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 ~: FICTION / SCI-FI :~  Gargoyles on the Edge by Alice Godwin The sky was a clear azure blue even though Jo knew that the pollution levels were at an all time high today. She gazed skyward and mused, perhaps the toxins actually made the blueness of the sky deeper, richer: cobalt blue, heavy metal cyan, cerulean chemical contamination. What colour was quicksilver poisoning? Blue, most probably, she thought. Our veins contain blood that is blue, not the red oxygenated blood of the arteries but a tired, depleted poison. But blood is always red, death blood that is, soaking the concrete like a sad dark stain. I've never come across a corpse that leaked blue blood. But there is a first time for everything, the thought was vaguely unpleasant but then her thoughts were nearly always so. Jo left the brilliant sky behind, slipping on her glasses of polarized black that turned everything into underwater murkiness, a place of shadows. She slipped into her pod of reconstituted metalloid paper and zoomed away. The streets above were narrow and harrowing, she gratefully left the outer world and went underground, here the freeways broadened out into cobwebs of steel and asphalt, here she could drive for days and not even have to surface for air, it was the closest she would get to being amphibian. Above her was the harbour and a billion litres of water, all that weight over her but what did she care. She headed west; following the curve of the river as it wound its way above, silently brimming with its own deep thoughts. She resurfaced three hours later; the plains were dusty, dry. The concrete apartments were shielded by awnings that doubled as solar ventilators, everything was grey or ochre, no vegetation grew here on the outside, the buildings faced inwards to their own private oasis, Perspex ceilings diffused the light and the humidity was sweet and gentle. Stay, live, love, die in your own, highly organic, totally pure environment. And of course people did, die that is, in ways that were not wholly natural either. Jo checked the pod in with security and entered the rainforest, level four; parrots flew through the trees, vines grew and bloomed with flowers the size of small children, butterflies fluttered and the air was misty. The low music was calming and watery, synthesized torrents that flowed over emerald cliffs, the murmuring of the dryads, the rolling of the pebbles on the river bed, the moans of fish fucking. Did fish fuck? She always felt slightly unnerved with all these subliminal aural pacifiers, they just left everyone so alpha waved that talking to them was like speaking to angels on lithium. I don't need this case, she thought as she crossed the narrow mossy creek on a bridge that was woven using raffia fibres, it swung perceptibly beneath her, basket weaving never looked so good, she thought. The apartment was located near a pond overgrown with lotus flowers, their narcotic scent was overpowering. Jo pressed her card into the slot, the wall moved and she entered. The place was dark; the walls, the furniture, the floors, the ceiling, everything was a dark serpentine metal. The floor was rough, some sort of serrated substance that reminded Jo of scaly creatures. The body lay on the floor near a doorway that led to the inner rooms. It was a woman: young, Eurasian, probably pretty once. She was naked and her full belly was slashed open, blood and gelatinous bits stained her skin and the floor around her. A carnal slaughterhouse smell pervaded the room; white-coated professionals slinked around like lions circling their next meal. Jo entered another room, Connor sat at the kitchen bar, he was drinking caffeine and smoking. He's so fucking ugly, she thought. It always struck her that way, although she had known him for years, yet she was still surprised by his outward appearance. He was a child's nightmare monster, the hideous beast condemned to eternal loneliness but his eyes were nice, that always struck her too, soft, sad eyes. "What am I here for?" She asked bluntly staring into those sad eyes. He passed over a forensic plastic bag containing a piece of flat crystal, paper-thin, etched with markings, a five pointed star within a circle within a cross within a flaming comet, the sign of The Rapturists. "Haven't seen one of these for a while." She said wistfully. "That's why you're here." He smiled and his monster face looked even more grotesque and gargoyle-like. I could fall in love with him, she thought, if I wasn't the logical realist I am. "The Rapturists are pre-millennium. They're long gone or at the very least diluted into nothing." She drawled. "It was found on the body. A calling card perhaps." "A decoy." She sniffed. "You saw the body, the stomach?" She nodded. "Nearly full term. They just yanked it out, took it with them and left her to bleed to death." His voice was edged with bitterness. Connor rarely let any emotion creep into his persona; something had really gotten to him. "What haven't you told me?" She asked. "Haven't lost your touch have you?" "Not yet." She said too brightly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out another bag, another crystal, this one was high tech, hologram etched, shining with multi fractured laser lights, very