Title: She’s a machine

Genre: Steampunk / Victorian Sci-Fi (with a dash of horror)

Author: Lid’l

Date: October 2009

Word Count: 3.883

References: The Lazarus Heart; Abarat – Days of Magic, Nights of War; Alice in Wonderland

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She’s a machine

The smell of petrol woke her. It was a thick smell, churning through the air in sluggish waves that made her skin feel clammy. She gagged on it. Her body protested and the bile that rose at the back of her throat told Lucrece her stomach had nothing to give. Her body gave a dry heave, a sickening contraction of muscles that felt too stiff and artificial to be alive. She looked at her hands. They were bloody and stained with oil.

In a panic, she scrambled up from the floor. Her limbs were numb and she stumbled. The front side of her lace dress was ripped to shreds, wet tendrils of cloth and gut dangling from the hole the Lord of Nightmares had left. Inside of her, she could see gory brass gears, slowly turning. Lucrece felt she would be ill again.

With a whimper, she fell back against the wall. Her eyes were burning with a horrible memory, visions of red and black in the firelight. Her lungs were punctured and unable to function, but she needed no breath. Her body was broken – dead, like a mechanical doll – but she moved as if alive. Lucrece lowered herself onto the floor, her head coming to rest against a metal step of the spiral staircase. She could see tendrils of her own long black hair drooping from it, a smudge of black indicating where she’d hit her head on it earlier.

Lucrece’s fingers rose to her scalp shakily and they came away sticky with grease and blood. A chunk of her forehead was missing, but she didn’t feel the pain. Her eyes started to burn as if she wanted to cry, but her body didn’t have the moisture to give. There was a sharp sound of metal on metal, but whether it came from within her or around her, Lucrece wasn’t sure. She covered her face with her hands and the spiral staircase creaked.

The tinny sound came again, more insistent this time. It was almost like the caw of a bird, twisted into a more perverse and synthetic croak. The ticking of metal claws on the rail of the staircase sounded ominous.

Lucrece couldn’t help but be drawn to it. Whatever was watching over her couldn’t be worse than the Lord of Nightmares. Her tired eyes came to rest on the rusty figure of a bird. It sat perfectly still on the railing, its glittering eyes shifting to get her into focus. Lucrece had to crane her neck to see the bird better. From her point of view, it seemed to be a large metal crow that had not been there before. Christopher Carrion had hated animals.

She            looked at it pitifully.

It cawed suddenly, stretching its razor sharp metal wings with huffs and puffs of steam. Inside the complex pattern of metal feathers, Lucrece could see its inner workings: a machine of gears and wires, but no seeming source of energy. “That is impossible,” she whispered, dropping her gaze to her own lap.

The stains on her skirt reminded her that the crow wasn’t the only impossible thing. She touched the wound on her head again, only to find it smaller than before. Her stomach was also healing, fresh pink skin carefully enveloping the gears inside of her. The sight made her sick again. “For what reason have you brought me back, carrion-eater?” she asked the bird, drawing her legs up to her body to hide the gruesome sight of her insides from her own view.

The shrill sound of metal gears creaking to life and falling into place filled the hangar as the bird rose. It was a heavy and ungainly thing as it dove for Lucrece and she shielded herself with a small sound of fright as it swept down. Impact never came.

When Lucrece dared to look, the bird was gone and she was all alone in the hanger. The air still smelled like petrol.

She had been all over the London Times: yet another victim of the Ripper, though her body had never been found. A thick lock of her midnight black hair had been placed near a ghastly amount of blood, the pearls of her grandmother’s necklace scattered in the puddle like cheap marbles in lemonade. Her brother Benjamin had grieved, but he still had his lover to turn to. Jared would keep him safe. It set Lucrece’s mind at ease.

In the dark of night, she was plagued by the sound of turning of gears, like the passing of time. But time stood still for her. The Lord of Nightmares had stolen her life from her and replaced it with something warped. She wanted it back. Or, if she couldn’t have it back, wanted his instead.

