Garbage Man by Joseph D'Lacey Page A

bones, already fusing into crippled angles and deformed shapes. One hand is now only a stump of broken razors. Its toes are tiny sharp bonelets. Bones which should have been ribs grow like spines from the baby’s back. Its other eye is gone now.
    Blind, shattered, emaciated, the baby still searches.
    ***
    Many, many times she follows the baby on its journey down from light to shadow to darkness.
    On the ground level, everything is dirty, messed up, abandoned looking. As though people were here once. Everything is broken as if a bomb exploded. She is back again, watching the bone-baby, the razor-baby, crawling. The only sound is the scrape of its knife-points and bones over the concrete. The baby has still not found what it seeks.
    There has been a pause in the dream for what feels like decades when she’s here. The baby has reached the ground floor but has found nothing. If anything, it is searching with even more determination now.
    This time, it finds something.
    Right in the centre of the ground floor there is a square opening. The hatch is open. It looks like some kind of maintenance shaft and she is able to peer down while the baby skirts its edge. It’s deep, too deep for her to see the bottom.
    Don’t do it. Don’t go in there.
    The baby hooks its crippled razor hands over the lip of the hatchway and pulls. She falls right behind it. It is in these descents through the air that the bone-baby knows its greatest and most short-lived pleasure; weightlessness means no pressure on its fractures and punctures. When it falls, it is free.
    She sees a ledge below them. The baby hits it, crushing both its legs before bouncing slightly and falling again. This happens many times. She would weep if her eyes weren’t as dry as dust.
    Finally the baby hits a dirty, debris-strewn floor. It hits with the sound of splintering. With her monochrome night-vision, she sees the bone-baby lying still and she feels a welling of terrible sadness and terrible relief. She wants to touch the dead bone-baby but the entity won’t allow it. Then there is movement. The rising and falling of crush-damaged lungs, the beating of a torn but resolute heart. The bone-baby lifts its broken skull, lolling dislocated but still attached to its neck. It scents the darkness and begins to drag itself along through the rubble. Its metal and bone protrusions catch on corners and tear its body open further. It crawls on.
    Then she can see something ahead. It’s a faint glow, rusty looking beyond the shadows. The bone-baby is eager. It crawls faster, scraping along like forks on china, like fingernails on a blackboard. She is suddenly afraid. More afraid than she has ever been before. The bone-baby makes progress towards the light. The passage grows tighter around them. Soon the baby’s spikes and breaks are catching the walls above and below and on both sides. She finds it hard to breathe as the space grows narrower. The baby gets stuck at the end of the passage. It is only inches from the light. She sees it straining its broken body, more glass and razor and steel and bone than flesh now, straining towards the red-orange glow.
    She knows the baby is crying in frustration but the entity won’t let her hear it.
    Then the bone-baby is gone. It has passed through. She tries to follow but she too gets stuck. There’s a huge warmth coming from the tiny hole at the end of the passage, huge and powerful. Eventually, she squeezes through.
    This time the fall is short. She lands on a stone floor on her feet. The entity has finally put her down. She feels solid, feels her own weight at last and knows she can fall no further. The heat and brightness are coming from a giant blast furnace which occupies one entire wall of this cavern she’s standing in. Inside the furnace, molten rock and metal bubbles and spits. She takes a few steps back and turns all about, looking for the bone-baby. The bone-baby has gone.
    For a while she thinks