Chapter 25: Stars

There were no more freight cars before the railway tracks underwent a slow curve to the east. Violet paused and looked to where the tracks continued on, framed by trees and the gentle sag of electrical wires hanging from the crooked brace of a half collapsed pylon. Her shadow stretched out before her, rippling over steel and gravel and tar sealed wood.

For a moment Violet thought about continuing along the tracks regardless of which direction they went in. It was open ground she was upon, far from the deepening shadows between the trees, but she knew this wouldn’t do her much good. Once the sun was fully set then everything would be shadow.

And the sun was already at the horizon, Violet could feel its dying glare warming the back of her neck. Slowly, she shuffled around to face due north. A ragged screen of aspen saplings grew almost to the edge of the tracks, ferns and morning glory vines twining around their black and white striped trunks.

Then she spotted something else, a white hot glint from between aspen leaves. Suddenly there was a little shapeless splotch of dazzle in the center of her vision. Violet looked again and realized that she could see something else behind the trees. A chainlink fence, overgrown and half collapsed in places, wound roughly parallel to the tracks.

Violet looked to the cat, who seemed to be waiting or her to make a move.

“Well?” It asked.

“There might not be anything past the fence. No shelter or anything.” Violet said. Her voice still felt blank and dull, like some stranger’s idea of what she would sound like.

“Perhaps,” the cat allowed. “I don’t see many better options.”

“I could camp right here on the tracks. It’s pretty open.”

The cat shifted from paw to paw, crunching the gravel.

“I’ve heard of people sleeping on pebbles before, but that always struck me as excessively New Age.” It said.

“What?”

“Give the fence a shot. Worst comes to worst we’ll find you a tree hollow to curl up in.”

“A tree hollow….” Violet sighed, but though she wasn’t keen on moving forward into the unknown so late in the day, the prospect of staying out on the tracks wasn’t great either. It would leave her exposed on all sides.

Reluctantly, she started forward. The sun had burnt a hole into the horizon and the shadows caught most directly in its glare had become impenetrably dark, like flows of liquid obsidian.

Past the aspens the fence itself was in poor repair, its poles rusty and bent, some pulled free from the earth completely. Showers of morning glories and roses and vibrant purple lilacs had embraced the chainlink, and through the gaps in their foliage came an impression of openness, like a continuation of the railroad but with no tracks in sight.

The razor wire capping the fence had sagged or even broken apart in places, hanging in steely curls as though attempting to imitate the vegetation supplanting it.

It took her a while, but eventually Violet found a section of fence that had completely fallen. She picked her way over it, careful to avoid being snagged by the razor wire that yet remained.

Rows and rows of metal boxes stretched out before her, arrayed upon a featureless field of gravel. The boxes were taller than her, with vents and little metal fins on each side like a radiator’s. From the top issued three steel coils, dull with corrosion but for a little copper globe on top.

Wires ran from globe to globe, linking the coils and connecting the boxes, though a great many had burnt through and some of the globes sat crookedly atop their coils, drips and jagged sprays of melted metal caught by time.

“What is all of this?” Violet asked, stepping free from the fence. There was an uneasy air to the whole place, like she’d just ventured into a graveyard. The boxes even looked a bit like headstones when viewed from the right angle, one where she could not see their depth.

The cat, having zipped over the fence so as not to trouble itself with crossing the fallen chainlink, shrugged. It was standing in the shadow of the nearest box and the motion was nearly lost, all Violet saw was a shift in the cat’s gaze as it looked elsewhere. Then, like a magic trick, there was definite form pulling free from the darkness, fur and flesh becoming apparent, separating and distinguishing what was cat from what was not.

“This whole place is connected to pylons,” her companion noted. “Or was, at least. I expect that once, a long time ago, it channeled electricity.”

Violet stepped closer to the nearest box. It was still and silent, no hum of hidden power, no faint half scent of ozone to the air, like there sometimes was back home, when all of the streetlights were burning at once. Still, she hesitated before touching the rusting metal with the very tips of her fingers. It felt grimy and warm, beginning to leak the day’s heat as the sun further set.

