Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

Flesh of the City, Bones of the World

The Surgeon’s hands are his most delicate instruments.

From the slim silver bones of the ten fingers to the minute arrays of gears, cogs, and springs set for agility and precision, to the pale elastic skin that stretches over the whole array, his hands are marvels of science. The rest of his body is no less amazing, no less detailed in its construction, a silver skeletal scaffold filled with organs of bronze and copper sheathed in that same supple skin without blotch or blemish.

His patients take these things for granted, ignorant of the miracles of design that sustain their existence. But he is a Surgeon and he knows the secrets of human biology as intimately as he knows the body and mind of his own wife.

While prepping for the operation, he recalls her silver skull laid bare and glimmering as she removed the demure porcelain mask that is her public face. The memory is from last night. They had danced in the courtyard of glass sculptures, baring body and soul beneath a canopy of stars. Tonight they will celebrate the return of their son from five years at the Ministère de Education. In a few days the boy will enter this chamber and at last become a man.

The Surgeon’s opticals blink and he returns to the present as his attendants wheel a youth into the Conversion Room. The Surgeon turns his porcelain visage to greet the nervous patient. It is the face he always wears for operations: lean and handsome with a strong chin and wide, warm smile. It was painted by one of the Urbille’s finest maskers.

“Are you nervous?” he asks the young man. Fifteen years old, just like his own son. So much like Alain that it frightens the Surgeon, though he doesn’t know why it should.

The youth nods, tears flowing from his soft opticals. He is a weak thing of flesh and blood, hair and bone…an outdated Organic construct. It is almost a miracle he has survived fifteen years in the Urbille…a miracle that any youth survives so long. The flesh is so vulnerable, so prone to injury, disease, and entropy.

“Will it hurt?” the youth asks.

“No,” says the Surgeon. “You will never hurt again. No pain, no bleeding…no hunger, no sickness. Won’t that be wonderful?”

The youth nods and trembles. They are always this way before Conversion.

“Relax,” he tells the boy. “It will soon be over, and your new life will begin.”

The Attendant administers a sedative and after a few moments the Surgeon begins his work. Fluorescent lights gleam blue-white as he makes his incision at the center of the forehead then carves his way about the cranium with a scalpel of sterilized steel. He peels back the shaven skin that covers the dome of the skull. Now the bone-saw, following the same track as the scalpel.

He removes cranial roof and the living brain glistens before him, a thing of beauty. A marvel that exceeds even the finest mechanisms of scientific design. Here lies the secret to immortality, creativity, humanity…the fleshy bottle that contains the very Soul of Man. He applies the topical solution and speaks the Incantation of Transferral, pronouncing each syllable with ingrained accuracy as he removes the brain from its bisected shell. He smoothly clips free the Organic opticals and carries the brain to a second table. There lies the youth’s new body: a perfect example of Beatific aesthetics, a collection of ingenious machinery wrapped in a smooth elastic sheathe exactly like his own. The silver skull wears no porcelain face yet…the youth will choose one when he awakes.

The Surgeon slides the brain into its new housing, connects the vitreous filaments to the new opticals (his mother chose green lenses), and seals the top of the silver skull with a soldering torch. Finally, he pulls the hood of elastic skin over the back of the skull and secures it with a permanent adhesive. He signals the Attendant, who flips a switch, sending a current of cobalt energy leaping through the youth’s new body. Gears groan and the body quivers until the charge dissipates. The Attendant hands a brass heart-key to the Surgeon. He inserts it gently into the keyhole in the youth’s chest and turns it…cranking it round and round until the green lenses begin to glow with faint light.

As he primes the youth’s new body, a trio of Transporters enters the room and gathers up the youth’s flesh-and-blood remains. They will remove it cleanly and dispose of the carcass somewhere. Three or four such operations a day creates a lot of cast-off flesh. The Surgeon is glad the disposal of such remnants is not part of his job. He has never thought of asking where they take the fleshy rubbish. Perhaps they cast them into the Well of Bones. He does not care enough to ask.

The youth sits up on the table, his opticals shining bright as emeralds. He lifts his arms and bends his fingers, looking at his adult body for the first time. His bright skull is incapable of expression, but the Surgeon sees wonder in the flaring green opticals. He is used to this moment of enlightenment. It always makes him proud of a job well done.

“How do you feel?” he asks the patient.

The green opticals blink, stare at him. “Brilliant,” says the youth. With some coaxing he stands on his new legs. The Attendant leads him toward the door and his expectant parents.

“You’re truly a Beatific now,” he tells the lad. “A man.”

“Thank you, Doctor…?” he pauses at the door.

“Wail,” the Surgeon says through his smiling mask.

“Thank you, Doctor Wail,” says the boy who is now a man.

The Surgeon bows at the waist. His patient disappears through the swinging doors.

“No more today, Doctor,” says the Attendant.

