way to the cave. Dancing. They think they’ve won.
But they forgot about Liora.
Immediately, Aphram steps in, seizes the opportunity to block Li, who’s now busy climbing out of the steel insect. She will repeat my action: take the device and win by activating the blast from nearby.
But Pyrrh stops. Opens the door of the container, and Liora, who has gotten the suitcase, shoves it in the back. Now she runs to me. Her face wet with tears.
“It’s not what you think,” she hisses. Picks up the device and walks back to Pyrrh, who meets her. She gets in. And with grit flying, the spinning wheels make a sand fountain as they drive off.
I wrestle my head to see. But I can’t. Hear them quickly gain distance.
I don’t get it.
I get it even less when one after the other loses interest in me and run-dance off to join the others at the cave.
I am left on my own. I sit up, dazed. Covered in sand, sweating, and bruised.