Above her, the cat appeared atop the box, twining comfortably between the coils.

“You shouldn’t worry. This place is long dead.”

“I’m not worrying.” Violet mumbled quietly, but the cat didn’t seem particularly convinced.

“It isn’t bad here,” her companion said after a moment. “It’s open. The ground is flat. You’d be able to hear if anything tried to creep up on you.” It dropped flat footed onto the gravel with an almost musical crunch to emphasize that last point.

Violet ground a few small stones beneath one heel, almost experimentally, but still felt worried.

It suddenly felt as though she’d awoken on the rooftop, undone the jammed door and drank her willow tea in an entirely different era.

“We should keep walking,” Violet said. “…Just for a little bit. Then I’ll set up for the night.”

The cat gave the deepening glow of the sunset a judicious glance, then nodded, looking surprisingly proud.

“I could always teach you a little more about night walking,” it offered. “Especially out here. The stars would be marvelous under such a big, open sky. You could see straight from the Pleiades to the North Star and beyond. A trip across all those stars would make this current errand we’re on seem like nothing at all.”

Violet looked straight up even as she turned away from the box, though she knew it would be a while before the first stars came out. They were still there though, in the same way the Glow was; present but hidden behind the dying veil of the daytime sky.

“Have you ever done it?” She asked.

“Done what?”

“Gone to the stars,” Violet said. “You can travel, so….”

Her companion gave the sky a thoughtful look. It seemed almost papery, like parchment lit by a candle flame.

“Hmm.”

“They can’t be that far,” Violet continued, following the cat’s gaze to where she imagined it was looking to the nearest star. “We can see them after all.”

“How adventurous you’ve become,” the cat said, and again there was a hint of pride in its expression. “Alas, I’ve never been and I would never go.”

“Why not?”

“I would surely perish.”

“But why?” Violet asked again, lowering her gaze to meet the cat’s. It began to walk and she followed, adjusting her rucksack as she went.

“It helps to know roughly where you’re going when you travel, what the weather will be like, etcetera. I don’t know much about the nature of stars other than they shine very brightly. If I aimed myself at one and decided to visit then there’s every possibility I would be incinerated upon arrival.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. And even if I was not vaporized then I’d likely be suspended in an airless void. I’d prefer even the worst parts of this forest to a fate like that.”

“…Airless?” Violet asked, and decided that she quite liked talking about stars, even if the subject matter was still very confusing. It was much better than being left to ponder the troubles and terrors of the day.

“Airless,” the cat confirmed, then gave Violet a strange look. “Did you not know that?”

“But stars are made of fire. How could they burn if there’s no air?” She countered, confused in turn.

At this the cat sighed.

“You’ve fought demons and encountered entities from beyond the bounds of logic, and this is where your willingness to accept strange things is exhausted?”

“But this isn’t a demon or….” Violet hurriedly skipped over the other thing the cat had mentioned. “It’s a fire. Fire is ordinary.”

“It’s not a fire. It’s a star. Very different.”

Violet huffed but knew she was defeated.

“So, nobody can go visit the stars?” She asked, and felt a sudden deep disappointment.

“It’s unlikely, but perhaps one day they’ll figure something out. For now, the best I could possibly do is aim very precisely and hope that I land on a world similar to this one, with air to breathe and little girls to pester.” The cat gave her a sharp toothed smile and trotted on ahead, tail held gaily aloft. It was clearly in fine spirits, removed entirely from the strange encounter they’d had at the signal-box.

Violet watched her companion go but could not decide whether or not she envied the cat’s calm. It would be good to feel less worried, but at the same time she could not shake the idea that her fears, as directionless as they felt, were of the necessary sort.

The cat had promised that they’d stay far away from whatever had been on the other side of the signal-box, but suddenly Violet felt a dreadful certainty that her companion’s promise was paper thin and useless. The cat fully intended to keep it, she knew that, but all the intention in the world would not (could not) make a difference against something like this.

