Everything left ghosts, even bushfires. So walking through that path, now overgrown and nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings, all sides stabbing and scraping and jabbing in at him, Job was assailed, sometimes, by choking smoke coiling acrid in his throat, nose.
And the branches, sharp and mottled with sunlight, bright green leaves glowing yellow, would sometimes be black and brittle, cracked veins glowing with flecks of flame. Or he would hear that flickering, that gasping of flames crunching down on wood and leaves, and folding up higher and higher, eating in the air and stretching arms out to unwholesome gods in the air.
So his eyes would burn, and he would feel that heat licking him on all sides, arms reaching out and then spreading over his clothes, into his body, down to his bones so he was burning out from his very innards, and it would be all choking smoke and stinging dusty acid, and he would then open his eyes to the clear air and the sounds of doves cooing for mates.
The path to the spear launcher was a ghost, too. It was overgrown, branches crisscrossing over it, hard sharp shrubs blasting through that once clear dirt road, all greens and yellows and browns and tiny white flowers unfurling gentle faces within. The ground was smothered with fallen leaves and the weeds breaking through them, chunks of torn bark or shredded branches. Shrieks of cicadas, ponderous beetles hovering, lines of ants over the earth.
But something was there, all the same. And on some strange turns, familiar sparks crackled in Job’s head. He recalled a twist, here. And he recalled that stone, there–the great orange one wearing its trees like a crown, sides rippled in layers and mottled lichens clinging on its sides. And this tree, here–long a corpse, even before the thing with the sun, before Job had ever seen it, before, perhaps, he had ever existed. More a plated pillar of hard wood, gutted, torn open like a shell, dark insides cobwebbed, leaves and dust caught in it all and hovering.
He didn’t want to be here. The statement went in multiple layers. Of course, he didn’t want to be ‘here’, on earth. And, where he was, swaddled in those mountains, close, so close, to that final station, he felt as if Mars were rising behind him, scraping his neck, blood red dust falling down his shirt.
And he did not want to be ‘here’, as in, in this throat of bushlands, the brittle branches poking his neck every time he turned his head, and the clouds of swarming insects that would phase suddenly into existence and batter against his face, and the path so thickly overgrown in places he would fire wildly into them with the tunnelgun until he was, once again, free. Let alone the aforementioned ghost fires.
The air was close and hard and stank of sweat and heavy dirt, the sunlight itself was piercing. He did not want to be ‘here’.
Most particularly, he did not want to be ‘here’, as in, on the near outskirts of the spear launcher. There is a natural survival instinct that comes to a person when they are told, by a mysterious stranger, to walk into the forest, alone, asking no questions. Job ignored them.
He was not, anyhow, entirely unfamiliar with deals and jobs of a more shady description. It was, as the man with teeth like shattered glass had put it, ‘one final commission’. Nothing more and nothing less. Just a favour.
And he did owe him.
So onwards he walked. It was not an especially long road, though it was sloped and twisting and overgrown and he needed, occasionally, to grab ahold of certain roots jutting from the dirt, or pull himself up by branches.
And, on the higher hills, where the trees, in accordance to some strange law of balance, shrunk against the size of the hill, with trunks thicker and branches harder, Job could see that spear launcher. That drowning arm, rust and death clinging on it. He held strange feelings for it. Who didn’t? Who hadn’t, anywhere, been affected by the spear launcher? It seemed to him the armoured gatekeeper of some ancient passage between his lives, one before that thing with the sun, one after. And though it was all rotted and dead, lifeless, emptied of blood and long forgotten, a glory was in it. Yet the rust clung, yet the vines hung, it still stood. It was still pointed, threatening, at the sun, as if daring it to attack again, ready to impale it a second time.
He could not help but flee faster, when he felt those ghost fires licking at his back. They were real, thoroughly, and even if it was temporary, Job knew that they were there, that he really was catching fire, that he had died in flames already once on this short jaunt.
There was a thinness of air, in this place. Or, a thinness of presence. A lack of solidity, so that Job felt like he might have been on a thin raft of earth, floating, bumping, ready to fall off at any moment into some unknown void, rather than on real ground. Cicada calls echoed. The walls between everything were thin. In places like this you could feel deeper layers of reality seeping through.
As the stink of smoke arose, Job felt that the pasteboard mask between himself and the ineffable something behind everything were close. He had only to reach out and tear it away, pummel it with a fist, or blow it open with the tunnelgun, and he would see it bared, naked, revealed to all. Unless there was nothing there at all.
And the man with teeth like shattered glass stalked him throughout. Job might blink and see him standing atop a rock. Or looking up after a short, hard climb to see his face peering between leaves. Or he would, as he had done frequently, reflect upon a short walk earlier and realise he had been talking the whole time with the man with teeth like shattered glass. And it all came flooding back.