“Excellent,” says Dr. Wail, stripping off his plastic gloves and surgical gown. “Summon a coach if you would be so kind.”

The Attendant nods and leaves the room.

A few drops of blood are all that is left of the youth’s fleshly body. Wail stares at the crimson stains. What a piece of work is man, he thinks. How frail and tender, how prone to destruction. “Not anymore,” he says aloud to himself.

In the lobby the youth’s family embraces him, their porcelain smiles wide and colored with cheer. Rose-tinted cheeks and scintillating opticals. The father is telling his son to keep his heart-key safe and clean, that he must wind himself back to full strength every morning. The son holds the brass key proudly in his hands. It is the key to immortality.

Dr. Wail exits through the main doors of the Ministère de Science. A black rain falls across the Urbille as his carriage approaches. A pale sun sinks beyond the silhouettes of rusted and jagged towers. The Ministère itself is a gleaming spire of glass and steel behind him, a monument to modernity rising from a landscape of decayed and crumpled metal.

Two clockwork horses draw the carriage through the muddy street. Above and behind them on the driver’s bench sits a steaming Clatterpox, its barrel-shaped body patterned with rust and salt encrustations. Its rod-like arms pull on the reigns, bringing the carriage to a halt before the Surgeon, who has wrapped himself in a gray overcloak. Soiled rain drips from the rim of his top hat. The Clatterpox driver vents a gout of smoke from tubes along its bulky frame, a sound like six teapots gone to boil at once. It swivels its oval head and focuses smudged opticals.

“Coach for the doctor?” asks the Clatterpox, its voice a rasp of scraping metal.

Wail nods, and the driver leaps down to open the door. Its joints creak and Wail thinks the poor fellow might fall apart at any moment. Still, he climbs into the dry, velvet-lined interior and doffs his drenched hat and cloak. He loosens a few buttons on his waistcoat and watches the Rusted Zone roll by as the horses pull him through the squalid streets.

Crowds of Clatterpox wander the avenues, going from factories to taverns, ambling through the red clouds of rust and oily rain. The Surgeon long ago stopped asking himself how people can live like this. A group of naked children, five of them, splash ecstatically in a mud puddle at the mouth of an alley. A shouting Clatterpox (their mother? father?) drives them into a nearby hovel. Wail knows that those children, if they survive another ten or twelve years, will undergo their own Conversions. But unlike the privileged sons and daughters of Beatifics, they will become clumsy, lumbering Clatterpox. For those who cannot afford the services of a Surgeon, the only choice is the Mechanics.

“Should these people even be allowed to raise children?” his wife had once asked.

“Perhaps not,” Wail had told her. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

But like everything else in the Urbille, it was not the Beatifics who made decisions. The Law came only from the Potentates, and The Law was incontestable.

As the carriage leaves the Rusted Zone and its rows of dilapidated factories, it passes into the rolling greenery of the Good Hills. Mansions of ivy-smothered stone dot the hills, one estate after another of sculpted gardens, cast-iron fences, and meandering avenues dotted with gas lamps in baroque shapes. Night has fallen and the windows of the great houses gleam with orange warmth, the light of blazing hearths spilling across lawns set with pathways of ground glass. These are the homes of Beatific families, ancestral estates designed with grace and beauty to house the Urbille’s most graceful and beautiful citizens.

The carriage pulls through the gate of the Wail Estate and up the curving driveway. That same kind firelight flickers from the windows of the house. The Surgeon’s heart gears speed up a bit as he imagines his wife and son waiting for him inside.

Home. He exits the carriage. The window’s glow caresses his porcelain smile.

He drops a single ruby brilliant into the driver’s iron palm and the Clatterpox approximates a quick bow with its bulky frame. The mechanical horses’ hooves click against the cobbled drive, as the Surgeon opens the door that bears the Wail sigil in pressed gold.

In the vestibule and the parlor beyond there is no sign of wife or son.

“Kalmea? Alain?” he calls out, removing his hat and coat.

“Kalmea!” louder now.

The house is stonily silent. Then the rush of padded feet on the carpeted floor. His wife enters the foyer, a single candle burning in her hand. There is no joy in her amber opticals. She wears a face of sculpted ceramic sorrow.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“He is…ill,” she says, a hand on his shoulder.

They rush to the bedroom where young Alain lies under blankets, sweating and moaning. The boy’s pale skin is covered in purple blotches.

The frailty of flesh…

Kalmea tells him of the carriage that brought Alain home from school. He seemed fine at first, but soon began coughing. He would not eat the meal she prepared, and collapsed in the den. “He has been lying here ever since,” she says. “I sent a summons to the Ministère, but they said you had already left.”

“Must have arrived just after I departed,” he says. He examines Alain’s pupils, pulling his soft opticals open gently. They are glazed and unhealthy. What is this sickness? He has never seen such symptoms. He mutters an Incantation of Health but it has no effect. Even as he watches, the dark spots grow larger on his son’s flesh. He administers an Elixir of Prevention with a golden spoon. No response.

