jamieproctor.ca

The book factory stood on a low hill, though it seemed like it’d rather squat. Or maybe sink. It was one of those buildings that looks like someone’s basement no matter how many stories it has.
It ran all day and it ran all night. It ran for six days of the seven, with a break for exhaustion and to prevent illiteracy outbreaks. Overexposure to mass-market literature can do that if you don’t get some fresh air, and many was the management team member who bitterly resented the damned regulations of ’72 that held them liable if a shift worker came home with ink for eyeballs or a pen stuck in their nose.
It was a big factory. Third-biggest in the state. It produced cheap, reliable hopes and dreams and far more importantly it provided Jobs, that nebulous, capitalized sort of thing that mattered to people’s guts if not their long-term health prospects.
There were sixty people manning the stamping lines, branding and tagging the covers.
A hundred people on the inking crews, mashing the nouns and verbs and adjectives into proper forms.
Two hundred hose-runners, who filled the paper husks with words and sealed them off.
Forty-six fermentation attendants, who adjusted the light and air in the aging room to ensure proper genre fermentation.
One hundred and twenty-eight workers tending the great steel bookshelves where the final products were herded and broken before shipping.
And four and a half C-level executives who got paid.
On the fifth day of the six-day week, a stranger came to the book factory.

“I am here to right wrongs and perform great deeds.”
“Pass.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a pass?”
“No.”
“Then stay out.”

On the fifth day of the six-day week plus a good few hours, a stranger came again to the book factory with the mutual aid of a small unbarred window and a rock.

“Psst!”
The shift worker looked up. Above them, clinging to the rafters, was a sort of murky thing wrapped in what seemed like a lot of blankets.
“Ah?” she said. This seemed noncommittal enough to be safe.
“Take me to your leader at once!” whispered the lurking thing. “There is little time!”
“Sure.”

The shift worker’s leader was as far beyond her grasp as the galaxy’s core; her leader under him as untouchable as the sun; beneath that, the moon, and so on.
So in the end the shift worker took the mysterious stranger to the foreman of station 10, subteam B, who was her immediate superior. He was long and grey and dead in the eyes and thus his only distinguishing characteristic was his name, Neewmaan, which he had acquired when a vowel line exploded in his face at the age of twenty-two.
He was standing at station 10, subteam B, close enough to another shift worker that he could surreptitiously grab at her ass when she wasn’t looking. This happened a lot, because her attention and both hands needed to be on the line.
“There is little time,” whispered the stranger (who was no longer lurking, just standing around wrapped in his extremely conspicuous and enormous cloak).
“Right,” said Neewmaan. “’Bout two hours left in the shift. Lull’s almost over and we gotta clean a belt before-”
“Not THAT!” said the stranger, whose voice was deep as a spring brook, soft as a bolt of silk, clear as the blue sky. “There are things to be done!” We must free my people and yours from tyranny!”
“Uh? Yeah. Right. Gotta tell ‘em.”
“Yes!” exulted the stranger, who was taller than any mortal man, and spry of limb. “We must rally them from the brink of defeat!”
The stranger’s vision was as keen as a hawk; his ears as sensitive as a mole’s; his mind as piercing and insightful as a big sharp sword through somebody’s liver, but he’d never run a warren like the lower workings of the book factory before. It took many steps and many hands poking and prodding him.
“What’s that?”
“Punctuation tank. They gotta heat it to separate the periods from the commas and semi-colons. Grades by density.”
“What’s THAT?”
“Hard boilers. Need ‘em to temper the private eyes before they get installed.”
“What IS that?”
“King-pins. They install dynastic politics in genre fiction, Iunno.”
“What in the name of the Great Shining Ones happened to that man?”
“That’s Ten-Ten Finger-Finger Eddy-Eddy. He got overwritten on the press line.”
“What’s that awful shrieking sound?”
“The presses. They got to run them hot or the ink gums and the characters get blurry and fat. Bakes ‘em right into the pages before they can slide off.”
And then they reached the great main hall, and the stranger’s questions were all removed because there was no doubt what lay in front of him.

The production line was difficult to conceive of. It was a space that seemed too large to fit inside a building…that was also overstuffed. Smooth steel surfaces covered in microscopic byproduct froth. A million moving arms and legs. And a churning, endless flow of names and places and things and people being ground down, grounded down, onto pages and paper and product.

