The Book of Cthulhu 2

Take Your Daughters to Work

Livia Llewellyn

Sadie smoothes down her long brown hair, then fastens a choker around her neck. She stares at herself in the mirror. Today her father is taking her to work, and she must be perfect. There will be other girls there, other daughters brought to work by their fathers. But her father runs the company, and so she sets the example. All who look on her must see perfection—otherwise, her father will be shamed.

From the darkened master bedroom, weeping rises. Sadie adjusts the heavy gold at her throat—her mother gave it to her this morning. It’s been in the family at least a thousand years. She leans close to the mirror, and smiles.

“Don’t worry,” she tells her quicksilver self. “You’ll do just fine.”

The train station swells with the chatter of a thousand excited girls. Sadie walks slowly, her head held high. Her father’s fingers trace patterns in the air as they climb the metal steps to his private car, fathers and first-born daughters crowding into the rest. Beneath her feet, engines throb. A lurch and a thrust: now the city parts as the train flows inside.

Sadie perches on the stiff horsehair seat, watching rooftops sail past the elevated tracks. Young men in brown livery pour tea into porcelain cups, and Sadie remembers to hold her little finger out, like a lady. The tea is the color of the sky—sulphur tinged with whorls of cloudy grey. It is the color of the webbing between the young mens’ fingers, the color of milky pupils in their lidless eyes.

“Will we see the ocean behind the factories? You promised.”

Sadie’s father smiles.

“I did indeed. You’ll see all the waters of the world.”

Sadie sips her tea, touches her throat with nervous hands. Outside, the horizon rushes toward them, a forest of massive smokestacks pumping out fire and haze under a burnt orange sun. The liveried men bow and sway, strange words bursting in wet pops from their lips. Fire makes them nervous. Sadie understands. She’s nervous, too.

Her father leads her to the observation car as they pass the first edges of the factory. Sadie stares in wonder at blackened brick rising all around her, at steel pipes tangled around cauldrons larger than her house. Red sparks float in the air like weightless rubies. The factory is the only ocean she’s ever seen, and it crashes against the city like a storm. Every year, another row of crumbling homes are eaten away. This is the way of the world, His way, her father has explained. If they cannot raise the old city with the old ways, they will bring it up from the deep, piece by piece, and the factory will rebuild it. Sadie cranes her neck, staring at thick columns blotting out the sky—she can see their fixed surfaces, but feels the walls bleeding through other dimensions, dragging a bit of her soul with them. Nauseous, she swallows hard.

“Remember what I told you, Sadie?” Her father touches her lightly, and she turns away.

“Never look directly at the edges,” she recites, and he gives her shoulder a quick squeeze.

“That’s my girl.” He fingers the choker, moving the interlocking hydras into place. Two small rings hang down from either side, like gaping mouths. His fingers hook them, gently. “You’re the reason I work so hard. You’re our future. I know you’ll make me proud.”

Alien emotion swims up from Sadie’s heart, and catches in her throat. The skin beneath the metal swells and chafes.

“I know,” she replies. “I know.”

Deep within the heart of the factory, Sadie shakes the scaled hands of many important men. Secretaries slither before her, leaving trails of damp that evaporate quickly in the factory heat. They give her gifts of seashells, and lovely historicals of the factory’s beginnings, bound in gilt-edged skin. Sadie eats lunch on a courtyard crowned by pyramids of slag, at a coral table set just for the daughters. Metal fines cling to their skin, settle in their food. Sometimes, Sadie lays down her fork and gasps for a bit of air. Just nerves, she tells herself, and wills herself to breathe.

Afternoon fades, as small trams whisk them down mile-long shafts to a room of pale rib and abalone, where dry air gives way to plump humidity, ocean-sweet. Sadie licks her lips, and tugs at the heavy gold around her neck. Her father holds her hand as they cross the floor, and when they reach the double doors at the far wall, it’s as if she’s traveled to the end of Time. Behind them, vice-presidents and company managers hover, their daughters clinging anxiously to their coats.

“Open the door, Sadie.”

Sadie wipes the sweat from her hands, and pushes. Brisk wind and the roar of surf rush in as Sadie leads them onto the balcony. Below, black sands speckled with skulls descend in jagged dunes down to the endless sea. It is everything her father promised, and more.

“Can we go down?” Her lungs expand, and baleen inside her corset snaps.

“Lead the way.” He points to wide steps plunging into the coarse sands. Sadie skips down the steps and into the dunes, all the girls following behind like a veil of trailing flowers. Overhead, pipes larger than the train thrust from the factory walls, plunging straight into iron-grey waves. As she reaches the beach’s edge, factory horns sound one by one, great spine-shuddering cries that send the waters rushing back. Sadie stops and turns. All along the curving coast, green light explodes from pockets of the factory—signal fires lighting the way.

The men spread out across the beach, directing their daughters to the edge of the tide line. Before them, dark shapes rise from receding waves—cobblestone roads slick with foam, low houses clustered like rotting mushrooms, and beyond… The sandy ridge breaks off and free-falls into the rift. Sadie spies chimney stacks peeking up from the depths, bioluminescent smoke coiling in the air, freed of the weight of water. Soft movements appear, as flippers and webbed feet emerge from gaping doors. More employees of her father, ready to greet them all. Sadie spies the liveried young man from the train car, and her heart skips a beat.

Some of the girls cry as their fathers pull chains up from the sands, hooking them at the loops in their golden hydra chokers. The chains stretch out along the ancient roads and over the edges of the rift, ending in the city below. Sadie trembles slightly as her father stretches out his hand, links of black metal dripping off his palm. Beneath her choker, skin stretches wide, half-developed gills sucking at the moisture in the air as they vaguely remember what to do.

“I’ll always love you. Remember that, in the last moments.” Her father looks down at her, the tentacles of his beard coiling into a hundred tender smiles.

“Of course.” Sadie covers his hand with her own. In the dying light, the silver of her bones shine through the flesh, luminous and pure. “When my bones are added to the city, you’ll see me. We’ll never be apart. It is my honor to join the work.”

“You are my greatest gift, my greatest sacrifice.” As he kisses her forehead, his tears fall onto her skin. Sadie feels the chain slide through the hoops as he carefully hooks it. Somewhere, beneath the rift, strong tentacles hold the other end. Sadie prays to the Mother that whoever accepts her, he is vast and terrible. After all, her father runs the factory, and she is her father’s daughter. She sets the example till the day her chained bones, heavy with spawn, are pulled back from her bridal grave.

“Our work renews our world,” her father says. “Our daughters renew our lives. In His name we bring them together. In His name, we take our daughters to work.”

Sadie steps onto the slick cobblestones, and the employees of New Y’ha-nthlei Steelworks follow, each of them walking their daughters into the rising waves.

•