“What can we do?” Kalmea asks him.

The Surgeon sits quietly for awhile, staring at his poor Organic son. He remembers the day they received this bundle of joy. The Angel of the Potentates with its flaring feathered wings, its heroic shoulders, its smooth and featureless head. It had come to them as expected, on the middle of the Fifth Day in the Year of the Basilisk. They were in the back garden when it descended, shedding sunlight from its pristine limbs. In its strong arms lay a tiny being of pink flesh, swaddled in linen and sleeping peacefully. Alain.

The faceless Angel placed the infant directly into Kalmea’s arms, as was the custom. They were so exhilarated by the baby’s presence that they did not see the Angel rise into the sky and fly back toward the great hill where stands the Palace of the Potentates.

“What can we do?” Kalmea asks him again, grabbing his arm.

“Rid him of this weak flesh,” says the Surgeon. “His Conversion was due in twelve days. I’ll do it tomorrow instead.”

“Is that legal?” she asks. He senses fear like poison in her voice.

“I’ll write up a Special Permit tonight,” he says. “Send a runner for a coach an hour before dawn. Conversion will save him from this wasting disease…whatever it is.”

“Father?” Alain’s blind opticals flicker open. They are blue, like his father’s, yet so soft.

“I’m here, son.” He squeezes the boy’s limp hand.

“Help me.”

“You’re going to be fine, Alain. In a few hours you will be a man…free from this sickness. From all sickness.”

Alain shakes his head. “The walls…” he mutters. “Skin on the walls…”

Wail looks at his wife, then back to his dying son.

“What walls?” he asks. Could this be some clue to the origin of his sickness?

Alain swallows, coughs. Bloody spittle stains his lips, which his mother wipes with a damp cloth. “On the Avenue of Copper Lungs…I had to stop…I’m sorry, Father.”

“You had to stop where? For what? Tell me, son.”

“The buildings…the rust, the metal…it was all covered over. Covered with…flesh. Some kind of skin, pulsing muscles beneath the surface. The Clatterpox were staring…some ran away in fear…but it grew larger as I watched it. I had to stop…I had to touch it.”

The Surgeon’s heart skips a cog. “What did you touch? Something on the Avenue of Copper Lungs?”

“The flesh…” mutters Alain. “Walls of living flesh, Father….flesh like me…how could it? How could it? How…” He fades away, consciousness lost beneath a wave of bodily stress.

“What is he talking about?” asks Kalmea.

The Surgeon shakes his head. “I have no idea. Stay with him. I must draft the Permit.” He shuffles down the hallway to his library, where parchment and a quill pen await his efforts.

As he pens the document that will save his son’s life, the boy’s words ring in his mind, fireflies set loose in the Organic folds of his metal-encased brain.

Walls of living flesh…

In the morning his son’s suppurating skin is the color of charcoal. There is a sickly-sweet stench about Alain. He appears to be…decaying. The Surgeon says nothing of this to Kalmea. Like her, he has donned a grim-set face. He hopes he will have cause to wear a smiling face again after this day.

After hastily winding their heart-keys they load Alain into a carriage by gaslight. Kalmea insists upon travelling with him to the Ministère, and he cannot refuse her. The driver is another Clatterpox, but the coach and horses might be the same ones that brought him home last night. The vehicle rolls through the green lanes and descends into the serrated mass of the Rusted Zone.

“Faster!” he shouts at the driver. The Clatterpox complies, but hits a mass of early morning traffic on the Street of Coils. The Surgeon curses the crowds of steaming mechanoids. Kalmea clutches his hand. Their son lies dying on the floor of the coach. Rotting…

In the smoggy glow of sunrise the coach finally reaches the Ministère of Science. The Surgeon calls for Attendants and they carry Alain inside, prepping the Conversion Room for an emergency procedure. Dr. Wail pacifies his huffing Supervisor by handing him the carefully prepared Permit. He does not wait to watch the man sign it, but rushes instead through the doors of the CR. A top-of-the-line body was commissioned for his son months ago. Using it now, twelve days ahead of the ordained time, should pose no problem. Attendants prepare it for the procedure as sedative rushes into Alain’s purple veins.

The Surgeon works feverishly, but with no less precision than any patient demands. The Attendants mumble behind their impassive ceramic faces…the state of Alain’s body horrifies them. His flesh looks like spoiled meat…it has already begun to dry…soon it will be only a desiccated husk.

The Surgeon works his bone-saw magic, then drops the tool as the cranial roof comes loose. The Attendants moan, or curse, he isn’t sure. He cannot hear them. He hears only the terrible shrieking of his wife, who looks into the CR from a round observation port.