“HOLD!” called the stranger. Such was the power of his voice that it carried over the great grey grinding machines and the endless drone and every eye – if not every head – turned towards him just a little, to see what was going on.
“Despair no more!” called the stranger, and his hood fell from his shoulders to reveal a beauty almost blinding. “I am Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzip, last of the line of Twoggles, heir to the Golden Seat, and” then the long grey men of station 10, subteam B picked him up and threw him over the mandated four-foot safety railing, which so surprised Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzi that he forgot to shout or fight or do anything much on the way down. He made no noise at all, even as the pressers grabbed a limb apiece and he vanished in a titanic fountain of ink and crushing sounds.
“I’ll go report it,” said foreman Neewmaan, who didn’t want to. “Goddamnit, what was that?”
“Four,” said a shift worker.
“Three?” asked another.
“Four,” said a third. “Over-par for the month.”

As a matter of fact it was station 10, subteam B’s FIFTH Reverse-Narnia for the month, four months running. Foreman Neewmaan became shift worker Neewmaan, the presses kept churning, and life went on.
In particular it went on for one shift worker, who’d been leaving a quiet word to her cousin over in the shelving squads every week or so. She had a lot more time to focus on the line now.

Hobbard’s Homecoming
An excellent housewarming gift, also ideal for short reunions after long absences. Warms the cockles of your heart with its charcoal mouthiness, but remains as a soft, heatless glow inside for many hours.
Prepare: on a slow boil, allowing time for the flavour to dissipate. Understeeping this tea is intolerable. Pour gently, as rushing it will cause it to turn sour.
Serve with: something unhealthy, yet lightly so, and comforting, yet deeply so.
Price: quite reasonable.

Old Shop Mix
For business that is also a pleasure all its own. Plain, but straightforward. Calm, yet full of anticipation. Broadens the palate and focuses the mind.
Prepare: very easily – simple, repetitive sifting motions, can be done with one hand and half a mind. Good hot, good cold, perfectly adequate lukewarm. Thrives with neglect.
Serve with: light conversation and heavy work. Especially good with math.
Price: negotiable.

Eld McCaffton’s Exciting Tour
An experience. Or rather, an experiences. Singular, but contains multitudes.
Prepare: using no more than a gram and no less than a dust speck. The body’s antibodies must respond, but not grow over-alarmed.
Serve with: a certain disregard for one’s senses and a substantial amount of free time.
Price: extremely dependent upon local street conditions.

Plain Water
For hydration.
Prepare: by putting it in your mouth, carefully swallowing. Ensure it goes down the right pipe. Maybe splash your face a little too.
Serve with: care.
Price: it’s on the house.

Itchy feet.
Gets you up and stretching and poking things. A must for hikers, runners, tourists, and anyone who wants a little challenge while meditating.
Prepare: stirring constantly and never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever stopping.
Serve with: the spoon still in the mug, rotating furiously.
Price: four no three no five no two just take the damned thing.

Reminiscence
For remembering the old days. The old, old days. Do you ever think of them? Dream of them. I do.
Prepare: with great patience. Do not disturb it while it is steeping. Brood over it a little before sipping.
Serve with: hesitation. Is this the road that must be travelled? Could you not move forward? But no. But no.
Price: perhaps too high. But perhaps worth paying all the same.

Revenge
Die! Die in the name of my parents, swine! Filth, pig, dog-shit, rot-that-walks!
Prepare: under icy atmosphere, slowly warm the kettle as it least suspects it until you have its trust, then put DEADLY POISON inside it and permit it to bubble with the patient, glacial mind of a REPTILE. SMILE unceasingly. Pour colder than HELL ITSELF.
Serve with: my heavy boot CRASHING INTO YOUR RIBS AS YOU VOMIT ON MY FLOOR, DOG!
Price:less.

When the prince was born, the word went out. When the world went out, the great hall filled. When the great hall filled, the king and the queen lined up with the heir for the most draining part of the whole damned thing: well-wishing.
“Congratulations! Please accept this humble gift of horses.”
“Thanks,” said the king, dead-eyed.
“Congratulations! Please accept this humble gift of gems.”
“Thanks,” said the queen, hollow-voiced.
“Congratulations! Please accept my blessing.”
“Tha-who are you?”
“I’m the witch you had burnt at the stake six months ago,” said the witch. Her claims seemed plausible, in light of her singed clothing, sinister air, and charred skeleton.
“Oh.” said the king. “What’re you doing here?”
“Giving your offspring my blessing. I’m fair, though. Ask me for it and I’ll give you it. Just be specific.”
The king thought about that.
“Maybe this is a bad-” began the queen.
“The world’s most captivating gaze,” said the king. “I always did have trouble with the ladies when I was young.”
“Done deal,” said the witch.
Then she cackled and evaporated into a foul wind, curdling all the milk in the castle.
The young prince was a happy and healthy little butterball, and within days had charmed half the castle staff, especially his nurse.
Which was good because the family went through nurses like a dog through butcher’s scraps. Once a month seemed usual.

