Furnace Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Livia Llewellyn’s Furnace

  Furnace - Half Title

  Other books by Livia Llewellyn

  Furnace - Full Title

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  Panopticon

  Stabilimentum

  Wasp & Snake

  Cinereous

  Yours is The Right to Begin

  Lord of the Hunt

  In the Court of King Cupressaceae, 1982

  It Feels Better Biting Down

  Allochthon

  Furnace

  The Mysteries

  The Last, Clean, Bright Summer

  and Love shall have no Dominion

  The Unattainable

  Publication History

  Acknowledgments

  Titles Available from Word Horde

  About the Author

  Praise for Livia Llewellyn’s Furnace

  “Livia Llewellyn arrived as a full-fledged star years ago. Furnace proves it once again. Llewellyn’s mastery of psychosexual horror puts her in the conversation with Ballard and Tiptree, Jr. when it comes to important literature.”

  —Laird Barron, author of

  The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “Livia Llewellyn is one of the finest writers of dark fiction working today. Her lush prose draws you into worlds both strangely familiar and shockingly surreal. The stories, a dark playground of despair, nightmares, and desire, set their hooks into you and refuse to let go, long after you’ve finished reading. Furnace is astounding.”

  —Damien Angelica Walters, author of

  Sing Me Your Scars and Paper Tigers

  “Short horror fiction is in a golden age, and Livia Llewellyn’s short stories help make it so: they’re fearless, ferocious, and compelling.”

  —Ellen Datlow, editor of

  The Best Horror of the Year

  “The pitch-perfect work of Livia Llewellyn is visionary and dangerous; it’s both extreme and unforgettably lyrical. Every accolade you’ve heard about this mesmerizing master of horror and her work is true. Furnace is a literary event of the highest order!”

  —Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., editor of

  The Grimscribe’s Puppets

  “Stark emotions and vivid sexuality coalesce in Livia Llewellyn’s fiction. Her stories manage to be raw in their intensity yet elegant in their delivery, making Livia one of the most exciting writers to emerge in recent memory.”

  —Justin Steele, The Arkham Digest

  Furnace

  Other books by Livia Llewellyn

  Collections:

  Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors

  Furnace

  Livia Llewellyn

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  Furnace © 2016 by Livia Llewellyn

  This edition of Furnace © 2016 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2013 by Mike Garlington

  Cover design by Scott R. Jones

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  An extension of this copyright page appears on page 192

  First Edition

  Print ISBN: 978-1-939905-17-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-939905-18-5

  A Word Horde Book

  www.wordhorde.com

  To Brenda and Maeve Llewellyn Ihssen,

  and all the other girls of the world.

  Panopticon

  Is this you?

  There is a place deep in the warehouse district, far outside the civilized edges of the city called Obsidia, where the population bleeds off into cul-de-sacs and dead-end roads, where only abandoned brick buildings and crumbling smokestacks remain. You have heard of this place solely by learning to phrase the questions as though they were snowflakes falling from the sky—questions outside your control, beyond your care or concern. Questions like that are answered in the passage of time, eventually: by cracked nails pressed against yellowing maps of long-dead subway lines, words parsed from veins of blood welling from a blossoming wound, grunts behind locked bathroom doors that echo out numbers, names. Answers, in the smoky plume of the dragon, the sour tang of the drug. And over the years and decades, you bead the collected answers onto the needle-fine wire of your need: gradually a map appears, a date, a time. You will not hold this information a second time: the invitation, like a comet, will pass from your view into the black of night, never to be seen in your lifetime again.

  It never occurs to you not to go. In a way, you’re already there.

  Is this you?

  ***

  Wheels screech against tracks, and sparks bounce off the pitted concrete walls. The train shudders as it plunges underground, and your cotton skirt slides with you over the curve of the orange plastic seat. No one else is in the car, so you slip onto the raised bump between seats, letting the V of the ridge rest firm between your legs. It calms you. Spaces are meant to be filled.

