Mark Doten - The Infernal

“Pumps blood from the blood helper boy—”

“Same fashion—”

“And pumps it into you—”

As they continue their explanation, I follow the angled tube back up and find there, on the table, at the very center, somehow lost until now among so much apparatus, a spherical vacancy that warps the clamps and flasks behind. A huge globe, three or more feet across. Atop the globe, stoppering the dainty neck, perches a small silver bird, wings spread, and into a beak thrown back and wide open the tube plunges.

Within the globe there appears to be a second glass globe blWETOF0S0X

distorting double globe, the space of the room is warped and reassem CQQLQXKARZYPI =OENYERP3I4B 15OT0 KPT

birds, lamps, appearing as a single, monstrous, varicolored creature, all wing and fire, with a claw for a head and a single unblinking eye in a low pool of blood whose level’s on the rise.

At every tug of the tube, the bird hisses more boldly — as I watch, he rotates so he is no longer facing, as it were, his audience, but shivers in profile, and there must be a pressure building, within the globe a terrible pressure …

“My Blood Youths, heed the cabinet! The silver bird!”

They wheel around, but too late.

With a gunshot crack, the bird is shot free. It sails high overhead, flaring a comet’s tail of tubing.

And when it’s fully uncoiled it pulls taut and the bird is still flying, the momentum of bird and long tail slows and stretches impossibly — indeed, the whole chamber seems to slow, to stretch, as the bird strains on. Then: an explosion of splinters and the side of the cabinet is torn away, and the blood helper boy concealed within whirls up through the air after the bird-missile at great velocity.

The silver bird ricochets high overhead, in the dome of rock it hits again and again, each time deflected and spun upward, and bird and tube and blood helper are lost to sight and hearing.

The Blood Youths exchange a look. Then return to their polishing with a pained sigh.

“A tiny failure of adjustment.”

“This was a one-time error.”

“The valve at the bird’s neck should have been turned ninety degrees.”

“That was our only mistake.”

“The design otherwise ingenious.”

“The design otherwise foolproof.”

Blood Youth #2 produces a huge wrench from his robe and rattles it along the glassworks at the front of the machine. “You see how strong our blood machine is, Teacher?”

“We designed it to withstand the most punishing environments.”

“There is no punishment this new blood machine can’t sustain.”

“And this is the most punishing environment we know of.”

They bow deeply.

“Inside the globe a second globe, and two plates welded together—”

“Two tubes of unequal length—”

“And a reservoir—”

“All of glass—”

“Therefore”—the youths now speak in unison— “a double globe fed by tube through a silver bird, which, when the beak is depressed, dispenses only boy’s blood, and when depressed again, dispenses only your own clean blood, and when depressed again, boy’s blood, and so on, until you have had your fill of blood in the proper ratio.”

They offer a grand, mirrored flourish to the machine; and in the globes behind I see them doubled, inverted, and redoubled: “And that is what we wished to explain!”

Their translucent reflections tremble. Within the inner globe, the monstrous bird is visible, a green wing covered in green fire. The eye caught in those claws darts and stares hugely — first left, then right, then it locks on my own gaze. And I realize it is not a bird — not this time — through some terrible trick of refraction, the great eye that looks out at me is the eye of Jew, and the globe cracks down the center with a jagged shriek.

The whole vast assembly of glass and rubber and copper goes into seizure, and then it falls in on itself almost silently. Or perhaps not silently — it may be just that the youths’ shrieks of frustration are too loud to admit any other sound.

The Jew remains chained to the wall. It was just a trick of the glass that brought the huge Jew eye to bear on me. In my relief I laugh and clap my hands. “Oh nooooo!” I scream, mimicking the youths’ wails, and their voices are so comical that I’m clutching my stomach. “Oh nooooo!” “Oh nooooo!”

Before us now is a heap of shards and twisted copper; with a rising whine and great woosh the blood helper boy crashes into the wreckage and bursts into bits and bony gobs, and above it all a cloud of powdered glass, glittering bluely.

Then the last blue flames are sucked into the mouths of the Bunsen burners and the cloud melts away and is gone.

In tha’ secon’ largesse crater setz a payl gre’n fridg. Toot house blasted, it musta’ come from one, but no one’s seen it heretofore. An’—double dumb ass on you —no folks in our village would’a known whence to procure such-like.

Jeeps whiz up an’ down, roun’ an’ ’bout, from yonder sand to white tents at scrubble’s edge 1FOEXCLBTS Z

sewin’ up a puh-teet veel tha’s no longer wut wuz. Crates are handed off, brows wiped, so much cussin’ swallowed by tha sand an’ wind, gah-bye, fuckaz, gah-bye.

Hakim helps me thru a splintered bit a do’ frame. He sez, “I got these feelings for you today.”

I weigh a goat noggin in ma’ han’s, then hurl it to brain him.

But lo, sparrows swoop ’n’ grab, and tha taloned head circles up, yessir, up.

Lost in tha corpsey sky, a nanny bleatin’ content at his new view o’ tha world, so much rubble teckered up at ten times the ver-kah-tal-i-tee of lay may-zones lost and then tha head’s wung away fer good.

Hakim clambers up a totterin’ tower o’ buckets an’ scouts, crowz-nesty, our dearest ‘orisons. “They heaped up our village!” he sez. “It’s heaps! Just heaps!”

I cross ma’ han’s at ma’ stomach, an’ Z2T-+0YF X 4

“Not quite, buddy,” sez I. “Craters, too, also tents where daze umms fritter the margins with munitional apparatus. Moreover, a payl gre’n fridg. An’ I have ma’ feathers, ma’ family feathers.”

I pat tha’ pocket for re-insurance: a soft clump. An’, in pocket two (pat pat): a pair o’ sawbucks.

Hakim: “Ma’ eyes hurts. They’re achey.”

Th’ crowz nest swaze.

Me: “You looks like pure-D muh- newer. If yah don’t ache all about yer body, I fear for your immemorial soul.”

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Hakim tumblin’ in a bucketty clutter.

I tellz hissef to quit wit’ messin’ round.

Then I looks to see the sample I’m settin’.

It’s no vanity to peep yo’ own face in the chrome of a mud-bit canister vac, an’ as Hakim craws to mah side, I do. I smooths tha robe, slicks tha hair, all not lost, nothin’ ever truly gone, that I believe. “There’sYFM501P

a fridg,” sez I. “We can look fo’ clues in/HJF6M 10PDY1

8C6

You, Hakim, an’ me. How old are you, Hakim?”

“Eight.”

“An’ how old am I, Hakim?”

“Twelve.”

“An’ our birthday’s two days apart, in a month not so distant, an’ our futures still befo’ us.”

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to a ledge, back-flat. He stares up into tha blue. “I do’n wanna die.”

“So wut’s inside that fridg? Could be deadly, could be something sweet, a prize of sorts.”

Hakim sez, “I have things I want to tell you, but I don’t know how.” He shakes his evah-rattlin’ skull. “Empty, that’s ma’ bet on le free-go. Or wired to ‘splode.”