It Begins With Isolation - Demons Always Inhabit Desolate Places
A broken frame on a wooden wall still holds a damp picture. Seven faces. Six hazed and blurred, one scribbled over — like blotches on a torn, discarded canvas. Their names, lost to me, bring blood pounding to my ears every time I scour my missing memories.
I am a blank. Nothing to recall, not even a name, and so I rise and open my eyes to the world and its utter blackness. My hoof prods around and against a sharp and cold edge that slices into my pastern. Curiosity is a gnarly flaw.
Pain lingers but I keep going, searching for a footing by the sensations at the tip of my skin. I contend with the icy bite of metal meeting wherever I lay my hoof. I am confined, lost, and alone in a slithering steel-and-wires intestine. My home.
The sun has never hugged those crude walls; the dark reigns within this ship, and without. I rove a space-faring vessel lost to a somber sea of nothingness that only rusty scuttles protect me from. Dust coats every thick window, and yet, the faint light of long-gone stars will never shine through the largest moats. I do not blame the stars for their absence.
There is no sight where my newly-found LED light doesn’t shine. Only acrid smells and metal clangs and the whinnies of the decrepit ship entertain my ears. Among these muffled bellows, the far-distant moans of an engine pull me in.
The engine grinds and pulses for a long time before switching off and I am alone with my thoughts and without its song. Sleep brings no rest; softness doesn’t exist. Metal, plastic, cables, pipes, and rough rims bite my back and flanks eagerly. And water, seeping through the cracks above my head, tortures me to lie ever aware.
An eternity passes and the machine starts back up, jolting me awake. I will soon learn that it beats like a heart, cyclical, always punctual. But, every time it retracts and falls asleep, I still fear it may never wake up again. I crave its rhythm, a throbbing telling me something is still working in the deepest reaches of this steel monster.
Not a single sleep cycle passes where I do not wake up to the drumming of droplets against my face. Water tastes of lingering ichor, oil, and sewage — only a trace of the life that once inhabited these empty halls. The sting and taste still plague my eyes and tongue. My breath, my heartbeat, my heaving offer the only echoes of life here, reverberated against the silent walls of every tunnel I pass through.
I’ve not talked to or even met anypony since I awoke a long time ago. I may cough but I never scream. I fear that if I do, a painful punishment will meet the great crime of noise.
I’ve learned to read with time. A name tag marks everything — etched, stickered, or printed — except myself. I learned the most obvious words at first: door, rail, staircase, lightbulb, or axe. I know their letters but not their sounds. I do not speak; I do not remember how to. Some words took the longest time to get, like intercom. It needs somepony on its other side, but there is nopony but me.
Ducts and pipes and old, powerless fridges open to my hooves. Hunger drives my guts and soul, and the moss that grows in the nooks and crannies of the ship barely satiates me. Eating is painful but I survive and carry on. Eat, drink, sleep, repeat.
Every cycle I survive and move through, the engine’s din grows stronger, louder, and closer. At first a low, monotonous beat, it now thumps like a giant drum against the disjointed and abandoned architecture caging me in. Low, high, long, short, it never stops, only pauses. Its staccato of wheels and pistons shakes my core as the distant engine carries the ship and me on a steady track.
Metal sings the echoes of my hooves, my pain, my struggle. They interfere with the questions wrangling my mind. Whatever awaits me at the end of this ship, this journey, there must lie the answers I seek. There can’t be nothing. There ought to be a purpose for all of this, and that prospect keeps me going.
I found a gun today. Kept in a safe, time couldn’t have devoured its pristine shape yet. It shines under my LED and a bullet still inhabits its chamber. I’ve been staring at it for a long time. An answer to this has more value to me than sleep — I keep repeating this like a mantra. There must be something, otherwise… it would be so easy.
The deafening hacking of the engine has long robbed me of every other sound. Only its scream remains. My head hurts. Is it crying for something — fuel, oil, maintenance workers? I cannot tell. I do not speak the language of the machine. I can only listen to its howl, louder than what clapping my hooves over my ears could silence. It’s close now.
As I came across a tiled area in the ship, my light cast its faint glow onto a silver slab. I dropped the lamp when I saw it. A reflection.
The mirror catching the discarded light highlights a gaunt, grey, arched-over figure. Its grey and flappy skin sinks and darkens around wrinkled, glassy eyes. Its chest bears the ridges of starvation and the ribs underneath, like pipes pushing against a thin leather tarp, shuffle with each breath. Teeth, laid bare under a pair of split lips, are rotten and cracked when not missing. Whoever engineered this machine of flesh was lousy. Whoever maintains it, a partner in crime.
