1.
Glistening fibers strung like muscles stirred, arching in delicate patterns across the skeleton of the warehouse his home. Hundreds of prisms hang from girders in the air, and a thousand points of light dance on the surface of his immense cocoon. The sun has appeared through the holes and broken windows of the east wall and it is time for the man to awaken. He feels pressure, calm and comforting like a deep breath all around him, remembers dreaming of a murmuring crowd of wispy phantoms, and then the release as the tendrils of his living nest unwrap and expose him to the chill of fall air. There he hangs like a puppet on a rack, stretching weakly, relieving himself and letting it fall a hundred yards to the ground. A tin can is held before him, soon joined by a battered spoon. Carefully, he is fed; and with a shake of his head he ends the meal and begins his day.
He is lifted, passed silently between tangles of wiry appendages reaching out from the monstrous growth that has filled the vast space of the industrial hollow. The great living mass spills in from the collapsed south wing and can be seen through smoke and fog rising up beyond like a mountainous insect shell pocked with scaly black flesh. He looks out at this with a child’s love and wonder, and he sees it beautiful.
The sunlight hits a carefully placed mirror and is reflected onto an open area on a concrete outcrop, what remains of the eighth floor and, visible far below past lines of pipes and layers of iron grid work, the still waters of the first. He is set before an old school desk, all around which, neatly stacked and organized, are treasures. One of them is selected and held in the light. He finds where he had left off the day before and, joining the sounds of running water and distant machinery, he begins to read.
2.
Marianne walked ahead, singing a quiet song and swinging by the arm an ancient teddy bear. Rose kept finding herself farther behind.
“Stay where I can see you,” she called.
“Okay mommy.”
It was a long walk, it was cold day, and neither would speak again until they arrived.
Mayburn was a labyrinth of empty streets and crowded slums. They reached the end of Greenwich St. and saw in all directions the remnants of old riots and battles. Those that left after the Arrival and the violence that followed never returned, and now only the desperate lived here, or the rare few, like Rose’s father, who had stayed. Eventually their footsteps softened as they fell on thick cut grass. They heard birdsong and picked wildflowers as they went. This was where her father was caretaker.
He had been a professor, and he lived on the grounds of the old university. It had remained an active community for some time, students and their favorite teachers who saw the isolation as an opportunity to live as they wanted. Rose had fond memories of the brief time when she knew the idyllic world that her father and his fellow idealistic founders had imagined when she was brought here at Marriane’s age by her mother a short time before her death. Rose’s mother had run, only returning when she had no other choice.
She remembered kind children, musicians, writers and scientists, gardens and forests, a city within a city. They tapped the river for electricity and painted the streets with light, except on the clearest nights when it would all go dark for the sake of their ramshackle observatory and the crowds that would gather to gaze with reverence at the stars.
She once asked him why her mother had left. He went with her to a building under a tall radio tower to a room filled with men and women scribbling on notepads with headphones on their ears. He took a pair and slipped them on her head.
The sound was like a dense forest of creaking trees, and then it was like waves crashing in a howling cave, and then it was like a hammered church organ, and then it was like whales singing. She could not listen easily. The strange sounds repulsed and frightened her, but they carried the impression of a will, an alien intention, emotions that she would never know and memories of an existence that she could not fathom. Pain there was, peace, solace, and endless loneliness.
“The mountain,” he said, “wasn’t there when you were born.” She could see it past the balcony at the edge of the city. On that day the light caught it so that it shined slick, red like blood.
“It came here and we didn’t know when it would stop growing. She got scared like everybody else and she took you and your brother away with her, took you where I couldn’t follow. But we don’t have to be afraid, Rose, you can hear it for yourself.
"It’s talking to us.”
She knew two years of happiness before the city was up in flames once again. In a neighboring country a war had broken and its refugees passed through Mayburn. Dressed in tatters, hauling their dead and maimed, she remembered no children with them. The school tried to help, tried to feed them, tried to keep them safe, but there were too many. The food ran out and hope faded quickly. Fights grew into riots, riots grew into battles, and the city was at war even before the militia came.
Then the mound joined the fight.
Rose had gone often to the radio building to listen. She never heard the same song twice, but it was always calm, somber, fleetingly uplifting in its own strange way. Nothing could prepare her for that night in the dark basement of the school’s strongest building where she heard a new side of it, held in a corner, deafening through her father’s hands on her hands on her ears. It filled the room and shook the earth: a cacophonous grinding howl of a great mass moving, writhing around them, churning like thunder as if inside a monstrous body at war; pure, terrifying, boundless rage of a magnitude inconceivable, unprecedented in the light of their sun.
Father didn't want her to see but she couldn't help it. Everything was crimson, mangled, slippery with gore. The rags were clothing, the shells once bone. It was silent and they were alone again, the mound and they. At night another sound came, shuddering through their feet, heard through ears pressed against the earth.
Sadness, loneliness and infinite guilt. The weeping of a god.
Not long after, Rose left Wayburn. She would only return when she had no other choice. Of all the horrors she had seen and had yet to see,
3.
Now the school was empty, entirely given over to the native flora and fauna apart from roughly trimmed avenues leading to the main buildings and one crumbling hovel. Marianne bolted through the open door of the overgrown tenement house and up two flights of stairs to the door of the small apartment where her grandfather had lived for forty years while everything around him was stripped away. She pounded the door with her fists and squealed with delight. It was not until Rose caught up some time later that the door finally opened, as much as it would allow, and Marianne squeezed through to embrace him.
Rose entered cautiously and closed the door behind her, greeted by the smell of mildew and the sound of laughter.
Filling every inch of the room, blocking the door and covering the windows, were books. She must have looked accusing accidentally. “I tried to clean up,” he said, grinning through an unkempt white beard.
An adjoining room had been given over to Marianne for their rare visits, filled with toys, children’s books, pencils and paints which had slowly covered the walls, and it was here that she was sequestered when he caught Rose’s pained glare.
She stood still while he approached, lifted a hand to brush her hair away, revealing a bruise on her face.
They sat in the kitchen and he put a kettle on an old gas stove. They did not speak for some time.
“He wasn’t always like this.”
“Yes he was. First time I met him I knew. Did he ever tell you what he did in the war?”
She shook her head, looking at his dirty bare feet.
“Well he told me, and I wish he hadn’t."
