| Tick-Tock Transmogrification |
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| By: |
| Published on 29 Jul 2023 20:17 |
My grandfather is an impossibly old man. But in his entire life of almost 110 years, I don't think he's ever been farther than 20 miles from his hometown. He grew up where we all grew up: a tiny village in Baja, on the coast. The parish church calls him Father Dreadnaught, because he's as sturdy as a battleship even after all his years. But you wouldn't know it from looking at him; skinny and withered, you'd think he's already dying. Despite that, he hasn't gotten sick in thirty years; hell, I don't think he's aged a day since eighty. He's almost supernaturally healthy, in that way — after all, it's all but biblical canon around my town that old Father Dreadnaught's age is a miracle from God.
Lately, though, he's self-isolated. I don't think he even hangs out with the other priests much nowadays. He barely goes to church anymore, just sits on the beach fishing. Sits there staring into the gulf for hours, like he's forgotten something there but can't remember what. I've gone with him; it's surreal. Sometimes I worry.
On my sixteenth birthday, my grandfather gave me a box. It was a gearbox within a box, full of screws and scraps, nuts and bolts and gears. Initially, I genuinely convince myself he thinks he's from the 1800s, because apparently this is what he thought I meant when I expressed an interest in technology.
Then he explains, and I take back that thought. He says he fished it up in the Gulf of California — somehow. That it must mean something, must be some sign from God, because he'd been fishing in the same spot a million times before and never found anything of the sort. He knows I'm not quite that religious. Says to take it as more symbolic than anything. A memento of him, if nothing else.
He says something like cuidarlo de cerca, I think — "look after it closely". He hands the box to me; the case is wooden with ornate bronze inlays, rusted from what looks like centuries of water damage. The thing weighs nearly a thousand pounds.
I'm visiting my childhood home because my parents are finally moving out. My former room has a uniquely dilapidated smell, every surface coated in a layer of dust. It's surely almost two inches thick, the room is tiny, and the two combined make the air almost unbreathable. I try to open a window, breaking the perfect stagnancy of the room maintained for who knows how many years and dispelling only more dust into my face.
I shield my eyes from the torrent of dust coming from the opened window, turn my head, and in doing so look to the front corner of the room, left of the door. There, I see the box. I remember the box, and I remember that I had forgotten about the box.
⠀
Beginning to clean off the shelves, I remove a small, robotic figurine — a favorite childhood toy, I think it was called "Lazinator 6000" or something of that genre — from the shelf to brush off the dust beneath. Without thinking, I place the toy on the top surface of the box.
In retrospect, I don't think it liked that.
I keep cleaning the shelves, and after around five minutes I hear a faint humming sound from the box and look back. The toy is jittering around, shaking and shaking, and I hear it getting faster and faster, but I hadn't wound it up or anything. It falls over and off the top of the box. Must be broken or something.
But then, I see the box open on it own. The lid almost comes flying off. On the inside, the little gears and tubes and metal joints stuck to the box's walls in stringy patterns like growing mold, as if they were trying to climb out of their confines. And they're all moving, if ever so slightly. Whatever sort of machine was in this box, whatever random agglomeration of turn-of-the-century mechanical spaghetti formed itself inside, it had deliberately climbed up the walls and opened the lid.
Next, the robot figurine starts moving on its own again. It climbs almost three feet up the flat, vertical surface of the box and pulls itself up and drops into the inside. It climbed, with nothing to grip with and nothing to hold onto, autonomously — and reached the summit in four seconds flat. I'm frozen.
And then it starts building. The robot picks itself up on the inside of the box while the gears and tubes and wires all attach themselves to it. They cling onto it and build onto eachother, giving rise to plated armor and six unruly appendages and a single wrought-iron crown. And before I know it, the once tiny robot action figure has consumed damn near everything in the box and it stands up and it's nearly my height.
The automaton looks around the room like it's adjusting to its surroundings, and then it stares at me with its piercing lack of eyes and makes a terrible metallic screeching.
I run downstairs and out the back door. The Thing breaks a window and drops down into the yard to follow me.
I'm running as fast as I can out the driveway, but then I see it turn and I realize it's not interested in me. It's heading for the garage; and it's already there. Breaks down the steel door and consumes it too — I hear the crunching and clanging of metal as it incorporates the door into its monstrous form and grows a seventh tentacle-arm with the additional material. I stop running and freeze, God knows why.
The Thing steps in and eats the entire goddamn garage and everything inside it in a matter of a minute or two. Gardening utensils break as rakes become claws and shovel heads are integrated as armor. An array of worn hedge clippers become gnashing teeth at the back of a macerating maw. Two lawnmowers buckle into the form of a stainless chariot and meld to the Thing's left shoulder. Metal fencing unfurls into a pair of misshapen, distended wings. A grilling stove is reshaped into a flamethrower. Rubber from spare tires wraps itself around joints and appendages. A power saw becomes the stinger on a scorpion's tail and revs up. The car's engine because a great and terrible Heart.
I'm in awe of its titanic form. It's monstrous, but I'm still not running. Jesus Christ, why wasn't I running?
It's a colossus now, a juggernaut. A behemoth dreadnaught-angel. Nearly thirty feet tall and it looks like it weighs a hundred tons. It stands on a tripod like a mechanical spider revving and smoking; straining to move. Its torso, built around the ungodly engine, now has fourteen swollen arms and claws and tentacles of varying lengths, all confusedly grasping at the sky. Still no eyes. Four ragged wings; three stinging tails; two shoulder-mounted sets of godslayer's artillery. And one wrought-iron crown.
Then, it turns away from me, lumbers out of the driveway, and marches east, toward the water. I watch it for a time.
I think it was going back into the Gulf.