It was this desire that drove her to roam the banks of the River Thames, her dull black eyes watching the air ships come and go from port, mirrored by bulky shadows in the dark water. London was the beating and festering heart of the United Kingdom, alive with vermin and slick with muck. Everything about the city was corrupt: from the polluted air hovering over metropolis to the perfidious people that inhabited it. Many a time, Lucrece had wanted to walk up to a patrolling police officer and tell them: “The name of my murderer isn’t Jack. It’s Christopher.” But who would believe her? She wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.

In the darkness, the metal crow cawed and Lucrece shielded her face from a passer-by on the street. She thought she could feel her heart anxiously beating in her throat, but that could also have been the clockwork ticking inside of her. She turned her face towards the bird, the animal’s mechanical movements accompanied by the angry hiss of steam. “For what reason have you brought me here, carrion-eater?” she wanted to know. Her voice was oddly hollow, as if her inside was made of brass like a musical instrument.

The crow cocked its head, the squeak of metal raising the hairs on Lucrece’s body. She looked around. The alleyway stunk of rotting food and sewage, the walls of the buildings built too close together for safety. There was a heavy metal door to one side of her, broken windows to the other. Lucrece knew the alleyway to be the one parallel to Chutney Road, connecting to Park Drive, where London’s eternal night life beat an even faster tempo than the heart of the city. Looking at the door to her right, she was looking straight up the ass of Wonderland.

And the door was cracked open invitingly.

Lucrece didn’t doubt for a moment. She whisked past the crow, not knowing if it would follow her and reached for the door handle to pull it open further. Her fingers made a sound of metal hitting metal when she closed them around the handle. “Carrion!!” she screamed inside, the plush walls muting the shrill sound that came from her lips. Knowing it to be pointless to call again, Lucrece slipped into the establishment. The hum and drum of steam-powered gearwork thrummed through the air, the lights flickering when there seemed to be a hitch in the mechanism. She wondered what kind of elegant machinery she would find on the other side of the velvet-lined walls.

The sound of music came from further inside the building where the private night club was located. It wasn’t called Wonderland without reason; a dark and confusing place of carnal pleasures, where up was down and left was right. Lucrece had once heard that its prime members had connections to the crown and the government and that the club staff was paid a pretty penny for their discretion. It was a place to live out one’s darkest fantasy, or have the owner –Herr Drosselmeyer– create the devices to indulge one’s most twisted of desires.

His voice carried down the hallway, “Gentlemen.” It was accompanied by the sound of distorted merry-go-round music; a wicked midnight circus. Lucrece slipped farther down the hall until she reached the back of the stage. Pushing aside the heavy velvet curtain, she could watch him from the shadows.

“This fallen angel is the illegitimate daughter of art and science,” he praised the doll dancing next to him. Her skin was pale and fragile like china, cracked on tender spots like a child’s toy. She moved with mechanical grace, eyes empty and her lips pouted. Her innards twanged as they uncoiled. “A modern marvel of engineering, clockworks elevated to the very natural process which even now is in your blood – racing; your eyes flashing at such irreproachable beauty.” He smirked behind the glass of his collar, filled with lightening nightmares, sizzling. “Here is Gaia,” Carrion breathed, “Here is Eve, here is Lilith, and I stand before you as her father. Sprung, fully-formed from my brow, dewy and sweet; she can be yours and yours again, for her flesh is the incorruptible pale to be excused from the wages of sin.”

Lucrece watched. And she bided her time, her nails digging into her palms and tearing the skin, though she didn’t bleed. Christopher Carrion had bled her dry that one fateful night. Only creaking gears and sour hate were left.

“Lucrece DuBois,” he said slowly when he noticed her lurking in the shadows backstage hours later. It was hard to read his face through the glass of his collar. His lips were stitched together like those of a scarecrow, but Lucrece thought she could see one of the threads pull tighter in a smirk. “I knew I shouldn’t have left business unfinished. Pests do tend to come back to bite one in the arse.”

