-in nature, perceived by naught but the wind
The Survivor’s eyes stared into mine. Haunted and impossibly sad. Through the viewfinder each blotch and bruise crosshatched, a traced echo of a life endured. But not lived. Gorky had found her amidst the wreckage of Jodrell Bank, subsisting on a diet of red weed and water collected in the radio dish.
It was difficult to imagine such a small creature clambering the rusted scaffolding, risking life and limb for sustenance not bittered by that falling star of Wormwood. Yet there she was, a shadow, but alive. The telescope had long since been abandoned, its Morse encoded warnings of heat-rays and genocides no longer beamed into deep space, for they had either been heeded, ignored or had never reached alien instruments. So, the great steel mushroom had been left to the Red Heath, the grand designs of lab coats reduced to mere shelter.
For a time. It was hard to say what had happened. Nobody could get a word out of her, but she had been the only one left. Gave Gorky flashbacks to the pit, prising her out of the wreckage of her family, an ossuary perverted with metal and weed.
It would’ve made for a good picture. Gorky, the towering anarchist hewn from slag and grudges, cradling the teenaged wretch like a broken doll, focus sharpened on the tear tracks navigating her cracked face, corpses tastefully obscured in shallow depth of field. Enough for a front page, awards, knighthood etcetera.
The portrait would have to suffice. 125 Imperial Standard Monochrome, a fine grain but the Heath was no London pavement, nothing came easy, no easy purchase for tripod feet. You had to shoot it wide open, the light diffused by the knotted canopies of red weed. Breath pulled ragged through a respirator, tendrils pulling boots into the blood muck, the science of light and film rendered useless in this alien North.
Click-clack of the film advance echoed through the wood, the edge of The Edge, once a verdant theme park for aristocrats to build follies for false idols, now a mausoleum for the industrial age.
Ms. Firth did not share my cynicism, her mind a similar assemblage of crystalline panaceas and nineteenth century esotericism as one would find on every campus south of The Red Wall. Her sickly pale palms brushed every branch and scrap of bark in search of gods, and it was only our begrudging acceptance that we would rest at the “Druid circle” that got her to wear a respirator. The air was thick with invasive pollen, a point of pride for Gorky, who would rattle on about weak Southern lungs unable to handle the air of God’s Own country.
As if it were designed for human consumption.
As if God had not left.
We soldiered on, Firth filling us in on the peculiarly gendered geographical intersections of occultic phenomena, and we discovered that Hell is cold, just like their blasted red dot. The weed is truly omnipresent in the Heath, congregates round human and animal bones alike, the plants far better at utilising blood iron than us mammals. They will find any crevice, any weakness, and were the Red Wall not so high, and were it not manned with flamethrowers, black smoke and belching napalm, they would pull London back into ruin within the month. On the cliffside their roots had torn great wounds in the rock and left the surface slippery with plasma. I held the Survivor’s hand and felt nothing. There was a weightlessness to her, a crackling beneath the skin that resolved into mere static. Though I could see that she was younger than me I could not place when she had been born, though it was almost certainly here-
We could finally see the full scope of the Red Heath, cities torn apart by war machines sinking into hell marsh, slagheaps still harvested by stragglers who had never felt the heat of the Ray Plants, the cleanliness of the air. Somehow, the scars of agriculture have not faded, the eye only had to travel a few feet from the bounds of aristocracy before the trees fall into endless patchwork, a world stitched together with animal blood and gunpowder. Firth walked widdershins around the largest gouge, once known as Stormy Point, or The Devil’s Grave, buried bars obscuring the oesophagus of an ancient bronze mine and it seemed silly to chide her for her foolishness when none of us were supposed to be there.
Through the telephoto I saw it. A great metallic limb in the rusted forest. The last of the war machines. The question floated first from Gorky’s lips: what did we plan to do with it? I told him that he needn’t worry about my plans getting in the way, I was simply here to document. This did not set him at ease, something about bloody Imperialists not being able to understand, as if the motivations of an anarchist intent on commandeering an interstellar weapon would be an enigma to an effete paparazzo. Neither of our other travellers voiced an opinion, the Survivor mutely raising her arm to point at Firth on the cliff edge, just before she disappeared from the world forever.
We all heard the crack, yet we all had to see. A knife edge of rock burrowing through her head, visceral senses broadcasted from her brain to mine, of blood flowing from splintered skull into the throat, lungs and stomach trying to force out fragments of eye and brain with breath and bile, her hands pointing with two fingers each, one to the sky and one to the ground. She gurgled words unheard through splintered teeth, a spasming grin that remained until life finally released its grip. About her corpse were already the shoots of weed.
I took another picture.
Gorky wept and scrabbled at my trouser leg, a hateful glare in his eye buried in a mess of tears and snot, chewed nails digging into my thighs, the buzz of the Survivor drowning out the epithets. He was never going to make it. For all his bluster he was far too sensitive, the world forever washing into him. To be a proper servant of Albion was to look into the face of horror unmoved.
I left him there in his puddle of good intentions and let him shrink into the horizon of sight and memory. Silence, blessed silence once more. The Survivor led me through the ever-thickening trees, camera clattering against the bark, the air thick with death. My respirator fell to the floor. I had no more use for it.
I had found what I came here for.
A Martian war machine, rusting and wrapped around a tree, long since abandoned by its pilot. This metal titan that had once strode across the island laying waste to every icon, rendered impotent, first by quirks of Gaia, then by history. No new world order. No uniting atrocity. Just us, and the Earth.
I can’t let go of the Survivor’s hand. Those haunted eyes burrowed into mine.
[Why did you come here?]
To document the last of the war machines.
[Why did you come here?]
Because I cannot go back home.
[Why did you come here?]
Because I don’t know what else to do.
[Why did you come here?]
I thought I could capture it. The rumbling. The tripod. The world after the worlds warred.
I think we didn’t realise what we were looking for.
The war machine a fetish, for the cold seeping in at the edges of the world, the island, the heart, for anything to change the impassable sense that there is nothing there, nothing inside me and nothing in this place, death drive island of pulsing anti-anima; we live in several earths and I did not choose to be conscious of this one, but still I walk forth, make renderings onto silver halide, my hands loyal servant to the camera obscura, wretched automata of tradition; and isn’t it better that we could keep this going, and isn’t it grand that so much happened to us for us then to spit back at the world; and the Survivor agreed. Shadow of Albion, raise thine hands!
[Dissolve]
[Coagulate]
The tripod moved. Moves. I/Tripod traipse across the Edge, a war machine devoid of purpose, gargantuan limbs felling trees with each step, snap/advance, snap/advance, shedding rust and loathing, I can see the horizon, a light beyond the Red Wall, and it’s beautiful, even despite the buzzing of the Survivor in my brain and the mangled body of Firth and the broken Gorky, there is still air, air and the sun upon my face and though the artillery shells still come, though my cast will tire, though my soul will be rent by shell and gunpowder, I was able to see too late a world beyond me, beyond the mire, for I am here-
This story is accompanied by the zine IMPERIAL STANDARD MONOCHROME