It was as though she had been caught by the influence of a slow, quiet whirlpool and was even now being drawn gradually in.

A great and sudden dread expanded within Violet’s chest, seeming to squeeze her heart and constrict her lungs. Her breath came short, her vision went dark around the corners and in an instant she felt very, very small. There was the cat, but if it could not stand against a fox then what could it possibly do against whatever lay at the center of this?

“Are you coming?” Her companion asked from up ahead, and Violet realized that she’d come to a halt. She looked up to where the cat stood, at the edge of a bank of shadows. One silvery eye glowed like a little moon, seemingly suspended from nothing.

“Yes.” Violet said, and willed the rising surge of dread within her to disperse. It disintegrated reluctantly, leaving the dull throb of her headache more prominent than ever. Still a frightened hollowness remained at her core, refusing to close.

The cat’s gaze lingered for a moment, then it turned and left the shadows, intact once more. Violet took a deep breath and followed after her companion, a shiver tracing every move she made.

“It’s not a demon,” Violet said after they’d gone another small distance. “…The thing in the signal-box, I mean. It’s not even like the creature we saw back at the cottage.”

“No it’s not.” The cat agreed, but sounded suddenly unenthused, like it would rather be talking about anything else.

“Aren’t you wondering what it is? Why it’s doing all of this?”

“No.” The cat said, and there was a curt finality to its reply that brooked no further response.

Violet ignored it.

“Why not?” She pressed.

For a moment it seemed that her companion might not respond, but at last the cat shot her a disgruntled look.

“For the same reason I don’t wonder about the motivations of smallpox or skin cancer. There’s nothing to wonder about, it’s just…there.”

“It turned on a light.” Violet said.

The cat didn’t answer. Violet huffed, deeply annoyed.

“I don’t like this.” She said.

“Of course you don’t. Just remember what I said about useless fear. If something is out there, formless and inevitable, what’s the use of worrying about it?”

Violet could only stare, unsure how to respond. The cat’s words sounded flippant and wrong in a way that should have been self evident, yet somehow her companion still stood by them, not in defiance but rather a cool self assurance that seemed impossible to assail.

She shook her head, exasperated.

“It knew I was looking at it.” She insisted.

“All the more reason to keep a wide berth.” Her companion said sagely, still sublimely unconcerned…or at least appearing to be.

Something told Violet that any continuance of the conversation was unlikely to be rewarding, but the cat’s stalwart refusal to engage rubbed her the wrong way.

“I thought you wanted to teach me things,” she said. “How to defend myself…how not be afraid. What happened to all of that?”

“What are you proposing exactly? Should I fabricate some story or piece of trivia about this entity I know nothing of? What would that solve?” The cat raised its brows, as though it honestly expected an answer.

Violet blinked and began to shake her head, once again caught off guard.

“No….” She sighed, all but admitting defeat. “But I can’t pretend that it’s not out there.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” The cat asked, but rather than accusation or anger in its voice, Violet could hear a groundswell of confusion rising. Her companion sounded almost…surprised.

She said nothing. The cat broke its gaze and looked elsewhere, suddenly troubled.

“When you felt it, what came to mind?” It asked at last, a trace of reluctance accompanying the question.

“A whirlpool.” Violet said quietly.

“I’m surprised you know what a whirlpool is.” The cat remarked.

“I saw a picture in a book once. It gave me nightmares.”

“Are you afraid it’s pulling you in?” The cat asked.

“Us.” Violet corrected bleakly.

The cat was quiet for a time, tail twitching unevenly from side to side.

“I got the sense of a system, some grand array of impulses and orders all following a very large and impossible framework. There was no center to it, none that I could feel, at least.”

“Like the bees.” Violet said.

The cat made a little noise that wasn’t quite a sigh. It seemed to be actively searching for the right words to use.