  Opposite, posters fill the space between the windows and doors. Women and men with once-glowing cheeks and plump lips hold bottles of effervescing liquids, or lounge on sleek leather Biedermeiers, gazing through curtainless windows into Obsidia’s glorious silver horizon, into a future that will never be. Their faces are faded, melted and mottled from mold, humidity, and relentless plumes of metallic smoke. The engines shudder again, and fluorescent panels buzz and wink out, one by one. At each far end, windows glow, illuminating the cars before and behind. You stand up and walk forward, your hand gripping the filthy poles and bars to keep your balance. The door to the next carriage is locked: you peer through the grimy windows and across a small rattling platform into sulphur-tinged light, your breath fogging the glass.

  They can’t see you, the couple in the car. You stand in black, swaying in time with the pitch of the train, watching the woman’s head jerk back and forth. A man stands before her, hands clasping the looped bars overhead. His pants hang below the curve of his naked ass, and he thrusts his pelvis forward and back, in time to the rocking of the car. You move to the window’s side, and catch flashes of long, wet cock, thrusting to and fro in the woman’s mouth and hands. The flesh between your legs swells and thickens in the heat, and your fingers twitch: but you turn away, walk back into the empty dark of the car, whispering a number, a name. The train seems to sigh in return, murmuring hot phrases of love. So easy, to lean against the trembling doors. The upturned handles, so very hard, so warm…

  Not yet, you whisper in the dark to the racing machines, to your racing heart.

  Not yet.

  Is this you?

  ***

  The afternoon is the caramel shade of fossilized saurian bone, hardened and inured to the passage of time. You walk down streets razed by wind and dust into thin crusts of cobblestone and tar, the destination always on the tip of your tongue like the taste of anthracite coal. Signs have long decayed into dust in this part of the city, and only ravens and dogs know the lay of the land. But the jewels of information gathered over the years are a crown, and for this single day you are Queen. And the kingdom waits. Left of the summit breaker, her broken windows winking like sequins on a dead bride’s gown. Right of the seven brick stacks, blackened with centuries and cloaked in webs of dead vines. Across the iron bridge and over the Mannequin Sea, its million sloe-eyed beauties jumbled below like broken teeth against a giant’s fist. Painted, flaking pupils stare up at you, a stagnant sea of watchers: you look away, and run. Through the endless warehouse rows, low grey bunkers like scabs on necrotized flesh, long emptied of goods and dreams. You squat once, by the side of the road, and watch the strand of urine slither into the street, seep into the cracks of the worn stones. In seconds, all traces of you disappear. For one fearful moment, you see yourself as though through distant glass: cunt pressed onto
the smooth rock, cobblestones melting and pressing up through the wet folds, the stony cock of the world fucking and drilling into your soul. You rise, scurry away. The cracked stones beneath your feet shift and moan.

  At the end of the warehouses, a single building stands, framed by two coke quenching towers. A blast furnace winds its way into the center of the brick, pipes as wide as buildings split into massive V’s that cast shadows into the sunless sky. Beyond the building, Obsidia disappears, as if the earth itself ends. This is it. There is nothing beyond.

  Cracked engines line the walkway leading up broken steps to a single open door, leading into a void. You check your watch. You know the time to enter. You sit on an engine, in the shadow of the furnace, and wait.

  Is this you?

  ***

  At the right hour, at the right minute, when the seconds have burned away like beads of sweat on a lover’s shivering back, you rise and walk with stiff legs up the steps. The air is still and thick, with motes of dust hanging about you like drifting spiders. The light ends in a clean line as you pass through the door, into a hallway that pierces through the wide factory space. If anyone else is here, you cannot hear them, cannot smell them. The dirt beneath your feet lays undisturbed. Those who dwell here did not come this way. Behind you, the door closes, the day disappears. Somewhere in the building, machines spring into life, their rhythmic thunder reverberating through the walls.

