Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

I Do the Work of the Bone Queen

After I died, I went wandering about the town. Stars littered the sky like diamonds, and the moon was a curved blade. I reveled in the freedom of ghostliness. No longer would a mangled and deformed body imprison me. I floated along the black alleys strewn with trash, past a crowd of rats gnawing a severed hand. One of the beasts looked threateningly at me as I passed by, its eyes gleaming like minute lanterns. I laughed and willed myself higher, rising above the cracked pavement and the black rooftops of condemned buildings. The town snored below me, a neglected, dying organism rotting in its own filth. A heavy rain fell, passing through my ethereal self, and distant thunder rolled across the flat, gray horizon.

Among the slumped roofs and crumbling towers stood the abandoned factory, a shriveled heart that had once pumped lifeblood into the town. When it had finally ceased operations, years after the industrial accident that crippled me, the town began to diminish. Then came the corpse-like rot. I looked out my window every morning at its boarded windows and rusted gates, wishing that it had closed down before it had ruined my body. Where it used to produce intricate copper components and bulky industrial machines, its only products now were dust and decay.

What surprised me were the watery lights shining from the factory’s windows.

The light struggled to free itself from the fissured brick walls, seeping through cracks in the boarded windows. Floating in the heart of the storm, I realized a magnetic attraction to that dilapidated place. The sensation became a raging hunger, amazing to me since I no longer had need of any food or drink. It was a hunger of the soul. Who could be in the old factory lighting fires or installing generators to shed light down its decrepit hallways?

My phantasmal form slid through the rain toward the speckled walls as lightning flared. Like a wisp of smoke I glided through an ivy-smothered wall and entered the musty bowels of the factory. Orange flames belched from a line of soot-stained furnaces. Silent forms bustled about a collection of worktables. They wore black smocks with heavy hoods. Their faces were indistinguishable in the shadows of these cowls, but I saw that opaque goggles shielded their dim eyes. Gloves of dark rubber covered their hands, and they worked feverishly to assemble some arcane product that made its way down the line. Hundreds of workers lined both sides of the tables, and as I floated near crimson drops spilled from the tables’ edges. They were not working with metal, this odd and faceless crew.

Had a new meat-packing plant moved into town? If so, shouldn’t they have cleaned the rust, mold, and filth from the walls and floors? Weren’t there federal guidelines for such things?

I looked over the workers’ shoulders; they seemed completely oblivious to me. They were not cutting meat. They were assembling something, some unknowable architecture composed of variously shaped chunks of raw meat. At the next table black-gloved hands chose pieces from a pile of shattered bones. Blunt fingers shoved the jagged bone bits into the fleshy sculptures and passed their handiwork on to the next table, where blankets of blistered skin were stretched over the grotesque forms. When these misshapen sculptures of meat, bone, and skin reached the final assembly table, new personnel hung them from metal hooks on rusted lengths of chain. The chains did not hang from any ceiling, but instead depended from a swirling sea of darkness that tossed and heaved above the sculptors’ heads. I expected the dark waters to fall at any moment upon them like a massive, oily tidal wave; but this never happened.

I hovered above the manufacturing tables, an unseen spirit watching the grisly work, and a deep horror surged to fill my bodiless form. What were these bloody sculptures and who were these faceless drones? What gruesome purpose did this installation serve? I imagined a work force of mass murderers engaged in the hopeless endeavor of reassembling the bodies of all those they had slain. But that could not be the case because the final products of their industry, hanging bloody from the hooked chains, came nowhere close to resembling human bodies.

Yet I did notice that after a time suspended in the charnel air of the factory, each of the meat sculptures began to quiver and twist on its hook. If they had mouths, I was sure they would be screaming in agony. Eventually, each of the twitching oddities was drawn upward on its chain and disappeared into the inverted sea of roiling darkness.

I could not watch this process any longer, so I willed myself to float out of the insane factory. Then I discovered that I could not pass back through the sweating walls. Passing into the factory had been easy, yet now I was trapped inside, and I wanted only to glide out into the churning freedom of the storm outside. I tried again and again, but I felt my airy form growing heavier and denser, and soon I stood on the gore-slick factory floor.

I looked at my hands, gleaming ghostly before my intangible eyes. My translucent wrists bore deep gashes, spiritual recreations of the fleshly wounds I had inflicted upon myself. I had used a shaving razor to make bone-deep cuts, and my life had flowed from these cuts drop by drop. At first, it was a glorious liberation, this death of mine. But now I felt drawn toward a terrible confinement far more horrible than the broken body that I had fled. Why could I not leave this scene of deathly industry? This was not what I wanted when I murdered myself.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me about. One of the hooded assemblymen stood before me. His face was lost behind some sort of gas mask or antique breathing apparatus. He motioned for me to follow him.

