His Misery Engine

I stand at her bedside.

Her breathing is croaking and strained. She withers against my touch. Her eyes are sunken, staring into the ceiling with no presence at all.

I light her another candle as the last one goes out, and I stay there, as the last hopelessly outmatched sentry that would hope to hold the wall against the emissaries of the afterlife.

But he who arrives is not that which I expect.

A man gently urges the door to our bedroom open, his form slowly unfolding into the dim candlelight, cane first.

He is tall. Almost unnaturally so, despite his hunched back. He kneels beneath the doorway as he enters, his gaze scanning across the room.

He is old. Maybe eighty, ninety years old. His face is covered with liver spots and wrinkles, his head crowned with nought but wispy gray leftovers that spill out from underneath his tall stovepipe hat. The suit he wears is elegant, with long coattails and a white vest that holds an audibly ticking pocketwatch. Its time is not ours. I catch the hand, which slowly passes the final notch, 44, toward “midnight”, 0.

Large, circular spectacles adorn his face. When he finally sets his eyes on my form, coming to my feet in a defensive posture, they are a bright, glaring white, seemingly with no eyes behind them at all.

“Illness,” he proclaims in a shuddering, aged voice. “More common now than ever. A shame. She is a victim of circumstance, isn’t she?”

I stare at him, my words caught in my throat. I start to speak, but he cuts me off.

“So familiar... the loving spouse watches the light seep from their beloved. An innocent victim of cruel nature. The spouse has no one to blame.”

“What do you want?” I demand. “Are you here for her?”

“It is not what I want,” he says. “It is what you want.” He lurches over Abigail, and looks at me. “Do you love her?” he asks me. His tone changes from regretful to all but sinister.

“I... of course I do!” I say, offended that he even needed to ask! He clicks his tongue, rises to his full height and draws the watch from his pocket.

“Her time is drawing to a close. Unless... I am mistaken, and the bell tolls for another.” He smiles at me, an implication. He extends a trembling hand to me, over her bed.

“The angels would be displeased that I have claimed the soul they were here to collect... but I have my ways. If you would, Mrs. Heritt.”

I look down at Abigail, at her wearying face. He holds the watch in his other hand, watching each precious, miniscule twitch of the hand toward her end.

I take his hand. “It is a shame that she will not know the sacrifice you’ve made for her,” he says, his hand now clutching mine. I cannot pull it away, even if I wished to. “But it is an act of love few would bestow their beloved. One life... for another.”

I cannot speak. In his grasp, the air in my lungs becomes so much thinner. Each breath drawn with desperation. As I follow him toward the door, I look back and see my body, slumped in the chair beside Abigail, a blade through my still heart.

Abigail begins to stir. The door shuts.

...

The machine is numbing. I wander its halls. Every so often, the gears begin to turn and the dead metal roars to life again, and the feeling in my soul is like I’ve lost her again; as if someone’s tearing me limb from limb. He has made another deal. His wretched machine has pulled the threads again. Someone else, in my name, in all of our names, is condemned to this awful place or worse.

I see others, whether among the sands or the machine, but they’re mere ghosts. Impressions of other people, too temporary and weak for my mind to hold onto.

En greets me, with a smile, exactly one year later as I wander the endless dunes. He tells me, almost proudly, that Abigail is with Fanekh now. He does not tell me why. I try to scream at him, but all that comes out of me is a hollow whistle. Before I can lay a hand on him, he is gone.

The machine’s gears begin to turn again, grinding noisily in the distance.