  Doors line the hall, but you do not touch the knobs as you pass by, though they look warm and inviting. None of those doors lead to what you were instructed to seek, what you asked to see. You walk carefully, one hand raised to brush stray webs from your face: as an afterthought, you look up. If there is a ceiling, it is not visible to your small human eyes. The walls rise straight up, as if into stars. You feel naked, as if something has peeled the edges of space away, inserting its gaze through dark matter and time all the way into the sticky center of your bones.

  In the gloom, a pale sulphur glow of light flares into life: a beacon, beckoning. You approach, your fingers brushing over the mound beneath your skirt. The glass is curved at the edges, like the windows of the subway car, and rimmed by strips of hard rubber. Like aquarium glass: thick enough to keep the two worlds, the wet and the dry, from commingling. Palms flat against the glass, you lean forward, until the tip of your nose hits the surface, and your breath flows from your lips back into your mouth. Your body settles against the door—not a door, really, but an end, a terminus—and finds the ridged curves of a handle, smooth and warm, perfectly positioned by your accommodating, hidden hosts. Vibrations from the unseen machines whoosh throughout the building like blood through veins, into the quivering brass. The fabric of your skirt grows damp. The light in the other room intensifies. And now you see.

  Is this you?

  ***

  In the next room, a crowd of people clumps together in the confined tube of a shuddering subway car, their faces blank, like melting ice. A woman sits on the plastic bench, one leg hitched up and resting on the orange curves of the preformed seat to her side. Her dark hair floats like a mourning veil in wind, obscuring her face. On the floor before her, a man crouches, his tongue and lips moving over the red folds of her cunt, barely visible through the long, unruly V of black hair that envelops it. The metal and glass before you is as impenetrable as a blast door, yet you swear you can hear the sound of her breath bleeding into your ears, hear the subtle wet sounds of the man’s tongue lapping, drawing the liquid out of her. The brass handle shudders and slips against your raw skin: your skirt is bunched around your waist, but you don’t remember raising it. You push your groin forward, gasping as the woman thrusts against the man, straining her body against his large hands. Claw-like nails bite into her thighs, and where they strafe her skin, rubies ooze from the flesh, clattering onto the floor. The standing, swaying men and women ignore them: they have no ears, no eyes, no mouths. Only you see the man’s hideous, lupine face, his darting tongue; only you smell the sea salt folds of the woman’s flesh; only you hear the leviathan sounds well from her throat as she comes, the noise as deep and dark as the engines below. Only you asked to see.

  The man rises, almost unfolding his bulky mass into the small space, pushing against the other commuters to make room. They clatter against each other, and you start in shock as a pale arm drops from a sleeve and floats to the ceiling. Another arm drops, followed by a head. One by one, the people crumble into brittle, bloodless pieces. Were they ever alive? Snowflakes of flesh and bone drift and knock about in the hot, noisy air. The car flooded and they are underwater, you realize, and the crowd nothing more than mannequins. But, then, how do the man and woman breathe?

  The man brushes the bodies away like fire pushing through grass. He is all impassive muscles and phallus, every part of him forged. Diamonds and pearls ooze from the tip of his purple cock in liquid strands, spilling down the woman’s breasts. She reaches up to brush them away, but the man grabs her thighs and lifts her torso high into the air, impaling her onto his cock as easily as if she were a summer cotton dress, to be bent and torn at will. Between your legs, the metal shifts and pierces upward, as if into your heart: the pain is so great, you cannot speak. Your nails claw at the glass, and small squeaks fill the burning air. Within the car, the woman slides onto the man, and sapphires bleed from her eyes; she opens her mouth, and more rubies stream out, emeralds and opals and stars. The man is a piercing sword, a burning blade, a broken train, and finally, finally, her head whips back and all that black hair floats away as she sees you, you see you and you see her and you both scream don’t, stop, don’t stop. Not yet.

  You want to see it all.