The man with teeth like shattered glass had asked Job, again, ‘How did they kill the sun?’
Job, still, didn’t know.
‘Oh, the technology was good, yes. But, really–killing the sun with a spear? What an order. And the moon, and the moon cult, they were helpful. Sure. But, the Lunarites were a joke back then. Who wasn’t a joke, back then, next to the Sun? King Sun? Whose Fires Are Smokeless?’
Job never replied. He just walked.
‘So, you know what I heard? Luis? Job?’
And Job saw his shattered teeth in a beam of light dancing on the leaves.
‘I hear the Devil came to the chief engineer when she was alone in her quarters. She’d all but given up, and so had everyone else. So the windows were all rattling with the sound of ships fleeing for Mars. He offered her a bargain, which was: her soul, and the souls of all the other engineers.’ His teeth glinted. Light played through them, flickering and crystalline.
‘But, you know. The chief engineer was a coward. So she waited for three days, until, finally, she brought it up with the other engineers.’
And Job was certain, then, his lips spread apart, the edges of his mouth pointed, jabbed further. That colossus of a grin, a scar across his whole face, monolithic, a great cave’s entrance, spread further.
‘And they were all cowards, too. So, she met the Devil again, at the train station at midnight, where he always appears to shepherd his witches and demons out into the night, and his captured souls into Hell. She asked him if there was any–any–alternative.’
His face quivered. It was uncanny, on a body so still and heavy and stoic. He was giggling inwardly, at a joke of his own.
Job was huffing, now. Maybe rain, maybe age, something had torn down this part of the path. What was once a slope was now almost a cliff. He held himself steady by weeds, stones, roots. And–something was stinging, in the back of his brain. A sensation of well-trodden ground. He knew exactly where the story was going, now, as if he had heard it before, very long ago, so that its components were absorbed into him, even if he didn’t remember the whole, itself. Yet, he knew he had never heard it before.
‘The Devil told her that, instead of her and her engineers, he would take the souls of everybody else in that building.’
Teeth like shattered glass, refracting light in all directions.
‘Isn’t that just something?’
And soon the trees split, steadily, apart. The soft crunching leaves gave suddenly away and Job’s feet clomped onto concrete. The carpark, too, was being taken over. Great torn plates of tarmac and concrete were ripped from the earth, soaring up like waves, as trees blasted through and hung over. The ground was steadier and clearer, but still carpeted with dried leaves and branches. It gave a sensation of a clearing in the forest, rather than an area enclosed within human bounds, owned by a company, managed by legal documents and paid for with fees and taxes.
And, far at the end of the carpark, a grey wall, brown stains, patches of rust and long tears and scratches. He recalled it, once, being white as milk. And the light, running down its edges, winking at him. The doors were crumpled, rotted. Through their edges, nothing but darkness. Emptiness emanated, quivered like wobbling heat.
And a sensation, once more, of thin skin with something rumbling beneath. Or like an egg, quavering, ready to break open from within.
He suddenly turned, on a whim that wasn’t his own, to the right. It was swaddled in trees and branches. In all the mottled light, the muddled, messy colours, all those browns and yellows and dry greens, it was nearly invisible. It was a shack.
‘One last commission,’ said the man with teeth like shattered glass, who was standing next to Job, who had been the whole time, ever since he had entered, and even before so.
There was nothing particularly ominous about the shack. It was a run down tilting stack of awkward wood and corrugated iron, groaning to itself, tiny dark holes making the wind whistle. It struck him as the most normal thing around–a strange mundane island of solidity, when everything else seemed to swim about him, glasslike, floaty.
‘It lives in there?’ asked Job. He stood there, feeling useless and lumpen. He did not reach for the tunnelgun. It was a useless weight in his pocket.
‘There’s an old woman in there. She’s rotten. To the core.’ The man with teeth like shattered glass cast a long, heavy shadow. The sunlight flickered in the marks on his face.
‘She’s killed a lot of people. Go and shoot her. That’s all.’ He turned, looked down at Job, grinning. ‘Easy, right?’
‘Who’s the old woman?’ asked Job. Still. The whole earth fluttered underneath him. He had a sensation of all things rushing past him. All things, atomic, spinning, fluctuations of electromagnetic forces, invisible impressions, waves of inertia.
‘Oh, you know,’ said the man. His head tilted. He gazed down on Job.
‘That’s pretty villainous, you know. That’s a real “villain” thing to do.’ Job hung there, lumpen and useless. ‘Kill a helpless old woman in a shack.’
‘Chief Engineer Eveline Turn. Good old Eve Turn.’