“Oh no,” she said calmly, her dull black eyes unblinking as those of her mechanical bird as she spoke. “You finished quite thoroughly, Carrion.”

“Please,” Carrion breathed raspily, as if insulted. He was quite a showman, even off-stage. “My name is Herr Drosselmeyer here. I’m not the man you are so desperately searching for.”

From the darkness, the crow cawed once and the lights behind the stage flickered. The sigh of a drawback in the steam engine was deafening. Carrion reached to cover his ears and it was all Lucrece needed to dig out a knife. She hadn’t even noticed it there, grabbing for instinctively. “I beg you reconsider,” she growled over the hiss of steam that leaked from the engine.

Carrion seemed to lose his cool, gazing upon his own reflection in the blade of the knife. He was a twisted and impossible creature like her, disfigured and ugly no matter how many riches surrounded them. “Did I not send you to hell already?” he demanded to know, eyes flashing wildly.

“I crawled back for your sake,” Lucrece answered, “Misery loves company, Carrion.”

This drew a high-pitched laugh from the other, the sound eerily bloodthirsty. His mouth curved up into a real smirk this time, his lips parting to reveal a withered purple tongue behind the stitches. Even through his glass collar and the murky water in it, Lucrece could see the rows of crooked teeth – the stuff of children’s nightmares. “You wish to take me to hell?” he screeched, the pressure in the engine next to them building, “You can’t!”

Lucrece could feel a scalding hot spray of vapour force the blade from her hand. Though she felt no pain, the impact made her cry and lose her balance, gasping for breath as she was thrown to the ground. The crow shrieked in a panic, flapping its impossible wings so hard, she thought the machinery might break. Carrion loomed over her, his eyes shining maliciously. “You can’t,” he repeated, his frightening form haloed by clouds of steam and darkness. His eyes narrowed. “I’m already there.”

And he was gone.

He slipped from her grasp time after time after the encounter inside the nightclub, each time adding to Lucrece’s madness. She forgot about what it meant to be human and went through the motions of being a hunter with artificial accuracy. She knew what it meant to be a machine. She had been hot on his track ever since, hounding him until she had him cornered in his own Wonderland.

There was a large table set out in the middle of the room, but they crowded around one corner of it. A body was sagged over the table between them and Lucrece wasn’t sure if they were dead, or just sleeping. Both Carrion and his doll had their elbows resting on the body’s back. The doll’s head turned to regard her with the painful creak of rusted metal insides, its cheek illuminated by the candles set on the table. “No room,” it said and Lucrece could feel her own gears grinding to a stop, every liquid left inside her body starting to boil at the sight of the fake woman at the table. Had Carrion tried to make her like that as well? Was that the reason her belly was pregnant with clockwork?

“There is plenty of room,” she hissed indignantly, her throat raspy and raw. Lucrece sat herself down in one of the Victorian arm chairs set at the head of the table, crossing her legs demurely at the ankles. She had no need to be as gracious –she was dead, after all– but old habits died hard. She smoothed the edges of her black velvet skirt over her torn knees, the lace ragged and oily in places. She ground her teeth together, feeling the edge of a bone -or was it a pipe?- stick through the cold hard skin of her calf.

“Have some wine,” Candy encouraged her in a robotic voice, as if it had practised the line over and over to entertain Carrion’s guests. Its double-coloured eyes were as soulless as they had been when it had danced on the stage. As soulless as they had been when it had been theirs and theirs again.

Lucrece looked around the table with a sense of urgency starting to unfurl inside where the pit of her stomach used to be. She only found tea, a cup and saucer set for every spot at the table. It almost seemed as if Carrion was expecting guests, but she knew him better than that. He cared about no one. Lucrece gave the doll a look. “I don’t see any tea,” she remarked, her voice alarmingly shrill. She had almost started to sound like her brass crow.

“There isn’t any,” the doll said plainly, unmoving but for its pouty red lips.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” Lucrece uttered, her dull eyes coming to rest on Carrion. She knew he was up to something, buying time until he could strike. He’d done the same that one dark night, when he had ended her life. He had made her think it was going to stop soon, that she would be spared any further horror, before he had stripped her of yet another virtue and another organ.

