Darker Worlds Page 6
He had never been inside the Mayor’s abode before, and to the man’s credit it wasn’t especially ostentatious. He supposed it made sense, given that the Mayor’s ultimate desire had been to escape the material world. Phemorus found the Mayor in a back bedroom, his artificial body suspended in a hammock. Not one of Phemorus’s creations, his body was a bit more flamboyant than his home, no doubt because he had had to make an impression in public. His was a portly black machine traced with gold filigree, with a long tapering gold bird beak and a metal top hat fixed to the crown of his black skull.
Standing over him, staring down at him, Phemorus said, Won’t you wake up?
He rocked the hammock gently. He watched its movements slow, slow, like the pendulum of an unwound clock losing momentum.
When the hammock was still again, Phemorus leaned down and slid his arms under the Mayor’s body, scooping it up against his chest.
-6-
Dr. Phemorus found that the Mayor’s metal top hat unscrewed. He removed it and placed it to one side, on his work bench, then turned back to the body stretched before him.
In a cavity that the top hat had concealed rested the coiled oval of a brain, like an octopus squeezed protectively into a tiny cave. The organ was encased in a rubbery membrane, transparent, with a pale greenish fluid between this casing and the organ to preserve it. He did not yet remove this package from the cavity, however, there being two similarly rubbery connecting tubes at its base that would need to be carefully severed and then spliced elsewhere. The dreaming brain must not die. He was not some crude murderer.
For now, he switched his attention to the second body he had moved to his workshop, lying atop another narrow table beside the Mayor. It was the malfunctioning custodian from the warehouse, in the empty head of which some bird had once made its nest. A hatch in its chest stood open, revealing its inner workings, but he had not yet tinkered with these to cancel the automaton’s original programming. This he would do now, so as to replace it with a new and rather more simple program.
To that end, using his dexterous porcelain fingers, he removed several gears, repositioned others. He slid out a number of thin brass cards with holes punched in them. He found some blank cards in his supplies and punched new sequences of holes in them, slotted these into the custodian’s chest. Meanwhile, he located the cause of the machine’s earlier problems: one diminutive cog that had become misaligned. It was a momentary aggravation.
He didn’t feel as efficient as he once had been. Perhaps he was a bit groggy from only having roused from his sleep a short while ago. He took a break from his work to go outside and see to another matter that needed addressing anyway.
He waited at a street corner, not far from his home. On the chalky white wall beside him was stenciled a barcode, like a giant’s hair comb with oddly varied teeth. He knew from a clock in a nearby tower, that had continued to do its useless job unobserved for who knew how long, that it was nearly time for one of the custodians to appear on his street.
Sure enough, a rhythmic squeaking sound came from the distance. It would pause, resume squeaking, pause, resume squeaking. Finally the source of the sound appeared from around a bend in the narrow street. A tricycle-like conveyance, painted red, ridden by a red-painted custodian with a pointed cardinal-like crest. The wobbly little trike paused beside a barcode several buildings down, and its rider reached out one arm. There was a pop and a bright flash, a little puff of accompanying smoke, as the security custodian scanned the barcode in the course of recording its rounds. Then, gripping the handlebars again, it resumed pedaling in Phemorus’s direction.
Before the automaton could reach the barcode beside which Phemorus had been waiting, he moved toward it. The custodian was oblivious to him, its bead-like black eyes fixed ahead, even when he reached out and shoved the thing’s shoulders. It toppled off its trike to the buckled and cracked pavement, the trike itself falling onto its side. Before the custodian could get to its feet and reclaim its vehicle, Phemorus rushed forward, righted it, and sat down upon it himself. He pedaled away toward his house furiously, glancing behind him to see the custodian standing bewildered in the middle of the lane, watching him without giving chase or protest.
He brought the tricycle inside his home, even though he heard a pop and trailing sizzle outside as the custodian scanned that nearby barcode, having come to the mindless decision to continue its duties on foot. Phemorus returned to his workshop.