Alain’s young brain is neither pink nor glistening. It is black and putrid…atrophied. Little more than a fist-sized lump of rancid meat. There is nothing left of his son to save.

The Surgeon falls to his knees. A keening sound fills the room, and he recognizes it somewhere in the back of his mind as his own scream. Dr. Wail is wailing…

Attendants carry him away from the CR while Transporters in special hazard suits carry away Alain’s shriveled remains. Wail breaks free of the Attendants’ supporting arms and slams his skull against the wall, shattering his porcelain face to bits. His silver skull-face continues to shriek as they carry him into an isolation room. He does not see what becomes of his poor wife.

If his opticals were Organic, he would be weeping. But he can only scream, until a gear in his throat slips. He lays in the isolation room, twitching and moaning until oblivion claims him. Sleep offers little help…he dreams of Alain rotting to death before him, skin falling in chunks from a skeleton of brittle white bone. He wakes up and slams his head against the wall again, seeking to pulp the brain inside; but his miraculous body is made too well.

In the depths of more mad dreaming he sees faces of carven stone staring at him with diamond opticals. The stone is alive and the faces speak with eerie voices:

It’s all a lie, they tell him.

The Potentates have bound you in a web of illusion.

To see the truth you must look beyond who you are…what you are…

How their stone lips can move and produce sound he has no idea. But this is a dream, so he accepts it. He does not like their accusations.

You are as dead as your son…who was not your son at all.

Conversion is Death.

The Beatific lifestyle is a sham…you are all walking corpses.

Accept this and know freedom.

Accept this and defy the tyranny of the Potentates.

Where does the new flesh come from, Dr. Wail?

Where does the lost flesh go?

All sense of time is lost while he dreams.

Someone eventually comes in, takes the heart-key from his pocket, and winds him back to full strength. By this alone he knows that twenty-four hours have passed. Wishing they would just let his body wind down and his brain expire, he fights against this, but four Attendants hold his limbs. The Supervisor tells him the key will be waiting for him when he feels better. When they leave he sits quietly for some hours.

Walls of living flesh…

The words of Alain are what bring him back to sanity. His grief transforms gradually into anger. What was it on the Avenue of Copper Lungs that his son touched? What was it that killed him?

Walls of living flesh…

When he speaks calmly again, Attendants summon the Supervisor, who interviews him for an hour, then decides to let him go. He gives the Surgeon back his heart-key, along with heartfelt condolences. He also insists on a six-week leave of absence. The Ministère de Science will pay for Alain’s funeral. (The diseased body, however, has already been disposed of. They will have to use his Beatific body…the unwound one that never housed his brain.)

The Surgeon nods, accepts an impassive face from the Supervisor’s personal collection, and says whatever he needs to say to get out on the street again.

“Go home and be with your wife,” the Supervisor says. “She needs you.”

He nods, shakes the man’s hand.

Now Dr. Wail stands in waistcoat and top hat in front of the Ministère, but he doesn’t call for a carriage. Instead he walks, weaving between the huffing exhausts of Clatterpox and steam-driven lorries. He slides his heart-key into his breast pocket, alongside the key that would have belonged to Alain.

He clutches a scalpel in his right fist (nobody saw him take it from the Ministère), and his booted feet carry him toward the Avenue of Copper Lungs.

The streets grow less crowded but more dangerous as he walks through the lowering sun. Abandoned foundries crumble slowly into rust alongside the paved lanes. Clatterpox rattle in and out of drinking establishments and Doxie houses. Bloaters float above the crowds, siphoning stray thoughts into their spherical bodies through quivering, worm-like tendrils. The few Beatifics to be found on this side of town wear their collars up to meet their hat brims, scarves hiding all but their narrowed opticals. Some hide themselves deep inside hooded cloaks, the handles of clubs or blades visible on their hips. The corroded walls of metal seem to close in about the Surgeon as he walks. The sky has taken on a ruddy color, as if it too has rusted. Gangs of rowdy Clatterpox roam the alleys, exchanging cryptic tweets and hoots of compressed steam. Their hearts are miniature furnaces that burn tiny chunks of anthracite.

Finally he rounds the corner and sees the Avenue of Copper Lungs running east to west before him. Looking back, he can barely see the shimmering steel and glass of the Ministère of Science rising from the metropolis of ancient, tangled metal. Now the wind picks up as he steps out onto the avenue, which is strangely deserted. Shops have closed here, and taverns have nailed their doors. Something has driven everyone away. He walks into the emptiness and a whirlwind of rust blows tattered broadsheets down the sidewalk. One wraps about his foot.

He picks up the crumpled newsrag and reads the headline:

MYSTERIOUS FLESH GROWS ACROSS SOUTHERN QUARTER

Part of the ensuing article is readable, the rest of it having been smeared to illegibility by some acrid puddle.