“I don’t belong here…” I told him. But he only motioned again for me to follow, and pointed toward a doorway where a set of cinderblock stairs led upward. He held something out for me to take, and I peered at his gloved hand. A red, glistening chunk of meat pulsed in his palm. It was a human heart, still living, squeezing the last few drops of warm blood from its interior chambers.

I don’t know why, but I accepted the throbbing organ. As the blood ran down my forearm, I noticed that I was no longer transparent. My flesh had returned, and my body was no longer crippled. A dark thrill excited me, and the hairs along my new arms stood up. The masked worker signaled that I should mount the stairs alone, so I did.

Shards of mutilated bodies littered the steps: ears, eyeballs, lips, fingers. Each one twitched horribly as I made my way upward. I passed a tall, gleaming mirror. I stopped, staring at myself in the glass, but it did not reflect my newfound flesh. It showed only my grinning skull and the skeletal network that existed beneath my fresh skin. I watched, fascinated by my fleshless reflection, and dropped the beating, bloody heart into the center of my empty rib cage. A great ecstasy filled me, and the world swirled like dark waters.

The heart beating wildly in my chest, I walked out of the mirror and continued up the stairs. I stared again at my skeletal hands, glad to see that the deep gashes had disappeared along with my new flesh. The wounds had reminded me of my old body, and I had not liked seeing them. But now I was glorious — the purity of gleaming white bone without a single ribbon of flesh. Except for the red, pulsing heart that floated within my skinless breast.

My feet clicked against the slimy stone of the stairs as I ascended, emerging onto a wide balcony overlooking the production floor where the hooded workers feverishly assembled their sculptures of flesh and bone. I paused at the railing for a second, looking down upon the flurry of activity. Then I looked up, and saw a sea of darkness rolling and heaving right above my head. Staring into its whirlpool, I experienced a great vertigo, and suddenly I was staring down into those dark waters. Since I could do nothing else in this precarious position, I fell.

The darkness swallowed me, and I sank like a stone. Leviathan forms swam past me, and tiny eyes like drops of flame swirled about my skeleton figure. Far below, which had once been above, I saw the roof of a great palace rising from the sea floor. The sand about its base was black as obsidian, and the towers were curved and pointed like scimitars or hooks. A forest of chains floated upward from the many windows of the wicked palace, and some of them were being drawn down into the structure, hauling in the squirming creations of flesh and bone assembled in the deathly factory.

I sank to the dark sand before the towering gateway. It was built from tremendous ebony blocks stained with flowering fungi. The figures of smiling fiends were carved across the walls, arabesques of tortured victims writhing across the green-black stone. Two soldiers stood before the gates, fleshless skeletons like me, but wearing suits of ancient armor flecked with coral. Their empty sockets stared at me from beneath horned helmets, and they pulled the gates open, moving aside their hooked spears so I could enter.

A host of living skeletons stood within, some draped in the robes of ancient Rome, others garbed in Grecian style, some in stranger garb from unknown lands, while others stood naked with phosphorescent bones gleaming in the deep waters. They stared at me, applauding as I walked a path of crushed rubies. Their bony hands made no sound in the thick depths, but I sensed their approval, their welcoming. I was expected here, and they were glad to see me. Suddenly I felt important, yet completely lost.

The Bone Queen waited to receive me on her throne of skulls. She wore a crimson gown, and her grinning skull face was set with two great diamonds. Two superb eyeballs had nested there in ages past, bright as sapphires. Her crown was a loop of dancing silver flame, blazing eternally, even in these abysmal waters.

I knelt, and kissed the bare bones of her feet.

“Welcome,” she said. “We have a special place for you.”

Her beauty was terrible to behold. It pierced my throbbing, naked heart. She had no flesh to spoil the purity of her immaculate essence, nothing but bleached bone that seemed to glow with the glory of jade.

I knew her. How I had dreamed of her, all those years sitting crippled in my darkened room, ignoring the dead factory rotting beyond my sealed shutters.

“I am your slave,” I said.

“As are all here,” she replied.

“How may I please you?”

“I am told you have…industrial experience,” she said. “We have a factory for you to run.”

I screamed then, and tried to tear the hammering alien heart from my rib cage, but the skeletal guards grabbed me and prevented this. They carried me away from the black palace and the terrible beauty of the Bone Queen.

They gave me a dark smock, with a heavy hood, and gloves of black rubber to wear. They conducted me back to the assembly tables and showed me to my glass-walled office overlooking the production floor.

“Is this…Hell?” I asked.

In voices of grating bone, they reminded me that I had a quota to fill.

So I work, and I dream of her beautiful, fleshless face.

I keep the production lines moving.

And I remind myself:

Now and forever, I do the work of the Bone Queen.