Despite working less crisply than once would have been the case, he worked tirelessly, because he had slept enough. He worked through the darkening of the green sky to blackness, and on unto the dawn.
Then, shortly after the sky had regained its feeble green light, he emerged from his tall skinny house, followed by a figure pedaling the red tricycle.
The figure riding dutifully just behind him on the trike, as the two of them navigated Ephemera’s maze-like streets, was the formerly gap-headed, baby doll-faced custodian, its eyelids no longer flickering erratically. Rather than look like the crown of its hairless head had been sawed off, it was now fitted with a black metal top hat.
When they came to the front gate in the high wall around Ephemera, the custodian astride its red trike waited patiently while Dr. Phemorus stepped up into the adjacent gate house. Within, a similarly baby-faced gatekeeper seated at the control levers swiveled its head toward him wordlessly. It looked down passively as Phemorus opened the hatch in its chest. He plucked out three hole-punched brass cards and pocketed them. The gatekeeper stared unmoving at the spot where Phemorus had been a moment before, as he reached past it to throw the lever to swing wide the gate’s double doors.
He emerged and returned to the custodian’s side. He placed his hand on its shoulder.
Go, he said, though he didn’t need to give it oral directions. It was all in its programming. Ride the path, and when the path ends, continue to ride. Ride straight away from this gate and keep to that direction the best you can. If your trike topples over rough ground, right it and continue on. If you tumble into a hollow or a brook, climb out the other side and pull your trike out with you. If you come to a ravine or a lake, go around it, but never turn back toward Ephemera again.
The custodian, carrying the Mayor’s dreaming brain within its skull, did not give a nod or a word in reply; it simply started pedaling forward, past the threshold of Ephemera and beyond, toward the seemingly infinite gray forest. The broad path that led into the woods, which Phemorus had walked many times, was all but lost under the dunes of dead gray leaves and their brittle ash. The custodian pedaled through these powdery heaps with little resistance.
He watched until the pedaling figure receded and became obscured, until even the bright red tricycle could not be glimpsed between the trunks and gray foliage, like the last red leaves finally fallen and gone.
Then Phemorus turned away, stepped into the gate house again, and threw the lever to swing the metal doors shut once more. They locked with a heavy metallic clunk.
He walked back toward his house, and while doing so he thought of how he might convert old market wagons and other freight vehicles, so that they might be used to transport large amounts of dreaming brains, which must of course remain inside their clear membranes and sustaining fluid so as to stay alive, their many cables connected to some sort of joint support system. His reason being that there were not enough automatons in Ephemera for him to house all the brains of its dreamers, but he would utilize all the custodians he could. Their maintenance and cleaning functions had been an empty gesture in any case.
The others could follow after their Mayor obediently, as they had done when they had been awake. He would lock the gates behind them, forever. They could go on dreaming in ignorance, or one day awake disoriented and lost, or they could die under showers of mercury. Their helplessness had been their choice; he had tried to warn them. Beyond their expulsion, their fate was out of his hands. They had exiled themselves long before he would do so in the merely physical sen
se.
His plans invigorated him as he walked, and he found his pace becoming more robust. It was as if he were brushing off the last cobwebs of sleep, no longer the somnambulist. The great inventor had purpose again.
He would be the new Mayor of Ephemera, and its sole citizen. He alone, unsleeping.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the setting Punktown. His short story collections include Punktown, Thirteen Specimens, The Endless Fall, Haunted Worlds, and Encounters With Enoch Coffin (with W. H. Pugmire). His novels include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Boneland, and Subject 11. Thomas’ stories have been selected for inclusion in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor, Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editor, Laird Barron).
Visit the author on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.thomas.71
Also in the Jeffrey Thomas Chapbook Series:
#1 THE COMING OF THE OLD ONES:
A Trio of Lovecraftian Stories
#2 NIGHTS IN PUNKTOWN:
A Trio of Dark Science Fiction Stories
#3 FLESH FOR PUNKTOWN:
A Trio of Dark Science Fiction Stories
#4 UNCANNY VALLEY:
A Trio of Disquieting Stories