“At the center of every hive is a queen. I didn’t feel a queen, no singular mechanism driving everything. It’s curious that you did.”

“Curious?”

“Like you said, it knew you were there. Probably knew I was there too, but it didn’t make itself known to me. I wonder why that is. …Oh.”

Violet thought for a moment that the cat had just come to some grand revelation, but instead it looked straight past her, eyes fixed on a distant and interesting point. She turned to look and saw something different amongst the boxes, a low, oblong building sitting neatly in the middle of them like a casual imposter.

“Oh.” Violet echoed. The cat trotted past her and she followed, looking the building over as she approached.

It was built almost like a shipping container, with corrugated metal sides and a flat steel roof. The top half of the building’s front wall was made up of one big pane of dusty plexiglass, and on the wall closest to her Violet could see a blue painted door, now very much faded. It looked to be made of aluminum and was dented in places, the paint faded and chipping.

“Hmm.” The cat vocalized, stopping a few meters short of the building. Violet came to a halt just behind her companion, fingering the corners of her notebook.

“Is there anything inside?” She asked, low and cautious.

The cat glanced back, halfway amused, and then offered a tiny shrug.

“I don’t hear anything,” it said. “But there could always be demons….”

Violet knew the cat was only teasing, but the latest turn of their conversation had put her on edge. The interior of the building was a smudgy haze, no definite details visible through the dirty glass. It certainly looked dark enough to be a demon’s hiding place.

The cat coughed once, a small, polite noise that broke through the frightened web of thoughts clouding Violet’s mind.

“I could always go in ahead of you.” It offered.

Violet looked doubtfully to the handle of the door, which seemed slightly beyond the cat’s capabilities to turn.

“But….” She began to say, only for her companion to sigh and roll its eyes.

“There was another sigil I taught you, right after your bladed circle. Do you remember it?”

Violet did.

“The gateway,” she said, feeling very much relieved. “You used it to get through my window.”

“Exactly. Now, quick lesson, if you’re going to be sending me into this dark, spooky building, where is the best place to draw the gateway?”

“The window. So you can see it once you’re inside, then use it to come back.”

The cat smiled.

“There is hope for you yet, girl.” It said, then quite suddenly was standing on Violet’s rucksack, perched like a maharajah atop an elephant.

“Onwards.” Her companion ordered, and Violet rolled her eyes before stepping cautiously to the front of the building. The plexiglass window was rectangular in shape and made up half of the entire front wall, from the roof to a point just above Violet’s collarbone. Even up close she couldn’t see much of the interior, only a dusty shape that might have been a desk.

There was enough dust and grime on the glass that Violet didn’t need to use her chalk. Instead she wet a pair of fingers and very carefully daubed a gateway there, taking care to make it bold and large enough to be visible from the other side. Even as she worked her eyes were restlessly scanning the murk of the interior for any furtive, stalking movements.

If there were any demons inside, this would be the perfect time for them to strike. For now they could get out.

But nothing moved and she stepped back unmolested, leaving the building silent and dark in front of her. Glancing up to the cat, which had taken a position on her shoulder, Violet nodded.

“Back in a jif.” It said, and then was gone, its weight evaporating from her shoulder as though it had never been there in the first place.

“…What’s a jif?” Violet asked, but there came no answer. On the other side of the glass she saw a dark, slinky something move and nearly jumped before realizing that it was only the cat.

Her companion’s form, muddled and indistinct, performed an elaborate shrug and then suddenly was gone. In an instant Violet found herself wreathed in soft, warm fur, the cat’s tail stroking ticklishly across her face.

“That is a jif,” her companion purred, settling itself more comfortably between her shoulders, front paws atop her head. “…Oh, and there’s nothing in there but some very startled wolf spiders.”

Violet breathed a quiet sigh of relief and tried to look up at the cat, though she could only catch sight of its tail, languidly swishing back and forth across her left shoulder.

“Thanks.” She said.

The cat nodded, or Violet thought it did, and when it next spoke her companion sounded almost bashful.