Foundries 17, 34, and 53 are suspending operations due to an unexplained phenomenon along the eastern flank of the Southern Quarter today, centering on the Avenue of Copper Lungs. Seemingly overnight, a vast blanket of what appears to be Organic flesh has grown rapidly to smother the three factories and surrounding establishments, including a vent shop, two taverns, and a bronzing outlet. Authorities were quick to arrive and cordon off the scene, but not before several Clatterpox investigated personally. Many of those first-hand witnesses claimed the flesh was “alive with muscular tension” when touched. Gendarmes arrested three citizens who refused to flee the cordoned area (all Clatterpox), and traffic has been indefinitely suspended along the Avenue.

Tribune Anteus had no comment when contacted about the spazmal, as some engineers are calling this outbreak of flesh, but in a statement he promised the “swift and immediate execution of anyone foolish enough to

The rest of the piece is a mélange of runny black ink that reminds the Surgeon of Alain’s decaying skin. He casts the paper aside and climbs the new metal fence placed by gendarmes to block the street.

An electricity in the air glides about his face and limbs, a growing pressure that signals the inevitable rise of a rabidity. He half-runs down the street toward the closed factories. They seem hung with great, flapping sheets or tarps of a torn and ragged substance. Red lightnings flare among the dark clouds as he comes to stand before the great wall of rotting flesh. The sound of the manifesting rabidity howls in his ears…the sound of reality splitting like punctured elastic skin.

The wind tears at the huge curtains of necrotic flesh hanging from the walls of the avenue. This place was literally smothered by flesh…a spazmal. He walks against the wind, following the length of the dead flesh walls. They are putrefying exactly as Alain’s own skin had done…withering and drying like his beautiful brain. Standing in the middle of the phenomenon, he takes it all in. These curtains of flesh grew like a rapid fungus over roofs, smokestacks, walls, alleys, pavements, and lamp poles. As if the Rusted Zone was trying to grow its own skin but got the process horribly wrong. He walks upon the putrid, jellied flesh that smothers the surface of the street. It squishes unwholesomely beneath his boots.

Rotten…all rotten.

Where did it come from?

He sees again the stone faces from his weird dream.

Where does the new flesh come from?

Where does the old flesh go?

This is the incident that fascinated Alain so that he had to stop his coach and get out to touch it. His own feeble flesh must have caught the wave of bacteria that causes this rapid decomposition. Now the flesh hangs here, quarantined like a plague virus, and his son is gone.

The rabidity reaches full force and the wind nearly knocks him face-down onto the rotting carpet of flesh. He steadies himself and watches a vacuity open in the air nearby. A split in the fabric of reality tears itself into being above the flesh-drowned street. A saffron glow emanates from within the fissure…some distance away, another vacuity emits a blue-green light, and farther away there are others, each a random portal to some distant reality.

The Surgeon’s green opticals stare through the vacuity nearest him. The world beyond is an alien realm, a broad sweep of sandy plain with obelisks of rock rising into a mauve sky. Nine moons float about the zenith of that wild dimension, and clouds of golden dust move across the wasteland. Colossal creatures lumber between the spires of natural rock…things with horned heads and pendulous jaws. Even on this side of the vacuity he feels the rumbling of that other ground beneath the tread of the shaggy behemoths. Do they recognize this portal into a separate reality? Or are they dumb brutes, ignorant of all thought? Nevertheless, they stampede on through the golden waste. If one of them stumbles into the vacuity, it may burst into the Surgeon’s dimension. If that happens, he will be crushed beneath its awesome weight.

He moves back, away from the sucking pressure of the multiversal fracture before it can draw him tumbling like a grain of sand into that forlorn landscape. The roaring wind flows into the vacuity, and he strains against it, using all the power of his grinding leg gears to reach a safe distance. Finally, the storm subsides and the vacuity snaps shut with a peal of thunder. All about the city, similar thunders roar as dimensional wounds repair themselves. The evening calm returns.

The Surgeon stares again at the immense blanket of rotted flesh encasing the Avenue of Copper Lungs. When all this rots away there will be nothing left that might answer the why of his son’s death. How long before all this spazmal flesh is nothing more than muddy pulp to be swept into the sewers? He must take a tissue sample. Get it to the laboratory. Maybe he will find an answer…some clue as to why the flesh appeared…why it decayed…why it took Alain. With the scalpel he carves a rectangular piece of oozing, blackened flesh from a defunct gaslight, wraps it carefully in a silken handkerchief, and tucks it into his coat pocket.

As he turns to go, a blast of white light assaults his opticals. The sound of a steam engine grinds near somewhere behind the lights. Tall, dark shapes rush forward pointing rifles. Gendarmes. They grab him and hustle him toward a six-wheeled lorry, ignoring his pleas.

