Liot rose from ascetic fountain, pondering his own declaration and walked past desolate town and stunted wood, up the dark fang of the mountain. Past and pain grew with each precarious step. Surging heat and echoes of dream. Laughter of the Halloween ball. Malzberg's cackle. The tittering of Freja and Tess. A cascade of hideous mirth, blending into a single disorienting howl. Liot stopped halfway along the rise, steadied himself against an outcropping of weathered stone and looked with muzzy sight through a lacuna in a curtain of bark and vine. Far below the overgrown precipice, the town smoldered in its hard won pit, its dim and forlorn beacons, fireflies amid a cruel and primitive acropolis. No cries of man or beast disturbed the purple black stillness of the vista. Earth, desolate as his heart. Sky, turbulent as his mind. Solace in the glinting bulwark beyond the clouds, where storms of dust to dwarf the world birthed bone and blood by radiant calamity. Infinitesimal to the tempest within.
His toilsome climb terminated at the chained black gates of the old factory, rising obdurant over the phantasmal field. A partition too high and shear to climb. For several minutes he followed the imposing barricade westward, head to chest, countenance vacant as mind dense. Blinking against the ringing in his skull and bracing himself against nearby trees. Cetacean clouds fled and blue moonshine drenched the ochre sprawl and the factory that dominated it, and rendered unto all the appearance of a giant aquarium. Under the marine glow and the caressing whispers of the wind, Liot felt he might float as one submerged. It seemed he had been sequestered in some liminal gulf, and drifted ever further from the world. Then came a voice and with it a crushing gravity. “I am become a shore for flotsam of sin's darkling stream.” The words and voice that spoke them were so strange that for a moment Liot believed his injury had induced hallucination. With hammering heart, he spun to the source of oration. Across a watery scimitar of moonbeam that seperated forest from fence, the figure of a man garbed in rally cap, shooting gloves and antiquated skyliner was just visible behind the iron bars. The stranger stood in absolute stillness, crowned by macabre halo of lunar disk. Behind the apparition, the still arched arms of earthmovers surged to candescent sky like vulturine wings. Liot slipped from the precipice of consciousness to the viscous depths of his soul.
Throbbing darkness gave to footfalls and pulsations of a distant machine. A rhythmic clatter that sounded as the marching of a dauntless clockwork horde. Liot opened his eyes. He lay on a cot in the corner of an austere windowless room, blue lit by frosted glass lanterns. At the far end of the space was a rectangular metal desk and behind it, the silhouette of the man who had stood the gate. The shadowed man rolled small eggs, as those of a songbird, upon the tabletop and peeled off the shells and set the rinds in a clay bowl filled with lazuline plume.
“What happened?”
“You fell. I carried you.”
“My injury was worse than I suspected.”
“The wound was deep.”
Liot felt fresh bandages fixed about his head, sat up and peered across the room at his shrouded rescuer. The crunch of eggshell ceased and the palled figure raised one of the bare eggs and swallowed it whole.
“You the night watchman?”
“And owner. Harmon Kessel.”
“Owner? Ms. Granger said you gave her a book.”
Liot could feel the man's gaze upon him as he spoke from tenebrous throne. “Did you like it?”
“For a while now I've been feeling watched. I thought I'd become paranoid. That my friend's superstitiousness rubbed off on me. But that book was like a biography. You've been following me.”
“Observing.”
“Stalking.”
“When you watch patrons at the cafe, are you stalking them?” Liot frowned. “A novelist is an archivist of sin. He must study his subject to write with authority.”
“And what sins have you observed?”
“Those expected. The typical declivities of the isolated differ from those of frenzied spaces. There is greater subtlety. A more thorough going deceit. And deceit is the lowest of sins, for it is the shade which covers all others.”
Liot stood from the bed, muscles weak, and walked to the table. He looked down at the clay bowl and the remnants of what might have been a bird inside it. Kessel held one of the peeled eggs to his guest and reluctantly, Liot took the offering and bit into it. Morsel's rubbery sweetness revivified his aching body. Kessel rose and exited the room through the iron door behind him. Liot followed the man to a mezzanine that overlooked the factory floor where printing presses dove from steel casing like huge skeletal fish. The air was thick with ink, paper, metal and cadent brattle. Kessel set his hands upon the railing and gazed upon his work.
“Once I set it in motion, no hand is required.”
“Impressive. But why set up shop here?”
“I like buildings like this. This structure outlasted its purpose. Abandoned but unbroken. Invaded yet unsettled. For hundreds of years due hundreds of lives. Wastful to let it molder. No one would have built in its stead and the wilds would reclaim what little our forebearers had carved.”
“Strange you say that. I was thinking the same thing but about that old pavilion. But I doubt you came out to a nowhere town like this just because of your architectural enthusiasm.”
The man did not answer and remained silent a long moment before speaking again. “You are writing a book.”
“Who told you that, Malzberg?”
“You have no publisher.”
“You offering?”
“I am.”
For a long moment Liot studied his host. Kessel did not fit the mold of a businessman. His manner was so alien he seemed from some time bygone or yet to come. A long deep scar ran the right side of his albite jaw, a chronicle of past horror. Despite Liot's trepidation at his eccentric savior, the offer was too fine to dismiss.
“I'm open to the idea.”
Liot could not see the man's face but felt his smile.