Chapter 24: The Signal-Box

Evening found her walking along the steel pinnings of a railroad track. Violet had never seen a railroad before, had only ever heard them described in books, and it had taken her some time to realize the nature of the path she was following. Every so often she found freight cars sitting alone and unentangled upon the tracks, like haphazard beads strung unevenly across the throat of some vast necklace.

All of the freight cars looked quite differently from one another. Some were shaped like boxes, made of steel and tightly locked. Others were sealed tubes of rusting metal, marked with diamonds divided into colored quadrants, though Violet did not pretend to know what they meant. One or two had disintegrated into tarry masses of charred slag that choked the tracks for great distances. Violet shied away from these. Others had rusted open and spilled their contents, staining the ground a vivid blue for meters and meters. The saplings and shrubs that pushed up through the gravel in these places were twisted and oddly shaped, as though they had forgotten which way was up. Likewise, Violet was careful not to tread upon these patches of blighted ground. The cat wrinkled its nose at them, assailed by the ghost of some pernicious scent.

Along the tracks, at every junction that broke off to forge its way through the resurgent woods, stood the tall, nearly skeletal figure of a signal-box, each one capped with a bulb of crimson hued glass. None had endured as well as the tracks, sagging under the weight of rust and neglect. Most were missing their lightbulbs, but the ones that remained were blank and dead, cracked or simply darkened by an internal layer of soot from filaments that had burnt through.

Yet, a few dozen meters ahead, along a stretch of empty track that held no junction but still bore the rising swell of a signal-box, Violet realized that she could see a glow issuing from within its intact bulb, the filaments just as brightly lit as it must have been back when everything was new and fresh.

She came to a halt and looked behind her, but the last signal-box was well out of sight. Its bulb had been dark, however. She remembered that much.

The cat had noticed the anomaly as well and paused alongside her, balanced neatly atop one slender steel rail.

“Hmm.” It opined, a crimson pinprick of electric light reflected in the center of each pale, feline eye.

Violet started forward, a cautious swell of curiosity blooming within her. The day was silent but for the hush of breeze and the whirring chirp of insects in the grass. There were no demons, nor any lurking animals. Beneath the signaling bulb was a squat, gray painted box, now very much streaked with corrosion. The door across its front had once been held shut by a tiny steel padlock, but the hasp had rusted completely away, and so had the lock. The door hung crookedly upon decaying hinges and Violet opened it with the tips of her fingers, ready to jump back in case she disturbed a skitter of spiders or some other sheltering creature.

It was only as the door swung open that she realized the cat was no longer by her side. It had paused a few meters back, almost in mid step, head cocked and ears pinned back. Its whiskers had gone flat against the sides of its face and all along the length of her companion, uneven patches of inky fur had begun to bristle and rise.

Then the signal-box door creaked fully open and Violet’s first impression was one of wires. There had once been a panel of gray plastic, to match the makeup of the box itself, but that had disintegrated and left dangling a dull array of dials and switches and metal cylinders that Violet thought were meant to house a key. Curling between these and the colored wires they hung from were fibrous, spider like tendrils of crimson fungus, quite similar to the type she’d seen issuing from the pavilion fountain earlier in the day. It thickened towards the bottom of the box, where the wires lost their rubber coating and became bare lengths of naked copper. Amongst the tangle of wires existed a material that was not fungus, nearly colorless but webbed within by a stretching mass of bluish threads, none thicker than a human hair. It followed a curious logic, the material did, curled almost possessively around the bare wires.

Violet was suddenly reminded of something from back home, an attempt by her mother to make strawberry jam. The jarring had gone wrong and the lid had popped off after a few days. Within, the berries and the pectin had become gray and slimily sour. The smell of decay, sugary and yet not, had coated the back of Violet’s throat. Yet beneath the gray there still lingered hints of color and past vitality.

She saw this and realized that within the material were cloudy, indistinct movements, regular and quick, arranged in sequence…or sequences all interwoven. And the blue webwork made sense. So did the pulsation of those vague shapes, and the slender, nearly invisible shadows like struts encasing them.

It all fell into place. Violet saw the heads and the ears and the eyes and knew suddenly that she was looking at what had once been a half dozen or so mice, like a puzzle that depended on none of its patterns to make sense until they all did.

The mice had no fur and their skin had become slick and translucent. Their bones seemed no more present than the internal structure of tadpoles and even across the circumference of papery skulls the bone had become thin enough that Violet could sense a sluggish flow of instinct and what could have become sensation had it not crumbled and been rendered dark by some unknowable foreign blockage.

She could see the places where an established framework of body had become theoretic and where flesh robbed of form flowed like water. Places were limbs had become vestigial and eyes were tiny functionless globes being slowly subsumed. Where vertebrae like grains of sand had melted and the spinal cord stretched out, exposed, across ever greater distances, to touch upon wires and transfer the body’s electric current from one place to another.

The mice were mice for only a moment, and then they were something else entirely, the puzzle’s patterns collapsing into nonsense once more.

From around the incomprehension that swallowed her, twining upwards as though vented from an invisible seam at the farthest, most unaware corner of her mind, Violet could feel something else. She began to tense but it did not seem to be very present or especially near. It lacked the needle sharp insistency of a demon but felt nothing like an animal either. The sensation of it pooled like lukewarm honey, slow but eternally persistent, seeking total envelopment, as gradually inevitable as the coming of a never-ending tide.

From the bottom of the spreading influence came another feeling, remoter still, like a sudden shift of water at the bottom of a very deep lake. There was something on the other end of the influence, but whether it was right next to her or amongst the dying stars at the far edge of the universe Violet could not tell. But in the movement of that single shift, that twitch of eldritch architecture, she suddenly knew that whatever she felt now was alive in a way the mice were not.

And it knew in turn that she was gazing upon its works.

Violet took a sharp step back and shut the signal-box door, severing the influence and leaving her in the midst of silence that felt like the moment after the climax of some great global horror. She took a deep breath and made herself exhale smoothly, all the while shuffling back towards the cat.

Though she knew that she was away from the presence inside of the signal-box (though not just the signal-box), an echo remained inside of her mind, its persistence seeming to dim the sunshine.

“You picked up on it.” The cat said.

Violet nodded, as evenly as she could manage.

“Was that what you felt on the riverbank?” She asked, and was surprised at how dull her voice sounded. It wasn’t shock, she felt as though she’d fallen a step beyond even that. Thinking of the mice and the wires and the influence directing it all hardly seemed real, like she was recalling the last dying images of a half forgotten night terror.

“Yes. It….” The cat was silent for a while, trying to order its thoughts. “…It feels different now. Different than the deer even.”

“The deer?” Violet asked, but knew already what the cat was saying. The mice had been blank in the same way the deer had been blank, paralyzed so that they could be made ready for further use.

She shivered, but the cat said nothing, only looked along the rails. They glinted orange, illuminated by a declining sun. Violet thought there was probably an hour or two of light left. Violet also thought the cat was about to recommend they move on, and end the conversation that way, so she interjected.

“Do you know what it is?”

Her companion hesitated for a long, worrying moment.

“No.” It said at last, very quietly. “But we’ll stay far away.”

Violet looked to the ground for a time and it was only when the cat noted the relative lateness of the hour that she felt even remotely motivated to move.

They continued on, leaving the signal-box and its light burning like a beacon behind them.