It had been an easy thing for Dül to find his way to Ōmůt, all of those years ago. It was hard to come back to Šeš. He could hear his father’s voice on the wind, could smell the cloying, acrid and ferrous stench of factory smoke (so many years gone, though the stacks still stood, still belched their emissions, though more carefully as EU demands dictated.) Now, as he walked with Samantha and Xéŗšé through half-fallow fields beyond the western edge of his childhood city, he wrestled with ghosts he’d left behind. He was close…this close to family, and the frowning disdain of a father who saw little value in a librarian for a son. There wasn’t enough dirt in the job, Father’s logic said. There was no way for the hands to grow calloused and for the soul to gain strength. If Father had been right, would it be easier to resist Samantha’s tourist-urge to come here? Dül smirked at the question as it sparked through his mind, squared his shoulders against the walk ahead, and told his father’s disembodied, needling voice to shut up. Where Ōmůt was a city surrounded by towns, villages, and factories, Šeš was twelve circular kilometers of twentieth century industrial nightmare. There was mercury in the water, and other heavy metals. Most of the rivers ran clean now, but the ground bore strange contaminations. Arcane and virulent poisons found their way into the soils around the city, into the air, and into the water. Cancers grew in human flesh and livestock on what farms braved the region. There were eyeless chickens in Šeš, and human children with cruel and creative deformities. Where Dül wore sandals in Ōmůt, he’d covered his feet in military boots for the journey here. “So,” Samantha asked. “How far do we walk.” “There,” Dül said, pointing. “To that rise.” In these outland-regions, there was a single, inescapable truth: where there were mounds, there were čötí. They were everywhere. Most—for reasons hard to explain—were devoid of the contaminants that tainted other soils. The mounds, as Dül remembered from his youth, were where couples went in order to conceive. *** They stepped into the mouth of a long and serpentine trench, quietly so. Graveled soil crunched underfoot, like pumice, like croutons, like half-cremated bones of small, small animals. Others had been here before them, local kids, no doubt…miscreant farm-boys with resinous wads of local hemp in their pockets, and tobacco to cut the sting of smoke when inhaled. Like marriage-couples, stoners came to the mounds. The machines, the čötí intensified their high, and kept cancer off of their lungs. Or so local lore had them believe. By smoker’s logic, the čötí were well-used here, and that same local lore spoke of doorways to other worlds: places where the āáppá lived…the real ones: the ones like nothing you’d ever see on Saturday-morning television. There were no smokers in the mound ahead, no couples engaged in the intimacies of amorous biology. Dül knew what signs to read, what color ribbons tied to sticks signified polite demands to keep away for an hour, two hours, or more. Samantha walked quietly at his side, touching the wall to her left. Her fingers trailed over lichens and moss in strange shades of black and rust: dead life, no longer able to tolerate whatever contaminants leeched into the walls. Ahead, bare meters, the moss was green, the lichens were grayish and fleshy, but there were meters to go, yet, before Samantha might touch them. And there…farther ahead, like a great and toothless mouth, the cave-entrance to the mound swallowed cloud-swaddled sunlight. “It looks like the way into King Tut’s tomb,” Samantha observed. “But we are not English archaeologists,” Xéŗšé said, a wry smile embedded in his voice. “The feeling’s the same,” Samantha said. “Quiet. Not exactly spooky, but not casual either. Not spooky for you. Dül thought. And for all that he anticipated, the first step into the cave-entrance of the mound didn’t shock the air with crackles of strange electricity. There were scents here: dampness, mildew, and the intimate, salty tang of human-sweat. Xéŗšé had taken it upon himself to manage the provisions necessary for this trip, and he fished three flashlights out of the backpack he carried. There wasn’t much to the mound. It was little more than a hollowed out space, half-sunk in the earth. Enormous and dark timbers gave their shapes the walls and the barrel-vaulted ceiling, so Roman in design, lost itself in inkwell shadow. Signs of human use littered the space. There scrawls of graffiti on the ancient wood: taunts and declarations of amatory fealty, existentialist rants, and rude, cartoonish drawings. There was a pile of crushed beer cans, and empty bottles stood at quiet attention like clay guardian statues in some Chinese tomb. In an undisturbed mound, the resident čotǻ enjoyed centralized prominence. Here, the machine seemed to crouch, like some strange termite queen in a sloping nest of bottles and beer cans so conscientiously—if haphazardly—arranged. Dül’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of it, and he felt himself move away from it. “You’re afraid of that?” Samantha asked, stepping closer to the thing, as if pulled forward by the beam of her flashlight. Dül said nothing. Xéŗšé held his silence. It was spherical in shape and hewn from polished brass, copper, and some strange, pearlescent metal that Dül couldn’t name. He approached it, approached Samantha, nudging her—ever so slightly—to one side, as he stooped