Lured (story from Codex Aeternum)
over 5 years ago
– Fri, Oct 02, 2020 at 01:42:41 AM
The passages seemed to spiral into infinity. Sprawling in every direction, tangled and inter-wrought, folding back upon themselves to defy cartography with a wink that upended perception.
Merceda fixed a listless stare into the murk as she struggled to recall her ingress. The cloying proximity of the walls and ceiling offered no bearings as the edifice itself seemed to hum and breathe in tandem with her own ragged exhalations.
Distractedly she found her fingers drawn to trace the intricate linework glyphs that unfurled upon every surface, etched in painstaking symmetry upon a thicket of dense cogwheels ellipses, each oiled, coiled and stacked in ossified bronze beams. The air grew thicker here as the stultifying heat dressed each surface in a film of condensation- as though the machine itself could sweat, pained by the exertion of its terrifying labours.
With no landmarks to guide her, she again pricked her ears against the stillness and spun to follow the strange rhythm that had compelled her this far. A clicking. A scraping. A chime. Entranced as though commanded – her limbs strode without purpose deeper into the labyrinth. With each faltering step, she strayed further from her companions, each of whom who were no doubt unravelling even now within chambers of their own personal reverie.
A click. A scrape. A chime. It resounded once more, more insistent than before. The strange glissando reaching deep within her to pluck bowstrings of long dormant memory…
…The peal of the bells were calling her to the chapel. It was daybreak and the sins of intent and omission were due to be recounted. They weighed upon her breast as she inched up her skirt, exposing pale brittle pins as she hiked her way through the square to the vaunted doors that forever smelled of circumstance and ceremony. A weary chorus hung muffled in the eaves of the vast interior, punctuated in dynamic shifts by the comforting cadence of the bell that had summoned her. Three chimes then an echo, decaying in anticipation of three eruptions further. And on it went, cutting ripples through the clouds of incense-sweetened air.
She had first learned of sanctuary here, although the safety she felt was one of compromise, conjoined as it was with the halting confessions she spat to redeem herself in a tiring cyclical ritual – her stories, her follies, her sense of self - made and unmade again in seven day snatches…
A click, a scrape, and a chime. She fought to remain present.
…The sound of cartwheels oscillating on rickety spokes as it ferried her brother home to her door. He would scarcely cross the threshold before tall-tales began tumbling endlessly from his road dusted lips.
She latches herself to his side and stares open-mouthed in admiration as he pools images in her brain with each new exclamation. The world at large is imbibed in vicarious gulps as she struggles to take it all in, legs bobbing like springs in the youthful urge to join him. The sunken streets of the village held no secrets now, the rituals sat splayed and arrayed, rote and desiccated. She would find no further meaning here.
The letter had landed in his absence. His return now a forlorn whispered wish, not spoken of over supper, nor even in those evenings when the light would crest his room to throw shadows where he used to lie. Like a sapling unfurled, she had grown into a woman in waiting, and as she read the tightly wound loops of ink, her resolve stiffened into something implacable. Before the new moon waned into a sickle she was gone - bedsheets still ruffled, pillow still warm.
Three steps further into the winding depths. The chime as guide. Like hammer upon anvil now. A clarion tattoo.
…As the final impact rang out, she stooped to admire the buckled plates that sat cooling in the strange breath after birth. Frescoed with filigree and tailored to her frame – the armoured attire she would tighten to her torso seemed impossibly mythical. Exoskeletal and impervious, it would brace her as she was buffeted both within and without.
Polished brass detailing catches the light, the curvature clicking as it contracts. It is almost too perfect. Un-scuffed. She will soon see to that. Strapped and bound she strides into the vespers and the carriage that awaits, crowded with companions whose names she aspires to live long enough to remember…
A click. A scrape. A chime. Impossibly close this time, and in an instant she hurtles back into her boots, firmly and irretrievably in the now as the sweet sounds curdle, drifting over her shoulder.
The scraping! An approach! Joints click like gunshot as they bend at angles outrageous. Leering - it rises, an ink-stain smear in her periphery.
The impact is like a bayonet charge.
Blood fills her lungs. She glances down gutted as the proboscis protrudes. Rib bones twist as they are exposed to the air, the exit wound ejaculating a clotted mist of gore. Behind her it bends in a chitinous arc, rising to dwarf her as a monstrous thorax stretches to its apex upon a cluster of spindled limbs. Choking now, she gasps only sputum and crimson as a scream suffocates to emerge as a muted gurgling whimper.
Again the impact. Probing extremities run riot inside her, viscera shredding as strange puckered orifices fill the rent space with a thousand slathered squirming sacs. The brood beds down, warm within. Organs erode, mulched for the many. It is over quickly but has only begun. Seeded, a surrender to decay and rebirth, human excrement and warm earth.
Fertilised she lies in vacant repose.
Three leagues removed, he turns to note her absence and follows the framework further, entranced as he is beckoned by a trio of clues.
A click, a scrape and a chime.