At the tender age of twenty the prince’s parents both vanished and he was forced, alas, alack, to begin rule. He did so absently but not unwell, although he still had some odd difficulties in retaining castle staff. He was also unengaged, which was solved with the acquiescence of a local duke with the grudging aid of his daughter.
“I don’t like this,” she told her father. “What happened to his parents, anyways?”
“Extremely natural causes, I’m assured,” he told her. “Now shoo! Go be a queen somewhere else.”
So she did, and vanished a week later.
A baron’s daughter followed suit.
And a lord’s.
And a knight’s.
And finally nobody of nobility was willing to send any daughters to the castle, so the king had his men pull a random girl out of a hamlet and bring her to the castle.
“You’re royalty now okay bye have fun,” said her handmaiden, throwing a heap of clothing at her and running away.
The random girl examined the clothing and couldn’t help but notice that every item of it was from a completely different outfit, each sized for a different woman. Including each shoe.
“This isn’t good,” she said.
So she tore the clothing to shreds and made a rope, which she descended down the wall and into the arms of the guards, who brought her back to the king in her normal clothing.
“Bit merchant-y, isn’t it?” asked the king.
“I’m a merchant’s daughter,” she said.
“Not anymore! Now you’re the queen.”
“No I’m not.”
“Oh right! Brother Jacobs?”
The priest stepped forwards, face a swamp of sweat, stammered out “bythepowerinvsstinmiyoutwoarewedtildethuprt-hrk!” dropped his book and ran away whimpering.
“There. Now you are.”
The king smiled. He had a very ugly smile, but there was something else about his face that made it hard for the random girl to look away. Something that scraped at her brain and bounced off, leaving no memories but unease.
“Don’t be frightened to look at me,” he said. And then he sent her away to her new rooms.

The new rooms were like the old rooms but with higher walls and large bars in the window. The random girl began to ignore the king’s advice immediately, and also to pace. Pacing helped her think.
The window wouldn’t do. The door was barred. There was no way out, none at all. Nothing that could be a weapon – the heaviest things in the room was a tiny wooden stand holding containers of cosmetics, each of which was no larger than her palm.
“Ah,” she said.

The king came into the room smile-first.
It was still quite ugly.
“Hello, wife!” he said.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I leave?”
“Of course not! There’s nothing to be afraid of. Just look at me and stop worrying.”
The random girl looked at him. This was a mistake.
She DID stop worrying though. It was hard not to.
The king’s eyes were large and soft and damp and filled with soft colours that hunted and scurried, diving in and out of his tear ducts. Each pupil was a constellation; the irises were seas. And surrounding them a white blank that could swallow brains. Perfect. Pearly-white. Smooth ivory.
“Glrk,” said the random girl, waving her arms ineffectually.
“Yes,” said the king.
“Hlrp!” said the random girl, slapping her hands at thin air.
“No, not really,” said the king.
“Fk!” said the random girl, and at last her palm spasmed open and she shoved the little hand-mirror into the king’s face.
At this sort of moment it is traditional for the villain to scream, shriek, or gasp. The king had no such time to prepare himself and instead simply stared.
This was precisely the wrong move.
He stared. He stared hard, and he stared long. Inch by inch he stared, foot by foot, first his face then his neck then his body then his legs then his fingers and last of all his eyes, twitching, blinking, stuttering and fading away like stars in an overcast sky.
Then the merchant’s daughter was alone with a broken hand-mirror and a bad set of heart palpitations.
“Holy SHIT,” she said.

The king was never seen again, though few begrudged this. Even fewer, the idea of him seeing them again. He had been far too thorough about it.

When she was just a week from hatching, she was taken to London to visit the Queen.
“Emu?”
“Ostrich?”
“Moa?”
Brows furrowed. Brains throbbed.
“Indeterminate!” came the cry, and so she was taken away and placed in a little straw-stuffed box with just that one word written on it and an exceptionally large and fat hen was applied to her.
One week later, the hen raised a godawful fuss in the middle of the morning and down came the tenders and the keepers and whoever was standing around at the moment, overcome with curiosity for the big bulky lump.
She was already half out of the shell by then, wheezing and snorting and blinking and grumbling. The hen lurked at the far end of the box, glaring at her as if this chick was a personal insult.
She gasped for air, sharp little teeth wet in the candlelight, and someone said “oh! What an ugly bird!”

