Thus begins Nanowrimo. 2000 words a chapter, a chapter a day, until it's finished. If you're enjoying it, please consider donating via Paypal to advance the noble cause of groceries.
~
He had travelled so far, could see an ocean to the west through the trees, little faltering, little flagging, but the body was not everlasting and now it had to stop. It did.
~
Dot Harlock didn’t know what the thing was. In such situations, one might take it as an affront or as a challenge and Dot would choose the latter every time.
Here is what it looked like: mostly like a young man, a couple of years older than her own eighteen-year old self. Soft features, skin a uniform brown. Now, if that were the end of it, there wouldn’t be any mystery to it, would there?
But his hair, had he ever any at all, was shorn right off, even the eyebrows, even across the entire expanse of his remaining skin. That skin did not cover the whole of his frame, but left gaping holes on his cheek, on his bicep, on his stomach, through which could be seen mechanisms of such sophistication that was nearly beyond Dot’s grasp. Shining from his otherwise empty eye sockets could be seen two pinpoints of white light that danced and darted with all the fear that the rest of his husk did not show. If he was feeling anything at all, that is.
He neither breathed nor moved, save for those two pinpoints, but there was a sort of thrumming noise from deep within his chest and a certain tension to the exposed gears that seemed to Dot as though they desperately wanted to move.
“And you just found him wandering down the mountain road?” she asked the two respectably burly individuals that sat bolt upright in the remaining chairs in the workshop.
Arla coughed in the manner of one clearing her throat. “Not wandering, per se. Wandering would’ve been less odd. No, y’see, Daffyd and I had gone up it to go meet Judge Holt coming in and the road was clear as you’d expect, but on the way back...”
“We found this creature sprawled across it,” finished Daffyd with a dramatic shiver. “His honour’s horse nearly stepped on it.”
“How much time passed between coming and going? Where’s Judge Holt now?” asked Dot, prodding the thing with a screwdriver. A small shock rushed through her and the screwdriver was withdrawn.
“Maybe about ten minutes, give or take. In the mayor’s house. What do you make of it, Dot?”
What did she make of it? Well, that was the heart of the matter, wasn’t it?
~
She soon hurried Arla and Daffyd off, promising them all the while to tell them the moment some new revelation occurred to her. It took her ten minutes for her to remember why this was a terrible move.
Arms of Gold, New Spira was more of a village than a town and as such, news and gossip travelled across it with a speed that could put shame to the fastest locomotive. Already at that morning hour, anyone who had ventured out of doors or had even opened a door for someone else had heard and put to memory all the reports from the crew and passengers of the daily ferry and, of course, from Judge Holt himself. With Judge Holt’s account of the incident on the road, they already knew of the creature’s existence and hazarded a guess as to where the creature was relocated. With Arla and Daffyd entering the fray, their guesses were confirmed.
And then came the endless knocking on Dot’s workshop door. She locked it tight, jammed a vacated chair underneath its knob, and tried to ignore it. She only wished she could cut the lantern light and pretend she wasn’t there, but no one in Arms of Gold was that stupid. The knocking continued, then stopped, then to be replaced with conversation, shouts for her attention, and what increasingly sounded like a beer hall discussion.
The creature became ever more agitated at the constant interruptions – or at least, the lights in his eye sockets brightened and dimmed and spun about with far more speed than they had been doing. Dot sat down again in the chair in front of him, meeting what passed for his gaze.
“What could you possibly be?” she said, nearly a whisper. She did have a notion now, but it was ridiculous.
Nevertheless, Dot opened her mouth again and began to speak – not at him, but to him.
~
Once the land was cold and covered in ice and he did not know it then but he did know it in a time when it was warm and it was filled with people and every day had a thousand and one marvels for him to take in but that time was so short, wasn’t it, even though for him it was all he had and it filled up his entire world, and it had been replaced with a long, black darkness that only had one marvel for him and it was this, “Why is this?”
The darkness ended, though, as he knew it had to, just like the time in the warm had to, and it was replaced with a woman with black curls and brown eyes and that was the most confusing thing of all, for it was happening again with the same woman and like the first time, his entire self was pain and numbness.
~
“So that’s who I am. Dot Schultz Harlock – okay, Dorothy, but no one call me Dorothy except my dad when he’s cross. She who mucks about with machines and such, even though she doesn’t know a damned thing about chemistry or other matters magical that could probably help with things. And I bet there’s a bit of ether running you, eh? Can’t just be the standard electrical current.”
The lights had stilled and remained bright. Dot could swear that he was making eye contact with her.