Of course Job knew the name. Everybody knew that name. It rang out to him, distinctly, down the old creaky tunnels of his memory. Strangely close, strangely personal. He knew certain things of her. The way her voice sounded. She liked her coffee decaffeinated.
‘Yeah. I know her,’ he said, finally, no longer looking at the man, his shattered teeth.
‘Of course. You don’t remember it.’ The man was still grinning, still unmoving. ‘I wonder I wonder I wonder. Are you really that forgetful? A few cogs loose, maybe, in all your machinery? Is it a choice? Do you like this?’
He leant over Job, raising an eyebrow. ‘Are you enjoying it, at all?’ He hung there, for a few moments. Tense, bricklike, like he could fall down all at once on him, crush him dead.
And he suddenly snapped back, looking at the shack. ‘Thoroughly disappointing. Really.’
‘Fuck off with that,’ Job grunted, finally. He stepped away. A pressure came off from the man with teeth like shattered glass. He had his own gravity. It pulled at Job’s arms and legs. The air felt suddenly clearer. Job felt whole. A numbness subsided. ‘You can be cryptic as you want when you’re stalking me and popping up in my dreams. But if you’re going to try and give me a job we really need to communicate better.’
The man with teeth like shattered glass hadn’t moved at all. He might have been carved into a cliff face. He simply looked and waited.
‘Don’t think I don’t know what this is. You reckon her being alive is all that’s keeping you around. You’re so mad at her you can’t even keep dead.’ Job fiddled with the tunnelgun, rubbed his forehead. ‘I dunno if you’re just one of those vengeful ghosts or what, but you’re all basically the same. You ever thought of getting counselling?’
‘Counselling?’ barked the man with teeth like shattered glass. A singular shock of movement burst through him in one. His eyes bulged. Job could see his tongue through his teeth.
‘It’s worked before. I saw a documentary about it,’ Job continued.
The man without shattered glass recovered quickly. He was so still it was as if he had never emoted, moved at all. ‘You know what she’s done, don’t you? Luis?’ His head tilted. He was smiling, once more. ‘You know exactly what she’s done, don’t you? Don’t you feel it still, now and then?’
Of course Job knew. He knew exactly what she had done. All of it was fact, objective fact. He’d seen it, after all, himself. ‘It’s none of my business,’ he said.
‘It’s fine if you don’t care, then.’ He began to pace side to side. He stopped, leant forwards, spread his arms. ‘I was hoping, maybe, for a little passion. I’m too optimistic. You’re damn thick, you know that?’
Job’s reply, immediately, was cut off.
‘Anyways. Listen. You’ve got those issues with your metal body, there. No offence–’ his grin widened, at that. ‘But it’s a real sack of shit. I can shift you to this body, if you really want it.’ His arms waved vaguely around. He drew lines over his grinning face with his fingers.
‘It really wouldn’t be hard. And, it has everything. It feels warmth, cold. It feels the wind. It feels the fuzzy fur of little rabbits. It’s got all that soft skin I’m sure you love.’
‘I don’t want it. I’m not going to shoot an old woman for it. Absolutely not.’ Job felt for his tunnelgun. Felt its squarish weight.
‘Big man!’ exclaimed the man with teeth like shattered glass. ‘What a paragon! Only a few weeks ago, you killed a teenager in that city, there. Do you remember that wet gurgling noise he made when you blew him open? Remember what his ribs looked like, hanging out there like little fingers?’
Job looked into the ground, at a weed jutting from the concrete. The man’s smile was horrendous. It went in odious angles. Light glinted horribly off its sides. And his guts felt like they were hanging open. Like he’d been shot with the tunnelgun, too. His ribs blowing in the breeze. ‘Well. Yes. I didn’t like it very much. Which is why I’m going to not do that to that old woman.’
‘What an inconvenient time to make a moral stand!’ said the man with teeth like shattered glass. ‘This could be. So easy. Really. She’s a wrinkled old bat. She’ll be dead in a few years, anyway. Both of all of our problems can be solved, instantly, like this. You ever get an opportunity like that, huh? Ever get a chance that good?’
‘She’s going to die soon? And you know that, yeah?’ asked Job, stepping steadily back. ‘Why even care, then, right? I mean, really, maybe you could consider refocusing your emotions into–’
‘Don’t! Try! Counselling me!’ exclaimed the man with teeth like shattered glass, looming in. ‘It’s very clear you have no expertise. At all. In it.’
So Job stood there, silent. Hanging in all the sweeping atoms and the rustling singing breezes. And, awkwardly, turned away and stepped off. ‘I’ll be off, then. Good luck. Uh. With that. If you got other jobs that don’t involve old ladies, though, well. I’m sure you’ll know how to find me.’
