You dream of eternal sleep, Amos Marshall.
This work contains CWs for: mentions of suicidal ideation, child abuse, and cannibalism.
Dead End City by xexnoncores and
HaydenSaintPascal
⚠️ content warning ↑
January 19th , 2000
Arise.
Amos Marshall sighs as he looks out a train window with a heavy device on his lap. It is slick, black, and built like a stereo, except that a pair of chrome antenna pulse on and off with carnelian light every thirty seconds exactly. It was explained to him to be a dimensional analysis trawler, able to approximate the size and density of a universe’s magic potential, along with its precious material capacities, entropic decay rate, and energy surpluses.
He cannot care as to why all of that may be important right now. Percival Darke’s yesterday ramblings drone aimlessly in his ears as he watches a slurry of warm-hued lights grease by, boiling his sense of urgency into mush.
His window is smudged to hell.
Could be worse, honestly. He is only here because this seemed like the perfect vacation, the perfect way to get away from his wife, his son, and his rat-race life. His endless spiral of adventures, stories, pens, closings, documents and signatures, all threatening to drown him at a moment’s notice, despite the fact they never seem to follow up on their promises.
They never follow up on their promises because he is always a single glass of champagne away from a mansion that is utterly and sleekly quiet. It is there when he is able to hear his own thoughts again, able to finally rise above the status of static plaguing his ears. He is a person in silence, a shell to be filled, and what comes after that he does not know nor wish to know, ever.
He is the perfect person for a weeklong train ride.
The night you fled it was raining.
The lights, a sickness, your sickness, crept across the front hedges. It spiraled in black rings of regret, shame and numbness as you remembered your wife called you, and you didn’t answer the phone. You forgot to. You forget a lot more things than you admit to anyone.
The station is cold. This is the only one your kind managed to find—the Foundation is protective of these entrances for the same reasons they always are. Security, protection, containment—secrecy, prognosis, confinement.
How annoying. But it can’t be helped.
A door opens and you step in. There is no one waiting for you.
Lampeter is new to Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. It was exciting those first few meetings, finding out a network of universes were so connected to each other. That the technology to harness such power also laid so dormant as well, untouched by even something as formidable as the Foundation—it was as if it was waiting for an eager master. If they could rebuild it, they could take over everything. There would be no end in sight to the money, no end in sight to the unstoppable subjugation march they’d be given the privilege to perform, no end in sight to the power they’d accrue from the gorging on a web of literally infinite possibilities more endless than any of their neurons could dare to put together.
A proper empire, at last. Percival was shaking from the notion when he first reviewed the documents, when the first specs came in. The Foundation was clever, but cash was even cleverer at finding ways to sneak measurements into eager hands.
Amos had never seen him pace so much. His fangs chattered like breaking porcelain, his voice quivering like a serpent ready to strike. The smile on his face was palpable; it grabbed every person in the office who saw it and smashed them against the wall in disbelief, for Percival’s enthusiasm was often as vicious as it was infectious.
It was not a victory that would endure.
As you wait for the train, you feel an expanse beneath your feet growing.
You are alone in London again, eighteen and cold. Your mother brought you to a dinner, a dinner you didn’t want to go to, and you walked out of it a ghost of a person, of something less than human, a thing which wanted to cry onto gray sidewalks and in valet cars with faceless drivers who will not recognize that you have been lashed in the heart.
She is kind, she is good. Your mother is a good mother, she only wants what is best for her son. You have no choice except to inherit your birthright, no choice except to fall into the fold of working for the company which gave your family their name, their status, their marching-gold reputation as the Marshall family.
You needed to understand that cities are not merely existences, but things born for you to control. London must not be just your home, but your castle too. Take the urban-housed financials and shove them into your heart like a bleeding spire, inject your veins with the emotional labor that you can force upon others for the sake of your commerce dreams you’re so deathly afraid of.
You’re afraid because something is weighing you down. It has always weighed you down, made you reach for less than you knew yourself capable of. Until that too faded, and you stopped being able to envision yourself as “making it”.
She was just trying to make you succeed. The blood and viscera was wholly necessary—you needed to be put in your place and reminded of what you could do.
You saw Percival Darke eat a man alive in front of you because you needed to stop being a lazy son.
Why Percival dropped the grander Lampeter plans was still uncertain. When pressed, he said the network was unstable. Too fragile to be put back together. Something was wrong, and eating away at the edges of the tracks predicted to exist.