She looked much prettier a few days later, after she was patted dry and named. And fed, very fed, very frequently.
“More meat for Jane.”
“Jane’s crying again.”
“Better feed Jane.”
So Jane got bigger and glossier and somewhat sleeker.
Still, she was a VERY ugly bird. No beak, just blunt snout, and her downy plumage refused to blossom into feathers.
The tail was the oddest though. A long and sturdy thing.
“Her mother was a crocodile, her father was an ostrich,” someone said, and the analogy stuck somewhat, even if the science was wild. “Poor plain Jane!” someone else said, and that stuck precisely.
Jane might have been plain, but she remained devoutly abnormal. At five years of age she was bigger than most of her keepers and still growing, steadily but surely, bite after bite.
She also had been put in a larger pen, which everyone refused to enter. Her appetite for meat had not dwindled, and all examination had to be done from a safe distance. Nobody was quite sure what they’d do if she got sick.
At seven she was moved to a yet larger pen, and again at ten. Each time this happened a fresh crowd gathered to see how much more the little monster had grown.
Then she turned thirteen, grew just a little faster than expected, and hopped the fence.

Oh goodness had Jane grown! About a ton, but so nimble! She ran as fast as a horse through the streets (the horses did NOT appreciate that, let me tell you) and snuck out of London in the dead of night. She left behind only a few scattered footprints, some traumatized drunks, and a bit of an unappreciative horse.
The forequarters, to be specific.

After that it was all smoke and mirrors. Who notices if a single sheep goes missing?
Or a single flock.
Or a single shepherd.
Well, more people than you’d think, but not when they go missing here and there and all over the place.
Still, she was a growing girl, and that was what caught her up in the end.

Jane didn’t plan to eat the Queen. The Queen didn’t plan to be eaten by Jane. Nobody else had any hand in this. It was just a thing that happened.
It started happening during a particularly miserable downpour. The kind of sky that makes you just want to lie down and wash away. The kind of rain that turns the air into an ocean all its own. The kind of damp that makes your marrow soggy.
The kind of awful that you carefully package up and tell your children about every year for the rest of their lives.
It was too wet out even for sheep, which was what was puzzling the hell out of their shepherd, who would prefer to be inside his cottage. They were huddled under the spindly little tree outside his cottage, and no matter what he did they refused, they refused, they absolutely refused to take one step further towards the nice dry (ish) barn he’d left open for them.
“’Gwan!” he yelled and swatted. “’Gwan!”
Silence. Not even a bleat. They stared at him as if he was speaking French. Then again, they’d never quite gotten the hang of English either.
Cursing, stomping, overflowing from boot and coat, he walked up to the barn and banged on the gate. “C’mere!”
Then he saw the sheep were staring past him and he turned around and looked Jane in the eye.
Jane’s eye was half-opened and lazy and tired. It was an eye that just wanted to be dry for six minutes more than anything in the world, which was why the shepherd made it the whole ways back to his cottage and then back into town without being chewed on or anything even a little.
The shepherd came back with the army, who arrived with chains, and that would’ve been that if one of the men (the report said it was a private, the company said it was the lieutenant) hadn’t sneezed.
Jane couldn’t run as fast as she had back in the day, but she could still get moving pretty quickly. Took a bit of the barn with her too, and was over the hill and through the dale before you could say ‘galoshes.’
Now, the good thing was that the men had brought horses, and a few of them were being ridden by lunatics brave enough to lend chase. The bad thing was that Jane knew she was being chased, and it took an uncomfortably long time for the cavalrymen to realize that they weren’t so much pursuing her as driving her.
About three seconds later one of them realized that they were specifically driving her right back into London, but it was hard to explain to his comrades through the wind and the rain and by then it was much, much, much, much, much too late.

Jane had lived a good while outside of the city, being very careful of being seen. Perhaps she had grown bolder as she grew larger. Perhaps she was too fearful from the hunt to take caution. Perhaps the weather was so horrible that she couldn’t tell she was running back towards her old home.
Whatever the reason, she made a godawful mess as she went through the streets. She stood over ten feet at the shoulder now and had picked up an extra ton somewhere. Her feet tore up the road, flattened dogs, and sent the few deep-sea-divers bold enough to travel outdoors scurrying for cover.
Now, all of this made a very complicated mess. A dark and rainy evening; a lot of confused shouting people; the last few persistent cavalry officers hard in pursuit; upturned carts, everything making noise and blocking the way and so on. So it wasn’t like it was planned for Jane to trample onto the garden of Buckingham Palace. It really wasn’t.
And it certainly wasn’t as if Jane knew what she was doing. She practically fell into the garden’s lake, poor thing, and that was through no grand scheme. The limp it gave her? Utter chance. The stumble that led her to put her weight onto the palace steps? Compound bad luck. As for the fall that sent her entire skull smashing through the nearest window, snout-first, well. Who could’ve thought that the Queen would be sitting there? Or that she might be so startled by Jane’s (again, quite unpredictable!) entrance as to jump up and turn her back and try to run?
Nobody! Nobody at all!
And so it was that on the one hand, the outcome of all of this was horribly predictable; and yet on the other, the blame for it was manifestly alien to all, quite unsupported.

It was just all tremendously awkward, especially after Jane made a nest in the summerhouse.