expensive. "She was wearing this around her neck." He said as he passed it over. "We scanned it. It's basically a highly evolved amulet. Protects the wearer from evil. Obviously it's superb quality, not cheap but the rich have their superstitions too and if you can afford it." He shrugged his shoulders. "The signature is unusual, an eccentric engraver, he made very few of these, none were ever sold, all were gifts. He died fifteen years ago. He was a founding member of the Pacific Rim Rapturist, main man of the Tokyo chapter. She was his daughter." "Connor we're talking fifteen years ago. Sects of that nature don't hang around, they evolve, change, metamorphose into something else. Apocalyptic visions are not the order any more. Once we went post millennium they all went atomic." "Jo, things like this don't die. There just go underground, become secretive, more dangerous." Jo stood and stretched, ran her fingers through her short, blonde hair. "You think because of my background, I can find things others won't." "Something like that." Connor was serious. "I want to find this baby and find the fucks that did this and I couldn't pass up the chance to have you on my payroll for a few weeks." His eyes, for a moment, looked surprising happy. I could really go for him, she thought pensively. Jo wondered around her apartment, it was a basement flat, small, airless, claustrophobic. She shared the space with Zento, a reclusive poet, who webworked for huge Chinese corporations, their relationship was based on a mutual dislike for superficial social chitchat, they could go for weeks without uttering a word and then spend a night pouring out their disturbances like a dam bursting over. Jo roamed the rooms thinking over the past week, she had spent her time online in CRs and sites of every bizarre sect she could hook into, which was huge; she had learnt nothing, which in itself was strange. It made no sense, nothing disappeared without trace unless it was deliberately covered up, everything left a trail, some footprint, faint but there if you looked hard enough. The Rapturists had just vanished, as though they had levitated into the clouds as they had foretold, only if that had happened it would be beaming out on a thousand You Tubes. Jo stalked the rooms, frustrated, annoyed, sinking fast. She should ring Connor; see what leads he had come up with. She heard the bars of the front entrance open and then the slide of the card over the light sensor. There was a jarring sound. She turned expecting to see Zento but instead saw two strangers, a man and a woman, he looking like a sideshow freak, she looking like a member of a neo-pagan goddess cult. Jo hit the floor with the scent of roses in her nostrils and the thought that there really wasn't anything worth stealing here anyway. She awoke to the stinking smell of refuse, her body was damp and felt broken and battered, the white corona of a copta light was pounding her optic nerves and she heard the thumping sound of its blades. She felt arms covered in anti-contaminate gloves lift her onto something that felt very soft. She looked into a set of dark, sad eyes and heard a familiar voice swearing. I really should do something about these rescue fantasies, she thought to herself before she lost consciousness all over again. They sat together on the rooftop watching the bleary sky turn red and orange and a bizarre shade of purple; a bruise is what it reminded her of. I sit looking at a sunset and all I see is bruises, Jo thought. Connor smoked his cigarette and stared morosely at the horizon of skyscrapers. She was tempted to ask Connor for a smoke but she knew she would throw up if she did, nicotine made her ill like that. Most things did. Life did. Connor turned his ugly face in her direction. The gargoyle and I, on the edge, she mused, all we need is to be turned to stone, two gargoyles together, forever. She smiled. "Going to share the joke?" "Just thinking about the total transience of everything." She replied flippantly. "Some things can't be destroyed." He said seriously. "Like what?" "Evil." "Don't be going religious on me now." She laughed. "Religion has no monopoly on evil. Evil is. Evil does. It's just out there, like the air, like the toxins. You can't see it but you feel the consequences." Jo made no reply and stared at the sky, the bruised skin of the stratosphere, sick with accumulated poisons. The planet's dying, she thought sadly. "There are too many strange threads, I'm being led around the labyrinth and it's not by your average sociopath weirdo, no, this is something more orchestrated and subtle. Get too close and the hall of mirrors bounces up and you can't tell which reflection is real and which isn't. Decoys. Traps. Deceptions."