Neither Amos nor Ruprecht, his Carter in crime, believed this for a second, but Percival’s hands were stained with silver for a week after the news hit. Neon silver, pulsating like jungles of mirror rebar, impossible and aping function but still somehow existent, crawled across his limbs. It clawed into his veins and leaked from his palms whenever he tried casting spells, as if something was strangling not the magic, but the in-betweens of magic as it was known. The bonds between belief and reality, causality and despair, creation and destruction, capitalism and the unknown.
It was as if for a moment, you could see his essence unraveling, the enigmatic powers that threaded the dominance of Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. together.
Amos sighs. He doesn’t want to think. He doesn’t want to reminisce. This is the first time in years he’s been immersed in this kind of nothingness, and he needs to rot in it completely. This is likely going to be the last time he will ever be given such a luscious opportunity, and that’s a shame, because he’s twenty-nine now. What a long life he has ahead of him to do absolutely everything.
He leans his head against the window as his vision blurs and the train’s rumbling slowly, slowly, slowly lulls him to sleep.
But before he does, he swears he sees something at the edge of his eyes in the lights passing by.
Metal has always been your best friend. Your childhood was spent learning the formulas of how fae demanded gold, your adolescence about how silver drove the economy of the Three Portlands. On your thirteenth birthday you received a platinum foxhound statue from your father that followed you everywhere like a flesh-and-blood one could. Your little brother was jealous, so you let him have it because he threw rocks at you when your parents weren’t looking. You didn’t want to do it, but he said he’d kill you if you didn’t.
He’s not given it back since.
Since that day, there’s been a pit in your heart the size of the English countryside, growing wider and wider every day, faster and faster as you realize how the years are slipping by. It was always there, but he uncovered it, and you discovered it when you went up to your room to cry all by yourself. It was there you waited for your parents to come home and make everything right, put everyone back in line again, make your four siblings respect your place once more. It was there you were alone in a noisy house that cost more than most cities, while eight sets of hands ran the servants ragged downstairs and you discovered the taste of what wanting to die felt like for the first time.
Since then, you’ve sworn it’s gotten better. You swore it got better when you met your fiancé and felt something for the first time in your life, a beautiful woman willing to put up with you. Who saw through all of the nothingness you dressed up in silk suits, manifesting something real in your chest that you convinced yourself would stay after the honeymoon ended.
She was wrong.
You were wrong. For being a fool, most of all. For pretending your existence didn’t continuously feel squeezed through steel wool.
What was going on? Why could you never wake up rested? Why did the happy moments always feel like a spiteful dream against the rest of the buzzing in your skull?
Had something been broken inside of you? Was it by accident you were the eldest, instead of someone else? Did everyone know this, could they tell you were made wrong?
It’s a dreadful secret to keep that you’ve spent most of your waking life wanting to go back to sleep.
Putting someone to rest is considered the simplest of all spells.
Having them stay there and wake up without complications—now that was where the problems lied.
Sleeping spells were odd little things. Most didn’t maintain bodily functions very well, but Percival’s were proficient enough to freeze everything in breathing place. That made them superb for withstanding long travels, and Amos had always wanted to try it, but there was embarrassment in asking for that kind of thing on purpose when he took a vacation. There was an embarrassment in admitting that a vacation to Venice felt like more trouble than it was worth, because the act of remembering you had a suitcase made everything heavy with thoughts. With having to remember things, having to remember where to go, when to eat, what to eat even.
All Amos was told to do was to get on this train, turn the device on, and sleep to see both to the end of the line. This universe was small, Percival said, finite in both entropy and its horizons, and thus its connection to the other Lampeter networks had fallen into disrepair a long time ago. That meant he’d booked a round trip, and that there was no one to manage the halfway point. This was going to be easy to measure, easy to analyze, easy to painlessly and effortlessly extract from once the computers crunched the numbers. The goal here was to see if this universe’s ambient properties could produce energy in profitable amounts.
Just get on the train, and go to sleep.
Amos doesn’t know when he falls asleep. The spell kicks in on Percival’s orders, not his.
But he knows when he is asleep, because he is totally limp, and his mind cannot stop wandering.
Everything pulsates in waves of stars, lights, stains and walls. His dreams are utterly empty, exhausted even as the hours wax by and a sprawling, duplicative metropolis slides past his windows. He can’t see anything, can’t see anyone, can’t see any body, especially his own, which he usually saw in his dreams. His more lucid ones often involved him as a disembodied pairs of hands moving along some kind of stage while a crowd whispered in the background.
The only thing keeping his mortal body safe now from the urban decay of this universe was some iron tracks and a train car.