“I’m a Surgeon!” he shouts, but their grip is tighter than iron screws. They shove him into the back of the wagon and slam the doors. Two of them sit inside with him, the barrels of their rifles pointed directly at him. Below their black, stove-pipe hats their faces are little more than clusters of dark optical lenses, each of which swivels independently in various directions. They wear trench coats and gloves the color of midnight. The lorry rumbles across the fleshy street, through a barrier gate, and into the streets of the Western Quarter.

“I was only doing research,” says the Surgeon. They ignore him. “Where are you taking me?”

“To the Tribune,” one of the gendarmes finally speaks. His voice is a transistorized buzz, as if broadcast on some distant wavelength. “Do not attempt to flee. We will shoot to kill.”

The Surgeon sits quietly, his fist wrapped about the handkerchief in his pocket and the decaying evidence wrapped inside.

Deep inside the Ministère de Justice gendarmes haul the Surgeon before the golden bench where Tribune Anteus sits in judgment. The crimson and black banner bearing the Sigil of the Potentates hangs on the wall. The Tribune’s official robes are white, as is the long veil that obscures his face. His ruby opticals gleam faintly through the fabric, twin points of rosy light. Above the veil a powdered wig hides the rest of his thin skull. His fingers are long and sharp, covered in jeweled rings, and one of them points directly at the Surgeon.

“You entered a zone of prohibition,” says the Tribune, his voice deep with power. The Surgeon recognizes it from a hundred transistor broadcasts over the years. It carries far more weight in person, seeming almost to vibrate the walls of the chamber. “How do you plead?”

The Surgeon can only speak in a rasping whisper, thanks to the damaged gear in his throat. “I was doing research—”

“How do you plead?” asks the Tribune again. “Guilty or not guilty?”

“I had a reason…” begins the Surgeon.

“Your reasons are of no consequence,” says the Tribune. “You broke a Tribunal Decree. This court serves the Potentates’ Justice and that Justice will be served.”

“Not guilty then,” says the Surgeon.

The Tribune lifts his gavel. “The plea is noted. This court finds you guilty of criminal trespassing and sentences you to death.”

“Wait!” A new voice rings through the chamber before the gavel falls. It is a voice the Surgeon recognizes. The Supervisor of the Ministère de Science stands nearby, escorted by a pair of private gendarmes. “May I approach the bench Your Honor?” asks the Supervisor.

The Tribune nods and the two personages confer in whispered conversation. The Surgeon stands anxious before the bench and wonders why the Supervisor is here. His hand clenches the rotting flesh encased in his kerchief. He still has the scalpel in his pocket as well. The gendarmes did not search him. Perhaps they have no fear of a mere Surgeon. Six of them, heavily armed, line the chamber walls.

Finally the Tribune nods his veiled head and speaks again: “Doctor Wail, you are hereby remanded to the custody of Supervisor Guillaume. Your sentence is indefinitely suspended, pending further reports. Do you understand?”

The Surgeon nods. The gavel falls upon the golden bench with a sharp crack, and the Supervisor leads Wail into an adjoining room where only his two personal guards are present.

“How did you know I was here?” asks the Surgeon.

“I have friends among the gendarmes,” says Supervisor Guillaume. “You are very lucky.”

The Surgeon would smirk if his porcelain face allowed it. He blinks instead.

“Forgive me,” says the Supervisor. “You have suffered a terrible loss. But I believe in you, Dr. Wail. I believe in your talents.” The Supervisor’s face is a grim ceramic expression; a serious mask meant for entertaining serious discussions. His top hat is red, with a black velvet band.

“I am grateful,” says the Surgeon. “But why did you intervene?”

“Because,” says the Supervisor, “I was wrong in asking you to take a leave of absence. You’re not that kind of man. I have a job for you.”

“I’m a Surgeon.”

“No longer. Now you will be so much more. A scientist.”

“I don’t understand…what happened to my son?”

“Come with me,” says the Supervisor. “I will explain everything. You will see that there is hope…for you and your family. For us all.”

“Where are we going?” asks the Surgeon, pacing behind.

“To the palace,” says Supervisor Guillaume.

A carriage waits outside for the Supervisor, driven by a third private gendarme. Inside its opulent interior the Supervisor offers Wail a glass of transparent lubricant. The Surgeon refuses, but Guillaume insists. Wail lifts his porcelain mask and drinks the liquid down quickly. The carriage trundles along the cobbled lane, heading into the Good Hills and the great prominence at the center of the Urbille.

“Good for the gears and cogs,” says the Supervisor, finishing his own glass.

“What is this all about?” asks the Surgeon.

“As you may have guessed by now, I am far more than a Supervisor,” says Guillaume. “I work for the Potentates. Special Sciences Initiative.”

“Why are you taking me to the palace?”

“To show you our latest experiment.”