‘ Connor stopped talking and stared at Jo. Jo stopped breathing for a moment. She could almost see her reflection in his eyes, almost. He blinked and his voice was very low. "There's also what happened to you. It wasn't robbery. You were asking too many questions. We found a derivative of BDA in you. You know what that means? They wanted to know how much you knew. It's a good thing you're pretty much immune to all of that." Jo's face was set in hard lines. Her eyes were the palest of blue like cats-eye marbles. She had a face that reminded Connor of raw quartz, it was all impossible angles and edges, it was crystalline white and somehow reflective like ice. If he ran his hand over her skin, would it be smooth and warm, or hard and cold? He had a vision of her naked on a lake of ice, the white of her hair and her skin blending into the frozen glacial landscape. A beautiful Angel of Ice. He blinked it shut. The sky was almost dark and Connor's face was in shadow. "I've been looking into time, the way we measure time. Calendars for instance are only our interpretation of measuring the past and calculating the future. Not everyone follows the same calendar, other cultures have their own calendar, now obsolete." "Time is relative." Jo couldn't help interjecting. "Exactly. Use a contrasting reference point and you come up with a different year entirely." "So we can, just like that, go pre-millennium again." "Obsessions always find their own solutions." "Any idea what time frame they think they're in?" "Pretty close to the final countdown, I'd say." He paused. "Ever heard of Tierra Del Fuego?" "South America?" "It translates to Land of Fire. It's something that keeps cropping up." Connor sat thoughtful. "When I was a child, my father used to drive me out to a petrochemical plant. To look at the dragon, he'd say. The dragon was this tall chimney made of blackened steel that had a perpetual, burning flame. It made the weirdest sound, like a breathing beast, a wheezing rasping noise. We pretended it was sleeping and so would be very quiet so as not to wake it. My father called this place the Land of Fire." "Does it still exist?" "Yeah. Though it's been disused for a long time." "Feel like a drive?" Connor parked the pod, the petrochemical plant was deserted, the dragon was long dead, only its skeleton reared starkly into the sky, the enormous tanks were empty and some had crumpled in as though they were nothing but giant tin cans. Jo had fallen asleep on the drive over. He gazed at her, entranced, why do I always think of fairy stories when I look at her, he wondered, long forgotten fairy stories from my childhood? The Snow Queen, Sleeping Beauty; she had been Rapunzel the first time he saw her, when her hair was long. Yet he knew her to be formidable, mentally and physically. She looked so desirable as she slept and he wanted, in an almost desperate way, to lean over and kiss her. Not a good idea, he thought, not now, probably not ever. He had no misconceptions about his looks. Had learned that quickly enough. Realism comes early to ugly ducklings and not all grow into beautiful swans. With a deep sigh he climbed out leaving her in the pod The cold night air would help him brush away these thoughts that kept infiltrating his mind. Sometimes Connor felt he lived his life in the darkness. Perhaps it was for the best, he often thought, the night suited his face, his profession, the night was full of scary beasts, scary monsters. He walked on feet used to treading softly, panther steps, predatory. The place seemed deserted, He walked carefully and methodically. He heard the sounds first, low drone of human voices, machinery. He found them too easily. They are too confident he thought, until he felt the cold steel against his head. The sentry led him through the jagged doorway cut into the now empty tank. The inside was cavernous, concave, and hollow, there was no sign of a roof, just an immense yawning blackness and an old smell of gasoline. Ten people sat on chairs around a long steel table; Connor heard the sound of a baby crying, far away. He noticed how well dressed they were; corporate, conservative capitalists around a board table. "Congratulations." An immensely tall man stood up from the table, his voice boomed in the empty chamber. He smiled, a serpentine smile, he looked like a Viking in a suit. "You don't know who we are, do you?" "Well I guess you aren't Rapturists." The Viking laughed. "We're scientists, geneticists, climatologists. You are privileged to see the inner core, a rare event. I hope you appreciate the situation." "I'm overwhelmed." "You should be. We are the future of this fucked up planet." "Why does that fill me with unease?" The Viking laughed. The faces around the board table remained impassive, unemotional. "What's the baby got to do with it?" Connor asked bluntly. "Straight to the point. I like that. The baby's only importance is its genetic make-up." The Viking beamed, his teeth were too perfect. "We don't care about the woman or her father, though he was a sort of manipulative genius, misguided like most religious zealots. The baby is important to us, purely because of her father. He was one of our own. He began us. We follow his charter. He died in an accident off the coast of South America. His body swept away in a catastrophic storm." "Tierra Del Fuego." Connor whispered. He heard a rasping slippery sound. "Why kill the mother?" "Expediency, of course. We have limited time, and people can be so difficult. Wouldn't you agree? And now we have another difficulty don't we?" "Don't mind me. Carry on as before." Connor managed to sound far more relaxed then he felt. "This is a special meeting and you weren't invited." The Viking's tone became just slightly menacing. "Don't mind if I smoke do you?" Connor reached into his suit pocket, felt the