At least, until the spell begins wearing off.
Hello, Mr. Marshall. Good to see you after so much fanfare.
I quite missed you. I haven’t felt a soul like yours in my arms for a long, long time.
Our phones are calling for you. They speak welded tongues through pylon tubes and nano-fiber cables carrying the broadcast of every sitcom you watched as a child.
Your meal is here. The afternoon has become morning, the day congealed into night.
All of the pieces are here. Please, delight yourself in them.
I yearn for your flesh to become my flesh. For you to give us meaning once more.
Don’t you want to lead a happy life?
You are so lonely.
Please, stay a while. You are standing in the place which was once our home.
Our veins are copper, our flesh is concrete. You must join us in this dance before it’s too late.
I am the City once more, and I wish I could bring you peace.
January 26th , 2000
The final hours of Amos’s trip are the first time in years he thinks he’s had nightmares.
Of what, he cannot properly actualize. They’re shadows of shadows, outlines of conceptual silhouettes.
He is embraced by asphalt and a starving sky, devoid of stars. The city has been robbed it of its light, so now only the blueprints of streets remain, and they remain to revile, to devour, to defile and re-flower.
Petals of stone and wires rend him apart while his body is dangled above an open flame. It burns like a wound, melting into itself like coded recursion, and he can do nothing but watch. He can nothing except watch his skeleton limply stretch along bizarre grids, his innards freed of their blood like a boy is freed of his shirt at the beach.
It repeats, over and and over again, the same grid, the same helplessness, the same pain, the same tears that prick the zeniths above and below and flood the images in front of him until he is no more. A pedestrian waltz, built on neophytic sensibilities of the skin-bound coil, blooms as a crosswalk is lit into pieces. He is no more as everything pours into a greater expanse, as everything collapses into subset fractals of materials that break and shatter under the weight of xenon pressure, under the weight of aimlessness more carnal than pure emptiness, more bestial than the breadth of every universe’s sapience.
When he jerks awake, he nearly bites his own tongue off in surprise. A smothering of smoggy red light chokes his eyes, poured from cars crashing invisibly into the train as it cuts across a congested highway.
Somehow, everything is moving at a breakneck speed despite this, but it does nothing to ease his nausea. It does nothing to ease his doubling vision, his eyes that feel want to drop out of his face.
It does nothing to ease the question of where that nightmare came from, if it was from Lampeter or something greater rumbling within it.
But soon, that question gives way to something smaller as the fright wears off and mundanity sets in.
Is that it? he thinks to himself. That’s all?
He feels like he’s been hit by a bus with no hope of recovery. When he sits up, he rubs his temples, stomach empty and mouth dry. The magic is supposed to wear off in stages, with the last one being the sustaining of the body as its biological functions adjust to realize what it was missing for the past seven days.
Amos dryly wonders to himself if this is what Foundation expeditions of Lampeter were like. Some unlucky lackey sent out into the network with food and water, reliant on some supernatural force to keep them intact while they pretended to understand what they were undergoing. What they were going under, even, because there were supposed to be tunnels in this universe—was that the case everywhere? Was that going to interfere with the measurements at all?
He didn’t know the technology he was supposed to be taking care of. Why should he? That was for the technicians, the engineers. Not people as dignified as him, never.
In thinking that, he realizes how stupid he must have looked to everyone taking on this task.
Almost seven full days of sleep, and he doesn’t feel any more whole than when he started.
God, he was so lucky had had Ruprecht to take on all those appointments that needed to be rearranged…
Was he being a lazy son again? Was he being a stupid child too scared to try again, wanting to run away from his responsibilities?
He never told his father, but he hated when he was whipped for that. He hated it when his mother watched especially, because she espoused such discipline as being necessary, and Amos thought mothers were supposed to protect their children from harm. Belts hurt.
Why would they feel the need to lay hands upon their precious heir?
Why did I have to bear the crown? he thinks in the silence. The quiet echoes and screams like a shot dog.
He knows his mother will be waiting for him when he returns to the station. She’ll be standing with her hands clasped against her waist, against that gray little petticoat she likes to wear to the office that he thinks is tacky and much too old-fashioned.
She’ll be standing besides Percival, watching with piercing green eyes as he gets off and hands to them the fruits of his unthinking labor, because she wasn’t told how he’d survive the trip. Only that he was taking it, and was coming back with data to help the company.
He was coming back a good son, allegedly.
If he’s in the mood, maybe he’ll joke that he finally napped off all the static in his head.