into a closer inspection of the object. “It’s active,” he said, his flashlight beam catching the motion of gears and fly-wheels and strange, amber vials of mercury tilting, tilting, and tilting into whatever balance the machine’s design required. There was something at the core of the device, and Dül could just barely make it out. Beneath a tangle of copper ribs and delicate, cobweb wires (here seen, and there unseen between slow-turning gears) something pulsed. It was a pale and organic presence. It reminded Dül of waxy maggot skin: the corpulence of a botfly larva embedded deep in some hapless animal’s flesh. He’d seen such a thing on The Discovery Channel and it came to him now, as the thing pulsed again, and squirmed. Where the outer shells of the device were metal and mechanical, its inner core was organic. It was possible that some insect had wandered in and laid eggs, but the insects of Ükür were careful in the presence of such artifacts. Nothing ever laid eggs in the works of a live and un-corroded machine. “It’s not the original,” Xéŗšé said. “How do you know?” Samantha asked. The brief exchange drew Dül’s attention into the conversation, and his gaze swung away from the device; he followed the course of Xéŗšé’s flashlight beam. He’d focused his beam on another stretch of wall space, on a splatter of blackened, oily rot. There was rust in it; there were fragments of gears and wheels, and blackened skeins of wire like gnarled, black hair. “That was the original.” Xéŗšé spoke with calm certainty. “What happened to it?” In the darkness, it was impossible to see, but Dül sensed Xéŗšé’s shrug. “Sometimes a čotá will rebuild itself. This one must have.” “How do you know that?” “Legends, mostly…but most people accept them. Someone must have seen it happening…a long time ago.” And Dül recalled all of the stories of strange noises in the night, of things just beyond the city limits, moving. There were stories, as well: My friend’s brother’s sister saw…. An American might easily have called them ghost stories or urban myth, but there were no ghosts in Ükür, and local city-logic spawned different mythologies. Dül had never seen a self-rebuilt machine, had never considered their reality. Now, in looking at the muck and dust of something outmoded, he considered the shiny, overcomplicated thing still centering Samantha’s attention. The beam of her flashlight danced back and forth, touching muck and gunk, then settling (almost timidly) on the clockwork nightmare with it’s waxy/white pulsing heart. “We should go,” Dül said, tasting the strain in his voice. Samantha shifted. He could hear the grind of her hiking boots on dense-packed earth. They made a disturbing sound. “We just got here.” “You wanted to see one of these,” Dül said. “Not camp out.” “I think Dül is right,” Xéŗšé said. “We shouldn’t stick around here too long.” “More local wisdom?” Samantha challenged. “Something like that,” from Xéŗšé. “All right,” Samantha said. “But I want a record of this.” Her flashlight beam went out as she shoved the metal shaft of the thing into a pocket. A disembodied, blue rectangle flashed into existence, behind a soft, electronic chime. Her camera. Her valued companion. She’d recorded so much on it, to post, she said, in her blog. And there were pictures: of Dül, of Xéŗšé, and random old women on park benches. There were images of the old town, and the new central quarters, full of European tourists. And now— “You’ll allow pictures, right?” There was mockery in her voice. “Do we have a choice?” Dül asked, more firmly and with more sarcasm than he thought possible. “No. So shine your lights on the thing. I want at least a decent shot of it.” *** What began as a journey to the outskirts of Šeš ended in a flash and a series of strange, stridulating clicks, like a swarm of angry, electric insects stirred into a defensive frenzy. What followed was silence. “No,” Dül said, and— *** —fought from dream-clotted unconsciousness. It was hot. Sweat clung to his brow and pillow. The bed-sheet was a sweat-tinged knot at his ankles. Pillows lay askew, as if he’d struggled with a fever. The window, open, admitted street-bustle and traffic noise: the distant grumble of trams, their antique bells ringing like wind-up toys for oversized children. There were sounds in the living room: voices. Music. Something on television. Local programming by the sound of it. The sun had set, perhaps only an hour ago. The sky, what Dül saw of it, was a deep, purplish smear above the apartments across the street. There were no clouds. He disengaged from the tangle of bedsheets and padded into the living room. Xéŗšé sat, smoking, on the old, battered sofa. For a moment, Dül felt a jarring twinge of discontinuity. Hadn’t the sofa been green? “You sleep like the dead,” Xéŗšé commented. “I didn’t have the heart to wake you for dinner.” “I had strange dreams.” “I dozed off here,” Xéŗšé said. “I had strange dreams, too…it must have been what I was watching.” He smiled dismissively. “There are dumplings on the stove.” “Strange dreams?” Dül asked. “About some girl…I think she was a friend of ours…only she was American.” “Samantha?” If Xéŗšé felt shock at the mention of the name, nothing registered on his face. “That was her name,” he said. “I had the same dream,” Dül said. “We went to Šeš, to show her a čotá. For a long moment, there was silence as Dül settled onto the sofa, a sudden chill prickling the flesh along his shoulders. “We went to the fields, just