  Before you, the woman splits apart. Her limbs join the others, drifting in the ruby sea. They were not mannequins, after all. The man pushes her torso off his cock, thick pearls of semen dribbling in strands from the purple tip. They brush across your face, droplets catching in the curves of your mouth. The taste is flame and oil, and you feel your skin peel away. You never left the subway train. You never wandered an abandoned kingdom of wonders, you never entered a hall of a million doors. You never received answers to all the questions you asked. You do not watch. You were never the audience. You were the space, the void. In the distance, sighs and faint applause; and the unseen engine winds down, each thunderous pound like a bead falling off a strand, with more and more space in between. Until, there is no sound at all, not even the crackle of fire or drip of blood. There is only you as the metal thrusts up past the walls of your cunt and splits you apart, you looking up past the endless walls past the brief flash pleasure into all-consuming frenzy of pain, you floating through a ruby ocean of your own making into a space where all the stars look down on you, and all the stars are eyes.

  And yet. And yet.

  You still see.

  Were you wrong? Is there more?

  Is this really you?

  ***

  Overhead, the slender pedestrian bridge stands fast against a saurian colored sky. Your painted, flaking pupils see it in slices, only through the rigid fingers of a hand—whose hand it is, you cannot tell. There are hands all around you, feet and torsos and heads, but you do not feel them as much as sense that they are there, jumbled about like autumn leaves. Like snow. You cannot feel any part of your body, or if it even remains a part of you. Maybe in some near acre or field, your hand obscures the view of other eyes, another face. Occasional storms smear black clouds overhead, and sometimes night falls, though it does not fall often in this forgotten district of Obsidia. Yet, the view never changes. Always and only, you see the bridge, the fingers, the bird-free sky.

  Although, once in a very long while, you spy movement on the bridge, the hesitant gait of a traveler, a seeker crossing the iron trestles. They are heading toward a place they’ve only heard of in half-spoken words, coils of smoke and spatterings of blood. You see the traveler, fix your unmoving eye upon their familiar, yearning face, and the slender line of metal will become a hallway, a bl
ack vein that bleeds out into a trillion desires, then endless horror, then beyond. You want to cry out, I know this woman, I know this journey, this place. Turn back. Don’t go. But your fading lips cannot part, and your torso is a hollow void. All you can do is watch with lidless eyes, watch each traveler arrive at the destination of their own making, and wait for the day when the sun runs down and the stars burn out in the sky, when there is nothing more to see, because there is nothing more. And then you will have what you asked for, so very long ago.

  You will have seen it all.

  This is you.

  Stabilimentum

  Thalia woke up with a small moan, a gasp of air escaping her mouth as her eyes opened to dim morning light. She stood before the open door of her bathroom, the small room as black and empty as an elevator shaft. Did she sleepwalk? No, that couldn’t be it. She was only still so tired that she didn’t remember getting out of bed. Just like the day before, and the day before—three months of this now, starting the day she moved in. Leaning against the door frame, Thalia flipped on the bathroom light, peering up at the ceiling as she waited for the vertigo to dissipate. Thirty floors above her, a small city pressing down. She felt it the most in this tight, windowless space, the gurgles of water and pinging of pipes, the crush of so many people above and around her, doing the exact same thing. She had wanted to live high above everyone, far away from the crowds. It never occurred to her that with so many tenants pressed together, she would never feel truly alone, never feel far away from anything at all. Everyone bleeding into each other’s space—city living, get used to it. Thalia pushed the unease away, and reached for the toothpaste.

  She only noticed it later, as she was getting ready to leave for work—looking up as she struggled with her hair, she spied a large brown spider trembling on invisible strands, high up in the far corner over her bathtub. Thalia stared, momentarily slack-jawed, as the creature seemingly floated through thick circles and curves of a white spiral pattern within the invisible rest of the web, its pace furious in tempo and intent. That was going to be one big damn web when it was finished. Which would be never.