The Hours of Creeping Night - a Collection of Dark Speculative Short Fiction by Sophie Playle

 
    Falling Apart in the Match-Lit Dark
     
    V ictor wasn’t born. He simply fell together. In the depths of a toxic junkyard, split pipes, busted toasters and keyless typewriters connected together, forming Victor’s child-sized body. With a marble for one eye and a cog for another, he blinked in the darkness. He flexed his coat-hanger fingers on his clock-face hands and dragged himself up to the world above. It took him all day to reach the surface, not because he was weak, but because an empty net dragged behind him, catching on bolts and wing-mirrors.
    By the time Victor reached the surface, the green moon was high in the sky, half-hidden behind wisps of dull orange smog. The junkyard was a jagged sea of scribbles: silver highlights over rust-red shadows. The yard was fortified with tall buildings decorated with systematically placed squares of glowing yellow glass. Victor sat in a heap and tried to untangle himself from the netting, but his fingers were rusty and stiff, and the thin ropes seemed to reach inside him and entwine themselves into the inner workings of his body. Eventually, he let it be.
    He clinked and clattered his way out of the junkyard and along the concrete streets towards the city, his knees cracking. He passed a sleeping man, hunched in a newspaper blanket, and as he did so, the net behind him became a little harder to drag though, looking back, Victor could see it had not snagged on anything. His rusty hands and feet tingled with numbness.
    Loud shouts startled him. Three women stumbled around the street corner like newborn giraffes, bleating and wailing, swigging on cheap wine as they precariously balanced on high heeled shoes in animal print dresses. Victor pressed himself against the brick wall, their naked thighs wobbling past his face; one of the women leaned over and vomited next to him. Victor felt a churning in his stomach and a nauseating dizziness.
    The screech of a near-by cat caused him to stumble in panic, and he fell to the ground with a clash. A police car roared past, sirens howling, tyres squealing and headlights blinding. Victor scampered into a dark alley, pulling desperately against the weight of the net.
    As Victor walked through each neighbourhood, made his way down each occupied street and passed each person, the net began to swell and became heavier and heavier, until Victor could hardly pull it. A swarm of emotion crackled statically inside him, causing oily tears to stain his face, until he could bear no more. In his frantic clawing at the knotted twines, Victor stumbled and clattered all the way down a flight of stone steps, until he lay in a contorted heap at the bottom, the net wound tightly about his throat.
     
    ~*~
     
    When Victor’s eyes flickered open he could feel a prickling sensation against his metal flesh as he lay against the net. But there was something new: a warm, comforting heat. He was no longer on the filthy concrete streets. There was soft carpet beneath his touch, and the glow of a fire illuminated the room in a gentle haze.
    ‘My God,’ Victor heard a voice say. ‘It still works.’
    Victor sat up, clunking with effort. Before him stooped a man with a moustache so grey and thick it looked as solid as etched stone. His head was nothing more than a skull with too much skin draped over it, and he craned his neck forward as though his moustache weighed him down. The man made a clicking noise with his tongue as he removed his pipe from between his teeth. ‘Well I never,’ he said.
    Victor trembled. He tried to speak, but the only noise he made was a computerised snarl.
    ‘Aggressive little thing, aren’t you? I thought you were broken when I found you piled outside my door. Thought someone might have thrown you away. You not got any buttons, so I didn’t know how to switch you on, see?’ The man stood up and sucked on his pipe.
    A cat-shaped shadow rubbed itself against the old man’s leg. The man reached down to stroke it and the cat rose up