man's hand on his arm before he even saw him move. "I don't think so. Not good for the health. And we all are on a tight deadline here. We have flights waiting. You will have to excuse us. Stefan." He motioned to the burly sentry. "Escort the detective off the premises, somewhere discreet should do." He turned away and sat himself back down at the table. Connor heard the rasping sound again slightly closer. "What happens to the baby?" His voice was loud and harsh. "She will be taken care of. We are not Barbarians. And it is not your problem." The Viking's voice had an impatient edge to it now. Connor stared at the man. "Really. I've seen barbarians with more respect for life than you've shown." "Don't try and bait me inspector or whatever you are. I've faced far bigger players than you'll ever know. I've played poker where the stakes were countries and the cards were loaded. You are a small inconvenience but only for the moment." Now, Jo, now, he whispered to himself. He felt the rush of a wind and hit the floor, but not before he saw her slight form abseil down from the darkness like some vengeful angel. Her feet hit the table, and she somersaulted over onto the floor and in one quick movement she threw the exploding canister of gas up into the air. He held his breath and counted to ten, felt her hands over his face pushing the mask roughly over his mouth. He was starting to lose it but the clear menthol taste of the gauze against his lips revived him, as did her presence as she pulled him towards the exit. They both ripped their masks off simultaneously as they plunged into the fresh night air. The others would be out to it for at least two hours. Connor made a quick call; the cavalry should be on its way soon. "This way." Jo shouted as she led him into a gaggle of pipes, twisting gleaming copper, the entrails of a dragon. The pipes contorted and coiled into a vast network, he followed her as she led him into the labyrinth; they found the child asleep along with her two guardians. Jo recognised the girl, her hair braided with feathers, her body covered by a snake tattoo that coiled over her as intricately and complete as a garment. The boy was naked as well, he was short and his limbs looked deformed as though they had been broken and repaired by a drunken surgeon. There was something peaceful about the way the two lay together. Jo and Connor exchanged glances. Jo picked up the sleeping baby and they left. When they arrived back at the pod the place was abuzz with vehicles and officials. Connor took the baby; they exchanged some words and then the throng of officials closed around him. She took the pod and left. Jo watched the dawn from the rooftop. The sky was grey, cloudy, and forlorn, it matched her mood. I've been lonely for too long, she thought, even the freaks have each other. She heard his footsteps and turned, his face was tired, haggard, his eyes world-weary, if possible he looked even uglier. Connor lit a cigarette and passed over a flask of alcohol. What the hell, she thought as she drank it down. It was good quality, very smooth. "Case solved." She said and passed the flask over. He nodded. "There's something you still haven't told me though. You going to fill me in?" There was a long silence. She felt disappointed, betrayed somehow. When he finally spoke it was a hushed whisper, grey and foggy like the morning. "The dead woman was my sister." She stared at his face. It was tragic, gothic, drained of everything, drained of life, it had become like stone, a real gargoyle at last. Yet somehow, despite it all, it became beautiful, like an object ruined beyond hope can still maintain the essence of what it was. Jo felt like crying. I've never cried, she thought, I've never cried for anyone, not even myself. "My mother deserted us when I was seven. She ran away to join the Rapturists. I never saw her again. A few years ago I began to do some investigating, I discovered I had a half sister. I found out what I could about her but that was it. Just knowing that she was there was enough. I only knew her from a file until the day I stepped into her apartment and saw her dead on the floor." He's lonelier than me, Jo thought. Connor ground out his cigarette on the stone parapet; the gesture was dismal and final. He stared at the scrapers rising from the fog. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. He looked ready to leave. I really want him, she thought, if I don't make a move now it will never happen, it's only pride, and maybe, fear. She leaned over and kissed him, she felt his surprise and then he had his arms around her and he was caressing her hair and kissing her back fiercely and with a passion she had not ever experienced before. He pressed her against the stonework, Jo felt something, it can't be his weapon, she thought as she leaned against him, he doesn't wear it slung quite so low; it must be my lucky day. |
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| Alice Godwin | |
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| After moving northwards from Tasmania, Alice Godwin now resides in Sydney, Australia. Her stories ...>> | |
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| More by author: The Veil of the Soul Drama | |
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