And he walked straight into the man with teeth like shattered glass. ‘Nothing’ll make you reconsider?’ Job looked into his chest. Wide, barrel-like. A great wall.
‘Nah,’ said Job.
So the man with teeth like shattered glass swept towards him like droplets of water sliding on a windscreen and Job felt his entire chest caving suddenly in before he even realised what was happening. All wind whipping and staticky noises of the mechanisms in his ears rattling, everything flung suddenly ahead, liquid and gusting. No pain, nothing had registered, quite yet. He felt all sensations perfectly, felt every individual atom on his body, felt it all misplaced, all bent outwards, pulling on one another. He felt the man’s fist, dense as a brick, dent his chestplate inwards. He gasped.
‘Fuck,’ he managed to say.
And the man with teeth like shattered glass was now standing over him, had always been standing over him, had simply slipped above with the landscape and the sky and the treeline. And all the rays of light dancing across his teeth were like a moving crystalline forest. He raised a fist up, held it there, leaving all to behold. Creases and hard leathery edges. The jutting points of his knuckles. And he moved like lightning; came down at Job like a collapsing building.
Job, feeling all stretched out, like he was pulled by ropes from all directions, shifted to the side and felt dust and dirt explode where he had just been.
‘Sit still… sit still now…’ hissed the man with teeth like shattered glass. Job blinked and realised he was being pummeled. Flashing swinging arms and crackling static, the pressure, sensation of his own faceplate bending inwards, now his chest, and now his guts, and now his arm. He was pinned; the man with teeth like shattered glass was dense as lead. And numb, he was still numb. Numb and aware.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK
The tunnelgun was heating up. Cylinders of smoking melting heat moved through it with every shot and Job felt it spreading over his hand. Stinking like acrid plastic.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK
His hand was melting. The skin on it liquidating and sloughing off. Job dropped the tunnelgun and heard grass curling, dying beneath. And he shoved the man with teeth like shattered glass off himself, wheezing, stood himself up against a wall behind himself. Generally vertical.
The man with teeth like shattered glass still stood there, like hidden ropes were keeping him from falling. He was as still as ever. The holes in him were sparking. Wriggling. Encrusting their edges, growing, sloughing, black muck, thin tendrils reaching blindly and wrapping around each other. Acridity, again. Burnt plastic, electricity. His chest was open. Wind fluttered through. His lower left arm was hanging by a thread. Jutting wires. A torn metal endoskeleton, hanging out. His head looked like it had been bitten in half. An eye was missing. An entire quarter of it, swirling, sparking black mess. His head was a crescent moon.
He still grinned.
‘Yowch, Luis.’ Fingers of smoke hung languidly off him and twirled in the wind. ‘You got me. You got the body.’
‘Uhhhrgh,’ retorted Job smartly. He felt something in him snap, tug. If he moved too much this way, or that, he felt certain ropes and pulleys all drag on each other, certain atoms bump. He was structurally unsound; if he stepped wrong he’d turn to rubble.
And now a mist was caught up in the wind, and flapped in the air, dancing with the fingers of smoke. It smelled like rain, or wet fur, or fresh blood. Cold and white and see through, swirling fingers, the colour of dew evaporating in sunshine.
Such was the stink of the human soul, leaking.
And Job saw him. A slight wobbling figure, visible through the holes in the man’s body, overlaid, slightly, over it, sides all sloughing off and shaking. Far shorter than the body it was inhabiting. Round faced, frowning faintly, puckered, almost. Fat brown hair in wild curls, hanging down, the unwashed hair of a glib young man. Pudgy, sort of. With short limbs, a lazy hunch in his stance. He had a confused mass of crosses hanging all over him, crucifixes on chains, dangling off his neck, out of pockets. Up his forearm–another cross.
‘Luis,’ groaned Job.
‘Luis!’ exclaimed the man with teeth like shattered glass. The figure quivered and swept as he spoke, splitting like smoke, growing, steadily, back together. The man with teeth like shattered glass stretched, grunted, wiggled his fingers. And, mists and smoke rising from him like a dying candle, onwards he walked.
Job snatched the tunnelgun off the ground, steadied himself, finally, feeling like he was all hanging together on a single tatty thread. It all rattled. Atoms. Atoms, rushing. All the little components of everything brushing against his sides.
He was leaning against the spear launcher’s door. How convenient.
He spun the tunnelgun around and CRACK, busted the door open. It groaned and swung and Job stumbled in, clasped on all edges by blackness.
And Job felt even the shadows brushing against him like physical things. Layers were being torn from him.
He saw nothing but darkness and dust and silvery edges, and he scurried in, pain spiderwebbing through him. Tap tap tap tap.
Layers and layers sloughed off Job. The air in this place was thin.
Somewhere, a wall broke.
Meat Girls Dot Org 