I looked at my hands, gleaming ghostly before my intangible eyes. My translucent wrists bore deep gashes, spiritual recreations of the fleshly wounds I had inflicted upon myself. I had used a shaving razor to make bone-deep cuts, and my life had flowed from these cuts drop by drop. At first, it was a glorious liberation, this death of mine. But now I felt drawn toward a terrible confinement far more horrible than the broken body that I had fled. Why could I not leave this scene of deathly industry? This was not what I wanted when I murdered myself.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me about. One of the hooded assemblymen stood before me. His face was lost behind some sort of gas mask or antique breathing apparatus. He motioned for me to follow him.
“I don’t belong here…” I told him. But he only motioned again for me to follow, and pointed toward a doorway where a set of cinderblock stairs led upward. He held something out for me to take, and I peered at his gloved hand. A red, glistening chunk of meat pulsed in his palm. It was a human heart, still living, squeezing the last few drops of warm blood from its interior chambers.
I don’t know why, but I accepted the throbbing organ. As the blood ran down my forearm, I noticed that I was no longer transparent. My flesh had returned, and my body was no longer crippled. A dark thrill excited me, and the hairs along my new arms stood up. The masked worker signaled that I should mount the stairs alone, so I did.
Shards of mutilated bodies littered the steps: ears, eyeballs, lips, fingers. Each one twitched horribly as I made my way upward. I passed a tall, gleaming mirror. I stopped, staring at myself in the glass, but it did not reflect my newfound flesh. It showed only my grinning skull and the skeletal network that existed beneath my fresh skin. I watched, fascinated by my fleshless reflection, and dropped the beating, bloody heart into the center of my empty rib cage. A great ecstasy filled me, and the world swirled like dark waters.
The heart beating wildly in my chest, I walked out of the mirror and continued up the stairs. I stared again at my skeletal hands, glad to see that the deep gashes had disappeared along with my new flesh. The wounds had reminded me of my old body, and I had not liked seeing them. But now I was glorious — the purity of gleaming white bone without a single ribbon of flesh. Except for the red, pulsing heart that floated within my skinless breast.
My feet clicked against the slimy stone of the stairs as I ascended, emerging onto a wide balcony overlooking the production floor where the hooded workers feverishly assembled their sculptures of flesh and bone. I paused at the railing for a second, looking down upon the flurry of activity. Then I looked up, and saw a sea of darkness rolling and heaving right above my head. Staring into its whirlpool, I experienced a great vertigo, and suddenly I was staring down into those dark waters. Since I could do nothing else in this precarious position, I fell.
The darkness swallowed me, and I sank like a stone. Leviathan forms swam past me, and tiny eyes like drops of flame swirled about my skeleton figure. Far below, which had once been above, I saw the roof of a great palace rising from the sea floor. The sand about its base was black as obsidian, and the towers were curved and pointed like scimitars or hooks. A forest of chains floated upward from the many windows of the wicked palace, and some of them were being drawn down into the structure, hauling in the squirming creations of flesh and bone assembled in the deathly factory.
I sank to the dark sand before the towering gateway. It was built from tremendous ebony blocks stained with flowering fungi. The figures of smiling fiends were carved across the walls, arabesques of tortured victims writhing across the green-black stone. Two soldiers stood before the gates, fleshless skeletons like me, but wearing suits of ancient armor flecked with coral. Their empty sockets stared at me from beneath horned helmets, and they pulled the gates open, moving aside their hooked spears so I could enter.
A host of living skeletons stood within, some draped in the robes of ancient Rome, others garbed in Grecian style, some in stranger garb from unknown lands, while others stood naked with phosphorescent bones gleaming in the deep waters. They stared at me, applauding as I walked a path of crushed rubies. Their bony hands made no sound in the thick depths, but I sensed their approval, their welcoming. I was expected here, and they were glad to see me. Suddenly I felt important, yet completely lost.
The Bone Queen waited to receive me on her throne of skulls. She wore a crimson gown, and her grinning skull face was set with two great diamonds. Two superb eyeballs had nested there in ages past, bright as sapphires. Her crown was a loop of dancing silver flame, blazing eternally, even in these abysmal waters.
I knelt, and kissed the bare bones of her feet.
“Welcome,” she said. “We have a special place for you.”
Her beauty was terrible to behold. It pierced my throbbing, naked heart. She had no flesh to spoil the purity of her immaculate essence, nothing but bleached bone that seemed to glow with the glory of jade.
I knew her. How I had dreamed of her, all those years sitting crippled in my darkened room, ignoring the dead factory rotting beyond my sealed shutters.
“I am your slave,” I said.
“As are all here,” she replied.
“How may I please you?”
“I am told you have…industrial experience,” she said. “We have a factory for you to run.”
I screamed then, and tried to tear the hammering alien heart from my rib cage, but the skeletal guards grabbed me and prevented this. They carried me away from the black palace and the terrible beauty of the Bone Queen.
They gave me a dark smock, with a heavy hood, and gloves of black rubber to wear. They conducted me back to the assembly tables and showed me to my glass-walled office overlooking the production floor.
“Is this…Hell?” I asked.
In voices of grating bone, they reminded me that I had a quota to fill.
So I work, and I dream of her beautiful, fleshless face.
I keep the production lines moving.
And I remind myself:
Now and forever, I do the work of the Bone Queen.
The Taste of Starlight
Pelops wakes gasping and shivering inside the CryoPod. A thin layer of ice crystals coats his cheeks and hands, pricking at his exposed skin. Crackling and moaning, he raises hands to his eyes and pries their lids open, shedding ice shards like tears. The curving glass surface before him is cracked into a mass of spidery lines. Struggling to inhale the frozen air, he pushes against the glass. The door of the pod refuses to move. He is entombed.
He moans as he raises his right leg, shedding a cloud of crystals. Boot against the fractured glass, but without much strength. His muscles are still asleep, slightly atrophied by years of stasis. Again he kicks, and draws in a burning lungful of cryonic air. A third time his booted foot meets the glass and it shatters, toppling him forward in a shower of ice and fragments. Instinct pulls his hands up, and he lands on them instead of his face. Splinters cut into his palms and fingers, but he can breathe freely now.
Lying on the floor, he rolls onto his back and looks sideways along a flickering corridor of cryonic niches. Here stand the stasis pods of his thirteen fellow sleepers. Even the chill metal of the floor feels warm compared to the ultimate cold of the CryoPod.