Candy was silent for a little while, until its head turned to Lucrece again. The sound its neck made, caused the tiny hairs left on Lucrece’s skin to stand on edge. “It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” the doll stated calmly, its voice holding no trace of venom. The doll had said it with the same level tone it had  said everything else, the same motorized interval of words and the same routine of systematic movements.

Lucrece couldn’t stand the sight of it. It was a fake, an impossible creature like herself and she hated it. It made a childish kind of disgust bubble up from deep within her core, loathing misting through her body like some acid vapour. It was almost as if the feeling unfolded a pair of big black wings inside of her chest, pressing against her breasts and throat, desperate for a way out. Parting her lips to speak, Lucrece was cut off by Carrion. “Your hair wants cutting,” he said.

It was the first time Carrion had spoken since she had joined them. He didn’t seem fazed to have her vengeful form sitting at his tea table. In fact, he looked more curious than anything, adjusting his position what shoved his elbow deeper into the slumped body’s back. Lucrece thought she could hear the spine pop, but she wasn’t sure. It could also have been Candy’s bowels bubbling and boiling.

Reaching for her hair on instinct and testing its ropey texture, she found it was matted with grime and smock from the city. Her hands came away black, taking long strands of hair with them. She held it in her hands and crushed her fingers into fists. “You shouldn’t make personal remarks,” Lucrece said with some severity, narrowing her eyes sharply, “It’s very rude.”

Carrion ignored her. “What day of the month is it?” he asked and he bent over the table towards Lucrece, his gaze burning behind his glass collar. There was a watch in the breast pocket of his vest and he pulled it out on the golden chain attached to it. Flipping it open, he watched the intricate gearwork behind the glass. It made Lucrece feel the answer to the question was very important. She considered it carefully, unflinching at his sudden closeness. “The fourth.”

“Two days off,” Carrion chuckled and she slid the watch into his doll’s hands. It looked at the watch blankly and dipped it into a cup wordlessly, as if this was Carrion’s moment alone and it was just making another cup of tea. Lucrece could hear the clockwork inside the watch die as violently as she had. Her fingers were itching to touch Carrion. To press at his eyes or claw at his face. To make him feel what she had felt, burning, grinding, seething. She withheld herself. “Two days off?” she croaked.

Carrion watched her for a second, an unreadable expression crossing his scarred features. “You are two days off,” he whispered with a frown, eyes searching for his watch as if it could reassure his sudden worry. But when he found it dipped into a teacup, his sickish pale skin took on an ugly pink flush.

“Take some more tea,” the doll suddenly suggested, entirely out of place.

“I’ve had nothing yet,” Lucrece replied in an offended tone. Her eyes were burning, but she had no tears to shed. “So I can’t take more.”

This made Carrion grin like a predator, the stitches keeping his lips together stretched to their maximum without breaking the skin. He yanked the watch from the cup and dangled it in front of his face like the pendulum of a big clock. “You mean you can’t take less,” he said triumphantly, starting to twirl the broken watch from a finger nonchalantly. It made the excess tea on its gold-and-glass surface splatter onto Lucrece’s dirty dress. “It’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

She growled at Carrion, both hands gripping the wooden armrests so tight that they splintered under the pressure. “You should know, shouldn’t you?” she croaked, her voice shrill as that of a bird or an ill-used horn.

“I provided for every scrap I took.” Carrion stood and he was even taller than Lucrece could remember. She could feel a flutter of something upset her stopwatch heart, but she couldn’t identify it. Fear? She’d learned a long time ago that there was nothing to fear in the darkness. It was in the plain light of day that the nightmares hid. Nightmares with glass collars and stitched mouths like rag dolls.