The machine screams anew and snaps me away from my own reflection. I taste bile, acrid at the back of my tongue. I retrieve my flickering, damaged light and carry forward. I understand the machine now, it screams for fuel and so do I.
I stumbled upon a light. Not my LED but a crackling tube dangling off the ceiling at the crossing between five flooded ways. I’ve been watching it sway for a long time, mesmerized by its bluish reflection on top of the oily, black muck that has puddled deep underneath. I’ve hoped that whoever keeps it swaying would soon pass by.
I’ve been waiting for a while and hunger hangs heavy on my belly, mouth, and eyelids. I don’t have much time left to reach the engine. The ship doesn’t move, the light still sways, and yet there’s nopony to move it, and for me to meet.
I hurry under and past this lure. I must carry on my journey and, as I crawl through the blackened, puddled crass, my hooves crash through strange sunken, calcified protrusions. I pay them no heed and escape through an alleyway. I must sleep now.
By the winding of a corner, a long window stretches the length of an empty corridor and gives into nothingness, a darkness so deep it swallows the flow of my LED. Outside, again but in a broader, wider angle than with a scuttle. I stand by and peer into the black.
The sense of scale slices into my heart like a knife, ripping a hole as I often did with near-empty water tanks to drain them of their last remnants. I watch this goliath of a spaceship alone in a starless nightly sea. Only a few survivors among what must have been many scattered lights pepper the ship’s hull. I can count them, isolated, always ever smaller as the distance increases until their light, so faint, merges with the depths of space.
There is no edge, no jagged outline to catch if I squint my eyes. This huge ship sleeps, unmoving, dead, and in the distance is one with the vacuum of space. I am not equipped to understand this place.
I’ve stumbled upon a series of doors, different than all I’ve encountered before. Coated in moss, flaked with dust, and rusted at the rims. The doors have no power. But the machine’s din shakes both ground and ceiling, and the air, thick with the sheddings of this metal beast, chokes my lungs and burns my eyes.
I’ve struggled for several cycles to crank the doors open and, as I do, the crust of moss, dust, and rust locking them always resists. With time, however, they always give out.
The blowing breath of a beast meets me as the last door opens. Hot, rancid air washes over my face and the engine rumbles hidden in the darkness past the empty door frame. Metal shakes around me, and my skin and insides echo this powerful, encompassing madness. I’ve reached the end. There, somewhere in this next room, lies the machine — my guide.
I work my cheeks into a smile. My mind hurt. I’m hungry, thirsty. I won’t need water where I’m going. I won’t need food once this ordeal is over with. I step past the door frame and it slams shut behind me.
In the dark, I’m crying. As if a cycle comes to an end, the machine’s heartbeat degrades to a low hum. As it does, lights, like pinpricks, flash to life in a room of proportions I couldn’t have imagined.
Vertigo from looking up and askance, from staring far in the distance. So much space given to see in the faint lighting while far away clouds scatter the farthest lights. Oil and grime rain over me, over the walls, over the mass of gears and flesh occupying the antechamber’s middle.
“You are late,” a low voice bellows, grinding my eardrums with its volume like skin and meat stuck in the gears of a cruel machine.
And what a titanic machine it is. Massive, far-spreading in that antechamber of rust, oil, and cables. And more... My breath is snuffed short at the sight of a living mountain of steel and, oh no, so much more… It bathes in a reeking pool of its own making. It pivots to me and a face emerges at its top, with two white, glowing eyes a hundred times larger than myself. It sees me and I see it and it skews towards my position and extends itself.
Its tendrils pulse and wobble, alive and well. Their shifting mass hulks through the air in an amalgamation of cogs, hoses, and flesh that seeps a raining curtain of sludge below itself. The flesh, that of ponies, is gaunt, grey and flappy, and skin patches sewn together into thin tarps highlight protruding, wiry ribs underneath.
Each appendix reflects my own distorted, screaming image back at me. Copy-pasted, multiplied in their anguish. Oh, the screams! I peer in horror at a broken, battered mirror lying in shards on the surface of this monster. But the mirror is not silvery, it’s flesh and metal combined together in a hellish alloy...
Me, myself, and I are staring at each other. The scream, a contagious disease, spreads to me. My rump hits the locked door behind me. The tendrils are close now.
I am standing here before the machine, and I am glued, merged, patched, caged, and pleading over there. I inhabit the gears and the machine’s flesh. I’ve been in this room before, endured this punishment many, many times before. There is only darkness and, as I raise my head to see into the white eyes of this black monster inhabiting this ship, I see a shadow imprint of myself. Hungry, gigantic, and angry.
“Welcome once again, Stygian,” the machine says and cackles. “I am glad you could join me.”
I wish I were alone again.
Author's Note
For you, wondering readers, the title is a quote from A Familiar Rain by John Geddes.