The coach travels up a long and winding incline. Through the octagonal window the Surgeon sees the twisted silhouettes of mighty trees, the Interior Forest surrounding the massive walls of the Potentates’ citadel. Soon the vehicle leaves the moonwashed forest and enters a tunnel-like gate leading to an inner courtyard. The obscure shadows of iron statues pass by the window. At last the coach comes to rest, and the Surgeon steps out into an immense yard of mossy flagstones. The Palace of the Potentates rises before them, a sleeping leviathan of gray stone dressed in tapestries of moss and ivy. The size of those stony towers dwarfs even the steel spires of the Ministères. Inside this colossal conglomeration of granite there might exist a second city, one more ancient and mysterious than the Urbille itself.

The palace is a carven mountain at the center of everything, and the Surgeon stands humbled in its inky shadow. In the gloom ahead he sees a vision of those stone faces from his nightmare, looking out at him from the very walls of the palace. They speak to him again. Neither the Supervisor or his guards seems to notice.

The Potentates have bound you in a web of illusion.

To see the truth, you must look beyond…

Accept this and defy them.

The faces disappear as the Supervisor leads him through an iron gate into a drafty hall at the base of a soaring tower. Then a series of heavy doors brings them into a great round-walled hall with a ceiling high enough to be lost in shadow. Perhaps this entire tower is hollow.

Beatific technicians walk about the rows of intricate machinery, adjusting tubes of glass and electrode displays. A confusing network of wires and colored glass hangs like a stained-glass window above the contraptions, connected to the machines by coils of cable and rubber-bound cords. This room, the Surgeon realizes in an instant, is one giant machine.

“Welcome to Project Viande,” says the Supervisor, doffing his red hat and gloves. He babbles on and on about the technological skill of himself and his technicians, but the Surgeon understands little of it. His opticals roam the intricate arrays of levers, gears, switches, and transformers. The great machine is as intricate as any Beatific body.

“…and two days ago we came as close to success as we have ever been,” says the Supervisor.

“Two days ago?” asks the Surgeon.

Two days ago something killed my son.

The Supervisor motions to a great oval of glass nestled at the heart of the machine. “Through this multiversal lens we have discovered a world comprised entirely of living flesh,” says Guillaume. “An Organic dimension!” The Surgeon focuses his opticals on the man’s dull ceramic visage. “Our goal is to enable the successful transversal of this world-flesh into our own realm. So…we introduced a viral strain of this Organic matter into an area of the Rusted Zone.”

“The spazmal…”

The Supervisor shakes his head. “We call it the Organism. It seemed to thrive for the first few hours, growing at a pace we hardly expected. Then something happened, some side effect of the transversal process. The Organism began a rapid decay.”

Alain’s words rang hollow in the Surgeon’s skull.

Walls of living flesh…I had to stop…I had to touch it.

“We had no choice but to cordon off the affected area and place it under quarantine,” says the Supervisor.

“Why?” asks the Surgeon. His fist squeezes the steel scalpel in the pocket of his waistcoat. “Why bring this…Organism…into the Urbille at all?”

The Supervisor stands silent for a moment. He turns away from the Surgeon and surveys the technicians at their work. “The Potentates have…certain needs, Wail. I’m going to tell you one of the Urbille’s great secrets.”

“Go ahead…tell me.”

The Supervisor whispers. “The Potentates…are Organic beings.”

Like every other citizen, the Surgeon has seen the Potentates in person once a year during the Parade of Iniquities, when all seven ride through the streets on great mechanical steeds. He remembers their bulbous skulls, their black robes and thick veils, the golden chains decorating their vestments. Their limbs were inhumanly long, their oblong heads balanced on thin necks. Only their shadowy opticals are ever visible to the parade crowds. Sometimes they wave with incredibly long (gloved) fingers at the populace that fears and adores them. No one would ever guess their fleshly secret.

“What exactly are you saying?” asks the Surgeon, though he begins to suspect.

“Organic beings require sustenance,” says the Supervisor. “The Potentates are entirely carnivorous. They desire only meat of a certain grade.”

Neurons blaze inside the Surgeon’s fleshy brain. His opticals blink and his gears moan and creak as if his parts were suddenly aged and worn.

“This…Organism…this transversal…”

“Was an attempt…” says the Supervisor, “…is an attempt…to provide an endless alternative food supply for the Potentates.”

The Surgeon has no words. If he could vomit up the contents of his clockwork guts he would do so…but he hasn’t vomited since he was a child. A small boy, frail and covered in tender flesh.

“We are so close, Wail,” says the Supervisor. “So close to perfecting the process. This world-flesh is the key…finding it was the real breakthrough. We need to assemble a process for countering the rapid cellular degeneration that our reality creates. The next piece of the Organism we bring through will have a better chance of—”

“You said alternative,” says the Surgeon. “Alternative food supply.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“What do they eat now?” asks the Surgeon. The Supervisor sighs. The Surgeon grabs him by the shoulders. A gendarme steps forward, but Guillaume waves him back.

