It was three weeks before those outside Tunwich realised what that last bout of roadworks had wrought. It took them another three weeks to work through the accumulated go-slow zones, diversions, reversions, revisions, turnbacks, turnarounds, roundabouts and traffic police. And when they did, they discovered that Tunwich had been cut free, excised from the city, and was sunk without trace. There was a lake there now. At least there were ducks.
Between the suburbs of Tunwich and O'Kieran there is a piece of open ground, not quite a park, not quite a wasteland. It is crossed by a line of worm-riddled pines that once might have been a windbreak. It is mowed occasionally, so there might be snakes, but mostly it is left to the joggers and walkers of dogs. Perhaps it dreams of the houses that can be seen glowing in the night all around it; perhaps it is glad to be free of them.
On the northern side of the space there is a single stone, about a metre tall, carved with scrollwork and a beady-eyed face that is not Celtic, Norse or Scythian. The stone itself seems old with its coat of lichen and moss, like an artefact of some lost indigenous culture, but it is not. It only dates back to the 1970s and the psychotic break of Charles Voss. One night in 1973 Voss discovered that consensual reality was not good enough for him and so he invented his own. In the occasionally violent transition to his new universe he decided his role was to carve guardian stones to 'cap' or block certain geomantic nexi around the City of Witches. He sought stone from particularly sympathetic places - the stone we started with originated in a quarry some 350 kilometers away - and gave them warding spirals and stony senses to do their work. He carved and placed five before the police arrested him over what he had done with his wife of 20 years, Lola.
Five out of a planned twenty-three stones are apparently enough to slow the onset of the ley-catastrophe Voss predicted, but he still worries about the shortfall in his ward in Greyhame Psychiatric Hospital, a safe 200 kilometers away in the Town of Rams. Another eight are still piled in his former home in Tunwich in various stages of completion. Voss had not even selected the stone for the other ten.
Just north of the city centre, in a neighbourhood of ramshackle cottages being slowly assimilated by apartment blocks, there is a traffic roundabout by a park. By day the park is deserted. By night it is the haunt of the walking dead, their eyes white, vacant and hungry, with tracked scars upon their forearms. Cranky old pine trees shroud the park in resinous gloom no matter the time of day.
The roundabout is lit at night with dim orange lights that give it the sense of being in a fire-cave, except that it is always unreasonably cold there, never warm. It is at the site of the oldest crossroads in the city. A circle has replaced the cross but the underlying energy is still the same.
Twice a year, on the ancient festivals, a faerie cavalcade passes through the roundabout between thither and hither. Typically mortal witnesses are blinded by the riders' splendour and sent into a cloying sleep from which they wake in their own beds, unable to remember how they got home.
In recent years, however, the cavalcade has not passed by at all and its place has been taken by the Wild Hunt. Now witnesses do not make it home at all.
On the southern outskirts of town there is a factory that manufactures things that nobody wants. Part of it is a printery responsible for the bales of junk mail that appear in your letter boxes, as well as government forms. Other assembly lines produce spurious samples, traffic cameras, those spikes they use to stop pigeons roosting under bridges, and Volvos.
From the outside the factory is nondescript, concrete blocks floodlit tacky orange at night, beyond a sagging perimeter cyclone mesh fence. Featureless trucks deliver the factory's products to the rest of the city at all hours of the clock.
Inside it is another matter. The workers on the assembly lines, amid the machines, are children and youths, abducted from the city's central bus interchanges at night, and blinded especially for the factory's purposes. They are chained to their workstations and fed once a day on MacDonalds hamburgers. Their swift pallid fingers work for fourteen hours at a time. They do not dream.
When they grow too old and big for their workstations they are taken shambling away to a shed at the back of the property, still crabbed over from their years of toil, and humanely killed. Their bodies are recycled, dried and kibbled for use as cattle feed. Their overalls are washed and then given to their successors. Nothing is wasted.
The factory's purpose is not production but consumption.