“You’ll want to get a move on,” it advised. “The dark is catching you.”

Indeed, the sun was but a memory upon the horizon, even if some remnants of its glow still remained. The orange in the sky had collapsed into a cool, steadily darkening blue.

She rubbed out the gateway mark with one sleeve so that nothing else could possibly use it, then went around to the side of the building and approached the door. Its handle was a simple bar that needed to be pushed down and was, for some reason, coated thickly with cracked rubber that left tiny black crumbs on her hand when she pushed it down. The door swung open surprisingly easily, admitting a bit of pale evening light.

The inside of the building was, befitting such a small space, one room, roughly rectangular in shape. To her right, bordering the entire front and the dusty plexiglass window, was a long metal control panel that reminded Violet a bit of the machine she’d found in her shed, the one Maud had hypothesized might be a recording device.

There were rows and lines of buttons and levers, dials and switches, some shielded by cloudy plastic bubbles, others open to the air. Their labels had mostly faded but Violet could make a few out, though reading them in the dimness was difficult.

Sitting before the control panel were three sagging office chairs, their cushions almost completely dismantled by mice and time. A few had lost wheels and sagged sadly in place.

Violet shut the door behind her, found the lock and engaged it. The thunk of the bar sliding home was a bit too tinny to make her feel very secure, but it was better than nothing.

The cat slipped from her shoulders and walked across the control panel, taking small, cursory glances around, though it didn’t seem to find anything particularly interesting.

At the back of the room were a few flimsy aluminum framed bookcases filled with thick, colorless technical manuals, alongside a small open fronted closet in which hung a few raggedy white plastic coats. The coats had been chewed by mice and what fabric was left had become stiff and cracked, as though the material had petrified.

Violet took a closer look at one of the manuals but found that only the cover, which was thick and plastic, had survived. The pages within had been reduced to a chalky, grayish brick that was no longer really paper. Judging by the silvery sheen of mildew on the walls, Violet thought that the building’s roof definitely leaked.

“It’s a nice enough place,” the cat said, glancing over to her from its place on the control panel. “A bit of a fixer, but I think it’s got good bones. What do you say?”

Her companion seemed to be being facetious, but Violet couldn’t tell what the joke was supposed to be and so focused on fetching her lantern instead. The room felt a bit cozier with some light in it and Violet set her lantern atop the sturdiest of the office chairs before carefully pushing them all to the other end of the room, opening up some floor space for herself.

After a moment the cat made a small, inquisitive noise and Violet turned to see it peering through the little hole in the dust where her gateway sigil had once been.

“That’s new.” It remarked, and Violet leaned in see what had captured her companion’s attention.

The plexiglass was cloudy but still offered a clear enough view of the outside. Along the tops of the metal coils capping each box, curling intimately around the swell of their copper globes, were sparkles and hesitant flickers of a very familiar blue light.

Violet had never seen the Glow so close to the ground before and nearly jumped in place. A part of her wanted to race outside and see if she could touch it, but of course it was now quite dark and so she stayed put.

The Glow had begun to cascade across the sky as well, brighter in the heavens than it was on earth, but the fact that she could see it at all, barely ten meters from where she sat, put a great warm glow of excitement all through Violet’s center.

“I wonder if I could talk to it. I tried to last night, but….” She trailed off, eyes locked on the traces of Glow circling and flickering like veils of electrified silk.

The cat shrugged, looking away. It seemed to have lost interest in the whole scene.

“Talk to it? Probably not.” It said.

The sureness in the cat’s voice startled Violet away from the window. She stared, quietly concerned.

“Why not?”

“Because you’d be focusing on the wrong thing. It’d be like me confusing the light your lantern gives off with the lantern itself. Does that make sense?”

Violet looked to the Glow again and then sighed and nodded. It did make sense, and was even weirdly reassuring in a way, though there remained a feeling of disappointment nonetheless.

“I guess I’ll have to wait.” She said, then sat down on the floor and prepared to settle in for the night.