“What do they eat?” asks the Surgeon in his rasping, weary voice.

“What do you think?” says the Supervisor.

The Surgeon remembers the Transporters, hauling brainless carcasses out of the Conversion Room. Three or four a day.

Again he sees the faces of living stone, hears their voices.

Where does the new flesh come from, Dr. Wail?

Where does the lost flesh go?

“All those bodies…”

“They come here, to the palace,” whispers the Supervisor. “For…processing.”

The Surgeon slumps, and the Supervisor helps him into a chair.

“Now do you see the value of our work?” asks the Supervisor. “How important it is? Have you ever wondered what causes the rabidities? Why these portals to distant worlds keep opening at random throughout the Urbille? They are side effects of this machine! It’s all about Project Viande.”

All our bodies…all our flesh and bones.

“I need you on this project, Wail. Your brilliance can help us find a solution.”

“What about the babies?” asks the Surgeon, remembering the white Angel. Alain’s tiny pink face. “Where do they all come from?”

“Harvested,” says the Supervisor. “From other realities. Places where life has nearly expired. Bringing them into this world is a gift. Their worlds are ruined and dying. We bring them into the Urbille and give them life…families…immortality.”

Where does the new flesh come from?

Where does the lost flesh go?

“Wail, don’t you understand?” demands Guillaume. “If we succeed, there will be no more need for Conversions! A new Organic Age will begin. All we have to do is find another way to feed the Potentates…”

The Surgeon pulls forth the scalpel and drives it into Guillaume’s left optical. Its steel tip enters the Supervisor’s brain and the blade lodges there.

Technicians run for cover as the gendarmes fire their rifles. Thunder echoes through the tower. A bullet grazes the Surgeon’s shoulder, tearing open his elastic skin. There is no pain. He leaps upon the nearest gendarme, turning him to take his comrade’s next bullet in the chest. The explosive shell scatters bronze and copper debris across the floor.

The Surgeon runs into the heart of the chamber, winding between banks of machinery.

“Don’t shoot! The machine!” someone yells, but the surviving gendarme ignores him. A console explodes as the Surgeon runs past it.

He flees through a random series of doors, losing himself in the dank corridors of the outer tower. He hides behind a ventilation grate as a squad of gendarmes march past.

Whispered voices lead him on. Eventually he finds his way outside, and in the light of the silver moon he creeps through the courtyard, passing the iron statues, and hides himself in the mud behind a green hedge. There is commotion within the tower, although the rest of the palace seems lost to silence and shadow. Somewhere within that ancient immensity, the Potentates are dining on the flesh of the city. He takes the rotted spazmal flesh from his pocket and casts it into a drainage ditch full of stagnant water.

When the courtyard gate opens, a gendarme-driven carriage rolls down the lane and exits the palace grounds. Nobody notices the Surgeon clinging to the back of the vehicle, his clothing soiled by dark mud. At the edge of the forest he drops off the carriage, rolling into a pile of rotten leaves. He rises, filthy and crouching like some beast from an ancient world of flesh and bone. He runs across the hills, trying to outrace the carriage.

Just before dawn he reaches the broken door of his estate. The tracks of steam lorries have left muddy ruts in the lawn. Inside the house he finds the corpse of his wife lying among the shambles of furniture. Kalmea’s silver skull blossoms like a rose where the exploding shell hit it. Head shots were the gendarmes’ specialty…the quickest and most efficient way to kill a Beatific. Their silver skulls could not protect the delicate brain from such firepower.

The brain…the last refuge of a stolen humanity.

A humanity fed to seven imperious carnivores.

He smashes a gas lamp and winds his heart-key in the light of the roaring flames. He leaves the mansion burning behind him. Wrapped in a black cloak and hood, an antique blade at his side, he follows the voices singing a clear high refrain in his mind.

Now you see the Truth.

Now you see Yourself.

He stalks carefully through several neighborhoods in the small light of early morning, until he finds the place. No family has lived in the overgrown estate for decades. The name on the iron gate is rusted and faded. The mansion beyond is little more than a ruin…shattered windows, fallen beams, crumbled walls of blackened stone.

In the distance, the mountainous bulk of the palace rises from its central hill. On the opposite horizon, the uneven skyline of the Rusted Zone straddles the lower world. The Urbille is a broken and decaying apparatus that runs on and on, fueled by ignorance and deception.

He lifts a fallen wall and discovers a stairwell that spirals deep into the earth. Far beneath the ruined manor he enters a chamber of damp stone. Along the walls, great carven faces stare at him with shimmering opticals. The floor of the vault is littered with glassy stones of every color, a vast fortune in brilliants left here to gather mold.

Some of the giant faces grin at him. Others frown.

The Ministère de Stone.

Now you see, one of them says. It’s all a lie.

The Surgeon nods.

“What must I do?” he asks.

With granite tongues they whisper ancient wisdom.