an hour from the central station in Šeš. The closest we could manage. There was a čotá there…an odd one.” Xéŗšé’s voice grew heavy with dread. “Rebuilt,” “There was a flash…” “And we woke up…” For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The television prattled on, spewing some dumb soap opera into the room. It could have been silent for all of the attention Dül paid to it. Xéŗšé shifted on the sofa, stepped into the kitchen for a long, long while, and then returned in silence, holding a plate for Dül. Rice dumplings and lamb, smothered with mushrooms and dill-and-pomegranate sauce with pine nuts. A family dish: one he’d learned from his grandmother, and he made it regularly enough, like a good Muslim boy, careful to avoid the evils of pork. Only Xéŗšé was a devout secularist with no room in his life for the extravagance of faith. Dül ate in appreciative silence, even if the dumplings were delivered from the Laughing Spoon franchise over on Kivoŗ Street. They were the handiwork of someone else’s family recipe, but they were good enough, stuffed, as they were with rice and onions and lemon-tinged tomatoes. They were a distraction from the storm of thoughts raging at the back of his mind. He ate. Silently. He dared not speak until his plate was clean, until he’d emptied the bottle of Italian beer that accompanied, and finished the meal. And then, with eyes focused just above the flat-screen of the television, he dared mention the dream that wasn’t a dream. “We went to Šeš with an American girl,” he said. “Yes.” Xéŗšé shifted at his side, uncomfortable. “I thought it was a dream, I thought I was just over-tired from something, but somehow I’d cooked and telephoned for dumplings. When I went to pick them up, I noticed my shoes. We’d walked through mud, and there was something stuck in the tread of my left shoe.” He leaned forward and retrieved something from the cocktail table (cluttered, as always, with magazines and pirate-copy DVDs.) He picked something up. A small thing. Dark in the night-light. He handed it over to Dül. It was a corroded and broken thing: the remains of a gear, no larger than an infant’s fingernail. As dark as a scab and as appealing, it weighted Dül’s palm like some ominous thing. He wanted to lunge to his feet and flush it down the toilet. He sat motionless instead. He knew where it came from. He knew what it was. And without words, Xéŗšé confirmed it. “Samantha,” Dül said. “I remember that name, but I don’t know her.” “Neither do I, but she’s the one we took to Šeš.” Dül’s heart skipped a beat and caught the rebound. He imagined (or did he remember?) the trip to Šeš, and the outskirt wastes. There was tension, something unspoken on the train ride and the bus ride that followed. There were photographs, and quiet mockery spoken from someone (Samantha) who found everything strange and thought her companions were superstitious. Only he hadn’t been to Šeš in years. But… He remembered flashlights in the dark. And something white. Something alive in the most improbable (impossible) of ways; it was nested deep inside of an ancient machine. And he was there…looking at it, with Xéŗšé…and someone else. Samantha? Memory was a slippery thing, and he couldn’t imagine the logic of going to see a wild and active machine; not when there were tame and inactive ones in all of the local museums—not when there were safe ones. “We both remember her,” Xéŗšé said, quietly. “We went, with her, to Šeš. It happened. Probably today.” Dül’s fingers went cold, as something shifted in his brain. “We went with her to see a čotå,” he said. “And it did something. It changed something, and sent us—you and I—back here. But this woman who must have been our friend…what did it actually do, and where did it send her?” Xéŗšé said nothing. Dül felt a muddle of thoughts he could scarcely express. He closed his hand into a tight fist, feeling the tiny, fragmented gear digging an edge into the meat of his palm. It felt like a grain of sand wedged into a sensitive place. After a long, silent moment, Xéŗšé touched Dül’s hand. “Are you going to look for her?” he asked. And Dül didn’t know the answer to that. He couldn’t say what he would do because down, deep down inside, he felt a nagging, stinging fear. Everything was so uncertain, insubstantial and unfixed. He’d had a friend named Samatha, in another world that no longer existed. Apparently he’d had Xéŗšé in that world as well. But what, he wondered, might change if he went in search of this phantom named Samantha? If he found her, would the world change again? Would he lose Xéŗšé, and all of the amatory nights they spent together? Dül caressed Xéŗšé’s fingers and leaned closer to him. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to look for her, or try to find out who she might have been.” Xéŗšé smiled. “Good,” he said, smiling softly, more than a hint of relief in his expression. THE END This is a strange place to end a tale, but it is the end of the action in terms of all three characters together. It is likely that there is more in store, especially since I'd hate to let typographically-challenging names go to waste with just ONE story, and besides, I'm interested in Ükür, and I'm curious to see what that mad, mad country has to offer. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, especially since this is one of the less reader-friendly pieces of fiction to grace the pages of the Writer's Gallery; hopefully the challenge and the reward are equal.