“I read stories about things like you when I was knee-high. Creatures that looked like humans and could think sort of like humans, but had circuitry and gears and ether under their skin. Golems or machina. Automata. But those were fairy stories. I think.”
Minutes passed. Not in complete silence – “Yoohoo, Dot! Open up, already!” and the robust sounds of carousing put a stop to that – but not a sound came from inside the house.
Dot sighed. “This is stupid.” She got up, fetched the Widow Olny’s clock down from the shelf and set to fixing it, just as she had pledged to do before the morning’s interruption. The creature’s eyes darted about once again. The door remained locked.
~
The woman with the black curls and brown eyes went away again although he could tell that she did not go far, oh no, he could hear her move and sigh and swear and could hear others, many others, not far at all from here talking about a creature and he wondered if the woman with black curls knew that there was a creature about and whether she was safe and were the others there to protect them from the creature, and he wanted to move and speak so badly and he couldn’t, his body was so useless and pained, and he didn’t know what else he could do but sit and see and smell and oh, how familiar and unfamiliar it was!
He strained to move his jaw but it would not shift. Nothing would shift. He had been told by many people to keep trying, though, so he tried.
~
“You are Kit,” the creature said.
Dot nearly dropped the clock on the floor in the process of putting it back onto the shelf. She turned about on her heels and practically dived across the table in her haste and placed her fingers gingerly on his throat and jaw. “What did you say?”
“You are Kit. Kit Harlock. You found me again. This is marvellous!”
Dot trembled in her excitement, just as the creature’s throat did with every syllable he spoke. “I’m Dot. Not Kit.” Was it just her imagination, or had his voice been tinnier than it ought to be? Like it was coming through a pipe? Of course, everyone’s voice came through a pipe when it came down to it.
“But you look the same as Kit and you are the same age as her, so therefore, you must be her.” He hesitated. “Isn’t that so?” How was the sound being made? She could see enough of him to know that he didn’t have lungs in the proper sense, so how was it being done?
“I have a sister named Kit. She’s or was three years older than me. We haven’t seen her in three years. How do you know her?” His jaw worked like a human’s should, though, and his lips and what she could see of his tongue. Even if there was something mechanical about the motion.
“She woke me up and took me out of the black. You’re not her? You’re her... sister?” He hesitated again and Dot thought she could hear a whirring noise from somewhere within him. Within his skull? “I’ve heard of such things. Girl children with the same makers. No, ‘parents’ is the right word, ‘not makers.’ No wonder I was confused. You look the same as her. You sound the same as her. You smell a bit different, though.”
Dot felt her heartbeats increase in frequency and mind boil over with what he told her. “Where did you meet Kit?”
“East. I’ve walked very far from there. I’ve walked ever since I met her.”
“For three years.”
“Yes, for three years.” He added, with the apparent hope that it would explain, “There was no money for riding on trains and it’s wrong to steal horses.”
“So you walked.”
“I’m good at walking.”
A mechanical man who walked across a country that spanned a continent who knew his sister. Who knew where she’d been. This was... well, marvellous, to use his word. He could speak. Could she get him to move his arms? His legs?
“Do you have a name?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well? What is it then?”
“Erasmus March.”
~
The door opened. The crowd quieted – that is, they allowed the volume of their conversations to descend to over-loud stage whispers. Dot stepped out into the warm afternoon air. The sun shone directly into her face and she squinted to avoid it.
“Now, then,” she announced, as loudly as she could in order to make herself heard over the noise. “The creature’s a ‘he’, he’s got a name, he can speak, and I don’t really know what he is yet. I’m going to fix him up and we’re to do some travelling to find out. Any questions?”
The noise exploded. “That’s too bad,” said Dot. “Because I don’t know anything else. If you’re not my mom or dad or Bill, you can scamper off now. Cheers, bye, etc.” She went back inside her workshop and shut the door hard behind her. Not slammed, mind – that would be rude.
Half a minute later, she opened it again. “Oh, and if anyone has a spare wig about their place that’s just taking up room or at least a decent hat, I could put it to use. Thanks!” And again, the door shut.
~
Dot hadn’t the faintest fathoming what his skin was made of yet and therefore couldn’t make anymore for him, but there was one thing she could do about it. It involved needles and thread, of which she had plenty. She found a spindle with brown thread not far off from the shade of Erasmus’ skin, cut a length, boiled it and a needle in boiling water atop the stove – she didn’t know whether the skin was human enough to get infected and didn’t wish to find out – and threaded the needle’s eye.
“I have to warn you,” Dot said. “This is going to hurt.”
Erasmus nodded. “That’s what Kit said.” The needle pierced the skin of his cheek and he whimpered. “Kit is very honest.”
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