The look in Carrion’s eyes changed; it became heavier and laden with something that made an urgent sense of dread braid together with her anger and the fragment of common sense she had still left. It was a perverted look that had her wanting to claw his eyes out. “I provided perfection for every sorry scrap I took,” he repeated, his words loaded with the same dark affection she’d experienced before. He moved to Candy and made to touch her porcelain lips as if overcome by a sudden desire. “Perfection,” he breathed, his sickly yellow fingers just a hair away from the doll’s lips.

Lucrece howled then, a whirlwind of mechanical bird cries echoing from her throat. Her gears creaked alive, fuelled by the mock blood that stained her insides, her imitation heart beating with something other than life. There was hate. There was loathing. But above all was disgust: he had tried to turn her into his doll when he had murdered her.

Carrion didn’t have the time to fight her off, he had created her too well. Lucrece’s fingers closed around the protruding piece of bone or pipe from her leg and she tore. Masking her shriek of pain with one of anger, she leaped over the table onto the man that had taken her life. The impact caused his collar to break, the shards of glass cutting the skin of his cheek and landing on his shoulders. Water turreted around them, sticking their clothes to their bodies and slicking Lucrece’s hair to her face.

Candy watched with an unreadable, artificial expression.

“Why?” Lucrece asked and her voice shook with the gnashing of old gears. She cried as she pushed the sharp metal feather to his exposed throat, drawing blood. When he didn’t seem likely to answer, she impatiently applied more pressure. “Why, Carrion?”

He coughed, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth into the mess of glass and wet cloth. His hands came up weakly, dirty fingers just reaching the tips of Lucere’s stringy, black hair. “You were so beautiful,” he rasped, his eyes glazy as if he was reliving a memory from long ago. “So perfect. I had to make you mine. Forever.”

Shaking her head in desperate revulsion, Lucrece balled her free hand into a fist and pounded his chest with it. The windows of the room burst open and a storm invaded with the sound of thunder and birds. The cold air blasted the hair from Lucrece’s cheeks, her pale skin cleansed by rain. “Why did I have to die, Carrion?” she shrieked, long streamers of black hair and dress trailing behind her like the wings of an angel of death. The clockwork crow in the window sill mimicked her words: “Why, Carrion, why?”

Carrion’s eyes were wide and for the first time in his life, he tasted fear. His voice was squeaky when he spoke next: “Because your original name is Lucas DuBois!” He blinked slowly, a painful look coming over his features. It looked out of place, a face that knew only deceit and cruelness holding such heartfelt misery. “And you were not the woman of my dreams.”

There was nothing human about the scream that followed. It was the screech of broken machinery, of steam escaping and the storm howling. She smashed the sharp metal feather down, flapping her wings. She kept beating until there was no recognisable part of him anymore, shrieking and tearing him to bits as if he were real carrion and she was the crow. And she ate him up until his black heart and her dark secret had been rid from the world.

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The Crow – The Lazarus Heart by Poppy Z. Brite

Ordered through a website specialising in second hand books at the ABC in Den Haag, the Netherlands.

From The Lazarus Heart, I took the Crow series concept: someone who died a very violent death but still had unfinished business is brought back to life. A crow is at their side. Whether the crow brought them back to life or is merely a guide, is never revealed. I also borrowed the character Lucrece from this book, because she is a very strong individual and I just love transgender people!

Abarat book Two – Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker

Bought at Fireside Books and Gifts, West Bend, Wisconsin, USA.

In Abarat – Days of Magic, Nights of War Christopher Carrion is the baddie who tries to catch the main character Candy Quackenbush. He’s the master of Nightmares and a very unpleasant man to be around. Plus, his character design was so weird I just had to use him!

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis

Borrowed from a friend of mine who lives in Klaaswaal (come again?), the Netherlands.

Truth be told, I love tea. I love tea parties! But I didn’t like the tea party in the book Alice in Wonderland that much. It was too chaotic, too complex and idiotic for me to understand. So I put it in here!

A/N: Besides those books, I named this piece of work after a song with the same title by Alice in Videoland. There are also a few elements from the Abney Park song Herr Drosselmeyer’s Doll put in there. I hope you enjoyed the story! -x- Lid’l